“Can we talk about the settlement? I don’t mean to put you in an awkward position.”
She dismissed that. “Not a problem. Honestly. I’ve thought about it and I can’t see that I’d be in jeopardy even if you broadcast details, which I don’t think you’d do. At the time, Ned scared the shit out of me, but I see now he was more frightened of me than I was of him. The settlement was seventy-five.”
“Thousand?” I asked in disbelief.
She nodded.
I said, “Oh, man. That’s not good. If you’d told me five grand, I’d have said it was a token payment, Ned trying to get you out of his hair. Seventy-five thousand sounds like a payoff motivated by guilt. He must have thought you had him by the short hairs, or why cough up that much?”
“Not my attorney’s response. He told me it was a good deal. More than I’d have gotten from a jury even if they’d sided with me, which he didn’t think they would. He urged me to take it.”
“I’ll bet he did. He wanted to make sure you could pay his bill, which must have been substantial.”
“He took fifteen thousand off the top.”
“How does Pete fit into this? You said he showed up a year ago.”
“He came to apologize.”
The four words were not what I’d expected. “Apologize? For what?”
“You won’t believe it.”
“Try me.”
“Okay, so here it is: Pete told me Morley Shine got drunk one night and admitted he’d broken into my psychiatrist’s office. That’s how he got the information. He photocopied my file and turned everything over to Ned’s attorney. Of course it was illegal, immoral, and unethical, but what good did that do me? Pete had felt guilty about it for years and he wanted to set the record straight.”
“Too little too late, wasn’t it?”
“Not at all. In a weird way, it helped. I felt vindicated. In some sense of the word Ned ‘won,’ but only by playing dirty.”
“Would have been nice if Pete had spoken up back then.”
“Oh, he did. That’s the point. He went to Ben Byrd and told him what Morley had done. Ben confronted Morley and they had a knock-down, drag-out fight. After that, I gather Ben never spoke to Morley again.”
I closed my eyes and lowered my head. “That’s why the partnership broke up.”
“Basically, yes. Morley blamed Pete for blowing the whistle on him, and I guess Ben blamed him, too, even though Morley was the guilty party. In the end, Pete was left out in the cold. Any work he did afterward was strictly catch-as-catch-can.”
I sat, pondering what I already knew in light of this new information. “So what’s the list of women’s names about?”
“You know Pete was an insomniac. He roamed the streets at night.”
“Right. He was doing that when I knew him way back when.”
“He had a protective streak. He knew Ned was treacherous and he took to hovering over the women who’d come in range of him. Me, Ned’s daughter, his wife, Celeste.”
“His daughter’s name and his wife’s weren’t on the list.”
“Maybe he intended to add them. He told me he’d spoken to both.”
“What about Shirley Ann Kastle? Who is she?”
“Ned’s high school sweetheart. That’s as much as I know about her.”
“I figured all of you were victims of a blackmail scheme.”
“No, no. You’re wrong about that. Pete was a purist.”
“A purist? You gotta be kidding me! The guy was a crook.”
“Not so,” she said. “I saw him as someone so passionate about justice, he was destined to fail.”
I made a sour face. “You met with him, what, twice? I knew him for the better part of ten years.”
“Hold on and just listen to me. I have clients you’d swear up and down were total, unmitigated slobs, but they’re actually the opposite—so hell-bent on ‘clean and tidy,’ they can’t even start. Rather than fail, they give up. Their standards are so high, they’re overwhelmed before they start. To them, it’s better not even tackling the job.”
“That’s a stretch.”
“Talk to Ruth. She understood him better than you did.”
“No doubt.”
“You want my opinion?”
“Are you speaking as a person or as a shrink?”
“I’m always speaking as a shrink.”
“Then I don’t want to hear it.”
She smiled. “I’ll give it to you anyway. No charge to the recipient.”
I raised a hand. “I’m serious. I don’t want to hear it.”
Taryn went on as though I’d never opened my mouth. “This is as much about you as it is about him. You’re entangled with the man. I don’t know how or why, but I can see it as clear as day.”
“I’m not ‘entangled.’ Bullshit. Where’d you get that? I didn’t like him. I disapproved of the choices he made. That’s hardly ‘entanglement.’”
“You felt no compassion for his Marfan syndrome?”