Dirty Blonde by Lisa Scottoline

give the man a little attention. It’s about time you had a date. Now, did you remember you have oral argument at two o’clock?”
    “Of course not,” Cate answered, turning with card in hand. “In what case?”
    “ Tourneau v. General Insurance . I ordered you a tuna fish salad for lunch.”
    “Thanks, great idea.” Cate had meant to study the briefs and the bench memo last night. Now she’d have to go on the bench cold. “Where’s Emily? It’s her case, isn’t it?”
    Val whispered, “She says you saw Simone’s picture on TV and got very upset.”
    Great . “Don’t be silly. Open the door, please, Val. And cover your ears.” Val complied, and Cate called out, “Emily! Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
    And at the appointed hour, Cate was berobed and back in court, presiding atop the dais. From her first moment in the courtroom, she flashed on a freeze-frame of the very last time she’d sat here. Marz was launching himself at Simone. She saw it over and over until she walled off the thought and concentrated on the proceeding at hand, which involved a question of conflicts of laws. Before today, she’d thought of conflicts as an abstract area of the law, but now she knew that no area of the law was truly abstract. She’d seen the intersection of the law and human beings, and it ended in a head-on collision.
    Cate collected herself and mustered a smile for plaintiff’s counsel. “Good afternoon, Mr. Gill.”
    “Good afternoon, Your Honor.” Herman Gill was a standard-issue big-firm lawyer; tall, middle-aged white guy in a dark suit, horn-rimmed glasses, and brown wingtips, as if he’d been mugged by Brooks Brothers.
    “What do we have today, specifically?” Cate asked, glancing at the papers.
    “Your Honor, I will review the facts briefly. Plaintiff Jean-Patrice Tourneau is a decedent, a Pennsylvania resident and former CEO of VistaView Communications, Inc., a Pennsylvania corporation with its headquarters in Blue Bell.”
    Cate listened, coming back down to earth. The defense lawyer, another big-firm squash player, crossed his pinstriped legs. She made notes, though she knew Emily had included it in her bench memo. The law clerk sat off to the side, taking her usual copious notes. She seemed better than she had been this morning, too. Sitting at his desk near her, the courtroom deputy was catching up on the crossword puzzle. The courtroom was back to normal. The pews sat empty, ten vacant rows of honey-hued wood, and Cate could see clear to the back wall, with its oil portraits of past district judges, all of them men with bald heads, horn-rimmed glasses, and somber smiles. The way you look, the way you act, even the way you dress. Cate wondered if she would ever feel like this were her courtroom.
    Suddenly the door opened in the back, and the movement drew Cate’s attention. A man in a dark suit entered and sat down on a back bench. Something familiar about him gave Cate pause, then she realized who it was.
    Gill was saying, “We urge the Court that there is a true conflict, because Indiana law, unlike District of Columbia law…”
    Cate tuned out, her concentration broken. The man in the back was Detective Russo. He sat still, facing front, his arms folded. He couldn’t be here for the argument. Was he watching her? She couldn’t see his features at this distance. It unnerved her. She couldn’t get her bearings today, with so many distractions. Art Simone was dead, and so was the man from last night, Partridge. It was like a one-two punch, and now Russo was watching her, the sole spectator in the empty courtroom, sitting squarely in her line of vision.
    In the next minute, Russo folded his arms. He knew she had to see him. Was he trying to intimidate her? Cate tried to catch the eye of the courtroom deputy, but he was doing the crossword, chewing the end of a pencil. Emily sat absorbed in her note-taking, her legal pad balanced on her lap.
    Cate tried to focus on the proceeding but