Even when you lie, p.1
Even When You Lie, page 1
EVEN WHEN YOU LIE
A NOVEL
MICHELLE CRUZ
Dedicated to the men and women who served in the United States Armed Forces, September 11, 2001–August 30, 2021.
CHAPTER
1
EVERY ONE OF my mental alarm bells clangs when the woman with pink hair shoves in through the glass doors separating Cade’s section from the rest of the law firm.
The women who sometimes trail their husband or lover through here are normally quiet, downcast, as if they bear the burden of guilt or shame that their partner won’t, shouldering it with their Louis Vuitton bags. They wear coordinating pantsuits and pumps in muted colors to avoid drawing attention to themselves, their hair inevitably blonde and slicked back, with conservative makeup—just enough to hide the evidence that they probably spent the morning crying before they armed themselves with a handful of pills to obediently trot into a defense attorney’s office and stand by their man.
But not this woman.
Her cheeks are red, sweat lines her upper lip below two nose rings, and her baggy black T-shirt reveals tattoos of flowers and astrological symbols trailing up her arms. An owl’s yellow eyes pierce me from one side of her neck. She wears ripped blue jeans and worn Converses, the laces frayed and untied.
She can’t be a client; her dishevelment is so out of bounds with what I’ve come to expect here that I think she’ll apologize and say she’s lost.
But she doesn’t.
For a second she stands, blinking like she’s orienting herself in the office’s fluorescent light, and then she squares her small, thin shoulders, and stalks to where Evangeline and I stand at her desk.
When we don’t immediately acknowledge her, the woman takes a deep breath and huffs the long bangs of her messy pixie cut out of her face.
“I want to speak to Cade McCarrick,” she says. “Now.”
She doesn’t ask.
She doesn’t say please.
She doesn’t even request an appointment; no, she just demands, like she’s someone an attorney of Cade’s caliber will make time for.
Yeah, she’s trouble, all right.
The kind of trouble that screams shrill voices making demands and hurried phone calls to security guards.
That’s not the kind of trouble we want around here, not at the law offices of Holcombe & Donaldson, where even the junior associates command retainer fees high enough to have every local law school student dreaming of a post-graduation employment offer.
Evangeline appears cool and elegant in her ivory pantsuit, which complements her creamy brown skin and amber eyes. As Cade’s paralegal for the last three years, she is most likely to recognize the stranger, but she only flashes me a sidelong glance—a warning that I don’t need to step in just yet, but I might be required at any moment.
Still, Evangeline keeps her voice low and soothing as she says, “Mr. McCarrick’s not available,” and stands, her long microbraids swinging loose down her back. “Is there anything I can help you with?”
The woman with the pink hair glares and wraps her arms around herself. “I want him. Now, damn it,” she hisses. “Get him here. It’s important.”
Evangeline gives me an almost imperceptible nod.
I shift my weight, drawing the woman’s attention to me, and motion to the chair by my desk. Maybe the outline of my pistol under my pantsuit jacket will put a little more respect in her voice. “I’m Reagan, Mr. McCarrick’s in-house investigator. Why don’t you have a seat and tell me what this is about?”
“I knew this would happen. I knew I wouldn’t be taken seriously.” She shoves an envelope into my hands. “Here. He’ll need this.”
It’s an ordinary white paper envelope with Cade’s name scrawled across. “What is it?”
“He’s a fixer, ain’t he?” she asks, halfway to the door. “Tell him to fix this.”
There is something desperate and courageous about her anger, that she knew the odds were stacked against her, and yet she walked in here anyway.
No, she’s not like the other women who follow the firm’s clients inside. I know I shouldn’t concern myself with her, that she doesn’t fit the image of who the partners want their clientele to be, but I can’t help myself from saying, “Wait.”
The glass door closes between us, and she never looks back.
Maybe she didn’t hear.
“Reagan,” Evangeline warns, but I ignore her and follow the woman.
The woman takes the elevator, but I slip past the law firm receptionist’s desk to the stairwell, where there are no surveillance cameras to monitor me, because I don’t like questions about my comings and goings.
I step out of my high heels and carry them down the four flights of stairs, reaching the lobby as she exits into the wave of skin-tightening heat. Her bright hair makes her easy to track through the late-lunch rush crowd in Uptown but, not wanting to spook her, I resist the urge to bolt after her.
It’s summer in Dallas, sticky and sweaty, and I try to ignore the immediate perspiration rolling down the small of my back. Protest season, my granddaddy calls it, with the blithe dismissiveness of a white man who has never had to march for a goddamn thing in his life. His messages lately beg me not to go downtown, but I don’t reassure him with a reminder that Cade’s office and apartment are in Uptown. There’s enough about Cade my family doesn’t like, and they’ll raise hell if they discover I sleep in his bed every night.
The woman staggers a few steps and drops to a seat on a bench.
I slow my pace to a stroll.
Her head bobs.
I stop cold, wondering how someone who was just energetic enough to weave through crowded sidewalks can now look like she’s on the verge of falling asleep sitting upright.
She slumps and nearly tumbles into a man in a suit, who recoils as if she’ll ruin his designer wingtips.
Instead, she hits the ground.
Someone screams.
A late luncher in khakis and a golf shirt leans over the woman and raises his head to shout, “Call 911!”
My heart pounds in my ears, but I hesitate and don’t rush to her aid.
At least not right away.
I tell myself I’ll just be in the way—too used to dealing with the aftermath of death to know how to help prevent it.
Then instinct overrides, and I push myself into the gathering throng.
The woman lies on the concrete, pink hair fanning out, her eyes closed.
A man says, “Get back, I’m a doctor,” even though he’s dressed more for the office than the clinic. He kneels beside her, his ear close to her face. “She’s breathing.”
She’ll live, then.
My conscience eases and I slip back into the shadows, withdrawing to the opposite side of the street as the crowd tightens around her.
An ambulance howls onto the scene, and I reassure myself that there are now trained paramedics present. A police car pulls to the curb, lights flashing, and an officer steps out to speak with bystanders, his notepad at the ready.
I can’t see the woman anymore, but I don’t move any closer.
If I stay, someone might notice me. There might be questions as to why she visited Cade’s office, and I don’t have those answers … yet. Given that Cade is a criminal defense attorney, our office doesn’t want or need additional scrutiny from law enforcement.
Nor do I particularly want to highlight myself to the firm’s senior partners, potentially drawing attention to Cade’s and my relationship.
I give the crowd a wide berth, forcing myself to a saunter back to the office. I only remember the envelope in my hands when someone brushes past me and I clutch it to my stomach out of instinct, as if to protect it.
This belongs to Cade, I tell myself. The woman brought it for him.
But the contents inside practically hum, rattling in my fingers like they’re begging to come out and show me what’s so damn important that the pink-haired woman insisted he have it.
Besides, I open his office mail all the time, after all. I should know if there’s something that could be dangerous to him.
I don’t go back in through the lobby doors, but circle around the building to the bench in the small oak grove, where I sit and toy with the sealed envelope flap. Carefully, oh so carefully—so later maybe I can claim it came like that—I slip a finger into a loose corner and lift until the adhesive gives way. The documents slide out almost of their own volition, slippery smooth, so cool in my hands that I almost shiver.
A Dallas County birth certificate—the paper thin and the print fading—of a thirty-four-year-old man named Cesar Morales, the son of Araceli Morales, no father listed.
A copy of a Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission permit for Club Saturnalia in Deep Ellum.
A faded snapshot, the focus fuzzy, of a pair of teenagers leaning against a white stone wall. She’s olive-skinned, black-haired, dark-eyed, and grinning, with her arms folded across her chest. He’s almost pasty, standing next to her, one arm around her shoulders, his face blurred in profile as he kisses her cheek.
I breathe the still, humid air deep into my lungs until my heart rate slows. Then I shove everything into the envelope and stand. If I don’t mention what I just saw, I’ll have time to check into who the pink-haired woman is and what this envelope means without anyone interfering.
Evangeline glances up as I come through the glass double doors, her pen paused mid-stroke. “Well?”
“Lost her in the crowd,” I say and toss the envelope in the inbox o
“You gonna tell Cade?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “What would be the point in that?”
Evangeline nods. “Are you riding with him this evening to the Holcombes’?”
I play with my notepad on my desk, so I don’t have to look her in the eye. “Why would I?”
She chuckles under her breath. “How long do you two plan to keep this up?”
How the hell does she know?
My jaw drops almost before I catch myself.
The precautions Cade and I take race through my brain: never arriving or leaving work together, never sharing a car, never appearing together in public where people might recognize us and we can’t claim it was a coincidence, and never discussing our arrangement outside his apartment.
The firm’s chief administrator strides by in the hallway on the other side of the glass doors. Her scowl is set as hard as her teased brown hair, and I automatically try to look as busy as possible, shuffling through papers on my desk.
With a half-hearted sigh, Evangeline resumes work on a deposition.
I try to force my mind back to the case I was working on before the pink-haired woman appeared.
Only now she’s all I can think of, collapsing to the ground, her glassy eyes staring up at the sky, and the faint tinge of blue to her lips.
I may not have to tell Evangeline the truth, but I can’t lie to Cade.
My Friday just got a helluva lot more complicated.
* * *
Cesar Morales. Dallas, TX.
I frown at the Google search results, close my eyes, and rest my fingertips on the keyboard, as if this will somehow guide me to the right page.
“What rabbit hole you running down over there?” Evangeline asks.
“Oh, nothing,” I say. “Just a case for Cade.”
“Aren’t they all?” she asks.
I shrug and eye the envelope in my inbox. Maybe I can slip it out and scan it over without her noticing.
But no, Evangeline is smart, apparently smart enough to catch onto Cade and me. While I know she’s so loyal to him that she won’t breathe a word to the senior partners, three months of working side by side with her probably hasn’t earned me the same discretion.
And I do need this job.
I click through the top few search results, but these Cesar Moraleses are too old, too young, and too wrong to somehow be associated with that picture in the envelope.
But the right one is out there, somewhere, and if anyone can find Cesar Morales, I can.
It was only a hobby in college, a defense for me and the girls on my dorm floor. We used to sift through their potential dates, separating the innocuous frat rats from the ones with darker reputations, and I further honed it as an Air Force intelligence officer.
But it was nothing more than that, not until three months ago, when my phone rang and the district chief of staff of the congressman I worked for demanded I find the personal cell phone number of Cade McCarrick.
I found all sorts of things that night, from Cade’s high school football career in Appalachian North Carolina—where his family has farmed for eight generations—to his collegiate career playing quarterback at the University of North Carolina and law school at Southern Methodist.
Finding Cade’s cell phone number, however, brought him to my door with a job offer at double the salary I made as congressional staff.
I took it and didn’t look back.
Now it’s June, almost July, and Cade strolls through the glass doors at three thirty with Armando Tamez, the firm’s other junior partner. I quickly close all the windows on my screen relating to Cesar Morales because I don’t want to explain what I’m doing just yet, and I watch Cade for as long as I can over the top of my monitor.
Six foot four, still with that athletic, muscular build at thirty-four, paired with an easy grace that must have been magic on the football field.
His black hair silky as cat’s fur, those green eyes and dimples no web search could have ever prepared me for …
Our gazes almost meet, but we both realize it at the same time and look away.
“Evangeline.” Armando smirks in my direction and raises a hand in a mock salute. “La capitana Reyes.”
“You don’t look like a Reyes,” he said my first day here.
That remark usually hurts, but with Armando and his grin, somehow it didn’t, and so I retorted, “Well, you don’t look like a lawyer.”
He only laughed and said to Cade, “Let’s keep this one.”
It’s possible Armando knows about Cade and me, too.
After all, Armando is Cade’s regular golf and tennis companion and closest friend. Armando’s shorter than Cade, his eyes as dark as his hair, and a ready smile that keeps him looking young enough for new employees to regularly mistake him for an intern rather than the firm’s lead on immigration and family law. Cade might be all ambition and hustle, the engine that keeps Holcombe & Donaldson pushing, but Armando is its lifeblood, the zest and vitality that makes the days more fun.
“Ladies,” Cade says, shrugging out of his suit coat.
Armando checks his watch and winks at Evangeline, then directs his attention to Cade. “You’re so needy. It’s not fair to keep Evangeline and Reagan here, especially with that dinner at Bridger’s tonight. I sent my staff home at noon.”
Bridger Holcombe is the managing partner of Holcombe & Donaldson. He’s the closest to Highland Park royalty one can get in a town already bursting with wealth. The dinner tonight at his mansion is practically mandatory for all employees. That Armando let his team leave at noon now concerns me—perhaps this is a bigger deal than I anticipated, and I should have pressed Cade harder on what to expect.
“Your office is down the hall, if you’ve forgotten,” Cade says, but he’s smiling, and he motions for me and Evangeline to leave.
She stands, gathering her things. “Six?”
“Cocktail hour starts at five thirty,” Cade says.
Armando and Evangeline exchange a look. He says, “I’m not getting there at five thirty.”
“Six it is,” Evangeline says.
From the corner of my eye, I see Cade almost glance in my direction. “You should head out too, Reagan.”
“In a minute,” I say, and when he moves toward the inbox on my desk, I add, “I’m not finished going through—”
“It’s fine.” Cade scoops up the contents, the envelope from the pink-haired woman on top. “Enjoy your afternoon.”
If I argue with Cade here, in front of Evangeline and Armando, it’ll only make a scene and pique Cade’s infamous curiosity, so insatiable he’d turn up with a job offer in hand at the apartment of the woman who found his personal cell phone number.
I nod, grab my purse, and follow Evangeline to the elevator. Once the doors close, I ask, “You’re not seeing Armando, are you?”
She examines her manicure, every fingernail polished in her signature pale pink. “One office romance is enough for Holcombe & Donaldson.”
I chew the inside of my cheek for half a second and decide to play this cool in the hopes she’ll either decide she has bad info or give up where she got it. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You know damn well what I mean,” she says. “You’re not the only one around here with a nose for secrets. The truth has a funny way of coming out, and consequences can be expensive.”
She’s not wrong, not necessarily.
Cade may not write my checks, but he’s my direct supervisor, and Holcombe & Donaldson strictly forbids romantic relationships between partners and staff. I remember very well initialing the full-page acknowledgment in the employee contract details that if one is discovered, the staff member faces automatic dismissal, and the partner is suspended from any benefits for at least a three-month period afterward—if not permanently.
But I make myself shrug, as if Cade and I have discussed this.
Like we made time for that eight weeks ago, when I caught him drinking apple pie moonshine from a silver flask in his suit coat pocket on the firm’s private balcony after a rare loss, and we ended up in bed together, promising each other it was only once.
Or six weeks ago, when he slid a key to his apartment across his kitchen bar to me.
