4   For her appointment at eleven on Wednesday morning, Libby Schlemmer wore a light-blue turtleneck sweater that, relatively loose-fitting as it was, did little to conceal the soft undulation of her breasts as she walked in, and a flared brown knee-length skirt, with low-heeled oxfords over short socks on her feet. Her calves, though shapely, were thicker than I had expected, no doubt the result of some athletic activity or other. My expectation had been based, I suspect, on the super-slim legs of models I had seen in liquor or automobile ads in the New Yorker. “What a beautiful day!” she exclaimed as she came in. “I walked all the way from my office downtown.” “I’m sure you’d like to sit down,” I said. “Would you like a glass of water?” “Sure, thank you,” she said as she sat. “That’s very thoughtful of you.” “Full of thought – that’s me,” I said as I handed her the glass. “I’ve had plenty of thoughts about you.” She crossed her legs; her bare thighs, or what she showed of them, were lovely. “Such as?” she asked after taking her first sip. “Just now, I’m curious about where you left your car if you walked here.” “Oh,” she said after swallowing another gulp of water and laughing, “I never drive to work when it’s downtown; I either bike or take Muni. This time I took Muni.” “Do you work other places as well?” “Yes, I work in several community centers around town. Then I sometimes drive, but more often than not I bike.” “What is your specialty? Is it like your mother’s?” She laughed again. “You mean, am I a sex therapist? Well, sex comes up quite a bit, but not the way it does in Laura’s work. I work with adolescents, girls to be specific.” The last bit of information seemed, upon reflection, to be unnecessary. It would be very difficult to imagine teenage boys being comfortable around a woman who looked like Libby. “That’s very interesting,” I said, “but since I’m on office time, we’d better not spend too much of it on chitchat, and concentrate on your case. Have you ever worked with a lawyer before?” “Yes. A few years ago I got hit by a car when I was on my bike, and the insurance company was stalling, so I hired a lawyer.” “On a contingency basis?” “Yes. And I got a good settlement.” “So you know what a representation agreement is like,” I said as I handed her a blank agreement form. She glanced at the seven paragraphs, the first one beginning IT IS HEREBY AGREED and the others beginning IT IS HEREBY FURTHER AGREED, and said, “Yes, this seems familiar.” With no hesitation, she uncapped the felt-tip pen that – like her business card at her first appointment – magically appeared in her right hand, wrote Elizabeth Schlemmer – she evidently didn’t use her middle name officially – in a flowing hand above the Client line and the date above the Date line to the left. She handed me her pen before I managed to get one of my own, and I signed and dated the Attorney line. Libby Schlemmer was now my client. “Now to the case,” I said. “The first step, I guess, would be to establish paternity. What is your birthdate?” “June twenty-first, nineteen-seventy-three.” So she was thirty-two. “Summer solstice,” she added with a smile, “on the cusp of Gemini and Cancer.” “That’s very important,” I said, returning her smile, “but everything else you’ve told me is quite circumstantial.” “Laura, I mean my mother, is willing to testify under oath.” “Yes, of course, we would need an affidavit from her. But we would need more than that. DNA would be ideal, but Peter’s remains have already been cremated and scattered. We would need to find some evidence that your mother and Peter were dating around the time that you were conceived.” “They weren’t,” Libby said simply. “What do you mean?” “They had stopped seeing each other some months before, when Peter went away for the summer, first to Tahoe and then to Europe. Then, in the fall, they ran into each other at a party, and hooked up for one night without taking precautions. Peter offered her ride home, her roommate happened to be away for the weekend, and things went from there. Since she hadn’t been seeing anyone in the meantime – and her roommate at the time, who she’s still friends with, would testify to that – she had stopped taking the pill.” “Would there be any witnesses to this… hookup?” “The party was at the Cushings’, and someone took a picture of Laura and Peter leaving together. Here it is,” she said as she took an envelope out of her purse and the photograph out of the envelope, placing it on the desk. The glossy photograph seemed overexposed, but there was no mistaking the young Peter Hart as I remembered him. Nor could the background be mistaken: it was the Diebenkorn that had hung on in the foyer of the Cushings’ mansion until some time in the nineties, when they donated it to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on the occasion of the museum’s move to its new building. As for Laura Perino, her dress was an epitome of post-Twiggy seventies fashion: a spaghetti-strapped sheath of a Japanese-like print fabric, loose around the waist while tightly hugging her hips and apparently braless bosom. She was undeniably beautiful, and if Peter was indeed Libby’s father, then Libby managed to combine her parents’ best features: Peter’s stature and blue eyes, Laura’s dark hair and figure. In the photograph, Peter and Laura were looking at the camera uncomfortably while holding hands; they seemed to have been caught unawares by the photographer’s flash. I looked at the picture for a long time. “Look on the back,” Libby said. I did so, and found a date stamp; it was OCT 10 72, about eight and a half months before her birth. “That’s the date when it was printed,” Libby went on. “The party was a couple of weeks before that. The Cushings’ parties weren’t that frequent, and they were well covered.” She fished another envelope out of her purse, and handed me a clipping from the Examiner. There was an extensive report on the party – the occasion was the Cushings’ tenth wedding anniversary – and listed among the guests were both Peter Hart and Laura Perino. Not together, but this was as it should be, according to Libby’s narrative. And the date was right: September 24, 1972. “As circumstantial evidence goes,” I said, “this is pretty good, especially if you believe that girls get pregnant from holding hands.” “But in the seventies they did, didn’t they? At least that’s what Laura told me,” she went on with a smile, “that if you saw a couple holding hands then you could assume they were balling.” Libby’s use of that very seventies verb drew my memory back to my early student days. The Vietnam War and its attendant protests were winding down, as Kissinger was negotiating with Le Duc Tho. The fervor of the civil-rights movement had grown tepid. All that was left from the sixties was sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. My love of rock had begun to dwindle with the dissolution of The Beatles (and was not rekindled until several years later, when Margo brought back an LP of The Clash from a trip to England). Drugs had not come into my life yet. But sex had just entered it with a bang when I discovered, as I was beginning my freshman year at Berkeley in that very fall of 1972, that girls could be attracted to a skinny, bookish guy with unkempt hair, and it felt as if feeling nubile flesh could fill the hole left by my mother’s recent death. The very night of Libby’s conception I may have been balling a girl I had just met in a registration line. Greg has told me that these days registration is done on the Internet, but then again that seems to be how young people nowadays meet other people. Probably not Libby Schlemmer, though. I remembered that the card she had given me didn’t even have an e-mail address. “You’ve got a point,” I said. She smiled again, but said nothing. “But I’d like to know why you never approached Peter while he was alive.” “Laura didn’t want me to. When she knew him he was already bisexual, and by the time she told me about him, he was completely homosexual and had been disowned by his family. She didn’t want to create any more problems for him, least of all a Tales of the City-type drama.” “And now?” I asked. “When I read that he was rich after all, and that Andy Stone was trying to get the money, I decided to act, and Laura agreed. You see, I know Andy Stone.” “You do?” I asked after a long pause, during which I fruitlessly thought of something meaningful to say. “He was my boyfriend when I was a freshman in college and he was a senior.” “So he was straight then?” “No more straight, or should I say no less gay, than he is now.” “What do you mean?” My puzzlement was growing. “Well, he seemed to have discovered that in a place like Eugene, being gay, or at least seeming to be gay, was cool. If he came on to a woman, even a girl like me who wasn’t exactly innocent, she’d be flattered to be getting attention from a cute guy who supposedly preferred men. But I don’t think he actually had sex with men.” “What?” “Well, he was living with this professor, an older man who had recently come out when he tested positive. Andy passed as his boyfriend, but he told me that of course there was no sex. But he was getting free room and board in a beautiful Queen Anne house.” “What happened after his senior year?” “He was a chemistry major, and he moved to Houston to work for Shell. I guess that’s where he picked up that drawl, just like Dubya.” “So he isn’t really Southern?” Libby laughed heartily, making her breasts bob up and down. “Sure he is. He’s a farm boy from Southern Oregon, somewhere near Medford. He took me down there a couple of times. He always took his girlfriends there, to prove to his family – especially to his cousin Tommy, who by the way was even better-looking than Andy – that he wasn’t really a faggot. His words.” “Did you have any more contact with him after he left?” “No. I stayed in Oregon – Eugene for my bachelor’s and master’s, and then back to Portland for clinical practice. I only moved here two years ago, and then I read something about Andy Stone and Peter Hart. Imagine my shock: my old boyfriend and my biological father!” She laughed again, but in a more restrained fashion. “It does sound a little like Tales of the City.” “Yes, that’s what Laura told me when I told her. She told me to read the books, which I hadn’t heard of up to then, and I did. She also advised me to ignore the whole thing, which I did. Until now.” I wondered if this was Libby’s chance, as she had put it, to get back at her ex. But I felt that to question her about it would have been appropriate for a therapist, not a lawyer. And I really had only one question left for her as a lawyer. “I would like to depose your mother’s old roommate…” I began. She smiled knowingly and handed me a piece of paper with the friend’s name (Sarah Scott), address (in Mill Valley) and telephone number. “She knows what this is about,” she said. Libby Schlemmer, or her mother, had obviously prepared the material for her case well. Now it was up to me to make her case legally airtight. And it was my fiduciary responsibility as Libby’s attorney to try to win the best possible result for her. If, as she had suggested, Andy Stone and Peter Hart had not registered as domestic partners, then she might well be the sole heir, and it would be my job to fight for her right to inherit. And my antagonist in the fight would be none other than my ex-wife, Margo Dufresne. “Have you always called your mother Laura?” I asked. “I don’t call her Laura,” Libby answered. “I call her Mom. But I refer to her as Laura when I talk about her to others. I don’t know why, and I don’t remember when I started doing that.” “How would you like me to refer to her?” Libby smiled. “I see what you’re driving at. All right, I’ll refer to your ex-wife as Margo.” “Now,” I said after a pause, “about your ex-boyfriend… I mean Andy.” Libby laughed. “Is his name Andrew?” I asked. “No. ‘Andy’ comes from his middle name, which is Anderson. His full name, if he hasn’t changed it, is Thomas Anderson Stone. He has an older cousin – I think I mentioned him to you – who is named Tommy Stone.” “Yes, you did. The better-looking one.” “That’s right,” Libby said with a smile, “but he was a bully, and Andy was gentle. So anyway, that name was taken.” We continued with chitchat that was personal but not particularly revealing on the part of either of us. I told her of my predilection for classical music, while Libby, it turned out, was a fan of what she called World Music – Brazilian, African, Middle Eastern and such – and it was the Bay Area’s abundance of venues where such music could be heard that, among other factors, had drawn her to San Francisco. She didn’t specify what the other factors had been, and I didn’t ask. I suspected that they might have been of a personal nature. I ended the appointment by telling Libby that I would be in touch with her at each step of progress on her case, but that I needed time to compose a strategy. She said that she understood and would wait. She smiled and got up to leave. It was almost noon. As I was walking out of my office behind her, Jerry Brucker was coming down the stairs with a slightly plump bleached blonde in a gray skirted business suit and high heels. What had taken place on his office couch was quite obvious.   Jerry, Margo and I have been friends since we were all first-year students at Boalt. We met him at a Carter-for-President rally, and Jerry was one of the many guys with whom Margo, who had gone to Mills, sowed her wild oats during that year. But after the first year Jerry transferred to the business school and, with the MBA that he got at the same time that Margo and I got our law degrees, went to work for a big real-estate company. It was a time of high interest rates and a sluggish economy, but he managed to make some money anyway, buying and selling residential property. Then, when the recession of Reagan’s first term ended, he went back to law school – Hastings, not Boalt, since by this time he was living in San Francisco – and passed the bar just about the time that Margo and I bought our building, with his help. Since he needed an office, we offered him one of the two vacant ones upstairs in the building – which he took to calling The Ash and the Unicorn, as though it were an Irish pub, with the plaque as its sign – and he accepted, becoming our first tenant. Nina Rowland, who had been one of his girlfriends at Hastings, became the second. Barbara Kaminsky did not join our group until after Margo left and her part of the downstairs space was remodeled into a separate office. Margo had done some part-time teaching at Golden Gate University Law School, and Barbara had been her student. Jerry’s specialty is, not surprisingly, real-estate law, and a good many of his clients are female brokers for whom he draws up contracts. It’s a point of honor with him to bang every one of them, attractive or not, in the course of at least one office visit. We took leave of our respective clients. Diane, who had just shut down her computer, began chatting with them about how chilly the August weather had been up to that day, and the three women left the building together. “What a gorgeous piece of ass!” Jerry said to me after the door shut. “She’s my new client,” I said, “and I’d like to talk to you about her case. Are you free for lunch? Just you and me?” “To talk about someone who looks like that? Anytime!” “You know I’m not like you,” I said as we walked out. “She’s beautiful, all right, but that isn’t what I want to talk about.” About a hundred feet to our right, the women were still walking together, possibly heading to Nardini’s for lunch. “Let’s go to Pete’s,” I suggested, and turned left. Jerry followed me, but continued to look back over his shoulder. “Would it bother you if I tried my luck with her?” he asked. Jerry is my age, but is ruggedly handsome in a Jeff Goldblum sort of way, and can easily attract women two decades younger. “Be my guest,” I said. “If we win the case she might need a good real-estate lawyer.” I knew that a good deal of Peter Hart’s assets had been invested in real-estate partnerships. Over drinks at Pete’s, after we had ordered our lunches, I told him the gist of the case. “Wow!” he exclaimed. “So the saintly Andy Stone is a closet-straight, pseudo-gay, faux-Southern gold digger! Do you think Margo has an inkling?” “That’s one of the many things I need to find out.” “When and how are you going to tell her?” “That’s where I’d appreciate getting your advice, counselor.” Our sandwiches came. “Well,” Jerry began after taking a bite, “to begin with, there are two separate facts: Peter Hart’s beautiful daughter, and Andy Stone’s dubious past.” “True.” “The information that you’ve got about the first is about as much as you’re going to get, so you might as well shoot with that. Save the other until you know more. And check if there’s a DDP on file.” “Yes, I’m going to the State Building this afternoon to do that. Too bad the registry hasn’t been put online yet. My guess is that Margo will argue that, absent DDP, the marriage – even if nullified – is equivalent to it, under in pari materia.” “Or maybe under nunc pro tunc,” Jerry said with a laugh as he bit into a pickle. “Don’t laugh,” I said. “Depending on where the judge is from, that might work too. My dilemma is that I would naturally be inclined to favor the argument.” “But as the beautiful daughter’s attorney…” “That’s right. And, mind you, she isn’t even demanding the whole pie. ‘At least a share’ is what she said. She knows that it would be one-half.” “Didn’t want to come across as greedy, did she?” Jerry laughed again. “I know, I know, I’m more of a cynic than you are.” “What are you saying?” “She wanted to make a good impression on you, to get you on her side.” “So what?” I said. Jerry was probably right. Libby Schlemmer was very intelligent, and a psychologist for good measure. It wasn’t unlikely that everything she said – or didn’t say – was calculated for effect. But it didn’t matter. “Nothing,” Jerry said. “I assume you’re working contingency.” “Yes.” “Ten percent post-tax?” “Yes. I told her that this was the going rate for lawyers doing this kind of work, and she said ‘that’s fine’ without batting an eyelash.” “Beautiful eyelashes. But that’s all the more reason to go for the max. It might be fun to dig up some dirt on Saint Andrew.” “Hmmm…” I said while chewing. “That detective friend of yours… Rose Bargello…” Jerry knew perfectly well that my detective friend’s surname was Bargallo, not Bargello. What most people don’t know, and what Rose takes pains to explain, was that the name was originally Bargalló and that it’s Catalan, not Italian. In Florida, where she is from, the name is pronounced in a Cuban Spanish way, but once she moved out west, Rose had to resign herself to Californians – even Hispanic ones – saying it as if it were Italian. When she identifies herself on the phone, she says Barga-Yo or Bar-Gallo, depending on where the caller ID tells her that the call is from. But Jerry Brucker doesn’t care about such details. When it comes to deeds and assessments and metes and bounds and latitude and longitude and acreage and footage, he’s a stickler. But not when it comes to people, and that’s why I didn’t bother correcting him about Andrew. He came across the term rose bargello while leafing through an old embroidery book that had belonged to his mother and used it on Rose when he flirted with her. It worked, too. “Yes,” I said, “Rose might like a job like that.” Rose Bargallo owns a PI agency with two partners – both men – and she has done a few jobs for me, successfully locating some missing heirs. For other lawyers she has done background investigations of the kind I might need, mainly in contentious divorce cases. She is about forty, and is one of the younger members of my hiking group. She has a pretty face and a stocky, masculine body. She is often typed as a butch lesbian but insists that she is as straight as a ruler. She had not shown up at Mount Tam for Saturday’s hike. She might have been on a job that took her out of town. I decided that I would e-mail her when I got back to the office, once I knew the legal status of Andy Stone and Peter Hart’s partnership. I thanked Jerry for his input, and he thanked me for the lunch to which I had insisted on treating him.   I got back to the office with only a few minutes to spare before my three-thirty appointment. The client, a man about my age who was filing for his second divorce, had arrived early and was chatting with Diane while waiting for me. The trip to the Secretary of State’s Office had taken longer than I had expected. The search system was antiquated and the staff was not particularly helpful. But Libby’s hunch was right: there was no record of a Declaration of Domestic Partnership between Peter Hart and anyone else. I decided that I would not spend any more time on Libby Schlemmer’s case that day. My afternoon client, a software developer, had grown quite wealthy since his first divorce. Much of his wealth was in stocks and stock options that he acquired when his startup went public, both before and after his second marriage. Determining the community-property status of his assets would be a complicated matter that would require my full attention.