“Mr. Hall, we need to go over some things. There’s a temporary custody and visitation order.”
“When do I get my baby?”
Eric hated this part. “There were problems. The test you took, the MMPI—the personality test—it came back unresponsive.”
“Did I fail?”
“It means you were nervous on the day you took the test, and they couldn’t get a clear reading on you.” He couldn’t get a clear reading on Lex, even face-to-face. The man was opaque. The flesh around his eyes never moved, and his mouth twitched as if he were talking to himself, practicing what to say. He was forty-eight, supposedly. If he claimed seventy, nobody would blink. “It means you’ll have to take it again. You just relax and answer the questions truthfully.”
“I didn’t understand the questions. It’s forever the same test. They used to make me take it all the time when I was in that place. I never understood the questions. When do I get my baby?”
When I was in that place: Eric wrote these words on his notepad to ask Sammie about later. What place, why, and for how long? Theo’s guardian ad litem had interviewed Lex at home and had reported the home was clean, child-proofed and well maintained, but recommended supervised visitation because Lex was hinky. Hinky. What did that mean in a court of law? The judge rightly disregarded it. “The temporary order is joint custody. The baby stays with Jeanne during the week, and you get her on the weekends.”
“I’ve got evidence now. I’ve got pictures. She’s giving my baby a piece of chicken. Force feeding. Look.”
Eric laid the pictures on his printer to scan them. “We’re deposing the pediatrician next week,” he said. “I’m not sure if pictures of Jeanne feeding Theo are going to help.”
“Force feeding.”
“Do these pictures show force?” Eric didn’t give him time to answer; this was not an argument. “Mr. Hall, I met your wife’s lawyer, and she told me there’s dirt in your past. I can handle it if I can get out in front of it. What I can’t handle is a surprise. If she shows up with something I’m not ready for, you’re done. Have you ever been arrested?”
This was Lex’s test, and he passed it. He looked down, looked away, stroked the pineapple, and then told Eric, in short spitting sentences, everything Sammie had laid out for him. The child abuse reports, the lawsuits, the assault arrest, everything.
“Is there anything else?” Eric asked.
“I brought you a pineapple.” Lex held out his hand to Eric. “Smell my fingers.”
“No thanks, I’m good.”
“When you touch fruit, you should smell of fruit. Then you know it’s ripe.” He reached into the blue nylon bag at his feet and pulled out a big heavy knife, as big as a chef’s knife but heavier, the blade corroded black but the edge silver with use and sharpening. Eric pushed back from the desk. Where was the panic button? Did he even have a panic button? He’d taken a seminar in risk management in law school and now he couldn’t remember anything except make sure you have a panic button.
Lex raised the machete over the desk, and the ceiling fan interrupted the light and sent it running along the edge like a string of boxcars. Eric couldn’t stop looking at it. His hands touched and discarded potential weapons on his desk—pencil cup, iPad—and settled on his laptop. He raised it like a shield. Someone said strongly and calmly, “Put that down, Lex,” and it was his own voice.
“I want my baby,” Lex said. He brought the knife down on the pineapple and skinned off half its peel in one stroke. Four more strokes, and juice trickled from the naked pineapple, oozing into Eric’s files and documents.
Eric set the laptop on the chair behind him and snatched his iPad out of the spreading pool. “Mr. Hall, please.” The chain of broken light along the machete’s edge sparked in his dizzy eyes, quick as his own pulse. Now the danger was past, fear crashed over him, and he tightened his hold on the iPad so Lex wouldn’t see his hands shaking.
“My baby needs fruit.” Lex cleaved the pineapple in two. Then he wedged the knife into the woody core and flicked it out, one half and then the other. “Jeanne won’t feed her right. You have to tell them. Whose lawyer are you? Mine or theirs?”
“Yours,” Eric said. He buzzed Sammie, to stop her if she was on her way in to see what he needed. He might need help; he certainly didn’t need to see Sammie getting her throat cut in his office. “Okay out there?” he said.
“Enjoying your Thursday?” she asked cheerily before she hung up.