The middle elevator opened and a new security guard came out, a young woman with black hair in big waves around her face and a coffee cup in her hand. Lex smiled at her. He liked her. She looked like the Mexican women who came into MacArthur’s. He always asked if he could help them, and he led them to the jicamas and the chili peppers. For them, he had persuaded the management to order sugarcane and mangoes and all the beautiful tropical fruits. She said, “Sir, are you lost?”
“I need help,” Lex said. His voice was too loud. “I need the police.”
“Do you want to report a crime?” she asked.
“Yes!” She was so kind and so beautiful. Tears ran down the inside of his nose, and he wiped his sleeve across his face. “A crime. I need to report a crime.”
She handed the coffee to the fat guard. “Here, Jim, I’ll be right back. This way, sir.” She led Lex along the purple line through several identical gray turns and into a glass-brick lobby he hadn’t seen before. He liked her young, strong walk, not panting and pigeon-toed like poor Jeanne. She took him past the lobby and into a maze of desks and cubicles, big messy offices with their doors flung open, telephones and shouts. It was worse than Moranis Miszlak. He wished he hadn’t come.
“Here,” she said, and sat him down at one of the desks in the middle of the room, opposite another messy cop, maybe the same one from the elevator, come here by a faster and more secret way. They looked just alike. “Officer Bennet will help you,” she said firmly, and took herself away.
He held out his disk, and the messy cop didn’t take it. People didn’t like to take things from Lex’s hands. He had learned not to touch the produce when the customers could see him. “It’s a crime,” Lex explained. “I had a camera.”
The messy cop took the disk and slid it into the drive on his laptop. After he watched the scene, he looked at Lex, his face turning red. “You wasting my time?”
“She’s poisoning my baby. It’s a crime.”
The messy cop sucked his big, pink lips and pressed a button on the phone. “Code L over here,” he said, “family court type,” and a few minutes later a woman appeared, not the kind Lex liked to look at but one of the other kinds, a short solid woman with stiff gray hair standing up in triangles just like the County Place building.
“Is there a problem, sir?” she said to Lex. She had a friendly voice.
“My wife is poisoning my baby. I took pictures.” He gave her the pictures. She stood behind the cop and watched the video on his computer.
“Has your wife left you, by any chance?” the gray woman asked.
Lex nodded.
“And there’s a custody hearing coming up, correct me if I’m wrong.”
He nodded again.
“You have a lawyer? What’s your lawyer’s name?”
“Miszlak.”
The cop pressed another button on his desk phone and said to someone, “Miszlak still down there? I got a Code L, one of his.” Then he turned back to Lex. “Your lawyer’s coming,” he said.
But it was some other lawyer, an old man in a pink checkered suit with a yellow bow tie. “That’s not my lawyer,” Lex said. “Mine is a young one.”
“You’re one of Eric’s clients?” the new lawyer asked.
The cop and the gray woman explained. The new lawyer gathered the pictures and the disk, took Lex’s elbow, and led him out through the glass lobby. “You can’t come to the cops with this,” he said. “You let Eric take care of you. He knows what he’s doing.”
“My wife’s lawyer says I’m crazy.”
“Who’s your wife’s lawyer?”
“MacAvoy.”
They had reached the front entrance of County Place. The new lawyer pushed Lex toward the big smoked-glass doors. “Oh, you’re that one. Are you crazy?”
“I just want to take care of my baby girl.”
“Eric never told you to come here with pictures. You’ve brought the cops into a custody case. You bring a gun to a knife fight, you better know how to use it, or you’ll get yourself shot. You want your kid in foster care? Let Eric do his job.”
“What’s Code L?”
“That’s L for loony.”
Lex turned back. He could find his way along the purple line. “They can’t call me that. There’s nothing wrong with me.”
The new lawyer grabbed his arm and towed him outside. “They call you whatever they want, and you say, Yes, sir, may I have another? Got that? Come here again before your court date, and you’ll be finding yourself a new law firm.”