Read Online West of Paradise by Gwen Davis - Free Book Online Page B

other name was still a pansy. It felt to the lawyer like a good place to end it.
    â€œThere’s just Sarah Nash’s final cross left,” said a reporter into one of the three adjoining pay phones in the marbled corridor outside the courtroom. The case involved celebrity and so was of interest to the whole country. So there were two other reporters from the area, another from Chicago, one from The New York Times, one from The Washington Post. In addition, there were several magazine writers. There was no one from the publishing house that had printed Sarah’s book. Arnold had left them out of the suit, since there was no way they could be said to have breached a personal contract. The publisher considered it circumspect not to have any representatives at the trial itself, as they were holding back a great reserve of Sarah Nash’s voluminous royalties in case anyone else should decide to sue and include them. But a few of the young men in the courtroom were whispered to be part of the publisher’s legal staff, quietly observing the proceedings.
    â€œThen the closing arguments,” said the reporter into the phone. “The instructions to the jury, and, depending on how long they take to get to their verdict, maybe we can get it into the Sunday edition.”
    â€œNo real courtroom theatrics,” said the reporter on the next phone. “Everybody’s pretty worn down.”
    *   *   *
    Sarah Nash had dressed differently for this last day of the trial. Throughout the proceedings, her clothing, like her demeanor, had been restrained, businesslike, rather drab, with only the occasional hint of courtroom flair, a scarf of some softness or color at her throat. That swanlike arch of neck was all that seemed assailable, naked as it was, revealing her alabaster skin. Everything else was lightly powdered over or obscured, from the steel blue of her wide-set eyes, shielded by the bought-for-the-occasion glasses, to her sizeable breasts, boxed into conventional career clothes, Brooks Brothers for women. It was a persona her attorney had worked very hard with her to present, the jury needing to put aside any prejudice it might have against an admitted cocaine and alcohol abuser, who had found restraint, self-esteem, and everything but God in the cleansing act of writing her book. Her shoulders were so broad as to seem androgynous, an image that would have been fortified were it not for the slenderness of her waist. Her hair, at the time still lustrous and dark, hung in a page boy just below her resolute, one might have said stubborn, jaw. Her nails were blunt and buffed. As characterized as her writing was by sharp wit, only the dimple that appeared occasionally to the side of her tight-held mouth indicated any humor. Throughout the trial she had appeared very much the serious author, just incidentally a Recovering Everything, and woman.
    Today though, as she entered the last phase of her cross-examination by Jessup’s attorney, she wore a light-blue coatdress, with a buttoned self-belt at the waist. Her breasts, which had seemed almost bound during the trial, looked opulent, the full fall in between made discreetly indistinct by the fashionable scarf tucked into her décolletage. It was finally clear that a woman sat there. Her generous mouth, loosed from its tense moorings, relaxed into an unaccustomed smile, as William Arnold asked her if it was not true that she deeply disliked Norman Jessup.
    â€œAbsolutely not. I really loved Normie.” Her glasses were perched atop her hair now, in Jackie Kennedy fashion, so she seemed less the driven career woman she had been depicted as in various publications, than a fortyish female who’d probed unexpected depths to become a writer.
    â€œWas it not your intention to vilify him? To break your contract?”
    â€œThere was no contract,” she said. “And as for … allegedly vilifying him, I left out a lot he