Fifteen Minutes
The biggest problem with the daily paper is that it’s a ten minute read. Most of the stories have been on the net for days and it only takes a moment to scan the obituaries to make sure I’m still breathing (that’s dad’s joke, not mine) and throw a glance at the sports page to see if my high school won whatever game they were playing last night. That isn’t enough. I need more time in the morning before I start staring at my phone or another screen. So, I usually sit and drink coffee and watch the table, wondering where in the hell my life has gone.
On Wednesdays, I stroll down the block to the red paper-box and pick up the local weekly. It covers stories that are too small for the web to pick up immediately and don’t always catch the daily’s attention. Every turn of the page brings the possibility of a juicy story of a local politician getting picked up on a solicitation charge or a local beer license getting blocked by a neighboring church that's worried people will be having sex in the parking lot when services start on Sunday mornings. The clank of quarters dropping into the box soothes me and I take the paper into the cafe and wait for the first cup of coffee, the first of too many.
Finding a body in the marsh near Georgetown wasn’t one of those hidden, local blurbs. That story had been all over the news three months earlier and local and national media tried to tie the discovery to half a dozen missing person’s cases. Families and friends of those lost souls flooded message boards with speculation, hopeful and otherwise. Like everything else though, the story faded away and nobody found any peace.
So, when I opened up the paper on Wednesday and saw the headline, “‘Swamp Lady’ Identified,” I was surprised I hadn’t seen it already on one of those screens I couldn’t always avoid. The article was accompanied by a photo of a luminous blonde with European cheeks and a big smile that jumped off the page at me. I skimmed the first few sentences, the same attention deficit that inhabited the rest of my life, until I got to her name and my breath stopped. I reached for the cup in front of me, not realizing it was just coffee until the splash hit my lips. The body was identified as the never reported missing ex-wife of a local Russian emigre who worked in some capacity for the Coffman family that operated every t-shirt and boogie board shop for fifty miles in any direction. The name had been Koifman until the family moved to the area from one of the five boroughs by way of St. Louis and thought Coffman sounded more legitimate in the not yet “New” South of the 1950’s.
The byline on the story was Jess Jones, of course as she seemed to be the only one of the staff that wrote about things other than flower shows and local scores. I’d met her a few years before when she’d worked as the co-anchor on the 4 a.m. show on the ABC affiliate in Myrtle Beach. She was too good for that hour and the pay sucked. That, along with the fact somebody had filmed her touching one of the dancer’s legs on stage one late night at the Rainbow, hastened her departure. She ended up at the weekly, tracking down rumors and making local celebrities nervous they’d soon be going down the ladder the same way she seemed to be, though she acted as though it wasn’t a descent. “I need to get back to my roots, Clark: real journalism,” she told me.
To her credit, she never blamed me for taking to the club. It had been her idea and I had told her many former clients of mine worked there, so we got lubed up on Captain and Diet Cokes and went in with a stack of $2 bills. I didn’t think I needed to tell her that no touching was allowed out in the main area, but, when I turned around from grabbing drinks at the bar, she was up by the stage, a bill in her teeth and both hands stroking the legs of one of those former clients who was gently trying to disengage her with “You can’t do that out here, honey.”
A bouncer and I made it to the scene at the same time and I gave him the “I got this'' look which works because I’m 6’ 3” and not an asshole unless I need to be. Luckily, the bouncer was Bobby Jensen, a kid I’d been able to plead a 10-20 year felony down to three years of probation five or so years ago, so he was either not going to be an asshole to me or was just tired to deal with it. He looked at me and said, “I’m sorry Mr. Evans, she can’t stay.”
“No worries, Bobby. I’ll get her out.” Unfortunately for Jess, the distraction of a local semi-celeb touching some same-sex skin distracted the rest of security for a bit and a knob at the next table got video he ended up selling to a reporter at the NBC affiliate who lied and said they hadn’t paid for it. It ended up running on the 6 p.m. show along with commentary from a gray-haired newscaster who intoned seriously about how “journalists need to be held to a higher standard to maintain the trust of our local community” which, from him in particular, was total horseshit, so I made sure to post a link to his CDV that had gotten him chased out of Denver ten years before in the comment section on every single story on the station’s website for the next six months.
I saw Jess on occasion after and got her out of a few scrapes on what did look like an actual fall down the ladder for a bit. We got along, tired of talking so much, tired of a lot of things, and content to sit and soak in the world sitting in the same room. Sometimes, we saw each other naked, usually after a few of those Captain and Diets and neither of us seemed to mind that, treating it as just another part of our relationship.
Jess is a good writer, but there wasn’t a lot to the story of the identity yet. “The body found near Georgetown on April 6 has been identified as Alena Avdeyen, a resident of Socastee, originally from Russia and former waitress at the Tea Room in North Myrtle Beach. Police indicate there are no signs of foul play, but the state of the remains prevent the medical examiner from making a determination of the cause or time of death. Police also have no information about how long Ms. Avdeyen had been in the country, but have been able to locate relatives in Russia who are making the proper arrangements. They have confirmed she was here legally. Ms. Avdeyen is the former wife of Dorofey Blokhin, a local businessman, who assisted authorities in contacting the family.”
My hands started trembling as I held the paper and continued to read past the dead woman’s name, alternating reading sentences with purpose now and looking at the photo accompanying the write-up. It must have been from the DMV, normally just a blank face against a blue wall, less personal than a mug shot even. Her face wasn’t blank in this photo though. The eyes sparked and her mouth was turned up on one side in a devious smile that would have looked perfect on tv or the movies or anywhere else for that matter.
My hands were shaking because it wasn’t the smile of Alena Avdeyen, at least not the one I knew. I blinked a few times as my mind worked backwards. I didn’t “know” Alena Avdeyen actually, but I’d met her once: In the courthouse where she sat alone at the defendant’s table while I questioned her husband, my client Dorofey, about his grounds for divorce. Dorofey was actually the client of a colleague of mine, an older attorney who lived a much more interesting life than I, showing up in Court in rumpled shirts and stained ties, garish and mismatched socks underneath $3000 suits that had last seen a dry cleaner years before.
He had asked me to cover the hearing at the last minute, saying he had a conflict in General Sessions, but that Dorofey had paid a big fee to get the divorce done quickly so, for $2000 slid across the table in an envelope at the Pancake House the morning of the hearing, I agreed. “It’s a done deal,” he told me. “They already split everything. It’s all uncontested and he’s bringing the witness. It’ll take fifteen minutes.”
“No worries, Bob,” I said. “I’ve done it a thousand times.” He didn’t respond other than to drop a $20 on the table for his $2.50 tab, stood and walked out without even a fist bump.
At the courthouse, Alena had sat silently throughout most of the proceeding, and if you had asked me, I would’ve told you I don’t think the woman had ever smiled in her life. She was a lesser version of the picture in the paper, duller hair and eyes without a hint of mischief, just a coldness that made it hard to get anything off of her other than an iciness when she looked at you. It wasn’t charming like the photo of the real Alena, but cunning and hard. It didn’t strike me as unusual at a divorce hearing and the fact she wasn’t getting alimony or any property out of the deal made me think she was pissed about the whole thing and just wanted to get out as quickly as possible. So, she stood and grunted affirmation as the judge went through the niceties afforded a pro se party until she was convinced Alena could represent her own interests in the matter.
The only hiccup came when I had to question Dorofey’s corroborating witness, an oaf of a man wearing as shirt that fit across his shoulders, but couldn’t be buttoned up all the way up around his tree-ish neck. All they had to do was answer “yes” to my four questions about the year-long separation and their knowledge that the parties had not reconciled, but the confused look on his face when I asked him to state his name for the record made the judge stop the hearing and delve in, where she and I figured out at the same time that the witness couldn’t understand nor speak English. She had her clerk go into chambers and see if they could find an interpreter, but there was nobody in the courthouse who wasn’t already in the room with us who could speak both languages.
I’d been in front of the judge dozens of times and I usually made life pretty easy for them, so she called me up and we concocted a plan that let me ask the question that would then be translated by my client as would the corresponding answer. Once that step was done, the Judge looked to Alena who would agree the translation was accurate. The fifteen minutes turned into an hour, but the divorce was granted. As I packed up, the court reporter looked at me and said, “I hope nobody ever needs a transcript of this hearing.”
I smiled and replied, “The beauty of uncontested.” He shook his head and asked my client for a few spellings and we were done. Alena walked out with her now ex-husband. I hung back for a few minutes and talked with the Court about bar gossip before heading out to my car. The walking out together hadn’t struck me as unusual, though seeing the now divorced couple making out in the back of the Town Car being steered out of the lot by the witness raised some questions I quickly and willfully put down. It was none of my business.
At the cafe, my hands stopped shaking and I nodded at the waitress as my cup was refilled. She was a sandy blondish, vague redhead, in her low 20’s but carrying too much weight on her shoulders. It made her look tired and old and I smiled in sympathy as she left. She reminded me peripherally of the blond, blandly pretty Alena Avdeyen I had met in the courthouse on March 3, without the coldness: The Alena Avdeyen that didn’t look anything like the photo in the paper. The Alena Avdeyen who didn’t smile once.
I dropped the paper and picked up my coffee, suddenly wishing I hadn’t quit drinking again, wondering what the hell had I done. The table vibrated under my phone and I looked at the screen which showed Jess’s face and number. My feet went cold as I knew she’d been digging. She won’t let some things go and my name was on the record of the divorce hearing. I let the call go to voicemail and I sat, trying to stare at nothing, but unable to see anything other than the real Alena Avdeyen’s face.
