Desperate Measures (15 page)

Frank shook his head. “I saw her a few days before she died; she looked well and acted well. And she was careful with medications. She wouldn't have taken more dope than was safe for her to handle.”

“You know how that goes, Frank. You take one and nothing happens, and after a while you take one or two more. What was she so worked up about?”

“Nothing that would make her reckless with medications. She had too much to live for.”

“Frank, we're not suggesting she did it on purpose. I'll send someone out to take off the police seal tomorrow, and I brought her personal stuff, purse, keys and safe-deposit key for you, the prescription containers, a receipt for what Doc tested. Her folks can claim the body. It's closed, Frank.” He stood up and put a plastic bag on the desk.

“I'll break the damn seal myself,” Frank muttered.

Milt shrugged. “Be my guest.”

Frank read the autopsy report: no bruises, no needle marks, no contusions, nothing. “But you don't just lie down and die,” he said uneasily. At his age that sometimes happened, but not at fifty-three.

He went home and changed his clothes, and worked for a short time in the garden. The rain had already brought up weeds. He picked some peas and lettuce, pulled a few new red potatoes out from under a thick mulch, then made dinner. When he realized he was pushing his food around on his plate, he forced himself to eat.

Afterward, he picked up a book, put it down, turned on the television, turned it off, considered going to bed early, but it was no use, he decided; he would go break that damn seal and have a look around Hilde's house for himself.

At nine he entered the little house and stood for a moment inside the front door, bewildered by the brightness. The drapes were closed…. He looked up and saw a skylight. The lowering sun made the room as bright as outside. He walked through the living room into the kitchen, everything very clean and neat, flowers turning brown in a vase out here; there were irises curling up and turning black in a bowl in the living room. Books on shelves in both rooms. He didn't stop to examine anything closely; for now he wanted to get a feel for the house, for how Hilde had lived. He remembered Geneva's words “the house was full of silence and emptiness.” He could feel that at the moment. Sometimes his own house felt this way.

He glanced inside a bathroom, then went through a hall into a room that had been used as an office. More books, every room had shelves and bookcases, all filled. And when they overflowed, she packed up a box of books and took them to her mother and sister. As before, he didn't linger to go through the room carefully. Light from the skylight didn't reach this far; the room was shadowy.

He felt a change in the air, a draft, or a shift of the light, something; he started to turn to the door and was in motion when something hit him in the head. Stunned, he reeled into the wall, then fell to the floor. He could hear someone shouting, and running footsteps.

Groggily he started to pick himself up, then hands were on him and someone was saying, “Mr. Holloway, don't move. I'll call an ambulance.”

“No ambulance,” Frank said hoarsely. “Just help me get up.”

The other man got him to his feet, and then helped him back to the kitchen, where Frank sat down. “Chris….” he said.

“Romano, sir. Chris Romano. Maybe we should call your doctor?”

“No. Nothing's broken.” He was feeling his head, just behind his ear. “Maybe some ice,” he said. He was certain nothing was broken, but already soreness was setting in from head to toe.

Then, holding a towel-wrapped plastic bag filled with ice against his head, he leaned back and closed his eyes while Chris Romano had a look outside.

Almost magically Bailey was saying, “Don't fall asleep. You don't want to go to sleep right now.”

Right, he thought. A concussion. Something about a concussion and staying awake. He jerked wide awake as Barbara said, “Dad, open your eyes.”

He opened his eyes to see her kneeling at his side, as white as snow. She examined his face, even felt his pulse, and then she was hugging him hard as he said again and again, “It's all right, Bobby. I'm not hurt. It's all right.” She was trembling all over.

“Let's go to the other room,” she said. “Do you need more ice?”

They wanted to make sure he could walk, he understood, and he rose carefully, held on to the chair back for a moment, then walked to the living room, where he sat on the sofa. Oh, yes, he thought, he was surely going to be sore.

“What's going on?” Barbara demanded, sitting near Frank, glaring at Bailey.

“Chris saw your father come in, and a few seconds later someone came around the side of the house and opened the door. It was all in shadows, he was in dark clothes, and if light hadn't come spilling out, Chris might have missed him. He followed the guy. He says the door was unlocked and he pushed it open a crack, and he heard the crash of someone falling. He yelled and the guy went tearing out the kitchen door. He didn't follow, because he saw your father on the floor.” He shrugged. “I sent him around to the houses back there to see if anyone noticed a strange car or a guy who didn't belong.”

“Thank God Chris was there in the first place,” Frank said. “But what the devil was he doing here?”

Without pause Bailey said, “I got wind that they were closing the books on Franz's death, and I thought someone might decide to come in and poke around before we had a chance to poke around ourselves. I told him to keep an eye on the place.”

It was a good cover story, Barbara thought, relieved. No way would Bailey let Frank know she had hired him to keep watch over Frank. And if Chris hadn't been there, no doubt the assailant would have finished Frank off as he lay helpless on the floor. When she started to tremble again, she stood up and thrust her hands into her pockets.

“Are you going to report this?” she asked Frank.

“No. What's the point? No one got a look at him. They'll say it was an opportunistic neighborhood kid. But he had a key,” he added. “I locked the door when I came in.”

“He must have seen the lights,” Barbara muttered. “He should have figured someone was in here.”

Frank pointed to the skylight. It had grown dark outside, and the rectangle was a black hole now. “I didn't touch the lights,” he said. “Didn't need them yet.”

She walked to the kitchen, back, thinking. “Let's say he's been watching for the police seal to be removed. There's something in here that he wants to collect or get rid of. He didn't lock the door after him, and probably didn't plan to spend more than a couple of minutes getting it. He's familiar with the property, what's behind it, a place to leave a car unnoticed, or at least unremarked. What could he have been after?”

She surveyed the living room: books, some pieces of polished stones, magazines, a CD player, television, newspapers on the sofa, many family pictures, nondescript prints on the walls, a bowl of dead flowers…. “It must be something small, that he could carry easily. What did he use to hit Dad?” she asked Bailey.

“A coffee carafe. It's still on the floor in there.”

“So probably he wasn't armed, just picked up what was at hand.” She turned to Frank. “When will the family come to clean out the house?”

“Anytime. The case is closed.”

“Can you stall them a few days? If that guy didn't have time to get whatever he came for, he might try again, and if they take possession….”

Frank's expression had been grim and became grimmer. ‘'I'll stall them.”

Barbara was already off in a different direction, he realized, and he thought he should remind her that this was not her concern, not her case, but he didn't say a word. She was doing exactly what he would have done if he were in charge.

“Bailey, you and at least one other guy,” Barbara was saying. “Fingerprints. Copy everything on her computer. We don't know what we're looking for, and don't even know if we'll recognize it if we see it. Could be a note, letters, a diary, diamond earrings… something traceable to him.”

Bailey was even grimmer than Frank, not slouching, not griping, more tight-lipped than she had ever seen him. He nodded. “Don't touch anything,” he said. “Be right back.”

He went out, returned with his old denim bag that he called his Junior Detective Kit. He pulled out latex gloves and tossed them to Barbara, then pulled out his cell phone. “You can start with the books in here. I'll round up some help.”

“Waste of time,” Frank said. He leaned back and closed his eyes. “I told her to get rid of anything that could lead a snoop to him, and she said she did.”

At twelve-fifteen Frank said, “I'm going home and soak in a hot Epsom salts bath.”

Barbara put back the book she had taken from a shelf. “I'll come with you.”

“I don't need you to scrub my back,” he said.

Bailey slouched in from the kitchen. “I'm spending the night here, and Alan will sleep at your place,” he said matter-of-factly.

Bailey and Alan had dusted surfaces Barbara would not have thought of for fingerprints, and now were making a thorough search of everything, making sure that the box of baking soda had only baking soda in it, that the sugar canister contained sugar. Bailey was taking pictures of everything, before and after pictures of the search. They would not finish that night.

“I don't want a baby-sitter!” Frank snapped at Bailey.

“Dad, someone knows you were here. For all he knows, you have whatever it is he's after. Alan stays.”

“For all he knows, you might have it,” Frank said.

“So I'll camp out at your place, too.” That was what she had planned from the start, only now it seemed reasonable and not as if she was being overprotective, she thought in satisfaction.

Frank scowled and hauled himself up from the sofa, feeling a twinge of pain in every muscle in his body. “Do what you want,” he said. ‘'I'm going to soak.”

The three-car parade made its way through Eugene. There was little traffic at that hour on a weeknight, but Frank, in the lead, was in no hurry. How much did Barbara know? Something, obviously. But how much? They had to talk, and he couldn't determine where to draw the line. There was even a possibility that her client had been his assailant. His thoughts wandered: if her client was accused of her father's murder, then what? He knew how close he had come to being killed, that if Chris hadn't been watching, in all likelihood he would have been. And his assailant might now target Barbara as well as Frank. Had there ever been a case where a client murdered his defense attorney? Then he was back to where he had started, they had to talk. But not tonight, he added, as a stab of pain shot through his shoulder. He envied movie heroes, where the good guy gets beaten to a pulp, and in the next reel is up and about, as good as new.

Following him, Barbara's thoughts paralleled his. She had to tell him what she knew or suspected about Hilde Franz, that her lover might be a local doctor, or at least on the hospital committee. He could sic Bailey onto all those people. Would he? Or did he know things that she hadn't even considered? It was bad enough to be in the sights of a guy with a rifle, but much, much worse if you didn't know who was holding the gun.

If Hilde's death was not suspicious after all, what was wrong with the guy? No questions raised about her death, what did he have to fear now? Of course, he might not know how much she had told Frank, she reasoned, exactly as she had done before, and she realized that she would continue to run in circles until she and her father discussed this aspect of the case. But she still couldn't tell him about Alex, about his secret persona, and Frank might clam up until she did. “It's a fucking mess!” she said under her breath.

But nothing tonight, she added. He needed to soak and get a good night's rest, and tomorrow, if he looked as bad as he did now, she would try to talk him into seeing his doctor. People in their seventies should not get hit in the head and slammed to the floor. She wanted to kill the guy who had done that to her father, not through the legal system, but with her bare hands. Then she mocked herself. She had been fighting against the death penalty all her life.

At the house, Alan examined all the windows and doors before he settled down in the living room. He would not sleep. Frank went to his room, and Barbara wandered upstairs, where there was a bed waiting for her, as always. She had left some clothes, T-shirts, underwear, nightgowns in the bureau, a housecoat in the closet; there were always new toothbrushes, and her old hairbrush was on the dresser. Home; this was home as much as her apartment, maybe even more. In this room were Monet posters in frames, her old patchwork quilt on the three-quarter-size bed, a small white rocking chair with three stuffed bears. One of Frank's clients had made the quilt for Barbara when she was ten.

She went back downstairs. She would not go to bed until Frank did; she wanted to find out how serious his injuries were. He knew that and obligingly went to the dinette, where she was waiting.

“Okay,” he said. “Bruised, sore, but okay. Now go to bed.”

“Right. And, Dad, in the morning, let's talk.”

“I think we'd better. Good night, honey.” He kissed her cheek and left her. He suspected she was wondering, as he was, just how forthcoming their talk would really be.

14

When Frank entered
the kitchen the next morning, Barbara was beating something in a bowl. He felt as if he had been used for practice by sumo wrestlers all night, and the goose egg on his head throbbed with every movement. When Barbara asked how he was, he said fine.

“Well, sit down. Breakfast coming up. Scrambled eggs, toast, juice, coffee. Anything else?”

“That's plenty,” he said, taking his seat at the table. He knew without a doubt that the eggs would be too runny, too tough, or else burned, the toast underdone, and the coffee bad. He also knew it would be pointless to tell her not to bother.