The Best Defense (15 page)

“Well, Craig was swimming and Reggie Melrose was in the kitchen. I rang the doorbell and hammered on the door, and Mrs. Dodgson opened it. She was carrying Craig’s robe. I guess she was pretty surprised to see me at the front door. I thought for a minute she was going to bawl me out, but she didn’t. She told me to use the phone in the family room, and she went on through it to turn off the music in the swimming pool room. Craig always blasted your ears with music in there. And she yelled at him to get out and get dressed, and Reggie came out of the kitchen to see what was happening.”

“Did you see Craig?”

“Yes, I guess I did. I saw him and then turned my back. He swims naked.”

“Who is Reggie? The housekeeper?”

“Was. She left. No one stays very long, I tell you. If there’s a speck of dust, someone’s going to lead you to it and point it out just like the world’s coming to an end.”

There was little more that she could add, and in a few minutes Barbara returned to the subject that couldn’t be avoided any longer.

“Mrs. Everts,” she said slowly, “I believe you know that Annie hasn’t really forgotten what happened that day. Children don’t forget things like fire and death. Probably she’ll never forget it.

Would you consider counseling for her?”

Angela stood up.

“I have to clean up all this mess and start making supper now. Miss Holloway.”

Barbara rose from her chair.

“I’m not a psychologist,” she said, “but I have read that children who are seriously disturbed by something they witnessed some times revert to more infantile behavior. They might start bed-wetting again, or suck their thumbs, or forget lessons they knew previously. Mrs. Everts, would you be willing to discuss this with a trained child psychologist?”

Angela looked hard and cold and very distant.

“No, I won’t. There’s nothing wrong with Annie! You hear me? There’s nothing wrong with my little girl!”

“I think there must be something disturbing her very much if she claims to have forgotten. Please think about it, Mrs. Everts. Her entire life could be affected if she is deeply troubled and doesn’t receive help now before she really does bury this incident.”

“I have to be getting on with my work,” Angela said, and started toward the hall that led to the front door.

Barbara followed her. At the door she tried once more.

“Do you know Dr. Jane Lipscomb? Mrs. Canby hired her early on, before she opened the house.”

Angela shook her head.

“I never saw her. Emma talked about her a little.”

“You know if Mrs. Canby hired her she must be good. If I ask her to get in touch with you, will you at least talk to her?”

Angela hesitated, then nodded.

“But she can’t see Annie, just me.”

on her way home she bought a frozen dinner and salad makings and even a bottle of wine, which was cheap but okay. She was too tired to cope with a real meal and too hungry to care what she had.

She listened to her phone messages as she ate. Unless she heard to the contrary. Bailey would drop by tomorrow around ten. She nodded. Nothing from her father, nothing she had to do anything about. Then she called an old friend, Brian O’Connor, who had been a classmate years ago and now was a professor of law at the University of Oregon in Eugene.

She remembered Brian as a chubby, round-faced, serious boy with red hair and freckles. She had gone to his wedding seven years ago and found that he had become a chubby, round-faced, serious man with hair not quite so red. Nothing really changes, she had thought then.

Brian wanted to chat, bat she was in no mood to hear about his two wonderful kids, his wonderful wife, or his wonderful tenure.

“Brian,” she cut in, “I need some students to do some research.”

His tone changed.

“Ah, research. Students. Why students?”

“Because I can’t afford professionals,” she said honestly.

“And it would be good experience for them. They have to be very, very discreet, and very bright.”

“Students,” he said again.

“I suppose you mean graduate students.”

“Brian, come on. You know that’s what I mean.

When we were in school this would have seemed heavensent to us. A little real work, a little money. Can you give me three?”

“Why don’t we get together and talk about it? You know, I have a responsibility to my students. I wouldn’t feel right unless we talk first.”

She closed her eyes tightly.

“Fine. Look, let me buy you ” She caught herself before she said lunch, remembering that he ate like a horse, and said instead, “A cup of coffee. Tomorrow?”

He had to explain at some length why he couldn’t make it until in the afternoon, and they agreed to meet at three in an espresso bar downtown. But he would do it, she knew. He owed her; she had done enough algebra homework for him a long time ago for him to pass the course, and her little reminder of their impoverished days would jog more than one memory. He would think about whom to recommend overnight, hem and haw about it, ask too many questions, and then give her the short list.

She had to write out her activities of the day, keep her notes up-to-date, plan tomorrow, clean up her kitchen, get some sleep eventually. And this was how it would be for the long stretch ahead, she knew.

* “You’re not going to like this,” Bailey warned her the next morning, opening his briefcase. He withdrew a file and put it on the table, pushed it across to her. She had given him a cup of coffee, which he sipped as she examined the contents of the file.

“Damn,” she murmured. He had brought a collection of photocopies of articles about pro-life demonstrations.

The caption of the picture she was looking at named some of the people, including Craig Dodgson, linked arm-in-arm with men on each side, blocking a women’s clinic in Cincinnati. The next one was in Spokane, Dodgson in the front of the line again, his face twisted in rage. And again in Buffalo. Atlanta…

She studied Craig Dodgson: Lean, dark-haired, young was all she could say about him. In each photograph his face was contorted in anger.

“Well,” she said when she had looked at them, nine in all.

“The boy’s busy, isn’t he?”

“He gets around,” Bailey agreed.

“He’s bad news, Barbara.”

“I see he is. Does he organize, or just show up to help out?”

“We’re working on that. There’s another son, Alex, twenty-four, an intern in the office of Senator Bulmar in Seattle. Nothing more than that about him yet. And we’ll get the aerial today. Our guy’s made a couple of sweeps over the forest, scouting out yew trees for the drug Taxol. He’ll wrap it up today.”

“What else is bothering you?” Barbara asked.

He shrugged.

“I just don’t know where to draw the line. I sent Winnie in at the restaurant to talk to some of the women there.” Winnie was Winifred

Scourby, a matronly woman in her fifties who could ferret out any 3 thing she went after.

“She got them talking, and they don’t think Craig Dodgson’s been asking anyone to take a cruise with him, not for a couple of years, and they seem to think that he did take a waitress out a few years ago, and then paid her off to go somewhere else.”

Barbara looked again at the furious face in the photograph before her.

“Give, Bailey. What did they say?”

“They believe he knocked her up and paid off with an abortion and cash for her to get lost.”

“Find her,” Barbara said in a soft voice.

“Don’t even think of drawing the line. Bailey, not until I tell you to.

I want her.”

She gave Bailey a new list, culled from the lists Paula and Emma had provided.

“You might have trouble getting some of them to talk to you. Let Winnie do it, especially this one, Carol Burnside. She took some pictures last winter, near dawn, that made Dodgson Senior blow. Why?

What’s in those pictures?”

He looked at the list gloomily and stuffed it into his briefcase.

“Okay. You’re the boss. I just don’t know what we’re digging for.”

“Worms,” she said.

“Slimy, loathsome worms.”

She made a few phone calls, and then she went to the office to intercept Bessie before he got busy, if he ever did. Bessie quivered when she told him she would like to have three researchers go through his accumulation of newspapers.

“No, no!” he cried.

“Barbara, you can’t be serious.

Three of them in my office? No, I can’t let them do that.”

“Can I have the papers boxed up, moved somewhere else?”

“All of them?” He turned anxious eyes to the many bins and quivered again.

“All of them?”

“I’ll bring them back, Bessie. I just want them to read, not cut them up or mark them up, just to read.”

She was afraid he would cry.

“We could do it another way, of course, but it would be so costly, and since they’re here, together … Bessie, we’ll take good care of them.”

“Oh, dear,” he said in an undertone.

“Oh, dear me.

Not out of the offices. I haven’t even finished them all yet.” His face brightened and he said eagerly, “In the waiting room, that would be all right.”

She knew the room he meant; it was where clients and family members and their attorneys all put in their time waiting for jury decisions, waiting to be called back to court. She nodded. That would be even better;

the students wouldn’t have to work in his office while he was out. They could go right through everything as fast as possible.

That afternoon she met her researchers. Although Brian had been painfully disappointed when she refused to explain what she was looking for, he had supplied two men and a woman. They looked terribly young. Sally Wesley had black hair halfway down her back, great round glasses, and a nice little snub nose. Rob Carradine, going for the poised, man-of-the-world appearance, had dressed in a shirt and tie and sports coat;

the effect was somewhat spoiled by Levi’s and dirty running shoes. And John Rohr, the youngest of the three, was bespectacled, tall, thin, and intense.

She had asked them to meet her at the office, and they were in the waiting room, where the bins of papers had been lined up against a wall. The coffee machine was plugged in, magazines in place on low tables, a few games on a shelf, all exactly the way it always had been as long as she could remember. She indicated the bins.

“They are far-right-wing publications; some are the religious right, others not, but they’re all right of Attila the Hun. You have to read them all and make notes of the articles and editorials—you know, pro-life or anti gay or school choice, whatever the topic is—and when you’ve read them all, group those under the same headings and check them out. Are they the same? Same wording, same catch phrases? Just similar? Not alike at all, except in topic? Keep good notes about dates and sources.”

“You think maybe they aren’t all locally written?”

John Rohr asked.

She looked at him more closely. He was no more than twenty-five, she thought, and intense. He had retainers on his teeth, and wore glasses that made his gaze more like a stare. She nodded at him.

“I don’t know yet. That’s what I want to find out. Is someone leading, others following? And if yes, who is doing which?”

It was nearly five, too late for them to start that day.

“Keep your hours noted,” she said.

“And if you get tired, or disgusted, you know, if your eyes start to blur, take a break.” She finished with a warning about not talking.

“Not with anyone,” she said, “except among yourselves. Okay?”

They all nodded solemnly. They looked like children, she thought with dismay, not at their youth, but at the gap that had widened insidiously and now separated her so thoroughly from students in their twenties.

As she was leaving, she saw Sam Bixby with an elderly couple who looked very prosperous. She smiled at Sam and kept walking.

“Oh, Barbara, do you have a minute?” he called after her.

She glanced at her watch and shook her head.

“Tomorrow?

I have an appointment in about ten minutes.”

She had known Sam Bixby all her life; he and her father had become partners more than forty years ago, and the firm they had launched had prospered. From the start her father had done most of the trial work, and Sam the estate planning, trust fund planning, wills, real estate deals. Now a dozen other lawyers did most of the trial work, and her father and Sam coddled the rich old folk who had come to rely on them. Sam was tall and stooped, with scant hair that didn’t cover his scalp, although he was always trying new ways to have it cut and combed. Silly, vain old man; today his hair looked as if he had had it styled and blow-dried. She was very fond of him.

He took a step in her direction.

“Call my secretary for a time, will you, Barbara? Tomorrow?”

She nodded. She had thought he just wanted to pat her on the head and voice the hope that no hard feelings would result from the firm’s decision. But this was something else, she realized.

She walked out of the offices, out of the building, out into the sunlight, where she debated walking the dozen blocks to her appointment, but after a glance at her watch, regretfully retrieved her car from the lot. No time, no time, she muttered as she headed once more toward the Sacred Heart medical complex. Five o’clock traffic was heavy on Pearl, but as soon as she turned off onto Thirteenth, she was out of the worst of it. Nice tree-lined streets with well-kept big houses framed with shrubbery and flowers gave the impression that this was a residential area, but it was commercial. Here the businesses had settled into the houses—a good women’s clothing store, a hatter, one of the best restaurants in town, real-estate offices, a book store…. Within a block of the hospital complex it all changed; the buildings were new, concrete, ugly. Tiny circles had been left open in the concrete paving, like fishing holes in ice, for spindly trees that were doomed. Barbara didn’t even look for a parking space, but drove straight to the hospital parking garage.

She had found Dr. Jane Lipscomb’s number in the phone book, had called her, and the doctor had said, “Why don’t we meet in the coffee shop on Thirteenth.