The Best Defense (16 page)

You know it? The Roaster?” She had added almost ingenuously, “I saw your picture in the paper. I’ll recognize you and wave.”

As soon as she saw Janey Lipscomb waving from a table, Barbara knew she would have trouble thinking of her as “the doctor.” She was dressed in wrinkled slacks with an equally wrinkled cotton shirt, sandals without hose; her permed hair was tied back with a red ribbon.

She was very pretty, very dimply, with blue eyes and brilliant white teeth. Her patients must love her, Barbara thought as they shook hands.

“I’m glad you had time to see me,” she said, taking a chair opposite Janey. She glanced about the coffee shop, which was crowded and noisy.

“This is a good place.”

“I think so. There was no way I could talk to you at the office. We’re

controlled by an ogre who runs appointments like Mussolini’s train schedules. No appointment, you wait. The usual lag is close to three weeks.”

She was grinning as she said this.

“And you intrigued me enough not to want to wait that long. You’re representing Paula Kennerman, and there’s an emergency with a child who possibly will be a witness. How could I wait?”

A waitress took their orders, two cappuccinos, one pastry.

“I have to eat something,” Janey said.

“No lunch today, and dinner’s a long way down the road.”

“Do you do much work with children?” Barbara asked when the waitress left.

“Mostly family practice, at least in theory, but actu ally it’s mostly survivors.” She looked at Barbara for recognition of the term, and when Barbara nodded, she went on.

“Women and their children. Dysfunctional families. Battered women. Children in trouble. How did you get my name?”

Barbara caught a glimpse of shrewd intelligence that vanished quickly from Janey’s face. She told her about Emma, and then about Angela and her daughter Annie.

“It made a difference when I said Mrs. Canby had hired you. I think otherwise she would have turned me down altogether.”

“Ah, the magic name,” Janey said with a little laugh.

The waitress came back with their order; the pastry was as large as a dinner plate.

“Ah, good,” Janey murmured, and began to cut the pastry into wedges with a knife and fork. She picked up a piece in her fingers.

“Have some.”

Barbara shook her head and watched her eat. The coffee was excellent.

Neither spoke again until Janey had eaten half the pastry and finished her coffee. She held the cup up to get the attention of the waitress and then leaned back.

“What I would do in a situation like this,” she said thoughtfully, “is go out and talk to the mother first. I don’t know how deeply into denial she is, of course, but that’s the first hurdle. She has to admit she has a trou bled child. Step one. She might not talk, you know. She might not trust me worth a damn.”

Barbara smiled. She would make a bet that suckling puppies would leave their mothers to follow this young woman.

“You agree that the child must be very troubled?”

“Well, sure,” Janey said.

“Ah, more coffee.” The empty cups were replaced with steaming cups, and Janey returned to her pastry.

“She’s in Cottage Grove,” Barbara said.

“And she isn’t to be billed. I’ll pay for this.”

“Well, someone better or the ogre would eat me raw.”

The second half of the pastry was vanishing as fast as the first half had done. Janey held a piece poised in front of her mouth.

“But you have to understand that no matter who pays the piper, if that child becomes my client, I have to treat our relationship with absolute confidence. I’ll make the mother understand that also.”

Slowly Barbara said, “What I’m hoping for is that if she’ll talk to you first, maybe then she’ll talk to me.”

“And if she doesn’t? Talk to you, I mean.”

“I don’t know.”

“Uh-huh. Boy, that was good!” She picked up crumbs on her fingertip and put it in her mouth.

“Sorry.

I was starved. I’ll call Angela Everts tomorrow and see if I can go out on Thursday. My day off,” she added with a rueful expression.

“You know this all might take a long time?”

“How long?” Barbara asked, almost dreading an answer.

“Who knows? If the mother agrees to the whole thing, I’ll have her bring the child to the office, where we are set up for children. You know—toys, dolls, doll houses

“You videotape the sessions?”

Janey gave her another one of her intelligent, appraising looks and shrugged.

“Usually. Off-limits, though.”

“Of course.” Barbara thought a moment, then asked, “But would it be unethical if you let me know how you’re making out with them?”

Janey laughed.

“You’re paying the bill. You get that much.”

“Do you want a map of the area? The house and barn , all that?”

“No. If she cooperates, she’ll make a map. I suspect it will be more interesting than one you could supply.”

Well, Barbara thought, back in her car, not moving yet, she had set a lot of wheels as ping She felt as if all around her things were in motion that had not been only a few days ago, and she was tired and hungry.

She drove through town without caring that traffic was heavy now, not caring how long she had to wait at the red lights. On impulse she drove toward Skinner Butte Park and the house her father had bought. She slowed down when she saw his car in the driveway. She could park, go ring the bell, and say, “Hey, I’m hungry.” And he would put his arm around her shoulder and say, “Well, let’s go eat.” That’s what her mother would have done, she thought, and they both would have pretended nothing had happened. She drove past the house and went home.

On her porch was a second potted geranium, white, with a card that read: One looked pretty lonesome. I watered them both.

She returned to her car and drove back to his house.

When he opened the door, she said, “Hey, I’m hungry,” and he said, “Well, let’s go eat.” His arm felt good around her shoulder.

They walked to a neighborhood German restaurant, where they had big fat sausages, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, and dark beer.

“Save room for strudel,” Frank warned when they ordered.

“This time of year it will be with fresh cherries.” It was a hard admonition to follow, the food was so very good.

“Never told you the fish story Lewis brought up, did I?” Frank said as they ate.

“Never told a soul, actually.

Let’s see, it was back about nineteen fifty-five, ‘fifty-six, thereabouts. We were both young and full of oats.

We decided to go over to Snake River and do a little salmon fishing, take a weekend off, have ourselves a boys-night-out sort of holiday. Long drive over there, of course, but that was all right. We got there before dark on Friday, and Saturday was exactly what we had planned. Good fishing, good weather, had a good supper that night of spit-roasted salmon, had some good talk. Then Sunday we decided to go back out for just a couple of hours before we headed back home. And Lewis snagged a sturgeon.”

Telling his stories like this always worked magic, Barbara thought, watching him. Years vanished, leaving his face soft and vulnerable; his eyes appeared unfocused, but she suspected that his vision was extremely clear, focused sharply on the past.

“A sturgeon,” he said, smiling slightly, “is really an waterlogged tree trunk that breathes now and then, once every six months or so, and moves just about with every breath. Any fishing fool knows that all you can do if you snag a sturgeon is to cut it loose. You try to bring it up, it’s like lifting the whole damn river bottom. Lewis knew that as well as I did, but he decided to forget what he knew. And another thing he forgot is that the river doesn’t like things to stay put. No way. It’s forever rearranging things to suit its own whims. And the current nudges everything downriver, toward the rapids and falls, toward the Columbia eventually, and the ocean by and by.”

His grin widened with the recollection.

“And it seemed that we interrupted this particular sturgeon during its period of activity; the damn thing decided to move, heading out toward the middle of the river, where the current was a mite swifter. So I’m yelling at Lewis to cut the thing loose, and he’s yelling that he’s got it.

And we’re drifting out and moving just a little faster downriver, but Lewis is at the end of the boat where the outboard motor is, and he won’t listen to reason. Start the damn engine, I yell, and he yells, I got the sucker!

And I yell. Change places with me! And we are doing that when Lewis goes over the side. Just like that, over the side. He said I pushed him, but I never, and he’s trying to climb back in and next thing the damn boat is upside down and we’re both in the drink. And now we can feel the current really fine. We can’t catch up to the boat, and we head for shore. A little bit of beach, a little bit of a cliff, some scraggly trees, and not a thing more.”

He laughed.

“Oh, we were a sorry couple, I tell you.

Lewis had some matches in a waterproof box, and we pulled down some of the scrub and started a fire and stripped to dry our clothes, and not a

single word 5 between us. Not a word. A little growling maybe, but not a civil word.”

Barbara had finished her dinner while he talked; she waved the waiter away when he approached the table

“So I was trying to calculate how long before the sun dipped behind the cliff, and trying to calculate how much firewood we’d need to last all night, and Lewis kept searching his pockets for something to eat, and we both sort of fell asleep for a little while. He woke up first and started yelling again, waving his shirt, just like a castaway.

Here came one of those big rubber boats that takes thrill seekers down the rapids, with a guide and six customers, and they’re heading our way and we’re trying to cover ourselves. But they rescued us, all right, and took us with them down the rapids. And that’s how I came to shoot the rapids in the deepest gorge in North America.”

He finished the last scraps on his plate and now the waiter came to clear the table and they waited for coffee and strudel.

“You never told Mother?” Barbara asked.

“Nope. Never told a soul, like I said. She would have worried every time I looked like fishing, and she thought Lewis was a bad influence. She said Lewis’s wife, Caroline, thought the same thing about me. Bet he never told anyone either.”

The strudel was too good for talk to get in the way.

When Barbara finished hers, she leaned back with a contented sigh.

“If I did this often I wouldn’t be able to move. I was starving.”

“Thought you looked a mite frazzled when you came in. I stopped by your office today and Martin says you’ve closed shop for a while. Busy days?” He was not quite offhand, but neither was he probing.

She nodded.

“I’ve done some thinking over the weekend,” he said, looking past her at a picture of hearty German women in dirndls carrying trays of beer steins. All the pictures in the restaurant were of hearty young women doing hearty tasks.

“About Judge Paltz?” she prodded when he seemed lost in contemplation of the artwork.

“About Lewis. He made a good judge, in spite of everything. He’s fair and honest. He can be loose and easygoing, or he can be as tight as—” He pulled his gaze from the picture and didn’t finish. All the young women wore very tight bodices over very plump bosoms.

He grinned and waved a hand.

“Anyway, he can be strict, allow not one inch of leeway.”

“And he probably thinks I manipulated him, lied to him,” she murmured.

“Hold on. Let me do this my way. See, I’ve known him for more than fifty years. He knows damn well that someone lied to him and threw him to the dogs. And you ended up getting what it appeared that you wanted in the beginning, and Bill Spassero ended up getting out.” He held up his hand when she started to speak.

“Wait. Paula Kennerman’s already been convicted by public opinion, the newspapers, television, all of it. She’s dead in the water as far as a defense goes, so that’s not a real consideration at this moment. It seems to me that you’ve got yourself on two tracks at the same time, and they’re going to rip you in halves. There’s the Kennerman track, where all you can do is make damn certain the state proves its case, and there’s the Dodgson track, where it all ends up in muck and murk and there’s damn all you can do about them except make them mad. I can’t see a way for you to prove anything about Spassero unless he decides to tell it himself. And with that hanging, you could be a liability, not an asset for Kennerman.”

She waited this time until she was certain he was finished

“Dad, thanks,” she said softly.

“I really don’t want you to worry about this. Maybe I’ve gone out on a limb, but maybe not. I don’t think there are two tracks at all. Just one, and I’m following it to the end.”

“Because of Lewis?”

“He’s a big part of it,” she admitted.

“It wouldn’t do for him to believe you tried to drown him and I threw him to the dogs, would it?”

He shook his head and drew in a deep breath, and re turned his gaze to the buxom women.

“No, it wouldn’t do. What can I do to help?”

She stared at him.

“What do you mean?”

“Christ on a mountain! What did it sound like? No deals. No quid pro quo. Just a doddering old fool offering a feeble, useless hand. You can’t do citations worth a damn.”

“Like hell! I can cite with the best of them when I want to!”

“When you want to,” he muttered, “and that’s rare.

Real rare. Well?” He looked at her over the top of his glasses, his eyebrows drawn nearly together in his fiercest scowl.

“I probably can find something for you to do,” she said, surprised at the huskiness of her voice.

“Well, let’s get out of here and talk about it,” he said.

“Your place. I’d take you home with me, but I’ve only got one chair and damned if I can sit in it with a woman sitting on the floor, and I’ll be double damned if I sit on the floor.”

barbara had an appointment with Sam Bixby at nine forty-five and another with her father at ten in his office.