Possession (43 page)

"I thought she was."

She lit another cigarette. "Suppose she didn't know Demich before . . ."

"Then she wouldn't have been so willing to kill me to save him, would she? She wouldn't have been rolling around in the grass naked with him when I found them. Even sluts have loyalty, and she wasn't a slut. She loved Danny. Shit, Nina, I used to envy him she loved him so much."

"Did you now?"

"Not her—just the situation. Why would any woman change partners so easily? I saw her. She was nuts about Demich."

"What? Say that again."

"She was nuts about Demich."

"Again."

"Come on, Nina. All right. She was nuts about Demich."

She stood up and paced, hampered by the confines of the narrow trailer.

"That's all we have, Sam. A mind."

"A mind?"

"You've been concentrating on physical evidence. That's what you do best, and God knows, we need all of it we can get our hands on. You know where I think our real evidence is? It's locked up in a mind that's not working the way it should. I think what we need is inside her head. She may not even know it's there . .."

"I must have made your tea too strong. Look, she's lyin§> so I guess that means that she holds the key to why 1' happened. If you want to get fancy and say it's inside her head, that's fine with me."

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She stopped walking and pulled the hassock up so close to him that her knees touched his.

"Let me tell you a story. We had a case. I went to court with it. The victim was a hitchhiker—seventeen, maybe eighteen, kind of a plain, stubby little girl. A runaway. Nobody wanted her. Mother took off with stepdaddy number four. Father was supposed to be in California; so she figures she'll hitch a ride and go find him and say, 'Hi there. I'm your long-lost kid.' She started out from Bellingham, and she made it to the southern limits of Seattle when this creep picked her up. He had no intention of taking her to Portland. He got off the freeway someplace south of Tukwila and drove into a gravel pit. The usual stuff. He screwed her. He made her blow him. And then he screwed her again. That tired him out; so he tied her up and put her in the back seat while he slept. In the morning, he repeated the whole process."

"That's almost your average American rape scene—" "Shut up. O.K., you're right. A nice average rape. Well, it went on for three days. Forced sex. Bondage. Isolation. No hope of surviving for her—at least in her mind. On the fourth day, he finishes with her, and he remembers he's supposed to be in Vancouver, and what's he going to do with her? So he shoots her. Not once. Not twice. He shoots her three times, and any reasonable victim would have lain down and died. She certainly seemed to be dead. Blood all over, eyes closed, breathing so shallow he thinks he's gotten rid of a complaining witness. He takes off." "I can't see how . . ."

"Please shut up. O.K. This little girl is made of tough stuff. She's got a .22 slug in her arm, and one in her hip, and e in her neck, only—get this—the one in her neck is

Jck neatly in her carotid artery. If it had gone through, she

'ould have died right away. If it stays there, her brain will

'•• But, if they take it out proper, they can stop the d»ng and she might live. She can't know that, of course.

^organism only wants to live. She comes to, and lover

'w 8°ne, and she's hurting like hell; so she crawls, crawls, 323

up to the road and lies down there. She probably crawled three hundred yards a little bit at a time, and she leaves a trail of red behind her. Somebody comes along, sees her, scoops her up, and gets her into Harborview Emergency. They operate, see that slug that stopped her from bleeding to death, and didn't quite kill her, and they take it out and sew the carotid together neat as you please. She lives. She not only lives, she eventually walks and talks."

"Babe, if you just want to trade war stories, I can match you horror for horror. I can invite the neighbors in and make popcorn."

Nina shook her head impatiently. "She gives a statement when she's in the hospital, while she's maybe not quite rational—but the county dicks figure out what happened to her; they find a gas credit slip with his license number on it, and they pick him up in Camas and charge him attempted murder, rape, sodomy, kidnapping. They match the gun he had with the slugs that came out of her. They find somebody who saw her get in his car, but you know what happens when they go to see her about testifying against him?"

"What?"

"She starts to cry. She refuses to testify against him. She says she wants to marry him."

Sam stared at Nina. "She what?"

"She loves him. There was nothing the dicks could do, nothing / could do. That girl was totally entranced, totally in love with the bastard who almost killed her, who left her bleeding inside and out. He went to prison—but without her testimony. She married him before he went to Walla Walla."

"Why?"

"Right. Why?"

"She must have been nuts."

"Right again. No particular argument on that. Which brings us back to where we started. There's something here, I think—something that matches what I just told you. Th< shrinks kept mumbling about isolation . . . and fear. Let's think about it overnight and see where Joanne fits into it.

Nina moved toward the couch where her suit jacket lay.

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and he stepped aside, too conscious of the small space with only the two of them in it. She bent over to pick up the jacket, poised in mid-movement without moving at all, and then she turned back to him, her hands empty.

"Oh, hell Sam. I'm not going. I have a forty-five-dollar motel room downtown, all reserved and paid for, and I can't go." He thought he knew what she was saying, but he stuttered like a schoolboy.

"You want me to go through it again?" "No."

"What then?"

"I want you to fuck me." She would not lift her eyes to his face, but kept them focused at his chest level. "I want to be here with you tonight when the wind out there picks up and rocks this trailer, and feel Pistol on the bed between us, scratching fleas and being annoying. I want to feel your old bones next to my old bones."

His arms were awkward, but she moved into them easily, fitting against him just as she always had.

"You think it won't get too hot, too uncomfortable?" he whispered. "You won't have to find a cool place, some stalwart young man who doesn't have one foot on a banana peel and the other in the joint?" ^Not tonight. All I want is tonight." "All you ever wanted was tonight." "Don't talk. Don't ask for a goddamn commitment." He heard her undressing behind him while he unfolded his new hideabed. And remembered he was a loser. Maybe he would fail at this too.

She was thinner; her expensive suit had hidden a new Miiness, flesh gone from her hips and breasts. It didn't seem to matter. Even knowing the risk, he responded to her completely, recalling in his loins their exceeding joy in one with her. The ache went out of him when he was at last inside of her, and just before he came, he thought that it was quite wonderful that he should be here, locked with her, instead of lying on his jail bunk in Wenatchee. ' fell asleep on top of her, too exhausted and too to move away from her. He kissed the damp hair 325

at her temples, and remembered nothing more all night long.

She was gone when he woke, chilled under the single blanket, the cat purring against his chest. He thought that he had dreamed her there. And then he saw the sheet of paper pinned to the hideabed arm, a yellow legal sheet with her square printing on it.

S.— Will call later. Gone to see Joanne.

N.—

Nina had found the element of surprise wise in her first contact with Sam in five years; she now considered it essential in getting close to Joanne Lindstrom. Mark Nelson had tried the proper channels and had been rebuffed by Elizabeth Crowder, and the welcome wouldn't be any warmer for her. None of them were going to give anything to Sam. She had no doubt that they had been warned to avoid the defense, told they did not have to face Sam Clinton outside the courtroom. Well, Mark Nelson was forthright to a fault—at least a fault in a defense attorney—gifted with no slyness and precious little ingenuity. Nina imagined him, hat in hand, announcing who and what he was and asking to see Joanne.

She had left Sam's bed at six and driven to the Holiday Inn to claim her suite, take a shower, and dress again into something that did not label her "professional woman." jeans and a red-checked shirt, boots that had cost three hundred dollars but didn't look it, she could have been the wife of a well-to-do Natchitat rancher.

She found the Lindstrom farm easily enough. She was good at directions, and she was lucky. She was invariably

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lucky for other people—unless they depended on her for something more than she could give. Just before she drew up to the lane to the farm, she saw a perfectly maintained 1972 Plymouth emerge from the narrow road and turn toward town. The driver had to be Elizabeth Crowder, an older woman sitting bolt upright behind the wheel. Nina slowed and satisfied herself that the Plymouth had disappeared around the first curve in the gravel road before she turned her Mazda toward the farm. Bumping over the last rutted hillock, she saw that there were no vehicles parked in the yard or in the shed, that the curtained windows shut any occupant off from a view of her.

She rapped sharply on the back door and waited. There was no answer. She rapped again and heard some sound in the house beyond, but no one came. A door slammed inside; music rose and then stopped as if someone had turned the volume knob of a radio or television up when they'd meant to turn it off. She knocked again, and called, "Joanne!" No answer.

"Joanne! I have to talk to you."

A figure moved toward her from the far end of the kitchen, and she thought at first that it was an old woman, the movement so tentative. The woman inside peered at Nina at a disadvantage as her eyes tried to focus into the sunlight of the back yard.

"Joanne?" Nina called loud enough to be heard through the glass. The door opened slowly and Joanne Lindstrom stood before her, so pale that her skin seemed translucent.

"Yes."

"I came to talk with you."

"There's no one here."

Nina stepped inside as if she had been invited, and Joanne moved aside, her back against the edge of the counter. "There's no one here now." Nina smiled and drew no response. "You're here. You're the one I want to see."

"I'm afraid I don't remember you. I ..."

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"We haven't met."

"Then I don't understand. I've been ill."

"I know, and I'm sorry for the trouble you've been through. My name is Nina Armitage." She held out her hand and saw that Joanne was confused, only belatedly lifting her own fingers. "I'm a friend of Sam Clinton's."

The reaction was immediate and full of panic. Joanne slid around her and moved frantically to the other side of the room, using the long table as protection. "No. No, I can't talk to you. I'm not supposed to talk to anyone who . . ."

"Who what?"

"Anyone who knows Sam. Anything like that."

"Sam bears you no ill will. He asked me to tell you that. He wondered how you were."

"I'm ... I'm all right."

"You look upset. Does my coming here upset you?"

"No! Yes. It's only that I haven't seen anyone. I've had to rest, and my mother has talked to—people."

Nina studied Joanne without seeming to do so, and she noted her sunken eyes, the lines in her face that had not been there—at least not in the pictures she'd seen. Joanne Lindstrom's hands trembled; she looked down at them, saw the tremor, and grasped the back of a chair to quiet them. She looked near collapse. Her arms were thin as sticks and her jeans bagged around her hips, the line of her jaw so bony that it had the harshness older women who diet obsessively attain.

But there was something else. Joanne Lindstrom wore a T-shirt that hung over her jeans, and the flesh beneath it was not wasted as the rest of her body was. Her waistline had thickened and the material over her breasts was drawn taut. Joanne saw Nina studying her, and stood up straighter, sucking her stomach in. But the thickness remained, and Nina recognized it for what it was.

Joanne Lindstrom was pregnant.

"Could I sit down?" Nina asked quietly. "Could we have a cup of coffee and talk?"

"But there's no one here."

"You're here. We'll be talking in the courtroom in a little

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over three weeks now. It might be easier for all of us if we could talk now instead."

"What do you mean? What do you mean about the courtroom?"

"I'm Sam's friend, but I'm also his lawyer. I came over from Seattle to represent him."

"You lied to me!" Joanne was poised for flight, but she seemed not to know where to go or how to get Nina out of her kitchen. "You lied."

"No. I didn't tell you all of the truth, but I didn't lie. Are you positive—absolutely positive—that you want to go on with this? Do you really want Sam to go to prison?"

"I want you to leave. I shouldn't be talking to you. Could you please go away?"

"You didn't answer my question. Do you really believe that Sam did you any harm?"

"He made you come here to get me all confused."

"He didn't know I was coming here. He's too kind for that. I came on my own."

"How is he? Is he terribly unhappy in jail?"

"He's all right. He's not happy, and he's not in jail anymore. He's back home."

"Oh." Joanne smiled, but it was not a real smile, only a vague mimicry.

"That's good. Tell him 'Hi' for me?"

"Tell him Hi? Tell him Hi? You could do a lot more for him. You could tell the truth, Joanne, and there wouldn't be any trial. People's lives are involved. Your life is involved. Joanne, do you know what the truth is? Do you realize what you're about to do to that man? What you've already done?"

The bright kitchen was quiet. Joanne moved one hand

slowly and brushed a strand of dull hair away from her face. She looked at Nina as if she could not remember who she

"as or why she was there. Then her eyes shifted and she was Panicked again. "Go away."