Possession (45 page)

She crept back to the window and listened for the river. It was still there, and she could concentrate on its roar and drown out the wicked birds. So close behind the farm property, the river rose high now between the walls of its rock channel after the rain and rain and rain, its current frothing white water over the deep green. She listened to it and smelled its clean, faintly salty smell until she began to

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shiver in the cold. She pulled on her robe in the dark and walked softly to the kitchen. Her mother appeared almost immediately, pretending she had not been able to sleep either.

"Can I get you something, dear?"

"My pills—I can't find them. I need to sleep."

"Oh . . . Joanne. It's not good for you to take so many pills. I think they just depress you more. Why don't you wait a while?"

"Never mind. It doesn't matter. What time is it?"

"Almost seven. Why don't you go back to bed for a while? Reverend Schuller's coming on at nine—or would you rather watch Oral Roberts?"

"It doesn't matter. Whichever you want."

It didn't matter. She watched her mother move stiffly in the harsh kitchen light and saw that she was old and tired, frail after all the years of being so strong. She should try to be pleasant but the air in the room was heavy and it was so difficult even to talk. The best thing she could do for her mother would be to just go away.

Surely she had been meant to perish on the mountain, and she was suddenly angry that she had not. Each of them—Danny and Duane—had promised her that she was to be with them always. Danny because of love and the other man for a reason she could no longer remember, and each of them had betrayed her. Her life was only left over, a mistake.

"You should get dressed, Joanne, if you can't sleep. Put on something bright and a little lipstick. Someone might come over later."

'Who?"

"Don't jump like that. Only Sonia or one of the girls from the bank, or Mr. Fletcher and, what's her name—the nurse—Mary Jean. They all ask about you."

"I don't want to see anyone but Sonia. Don't let anyone else come. I'm not ready."

Her mother sighed and rose to clear away their coffee cups. "All right, dear. But one of these days—"

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"One of these days, I'll be ready to talk to people. I promise you."

/ promise you something easier, Mother. And you would thank me one day, if you understood why.

Chelan County's senior deputy prosecutor—Martin Malloy—had watched Nina Armitage in action and under other, more benign, circumstances would have welcomed the chance to confer with her. At present, he was aghast to learn that she—and not Mark Nelson—would be handling Sam Clinton's defense. He had never shared Moutscher's steamroller confidence that they would convict. Moutscher had left too many crevices in the case unchinked; the structure was not as sound as it might be. Even as Malloy stood with wary graciousness and urged Nina to sit down, his hand hovered over the ballistics reports he'd been perusing when her visit was announced. If she didn't have the same reports now, she would demand them soon enough. If he didn't give them to her, she'd scream "Failure to Disclose" and make a jury wonder what he was hiding. The bullet fragments they'd scooped out of Ling were •38's, jacketed hollow points—police type—but there was no law that stopped civilians from buying them. No lands. No grooves. No firing pin marks. They could have come from either of the .38 pistols recovered, and Armitage would know that and go with it.

He smiled at her and slid the reports into his desk drawer. "Counselor, this is a pleasure."

"My pleasure, Mr. Malloy."

She was relaxed, and that bothered the hell out of him. She seemed already to view him as dead in the water. Why? She was too solicitous, too complimentary about the prestige of his law school, and the unexceptional decor of his county office.

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"What can I help you with, Ms. Armitage?"

"I thought we might communicate better if I came in person to tell you I've taken over the case."

"Is that all?"

"I see you have the ballistics report there."

Shit! He slid the ballistics sheets out of his desk and handed them to her, and met her head-on, his voice studiously casual. "Minor consideration, you'll see. A toss-up. Only bullet recovered was in little, tiny pieces."

She read the report without expression, and then smiled at him. "I already have this, but thanks. Ling was behind Sam all the time. Sam was firing toward the canyon. Demich had a .22. It looks like the lady may have got a shot off. Amazing, isn't it? She seems such a delicate woman, and from what I've been able to find out, she was terrified of guns. That she could react so quickly, so accurately. What's the pull on a .38? Fourteen pounds, isn't it?"

"That's double-action."

"Of course."

"Single action would be only five to seven."

"You know your stuff, counselor. But you think a mere child could fire a .38 and hit a bull's eye fifty feet away? That puzzles me. It almost seems that someone gave her a crash course, prepared her in case of attack."

"Lindstrom might have. Up there in the woods, he might have shown her how to fire."

"Sam says he tried many times, Mr. Malloy. She wouldn't touch a weapon."

"Clinton is not my most reliable source of information."

"Perhaps not."

She shook a cigarette from her pack, held one out to him and he shook his head. She lit one and inhaled deeply.

"You don't smoke. That's admirable in this business. I suppose you play racquet-ball and lift weights too?"

"Squash." He reddened. The woman was what—ten— fifteen years older than he was, and she made him feel like a gawky student, stuttering before a teacher.

"Have you met Mrs. Lindstrom? Have you talked with her, Mr. Malloy?"

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"Rex Moutscher has. My staff members have, and I will. She has been through quite an ordeal, and I..."

"What about a polygraph? Voice stress analysis? Did you run her on any of those magic boxes? No? Have you ever considered that it was possible she'd blow ink all over the walls—that she could talk into a PSE and make a lovely line of telling domes? But then, you do have the perfect witness. She's the All-American Beauty, the little heroine, McDonald's, and the Lutheran Church, and .. ."

All her jousting about ballistics had been cat-and-mouse. Malloy saw that she was rolling now, but could not see her direction clearly.

"The tests occurred to us, but it seemed kind of nasty to subject her to all of that when her statement was so straightforward."

"A little like putting the Virgin Mary on the lie-box? It's all right to ask hookers and gypsies if they're telling the truth, but not the kind of girl every man wants to bring home to Mama?"

"We all make value judgments, Ms. Armitage. Any attorney, any detective, has to depend on his—his instinctive sense. My choices are based upon the physical evidence, on Mrs. Lindstrom's statement, on the medical evidence, and on Moutscher's opinions."

She laughed, almost a happy sound.

"Rex Moutscher can't tell a rat's ass from a primrose. Rex Moutscher let half of the physical evidence slip between his clumsy fingers, and I think, Martin—if I may call you Martin—that his ambition might just possibly exceed yours and mine, and we both admit that we're greedy as hell."

"You coin a poetic phrase, Nina—if I may call you Nina?"

"Of course. I'm only a woman, really, and it's difficult to believe I do what I do, isn't it? A pale flower of a woman Cast into the path of ruthless men. Not unlike your little witness." He leaned back and grinned, but she caught him before W^tilted chair hit the substance of the wall.

"Did you know Joanne Lindstrom was pregnant?" 341

He bounced back with a jolt. Before he could respond, she skewered him.

"Did you know that the late Daniel Lindstrom didn't have enough motile spermatozoa to impregnate a female— not even if they froze thirty ejaculations and stockpiled them? Did you know he was sterile?"

". . . no. That I did not know." Barracuda. Armitage was a barracuda.

"We have the medical records to prove that. Unless you're anxious to explain to a jury that an immaculate conception took place up there in the greenery, that Joanne is even now carrying the next Messiah, you might be interested in a compromise."

"Fuck!"

"You speak with a certain lyric quality yourself, counselor."

Malloy sighed and she felt a moment of empathy for him, remembering her own losses when victory had seemed so close. Resignation hung heavy over his slumped shoulders. "You're sure about the pregnancy, and the other?"

"Absolutely sure. Funny, isn't it—how many of our efforts come down to the birds and the bees?"

"What do you want? When you speak of a compromise, what would you want from me?"

"Surrender with honor."

"Given the alternative, that seems generous of you. What could you possibly gain from preserving my honor? Your reputation has preceded you, Nina. You've left a lot of opponents twisting in the wind."

"It's not for me. I'm a cut-throat; my client is a man of some compassion. Sam would prefer that the woman not be held up to public ridicule. I don't agree, and I don't really fathom why he isn't itching for revenge. But there you go. For me—for you too—there might be an interesting phenomenon. A defense we could use in the future. I've promised I won't use it this time, but it's happened before and it will happen again. Something weird happened to Joanne Lindstrom and left her brain scrambled; when Moutscher talked to her, she didn't know if it was Sam

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Clinton or Godzilla who shot Demich. I think she may have gotten some of it back by now, and I'm fascinated with the process." Malloy listlessly arranged paper clips across his desk; he had no enthusiasm for Nina Armitage's psychiatric research, coming as it did on top of the shambles of his best, most glorious, and, yes, most longed-for murder case.

"So then. What do you want?"

"I'm going back to Natchitat. I'd like to take you and Moutscher with me—and we'll arrange a meeting with your witness." He thought of Moutscher, the outraged disbelief on his face. "Rex is not going to like this at all."

"It might be good for him. Better than a 4.6 deposition from your witness, anyway. From what I've heard, he is a man of little imagination."

"You might say he doesn't know the meaning of the word. He's a cop. What do you expect from cops?"

"I won't tell him you said that. Counselor, we feed off cops. They bring us all their treasures neatly labeled and initialed, and their theories, and their gut reactions, and we make something intelligent out of it. They're our raw material any way you look at it. From your seat, you need them. From mine—and one day you'll be a defense attorney too because you want the money; you're only here for experience—from mine, I get my jollies out of pointing out their overweening stupidity. For now, Moutscher is your cross to bear."

She stood up and smiled again, and he thought he liked her very little.

"One thing. Sam Clinton is a cut above them all. If he had had the good fortune to be born meaner, a little quicker on his feet, and a little hungrier, he could have been one of us."

"Is that how he got you for his attorney?"

"That's a long, tired, pathetic story, unfit and uninteresting for your ears." She handed him her card with the Holiday Inn number scribbled on the back. "Can you and Moutscher get down to Natchitat by three or four?" He reached for his desk phone. "I'll call him now." 343

"Wait until I leave. I don't want to gloat. We'll look for you by four. And Martin . . . don't call Joanne first. If she spooks, we'll both be up shit creek."

"You're so damned smug," he said, a bite in his voice that he hadn't meant to betray. "You keep ordering me around and I'll balk. I may just decide to go for a tussle in court. You've got a right to all my paper, but you don't know my battle plan. You could be whistling in the dark, Nina."

"I could be. If today doesn't convince you, then we go ahead into trial. You'll still have your zingers and I'll still have mine. If you do see what I think you will, then we can ask the judge for a 4.9 pretrial conference—clandestinely, as it were, without the press—and we work it out to our mutual satisfaction."

"You've got a deal."

"You don't sound that certain, but I'll shake on it." She held out her hand, and he took it, and found it was only a woman's hand, thin and bony and crushable in his.

"One more thing, counselor—"

"Yes. What else?"

"Do you fool around?"

He laughed and dropped her hand. "With you, my dear, only with the greatest of care."

Joanne had kissed her mother before Elizabeth left for her day of teaching.

"I love you, Mama."

Her mother could not say it back. "Take care of yourself today. Is Sonia coming over?"

"Maybe. Maybe this afternoon."

"Well, that's good. Try to keep busy."

"I will."

"You're a good daughter."

She heard the car door slam, the whisper of tires moving

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away over the frosted lane, and then the vast promising silence that meant she was entirely alone.

She was no longer afraid. There was such calmness in her and so much relief that it should be that way. She moved in cool fluidity where nothing or no one could harm. It seemed as if the river already flowed over her, gently forgiving.

She suspected there would be nothing beyond. If there was a God, if the God of her Sunday school days in whom she had believed without questioning still endured, He would not have allowed the red man to have her. It was quite simple. There had been no God to save her, and there was no God waiting now to punish her.

She no longer resented the child. It deserved only the small kindness of dying in her womb before it could be thrust into a world that promised nothing to it.

She had control at last. She had chosen never to be older than thirty-two. She had chosen this day, this last cold Monday, for her own, and she had hours of it.

She did her mother's breakfast dishes, wiped the counter clean, and, not satisfied, sprayed kitchen wax and polished the Formica until it glowed. She swept the floor; it was important not to leave a dirty house behind. The effort exhausted her and she slept until two. When she woke, she took a very long, very hot bath, and felt clean. Really clean, at last.