The Best Defense (5 page)

“I’m going to draw up a couple of legal documents, and you make a list of every thing you can think of that is or was yours that you would like to have back.”

Lucille was uncomprehending but cooperative, and Barbara left her at the table and went to draw up her two documents and print them out in triplicate. When she brought them back, Lucille had finished. She signed the document without a second glance when Barbara slid it across the table and patiently told her what it meant.

“I have been retained by you to take possession of your belongings that are in the Kennerman apartment.

Your sister’s permission is necessary for me to gain entry, and I will try to get it from her. The other document is for her, giving you permission to take possession of her personal belongings and keep them safe for her until she can claim them.”

Now that Lucille was her client, she advised her very carefully about talking to reporters, about the difference between “No comment” and “I don’t know anything about it.”

They agreed that fifty dollars was a fair charge for the duties Barbara had agreed to do, and then Lucille asked if she would mind holding the check a day or two until she could take some money out of the savings account to cover it.

At the county jail an hour later Barbara argued with a sergeant, and then with a lieutenant, and watched them confer out of hearing, look up from her ID to her, reexamine the document signed by Lucille, until finally the lieutenant shrugged, handed everything back to the sergeant, and walked away. An escort was summoned to take her to a small conference room crowded by a table and two chairs. She sat at the table waiting for Paula Kennerman to be produced.

“For all the good it’ll do you,” the sergeant had said.

“Might as well talk to a log.”

To a mobile corpse would have been more appropriate, Barbara thought, when Paula was brought in by a lean, gray-haired matron who watched her sit down, then went to the door.

“I’ll be right outside,” she said.

Everything about Paula looked dead. She was as colorless as a body waiting for the undertaker to restore it to a semblance of life. Her brown hair was lank and dull. Even her dark eyes seemed dull, with purple shadows beneath them. She was terribly thin. The bandages started around the heel of her thumb, reached nearly to her elbows.

“My name is Barbara Holloway. You don’t know me, but I’ve talked to your sister.”

There was not even a flicker of interest. Paula looked straight ahead, as if she were alone in the room.

“Lucille has retained me to go to your apartment and pick up some of her possessions. She made a list. But we need your signature.”

Paula’s eyes shifted to the briefcase on the table and a new alertness enlivened her face, and vanished almost instantly.

“Unfortunately they didn’t let me bring a pen in here, but I have the papers,” Barbara said. What would she have attempted? she wondered. Grab the pen, stab her self in the heart with it?

“I have another document giving Lucille permission to remove your personal be longings and keep them for you until you are ready to claim them. Will you agree to that?”

Paula shrugged.

“What difference does it make? I don’t care.”

Slowly Barbara opened her briefcase and brought out the papers. Paula did not look at them.

“Will you make out a list of things for Lucille to keep for you?”

“Let her take whatever she wants. Get the matron and I’ll sign anything you say. And then leave me alone.” The words were toneless.

“I also told Lucille that I would advise you about your public defender. You don’t have to keep the one they assigned to you if you’re not satisfied with his performance

Paula did not respond.

“I won’t tell you the danger you’re in,” Barbara said evenly.

“I believe you understand that perfectly well.

The only thing the state was lacking before was motive, and now they think they have it. Do you know Craig Dodgson?”

Paula shook her head.

Fighting frustration, Barbara rose from her chair.

“Well, have you thought of this? You said in your statement to the police that the house was already burning when you got there. Have you considered what that means? Someone else killed your child, Paula, that’s what it means, if you told the truth.”

“I can’t help it,” Paula said.

“Call the matron.”

Barbara walked to the door, but she did not knock yet. She remained motionless, facing the door for a moment and then with her back to Paula she said in a low voice, “I keep wondering which loss is worse, the loss of someone you’ve had a long time, or the loss of someone you have just begun to love. I don’t know.

Last winter, the man I loved died. We were going to be married. I went to the coast. You know how the coast is in winter, gale winds, the surf crashing. It was raining.

I stood on a cliff and looked at the water and I knew this was the way for me. I’d thought of other ways, but they didn’t seem right, and this did. The water was all gray and black and foamy. I stood there a long time and then I went to a motel to think about it, to write a letter to my father, tidying up. And the next day I went back to the same place. The sea was smoother. I thought, Yes, now is the time, but I just stood there, and finally I had to leave again. I didn’t want to live. He was all I had to live for, but I didn’t do it. I tried once more, that same night. And I finally understood why I couldn’t do it. He would have been so ashamed of me. I couldn’t do anything to make him ashamed of me when he was alive, and I had to honor his memory, not do anything that would have made him ashamed, even if he was gone.”

“Stop it!” Paula cried.

“Why are you telling me all that? Get out of here!”

“I don’t know why I told you,” Barbara said quietly, not moving “I haven’t told anyone else. I tore up my letter and threw it into the ocean, and I went home.”

“It’s not the same,” Paula whispered raggedly.

“He wasn’t your child.”

“No. He was my life.” Barbara turned to look at Paula then.

She had come to life, but the life was too painful to bear. Her face was twisted; tears ran down her cheeks.

She was holding up her arms, staring at the bandages.

“She was all I had t live for,” she said, choking on the words. Abruptly she dropped her arms to the table and buried her face in them, sobbing.

Barbara was holding the doorknob with one hand be hind her back in a position that brought sharp stabbing pains in her shoulder. She moved her hand and walked to Paula, feeling unsteady and weak, and tentatively put her hand on Paula’s shoulder. She sobbed harder. Barbara leaned in close, put one hand on Paula’s head, her other arm around her shoulders, and held her.

When the shudders began to lessen, Barbara went to the door and opened it to say to the matron, “Could we have some tissues, please?”

“Tissues?”

“Kleenex. I don’t have any with me. And maybe a glass of water?”

The matron opened the door farther and looked past Barbara, then at her with an incredulous expression.

“I’ll get some,” she said and shut the door.

When Paula finally raised her head, Barbara had the box of tissues and the glass of water at hand. She eased the documents from under Paula’s arm and sat down again to look them over while the young woman blew her nose and mopped her face and drank some of the water.

“I made a mess of your work,” Paula said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’ll just run off some more copies.” Stuffing the crumpled, sodden papers into her briefcase, she asked, “Will you help yourself, Paula? Will you talk about it?”

“Yes,” she whispered, and then more strongly, “but not to him. Mr. Spassero. He wants me to tell them I killed Lori, that I lost my head and hit her and set the fire.” She jerked up from the chair and swayed.

Barbara grabbed her hand from across the table

“Sit down,” she said sharply.

“Go on, sit down.” When Paula was seated again, Barbara let go of her hand.

“No more for today,” she said briskly.

“You’ve had enough.

I’ll make new copies of everything and bring it all back tomorrow. You try to rest, and we’ll talk then. Okay?”

Paula nodded. She looked ghastly; her face was blotched, her eyes red-rimmed and swollen. But she looked alive.

“What do you mean, I can’t see her?” Barbara demanded of the sergeant the next morning at ten. She had been thinking there was plenty of time to wrap this up, get the signatures, help Paula draft a letter to the court requesting a different attorney, have a bit of lunch,

and be at the restaurant in plenty of time for her first drop-in client. She peered closer at the sergeant’s identity tag: SGT. R. T.

PERRY.

“Look, Ms. Holloway, I’m just following orders.

Okay? She’s sleeping. Dr. Grayling said he’d talk to you if you want. You want to talk to him?”

“You bet I do.”

The sergeant began to rummage through papers on his desk.

“Here it is. He left a card with his number and address. He’s already been here and left again, but he’ll be in the office all day and he said he’d see you between patients. That’s all I can do, Ms. Holloway. I’m sorry.”

She believed him. He was gray-haired, florid, over weight, and, no doubt, as tough as he looked, but at the moment his expression appeared genuinely regretful.

She wanted to ask him why Paula was sleeping at ten in the morning, but he wasn’t the one to question, she decided glancing at the card. Dr. Grayling was in the medical building across the street from Sacred Heart Hospital, where they had taken Paula to stitch up her arms. She nodded to the sergeant.

“Thanks.”

A freight train was howling its way through town behind the jail when she went out to her car. For a moment she thought of the prisoners up there behind narrow barred windows listening to the trains, wishing, wishing…. She shook her head and got in her car.

From Fifth down to Seventh, which turned into Franklin, to Patterson, one more block to the medical office building. The hospital sprawled across two city blocks, and all around it, like the moons of Jupiter, satellites had appeared sometimes it seemed overnight professional buildings, pharmacies, parking structures, gift and flower shops, restaurants, wide sky ways linking buildings. The complex couldn’t spread out to the west, the university grounds started a block away; instead it was inexorably moving south and east, gobbling up neighborhoods. She drove into a parking structure; there was absolutely no parking on the street in the area. It took her longer to find a vacant slot for her car than the drive over had taken. Med biz was booming, she thought gloomily.

She found her way to Grayling’s office, where she waited ten minutes in a large anteroom where dozens of other people were waiting to see half a dozen different doctors who shared the common reception area.

The office she was taken to was minuscule, with hardly enough room for the two chairs opposite the doctor’s desk. Dr. Grayling was behind the desk; he made a half-hearted motion toward rising, then sat down again. If he moved back more than six inches, he would have been up against a window. His hair was a touch too long, dark and straight, and he wore horned-rimmed glasses that were too low on his nose although he pushed them up time and again. He was about forty, she decided; it was hard to tell because he looked tired and harried. He pushed his hair back, pushed his glasses back, shifted in his chair, and kept in motion.

He didn’t register any surprise at her blue jeans and T-shirt, and she decided he hadn’t noticed. She had thought briefly of going home and changing, and had decided not to. If what she had on was good enough for the county jail, it was good enough for the jail doctor.

“Ms. Holloway,” he said after she took one of the chairs, “you know the system we’re using over at the jail, don’t you?”

She shook her head.

“Tell me.”

“Yes. Well, there are a couple of nurses on duty and a paramedic. In fact, one of the nurses is actually a paramedic. And I’m on call. You know, for things they can’t handle, or shouldn’t handle.”

“You treated Paula Kennerman the other night? At the hospital?”

“Yes. They called me and I met them there and took care of her. I’ve seen her off and on from the start, of course. Very early on I told her that if she needed something to help her sleep, she could have it.”

“Did she talk to you?”

“Not a word.”

She wished he would get a haircut, and have his glasses adjusted, or simply sit on his hands, but they were in constant motion, fiddling with his glasses, his hair, a few papers, a patient’s file.

“What happened last night, or this morning?” Barbara asked.

His hands came to rest on the file folder.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“This morning when I was over there they said her lawyer had brought in a private doctor for her, that she had been agitated and the doctor had given her a sedative. From now on she will be in his care.”

He was lining up papers, rearranging them in minute increments.

“That’s his right,” he said hurriedly, watching the progress his hands were making.

“The county encourages inmates to have their private physicians after the initial examination. That’s not at all irregular.”

She watched him and waited. When he remained silent, she asked, “What is irregular, then, Doctor?”

“I didn’t say that,” he said swiftly.

“I’m willing to forget this whole conversation,” Barbara said.

“It never happened. But I have to know why you agreed to see me, what it is you have to tell me.

Not only that she has a private doctor now.”

He stood up and pushed his chair back against the window; he looked with despair at the cramped office and sat down again. They hadn’t even given him pacing room, Barbara thought with sympathy.

“They told me you had a breakthrough with Paula,” he said then.

“We all tried, but you did it. There’s something we don’t talk about much,” he went on, sounding almost embarrassed.

“The will to live. In children we say failure to thrive. Almost the same thing.