The Best Defense (8 page)

“He came to talk to me, the lawyer. He’s off the case.

Thank you. They’ll send someone else now, I guess.

Anyone would be better.”

“Friday?” Barbara prompted. At least Spassero had had enough sense to bow out, she thought, before Paula asked for his dismissal.

“He came and began asking me what Craig someone was to me. Were we having an affair? Was there anyone else I was running around with? Things like that. He said this Craig would cinch it for the state, that I had to talk about him, about us. I tried to tell him Jack must have done it, and he wouldn’t listen and just kept asking about affairs, and I started to yell at him to get out and stay out.” She ducked her head the same way Lucille did. For just an instant she looked like her sister, then the look vanished and she leaned forward with her hands on the table

“I kept thinking of what you said, someone else did it, and it had to be Jack. There’s got to be a way to prove it!”

Barbara said quickly, “Paula, listen to me a minute before you say anything else. You know I’m not your attorney. I’m representing your sister, that’s all. I have the papers for you to sign, and you can add whatever you’d like to the list of things for her to keep for you.

You see, since I’m not your lawyer, there is no guarantee that anything you say to me will remain confidential. If they put me on the stand under oath, I would be required to repeat what you tell me.”

“I understand,” Paula said impatiently.

“It’s what I told the police in the very beginning; they know what I said. So does that lawyer, but he didn’t believe it. I just didn’t tell them all about Jack because … I don’t know why. I didn’t think of him, of someone killing Lori. I thought I was hidden from him out there at that place.”

She took a long breath.

“He did it, he had to have been the one. We … he used to hit me now and then, not of ten, three or four times. I told him if he did it again I’d take Lori and leave, and for a long time, nearly a year, he didn’t touch me. So that day I had a big tip from the night before, and I went to the bank to add it to the special account we started for Lori’s school later, and all the money was gone. He took it all out. When he came home I yelled at him and he punched me.” She had started calmly enough, but now she was crying and choking on the words, which came out faster and faster.

“I was on the floor and he picked up Lori and threw her down on the bed and he said next time he’d throw her out the window. I was scared, more than I ever was be fore. He’d never touched Lori before, only me, and I knew it would be like it was with my father. I heard the hall door slam, and as soon as I could get up from the floor I grabbed Lori. She was crying, as scared as I was, and I ran out with her.”

She had to stop, her sobbing was too hard for the words to be coherent. Today Barbara had stuffed a big wad of tissues in her briefcase; she put some into Paula’s hand and waited, feeling sick.

When Paula was able to speak again, she said, “A long time ago, one of the girls at work told me about a Safe House, and I went there. But I was afraid to stay because he’d find us. And they took us to the ranch and gave us some clothes. But he found out anyway.”

“Did you tell anyone about this?” Barbara asked.

“At the ranch? I couldn’t. I just couldn’t say anything like this in front of Lori. And I couldn’t leave her alone, she was so scared.”

“You have to tell this to the new attorney they assign you,” Barbara said.

“It’s very important that you tell him exactly what you told me. Will you do that?”

Paula nodded.

“Can I tell you about the … that day?

It’s just what I told the police,” she added in a rush, “and the psychiatrist. I haven’t changed anything because there’s nothing to change.”

Reluctantly, Barbara nodded.

“Lori wasn’t feeling good,” Paula said. Her voice wavered, and she closed her eyes for a moment and drew in air.

“She kept getting a stomachache, and she had to go to the bathroom, and she didn’t want to go out when everyone else did, and another little girl said she would stay with her. One of the women said the best thing I could do for Lori was to act like I wasn’t afraid, and that sounded right, so I went out, but I stayed at the edge of the woods waiting for her, and the other little girl came running over in a while and said Lori was sleeping. I hung around the woods for another minute or two, but finally I had to go back, to be with her if she woke up in a strange place, so she wouldn’t be alone and scared again.” Her voice dropped to a hoarse whisper, and she was staring at her hands on the table;

they were clenched into tight fists.

“I went to the back door and the whole kitchen was on fire, so I ran to the front. I ran upstairs, but she wasn’t in the bed, and I looked in the bathroom and the other bedrooms and then ran down again, and then … I don’t know what happened, they said the stove or something

exploded, and someone was holding me and the house was burning up.” The words were almost unrecognizable now.

“I

woke up in the hospital.”

Barbara did not ask questions, did not try to get any more details than Paula was giving her; that was a job for her new attorney. Obviously the police had found terrible flaws in her story, and also obviously the district attorney believed he had everything he needed to convict her. She simply listened as Paula talked.

Toward the end of the hour and a half she spent with Paula, she did ask if Spassero had told her about the new attorney.

“No. I haven’t seen him since Friday. Dr. Grayling told me. He said I can have my own doctor if I want, but I don’t have a doctor. Dr. Grayling has been good to me. Is he all right, to just let him be my doctor now?”

“I think he’s fine,” Barbara said.

Paula added to the list of things for Lucille to take from her apartment, and signed the papers. Barbara was replacing them in her briefcase when a tap sounded on the door, and the matron opened it to say, “Mr.

Fairchild is here to see Mrs. Kennerman. Will you be much longer, Ms. Holloway?”

“No. I’m leaving now.” Theodore Fairchild, she repeated to herself: retirement age, in the public defender office as long as she could remember, kindly, sharp in court … “Will you stay, too?” Paula asked in a hushed voice.

“No,” Barbara said, and stood up.

“You have to have confidence in your attorney or the case is hopeless, and you have to speak to him knowing that everything you say is protected. That isn’t true about what you say to me. I explained that before, remember? I can’t sit in on a private, confidential talk between you and your attorney.”

“What if he agrees with the other one, that the only thing I can do is confess? What will I do then?”

“Talk to him,” Barbara said firmly.

“Just talk to him.

Okay?”

Paula nodded, and then made a visible effort to control the fear that had reappeared on her face. She closed her eyes a moment, opened them, and drew herself up straighten Her clenched hands gave her away.

Barbara met Theodore Fairchild briefly in the corridor as he was being escorted in. They shook hands. He looked tired, she thought, older than she remembered, not quite haggard, but drawn.

“Ms. Holloway,” he said.

“Barbara. Always a pleasure to see you. How are you?”

“Fine, fine. And you? And Mrs. Fairchild?” A mistake, she realized too late when a shadowed look crossed his face and his shoulders sagged momentarily.

“I’m well, and my wife is getting along fine. Doing better all the time. I’ll tell her you asked.” He started to move away, then added, “Oh, yes. I told Bill I’d pass the word to your … that is, my client. He was given permission to oversee the case after all the preliminary work he put into it. Judge Paltz said that seemed fair.”

He was watching her closely.

She shrugged.

“That’s his right. Nice seeing you.”

She spent the next several hours in Herman Besserman’s office reading The Valley Weekly Report. She had come to the office when most of the people were out to lunch, but it seemed word had spread that she was here, and now and then someone opened the door to say hello, or just to check it out that she really had made an appearance. Her name was still included in the long list of attorneys that went down the length of the left mar gin of the official letterhead, but it was a joke, and they all knew it. She had no salary, no office, no flunky to bring her coffee…. The door opened a crack; she looked up to see Herman Besserman Bessie peering, at her curiously. She had called, asking permission to use his room, read his papers, and he had given it cheer fully, although, he had added, he wouldn’t be around until midafternoon. His eyes were like owl eyes, magnified by thick lenses, and he was as pink and roundly smooth as a baby. Stout, they said; never fat, just stout.

But he was fat and happy with himself, with his body, with his office, and now he seemed especially happy to see Barbara at a table poring over the tabloids

“I always say know what the devils are saying about you,” he said, entering.

“How are you, Barbara? Good picture of you there, I thought.” Bessie would outlive them all, everyone agreed, and although he had not been in court for fifteen years, he was still respected as a smart attorney who knew a thing or two.

“Makes me think censorship might be a good idea, after all,” Barbara said with disgust.

“You know what they say, homophobia, hatred of all government, misogyny, you name it, might be bad, even evil, but it’s not a crime. Not yet. The Dodgsons have perfected every aspect of voicing hatred for the other.”

Barbara nodded, putting the newspapers back in their bin. Reading them like this, one after another, covering a six-month period all that Bessie kept at any one time was like seeing particularly evil souls exposed to a harsh light that left few secrets. Evil, she repeated.

Evil people who hated women, hated gays, hated liberals humanists. Democrats, most Republicans, feminists, agnostics, atheists … “Why did they take out after Paula Kennerman like that?” she asked.

“Prom day one, they tried her, convicted her, and now they’re yowling for the death sentence for mothers who ‘kill’ their babies in any way abortion, actual murder, manslaughter, neglect of the child, prenatal neglect….”

“That’s their style,” Bessie said simply.

“You mixed up in that?”

“No!” she snapped. She straightened up from restoring the newspapers to their proper place. Bessie’s office was large, like her father’s, with the same kind of desk, big and durable, and a round table with two straight chairs, other comfortable chairs. His office had one wall taken up with big windows, one wall with bookcases, and two walls with bins for the newspapers he collected fifteen different papers, at least. She glanced at them.

“Bessie, are others picking up that same message? Death sentence, baby killer already convicted, all that?”

“Some are.” He waved at the bins.

“Do you good to spend a day or two with them, see what they’re really saying out there in the boonies.”

She nodded slowly.

“I might do that, if you don’t mind. Thanks. I’ll give you a call. Now, I need a shower.”

He grinned amiably and waddled to his desk. His chair was custom-made, oversized, well padded. He sank into it with a little sigh that could have signified pleasure.

She had just missed her father, Pam, the receptionist, said: he had been in and left again. Good, Barbara thought.

But she wasn’t ready to go home, she knew, as she headed west on Sixth, toward Highway 126, the major road to the coast in this area. It was said that from any point in downtown Eugene a fifteen-minute drive would take one out to the country, and for the most part that was true. She had bypassed most of the commercial strip, had driven past industrial strips, skirted Fern Ridge Reservoir, dotted with bobbing small boats, and was in open country within minutes. A few minutes later the land became hillier at the start of the eruption of the Coast Range of mountains that sheltered the broad valley from the Pacific storms. Her next turn would be onto Spring Bay Road, where the Dodgsons lived, next door to the Canby Ranch, where someone had killed Lori Kennerman and burned down the Canby house.

The Dodgsons had made a statement that no one could have passed them to get to the Canby house that morning without being seen. They had convicted Paula Kennerman in their newspaper. Their son had come for ward to supply a motive, and altogether they just might convict her in court.

have on her right the land was mesa like while on her left forest-covered low hills came to the edge of the road, retreated, forming deep narrow valleys, advanced again, and beyond lay the paroxysm of the Coast Range with its rain forest. Orchards—cherries, apples, peaches-strawberry fields, pastures, fields of wheat gleaming in the sunlight, fields of grasses grown for the seed industry—all were very pretty and lush now in early summer before the usual summer drought struck. When she reached Lewiston, she slowed to the posted speed limit of twenty miles an hour. A small town, under a thousand people, it served the farming community, and it housed many people who drove the twenty-four miles back and forth every day to jobs in Eugene.

She had driven through Lewiston before without stopping, and had paid little attention to it; today she looked it over more carefully. A Dairy Queen, Texaco station, post office, grocery store … and the large metal building housing the Dodgson Publishing Company. It was set back several hundred feet from the street, with a manicured lawn, precisely planted red petunias bordering a white walk to the main entrance, and a wide concrete driveway that vanished under a high wooden 73 fence which enclosed the rear of the property. No one was in sight on the grounds.

She nodded at the building, then turned onto Spring Bay Road and followed it out of town, not yet heading for the Canby Ranch, in order to look at the Dodgson house. She passed an orchard and a strawberry field on her right and a meadow on her left. The main crop of berries evidently had been picked; now the field was open to the public, and women and children were there in force.