“That depends, too. I’m working hard on Angel’s case. These cases sometimes assume a life of their own. It’s like wrestling Jell-O. There’s just no place to grab hold.”
“Will you need money?”
“Maybe. If I do, I’ll let you know.”
Angel came back in.
“I couldn’t find the tickets,” she said.
Robin took up a purse and opened it. “Oh, here they are. Sorry.”
Angel as usual showed no reaction.
“We have to go, Charley. I’m having Bernard drive us to the airport. Would you like to come along for the ride?”
‘Thanks, no. I have a few appointments.”
“With that pedophile?” Angel asked.
I laughed. “Among others, yes.”
“Don’t forget us, Charley.” Robin kissed me, a quick chaste kiss, barely touching my lips.
Angel kissed me too, but with surprising passion, her tongue flicking between my lips.
“Angel, let’s go,” Robin said sharply.
I wondered if she was jealous.
*
I WENT out with them and watched Robin and Angel climb into the big Mercedes. Bernard put their bags in the trunk and waved to me as he climbed in behind the wheel. And then they were gone.
It was a nice little scene, two beautiful women off on a nice relaxing trip with no cares in the world. That’s how it looked. You would never guess that one of them was about to be tried for murder. If Angel was nervous about it or even thought about it, she didn’t show it. That in itself seemed odd.
Outside, the still air was even warmer than before. The river was as smooth as glass, its surface disturbed only by the crisscrossing wakes of the flotilla of small boats filled with people trying to beat the heat. In the trees above, the leaves were motionless.
A distant rumbling, barely audible, warned of an approaching thunderstorm, but the sky remained clear and the relief offered by rain squalls was still miles away.
I had made the mistake of parking the Ford in the sun. The steering wheel was as hot as new steel and I had to drive with one hand wrapped in a handkerchief to protect my tender flesh. Traffic was becoming heavy now. People from Detroit were flocking up, heat or no heat, some for the weekend and some just for a Friday-night outing.
The old air conditioner back at my office could be heard a block away, but it still worked efficiently and my office was blissfully cool.
I stripped off my sweat-soaked shirt and hung it near the window unit so it flapped like a breeze-driven flag. Then I checked my messages. There was only one, from Bob Williams.
I called. His girl said he was with a patient but would call me back when he was through.
I turned my tippy chair and watched the action out on the river. A big freighter had just passed, leaving mountainous waves behind it. Small motorboats popped around on the waves like surfers. A few came within inches of colliding.
I was pondering this aquatic gridlock when Bob Williams returned my call.
“I saw your client today,” he said.
“I heard.”
“I think we should talk, Charley.”
“How about dinner?”
He grunted. “Not tonight, I’m afraid. I’ve been invited out. How about tomorrow afternoon?”
“My curiosity is killing me. What about right now?”
“If you can hop right over. I won’t have much time, though. I have to go home and change before dinner.”
“I’ll be there in minutes.”
My shirt hadn’t dried, but it had gotten cold. I sniffed and decided I, too, should consider changing clothes before too long. I gingerly put it on. It was like sliding into ice.
I had parked the Ford in the shady part of the parking lot so I didn’t have to put anything around my hands to drive this time.
The rumble of thunder was closer and the sky had begun to darken in the west. It wouldn’t be long now.
Dr. Robert Williams was one of three psychiatrists who shared office space in a modern two-story building near the shopping mall. The building catered to medical tenants exclusively — internists, surgeons, psychologists, and dentists. Theoretically, you could have your mind and body, including molars, attended to in one stop.
Bob Williams and the other shrinks shared a reception room. The decorator had tried to make it different from the usual doctors’ offices, using pastel colors, cheerful prints, and stuffed soft chairs and sofas. The magazines were still the same, only a little more mangled than usual.
It was almost closing time and the receptionist, a small woman with reading glasses propped on her nose, glanced up at me as if I was an intruder. I had never seen her before.
“Mr. Sloan to see Doctor Williams,” I said.
She frowned. “Are you a regular patient? I don’t see your name on the appointment list.”
“It’s a personal matter. I just spoke to him and he told me to come over.”
“What kind of insurance do you have?”
“I’m not a patient,” I said. “I’m an attorney. I’m consulting Doctor Williams on a legal matter.”
Her eyes blinked up at me. I could see the disbelief. She was used to dealing with mental patients, and she had definitely placed me in that category.
“Have a seat,” she said, her tone edged with firmness. “I’ll let him know you’re here.”
I took a seat as instructed. The only other person in the room was a young man dressed in a three-piece wool suit, despite the weather outside. He sported an institutional haircut, the land that looks like it was done with a bowl.
He smiled shyly. I nodded.
“Mr. Sloan,” the woman called from her spot at the reception slot, “Doctor Williams will see you now. Go through the door over there.” Her tone had changed. She sounded friendly now that my identity had been verified.
Bob Williams, his shirt-sleeves rolled up, was waiting for me in the hall outside his office. We shook hands and he escorted me into his very spartan office.
“Where’s the couch? I thought all you guys used one.”
He sat down behind the desk. It was bare except for a note pad and a telephone. Like the office itself, the desk indicated that the doctor employed a simple, no-nonsense approach.
“That’s only in the movies. They like the Freudian symbolism of a couch. Care for a drink?”
“Scotch, if you have it.”
He chuckled softly and padded over to a small refrigerator set on a matching dark brown cabinet. He extracted two cans of a diet cola and handed one to me, then perched himself on one corner of the desk. It was like looking up at Mount Rushmore.
“Angel Harwell is quite a package,” he said as he sipped the cola.
“So, what do you think? Is she a mental case?”
Outside, the muted sound of thunder sounded closer.
“We all are mental cases at some time or another. You are, I am, everybody. It’s usually a matter of frequency, severity, and timing.”
“That’s not telling me a whole hell of a lot.”
“How bright do you think Angel is?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I know she got almost straight A’s in school. But she didn’t go to college. Maybe she’s no genius but she seems bright enough to me.”
“She just might be a genius, at least based on her IQ level. She tested out at one forty-five. Genius, to use that term, is arbitrarily set at one fifty in the standard test. She’s close enough. She’s in the top one percent of the population as far as intellectual testing goes. What do you think of that?”
“I’m impressed. But what does it mean?”
“It means she’s bright enough to manipulate the other tests we gave her.” He chuckled. “We use the projective tests, the so-called stick drawings and others, to get a picture of how people view their world. Angel did one of those, drawing nice little flowers and birds on one side of the paper and hands holding bloody knives on the other side.”
“So?”
He finished up his cola and tossed the can into a wastebasket. “The flowers and birds are standard for someone who sees the world as a pleasant friendly place. The bloody knives usually indicate a kind of paranoid fear. The point is, the two cannot coexist, not in such a stark contrast. Your little Angel was having fun, fooling the doctors, playing with us, so to speak. Somehow she knew about the drawings and what they indicated. Perhaps she did a bit of reading during one of her hospital stays. In any event, she was having a little joke.”
“That sounds pretty sane to me.”
“Me too, if that’s as far as it went. But it wasn’t. All the tests generally show a superior mind, but the mind of someone who is making every possible effort to hide something.”
He got off the desk and took his usual chair behind it. Angel was right, his size and manner were intimidating.
“Charley, to make this quick, a personality is nothing more than the sum of how we function, the things we do to get what we need. It’s our basic structure. It’s how we perceive the world and, to a lesser extent, how the world perceives us. When there is a significant flaw in the techniques we use to manage our lives, we call that a personality disorder.”
“Fascinating, but what are you getting at?”
He smiled, but without humor. “Perhaps the better term would be a disordered personality. There are several categories — hysterical, histrionic, passive-aggressive, and borderline, among others. The terms refer to the self-defeating mechanisms used to defend against the person’s world. The problem is that the mechanisms don’t work, but they are the only things the person can use.” The smile faded out completely. “I cannot tell for sure, but I think that Angel Harwell has a personality disorder.”
“In other words, she’s nuts.”
He shook his head. “No. People with personality disorders can be insane, but mostly they are not psychotic. It’s usually a lifelong problem that limits their development and makes them and the people around them miserable.”
“But you said Angel was nearly at the genius level. If she’s that smart, she should be able to figure things out and make corrections.”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way, unfortunately. Sometimes we aren’t the captains of our souls. Anyway, I’m not completely sure about Angel. You see I can’t really diagnose accurately when the person is trying to hide something from me, especially if what’s being concealed may be the main cause of the way she acts and thinks.”
“Why do you say she was hiding something?”
“I’ve seen it before. It’s in the way they answer questions, both written and verbal. Of course, since Angel is so bright, she’s better at it than most.”
“Do you think she may have killed her father?”
He inhaled, then expelled air through pursed lips. “I’m in no position to answer that, Charley. Some people with personality disorders can be explosively violent. Some have no sense of guilt or regret if they do something antisocial. Angel might possess either of those traits or both of them. I can’t tell without learning much more.”
“Jesus. Then she may have killed him. Maybe that’s what she’s trying to hide?”
He shrugged. “I think it’s more basic than that.”
“What’s more basic than knocking off your father?”
“I said I had seen that evasive pattern before. Many times, as a matter of fact. If she did kill him it might even hold the reason for her action.”
“What the hell are you trying to tell me?”
“The pattern. It’s employed by people who are so profoundly ashamed of something they can’t risk anyone else knowing.”
“Like what?”
“Incest.”
“Holy shit! You mean her old man might have been plugging her and she stabbed him?”
“I’m not saying anything definite, Charley. I don’t know what she’s hiding. All I’m suggesting is one possible construction. I asked her many questions about her childhood and her relationship with her father. It was like trying to scoop a live fish out of the water with your bare hand. She was masterfully evasive.”
“She told me she thought you were a pedophile because you were so interested in her schoolgirl activities.”
He smiled, then chuckled. “Angel has an inventive mind. That’s something I’m sure she would say.” He studied me for a moment before continuing. “I wish I could be more definitive. Of course, I’ll put all of this into a written report so whoever testifies at the trial can use the findings, for what they’re worth.”
He stood up. “I hate to throw you out, but I don’t want to be late for my dinner engagement.”
He walked me to the door and through the reception room. The receptionist and the patient were both gone.
“Angel is a very complicated person. I don’t know what might be lurking under that stoic surface of hers. It might be quite innocent, or it could even be dangerous. But there is something about her that I just can’t put my finger on. Whatever it is, I get the feeling it wouldn’t be wise to get on her wrong side. Keep a wary eye, Charley.”
The thunder boomed just above the building and the building shook a bit. A superstitious person might have considered that an omen.
17
THE PRACTICE OF LAW IS A PEAKS-AND-VALLEYS Business, at least for lone lawyers like myself. I had been in a valley for a long time, in terms of both work and money. Suddenly I was experiencing a peak in both.
Robin and Angel were in Florida. Sidney Sherman and his people were digging up rocks of information, and I was waiting for the doctors and hospitals to send in reports on Angel’s past treatment. The Harwell case was managing to speed along without my doing a thing.
It was just as well. The publicity was bringing in all kinds of other business. Some good, some bad.
A banker in Port Huron had borrowed a little money from his place of employment without them knowing about it and the feds were about to drop the net on him. He wanted Charles Sloan, the lawyer he had seen on television, to defend him. The retainer was substantial.
Two brothers ran a chop shop down river near New Baltimore. Like all successful chop-shop operators they relied on an army of car thieves to bring in nice new autos at a bargain price. They would chop up the nice new auto and send out the almost new parts for resale. Some prime models were worth more apart than they were in one piece. One of their car thieves, hoping to get a good deal from the Macomb County prosecutor in another case, gave them the chop-shop boys on a silver platter. They were out on bond, but they couldn’t think of anyone they wanted to defend them except the famous Charley Sloan. That money was substantial, too.
Mostly, it was criminal defense work coming in, but I picked up some other stuff, too.
Like the little drunk who must have said something really nasty to the bartender at the place where he was drinking. He couldn’t remember what he said, but he remembered the bartender leaping over the bar, knocking him down, and kicking the general hell out of him. It must have been some insult. The little guy had one arm in a cast and his broken jaw was wired. I agreed to sue the bartender, who had been arrested for the assault, plus the bar he worked for. The owners had the real money. I took the case on a contingent basis. If we won, I would get one-third of whatever was paid the little man. I figured that could end up as a tidy little sum when the legal smoke cleared.
There were a few others like that, cases where liability was pretty clear and the measure of damages possibly fat. Some went the other way and eventual victory was doubtful, usually for technical legal reasons.
It had been a long dry spell, but it was beginning to look like the old days again.
Of course, I got my share of folks who were worth their weight in trouble.
One woman wanted to sue a boyfriend for transmitting herpes to her during sexual intercourse. But she wasn’t exactly sure which boyfriend it was, she had several. She wanted to sue all of them and let them figure it out. I passed on that one.
Some, like Howard
Hughes’s daughter, were flat-out nuts and had made a career out of bothering lawyers.
Still, I liked being busy again.
Of course, I hadn’t yet been tested in a real courtroom battle. Everything so far had been mostly office work, or out talking to witnesses. Even if I couldn’t work out pleas or settlements, none of the cases would come up for trial before the Harwell case.
That would be my real test. But the Harwell trial was five weeks away. Like a trip to the dentist, anything five weeks away wasn’t worth worrying about.
At least I tried not to worry about it.
*
IN keeping with my new success I needed some new clothes.
My old tailor was among my creditors who had settled for a fraction of what I owed him. Although some years had gone by, I thought he was probably still angry so I decided not to call him. God knows where he might put the zippers.
I had been buying cheap stuff off the rack, and damn little of that. But I knew I’d need some summer suits for the Harwell trial in August.
I wondered what Mark Evola would wear. Sometimes it was wise to dress down for the benefit of a jury.
Old Harry Boyd, a courtroom star of my youth, had amassed more money than an Arab oil mogul, yet he always wore a ill-fitting old suit when trying a jury case. Harvard Harry, the name lawyers called him, liked to stand before a jury and sorrowfully confess that he wasn’t very good as a lawyer but he was the best his poor client could afford. Harry, of course, charged on a scale that would have made Bonnie and Clyde sick with envy. Juries liked him. They were impressed by this plain honest man standing before them in his worn, ill-fitting clothing, telling the pure simple truth in his halting, uncultured voice.
Harry, who could speak four languages, made out like the bandit he was.
So, the selection of what to wear before a jury was not always a simple thing.
Harry might be able to get away with a “man of the people” approach, but I knew it wouldn’t work for me.
So, I tossed my business to a local tailor who almost kissed my hand in gratitude when I paid him. I now possessed three very nice conservative summer suits, together with some expensive shirts and muted ties. I could never match Mark Evola, who looked like a Brooks Brothers ad even in running pants, but I wouldn’t appear to be a bum off the street either.
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