“If it wasn’t true, why would your father have those records altered?”
She shook her head slowly. “You really don’t have a clue, do you?”
“What the hell are you talking about, Angel?”
Her ice-blue eyes were fixed on mine as she again sipped. I thought she seemed to be enjoying my discomfort.
“Charley, my father was an ass, a stereotypical macho man. You saw all those photos he had of himself in uniform. The big war hero. The closest he ever got to combat was watching John Wayne movies. But that didn’t matter, he embraced the macho image with a passion. My grandfather was like that, only with him it was real. He really was a tough son of a bitch. My poor father pretended to be, fucking any little thing who would let him, shooting little animals, drinking straight whiskey, playing poker with elderly boys just like himself, all that supermale bullshit.”
She laughed. Again I heard that odd discordant sound of bells.
I said nothing.
Then she continued. “How did you see your parents, Charley? Big heroes to you, were they? Ma, the perfect housekeeper. Pa, quiet and wise?”
“They were both drunks, frankly.”
She laughed, this time a little louder.
“See! Things often aren’t the way they seem, or the way we might want them to be. So many people pretend to be what they aren’t. My father was like that.”
“And you stabbed him for that?”
“No.”
“Then why, Angel?”
The little smile faded.
“I told you. I was angry. Besides, this time I think he was really going to do it.”
“Do what?”
“Kick us both out. He couldn’t bring himself to do it before. He was too afraid, afraid everything would be made public.”
“I’m not getting this.”
She sighed. “Actually, we really didn’t want to leave. My trust money had kicked in, but it wouldn’t be much. Robin had signed that awful prenuptial agreement. One hundred thousand wouldn’t last long, Charley, at least not the way we like to live. It would have been a disaster if he had carried through with his threat.”
“So you killed him.”
She shook her head. “No, not just like that. It just happened. I admit I had thought about it, but it wasn’t planned.”
“Angel, are you all right? Maybe all this is something you’re inventing. You’ve been under one hell of a lot of stress.”
The little smile came back. “I’m not lying now, Charley. Oh, I’m pretty good at it, I think. They say I’m smart. Maybe that’s true. I do seem to be able to see things others don’t. It’s like I’m always one step ahead of everyone else. It’s always been that way. Like that jury, even you. The judge. I knew what all of you wanted and I gave it to you.”
“Jesus!”
“Don’t take it so hard. You did a much better job than either Robin or I thought you would. Really, that’s the truth. Of course, we hadn’t planned it that way.”
“What do you mean?”
“They had a pretty good case on me, wouldn’t you say? You were right about that so-called confession, by the way. I don’t know why I let them get away with that. I finally just got pissed off. I really didn’t think what I said was harmful, I just wanted to get them out of my hair. It was impulsive. I do things like that sometimes. Charley, that shows that even I can make a mistake.”
She finished her drink. “I didn’t even think about my hand prints on that damn sword. Christ, it all happened so fast. I was truly in shock or I would have done something about it. He was all blood, and very dead. I wasn’t thinking, and I did run. I admit it, I’m human, like everyone else.”
“Are you?”
“Don’t be bitter, Charley.” She stood up. “I’m going to have another. Sure I can’t fix you one?”
I shook my head. Angel walked to the bar and made herself a fresh drink and then returned. She looked so normal, so beautiful, so wholesome.
“I’m sincerely sorry we tried to set you up, Charley. You must realize we were desperate. We thought that if I was convicted we could get a new trial on the grounds that you were incompetent.”
She sipped the drink and smiled. “Nate Golden was sort of a coach there, although he didn’t realize it. If I got convicted, he thought I could get a new trial because of you. If that happened, time would go by, Judge Brown would have retired, and Nate thought he could then work out a plea so I wouldn’t have to serve even one day. That’s why we tried to get you drunk the other night, to show you weren’t competent. We knew you had been in trouble, that’s why I insisted you stay on as my lawyer. We would have lost our ace if someone else took over. It was cruel to do that to you, I know. But you can’t blame us, really, given what was at stake.”
“Angel, what kind of a game is this you’re playing? Not a word of this is true.”
“It is, though.”
“If it were, then why would your father go to the trouble to have the treatment records altered? He abused you and he didn’t want anyone to know, that’s why. There’s no reason to lie about it now.”
She nodded slowly. “You’re right about that. There is no reason to lie, is there? I’ve been acquitted. I couldn’t be tried again even if I took out an ad.”
“So tell me the truth.”
“I am.” She sipped her drink.
“I don’t believe any of this.”
She sighed. “Charley, my father lived in some kind of macho dream world. When it happened, he couldn’t handle it.”
“What happened?”
She laughed. “You really don’t know, do you?”
“You’re lying again, Angel.”
“I was a perfect little girl, Charley, did you know that? Skinny, but perfect Pretty, too, after I got past the gawky stage. When I came home to live I blossomed physically.”
“That’s when your father came after you.”
She laughed, that peculiar bell sound. “I told you. He would have killed himself first. According to him, no real man would even think of doing anything like that. No. I grew out of the ugly duckling stage and became a swan. Robin saw that.”
“So?”
“So. So, we became lovers. Affection became attraction, and then love.”
“You’re lying, Angel.”
She smiled. “That shocks you, doesn’t it? How much you sound like father. It’s true, Charley. It happens, you know. Robin and I fell in love, deeply in love. At first, it wasn’t physical, but then it was.”
She sighed. “Of course, we didn’t flaunt it. But eventually he found out. Can you imagine what John Wayne would have done in those circumstances? He would have sent the daughter to a mental hospital and he would have beat hell out of his wife, the evil stepmother. At least that’s what my father thought, and that’s what he did.”
“Why no divorce, if all this is true?”
“Because he didn’t want it known. Macho men are like that, Charley. He didn’t want his pals on the golf course snickering behind his back. He couldn’t stand the thought of being the joke at the weekly poker game. So he kept trying to break it up, but he couldn’t risk divorce.”
Angel laughed. “And all of that, the song of lesbian love, was what he had deleted from those medical records. He paid a lot of money to cut out any reference to the horrible fact that his kid and his wife were lovers. It wasn’t an oedipal situation, no son was screwing his mother. It wasn’t even an Electra thing, no daughter wanting to fuck dear old dad. In his mind, our situation was far worse. To him, it proved he couldn’t hack it as a man, as a husband or as a father. It was killing him.”
“And it did.”
She nodded. “How perceptive. When you think about it, he was the ultimate cause of his own death.”
Robin had come in, but I hadn’t noticed her until now.
“You heard?” I asked.
She nodded.
“True?” I asked.
Robin smiled sadly. “Yes. I’m sorry, Charl
ey.”
“You should be.”
“I mean, about what we almost did to you. But we were desperate. You have to understand that.”
She sat down next to Angel. They kissed. It was indeed a kiss of lovers.
Angel looked at me. “Does that offend you, Charley, to see us kiss like that?”
“No. Sexual preference is sexual preference. I’m not bothered by it. Never have been. But there is one thing I don’t understand.”
“What’s that?” Robin smiled.
“Why the roll in the hay with me, Robin? I can understand that you prefer women. But why did you make love to me here the night before the funeral?”
Robin shrugged, but I wasn’t watching her. It was Angel I saw, although Robin didn’t see the reaction. For a fleeting second, the mask fell away and Angel’s jealous face was alive with flaming anger, a kind of horrific madness. It was fleeting but it was frightening.
Robin colored slightly. “Well, that little episode was a combination of worry and liquor. I needed someone to hold me, Charley. You were closest.”
Angel’s mask was firmly back in place.
“Okay, that figures. But what about you, Angel? Why did you throw yourself at me? I mean, given everything.”
Robin’s head snapped around. Her mouth tightened. Jealousy was directed the other way. But it was a normal kind of response. Angel’s hadn’t been.
“I wanted you to stay on the case, Charley. I wanted to keep you interested,” Angel said evenly.
I stood up. I began walking out but I stopped at the atrium door.
“You beat the legal system,” I said.
“No, Charley,” Angel replied. “You did.”
I shrugged. “Well, you know the old wheeze, murder will out.”
Angel laughed.
“You feel pretty sure about things do you, Angel? Good idea, wasn’t it, this incompetent attorney defense? It was Robin’s idea, right? You’re smart, you figured it out. If things went wrong and it didn’t work Robin had nothing to lose. You’d be in prison and she’d have all the money. Does that give you a lot of confidence in your lady love? Justice has a strange way of being done eventually, official or not.”
“A sermon, Charley?” Robin smiled.
I shook my head. “More of a prediction. You girls are about to go traveling together, a murderous Gertrude Stein and a homicidal Alice B. Toklas, from my point of view.”
Robin laughed.
“In a while, maybe a day, maybe a year, one of you is going to make the other one very jealous, or very angry. You are dangerous people. If I were either of you I’d always sleep with one eye open. One of you, eventually, is going to kill the other.”
Angel cocked an eyebrow. “That’s nonsense,” she said.
“Maybe. We’ll see.” I looked at each of them for a moment. “You deserve each other,” I said.
Robin stroked Angel’s hair. “We think we do.”
*
I FELT sickened.
Angel Harwell wasn’t the first guilty person I had gotten off, but none of them had been quite like her. There had been reasons for the others, excuses, perhaps not fully legal, but human at least. None of the others had coolly manipulated the legal system and done it with such arrogance and disdain.
I had shot my mouth off about the criminal justice system. It would play on the world’s television screens, and it would look sincere. It had been then. It wasn’t anymore.
Poor Harrison Harwell. He tried to match his daddy, but he never could. He wanted to go to war, but he couldn’t. He wanted to equal John Wayne, but he couldn’t do that either. He was a poor flawed man, like the rest of us, condemned to exist within the limitations set by his own weaknesses and fate.
And he was dead, murdered.
Who would speak for Harrison Harwell? Mark Evola had asked that of the jury. It sure wasn’t me. I had managed to get his killer off, scot fucking free. So much for my wonderful system of justice.
I drove back toward my office. Fury soon gave way to depression. Even if I had lost, Nate Golden would have manipulated the system and achieved almost the same result. Of course, then I would have been ruined. My ticket would have been pulled.
Now I was a very successful lawyer, albeit a slightly shady one, at least in public opinion. I would again make money, at least for a while. But for what? To be John Wayne? It didn’t do much for Harrison Harwell.
I could think of no reason not to drink. No one depended on me. There was no point in continuing to struggle against myself. At least alcohol had a kind of anesthetic value for a while.
There was that bottle of brandy back in the desk, the hidden compartment. And if that didn’t work, there was the gun.
And if it came to that, who would come to the funeral? Not many, just the Club. But first I would drink.
I pulled up into the parking lot. The clouds obscured the moon so that darkness was almost total. At the top of the outside stairs, there was a light, enough so I could see to climb. By the side of my office door, I saw a figure sitting. As I approached, the figure stood up.
If he was a robber, what could he get? My wallet? It held about fifty bucks and an unsigned check. My life? Hell, that wasn’t worth two bits.
“What do you want?” I demanded as I got closer.
“Mr. Sloan? Mr. Charles Sloan?” The voice was feminine.
I thought she might be a reporter, one who just wouldn’t give up.
“Get out of here,” I said. “Everything is all over.”
“I don’t have any other place to go.” The voice was almost a whisper.
“So? What’s that to me?” I was close enough to see her now under the naked light at the top of the stairs. She was young, a trifle stout, and she had a conspicuous skin problem. She had a hiker’s knapsack and nothing else.
She started to turn away, but stopped. “Look, I’m embarrassed about this, but could you make me a loan? I’ll pay you back.”
I recognized the voice. It was the young woman who had left the messages but no name on my answering machine. “Do I know you?”
She again started to walk down the stairs.
“Hold on. Who are you?”
“It makes no difference.”
“It might. Who are you?”
“My name’s Lisa.”
“Lisa who?”
“Different names. It depends on who Mother was married to at the moment. She tells me it was Sloan originally. I don’t remember, but that’s what she says.”
“You’re Lisa? You’re my daughter?”
“That’s what Mother says.”
I opened the office door and flipped on the lights. “C’mon in.”
She followed me in and looked around.
“Not much, eh?”
“Well, it has possibilities,” she said. “Whose name is on the door?”
“He’s dead. I took the office over. I have to have that changed.”
“Nice man?”
“I didn’t know him. How come you’re here and not in California with your mother?”
She took off the worn knapsack and sat down. She could be pretty if she tried. She was someone who the beauty experts would say needed a lot of work.
“Look, if you can let me have a hundred bucks, even fifty, I’ll be on my way. I’ll pay you back as soon as I get a job.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Wherever I end up, I suppose.”
“How come you’re not with your mother?”
“You won’t lend me the money if I tell you.”
“Try me.”
She sighed. “I was in a treatment center, the twenty-eight-days bit. I snorted a little coke now and then, a little meth, too, but alcohol was the main problem.”
“A drunk?”
She nodded slowly. “Yes.”
“Did you run out on the program?”
“No. I finished.”
“And then what happened?”
“I went home, but mother and he
r newest husband didn’t want me around anymore. She gave me a couple hundred dollars and told me I was on my own.”
She shrugged. “I guess I am. I used the money to five on and to get here. It’s gone now. I know I shouldn’t have come to you, not after all these years, but I really don’t know what to do. I’ve just about played out my string.”
“How old are you now, Lisa? Nineteen?”
“Yes.” She seemed shocked that I knew.
“How about school?”
“I’ve graduated from high school. And I had one year of college.”
“Good grades?”
She nodded. “Yes, when I was sober enough to get there.”
“Is your mother still a drunk?”
She seemed defensive. “I suppose you could say that.”
“Well, you come by it honestly. A predictable by-product of the gene pool,” I said. “I’m a drunk, too. Did she tell you that?”
“She never talked about you much.”
“I’m in A.A.”
Her eyes widened. “So am I. I started at the hospital.”
“What are your plans?”
“I don’t know. I thought maybe I could get a job in New York maybe.”
She was putting up a brave front, but I could hear the uncertainty in her voice and see the fear in her eyes.
“Would you want to stay with me for a few days? I have a two-bedroom apartment.”
“No wife?”
“I’ve had a couple since your mother, none now. Do you know how to run a word processor, by any chance?”
“I do. I’m pretty good.”
“Want to work for me, until you find something else?”
“I don’t know. Do you think we’d get along?”
“We’d have to find that out, wouldn’t we?”
She smiled shyly. “I guess we would.” She studied me for a moment. “I saw something on television in the bus station, about a lawyer, a famous one, a Charles Sloan. Is that you?”
“Don’t pay any attention to that, Lisa. It’s all show business, just show business.”
She grinned. “I’m impressed.”
“Okay, here’s the rules. I’m a recovering alcoholic. If you are too, swell. But if you have to snort a little coke or sip a little gin, our arrangement is over. Any trouble with that?”
Shadow of A Doubt Page 42
