[Barbara Holloway 02] - The Best Defense

by Kate Wilhelm

  She had to write out her activities of the day, keep her notes up to date, plan tomorrow, clean up her kitchen, get some sleep eventually. And this was how it would be for the long stretch ahead, she knew.

  “You’re not going to like this,” Bailey warned her the next morning, opening his briefcase. He withdrew a file and put it on the table, pushed it across to her. She had given him a cup of coffee, which he sipped as she examined the contents of the file.

  “Damn,” she murmured. He had brought a collection of photocopies of articles about pro-life demonstrations. The caption of the picture she was looking at named some of the people, including Craig Dodgson, linked arm and arm with men on each side, blocking a women’s clinic in Cincinnati. The next one was in Spokane, Dodgson in the front of the line again, his face twisted in rage. And again in Buffalo. Atlanta …

  She studied Craig Dodgson: Lean, dark-haired, young was all she could say about him. In each photograph his face was contorted in anger.

  “Well/’ she said when she had looked at them, nine in all. “The boy’s busy, isn’t he?”

  “He gets around,” Bailey agreed. “He’s bad news, Barbara.”

  “I see he is. Does he organize, or just show up to help out?”

  “We’re working on that. There’s another son, Alex, twenty-four, an intern in the office of Senator Bulmar in Seattle. Nothing more than that about him yet. And we’ll get the aerial today. Our guy’s made a couple of sweeps over the forest, scouting out yew trees for the drug Taxol. He’ll wrap it up today.”

  “What else is bothering you?” Barbara asked.

  He shrugged. “I just don’t know where to draw the line. I sent Winnie in at the restaurant to talk to some of the women there.” Winnie was Winifred Scourby, a matronly woman in her fifties who could ferret out anything she went after. “She got them talking, and they don’t think Craig Dodgson’s been asking anyone to take a cruise with him, not for a couple of years, and they seem to think that he did take a waitress out a few years ago, and then paid her off to go somewhere else.”

  Barbara looked again at the furious face in the photograph before her. “Give, Bailey. What did they say?”

  “They believe he knocked her up and paid off with an abortion and cash for her to get lost.”

  “Find her,” Barbara said in a soft voice. “Don’t even think of drawing the line, Bailey, not until I tell you to. I want her.”

  She gave Bailey a new list, culled from the lists Paula and Emma had provided. “You might have trouble getting some of them to talk to you. Let Winnie do it, especially this one, Carol Burnside. She took some pictures last winter, near dawn, that made Dodgson Senior blow. Why? What’s in those pictures?”

  He looked at the list gloomily and stuffed it into his briefcase. “Okay. You’re the boss. I just don’t know what we’re digging for?”

  “Worms,” she said. “Slimy, loathsome worms.”

  She made a few phone calls, and then she went to the office to intercept Bessie before he got busy, if he ever did. Bessie quivered when she told him she would like to have three researchers go through his accumulation of newspapers.

  “No, no!” he cried. “Barbara, you can’t be serious. Three of them in my office? No, I can’t let them do that.”

  “Can I have the papers boxed up, moved somewhere else?”

  “All of them?” He turned anxious eyes to the many bins and quivered again. “All of them?”

  “I’ll bring them back, Bessie. I just want them to read, not cut them up or mark them up, just to read.” She was afraid he would cry. “We could do it another way, of course, but it would be so costly, and since they’re here, together … Bessie, we’ll take good care of them.”

  “Oh, dear,” he said in an undertone. “Oh, dear me. Not out of the offices. I haven’t even finished them all yet.” His face brightened and he said eagerly, “In the waiting room, that would be all right.”

  She knew the room he meant; it was where clients and family members and their attorneys all put in their time waiting for jury decisions, waiting to be called back to court. She nodded. That would be even better; the students wouldn’t have to work in his office while he was out. They could go right through everything as fast as possible.

  That afternoon she met her researchers. Although Brian had been painfully disappointed when she refused to explain what she was looking for, he had supplied two men and a woman. They looked terribly young. Sally Wesley had black hair halfway down her back, great round glasses, and a nice little snub nose. Rob Carradine, going for the poised, man-of-the-world appearance, had dressed in a shirt and tie and sports coat; the effect was somewhat spoiled by Levi’s and dirty running shoes. And John Rohr, the youngest of the three, was bespectacled, tall, thin, and intense.

  She had asked them to meet her at the office, and they were in the waiting room, where the bins of papers had been lined up against a wall. The coffee machine was plugged in, magazines in place on low tables, a few games on a shelf, all exactly the way it always had been as long as she could remember. She indicated the bins.

  “They are far-right-wing publications; some are the religious right, others not, but they’re all right of Attila the Hun. You have to read them all and make notes of the articles and editorials—you know, pro-life or anti-gay or school choice, whatever the topic is—and when you’ve read them all, group those under the same headings and check them out. Are they the same? Same wording, same catch phrases? Just similar? Not alike at all, except in topic? Keep good notes about dates and sources.”

  “You think maybe they aren’t all locally written?” John Rohr asked.

  She looked at him more closely. He was no more than twenty-five, she thought, and intense. He had retainers on his teeth, and wore glasses that made his gaze more like a stare. She nodded at him. “I don’t know yet. That’s what I want to find out. Is someone leading, others following? And if yes, who is doing which?”

  It was nearly five, too late for them to start that day. “Keep your hours noted,” she said. “And if you get tired, or disgusted, you know, if your eyes start to blur, take a break.” She finished with a warning about not talking. “Not with anyone,” she said, “except among yourselves. Okay?”

  They all nodded solemnly. They looked like children, she thought with dismay, not at their youth, but at the gap that had widened insidiously and now separated her so thoroughly from students in their twenties.

  As she was leaving, she saw Sam Bixby with an elderly couple who looked very prosperous. She smiled at Sam and kept walking.

  “Oh, Barbara, do you have a minute?” he called after her.

  She glanced at her watch and shook her head. “Tomorrow? I have an appointment in about ten minutes.”

  She had known Sam Bixby all her life; he and her father had become partners more than forty years ago, and the firm they had launched had prospered. From the start her father had done most of the trial work, and Sam the estate planning, trust fund planning, wills, real-estate deals. Now a dozen other lawyers did most of the trial work, and her father and Sam coddled the rich old folk who had come to rely on them. Sam was tall and stooped, with scant hair that didn’t cover his scalp, although he was always trying new ways to have it cut and combed. Silly, vain old man; today his hair looked as if he had had it styled and blow-dried. She was very fond of him.

  He took a step in her direction. “Call my secretary for a time, will you, Barbara? Tomorrow?”

  She nodded. She had thought he just wanted to pat her on the head and voice the hope that no hard feelings would result from the firm’s decision. But this was something else, she realized.

  She walked out of the offices, out of the building, out into the sunlight, where she debated walking the dozen blocks to her appointment, but after a glance at her watch, regretfully she retrieved her car from the lot. No time, no time, she muttered as she headed once more toward the Sacred Heart medical complex. Five o’clock traffic was heavy on Pearl, but as soon as s
he turned off onto Thirteenth, she was out of the worst of it. Nice tree-lined streets with well-kept big houses framed with shrubbery and flowers gave the impression that this was a residential area, but it was commercial. Here the businesses had settled into the houses—a good women’s clothing store, a hatter, one of the best restaurants in town, real-estate offices, a book store… Within a block of the hospital complex it all changed; the buildings were new, concrete, ugly. Tiny circles had been left open in the concrete paving, like fishing holes in ice, for spindly trees that were doomed. Barbara didn’t even look for a parking space, but drove straight to the hospital parking garage.

  She had found Dr. Jane Lipscomb’s number in the phone book, had called her, and the doctor had said, “Why don’t we meet in the coffee shop on Thirteenth. You know it? The Roaster?” She had added almost ingenuously, “I saw your picture in the paper. I’ll recognize you and wave.”

  As soon as she saw Janey Lipscomb waving from a table, Barbara knew she would have trouble thinking of her as “the doctor.” She was dressed in wrinkled slacks with an equally wrinkled cotton shirt, sandals without hose; her permed hair was tied back with a red ribbon. She was very pretty, very dimply, with blue eyes and brilliant white teeth. Her patients must love her, Barbara thought as they shook hands.

  “I’m glad you had time to see me,” she said, taking a chair opposite Janey. She glanced about the coffee shop, which was crowded and noisy. “This is a good place.”

  “I think so. There was no way I could talk to you at the office. We’re controlled by an ogre who runs appointments like Mussolini’s train schedules. No appointment, you wait. The usual lag is close to three weeks.” She was grinning as she said this. “And you intrigued me enough not to want to wait that long. You’re representing Paula Kennerman, and there’s an emergency with a child who possibly will be a witness. How could I wait?”

  A waitress took their orders, two cappuccinos, one pastry. “I have to eat something,” Janey said. “No lunch today, and dinner’s a long way down the road.”

  “Do you do much work with children?” Barbara asked when the waitress left.

  “Mostly family practice, at least in theory, but actually it’s mostly survivors.” She looked at Barbara for recognition of the term, and when Barbara nodded, she went on. “Women and their children. Dysfunctional families. Battered women. Children in trouble. How did you get my name?”

  Barbara caught a glimpse of shrewd intelligence that vanished quickly from Janey’s face. She told her about Emma, and then about Angela and her daughter Annie. “It made a difference when I said Mrs. Canby had hired you. I think otherwise she would have turned me down altogether.”

  “Ah, the magic name,” Janey said with a little laugh.

  The waitress came back with their order; the pastry was as large as a dinner plate. “Ah, good,” Janey murmured, and began to cut the pastry into wedges with a knife and fork. She picked up a piece in her fingers. “Have some.”

  Barbara shook her head and watched her eat. The coffee was excellent.

  Neither spoke again until Janey had eaten half the pastry and finished her coffee. She held the cup up to get the attention of the waitress and then leaned back. “What I would do in a situation like this,” she said thoughtfully, “is go out and talk to the mother first. I don’t know how deeply into denial she is, of course, but that’s the first hurdle. She has to admit she has a troubled child. Step one. She might not talk, you know. She might not trust me worth a damn.”

  Barbara smiled. She would make a bet that suckling puppies would leave their mothers to follow this young woman. “You agree that the child must be very troubled?”

  “Well, sure,” Janey said. “Ah, more coffee.” The empty cups were replaced with steaming cups, and Janey returned to her pastry.

  “She’s in Cottage Grove,” Barbara said. “And she isn’t to be billed. I’ll pay for this.”

  “Well, someone better or the ogre would eat me raw.” The second half of the pastry was vanishing as fast as the first half had done. Janey held a piece poised in front of her mouth. “But you have to understand that no matter who pays the piper, if that child becomes my client, I have to treat our relationship with absolute confidence. I’ll make the mother understand that also.”

  Slowly Barbara said, “What I’m hoping for is that if she’ll talk to you first, maybe then she’ll talk to me.”

  “And if she doesn’t? Talk to you, I mean.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Uh-huh. Boy, that was good!” She picked up crumbs on her fingertip and put it in her mouth. “Sorry. I was starved. I’ll call Angela Everts tomorrow and see if I can go out on Thursday. My day off,” she added with a rueful expression. “You know this all might take a long time?”

  “How long?” Barbara asked, almost dreading an answer.

  “Who knows? If the mother agrees to the whole thing, I’ll have her bring the child to the office, where we are set up for children. You know—toys, dolls, dollhouses.”

  “You videotape the sessions?”

  Janey gave her another one of her intelligent, appraising looks and shrugged. “Usually. Off-limits, though.”

  “Of course.” Barbara thought a moment, then asked, “But would it be unethical if you let me know how you’re making out with them?”

  Janey laughed. “You’re paying the bill. You get that much.”

  “Do you want a map of the area? The house and barn, all that?”

  “No. If she cooperates, she’ll make a map. I suspect it will be more interesting than one you could supply.”

  Well, Barbara thought, back in her car, not moving yet, she had set a lot of wheels aspin. She felt as if all around her things were in motion that had not been only a few days ago, and she was tired and hungry.

  She drove through town without caring that traffic was heavy now, not caring how long she had to wait at the red lights. On impulse she drove toward Skinner Butte Park and the house her father had bought. She slowed down when she saw his car in the driveway. She could park, go ring the bell, and say, “Hey, I’m hungry.” And he would put his arm around her shoulder and say, “Well, let’s go eat.” That’s what her mother would have done, she thought, and they both would have pretended nothing had happened. She drove past the house and went home.

  On her porch was a second potted geranium, white, with a card that read: One looked pretty lonesome. / watered them both.

  She returned to her car and drove back to his house. When he opened the door, she said, “Hey, I’m hungry,” and he said, “Well, let’s go eat.” His arm felt good around her shoulder.

  They walked to a neighborhood German restaurant, where they had big fat sausages, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, and dark beer. “Save room for strudl,” Frank warned when they ordered. “This time of year it will be with fresh cherries.” It was a hard admonition to follow, the food was so very good.

  “Never told you the fish story Lewis brought up, did I?” Frank said as they ate. “Never told a soul, actually. Let’s see, it was back about nineteen fifty-five, ’fifty-six, thereabouts. We were both young and full of oats. We decided to go over to Snake River and do a little salmon fishing, take a weekend off, have ourselves a boys-night-out sort of holiday. Long drive over there, of course, but that was all right. We got there before dark on Friday, and Saturday was exactly what we had planned. Good fishing, good weather, had a good supper that night of spit-roasted salmon, had some good talk. Then Sunday we decided to go back out for just a couple of hours before we headed back home. And Lewis snagged a sturgeon.”

  Telling his stories like this always worked magic, Barbara thought, watching him. Years vanished, leaving his face soft and vulnerable; his eyes appeared unfocused, but she suspected that his vision was extremely clear, focused sharply on the past.

  “A sturgeon,” he said, smiling slightly, “is really a waterlogged tree trunk that breathes now and then, once every six months or so, and moves just about with every brea
th. Any fishing fool knows that all you can do if you snag a sturgeon is to cut it loose. You try to bring it up, it’s like lifting the whole damn river bottom. Lewis knew that as well as I did, but he decided to forget what he knew. And another thing he forgot is that the river doesn’t like things to stay put. No way. It’s forever rearranging things to suit its own whims. And the current nudges everything downriver, toward the rapids and falls, toward the Columbia eventually, and the ocean by and by.”

  His grin widened with the recollection. “And it seemed that we interrupted this particular sturgeon during its period of activity; the damn thing decided to move, heading out toward the middle of the river, where the current was a mite swifter. So I’m yelling at Lewis to cut the thing loose, and he’s yelling that he’s got it. And we’re drifting out and moving just a little faster downriver, but Lewis is at the end of the boat where the outboard motor is, and he won’t listen to reason. Start the damn engine, I yell, and he yells, I got the sucker! And I yell, Change places with me! And we are doing that when Lewis goes over the side. Just like that, over the side. He said I pushed him, but I never, and he’s trying to climb back in and next thing the damn boat is upside down and we’re both in the drink. And now we can feel the current really fine. We can’t catch up to the boat, and we head for shore. A little bit of beach, a little bit of a cliff, some scraggly trees, and not a thing more.”

  He laughed. “Oh, we were a sorry couple, I tell you. Lewis had some matches in a waterproof box, and we pulled down some of the scrub and started a fire and stripped to dry our clothes, and not a single word between us. Not a word. A little growling maybe, but not a civil word.”

  Barbara had finished her dinner while he talked; she waved the waiter away when he approached the table.