Death Qualified Part 20

"We'll see," she said slowly.

"We'll see." She thought it interesting that Frank used shark in connection with Tony, exactly as she had done. Even more slowly she said, "Dad, sooner or later I'm going to need some legal help, citing help, things like that."

"There's a lot of help available at the office."

"I'm going to need someone who knows where to tell help to start searching," she said, still speaking very slowly, carefully, keeping her voice as neutral as possible.

They did not look at each other, but she knew exactly when he breathed in, breathed out; knew how his fingers held the doork.n.o.b, how his gaze remained fixed straight ahead; and she knew he was equally aware of her every nuance. They were like two gunfighters, one in gray, one in blue, fingers on hair triggers, not wanting to do battle again, avoiding the direct look, the confrontational challenge, caught up in a dance whose motion had been frozen, a dance that neither could easily end.

Finally he spoke, his voice as flat as she had kept her own.

"A long time ago, before you were born, a very good judge. Harry Bromleigh, gave me some good advice.

He said never walk into the arena blindfolded. He said a lot of different things could act as blindfold--money, love, loyalty, ambition, hatred, religion, politics. You go in with the blindfold on, they carry you out."

She nodded slightly.

"When the time comes you want help, that's the time to talk about it."

She nodded again, a nearly imperceptible motion, but enough. He opened the door and went inside the house.

Almost lazily she began to reconstruct the last two days, but the edges were blurred already. They ate, they went to bed, they got hungry and ate again, and went back to bed again. She smiled at the river. And they talked. With their mouths full, sitting on cus.h.i.+ons on his floor, propped up with pillows in his bed, walking from a restaurant to his place or along the river, always talking. His past, hers, his parents, hers, his work, hers. He talked hard, but he listened just as hard, and he asked questions, made comments.

At one point she had said, "I'm not cut out to practice law. What a thing to find out after pa.s.sing the bar exam, after all those years in school."

"What are you cut out for?"

"Nothing. I had no business taking this case, but here I am, and every time I try to rationalize it, I trip and fall flat."

"You took it so we would meet. It's so simple. I never would have come to see you at work in court, you know.

And you would have been just another good-looking woman pa.s.sing by if we happened to be in the library at the same time, or on a sidewalk."

He had been smiling. She remembered suddenly how big his smiles were, how total. That was his quality, she decided then; he was involved totally every minute, every second, and there was no way the absentminded-professor image could ever be linked to him. And, she reminded herself, he was very naive, very innocent and ignorant.

His life had been in academia from the time he was a child, academia and the abstractions of his work in mathematics.

"I can't make any commitments," she had said sometime during those two days.

"I just don't know what I'll be doing after this case is over."

"So we have now, and then another now, and another one." He held her hand.

"Do you expect to win the case?

Will that influence your decision about afterward?"

"I'm going to give it my best shot," she said.

"Win? I don't know. What's win in this instance? Nell can't win; she's been hurt too desperately. Her kids can't win. Lucas can't. Win has lost all meaning. But Nell can lose more than she already has, and that's what I'll try to prevent. Accept that there are no winners, and limit the losses. And that's why I'm dropping out. It's a rotten system."

"What kind of system would you have instead?"

"One in which no one ever kills anyone else, except in accidents. In which the system isn't rigged like a game, an adversarial system where scores are kept. In which the government's investigation doesn't stop with an accusation, as if the case has already ended. In which the deck isn't stacked against the helpless, the powerless. In which no one has to lie and if anyone says I didn't do it, the statement is accepted as truthful because it is the truth."

She stopped abruptly when she heard a stridency giving her words a harshness she had not intended. Not now, not with him.

"Utopia," he said softly.

"I'll go there with you if you find it."

Was that when she had wept? She believed so, but the edges were blurred; one moment melted and became a different moment in a different time, a different place, and yet it was all one. She had wept. If not then, then another moment in that magical now that had lasted from Friday afternoon until Sunday.

On Wednesday Bailey checked in to say the fish was hooked. Tony had cornered him in a bar and interrogated him severely. Barbara let out a long breath. Bailey chuckled and said he'd drop in with more stuff tomorrow. He had a line on the detectives who had planted the listening device. Barbara could have kissed him, and in fact when he showed up on Thursday, she did kiss him. He was terribly embarra.s.sed.

Barbara listened to his report intently. She did not ask anything stupid, like "Are you sure?" when he said that Walter Schumaker had paid the agency five hundred dollars with a check. Just a retainer, Bailey said; their fee would have ended up in the thousands. And they left Turner's Point the afternoon that Lucas had been killed. Upped and left, he said, without any attempt to retrieve the bug.

Too many investigators swarming by then. Just another item on a very large bill.

"That other guy, Emil Frobisher. I got all there's to be got on his death."

She nodded.

"It's been a while, I know. Tell us."

Frank looked removed, as if he were not even listening, but she knew better than that. Bailey scanned notes that from Barbara's perspective looked like hieroglyphs.

"Okay," he said then.

"It's not pretty. Frobisher picked up a street kid in Denver, a fourteen-year-old male hustler, and took him home to play with. Leads to a lot of speculation about what he was up to with Lucas, nothing specific, but he was one of a series of guys Frobisher took home and kept, sometimes for months at a time. Anyway, after a couple of weeks the kid freaked out, maybe withdrawal, maybe something else. A lot of blanks in the police reports, and the newspapers didn't have much more than what they were spoon-fed, but since the autopsy didn't show drugs, the speculation was psychosis. Brandy wine's diagnosis. Anyway, the kid flips and there's real carnage at Frobisher's place, things wrecked, the computer system trashed, records destroyed, furniture torn up, the works.

That evening a colleague, Herbert Margolis, paid a call and found Frobisher dead, shot, and the kid dead, shot.

Frobisher was cut up pretty bad before the shot, and the kid was cut up. Blood everywhere. Hard to tell who did what to whom apparently, but the final report was that the kid went for Frobisher, who defended himself, accounting for the knife cuts they both had, and then the kid shot him and turned the gun on himself. At least, the gun was in his hand when Margolis found the bodies."

"My G.o.d," Barbara muttered after a moment.

"This whole affair is like being caught up in a food processor.

Where was Lucas Kendricks when all that was going on?"

"At Brandy wine's house. She says he was her patient by then, in her care at home. She was trying a new treatment with him that demanded that kind of personal care.

She says."

"So what's wrong with that?" Barbara asked. Bailey's face was so expressionless he looked asleep, except for his eyes, which gleamed the way they did when he had something he called "interesting."

"Interesting thing," he said then, "is that Brandy wine's house is just a short walk through the woods to the Frobisher place. And it seems that the day Lucas Kendricks took her battery, he paid a visit to the Frobisher place. At least, he went to a barn on the property and carried something 1 away with him. Different people there now, of course, but a kid saw him, a little kid, and his father was the one who called the police to investigate a stranger prowling about. No description of what he took away with him. The kid just said a big bag."

That finished what he had found to date, and they talked about it for a few more minutes. Barbara asked him to find out what he could about the ranger who had spotted Lucas's car from McKenzie Pa.s.s, and he left soon afterward.

She sat frowning at the river for a long time, not willing to look at her father, who was still imitating a carved Buddha.

There was too much, she had to admit. Too many loose ends, too many directions to pursue. It made her most unhappy that adolescents kept popping up. Lucas had been twenty when he went to work with Frobisher, Nell said a very young twenty; the boy involved with Frobisher's death; other boys; Nell's twelve-year-old son; even the teenage girl^ Lucas was accused of murdering.

Too many young people. Things tended to get too messy when young people were involved; emotions flared, tempers erupted, judges got either testy or sentimental, both death to a case. And maybe none of it had a thing to do with Lucas's murder. She could say that to herself, but she didn't want to hear it from her father. It was all connected, she told herself firmly; it had to be.

That same afternoon Tony De Angelo called Frank. He would be in the area the next afternoon, and would like to drop in if Frank and Barbara were both going to be home.

As soon as Barbara heard this she called Mike Dinesen and invited him to dinner on Friday. Frank did not comment.

When they took their daily walk to town they talked of many things that did not include Nell Kendricks and the murder case against her. But Barbara had talked a bit about the mathematician she had met and his gallery of art and slide show. Frank had looked at her in disbelief.

A mathematician?

The weather had changed; it was too cool now to remain on the deck in the evenings. As soon as the sun went down the chill in the air drove them inside, where Frank lighted the fire in the fireplace. But in the afternoon with the lowering sun softening the light, erasing hard edges everywhere, and the river turning golden and motionless, the deck was still first choice for any gathering.

Barbara waited in her chair while Frank went to answer the doorbell and admit Tony that Friday afternoon. She did not rise or offer to shake hands when he appeared. She nodded.

"h.e.l.lo, Tony. Sorry I was so rushed the other day."

"Not just rushed," he said, examining her face with the same kind of intensity she remembered, as if he had to rememorize her features time and again.

"Not just rushed," she repeated lightly.

"Mad as h.e.l.l, was what. Sit down, help yourself to the booze, coffee, whatever. We're very informal out here in the boonies." He was dressed in a gray suit with a red tie that he now loosened. He hated ties, always had. Prank took his usual chair and tasted his coffee to see if it was still hot.

"How are things. Tony?" Frank asked.

"It's been a long time."

"Very long time," Tony said. He pulled another chair closer to Barbara's and shook his head as if in wonder.

"I.

can't get over how marvelous you look. You went off and found the Fountain of Youth or something."

"Or something. Do help yourself to a drink."

He poured coffee but kept his gaze on her.

"Have dinner with me later?"

"Can't. We have a guest coming. Sorry, but thanks."

"Another time, then. I'll give you a call."

She sipped her coffee and looked at the molten river.

"I think I'm going to be pretty busy."

There was a silence of several seconds. When she glanced at him again, his eyes were narrowed, and a watchful expression had chased his openness and friendliness of moments before.

She regarded him candidly, waiting for whatever he 5 intended to say, making not the slightest pretense at real interest. She knew his expressions so well, she realized, when it changed again, and subdued anger made his sharp face look even sharper; his cheekbones, his nose, his chin all seemed more prominent, as if the skin had stretched tighter over them. She found herself thinking he looked like a man whose corset pinched unmercifully. She knew this controlled anger had been one of the things about him that had attracted her in the beginning. It was dangerous, she had suspected; such anger so close to the surface, too tightly suppressed, would erupt and ignite everything in its way. That had been exciting.

"We'll be sending you an official notification," he said then, very cool, the anger still there, still stretching his skin too tight.

"I thought I might as well bring it up while I'm in the neighborhood, give you time to object if you want to. We're planning to obtain perpetuation of testimony from the psychiatrist, Ruth Brandy wine, probably on video, as soon as we can arrange a time with her."

Barbara turned away and raised her cup to her lips. After a few seconds, she said, "Shaky case. Tony? Need more ammunition? I'll fit it in somehow, of course."

"So glad you can find the time," he said coldly.

"Well, it's been interesting, seeing you again after so many years.

Thought you'd have found yourself an accountant or something by now."

"And you? Find a glamorous heiress yet?"

"As a matter of fact, there is someone, and she is quite well off." He stood up.

"Good to see you, Frank. Beautiful place you have here."

Frank got up to walk out with him. Barbara murmured, "So long, Tony. See you in court." He nodded. As soon as they were gone and she heard the car crunching gravel in the driveway, she stood up and poured herself a shot of bourbon and drank it down neat.

"Nerves?" Prank asked, returning to the terrace.

"My G.o.d, you didn't show a sign of nerves."

She grinned.

"Celebration."

Once or twice a week Barbara cooked dinner, and they went out to a restaurant at least once a week, but Frank made dinner the other nights. Her suspicion that he merely tolerated her cooking was confirmed when he said incredulously, "You're going to make dinner for the young man?

Must be easier ways than that to get rid of him."

"It seemed fair; he's my guest, after all."

"And it's our reputations. I'll cook."

She kissed his cheek.

"You're really not bad as a parental figure, you know? I wonder if I can do anything about the dining room table." She went to the doorway to look at it, then shook her head. The table was covered with her papers, books, maps, her little computer .. .

"Okay, kitchen it is."

When Mike arrived, Frank was putting the finis.h.i.+ng touches on a duck in pumpkin seed sauce, and the kitchen table was perfect since she could sit there with Mike and they could all talk. She was ridiculously glad that Mike did not bring a bottle of wine, or a token flower, or any thing else. And she was glad that he was in jeans and a sweater. Himself. Within five minutes he and Frank were arguing about whether children should be forced to study math.