Death Qualified Part 42

She went to Tawna in the living room.

"Nell said she has some tapes she wants me to put away for her. You know anything about tapes?"

"She brought them in with her," Tawna said, nodding. "In a plastic bag that she managed to rip open. Tapes went out everywhere. I put them here." She pointed to two stacks of audiotapes on an end table.

Barbara stared at them, and slowly looked back to Tawna.

"What did she say when she came in? What did she do?"

"She was incoherent," Tawna said.

"Really out of it.

She didn't even see me, but she was seeing something, or some things. She said something like "You can't have it."

And then she said, "Finders keepers." When she tore the bag and the tapes came spilling she began to cry, saying, "I'm sorry." Then she pa.s.sed out, sort of."

"Could she have taken something? You know, a drug or something? Alcohol?"

Tawna looked scornful.

"Nell? Forget it. Besides, she was as cold as a two-day-old corpse." She went to the kitchen.

"I'll see if there's a bag around to put the tapes in."

"This is what you call being up the creek without a paddle," Frank said a little later. They were at the table where the tapes were fanned out neatly. Sixteen in all.

There was not a tape player in the house.

Barbara regarded the tapes with bafflement and frustration.

She had reasoned that Lucas had taken something that Brandywine and crew had wanted desperately to find again; she had gambled and said disks to lure Brandywine to Oregon. She had not for a second thought of tapes, regular music tapes that someone had recorded over. Only moments ago she and Mike had sat in his car with the rain beating on the roof and, using his tape deck, had confirmed the fact that a man's voice had been recorded over regular audio music tapes. The sound quality was poor, the rain and wind had made it nearly impossible to hear the words, but there seemed no doubt that Nell had found what Brandywine's detectives had been searching for. Sixteen tapes!

"I'll go buy a Walkman," Mike said.

"I'll probably have to go in to Springfield. Take a couple of hours."

"Buy two," Barbara said.

"Make it three," her father said.

"You think I could stand knowing you were both hearing what he had to say while I couldn't?" he demanded when Barbara looked surprised.

He shook his head.

"You know it's going to take as long to listen to them as it took to record them. Thirty hours?

Thirty-two? Good G.o.d!"

"Mike, are you sure you don't mind? That rain's still pelting down like crazy. I'd go, but I really have to try out the summation."

"No big deal," he said. He touched one of the tapes.

"Who could sleep tonight without knowing something about what's on them?"

"We'll eat when you get back," Frank said.

"We'll plug in and eat. The American way."

After Mike had gone, Barbara stood at the table and regarded the tapes.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n it!" she said finally.

"That sums it up pretty cogently," her father said.

"I.

suppose this explains why Lucas made that detour to the ledge. Nell finally remembered, or figured it out, or something."

"And she picked a blizzard and monsoon to wade through to get to them again," Barbara muttered.

"Smart." Nell must have seen him just after he hid the tapes; when she closed her eyes, he moved out of her line of sight. Probably he had not wanted any connection made between his arrival and the hiding place. She scowled and cursed under her breath. Nell had remembered everything else about that day; why not this? Why not until now?

Frank turned his back on the tapes with a show of irritation.

"You ready to try out your summation? Let's go to the living room."

When they got to the cheerful room with its welcoming fire, he seated himself in one of the overstuffed chairs, a legal pad on his lap.

"What we used to do," he said with a faraway look on his face, "was have her sit and make notes if she thought of anything to question, and I just sort of moved around, peeking at my crib sheet from time to time. How's that sound?"

Barbara nodded, her throat too tight to say anything at the moment. She cleared her throat, placed her printout on an end table, and started. After ten minutes, she stopped.

"It's awful, isn't it?"

"Well .. . you seem a bit distracted, not concentrating exactly, I'd say."

"I'm out of my depth, Dad, and that's the truth. I don't know where I stand, where Nell stands. I don't know if she intends to testify. I can't stop her, you know. I'd like to get a continuance, but I doubt Lundgren would agree, not unless Nell is in the hospital, at least. I couldn't talk to her when I went over there; she was babbling like a loony. I don't even know if she intends to put on a psycho act from here on out. Tonight was a good start, if that's what's on her mind. I can't mention those tapes to a soul, not until we know exactly what's on them, and even then, so what? I just don't know what I'm doing anymore."

"I guess that's what comes of trying to do too many jobs at once," he said thoughtfully.

"Yep, try to do it all and you don't do anything."

"Meaning?"

"Well, it seems to me you've taken on a h.e.l.l of a lot of hats. Judge, jury, prosecutor, investigator, defense attorney. Any one of them is a full-time job, in my experience."

She contemplated the fire. After several seconds she muttered, "You left out a few. Social reformer, theologian, philosopher, probably a couple of others that will pop into my head any minute now."

"All the above," he agreed.

"And what you need for the rest of this trial is the actor's hat. You've done the defense attorney to the hilt. I'm very proud of you, Bobby.

More than I can say. a.s.suming Nell will come to her senses, there's nothing you can add to your case. Not a thing. Lundgren won't grant a continuance unless you show cause that you simply don't have. So now you go into your dramatic act. The final scene, then curtain down, and the waiting starts."

Abruptly she got to her feet.

"One more prop," she said, and hurried from the living room. She went to the kitchen and ran the water a few seconds while she thought.

She knew how Tony would come on in court with his summation, filled with righteous indignation, demanding justice and so on. She had seen Tony work too many times not to know how his inflections would be, how his voice would rise and fall, the points he would make about law and the finality of death. All right, she told herself. All right. She knew more than Tony about this case, and she did not know if Nell had killed Lucas or not. That was the point, the only point, she said under her breath. No one knew except the killer, who was just possibly Nell, and Barbara could no longer trust anything Nell said. But she didn't know. Tony had proven nothing. She filled a tall gla.s.s and returned with it. Her father had not moved.

"I'll save the histrionics for tomorrow. Now, where was I?"

She sipped water, put the gla.s.s down, and began to move about the room, summing up the case for her client.

She went through the many steps thoroughly; now and then she caught a look of surprise on his face, now and then he made a note. Only once did she waver, when a memory surged through her mind. Not in this house, be fore they had this house. She had gone downstairs as a child and had heard his voice raised angrily, and, frightened she had crept to the study door where she saw her mother in a chair with her feet drawn up under her, a legal pad on her lap. Her father had been pacing with great energy, shouting almost, his voice thick with anger. The memory ended there. She didn't know what happened next, what she had done, if she had interrupted, if she had continued to listen. Her mother had been beautiful. Her voice faltered, and she sipped the water, then went on speaking.

The memory had lasted only a second in real time, but in memory time it had been many minutes; the images it had brought were sharp and clear. Especially her mother's face, so intent on Frank's words, a little frown of concentration creasing her forehead, the tip of a pencil against her lip, pressing in on it.

When she finished, Frank grunted softly.

"Okay," he said, and then he looked at the notes he had jotted, and they began to discuss the points he felt needed something.

She listened carefully to his reasoning, and he listened just as carefully to hers. They were still at it when Mike returned.

"I bought two Walkmans and a tape player that will make copies," he said, lugging a large box to the living room.

"And a lot of tapes. I thought it would be a good idea to copy everything and stash the originals in a safe-deposit box, something like that. I mean, if Brandywine's crew thought they had something important enough to hire those detectives and all, well, maybe we shouldn't take chances, either."

Barbara gave him 'a. grateful look, and Frank patted his shoulder on his way out to put the finis.h.i.+ng touches on their dinner and get it on the table. It was almost nine-thirty; they all seemed to realize at the same moment that they were starving.

"I was thinking," Mike said to Barbara, "we could divide the tapes among us and listen to enough of each one to see if the whole thing needs listening to right now.

And if anyone finds something particularly interesting, we can play it on the machine so we can all hear it. Okay?"

"Good. Eventually we might have to hear everything, but that's a good way to start. I 'm glad you were thinking of things like that. I certainly wasn't."

"Yeah, that's what I thought." Suddenly a distant look came over his face and he said, "Something I have to tell Frank. Be right back." He trotted from the room.

Barbara began to examine the many tapes. None of them was in a case; none was labeled. Maybe Lucas had removed the cases to save room, she decided, and wished he had thought to put numbers or dates or something on the tapes themselves. Then Frank whooped with laughter in the kitchen, and Mike returned, grinning. He looked like a little boy who knew very well that he had done something marvelous and precocious. A dirty limerick, she thought with resignation. Determinedly, she did not ask.

Frank had made a ca.s.serole that might have been some what overdone and baked potatoes that very definitely were overdone. No one cared. They did not listen to the tapes during dinner, but immediately afterward they began.

Barbara listened to a disembodied voice that turned out to be deeper than she had expected. She had had no reason to expect anything, but when the deep voice identified himself as Lucas, she started, surprised. He was talking about some time in the past, and she had no way of knowing when the tape had been recorded, or how distant from that time the events he described had happened. Later, she told herself; she rewound that tape and inserted a new one.

Twenty minutes after they began, Prank made a grunting sound and held up his hand. Barbara and Mike took their headsets off.

"I think this is the first one," Frank said. Mike was using the big machine. He removed his tape and Frank slipped his into the slot. They all listened: "September 14, 1982. Two days ago I told Emil I want to get out of all this and go home. Nell's right. This is all a piece of bunk.u.m, and they're treating me like s.h.i.+t. Emil yelled at me and said to wait until he talks to Schumaker about my degree. He was sure it was just a technicality that kept it away from me. He promised to look into it ASAP. Today Emil said I should go to the lab and give a demonstration for Brandy wine. They've been in conference day after day, hour after hour. I've never even met her yet. I didn't want to, but finally I said okay, one last demonstration, and then we talk about my degree, and he said sure. He thinks Schumaker needs a paper, for the committee, for the files or something. A simple paper, not a real thesis, he said. Notes about my work with him would be okay, fifteen, twenty pages, up to fifty or more if I want to go that high, but I don't have to. And then the master's degree. I don't believe it.

"I went to the lab. It's in the math building, a little room with a bunch of chairs with plastic seats, and a long table. I have a special chair with arms and b.u.t.tons on the right one. And there's a big screen, a computer monitor.

There's a gla.s.s window, one-way gla.s.s, I know, because sometimes I help with other subjects and those times I'm on the other side of that gla.s.s. We just do one at a time in here. So, I take the chair and they're all behind the gla.s.s and it starts like always.

"I could go longer than anyone else, but even so after an hour or a little more I had to stop. It was tiring. Emil knew that, Schumaker knew it, and Margolis, but she didn't believe it. Go on, she kept saying over the micro phone. Keep going, she said, as if she thought I stopped to prove a point or something. I told her my head was aching too much, and that was the truth. Sometimes it was my stomach that ached, but usually my head hurt too much to keep on. And I just wanted to take a nap.

"They came into my room and sat at the table. She said, why don't you go get a c.o.ke or a cup of coffee, walk out in the fresh air to wake up. Take a ten-minute break.

"So I left, but I didn't want anything to drink, or to take a walk. I wanted to have a nap, so I went in the other room, the one we called the control room, and I could see them at the table talking. I put my head on my arms to go to sleep, but I kept hearing what they were saying. And she said I was resisting. Emil said I was cooperating fully, and she said, I don't mean that, I don't mean deliberately.

You say the others all begin to have physical symptoms after a time? He said yes, and she said, they're all resisting They meet a wall that terrifies them and gives them physical symptoms so they can retreat in good faith. I want to hypnotize him now, today, and see what that wall means.

"Schumaker said, does that mean you're in? And she said, I don't know. Not yet. But I have a few suggestions. "I looked at them then and realized that Emil and Schumaker were treating her just the way they had treated Margolis when they wanted him to help with the computer programming. They were being very polite and acting like she was something really special, and she liked that. I could tell.

"I decided I wanted to pack up my stuff in the car and just go home, as fast as I could drive back. I started to leave, and then I saw my backpack in the other room by the special chair, and I knew I had to get it. My car keys were in it, and my apartment keys, my wallet even. So I went back in.

"She said, is your head better? and I said sure, it's fine now. She laughed and said, don't be silly. Sit down and I'll show you a trick to get rid of a headache. You can use it whenever you want. It's pain transference. I said no, I was okay, but she took my arm and sort of pushed me into a chair at the table. I said I didn't want to be hypnotized, and she laughed and said that since no one can be who isn't cooperative, there wasn't any danger of that. Keep that thought in mind, she said. Now where does your head hurt? I touched the back of my head without even thinking what I was doing, and she nodded as if she had thought so. Then she began talking about the pain, where it was, how it felt, on and on, and she told me to think of it as something I could see, something I could touch and move.

She said, don't close your eyes, don't relax too much, just think about that pain. We're going to gather it up and start moving it. We'll move it down your neck, across your shoulder into your right arm and down into your hand.

When it's all in your hand, you'll just throw it away. All with your eyes wide open. Simple pain transference.

"She never said a word about trance, or sleep, or relax, or close your eyes, nothing that I a.s.sociated with hypnosis, but she hypnotized me anyway, and that's all I can remember of what happened in the lab this afternoon.

"Emil will tell me eventually. I know he will. It's night now, and I've tried and tried to remember and had to give up, but it's okay, because Emil will tell me. Now I have to get some sleep. It's going to be a long day tomorrow.

We're going to start at eight in the morning and go through all the disks, everything. They're all excited. I know I planned to go home again, leave today, this afternoon, or tonight, but I'll wait until I find out what happened. An other few days won't matter, not after all these years.

"And I'm going to start making a record of everything I know about what we've been doing. Not the paper Emil said I need. That's bulls.h.i.+t. But a record, something to take away with me. I'll tape over my music tapes. Nothing now to make them suspicious of what I'm doing. I don't think any of them would like it if they knew I'm making a record of all this."

His voice stopped and the sound of Jimi Hendrix filled the living room. Mike turned off the machine.

"Oh my G.o.d!" Barbara breathed.

"He never had a chance," Mike said softly.

"That poor guy never had a chance."

Prank stood up.

"You want anything to drink? I'm having a gla.s.s of wine and then I'm going to bed. You can fill me in tomorrow." His face was drawn with pity.

Mike decided to make coffee; it promised to be a late night. Barbara got up to poke at the fire, but really, she understood, they all simply needed to move, as if to break the spell of that distant, dead voice. Poor Lucas, she thought. Poor Nell. All flip-flopped over. She had started out feeling only anger at Lucas for abandoning his wife and children, and sympathy for Nell, as well as admiration because she had handled it so well. Now the sympathy was for Lucas, and she was no longer certain how she felt about Nell.

None of this, she thought bleakly, had a thing to do with the case she had to sum up tomorrow. She glanced at her watch. Twelve-forty. Another twenty minutes and she would have to go to bed, or she would be a wreck tomorrow, she knew. The tapes would keep. They had kept for seven years, and then another six months. They would keep another few days. She remembered her fierce wish to destroy Ruth Brandywine along with her accomplices, and she thought, maybe we will yet. Maybe we will.