Death Qualified (10 page)

    Then he had walked out. He had been right. There was something, there were always things.

    "You don't trust me worth a damn," he had shouted the last night they were together. That was right, too. His actions had proven her point, she added: He had walked out. But there were things to be settled, and she might as well get on with them. Not because of Craig; it was understood that she never would see him again. Not because of anything she could put a name to; things should be settled. Because.

    She packed quickly; she had very little. The computer, the hair dryer, the box of books, radio.. .. Two suitcases of clothing, everything she owned in the world, all got stowed in the car without crowding the trunk or the backseat even a little. She scribbled a note for Winnie, opened the shop, left the note on the cash register, and took a final look around. It had been fan for a time, she thought.

    The fan had ended. Time to vamoose.

    She pulled into the driveway of Frank Holloway's house on Tuesday afternoon. It was eighty degrees, deliciously cool; the light was dim, filtered by old growth fir trees that crowded the house. Exactly right, she thought with approval, exactly what she had been imagining. Her father hurried out to meet her. He was wearing ridiculous shorts that came down to his knees, a sport shirt not tucked in, and sandals. She smiled at the incongruous figure, nothing like the man she had been imagining; in her mind he always wore a gray suit and a maroon tie.

    He embraced her, then held her tightly, pushed her back a fraction to look at her, and clasped her hard against his chest again.

    "I can't tell you how happy I am to see you," he said.

    "You look marvelous, brown as a nut, pretty as I recall, prettier even. Come in, come in. We'll get your stuff out later. Too hot now. Let me look at you."

    He studied her again as she laughed. Too hot!

    "You've got some gray hairs," he said in wonder.

    "Way it goes, Dad. Getting old, just like everyone else." Thirty-seven, she thought. For God's sake! Thirty-seven!

    He shook his head.

    "No. But you finally are starting to look grown-up. A little grown-up. Come on inside."

    It was good to be here, she realized as they walked into the house. She liked this house with the cedar paneling, the cedar fragrance, the wide windows overlooking the river. And even the clutter. It pleased her that he had cluttered up the living room. Books, magazines, papers on all the end tables, notebooks here and there. For a time, after his move out here from the city, she had been afraid he would vegetate, but evidently he was as busy as ever.

    She moved through the living room, examining things she remembered from her childhood Indian pottery, Indian throws on the furniture, a copper kettle with fireplace tools. On a leather-topped coffee table, nearly hidden by stacks of old Law Journals, was an exquisite cut glass bowl with a cover, filled with mints. Her mother had got the bowl out only for Christmas, she remembered. Beyond the windows was the river, trees, sky. Very nice rock samples were lined up on the windowsills: picture jasper, quartz crystals, thunder eggs.. ..

    She looked up to see him watching her with a faint smile. She smiled back at him.

    "It's good to be back," she said.

    "Got any coffee?"

    He laughed, and they walked through the house to the kitchen where she sat down as he prepared a pot of coffee.

    No one made coffee as good as his. He started with whole beans, dark roast Colombian, mixed with dark French, with a few pale mocha beans to mellow it, he said. The noise of the grinder filled the room. The same table, she realized, looking at it closely. He had brought it out from the other house. She found the nick she had made with an ice skate and rubbed it gently.

    "What were you up to in Phoenix?" he asked from across the room, spooning the ground coffee into the basket

    She told him about the shop, about Winnie, and made it all sound funnier than it had been; she made the drive up sound more interesting than it had been. She went on to tell him about her plans for Minneapolis, where she had a school friend who was starting a co-op health food store.

    Her voice trailed off when he came to the table with a tray.

    "Let's sit on the terrace," he said.

    "Nice time of day."

    There were houses on both sides of his, she knew, but from his terrace they were invisible. The cabins at Turner's Point were down there, thirty feet below, and some boats tied up at wooden docks, kids fooling around, far enough away so that their voices did not carry here. There was the river, and endless trees. A breeze blew in from the west, carrying the scent of river and forest, healing scents, she felt certain. She had not realized until this moment how tired she had become from the long drive, how tense she had been over the meeting after five years.

    "It is lovely," she said after they were settled in lounge chairs.

    He nodded. He never had talked very much, never said the obvious, but let the self-evident be its own witness.

    He now took his coffee black; he used to make it almost white with heavy cream. Cholesterol? There was time, she thought, to learn about his health, his diet, his work. She would not rush things any more than he would.

    Then he surprised her again.

    "Let me tell you about it," he said, keeping his gaze on the flowing water. He didn't wait for her to protest, to point out that she no longer practiced law, that she was on her way to work in a food co-op.

    "First, there's Lucas Kendricks," he said.

    "He came from over in Deschutes County, married a girl here, Nell Dorcas. She's thirty-two now. He left six years ago and was not heard from since until he showed up again in June. On a Monday afternoon he turned up at his father's house. He said someone was after him, not who, just someone. On Tuesday he left his parents' house and next place he was seen, same day, was in Sisters. He bought food for camping and picked up a couple of girls.

    He took them to the Eagleton ranch where one of the girls stayed to take pictures of the llamas; the other girl went on with him. On Thursday of that week a girl's body floated down the river and was seen by a number of people.

    They didn't find her immediately, however. Saturday, Lucas Kendricks arrived at a ridge overlooking his wife's property, and he was shot through the head, killed instantly.

    The girl's body was recovered on Sunday. She had been beaten, tied, raped, mutilated, murdered. She was identified as one of the girls Kendricks picked up in Sisters.

    And last week Nell Kendricks was indicted for the murder of her husband."

    "Your client?"

    "Yes."

    "Did she do it?"

    "She says no."

    "Murder one, probably life. Manslaughter, ten to twenty," Barbara said coldly.

    "I assume they indicted on the highest count, aggravated murder. If they bring in guilty, possible death penalty." She had not looked once at him while he spoke, and she did not look now. She poured herself more coffee.

    "Let me know how it all comes out."

    He grunted, shifted in his chair.

    "I can't do it, Bobby.

    And there isn't anyone else." He began to list the others in his law firm, and the reasons why none of them could or would take on Nell Kendricks.

    She stopped listening. A joke at Reed College had been that if you shake a tree in Oregon three lawyers and a logger would fall out.

    He stopped talking.

    "You haven't heard a word, have you?"

    "Enough. It's no good, Dad. Even if I became interested, and I won't, I can't practice in Oregon. It's pointless to talk about it to me."

    "You can practice," he said.

    "You've been on extended leave without pay while you were doing research. That can be taken care of."

    She felt so tight that she was certain if she moved, she would appear spastic. She looked at the mug in her hands.

    He had a set of them, each with a comic judge, a comic scene. This one had the judge leaning across the bench, asking the defendant, "You say your neighbor hit himself over the head with your pool stick just to make you look bad?"

    When she was certain she could control her voice, she said, "You can't take care of it. Dad. You can't fix it. I'm sorry if you have a client who has a losing case, but that's life. Possibly mandatory life," she added bitterly.

    "What did you mean, you can't do it? You win a few, lose a few.

    Isn't that what you told me? So she gets twenty years, isn't that how the game is played?"

    "It's rotten, Bobby. I don't know how or why, but there's something truly rotten about this affair. And I don't know where to start."

    He wasn't playing fair, she wanted to cry out. He was supposed to pick up on the cues she was throwing, revive the argument that had sent her away five years ago, that had kept them apart since then. He sounded more troubled than she could remember; he never had become involved with his clients. Interested, willing to fight for them, suspicious of them, but never really involved. He had always treated his clients like specimens that fascinated him for a time, exactly the way a boy would become fascinated with a frog under the dissecting knife.

    "You say Kendricks left his wife six years ago and just turned up again. Why didn't she divorce him?"

    Her father looked startled, then thoughtful.

    "I don't know why not."

    "Well, find out. And while you're at it, find out who she's been sleeping with. Or is she celibate at thirty-two?"

    She stood up.

    "I'll bring in some of my stuff. Most of it can stay in the trunk for the next few days until I take off." She left him on the terrace.

    NINE

    she carried her suitcases upstairs to the guest room she had used in the past. It had a western view, a better view of the river, actually, than the terrace. The water had taken on a golden sheen that looked like a shiny satin fabric in just enough motion to keep the highlights moving, to keep new patterns appearing, vanishing. She watched it for several minutes, her head empty, content to watch the infinite changes.

    When her father's words began to overtake the peace that she could almost feel seeping into her, she began to move briskly around the room, first to examine the drawers of the chest, empty, and then to open her suitcases and begin unpacking a few things. The closet had a down jacket and two sweaters, apparently left here on her last visit.

    She had forgotten them. In the bathroom there was a jar of soap roses with the spicy fragrance of wild roses.

    A sharp memory came to mind. Her mother, slender, white-haired, lovely, saying in her soft voice, "Dear, leave it open. If the soap air dries, it lasts longer. That's why I always unwrap them all." Barbara caught her breath at the clarity of the fleeting moment. Her mother had been talking to her father, who always closed the jar. It was open now.

    She went back to the bedroom to stand in the center indecisively. There was a comfortable chair, a reading lamp, some books, magazines. Newspapers. The bed was the three-quarters brass bed from her old room, with the same quilted spread in pink and green leaves and flowers.

    She wanted to lie down on the bed and cry, as she had done in that distant past over this heartbreak or that.

    She finished putting away the few things she had decided to unpack. Then she set her shoulders and went back downstairs.

    At the foot of the stairs, her father called her from the kitchen.

    "In here, honey. Doing things with food."

    She went through the hallway, glancing into his study on her way, and on to the kitchen. His study was more muddled than the living room, more books, many of them open, a computer setup that was new, a pair of slippers near his favorite leather chair.

    "What I thought was grilled trout. You're not on a diet or anything, are you?" He looked across the room at her over the top of his glasses. She had stopped at the dinette table and chairs. When she shook her head, he went on.

    "Good. Good. Stuffed tomatoes. Lonnie grew them, and sweet corn. You remember Lonnie Rowan, don't you?"

    "I don't think I met her."

    "Maybe not. She was probably still in the hardware store last time you were around. Her father owned it since the Flood, I guess, and then a few years ago he upped and died on her. She was fifty-five. It seemed that all the promises he made about providing for her were fairy dust. He died in debt, store with a mortgage, house mortgaged, more bills than you could imagine."

    As he talked he moved around the other side of the kitchen, to a cutting board where he cut the tomatoes, salted them, turned them over to drain. To a short step ladder he always had used as a stool, where he sat to shuck corn. Back to the sink.. .. She didn't offer to help. He was a much better cook than she was, and he couldn't stand another person in the kitchen when he was cooking.

    "So there she was, fifty-five, broke, in debt, no experience at anything but selling hardware now and again, and taking care of her mother first, until she died, and then her father." He went to the refrigerator and brought out a bottle of white wine.

    "Thought I was forgetting something." He brought it and glasses to the table and poured for them both.

    "That's better. So Lonnie started to work for different people around here. Over at Doc's " He peered at her again, and she nodded. She remembered Doc and his crippled wife.

    "Over there most days, over here once a week, here and there. But what she's really planning is murder."

    Barbara sputtered on her wine.

    "Come on! What do you mean?"

    "Well, way she figures it, no matter how much she works from now on, the day's coming when she won't be able to anymore, and she'll be a pauper, out in the street more than likely. A little bit of Social Security, if she holds out for enough work quarters. Some of us managed to save her house for her, not much of a house, sixty years old, sort of decrepit, but still it was home. But she won't even be able to manage the taxes, way she figures. So, if she kills someone, the right someone, she'll get sent up and live out her life comfortably."

    "Loony bins aren't all that comfortable," Barbara said gravely.

    "Nope. Told her that. But she doesn't intend to be taken as a loony. A political statement. Get rid of someone who deserves to be off the face of the map anyway, do the world a favor, get the maximum sentence and relax. She wouldn't even think of parole, would do whatever it might take to avoid it. Start a riot or something, I guess."

    Barbara laughed then.

    "You're her attorney, advising her, I suppose."

    "I am not colluding with her, not in a conspiracy of any sort, not advising her in methods of murder. Certainly not an accessory before the fact. Even tried to talk her out of it, but she's got her head set. Every once in a while she'll ask me what I think of so and so. A senator, or justice maybe, head of state. Once it was a talk show host.

    Now, let's see, hot black bean sauce, garlic...."

    She sipped her wine, watching him prepare their dinner.

    She wondered, as she had so often, how aware he was of his own machinations. At one time, as a teenager, she had been certain everything he did, everything he said, was planned, calculated for effect, but she had discarded that assessment eventually. For a longer time she had under stood that he worked on an intuitive level that even he was unaware of, but she had come to question that, too. He was aware, but not that calculating. His intuition seldom led him astray; he had come to trust it to the point where he could now charm her, be the amusing father she loved, lull her into passivity, and then he would press a new at tack more vigorously than before. She recognized his maneuver the way he had switched from his murder client to this other woman, letting the other matter hang unattended until he was ready to return to it, and not a second before he was ready. She sipped the wine, waiting, amused now, but waiting.

    "This Lonnie Rowan, does she have a game plan?

    Money to travel to wherever her victim might be? A way to get through whatever security there might be?"

    He nodded.

    "Better than that. She knows if she sits tight, he'll come to her. But she's getting frustrated. Seems every time she chooses someone, he gets the axe before she can gather her forces and actually do anything. She had a televangelist picked out, and he got the can, in prison now. And a governor kicked the bucket as soon as she began to research him. Somebody else got cancer. It's been frustrating for her, I tell you. She's starting to think she's putting the jinx on them just by thinking of them, and she knows they won't send her up for thinking people to death, Plain frustrating." He had made a sauce that he was smearing all over two large trout.

    "You want some peanuts, chips, cheese? Anything?"

    "I'm fine. Speaking of research, what are you up to with the open books in every room? And the computer. My God, you've entered the twentieth century!"

    "Ah," he said in satisfaction.

    "My life's work. Finally.

    Been waiting twenty years, collecting material all that time, and now I'm at it. A collection of great cross-examinations in two volumes. Historical stuff in one, modern in a second.

    Problem is too much material. But great stuff.

    Great!" He wiped his hands.

    "Wait a minute. I'll show you some printouts."

    He hurried from the kitchen and returned swiftly with pages of fan fold paper not trimmed yet, not torn apart.

    "This one's a beauty. Geiger, Stan Geiger, back in Ohio, before your time. In the fifties and sixties. Very fine. Just read that."

    "Wouldn't it help if I knew something about who did what to whom?"

    "No. No. Just read it. You'll catch on quick enough."

    He was chuckling as he returned to his fish.

    She read the page he had indicated:

    Q. Weren't you afraid, knowing a burglar was in the room, knowing there was a chance that he was armed?

    A. Yes, of course.

    Q. So you hid in the closet. Wise course. You didn't have a gun, did you? No weapon of any sort?

    A. No, nothing. If I had, then I would have faced him.

    Q. I see. Please, just tell us once more exactly what happened.

    A. As I said already--several times, in fact--I fell asleep in the armchair, and it grew dark. I woke up when I heard the window opening, and I slipped into the closet because I knew I couldn't get to the door without being seen.

    Q. Thank you. Very concise.

    In her father's scrawling writing was a note to reproduce the layout of the room.

    Q. And there was a light at that end of the room, although the side you were in was in deep shadows, is that right?

    A. As I have said several times, I was in virtual darkness at that end of the room. There was a dim light on the chest of drawers on the other side. In order to leave, I would have had to pass it. I could see him plainly in that light.

    Q. Yes. I can see that it is a straight line from the closet to the safe. A good view of anyone opening the safe.

    Yes. But I wonder why he didn't notice the light in the closet. Did he seem aware of the closet light, react to it in any way?

    A. There wasn't any closet light. He never got a glimpse of me.

    Q. Then you must have had the door closed all the way. Is that how it was?

    A. No. As I have said, I left the door open an inch or so. I wanted to get a look at him if I could.