An Imperfect Spy (16 page)

As they pulled up at the entrance and Bobby stopped the car to speak to the gatekeeper, she put out a hand and touched Kate. “Thank you,” she said.

“Don’t thank me,” Kate said. “If you lay a hand on him, I’ll kill you, of course; I’m a very jealous woman.”

“You are a bit, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Kate said. “But I try to deny it with every fiber of my being. What a horribly depressing place this is.”

It seemed no less depressing as Kate sat facing Betty Osborne across a table in an otherwise bare and crumbling room.

“I don’t suppose you have a cigarette,” Betty said.

“I do, as a matter of fact.” Kate handed over a
pack of cigarettes. Reed had told her long ago that lawyers, even those who never smoked, always took cigarettes with them when interviewing prisoners in holding cells. They always wanted cigarettes, and had run out. She had remembered this, and lifted cigarettes from Harriet before setting out. Harriet had asked who they were for. Kate told her. “The best of all good luck,” Harriet had said.

“Keep the pack,” Kate now said to Betty Osborne.

“Only for now,” Betty said. “I’m trying to give it up, I almost have, but I need to smoke under extreme stress; like this.”

“You asked to see me. That needn’t be stressful. Some people have even been known to talk to me without any stress whatever.”

“I took one of your courses. A lecture, ten years ago maybe. I was getting my M.A. You talked about Hardy’s women in a remarkable way. I remember that. Later you wrote a book on him, and I bought it and read it. I was taken with Hardy; you can see why.” She laughed sharply. “I’ve become a Hardy-esque heroine. Tess, that’s me; we kill the men who do us wrong. Only they hung Tess, didn’t they? I sometimes wish they could hang me.”

“If you have turned into a self-pitying mess, there isn’t much I can do for you, is there? It was not something Hardy’s women allowed themselves.”

Betty laughed again. It was a hollow laugh; Kate realized for the first time the condition that had inspired that cliché. Hollow, because there was no joy in it.

“Well,” Betty said, “that’s the script, I guess. You give me backbone, and persuade me to reopen my case. The thing is, I have a certain distrust of lawyers—hell, I detest them, them and doctors both—but I thought with you as a sort of intermediary, we might, well, at least talk about it. Not very invigorating, am I?”

“Didn’t you plan to go on for your doctorate?”

“Sure, I planned to. I planned lots of things. And then I met this man—isn’t that a cliché?—and we married, and I got pregnant, and then he started drinking, or started again, as I afterward learned, and beat up on me. Often, even when I was pregnant. And then in front of the kids. It’s an old story by now, isn’t it? Old and boring and hopeless.”

“Where are the kids now?” Kate asked.

“With his parents. They got custody. They’re not bad, it’s probably the best arrangement. Of course, since I killed their son, I’m not exactly their favorite person. Probably you could guess that.”

“Haven’t you any family who could have helped out?”

“No. No one. This is home now. It’s not as bad as it is for the women who have their babies in jail.”

Kate found herself lost for words, an unfamiliar condition, but one that had occurred lately more than she might have expected. Perhaps we are likelier these days to face situations for which there are no words, she thought.

“Whatever the situation,” she finally said, “I do think it would make sense to attack your conviction. I understand that you have a chance, under the now
more general acceptance of the battered woman syndrome. Why not ask for Reed Amhearst as your lawyer, and give it a try?”

“Is that what you would do?”

“For god’s sake,” Kate exploded, “I haven’t the least idea what I would do. I don’t want to sound unsympathetic, and do please know that I’m not unsympathetic, but I have difficulty imagining staying with a man who battered me, even once. Which, of course, is a meaningless thing to say. I do understand how battered women become afraid, and victimized, and without any place or person to turn to. But since I’m not you, I don’t know what I would do. Which is to say, if I were in your situation, I would certainly do everything I could to get my life back.”

“I can’t get my kids back.”

“Even that isn’t certain. If you are freed, the court would have to reconsider custody or at least visiting rights. Do you think you’re free of him now—not literally free, of course you’re that—but free inside yourself of dependence on such a man? I mean, Betty, if you were a character in a Hardy novel, you would have to ask yourself that, and answer yourself.”

“And if I were a character in a Hardy novel, I would try to get my conviction thrown out?”

“I think so.”

“It’s more complicated than that.”

“Tell me why.”

Betty lit another cigarette and sat back, blowing the smoke ceilingward. “Have you read my case?”

“No,” Kate said. “I haven’t. I’m sorry. I was just told, a short time ago, that you wanted to see me, and that I had to come right away or permission for me to see you might be postponed. So here I am, sympathetic but uninformed.”

“My husband taught at that law school, the same one that now has that clinic. Pretty funny, don’t you think?”

“Very,” Kate said. “Tell me about him.”

“That’s it, you see. I got a job there, at the law school, as his secretary. His secretary had to be smart, and flexible, and intelligent enough to know what was going on in his life. He was connected to a law firm as well as teaching, and needed someone to keep track of things. What he needed, of course, was a wife, as both of us figured out before long. He didn’t bother mentioning, however, that he’d had a drinking problem. He’d been to AA, but he reverted under the strain of the new relationship. I think that’s how they put it.”

“Who put it?”

“His wonderful colleagues at Schuyler Law. Have you met any of them?”

“Yes,” Kate said, “not a madly attractive bunch.”

“I call them a scary bunch. I mean, nice as pie when you first meet them, but covering each other’s asses, and their own, was the first order of business. And the last, of course. They testified that I drove him crazy, cheated on him—I didn’t, but they manufactured evidence—and generally made the court believe that I not only got beaten by Fred out of a kind of sad desperation on his part, but that I was
lying about him, and so on. I wouldn’t let them put the kids on the stand, which I guess was noble but dumb. It was those law-professor colleagues of Fred’s who did for me. That, and what the appeals court kept calling imminence, which means he wasn’t beating me to death at the time I shot him. Of course not. I waited until the bastard passed out, and then I did it.”

“Where did you get the gun?”

“From this guy I knew—well, I’d known him before. He was a graduate student, in political science. We met when we were students; he was a friend. I ran away once, and he was the only one I could think to go to. I knew where he had lived, and he was still there. He got me the gun. He said, ‘Next time he goes for you, shoot him.’ I never asked where he got the gun. They’re not hard to get, are they?”

“No,” Kate said, “they’re not. And that was the guy you were supposed to be being unfaithful to Fred with?”

“They hired private detectives, those colleagues of his. They followed me. I used to go to see my friend with the kids—I hated to leave them alone or worse, with their father. They made that into something seamy. He was a friend, that’s all. I should have had a woman friend, I guess. I had had them, but they all married and moved away. I was only at the graduate school for a year.”

“Where did you grow up, come from?”

“Massachusetts. I left there a long time ago.”

“What I’d like,” Kate said, lighting one of the cigarettes
and cursing herself, “is to persuade you to go ahead with a habeas corpus, a term I’ve only just got my mind around. Talk to Reed and his students, however it works, maybe only one of his students, maybe only Reed, I don’t honestly know, but do it, go with it, take a chance.”

“I don’t need custody of the kids,” Betty said, as though she were only catching up with the conversation on some sort of replay. “They’re in school; they’ll both probably be in college by the time I get out of here, if I ever do. It would be up to them if they wanted to see me. I keep remembering them as younger. As they were. I’d just have my own life to go on with. Suppose I wanted to go back for a Ph.D. Would you help me?”

“Yes,” Kate said. “That’s the first question you’ve asked me that I can answer with any assurance of knowing what I’m talking about. And, I think if you express a desire for the clinic’s help, you can have it. Notice I said ‘I think.’ But there’s a good chance. Think about it.”

“I will. I’ll think about it. Could you send me another copy of your book on Hardy?”

“Of course,” Kate said. “But what about Hardy himself? Shall I send you some of his novels?”

“No. I can’t bear reading novels, not good novels. I like reading literary criticism, but of course there isn’t any around here.”

“I’ll send you a selection. That’s too bad, about not reading novels, I mean.”

“They’re too powerful. They make me feel too hopeless. And I don’t like the escape ones, which a
few of the women here read. But literary criticism is, well, like a veil I watch literature through. I don’t want to read about anyone killing anyone, or even hating anyone. Or loving anyone. Peculiar, I guess.”

“Not really. Do you watch television? Do they let you?”

“We can, at certain hours. But I don’t like that either. I try to keep my brain from going soft.”

“And there is no one to send you any books?”

“My friend sends them, once in a while. But I haven’t known what to ask him for. You’ve reminded me.”

“I’ll see that you get the books,” Kate said, “and I’ll be in touch. Or, if they don’t allow me to come back, I’ll send you messages through the clinic or write you letters by regular mail. I think that’s allowed. And you write to me if you feel like it.”

“Maybe I will. Thanks for coming. I think I asked for you because I thought you wouldn’t come, but I’m glad you did. I think I’m glad. I’ll let you know. You’ll hear.”

Driving back, they didn’t talk much. Bobby kept her eyes on the road and the even heavier traffic. “I think she’ll ask the clinic to take up her case,” Kate said, when they were almost home. “I hope so. Perhaps you can see her soon, if you put her name on the list and get the coordinator’s permission, and all the rest of it.”

“We’ll try,” Bobby said.

They drove a bit longer in a silence punctuated
only by the action of gears and brakes. Kate leaned back against the headrest and, as was her habit, let the day roll through her mind, like a film she could stop when something puzzled her.

“How did she know to ask for me?” Kate said suddenly, just as Bobby undertook a particularly tricky maneuver into another lane. “How did she know you knew me?”

“She heard Reed’s name,” Bobby finally said, when they had achieved the other lane, which immediately ground to a halt. “From some other prisoner, probably, or maybe she caught sight of him in the prison and asked who he was. As soon as she heard his name, yours, of course, followed like night the day.”

“Why should it have?”

“Because as a student, I suppose, she was interested enough in you to find out all she could about you. Students often are that interested, you know. Finding out you were married and to whom hardly required rare detective talents.”

“Reed seems to have been the key to today’s conversations between us,” Kate said. “I mean you and me. I hope all goes well with you, I really do.”

“But sometimes,” Kate muttered under her breath when they finally reached their destination, “I wish we’d never heard of the Schuyler Law School.”

Nine

B
EFORE
the following week’s class, Reed had been able to report to Kate that Betty Osborne was considering reopening her case. Blair and Kate approached the room with a sense of being ready for anything, except, as Blair pointed out, being locked in.