Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller (24 page)

“And more slowly than normal in a dry and generally cold climate?”

“Yes. Also true.”

“How would you describe the climate in Carbondale, where you live?”

“Dry and pleasant in summer—dry cold in winter.”

“And what’s Springhill’s climate compared to Carbondale’s?”

“It’s colder up there.”

“And dryer?”

“I guess so.”

“What’s Carbondale’s altitude?”

“About five and a half thousand feet.”

“What’s Springhill’s?”

“Nine thousand?”

“It happens to be nine thousand two hundred, but we won’t quibble. No further questions,” Dennis said.

Late that afternoon Dennis and Sophie left the court together and drove downvalley toward Carbondale. “What do you think?” he asked.

“It’s not like
Perry Mason,”
she said, managing a smile. “It’s not even like
L.A. Law.”

“No. It’s tedious. It’s detailed. It’s rarely melodramatic. It’s every trial lawyer’s dream to cross-examine a witness who suddenly turns pale and says, ‘I can’t stand it anymore. I confess,
I
did it!’—then pitches forward from the witness chair, dead of a heart attack. But it’s never happened to me. How are you bearing up?”

“I just want it to be over,” Sophie said wearily. “For my mother’s sake.”

“For everybody’s sake,” Dennis said, reaching out to touch her cheek.

At the City Market in Carbondale, while Sophie shopped for groceries, Dennis bought Colorado Rockies’ baseball caps and a softball for the children. The long major-league baseball strike had just ended—time to celebrate, he decided, even in the midst of uncertainty. And he wanted to do something with the children. He saw little of them these days. He had tried to explain that to them, and they said they understood. But at some level he knew they felt set aside.

The day was sunny, the aspen trees were budding, and suddenly it seemed as if the winter snowpack was finally beginning to melt.

“Let’s go down to the creek,” Dennis said to Brian and Lucy, after giving them the softball and caps. “Let’s have a catch, like we used to do in Westport.” He turned to Sophie, who was unpacking plastic bags of food. “Come with us.”

She started to protest, but he took her hand.

“No,” he said, “that can wait. Come.”

“All right,” she said, and suddenly smiled.

They all walked down to the creek together in the early evening light, with Sleepy trailing along behind. She was a pale gray color with tigerish orange stripes. Her fur felt as soft as mink.

Near the creek they played a game of catch. “Now let’s play running bases,” Dennis said. He explained the game to Sophie and she surprised him by saying, “Okay, sounds like fun. I’ll be the runner.” They used their jackets for bases and Sophie ran back and forth between him and Brian, who tried to tag her with the ball. Lucy watched and cheered: “Run, Sophie!” Dennis deliberately dropped the ball that Brian had thrown to him.

“Run!” Lucy cried. “She’s safe! You’re safe, Sophie!”

Through patches of snow the softball bounced a little too close to Sleepy for her comfort, and she quickly clawed her way up a spruce tree to a lower branch, where she stretched out in the slanting shadows, nearly invisible. A few small birds that had been twittering in the trees flew away.

It grew chilly. The April nights came quickly. “Okay, kids, I’m beat,” Dennis said. “I think Brian’s the winner. Let’s go back to the house.”

He heard a soft ruffling sound, looked up into the violet evening air, and saw an unfamiliar bird descending rapidly toward them from the sky above the forest. It seemed to have the tufted head of an owl and the broad wingspan of a hawk. Its flight was as soundless as the evening breeze. Brian drew closer to his father’s protective grasp, and Lucy grasped Sophie’s hand.

“Daddy, what’s that?” Brian asked.

“A damned big bird, I can tell you. Where’s Sleepy?”

“In the tree,” Lucy said.

Brian turned quickly. “No, she’s following us.”

Sophie thrust Lucy to the ground, crouching over her in a fierce protective gesture.

The descending bird—a Rocky Mountain great horned owl,
Bubo virginianus
—rushed past their heads; they could feel the cold frenzy of the disturbed air.

Sleepy raced across the grass toward the safety of an aspen tree. She had clawed halfway up the trunk when the stooping owl dipped a few degrees in its trajectory. With hardly an effort, it plucked Sleepy off the gray bark with its outstretched thick talons. Its grip was sure. The cat screamed.

Dennis stared, disbelieving, as the owl flapped into the sky, clutching the wailing cat. Lucy screamed too, and Sophie covered her eyes with one hand. But she and Dennis and Brian still gazed up in amazement at the evening sky, where the owl’s wings beat silently in the direction of the mountains and rose toward the first stars. The doomed cat wailed steadily, and then weakly, and then faintly, and then not at all; and then the bird and her prey were gone. Nothing remained to show what had happened. Not a feather, not a patch of fur. Dennis’s heart pounded violently.

In the living room, Lucy shuddered in Sophie’s arms for an hour.

Then she turned to Dennis and said, “Daddy, Donahue won’t come back either. I know that now. The bad owl ate him.”

Neither Dennis nor Sophie could reply.

Brian watched television. He would not talk. Lucy went early to bed, still weeping. Both Dennis and Sophie sat on her bed in the darkness for nearly an hour, until she was quiet and finally slept.

Early the next morning, while Sophie was upstairs on the telephone to her mother, Lucy came to Dennis, who was alone at the breakfast table.

“I don’t like it here anymore,” Lucy said. “I’m scared, Daddy. So is Brian. He thinks a bear’s going to come one night and get him and eat him, just like the owl got Sleepy and ate her. We want to go home.”

“Home?” Dennis reached out to enfold his daughter in his arms. He stroked her hair. “This is home, darling.”

“No, Daddy.” Lucy whispered into his neck. “Home is where we were before. In Connecticut. Where nothing could hurt you.”

My God, Dennis thought, this is a savage place. This is the edge of the wilderness. Why have I not seen that before? What else can happen here?

Chapter 21
The Doctrine of Optional Completeness

THE abduction of the cat scraped like a ragged and rusted blade at the edges of Dennis’s mind. He begged Sophie to stay home and be there when the children came back from school. “I’ll explain to your mother. She’ll understand.”

“Yes, of course,” Sophie said. “Of course I will. But I promised Harry I’d give him a lift to court in Aspen.”

“I’ll take him,” Dennis said.

He pulled up to the painter’s house a little before seven o’clock the next morning. Harry was standing on the porch in a navy pea jacket, stamping his feet to keep warm.

“Hop in, Harry.”

The sun rose over the tall eastern rim of the mountain range, at first a blood orange arc against pale blue, then a lightening half disk, and half an hour later a blinding sphere heaving clear from the mountains entirely and spreading long shadows over the snow. The Crystal River glittered like a field of diamonds. The sky lacked a single cloud.

Dennis told Harry what had happened to the cat, and how the children had reacted.

“You got to tell them the facts of life,” Harry said. “Horned owls and black bears are part of the scheme of things. The kid wants to go back to Connecticut? Back there you got rapists and cops.”

Dennis was silent.

Suddenly Harry said, “Didn’t you once tell me you knew some art dealers in New York City?”

“Yes. I do.”

“And a while ago you told me I ought to get my work out there into the world. Get it seen before I died.”

“I remember.”

“I’ve been thinking about that. Especially lately. You’re a friend. You want to help me?”

“Sure. How, Harry?”

“I thought I might go East. See people. Show them pictures or slides—even ship a crate fall of my stuff and haul it round to the galleries. Try to get someone interested.”

“In the land of rapists and cops?”

“I’m old. I’ll take my chances.”

“You should go,” Dennis said firmly. “As soon as this trial’s over, I’ll talk to a couple of friends.”

“It’s not so simple. People won’t like me leaving.”

“I don’t understand.” Dennis frowned. “What people? Why will they care?”

Harry lapsed into silence again, and his chin sank down. “You don’t need to know all this now,” he said. “We’ll talk about it later. I shouldn’t be pestering you—you’ve got plenty on your plate already. Like you said, when the trial’s over.”

“What do you mean, I don’t
need
to know? Need to know what?”

“I’m hung over,” Harry said. “I babble. Tell me about the trial.”

“Hard to predict,” Dennis admitted. “Juries are human beings. You never know what they’re really thinking, or what they’ll do.”

Harry nodded sympathetically.

“You’ve been watching it,” Dennis said. “Imagine you were on the jury and you don’t know the Hendersons at all. Would you get the feeling that they did it, or that they’re not guilty?”

“Oh, you can’t ask me that,” Harry said.

“Why not?”

“I’m from Springhill.”

A little chill touched the base of Dennis’s spine and spread upward. “What do you know,” he asked carefully, “that I don’t know? And that I should know?”

“Nothing.”

“Yes, you do. You’re not hung over. Damn it, tell me.”

Harry stared out the window. The snow-dappled valley—houses, horse farms, trailer parks, the swollen river—rushed by the car windows. From the west they were approaching the midvalley town of Basalt. Rain clouds had begun to darken the mountaintops.

“It would look to me like they were guilty,” Harry said, slowly. “Based on the evidence?”

“It just seems likely.”

“You’re not answering me.” Dennis suddenly realized that Harry was trying to tell him something. “You’re bullshitting me.” His tone sharpened. “You know something.”

“Only what I hear in the courtroom.”

“Why do you think they’re guilty?”

Harry said nothing.

“You’re lying,” Dennis said angrily. “You call me a friend and you ask for my help, and then—goddamit!—you lie to me. Like everyone else around here does! What the hell is going on?”

“You better stop the car and let me out,” Harry said.

“Tell me!”

“Talk to your wife.”

“My wife? Harry—”

“Pull over. Let me out of here.”

Harry was already fumbling with the car door. Dennis braked firmly and swerved the Jeep to the side of the road, near a gas station and a traffic light. “See you in court,” Harry mumbled—and before Dennis could stop him, he leaped from the car and was gone.

“Are you all right?” Dennis asked Bibsy.

“I wish it would be over,” she murmured, “no matter how it turns out.”

“You’re doing fine.” He kissed her lightly on the cheek. No matter what she had done or not done, he felt nothing evil or destructive in this woman, or in his father-in-law. He wondered if he would ever understand what had happened and why.

Dennis settled into his chair at the defense table. His eyes swept the banks of spectators. The Springhill people were there: the Frazee and Hapgood clans, Grace Pendergast, the younger Lovells, Edward Brophy and others. Oliver Cone sat next to his uncle. Dennis wondered if the marble quarry had been closed for this occasion.

Harry Parrot had not yet arrived. Dennis was still trying to make sense out of what had happened in the car.

The clerk called the courtroom to order.

Ray Bond called as a witness the Pitkin County deputy who had taken the fingerprints of the Hendersons. He then called a different deputy sheriff, who had received the Remington rifle and pillbox from Queenie at the crime scene near Pearl Pass, bagged them, sealed them and labeled them, and brought them by snowmobile down to Aspen. To complete the untainted chain, Bond called the evidence custodian, and then the CBI agent from Denver—he had a mustache and looked like an old-time fireman—who had analyzed and matched all the prints.

“Once again, sir, is there any doubt that the prints on these two items belong to the two defendants?”

“No doubt at all,” the agent said.

To complete the case for the People, Ray Bond recalled Queenie O’Hare to the stand.

Again she was in uniform. Dennis saw some jurors smile at her. They felt they knew her already from the first day of her testimony. Her face was open and friendly, her expression one of unassuming and modest competence.

The prosecutor took Queenie back to her first meeting with the Hendersons in Springhill.

“And did the defendant, in her own home, say anything to you about a pillbox?”

“Yes, she said she’d once owned a silver pillbox. She bought it in Paris many years ago—she wasn’t specific about the date. And she lost it. Lost the pillbox three years ago, she said, in Glenwood Springs.”

“Did you ever show her the silver pillbox recovered from the dog’s grave at Pearl Pass?”

“Yes, I did, here in Aspen.”

“Did she have any comment?”

“She said, ‘Oh, that’s mine. That’s the one I lost in Glenwood Springs.’ “

Ray Bond moved from there to Queenie’s account of the attempt to exhume the bodies of Susan and Henry Lovell, whom she believed at the time—and still believed, she said—were Jane and John Doe, and how the caskets were found to be empty. And in her judgment had always been empty.

“Did you make further inquiry in Springhill about this matter of the empty caskets?”

“I did indeed.”

“With what result?”

“I couldn’t find out a thing.”

“I don’t understand,” Bond said.

“I couldn’t get the local doctor or the local dentist to cooperate with me. The doctor, a Dr. Pendergast, said that as far as she knew—”

Dennis objected; it was hearsay. “Mr. Bond is asking for a statement made out of court. The doctor isn’t here to testify.”

“Sustained.”

Bond smiled. “All right, Deputy. Let me put it to you another way. After you spoke to Dr. Pendergast up there in Springhill, were you satisfied that she was telling you the truth about the cause of death of Mr. and Mrs. Lovell?”