Cold Case (30 page)

T
he days galloped or stalled, sometimes the same day did both. From nine until three gone in a flash, and then the clock became stuck and the hands were mired as minutes were like hours.

Barbara gazed at her blank screen, tentatively keyed in the word
The.
Nothing followed. She deleted the word and started over. Her opening statement was a blank screen, continued to be a blank screen. She tried a different first word—
This.
She stared at the word. Nothing. She hit Delete. She got up and paced. She was getting nowhere.

All right,
she told herself,
I'm blocked. Why?
The answer was not long in coming. She no longer believed in her case, what pitiful defense she had to mount. It was meaningless.

At three-thirty Maria buzzed her to say David was on the phone. She was not surprised when he got straight to the point without any small talk.

“I want to talk to you,” he said. “Is this a good time?”

“Sure. Do you want me to come out to the house, or meet somewhere?”

“Alex loaned me his car. I'm on my way over. Ten minutes.” He disconnected.

He had decided it was time to fire her, she thought distantly. She wouldn't blame him. She never had been fired before, another first. She realized that she was keeping his curt announcement at a distance, the way she was keeping everything else as far removed as she possibly could. She was adding another layer to the protective shell that she was pulling tighter and tighter about herself. In the end it might suffocate her.

David was prompt. He had on a Windbreaker, hiking boots, jeans. During the past months, he had become tanned, and he looked fit, healthy now. When he took off his Windbreaker, he pulled a red ball from the pocket.

“Congratulations,” Barbara said. “Another rung up the ladder for you.” She didn't bother to ask how long he had been borrowing a car, leaving his sanctuary. He would stay or not out there.

“Thanks. Here?” He motioned toward the easy chairs by the inlaid table.

“Sure. Comfort of home, all that.”

He nodded and sat down. “The first time I came in here, what I saw was a lot of money tied up in a fancy office, and I thought another attorney making it big off the misery of others. Wrong. Alex told me your dad and Shelley ponied up for all the trimmings. Proud of their kids, something like that. Rightfully so. After I looked you up, tried to estimate how much pro bono time you and Shelley put in, I wondered if you made a cent as an attorney. But it was working both ways back there in the beginning. My hunch was that you were okay, the backdrop suggested otherwise. I'm very glad I listened to the hunch. Sometimes it pays to put reason aside.”

Taken aback, more surprised by his words than she wanted to acknowledge, Barbara could only nod. Her first hunch about him had been to tell him to get lost. To give herself something to do instead of speaking, she poured coffee for them both, passed a cup across the table to him and picked up her own to take a sip. He ignored his.

“What's the opposite of a den of thieves?” he asked in a musing sort of way.

“Cloisters?”

He smiled. “I don't think so. But whatever it is, I've found myself in the middle of it. You're surrounded by some good people, Barbara, and Amy and her mother are also good people. It seems a strange place to find myself, so completely surrounded by good people. Nothing I've known before quite prepared me for it. At times it's been a bit bewildering, in fact, and I haven't known how to react. I've been rude and sarcastic, testing, always testing others, watchful for a sign of perfidy or hypocrisy. It doesn't take long generally to come across one or the other, or most often both.” He laughed. “I can't think I've quite come around yet to humility, but in time even that could come to me, possibly.”

“David, where are you leading with this?”

“To the edge of the cliff maybe,” he said lightly. “I had lunch with Amy today. Does she understand what they're going to do to her on the witness stand?”

Barbara nodded. “I think she's prepared.”

“She can't be. You know how rapists and serial killers in prison sometimes get letters from adoring women? Some kind of perversion, I imagine, but she'll be painted as one of them, ridiculed, mocked, scorned, vilified. And her mother? What will it do to her to denigrate her son in favor of a killer? Her son's killer. How is she going to live with that?”

“They both believe you're innocent. As I do, and Dad does,” Barbara stated.

“I know and, in case I forget to say this, I'm very grateful. But that's not the question. What will testifying to what she witnessed that night do to Lucy McCrutchen?”

There was no way to answer that, and Barbara remained silent.

“Exactly. A part of her will die on that stand. Death is final, absolute. That part will be irrecoverable. Olga Maas will live in fear that she will be exposed as a lesbian, lose her daughter. And it could happen. People, good people, are going to be hurt, Barbara, desperately hurt, if this debacle goes to trial.”

“You know what will happen if you run,” she said in a low voice. “A fugitive, admitting your guilt by fleeing, you would be captured and taken directly to prison, or else shot down resisting arrest.”

“Or something,” he said. He lifted his coffee cup for the first time, took a sip and put it down. He leaned forward and watched her intently as he said, “Barbara, I've come to have a great deal of respect for you and your father because you play it straight with me. Play it straight now. If our positions were reversed, what would you do?”

She rose, walked to her desk and ran her fingers across it, then went on to the window and moved the blind aside, looked out, seeing nothing. He was waiting, watching her. She returned to her chair and sat down again.

“I don't know,” she said.

David nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “I'll be on my way. Thanks for seeing me on such short notice. You might tell Darren I'm working on the red ball these days. He'll be pleased, I think.”

She remained seated as he put on his jacket and went to the door, where he turned to look at her again. “I won't be deciding immediately. I want to finish a draft for the book Alex and I are working on. I owe him big. I'll be seeing you.” He let himself out.

She should have offered him words of encouragement. Told him all she had to do was raise a reasonable doubt. She didn't have to prove anything. A reasonable doubt was not an impossible bar.

She thought of something they had chanted back in high school—shoulda, woulda, coulda, didn't, won't. Rebellious bravado. Meaningless. She repeated it under her breath and this time added a word—can't. With that she stood and went back to her desk where she stared at her blank screen.

Maria tapped at her door, entered the office and asked if Barbara wanted her to do anything. She said no. Told her to go home. Shelley looked in and said she'd be leaving and Barbara waved goodbye and absently gazed at her blank screen.

David's words came to mind—
Sometimes it pays to put reason aside.
He had too many faces. She never knew which one she would see next. He was like some curious dice Todd and his friends used for a game, ten sided, twelve sided? Too many possible faces, and unpredictable as to which face would be revealed next. That was David. Her first encounter with him had made her not want to see him again. He had been arrogant, impatient, angry, sarcastic to the extreme. Lucy said he was too decent to have talked about the scene on the deck. Amy knew him as an understanding adult at the time she was suffering through adolescence. Frank wanted him to reveal the man who had held Olga and wept with her over the loss of a friend. And now he was concerned that good people were going to be desperately hurt. She remembered the line in his book that Frank had called the most important one.
Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
That was David, too.

It hadn't been just a hunch that first day, she thought then. That had been a very conscious thought. She had not wanted to deal with a man who made such harsh judgments about people. He had been right, though. Robert McCrutchen had been a two-bit, small-town politician who had meant nothing to David.

But she had put a hunch aside later, she realized, and she had followed reason instead. Her first intuition, her hunch, had been that both murders and the attack on David had been committed by the same person. Reason had prevailed, and left her staring at a blank screen.

Start over, she told herself, and remembered that she had done that before, but each time the new start had been based on a false premise. Start over, this time with the assumption that there was only one killer, she thought clearly. It was time to put reason aside.

Later she was startled to hear a tap on her door. It opened and Frank walked in. She looked at him blankly, then shook herself. “What's wrong? What are you doing here?”

“I brought you something to eat,” he said brusquely. “Darren said he had orders never to bring any food here, but, by God, I don't have such orders. Do you have any idea what time it is? Have you had a bite all day?”

She looked at her watch. Twenty minutes before ten! Instantly she felt light-headed from hunger or fatigue, possibly both. She shook her head. “I don't know. I don't remember. Dad, there's something we have to talk about.”

“After you eat,” he said. He was carrying a basket. Her round table was covered with papers, as was her desk. There were papers on her sofa. “Out here,” he said, backing out, holding the door open with his foot. Maria's desk was spotless. He put the basket down on the desk and pulled a second chair close to it.

“Darren called you?” she asked, taking the other chair, behind Maria's desk.

“No. I called. Conyers brought over a five-pound chunk of halibut this evening, caught this morning. I called to invite you all over to help eat it tomorrow. Darren said you were still working.” He pointed to the basket and took off a cover. “Leftovers. They'll do.”

The smell of chicken and spaghetti with pesto made her mouth water instantly and she picked up a piece of chicken before she had a plate in place.

Frank sat and watched her for a moment, shook his head and got up again to make coffee.

Besides the chicken and pasta, he had included salad with snap beans vinaigrette. His leftovers were better than any restaurant food she could remember. She ate greedily.

“Why do you do that to Darren?” he asked after a moment. “He'd like nothing better than to pamper you just a little bit. If you'd get off your high horse and let him.”

“I'd feel too guilty. This is wonderful.”

He realized that she had given him an honest answer and did not press the point.

Neither spoke again until she sighed deeply and leaned back in her chair. “I was pretty hungry,” she said.

“I noticed.” He poured coffee and sat down again. “What have you been up to?”

“I'll tell you a story,” she said, “and then show you some things. First the narrative. And understand this is bare bones, few if any details. To be filled in later, if we're lucky.” At his nod, she started.

“Jill was desperate to make her grades and get enough money together with Olga to avoid eviction. She talked to instructors and got an extension for class work and tests, and she got money from Robert in return for a tumble in bed. She wasn't interested in history, just needed the credits to graduate, and she put off the history until she finished the other class work, but then she found she couldn't complete Elders's assignments. He had loaded her with a dozen books to read, a long report to write, and she had to defend a character from history to his satisfaction. Impossible tasks for the shape she was in and too little time. She went to his office to plead her case, but he was a strict master, one who set rules and followed them. Probably she was crying, possibly he ended up holding her, and no doubt they wound up on his couch. She got a high B from his class, in spite of missing half the seminars. She was young, beautiful, vulnerable, and he was fifty-one years old with a very ill wife who smelled bad and kept the house like a tomb. He was equally vulnerable, no doubt.”

Frank was shaking his head, but she ignored that and continued. “So that night, the dancing stopped. No pun intended. Elders told Lucy good-night and left. Aaronson and his date and the other woman had left earlier and Lucy went out to the deck to get some fresh air. Amy had already gone out to the grass under the tree. And Elders, at home, not wanting to go inside that medicinal-smelling crypt, sat on his own patio and fantasized about the beautiful Jill, vivacious and manic that night, and all his. Then he overheard the incident on the deck with Robert and David, and Elders knew that he had been taken as much as Robert. Whether he took the gloves or they were in his car doesn't really matter—he had them. Either he beat Jill to her apartment and waited, or he followed her. If he tried to talk to her, no doubt, she would have been as harsh with him as she had been with Robert, and he killed her.”

When Frank looked as if he wanted to interrupt, she held up her hand. “Wait. No one else knew about the key, and that's what Robert was interested in finally. Who tipped off the police about the key? Only another observer of that scene on the deck could have known. That's what he learned from the old police file. He wrote
Key
on the sheet of paper and filled in where he knew people had been, and he left room for the patio in Elders's yard. He had not yet filled in the lines and walls, or the patio with Elders on it when he was interrupted. It's eight feet from the end of the deck to the hedge, another two or three feet, and the patio begins, with a table and chairs right there. He'd have been about as close as Amy was, and closer than Lucy. He could have heard it all.”