Defense for the Devil (27 page)

“What’s up?” Frank growled when she cursed in an undertone.

“Don’t know. But Gramm’s in on it, and we’re due in chambers in ten minutes. I want you to go with me. If they’re trying to pull a fast one at this late date—”

“Don’t panic until you see the fire,” Frank said.

Today Judge Waldman did not serve coffee; she had not taken off her judicial robe, and was seated at her desk with the visitors’ chairs arranged in a semicircle across from it. Gramm and Roxbury nodded at Frank and Barbara, and that ended the civilities. If Roxbury could have been described as an accountant with fair accuracy, Gramm would have fitted anyone’s description of a wrestler, which he had been in his youth. He was fifty-five, sandy-haired and tanned, and large in every dimension, with thick shoulders and a deep chest, over six feet tall, well over two hundred pounds, and most of it muscle. He worked out, he liked to tell people; athletes got flabby if they didn’t continue to work out all their lives. He was not flabby.

“Mr. Gramm has filed a motion requesting a short continuance of the trial,” Judge Waldman said crisply. “Mr. Gramm, will you explain please.”

“Although this is highly irregular, which we admit,” Gramm said easily, “under the circumstances, we are compelled to ask for a delay. A witness has come forward today—this morning, in fact—with a statement of such gravity, it cannot be ignored. We are forced to investigate, and our investigation will cause a brief delay in the proceedings.”

“A surprise witness!” Barbara exclaimed in disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding! With no discovery? Please!”

Ignoring her, Gramm addressed the judge. “This witness called my office earlier today, and came in person three hours ago. She has made a formal statement in which she swears she saw Ray Arno throwing a large bundle into the McKenzie River at eight o’clock on the morning of August sixth. At this moment we have divers in the water, searching for the bundle.”

Barbara made a rude snorting sound. “Is your witness certifiably blind? A partner for Radiman?”

“Our witness,” he said smoothly, “is Marta Delancey, the wife of California senator Rolfe Delancey.”

For a moment no one moved, then Gramm reached into his briefcase and withdrew a folder, which he handed to Barbara. “Her statement,” he said, not quite smiling, but close enough for her to want to kick him. “I already handed a copy to Judge Waldman.” He turned back to the judge then. “Of course, we will call her even if we don’t find the bundle, but it would be a dereliction of our duty not to search for it.”

“How long a delay are you requesting?” Judge Waldman asked. She had been cool at the start of the meeting; now she was icy.

“Two days only,” he said. “Mrs. Delancey said the bundle appeared quite heavy. It could have been weighted with something, and it is quite possible that it has not moved very far.”

Frank and Barbara both began to make objections, and the judge heard them without interruption; then she said, “I will grant the continuance for two days only. Presumably, Mr. Roxbury, in the event that a bundle is found, you will then want to call a witness to identify the contents. I warn you to have any discovery in the hands of the defense by Friday morning when we resume. You will not be permitted to rest the state’s case until the defense has had an opportunity to examine all the evidence you uncover, and statements from all the witnesses you intend to call to testify.”

“Your honor,” Barbara said very quietly then, “this development means that the defense very likely won’t be able to conclude during the period we agreed upon earlier.”

“I’m afraid that’s correct,” Judge Waldman said with some bitterness. Evidently she was already considering what the news of a delay would mean to the jury panel.

“They can use this hiatus exactly as if we had rested,” Gramm said. “It shouldn’t make a bit of difference to them.”

Judge Waldman regarded him silently for a moment. “Don’t push too hard, Mr. Gramm,” she said. “I’ll inform the jury that we will be in recess until Friday morning.” She stood up. The meeting was over.

27

They had read
Marta Delancey’s statement in Barbara’s office. A glum silence had followed. “She was a local girl,” Frank said thoughtfully. “Can’t recall her maiden name, but she married Joel Chisolm, and after he died, she latched on to the senator. She’s on committees, boards of directors, things of that sort. Respected.”

The silence had settled again, until Barbara broke it the next time. “Shit!”

Now she was waiting for Ray to be delivered to the conference room at the jail. Her father was having a t
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te-
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-t
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te with Sylvia Fenton, and Bailey and Shelley had been dispatched to dig up what they could about Marta Delancey.

Ray was almost bouncy when he entered the small room and sat down. “Wow! You did a real job on that creep today.”

She shrugged. “He was easy. Ray, do you know Marta Delancey?”

He looked blank, then shook his head. “Why? Who’s she?”

“Of course, we knew Marta after she married Joel Chisolm,” Sylvia said to Frank.

They were in a small sitting room, Sylvia, Joe, and Frank, having a glass of wine and some very fine spiced shrimp and lobster tidbits. The room was overcrowded with furniture, as were all the rooms in the mansion, but it was an intimate setting, and the artwork had been held to a minimum here. Only one wall had paintings, Picassos, and the tables had space for the Waterford wineglasses, after some of the knickknacks had been rearranged. Lovely crystal fish and Dresden bowls of candies, a hand-beaten copper bowl of agate marbles…

Joe Fenton had a little bit of fuzzy white hair, hardly enough to cover his scalp, and fuzzy white eyebrows; his eyes were bright blue, and his cheeks as pink as any Santa’s. He was wearing a gorgeous Chinese brocade jacket and old worn house slippers. Sylvia had on a silk sari in a wild red print. On the table at her elbow was a silver bowl with a lot of rings in it; the gemstones flashed and glittered as if with an inner life.

“Joel Chisolm was an idiot,” Sylvia said complacently. “He got an MBA, and God alone knows how he managed to get through the courses—we always thought Marta did the work for him—and they went off to New York for him to make a million or two, but he was mugged and killed. What else do you want to know?”

“What about her, Marta? Tell me about her.”

“Marta Perkins, gold digger,” Sylvia said promptly. “Greta, Joel’s mother, wanted to kill her when she snatched little Joel. She told me all about it. I reminded her that people had talked about me that way, and she pooh-poohed that, said this was different. And maybe it was.” She looked at her husband, who was beaming at her.

“The Chisolms made a fortune in wood products,” Joe Fenton said then. “They had three kids, none of them able to tie their own shoes, so there was a lot of disappointment in that house. But they had hopes, always had hopes, you see. Marta’s father was a working logger, worked for the Chisolms, in fact. She was a pretty girl, I remember.”

“She tried to snag you,” Sylvia said with good humor.

“When was that?” Frank asked.

“Oh, we were married by then. And she was married to Joel. Fat chance she had, but she gave him the eye plenty. He would have been a better catch than Joel, you understand. Anyway, they got married and after five or six years moved to New York, and a few months later, his father died from a massive heart attack. No warning symptoms or anything, just keeled over one day. Poor Greta was devastated. Her kids were a mess and she was a widow. She hit the bottle, and that and prescription drugs did her in within a few months. Found dead one morning. So the kids suddenly inherited a lot of money. There’s Harry, he’s up in Portland, I think, with his third or fourth wife, and broke. And Connie, who’s off in Italy, last I heard. And Joel was mugged and shot soon after his mother died; after he and Marta came home and cleaned out the old house; they took everything worth a cent and moved it all back to New York, and probably had a big yard sale. Harry and Connie fought like devils to prevent it, but Greta had left the house and everything in it to Joel. She told me that Joel needed money, that things just seemed to go wrong for him. The rest of the estate, stocks and such, was split three ways. I don’t believe any of them ever spoke to one another after that.” She speared a piece of lobster and ate it, then went on. “So there was Marta, a very pretty widow with a fortune of her own. She’s smart, got herself a college degree in history, I believe, and she learned how to eat with a fork and everything. She married the senator within the year. And he has an even bigger fortune. She’s done well, little Marta Perkins.”

By the time Frank left, he felt he knew more about Marta Perkins Delancey than any tabloid reporter could ever uncover. At the same time, he felt that all this information was as useful as a tabloid story that proved the aliens had landed.

Rain moved in before dawn on Wednesday, not a hard, driving rain, just insistent and continuous, and it was still like that when Barbara and Bailey left her apartment before nine. She drove to I-5, onto Highway 126, through Springfield, past Weyerhaeuser with its loathsome smoke curling up to merge with the clouds and turn them a dirty yellow, then the straight shot toward the McKenzie River bridge. She didn’t exceed the speed limit; when the bridge came into sight through the relentless rain, Bailey said. “Twenty-two minutes.”

She slowed down. Ahead, on the other side of the bridge, a turnoff access road wound down to a parking area near a small beach where the river was shallow and not too fast for swimming, although the McKenzie was always so cold, summer and winter, that warnings about hypothermia had to be repeated year after year in the hottest weather. Now the beach was crowded with official cars; a dozen men in waterproof ponchos, under umbrellas, were standing around, a camera crew huddled by their own van…. There were two drift boats in the water.

Barbara didn’t stop; she felt sorry for the divers in the swirling frigid water. Today the river looked black; the sky at treetop level and the steady rain dimmed what little light there was at this time of year. She hoped that Gramm and Roxbury were freezing their asses off down there in the rain.

“Tell me where to turn for the cabin,” she said. She had been there once, but on a sunny fall day, and the road had been easy to spot.

“There it is,” Bailey said a minute later.

She made the turn off the highway onto a county road, and the forest closed in on both sides immediately. They had been in farmland until now—fields, pastures, filbert orchards, farmhouses—but here the forest took over with massive fir trees that blotted out the sky.

“Third turn on the right,” Bailey said, watching closely. The next turn put them on an even narrower road that twisted and climbed through the forest. There were driveways, but the cabins themselves were invisible. “There,” Bailey said. She turned onto a gravel driveway, and ahead was the Marshall cabin.

“Okay,” she said, and started backing and filling until she was heading out again. It would be faster going out, she knew; it took ten minutes to get back to the bridge, then another twenty minutes to return to Eugene.

Neither commented again until she parked at the office on Sixth. “It’s a fuckup,” he said then.

“You got that right,” she agreed unhappily.

Late in the afternoon she visited Ray. “How are you holding up?” she asked.

He looked very tired and worried. “Okay, I guess. I’ve tried and tried to come up with a time I might have run across Marta Delancey, and there’s just nothing. I never saw her in my life.”

“Did you know her first husband? Joel Chisolm. They were still married eighteen years ago, just about when you were opening your shop. Could he have been a customer?”

He shook his head. “Good God, eighteen years ago! Chisolm. You mean the lumber-company people?”

“He was one of the sons.”

He shook his head more emphatically. “I don’t believe the Chisolms mingled much with the Arnos. I never met him, never even saw him that I’m aware of.”