Desperate Measures (6 page)

Shelley was on the phone. She grimaced, and it was more like a quirky grin than anything else. Frank called her the pink and gold fairy princess, and that was exactly right; she had enough golden hair for two people, the complexion of a milkmaid, and big blue eyes. She looked like almost anything other than the crackerjack attorney she was fast becoming.

Barbara mouthed at her, “Drop in before you leave.” She returned to her own office and picked up the briefcase Dr. Minick had left with her.

She was grinning over a political cartoon when Shelley joined her a few minutes later.

“You real busy these days?” Barbara asked.

Shelley sprawled on the sofa. “Not terribly. It's still petty stuff they're bringing me. As you know very well,” she added. “What's up?”

“We may be heading for a murder case, the Marchand murder. I have three pending cases: one will go to trial this week, one's a plea bargain, and I hope to get the other one dismissed. So, all in all, I'll be pretty busy; I may have to ask you to sub for me at Martin's.”

“Sure,” Shelley said. “What about the murder case?”

Barbara told her a short version. “I'll go meet the client in the morning, and after that either we're in or not. If yes, there's something I'd like you to do for me in the next day or so. It's right up your alley—land-use laws.”

Shelley groaned, and Barbara said sympathetically, “I know. But I want to know if Marchand's threat was real. If there's no way he could have gotten zoned for a housing tract, his threat was empty and there's no motive.”

“There's no motive anyway,” Shelley said. “So they might have to move. Big deal.”

“Apparently for them, for Alex, it would be a big deal. Anyway, Dr. Minick left me a stack of stuff, political cartoons, a comic strip, and a medical record that's three inches thick. I'll pretend to believe I'm in, and start on it all tonight.” She motioned toward the folders.

Shelley opened the one closest to her, then opened a scrapbook it contained, and gasped. “It's
Xander!
He draws
Xander?
”

Barbara knew that she had not mentioned Alex's secret name.

“What about Xander?” she asked.

“The comic strip. It's a great strip! Don't you read it?”

Barbara moved to sit on the sofa next to Shelley, where she could look over the strip. She had seen it before, she realized, but had not followed it. “A teenage boy full of angst,” she commented.

“No! Well, yes. See, his name's Timothy, and his mother calls him Timmy Dear; his father calls him My Boy. Look, let me find his mother.” She leafed through the pages, then stopped to point at the mother, tall, stick-thin, with pale hair flipped up at the end. And hanging from her forehead on a rod was a rectangular object. A mirror! “When she turns sideways,” Shelley said, riffling through the pages again, “she sort of disappears altogether. Here.” The mother had become a simple stick with a head, feet in stilt shoes, hands, and the mirror. “Sometimes you get to see what she sees—a gorgeous woman. And the father. Here.” He was a corpulent figure with a great mop of curly hair; he was dressed in a suit and tie.

“Look closely,” Shelley said.

Barbara peered at the drawing, then drew back. The mop of curls was made up of dollar signs, and the suit, which had appeared to be tweed or herringbone, was patterned with dollar signs.

“His underwear, neckties, everything—it's all dollar signs,” Shelley said. “At first the strip seems to be simply about a boy coping with hypocrisy, but then you begin to get the real story. Timothy is a secret superhero. He can fly away and do good deeds, save damsels in distress, thwart bank robbers, outsmart terrorists, make things right. The catch is that his powers are unreliable. He's trying all the time to find the secret that turns on his powers. One strip had him eating spinach, nothing else for a month or longer, thinking it worked for Popeye. He just turned green. When his powers are working, he's Xander.”

Shelley's eyes were shining with excitement over having Xander's creator as a client. Now Barbara could understand the barely concealed excitement in Will Thaxton's voice when he called.

She reached across the table and pulled the thick medical file closer. “I'll save this for later,” she said. Almost idly she opened the folder, then drew in a sharp breath. She was looking at a glossy eight-by-ten photograph of Alexander Feldman.

Beside her, Shelley gasped, then said in a choked voice, “My God! It's not fair!”

Barbara had changed her clothes, finally, and had made notes about her talk with Dr. Minick. She was sitting at her desk reading Alex's medical history when she heard the outer door open. She stiffened in alarm, certain that she had locked it when Shelley left.

“It's just me—Maria.” She came into the office carrying a box, flat like a pizza box. “We had tamales tonight, and you know Mama, how she overdoes everything. So she said, Why don't you go see if the lights are on, carry her some of the extra tamales and stuff. And the lights were on, so here I am.”

She said all this with an innocent expression. Maria lived with her mother and her own two daughters; her mother was the matriarch who bossed and babied everyone, and Maria did the same here in the office.

“Oh, Maria,” Barbara said, rising, “tell me the truth, do I look like I'm starving?”

Maria studied her through narrowed eyes, then grinned and nodded. “I can hear your stomach making like an express train from over here.” She put her box down on the coffee table and opened ita crack. “They're still hot.”

The aroma of tamales and salsa, refried beans, and garlic filled the office. Barbara could hear her stomach making incredible jungle sounds, and suddenly she felt famished.

“Tell Mama thanks for me,” she said. “And thanks for bringing it. I guess I am starving.”

After Maria laughed and walked out jauntily, Barbara washed her hands and sat at the coffee table to eat. Tamales, a sweet-and-sour carrot salad, refried beans, crisp fried plantain slices—not a meal for a cholesterol watcher or a dieter; there appeared to be enough for two lumberjacks. Barbara ate it all.

And she thought about Alexander Feldman. She had not read his surgery reports, and for now she was skimming through the psychological evaluations. Violent as a child, as a teenager, as a young man. Suicidal as a youth. Frustrated sexually. Self-conscious and reclusive. No doubt bitter and full of hatred for his fate, his parents, himself, the world. Still, he could draw wickedly funny cartoons and a comic strip that probably every adolescent adored. Not just adolescents, she thought then, recalling the excitement in Shelley's eyes.

She didn't linger in the office that night. After locking the material in the safe, she had a disturbing thought: Had Alex sicced Xander on his nemesis, Gus Marchand? Had Xander made things right?

The next morning she was surprised to see Shelley in her going-to-court mode, her hair neatly gathered in a swirl at the nape of her neck, skirt and jacket, even hose and low-heeled shoes. Shelley tried hard to look mature when she had to appear in court. Barbara was wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers.

“So you do have a trial,” she said. “What time? If I can swing it, I'll sit in.” She often did that, and afterward discussed Shelley's technique with her, as a good mentor should, she thought. She pulled no punches at those critique sessions.

“No trial. I want to go with you,” Shelley said, almost defiantly.

Taken aback, Barbara shrugged. “Okay.”

Shelley drove. Her car was a fiery red Porsche with Winnie the Pooh dangling from the rearview mirror. Shelley's father made yachts; her mother was an heiress to an immense fortune, and Shelley was a very rich young woman.

Barbara filled in details as Shelley drove through Eugene, through Springfield, and into the countryside. The valley floor was still flat here, but in the distance the Cascade Mountains rose, and closer, behind the farmland, hills were beginning to appear. They had entered filbert country. The world might call them hazelnuts, but here they were and would always be filberts. The trees were not very big, twenty feet or less for the most part, and they were meticulously spaced. Now fully leaved, their twisted limbs were concealed; the canopy cast deep shade beneath them. Occasionally a green groundcover, something that thrived in shade, protected the ground from the relentless winter rains. They passed several impressive bonfires, with small huddles of men around them; the orchardists were torching the blight.

Opal Creek was off to the right, a racing silver stream cutting its own little channel in its run to the big Willamette River. They came to a stop sign and a bridge to the new road on the other side of the creek.

“Gus Marchand's property,” Barbara said, pointing. On the other side of the creek was another orchard, where Mike Bakken and the inspector had been the day of the murder. They passed the Marchand house, set back a couple of hundred feet from the road, with shrubbery and shade trees all around. It appeared almost obsessively neat: the grass mowed, circles of mulch around bushes and trees, no weeds anywhere. Then came the land that he said he would put houses on; this ground was heavily forested, with a hill that rose to the state forest land behind it. She saw the track that led into the woods; the place where Minick said the girl Rachel and her boyfriend went to park. It was impossible to tell where the Minick property started; it looked exactly like the forest until they came to a gravel driveway. Trees concealed the house.

Rhododendrons in bloom lined the driveway and crowded the house. There were no other signs of gardening, but anyone who couldn't grow rhodies in Oregon simply had never stuck a bush in the ground and walked away from it.

The house was a low, rambling building, clad in cedar siding stained a natural color, with white trim. The front door opened as they drew near, and Dr. Minick stepped out to meet them.

On the porch Barbara introduced Shelley. “My colleague,” she said. “If Mr. Feldman hires us, if a case actually develops, Shelley will assist me.”

“Well, come on in. Can I get you something to drink? Coffee, tea?”

“Thanks, but no,” Barbara said, surveying the room they entered. Comfortable and very male. Fireplace, leather furniture, no knickknacks of any kind, no plants, just lots of books and magazines and an enormous pile of newspapers. Of course, she thought, Alex was right on top of the news. She noted with interest that there was a wood-burning stove and a fireplace. One for efficiency, one for comfort.

Then a door on the far side of the room opened and Alex came in. He was wearing a baseball cap. She had steeled herself, Barbara thought distantly; she had thought she was prepared, but no one could be prepared for this. Worse than the pictures, far worse than she had imagined.

“Ms. Holloway and—” Minick started, only to be interrupted by a strange sound that Shelley was making.

Barbara turned to look at her. Shelley was choking and gasping, and trying to hide her face with her hands. “I'm sorry,” she managed to say, and turned as if to flee.

“Nonsense,” Dr. Minick said firmly. “Let me show you our bathroom. Come along.” He took her elbow and steered her toward a hallway. She was sobbing like a child as he led her away.

Barbara turned back to Alex. “I'm terribly sorry,” she said.

“What for? That's the first normal human reaction I've ever seen.”

Watching his face when he talked was worse than ever. One side fixed forever in an eerie grimace, the other side animated; one side like a demented midget's face that had undergone unholy twisting and distorting, the other side almost handsome.

“It's easier if you don't look at me when we talk,” Alex said. His voice was low-key, deep, the words well modulated, rhythmic. He went to a chair and sat down partly turned away from her. “What do you want from me?”

Barbara sat down then and shook her head. “Nothing. It's what you might want from me. Dr. Minick is afraid you'll be charged with murder, and if you are, you will need counsel.”

He shrugged. “Ms. Holloway,” he said, “all my life people have wanted to put me away, remove me. I removed myself with Graham's help. If Marchand had built his tract of houses, I would have removed myself farther. It's that simple.”

“Look at it from a different perspective,” Barbara said. “If they don't have another suspect and they settle on you, they will make a big deal of Marchand's accusation that you were stalking his daughter. They'll go through your medical records and they will find that you were labeled violent in the past, that you were suicidal. Violence can be directed both ways, to the self and to the other. They know that.”

Alex had not moved as she spoke. The good side of his face was visible, impossible to read, the other side hidden.

“Mr. Feldman,” Barbara said, “they will also investigate your economic situation. They'll want to know where and how you get money, what you do for a living, and once they learn, there will be no more secret about
Xander
or X.”

After a moment Alex faced her squarely, and very slowly he reached up and took off his baseball cap. Part of his head was covered with very short brown hair, shaved, growing back. The rest was smooth and too pink, like the skin of a pink grapefruit. There were visible scars.

“See,” he said. “That's where they cut off the horns. Ask anyone around here, they'll tell you.” He tapped the pink covering. “Artificial turf. A metal plate under it. I wouldn't be able to wear a cap in court, would I? This is what a jury would stare at day after day while their stomachs turn. If I go to court, I go to prison, Ms. Holloway, probably get the death penalty. Can you prevent that? Can anyone?” His voice became harsh and raspy as he spoke.

“I don't know,” she said. “Will you cooperate with me? Help me? We can't have an antagonistic relationship, Mr. Feldman.”