Sleeping Beauty (34 page)

“We may,” Anne said. Her voice was casual, in contrast to Miller's careful formality. Fritz was always as reserved and punctilious as if they had never met, and to counter it, she began with an easy air that still made him wary, even though they had been opposing attorneys on five cases. She settled back without looking at the papers Miller had put on her desk. She was wearing a white silk suit with a dark red blouse with a neckline of soft folds. “We have a lot of things to talk about, Fritz, and of course one of them is the lifestyle Miss Chatham and Mr. Durant lived while they were
together, but first of all I'd like to talk about what promises were made.” She turned to Josh. “Mr. Durant, you asked Dora Chatham to move into your apartment a little over three years ago, on July tenth, at nine-thirty
P.M
., during dinner.”

“Over coffee and cognac,” he said, “at La Nuit, table five, in the back.” Anne looked at him steadily, but there was no mockery in his eyes or his voice; he simply recalled that night as clearly as Dora had. It was strange, Anne thought, that few people are surprised when a woman remembers precise details, especially romantic ones, but when a man does it, listeners look for hidden meanings. But he's a scientist, she reminded herself; it's his job to remember details.

“From that time on,” she said, “you took a number of steps that implied a permanent relationship. You—”

“We aren't talking implications,” Miller protested. “We're here to talk facts.”

“I think you'll find these are facts,” Anne replied. She did not look at her notes; she kept her eyes on Josh. “Shortly after Miss Chatham moved in, the two of you opened a joint bank account at First National of California.” Dora turned from the window to watch Anne, nodding as Anne made each point. “You obtained credit cards with a shared account number. Miss Chatham wrote the checks to pay the monthly credit-card bills. The utility bills were in your name, but Miss Chatham wrote the checks to pay them. She wrote checks for the monthly assessment on your apartment, for the housekeeper, and for caterers for entertaining. She shopped for food. In effect, she managed your home. In September, two months after she moved in, you named her as your beneficiary on the life insurance policy you have through UCLA, where you are a professor of archaeology. That's correct, Mr. Durant?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Why did you do that?”

“I had no other family,” he said quietly.

“Then you thought of Dora Chatham as your family.”

“No. And she didn't think of me that way. We'd just begun to live together.”

“You said you had no
other
family.”

He hesitated. “Yes, I did say that. As I recall, for a while after Dora moved in, we played house; we were like a couple of kids, having fun pretending we were creating a family.”

“You said you didn't want a family!” Dora cried.

“Dora,” Anne said sharply, stunned, as she was so often, at the ability of clients to weaken, or even ruin, their cases with a single devastating remark.

Dora shrugged and fixed her gaze again on Anne's face.

“I thought I didn't want one,” Josh said to Anne. “I thought I was content without one.”

“But you were willing to ask Miss Chatham to mimic a wife.”

“No, I asked her to live with me. I didn't tell her how to do it; I asked for her companionship, nothing else.”

“But companionship in this case included buying the groceries, being hostess at parties, paying the bills, dealing with the housekeeper, choosing the Wedgwood and the Baccarat crystal when you went shopping your first Christmas together. Those are only a few. Did she beg you to allow her to do all those things?”

“Neither one of us begged. I don't know how it happened. I did ask her to hire a new housekeeper when the one I'd had moved away, and she did, but the rest . . . just seemed to happen.”

“ ‘Just seemed to happen,' ” Anne repeated. “But things usually happen when the stage has been set for them. In fact, it would appear that your relationship with Miss Chatham came about because you had a place waiting—”

“Lots of conjecture here,” said Miller. “Could we get back to—”

“I'd like to hear the rest of Miss Garnett's sentence,” said Josh.

“I was about to say, you had a place waiting for Miss Chatham, as if you had a comfortable pair of slippers that someone had recently stepped out of—or been forced out
of—and you showed Miss Chatham how to put them on, even though—”

“That's ridiculous,” he said coldly. “You didn't hear that from Dora; she couldn't have thought that up herself. Even if she could, she knows me better—”

“I don't know you at all!” Dora cried. “You threw me out—I didn't even
guess
you'd do a thing like that!”

“Now, Anne, you see?” said Miller reproachfully.

“And even if I didn't think that up, about the slippers, it's true!” Dora went on wildly. “You wanted a wife but you wouldn't make a commitment; you wanted a little homebody to make you a nest and protect you in it, but you weren't willing to fold her inside your wings and keep her close.”

Josh gave Anne a curious look. “She didn't think of that by herself, either.”

“It's not important. Dora, we agreed you would let me handle this.”

“Good advice,” Miller said to Josh. “You should answer questions, just the questions, nothing else. Let the lawyers take care of the rest.”

Josh spoke to Anne. “Whatever we did, we did it together. I would have thought, if someone wanted to be protected and kept close, she would have offered the same in return. I thought the days of tough warriors and frail maidens had been over for a long time.”

“What does that have to do with it?” Dora cried. “You did worse than not protecting me—you forced me to leave!”

“I did not,” he said quietly.

“We'll get to that in a minute,” Anne said. “First, I'd like to turn to something else. Two women shared your apartment at different times in the years before you met Miss Chatham, one for a little over a year, one for approximately two years. You got rid of both of them. Is that correct?”

“It's not relevant, Anne,” said Miller.

“I think it is. One went to Europe on a job you found for her. The other moved to New York on her own. After that there was another woman you knew very well and were seen with for a couple of years. She went to Chicago a few months
before you met Miss Chatham. You've left a long trail of failed relationships, and in each case you've walked away without a mark on you; you pay nothing, you give nothing, you lose nothing.”

His eyes hardened. “At least I try to build relationships instead of being in the lucrative business of ending them.”

“Josh, shut up,” Miller said. “You're in danger of being a horse's ass here.”

“Dora knows about those women,” Josh said to Anne. “She knows the truth about them. Ask her to tell you the truth.”

Anne was flushed. “You repeated with Miss Chatham a familiar pattern. You have a history of relationships that end within one to three years, in each case when you ask the woman to leave. We don't have to know what promises, real or implied, were made in those other relationships; intimacy breeds promises, often made carelessly from laziness or passion—”

“What a fine pair, laziness and passion,” Josh said bitingly. “If that's all you know of love, you're a poor authority to tell the rest of us what we ought—”

“Josh, for Christ's sake!” Miller burst out.

“I apologize,” Josh said instantly, to Anne, seeing a flash of pain in her eyes. “That was rude and entirely uncalled for. You're wrong about me, but that's still no excuse for my behavior. I do apologize. As for my past, I won't discuss it. You'll have to accept that. It has nothing to do with Dora and me. We started out with affection; I thought we were giving, not demanding; I thought we were sharing, not taking. I know now that I was wrong in believing that, but at the time that's what I thought, and I thought it for the first year, before things began to change. If I could have controlled that . . .” Abruptly, his voice changed. His gaze grew inward. “But I didn't. It took me by surprise.”

He was silent. Anne, who was trying to quiet the turmoil within her, let the silence go on.

“All right,” said Miller, “I want to ask a few—”

“But all through that first year,” Josh went on, ignoring Miller's exasperated grunt, “the things I did probably
sprang from some desire for family that I'd had for a long time and hadn't recognized—like a dream we can't recapture but that still haunts us with the mood it leaves behind. I suppose that's what happened to me. I don't know how else I'd explain the fact that, as you said, I did take a number of steps—”

Miller slammed his palm on his thigh. “We're going to slow down now.” He shot a quick glance at Anne. “I've seen these sessions get a little crazy, but we're about to set a record here.”

Anne did not reply; she was making notes. What was wrong with her today? She never argued with opposing clients; she asked them direct questions or spoke to them through their lawyers. But this morning she was behaving as if she were in Dora's place. Well, there's a lot going on, she thought defensively. And she found herself repeating Josh's words:
a dream that haunts us
 . . .

For twenty-four years she had lived with that.

But this was not the time to think about it. This was the worst time to think about it. “I do have some other points to make, Fritz,” she said firmly. “Mr. Durant, in October of the year Miss Chatham moved in, you traveled together to France; in December the two of you went to Greece; you went to England the following spring, and Egypt the next October. You paid for all of those trips, and the airline tickets and hotel registrations were in the names of Mr. and Mrs. Joshua Durant.”

He nodded. “Dora wanted that. As for—”

“You
wanted it!” Dora said hotly. “You said you didn't care how indifferent society was, you didn't want me to tag along as an appendage; you wanted me to belong with you wherever we went!”

Anne looked at Josh with interest. “An interesting idea,” she murmured.

“But not quite accurate,” he said evenly. “Dora was the one who said she didn't want to be an appendage; it never occurred to me that she would be, whatever name she used. She was my companion, my equal. I did say I wanted her to belong with me when we traveled; I did suggest that we use
Mr. and Mrs. if that would make her more comfortable. As for paying, of course I paid. I asked her to come with me to Greece and Egypt; those were business trips. France and England were vacations and I wanted her with me. So I paid.”

“And nothing is proved by it,” Miller said. “Where's all this leading, Anne? We've never denied they lived together. People do those things when they live together.”

“A year after Miss Chatham moved in,” Anne said to Josh, “you bought a house in Tamarack. The deed is in both your names.”

“People do that, too,” Miller said. “All it means is they liked each other. They liked living together and doing things together. They were very close. But they weren't married, they weren't planning to be, they weren't setting dates, they weren't even talking about it. Nobody promised anybody anything in any way at any time.”

“As for promises,” Anne said to Josh, “at a New Year's Eve party six months after Miss Chatham moved in with you, she told a friend, in your presence, that she planned to take care of you forever and keep you away from young chicks when you got too old and feeble to resist. You did not contradict her.”

“Of course not,” he said. “It was almost dawn when Dora said that; by then no one was taking anything very seriously. It was simpler to let it pass than to argue.”

“A month later, you came into the apartment when Dora was having a fitting with her dressmaker. Dora introduced you and said to the dressmaker, ‘One of these days I'll ask you to make my wedding dress, and a matching cummerbund for Josh's tux.' You did not contradict her.”

“No. I was embarrassed for her—she shouldn't have said it and she knew it; her voice had that kittenish quality it gets when she knows she's wrong—and I just wanted to change the subject.”

“It was simpler to let it pass than to argue.”

Josh frowned slightly. “Yes.”

“In July of that same year, at a barbecue in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, your hostess asked when the wedding would
be; Miss Chatham said it would be soon. You did not contradict her.”

Miller shot a quick frown at Josh. Slowly, Josh nodded. “I almost did. I was about to say something. But Sandra—our hostess—is one of the world's premier gossips. If I'd said anything, it would have been all over Cape Cod in an hour, and within a week it would have reached Los Angeles, embroidered with variations, all of them humiliating to Dora. I couldn't do it.”

“It was simpler—”

“To let it pass,” he said coldly.

“Anne.” Miller was frowning. “These are all negatives, you know. He didn't contradict somebody; it was simpler not to argue . . . I don't think you want to call those facts.”

“I call them facts, Fritz, and so do you. Over the years an atmosphere was created in which Miss Chatham had every reason to assume that her feelings were reciprocated and her ideas were shared. She had no reason to assume that Mr. Durant did not see the future as clearly, and in the same way, as she did.”

Miller pursed his lips. “Somebody might see it that way. Somebody else could say this is a nice guy who doesn't like to hurt people or make trouble, so when a woman makes foolish statements, he keeps his mouth shut because he doesn't want to put her in a position where she looks to the world just as foolish as she is. So unless you have evidence that Josh made a direct offer or promise or suggestion or whatever, I don't see what you've got.”