She didn’t tell Deirdre about the single mother with a fifteen-year-old daughter who looked older that had moved in next door. Both mother and daughter were overly friendly toward Barry and he openly flirted with both of them. “Mrs. Robinson and Lolita,” Marlowe called them, after the promiscuous movie females.
“My father always says, you can take a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. You want to reform him. He’s the one who has to want to reform before it’ll happen,” Deirdre told her.
A month passed before she found out Barry had lost his job.
“They’re full of shit,” he told her. “They never gave me a chance, always directing the good stuff toward other guys.”
It wasn’t just the loss of a job, but of a career—he admitted to her that it was the second brokerage firm he’d worked for. Stockbrokers were a cottage industry and every one of them would know he had been fired twice.
He talked about going back to school and she encouraged him.
“I don’t want a woman to support me,” he said.
“It’s for both of us. You’d do the same for me.”
They’d been married three months when she came home from work before noon feeling nauseated. She thought she might have a touch of the flu or food poisoning. She was surprised to see Barry’s car out front. He was supposed to be in school until early afternoon.
He had left his keys in the front door of the condo. In a hurry, she thought. She twisted the key in the lock and stopped, nearly stepping on a pair of pink panties.
Barry was on his back on the floor. His pants were down to his knees. Lolita was on top of him, bouncing up and down, her dress up to her waist. She looked over at Marlowe, her tongue cocked out of her mouth. She smiled and shook her head. “Oh-oh.”
Marlowe did something totally unexpected. She calmly walked past them to the bedroom without saying a word. Later, she would realize it wasn’t a real surprise, that it was just par for the course with Barry.
She went into the bedroom and began taking Barry’s clothes out of the closet. He came to the door. He looked ready to cry. “I’m sorry, shit, I’m really sorry.”
She ignored him and began pulling his stuff from a dresser and throwing it on the bed.
He grabbed at her and she spun away. “Keep away from me.”
“Please, I need you.”
“You need a mother, you fuckin’ loser!”
She saw the feral rage in his eyes and stepped back. His fist caught her in the stomach, nearly lifting her off her feet. She collapsed on the floor. He stared at her, gaping. “Oh, my God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Get out! You bastard! Get away from me!”
He ran from the room, flying out the front door, coming back to grab his keys and taking the steps two at a time.
She lay on the floor in terrible pain, trying to breathe. Her guts felt like they were on fire. She vomited over and over on the bedroom carpet, unable to even crawl to the bathroom. When she started dry-heaving she realized she was bleeding from her vagina. She crawled to the bedside phone and called 911.
31
Marlowe stared up at the doctor who stood by her hospital bed and repeated what the doctor had told her. “I was pregnant?”
The doctor’s statement didn’t make much sense to her. They had brought her in that morning by ambulance. It was late afternoon now and she had been examined, X-rayed, and put on IV. She had been waiting for the results of a scan. She shook her head. “It can’t be, I wasn’t pregnant.”
“You were for the last couple months. It’s not unusual not to notice, especially if it’s not planned. You had a miscarriage.” The expression on the face of the woman, a gynecologist, was grim. “I’m sorry.”
“There’s more, isn’t there?” Marlowe said.
“You’re pretty torn up inside. There’s hemorrhaging, a significant risk of infection. We’ll have to operate, we need your permission.”
“Do what you have to.”
“Marlowe…”
The worst was yet to come. She felt like crying.
“We need to do a hysterectomy.”
Like pregnant, the word had little initial meaning to her. She shook her head. “No. You can’t do that. I won’t be able to have children.”
“We have to—”
“No! I’d rather die, no, you can’t do it.” She tried to get up and the doctor gently pushed her back down.
“Marlowe, you will die—”
“No, I don’t care, you can’t do it, I’ll risk it.”
The doctor shook her head. “There’s nothing left to risk. Your womb was torn, it can’t be repaired, we have to take it out. It doesn’t matter now, you will never be able to have children.”
“No! No! That son-of-a-bitch! No!”
32
Marlowe returned from the courthouse and lay on the bed in her apartment. It had been two months since she had been released from the hospital. She carried home from her hospital stay severe depression, burning anger, and a large scar on her abdomen. She had hardly spoken to anyone, not even returning the phone calls of her friends or answering the door when they came by. She had crawled into herself. It was a cold, dark place.
Barry was charged with felony assault and battery with great bodily injury for striking her. She had gone to the courthouse that morning because she had been subpoenaed by the district attorney’s office. She had to be subpoenaed rather than showing up voluntarily because she had not cooperated with the prosecutor. The deputy DA in charge of the case against Barry thought she was a typical abused wife, refusing to testify because she was either scared shitless of the bastard who knocked her around or was stupid enough to want the guy back.
“Seventy-five percent of the abused-spouse cases we get, the woman refuses to testify,” the deputy told her when she came to the courtroom where Barry was being prosecuted. “We still prosecute if it’s serious, and this one is. You have to come to your senses, Ms. James. This guy really hurt you. He’s a danger to you and other women. If you don’t care about yourself, then think about the next woman he batters.”
Marlowe just stared at him, not speaking. He was wrong, but she didn’t tell him that. She wasn’t afraid of Barry. She’d refused to go to court because she was so depressed she didn’t want to leave the house.
He slammed closed his file. “Fine, be as stupid as you please. You’re under subpoena. If you refuse to testify, you’ll be held in contempt. If you lie and say he didn’t hit you, I’ll prosecute you for perjury. You’re to stay in our reception area until I tell you we’re ready for your testimony.”
She was never needed. Barry pled to a misdemeanor battery, was granted probation, fined three hundred dollars, and ordered to perform a hundred hours of community service.
She returned from the courthouse, went back to her bedroom, and crawled back into that dark place in her mind. The light on her answering machine was blinking and she didn’t bother answering it. It was probably her boss at work telling her she’d been terminated. She had been granted sick leave without even asking for it, but hadn’t communicated with the office since the operation.
The phone rang and the machine went on with the first ring.
“Marlowe.”
She felt a stab of pain in her gut.
“Marlowe, it’s me. I need to talk to you. Honey, I really need to talk to you, I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”
Marlowe picked up the receiver and spoke in a whisper. “I’m on.”
She heard him take in a deep breath. “Jeez, honey, I’m so sorry, I really am.”
She didn’t respond.
“I want to thank you, my attorney said they offered me a misdemeanor because you wouldn’t cooperate. That means you still love me, baby, I love you, too. I … I need to see you.”
“Okay,” she said.
* * *
THE GUN WAS UNDER the bed, still there where Barry had put it after he moved in. He had come back for
his things while she was in the hospital, but had forgotten the gun.
She unzipped the leather case and removed the weapon. Turning it in her hands, she stared at it, familiarizing herself with it.
She knew how to point and pull a trigger. Her father had had guns in the house and had taken her and her brother out into the countryside to show them how to use a gun. That had been a 30-30 deer rifle, but her father had two shotguns, and though she’d never fired one, she had seen him shoot them.
Barry called his a duck gun. It was a fancy shotgun with an elegant hardwood stock and silver etchings on the side. His indulgent mother had bought it for him and he had used it only once. But leave it to Barry to screw up—naturally, he left it loaded with even the safety off.
She unlocked the front door and opened it a crack. Then she sat in the living room in a soft chair and waited.
Twenty minutes passed before she heard his hurried footsteps coming up the concrete steps. She got to her feet and held the shotgun at her side, her left hand down the grip, her other hand with the trigger.
He pushed open the door and stopped in his tracks as he saw her with the gun. His face was flushed, not from the stairway, but from booze. He stared at her holding the gun and burst into a laugh.
“You dumb bitch, give me that.”
He stepped forward and she pulled the trigger. The gun jerked in her grasp and she dropped it.
A shotgun blast comes out of the barrel as a tight knot of BB-sized lead pellets, but the wad expands. By the time it reached Barry across the room, the pellets had spread out bigger than a softball. The shot hit him in the groin.
He flew backward with a crazed, violent movement and went down the stairs headfirst.
He mercifully bled to death before an ambulance arrived.
Barry would not have wanted to live as a eunuch.
OLD BAILEY
A quicksand of deceit.
—SHAKESPEARE, HENRY VI
33
St. Andrews Hotel
Philip Hall was waiting in the lobby for Marlowe when she stepped out of the elevator. He had come to escort her to the Old Bailey, where her petition to represent the princess would be heard. The press was in full force outside the front doors, with TV cameras ready to beam her image around the globe.
She wondered if people back in Modesto would see it, whether her father would be bragging that that was his daughter. If he was still alive.
She hadn’t heard from him since she won the San Francisco jury trial in which she was accused of murdering her husband Barry. He called her soon after the trial was over and she had listened quietly as he spoke. “This is your father, Marlowe. How are you?”
They hadn’t spoken for nearly a decade, not since she left Modesto, and his tone sounded as if she had been away for the weekend. In her eyes, it was apropos that her father waited to contact her until after she won the murder case against her for shooting Barry.
“Where were you when I needed you?” she asked, and hung up.
The next day, a woman with a weepy voice on the verge of hysteria called to tell her that she was her stepmother and that her father needed her. He had stomach cancer.
Marlowe listened unsympathetically to her appeal and hung up the phone without replying, and then called the telephone company to change her number to an unlisted one.
She knew what her father wanted—he was facing his Maker and wanted forgiveness and closure. She wasn’t willing to give him either. The reason she had been unforgiving was that he had not called for her sake—he had called for his own peace of mind. He could take his guilt and open emotional sores to the grave and toss and turn for eternity.
The sight of the cameras of the Fourth Estate waiting in front of the hotel brought her back to the present.
“Any chance we can sneak out the back rather than face that mob?” she asked Hall.
“’Fraid not. British newspeople can be fair or they can lynch you with printer’s ink. We’re better off facing the pack than antagonizing them. But Anthony has asked that we limit our interaction with the news media to polite smiles. I’ve already told the group outside that there will be a news conference later in the day, so all you have to do is give them a nice smile as we wade through.”
More of Anthony Trent putting a muzzle on her mouth was her impression, but she didn’t have anything she wanted to say to the press. Safely ensconced in the limo, Marlowe said, “I need to ask you something, not specifically about the princess, but the Royals in general. In America, we get cross-signals about the Royals. On the one hand, it appears the British people cherish their royal family, but we hear about people who openly criticize the institution, complain about spending tax money to protect them, and basically want to get rid of the system.”
“I think that’s a fair assessment of the range of feelings, somewhere between adoration and off with their heads. Most people support the queen.”
“Where are you in that equation? And I’m not asking that question of you when you’re wearing your hat—or wig—as a lawyer for the princess, but as a person.”
Hall pursed his lips with a little disapproval, as if she had asked a question about a family secret. “Where do I stand? I believe the Royals are the very heart of Britain, even more so than Parliament, Westminster Abbey, the Church of England, and our other assorted monuments and institutions. You Americans have far fewer traditions than we—”
“We’re a younger country.”
“It’s not just that, that excuse doesn’t work anymore, America’s been around for centuries. I see it differently. Americans don’t honor their traditions the way we have. People in your country pride themselves as being irreverent much more than we do. And I think it’s because you’ve never had a central tradition to focus upon. Your presidents come and go, some in disgrace one step ahead of impeachment, some doing tacky telly commercials soon after leaving office—”
“And some work for world peace and lead very distinguished lives.”
“Rightly so. But the point is, your heads of state are rarely remembered or revered past their term of office unless they get assassinated. Here in Britain, we have had kings and queens as heads of state, sprouting for centuries from the same family tree. I don’t know how the royal genealogical table works, but I would imagine that we’ve had branches of the same tree going back to the Middle Ages. Unlike many other European countries—France, Germany, Italy—we have not had heads of state and forms of government coming and going and leaving chaos in their wake. And the same goes for other European countries with monarchies—the Dutch, Belgians, Swedes, Danes, Norwegians—all of them have cherished their monarchs and have enjoyed long-term stability.”
“What about these Royals, specifically?”
“The only Royals that really matter in terms of the nation are the reigning monarch and heir to the throne. As for the queen, I believe she will go down in our history as one of our most gifted monarchs. She has reigned through the advent of both the atomic age and the computer age, the loss of the colonial empire, the Cold War, the advent of the European Union, and the War Between the Sexes.”
“We call that the Sexual Revolution,” Marlowe said. “What do you think of the princess? Off the record, in complete confidence.” Which was nonsense, of course. How could anything that was said to a lawyer or a reporter be off the record?
“I admire the princess for her courage to stand up for what she believes. She has a good heart, I believe she honestly loves people and has done good with her charities. And she appears to be a caring mother, though one has to wonder how caring it is to kill the boys’ father.”
“But?”
“Some question whether her immaturity and neurosis killed the heir to the throne. What do you think of her?”
“I haven’t reached a conclusion yet. If you had asked me that question before the shooting, I suppose I would have given a response similar to how I imagine many American—and I suppose British—women felt about her. On the one ha
nd, she had married a prince and was to be a queen, that’s a fairy-tale romance to us poor unwashed masses. There are many royal weddings, but this one was particularly special because she has that elusive quality called charisma.”
“She’s quite pretty—”
“No, she’s not that attractive, and physical beauty has nothing to do with it. Every year at the Miss America and Miss World beauty pageants, there are women who are far more physically beautiful than most of the female actresses in Hollywood. Julia Roberts, for example, would not be a runner-up at a beauty contest. But she has charisma that makes her stand out from the rest. And the princess has some of that mysterious magnetism.”
They rode in silence for a moment before Marlowe brought up the subject of the procedure at the courthouse whereby she would be granted permission to appear on the princess’s behalf before an English court.
Hall said, “We will meet with the judge and the Crown Prosecutor informally. The right of barristers to act as advocates rests mostly on tradition—theoretically, a judge could allow a solicitor or anyone else to argue a case, but it just isn’t done.”
“I’m not sure that an American court would permit a barrister not licensed in the state to appear before it. Our courts generally operate by the strict rules of statutory law, not traditions. But we do recognize the similarity between the legal systems. If you came to California from a common-law country like Britain or Canada and wanted to be licensed to practice, you could take the bar exam without going to law school. If you came from continental Europe or almost anywhere else in the world, you would have to go to law school before they permitted you to take the exam.”
“Quite so. As Lord Finfall pointed out, both the British and American systems are based upon the same principles, concepts that would be alien to a French, German, Italian, or other continental European attorney. As you well know, the continental system is not based upon attorney adversaries battling before a neutral judge for the favor of a jury, rather it’s an inquisitional system, with the judge conducting an interrogation of witnesses. It’s called civil law, I believe, as opposed to our system of common law. I seem to recall much of it evolved from the Napoleonic era.”
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