There was a gold-framed mirror on one wall, and there were a couple of large, dark, old-fashioned paintings on the others, in which the sprightly nymphlike ladies were more or less covered by diaphanous white garments that drifted about them gauzily and rather interestingly. The gentlemen were more substantially clad, in an old-fashioned way, and looked rather stuffy and unenterprising. I mean, a girl dressed like that expects something to be done about it, doesn’t she? Get with it, boys!
We took our places in front of the desk, like kids settling down before the teacher. Baron seated himself in the gray metal chair and placed his hands flat on the big desk, a gesture clearly meant to bring the meeting to order.
“Perhaps it’s as well that Walter’s here,” he said deliberately, “since we’ve spent some time discussing your problem, Madeleine. And I hope Mr. Helm—that’s the name, isn’t it, Helm?—won’t mind if we get a little personal business out of the way before hearing what he has to say.”
“Never mind me,” I said. “Carry on.”
Baron went on: “As I was saying, at the time of your release some weeks ago we considered what could be done for you, my dear. The suggestion I’m going to make has been cleared with the other partners. There was some opposition from Homer Walsh, who felt that you—your case—had caused the firm enough unfavorable publicity already, all those years ago, and that your presence here would rake it all up again; but we managed to win his approval. What I’m trying to say is… well, we can offer you a position of sorts if you care to accept it.”
I saw Madeleine swallow hard, clearly affected; but her voice was harsh when she spoke: “A position of sorts! What sorts?”
Baron showed some embarrassment. “Of course, it’s impossible under the circumstances for us to employ you in anything resembling your previous capacity…”
“I see!” Madeleine laughed sharply. “The janitor’s quit and you need somebody to wax the floors and scrub out the johns; a grateful cleaning woman who’ll slip in nights to do her work so she won’t be recognized and give the place a bad name!”
I caught the quick little glance she threw me; and I knew she was apologizing for using the poor-downtrodden-scrubwoman line I’d heard before—but Baron hadn’t.
Disregarding her sarcasm, he said calmly, “We have the biggest law library in the state, but nobody’s been responsible for it, so nobody can find anything in it. It will take several months for you to learn how it should be organized—I believe there’s a seminar on the subject coming up in Denver to which we’ll send you, if you accept the job. This will provide you with something to do, and a modest salary, while I investigate what can now be done about your situation. I had to make certain you were actually coming back here before I made any moves on your behalf.”
There was a little silence. At last Madeleine drew a rather shaky breath and murmured, “God, you’re good, Waldemar. I’d forgotten how convincing and persuasive you can be. I’d forgotten how you had me believing in you even while those damn steel doors were clanging shut behind me for eight years! If I let you, pretty soon you’ll have me thinking it didn’t even happen… But I already have a job. I have the job of finding out who hired you to do a job on me!”
“Madeleine!”
She went on inexorably: “Or, hell, let me kid myself that I didn’t misjudge you that badly. Let me keep on telling myself that there isn’t—wasn’t—money enough in the world to hire you for that. But you’d do just about anything for this precious firm of yours, wouldn’t you? And if somebody got something on you that, made public, would mean the end of everything you and Homer Walsh had built up here, I’m sure they could blackmail you into sacrificing your pet girl genius—at least she thought she was a genius, which made it easy for you—the precocious little new-hatched lawyer you’d worked so hard at turning into a tough practicing attorney. And the fact that… that she considered you her friend would make no difference at all, with the survival of the firm at stake!”
It was Walter Maxon who burst out, shocked: “Madeleine, you’re crazy! You can’t believe this!”
“Can’t I?” she demanded. “At first I couldn’t, of course, sitting in that lousy cell watching myself deteriorate day by day, trying to face the fact that I’d never again be the bright girl wonder… trying to accept that by the time they let me out there’d be no way back for me, even if there had been something to come back to, which there wasn’t. But it was just something blind and accidental that had happened to me, like being hit by a runaway truck or struck by lightning. I did find myself wondering a bit, occasionally, but I told myself it was too easy to get paranoid in there, and I’d better get a good hold of my sanity and stop suspecting everybody. The whole world couldn’t possibly be conspiring against me. But it was, wasn’t it, Waldemar? At least my whole world was, all that was left of it, with Roy gone. You.”
Waldemar Baron said gravely, “I’m sorry you feel this way, Madeleine, but I suppose it’s perfectly natural that your mind should have found a scapegoat during your long prison ordeal, somebody to blame for everything that had happened to you.”
She laughed harshly. “It isn’t my mind that’s shooting at me, Waldemar!”
“Shooting at you!” That was Maxon again. “My God, you must be imagining—”
I interrupted: “I don’t know about the lady’s accusations, Mr. Maxon, but I do know there have been several attacks on her person. I’ve got a hole in my shoulder to prove it. So let’s leave her imagination out of this. She may be wrong, but she’s not hallucinating.”
Madeleine had paid no attention to this exchange. She was still staring bleakly at the man behind the desk.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said to Baron. “Sent those men to kill me. If you’d just left it alone, you’d have been perfectly safe. I… I wasn’t good for much when I got out. And I didn’t really suspect anything; I hadn’t put it all together yet, even in all those years. If you’d left me alone, I’d simply have wandered off somewhere in my dull and hopeless way and never troubled you again. But Mr. Helm’s agency got wind of the fact that I was to be assassinated and wanted to know why, and somehow in the line of duty he managed to stick all the jagged pieces of Ellershaw back together—well, almost all; I guess there’ll always be a few chips missing, a few cracks showing—and started asking myself the questions I should have asked years ago, and here I am.”
In the ensuing silence, we heard somebody walking down the hall outside the office, although the footsteps were muffled by the deep carpet.
“Here I am,” Madeleine said softly, “wanting to know why you want me dead. Here I am wanting to hear about the clever railroading job that was done on the naive young girl attorney who thought she was so bright and sophisticated, and had the illusion that she was surrounded by loyal friends. That dumb, innocent girl whose husband learned something he shouldn’t have, presumably up in that scientific security-fortress he worked in up Conejo Canyon. What it was is beside the point—”
Waldemar Baron stirred. “We all know what your husband did up there, Madeleine. We all know what he stole up there. There was never any question raised about his guilt—”
“And why wasn’t there?” Madeleine leaned forward in her chair. “Why was my high-powered attorney so busy trying to browbeat me into confessing to something I hadn’t done that he never explored the possibility that my husband hadn’t done anything either—anything subversive and illegal, that is? You never for a moment considered the possibility that the whole case against me, against us both, might be a put-up job, as phony as the hair of that snow queen you’ve got reigning downstairs these days! Why didn’t you?”
“But you yourself accepted his guilt, my dear!”
She said, “Ah, there’s the real cleverness of it! Yes, I accepted, numbly, the possibility that Roy could have taken super-secret laboratory reports, or whatever they were, for some crazy idealistic reason of his own—I resigned myself to it in my dazed way, as I resigned myself to a
lot of things. Everything except my own guilt; I knew the truth about that. But I didn’t seem to know anything else anymore. My… my lovely serene assurance was gone; my wonderful young confidence in myself and my judgments. Nothing was the way it was supposed to be. My safe and beautiful world had suddenly become a terrifying place where people grabbed me rudely and put manacles on me and shoved me around as if I were some kind of an animal and yelled outrageous accusations at me and locked me up in filthy places stinking of urine and disinfectant… You knew, didn’t you, Waldemar? You had me all figured out; you knew exactly how to break me. You set me up so carefully, and then you had them tear me down so brutally, knowing what it would do to me—the precious little rich girl who’d grown up so very intelligent and competent in lots of ways, but who’d never had a rough hand laid on her in all her sheltered life, or a rude word spoken to her. You knew that kind of treatment was the one thing I couldn’t possibly cope with!”
Abruptly, Waldemar Baron heaved himself out of his chair, a little painfully the way old men do, although he’d displayed few signs of his age previously. He walked to the diminutive bar in the corner and poured himself a drink and stood there with his back to us.
“Psychological demolition!” Madeleine said softly. “Build her up so the shock will be that much greater when you smash her down. I was suddenly very busy those last few weeks, wasn’t I, Waldemar? Those last weeks when Roy was so troubled but I simply didn’t have time for him because in addition to my own work I was forever being asked please wouldn’t I take over this or help out with that. And of course, being me, ambitious me, I was delighted, even though it meant working my ass off. I thought it was a measure of how good I was, what a solid place I’d made for myself here, how much I was trusted and relied upon! And then a fantastic bonus to tell me my efforts were recognized and appreciated—and that very night the crash: total disgrace, total disaster. Arrest and jail; and nobody to help but a boy just out of law school who didn’t know his anus from a prairie-dog hole. Sorry, Walter. But don’t try to tell me, now, that it was a coincidence, that it just happened at a time and in a way that left me no defenses at all!”
Walter Maxon started to speak and checked himself. Madeleine stood up and walked deliberately to the window and stood looking out. She spoke with her back to us:
“It was Mangle Madeleine Week, it was Smash Ellershaw Month; and it went on and bn. Husband gone, career in ruins, bills and creditors and total financial disaster, home gone, dreadful newspaper and TV publicity, unbelievable public snubs and insults; and every time I seemed about to catch my breath and get some kind of a grip on the situation, I’d receive another dose of the kind of brutal treatment I simply couldn’t deal with: another trip downtown for interrogation, another shocking humiliation session, with my lawyer telling me that of course we must cooperate in all ways with the federal authorities, my dear. Yes, you did a good job on me, Waldemar. You made sure I was in a total beaten-down daze right up to the trial and through it, too punch-drunk to really know what kind of a legal job you were doing for me. And it wasn’t much of a job, was it? I keep remembering Willy Chavez.”
Walter Maxon stirred. “Chavez? Who…? Oh, I remember, but that case was before I came here. What does Chavez have to do with this?”
Madeleine didn’t look his way at all. She continued to stare out the window. Her voice reached us: “Chavez was guilty as hell, Waldemar, but you got him off anyway on a clever technicality. I was innocent, but you didn’t get me off. And now that I’m, well, functioning again after a fashion, I’d like to know why the great Waldemar Baron couldn’t find any clever technicalities with which to keep his own associate out of prison. And while I was too… too shattered at the time to actually remember much of what happened in court, I’ve recently studied the transcript—Mr. Helm had an abridged version he let me read—and it was a very lousy job you did of defending me, wasn’t it? A lot of noise, a lot of drama, but so little substance that even the jury saw through it and decided that I simply had to be guilty if my well-known attorney couldn’t do better than that for me.” She paused, and drew a long breath, and went on: “And then at last it was over, and I was hauled off across the country by way of one foul, bug-infested little jail cell after another—more of your treatment, Waldemar?—and finally I was put away in that place and you were safe for eight years. But now they’ve let me out at last, not quite a bag lady or a mental case, although it was close, so I have to be killed… Walter.”
The younger man started. “Yes, Madeleine.”
“When you came back from that visit to Fort Ames, what did you tell them about me, about how I looked?” When Maxon hesitated uncomfortably, she turned on him. “You didn’t tell them the truth, did you? You’re a sweet boy, Walter, and you couldn’t bear to describe the gray wreck of a woman you actually saw in there; it would have seemed disloyal, wouldn’t it? So you told them all, when you got back here, that I was doing fine, just fine, bearing up beautifully, still the same brave lovely person as always…” She laughed softly, seeing the truth in his face. “You were being kind, but I’m afraid you passed the sentence of death on me, my dear. You got somebody worried. If I’d actually recovered from the initial shock of my conviction, as you reported, if I was standing up unexpectedly well to all the degrading prison routines, if I was still—or again—an intelligent, thinking woman instead of the useless zombie they’d tried to turn me into, then I’d be a menace when I got out, wouldn’t I? A danger that had to be removed.”
Waldemar Baron swung around to look at her, and she turned a little to face him. He spoke without expression:
“Do you really believe all this, Madeleine?”
She didn’t answer the question. Her face was quite pale as she said, “I could have understood your having me murdered, Waldemar, if enough was at stake. I mean, the life of one lousy girl lawyer as against the welfare of the firm… But the way you did it, the cold-blooded, unspeakably cruel way you did it! Wearing me down like that, breaking me, humiliating and humbling and crushing me, grinding me into the dirt! Damn you, I loved… No, it wasn’t love, but I honored and trusted you; and in the end you even let them send me to that hell-place to be totally destroyed! How could you do it to me? How the hell could you do it?”
She whirled and ran out of the room.
15
After the door had closed, Waldemar Baron stood staring at it for a little while; then he seemed to come awake abruptly. He asked me what I wanted to drink, and told Maxon to fix his own, he knew the way. Actually, it was a little too early for the first drink of the day as far as I was concerned, but it was no time to be arguing about booze. After putting a glass into my hand, Baron moved to the chair in which Madeleine had been sitting, swung it around one-handed, and sat down facing me. He gave me a faint, cynical smile.
“I suppose you’re waiting for me to tell you, sadly, what a poor unbalanced woman she’s become, Mr. Helm, making such wild and unfounded accusations against someone who’s never had anything but her good at heart.”
I said, “I don’t know about her accusations or your heart, sir, but Mrs. Ellershaw has just spent several weeks at a facility of ours going through a rigorous course of physical rehabilitation, preceded by a psychological testing program designed to find out if she was likely to break down under the pressure. I can assure you there’s nothing whatever wrong with the lady’s mental or emotional balance; in fact she passed all tests, and the course, with flying colors.”
“I see.” He studied me for a moment longer, and rose again, and went to the desk to pick up the telephone. “Did you check Mr. Helm’s credentials, Cassandra? I see… Yes, thank you, my dear, that’s very good thank you.” He put the phone down and returned to his chair and studied me for a moment. “The Chief of Police, Mr. Cordoba, says that you seem to be quite legitimate, although there’s some mystery about what function your agency actually performs.”
I said, “We sometimes wonder ourselves, sir.”
He said, “It’s been a long time. I will retire soon. Perhaps I’ve been looking for someone to take my confession before I do—”
Walter Maxon said sharply, “Waldemar!”
Baron looked at him for a moment, and shook his head regretfully. “I appreciate your faith, Walter, but Madeleine is perfectly right. I deserve every ugly word she threw at me.”
Maxon started to speak again, and stopped. We sat in silence for a little. Everybody started when the telephone rang. Baron made a little gesture, and Maxon rose and picked it up, and listened.
“No,” he said. “No, he’s in conference and can’t be disturbed. Later.”
Baron waited for him to return to his chair, and spoke quietly: “Let us consider, first, what I did not do. I’m afraid Madeleine gives me credit for greater wickedness and ingenuity than I’m capable of. I certainly did not set out deliberately to shatter her self-confidence or destroy her self-esteem. There was, of course, no deliberate program of working her to exhaustion so she’d be more vulnerable; and it was simply unfortunate that the only one of us available the night she needed legal help was rather inexperienced. I don’t know what horrors she was subjected to on her way to Fort Ames, but I assure you I had nothing to do with them.” He cleared his throat. “And I hope you’ll believe me when I swear that if there have been attempts on her life, as you say, they were not organized by me and I know nothing whatever about them. It’s natural that, under the circumstances, she’d evolve the theory that all her disastrous troubles are connected; all the result of a great elaborate conspiracy concocted by a master villain. By me. But as I said, she’s endowing me with a greater capacity for evil than I actually possess.” He paused briefly, and went on: “However, this is all peripheral. Her central thesis is perfectly correct. I did allow her to be sent up, quite deliberately.”
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