[Barbara Holloway 02] - The Best Defense

by Kate Wilhelm

  The next morning Barbara glared at the coffee pot, willing it to be done, then glared even more fiercely at the interior of her tiny refrigerator. Almost barren. A little cheese, two eggs, juice. Some shriveled apples. She didn’t open the crisper, afraid she would find things growing in there. She yanked out the juice. No milk, damn it. She had meant to stop at the store on the way home and her father had made her forget. No milk. After she showered and drank her third cup of black coffee, she went to the room she called her office; she glared again, this time at her answering machine, which was winking at her. The message was from her father: “Want to see Spassero in action? He’s in court today, about eleven.”

  It had been a mistake to come to court, she told herself at five after eleven. Too many people knew her, greeted her, seemed to assume she was working again. Joe Spender down in the jury room had yelled out as she passed him, “It’s about time you got back in harness. We missed you.” And everyone had turned to gawk, naturally. Now she was seated in the back row of Court Room B watching Bill Spassero do his thing. The case seemed to be about an attempted extortion and malicious vandalism to an apartment building. She paid little attention to the details; which were tedious. But already she had learned something.

  Spassero was impressive. He was larger than he had appeared in the photo she had seen. Over six feet tall, with more hair than seemed necessary, almost bouffant it was so fluffy-looking, and very blond. He was not fat, just big, as if he pumped iron an hour a day. Everything about him looked expensive, from his clothes, which were as spiffy as her father’s, to the way he held himself, to his voice, which was so mellifluous he sounded rehearsed, except no one would have ^rehearsed for a piddling case like this one.

  Ambitious, her father had said, and she understood exactly. Spassero looked like a young man putting in time enough to get some headlines, to get a lot of trial experience quickly, maybe even make a name for himself in court, and then he would become the golden-haired lad of a prestigious firm, or maybe run for office. Senator, she thought. He wouldn’t aim for less. He would want the Paula Kennerman case over and done with as swiftly as possible, forgotten as swiftly as possible. Representing a defendant accused of murdering her child would not do him any good at all, even if his office had forced him to take the case. Defending the indefensible left a blot.

  So, she told herself, she had seen him in action, and she had made a spot judgment, now what? Nothing followed, and she stood up to leave the courtroom before the lunch recess was called. Spassero glanced her way and nodded, as if to an acquaintance, or even a friend. She nodded back and left.

  She had several things to look up in the records room— one of her clients was in a dispute about whose fence it was that kept falling down, and another one believed her grandfather had left a vacant lot to her and two cousins; she wasn’t really certain.

  It took longer than it should have, but one client had spelled every name wrong and even had the wrong street, and the other one didn’t own the property in dispute. She was finishing up when she heard her name called; she turned and saw Spassero.

  “I don’t want to interrupt,” he said, “but I did want to meet you. It is Ms. Holloway, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. And you’re William Spassero. How do you do?” She let him shake her hand and hold it fractionally longer than called for. Close-up inspection did nothing to dispel the boyish image he projected; even his eyebrows were blond, and his cheeks were very pink.

  “I’ve read about you,” lie said with a remarkably charming grin. “It’s a pleasure, Ms. Holloway.”

  “Thanks,” she murmured, and slipped her yellow pad into her briefcase. She glanced around checking for pens and pencils, then made a motion to leave.

  “I was surprised to see you in court,” he said. “You have an interest in that extortion case?”

  “None whatever. Just passing by and thought I’d have a look to see if anything’s changed. It hasn’t.”

  He shrugged a little, grinned again, and then became very serious and sincere. “Lucille Reiner called me this morning, after she saw Paula. She said she talked to you. I guess she wanted you to check me out.”

  Barbara regarded him for a moment. He looked as open as a schoolboy denying to a big sister that he had taken her jelly beans. “I talked to her yesterday,” she said. “She was confused about what a public defender is, what he does.”

  “You heard the news about Paula, I guess,” he said. “On the radio? Television? It wasn’t in the papers yet.”

  She shook her head.

  “She tried to kill herself last night, and very nearly did it.”

  Barbara could think of nothing to say. She started to walk slowly, and he walked by her side.

  “Her sister thinks I’m pushing her, trying to get her to plead. I suggested it as one of her options, that’s all. Best thing she could do for herself, actually, but if she won’t, she won’t. Now this. Remorse, guilt, this isn’t going to help her.”

  “No,” Barbara agreed. “Have you seen her? Will she be all right?”

  “I talked to the doctor, she’ll be okay. They’re keeping her sedated for now. I’ll drop in tomorrow.”

  They walked toward the below-the-street tunnel to the parking lot. Many other people were going that way; it was lunchtime.

  “Mr. Spassero, have you considered a second evaluation of her mental condition?” she asked finally, keeping her voice neutral and low.

  “What’s the use? Ricky Palma is as good as they come. He says she can stand trial.”

  “I don’t know what’s the use,” Barbara said. “I’ve read

  about her case. Everyone except her husband says she was a good mother to her child. If she was, she wouldn’t have killed her, unless she was severely mentally disturbed. I guess that’s all I mean.”

  “Every woman who turns up at a place like the Canby Ranch is disturbed,” he said. “You know that. But they don’t all kill their kids. And maybe the husband knows more about her than anyone on the outside.”

  She stopped walking and turned to face him, wondering why he was willing to talk about this case with her, why he seemed to be arguing about it with her. People eddied around them as if they were rocks in a river. “Will you get a second opinion?”

  “No.”

  “And last night, was she disturbed then, Mr. Spassero?”

  “She’s overwhelmed by guilt,” he said. The boyish look was gone, and although he looked less certain, a hard edge had come into his voice. “I don’t want to stage a courtroom melodrama with two psychiatrists going at each other. Guilt and remorse drive many people to suicide, Ms. Holloway. I accept that.”

  “I know,” Barbara said, and started to walk again. “But so do a lot of other states of mind. Despair, severe depression, fear, helplessness. Even grief.”

  They exited from the tunnel and climbed the stairs to the parking lot, into the sunlight.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Spassero,” Barbara said, and started to walk away from him. He caught up with her and she walked a little faster. He put his hand on her arm and when she stopped moving and looked at it, he hastily pulled back; she resumed threading her way among the parked cars.

  “Look, you think I’m not handling this case right, take it. It’s yours. You think I want this chickenshit? I won’t fight a change of attorneys.”

  They had reached Barbara’s car. She unlocked the door, glanced at him, and said again, “Good-bye, Mr. Spassero.”

  Well, well, she thought as she left the lot, Mr. Spassero had a few things to learn, but he was on his way. He knew as well as she that he was not handling the case properly; there should be a second opinion. And he had tried one button after another to induce her to take over: remorse, guilt; the husband might be right; an uncooperative client; an interfering and distrustful sister. Why didn’t he just get excused? A client who wouldn’t talk to him was reason enough for the court to appoint someone else without another question asked.

  All right, she told
herself, and tried to put herself in his place. He knew there was no money; the state would pay thirty to forty thousand for the defense of a murder case, but who would pay expenses for a private attorney? She frowned. He knew she couldn’t do it—few private attorneys could— but maybe he had goaded her in order to provoke her into advising Paula Kennerman of her right to have a different public defender, in which case the petition would come from the defendant, not him. Would that look better? She didn’t see why it would, but maybe he thought so. It didn’t matter much, she decided, what his motives were. She fully intended to advise Lucille Reiner to tell her sister she had the right to get rid of him and have someone else appointed. Anyone at all would be an improvement.

  So he had read about her, she thought derisively. What he hadn’t read was that she was out of it, out of court, out of doing battle with the giant state, money or no money. No more games, she had told her father. No more devious tricks and grandstanding, no more trying to psych out juries that more and more seemed to believe the state was the final authority, that more and more accepted as probably true enough whatever the state claimed, and that seemed more and more often to defy defense attorneys to try to rearrange their gray cells and convince them that the district attorney or his assistant might not be imbued with the wisdom of Solomon, the intelligence of Einstein, the prescience of—

  “Goddamn it!” she muttered as she hit the accelerator and cleared an intersection to a blare of horns. Now she was running red lights. She took a deep breath and turned at the next corner. Something to eat first, then see if Mrs. Cleveland

  was ready to complete the will they had started a month ago. Mrs. Cleveland was having trouble deciding who should get her sewing machine.

  After the will, laundromat, and then shopping— No, she had to clean her refrigerator first. She had made herself stop putting anything of consequence in it until she gave it a thorough scrub.

  Late in the afternoon she finished the refrigerator. It didn’t look any different, she had to admit, but now she felt she could put milk and lettuce and good things like that into the box without holding her breath. She took the newspapers out to her car and then yanked the sheets off her futon and added them to the basket of laundry. And while she worked at domesticity, she mocked herself, she was avoiding the other problem that she kept pushing out of mind. What to tell her father.

  The next morning she read the news story about Paula Kennerman’s attempted suicide. Lucille Reiner was quoted as saying it wasn’t guilt that drove her to it. The article was fair enough, not inflammatory, and the reporter had not mentioned guilt, except to quote Lucille, but there it was. Hadn’t that asshole told Lucille not to make statements, not to comment?

  If this paper was doing this, she thought then, what were the other papers doing? The weeklies, the monthlies. What were the television commentators saying?

  She banged her cup down so hard, coffee splashed out on the table, on her shirt. Not my business, she told herself sharply. Pulling off the shirt, she went to the bedroom for another one, then snatched up her briefcase and left the house thinking of her two appointments that morning, two more earth-shaking matters to resolve for clients. She heard the sardonic edge in her mind and shook her head. Actually, she was dealing with people for whom ten dollars was a lot to pay for advice, and for those people these were earth-shaking matters.

  When she returned home two hours later, there was an old Datsun parked out front with Lucille Reiner behind the wheel. Barbara went to the driver’s side and said hello. Lucille jumped as if she had been shocked from a trance.

  “Can I ask you something? I mean, here, not at the restaurant?”

  “Of course.”

  “I thought I shouldn’t wait until tomorrow. I can wait if you’re busy.”

  “Come on in,” Barbara said with resignation. Inside the house she herded Lucille into the kitchen and sat her down in one of the chairs out of the way, then began to make coffee.

  “You know she cut her wrists?”

  “I know.”

  “It’s my fault,” Lucille said dully. “I was supposed to take care of her and I left instead.”

  Her resignation turning into fatalism, Barbara stopped fiddling with the coffee pot and went to the table. “Okay. Just tell me about it, but start farther back.” But she knew, Barbara thought despairingly. She knew this story all too well.

  The night her mother left home, Lucille said in a toneless voice, she had made her promise to take care of her little sister. Lucille was fourteen, Paula nine. Their father never had hit them, but that night her mother’s eye was swollen shut and her jaw was swollen from a broken tooth… The day Lucille graduated from high school, she had kept going and had never gone back.

  “I told Paulie I’d get a job and bring her with me,” she mumbled. “But I couldn’t. Minimum, that’s all, washing dishes, stuff like that, and then I got married… She stayed until she was sixteen, and he started beating on her just like he did our mother.”

  Once Lucille started talking, Barbara had got up and finished the coffee. Now she brought two cups to the table and put one before Lucille, who had lapsed into silence and was gazing into the past.

  “What happened to your mother after that?” Barbara asked.

  “She died. We got a letter. That’s when he beat up Paula the first time.”

  And the district attorney would get all this into the record, Barbara thought moodily, and an expert would testify regarding the statistics that showed the f requency of battered children becoming battering parents.

  “Where’s your father now?”

  Lucille shrugged. “Maybe still in Salem. I don’t know. One time after Paula came to Eugene she was going to LCC to get her GED, I mean, she left before she finished school, and we thought she should do that, and we went to the coast and sat watching some of the boats leave. Not just fishing boats, I mean. Pretty boats, yachts. And we said when we got rich that’s what we’d do, have a pretty boat and take off. Just take off.”

  Barbara glanced at her watch. “You said you had something to ask me, Lucille. What was it?”

  “Yeah. It’s just that this popped in my mind when that reporter came around asking about Craig Dodgson. I mean, did I know him? Did Paula ever talk about him? Stuff like that?”

  She was losing a battle with exasperation, Barbara felt then; compassion for the two mistreated girls, sympathy for their fantasy about wealth and escape were not enough to tilt the scales. Carefully she said, “Lucille, I don’t know who Craig Dodgson is. I don’t know what you’re talking about. What reporter? What did the reporter want?”

  “He said he had a tip that Craig Dodgson was telling the police that he had joked with Paula about taking her away on his yacht. He said that Craig Dodgson told Paula that no kids were allowed on his boat.”

  “Oh, God,” Barbara sighed. “And what did you tell the reporter?”

  “Nothing. I said I didn’t know anything about it.”

  “Did he say anything else, ask you anything else?”

  “He said did I realize this gave Paula a motive for killing Lori. And I slammed the door on him. Then I got in the car and came up here to see Paula. I might lose my job. I was supposed to work today.”

  “And what did Paula say?”

  “I told her, and she just said what difference did it make?

  And I got scared. It was like she was thinking about something else and just not interested. She’s thinking of another way to kill herself. I know she is. She’s smart. She’ll find a way.”

  She was going to break down, Barbara realized. She said sharply, “Lucille, stop that! Wallowing in self-pity isn’t going to help your sister.” She took both cups to the sink and dumped out Lucille’s coffee. She had not touched it. She refilled the cups and returned to the table. “Listen to me,” Barbara went on then. “Have you told anyone else about this? Spassero?”

  “No. I went to see Paula and came straight over here.”

  “What is the
question you said you wanted to ask?”

  “Will you see if they’ll let you in? So you can talk to her, I mean? She won’t talk to the lawyer, and I don’t blame her, but she won’t talk to me, either.”

  “What on earth makes you think she’d talk to me, then?”

  “People do. I knew it when I first saw you, and me, the way I’ve been talking. She would, I know she would. Make her understand she has to tell her side.”

  This was a different level, Barbara understood. Explaining the system to Lucille so that she could inform her sister of her rights was Level A, but what Lucille was asking would put Barbara on Level B, and whether it was higher or lower she didn’t know. Different. There was too much she didn’t know, she thought then. Was Paula simply stonewalling? Was she crazy? Was she so depressed and withdrawn that she was uncomprehending? Would she grasp the fact that she didn’t have to stick with Spassero? Would she understand that she had to talk to her attorney, whoever it was, if she expected any kind of fairness? In the end, would it matter who represented her? she asked herself bitterly. Baby killer.

  “Please,” Lucille whispered.

  “I’ll talk to her,” Barbara said. “But understand this, Lucille; that’s all. I’ll explain her rights to her, no more than that, but don’t expect any miracle. If she doesn’t want to talk, that’s it.”

  THREE

  Barbara explained the public defender system to Lucille then, and what Paula could do about Spassero. “All she has to do is write a letter to the judge, say she’s uncomfortable with her attorney, that they are incompatible, and she will be assigned someone else. They’re good people over there, for the most part. Spassero’s just not for her.” Then she asked, “What did you mean, if I can get in?”