Dead In The Water (Rebecca Schwartz Mystery #4) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series) (8 page)

“You know, Libby loved Sadie very much, too. It’s going to be very hard for both of you without her, and I understand how bad you feel. I want you to know that it’s okay to cry and feel as bad as you need to feel and that that feeling will go away, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow—”

I stopped to get hold of myself, hoping she was too young to have seen
Casablanca
. I got up the nerve to stroke her hair, and to my surprise, she turned on her back and looked at me. Her eyes flicked to Julio, and I thought I saw fear in them—he had said she seemed afraid of him—and instinctively I turned, perhaps to see if I could see what she saw. But Julio smiled a quiet smile and left.

The coward
, I thought, but my heart wasn’t in it. I knew he had done the right thing, leaving us alone.

What next? It was anybody’s guess what was troubling her—other than simple grief—but that flicker of fear made me think there
was
something. Why would a child be afraid of her father?

The first thing that came up made my throat go dry. I smashed it down quickly and tried to think. But my mind wouldn’t leave it. I remembered everything I’d ever heard about molested children—that is, about our reactions to them. We try to pretend it didn’t happen. We don’t want to believe it and we don’t listen. I couldn’t fall into that trap. I had to face it.

“Sweetheart, is there something you need to talk to me about?”

Terror. Absolute, unadulterated terror spread like a blush on her small face. She shook her head violently. I pretended not to notice. I smiled, or maybe grimaced; anyway, I went through the motion. “Good. Because if anybody hurt you, I wouldn’t let them get away with it. Adults are supposed to protect kids, and I’d do that. I’d make sure they never hurt you again.”

I saw the relief even before I started the protection promises. Did she believe me? Was I winning her confidence?

“Has someone hurt you?”

She shook her head, eyes bland, telling me I was completely off base.

“Are things okay between you and your dad?”

Fear flickered again. Having faced the incest specter (and gotten nowhere), I tried to see beyond it. Why else might a child be afraid of her father?

Because she had a guilty secret.
Or thought she had
.

That must be it. Aha, I had it now for sure.

“You know, Esperanza,” I intoned importantly, “what happened to Sadie was really awful, but you couldn’t stop it from happening. A lot of times people feel guilty when someone dies, but it’s only a feeling, it’s not real. I mean, they feel that way even though they couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with the person’s death.”

Tears started in the brown eyes, and a sob from the deep wracked her body upright and into my arms. She clung to me like a barnacle to a gray whale, her body heaving as if she were retching, and I knew that it felt that way to her. I was swept to my own childhood crying jags, to the overwhelming feeling of needing to be rid of something.

Unexpectedly she spoke to me. “Did they really put Marty in jail?”

“I’m afraid they did, but she won’t have to stay there long. They’re going to let her out pretty soon.”

She pulled away from me, but maintained eye contact, kept sitting. She seemed to be coming out of her waking coma.

“Is jail worse than hell?”

“To tell you the truth, not everyone believes in hell.”

“They don’t? It isn’t a real place?”

“Some people think it is. But no one’s ever been there and come back, so no one knows for sure.”

“Jail’s real, though, huh?”

“Yes, but you know what? I’m a lawyer—did you know that?”

“You are?”

“Uh-huh. And that makes me an officer of the court. The law says you can only go to jail if you’re guilty. As an officer of the court, I pronounce you Not Guilty.”

She lay back on her pillow, her face infinitely sad. I had said the wrong thing.

Desperate to keep her from retreating again, I said, “Can we be friends, you and I?”

She nodded once, vaguely, her heart not in it, just pleasing a grown-up.

“I’ll help you no matter what, Esperanza. And I can do that because I’m a lawyer. Do you believe that?” (I’d heard that kids know instinctively when you’re feeding them bilge water, but I was gambling that it wasn’t true.)

She nodded again. This time did I see a faint glimmer of hope? Probably not, but I bulled forward.

“You lost a good friend when you lost Sadie, and I think you need another one. I’d like it to be me.” I had a sudden twinge. Was I being manipulative? Quickly I said, “I don’t mean you have to do anything for me or even talk to me if you don’t want to. But I want you to know you can if you like.”

I waited a moment. “Would you like to tell me about the white thing?”

She turned to the wall.

“I just thought that, since you trusted Sadie with it, and I’m your friend now, that you might trust me.”

Dead silence.

“Okay, I understand. I was just wondering—a thing like that—what did it look like, exactly?”

Her voice was flat, a monotone, as if she were on drugs. “Like a brain.”

Julio came in. “You two doing okay?”

I patted a small leg. “You know, you’ve got a terrific little girl here.”

“Don’t I know it.”

A tiny sniff escaped the huddled-up heap on the bed—a stifled sob, I thought. Julio said, “You know what Esperanza really loves?”

“Pizza?”

“Besides that.”

“Spaghetti?”

“Besides that, too.”

“Movies.”

“As long as nothing awful happens to any fuzzy animal. But something else.”

“Sea otters!”

“Bingo! Bingo! The grand prize for Rebecca! But what I meant was, the way she really likes to look at the sea otters is from a boat. Isn’t that right,
Nena
?” He paused for an answer, received none, and continued undaunted in the same vein. “So guess what we’re going to do this afternoon? We’re going for a sail! That is, if Esperanza wants to—”

He winked at me, so confident was he this was an offer she couldn’t refuse.

And she didn’t refuse. She simply kept her own silent, ominous counsel.

“Want to go with us, Rebecca?”

“I don’t know. Libby and Keil—”

“We’ll all go! It’s more fun that way—isn’t it,
Nena
?” Esperanza seemed interested. She didn’t face us, but she broke her gravelike silence: “Can Amber go, too?”

“Amber’s grounded. Ricky came by and said—”

She sat up, her golden face white. “What? What did she do?”

“He wouldn’t tell us. He just said it was so bad he didn’t want to talk about it.”

She rolled off the bed, running, but she stopped suddenly, stood a moment, and then started to fall.

Julio moved quickly, catching her as she sank to her knees. “Head down,
Nena
. Head down.” To me he said, “It’s all right. It’s all right. She’s just fainted. It’s not a seizure or anything. She’s okay!” He was shouting.

I saw that her face was sweaty now. Julio fanned her with an opened book, and elevated her feet. In a moment she woke up, and the look in her eyes said she didn’t need to go to hell to know what it was like. “You fainted again, baby.”

She closed her eyes again, to get away, I thought. When we had put cold washcloths on her face and given her juice, we left. It seemed to be what she wanted.

Julio stared at his aquarium, and it gave me such a start, I said, “I do that. I stare at mine when I’m upset.”

“You have an aquarium?”

“Saltwater tropical. Smaller than yours—only a hundred gallons.”

“Well.” He seemed to want to smile, but couldn’t bring himself to do it right then.

“That’s what Marty and I have in common.”

He patted his pockets, caught himself, and looked at me sheepishly. “I haven’t done that in ten years. Haven’t smoked in twelve.”

“I’d better go.”

He ignored me. “She fainted once before—when Sylvia and I told her we were getting divorced.”

A small voice interrupted. “Dad?”

Julio and I smiled conspiratorially, two kids who’d gotten a wish.

“Yes, honey?”

“What time are we going sailing?”

If it had to be a sunset cruise, I was going to do one little thing first. Maybe not get Marty out of jail, but at least give her a piece of my mind. And there was one other thing I wanted to check on.

Jacobson, apparently working all weekend, was in her office, which looked out on a little lemon grove. It was a cheerful place for such business to be conducted, very different from San Francisco’s Hall of Justice, which is gray (except for the rose marble on the first floor), urban, and all business.

“Hello, Paula. I was just wondering—has the autopsy been done yet?”

“I’m sorry, but I really can’t give out that information.”

“Sure you can. I bet it has been done—or it’s scheduled for sometime today, right? I mean, how many homicides do you have around here?”

“Two in a year would be a record,” she said dryly. “Who’s the DA assigned to the case?”

“Todd Greenberg. Why?”

“What did he think of your case?”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“I will. But as long as I’m here, why don’t you let me see the autopsy report?”

“Sorry.” She gave me a pitying look and went back to her paperwork.

I kind of liked what I heard. She was a little more defensive than she’d had to be. I wondered if Greenberg wasn’t as thrilled with her airtight case as she and Tillman were.

Perhaps fifteen feet away from the pleasant office with the view of a lemon grove, just around the comer, was as nasty a jail as—well, frankly, as jail always is. This one was painted a deep turquoise instead of black or gray, but bars are bars. It seemed ten degrees colder after Tillman turned the oversize key in the lock and led me inside. His feet—mine were in noiseless tennis shoes—echoed in the corridor. Three steps in, I was deeply depressed, and Marty’s cellblock was at the other end of the place.

She was standing, waiting for me, in the business suit I’d left her in, the same one she’d worn to work the day before.

Her cell nearly made me cry, and would have, I suspect, if I’d been younger and less experienced and not so angry with her. That horrible chestnut. “She’s made her bed—” popped up, but it was hard to be too punitive when the bed in question was a concrete bunk built into the wall. It had on it only a mattress, a pillow, and a folded-up blanket.

The only other furniture, if you could call it that, was a no-frills metal toilet.

She spoke first. “What time is it? They took my watch.”

“Around two, I think. Have they fed you?”

“Two TV dinners already today, but of course I didn’t eat them. Do you know what the sodium content of those things is?”

“Didn’t eat them? You were expecting radicchio with a little warm chèvre?”

We both sat on the bunk.

“It’s no big deal. I needed to lose weight anyway. It’s inconceivably boring in here, though. I wish I’d taken a meditation class, but there never seemed to be time. Did you know you’re not allowed any reading material? Or pantyhose—how about that one?” She held out a bare foot, shod in a neat black pump. “You might strangle yourself with them.”

“But they let you take a shower, of course.”

Of course they hadn’t. I was rubbing it in. I was getting madder by the moment, and not only at her—at myself for wasting sympathy on her. “Marty Whitehead, you lied to me.”

Her face lit up. “You’ve been to my office? Did you bring the stuff?”

“No, I did not bring the stuff. I had to impersonate a member of the staff to get in, and then I was caught in the act, so I didn’t get anything out of the building—except this.” I produced the calendar leaf for the night before. “You couldn’t have killed her, damn you! You were somewhere screwing your brains out.”

I admit I made this speech partly in case the cell was bugged—a ridiculous idea for a quiet town like Monterey.

“You sound mad that I didn’t kill her. Whose side are you on, anyway?”

“I’m mad because only a born victim would spend a night in jail to protect a man. A born victim is a dead loser in court, and I don’t want one for a client.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll get another lawyer.”

“That won’t solve your problem. Another lawyer’s going to feel exactly the same way—like doing anything in the world besides stand around watching you cut your own throat. Tell me the guy’s name, Marty. Tell Jacobson and Tillman and walk away from this. He got himself into this mess, you didn’t. Who cares about him? Think of Libby and Keil, dammit!”

Her refusal to think of her kids seemed so heartless,I wanted to bang her head against the bars. Recent encounters with ten-year-olds had left me feeling protective and righteous.

“Rebecca, I don’t have an alibi. He stood me up.”

“He stood you up. Sure he stood you up. First your date wasn’t this Friday, it was last Friday, and now he stood you up. If your own lawyer can’t trust you, how’s a jury supposed to?”

She said nothing.

“The guy’s married, I suppose. Is that it?” Suddenly I thought I knew what she was up to, and I was sorry for the remark about Libby and Keil. “Wait a minute. You’re afraid of a custody battle, aren’t you?”

She nodded, maybe blinking tears, maybe not, I couldn’t tell.

“Well, get it out of your head. If you have to stand trial, even if you’re not convicted, those kids are going to have to go through something a whole lot worse than any custody fight in the world. If you’re found guilty, it won’t be an issue.”

I knew I sounded cruel—I’d learned how in acting class. But a good alibi was my best shot at getting her out of this mess. Besides, she was genuinely getting my goat. Self-destructive behavior in a client spells defeat in the courtroom. And I hate defeat.

“I don’t expect you to understand.”

“Okay. All right. But I’m off this case as soon as you’re arraigned.”

“I think that’ll be best for both of us. Are the kids okay? Did Mother get here?”

“Your mother got here. The kids are not all right. Their mother’s in jail, and they’re worried.”