my child? Andy doesn’t think or act like other men. He doesn’t stop and figure out the cost. By the way, he didn’t try to seduce me; I seduced him.” She gives me a fierce look, as if she expects me to react, and continues, “But now that Pam is dead I’m really confused about how I feel about Andy. Maybe he did use my child to get to me. I don’t think so, but I don’t know.”
Andy using her? A nice twist, putting the idea in my male mind. I lean back in my chair, trying to decide if she was simply ready for me or whether she has been extremely candid.
Yet my own reading of Andy doesn’t change. As idealistic as he is, he could have been thinking he was embarking on the great love affair of the century. Maybe they’re both for real. Who knows? My chair begins to squeak, and I stop the rocking I have unconsciously begun. As Olivia herself has pointed out, few people serving on an Arkansas jury will sympathize with either of them.
“I don’t know about his personal motivation,” I admit, “but as a professional psychologist he’s going to be held to certain standards.”
She nods soberly, and I am forced to conclude that she is telling me the truth. So what if she came on to this guy to get him to try to help her child? People have gone to bed for a lot less noble motives. What we call “love” always has a price. I feel my own blood begin to quicken. What is it that this lanky, angular woman has to offer Andy that couldn’t be better satisfied by a younger, more voluptuous female of his own race? Is it the forbidden fruit that tempts us all? I have wondered more than once if that wasn’t the initial reason I was attracted to Sarah’s mother. Southern boys at one time had a long history of crossing to the other side of town. I ask, “Who have you told about this relationship?”
Now seemingly more relaxed, she slumps back against her chair.
“No one, of course. Who has seen us?”
Now that some of the tension in the room seems to have dissipated, I notice my stomach growling. It is almost time for lunch.
“Yettie Lindsey has seen all the signs, but I doubt if she can implicate you directly.”
Olivia’s eyes narrow and she once again becomes alert.
Competition is good for the circulation.
“She does everything but take off her clothes in front of Andy.”
I keep from nodding but just barely.
“She feels like you’re moving in on what ought to be her territory.”
“Did she say that?” she asks, now rigid in her chair.
I would not want to go one on one in a dark alley with her.
“Not in so many words,” I say mildly, “but I can understand that point of view. Good men, I hear, are few and far between.” The smile flickers but doesn’t quite come back.
From where she is sitting she can see Sarah’s picture on my desk. I follow her gaze and explain. “At least that’s been my daughter’s experience.”
Her expression softens as she listens to me brag about Sarah. It is somehow easy to forget she was a normal mother at one point in her life. In the last few moments she had become more like some kind of predator. Even as vulnerable as she sometimes seems, I cannot think of her cuddling a child. Perhaps, had I endured her life, I would be equally intense.
Olivia merely shrugs when I finally ask about Andy’s statement that she, too, felt certain that David Spath would go along with ordering remote-control equipment once it had been demonstrated that shock worked on Pam.
“Andy was more optimistic than I was, but he and David were good friends. I had to trust Andy. Usually, the administrators of these places will never go out on a limb, but Andy swore David would come around once he could see Pam was no longer hitting herself.”
I write down the words “not certain at all” as if they are the key to the case. Fat chance. Tomorrow I won’t even re member what they mean. Clearly, Olivia feels too conflicted to make a strong witness on Andy’s behalf.
“What’s your opinion of David Spath?” I ask, thinking of my fruitless interview with him. The only thing I got out of him was that he wasn’t from England.
A look of consternation comes over Olivia’s face as though she has met her match in Spath.
“David’s an expert at massaging parents. He knows how guilty a lot of us feel and tells us what we want to hear; in retrospect, I think Andy may have overestimated him. Honestly though, Andy was really putting him on the spot by not getting consent of a human rights committee first.”
I scratch my right ear with my pen. All of a sudden it is Andy alone who is responsible. She has forgotten she was part of this plan.
“You don’t think it’s possible Spath might have known in advance Andy was going to try shock?”
As if she is resisting me, Olivia stiffens her back against the chair. If she knows something I don’t, she isn’t telling.
“Not David Spath,” she says, her voice hostile.
“I can’t see him leaving himself open that way.”
To make certain she isn’t totally abandoning Andy, I ask, “How much of what happened occurred without Andy talking about it with you first?”
She looks at me warily but admits, “I knew about all of it.”
I nod, knowing she is slipping away from Andy as we get closer to trial. The possibility that her affair with him may become public isn’t helping.
“I admire the hell out of what he risked for you,” I say, trying to keep her on his side.
“As you say, nobody else would do anything but massage you.”
She starts to speak but doesn’t, and I ask the question that has been on my mind since Andy gave me his check.
“Have you given him any money for his defense?”
She begins shaking her head even before I have finished.
“He would never take money from me. He’ll probably never tell you, though, that he has a very successful brother in Atlanta who thinks he’s a saint for working with the retarded.”
“No,” I say weakly, feeling like an idiot. Despite what he had said, I was absolutely positive it was from Olivia. If his own lawyer is this blind to him, what can he expect from his jury? I dread this trial.
After a few more questions I walk Olivia to the elevators.
There is no need to caution her about the need to cool down the relationship between her and Andy until after the trial, since that is obviously on low pilot now anyway. She gets a commitment from me to let her call him first to tell him she has admitted their affair to me. I see no harm in this and was not looking forward to having to leap in headfirst when I see him tomorrow.
As I walk back through the reception area, Julia, who is dressed almost normally for once (her polka-dotted blouse looks as if it is on backward, but I am no fashion expert), says from behind her computer terminal, “You look way in over your head on this one, buddy boy.”
Buddy boy? I laugh out loud, realizing for the first time that Julia is a romantic stuck in a 1940s time warp, all the way down to the fashionable shoulder pads that look like bean bags underneath her blouse. All of this business must be from old movies on TV, because I have a sneaking suspicion, based on her spelling and punctuation, that she is no great shakes as a reader. All we need on our floor is a couple of investigators and she would be in absolute heaven.
“You guessed it, sister,” I say, doing a quick Humphrey Bogart, and roll my shoulders to indicate that I may be in trouble now but I’ll get out of it.
Julia narrows her eyes at me, surely wondering if I am mocking her.
“Guess who called for the hundredth time.” “Mona Moneyhart.”
“Give this man a cigar,” she says to no one in particular.
There is supposedly a key to understanding everyone’s frame of reference. Too bad I don’t have one for my main client. Back in my office I stare out of my sorry excuse for a window (I could see the river if I could hang by my feet) and wonder what really happened in this case. Unfortunately, bad lawyers are always the last to know.
On my kitchen table near the nearly empty box of Kentucky Fried Chicken and french fries confronts me like
