By the time they arrive, Arthur has sketched for her Brian Pomeroy’s scheme to get Adeline Angella loose and talkative and to steal off with a set of fingerprints to compare with the unknowns from the cottage. Brian will be joining their table later-Arthur spots him at the bar with his marriage counsellor, Lila Chow-Thomas.
Over salads and the house-special pasta-nothing else today, Arthur is made of steel-he charges his new assistant with her first duties: interviewing Winters’s hiking companions, overseeing the independent analysis of the semen sample, gathering information about Rohypnol. Buddy Svabo has been playing coy with the many files police carted from Eve Winters’s office. (Nothing to hide-that’s the way I always work.). There will be a disclosure hearing Monday at which they will demand he produce them.
Lotis makes notes, head bowed, brushing hair from her eyes that soon take up their former place. “I still don’t see Angella stashing the semen. Is there some kind of DNA pecker-track vault where they keep ten-year-old smears?”
“They usually discard old exhibits after appeals, or after a sentence has run its course.”
“So here’s a different thought: Someone from Forensics could have planted Nick’s ejaculate in Winters. Or a cop.”
“Planted how?”
She shrugs. “Soak the old swab in distilled water, squeeze it out, douche the corpse with a syringe or a turkey baster. Grade-school chemistry.”
“It would be quite a reach to prove that.”
“How many people have access to the exhibit lockers? Don’t they have to sign some kind of register?”
Arthur can’t keep up with the questions. Her scenarios are improbable-an analyst stealing, an exhibits clerk switching samples-far less credible than the Adeline Angella theory. Still, he must not, like the police, become fixated. He will follow the trail of these exhibits, seek a gap in continuity, evidence of mishandling. A known sample of Faloon’s DNA may have accidentally mixed with the test sample.
Now comes Gowan Cleaver, pinched nose and pencil moustache-an austere man whose suits never wrinkle. “Welcome back to the lists, Arthur.” He calls to the waiter, “Just a whiff of vermouth, Samson.”
Hands are shaken. “This is my indefatigable assistant, Lotis Rudnicki. Gowan is one of our leading barristers.” A slight exaggeration-his main handicap as counsel is his caustic manner.
Cleaver accepts his martini, a double. “Quick power lunch, then back to court. Are we waiting for Pomeroy?”
At the bar, Brian’s marriage counsellor gives him an exasperated look that suggests she’s losing patience, then finishes her mineral water, looks at her watch, and excuses herself. Brian slumps, orders another glass of wine.
Cleaver produces a file folder with several handwritten sheets. “Dr. Eve Winters’s notes on some silly dame who hated her father and thus got fucked up in life and went frigid. Winters came to me because she started ranting on the phone, threatening defamation, fraud, breach of ethics, invasion of privacy, every tort in the book.”
He dips into the folder for a cassette tape. “Here’s some of it, recorded off her machine. I told her to wait it out, not stir up any hornets’ nests. Didn’t matter, never went anywhere.”
“What was the nub of the complaint?”
“Okay, she comes to Dr. Winters with a problem-she can’t get it up, she’s frigid.”
“Sexual arousal disorder,” Lotis says.
Cleaver reacts as he might to a child who should only be seen. “I stand politically corrected. I assume you have expertise in the area.” Lotis tosses her hair, unchastened.
Brian brings his wine, straddles a chair. “In case anyone’s interested, I’m having a marriage breakdown.”
“Obviously,” Cleaver says. “I see you’re using Chow-Thomas.”
“Is she any good?”
“Usual feminist bias. Mind you, my marriage was beyond saving.”
“I think Caroline has got to her.”
Lotis mimes a gag reflex.
Cleaver continues. “Dr. Winters’s patient is hung up on men, she flirts, gets into awkward situations when her bluff is called. Can’t do it, backs out, freaks out. Another relationship in the wastebasket. Winters saw her twice, encountered blocks galore, got stood up for the next appointment. Their last contact was a month later, when this sexual-arousal-disordered person got on the blower to Winters with a rant about how she was going to sue her ass off. That was after this came out in The Post.”
Cleaver reads from a photocopy of the Doctor Eve column: “‘A strict religious upbringing has barred the doors of awareness for this sad woman, who has painted herself into a lonely corner. She has a desperate need to examine her sexuality, to discover inclinations which may be truer to her heart.’ Winters changed the name, of course, and identifying details, called her Lorelei.”
The siren of the Rhine, who lures and leaves men to their fate. A silence as Arthur exchanges glances with Lotis and Brian, then asks, “Would the woman’s name be Adeline Angella?”
Cleaver looks at him oddly. “Yeah, I think that’s it.” He studies the notes. “Angella.”
Three pair of eyes grow large around the table. “This was when?” Arthur asks.
“Two years and two weeks ago.”
“Do you remember the Faloon rape?”
“Vaguely, it didn’t connect.” Cleaver rises. “Hope I’ve been of help.”
“Your lunch is on me.” Arthur decides to order the apple pie-but only one scoop of ice cream.
Brian groans. “I am looking forward with unimaginable delight to having dinner with this flirtatious ball-crunching iceberg. I intend to protect my ass.” He snaps open a cellphone. “Latest Japanese gimmick-wireless relay to the recorder in my crotch. I just did a tester.”
He presses various buttons on the phone. A women’s voice. Brian, that is an extremely sexist comment, and I find it quite cheapening to have to meet you in a public bar. Goodbye.
“Loud and clear,” Lotis says.
Brian looks at her. “I think you’re weird.”
“Back at you.”
That night, Arthur is awakened in his hotel suite by Brian’s haunted, inebriated voice. “Arturo, we’ve got to talk, it was right out of Stephen King, I had to pull a last-minute el foldo.”
Arthur manages only a sleepy grunt.
“What time is it? Chris’almighty, it’s after midnight? Sorry, I’ll come by for breakfast…No, I’ll be too hungover, let’s make it lunch.” He hangs up before Arthur can croak a response.
13
Arthur sees no hangmen on this morning’s Appeal Court roster. The three judges are a liberal lot, the chief justice himself presiding, Selden Horowitz, shrewd but kind, on the cusp of retirement at seventy-four.
Arthur eases himself into a chair, weary. He slept poorly, missing the softness of a Garibaldi night, unused to the clanging city. Selwyn Loo’s table is almost bare, the seat beside him empty: Lotis is off arranging for the DNA analysis. She will visit Faloon, introduce herself. She is not to mention the Lorelei business yet-institutional walls have ears.
Selwyn is on his feet for only ten minutes, a performance that seems to startle the court, a precis of facts and law without a wasted word. “On page 401, Justice Duff affirms the principle that an unfair hearing has no legal force.” At that point, Horowitz asks him to pause, and the three judges huddle and whisper.
“Mr. Prudhomme,” says the Chief Justice, “it would seem that the judge below was in a fit of pique.”
“Got up on the wrong side of the bed,” says a fellow justice.
And with that, Arthur understands that the day has been won. Prudhomme can’t find an opening; the third judge chimes in. “Yes, he forgot that an accused party has the right to be heard before conviction and sentence. And what’s this nonsense about doubling the fine and jail term every day? After three weeks, by my rough calculations, that comes to $3 billion and forty thousand years in jail.”