Adele’s hair was still blond. She had worn it long when she was young, but now it was cut short. Her maid washed it each day, and it stood up like a healthy crown, springing vibrantly from her bony, fragile forehead in a subtly ironic rebuke to her body, which was slack and useless... ever since she’d leaped up to pick a strange blue flower glinting in the last sunlight, and Thomson had fired at the movement, sending her body crashing into a ravine, broken and stained with blood...
A knock sounded on the half-open door and Davic came in. Thomson said, “I’ll see if my wife’s ready.”
Adele lay on the massage table, eyes covered with cotton pads. Her thin legs were a deep brown against the white sheet tucked around her hips. Santos was vigorously massaging her neck and shoulders. Adele heard her husband’s footsteps.
“George?”
“Yes, Adele. Mr. Davic is here.”
“Santos isn’t through yet.”
She wanted him to stay and watch, of course, to forgive her for the pleasure she took in Santos’s hands, those oiled and sturdy fingers which manipulated her wasted muscles and forced contractions that created at least a memory of pleasures she had once known.
She’d always needed forgiveness. He had learned that early about her. That was why she had been disloyal to him, why she had taken lovers, only to be forgiven. That’s what he had told himself for a long time. It had helped a little. Her last had been the American colonel in Tehran. Madsen, was that his name? Something like that.
They returned to the bedroom together — her massage table was electrically powered, the controls at her right hand — and Santos helped her under the coverlet.
The muscular Cuban smiled a good night and left the room silently on rubber-soled shoes.
Davic then said, “Judge Flood has agreed to take your testimony from here, Mrs. Thomson. A van from the TV station with a power pickup will relay your testimony to a screen in the courtroom. That screen faces the judge and jury. A TV camera crew will be here” — he glanced about — “probably in front of the closets, the camera shooting at you but including the bed, the books behind you and so forth. The deputy DA will ask you what time you and Earl had dinner that night. I would suggest you watch Miss Brett as she questions you. When you reply, shift your eyes from the monitor to the red light. Then you’ll be looking directly at the judge and jury.”
Davic paused and glanced at his notes. “There won’t be anything in her questions for you to be concerned about. You know exactly when Earl got home, there’s always a clock at your bedside. You took no medication, nothing that would make you sleepy or confused. The prosecution will know that you use prescription medicines for pain and insomnia. It’s their business to find out such things. We won’t sidestep it. We’ll bring it out in direct examination. Now... Earl showered and changed, remember, before he joined you for dinner. That was his custom, what he did as a matter of course.”
“Oh, I know what she’s after, all right.” Adele’s one useful hand stroked the covers tensely. The mattress below her right hand concealed her security needs, a secret compartment installed by Santos, a steel box with her diary, a single pill and a small revolver. “She wants the jury to think I’m a poor excuse for a mother, isn’t that what she’ll try to prove? That I’m crippled, that I can’t push a child in a swing, paddle around a swimming pool—”
“Your relationship to your son is irrelevant, Mrs. Thomson. Miss Brett may inquire only into those areas that relate to my direct examination.”
“Let her inquire then.” Adele picked listlessly at threads in the coverlet, snapping them with the thin fingers which had unaccountably escaped the vise gripping the rest of her body. “She’s never had a child, you know. She’s never had that experience.”
Her oiled face became slack, the flesh under her cheekbones sagging toward her mouth. She was like a wax figure beginning to melt, a decorative object carelessly left too close to a flame.
Thomson nodded to Davic and told him he would join him downstairs. The lawyer said good night to Adele and left.
“Today was the worst of it,” Thomson said then.
“You promised there’d never be a trial.”
“Earl will be cleared, Adele.”
“But you let her make those obscene charges. That was too much for Earl. It shouldn’t have been allowed to happen.” Adele’s face hardened. Her eyes were sharp again under the cap of lush blond hair. “You’ve talked with him, you know what he wants. You’d better explain that to Davic.”
“Yes,” he said. “I intend to.”
“I suggest you do before he leaves.”
A panel beside Adele’s bed controlled a TV set mounted in the ceiling. Snapping it on, she watched a smiling game show host exuberantly addressing a panel of contestants. Her eyes remained fixed on the screen as her husband left the room.
Thomson had talked to his son Earl after the day’s session in court, and its stormy conclusion. Earl had been in his room, his face flushed from jogging about the grounds. At first his mood had been ominously mild and reasonable, his emotions masked by an apparent indifference.
“I don’t blame you for not understanding,” he’d told his father. “But you can’t realize what it’s like to sit there and have to listen to the things she said. Facing that jury and hearing myself described as a degenerate and a sadist. It just got to me. I couldn’t take it any longer. Sorry.”
But then as he pulled off his sweat shirt, his voice began to quiver with anger. “A pervert, a sodomist, a goddamn unnatural animal, that’s what she kept calling me, and those morons on the jury were licking their lips over it. I know what they’re thinking, what fun it’ll be to whip my privileged ass. But you don’t care, none of you do, because you don’t have any idea of loyalty...”
It was futile to try to reason with him. Earl had usurped the role of the victim. Now it was Earl who had been damaged and vilified and so it was his right, more, his obligation, to strike back at whatever had hurt and betrayed him.
“Even if I did fuck her,” Earl had shouted, “even if I did every goddamn thing that bitch is whining about, I’d still be innocent in a way you can’t appreciate because you don’t understand about loyalty to truth, to ideas that are more real than any damned little piece of reality, so-called, of the moment. I’m taking the heat because I believe in something... in an elite society. Damn right... and I live what I believe in. There never should have been a trial. I shouldn’t be crucified for trying to live up to something special, to what I believe in, to what, by God, is right and true—”
“Goddammit, Earl, listen,” Thomson had said. “We got problems enough already.”
“Screw it. I’ve taken all the abuse I intend to. You’re going to pay them back now, the lying bitch, her hypocrite lawyer and her goddamn righteous father. Did you see him slam me in the chest when the marshals were holding me?” Earl had stopped to draw a deep breath, trying to calm himself, but his neck and face were swollen and red with anger. “Tell that shyster you hired what I want him to do,” he’d shouted. “You tell him.”