“A woman?”
“You’re jumping to conclusions, aren’t you?”
“When the sex isn’t indicated, it’s usually a woman. Who is she, Archer?”
“I wish I knew.”
“Come on now.” His square pink hand rested on my arm. “You don’t accept anonymous clients any more than I do.”
“This one is an exception. All I know about her is that she’s anxious to see Cave get off.”
“So are we all.” His bland smile tightened. “Look, we can’t talk here. Walk over to the office with me. I’ll have a couple of sandwiches sent up.”
He shifted his hand to my elbow and propelled me towards the door. The dark-eyed woman with the artificial violets at her waist was waiting in the corridor. Her opaque gaze passed over me and rested possessively on Harvey.
“Surprise.” Her voice was low and throaty to match her boyish look. “You’re taking me to lunch.”
“I’m pretty busy, Rhea. And I thought you were going to stay home today.”
“I tried to. Honestly. But my mind kept wandering off to the courthouse, so I finally up and followed it.” She moved towards him with a queer awkwardness, as if she was embarrassingly conscious of her body, and his. “Aren’t you glad to see me, darling?”
“Of course I’m glad to see you,” he said, his tone denying the words.
“Then take me to lunch.” Her white-gloved hand stroked his lapel. “I made a reservation at the club. It will do you good to get out in the air.”
“I told you I’m busy, Rhea. Mr. Archer and I have something to discuss.”
“Bring Mr. Archer along. I won’t get in the way. I promise.” She turned to me with a flashing white smile. “Since my husband seems to have forgotten his manners, I’m Rhea Harvey.”
She offered me her hand, and Harvey told her who I was. Shrugging his shoulders resignedly, he led the way outside to his bronze convertible. We turned towards the sea, which glimmered at the foot of the town like a fallen piece of sky.
“How do you think it’s going, Rod?” she said.
“I suppose it could have been worse. He could have got up in front of the judge and jury and confessed.”
“Did it strike you as that bad?”
“I’m afraid it was pretty bad.” Harvey leaned forward over the wheel in order to look around his wife at me. “Were you in on the debacle, Archer?”
“Part of it. He’s either very honest or very stupid.”
Harvey snorted. “Glen’s not stupid. The trouble is, he simply doesn’t care. He pays no attention to my advice. I had to stand there and ask the questions, and I didn’t know what crazy answers he was going to come up with. He seems to take a masochistic pleasure in wrecking his own chances.”
“It could be his conscience working on him,” I said.
His steely blue glance raked my face and returned to the road. “It could be, but it isn’t. And I’m not speaking simply as his attorney. I’ve known Glen Cave for a long time. We were roommates in college. Hell, I introduced him to his wife.”
“That doesn’t make him incapable of murder.”
“Sure, any man is capable of murder. That’s not my point. My point is that Glen is a sharp customer. If he had decided to kill Ruth for her money, he wouldn’t do it that way. He wouldn’t use his own gun. In fact, I doubt very much that he’d use a gun at all. Glen isn’t that obvious.”
“Unless it was a passional crime. Jealousy can make a man lose his sophistication.”
“Not Glen. He wasn’t in love with Ruth – never has been. He’s got about as much sexual passion as a flea.” His voice was edged with contempt. “Anyway, this tale of his about another man is probably malarkey.”
“Are you sure, Rod?”
He turned on his wife almost savagely. “No, I’m not sure. I’m not sure about anything. Glen isn’t confiding in me, and I don’t see how I can defend him if he goes on this way. I wish to God he hadn’t forced me into this. He knows as well as I do that trial work isn’t my forte. I advised him to get an attorney experienced in this sort of thing, and he wouldn’t listen. He said if I wouldn’t take on his case that he’d defend himself. And he flunked out of law school in his second year. What could I do?”
He stamped the accelerator, cutting in and out of the noon traffic on the ocean boulevard. Palm trees fled by like thin old wild-haired madmen racing along the edge of the quicksilver sea.
The beach club stood at the end of the boulevard, a white U-shaped building whose glass doors opened “For Members and Guests Only.” Its inner court contained a swimming pool and an alfresco dining space dotted with umbrella tables. Breeze-swept and sluiced with sunlight, it was the antithesis of the dim courtroom where Cave’s fate would be decided. But the shadow of the courtroom fell across our luncheon and leached the color and flavor from the food.
Harvey pushed away his salmon salad, which he had barely disturbed, and gulped a second Martini. He called the waiter to order a third. His wife inhibited him with a barely perceptible shake of her head. The waiter slid away.
“This woman,” I said, “the woman he spent the night with. Who is she?”
“Glen told me hardly anything more than he told the court.” Harvey paused, half gagged by a lawyer’s instinctive reluctance to give away information, then forced himself to go on. “It seems he went straight from home to her house on the night of the shooting. He spent the night with her, from about eight-thirty until the following morning. Or so he claims.”
“Haven’t you checked his story?”
“How? He refused to say anything that might enable me to find her or identify her. It’s just another example of the obstacles he’s put in my way, trying to defend him.”
“Is this woman so important to his defense?”
“Crucial. Ruth was shot sometime around midnight. The p.m. established that through the stomach contents. And at the time, if he’s telling the truth, Glen was with a witness. Yet he won’t let me try to locate her, or have her subpoenaed. It took me hours of hammering at him to get him to testify about her at all, and I’m not sure that wasn’t a mistake. That miserable jury–” His voice trailed off. He was back in court fighting his uphill battle against the prejudices of a small elderly city.
And I was back on the pavement in front of the airport, listening to a woman’s urgent whisper: You’ll have to give me a yes or no. I’ve made up my mind to go by your decision.
Harvey was looking away across the captive water, fishnetted under elastic strands of light. Under the clear September sun I could see the spikes of gray in his hair, the deep small scars of strain around his mouth.
“If I could only lay my hands on the woman.” He seemed to be speaking to himself, until he looked at me from the corners of his eyes. “Who do you suppose she is?”
“How would I know?”
He leaned across the table confidentially. “Why be so cagey, Archer? I’ve let down my hair.”
“This particular hair doesn’t belong to me.”
I regretted the words before I had finished speaking them.
Harvey said, “When will you see her?”
“You’re jumping to conclusions again.”
“If I’m wrong, I’m sorry. If I’m right, give her a message for me. Tell her that Glen – I hate to have to say this, but he’s in jeopardy. If she likes him well enough to–”
“Please, Rod.” Rhea Harvey seemed genuinely offended. “There’s no need to be coarse.”
I said, “I’d like to talk to Cave before I do anything. I don’t know that it’s the same woman. Even if it is, he may have reasons of his own for keeping her under wraps.”
“You can probably have a few minutes with him in the courtroom.” He looked at his wristwatch and pushed his chair back violently. “We better get going. It’s twenty to two now.”
We went along the side of the pool, back toward the entrance. As we entered the vestibule, a woman was just coming in from the boulevard. She held the heavy plate-glass door for the little flaxen-haired girl who was trailing after her.
Then she glanced up and saw me. Her dark harlequin glasses flashed in the light reflected from the pool. Her face became disorganized behind the glasses. She turned on her heel and started out, but not before the child had smiled at me and said: “Hello. Are you coming for a ride?” Then she trotted after her mother.
Harvey looked quizzically at his wife. “What’s the matter with the Kilpatrick woman?”
“She must be drunk. She didn’t even recognize us.”
“You know her, Mrs. Harvey?”
“As well as I care to.” Her eyes took on a set, glazed expression – the look of congealed virtue faced with its opposite. “I haven’t seen Janet Kilpatrick for months. She hasn’t been showing herself in public much since her divorce.”
Harvey edged closer and gripped my arm. “Would Mrs. Kilpatrick be the woman we were talking about?”
“Hardly.”
“They seemed to know you.”
I improvised. “I met them on the Daylight one day last month, coming down from Frisco. She got plastered, and I guess she didn’t want to recall the occasion.”
That seemed to satisfy him. But when I excused myself, on the grounds that I thought I’d stay for a swim in the pool, his blue ironic glance informed me that he wasn’t taken in.