Susan leaned forward, elbows on knees, eyes lifted to the rough, cottage-cheese ceiling, and I could hear her brain clicking, a mechanical readjustment, tapping and turning what I had just told her, searching for the advantage. "But what mother wouldn't be jealous," she said. "Of a daughter growing fond of a foster mother. Honestly speaking." She flicked her ash into the beanbag ashtray, shaping the cherry on the bottom.
I turned to her, looking at her through the veil, glad she couldn't see the fear in my eyes. "Honestly speaking, she killed Claire. She shoved her over the cliff, okay? Maybe she can't be prosecuted for it, but don't try to sell me this new and improved spin. She killed Claire and she killed Barry. Let's just get on with it."
Susan sighed and put her pen down. She took another hit of her cigarette and ground it out in the ashtray. "You're a tough nut, aren't you."
"You're the one who wants to let a murderer go free," I said. I took off the hat and threw it on the chair, scaring the white cat, who ran out of the room.
"She was denied due process. It's in the record," Susan said, striking the edge of her hand into the other palm. I could see her in court, her hands translating her for the hearing impaired. "The public defender didn't even raise a sweat in her defense." The accusing finger, red-tipped. "She was drugged, my God, she could barely speak. It's in the file, the dose and everything. Nobody said a word. The prosecution's case was completely circumstantial." Hands palm down, crossed and cut outward, like a baseball ref's "safe." She was building momentum, but I'd heard enough.
"So what's in it for you?" I interrupted, in as dry and unimpressed a voice as I could register.
"Justice has not been served," she said firmly. I could see her on the steps of the courthouse, performing for the TV crews.
"But it has," I said. "Blindly, and maybe even by mistake, but it has been served. Rare, I know. A modern miracle."
Susan slumped to the back of the couch, as if my comments had drained her of all her righteous vigor. A car with the radio up loud, spewing ranchero music, cruised by and Susan quickly turned to look out the window at the dark green Jaguar parked in front. When she was satisfied that it was still there, gleaming by the curb, she returned to me. Slowly, and wearily. "Astrid, when young people are so cynical, it makes me despair for the future of this country."
It was the funniest thing I'd heard all day. I had to laugh. I didn't find much funny these days, but this definitely was bizarre by anyone's standards.
Suddenly the weariness disappeared like the courthouse righteousness before it. Now I was looking at a cold and clever strategist, not so very unlike Ingrid Magnussen herself. "Barry Kolker could have died of heart failure," Susan said calmly. "The autopsy was not conclusive. He was overweight, and a drug user, was he not?"
"Whatever you say." The truth is whatever I say it is. "Look, you want me to lie for her. Let's go on from there and see if we have anything to talk about."
Susan slowly smiled in her red lipstick, pushing her black curls back from her face with one hand, her lashes very black against her white face. As if a bit ashamed of herself, but also somewhat relieved that she did not have to sell me as hard as she thought she might.
"Let's go for a drive," she said.
BEHIND the tinted windows of her Jaguar, I nestled into the smell of leather and money. It wrapped around me like fur. She had the jazz station from Long Beach on the radio, a free-form West Coast piece with a flute and an electric guitar. We rose out of Ripple Street, past the unlicensed day care and the bakery and the trompe 1'oeil of Clearwater in silence, made the left on Fletcher, left on Glendale, right onto Silverlake Boulevard, and drove around the lake for a while. Gulls bobbed on the blue-green water. The drought had exposed a huge concrete collar around the lake, but in the sealed world of the Jaguar, it was sixty-eight degrees. Such a pleasure to be in a rich woman's car. Now a new song filled the rarified atmosphere, I immediately recognized it. Oliver Nelson, "Stolen Moments."
I closed my eyes and imagined I was with Olivia and not my mother's lawyer. Her bare arms, her profile, scarf tied Kelly-style around her head and throat. That precious moment. All the more so for being unreal, gone in an instant, something to savor like perfume on the wind, piano played in a passing house in the afternoon. I hung on to it as Susan parked on the far side of the lake, where we could see the blue-green water, dotted with white, the picturesque hillside beyond. She turned the music down, but you could still hear Nelson's trumpet.
"I want you to ask yourself, what's she guilty of?" Susan asked, turning toward me from the driver's seat. "I mean, in your mind. Really. Murder, or being a lousy mother? Of not being there for you when you needed her."
I looked at the little woman, her black curls maybe one shade too black, her eyes a little mascara-smudged from the heat. The weariness was an act, but also the truth. Like so many things, the words hopelessly imprecise. I wished I had something to draw her with. She was in the process of becoming a caricature of herself. Not yet, now she was merely recognizable. But in five years, ten, she would only look like herself at a distance. Up close she would be drawn and frightened. "Honestly, aren't you just trying to punish her for being a crappy parent, and not for the alleged murder?" She cracked her window with the electric button, snapped in the car's lighter, and reached into her bag for her cigarettes. "What was Barry Kolker to you anyway, some boyfriend of your mother's. She had a number of boyfriends. You couldn't have been that attached."
"He's dead," I said. "You're accusing me of being cynical?"
She put a cigarette in her mouth and the lighter popped out. She lit it, filling the car with smoke. She exhaled up toward the slit in the window. "No, it's not Kolker. You're angry with her for abandoning you. Naturally. You've led six difficult years, and like a child, you point to the almighty mother. It's her fault. The idea that she too is a victim would never occur to you."
Out the window, in the unairconditioned part of reality, a very red-faced jogger trotted by us, dragging a tired setter on a leash. "Is that what you'll say if I tell the truth at her trial?"
We watched her plodding down the sidewalk, the dog trying to sniff at the plants as they went by. "Something like that," she said, the first honest thing I'd heard her say since I'd shaken her small hand. She sighed and flicked ash out the window. Some blew back in. She brushed it off her suit. "Astrid. She may not have been some TV mom, Barbara Billingsley with her apron and pearls, but she loves you. More than you can imagine. Right now she really needs your faith in her. You should hear her, talking about you, how she worries about you, how much she wants to be with you again."
I thought again about my imaginary trip with her, the sight of her, the magic of her speech. Now I was not so sure, maybe it was true. I wanted to ask this woman what my mother said about me. I wanted to hear her tell me what my mother thought about me, but I didn't dare leave her that opening. Bobby Fischer had taught me better than that. "She'd say anything to get out."