Defense, page 25
I rolled the window part-way down. “Yes, but not for a few years.”
We came out of the park and onto Lion’s Gate Bridge, hundreds of feet above the bay. I remembered the first time I had been here, one Christmas when I was still an undergraduate, driving through the park late at night. Snow covered the bridge and for just an instant I felt as if I had driven over the edge of a cliff and was about to plunge headlong into the cold dark water below.
On the other side of the bridge we turned west and drove along a highway carved into the rocky hills that stretched along the coastline. Not quite ten miles past West Vancouver, McKeon turned off into the village of Horseshoe Bay. A double-decker car ferry was just pulling away from port, churning slowly out into the sound, at the beginning of a two-hour crossing to Vancouver Island. The upper deck was already crowded with people who had left their automobiles below and scurried up the stairs to watch in the light of a late-spring day while the wake lengthened behind them and the shoreline drew farther away.
Still driving with one hand, McKeon tapped the open end of his pipe against the metal ashtray and left it there. “This woman you’re looking for, Myrna Albright. What exactly is it she’s done?”
He had turned away from the harbor and was driving along a narrow, blacktop road that wound through the low-lying hills that jutted up from the bay a hundred feet below.
“I’m not sure she’s done anything,” I replied, with a vague sense that there was something more behind the question than the normal curiosity. “I just want to talk to her.”
“Yes, I see,” he said, his eyes on the road. “I only asked because it would be odd if she were involved in something she shouldn’t be.”
I looked across at him. “And why is that?”
“Two reasons, really. She’s quite well off and, stranger still, she must be close to seventy.”
“There’s been a mistake. Myrna Albright is at least twenty years younger, and the last time I saw her—though I admit it was ten years ago—she barely had enough money to keep herself in cigarettes and beer!”
“Yes, well, look around you,” he remarked, waving at the large houses set far back from the road. “It takes a lot more than that to live out here.”
The rugged, taciturn self-assurance which I had at first found so admirable in this former Mountie now seemed like nothing so much as willful stupidity. “Look, we’ve obviously come to the wrong place. Let’s just turn around.”
“No,” he interjected, “not the wrong place at all. There it is. Just up ahead.”
It was a bad joke. He was pointing toward a driveway that led through two stone pillars to an enormous, rambling two-story house of wood, stone, and glass, surrounded by more than an acre of manicured lawn and carefully tended trees, with nothing between it and Vancouver Island except miles of trackless sea. McKeon parked the car in the circular drive, shut off the engine, and turned to me. “It may not be who you’re looking for, but the name of the owner is Myrna Albright and this is the address Emma gave me.”
He was right of course. I had no reason to be upset with him. He had done what he had been asked to do. It was not his fault that none of it made sense.
“You mind waiting?” I asked as I opened the passenger door. “I won’t be long.”
I rang the doorbell and waited. A middle-aged woman with black curly hair opened the door. It took me a moment to realize that she was a maid. “I’m here to see Myrna Albright,” I explained.
“Is she expecting you?” she asked, her hand on the door.
“No, but I’ve come all the way from Portland, Oregon, to see her.”
“Your name, sir?”
“Joseph Antonelli.”
She turned away and shut the door in my face. I stood there, wondering how long to wait before I walked away and put an end to this useless adventure. Just as I was about to go, the door opened and, with no more enthusiasm than she had shown before, the maid told me to come in and wait. She led me into a large living room with Persian rugs scattered over a hardwood floor and windows that looked out toward the water.
“Mrs. Albright will be in presently,” the maid announced before she turned on her heel and left.
I walked over to the window and looked out. In the far distance, I could see a ferry moving slowly across the sound and wondered whether it was the one I had seen leave Horseshoe Bay.
“Mr. Antonelli?” I heard someone say behind me. It was a woman’s voice, a dry, unfriendly voice that had not often been used to make strangers feel welcome.
“Joseph Antonelli,” I said as I turned around and found myself in front of a thin, white-haired woman with sharp eyes and small, bloodless lips pressed tight together.
“I’m afraid I’m not used to having people I don’t know simply drop by, Mr. Antonelli. What is it I can do for you?”
She stood there in a plain, black dress with a gray cardigan sweater thrown over her shoulders, waiting for the first excuse to ask me to leave. I decided not to give her the chance.
“I’m sorry for the intrusion,” I said, as I walked past her. “You’re not the Myrna Albright I was looking for.”
“Did you know my daughter?” she asked as I reached the door.
“Your daughter?” I asked, turning around.
“My daughter has the same name. And I understand you’re from Portland. She lived there some years ago.”
“Oregon City?”
“Yes, I believe so. Please,” she said, “come in and sit down.”
I followed her back to the living room. We sat on a sofa in front of a large, stone fireplace. “What is it you want with my daughter, Mr. Antonelli? If you were friends, you wouldn’t have come looking for her here. You’d know where she was. Are you with the police?” she asked, the only expression on her face a shrewd glint in her pale blue eyes.
“No, I’m not with the police,” I replied. “I’m an attorney.”
A tiny smile formed at the corners of her aging mouth. “My husband was an attorney. He was one of the youngest attorneys ever called to the silk,” she said.
“I’m afraid I don’t know what that means,” I admitted.
A flash of withering contempt passed over her eyes. “It’s a very high honor,” she said impatiently, convinced my ignorance was beyond correction.
Something buried in my subconscious shot to the surface of my memory. “Your daughter wanted to be an attorney, didn’t she?” I asked before I knew what I was saying.
“Yes, but how would you know that? From the time she was a little girl. All the way through university.”
“University?” I asked, trying to hide my surprise.
“UBC. University of British Columbia. She was a very good student, until that other business,” she said, wrinkling her nose in disgust.
“What happened then?” I asked sympathetically. “After she started on narcotics?”
Forcing a smile, she folded her wrinkled hands on top of her knees. “What is it I can do for you, Mr. Antonelli? Why are you here?”
As briefly as I could, I told her about Leopold Rifkin and the murder he was accused of having committed. “The woman had a child, the child your daughter adopted.”
“Michelle. Yes, of course,” she said, raising her eyebrows. In a barely audible voice she added, “That poor child.”
“I was hoping that your daughter could tell me something about what’s happened to her.” It was not the whole truth, but it was as much of it as I was going to reveal.
Her frail shoulders drew back, her eyes opened wide in disbelief that bordered on horror, and she covered her mouth with her hand. “You don’t believe she could have killed anyone!?”
“No, I’m sure—” I started to say before I grasped what her reaction really meant. “You think it’s possible, don’t you?” I asked, staring at her. “You think she’s capable of doing something like this, don’t you?”
Perched on the edge of the sofa, her arthritic fingers hanging limp over her bony knees, the mother of the Myrna Albright I had not seen in ten years slowly shook her white-haired head. “I hope not. But after everything that was done to her, I just don’t know,” she said, biting her lip as she stared toward the window.
“You know? About all of that?” I asked tentatively.
“Oh, yes, of course,” she said, turning toward me. “My daughter told me everything. After my husband died, I asked her to come back. I went down to that god-awful place she lived in and begged her to come home! Then, when she told me about this poor child and how she felt because she hadn’t been able to help, I decided we had to do something. I was the one who insisted, Mr. Antonelli. We paid that awful woman twenty thousand dollars for her consent, and it was worth it—every penny!” she insisted fiercely.
“And she came to live here, with you and your daughter?”
“Yes,” she replied, her gaze drifting away and her voice dwindling to a whisper. “For two years, until she was seventeen.”
Leaning toward her, I asked, “What was she like?”
“When she first came here, she was in terrible shape,” she sighed, “with barely any life left in her. The first need was therapy, and, of course, we taught her to take care of herself. Most important, we gave her a place to live that was healthy, safe, with decent food and a good school nearby. That was really the most extraordinary thing! The school tested her, and it turned out she was gifted! Think of it! A child of someone as degenerate as that child’s mother and she’s born with an extraordinary intelligence!” Almost the first thing we did was to put her into an intense regimen of therapy. I’m sure it must have done some good,” she said, her eyes filled with doubt. “It certainly taught her not to be ashamed about what had happened to her.”
It caught me off guard. “Why would she be ashamed? She shouldn’t…”
“Yes, I know. It’s not that. It’s that, far from repressing it, far from having any reluctance to talk about it, she became almost obsessed with it. Michelle could become, well,” she said, trying to think of how best to describe it, “completely detached from herself. When she talked about what had happened to her, it was like listening to someone describe something they might have read about in the papers. It was all very clinical,” she added with a shudder.
“But that doesn’t explain why you think she could have killed her mother.”
“Oh,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t believe that. It’s just that after what she did to my daughter … But that wasn’t really her fault. She couldn’t have known the effect it would have. She was just a young girl.”
She had forgotten that I was a stranger, and she was talking to me now as if we were old friends and I knew everything that had happened.
“What did she do?” I asked gently.
“Oh, you know. The day after she graduated from high school, she packed a bag and said she was leaving. Just like that, as if she was checking out of a hotel. She thanked us for everything we had done, promised to write, and left,” she said, as if she had gone over it a thousand times in her mind and could still not believe it had really happened. “I gave her some money, probably shouldn’t have, but I did.”
“And did she write?”
“Yes. Twice. From Montreal. She had enrolled at McGill. We hadn’t even known she had applied. I’m afraid I took it all a lot harder than my daughter. Myrna was just grateful that she was safe and able to take care of herself. That’s what she said,” she added after a short pause, “but I think it really broke her heart.”
“I’d like to see your daughter.”
She rose from the sofa and I stood up as well. “A year after Michelle left us, Myrna went back to that other business,” she explained as she walked me toward the door. “I told her she would have to leave, that she couldn’t live here if she was going to do that sort of thing. A line has to be drawn somewhere, you know.”
She opened the door and waited until I moved past her. “I haven’t heard from her in a very long time. When I was told you were here from Portland, I thought you might be from the police, come to tell me she was dead.” She said good-bye, then looked at me as if she were trying to remember who I was.
Jack McKeon was still sitting behind the wheel of the Range Rover. He had refilled his pipe and was puffing contentedly when I opened the car door.
“Get what you needed?” he asked as we drove between the two stone pillars and headed back toward Vancouver.
“No, not really. I came up here looking for one suspect, and now I have two.”
xxi
Leopold Rifkin nodded slowly. “Yes, Myrna Albright would be a logical possibility,” he said after I told him what I had learned in Vancouver. “Yes, it makes perfectly good sense. You were right to go.”
He began to stroke his chin. “Interesting how human beings, pushed to a certain point because of some weakness they have—can sometimes react in a way that makes their weakness the source of an unusual strength,” he said, looking at me with eager eyes. “You believe she might have killed them as an act of revenge, not only because of what they had done to the child, but because of the guilt she felt over her failure to do more to help her. So, you see, she kills because she had—in her own mind at least—behaved dishonorably. This in a way would be the motive that would explain why I killed them.”
I had come straight to Rifkin’s home from the airport. It was late and I was tired. At first I was not sure I had heard him right. “Why you killed them?”
“Yes. The two motives are similar. Myrna Albright was humiliated. I was humiliated. She was forced to stand by while a terrible thing was done to a child she cared about. I was not able to do anything after Denise made a fool of me, and then, worse yet, afraid of what she might say, I helped her husband defeat justice. And if you had to choose between Myrna Albright and myself in terms of which of us is more capable of murder, surely you would have to choose me.”
Rifkin caught my attempt to suppress a smile. “You are willing to believe that this poor woman could have committed these murders, but you are not willing to believe I could? Why? Because you think I’m not capable of violence? I was in the army, you know.”
I had not known. Barely visible behind his massive desk, surrounded by the rows of book-lined shelves that spiraled up to the ceiling, staring at me with incandescent eyes, he did not look like someone who had once been a soldier in the service of his country.
“I was not much of a soldier,” he remarked with a self-deprecating shrug. “I went ashore at Normandy. Omaha Beach. I was lucky. I was wounded by artillery fire, but it was not very serious. I was out of the hospital in just a few weeks.”
That was all. A simple statement of fact. No embellishment. Nothing about the rigors of war or the horrors of violent death. He had done his duty, and for him and for the other members of his generation, there was nothing extraordinary about it.
He got to his feet. “When you called from the airport, I was just about to have something to eat. You must be hungry. Would you like to join me?”
“I had something on the plane.”
He put his small, soft hand on my shoulder. “I was just going to scramble some eggs. How bad can they be?”
I followed him into the kitchen and watched while he busied himself at the stainless steel gas stove.
“You don’t seem very worried about this,” I remarked, as I settled onto a chair at the kitchen table.
“You mean about the trial?” he asked without looking up.
I took off my suit coat, loosened my tie, leaned my head against the back of the wooden chair, and let my arms fall limp over the side. “Yes, the trial.”
He seemed not to have heard me. All his attention was concentrated on what he was doing, constantly stirring the eggs in a large cast-iron frying pan. When they were ready, he spooned most of them onto my plate, and then sat down next to me at the head of the table.
“No, I’m not worried about the trial. I have complete confidence in you, Joseph.”
With a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach, I put down my fork. It was the last thing I wanted to say, but I had to tell him. He saw the look in my eyes and knew what I was going to say while I was still struggling to find the words.
“But you’re not to worry about that,” he said with a quick, decisive smile. “A long time ago I told you I thought you won too much. Well, perhaps this is the one you will lose. And the one you should lose.”
With my hand on the arm of the chair, I sat straight up. “The one I should lose?” I asked, trying vainly to search his impenetrable eyes.
He put his hand on my arm and let it stay there. “You know the phrase, Joseph, ‘living on borrowed time?’ After you turn fifty—and for me that happened a great many years ago—certain things change.”
He let go of my arm and sat back in his chair. For a moment he seemed to forget I was even there. “Do you know,” he said, suddenly alert, “that Descartes once remarked that God had really not done a very good job, and that he, Descartes, would have done it much better. He would have given human beings full use of their reason from the beginning. God only gave them the full use of their emotions. We begin, you see, with all these powerful pushings and pullings, all these appetites: hunger, thirst, fear, desire, all the bodily things. Reason, on the other hand, is slow to develop, and for most of us remains very weak. It seldom reaches the point in any of us where it is really in control of, instead of simply in the service of, the passions.”
He stared at me for a moment, and then, slowly, his eyes still on me, he tilted his head slightly to one side and with his thin, almost flat, forefinger began to draw a circle in the air, that movement which over the years had become so familiar. “To tell you the truth, I am almost persuaded that the real purpose of human life is simply to develop your mind to the point where you not only understand that reason is the only thing that matters, but that it becomes the one thing in which you believe completely.”
After a long pause, he added: “What I am trying to tell you is that losing this case would not be the worst thing that could ever happen. When you reach my age, you really have nothing to complain about.”
