Free The Best Defense by Kate Wilhelm Page A

did not try to get any more details than Paula was giving her; that was a job for her new attorney. Obviously the police had found terrible flaws in her story, and also obviously the district attorney believed he had everything he needed to convict her. She simply listened as Paula talked.
    Toward the end of the hour and a half she spent with Paula, she did ask if Spassero had told her about the new attorney.
    “No. I haven’t seen him since Friday. Dr. Grayling told me. He said I can have my own doctor if I want, but I don’t have a doctor. Dr. Grayling has been good to me. Is he all right, to just let him be my doctor now?”
    “I think he’s fine,” Barbara said.
    Paula added to the list of things for Lucille to take from her apartment, and signed the papers. Barbara was replacing them in her briefcase when a tap sounded on the door, and the matron opened it to say, “Mr.
    Fairchild is here to see Mrs. Kennerman. Will you be much longer, Ms. Holloway?”
    “No. I’m leaving now.” Theodore Fairchild, she repeated to herself: retirement age, in the public defender office as long as she could remember, kindly, sharp in court … “Will you stay, too?” Paula asked in a hushed voice.
    “No,” Barbara said, and stood up.
    “You have to have confidence in your attorney or the case is hopeless, and you have to speak to him knowing that everything you say is protected. That isn’t true about what you say to me. I explained that before, remember? I can’t sit in on a private, confidential talk between you and your attorney.”
    “What if he agrees with the other one, that the only thing I can do is confess? What will I do then?”
    “Talk to him,” Barbara said firmly.
    “Just talk to him.
    Okay?”
    Paula nodded, and then made a visible effort to control the fear that had reappeared on her face. She closed her eyes a moment, opened them, and drew herself up straighten Her clenched hands gave her away.
    Barbara met Theodore Fairchild briefly in the corridor as he was being escorted in. They shook hands. He looked tired, she thought, older than she remembered, not quite haggard, but drawn.
    “Ms. Holloway,” he said.
    “Barbara. Always a pleasure to see you. How are you?”
    “Fine, fine. And you? And Mrs. Fairchild?” A mistake, she realized too late when a shadowed look crossed his face and his shoulders sagged momentarily.
    “I’m well, and my wife is getting along fine. Doing better all the time. I’ll tell her you asked.” He started to move away, then added, “Oh, yes. I told Bill I’d pass the word to your … that is, my client. He was given permission to oversee the case after all the preliminary work he put into it. Judge Paltz said that seemed fair.”
    He was watching her closely.
    She shrugged.
    “That’s his right. Nice seeing you.”
    She spent the next several hours in Herman Besserman’s office reading The Valley Weekly Report. She had come to the office when most of the people were out to lunch, but it seemed word had spread that she was here, and now and then someone opened the door to say hello, or just to check it out that she really had made an appearance. Her name was still included in the long list of attorneys that went down the length of the left mar gin of the official letterhead, but it was a joke, and they all knew it. She had no salary, no office, no flunky to bring her coffee…. The door opened a crack; she looked up to see Herman Besserman Bessie peering, at her curiously. She had called, asking permission to use his room, read his papers, and he had given it cheer fully, although, he had added, he wouldn’t be around until midafternoon. His eyes were like owl eyes, magnified by thick lenses, and he was as pink and roundly smooth as a baby. Stout, they said; never fat, just stout.
    But he was fat and happy with himself, with his body, with his office, and now he seemed especially happy to see Barbara at a table poring over the tabloids
    “I always say know what