Summitt

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Early the next morning Selby drove Shana into East Chester. Brett had asked them to come to her office before court convened; she needed the time to prepare Shana for Dr. Clemens’s probable inferences and conclusions.

But when they arrived Brett’s secretary told Selby there was a call for him from Senator Dixon Lester’s office in Washington. He took it in Brett’s reception room.

“Mr. Selby? Mr. Harry Selby? I’m Victoria Kim, Senator Lester’s staff coordinator. Do you have a moment to talk, Mr. Selby?” Her voice was full of energy, and flat with an unmistakable midwestern accent. Without waiting for his answer she said, “We’ve been monitoring the Earl Thomson trial as a matter of course, Mr. Selby. The senator’s committee has an ongoing investigation that includes George Thomson.”

“Yes, I’ve read about that.”

“Our interest in the trial was routine until yesterday when the defense introduced the transcript of the Jonas Selby court-martial. That shifted the emphasis from a local defense of Earl Thomson to a personal attack against you and your late father. I sent off a record of that testimony by jet courier to Senator Lester last night. The senator’s in Belgium presently. He called later to ask if you’d meet with him and discuss this development.”

“What ‘development’? I’m not sure I understand—”

“Has the defense offered you any inducement to drop the charges?”

“You mean some kind of bribe, a payoff?”

“Mr. Selby” — her voice sharpened with impatience — “I can make the eleven a.m. shuttle flight to Philadelphia. We have a suite at the Hamilton on the Fairmount Parkway. Do you know the Hamilton?”

“Yes.”

“Would it be possible for you to meet me there, about twelve-thirty this afternoon?”

“Miss Kim, I’m on my way to court for the morning’s hearings. I didn’t know anything about the committee’s interest in this trial or in my father’s court-martial. I was never able to get a copy of that transcript myself, as you may know. But the defense had no trouble getting it, and it seems you didn’t either.”

“I’m sorry if I’ve caught you at a bad time, Mr. Selby. I can’t discuss this on the phone, but I do urge you to cooperate. If the Hamilton isn’t convenient, I’ll meet anywhere you suggest.”

“No, the Hamilton’s fine.” Selby looked at his watch, then said, “Miss Kim, I need help. I’m willing to trade for it. If you understand and agree to that, I’ll see you around twelve-thirty.”

“Can you give me an idea what you’d have to trade, Mr. Selby?”

“I’ll bring it with me.”

After hanging up, he returned to Brett’s office and explained that he was driving over to Philadelphia but would try to be back as soon as possible after his meeting with the senator’s assistant. He gave Shana a kiss, nodded to Brett and headed for the elevators.

When court convened at ten o’clock, Counselor Davic addressed this question to the defense expert witness, Dr. Leslie Clemens.

“In your monograph, Doctor, which appeared last February in the Psychiatric Review, you used the terms ‘victim-signal’ and ‘victim-language.’ You also stated that in assault and rape cases, some victims are, in fact, crying out not for help but for abuse and humiliation. Would you explain these concepts more fully to the court, Dr. Clemens?”

“I’ll try. Studies of sexual pathology contain case histories characterized by these so-called victim-signals. In my article I was referring to body language and facial expressions, combined with certain clothing and terrain by which women advertise their availability as willing partners in unconventional erotic activities.”

To the intent jury and spectators, Dr. Leslie Clemens was drawing — under Davic’s questioning — a portrait of a specific class of female with whom the plaintiff, Shana Selby, might logically be identified.

“At first glance,” the doctor continued, “the signals may seem artless or even unconscious, but the literature of abnormal sexual tendencies, not to mention plain commonsense, tell us these advertisements, these sexual alerts are more often than not deliberately and cleverly planned.”

Dr. Clemens adjusted his cuffs and shifted his position on the witness stand to more effectively keep in view the jurors. “I have examined Miss Selby on three separate occasions. Each interview lasted an hour or more. I’d like to state that my judgments fall only within the parameters of probability, but my conclusions are supported by numerous accounts of sexual dysfunction that I am familiar with as a physician and which, in certain instances, I myself have authored...”

Tall and slender with short brown hair, graying in patches above rather knobby ears, Dr. Clemens, except for a head somewhat larger below those ears than above — cheekbones and jaw more prominent than temples and forehead — was handsome, with pleasant, if somewhat formal manners.

He went on to explain that the death of Shana’s mother, coinciding with Shana’s own onset of adolescence, and burgeoning womanhood, had surely been a traumatizing blow to the young girl... A causal relationship was very common in such situations. When a mother’s death occurred at the time of a daughter’s passage into sexual maturity, that new sense of life that otherwise might be so welcome became a guilty burden. A kind of rebuke to the dead mother, causing and reinforcing feelings of responsibility for her death. Such daughters tended to feel they had stolen this precious gift, the power to conceive and nurture life, from the departed mother. Now Shana Selby had experienced her first menstrual period just one month after her mother’s death. Studies of sexual disorders ranged extensively over this specific subject — the theft-association between the approach of menses and the death of a maternal parent. In such situations it would be unlikely that a daughter could enter into sexual relationships in a normal manner, since a pleasurable experience might be an unbearably guilty reminder, to her, of what she had presumably stolen... Such bruised psyches tended to take refuge from their sexual desires — which they often found punitively keen and insatiable — by retreating into emotional connections with idealized, unavailable figures — or into other fantasy worlds where their sexual drives might be internalized. But at other times such damaged young females might deliberately place themselves in jeopardy situations and send out victim-signals to alert males to their presence, availability, thereby provoking attention, aggression, and even sexual attacks. This way they could at once satisfy and be punished for their sexual drives, which at the onset of menses would be straining powerfully. They might well encourage a chance male to molest them, to abuse and assault them, even to commit rape on them but — crucial to their simultaneous need for a virginal self-image — they would insist that they had been forced into those acts against their wills.

At this point Davic asked Clemens to be more specific about the victim-signals.

The vocabulary of this system of communications, Dr. Clemens said, was clear and extensive, although it couldn’t always be interpreted accurately, especially by understandably protective relatives and parents.

The doctor commenced to tick them off on his fingers... jeans, tight, constricting jeans were obvious. Belts made of leather and ropes and chains were another, pulled painfully tight across creased and sucked-in stomachs. Wedged soles that made running (flight) impossible, foot gear with thongs and straps binding ankles and calves in painful cincture, all were potential “advisers” to the stalking male, signaled a willingness to participate in a kind of bondage. Any female who permitted herself to be tied up and gagged — no easy matter without at least a certain unconscious cooperation or submission from the so-called victim — was very possibly signaling her readiness to accept not only sadistic sex but other humiliating punishment that her, in effect, invited guest might want to inflict...

Under Davic’s prompting, Dr. Clemens gave as further examples women who exercised “in brief attire” in front of undraped windows, used washing machines in basement laundry rooms or public laundromats late at night because they had supposedly forgotten or postponed that chore during the day, loitered in poorly lit stacks in public libraries, allowed their cars to run out of gas on deserted highways or turnpikes, or hitchhiked along such highways... or rode a bicycle at dusk on lonely country roads, even short distances from their homes...

A pause as Davic looked at Shana, and then at the jury.

These were not accidents, Dr. Clemens said... no, they were contrived situations in which the elements of seduction were gathered together with premeditation — subconscious or not — in a place favorable to sexual combustion, just as if paper and dry twigs and kindling had been piled high and splashed with flammable liquids, needing only the single chance spark to set them off...

At that point Counselor Davic thanked his witness and announced to the bench that he had no further questions. With a pleasant smile he addressed Dorcas Brett with an old-fashioned legal phrase, “The People may inquire if they so wish.” Then he sat down at the defense table.

Brett’s face was white with anger. She stood up and said, “The People certainly intend to inquire, Mr. Davic. We will examine the expert witness and his novel speculations. We—”

Judge Flood interrupted with a glance at the wall clock. “If it’s agreeable, Miss Brett, and to you, Mr. Davic, I think tempers might cool over a recess for lunch.”

Victoria Kim was a striking Eurasian in her early thirties, Selby judged, with a narrow, elegant face and graceful hands. Her clothing and eyes heightened her exotic appearance; a slim pink cashmere suit, heavy coral bracelets. Her eyes were dramatically emphasized with blue eyeliner and a velvet sheen of mascara on her thick lashes.

They met in a suite with a view of the river and its sculling boathouses. A suede coat and pieces of matching luggage were in the adjoining bedroom. After they introduced themselves, Miss Kim lifted a receiver and dialed room service. “Would you like coffee and sandwiches, Mr. Selby, or something to drink and a decent lunch?”

“Just the coffee, thanks,” Selby said. He hadn’t been eating regularly, and while he was hungry he couldn’t rid himself of a vague suspicion that he might be accepting hospitality in the camp of the enemy. There had been so many evasions and lies to this point that he accepted a sense of paranoia as his only practical defense against them. If you didn’t suspect that the pulling guards had homicidal designs on you there would be no need for face guards and helmets.

Selby unwrapped the package that contained his father’s diaries and placed the weathered notebooks on a coffee table.

After explaining how they had come into his possession, he said, “As far as I know, Miss Kim, no one has seen these but my father and the lawyer in Truckee, California. I took them to Summitt City but never had a chance to show them to Jarrell. This is my part of the trade. Now here’s what I’d like in return...”

Her smooth oval face and dramatic eyes remained impassive as she listened. Then, in her incongruous idiom and accent, she said, “Hell, that’s no problem, no sweat at all, Selby. There’s nothing like a call from a senator’s office to lubricate the bureaucracy.”

Dialing Senator Lester’s office in Washington, she tapped a narrow suede pump impatiently. As she waited she told Selby the senator would be joining them later; he was flying in from Brussels and a car would pick him up at the Philadelphia airport... To someone named George in the senator’s office, she said, “Call Albany right now and get hold of Bill Touhy. He’s chief of the section that bonds and licenses private eyes, armed couriers and so forth. I want everything he’s got on two investigators. Here’s their names. Aron and Ben Cadle.” She spelled the last name carefully. “Got it? They’re believed to be in the Philadelphia area and may be undercover using aliases. Find out where they’re staying, who they’re working for, what they’re driving, leased or personal, everything. And George... tell Bill Touhy that Senator Lester is personally interested. It’s urgent.”

A knock sounded and Miss Kim opened the door to a white-jacketed waiter who pushed in a service cart. She signed the check, and when the waiter left she lifted the silver cover from the small sandwich tray, saying, “It’s Kim, or Vickie, if you like, Mr. Selby. Victoria was my grandmother’s name. She was born in Hong Kong and married a Brit who ran a souvenir shop and sold tons of Empress Victoria dolls to cockney sailors. I grew up in Evanston, Illinois, and was a cheerleader at Northwestern, pom-poms and all.”

She poured their coffee, excused herself with a smile and began to look through Jonas Selby’s diaries. Her dramatic eyes reminded him of clicking camera shutters; they embraced a page at a time, apparently fixing in her mind the words with one sweeping glance.

“We’re already in the picture on a good bit of this, Mr. Selby.” She closed the books and sipped her coffee. “The major, who is George Thomson, of course, the court-martial and the chief, who was — and is — General Adam Taggart. The railroad names and songs seem like grace notes, a kind of lonely poetry but don’t mean much to us... So, why do you think the defense introduced your father’s court-martial into your daughter’s trial? That’s what our deal is about, right?”

“To influence the jury — that’s logical, isn’t it? To convince them I’m out to nail Thomson for something done to my father by his father... something that has nothing to do with the attack on my daughter.”

“But just to save Earl Thomson’s sweet buns?” Kim sipped her coffee. “Somehow I doubt it. There s an old Chinese saying, Mr. Selby, which goes... ‘If a piece of paper gets dragged into a courtroom, two teams of oxen can’t drag it out.’ ”

Frowning, she put down her cup. “So why Davic would use K.S. 36663864 still beats me. But let’s get to our deal.”

Settling back on the couch, she tucked her legs under her. “Before the senator gets here I can tell you this much from what we’ve pieced together from the records, some letters and from telephone conversations Senator Lester had with your father. Jonas Selby served his five-year sentence in Seoul, then was transferred to a rehab center in Colorado. That wasn’t done by the book. He’d received a dishonorable discharge and wasn’t entitled to further army treatment. But somebody needed to keep him under surveillance.”

“In other words, he was a prisoner those additional years.”

“Technically, yes... Please hear me out. When he left Boulder, your father moved about and finally settled in Truckee. He was married by then, Jarrell was a young child. His wife, Rita, died about thirteen years ago. Jonas Selby, ill or not, or whatever he was, saw your brother through highschool and into college.”

She studied him with her remarkably vivid eyes. “Which brings me to an important question. When were you last in touch with Jarrell?”

Selby told her about the call from the motel in Quinton, New Jersey. Kim made a note on a pad.

“But you didn’t actually talk to him?”

“No.”

“Then anyone could have called and given that message to your housekeeper?”

“That’s true.”

“She wouldn’t have recognized his voice?”

“No. But I want to know why you’re interested in my family now. You weren’t there when my father needed you. You saw that in his diaries. He wanted help the night he was killed. Where was Lester then, and the other elements that are supposed to lubricate the bureaucracy?”

“Mr. Selby, we aren’t adversaries.” She chose her words carefully. “Please believe me. But I can only tell you what I’m allowed to by security restrictions. The senator has considerably more leeway. Your father trusted Senator Lester. Jonas Selby realized, eventually, that he’d been the victim of a rigged court-martial, and the reason was that he was a cog in something too complex for him to understand. He got in touch with Senator Lester by pure coincidence, if you believe in such things. Living alone in Truckee, he happened to watch a network television show that exposed certain U.S. Army experiments with LSD on unwilling, unknowing military subjects. A black sergeant, it was demonstrated, had had his head turned into a psychedelic merry-go-round by chemicals added to his food. Your father realized then that his brain had been scrambled in some similar way in Korea, and in Colorado, accounting for his lapses of memory, his failure to defend himself, even to understand the charges. He wrote to the network. His letter was forwarded to the late Senator Mark Rowan’s committee, where it was tucked away in an inoperative file. Senator Lester didn’t see that letter, and the two that followed, until after Rowan’s death when Lester succeeded him. A secretary found the file when they were changing offices. Lester immediately phoned your father, who told him he could cite names, dates and specific instances of illegal use of drugs on captured South Korean soldiers.

“They arranged a meeting to put those charges on tape. One week before that meeting, your father was shot to death in his cabin by so-called prowlers.”

At which point in her chilling narrative Senator Lester arrived, accompanied by a bellhop toting his luggage. Tired and travel-worn, the senator looked smaller than he did on television; the camera emphasized his high coloring, his square jaws and the military brace of his shoulders. Now he seemed slight if trim alongside Selby. Strands of gray-black hair fell across his forehead. His deeply set eyes were shadowed with fatigue.

He asked Miss Kim for a Scotch and tossed his topcoat over a chair. Excusing himself, and carrying his drink, he went into the bedroom with his aide and closed the door.

When the senator returned moments later he had freshened himself, brushed his hair and changed into slippers and a loose cardigan sweater. “Fourteen hours from Brussels to London to Philadelphia. I’m beat, Mr. Selby. Jet lag is winding up with the common cold on the list of things we can’t do much about. Thanks for coming over here to talk to us. I know you’ve got demands on your own time.”

His eyes turned to the stack of diaries on the coffee table. “Your father never mentioned these to me. We’ll have a close look at them, you can be sure. In a case like this any lead can pay off. It’s pretty difficult to say in advance what a so-called reliable source will turn out to be.”

An urgency in Lester’s manner communicated itself to Selby; it sounded in his husky voice and animated his distracted gestures. He held up his glass. “A tad more water, Vickie. I didn’t eat since Brussels, a straight whiskey would put me away

An investigation like mine, Selby, attracts tipsters, informers, vindictive gossip, people with grudges, ex-wives, power-brokers in Intelligence... Who was Deep Throat, for instance? What’s a highly placed official? Who are those people the press and TV quote like Holy Writ? Cleaning women selling shredded papers to Jack Anderson? A maintenance man eavesdropping in an elevator? But your father was an authentic source, Selby. He was a living example of what they’d done.”

The senator settled back and put his slippered feet on a stool. He rubbed his forehead. “Vickie, would you order me something light. A steak sandwich and a salad would be nice... Mr. Selby, we’ve run a quick check on you. Miss Kim tells me you never had any direct contact with your father. Unless there’s something in his diaries Vickie missed, this could be another dead end, one more lead that didn’t pay off. Still, I’m grateful for your cooperation... Now tell me this. When you were in Summitt City last October you met a friend of your brother’s, a girl named Jennifer, a model or photographer, something like that. Have you had any further contact with her? Vickie tells me there was one ambiguous phone call from Jarrell. Could have been anyone, for that matter. But I’m wondering if you’ve heard anything from that girl?”

“You also must be wondering,” Selby said, “about what I’m wondering about.”

“How we knew about this Jennifer in the first place? That what you’re thinking? As I told you, Selby, a case like this has an effect on information like a magnet on metal filings. Things can come flying in from everywhere. But you’re entitled to more than that kind of bullshit, pardon my pidgin French, Vickie. We’ve got an agent undercover in Summitt City, have had since we started looking into Harlequin. A routine procedure. Never mind whether it’s a he or a she — it’s our source for your brother’s friend. But we don’t have much. So I’m curious about her, thought you might know something.”

“Sorry I can’t be helpful—”

“You don’t know anything more about her?”

“No.”

“Did she mention how she met your brother?”

“Said something about a disco party, they met, started talking.”

“Your brother tell you anything else about her? How she happened to be there that particular weekend, for instance?”

Selby said no. He’d been trained, it occurred to him, to stand for the national anthem, to regard pretty cheerleaders waving pom-poms on sunny fall afternoons as the quintessence of healthy and innocent American values, and, it followed, to trust members of the United States Senate. But it struck him that Senator Lester was not being altogether truthful with him. Why all this curiosity about Jennifer? Why so little, really, about Jarrell, or Harlequin, which they were supposed to be investigating? He had been told — by the senator and Miss Kim — a judiciously edited story... They also hadn’t revealed what Jerry Goldbirn had found out in an unofficial inquiry, that Jennifer’s last name was Easton, that she lived at an expensive address in New York on Sutton Place South and had an unlisted phone protected by a high priority seal. Such basic information had to be available to anyone with Senator Lester’s contacts. If they were keeping their own counsel on those matters, Selby would keep his.

“If your check on me was as thorough as I imagine it was,” Selby said, “you’ll understand I’ve got to be back in East Chester this afternoon.” He stood and picked up his coat. “So you’ll both have to excuse me now. Thanks for the coffee, Miss Kim.”