Lady Afraid Read online

  She had wondered if the man would be a poseur, a martinet, a prima donna. Sometimes they were; sometimes it was that which was in them and drove them to accomplish their deeds. But yesterday she had found she understood him rather well. A man, Sarah had placed him at once, who had no predominant need for social approbation of others, a man who probably lacked insulation, who felt things rather intensely. Most was clearly one thing—he was his own man. He gave obsequiousness to no one, neither to Mr. Arbogast nor to Mr. Collins, owner of the yard, and Sarah had noticed this and admired the quiet way he managed it. She had drawn conclusions about him because of it. In general she suspected him to be oversensitized, overexposed, naked to his environment. She gave him a pattern of jagged, impatient reactions; it would be difficult for Most to wait for anything, and relaxation would come hard for him, and come only consciously.

  These were pretty deep conclusions to draw of a man. But this man was—to use Mr. Arbogast’s word again—salty; and so was she, and she could measure a salty one.

  Anyway, Mr. Arbogast was lucky to get such a one to skipper Vameric. She was surprised he had. So, for that matter, am I fortunate, Sarah reflected. A man like Most would draw the best from Vameric.

  Slowly, almost furtively, the lunchroom door opened. A shotting of rain came in. Then a man, his head drawn down into upturned coat collar.

  The newcomer’s eyes traveled the room, passing Sarah without sign. There was water spilling off the brim of his felt hat, and suddenly he swept off the hat, snapped away the water, replaced the hat, turned down his coat collar with quick thumb strokes. As suddenly, he approached Sarah.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Lineyack,” he said briskly.

  She replied, “Hello, Mr. Brill. I’d started to think you weren’t coming.”

  He shrugged. “Vile weather.”

  Her nod was slight. Rather more strongly than usual, she did not like this man. It had occurred to her that Calvin Brandeis Brill, attorney-at-law, had come to her in the beginning with this thing. Come adeptly, with so little air of soliciting this particular piece of business that for a long time she had not realized that he was out-and-out mercenary.

  “Well?” More tension than she wanted got into her voice. “Is today to be the day, or isn’t it?”

  The lawyer leaned back, took his time answering, took enough time so that she suspected him of indicating he would not be driven by her impatience.

  “Do you know the firm of Maurice and Black?” he asked.

  Sarah shook her head.

  “Private detectives,” he said.

  She looked at him blankly.

  “I’m using them,” he said. “They’re scouting the scene of operations for you. I’ll get a report from them later in the day, and you’ll need to wait for it.”

  “I wish you hadn’t done that!” she said sharply.

  His eyes grew opaque, and presently a thinness that could be contempt settled on his thin lips. “They’re not expensive.”

  “It’s not that!” Sarah retorted. “It’s just that I’d rather no one knew.” She frowned and then added gravely, “I don’t like the idea of someone I don’t know, private detectives or anyone, being told about it.”

  “Maurice and Black aren’t going to spill anything, Mrs. Lineyack. Do you know what would happen if you called them up right now? They wouldn’t know a thing about it.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t approve,” she said firmly.

  “I’m sorry, but it’s already done, Mrs. Lineyack,” Brill told her, and got up and went to the counter. He came back presently with a glass of milk and two pastry rings on a saucer. He added, “Really, Mrs. Lineyack, you’re going to do this open and aboveboard. You must make no act that the law can construe as evidence that you thought you were doing wrong. Before this is over with, we may need that point in your favor.”

  He had, she knew, defeated her with logic. She remained silent, the quality of dislike for the man strongly about her. She wished wryly that she had possessed the mental brass to double-cross him, take his idea, lay it on the desk of some lawyer she liked. Surely a congenial one could be found.

  She detested acts of sly intrigue. About to engage in such an act herself, she nonetheless was repelled by foxy ways. And this Brill was clearly an artist at furtive maneuvering. The circumstance of their acquaintance was an example: A girl Sarah knew, a girl named Lida Dunlap, who worked in Mr. Arbogast’s office, had introduced Brill to Sarah at a Biscayne Yacht Club dance. The first evening Attorney Brill had been merely conventional: he had made passes at her, had been rebuffed, and had been too sly to drop the amorous approach instantly. She remembered how gradually he had wheedled from her the story, getting the gate open for himself as it were. She was now sure that from the first he’d known who she was and had her case in mind for himself.

  But Brill had been all business once he had maneuvered into position. His next step apparently had been to impress on her that he was a good lawyer. He had practiced in Chicago until a few months ago, and he had casually presented newspaper clippings of cases Attorney Calvin Brandeis Brill had handled in Chicago. All criminal cases, she noticed. And she had thought him gaudy, like an uninhibited actor. As he was. But his brash, foxy self-confidence must have sold itself. For here she sat.

  Brill was eating wolfishly now, cramming pastry past his lips, washing it down with milk. Pastry rings, milk, vanished with repulsive speed.

  “Here’s one other thing you had better do, Mrs. Lineyack,” he said. A sugar crumb lay in his mouth corner. His tongue got it with a quick flick. “You had best leave a note.”

  “Note?” Sarah frowned.

  “Yes. Something that will clearly state, from the beginning, your legal position in the matter. Type the document if you wish, but sign it. And leave it in a conspicuous place. And you might leave more than one copy, being sure to place them where they will positively be found.”

  “You mean,” Sarah asked, “a statement of the facts?”

  “Something like that. And I would suggest that you append your address to the statement, to give a genuinely honest touch.”

  Sarah’s head came up; alarm widened her eyes. “Oh no! The Lineyacks would find me at once!”

  “They’re going to find you quick enough anyway, you know.”

  She shook her head stubbornly. “No, they won’t, not at once. Because I’m going away for a few days.”

  “Going away?” the lawyer said. “Going away?”

  “Yes.”

  “Disappear?”

  “Well—yes. For a few days.”

  Brill turned down a mouth corner briefly, said, “Not so good, Mrs. Lineyack.”

  “You’re not going to talk me out of it, Mr. Brill,” Sarah said stubbornly. “I’ve already made plans.”

  “You mean you’re set on doing that?”

  Unalterably, flatly, she replied, “Yes… I’m going to have a few days alone with the child. After those few days—well, I can face what will come then.”

  His right hand shot up, his mouth opened; in the end he did not say it, whatever it was, and his hand fell to the table. He contemplated the hand, turned it over, inspected the neat manicure, made a fist of the hand, said, “Well, if you’re that determined…” The hand became an open palm, as if it had released a bird. “I suppose it won’t look too bad,” he added.

  “Wouldn’t it help if I put in the note that I’m going away with my son?” she asked.

  “Yes, by all means. I advise that. Put it in the note you’re going to leave.”

  “I will do that, then.”

  “This disappearing you’re going to do—only for a few days, you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many days?”

  “Well… about a week.”

  “Make it a week exactly. Let’s not have any abouts,” Brill said. “Today is Thursday. Next Thursday you and the boy be back in town.”

  “Will they… then…” The words crossed like sticks in her throat.


  “Will they then let you live a normal life with your son?” Brill shrugged. His hands released the bird again. “I don’t know how normal it will be. But by that time I’ll have slammed so much law at them that they’re not going to be rambunctious. I’ll have yanked them into the juvenile division of the circuit court, demanding that they show where you consented in writing to the adoption. They can’t show that, because you say you never signed any such consent. Adoption is of purely statutory origin, and statute must be strictly complied with. The statutes of the State of Maine say the consent of parent is required except in the following cases: First, the parent is insane. Second, the parent is intemperate. It is the clear intent of the statute that there shall be no cutting off of parental relationship without consent. You weren’t insane, and you weren’t a drunk. In habeas corpus by mother, her moral fitness and financial ability cannot be questioned. That sinks them. They’re going to have a mess on their hands. Just so they’ll know it, I’m going to slap a damage suit in their faces too.”

  “I don’t want their money.”

  Brill smiled fiercely. “I do.”

  She was silent, and shortly Brill added, “You want to keep in mind the two main points. These: You’re tricking Lineyacks into showing they’re the aggressors. The persecutors. And you’re also taking the child to establish mother-love in the eyes of the court. It’s been nearly two years since they took the kid away from you, and the judge is going to wonder why you waited.”

  “But I did try to see him!” Sarah gasped.

  “Uh-huh. So you’ve said.” Brill’s eyes flicked over her casually. “But two years sounds like a long time for a mother who really wanted to see her child.”

  “Oh my God! Don’t you believe even that?” Sarah asked weakly. “I did try. They stopped me. At first they hid the boy—went away on a trip with him. And then old Ivan wouldn’t even see me. See his attorneys, he said. And the lawyers were so ugly to me. When I tried to go to the house—I did that three times—there was a man, a guard, who threatened me. And then Ivan’s lawyers called on me and told me I would be prosecuted if I didn’t stop.”

  “The point is that you haven’t seen your son for those two years. We don’t want your reasons to sound so much like excuses.”

  “But I believed they had legally—”

  “Yeah, sure. They have got a legal adoption. You figured you had no chance. Okay, we’ll try to establish that too. But you’re doing this wild thing to set up an emotional situation that is going to influence the court more than just words would.”

  Sarah nodded and said slowly, “The leave of absence from my job—I haven’t arranged that yet. But I will. This morning.”

  “I was going to remind you of that, Mrs. Lineyack. You don’t want to just disappear off your job, because that wouldn’t look good. It would seem impulsive, and we don’t want them to get the notion you’ve been a bit impulsive. If they figure you’ve had foresight, good legal advice, made sure of your rights, they’re going to stop and look before they jump on you so hard.”

  With tightening lips, a downward movement of chin, Sarah expressed bitterness.

  “They’ll jump on me,” she said grimly. “The Lineyacks will see to that.”

  Attorney Calvin Brandeis Brill crumpled his napkin and shot the soggy paper ball at the empty milk glass. It landed neatly in the glass. “We’ll knock them right off again if they do. I’m your attorney, and I’ll see to that. And don’t forget, the harder they jump on you, the more clear it’s going to be to the court that they’re stinkers and are persecuting you.”

  His confidence—foxy, brash, overassured—did not impress her at all. At the moment in great need of solidarity, firm steppingstones, she resented both the man and his implication that old Ivan Spellman Lineyack was a pushover. She knew better. She knew, indeed, a considerable terror of old Lineyack.

  “Don’t underestimate them, Mr. Brill,” Sarah said sharply. “They’re rather terrible people—where I’m concerned.”

  “They don’t scare me, Mrs. Lineyack,” Brill said.

  “You don’t know them the way I do.”

  His eyes touched her a little insolently. “Maybe that’s a good thing, Mrs. Lineyack. If I knew them the way you do, I’d be scared of them, and a scared lawyer is a licked lawyer…. By the way, there’s an old saying that what a lawyer really needs is an honest client. I even know one young attorney who seriously considered investing in a lie-detector, just to use on his clients.”

  Sarah’s head jerked up; she was not sure she caught the import of his words. Then she believed she did, and the feeling of anger, dull, flat, wooden, began coming into her cheeks. “Are you making a bad joke, Mr. Brill?” she asked.

  “Not exactly—and take it easy,” the lawyer replied. “Let’s put it this way: Do you happen to know of anything about the setup that you haven’t told me?”

  Sarah stared at him woodenly. “That sounds almost as if you were calling me a liar, Mr. Brill.”

  “Mrs. Lineyack, when I call liar, people don’t have to guess.”

  “Then what—”

  Brill grinned thinly. “Look, I’ve never heard of a client yet who liked his lawyer. So I don’t strain myself to make mine like me…. Let’s put it still another way: You have narrated facts, very heart-wrenching facts, to the effect that you were married to the only son of a couple of neurotic, unstable parents. They did not like you—by they I mean Mr. and Mrs. Ivan Spellman Lineyack, your husband’s mother and father—”

  “You call them both neurotic,” Sarah interrupted. “That’s wrong. They are nothing alike.”

  “No? Old man Lineyack is a self-aggrandized, bullheaded, cold-blooded bigot. That right?”

  “Yes, that would fit—”

  “And Alice Mildred, his wife, is withdrawn and inward, a person who absolutely can’t be reached by friendliness or anything else. An old woman so unapproachable and vague that you look at her and you begin to think of a bleeding angel. Right again?”

  “I’m not so sure about Alice Mildred—”

  “They’re neurotic for my money,” Brill said. “Those two people aren’t alike, but I’m telling you they wouldn’t stand for anyone coming into their warped, shadowy world who was a normal person—but particularly they did not like you. Because you’re human as hell, Mrs. Lineyack. You’re lively, and you’ve got as many normal human emotions as Planters has peanuts. Those two old people would hate you. And specially they would hate you because you took their perpetual Christmas tree, their godlet, their only son, away from them. You married him. They would have hated the Virgin Mary herself for that, but they hated you specially for another reason: you weren’t like them. They didn’t even understand how to love you, but they did understand how to hurt you. So when your husband was killed in a car wreck and you got smashed up yourself, they got you stuck away in a hospital in the state of Massachusetts. Then, in the state of Maine, serving you by publication, they alleged you were a drunk and got the boy away from you. Being in Massachusetts, you never saw the published notice in the Maine paper. That’s a common gag, that notice by publication. You want to do something to somebody in court, so you make a statement their whereabouts is unknown, prove it by a letter you mailed to some address and got back marked addressee unknown, then you slap a two-inch legal notice in some jerk paper nobody ever reads. They do that. Then they make you think they got the boy legally—why not; they’ve got the legal paper now, big as anything—and they’ve never let you see him since, and you still thought it was legal until you met me—and I discovered what they did to you. And I know we can get that adoption hauled up for examination, and they’re going to have their hands full proving you were a drunk when you were in a hospital getting hospital care, and not for alcoholism, either…. That’s the story, Mrs. Lineyack, the facts as you’ve given them to me.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “No buts about it, Mrs. Lineyack,” Brill said. “Either that’s the facts or you’d better tel
l me otherwise.”

  Sarah stared at the lawyer and the flames of her anger grew blue-tipped with heat. “You’ve investigated the records of the inquest over the automobile crash that caused my husband’s death! You should know the facts.”

  His thin grin came, left. “The point is this: You take a baby from its nursery. You disappear. I’m your lawyer—moreover, I’m the one who advised you it was the thing to do, the quick way. Take the kid—let Mr. and Mrs. Ivan Spellman Lineyack do the yelling. You’ve put the monkey on their back. As your lawyer, I told you to grab the boy. I’m right. But I’m right only as far as you told me the truth, and if you didn’t tell me the truth, where do you think that puts me? Up the creek, that’s where. And I’d hate to tell you how far up that creek too.”

  Despair in Sarah was a thin, high thing, like a harp string wailing. “I haven’t lied,” she gasped. “They have Jonnie, and he’s my son, my soul, the only thing I want—”

  Coldly, emotionlessly, the lawyer put in, “Sure, I know it’s tough for you.”

  He struck back his left coat cuff; there was a yellow gold watch held to his wrist by a gold-link band; he consulted it for the time.

  “All right, I believe you,” he added. “You put it in the note that I’m your attorney. Put in my name, office address. Got it?”

  “Yes, I will do that.”

  Brill slid his chair from the table, arose. “Remember that Maurice and Black, the detectives, have got to case the Lineyack joint for you. So wait until I have their report. I’ll telephone you—probably sometime this afternoon.”

  Now quite dry of words, Sarah nodded.

  “I just wanted to point out to you, Mrs. Lineyack, that this can be just one of two things—either it’s legal or it’s not. And if it’s not, I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.”