Fools Rush In

1

On the drive over, I decided to leave it in the hands of the gods.

If Richie Neville’s cabin door was unlocked, I’d go inside. If not, I’d turn right around in my red Ford ragtop and head back to my office. I wouldn’t pick his lock, as I’d considered doing. State bars frown on lawyers who work night jobs as felons.

Neville lived just outside the city limits of Black River Falls, which, in this August of 1963, had reached 37,000 in population, thanks to an influx of young marrieds who looked upon us as a suburb equidistant from Cedar Rapids and Iowa City.

God had just flipped the switch and filled the early evening sky with stars. The stretch of river to my right was serving as a racetrack for speedboats, and on the far shore, among the moonglow birches, you could see campfires — hot dogs and s’mores and portable radios bursting with rock and roll — and in the ragged piney hills above, a freight train rattling through the prairie night.

Too good a night to risk my primary career as an attorney and my secondary career as a private investigator for the court of Judge Esme Anne Whitney.

But something ugly was going on, and it was that very same Judge Whitney, who was also risking some serious legal trouble of her own, who’d convinced me that we both had to put a stop to it now.

For ten minutes I traveled a narrow gravel lane, and then I descended into a wooded hollow that smelled of loam and skunk and apple blossoms.

I pulled the ragtop off the road and stashed it behind a copse of hardwoods.

The rest of the trip would be on foot.

“You mean her Negro boyfriend?”

“Yes, McCain, I mean her Negro boyfriend. His name is David Leeds.”

We were in her courthouse office. This was about an hour before I left for the cabin. Thunder booming. Rain slashing the mullioned windows. And Her Honor, perched on the edge of her desk, shooting rubber bands at me and hitting me every other time or so.

She had a small box of the damned things on one side of her, and on the other side she had a snifter of brandy. Someday, years from now, when I was dying from a terminal illness and nothing mattered anymore, I’d find the courage to tell her about an organization called AA.

She tamped herself another smoke from her blue packet of Gauloise cigarettes. She was a good-looking woman in her early sixties. She escaped to New York whenever possible and that showed in the cut of the designer suits she favored and the faintly snotty way she dealt with plebeians such as me.

“Do a lot of people know about it?”

“They stay in Iowa City most of the time, thank God. He’s in school there. But it’s bound to get around. That’s the first problem.”

“Well, she’s what, twenty, twenty-one? It’s sort of up to her, isn’t it?”

“Why don’t you just call me a bigot and get it over with?”

I smiled. “I was saving that for later, Judge.”

“The fact is, I’m not a bigot at all. I merely want to see Senator Williams get reelected. And since he’s a Republican, I’m sure you’re more than happy about his daughter seeing a Negro.”

She hooked another rubber band to her thumb and finger and let fly. It struck my small Irish nose and bounced off.

“I’ve never met Leeds. But I guess he’s very bright. He’s in law school, I understand.”

“He’s a Negro. A very handsome young man of twenty-one, I’m told, but a Negro nonetheless. And I say that with no prejudice whatsoever. You’ll remember that it was my party, the Republicans, that freed the slaves.”

“Oh, I already knew you weren’t a bigot. You have a Negro gardener, a Negro horse groomer, and a Negro maid.”

“I know you’re being sarcastic, McCain, but that’s just because your party didn’t free the slaves.”

There were several hundred arguments that came to mind but they’d be lost on her.

“So what we have,” I said, “is a semipopular Republican senator in a tight reelection race this coming fall who doesn’t want it known that his innocent young white daughter is dating a Negro.”

She eased off the edge of her desk and walked over to one of the long windows, where she looked out at the wind-lashed summer trees. The rain tormented the glass. She held her elbow in the palm of her right hand and smoked with her left. I saw a watery portrait of her in the dark pane.

“You know what people see on television every night on the news, McCain. All these civil rights marches. All these threats those people make. Everything was fine a few years ago. I just don’t know what happened. Anyway, most people are already stirred up by everything they see on the evening news. And if it were to be known that their beloved senator — and he is beloved no matter what you say, McCain — if they knew that the daughter of their beloved senator — a very beautiful young girl who has had every advantage a wealthy father could possibly have given her — if they knew that she threw everything away, including propriety and moral values... well, how could they ever vote for him?”

Now I got up, grabbed a bunch of her rubber bands, and walked over by the window. I began firing them at her from the side.

“So let me understand this, Judge. When you see all those impoverished people who haven’t been able to vote or find decent jobs or send their kids to decent schools or do anything about all the police brutality generation after generation — it irritates you?”

She picked a rubber band from her hair and said, “Nobody has the right to break the law and march in the streets without a permit.”

I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my laughter. “I’m glad you weren’t one of Lincoln’s advisers. He never would’ve gotten rid of slavery. And if you shoot one more rubber band at me, I’ll start charging you a buck for every time you hit me.”

She was mad and so was I. Most of the time our arguments had to do with her snobbery. She was, to her credit, able to rise above most of her prejudices in her courtroom. But when she wasn’t in her judicial robes, she reverted to the coddled, cuddled old-money imperialist she usually was.

The arguments rarely got personal. This one was different. How could you see the shacks the marchers lived in, the degradation they had to put up with every day of their lives, and not in some way share their grief? How could you possibly watch the freedom marchers and not see how righteous they were in their simple but profound demands?

Who gave a shit about parade permits?

“But that isn’t all, McCain.”

“Oh?”

“Pick up the gray envelope on my desk.”

I did so. There were photos inside of Lucy Williams and her boyfriend. Not dirty photos. If Lucy Williams and David Leeds had both been white or both been black, there’d have been no problem. Walking across the U of Iowa campus, his arm around her. Sitting on the same side of a restaurant booth. Her sitting on the handlebars while he was pedaling.

Innocent pictures. Two clean-cut, nice-looking young people in love.

“I see what you’re talking about. Some people’ll be offended by these, but they’re really innocuous.”

“These were sent to the party office in Des Moines. Imagine if they made it into a newspaper.” Then she said: “You once had a client named Richie Neville.”

Maybe I was as slow as the judge frequently accused me of being. I didn’t connect Neville to the photos until I remembered that he was a photographer now. When I’d represented him as a teenager he’d been nothing more than a harmless, garden-variety punk who’d gotten in juvie trouble in Chicago and had been shipped out here by his parents to live with his overly devout aunt.

“You’re kind of jumping to conclusions, aren’t you?”

“The senator’s wife said she is sure she saw him two or three times driving past their house.”

“How does she even know him?”

“He did yard work for them a few times. And now he’s a photographer.”

“Well, gosh, let’s go lynch him then, since we’ve got such solid evidence against him.”

“You’re being ridiculous as usual, McCain. But I’ll bet we could learn a lot by getting into his darkroom.”

“You’re ordering me to break the law?”

She had such a serene smile. “I’m not ordering you to do anything, McCain.” The smile grew richer, deeper. “I’m just saying that if somebody were to be in the vicinity of Mr. Neville’s cabin...”

The river sparkled in the moonlight. The rain had ended and all the foliage gleamed. Above me a raccoon was placing calls to other raccoons in a loud and endearing voice. The pines on both sides of the small, tidy cabin smelled sweet as a summer morning.

The raccoon was still jabbering as I surveyed the place. The exterior of the cabin was brown-painted sheets of plywood. A large window had been cut into the front of it, exposing the darkened interior.

Somebody, probably during one of Richie’s notorious parties, had torn the door off the outhouse. Nobody was sitting in there reading Playboy in the dark.

Night birds and the sad solemn cry of an owl. The raccoon had fallen into a peeved silence. Screw them if they didn’t want to answer back.

I wanted to make sure that nobody was around before I approached the door. It looked safe. I walked through the grassy space that served as yard. Before I touched anything, I slipped on the brown cotton gardening gloves I’d bought earlier at the A&P. Not for nothing was I a reader of hard-boiled paperbacks.

Despite the cool night breeze that carried the smell of pine, I felt myself sweating. Something was wrong here. I’d learned never to make assumptions, but I couldn’t ignore the subconscious warning signals my body was sending me.

I reminded myself of my earlier decision. If the door was locked, I wouldn’t go in. And I was assuming the door would be locked, what with all the expensive photography equipment inside.

I stabbed a finger at a piece of mid-level door and damned if the pine slab didn’t swing inward.

The gods had decided.

Before going in, I played the light across the first few feet of scuffed and cracked linoleum inside. No evidence of blood.

I went in and played the beam across the destruction that somebody pretty angry had left behind. Neville’s cabin was usually orderly. I’d done some legal work for him and he’d let me fish off his small pier. But the cabin was orderly no longer.

Neville’s pride was his collection of blues records from the thirties and forties. Seventy-eight rpms and forty-fives, flung, broken, and smashed, lying across the debris that had once been a couch. A stuffed armchair, a nine-inch TV, as well as books, magazines, ashtrays, beer cans, Pepsi bottles, and smashed framed photos that had probably meant something to Neville littered the floor.

You always see rooms tossed on the silver screen. What you don’t get is the violence of it, the jagged pieces of glass, the splintered thrusts of wood, and the stench of various liquids mixed together.

The beam revealed the chaos that extended from inside the front door to Neville’s “church,” as he called it. His darkroom. He was a local photographer of weddings, rodeos, and various civic and cultural events. People admired his work and he was always in demand.

I worked my leery way across the cabin, stumbling here, tripping there. The darkroom ran the length of the far wall. The door stood open.

The darkroom was more of a mess than the living area. An enlarger, a print washer, a print dryer, several lenses, a negative carrier, pans, and numerous other darkroom fixtures had been hurled to the floor. The chemical stench filled my nostrils.

Time to get out of here.

I’d just about worked my way across the rubble to the front door when car headlights swept across the front of the cabin.

Company had arrived.

The slight man who emerged from the white Valiant sedan was maybe thirty. He was dressed in the kind of tight dark suit you saw in dance clubs where everybody did the twist — the slash pockets, the pegged pants, and the porkpie hat that the better grade of Chicago hood was wearing this year — and he was altogether as sleek as a stiletto.

But the shades were the startling part of his ensemble. Who the hell wore sunglasses out in the country at night? He leaned in through the open car window and doused his lights and cut off the engine. But he left the shades on.

I stayed inside, hiding. I wanted to see who he was and why he was here. This time when I took a quick look out the window, I saw he’d added one more piece to his outfit. A .45 that he’d just slid out of a shoulder holster.

This was Black River Falls, Iowa, where the worst violence we generally have is limited to high school kids getting into shoving matches after football games with fans of rival teams and engaging in that favorite working-class pastime, bar fights.

A gun?

I decided to step into the door frame rather than wait for him in here. Scare him less than if I was lurking inside the cabin.

I held up the badge I got as a court investigator. “I need you to identify yourself.”

“Shit,” he said.

He was turning and running back to his car before I was able to speak even one more syllable.

He ground the ignition key until the motor exploded into life and then he backed up like a bullet, never turning the lights on. His tires found the gravel road and he fishtailed away with his porkpie hat, and the .45 I doubted he had the legal right to carry. I took my nickel notebook from my back pocket and wrote down the number of his Illinois plates.

I was walking to my car when I heard the whimpering in a wooded area west of the cabin. A dog. I remembered Neville’s beautiful little border collie. Princess had one of those sweet faces that you want to carry in your wallet for emergencies. When the blues get bad, her face could help you get through.

The wooded patch was so dark I couldn’t see anything resembling a path. I let her voice guide me into maybe three feet of undergrowth and then into the woods itself. A half dozen creatures crashed away from me in the bramble. Princess’s whimpering never wavered.

The mournful sound of it scared me. I was afraid of what her voice was leading me to.

And it turned out my instinct was right. I had a damn good reason to be afraid.

2

“This must be Lucy’s boyfriend,” Police Chief Cliffie Sykes said after arriving at Neville’s cabin. “The Negro kid who was seeing Lucy Williams.” He raised his flashlight high enough so that the edge of the beam washed across my face. “Or didn’t you think I knew about that? I bet the judge and the senator sure didn’t want that to get around.”

It’s hard to say which of us Cliffie hates worse, the judge or me. Probably Judge Whitney because he knows that she represents all he and his kin will never be — intelligent, reasonably open-minded, and eager to serve the greater good, the latter stemming not from virtue so much as simple patrician obligation. The best dukes always took care of the peasants.

This particular branch of the Whitney family fled New York due to a bank scandal created by the judge’s grandfather. They came to what was little more than a hamlet and created the town of Black River Falls. They frequently took the train back to New York for a few weeks at a time. I imagine they needed respite from the yokels, my people. Various Whitneys served in all the meaningful town and county offices and ruled, for the most part, wisely and honestly.

But then the Sykes family made a fortune after winning some government construction contracts. They were rich and dangerous. And they moved fast. Before anybody quite understood what was going on, the Sykeses had planted their own kin in most of the important political offices. Within two election cycles all that was left of the Whitney clan was the judge’s office.

She hired me for a simple reason. She wanted to do her best to humiliate Cliffie. Whenever a major crime occurred, she put me on the case. After law school I’d gone back and taken night-school courses in criminology and police science, something, it is safe to say, that neither Cliffie nor his hapless staff had ever done.

We usually identified the culprit — bank robber, burglar, arsonist, and the occasional murderer — before Cliffie did. And thus the animus.

“Somebody had it in for these two,” Cliffie said.

About that, he wasn’t wrong. I’d found two bodies in the woods, Neville and the Negro whose name, Cliffie assured me, was David Leeds. Neville had been shot in the face twice. Leeds had been shot in the neck.

A voice from behind us said: “You think he was sleeping with her, Chief?”

The one and only Deputy Earle Whitmore, who said, on local radio, that if “those freedom marchers ever come up here,” he wouldn’t just use dogs and water hoses, he’d turn poison gas on them. Even for Cliffie that had been a bit much. Earle the Pearl had been forced to apologize to “the law-abidin’ colored people of Black River Falls who know to not stir up no trouble lessen they get trouble right back.” Probably not the apology Cliffie had in mind but it was better than the threat of poison gas.

“I just hate the idea of a colored man gettin’ together with a white gal,” Earle went on. “Makes me just want to go over to them bushes and puke my guts out.”

“Straight from the KKK handbook,” I said.

“Watch your mouth, Earle,” Cliffie said, “or McCain here’ll run and tell everybody what you said.”

“Can’t a man speak his mind?”

“Earle, goddammit, shut up — and I mean it.”

A few months ago Cliffie, in an act of true bravery, had hauled two people from a burning car. He not only got written up admiringly by Stan at the paper, he’d even been interviewed on television. Even though most people still thought him incompetent as a police chief, they no longer laughed about him as a joke. The way he was treating Earle tonight indicated that he was enjoying his well-earned admiration.

“In fact, Earle, go back there and direct some of that traffic that’s comin’ in here all of a sudden.”

Earle stomped away, angry.

“You better watch yourself around him,” Cliffie said. “He don’t like you much.”

“I noticed that.”

“But most people — a colored kid and a white girl — I don’t like it myself.”

The medical examiner came then. He wore his usual black topcoat, black fedora, black leather gloves. He carried a black leather medical bag, the type Jack the Ripper dragged around Whitechapel in the fog.

The TV crew had brought enough lights to illuminate a long stretch of woods. The light was almost as lurid as the corpses themselves, that too-harsh glare you see in crime lab photos.

“How come you were out here tonight, McCain?”

“Neville was my client.”

“I suppose it’s gonna be that attorney-client privilege thing.”

“Afraid so.”

“Did he know this Negro?”

“I don’t have any idea. He never mentioned him, anyway.”

“Judge know about this yet?”

“Not as far as I know. Haven’t called her, anyway.”

He nodded. “There’s gonna be a lot of press on this. That’s all you can see on the news these days. Negro this and Negro that. Personally, the government never did a damn thing for me, but if they want to live off the government, I guess that’s up to them.” Then: “I don’t want you working on this case. I’m gonna find the killer and I’m gonna throw him in jail.”

The New Cliff Sykes. He was now looking to score a double public relations coup. Pull two people from a burning car and then solve a racial murder.

“I can’t promise you that.”

“Well, then I can’t promise you that I won’t throw your ass in jail. There’re a lot of laws against interfering with a police investigation.”

“Yeah? Name one.”

He spluttered. This was the old Cliffie, not the new, composed, beloved Cliffie. Well, beloved goes a wee bit too far, I guess.

“I don’t pretend to be a lawyer. I never had the advantages you did.”

Much as I didn’t feel like laughing with two young men lying dead at my feet, I couldn’t help it. “No offense, but your old man owns this town. He could’ve sent you to Harvard if he’d wanted to.”

Then I laughed again for picturing Cliffie storming around the Harvard campus, picking fights wherever he went.

“I’ve given you fair warning, McCain. And I’m going to put it in writing, too. I’m going to write you a letter and I’m going to keep the carbon. So when I take you to court, I’ll have the evidence.”

Four reporters had just spied Cliffie and were hurrying over. Superman had nothing on our esteemed police chief. Clark Kent had to go into phone booths to change. Cliffie could swell up into the hero he’d recently become with virtually no effort at all. And he could do it standing in place.

One of the reporters said, “Do you think the March on Washington is going to inspire this kind of violence?”

Three days from now there was going to be a march on Washington, D.C., that the Kennedy administration was only reluctantly going along with. The national press was obsessed with it. Any local story that had any element of race in it was an excuse to bring it up. There was one hero in the land, at least for me: Dr. Martin Luther King. Despite J. Edgar Hoover’s predictable warning that the march would be filled with “communists and agitators,” Dr. King’s hopes for the march buoyed everybody who believed that race had to be dealt with seriously for the first time since Reconstruction. The march was discussed on radio, TV, at picnics, family meals, church gatherings, fancy bars, blue-collar bars, everywhere. The topic was inescapable.

So of course, as the reporters gathered around him, Cliffie said, “Just what march on Washington are you boys talking about?”

The chest expanded. The campaign hat that was the same tan as the khaki uniform was tilted a more dramatic angle. And of course, his right hand dropped to the handle of his holstered handgun.

Slap leather, pardner.

As I walked back to my car, I heard one of the reporters say, “You mean you haven’t heard about the March on Washington, Chief?”

The grounds were getting crowded. The gathering of ghouls had already begun. The triple features at the drive-in weren’t that hot tonight, why not drive out and stand around a murder scene instead? True, nobody sold popcorn out here, but there was the chance you would get to glimpse a real true corpse. You wouldn’t see nothing like that at no drive-in. No chance.

“You sure you don’t want no wine, Sam? It’s the good stuff. That Mogen David.”

Cy (for Cyrus) Langtry claimed he wasn’t sure how old he was. He came up here with his grandmother, who had been a slave in Georgia before the war. He had spent most of his fifty years in Black River Falls as a janitor, first at city hall and later at the grade school. I imagined he was at least in his mid-seventies.

I went directly to his place from the cabin where the murders had taken place. He’d known David Leeds well. I wanted to be the one to tell him.

Anytime the temperature was above fifty-five you saw Cy on the front porch of his one-story stucco house so close to the river that, as Cy liked to joke, he could probably fish out his back window if he wanted to.

At night he played records. His vision was so bad television was wasted on him. He’d sit on this thronelike rocker, in a white T-shirt, brown cardigan sweater, and gray work trousers. He usually wore sandals with no socks. He was now a shrunken little man with a raspy laugh and a thick pair of glasses that did him no good at all. I was never sure why he wore them. Next to him on the floor he kept his Mogen David and two glasses, the second one for any guest who might drop by.

When I pulled up, he was playing his favorite singer, Nat “King” Cole. Cy liked to tell the story of how back before the war he used to go to Moline, Illinois, some weekends to see Cole play when he’d make a Midwestern swing of the better cafes.

I’d been around him all my life without ever really knowing him, until two years ago when the city tried to claim eminent domain and seize his property for some sort of warehouse. His daughter, who lived closer to town than Cy did, came to me and asked if I’d represent him for what she could afford to pay me. The way eminent domain is frequently used has always pissed me off. The rich get their way. I took it on for free, not because I was such a swell guy but because I didn’t like the idea of kicking Cy out of the home where he’d lived with his wife and kids for so long.

Sarah, Cy’s daughter, got to know David Leeds when he’d been going through her neighborhood one day looking for yard work. She’d taken him out to Cy’s place a few times. David loved listening to Cy’s stories. And, as Sarah said, he didn’t seem to mind the free wine, either. Cy always kidded David about all the jobs he did to support his college habit. Yard work, car-washing on Saturdays, farm work when he could get it, and employment as a dance instructor a few nights a week. That was the one Cy couldn’t get over. But David was a good-looking kid, he had that big-city patina about him, and he worked for a studio that taught all the dances on American Bandstand, while ballroom dancing and the like were left to Arthur Murray.

The plan was for David to sleep on Cy’s couch all summer. There was a big detasselling operation that worked out of town here. Detasselling paid better than even factory jobs and you damned well earned it. I detasselled for two summers and I rarely had dates. Too tired even on the weekends I didn’t work.

“You sound kinda funny tonight, Sam.”

“Guess I’ll have some of that wine.”

“Help yourself.”

I did, downing half a glass of it in a single gulp. Bombs away.

Crickets and river splashing on rocks and lonesome half-moon and the sound of distant ghost trains.

I spent a minute or so trying to figure out how to tell Cy about it, and then I just said, “Somebody murdered David tonight, Cy.”

I don’t know how I expected him to react. He rocked back and forth. He said nothing, then “Figured it’d be something like that, the way you sounded, so funny and all.”

“I’m sorry. I’m going to find them.”

“You sound like Marshal Dillon on Gunsmoke.”

“I’m not tough, Cy. You know that. But I can get things done when I need to.”

“Whites killed him.”

“Probably.”

“Bastards.”

I had never heard him use language like that. It shocked me because it came from him and then saddened me because I heard the tears that overcame the rage in those words.

“Bastards.” A lifetime of anger, frustration, humiliation, fear, and ruined hopes in that single word.

The night birds had never sounded more mordant as we sat in the terrible echoes of that single word, of all the sorrow in that single word.

“He wasn’t perfect. Drank too much. Ran around with white girls too much. He even tole me one night we was helping ourselves to the jug here about how he pulled off a couple robberies back in Chicago. But that don’t give no white bastard the right to kill him.”

“It sure doesn’t.”

“And anyways, he tole me that when a friend of his got sent up, he quit doin’ bad stuff and buckled down and got himself a partial scholarship.” Clink of bottle neck on glass. This time he didn’t offer me any. He sat back and started rocking in his chair. “I think he knew something was comin’.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“That white girl, Lucy. He said she was all tensed up lately. So many people on them. Her folks and that rich boy she used to go out with. And then them bikers always following him around and makin’ fun of him. She told him she had nightmares about something terrible happenin’ to him.”

“How did he feel about it all?”

“Oh, it was getting to him, too. Reason he always liked our town here was because folks were nice to him. He said he never seen so many nice white folks. The bikers and them like that, they didn’t like him. But I mean most folks — we got a nice little town here, Sam. Still is. Even when he was goin’ out with Lucy, people still hired him for the jobs he did. And was nice to him and everything. But there’s always a few—”

I stood up.

“I’ll find them, Cy, the ones who did it.”

“There you go soundin’ like Marshal Dillon again.” He’d allowed himself the one joke. Then: “The colored, we’ve had to put up with shit like this all our lives. I want you to get ’em, Sam, and get ’em good and don’t let that stupid bastard Cliffie get in your way, either.”

Rage and tears, rage and tears. Job was the only book of the Bible that held any meaning for me. Rage and tears against the unfathomable ways of God. Or as Graham Greene put it, “the terrible wisdom of God.” If there was a God. And if not, rage and tears against the unfathomable randomness of it all.

“You do me a favor and go in there and turn up Nat for me?”

“Sure.”

Cole was singing “Lost April,” one of my favorite songs of his. The wan melancholy of it matched my mood exactly.

3

“You know, Mr. C, you should write a book about all your experiences. Look at Sherlock Holmes. He wrote a lot of books.”

In case you haven’t met her before, Jamie is my secretary. She was free when she was part time, now she was full time and I paid her.

I’d represented her father in a property-line case and he ceded her to me as a form of payment. We don’t discuss the fact that she was nineteen when she graduated high school — she once vaguely alluded to the fact that she had to take eleventh grade over again because she couldn’t remember the lyrics to the school fight song — nor do we mention the fact that if murder was ever declared legal the first person I’d shoot was her boyfriend, Turk, who combines the most annoying mannerisms of Marlon Brando and James Dean and that New Zealand tribe said to wash themselves only once every full moon because they fear water will eat their flesh.

Judging by the responses of my male clients, Jamie will never have to want for men eager to woo her. She’s one of those women blessed with a face and body that will keep her looking like jailbait until she’s well into her thirties. The fact that she can only type sixteen words a minute, and not all of them exactly what you would call words, and that she frequently forgets to write down phone messages — they are as nothing compared to the luxurious promise of that body and the merry gleam of those blue eyes.

“He isn’t still alive, is he?”

I’d been studying a brief I needed in court this morning and had been trying hard not to pay attention to her usual babble. My terrible secret is that I have my own fantasies about Jamie — how could I not? — and I even like her because for all of her mindless prattle, there is a genuine sweetness in her that’s rare in our species. She’s a good, if daft, kid. And it doesn’t hurt that, as demonstrated this morning, she’s picked up on the see-through-blouse trend.

“Sorry, Jamie. What did you say?”

“Sherlock Holmes, Mr. C.”

The “Mr. C,” by the way, comes from the Perry Como TV show. All of Perry’s regulars call him Mr. C. Jamie thinks this is pretty cool. That my name starts with “Mc” doesn’t deter her in the least.

“Sherlock Holmes?”

“Yes. I was saying he wrote all those books and you should, too. You know, about your experiences.”

“Ah. I see.”

“Like what happened last night out at that cabin. That would make a chapter in itself.”

“Yeah, but I sure couldn’t write like Sherlock.”

“Is he still alive, by the way?”

The phone, in its mercy, rang.

“Well, you made the wire services this morning,” Stan Green said. “AP and UPI both. Do I get an exclusive if I buy you lunch?” Stan is the Clarion’s managing editor and one of its three reporters.

“That would depend on whether you can take a late lunch and if you’re willing to spend at least sixty-five cents for my food. That would mean ham, lettuce, mayo on white bread with the crusts cut off and a small fountain Coke at Woolworth’s.”

“You are one crafty bastard, McCain. One-ish?”

“One-ish will do it.”

“God, I hate politicians.” A phone rang behind him. “Gotta go.”

“Turk wants to write a book,” Jamie said after I hung up.

I looked at her. She’s one of those girls who wears ponytails well. I just smiled at her for making me feel good for at least these few moments. She really is sweet.

“Of course,” she said, “I’d end up doing most of the writing.”

I was still within the wonderful beatific moment she’d inspired with her odd innocence and her jutting blouse. Jamie and Turk writing a book together? Of course. All things were possible in my beatific if transient world.

The most valued item in Woolworth’s wasn’t anything on sale. It was a booth in the luncheonette. There were five of them. The rumor was that you had to get up before dawn and stand at the Woolworth’s front door until they opened. Then you had to leap over entire aisles of merchandise and catapult into a booth, which you had to occupy for hours before the lunch menu was available.

So it surprised me that Stan was sitting in a booth. He wasn’t alone.

The girls in my high school class used to play an interesting game called One Word. You were given one word to describe a person. If the game was played with beer present, it quickly degenerated into stupidity. “Fat.” “Icky.” “Smelly.” Anything that would get a giggle.

But if it was played sober, it revealed interesting and sometimes serious perceptions of people you knew.

The word for Stan was “slovenly.” When he’d first come to town ten years ago, he’d been a dude. It was rumored he even swam at the Y in one of those three-piece suits of his. But then his wife left him for an old flame, moved to Denver, and left Stan bereft of hair (he got bald within six months of her leaving) and even more bereft of grooming. He had two suits. He wore one till it got stiff with sweat and various other goodies and then put on the other one. His ties must certainly violate some civil code somewhere, given the fact that they look like an artist’s palette. Except that the colors are stains of various kinds. The spaghetti and the mustard stains are the easiest to guess. The others are more obscure. His only known vice is bowling. As a vet, he spends most of his time at the Legion Lanes, where, upon occasion, he has been known to take home one of the bowling gals. He has a round, good-natured face that gets sort of wan whenever the subject of his wife comes up. She has yet to divorce him. She may just be test-driving this rodeo guy. We’re all afraid that she’ll come back to him someday. Nobody doubts that he’d build her a mansion if she did.

I could only see the back of the woman Stan was talking to.

I walked over to Stan and slid in next to him.

“Sam, this is Marie Leeds. She’s David Leeds’s sister.”

Marie Leeds possessed one of those faces so regular of feature you wanted to study it. Not great beauty, this face, but certainly pretty. She nodded. “I came out here from Chicago two days ago to spend some time with David.”

“I’m sorry about your brother.”

“If I start talking about him, I’ll cry. What I’d prefer to talk about is how serious this investigation is going to be.”

“She talked to the chief of police,” Stan said, “and said that he was very polite and friendly but she sensed that he might be a little—”

Marie’s smile surprised me. It was a little girl’s smile and it was a treasure. “‘Stupid’ was the word I used.”

Her smile relaxed me and I sensed it had done the same for Stan. We were no longer representatives of the white race and she was no longer a representative of the Negro race. Not that we were such great grand friends but we were at least just human beings talking to each other.

“All the information he gave me came from the newspaper on his desk. Turns out Stan wrote it. Doesn’t the chief file reports?”

“Well, in his own way he does. He used to have a very bright deputy who did most of the work in that area. But then the deputy couldn’t take it anymore and got a job in Cedar Rapids.”

“That deputy he has now — that Earle? — he just sat there with his arms folded the whole time I was talking to the chief. The only thing he said was, ‘This is a small town and your brother acted like it was a big town.’ A font of wisdom.” She looked directly at me. “By that I take it Earle meant that David was seeing a white girl.”

“That’s what we’ve been told,” I said.

Marie shook her head. “An ambitious young man like my brother, his good looks caused him a lot of trouble. He always said he preferred to live the way white people did. If you saw a job opening, no matter what it was, and you thought you could do it, go up and apply for it. And if you saw a girl you wanted to date, go up and ask her.” She looked at Stan now. “Not that he made a big thing out of dating white girls. Most of his girlfriends were Negro. But every once in a while he’d get serious about a white girl for a while — he always taught dance lessons because it was easy money and he sure met a lot of young women.” The wonderful girly smile again. “David was never much for staying with one girl long, whatever their color was. He liked variety.”

“Marie raised him,” Stan said. “Her folks were killed in a fire.”

“You don’t look much older than he was,” I said.

“Seven years older. They died when I was seventeen.” This smile lacked the energy of the others. “Here I said I didn’t want to talk about him and that’s all I have been talking about.”

Discreet tears filled the corners of her eyes. She dabbed at them with a piece of tissue.

“I really don’t want to be emotional about this. I want to find out who killed him. And emotional won’t help me get there.” Another dab at her eyes. “I teach seventh grade and that’s what I try to teach my students. Anger, especially righteous anger, can get people up on their feet. But to get things done, you have to hold a tight rein on your feelings.”

“I’m afraid you’re right,” I said.

“That’s why I admire Dr. King,” Marie said. “He’s exactly the sort of person I’m talking about.”

The waitress came, took our order, and fled back to the counter to call it in. She was frantic. By this time the lunch area was jammed. Some customers had to stand behind the stools to eat their lunch.

I’d just picked up my cup of coffee when the frantic waitress returned and said, “Are you Sam McCain?”

I nodded.

“There’s a call for you. There’s a phone at the far west end of the counter.”

I knew who was calling and I knew why she was calling and I knew why I was mad she was calling.

“Just do me a favor and tell her I’m not here.”

“Really?” the waitress said.

“Yeah, really. And I appreciate you doing it for me.”

She hurried away.

“The judge?” Stan said.

“Who else?”

“You have a very strange relationship with her. Really passive-aggressive.”

I glanced at Marie and laughed. “In case you couldn’t guess, Stan’s minor at Northwestern was psychology.”

Marie blessed me with one of her sweet smiles again.

4

The Colonial-style house gleamed pure white in the early afternoon sun. Ellen Williams, the senator’s wife, was tending to her garden of roses as I pulled up the drive.

Karen Porter, not only her friend but her partner in their downtown flower shop, was watering plants further downhill. She gave me a big wave and a big smile. I’d always felt much more comfortable with her than with Ellen.

Ellen turned when she heard my engine. She just stared at me. I’d never had the feeling she cared much for me, but because I worked with her good friend the judge, she was always polite.

While the house wasn’t a mansion, it had a mansion’s sprawl, grass so green it looked slightly unreal stretching east to a forest and west to a plateau, where an enormous white gazebo sat twenty yards from a tennis court and covered swimming pool.

Lucy Williams sat in the gazebo with her friend Nancy Adams. Even though Lucy was talking, there was an Andrew Wyeth loneliness in the juxtaposition of the frail blonde girl in the tennis outfit and the forlorn air she radiated even from here.

I parked and walked over to Ellen.

“Hello, Sam,” Ellen said, striving to put some warmth in her voice for me. “Esme called and asked you to call her if you stopped by.”

Ah, yes. Esme. Wasn’t that French for relentless?

“I’ll give her a call when I finish here. I’m sure she explained that she’s asked me to look into this whole thing with David Leeds.”

She was one of those erotically overweight women, the type favored by the Brits at various times in their bloody history. The face was what did it, that sensual mouth more than anything. Even in a pair of slightly baggy yellow walking shorts and a yellow sleeveless blouse, there was a sexual dynamic. I wondered if she was even aware of it. I wondered that especially now when the blue eyes held a quality of fear.

“I wish Lucy had listened to us.” The trowel in her hand pointed upward like a dagger. The gloved hand seemed to tighten on the handle. “We begged her and begged her.” The face tightened, while the dyed red hair blew in the breeze. “She owed it to her father not to get involved. His career is everything to him. He’s the third senator in the family.”

Five generations of Williamses, three senators. By now we were talking divine right. The bitterness in her voice let me know that her husband’s career was everything to her as well. Her daughter didn’t seem to be much more than an encumbrance.

“All right if I talk to her?”

“Personally, I wish you wouldn’t. But Esme says it’s important, so I suppose you should.”

“I won’t keep her long.”

“You can keep her forever for all I care. My poor husband. I’ve never seen him like this. The election was close enough. Now, with this—”

Just then a red MG appeared in the drive. Two young men in tennis whites. Rob Anderson, Lucy’s former boyfriend. Nick Hannity, a noted college football player.

When she saw them, she said, “You know, Rob would forgive her in a minute.”

“For what?”

“For — seeing a colored boy.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t seem impressed. But I am.”

“Were they going out when she started seeing Leeds?”

“No — she’d already broken it off. She thought Rob was getting too possessive and she wasn’t ready to be married to him. They were supposed to be married this summer, you know.” She watched as the two young men in whites strutted toward us. “He’d still marry her, that’s what I meant about his forgiving nature. He’d forgive her and still marry her.”

“I think I’ll go down to the gazebo.” The way she talked about Anderson, he sounded like a master on a plantation. He would forgive her even though they hadn’t been going out at the time she was seeing David Leeds. How big of him.

I was never eager to talk to Rob Anderson or anybody like him. His father was a very successful businessman who walked the dark side of the street, running loan companies that exploited the poor. He’d once made a martini crack about Judge Whitney that had pissed me off unduly. I managed to tromp, with great fervor, on his tennis-shoed foot as I left the party. He knew I’d done it on purpose but he could hardly say that without sounding paranoid, now could he? Especially after I’d made such a show of apologizing.

I think Lucy sensed me rather than saw me as I made my way down the hill to the gazebo. She lighted her new cigarette with her previous one.

She still hadn’t looked at me when I stepped up on the gazebo. “Hi, Lucy. Your mother said I could talk to you.”

“My mother says a lot of things, Mr. McCain.”

Impossibly young, impossibly pretty, impossibly tortured, as you could see with a glance at those enormous brown eyes. The whispered word was that she seemed even more troubled following her stay in a mental hospital. They’d been trying to break her away from David Leeds. It hadn’t worked. Most folks seemed to feel sorry for her parents but not for her.

Nancy Adams, a very pretty slender brunette also in tennis whites, said, “I’m going for a little walk.”

“You don’t have to,” I said.

“It’s all right, Mr. McCain.”

“I’m supposed to play tennis,” Lucy said after Nancy went over to talk to Karen Porter.

Lucy sat, prim and sort of casually regal, on the bench that ran around the interior of the gazebo. Her blonde hair was stylishly wind-mussed and the sorrow-shaped mouth had never looked more kissable than now in her deepest grief. Her long, tanned legs were wonderful.

She looked up at me and said, “I always thought you were kind of nice, Mr. McCain. I’m disappointed you agreed to help them. I suppose it’s because of Esme.”

“People are just trying to figure out what happened, Lucy. Two young men are dead.”

“Some bigot killed them. Have you seen what’s going on in the South? It’s on TV every night. Something like that happened to them.”

“You mean they were killed because David Leeds was a Negro?”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“But then why would they have killed Neville? He was white.”

“Because they were friends. Good friends.”

Judge Whitney had told me that Neville might have been the one to send photos of David and Lucy to the party office in Des Moines. Good friends?

But I didn’t get to finish up my questions because Rob and Hannity were here. Rob was the sinewy type with a kind of mild contempt on his handsome face. He seemed to believe that God had put the rest of us here for his amusement. He walked over to Lucy and said, “If you want a lawyer, Lucy, let me get you a real one.”

“Sorry to hear you flunked out of law school, Rob,” I said. “Not even Daddy could save you this time, huh?”

He didn’t lunge at me. Hannity, good watchdog that he was, did. But Lucy was already on her feet. “For God’s sake. David’s dead and you’re all acting like brats.”

We all froze in place at her words. I heard Rob say to himself, “David.” Scornfully.

“I’ll talk to you later, Lucy,” I said.

Hannity was still glowering at me. He’d beaten up the son of a client of mine. We’d pressed charges. He got probation. He didn’t like me much and I liked him even less. Predators are bad enough. Predators born with silver spoons up their asses are even worse.

“Why the hell would you want to talk to somebody like him?” Rob Anderson said, making sure I heard him.

“Just shut up, Rob. I told you on the phone I didn’t want to play tennis anyway. David’s dead. You don’t seem to understand that.”

Ellen Williams was gone when I reached the house. I took a last look at the gazebo. Hannity was still glaring at me.

Then Ellen was coming quickly down the steps from the screened-in back porch.

“There’s some news, Sam. Wait for me!”

I couldn’t read her excitement. Was the news good or bad? She put her hand on my arm and said, “Esme just called. Sykes just arrested one of those horrible motorcycle hoodlums for killing Neville and Leeds.” She gripped my arm even tighter as her face broke into a smile. “This should help, an arrest this soon. The focus will be on the killer and maybe not on Lucy so much.”

“Just remember Cliffie’s track record,” I said. “He usually arrests the wrong person.”

The eyes reflected instant anger. “Esme tells me that you’re a wiseacre and now I can see that for myself. My husband’s career is on the line here and I give you some good news and you do everything you can to knock it down.” She nodded down to the gazebo. “I’m going to speak to Esme and tell her that I don’t want you around my daughter at all. If she needs a lawyer, we’ll get my uncle. Now, good-bye.”

Only when she turned and walked back to the porch did I notice that all three people in the gazebo were watching me. I wondered if they’d been able to hear what Ellen had said. The way Anderson and Hannity were smiling, I assumed they’d heard every word.

Karen Porter, my one friend here, waved good-bye to me, smiling as always.

Our town likes to claim that its jail once held Jesse James, well-known psychopath and shooter of unarmed people, for a few days back in the bloody prime of the James-Dalton gang. While it’s true that the James boys favored Iowa as a hiding place, they did most of their hiding just inside the Iowa-Missouri border. The man we got, close as we could figure, was a man named Niles Wick, who was a gang straggler.

Of course, in my growing-up years, none of us kids accepted the Niles Wick story. We preferred to believe that the name was simply one Jesse used. In those days, our jail was located one block east of the Royale Theater, the best second-run movie house anywhere, so we could load up on popcorn and a couple of flicks about Jesse — in these Jesse was a persecuted saint of course — and then we could run to the jail and stand on the corner and imagine Jesse looking down at us from behind the bars on the second floor. He looked like either Tyrone Power or Roy Rogers, take your pick. Both men had essayed him in film.

There was a new jail now, and it was located on the third floor of the recently built county courthouse. The design was severely functional, the material was a step up from cinder block, and the overall look was so dreary that you felt the prisoners could be sprung on a charge of cruel and unusual just for having to stay inside.

Cliffie’s uncle, a man named Merle who had formerly been an auctioneer, laid out the plans and used his own construction company to build this monument to civic corruption.

There were at least a dozen Harley motorcycles in the parking lot. Ellen had been right. A biker had been arrested for the murders.

Inside, I said hello to Cliffie’s sister, the receptionist; and the same to Paul the elevator operator, Cliffie’s second cousin; and finally to Norman, Cliffie’s first cousin and the front-desk day man at the police station on the third floor.

“No call for you to be here, Sam,” Norman said, pushing his thick glasses back up his short nose. “My cousin’s got everything under control. Case is all wrapped up.”

“I was just wondering if the accused man has a lawyer yet?”

“He’s guilty, Sam. Why would he need a lawyer?”

“You mean he’s confessed?”

Norman grinned with gray teeth. “He will, time my cousin gets done with him.”

“Misceg — damn, I can never say that word.”

“Miscegenation.”

“Yeah, that’s the hot one now. Forbidden love. Black men and white women. Misceg—”

“No black women and white men?”

“No sizzle.”

“‘Sizzle’?”

“That’s the word my editor always uses. ‘Sizzle.’”

In case you’re wondering, the writer I was talking to was not F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway.

The writer I was talking to was Kenny Thibodeau, the official pornographer of Black River Falls, and not least of all, my best friend since we made our First Communion together nearly twenty years earlier.

On a trip to San Francisco four years ago, where he hoped to set eyes upon his idols Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, Kenny read some of his poetry one night at a coffeehouse. Believe me, Kenny is to poetry what I am to astronomy — nowhere.

But this guy came up afterward and said, “I really like your poetry.” I’m sure that Kenny was secretly as shocked as I was when he told me the story. Even he knows his poetry stinks.

But the guy wasn’t finished. “You ever thought of writing novels?”

“Sure. Who hasn’t?”

“How’d you like to make four hundred dollars for a novel?”

“Are you kidding?”

“No, I’m not. You ever hear of the Midnight Secrets line of books?”

“The ones they keep under the counter in cigar stores and like that?”

“Yeah, in hick burgs they keep them under the counter. Where you from by the way?”

“Iowa.”

“Iowa. I went through there during the war. You’ve got some nice-lookin’ broads back there.”

Kenny didn’t mention that almost none of those nice-looking broads would have much to do with him. Or me. We had yet to grow into the charming, witty Cary Grant-like figures of our later years.

“You know how they work, don’t you?”

“‘How they work’?”

“No dirty words. No explicit descriptions. We generally like it when breasts are compared to fruit and when orgasms are compared to tidal waves. The thing is to make them think the stuff is really dirty. But we know better, don’t we, Kenny?”

“We do?”

“Sure. Because if it was really dirty we’d all be in prison.”

“I guess that’s something to keep in mind. Prison.”

“So anyway, Kenny, tell you what. You walk out to my car with me and I’ll just give you copies of our two latest books, Pagan Pussycats and Niagara Nymphos. You take them and read them and before you leave town you give me an outline and three chapters. If I like what I see, I give you a hundred fifty on the spot and you go back to Iowa and write the rest of the book. How do you like the sound of that, kid?”

“Can I still write my poetry?”

“Kid, you can write all the poetry you want as long as you meet our deadline.”

“How much time will I have before I turn my book in?”

“Three weeks.”

And thus was born, among many other Kenny Thibodeau pseudonyms, Brace Bryant, Cal Cavalier, and Jack Hoffman.

But those were the days of jocularity when you could smirk at the ridiculous business Kenny was in, exploiting serious topics such as civil rights to idiotic ones such as how many stewardesses you could shove into the arms of a studly airline pilot.

But today neither of us was in a joking mood. Kenny said, “I’m thinking of driving down to Birmingham with my .45. Wanna ride along? You see that TV special last night?”

“Yeah. I’d like to kick Bull Connor around for three or four hours and then set him on fire.”

“Right after I get done whipping him, man.”

“Son of a bitch. I had to turn the set off. I couldn’t take it.”

Eugene “Bull” Connor was the Birmingham, Alabama, commissioner of public safety who had turned not only fire hoses but dogs on civil rights demonstrators. It was hard to watch the barrage of water and brutal cops pounding, kicking, and stomping people. And then he’d added those dogs.

The problem was that it was all being laid on Southerners. We lived close enough to the Missouri border to know that not all folks of the Southern persuasion were anything like Bull baby or his henchmen. And discrimination and violence were hardly limited to the South. Try walking down the street hand in hand with a Negro girl in Cicero, Illinois, sometime, or in parts of Chicago or border towns in my state. Or a hundred other northern towns.

Kenny said, “You think the biker killed that Leeds kid?”

“Too early to know.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it. Couple of them beat up those two Negroes at the county fair last year.”

“Yeah, and got a weekend in jail for it.”

“Surprised Cliffie went even that far.”

We sat on the front steps of my office. A sleepy burg; a sleepy, hot afternoon. Turk had called and decided to break up with poor Jamie again — this generally happened once a week — and since neither Kenny nor I could take her sobbing, we sat out here with Pepsis and Lucky Strikes, just like the high school kids at least a part of us would always be.

“What’s funny is that Lucy’s old man seems to think nobody knew she was seeing Leeds.”

I’d told him what the judge had told me. Kenny knows most of the worst people in town, so he helps me investigate sometimes by seeing what’s going on in the Black River Falls underworld, if there is such a thing.

“So a lot of people knew?”

“Not a lot. But you know how gossip gets around.”

“Then the senator is way behind if he thinks he can keep his daughter out of this.”

Kenny, with his little tuft of chin beard, his long dark hair, and his dentist-deprived teeth, still and forever an honorary citizen of City Lights Bookstore in old San Fran, said, “Hell, I want him to lose anyway.”

“So do I. He’s a robber baron. But I hate to see Lucy dragged through this. And all the people who’re gonna put her down.”

“It’s gonna be a bitch.”

Jamie, bless her, still sniffling, came to the door and said: “It’s the judge. She sounds really mad.” She instantly began bawling again.

“Catch you later,” Kenny said.

“Ask around, see if you hear anything.”

He grinned. “Philip Marlowe is on the job.”

I followed the sobbing Jamie inside, lifted the receiver from where it rested next to the phone. “Hello?”

“How professional of you to have a weeping girl answer your phone.”

“I was going to call you first chance I got.”

“I’m too angry to even talk about how you’ve been avoiding my calls all day. We’ll deal with that later. Right now I need you to get out to Reston Park at the big pavilion.”

“A picnic?”

“Lucy Williams called me. She said I wasn’t to tell her parents about this. She wants to talk to you right away. Now get out there.”

She slammed her receiver down.

“Do you think Turk and I’ll get back together, Mr. C?”

I went over and put what I hoped was a brotherly arm around her and kissed her tear-warm cheek. “Sweetheart, you go through this every week. Of course you’ll get back together.”

She looked up at me with those guileless eyes and said, “Really?”

“Really.”

“Oh, thank you, Mr. C. Now I feel a whole lot better. Thank you so much.”

I was going to ask her not to be sobbing when she took the next phone call but who was I to interfere with, as Buddy Holly called them, true love ways?

5

The pavilion overlooked the river and a stretch of limestone cliffs that gleamed in the sunlight. The latest chromed and finned Detroit pleasure mobiles crowded around the structure itself. The smell of grilling burgers, the ragged laughter of three- and four-year-olds, a large portable radio playing Darlene Love’s “(Today I Met) The Boy I’m Going to Marry.” America, of Thee I Sing.

Lucy sat on a small boulder far upslope, where a fawn stood watching her from the woods. Instead of tennis whites she now wore jeans and a yellow blouse, her blonde hair long and loose in the wind sweeping up from the river below. She smoked a cigarette with great intensity and once, just as I approached and frightened the fawn away, touched a gentle hand to her temple, as if a headache had just struck.

“Lucy.”

I didn’t want to frighten her. But my call was worthless. She hadn’t heard me.

I walked closer. She turned, startled, and for just a moment seemed not to recognize me.

“Oh, God, Sam. It’s you.”

“I didn’t mean to scare you.”

She pointed a finger at her lovely head. “Migraine and — don’t ever tell my mother I mentioned this — my period. How’s that for God’s wrath?”

She’d meant the last as a joke. She’d even given me a momentary smile. But there was no humor in the tone or the smile.

“Why would God be punishing you, Lucy?”

“Because I killed David.”

Wind and the sound of a grass mower somewhere and downslope the delighted screams of the pavilion kids.

“You shouldn’t say things like that, Lucy. It could be dangerous.”

“It’s true, Sam.” Her eyes coveted my face, searching for even a hint of wisdom. But I was twenty-six-year-old Sam McCain and I had no wisdom.

“It’s not true, Lucy.”

“He wanted to break it off. He said he was destroying my life. He said that I didn’t have the strength to pull away but that he did. But I wouldn’t let him.” The tears came then, soft, soft as Lucy. “And they killed him. They said they would and they did.”

Face in hands, sobbing now, not soft, hard, hating his killers, hating herself.

“Who said they’d kill him, Lucy?”

She raised her small bottom up from the rock and pulled three small envelopes from her back pocket. As she handed them to me, she forced herself to stop sobbing. For moments, like a child, she couldn’t catch her breath. I didn’t look at the envelopes until I saw that she was all right.

Crude drawings of a stick figure hanging from a noose attached to nothing. And the words “Sambo has defiled the white race and he will die for it.”

All three were identical. The postmarks put them three days apart, all mailed from Cedar Rapids.

“I know who killed him, Sam, and it wasn’t that stupid biker.”

“Who do you think did it?”

Anger. “Goddammit, Sam, I didn’t say that I think. I said I know, all right?”

“All right. You know. Then tell me.”

“Rob and Nick.”

Simply Rob and Nick.

There were all sorts of ways to respond to what she said. But most of them would have just agitated her further. I went with “Tell me some more.”

She dug in the front of her jeans and pulled out a crumpled package of Winstons. She delicately plucked one free and then straightened it out before lighting it. The wind whipped away her first stream of smoke.

She was composed now. Hard, even. I’d never seen her this way. “Well, for one thing, they kept threatening to do it.”

“Both of them?”

“Both of them. Together and separately.”

“Drunk or sober?”

“Both.”

“Did they ever try anything?”

Another drag from her cigarette. “David had a little motor scooter. It wouldn’t do more than thirty miles’ an hour. He rode it back and forth between Iowa City and here on the nights when my parents wouldn’t give me the car. One night, when he was coming back from my house, they were parked in the woods and then they started following. They kept running him off the road. Scaring him. And he was scared. Then another night they got into his apartment in Iowa City and drew all kinds of terrible racist stuff on the walls.”

“You sure it was them?”

“Nick Hannity bragged about it.”

Fun guys, Rob and Nick.

“But killing is a long way from what you’re describing.”

“Nick beat him up in Iowa City one night. Badly enough that he had to stay overnight in the hospital.”

“Did he go to the cops?”

“Coming from Chicago? David wasn’t a big fan of cops.” The sunlight revealed the freckles across her nose and cheeks. A fetching touch of prairie girl. “There wasn’t much he could do. For one thing, we were both scared that the next time Rob and Nick did anything it’d be much worse.”

“You couldn’t tell your parents?”

“Are you kidding? They wouldn’t have taken Rob’s part but they would have nagged me about how this wouldn’t have been happening if David wasn’t a Negro.”

I got out a Lucky and lighted it. “Let me say something and don’t get mad.”

She smiled. A genuine smile. “I’m sorry, Sam. I can be a bitch.”

“You weren’t a bitch. You’re just understandably sad about David. But I need you to be rational and think clearly.”

She nodded. “I’ll try.”

“I have enough to go to Cliffie with, but with the connections Rob has he’ll be able to hide behind a lawyer. And besides, Cliffie has a boss now.”

“Cliffie has a boss?” A half smile. “He’s got to be a relative.”

“He is a she. But she’s not like other Sykeses. She eats with a fork and knife and never takes her dentures out at the table.”

She was enjoying this diversion. “God Almighty, can such a Sykes exist?”

“Jane is her name.”

“The new district attorney is a woman?”

“Not only a woman but a Brown grad. Honors from Brown and was second in her school class.”

“A Sykes?”

“A Sykes. A cousin. Old Man Sykes would have preferred a Sykes male, but he couldn’t find one smart enough for Dartmouth, which he’s got a fondness for because of some movie he saw when he was a kid. And Old Man Sykes got her elected because he knows how tired people are of Cliffie. Who, by the way, has improved considerably since he became a hero. I’ve got two uncles who were falling-down drunks and they’ve been on the wagon for about fifteen years each. I believe people can change.”

“Even Cliffie?” Then, frowning: “That’s what I meant about being a bitch. We make so much fun of him it’s hard to remember he’s a real human being. I suppose he can change. But he arrested that biker so quickly—”

“His mistake. Jane’s in Chicago right now at a legal convention. She’s back this afternoon. And I’ll bet the biker is turned loose by sundown. And I also bet that Cliffie catches hell from Jane.”

“You sound like you have a lot of faith in this cousin of his, Sam.”

“You will, too, when you see her.”

“That means she must be pretty.”

“I’ve only seen her from afar, as they say. Haven’t spoken with her yet.”

Without warning, she covered her face with her hands. “I’m sitting here on this beautiful day,” she said, the words muffled by her fingers, “and David is dead. I feel guilty about it — every time I see a butterfly or a speedboat or one of those sweet little kids down there, I think it should be me who’s dead — but now I’m tired, Sam. Will you just leave me alone now? Please?”

I walked downslope to my car. As I passed the pavilion, a woman came out and handed me a s’more. I spent the drive back trying to get the marshmallow goo off my fingers. But at least the good taste stayed in my mouth.

6

“Have you heard the radio in Cedar Rapids?” Judge Esme Anne Whitney snapped at me on the other end of the phone.

“Guess I haven’t.”

“Well, so much for this story not touching the senator.”

“They named him?”

“They didn’t have to. They named Lucy as a ‘very good friend’ of David Leeds. Said that they were coeditors of an off-campus literary magazine.”

“No other implication?”

“No other implication, McCain? Do you have gravel for brains? If this is the first story, imagine what it’ll be tomorrow or two days from now. They’ll find people in Iowa City who’ll say they were dating. They’ll probably even find a few of them here.”

“How long will you be in your office?”

“Aaron will be here with the car in five minutes. Then I’m going home. I need to make a very important phone call tonight on California time.” I heard her lighter come ablaze. One of her numerous Gauloises. “There’s not much we can do about the press now. But we can wrap this thing up as fast as possible.”

“Cliffie’s already arrested somebody.”

“(A) You know all about Cliffie’s track record. We’ve proved him wrong on ninety percent of his arrests. And (B) the thug has already been released. Jane Sykes is back in town, and one of the first things she did was look at the so-called evidence that Cliffie had on the man and she immediately told Cliffie to let him go.”

Then I told her everything Lucy and I had discussed. “Lucy can’t believe there’s a Sykes who could get a degree at Brown.”

“I’m told she’s even an opera fan.”

“She must be a Republican.”

“You and your stupid Republican jokes. If you ever grow up, you’ll be one of us, McCain. I promise you that.”

She rarely said good-bye and this late afternoon was no exception. She simply slammed the receiver down.

“Far as I’m concerned, my brother died because of that colored boy. No other reason at all.”

Will Neville was watching a Maverick rerun when I knocked on the screen door of his apartment on the upper floor of an old house whose stucco had mostly fallen away.

Now I sat in a living room filled with furniture that looked as old as the house. I sat on a horsehair sofa. He had a big Cubs pennant on one wall and a Hawkeye pennant on another. There were cardboard boxes everywhere, overflowing with things as various as kitchen utensils and dusty, brittle-looking shoes. It was one of those suffocating little prisons, his apartment, with faded rose wallpaper and tiny mouse droppings littered across the scraped hardwood floor.

“Just moved in, huh?”

“No. Why?”

I glanced around the room again. “I was just wondering, all the boxes.”

He shrugged sturdy shoulders. “Just haven’t had time to unpack them yet. Sometimes I live here and sometimes I live with my older brothers in Chicago. Not that it’s any of your business.”

He wore a Stanley Kowalski T-shirt and a pair of work pants. He had a belly that could have accommodated a set of twins. He was hairy in a dirty way. I wondered if he’d ever considered shaving his arms.

“Like I said, far as I’m concerned, my brother died because of that colored boy. No other reason at all.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Why do I say that? My brother didn’t have no enemies. Everybody liked him. Some bastard followed Leeds out to my brother’s place and decided to kill both of them. To confuse people.” He made a face and then noisily gulped half a can of the A&P beer he’d been swigging all along. He made everything official by belching. “You knew my brother.”

“Sort of.” I’d actually represented him in a Peeping Tom incident a few years earlier. I felt he was falsely accused in that one. But by the time the trial was over, I’d come to feel he was a pretty dark guy.

“Well, then you’d know, nobody would want to kill him.”

“He ever talk about knowing David Leeds?”

“Said Leeds stopped out there a couple of times.”

“He say why?”

“Said he wanted to learn about photography. I suppose they have colored photographers in Chicago, you know, for the colored trade and all. I didn’t think nothing of it, but I wasn’t real happy with him spending much time with Leeds.”

“Had you ever met Leeds?”

“No, but you know how people are. They see you spending a lot of time with a colored boy, they start to wonder about you.”

“I guess I don’t understand.”

“You know, they start thinking maybe something’s wrong with you. Think maybe you can’t get white friends or something.” He smirked. “Especially hangin’ around a colored boy that gives dance lessons.”

“He did anything he could for college money.”

“Still and all, a boy who teaches dance lessons? Ain’t real manly.”

The smirk again. “You wouldn’t see me givin’ no dance lessons.”

It was too tempting. Instead I said, “I see. Did your brother seem happy lately?”

“Happy? No shit, he seemed happy. He come into this job over in Des Moines. Some studio named Brilliance I think it was. Brilliant or Brilliance, one of those. Said that their best photographer got sick and they had this real important job they had to do fast. And they needed somebody as good as the sick guy. So they called my brother. He made so much money on it he slipped me a hundred bucks so I could get caught up with my light bill and shit like that. But that’s what I mean, the kinda guy who would slip you a hundred, who’d want to kill him? I’m just glad my folks aren’t alive to have to see this. And like I said, it’s all this Leeds’s fault. You get a colored boy pokin’ around a white gal, you got trouble. And that’s just what he got, ain’t it? Trouble.”

7

After driving two blocks, I realized I was probably being followed. I say probably because there were an awful lot of white 1961 Plymouth Valiants on the road. I was pretty sure that this was the Valiant that had been at Neville’s cabin the night before. But I needed a closer look at the license plate. Once I got one and confirmed it was the Valiant I wanted, I let him follow me for another three blocks.

When we got to a red light, I yanked on the emergency brake and jumped out of my ragtop. I brought one of the two guns in my glove compartment with me.

He was slow to realize what I was going to do. The corner we were at was empty except for us. The small shops on both sides of the street were closed. The only activity was half a block away at the Dairy Queen. It was dusk.

He started putting his Valiant in reverse, but before he got anywhere, I shoved my .45 through his open window and put it right to his head.

“Pull over to the curb.”

“What for?”

“Pull over to the curb.”

“You bastard. Nobody pulls a gun on me.”

“I just did. Now pull over to the curb.”

I could see he was considering just flooring the Valiant and peeling away. But then he had to gauge how crazy I might be. You never know with people who pull guns.

He pulled over to the curb.

“Now turn off the engine and step out of the car.”

“You know, a cop could drive by here anytime, asshole, and your ass would be grass.”

“Turn off the engine and step out of the car.”

“You’re gonna regret this.”

“Not as much as you are.” But he finally turned off the engine. I opened the door for him. He stepped out.

Then I plucked his car keys from his hand.

And that was when I shot him right in the face. It was my mood, I guess. I didn’t even worry about the consequences. I felt my life was at an end and nothing mattered.

“You bastard,” he said.

He looked pretty pathetic there in his tight black suit with the pegged trousers and gold tie bar and porkpie hat, a denizen of a Chicago twist club if I’d ever seen one. And all that water running down his face.

“A squirt gun?”

“Yeah, I had a gunsmith modify a squirt gun so it’d look like the real thing.” I nodded to the DQ down the street. “Let’s go.”

“You know, they keep introducing all these new flavors and cones and malts and stuff. But if you ask me, you can’t beat your basic chocolate sundae. How’s your cone?”

“How’s my cone? This is how my cone is.”

We were sitting on a bench on the far side of the DQ so we could call each other foul names without offending all the moms and kids lined up for treats at the counters.

He took his cone and threw it hard against the blacktop parking lot. “That’s how my cone is. Now give me back my car keys.”

“You don’t want me to squirt you again, do you?” I was aggravating the hell out of him and enjoying myself. Life was good again. I would find the Right Woman after all.

I pulled my wallet out and showed him my two pieces of identification. One was private investigator. The other was court investigator.

“The last one’s the one you have to worry about. I have the power to arrest you.” I decided not to point out that every other American citizen has the same right. “So let’s cut the bullshit and you tell me who you are and what you were doing out at Neville’s cabin the other night.”

“And if I don’t?”

“And if you don’t, I take you right to jail.”

“For what?”

“For being at a murder scene and not reporting it.”

And that was when one of Cliffie’s finest pulled up next to where our cars had been pulled in, not with any great talent for careful parking, to the curb.

The car had the red lights flashing but no siren.

“Get over here, McCain. You’re getting a ticket.” He was a young guy named O’Brien and he was ticket-happy.

I made the mistake of turning to O’Brien to explain to him that I was working on a case for the judge when the man next to me damn near vaulted up from the bench and started running away.

“I’ll be back!” I shouted to O’Brien.

And O’Brien shouted: “Where the hell you think you’re going?”

There were three of us — Mr. Twist, me, and O’Brien, running across the parking lot toward the busy avenue that ran adjacent to the DQ.

And for a block, it was really a race. None of us was in danger of becoming a track star. None of us was in danger of becoming graceful. None of us was in danger of catching the others.

The sidewalk we were racing down was no beauty. A lot of cracks, a lot of places where the concrete had stove in to create jagged points.

So we stumbled a lot. And shouted curses at the other guys because somehow the stumbling was their fault.

We attracted our share of attention from the traffic streaming by at 40 mph. There was something about three grown men in pursuit of each other. And even more, there was something about a cop in uniform waving his gun in the air and shouting “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

You don’t get this kind of realistic TV on Dragnet, that’s for sure.

When it happened, it was over so quickly I had to wonder if what I’d just witnessed had actually taken place.

Mr. Twist had jumped from the sidewalk to the avenue and attempted to race across the street.

Insane on his part.

Cars going by fast enough and close enough that they were starting to resemble those streaming photographs where everything is a streaking blur.

And then he just leapt into the traffic stream.

But a streamlined, new two-tone blue Oldsmobile slowed him down instantly by hitting him at 40 mph or so and then punting him to the opposite curb, where he landed — from what I could see — next to a fire hydrant.

He’d screamed while still in midair. Or at least I thought I’d heard him scream. Maybe it was screeching tires, all the drivers trying to halt speeding cars.

The white-haired man in the Olds was out of his car and running to the opposite curb before O’Brien and I, who now stood side by side, could even start into the street.

O’Brien started using his traffic whistle and, holding his left arm up to stop traffic completely, gave us a chance to get to the mystery man.

I’ve never had any interest in seeing human beings ripped apart or smashed up inside and turned into a big blood-leaking chunk of human hamburger. A lot of people seem to regard a glimpse of stuff like this as a treat.

So I wasn’t all that hot on seeing what was left of our feckless friend who tried to outmaneuver tons of speeding Detroit iron.

But he didn’t look that bad.

His right arm was obviously broken. He was bleeding through a busted nose and ripped-up lips. And his left foot had somehow lost its shoe. But no human hamburger.

“Take over. I’ll call for an ambulance.” O’Brien started running back to his car.

“Stay back.”

The crowd was small for now. Maybe fifteen people from cars and the DQ. In a few minutes it would look like a movie opening.

Comments:

“Is he dead?”

“He looks dead.”

“Hell, he isn’t dead.”

“Oh, yeah, what’re you, a doctor now?”

I knelt next to him. His eyes flickered open a few times, but despite the moans, I wasn’t sure he was conscious.

I checked his wrist pulse and his neck pulse.

“How’s his pulse, mister?”

Might as well answer. “Pretty good. Better than I would’ve thought, in fact.”

O’Brien, breathless, sweaty, was back. “Ambulance on the way.” He haunched down next to me. “Who is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re sitting at the Dairy Queen talking to him and you don’t know?”

I didn’t want to discuss it with eavesdroppers around.

A siren worked its way from the hospital five blocks away, that sad scary sound. The nuns always had us say a prayer for the person in need whenever we heard a siren. Probably not all that bad an idea.

Two more uniformed cops.

“Let’s go back to our cars,” I said to O’Brien. I wasn’t going to tell him much, just enough to explain why I didn’t know the injured man’s name.

By the time we got back to the DQ, he seemed to be satisfied that this was all the result of some guy following me around in the white Valiant for reasons I didn’t understand.

He said, when we came into the stark, bug-swarmed fluorescent light of the DQ, “Think I’ll have a cone. You want one?”

“Nah. Got an appointment I need to keep.”

“Guess I won’t give you a ticket, after all.”

“Appreciate it.”

And then I was gone.

8

The Hannity house was one of the new ranch styles that sat in scornful superiority above all the little Levittown-like boxes in the valley below.

The boxes had been built back in ’49 and ’50 when the American Dream everybody had fought for in the war seemed to be coming true.

But in a decade, the boxes had begun to show the perils of houses built so hastily and so ineptly. The pastel exteriors that had shone like dewy flowers in morning light had faded. Windows had dislodged from cheap frames and sliding tracks. And the yards the developers had promised never quite came to look like yards, just thin stretches of grass on dirt.

But moon shadow was merciful. As my ragtop climbed the winding hill leading to the imposing homes at the top, I was able to remember how much I’d always wanted to live in one of those boxes when I was in my early teens. We’d moved from the Knolls, where the poorest of working families lived, to the glamour of a housing development. I could still remember a kid telling me that many of the homes there had actual extension telephones. That’s right, more than one phone in the house so you could talk to your friends — and hopefully that someday girlfriend — in the privacy of your own room. For some stupid reason the extension phone had struck me as an invention much superior to that of the airplane or medical advances.

I’d never dreamed big enough to think that I’d someday live up on the hill above the boxes. The boxes, with a real laundry room for Mom, a basement shop for all of Dad’s tools, and a sunny room for my often sad little sister — who could want more than a housing development house?

A yellow Lincoln was parked in the driveway of the Hannity house. From inside, fairly loud, came Sinatra singing Jerome Kern — as much as I loved rock, I was beginning to learn my American popular composers — and tinny martini laughter.

I pulled up, killed the lights, and then watched as the double garage door ground its way upward, revealing two cars parked inside, one a black Lincoln and one a 1962 buff-blue Chevrolet.

My ragtop sat directly behind the Chevrolet. Nick Hannity was just about to climb into the Chevrolet when he turned and saw my car.

In the grainy garage light, almost in silhouette, he looked bigger than ever. Football hero, tormentor of Lucy Williams and David Leeds, and now insolent swaggerer making his way to my car.

No way was I going to let him trap me inside. I opened the door and got out.

As he approached, he said, “You’re trespassing, asshole.”

“Wrong-o, Hannity. I’m a licensed investigator and I’m investigating. Legally.”

“Yeah? Well, then I’m gonna illegally throw your ass off of my property.”

When I was growing up, even though I was small, I always figured for some balmy reason that I was just naturally stronger and tougher than kids younger than me. And most of them seemed to go along with it. I wasn’t a bully, but in the way of the playground and the backyard, I usually got younger kids to do what I told them to.

Then one sixth-grade autumn day when I was walking home with my friend Carl Sears, generally known as a puncher, some stupid kid in fifth grade started mouthing off behind us. His prey seemed to be Carl. I wondered if the stupid kid knew who Carl was.

Couple more blocks, Carl just sort of laughing at it. And then Carl turning without warning and hooking a right hand into the kid’s face with enough force to knock the stupid kid back a good three or four feet.

An easy, clean victory for Carl.

Except it wasn’t. Because the kid picked himself up and proceeded to beat the holy hell out of Carl, thus ending my personal myth of age mattering in a fight.

Now here was Hannity, a college senior probably four years younger, just about ready to take me apart. Age didn’t matter, my badge didn’t matter, whatever status I had as an associate of Judge Whitney’s didn’t matter.

He was closing in on me and he had every right to think — to know — that I was afraid of him.

He was tough, but he wasn’t subtle. He spent too much time bringing his left hand up. In those seconds I was able to plant the tip of my shoe right in his crotch.

I had the extreme pleasure of watching him fall to the ground, clutch his crotch, and cry out in pain.

“You son of a bitch,” he said. “I’m gonna tell my dad.”

But Dad was already running toward us. He obviously had a keen paternal ear. He’d heard his son’s cry.

As soon as he saw his son on the ground, he let out a yelp that combined fear and rage in equal parts.

But as he leaned down to help his son to his feet, Hannity started the painful climb on his own. “I don’t need any help.”

“What’s going on here, Nick?” Bill Hannity said.

“Ask that asshole over there.”

He looked over at me. He was a beefier version of his beefy son, a financial consultant in Cedar Rapids who tended to dress in California casual as often as possible: sport shirt, custom-fit slacks, and a tan collected from visits to three or four sunny climes a year.

He was also much smoother than his son. “Are you beating up children now, McCain?”

There were two warring groups at the town’s lone country club. One was run by the judge, the other by him.

“Yeah, I usually kick the shit out of ten-year-olds a couple times a week.”

Now that Junior was on his feet, Bill said, “Are you all right, Nick?”

“He really hurt me, Dad.”

Back to me: “What the hell do you think you’re doing, McCain?”

I shrugged: “It was either that or let him take me apart. He started coming at me. I didn’t have a lot of choices.”

“He’s just a college kid.”

“Yeah, and he’s got forty pounds on me and is one of the biggest bullies in town. As you might have guessed, since he’s been in court four or five times on assault charges.”

Nick, even though he was still wincing from time to time, started toward me. But my words had cooled Bill off at least temporarily.

“What are you doing on my property?”

“Investigating. I’m licensed, you’ll remember.”

“Damned Esme.” He shook his sleek gray head. “Investigating what, may I ask?”

“Trying to find out if your son was involved in the murders of the two men last night.”

“That colored boy? My God, McCain, what the hell would my son have to do with that?”

“He has a history of harassing Leeds.”

“You’re a liar. And besides, I was with my girlfriend Nancy Adams last night.” Nick started at me again. Bill put a formidable restraining arm across his son’s chest.

“Be quiet, Nick. What’re you talking about, McCain?”

I told him what Lucy had told me, about how his son and Rob Anderson had treated Leeds on several occasions.

“He’s lying, Dad.”

“There’s a witness,” I said.

“Nick wouldn’t do anything like that. He’s got a temper but—”

“Tell that to Lucy Williams. She knows better.”

“That bitch,” Nick said.

Bill Hannity’s expression changed. He seemed to consider the possibility, for the first time, that maybe something was going on here.

“Go in the house, Nick.”

“Dad, this little jerk kicked me in the crotch.”

“In the house, Nick. Now.”

His quiet authority impressed me. He’d handled himself pretty well, considering that he’d found his son writhing on the driveway.

Nick gave me the big bad glare and muttered all the usual curses just loudly enough that I could hear them. But then he turned and hobbled his way back to the house. I hadn’t meant to kick him that hard but I probably wasn’t going to cry myself to sleep about it.

Bill Hannity took a cigarette from the pack of Camels in his blue sport shirt, flamed it with a golden shaft of expensive lighter, and said, “Is he really in trouble?”

“Right now it’s hard to say.”

He made a face. “That damned temper of his. I suppose I was just as bad when I was his age. But you didn’t have to kick him that hard.”

“He didn’t have to charge me, either.”

He took a drag off his cigarette and blew the smoke up toward the clean nuggets of stars. This was the air of privilege up here, the warmth and safety of the lights in the wide windows of the ranch house, the expensive cars on the drive, and again the swagger of rich-people laughter fluttering up into the sky like sleek golden birds.

“I’ll talk to him. Do I need a lawyer yet?”

“See what Nick says first.”

He arced his cigarette into the air with all the finesse of a street-corner punk. A meteor shower erupted when cigarette met lawn.

He put his hand to his head and sighed. “A white girl who comes from a good family going out with a colored boy. It had to be trouble. It had to be.”

He didn’t shake my hand but he chucked me on the arm and said, “Thanks for being honest with me, McCain.”

Then he went back inside with his own class of people.

9

There’s a small cafe half a block from the courthouse that, at night anyway, resembles the cafe made famous by Edward Hopper. You rarely see more than two people at the counter and I don’t recall ever seeing anybody occupy any of the four booths. The man in the white T-shirt and apron behind the counter speaks a language nobody’s ever quite been able to identify. And the faded posters on the walls advertise obscure singers from the ’30s who appeared at a dance hall closed down in the late ’40s.

I go there sometimes when I can’t sleep and I can’t even tell you why. The old songs on the jukebox, the silent people sipping coffee at the counter, the counterman talking angrily on the phone in that strange language — it’s our own little corner of the Twilight Zone.

Tonight, though, I got a surprise. Not only were there at least six people at the counter, there was also somebody occupying one of the booths. And that was the second surprise. The occupant was none other than the new district attorney, Jane Sykes.

She wore a white silk blouse and a navy blue suit. With her golden hair swept back into a chignon and a cigarette burning in the ashtray, she had a certain chic that didn’t get in the way of her melancholy aura.

And there was yet another surprise. When I got to her booth, carrying the cup of coffee I’d bought, I saw the title of the book she was reading: The Stranger by Albert Camus.

“Miss Sykes.”

An expression of irritation drew her chic face tight. She’d been engrossed in the book.

“Yes?” Then: “Oh.” Then a long and silken hand angled up toward me. I took it and we shook. “You’re Sam McCain.”

“Yes.”

“Please. Sit down.”

“Looks as if I’ve dragged you away from your reading.”

“You did.” The smile was a beam that brought peace and wisdom to the entire universe. “But sit down and we’ll talk lawyer stuff.”

“You always work this late?” I said as I sat down.

“My first eight years were in the Cook County office. You’ve heard of Chicago? Seven days of twelve hours a day sometimes. This is nice so far. Only a couple of those twelve-hour days.” She raised her cup as if in a toast. “Plus the coffee’s better here.”

“You actually like this place?”

“You know who Edward Hopper is?”

I laughed. “That’s who I think of every time I walk in here.”

“I don’t know much about art but I had a husband who did. And there was a traveling Hopper show at the Art Institute for a month. I went every day. It was like a religious experience.”

“Same way here.”

“He explained something to me — about myself.” She smiled that smile again. “The trouble is I can’t articulate it, what he explained to me. Not even to myself.”

I must have looked transfixed. I sure felt that way.

“Want me to read your mind, Sam?”

“My mind?”

“Yes, I’m pretty sure you have one.” She tapped a long, red-tipped finger against her perfect forehead. “Want me to read it?”

“Uh, sure.”

“You’re thinking how could anybody with the name Sykes know anything about Edward Hopper.”

“Hey, c’mon.” But I knew I was flushing. Of course I’d had that thought two or three times since sitting down here. “Why would I think anything like that?”

“Because my family has its share of dim bulbs, as I’ll admit. Not to mention criminals. But they’re not stupid, they’re just uneducated. And they’re uneducated because they’re too lazy to learn. They look at ‘book learning,’ as they call it, as effete and dull. The women as well as the men, unfortunately.” She stubbed out a Viceroy and tamped another one from her pack. “So let’s be clear about this. I’m well aware of my family’s faults. That’s why my dad fled to Chicago as soon as he could. He wanted to be educated. But the big war got in his way and he got wounded in such a way that he has these terrible memory lapses. But he made sure that I did everything he couldn’t do.”

“You must be something in court. You just spoke everything in perfect sentences.”

“I wasn’t trying to dazzle you, Sam. I was trying to make a point. You and I will be bumping up against each other in a lot of different situations. I know you work for the judge and you know I’m a Sykes, but that’s no reason we can’t be friends. You know, in Chicago, lawyers for the prosecution and lawyers for the defense can actually be friends.” She had an easy touch with wry comments.

“And in a small town, I like the idea of having a friend who knows who Edward Hopper is. But—” She folded her hands on the table and looked at me directly. This particular gray-eyed gaze had to be a killer in court. “But whatever your feelings about any of the Sykeses, including Clifford, I want you to keep them to yourself. I’m well aware of his shortcomings, and one of my first priorities is to straighten out the police department. But he’s my flesh and blood and I know a side of him you don’t. So, no Cliff jokes, no Cliff jibes. If he does something that conflicts with the law, let me know and I’ll take care of it. Otherwise, the subject of Clifford is off-limits. All right?”

“Breathtaking. God, I’m afraid to go up against you in court.”

“I’m serious about it, Sam.”

“I know you are. But that didn’t take anything away from the presentation.”

She sat back in the booth. Yawned. Covered her mouth with that long, graceful hand. “Sorry. I guess I’m not as young as I used to be.”

“Ancient.”

“Thirty-one next month.” Thank God the smile came back. “That’s almost five years older than you.”

“How’d you know that?”

“You think I didn’t research every attorney in the county when I came out here?”

“Do I get to research you?”

“Be my guest. You know how old I am. My husband divorced me four years ago because of all the hours I put in and because I didn’t want children. Now I think maybe I would like to have a child, but the problem is I haven’t met anybody I’d like to get serious with, let alone get married to. As for my time in the DA’s office, I held the highest position ever held by a woman in the Cook County legal establishment. I’m slim but it’s becoming a battle to stay that way. And of all the lawyers in town, you’re the one most interesting to me.”

She tapped the finger where a wedding ring had once resided. “You’re single. That means you can show me the town.”

“Such as it is.”

“Such as it is.”

Then, without warning, she was gathering up her materials and sweeping herself out of the booth. “Want to walk me to my hotel? I haven’t found a place yet.”

“Sure.”

I hadn’t walked a woman home in some time. And I liked it.

“This must be quite a change from Chicago.”

“It is. But I’m enjoying it. I’ll like it even better when I’m moved in somewhere.”

As we walked I felt connected again. Girl-connected with all its rich erotic promise.

And then we were standing in front of the hotel, three wide steps up to a pair of revolving doors and a surprisingly comely interior.

She extended her hand and we shook. “Thanks, Sam. I’ve really enjoyed meeting you.”

And then she was gone. I tumbled down into the womanless darkness that had been my home since Mary had found out that she couldn’t marry me. Her husband Wes, who’d left her for another woman, had gotten Mary pregnant with their third child, unbeknownst to both of them. Since Wes had gotten dumped by his new girlfriend, he saw the wisdom of returning to Mary. She didn’t believe in abortion. She would have the baby — had already had the baby girl, in fact — and Mary and Wes would try again to save their marriage.

I went for a long, melancholy ride in my ragtop, and then I went home to feed the cats.

10

“I play a pickle, Sam,” Samantha said on the other end of the phone. “A network commercial, too. The residuals should be really good.”

Samantha, a very appealing copper-haired young woman from right here in Black River Falls, had been in Los Angeles. Couple of years older than me, a small legal infraction known as shoplifting being the way we’d met, she finally decided that maybe “everybody” was right, she should try Hollywood before it was too late. She did the impossible. She got me to keep her three cats for her, Tasha, Crystal, and Tess. I was previously a catdisliker. Not hater. But disliker.

Until I got her cats. And they became my cats by default.

She checks in three or four times a year, usually when she has news of a commercial or a bit part in a movie or a TV show or a stage play. I’ve never summoned the nerve to recommend to her one of my three or four favorite novels, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? by Horace McCoy. It’s the most scathing of all the Hollywood novels about people who trek out there filled with Cinemascope dreams about the gilded life that will be theirs.

To date, according to her count, she’s had more than a dozen jobs, slept with three bona fide movie stars, endured two failed marriages, one miscarriage and two abortions, and has spent a good deal of her modest income seeing a shrink who has convinced her that the sex they have is a vital part of the therapeutic process, something she admitted while stoned on marijuana and wine.

She checks in on her cats the way a really bad parent would check in on children she never sees, all effusive stagecraft about how much she misses them, thinks about them, even dreams about them. I’m sort of the adoptive cat parent now. Or the cat nanny.

After Samantha and I said our good-byes, I took off my clothes, grabbed a beer from the fridge, turned on the TV just for noise, and then saw the piece of paper by the door. I went over and picked it up and brought it back to the couch.

The cats read it with me, Tasha in my lap, Crystal and Tess on the back of the couch, reading over my shoulder.

A client of mine in a spooky divorce. A husband so abusive he’d once chased her through the woods with a fire ax. For which he is still serving some well-deserved time.

A Knolls kid, like me, Rachael had dropped out of school in tenth grade and taken up with the Road Devils, some local bikers who fashioned themselves after the Hell’s Angels. At first they’d been poor imitations. But by now they were serious criminals: car theft (the cars driven to Chicago where they were repainted and their registration numbers filed off, sold at auction to used-car lots), arson-for-hire, and numerous charges of assault and battery. Judge Whitney had sent a few of them up, in fact.

Rachael wasn’t especially attractive physically except for her enormous breasts. I’d always felt sorry for her. Nobody’d ever paid her any attention until her breasts sprouted, and then she was reduced to something of a joke by boys and girls alike. I suppose hanging out with the bikers gave her the sense of belonging she’d never found at school.

I’d lost touch with her since the divorce decree two years ago, though I wondered about her occasionally. She’d always be one of those sad-eyed kids nobody at school had ever bothered to bestow humanity on.

I dialed the number. One thing she wasn’t was a hysteric. If she thought she’d seen something, she’d seen something.

No answer.

I dialed and redialed right up to when the yawning finally overcame me and I turned off the TV and went to bed.

It was just before 6:30 the next morning when the clock radio next to my bed came on with the news that a body identified as that of Rachael Todd had been found on the highway, the victim of an apparent hit-and-run.