Fools Rush In

11

Whenever I want to find out what I really think about something, I go to the barbershop, the same barbershop I’ve been going to since my mom quit cutting my hair when I turned three. The two men who ran the shop since the 1920s have retired now, but the other characters are pretty much the same.

The men who collect here, whether they need a haircut or not, are a good cross-section of small-town folks: farmers, blue-collar workers, merchants, a newspaperman or two, and a fair number of retirees.

Pipes, cigarettes, cigars are smoked. Dirty jokes are told. Gossip is exchanged. And politics are argued.

I happened to need a haircut, so after visiting the morgue to learn what I could about Rachael Todd’s death, I spent part of the early morning sitting in a barber’s chair, soaking up not only the commentary but also the wonderful timeless scents of the barbershop — the hot foam for shaving, the aftershaves, the hair tonics, the powder, the smell of the bristles in the whisk broom when the barber is cleaning off your neck and shoulders.

The talk itself this particular morning took a roundabout way of becoming political, traveling from the particular to the general — from the murders of Leeds and Neville to the civil rights struggle on the tube every night.

The only thing that didn’t figure into the mix was Rachael Todd’s death. They’d heard about it but they didn’t know yet that it had some undetermined connection to the murders.

“landed at an odd angle,” the new county medical examiner showed me after tugging out the drawer in which Rachael resided. “Broke her neck.”

His name was Dr. Henry Renning and his duties were part time. He had his own practice to tend to the rest of the time. He was best known for wearing one of the most hilariously lousy toupees in town history and for driving a 1951 cherry MG that everybody, including me, envied the hell out of.

I hadn’t seen Rachael much since handling her divorce. She’d put on considerable weight. In death, at least, she appeared to be much older than her calendar years. She looked sexless now, and she’d been one of those women who made up with an erotic air what she lacked in looks.

“Her blood alcohol was nearly three times the legal limit. The way the accident looks to have happened, I’m not even sure the driver was sure he’d hit anybody. It’s pretty dark on that stretch of highway and she might just have lurched into his headlights.”

“I didn’t know she was a drinker.”

Renning nodded. His rug moved a half inch down his forehead. “The woman who identified her, her sister, said that Rachael here was in AA and had been up to that clinic for alcoholics in Mason City. Twice, in fact.”

First her husband had beaten her up with his fists. Then she’d beaten herself up with liquor.

I became aware of where I was. The bodies in the drawers. The terrible cold stench of the place. The hum of gurney wheels as corpses were moved around, the efficiency of it all as depressing as the sight of a man and woman weeping on the other side of a glass door as I’d come in. Weeping silently because I couldn’t hear them, a scene from an ancient silent movie.

But mostly I was aware of poor Rachael, the left side of her face almost black with bruising from her accident. And various other bruises and small cuts up and down her body. Meat now. Just human meat. I wish Dylan Thomas had been right about death not having dominion. But that was just a poet’s fancy to put up against eternal darkness. Death has plenty of dominion. Plenty.

“Got a suicide I need to check out,” Renning said, his toupee looking like a squirrel sprawled over his bald pate. “We about done here, Sam?”

If there were a list of Top Ten Barbershop Topics over the past few years it would include the birth control pill (“Shit, why didn’t they have somethin’ like that when I was young; McCain, your generation’s got it knocked!”); the Berlin Wall (“Who gives a shit? After what the Krauts did, screw ’em!”); Ernest Hemingway (“All the money and all the broads that guy had and he kills himself?”); the recent trip by Rick Paulson to the Playboy Club in Chicago, the first of our townspeople to enter those sacred doors (“Hefner just walks around in his tuxedo with that damn pipe of his and the gals are all over him!”); and the recent murder of Medgar Evers (“I think the colored people are pushin’ it pretty hard these days but I don’t hold with no murder.”).

“That wife of Williams’s didn’t look so snotty when I seen her at the post office yesterday, I’ll tell you that much.”

“’Bout time we got a Democrat in there, anyway.”

“I had a daughter seein’ a colored boy, I’d whip her ass good.”

“I can tell you I’d take a couple of colored boys I used to serve with in Korea over some of the white boys around here.”

“They say in France they treat Negroes just like white people.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the French. We had to save their ass in the big war and they never have thanked us.”

“I don’t want to be nowhere around ’em. I don’t like lookin’ at them or talkin’ to them or even thinkin’ about them.”

“Segregation’s good for them. They do better when they’re with their own.”

“Ike was the one who named that son of a bitch Warren to head up the Supreme Court. He’s the one who started all this.”

“My son in Des Moines says my grandkids go to school with colored kids and they all get along just fine.”

“Look at Sammy Davis. He don’t care who knows he’s married to a white woman.”

“Well, they fought in the war just like I did. They shouldn’t get shoved around the way they do. You see them little kids when they get them hoses turned on ’em? I went south one time and you can keep it. Didn’t care for one bit of it.”

“I’ll take Nat ‘King’ Cole any day. He’s my kind of colored man. A gentleman.”

“I hear a couple of those bikers really had it in for that Leeds kid.”

Somehow, if you listened long enough and carefully enough, you heard the kind of prairie debate that was going on, in a more sophisticated way perhaps, all across the country. You heard the men good and true and the men confused and struggling and the men who hated, one or two of them who might even be capable of violence against Negroes in the great wrong moment.

And once in a while, no matter what the subject was — and it could be anything from did Marilyn Monroe really commit suicide to why Roger Maris really was entitled to that home run record after all — once in a while you really learned something specific and useful.

In this case, it had to do with David Leeds.

“Hey, Karl, where’d you hear that?” I asked just as Mike was using the whisk broom on me.

“About the bikers and the Leeds kid?”

“Yeah.”

“Out to Savio’s, getting a tune-up. One of the bikers was in there. The one wears the bandana around his head like an Indian? Name’s De Ruse, you know the one I mean? After he left, Savio told me that when De Ruse was drunk he talked a lot about killing Leeds. He doesn’t go for white gals and Negroes gettin’ together. Savio said he saw De Ruse out in that area near those cabins when he was driving home around the time Neville and Leeds got killed.”

“He really said that about De Ruse wanting to kill him?”

“He sure did.”

One of the old gents laughed. “You’re forgetting you’re talkin’ to a private investigator, Karl.” And then the inevitable: “I always thought Mike Hammer was taller’n you, McCain.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I’m a lot handsomer.”

That got the kind of laughs and smiles a wise man uses as his exit line. Old vaudeville truism.

“Hey, McCain, didn’t one of them bikers get arrested already?”

“Yeah, but as usual Cliffie arrested the wrong one.”

I got another laugh at that one.

12

“So what’ll it be?” the cutie in the pink ruffled blouse and matching pink Capri pants asked me when I was two steps across the threshold of Gotta Dance Studio! She had dimples you could hide quarters in and happy little breasts that said, “Glad to see you.” You could tell she hadn’t worked here long. Chick Curtis hadn’t been able to browbeat all happiness out of her yet.

She asked her question while she was still walking across the shining hardwood floor where instructors and students came together.

“You can see our list right up there on the wall. You can learn any three dances today for only nineteen ninety-five. I’m Glory, by the way.”

The list was long if nothing else, and carefully hand-lettered on a white length of cardboard.

“You look like you’d be a good dancer,” she said.

“How can you tell?”

“Oh, you know, just the way you move.” She seemed flustered, as if nobody had ever questioned her ability to spot good dancers. I could see why Chick had hired her. Even in her early twenties she’d retained a bit of the innocence and freshness of a much younger girl. How anybody as seedy as Chick had ever come by her, I was afraid to guess. (WHITE SEX SLAVERY IN AMERICA! the supermarket tabloid had cried last week.)

“And there’re a lot more dances, too, on a sheet I can give you.” Then: “Oh, darn!”

She ran over to a bulletin board filled with black-and-white Polaroids of couples who’d become Chick’s Cool Ones. The odd thing was that most of the Cool Ones appeared to be in their forties and fifties. Well-dressed, middle-class folks clearly trying to capture the Kennedy mystique, Jackie Kennedy having been filmed on dozens of chi-chi dance floors twisting the night away with movie stars, political figures, and various members of the Kennedy clan. So now the Lincoln and Cadillac doctors and CEOs and real estate rich of the Midwest were rushing to grab a little bit of that Camelot luster for themselves.

I tried not to stare at her friendly little bottom as she bent to right a photo that was falling off the bulletin board. I would learn anything she cared to teach me, even, God forbid, the shimmy-shimmy.

“There,” she said, pushing the red thumbtack in, “Mr. and Mrs. Winnans sure wouldn’t like to see their picture on the floor.”

A sexy version of Sandra Dee, she turned back to me. I probably wasn’t more than seven years older than she was. But there was a chasm separating us. “So have you decided?”

“I’m sorry. I’m sort of here on business.”

“Well, we’re a business.”

“I know. But I’m here on a different kind of business. I need to see Chick.”

“Oh, you can’t!”

“I can’t?”

“I mean, my dad’s been out of town for a week and won’t be back until the weekend.”

“Your dad is Chick Curtis?” I tried to keep the shock out of my voice.

“Uh-huh. Isn’t that cool? He’d always teach all the kids at my parties how to dance. Are you a friend of his?”

“Well, we’ve done business together on occasion.” Meaning I’d been able to blackmail him into giving me information from time to time. I’d had several clients who’d had problems with Chick and had learned a whole lot about him. He was the forward flank of the Quad Cities mob, which was, of course, the forward flank of the Chicago mob. With two wartime boot camps to prey on, they’d been able to take over all the prostitution and gentler kinds of drugs. They still hadn’t touched heroin. Once you started playing with heroin, the feds took special note of you. Why bother with smack when you could make just as much with your other enterprises, including, of late, some mighty fine counterfeiting that extended all the way to Denver. Chick himself stuck to laundering mob money through dance studios, dry cleaners, roller rinks, construction companies, even, one hears, a group of religious bookstores throughout the Midwest.

“My name’s Sam McCain.”

“Oh. I think maybe he’s mentioned you.”

“Maybe you could help me.”

“Me?” she said, as if nobody had ever asked anything of her before but to look fetching and just a wee bit dense.

“Did you hear about David Leeds being murdered?”

That little face reflected grief as well as happiness. “I’m trying not to think about it until I get off work because I don’t want to be crying in front of customers all day.”

“He worked here.”

“Yes. Everybody liked him. Even my dad who doesn’t like — you know, colored people all that much. But David needed money for college so he came in three nights a week. He was very personable and he knew all the dances. I think it was kind of a lark for him, you know? Except for all the jokes about how Negroes have natural rhythm and all that.”

“That made him angry?”

“Not angry so much as — hurt. You could see it in his eyes then. The people who come in here are usually very nice and they were careful about what they said to David. But every once in a while somebody would make a joke like that and he’d kind of freeze up and just get this look on his face.”

“Sad.”

“Yes, sad. More than angry.”

“So nobody really picked on him?”

The phone rang. It sat inside a glassed-in office. “Just a sec.”

I hadn’t thought about that. Teaching all those American Bandstand dances to white people, you’d just be setting yourself up for mean jokes. But Leeds seemed to be a serious young man who wanted a good future, so he did what he had to to get money. And a lot of folks would probably think they were just making friendly jokes, not intending to hurt his feelings at all. But it was hard to watch Sammy Davis Jr. on TV for exactly that reason. The only things people seemed capable of saying to him were race jokes. Very few were really ugly jokes, but they made it clear that to them Sammy wasn’t of the same species — separate and apart. Only occasionally when you were watching him would you see that split second of pain, of humiliation. Hard to enjoy his act when you sensed that there was so much grief under all that showbiz laughter.

“Mrs. Paulson,” Glory said when she came back. “Listen, why don’t we sit down over at that table? I’ll be on my feet for the rest of the day and night.”

Once we were seated, once I’d declined her offer of either coffee or soda pop, she said, “I didn’t mean to give you the impression that there wasn’t any trouble. There was. Just not with our dancing people.”

“There was trouble?”

“The bikers would sit outside and roar their engines and call him names as soon as we killed the lights for the night. I was always afraid for him. And then there was a guy whose girlfriend was taking lessons here and he waited for David one night and jumped him because David had taught the guy’s girlfriend the pony. I mean, they didn’t even touch or anything. David wasn’t much of a fighter but my dad sure is. I screamed for him to come out and he really roughed up the guy pretty bad. Broke his nose and two of his fingers.”

Chick Curtis came from the South Side of Chicago, back when a lot of it was still white. I’d seen him work over a guy in a tavern one night when the drunk had started ragging on Chick for being mobbed up. I don’t think the whole encounter took a minute. Chick grabbed the drunk by the hair, slammed his forehead against the bar three or four times and then he stood him up straight and put one punch into the drunk’s face and another to the guy’s belly. There was blood everywhere. The guy was going to sue in civil court for damages, but then one of Chick’s more sinister employees had a talk with him. No lawsuit was forthcoming.

“The bikers knew better. They only came around when my dad wasn’t here.” She frowned. “Then Rob Anderson and Nick Hannity used to come in. They’d pay for dance lessons and I’d lead one of them out to the floor but then they’d say, No, they wanted to dance with David. Really embarrass him like that. They thought it was really funny, of course. The people who were here to learn the dances really hated them. I was sort of afraid of what my dad would do to them if I ever told on them. But finally it got so bad with how they were picking on David that I didn’t have any choice.

“He waited until they came in one night and then he took them out into the parking lot. I went out to try and stop him from really hurting them. There were a lot of their friends outside. They were all pretty drunk. My dad knew he’d get in trouble if he hurt them, so what he did was walk up to both of them and spit in their faces. Then he dared them to take the first swing. It was sort of funny because you know how short my dad is. Then he spit on them again. Their friends kept yelling for them to hit him. But they knew what would happen to them if they did. They finally just went away.”

The door opened and a gentleman who had to be seventy-five walked in carefully. Glory jumped up and said, “Here, Mr. Winthrop, let me give you a hand.”

“I’m gonna learn to mambo yet,” the old man said and winked at me. “I’m taking the widow Harper to our class reunion and she says that’s the only dance she likes.”

Glory turned away from him momentarily and said to me, “I hope they find whoever killed him. I just wish they hadn’t repealed the death penalty. I told Dad about David when he called in this morning and he said the same thing. He really liked David.”

The hospital was on the way back to my office, so I stopped in to inquire about the condition of my friend in the white Valiant. The one who liked to play in traffic. “His condition is listed as fair,” said the pleasant woman at the switchboard. She was the mother of one of my high school friends. She was legendary for her cheeseburgers, which she fixed every few weeks during the summer in the backyard whose lawn we all took turns mowing to keep her happy. “I’m afraid he can’t have any visitors, Sam. Well, except for that new district attorney. She’s up there now.”

“She is?”

She smiled. “I can tell you’ve met her. She’s a looker, isn’t she?”

“Oh, she’s all right if you like that much intelligence mixed with that much beauty.”

“Same old Sam. You should settle down and get married like Bill did last year. She’s already pregnant.”

“How’s he like St. Louis?”

“Oh, he’s still adjusting. It’s quite a change from our little town.”

Jane Sykes was outside room 301 talking to a uniformed police officer.

No smile when she saw me approach. Just a barely perceptible nod. A yellow summer dress and a matching yellow straw hat. I was alive to other women and grateful to her for that. But I was also scared as hell, as I always was when I knew I’d already loosened my grip on the self-control handle.

When I reached her, she said, “So if you hear him even so much as mumble, be sure to get in there and try to catch what he’s saying. Even if it doesn’t make any sense.”

“Sure, Miss Sykes.” His eyes dazzled with fondness for the beautiful, stylish lady in front of him.

She didn’t say anything to me, just nodded at the elevator. The doors were open, so we stepped inside.

“I know you can talk,” I said, “I heard you just now telling that cop something.”

“I’m saving it till we get to the cafeteria. I’m starving.”

The typical hospital cafeteria. The nonmedical staffers sitting together enjoying leisurely lunches. The doctors and the nurses seeming in a bit more of a hurry.

Just once I’d like to play doctor. Walk around with a stethoscope dangling around my neck. In my high school days I’d been convinced that that was the easiest way of all to attract girls. While all the other boys were making fools of themselves trying to attract the most unattainable of girls, there I’d be walking up and down the ol’ high school corridors, very cool in my white medical jacket and ’scope, a perfect combination of raw male sexuality and deep medical seriousness. Dr. Sam McCain, M.D.

She didn’t order as if she were starving. Fruit cocktail, a bowl of chicken-rice soup, and a 7UP. I had a burger and a Pepsi.

“Now can we talk?”

“Sure.”

“Have we found out his name yet?”

“‘We’ certainly have, Sam. James Neville.”

“The same Neville as Richie Neville?”

“Half brother. They share a father.”

“Any kind of record?”

“A long one. The biggest rap was for extortion. Served six years in Joliet. Armed robbery as a juvenile.”

Will Neville, the man who blamed David Leeds for the murder of his brother, hadn’t bothered to mention any James Neville. I’d have to talk to him again.

A doctor interrupted us. Young. Nice-looking. No wedding ring. Leaning unnaturally close to Jane as he spoke. “I hope you got my invitation.”

“I did, Dr. Higham. And I appreciate it.”

“And even more, I hope you’ll consider joining me.”

“I’ll get back to you.”

He glanced at me and said, “I didn’t know that DAs trafficked with defense attorneys.”

Then she won my heart. “When they’re as charming as Sam they do.”

His smile was more of a grimace. Just the way I wanted it. He said good-bye and left.

“He made the mistake of pawing me at the party Judge Martin gave for me. Very possessive. Not the right approach, not for me anyway.”

“Me, either. I hate to be pawed.”

“Very funny, McCain. Now tell me what you’re going to do about Neville upstairs?”

“About Neville upstairs I plan to see his slug of a brother. And then I plan to find this biker.” I told her what I’d heard in the barbershop.

“Now that’s interesting, if it’s true.”

Not until then, me being a slow learner, especially when I’m so taken with a woman, did I realize what was happening here.

“We’re working together.”

“Yes, we are, Sam. And that’s just the way I planned it. I confide in you, you confide in me. Neither Clifford nor Judge Whitney has to know. The point is to serve justice, as stuffy as that sounds.”

“This is like a secret club.”

She smiled, shaking her head. “Here’s my unlisted number at home. You’d better write it down.”

Then she went and spoiled our little movie moment. “And please don’t call me at this number unless it’s business. I need my private time, Sam.”

“Yeah, me too,” I said, though that’s all I’d had since Mary had gone back to Wes. Private time.

I needed more information about James Neville. It was likely he was staying in one of the local hotels, maybe even the one my old friend Dink worked at. I called his home.

“Dink, please.”

“He isn’t here right now.”

“Please, Mrs. Dink—”

“Are you trying to be funny?”

“You don’t recognize my voice?”

“The TV’s up too loud.”

“Look, I know he’s there because you won’t let him go out unless he’s going to work.”

“He tell you that?”

“It was my idea.”

“Oh, then this is McCain.”

“Yes.”

“Darn right he don’t go out. He only gets in trouble.” I didn’t tell her that I was calling to get him in some trouble for me.

“Well, I wonder if I could talk to him.”

“They didn’t cancel his bail, did they?”

“No, but I need him to do me a favor.”

Suspicious. “What kind of a favor?”

“He’s still at the hotel every day?”

“Yeah, his uncle’s the only one who’d hire him.”

“Good. Then I need to talk to him.”

“I don’t want him in no more trouble.”

The way I had figured it out, he wouldn’t have to get in any trouble if he did what I told him.

“He’ll be fine.”

“And I didn’t appreciate that ‘Mrs. Dink.’”

“I apologize.”

“I’ll go get him.”

When he came on the line, Dink said, “The wife, she don’t care for you much.”

“I called her Mrs. Dink.”

“That ain’t why. She said you shoulda got me off on probation.”

“I did get you off on probation. Then you stole that cop’s billfold. That’s why you’re headed back to court.”

“Oh, yeah, I guess she forgot that.”

“Listen to me. I need you to do something for me.”

He listened.

“Thanks, McCain.” He lowered his voice. “I’ve been needin’ to do something illegal. I’m goin’ nuts here.”

“It’s not illegal. Not if you do it the way I told you.”

“Well, at least it’s sneaky. That’s a start in the right direction.”

“Remember what you need to do, now.”

“You knock something off on the bill?”

“You mean the bill neither you nor your parents have paid me anything on for five years?”

“I guess you got a point there.”

“Call me as soon as you do it.”

13

I drove past both of the garages where the bikers tended to hang out when they weren’t at the Iron Cross, the tavern on the edge of town where the local gendarmes had to come in full force several times a week to break up fights. The local gendarmes often looked worse than the bikers when it was all done.

But there were no signs of Harleys or Indians anywhere. I assumed they were out on the highway or at one of their enclaves in the nearby woods.

I found a Debbie Todd Carlyle in the phone book and drove on out to the hardscrabble little acreage where chickens seemed to have taken over. They were everywhere. I had to park on the edge of the gravel road. There were too many of them in the drive to scatter.

Debbie, a heavyset woman in a red-and-black checked flannel shirt and jeans, stood with her hands on her hips watching me approach. She didn’t look happy.

When I had to slow down because I was entangled in chickens, she said, “You might as well go back to town, McCain. I don’t plan to talk to you.”

“I just came out to buy some chickens.”

“You know where you can shove your chickens.”

“Any special reason you seem to hate me? Your sister and I were good friends.”

“Good friends, my ass. She’d still be alive if it wasn’t for you. She shoulda kept her nose out of it.”

I was marooned on the front lawn amidst a sea of gabby white chickens. The one-story house in front of me needed a coat of paint and the 1949 Pontiac up on blocks needed a left front door.

“She was murdered.”

“You think I don’t know that, McCain? That’s exactly what I told her would happen, butting in like that.”

They pecked, they squawked, they shat. Their heads jerked back and forth. They were pretty ugly creatures when you came right down to it. But you had to feel sorry for them. They had but one mission on this planet. To be consumed.

I worked myself through a clutch of them, drawing a few feet closer to the small, old house.

“If you know she was murdered, Debbie, you should want to help me.”

“And end up like she did?”

“Did she tell you what she saw?”

“No, she didn’t. I told her not to. I didn’t want to get caught up in all this crap.” She had a broad face that would have been attractive if she’d wanted to make it so with a little soap and makeup. But she was a widow — her husband had died in a freak accident with a combine — and a doggedly antisocial one at that.

“So you might as well get out of here, McCain. I don’t know nothing about what she saw or didn’t see. That’s between you and her.”

“She’s dead, Debbie. You’re the only one who can help me.” Then: “She saw something, Debbie. Something to do with the murders the other night. You were her best friend. She must have told you something.”

“I said that she didn’t, McCain. Now I’m going back inside and finish my lunch.”

And that was all. She turned, went back inside, and closed and locked the door behind her.

And left me with the chickens. Their squawks were putting me on edge. “How about keeping it down?” I said.

Which, of course, did me a lot of good. If anything, they seemed suddenly louder.

They trailed me back to my ragtop. A pied piper I was. I got in my car and started up the engine. I decided to go up to the far end of the road and take the blacktop back to town. Shorter route and less damage to the machine than on this scaly road.

I roared the mufflers three or four times. The chickens scattered. I didn’t want to grind one of them to death beneath my wheels.

I set off, turning up the radio as I did so. The local stations still played Elvis’s “Return to Sender” from last year. I liked hearing Elvis sing just about anything, though I already missed his original sound when he was with Sun Records and covering songs like “Milk Cow Boogie” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” Hard to grow up out here without at least a sneaking fondness for real country music.

Also hard to grow up out here without a real desire to protect your blood kin. People like Debbie always bothered me. I just didn’t understand how you could write off a sister the way she had.

14

“I wouldn’t go in there if I was you.”

“It’s a public place, isn’t it?”

“Not really. Especially not to fuzz.”

“Technically, I’m not fuzz. I’m private.”

“Yeah, but you work for the judge. You know how many Devils she’s sent up?”

“Two, that I remember.”

“Well, you remember wrong. Four. And two of ’em are still doin’ time.”

The Iron Cross was a one-story concrete-block building that had been painted black, apparently to suit the mood of the bikers who drank there. At this hour of the day the front and sides of the place were packed with motorcycles. The jukebox inside trembled with gut-bucket rock and roll. And the laughter was of the coarse, ugly kind of pirates in all those buried-treasure movies.

The man I was talking to was named Ray Peters. He was a sort of honorary biker. He’d lost a leg and an arm in Korea and now got around on a single crutch. The word his brother gave me — his brother being a nonbiker who ran illegal crap games and was frequently in need of my legal services — was that Ray never felt right around “normal” people. So he dressed in a sleeveless denim jacket, jeans tucked into motorcycle boots, and an eyepatch he justified wearing by saying that his left eye had been damaged in Korea, too. He had one big problem that I could see. Take away the rebellion and what you had was a sad, lonely, and very decent guy.

“How about I do you a favor?” he said, as if to prove my point. His blond-gray hair was so thin on top the sun had already baked his scalp brick red.

“A favor?”

“You tell me who you want to see and I’ll go in and get him and see if he’ll come out.”

“Won’t that get you in trouble?”

A bleak smile. “Nah. They don’t pick on gimps till real late at night.”

“Nice folks.”

“They don’t pity me, anyway, McCain. And they don’t make fun of me. You take your nice, normal people — they wouldn’t let me fit in even if I wanted to.”

Even if some of that was paranoia, I knew how he felt. Or should I say I presumed to know how he felt? Being short and coming from the Knolls had made me into an outsider of sorts, too. But I was strictly a tourist. There was a French saying I’d picked up from a Graham Greene novel — “Embrace your fate.” I was pretty sure mine was a whole lot easier to embrace than poor Ray’s. He had to live his out every second of every moment when another human eye was on him.

“So who is it you want to see?”

“De Ruse.”

He laughed. “Man, you picked just about the meanest son of a bitch in the whole wolf pack. De Ruse. You sure you want to talk to him?”

“Yeah.”

“You packin’?”

“I’ve got my old .45 in the glove compartment.”

“Maybe you should transfer it to your coat. One of the guys who’s still servin’ time is his brother.”

“Good thing I’m a mean son of a bitch myself, huh?”

He laughed again. “I don’t know about mean. Crazy might be closer.”

He adjusted his crutch and said, “You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

When the door opened, a hurricane of dank smells violated the soft, sunny afternoon. Smoke, beer, whiskey, marijuana, and a toilet that the UN might cite as a weapon of mass destruction.

De Ruse came right out.

The muscles in his arms rippled like crawling snakes.

His green eyes gleamed with enormous malice.

He was alone.

He didn’t need anybody else.

He was strutting.

With his big loop earring and his bare chest and his red Indian-style bandana around his blond head, he looked like somebody who’d give Spiderman a whole raft of shit, Spidey being the only comic book I still read.

He threw the right hand from at least a foot and a half away. Given his short legs, just throwing it should have knocked him off balance. It didn’t. And traveling such a distance, and it being only one punch, its power should have been cut at least in half. It wasn’t.

There was quick, sharp, overwhelming pain, and then there was nothing.

I woke up sometime later with my wrists bound up in the necktie I’d been wearing and the rest of the tie wrapped around the rear bumper of my ragtop.

De Ruse was dragging me around the dusty lot of the Iron Cross to the great and abiding amusement of maybe twenty Road Devils.

The Road Devilettes, or whatever you called them, laughed especially hard. I knew right then and there that I probably wasn’t ever going to sleep with any of them, much as that was to be desired, with their beehive hairdos and witches’ brew cackles.

The point wasn’t to hurt me, it was to humiliate me. The soil was loose and sandy and he probably wasn’t even going fifteen miles an hour. The big fear was pieces of glass scattered across the lot, but the worst I got was the occasional scrape from small rocks. He was being careful without seeming to understand that simply by knocking me out he was already in trouble and probably on his way back to the state pen.

He went in wide circles. I didn’t try to get loose. That would give them too much pleasure.

He drove close enough to them so that they could spit on me, which they took the opportunity to do. But at least they didn’t hit my face. I imagined that my trousers and jacket were beyond even the healing powers of dry cleaning.

And then he decided to give me a little scare. He floored it. We tore across a long sandy patch that ended up near a creek at maybe forty miles an hour. Now there was pain.

Behind us the Devils were shouting and applauding.

And then it was over.

He shut off the ignition and shouted “Beers’re on me!” and then ran back to the crowd.

This was how the truly cool guy would handle himself. He had not given me any formal verbal recognition. He’d hit me, he’d dragged me around. But he hadn’t acknowledged me as a person in any other way.

And he still hadn’t.

They hailed their hero and then went back into the tavern, thunder of jukebox, unholy stench of toilet.

Leaving me to start the process of getting to my feet and untying myself. It didn’t take long and it wasn’t difficult. Restoring my dignity would be another matter altogether.

I was in the process of taking off my loafers and dumping the sand out when I heard the tavern door open. But I was already prepared for a return match.

Ray crutched his way over to me. “You all right?”

“All right? A tough guy like me?”

We both smiled at that one.

“He can be a real asshole sometimes.”

“I find that hard to believe, Ray. Seemed like a real nice fella to me.”

He moved a few feet closer for a better look at me. “No offense, but you sound kinda crazy.”

And I suppose I was. In a business like mine, whether I’m investigating for myself or the judge, you meet people who do their best to belittle you any way they can. I used to be able to deal with it. But as I got older I got tired of insults, innuendos, jibes. And when I got tired enough, I’d push back. These were almost always verbal battles.

But being punched out and dragged across a parking lot for the entertainment of a bunch of bikers — that was a special kind of debasement.

What I should’ve done was find a phone and call out the gendarmes to arrest him. And that had been my first impulse. But then I remembered that not only had I been humiliated, I hadn’t even done my job, which was to ask him about being spotted at the murder scene the other night.

Ray said, “Some of them’re afraid he’ll get sent back to prison.”

“Aw, that’d be too bad now, wouldn’t it?”

“They said to tell you he was only havin’ some fun was all.”

“A growing boy needs to have some fun, doesn’t he?” And right then I knew that I did sound crazy. That in my voice you could hear rage and tears that I couldn’t control. “I’ll tell you what, Ray. You go back in there and tell him to come out here by himself and we’ll talk.”

“You mean you might not get him sent up again?”

“We’ll see how it goes. Now you go back in there and tell him.”

He was still studying my face. He was still sensing how near being unhinged I was.

“Well, I’ll go tell him.”

“By himself, remember. And nobody else is to come out until I open the door. You got that?”

“I’m sorry this happened, Mr. McCain. I truly am.”

He stared at me a little more and then started working his pained way back to the tavern.

I flipped the trunk open, got what I needed, and when he went inside, positioned myself next to the door.

I knew I wouldn’t have much time. There was a back door, and a few of them would undoubtedly sneak out to back him up.

Like the good thug he was, he let some time go by. Get me nervous, uncertain, so he’d have the advantage when he strode through the door.

But I was neither nervous nor uncertain. I was crazy pissed is what I was.

And so when he was less than four feet from the door closing behind him, I moved.

He’d been looking straight ahead for me. By the time he decided to look to his left, I was bringing the tire iron down on the side of his head.

He did a cartoon take. He staggered backwards but for a second there he looked as if he was going to shrug it off, the way those professional wrestlers do after the opponent hits them with a chair.

He even gave me a little professional wrestler grin. But then blood bloomed on the spot where I’d hit him and his eyes got hazy and he collapsed. Just hit the ground in a pile of unwashed flesh, tattoos, and now free-flowing blood.

I just had time to drag him over to my ragtop before three of his buddies came running along the side of the building.

But they were too late. I had my .45 jammed into his face. He was still unconscious, sitting on the ground with his back to my passenger door.

“You boys go back inside. This is between us. If you stay inside for fifteen minutes, I won’t file any charges. I won’t even mention it to his parole officer. But if I see anybody before the fifteen minutes is up, I’ll have the cops out here and they’ll bust every one of you. Now get back inside.”

They had to sneer and threaten and make a show of it. But they knew they didn’t have any choice. One of them, the one most likely to have studied under Gandhi, flipped me the bird just before he disappeared into the stench inside.

It hadn’t taken much to calm me down. I’d hit him hard enough to draw blood and the sight of that blood was enough to pacify me.

As he came back to Planet Earth, I said, “Now I want you to tell me what you were doing out at Neville’s the other night.”

“Go to hell.”

Then I learned that I wasn’t quite as pacified as I’d thought. This time I pistol-slapped him right across the face and broke his nose. I hadn’t intended to, but fortune of war and all that.

He started crying. Not from the pain, I was pretty sure. But from the humiliation. He would have to go back inside and explain to them how somebody who weighed less than his left arm had knocked him out and then busted his nose.

“You’re gonna pay for this, McCain. You mother—”

And then I grabbed his hair and gave it a twist and raised him an inch or two from the ground. “Why were you out at Neville’s the other night?”

“I wasn’t! I wasn’t there!”

Screeching his words now. A good sign.

I gave his greasy hair another twist and then slammed his head against the door.

And then he collapsed. Emotionally. I let go of his hair. His head slumped. The blood was running faster and thicker from his head. He was snuffling up air through his busted nose. Crying and choking sometimes.

“You tell me the truth, I won’t press charges against you. And I mean the truth right now.”

“You bastard,” he said through the phlegm and blood.

“That’s not a good start. You want to try again?”

I was just about to step on his hand — sadism is a lot more fun than it sounds — when he said, The pictures.”

“The what?”

“The pictures. The photographs.”

“What photographs?”

“That we paid Neville to take of Phelps.”

“Phelps the cop?”

“Yeah.”

His nose was getting bloodier. I dug in my back pocket and pulled out my handkerchief. Tossed it on his lap. “Christmas came early.”

I gave him a few minutes to do what he could with the handkerchief. “This really hurts, man.”

I wondered how many innocents had said that to him over the years after he pounded on them.

“What about Phelps?”

“He busted Charlie Eagle for grass.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. So what? He was just doing his job.”

“Bullshit, he was doing his job, man. He caught two of us smoking grass one night sittin’ on our bikes downtown and you know what he did? Took our grass and smoked it himself. Never charged us.”

He tried to shake his head but misery cragged his face instantly. “We knew Phelps was seein’ this Mexican chick over by the rail yards. Her old man is a switchman, works nights. We had Neville take some pictures of Phelps goin’ in the door at her place. We were gonna use them against Phelps, see if he’d tell the DA that maybe he made a mistake, you know, with Charlie Eagle.”

I was amazed at his ignorance. “The trial’s already been scheduled. If Phelps backed out now, the DA would know that somebody got to him.”

He angled his head up. Between the blood and the bruises he was one sorry biker.

“So that’s why I was at Neville’s, but him and that colored boy were dead when I got there.”

“You find the pictures?”

“Too scared, man. Somebody sees me there, they’ll nail me for them bein’ dead for sure.” He snorted. “I knew somebody’d get to Neville someday.”

“Why?”

“Why? He took pictures of people all the time. Secret shit, I mean. He’d hang out in different spots at night and see things and hear things and then he’d start following somebody, see if the rumors was true. And if they was, he’d start takin’ pictures.”

Good old Neville. I’d congratulated myself on him staying out of trouble, thinking that he’d learned his lesson just the way young men do every night on TV. Crime Doesn’t Pay and all that. Maybe burglary or car theft or armed robbery didn’t pay because you could get caught so easily.

But blackmail was a more subtle crime, one infinitely more difficult to prove — because the blackmail-ee had a vested interest in protecting the blackmailer.

“And that’s the truth, man. Everything I just said. Now, was you telling the truth, McCain? About not tellin’ my parole officer?”

“Far as I’m concerned, we’re even up.”

“I got the worst of it.”

“Good.” I didn’t smile. “Now get your ass up. I want to get out of here.”

“Good thing you work for the judge, McCain. Otherwise I’d get up right now and beat your ass bloody.”

“Jeez, man, and here I thought we were friends.”

I stopped by my office to see if any money had come in. My body was a universe of pain, large and small. While I was going through the mail, Dink called.

He said, “It wasn’t as much fun as I figured it would be.”

“Well, I’m sorry you didn’t get to commit a felony, Dink.”

“I got to work early just like you told me so I could get one of the maids to let me in his room, see—”

That had been my plan. Get Dink into James Neville’s room and see what he could find.

“But you know what?”

“What?”

“I didn’t even have to find a maid to con into it.”

“No?”

“Rosemary — the one with the lazy eye? — she was in there when I got there.”

“Good old Rosemary. So what did you find?”

“He’s got a lot of dirty magazines.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And a lot of socks. He must have twenty pairs.”

“Good for him.”

“I know the kind of thing you wanted me to find. And I only found one thing. It’s this brochure.”

“Brochure?”

“Yeah. It’s pretty chintzy-lookin’. It’s for a photography studio. The Neville Brothers Studio, it says.”

It had been well worth the trip. “Dink, that’s great.”

“I wanted to steal it — you know, I wanted to get a little something out of it. But then I remembered you said only go in when a maid lets you in and don’t take nothin’ out of it.”

“I appreciate it, Dink.”

“The wife thinks I’m goin’ to prison.”

“I’ll do my best for you, Dink. I just wish we didn’t have to go up against the same judge.”

He paused. “Listen, anytime you want me to sneak in someplace for you, just give me a call. I don’t think you appreciate the full range of my talents yet, McCain.”

Lord God Almighty.

“I’m sure I don’t, Dink. I’m sure I don’t.”

15

Thanks to the new procedures that Jane Sykes had forced Cliffie to follow, the entire area around Neville’s cabin was now set off as a crime scene. Nobody was allowed past the sawhorses that formed a square around the area.

The day was closing as I got out of my ragtop. The birdsong and the long shadows and the purpling clouds were as lonesome as a Hank Williams song. I brought along the outsized flashlight I’d bought a year ago at Western Auto.

I started inside the cabin. The darkroom looked even worse than it had the night of the murders, everything busted up in a frantic search. And now I knew for what.

The whole idea of blackmail had a big-city feel to it. Every other episode of Perry Mason used it as a device and every once in a while the Chicago Trib would run a crime story that involved it, though it was usually described as extortion.

I worked till near dark. I pretty much knew I wouldn’t find anything. Richie Neville had been a smart young man. The sort of crime he was committing meant that he had to be careful where he hid the photographs he used. And that meant that he probably didn’t leave them in his cabin. But it had to be checked.

Weariness from being dragged all over the parking lot had begun to sneak up on me. I needed a drink and a shower, and then a meal.

I was just leaving the cabin when I saw a stack of business envelopes on an overstuffed chair, one of the few pieces not to be knocked over. My first thought was that one of the police officers had probably gone through the envelopes. But then I remembered Cliffie was in charge. I sat down with my flashlight and went to work and came away with one interesting fact. I extricated a monthly statement from one of the six bank envelopes and got back to my ragtop.

The meal turned out to be a fried egg sandwich, a glass of V8, and a slice of birthday cake I’d brought home about a week ago and kept in the refrigerator.

I kept wanting to give Jane Sykes a call. Officially, I had business to discuss with her. Unofficially, I just wanted to hear her laugh. I enjoyed sitting in my apartment with the cats all over me, watching an inane situation comedy and not thinking about Mary and would she ever change her mind and come back to me.

I was thinking about Jane Sykes and wondering if there was any kind of future there.

The shower had been nice — I had a lot more bruises than I’d realized from the dragging — but it hadn’t revived me. Sitting there in my boxers with the cats, I was starting to give in to sleep.

In fact, I was dozing when the phone rang.

Good news — possibly Mary or Jane calling.

Bad news — my dad had had another heart attack.

All these thoughts before I was truly awake. Automatic thoughts.

“Hello.”

“Did I wake you up?”

“No, uh-uh, I was just going over some work.”

“Gee, I hope I get you on the witness stand sometime. You’re a terrible liar. You’d be so easy to break.”

“Thank you for that and all the other compliments.”

“I heard a rumor you had kind of a rough time this afternoon.”

“That’s all it is, Jane. A rumor.”

“So you don’t want anything legal done about it?”

“Not so far. Let’s wait and see what happens.”

With my usual grace I quickly changed the subject.

“What’s the word from the hospital on James Neville?”

“No change. Still unconscious.” Then: “Are those cats in the background?”

“Yes, and cruelly mistreated cats. They haven’t been fed for upwards of twenty minutes.”

I could hear the smile in her voice. “My little kitten died when she was only six months old. I’m afraid to get another one. I don’t want to go through that heartbreak again. You should’ve seen her. Gray fur and these sweet little white paws.”

“For a DA, you really have a sentimental side.”

“Whatever you do, don’t tell anybody about it.” Then: “Well, I’ll talk to you tomorrow. ’Night, Sam.”

“’Night.”

After we hung up, I stood in the light of the refrigerator eating what remained of that large chunk of cake. I also finished off the beer I’d started as soon as I’d gotten in. I’m not sure you’ll find that particular combination — cake and beer, in your average cookbook, but it’s not as bad as you’d think.

The phone again.

No doubt it was Jane asking me to spend the night with her. Or Mary saying that she’d made a very bad mistake and was coming back to me. Or Janet Leigh asking me if I’d mind taking a shower with her because she was still scared after Psycho.

The voice was male and tainted with whiskey.

“This phone may be tapped, so listen to me. I’ll be sitting on a bench by the wading pool at six a.m. tomorrow morning. I expect to see you there, too.”

A teasing familiarity, that voice. But he hadn’t spoken long enough for me to identify it.

A restless night. Not just because of the late call but also because I was beginning to think that Richie Neville hadn’t been alone in his blackmail operation. His brother James probably hadn’t come to town just to say hello. With his record for extortion, he had most likely played a part in the whole scheme.

And there was another reason for my restlessness. The bank statement indicated that four months ago Richie Neville had paid a year in advance for a safe-deposit box. I was eager to get in there and see. I’d need the permission of either Judge Whitney or Jane Sykes, but I was sure that one of them would grant it.

The one aspect of the murders I’d yet to piece together was the relationship of Richie Neville and David Leeds. Why had Leeds been at the cabin? What had he wanted with Neville? Given what I could reasonably surmise, Richie possessed far more salacious photos of Lucy and David than had been sent to the party office. The senator would have no choice but to pay a good deal of money for them.

The final thought was one I didn’t want to have in my head, but I had to consider it at least. Were Richie and David working together? Was David helping Richie get some especially good photos for the camera?

I hoped not. I just kept seeing Marie Leeds’s face as we talked and sat in the booth at Woolworth’s. Grief enough that her brother had been murdered, intolerable that he’d been part of the scheme that had likely caused all the violence.

The cats, sprawled across various points of my bed, got a lot more sleep than I did.

16

He wasn’t there.

I’d taken a cold shower, gunned three cups of steaming coffee, and chain-smoked half a dozen cigarettes just so I could be awake when I met him.

And he wasn’t there.

The summer morning almost made up for it. The birds sounded happy as drunks at a party and the clouds were as white as they’d been in those great old Technicolor pirate movies. The dew-gleaming grass had a sweet, almost narcotic aroma and the breeze reminded me of my brother Robert, long dead now, and how we’d always flown kites on such mornings as this.

I could almost forget how much our town was changing. Chain stores and chain burger joints and chain supermarkets starting to push our own merchants out. And the bedroom commuters a community unto themselves, separate and superior.

And then, behind the bench where I was sitting, a voice said: “Back here, McCain.”

He was hiding behind the god-awful pink concession stand that in summer bloomed with moms and kids and the smell of hot dogs.

His head was all I could see, and even that I didn’t see much of, given how low the brim was snapped on his fedora and the large sunglasses that made identification even tougher.

“Back here.”

I walked back.

When I was within ten feet of him, I knew who he was. And given who he was, I guessed he was probably right holding a meeting the way spies did in the James Bond novels.

“I’m sorry for all this,” Senator Lloyd Williams said.

He made no move to take off the hat or the shades.

We were screened by a dense run of pine trees behind us. Safe.

“My opponent hires operatives to follow me around.”

“Of course you’d never do anything like that.”

“I do it only because the other side does it.”

“Of course.”

“You always were a sarcastic bastard.”

“Are we here to run each other down, Senator, because if we are, I want to remind you what a chickenshit you were in sticking up for Senator McCarthy. Not to mention all the bullshit laws you’ve introduced to hurt poor people.”

I’d forgotten what a cranky bastard I could be in the morning when somebody irritated me.

“I can see I’ve made a mistake.”

He turned to go, the long body buried in a long tan trench coat whose collar ran all the way up under the back of his hat.

“Look, Senator, you got me out of bed this early, so I deserve at least the courtesy of an explanation.”

He turned back toward me. “You don’t like me and I don’t like you. That’s hardly the basis for a good working relationship.”

I’m rarely shocked these days. I was shocked. “You want to hire me?”

He was silent for a time. Those big, dark plastic bug eyes staring at me. “I wanted to hire you because I believe you’re as good as your word.”

“I like to think I am. I try to be. Sometimes things go wrong, of course. Beyond my control.”

“But you wouldn’t blackmail me. You’d do the job I hired you to do and that would be that.”

“You’re talking about Richie Neville.”

“Yes.”

“And him having photos of David Leeds and your daughter.”

“No.”

This time I think I actually flinched when he answered me.

No? Not his white daughter going out with a black man? What else would he hire me for?

“We need to make a deal right now. Before you say anything more.”

He nodded. “All right. I do want to hire you, then. But given your situation with the judge, can I be assured that you won’t share any information you gather with anybody else?”

“I’ll give you my word as long as the information I gather doesn’t cover up a crime.”

“Not a crime — a stupid—” He touched long fingers to his cheek. “I’m so exhausted from worrying about this that I can’t even think clearly.” Then: “Indiscretion. A stupid indiscretion.” Then: “A local woman. A prominent woman. Her brother has a fishing cabin. A very nice one. He’s been in Europe for the past few years. That’s where we — she and I — got together. And that’s where Richie Neville took photographs of us.”

“Marsha Lane.”

“My God, how did you know?”

“Prominent woman. Brother in Europe. Nice fishing cabin. You forget I work downtown. Had to be Marsha Lane.” Then: “I can see what you’re up against. First Lucy and David Leeds. And now Marsha Lane. Your campaign’s going to be a nightmare.”

He leaned back against the concession stand. He took out a pack of Chesterfields and lighted one with a Zippo. He hadn’t relaxed; he’d damned near collapsed. Even his voice was weaker. “I’ve thought of announcing that I wasn’t going to run again. But my family — if I announced that, the press would be all over. They’d know I was hiding something.” Then: “Ironically, I think I can weather Lucy and her young gentleman. But with Marsha added to it—” He threw his cigarette away. “It’s funny you’re the only one I can trust. But who knows what you’re getting when you hire one of those Chicago agencies. They could be just as mercenary as Neville.” Then: “What a great fix this is, huh? Somebody like you is my only hope.”

I didn’t like him. He brought out all my class anger. He’d been an overindulged preppy who’d come back here summers to tell everybody of his manly conquests back East. He’d never carried this county because so many people in their forties remembered him all too well.

But what he was talking about was a principle. Whatever I thought of him, he didn’t deserve to be blackmailed.

“I’ll tell you what, Senator. I won’t make any kind of deal with you except to say that whatever I find, I’ll turn over to you. I want to see you defeated but not because of some pictures. You don’t pay me anything, I don’t tell anybody about this, and whatever I find is yours.”

“I’m sorry I shot off my mouth and called you a name.”

My laugh was harsh. “That was a moment of truth, Senator. We basically hate each other. And a moment of truth coming from a politician is something to be happy about.”

I started to turn away from him. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Can’t I at least say thank you?”

This time I was the one who regretted being a bit nasty. I turned back to him and stuck out my hand. We shook.

“Thanks, McCain.”

I walked back to my ragtop.

17

“Cig” meaning signature.

“Think you could run this through the typewriter one more time, Jamie?”

“Was there something wrong with it?”

“Just a few things.”

“I really took my time with that one, too, Mr. C.”

“I just made little marks on it.”

I placed it on the edge of my desk for her to pick up. She wore a tight mauve blouse and a short tan skirt. She also smelled great. In the face of such things, what are a few typos?

The phone rang. I grabbed it.

No greetings and salutations. “Since you’re on salary, would it be too much to ask that you stop by my office?”

“I’d be honored to.”

“And I mean now.”

“Delighted to. Five minutes?”

“How about three? You’re not that far away.”

Just as I hung up, the mailman came through the door. His name was Henry Woolsey and he was an unabashed admirer of Jamie’s, fifty-some years notwithstanding.

“’Morning, Jamie.”

“’Morning, Henry. I see you broke out your shorts already.”

“Plenty warm for them. Too bad Sam won’t let you wear shorts.”

“Why don’t I just let her wear one of those French bikinis, Henry? Would that be good enough for you?”

Henry’s furiously flushed face contrasted vividly with his white hair.

“He’s always kidding around like that, Henry,” Jamie said. “He wouldn’t actually let me wear anything like that to the office.”

Henry started dealing out the pieces of mail as if they were cards and we were playing poker. I immediately saw what all the envelopes had in common. She just looked so innocent poised on the edge of her chair, I had to say it gently: “Gee, I guess I must have forgotten to put stamps on all these envelopes last night. Would you do that for me, Jamie?”

I was already late for the judge. Three minutes can go by awfully fast.

“I’ll probably be back in an hour or so,” I said.

Henry, the lecher, was already helping himself to the coffee. Young women like Jamie were in need of protection, no doubt, and Henry was only too eager to lend a hand.

He winked at me. “I like that idea you have for a French bikini, Sam.”

After I brought her up to date, she said, “My spies tell me you spent some time with Jane Sykes.”

“True enough. Your spies got something right for once.”

Judge Esme Anne Whitney’s office was one of timeless solemnity: deep leather chairs, rich carpeting, flawless wainscoting, two full walls of legal tomes, and a desk big enough to play a passing fair game of Ping-Pong on. It was always cleared off.

“Maybe you haven’t noticed, McCain, but the Sykes family is our enemy. They stand for everything we revile — or at least that I revile. And I assumed you did, too.”

“She’s cleaning up the police force, for one thing. And for another, she’s not going along with all of Cliffie’s arrests.”

“And she’s very good-looking.”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed that.”

“I don’t want you to see her anymore.”

Per usual, she parked herself on the edge of the desk with a Gauloise and a cup of coffee laced with brandy. No rubber bands this morning, which was an indicator of how seriously she took this.

“I’m serious, McCain.”

She looked regal in her fitted gray dress and oversized, vaguely African-style earrings. No wonder she’d managed to find four men to marry her. Even in her sixties, she was still a desirable woman, if, that is, you caught her before a day’s worth of sipping brandy-soaked coffee began to take its toll.

“You can order me not to work with her. That comes under the heading of employment. But you can’t order me not to see her for pleasure. That comes under the heading of private life.”

This was my morning for shocks as she said, “I thought we were friends, McCain.”

My instinct was to laugh. The words hadn’t come out right, which I’d put down to bad acting. But then I saw the shimmer of tears in her ice-blue eyes and knew better.

The judge had never before said anything like this to me. She’d always made it clear that she’d hired me because she couldn’t find anybody any better who lived here in town. Not exactly your ringing endorsement. Never warm, most of the time barely courteous, sometimes damned mean, she was fond of reminding me of her social background and position and my lack thereof.

And now this. Served with tears yet. But those first tears were now followed by more tears that actually escaped her eyes and sparkled on her cheeks.

“I just feel so damned alone sometimes, McCain. No friends to confide in except back East; nobody to have dinner with at the end of the day.”

I knew what I was seeing, of course, but now wasn’t the time to talk about it. In the years I’d been her court investigator, I’d seen her drinking get increasingly serious. And now she was at the point where she needed to make the trip up to the Minnesota clinic that was disguised as a resort for rich people.

Four, even two years ago, she would never have let me see her so vulnerable. She enjoyed being imperious. She even enjoyed jokes about being imperious.

I found myself standing up and walking to her. I found myself putting my hands gently on her shoulders.

And she found herself jerking away from me and snapping, “Don’t you dare ever touch me like that, McCain! I’m your employer, not one of your little strumpets!”

I thought of explaining myself but realized it wouldn’t help either of us. I’d embarrassed her. I’d damaged her pride. People just didn’t go around touching imperious people the way they would little strumpets.

There was only one thing left for me to do. I walked to the door. “I’ll give you my word that I will never cooperate with Jane Sykes on a case. If we have a relationship, it’ll be strictly a personal one. And if that’s not good enough, then—”

“Just get the hell out of here, McCain, and don’t come around until I tell you to.”

She was drinking deeply from her cup as I quietly closed the door and stepped out into the hallway.

Walter Margolin had been a particularly obnoxious hall monitor. We’d always had the sense that he was too goody-goody even for the nuns. I remember Sister Mary Rosemary standing behind him while he was ragging on some poor little girl for taking too long at the water fountain. The sister rolled her eyes as Walter became more and more dramatic.

In his graying crew cut, huge red bow tie, and tan summer-weight suit with enough patriotic pins on it to start a war, Walter was now a grown-up version of a hall monitor.

He was vice president of loans at First Trust Bank. His desk sat in front of the vault, and it was to him that supplicants came to plead their cases. I’d always thought he should have a kneeler in front of his desk, the way you do in confessionals. Because from what I’d been told, you had to show Walter a great deal of deference and piety before he would even consider your loan.

He looked up and gave me the hall monitor’s smirk he’d perfected by the time we were in fourth grade.

“Well, well, well, I knew you’d be in here someday, McCain. Destitute and in dire need of help.” The smirk got smirkier. “Do you remember seventh grade?”

“Barely. I was drunk for most of it.”

“Very funny, McCain. I seem to remember a certain juvenile delinquent who dropped a water balloon on my head from the third floor.”

“I was framed, Walter.”

“And now,” he said with great satisfaction, leaning back in his executive chair, “you’ve come here to see if I’ll be decent enough to forget how you humiliated me and give you a loan.”

I tossed the envelope on his desk. “That’s court permission to open Richie Neville’s safe-deposit box.”

He leaned forward. “That’s not going to happen. Only the person designated as his closest family member can open that now.”

“Open it up and read it.”

“You don’t seem to understand, McCain — but then you were never real bright, anyway — that court orders don’t matter. We have our own rules of procedure here.”

“If you say so, Walter.”

I snatched back the envelope and headed straight for the large corner office where the bank president resided when he wasn’t attending vital banking conferences in the Bahamas or playing nine rounds at the country club.

I got what I wanted.

“Here, Sam, let me take care of that for you. We can open that safe-deposit box right now.”

There was a tremor in his voice that attracted a few glances and he came upon me so fast he almost bumped into me.

But he did lead me to the large solemn room in which the safe-deposit boxes were kept.

There was more than three thousand dollars in cash and four manila envelopes with familiar last names written in ink on them. I took a quick glance inside and found photographic negatives. I didn’t look at any of them.

The new black Cadillac didn’t belong in one of the three parking slots that came with my office. Neither did the man sitting behind the wheel.

He got out of his car as soon as I got out of mine.

“I suppose you’ll grow up someday, Sam, and get an adult car instead of that convertible.”

“And I suppose you’ll grow up someday, Anderson, and stop bleeding poor people dry.”

“Nobody else will loan them money. I have to charge the rates I do. And I don’t intend to defend myself to somebody like you.”

“You just did. Now what the hell do you want?”

“I want you to leave my son alone. Because if you don’t, you’ll be damned sorry.”

Rob Anderson’s father was tall, slim, sour, and a professional nag. He owned four loan companies throughout the state that were the last resort for debt-ridden people. I’d seen it calculated that his loan rate ended up being in the fifty-five percent area by the time a loan was paid off. The money he made, and it was as much as anybody made in our town, automatically made him respectable, never mind that he traded on human misery. He was an elder in his Lutheran church, he frequently wrote guest editorials for the newspaper, and he even ran radio spots that were long enough to promote his usurious business and give him forty-five seconds to expound on how America was in the process of losing its moral compass. Whatever the hell that was. He was one of the Midwest grotesques Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis had identified as sui generis long, long ago.

“I haven’t been bothering him, but the police probably have.”

“Uh-huh. And who put it in their minds that he had anything to do with that damned colored boy?”

“I didn’t have to put anything in their minds, Anderson. Your son was engaged to Lucy. But she broke it off because she was sick of the way he treated her. Rob’s a bully to everybody, including Lucy.”

“Oh? Rob’s a bully? Well, for your information — and even though I’m strictly against this — even now he’s willing to forgive Lucy for running around with that colored boy. Forgive her and take her back. Now does that sound like a bully?”

“He’s a regular saint, ain’t he?”

He glared at me. “You’ll never get the Knolls out of you, will you, McCain? No matter how successful you become, you’ll still be that shabby little Knolls boy.”

I leaned against the trunk of my immature ragtop, tapped a Lucky free, and said, “What the hell are you doing here? You didn’t come here to tell me to lay off dear sweet Rob. You want something.”

He pushed his rimless glasses back up his long nose and said, “I have some information for you.”

“Why don’t you take it to the police? I’m not interested.”

“Clifford’s a buffoon. At least you’re somewhat intelligent. And Esme and I are bridge partners at the club sometimes.”

“I still don’t want it.”

“Why not?”

I pushed away from the Ford. The summer sunlight fell broken in soft shadows through the trees above. The birds sang with impossible sweetness. And the old garages that lined the other side of the alley behind my building looked like the sort that I’d explored as a kid.

I didn’t want to be standing here talking to this prissy prick.

“Anything you say’ll be self-serving. You know it’s logical that your son is a primary suspect. You also know that it’s logical that the police will keep on contacting him until the case is resolved. So you’re here to tell me something that’s going to put the blame on somebody else. Am I right?”

He looked embarrassed. “You’ve discredited me even before I had the chance to say anything.”

“Then we’re done here.”

I started to walk toward my office. He caught up with me. He grabbed my shirtsleeve. I pulled my arm away.

“Here’s something Rob told me at breakfast this morning. While Neville and Leeds were being killed, my son was visiting his old girlfriend. Her name is Sally Amis and I invite you to call her.”

“Were they alone?”

“What difference does that make?”

“It’ll make a difference in court. Her word alone won’t be good enough, especially if she still has feelings for him. She’d need a witness of her own to corroborate what she says.”

“She comes from a good family. She wouldn’t lie.”

“People lie all the time, good families or not.”

“You’re missing the point here, McCain. Hannity and Rob weren’t together at the time the coroner set for the death. They only got together later. Hannity would have had plenty of opportunity to—”

“I need to get to work, Anderson.”

“Your vast law office, huh? I’m sure you’ll be sitting on the state supreme court any day now. And be sure to take that stupid secretary you have along with you.” Then he chastened himself: “I came here to offer you some help with this case.”

“And to get your son off the hook?”

“Well, what if I did, McCain? You’ll do the same thing if you ever quit sleeping around and get serious with a decent woman. You’ll protect your children just as fiercely as I do.”

“Not if they’re like your son, I won’t.”

I went inside.

I never told my dad I didn’t care much for hunting mushrooms. I like the outdoors if you have something entertaining to do while you’re out there. Mushroom-hunting never fell into that “something entertaining” category for me.

But I always went because it meant I got to be alone with him. And he, or so my mom always said, could maybe forget for a while that my brother had died of polio.

What I liked best about being around him was his stories. His weren’t the kind that won you the biggest laughs on Saturday night front porches where the vets from the war gathered. He’d won himself some medals, but he never talked about them. At boot camp he’d saved a buddy’s life by dragging him mostly dead from a flooded river. But his stories were rarely about derring-do.

His favorite subject was how radio developed, and I expect just seeing those words set down like that you can see why my father was never a renowned bullshit artist.

But when he’d start talking about how he’d built his first crystal set and how he’d then raised money for his Depression-era family by building crystal sets for other families, it was fun to hear. And then he’d talk about the Red Network and the Blue Network and how for a long time there was never such a thing as a network that covered the United States all at the same time — the West Coast was usually recorded for later play — and how radio stars like Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy and the Shadow became just as big as any movie star.

He could also tell you the history of New Orleans jazz, the evolution of the cowboy movie from the silents to the singing cowboys, the days when Orson Welles was the radio voice of the Shadow, and the ten most memorable days of the big war, Pacific and European; all of it bedazzled me.

I remembered all this as I knelt next to the cot Mom had fixed up for him in the spare room after he got out of the hospital two weeks earlier, the nightstand holding a stack of his beloved Luke Short westerns and two bright yellow packages of Juicy Fruit for when he got the urge to smoke, an urge he would never be able to indulge again.

He slept peacefully, a small and tidy man, his hair gone all to white and that little Irish mug a bit impish even now. The doctor had told me but not Mom (and I wasn’t about to tell her, either) that with luck, Dad could live another six, seven months if he didn’t have any more major heart attacks. But even without an attack, his heart wasn’t going to hold out much longer.

I held his small, coarse, wrinkled hand now and touched my cheek to it. This was when I needed my boyhood faith, my blind certainty there was a God, and for a few moments I banished all cynicism and disbelief. Maybe it wasn’t like the believers said, all that angel stuff, but maybe we did live on in some fashion, the essence of each of us anyway, and then I couldn’t help it, I touched my cheek to his hand again and started crying.

“He’s looking good, isn’t he?” Mom said, serving my favorite, tomato soup and toasted cheese sandwich.

He had, of course, looked blanched, dead.

“He looks great.”

“I know you don’t go to Mass anymore, Sam, but I think you can see what all of us praying has done for your father.”

I nodded, spooned some more soup into my mouth. She finally started to eat and I watched her, still the possessor of her young-woman elegance even in a faded housedress; “the prettiest Irish girl of her time” the old monsignor had told me one day as I was cleaning up the altar after serving Mass. I’d wondered if he might have had a crush on her.

But there was no denying the weariness that claimed her. The step a little slower, the response to a question or a remark a few seconds late in coming, and something new of late, sighs so long extended they were like notes in dirges.

“He was talking to Robert again last night just like Robert was alive. He woke me up and I went into the spare room and stood over him and just listened. He was dreaming about that time he built that soapbox derby car for you boys. It was so wonderful hearing him talk like that. He seemed so happy.”

She put her hand on mine. “By the way, the judge called here for you late last night. She sounded — confused. I was very polite to her. I told her you hadn’t lived here in a long time.”

“She was drunk.”

“Yes, I’m afraid she was. She’s such a fine woman in so many ways. Maybe she needs help.”

“She does for sure. It’s getting her to accept it that’s the problem.”

And Mom said what she always says at such moments, “I’ll add her to my prayer list, honey.”

18

“Hi, is Nancy home?”

Mrs. Adams didn’t look happy to see me. She knew who I was and knew that my appearance on the doorstep of her large, Spanish-style home could not mean anything good.

“You’re Mr. McCain.”

“Yes.”

“We know the judge from our club.”

“I won’t keep her long.” I wanted to get on with it. I didn’t want to discuss her club or her rather extravagant house or her friendship with the judge.

Mrs. Adams was in her mid-forties, I guessed, so tanned from various trips that her skin was becoming lizardlike in places. She wore large sunglasses with white frames. They were girly and seemed frivolous on a face with a sharp, jutting nose and a mouth made for slander. In her blue walking shorts and sleeveless white blouse, she was every woman you saw playing golf at the country club.

“I think I’m going to refuse.”

“That’s your prerogative.”

“You don’t have a very good reputation with people at the club. They’ve been after the judge to fire you for several years now.”

A Negro maid in a crisp gray uniform appeared behind her in the air-conditioned shadows of the large house.

“Good day, Mr. McCain.”

“I need everything you can dig up on Nancy Adams.”

“She isn’t anybody I’ve ever heard of before.” I could hear Kenny Thibodeau take a deep drag of his cigarette. “I need to finish this chapter. I need to read up on lesbians, I guess. This is lesbian novel number nine and I’m running out of ideas for what they can do in bed.”

“That’s pretty much what happened to John Steinbeck, wasn’t it? Didn’t he run out of lesbian ideas for his books?”

“You’re just jealous you don’t have my career.”

“You know, in a weird way I am. I look at all your books in your trailer and I do feel a little pang. That you’ve been able to start and finish so many of them. The one time I tried to write a novel, I never got past page twenty.”

“I didn’t know that. How come you never told me?”

“Embarrassed, I guess.”

Then Kenny said, “I was going to talk to you later in the day, but I guess I might as well tell you now. You asked me to dig up what I could. So far I’ve got two real interesting things.

“The first thing is, Richie Neville had two places to work in. His cabin, and then he rented the upper floor of the Parker House, that supper club out on the highway. That was pretty much a secret.”

“How’d you find out about it?”

“That was pure Sherlockian fortitude, man. I called the photo shop where he bought all his supplies. The guy there said that he liked working with Richie and didn’t mind delivering to the cabin but that the Parker House took an hour back and forth.”

“Good work, Kenny. I have a plaque here with your name on it.”

“And then when I was in Iowa City last night, I went over to where David Leeds lived and asked some of his friends about him. They still can’t believe he’s dead.”

“Yeah, so what’s the one interesting thing?”

“You know his sister you were talking to?”

“Yeah?”

“They said he didn’t have a sister. He was an only child.”

“He was the perfect type of renter for us. Real quiet.”

“How much time did he spend here?”

“Couple of nights a week, two, three I’d guess.”

“He have many visitors?”

“Not that I noticed, anyway. His brother Will.”

Ted Wheeler, the owner of the Parker House, had played football for the Iowa Hawkeyes back in the early fifties. He’d known he wasn’t good enough for the pros, so he did what so many in sports do, he opened an insurance agency. Who wouldn’t want an esteemed Hawkeye as their insurance man?

He’d made so much money with the insurance that he was able to buy an aging restaurant on the highway and turn it into another prosperous business. A bit of a drive for small-town folk not used to driving more than a couple of miles for anything in town, but the drive just seemed to make the evening more special. It was a memorable night going to the Parker House.

I’d found Ted in back of his restaurant hosing off his new, black Jaguar. He was a short, thick man, blond hair thinning now, with a pleasant face that included a badly broken and badly set nose.

The water sparkled rainbows in the late afternoon sunlight and smelled of the rubber hose.

“The police been here to talk to you yet?”

He wiped a massive paw on his T-shirt. “Not yet. I don’t think too many people knew about this place.”

“I’d appreciate a look.”

He shrugged. “Fine by me.” He frowned. “He was a nice kid.”

I didn’t correct him.

“You want me to let you in now?”

“Please.”

“I really appreciate how you took care of my sis that time. The dog ripped her leg up pretty good. But then that shit owner brought in that vet who said that she must have done something to rile the dog herself. He looked pretty good on the stand there, but you brought him down right away.”

“I didn’t have to do much. His story didn’t make a lot of sense. And even if she had riled the dog, he was still responsible for what the dog had done.”

He twisted the hose off. I followed him up the outside stairs leading to the apartment on the second floor.

The front room must have been half the apartment. New linoleum, throw rugs, a pair of couches covered with matching floral slipcovers, a bookcase packed with a lot of Mickey Spillane and dozens of science fiction titles, a three-foot stack of albums that ran to Elvis and rockabilly types, and a refrigerator-freezer packed with every kind of tasty but spurious TV dinner on the market. With the long front window and light of the fading day, there was a pleasant college-dorm feel to the place.

“I need to get back and get the troops ready for tonight,” Ted said. “I always give ’em a little pep talk, you know, like a coach at halftime.” He laughed. “They hate it, think it’s real corny. But it’s a reminder that I expect them to do everything they can to keep the customer happy. You know how that goes. You start out on a job and pretty soon the customer starts looking like the enemy. Hell, I’m the owner and some nights I don’t want to wait on certain customers. The real picky ones, I mean. I’m half tempted to say, ‘Well, since you find so many things wrong with this place, why don’t you go somewhere else?’ But I never would, you know what I mean? I’ve worked too hard to get this place rolling to do anything stupid like that.” He gave me a wave. “Good hunting, Sam.”

I’ve always felt self-conscious picking over the bones of the dead. The left-behind letters and photos and books that seem to contradict what you knew of the person. On one job, trying to learn the identity of the man who’d robbed and strangled an eighty-six-year-old longtime widow, I found a fresh pack of Trojans beneath a silk slip; on another investigation, I found a letter written to the deceased man from the child he never knew he’d had until a few weeks before his death. And then there’d been the brutal street cop with a ninth-grade education who’d been killed by a man he’d beaten a false confession out of, the cop belonging to both a classical records club and the Great Books society.

Picking over all these bones through the years, I realized how little we know of each other. We judge each other without having all the information. Many times the quiet life of the soul has little bearing on the noisy life of the body.

But, after an hour of searching, I came to the conclusion that the exterior Richie had been pretty much like the interior one. Girly magazines, several handguns, books on weightlifting and advice on picking up ladies, several photography magazines that did double duty as girly books (the models in the photography magazines infinitely more mysterious and sexual than those in the girly magazines), and six different kinds of aftershave. Apparently the book on picking up ladies swore by aftershave as a tool of seduction.

I found the hidey-hole because I tripped over the register grate in the floor. Its black paint had long ago faded so that the grate was almost gray now. It had collected a furry tissue of dust on it. One thing was out of place. The east end of it was ajar, raised about a quarter inch from the floor. Maybe he’d been in a hurry pushing it down. Or maybe he simply hadn’t noticed.

I got down on my knees and went to work. He hadn’t made it especially difficult to find the envelopes once you figured that maybe the grate hid, in turn, a more artful hiding place.

My hand went left, my hand went right, waggling, wiggling, crawling until it reached what felt like a large manila envelope that was concealed beneath a piece of cardboard that had been spray-painted black and then carefully covered with mice turds and large furry dust devils. You wouldn’t look twice at how it had been concealed. It appeared to be a natural part of the heating system.

The envelope was heavier than it looked, an 8 x 10 standard issue that had been used for mailing before. It bore Richie’s name and the address of this place.

I grabbed a Falstaff from the refrigerator and seated myself in an armchair. The contents of the envelope radiated evil thoughts. I knew I’d found what I was looking for.

Twenty minutes later, having gone through all twenty-one photographs, I realized that he hadn’t been much of a Peeping Tom. He hadn’t needed to be. Who needed sweaty naked flesh when it was much easier to get a couple of simple shots of two adulterous people holding hands as they left a boathouse or two adulterous people walking into a motel room or two adulterous people furtively kissing goodnight as they stood between their respective cars. In divorce court, these would be a bonanza. You didn’t need pornography to make your case. Context alone was enough. Kissing and holding hands was pretty much a carnal act with photos like these.

But these weren’t local folks. Given the various settings, I could see that these had been taken in Chicago. The blackmail franchise had apparently started in Chicago and had been brought to Black River Falls.

I slid the photos back in the envelope and carried my beer can to the kitchen counter. The prig side of me had taken over again. I hated thinking about the misery these photos had wrought.

19

“How did you find out?”

“Guy who writes dirty books found out.”

“You have interesting friends.”

“And useful.”

“Will you be able to believe anything I tell you from now on?”

“It won’t be easy.”

“My first husband.”

“Beg pardon?”

“He had an affair right after we got married. Right after. I found out and tried to leave him. He convinced me to stay for three months and give it a try. But it didn’t work.”

“Because you couldn’t believe him. You were suspicious all the time.”

“You’ve been through it?”

“Both ends of the gun. Cheater and cheatee. Once somebody lies to you it’s hard to believe them again.”

“Maybe next time around I should try being the one who cheats.”

Marie Leeds’s hotel had a taproom full of road-weary salesmen, half of whom stood at one end of the bar and told dirty jokes, the other half of whom sat at the bar and stared at their drinks, as if by trying hard enough maybe they could levitate them.

We were sitting at one of those knee-knocking little cocktail tables that get wobbly pretty fast. A candle encased in a tube of red glass flicked rose-colored light across our faces.

“How about we start with your real name, since you aren’t really his sister.”

“The first name really is Marie.”

“Gosh, I know we’re on the right track now.”

“And my last name is Denham.”

“And you knew David Leeds how?”

She leaned back and picked up her package of Tareytons, got one going, put an explosion of smoke in my direction, and said, “I was his English teacher in high school. He came from a bad home situation. I sort of adopted him. I gave him the small apartment above my garage and that’s where he spent his senior year.”

“His folks didn’t have any objections?”

“His father was dead. His mother was an alcoholic and not easy to get along with. We had our battles, she and I. David made the mistake of telling her he had a crush on me. It didn’t last long, but the damage was done.”

“She thought you were sleeping together?”

“Yes.”

“Were you?”

She smiled. It was slow and sweet, that smile, suggestive of whatever you wanted it to suggest. “I wish I could say yes. Maybe things would’ve turned out differently. David was extremely impulsive. He never got into big trouble, but he certainly got into his share of scrapes. Maybe it would have allowed me to keep tighter control of him.” The smile slowly disappeared. “But, no, I didn’t. My mama didn’t raise me to do things like that.”

“Why did you register at the hotel here as Leeds?”

“Because I was pretending to be his sister.”

“You mentioned scrapes. What kind of scrapes?”

“Girl scrapes mostly.” She smiled. “He wasn’t just handsome. He was Negro and handsome. A lot of white girls were curious about that. But he also got into scrapes out here. Somebody at the hotel told me David caught Hannity cutting the tires of his scooter. I guess Hannity’s a pretty big guy. But David was so mad he plowed right into him.”

“When was this?”

“My understanding is that it was a couple of weeks ago.”

Rob Anderson’s father had hinted that Hannity might be worth checking into. The two young men hadn’t been together during the time of the murders. This had all been self-serving, a dad trying to help his son, but Marie had given me one more reason to look Hannity up again. “I’ll be lucky if I don’t get my own tires slashed. I rented a car this afternoon and drove around. Most of the people were very nice to me. But there’re a few — they always want you to apologize somehow for existing because you’re different than they are. And they think they know you just because of your skin color. And worst of all, they hate you. You can see it in their eyes. You’re something vile to them. I’m not sure I could live in your town.”

“You just said it was a minority of people who were like that.”

“That’s all it takes, Sam. A handful. Being just as hateful as they can be. The Klan doesn’t have all that many members, but they’ve never been stronger because we’re finally standing up for our rights. It doesn’t take many bad guys to cause a lot of pain and consternation. Look at poor Medgar Evers.”

“I’m sorry for the bad ones you met here.” I laughed but without pleasure. “The old love-hate thing I have for this town. Most of the folks here are decent. Not saints, nothing like that. Decent people. But there are always a few—”

“Hannity and Anderson might get away with it because their people have money and influence.”

“In most cases, money and influence can buy you out of trouble. But not a double murder like this. Every paper in the state is covering this. The race angle’s in everybody’s mind. Anybody who’s charged will be prosecuted right up to the maximum sentence.”

She put her cigarettes in her purse and sat up straight, with her hands folded in front of her. She was ready to shove off.

“Those Freedom Riders, that’s why most people around here’ll want to see justice. Even some of the folks who hate us see what’s happening to the riders and Dr. King and they know it’s not right. They’re doing our suffering for us.”

“You’re probably right. A lot of the haters probably don’t like watching fire hoses and dogs put on little kids.”

Her smile was bitter. “Thank God for the wee ones. They can get to adults the way we can’t. It’s the old plantation thing — the pickaninnies sure are cute till they grow up. Then they’re just more colored folks to put the lash to. David paid the price for that. He stayed real cute right into his twenties and somebody around here didn’t like that. Didn’t like that at all.”

20

Clammy sweat. Otherworld darkness. Nightmare. My conscious mind trying to reject — to banish — the hellish sounds that forced blood to run dripping from my ears. The cats were in my nightmare, too, each of them crawling beneath the covers to free themselves from the tortured voice that refused to stop.

And then I was sitting up and wide awake the way movie people always are right after nightmare time. Disoriented for a few moments. Trying to comfort the cats that now clung to me as if I were their father.

And still that noise—

Aw, shit.

And then I realized what it was. Kenny Thibodeau’s new girlfriend Noreen De Grasso, who fancied herself the nation’s only serious rival to Joan Baez in the folksong singing business.

Trying to untwist my boxers, I stomped over to the open window next to the back door. Had to be 100 degrees in here and it was nearly ten at night. The window air conditioner Mrs. Goldman had bought for my apartment was brand-new not long ago and was already in the shop getting repaired. She’d let me pick out the one I wanted. Some picker-outer.

I found a pack of smokes on the kitchen counter and fired one up before I yelled down there and told them to cool it.

But the way they were passing that half-gallon jug of Gallo back and forth, it was unlikely they even heard me.

Finally Kenny looked up and saw me in the window and waved.

“Hey, man, we’ll be right up!”

This was how I’d lived for six, seven months — this being a few years before even Mary dumped me — after it became clear that the beautiful Pamela Forrest and I were never getting married. I had planned, in my early twenties, to try to become something remotely resembling a grown-up. But the heartbreak was such that all I wanted was to stay numb. Kenny was eager to show me the wastrel route and I went along willingly.

That six or seven months was a frenzy of self-indulgence that was at least manic and maybe even clinical. In memory, everything runs speeded up, the way the old silent films look to us today.

Piling in and out of cars, apartments, movie theaters, taverns, the abodes of girls you were somewhat serious about, the girls you selfishly used for lonely sex (and who were using you right back the same way) — anything and everything was never enough. Two hours’ sleep before you went to work? No sweat, man. Your car never having more than a quarter tank of gas because you’d spent all your money on girls and beer? Cool. Waking up on the floors of strangers and strangers waking up on your couch and pissed in their psycho hangovers because you weren’t serving breakfast, and their girlfriends commandeering your toilet for an hour or two—

And the people you only vaguely remember through the haze of alcohol — my haze was pretty transparent; two beers and I was drunk and doing my yodeling impression — loners and losers and grotesques and dangerous people who somehow stayed with your group through barhopping, dancing, pissing in tavern parking lots, breaking up fights, starting fights — somehow they were always with you. One night this guy pulled a knife on Kenny because he said Kenny’s porno was grabbing the money and attention that he, the knife-wielder, should rightly claim for his own writing, which just happened to be Literature. Another night I’m in bed with this girl who was far gone drunk but still very sexy and when I rolled over there was a steely lump of something beneath the sheets and it turned out to be a .38 because “I always take a gun along with me the first time I sleep with a guy because he might be, you know, creepy or something.” True tales of the bedroom. Would-be communists, anarchists, pregnant girls stepping out on their husbands (more true bedroom tales), and of course the entire range of ex-cons you always stumble on in the taverns where the girls go.

But all this was in another part of the galaxy. Whoever that moron had been who’d lived that way sure wasn’t me anymore. I just gave it all up and went back to being a pretty serious young man.

Kenny hadn’t.

So they tromped up the stairs and I grabbed a pair of Levi’s cutoffs and slammed a six-pack of Schlitz down on the coffee table and readied myself for the siege.

Coming through the door, Noreen said, “Man, do I have to take a dump!”

Kenny howled. “Isn’t she something?”

“‘Something.’ I think you hit it, Kenny. You know what time it is?”

“Aw, hell. Relax.”

He helped himself to one of the beers on the coffee table and said, leaning forward, “You know what she did, man?”

I was afraid to ask.

“She wrote a song for you.” He put a finger to his lips and went sssh. “But act surprised when she tells you.”

Could this be real? Maybe this was one of those real tricky nightmares that went on for a long time.

I hate the prig side of me. The unkind, snotty thoughts. But Noreen brought them out in me. It wasn’t just her singing. She always wore short skirts and no underwear and when she sprawled on my couch it was impossible not to look. She just helped herself to whatever she wanted from fridge or cupboard. And a couple of nights she asked if she could sleep on my couch because she was pissed at Kenny. And she didn’t bathe very often. She said she had read an article in some health magazine — one can only imagine what kind of magazine that was — that if you bathed or showered more than once a week you caused a “frisson on your epidermis.” And as she always said when she was finishing up, “A lot of scientists are signing on to that, McCain. This isn’t just, you know, bullshit or anything.” I was pretty sure that most of these “scientists” had probably been educated on the lost continent of Atlantis.

And one more thing — as I heard her exploding from the bathroom door — she never washed her hands after attending to her toilet needs.

“You asshole,” she said, “I heard you telling him I wrote a song about him.” She whacked him pretty hard across the back of the head. He giggled.

She jumped on the couch, managing to snag her acoustic guitar in the process, and landed with enough force to make one end of the couch jump a quarter inch. What’s remarkable about this is that she weighed only about a hundred pounds. She was five-two, junkie-thin, with scraggly black hair down to her ass and a face that was pretty in a sort of psycho way. Not even Norman Bates could have claimed eyes as crazy as her baby-blues.

Whenever I saw Noreen and Kenny together, I wondered how Kenny could have given up his former longtime girlfriend Cindy Baines, a sweet, smart, pretty nurse who loved Kenny in a way that was moving to see. But Cindy hadn’t wanted the abortion he browbeat her into having. And after that things weren’t right. She spent several long evenings at my house telling me how much she loved him but also how much she felt sad about the abortion. She still wanted to marry Kenny, but she wanted him to understand how the abortion had devastated her. Ultimately everything came to a sad end and Cindy moved to Omaha.

As for Kenny...

As she strummed her guitar in preparation for the song she’d written for me, she said, “Did Kenny tell you I’m in regression therapy now?”

“No, he didn’t mention that. I guess I’m not sure what that is.”

“You know, like they take you back to past lives.”

“This shit is so cool,” Kenny said. “I’m gonna try it for myself.”

“I was an Egyptian princess.”

“Isn’t that cool?” Kenny said, chugging beer. “She’s an Egyptian princess.”

This was bringing back all those insane nights in my degenerate period. Everybody was so drunk or so stoned on bad marijuana that everything that was said made a kind of sense. Did he just say he kept a dolphin under his bed? Did she just say that she was a telepath? Did he just say that he’d once fought Rocky Marciano and beat the crap out of him? Sure, why not, everybody was so stupid on booze and grass, anything that was said was perfectly fine. Down the rabbit hole.

So why not an Egyptian princess?

Every time I was around Noreen I realized, despite feeling like an outsider, how middle-class I really was.

“So go on, Noreen. Play him the song you wrote about him.”

I prepared my face to contort itself into an expression of seeming pleasure that would extend from the first to the last note she played. What choice did I have? I had to like it, didn’t I?

“You know the song ‘John Henry,’ Sam?” Noreen said.

“‘John Henry was a steel-drivin’ man’? Sure.”

“Well, that’s what this is pretty much except it’s ‘Sam McCain was a law-abidin’ man till they pushed him too far.’”

That was another thing about Noreen’s songs. They were never Noreen’s songs. She purloined the music from famous songs and just rewrote the lyrics, most of which were so radical politically they made me feel positively GOP.

“The deal is, see, in this song,” Kenny, ever helpful, said, “you bring this innocent man to court but the corrupt jury that’s bought off by the robber barons, they find this guy guilty. And so you track every one of the jurors down and shoot ’em.”

“Great,” I said. “A mass murderer.”

“See, you screwed it up again, Kenny,” Noreen said. “The last one he doesn’t shoot, he stabs.”

“Oh, sorry, babe.” To me: “The last one you stab.”

“Got it. The last one I stab.”

I don’t know about you folks but I believe in miracles. Big miracles and sort of smaller, everyday miracles alike. I mention this because right then the phone rang.

“Don’t answer that,” Kenny said.

“Why the hell not?”

“Because she’s psyched to sing you your song.”

The phone continuing to ring.

“He’s right, Sam. I’m ready now.” Starting to strum again. Ready. Psyched.

I picked up the phone.

“Am I calling too late?” Jane Sykes said.

“No. Not at all.”

Kenny was pantomiming “hang up” with his hand slamming down an invisible phone. Noreen was rolling her eyes at me and looking generally disgusted with humankind, especially those who served on juries.

“Have you heard what happened tonight?”

And I saw how I could get rid of them.

“Hold on a minute. I didn’t realize this was going to be official business,” I said to Jane and set the phone down. I stood up and said, “I’m sorry but you’ll have to leave. This is something I have to deal with alone.”

“Can’t you take the phone into the crapper?” Noreen said. “We couldn’t hear it then.”

“Much as I enjoy sitting in the crapper, the phone cord doesn’t reach that far, Noreen.”

I grabbed the phone and said to Jane, “Just one more minute.” I put the receiver down and said, “C’mon now, you guys, you gotta leave.”

“Well, this is really bullshit,” Noreen said.

“She was really psyched.”

“I write a whole goddamn song for him and he kicks me out,” Noreen said to herself.

But Kenny, finally understanding how pissed I was, grabbed her hand and started dragging her toward the back door.

“I write a song just for him and—”

I missed the rest because the door had slammed on her. Kenny was still on the inside of the door: “This is pretty rude, man.”

“Is it as rude as waking somebody up on a work night to play some lousy song?”

“Lousy? You haven’t even heard it yet.”

Kenny and I have had a love-hate relationship since grade school. We were definitely in hate mode now.

“’Night, Kenny,” I said, pushing the door open and giving him a little shove into the night.

The last thing I heard from them was Noreen strumming and singing “Sam McCain was a law-abidin’ man till they pushed him too far.” I was glad I couldn’t hear anything more.

Back on the phone, Jane said, “I’m sorry if I interrupted anything.”

“Just a murder.”

“What?”

“A double murder, actually. Two people who woke me up and decided to have a party. So what’s going on?”

“Rachael Todd — the one we thought was killed because she was going to tell you something about Leeds and Neville?”

“Yeah.”

“A sixty-six-year-old woman walked into Cliff’s office tonight — of course Cliff wasn’t there — and confessed to being the hit-and-run driver. She was coming back from her sister’s and realized that she couldn’t see very well without her glasses but assumed she could make it home without any problem. Well, there was a problem. Rachael Todd sort of stumbled out in front of the woman’s car and that’s how the woman hit her. The woman’s name by the way is Dot Taylor, and the deputy who looked over her car said you can still see blood and a little bit of hair on the right front bumper and fender.”

“I don’t know if this is good news or bad news. You know, in mystery novels you’re never supposed to have a coincidence like this.”

“Well, I guess it gives us one less thing to worry about.”

“But we still don’t know what she was going to tell me.”

A pause. “I notice you said ‘me.’”

“Oh. Right.”

“I was under the assumption that we were still working together. I haven’t heard from you in a while.”

“Well, I’ve been—”

“Before you tell a lie, which will really piss me off, let me tell you what’s going on. She got to you, didn’t she?”

“She?”

“God, c’mon, Sam. Just admit it. The judge found out that we were together socially and got all uptight about it. Right?”

My turn to pause. “Yeah, right.”

“And so she just naturally extrapolated from there that we were probably working together, too.”

“Pretty much.”

“And you gave in to her.”

I took a long time to answer it. “The judge and I have a very complicated relationship. She helped me when I set up shop and nobody else would. She helped me get my private investigator’s license, which isn’t easy in this state. And she’s steered a lot of business my way.”

“You gave in to her.”

“And she’s... she’s in a kind of strange position now. She needs some help.”

“Her drinking.”

“Are you mocking me here?”

Extended sigh. “A little, I guess. I mean you’re making it sound more like a love affair than a business relationship. But I apologize, Sam. I guess it hurts my pride that you chose her over me. But that makes sense. You’ve been friends — or whatever you are — for a long time.”

“That doesn’t mean we can’t see each other socially.”

Nervous laugh. “I probably screwed that up for us, Sam.”

“How?”

“I said a lot of awkward things the first night we met. I was trying not to flirt with you but it sort of came out that way, and I’m sorry it did. The truth is, Sam, I don’t know what I’m looking for — if I’m looking for anything. I like to work hard because then I don’t have to think about it. I like you very much, but you’re very different from the other men I’ve been with. There weren’t that many — three, really — but they ran to a type and you don’t fit that type at all. And you’re so different from them and—”

“What type are we talking about?”

“Oh, it’s not worth discussing. See, right there I said something I shouldn’t have.”

“Tall, dark, and handsome? Is that the type we’re talking about?”

Pause. “Believe it or not, yes. It just seemed to work out that way. And it was very flattering, I have to say.”

“But you’re beautiful.”

“Well, I’m attractive. I don’t know about beautiful.”

“So it’s logical handsome men would be attracted to you.” Pause. “Let me ask you something personal about them.”

“Well, if it’s not too personal.”

“Were any of them ever nicknamed ‘Yosemite Sam’?”

I thought she might not have understood the reference, but after a hesitation she broke into a full-throated laugh. “That’s just what I mean, Sam. You saved the moment because you’re so witty.”

“And short.”

“Well—”

“And not handsome—”

“In your way you are.”

“And not dark. Fish-belly white and freckled in places.”

“You really know how to sell yourself.”

But then it was done. I could sense it. I’d kidded it along so we could both save face, and much as we enjoyed that moment, we both realized that it was one of those fireflies that only glow for a minute or so.

“I just don’t want to hurt you, if we go out socially I mean.”

“I understand.”

“I think I’m pretty good company sometimes, but I don’t know if it can ever be more than that for us.”

“Well, let’s think on it.”

“I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.”

“You didn’t. You were honest is all.”

“Well, I probably should go. We both need our sleep. I just wanted to make sure you’d heard about Rachael Todd.”

“I appreciate the call, Jane.”

“We’ll talk soon, Sam.”

“’Night.”

For a long time I just sat in the chair. The cats came and sat on me. I was looking for a bride these days — now that I was trying to be an adult again, and at age twenty-six it was past time — but maybe in looking so earnestly I’d lost whatever charm I’d once held for women. Trying too hard, to make it simple.

I spent a few minutes working out with self-pity, spreading it throughout my body, saturating every cell of my being and mind with it, and then I stood up and turned off the lights and went to the back door to make sure it was locked.

And it was then I heard it. And for the first time there was a sweetness to Noreen’s voice. Maybe it was because this particular song was about a lost love and not shooting cops or burning nuns or building monuments to Stalin.

This was a young woman singing about a love affair she couldn’t rid herself of. And it had an old hill-country quality — a good many townspeople were from folks who’d migrated here from the Ozarks following the Civil War, the kin of whom still lived in the section where I’d grown up — that particular sadness of the poor and the uneducated and the trapped that the Irish and the Scotch had carried with them on their boats to the new country.

I’d never heard any of these qualities in her voice or manner before and so I grabbed the last six-pack and went down to the old rocker porch swing that Mrs. Goldman had put near the alley and joined them.

And limned by starlight and soothed by wind and startled by the beauty of her voice when she sang this type of song, I became in those moments a fan of Noreen’s, something that verged on the impossible.

“I’d like to see her.”

“She specifically asked that you not see her.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“That was what Dr. Berryman told us. In fact, there he is now. You can ask him yourself.”

Hospital. Six-thirty a.m. Sights and sounds and smells of the new day. Crisp nurses, preoccupied doctors studying notes and charts. Gurneys being pushed toward one of three operating rooms at the far end of this hall. A glimpse into the room where loved ones waited for word of how the surgery went. Tense faces. Tears. A young man hugging a frail elderly woman.

The nurse I’d been speaking to pointed to Berryman, who had just stepped off an elevator and was just starting down the hall in the opposite direction.

I caught up with him. We’d known each other professionally for three or four years. He was a small man in his forties with a somber face and a cordial manner.

“She’s going to be all right, Sam. But it’s going to be a while before she’s back on the bench.”

“I don’t even know what happened. I just got a call from her driver that she’d been in an accident and was in the hospital.”

He frowned. Leaned in, quieted his voice. “She’s got to face it this time, Sam. She was coming home from the club alone and ran off the road out by Simpson’s Peak.”

“That ravine?”

He nodded. “She’d be dead if she hadn’t run into the pine tree that’s right down from the top. Nobody found her till about four this morning. She’d lost a lot of blood. She’s also got a broken hip, a broken arm, and a concussion.”

“Is she awake?”

He studied me a moment. “Sam, the way she tells it, the reason she got so drunk at the club last night was because she’d had some kind of falling-out with you. She said she didn’t trust you any longer.” Then: “She wanted me to be sure and tell you that.” One of his infrequent smiles. “Working the old guilt routine on you. Esme’s drunk every night of the week no matter what happens in her life, good or bad.”

“She wanted you to tell me that but she doesn’t want to see me.” Alcoholics always blame other people.

“That’s what she says anyway, and in her condition, I didn’t want to argue with her. For one thing, we gave her a lot of pain medication, so she’s not thinking clearly. And for another, you’re just a handy excuse, as I said.”

A nurse passed by and smiled at me. Former client of mine. Happily remarried after I helped her win an unchallenged divorce. Another wife abuse case. “Sam, you’re closer to her than anybody.”

“Than her friends at the country club?”

“I’m one of those friends at the country club. We all care for Esme a great deal, but we really don’t know her, even after all these years. You know how she holds herself back. Even when she’s drunk and staggering around, she never divulges anything personal. And she’s at the end, Sam. She can’t go on drinking. Her body won’t let her. Her liver—”

He made a face.

“You work with her. You have influence with her. You’re the only one we can think of who can get her into that clinic. If she doesn’t go through that program and give up the bottle, our Esme won’t live another year. Two at the very outside. And believe me, they won’t be pretty years either. Not for her or anybody around her.”

His name was announced in that sterile tone of all hospital announcements.

“Give her a day or two, Sam. Then come back and see her. I need to go.”

Judge Whitney submitting herself to the structure and vagaries of a clinic. Life lived at the mercy of somebody else’s rules. Unthinkable.