Rita Scully’s father had managed to escape the Knolls by building from scratch a stable that boarded and trained horses. Because he was the only person in the area who had any skill with show horses and jumpers, the gentry-remember here we’re talking about the gentry of Black River Falls, not to be confused with the gentry of Greenwich, Connecticut, or Beverly
Hills, California-turned his business profitable within a year. The Stables, as it was called, had been in business some twenty years but Bud Scully no longer ran it. He had emphysema so bad, he rarely left his wheelchair. His barn manager was named Cal Rice and he was a good man when sober, which was most of the time; immediately after his benders you could find him forlorn and genuinely ashamed in the church basement where the local Aa met seven nights a week.
The meeter and greeter, and the most savvy about show horses and jumpers, was Rita Scully herself. She wore Western even though most of her customers wore riding academy. She sure looked good in an emerald-colored Western shirt with white piping, faded Levis, and black cowboy boots. The shirt set off her green, green eyes and black hair; it set off a couple of other things, too.
I was there at 7 A.M., when she was in the sunlight outside the huge white barn brushing down a colt.
Out on the white-fenced track, a swarthy man walked a pair of huge Palominos. Closer by, a woman with a fierce length of hose was scrubbing out a horse trailer.
When she saw me, Rita said, “That’s funny, McCain, I don’t remember inviting you to stop out.”
“All I’m trying to do is figure out what happened.”
“So the judge can show everybody how much smarter she is than Cliffie?”
Like most people in town-l myself, sometimes-she didn’t like either Cliffie or the judge.
“No, so we can figure out exactly what happened.”
“Exactly what happened,” she said, running the brush over the rippling flesh of the sweet, skinny chestnut colt, “is David got drunk and killed himself. It was an accident. He didn’t commit suicide, no matter what you might think otherwise.”
“There’s a third possibility.”
“Oh, yeah?” She had a hard beauty but a beauty nonetheless. “Oh, I forgot. You’re not only an unsuccessful lawyer, you’re also an unsuccessful private eye.” From her back pocket she took a currycomb. She set the brush on the ground and started combing him. She’d pause every once in a while to kiss him on the neck. She’d always been sexy, Rita
Scully, but I’d never seen her be sweet.
There was something touching about the way she’d kissed the horse. She became a new person to me. She was interesting now in a way she’d never been interesting before.
“What if he was murdered?”
And that stopped her. Stopped her from brushing.
Stopped her from glancing around the grounds to see that everybody was doing his or her job. In the silence you could hear the horses talking and the birds singing and the sound of a tractor in the fields of a nearby farm. The grass was still silver with dew and even the scent of horseshit had a certain homely sweetness about it.
She said, “Now there’s a stupid idea.”
“What’s so stupid about it?”
“He got drunk and smashed up his car.
Case closed.” She went back to brushing the horse.
“He talk to you about getting into an argument with anybody recently?”
“He got into arguments all the time. It was just the way he was. That’s why Molly was so bad for him. She wanted to change him. Nobody could change David. He was what he was.” She glared at me. “And I loved him just the way he was.”
“How about Sara Griffin?”
Before she could answer, the woman who’d been hosing out the horse trailer came over and said, “That left tire’s bad, Rita. I s’pose we can patch it again but one of these days we’re gonna need a new one.”
“Well, see what they say at the station. If we can get along without buying a new one, let’s do it.”
The woman nodded and went back to her trailer.
She had a tire jack laid out on the grass and went quickly to work taking the left tire of the trailer off and then transferring it to the back of a battered old Ford pickup.
“So you were saying what, McCain?” She went back to the brush, much longer strokes this time, the colt making satisfied little noises in its throat. She gave it another quick kiss.
“I was starting to ask you about Sara Griffin and Egan.”
She wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. “I was waiting him out.”
“I’m not following you.”
“Waiting for him to grow up a little. See that when it came down to having a wife and kids, I was the one. Not Molly. Not Sara. She gave him status but I gave him love. No matter what happened, he always came back to me.”
“Or Molly. Couldn’t have been too good for your ego, him seeing all those other girls.”
She shrugged. “I got used to it. Anything I’ve ever really wanted, I’ve gotten. I lived in the Knolls just long enough to know that when you want something, you have to go through hell to get it. But if you have patience and you don’t care what other people think, you’ll get it.”
“You happen to know where he was Friday night?”
“He didn’t kill Sara.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
She stopped brushing the colt. I reached my hand out and stroked its neck. She was a beauty, a poem of elegant awkwardness and vulnerability.
“He was with one of his tramps. He didn’t want to get her into trouble, so he wouldn’t say who it was.”
The trainer walking the horses on the track called out her name.
“It doesn’t matter now anyway, does it, McCain, who he was with? He’s dead. Now, I need to get to work. If that’s all right with you, I mean.”
Jay Norbert was in the can when I got to the Dx station. All three bays were in use and the far edge of the drive held four cars waiting to be serviced. Rock and roll blasted from the bays, and on the drive two old-fashioned merchants stood in straw hats and suspenders looking at the remains of Egan’s car and shaking their heads.
“Damned Italian food,” Norbert said, coming out of the john about ten minutes after I’d arrived. He had a copy of the local newspaper. “Plays hell with my stomach. I picked up colitis when I worked for Uncle Sam.”
We walked out to the tangled remains of David Egan’s Merc. Three teenage boys stood there studying it.
“He went right off the edge,” one of them said.
“Drunker’n a skunk.”
“My brother said he got more ass than a bicycle seat.”
Ah, youth.
After Norbert shooed them away, he said, “C’mere a minute.”
We walked around to the side of the Merc. The crash had smashed the motor mounts. The engine was tilted so badly it was almost upside down.
He took a long yellow-handled screwdriver out of the back pocket of his uniform and said, “Look at this.”
He tapped the hose leading from the brake fluid to the brakes themselves with the tip of his screwdriver.
“You have to look close.”
I leaned in, squinted.
“Pretty crude,” he said.
“I’ll say.”
“I figure whoever did it either didn’t know anything about cars or tried to make it look like they didn’t know anything about cars.”
He was right. When you got close enough, it was plain to see the slash in the hose.
“Probably figured that the crash would destroy everything,” he said.
“Including the hose.”
“So nobody could tell it was cut.”
“He couldn’t have stopped if he wanted to,”
I said.
“Yeah, not even if he’d been sober.” He took a pack of Marvel cigarettes from his uniform pocket and tamped one out. “I’d offer you one, Sam, but you’d hate me for life. The wife buys these damned things because the AandPeople always has them on sale.” He lit up, coughed.
“What’ll Cliffie make of this?”
“He won’t like it.”
He grinned. “That’d sure be too bad, wouldn’t it?” Anybody who’d served in the military resented Cliffie because his two uncles on the draft board had managed to keep him from serving. He stared at the car we stood in front of. “This was a hell of a rod. He told me one night that if he took half as good care of all his girlfriends as he did the Merc, he’d probably have a lot happier life.”
I nodded to the phone booth. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
I should’ve been happy about giving Cliffie the bad news, spoiling his neatly resolved case.
But I was thinking about Egan. He hadn’t exactly been my favorite client, but he’d earned a good share of his anger and bitterness.
He’d wanted to improve his lot by using the daughters of the local gentry to prove that he was just as good as everybody else. He’d wanted respect and dignity but he got neither in his death.
It was the sort of trashy story-drunken girl-stealing, good-looking kid is murdered in a hick town where he lived with two maiden aunts -t the more lurid of the true detective magazines would buy. Not much respect or dignity there.
When Cliffie came on the line, I said, “You need to get over to the Dx station right away.”
“What the hell for, Counselor? I’m busy. I can’t sit around all day like you.”
“Just get the hell over here.”
A pause. “You’re gonna pay for that, you know. Talkin’ to me like that.”
“Yeah, well, there’re a lot of things I’m gonna have to pay for someday. Just get over here.”
The drive got busy. Norbert even had to call one of his mechanics away from his bay to help scrub windows and pump gas. A mechanic can make a station a lot more money than a gas jockey can.
Cliffie made a point of not showing up for half an hour. I sat in the station and listened to tire irons clank on the concrete floor of the service bays and tinny juvenile rock and roll. Frankie Avalon was just never going to replace Chuck Berry on anyplace but Dick Clark’s show.
Cliffie came in and said, “Maybe you haven’t heard, Counselor, but the little matter with Egan is all wrapped up.” He was all khakied up as usual. “He killed Sara and feeling guilty about it killed himself. And if you didn’t work for our dear, sweet Judge Whitney, you’d be able to admit I’m right.
What’d she put you up to now?”
“Let’s go look at the car.”
He looked shocked by what he saw. “Crazy sonofabitch. He mst’ve really wanted to die.”
“Come over here.”
“What for?”
“Look at something.”
He sighed and came over. I made the same case Norbert had made to me.
“Oh, no,” Cliffie said.
“Oh, no, what? Somebody obviously cut that connection.”
“You think I’m gonna fall for this shit?”
“What shit?”
“Somebody cut this, all right. But after the wreck.”
“After? Why would somebody do that?”
“Mischief. Some butthole buddies of his decided to have a little fun with me so they cut the line to make it look good.”
I saw Norbert and waved him over.
“Morning, Chief,” he said when he reached us.
“I’m kinda busy, Sam. What can I do for you?”
“He thinks the brake fluid line was cut while the car was sitting here on your drive. I just thought maybe you could clue him in.”
“The hell of it is, Sam, I can’t.”
“What?”
“I can’t say exactly when it was cut. You could get the state crime lab to check it out for you, I suppose. If I had to bet that the line was cut before the wreck, that’s how I’d bet. But I can’t prove it. Sorry.”
“The state crime lab,” Cliffie said, “couldn’t find their ass with both hands.”
“I’m requesting that you call them in.”
Cliffie smirked at Norbert. “See how free he is with taxpayers’ money? Good ole McCain, the taxpayers’ friend.” He smiled at me. “I’ll take it under consideration, as you legal types like to say, Counselor. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. I’m a busy man and those fancy-pants crime-lab boys don’t like drivin’ over here for something like this.”
“This is very important,” I said.
“Sez you. Me, I say this case is wrapped up. Them two old ladies who raised him don’t want people to think he killed himself, so they put a bee in your bonnet about proving it was murder. And that judge of yours figures this is another way to try and humiliate me. All of which adds up to exactly jack shit as far as I’m concerned.” He nodded to the gas station. “Norbert, I need to use your crapper.”
And that, as far as the khaki-clad, crapper-needing chief of police was concerned, was that.