Just before noon, I stopped by the courthouse to talk to the judge. She was in a conference. As I was walking out the back door to where I’d parked my ragtop, I fell into step next to Jack Coyle. He never looked nattier than when he was in his hand-tailored blue suit.
He carried a briefcase and a scowl. “Your friend Judge Whitney gave me one hell of a headache this morning. I’m handling a property matter for a Des Moines firm and need a little more time to prepare myself. She denied it.”
“You should never go up against her on Monday mornings. Or Tuesday mornings, come to think of it. Or-” But I stopped joking because he wasn’t smiling.
“Now, Jean wants to move, too.”
“Move?” I said.
“Build a new house. And in the meantime rent one. She’s into a lot of supernatural things.
I think it’s all crazy but of course I don’t want to hurt her feelings.”
“Sara Griffin haunting your place, you mean?”
“Not haunting precisely. But something like that.
I mean, I’m kind of uneasy being there myself.
My God, a dead girl-”
“I still don’t understand that part of it.”
“What part of it?”
We were now outside in the parking lot. A mix of people came and went as we stood there talking.
Dotted everywhere were pairs of other lawyers talking.
“If Egan did kill Sara, why did he leave her in your gazebo? I don’t get the connection.”
“I don’t, either. But he mst’ve been psychotic. He killed her, after all. Maybe he was driving around with the body in his car and-”
I said, “Did you know her?”
“Sure. She was a damned sweet kid. She had her troubles but she was sweet.”
He made a point of meeting my eye when he said it, a courtroom trick. You can’t tell a lie when you’re looking somebody in the eye, can you?
Sure. Good liars can, and do, all the time.
“Your daughter knew her, I understand.”
“They were friends.”
“Sara spend much time around your house?”
This time when he stared at me, there was a suggestion of anger in his All-American blue eyes. “Are you trying to get at something here, Sam?”
“Just trying to understand why the killer would put the body in your gazebo.”
He set his briefcase down, pulled out a package of Viceroys from his suit jacket pocket and lit up with a nice, small, silver Ronson lighter. He didn’t offer me a smoke.
“So you’ve heard the stories.”
“Not plural. Singular. Story.”
“I gave her some tennis lessons. Her psychiatrist told her that exercise would help her with her mood. Exercise, that whole bit.
She didn’t have any special interest in tennis.” He smiled. “She just thought the women in their tennis whites looked very nice. She was a nice-looking girl. And I’m not exactly an old fart. I’ve been known to get an erection once in a while. All the guys at the country club followed her around like horny dogs. I suppose I felt some manly pride in spending so much time with her. But nothing happened. The stories are bullshit.”
“Meaning you’d have no idea why somebody would put her body in your gazebo?”
This smile was malicious. “I swear to God, Sam, working for the judge is starting to poison your mind. You were a nice, clean-cut, sensible young man when you hung out your shingle. I’m sorry to see you’re becoming such a paranoid. I love Esme-she’s a good friend of ours-but for once I think Cliffie’s right. David Egan killed Sara and then felt so guilty about it he killed himself.”
“Makes everything tidy, anyway.”
He leaned down and picked up his briefcase.
“Jean and I like you, too, Sam. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to our friendship.”
“Egan didn’t kill her and he didn’t commit suicide.”
He shook his head. “Maybe Egan didn’t commit suicide, Sam, but you may not want to start bothering people who knew Sara. They’re not lowlives. They don’t allow themselves to be pushed around.”
“Unlike the people who come from the Knolls and get pushed around because they don’t have any other choice.”
“You think you’ll ever get over that class anger of yours, Sam?”
“I doubt it.”
He dropped his cigarette to the pavement and twisted his foot on it so it shredded into torn white paper with brown tobacco spilling out.
“You’re one of us now, Sam. You grew up in the Knolls but that doesn’t mean you have to live there the rest of your life-physically or mentally, either one. You don’t want to ruin your chances by making a lot of important people mad. And I’m saying this as a friend.”
To prove it he put a fatherly hand on my shoulder. “You take care of yourself, Sam. I’m hoping you’re going to be a member of our club sometime in the not-too-. tant future. You’d be a real asset. And I’d be happy to talk you up to the board. I really would.”
A minute later, his bronze Buick came to smooth and powerful life, and he backed out of the lot, his briefcase on the seat next to him, as if it were a passenger.
The Griffin house was built inside a large tract of timber. You got the sense they were hiding from something, the way the hardwoods and pines enveloped their home of native stone and glass and wood-homage, I expect, to Frank
Lloyd Wright. There was even a trickle-small Wrightian waterfall behind the long, angular house.
I counted six cars in the drive. All new, all expensive. The Caddy was the most imposing, all white and chrome and sweeping fin. But then Dix Griffin owned the Cadillac dealership.
Mandy Griffin answered my knock.
She was a tall, prim woman in a black sheath dress, her graying hair in a chignon. She had good facial bones, an older woman’s neck, and blue eyes that didn’t look happy to see me at all. “This isn’t a good day, McCain.”
“I realize that but I just wondered-”
“We know what you’re doing and we don’t approve.”
“What I’m doing?”
“Trying to prove that David Egan didn’t kill our daughter. Of course he did.”
Dix was in the door then. As a longtime car dealer, he couldn’t find it in himself to be rude to anybody. After all, he wouldn’t want to kill a potential sale.
“Oh, now, honey,” he said, “McCain’s just doing what that damned Esme Whitney wants him to do. He wouldn’t be doing this on his own so there’s no reason to take it personally.”
He was big, he was hammy, he spoke in a Southern dialect that seemed contrived. He always spoke of his Southern boyhood but he’d lived up here for forty years. The reverse of your friend who goes on a four-day trip to London and comes back with a British accent.
He wore a black suit with a white shirt and dark blue tie. But the shirt collar was open and the knot of his tie rode at his sternum. His fleshy face was boozy red and he was sweaty. He looked as if he were at an event that combined mourning with poker. Hard to believe he was a Yale man-old Southern money-but then William Buckley Jr. got through there so I suppose anything is possible.
“Cliff called just a few minutes ago and told us what you were up to, McCain, and I have to tell you, we agree with him. Egan killed her, all right, and then he killed himself. I’ll give him that much, anyway. He had that much good in him-ffrealize what he’d done and make his peace with the Lord.”
“Somebody cut his brake line.”
“Cliff said you’d say that, too. He said, near as he can tell, somebody cut it after Egan’s car sat out all night.”
“You’re a terrible little man,” Mandy said, “and I want you to get into your car and drive away right now.”
Her voice was loud enough that their other guests started peeking out the front window to get a look at me. Most of them, recognizing me, frowned. Difficult as it is to imagine, I am not a universally beloved figure.
“Don’t you want to know who really killed your daughter, Mrs. Griffin?”
“We do know, McCain,” Griffin said, sliding his arm around his wife’s frail shoulder.
“We’re not going to waste our time-and our feelings -on some damned stupid contest between Esme and Chief Sykes. He’s made his share of mistakes in the past, that’s true, but he also happens to be right on this one. And that’s all we have to say on the subject.”
He closed the door. His guests were lined up in the front window like kids forced to stay inside on a rainy day. I was like an exciting Tv show, the way they watched me get in my ragtop, U-turn on the drive, and head back to the front gates. Fascinating stuff.
I called Linda at the hospital in Iowa City.
“So you just called? Just to say hi? That’s very nice of you. In fact, I was thinking that maybe you’d like to get a pizza tonight. My treat, Sam.”
“That sounds great. I’ll pick you up at seven.”
“Just remember-”
“I remember. We’re going easy. And that’s fine with me.”
“This will get to be a real drag for you someday, Sam. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not sorry at all. I like being with you and that’s all we need to say.”
“Thanks, Sam. See you at seven.”
The librarian gave me a curious look when I asked her where I might find a book on cancer. Having been a librarian here since I was a kid, she was naturally concerned that my reading wasn’t for my mom or dad.
“Everything all right at home, Sam?”
“Everything’s fine, Mrs. Anderson.”
She was the only librarian who’d bought both Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert Heinlien for the library in those long-ago days after the war when the country was on one of its sporadic improve-your-mind campaigns, which always meant promoting the sort of books kids didn’t want to read. A few libraries were forced to give away all their Burroughs books.
She’d shown up at the graduation ceremony for the law school and given me a nice auntly kiss on the cheek as I passed down the aisle clutching my diploma. You don’t forget people like that.
I was pretty self-conscious about it. When I found the book she suggested, I took it to a corner table and kind of hunched over the book.
I wasn’t shocked. I sort of knew what I was going to see. It made me mad looking at the woman whose torso they’d color-photographed. The healthy breast next to the flat line of scar next to it. I thought of Linda and then of my mom and then of my kid sister. I wanted to hold somebody responsible for this. But mad became sad and I thought of my aunt Barb, who’d died of it, and the lady down the street who was fighting it and all of a sudden it seemed overwhelming, like every woman in the world was going to get it eventually. I closed the book. I wanted a cigarette, speaking of cancer. I sat there and thought of Linda and what this must mean to her.
And how she had to live in daily fear that it would come back. Some little routine test, some little sign, and then your doctor was talking about surgery again; or worse, not talking about surgery because it was too late even for that. I still wanted somebody to blame for all this. Random cosmic bad luck wasn’t good enough. I needed to see a Wanted poster with some bastard’s face and name on it.
The cigarette tasted so good, I had two of them, just sitting in my ragtop in the warm, glowing autumn afternoon watching the old guys play checkers on the bird-bombed green park benches.
I wanted Linda with me. A healthy, long-lived Linda. Hard to imagine the darkness of death when I thought of her on so fetching a day.
The judge would be wanting to hear from me, and since I had nothing much to report I thought that maybe it was time I visit Brenda Carlyle, which I’d been putting off. Her husband, Mike, had gotten all the way to Chicago in the Golden Gloves just before he left for Korea. He worked at his old man’s lumberyard and spent his idle hours beating the crap out of any guy who so much as glanced at his wife, which wasn’t easy not to do, believe me, her being one of the most quietly erotic women ever born in our little valley here. She is not innocent of her charms.
In high school, I’m told, she used to pursue various boys and, when done with them, turn them over to Mike for summary punishment.
Mike either didn’t know that she’d approached the boys, rather than the other way around, or he chose not to know.
Certain legends were passed among the panting young men in our town. Many of them concerned Brenda.
Most of the stories were variations on the stuff the panting young men had read in the sort of books Kenny Chesmore writes. You know, that she liked to stand on certain husband-gone nights draped only in the gauziest of teddy-bear nighties and try to lure foolish boys inside in the way a sea siren would. That she rewarded the best high school football player of the year with a special night all their own. And that at Christmastime she gave herself to the young man who struck her as the most exciting.
But remember, folks, this is Black River Falls, after all, and there isn’t much else to do but think up stories like these.
I decided to stop by the lumberyard and make sure that Mike was at work. Didn’t want him to surprise me by opening the door of his home.
The lumberyard always unmanned me. I come from a long line of handymen. If a tornado knocks your house down tonight, my dad and a couple of his brothers will have it standing, good as new, twenty-four hours later. I have trouble pounding nails in straight. Or getting screws to stay in. And anything I painted always came out striped, as if I’d used several subtly different colors. When I was in tenth grade my dad asked me to help him install a new window over the kitchen sink. We got the window in all right, but when I was putting the shutter back on, my hammer accidentally slammed a corner of it and shattered glass all over my mom, who was innocently washing dishes. My dad never asked me to help him again and I couldn’t blame him.
But the lumberyard dazzled me with all its manly secrets and rites of passage: whine of electric saw, smell of fresh cut lumber, stacks of wood in the yard, men in big overalls, their pipes tucked into the corners of their mouths as they loaded lumber into the backs of their trucks, their tool belts packed with all sorts of arcane instruments that would be lost on me. I had a pair of bib overalls but the legs were too long. And I had some tools but Mrs. Goldman kept them because she used them-and used them well-mch better than I did.
I saw him and he saw me. He didn’t like me. One night in a bar his wife had grabbed me and swung me out onto the dance floor. It was fast dancing but he still hadn’t liked it. He had a good memory. He’d been glowering at me ever since that night. And that had been at least four years ago.
He didn’t wear overalls. He wore a shirt and tie and trousers. He was huge but quick and deft for his size. He picked up a pile of two-by-fours and dropped them in the bed of a truck.
No reason to stay there. I turned and walked away, inhaling the perfume of fresh sawn lumber.
I got in my ragtop and drove maybe three blocks to the narrow road that would take me to the Carlyle house when I decided I’d better check in at my office.
“Uh, just a minute, okay?” Jamie answered.
This is one I hadn’t heard before. I’d heard “It’s your nickel,” I’d heard “Uh, Mr.
C’s office.”
Now she said: “Damn, I just spilled my nail polish all over the desk.”
There was no sense being angry. God was punishing me for all my sins.
“Okay, I’m back,” she said.
“It’s me.”
“Oh, gosh Mr. C, I’ve been trying to find you.”
“You have?”
“Well, I was about to try and find you I guess I should say. Turk brought me a sandwich and we’re just sort of eating it.”
A lurid picture of them humping on my desk filled the drive-in screen of my mind.
“Ah, lunch.”
“She tried to kill herself, Mr. C.”
“Who did?”
“Molly.”
“Molly Blessing?”
“Yeah. Molly Blessing. Her mom called and said Molly wants to talk to you.”
“Where is she now?”
“The hospital. Not the Catholic one.”
That was how she always referred to things. The Catholic one or not the Catholic one. The dime store that’s not Woolworth’s. The pizza joint that’s not out on Highway 6.
“I’m going over there now. were there any other messages?”
She cupped the phone. “Didn’t somebody else call, Turk?”
A muffled male voice.
“Turk says no other calls. I was in the ladies room for a while, Mr. C. He was watching the phone.”
Watching I wouldn’t mind. Talking into it I would. If her phone mannerisms were bad, imagine Turk’s. He’s Irish by the way.
God only knows where the name Turk came from.
I drove straight to the hospital. Not the Catholic one.
I wasn’t surprised by a suicide attempt, not after the way she’d acted the other night.
When I got to her room, the nurse said, “Her parents are downstairs talking to the doctor. You can have five minutes or so. She’s weak.” Betty Byrnes read her name tag.
“What happened?”
“She got into her mother’s tranquilizers.
Took a dozen or so. Fortunately, they’re not especially strong dosage-wise. She’ll be fine.”
She didn’t look fine. The only vibrant color in the room was her coppery hair.
Everything else was white, including her face.
She looked like a dying angel. She seemed to be sleeping. I didn’t want to wake her up. I started to turn and walk away.
“Hi, Sam.”
I turned back to her. “Hi, Molly.”
“Pretty stupid thing to do, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said, walking over to her.
“Pretty stupid.”
Deep sigh. There was a table on wheels next to her bed. A silver metal water pitcher was beaded with sweat. An abridged version of the King James Bible. A movie magazine with Rock Hudson on it.
She said, “I just couldn’t deal with it.
It really hit me. You know, that he was dead and not coming back. I had a couple of drinks from my father’s bar in the basement and then I found my mom’s tranquilizers. I don’t remember much after that.”
“You in any pain?”
“Not really. Just kind of groggy. This was so dumb. It’s embarrassing.”
“Anything I can get you?”
She tried to smile. “A phone call from David would be nice.” Then, “I wish I were as strong as Rita.”
“She’s pretty tough.”
“She wouldn’t pull a stunt like this one.” She laid her head back. Closed her eyes. “You think I’ll ever get over it, Sam?”
“I don’t know about getting over it. But you’ll be able to deal with it.”
“I wish I were an adult.”
“We all wish we were adults.”
She opened one eye and smiled at me.
“You’ve got a great sense of humor.” Then, “David did, too. He was never boring to be with. Never. You could just sit somewhere and he could keep you entertained for hours. I’d never known anybody like that before.” Then, “My folks told me Cliffie’s mad at you because you’ve been asking people a lot of questions.”
“Just trying to make sure that Egan’s death was accidental.”
“You didn’t like him much, did you, Sam?”
“Sometimes I did. Sometimes he was pretty hard to take. The way he felt sorry for himself and everything.”
“He had good reasons to feel sorry for himself, Sam.”
This wasn’t the time for a debate. “His aunts will see to it that he gets a nice funeral.”
“I may still be in here.”
The nurse came in. “Her folks’ll be back in a few minutes.” She had a kind, middle-aged face. She gazed down at Molly. “She conned me into phoning your office and inviting you up here. But I’d just as soon the doctor doesn’t know I did it.”
“I really appreciate you coming here, Sam.”
“I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”
The nurse beamed. “She’ll be fine. All her vitals are good and she’s in much better spirits this morning than she was last night.”
“What I am mostly is embarrassed,” said Molly. ““Poor, pathetic Molly crying out for help again.” I can just hear people saying that now.”
I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead.
She took my hand and squeezed it.
In the hall, Betty said, “She’s a nice kid. But unlucky.”
“Unlucky how?”
“David Egan. My oldest daughter went out with him a few times. I know you were his lawyer, Mr. McCain. And maybe he was your friend. But mothers aren’t thrilled when their daughter takes up with somebody like him. They’re like professional heartbreakers, boys like him. They want to wound the girl in some way and walk away. Fortunately for my daughter, she recognized this in him pretty early. She made sure he didn’t hurt her. She finally met a nice kid and told David good-bye. I was on my knees a whole lot of nights praying that Doris wouldn’t fall in love with him.” She nodded to the room.
“Poor little Molly wasn’t so lucky.”
The elevator doors started to open.
“I think I’ll take the stairs,” I said.
“I don’t blame you,” Betty said. “Her parents are in a mood to tear into somebody. And I’d hate to see it be you.”