Fools Rush In (The Sam McCain Mysteries Book 7) (13 page)

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.”

“H
I, 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.