Fools Rush In (The Sam McCain Mysteries Book 7) (17 page)

“When was this, by the way?”

“Two nights before they were killed.”

“Fine. Now you said there was something else, too?”

She sat up straight again. “I’d been taking some time off from Nick. He was a year older and he was one of the really cool guys in high school and everybody always told me how lucky I was to be going with him— I just always thought we’d get married. But then I started going to the university in Iowa City and seeing him constantly and—I didn’t like him. I always knew he was sort of a bully, but it really came out when he was on campus. And he got mad if I even said hello to some guy. So when Rob told him about Lucy seeing David—he went insane. He had no reason to be jealous of anything. Even if I’d had a crush on David, I’m not sure how I feel about dating Negroes—I’m being honest here—and I’d sure never date any boy, white or colored, who looked like David.”

“Why not?”

“Just too good-looking. Girls were always making passes at him and right in front of Lucy. I just couldn’t have dealt with that.”

“How did Nick find out that David had been at your house?”

“My dad told him when Nick came over on his motorcycle that night. You should’ve heard Nick. I was really scared. He wanted to go and find David right then. He kept saying he was going to kill him.” She started picking at her fingers.

The phone rang. I excused myself and picked it up. Kenny Thibodeau. “A little news for you. The afternoon Neville and Leeds were shot to death, Rob Anderson asked Ned Flannery to make him up a good-sized ‘tar baby’ with a rope around his neck.” Flannery was a local artisan. “Ned wouldn’t do it, of course. Anderson offered him a hundred bucks.”

I saw Nancy glancing at her watch. She started to stand up. “Hang on a minute, Kenny.”

“I’d better go. I’m s’posed to meet my mom in a few minutes. I’m pretty much done, anyway.”

“Well, thanks for coming in. I really appreciate it.”

As she left, Kenny said, “Pretty sick, huh?”

“Very.”

“I wonder if he got somebody to do it for him.”

“I’ll ask him when I see him.”

“Man, I get all hepped up watchin’ TV and all the Freedom Riders and thinkin’ everybody will get behind all this, they’ll see what bullshit racism is. But it’s like bein’ stoned when you think like that—because when you come down again, nothin’s changed. People’re gettin’ tar babies made.”

“It’s hard to watch TV anymore. You want to put your fist through the screen.”

I heard Kenny strike a match and light a cigarette. “That was pretty cool last night. Those old mountain songs, huh? You still gotta hear this Bob Dylan guy. He’s as good as Woody Guthrie.”

I laughed. “You’ll guarantee that?”

I went over and locked the door. Jamie wouldn’t be back for another fifteen minutes.

The wall safe was behind a framed reproduction of an Edward Hopper painting. I pulled the frame back on its hinges and went to work on the safe. It was good-sized. When I got it open, I pulled out the manila envelopes with the blackmail negatives. Four envelopes.

I set them on my desk, grabbed the phone book, and went to work. I had sealed them all with extra-heavy tape. I hadn’t looked inside. It wasn’t that I was such a moral person. I just didn’t want to know what the negatives would tell me. Because once I knew, it would change my attitude, however subtly, toward the people in the pictures. And two of them, excluding the senator, I considered myself at least casual friends with.

I called each name on the envelopes and said that I’d come into possession of something that Richie Neville had inadvertently left in my office. I wondered if they’d like to stop by and pick it up between five and seven tonight. I gave them each specific times to be here. They all agreed to appear.

Most important, I said that I hadn’t had time to look at the contents and that there’d be no charge. They all sounded relieved. One woman started crying and saying thank you so often, she sounded like the lucky contestant on a quiz show.

The flower shop was nearby. I decided to see if Lucy was working.

Karen porter said, “I still think you should have a nice fresh flower for your lapel. I hear judges are impressed by things like that.”

She was always fun to clown with. “Not any judges I know on this planet.”

The small shop was filled as always with the sights and scents of dozens of flowers, arrangements, and potted plants. A pair of women in straw hats were dawdling over carnations while the little boy with them looked as if he’d suddenly found himself in hell.

Karen, in her usual crisp white button-down shirt, long blue apron, and chignon, still looked as if she should be in a fancy wine ad in
The New Yorker.
New England, modest wealth, intelligence, quiet beauty.

“You lucked out, Sam. Ellen’s off running errands.”

“Am I going to get you in trouble if I go in the back and talk to Lucy?”

“Not if you happened to have snuck in the back door and I didn’t happen to see it.” She frowned. “I don’t know why Ellen has to see you as the enemy.”

To me the reason was obvious. Ellen was afraid that Lucy might have killed David Leeds and Richie Neville. Lucy had said herself that David had wanted to break it off. I represented a threat to Ellen and her daughter.

“I appreciate it, Karen.”

“Just don’t get me involved. That lady has got a temper.”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to be here, Mr. McCain.”

Lucy, in jeans and a black Hawkeye T-shirt, was using a spritzer to water rows of plants.

“I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

“How do you
think
I’m doing? That’s sort of a stupid question, isn’t it?”

“Now that you mention it, it is. I apologize.”

“It’s like those stupid reporters asking parents how they feel when something’s happened to one of their kids. ‘How do you feel?’ That really pisses me off, being that insensitive.”

The rear of the shop had been built as an afterthought, a shedlike area that housed two huge refrigerated glassed-in cases to keep flowers fresh and then plants and seedlings sitting on sawhorses that had been covered with plywood.

“Have you talked to Rob?”

“Not if I can help it.”

Spritz, spritz.

Lucy said: “I did talk to David’s sister. She called me and we had coffee. I liked her very much.”

I didn’t tell her of David’s real relationship with his “sister.”

“So do I. I just wish I had some news for her.”

“A lot of the kids around town think it was Rob.”

“Or Nick.”

Spritz, spritz.

“Or Nick.”

The smell of damp earth brought back a memory of my Uncle Bob’s funeral. He’d died in Korea. When they buried him here, a light rain had given the grave dirt a particular odor. I smelled that odor here, now, with the spritzed dirt in the various plants.

“You know anything about Rob trying to get a tar baby made up?”

She nodded, still not looking at me. “Oh, yes. I heard all about it from a couple of people at the craft store. Good old Rob. God, I don’t know how I could’ve gone out with him all that time.”

I said, as carefully as possible, “I guess I never really asked you.”

“Well, then, I’m sure you will. Whatever it is.”

“I just need to know, just to keep everybody equal, where you were the night Neville and David were killed.”

Now she looked up. “Why, I was out at Neville’s cabin, killing them. I’m surprised it took you this long to ask. So do you put handcuffs on me here or do we wait until we get in your car?”

“You could’ve done it, Lucy. You know that.”

“You stupid ass,” she said, pushing me aside so she could reach another tray of seedlings. “I loved him. I was willing to destroy my father’s career because of him. Why would I kill him?”

Karen appeared in the doorway. She was irritated: “Hold it down, you two. We’ve got customers, for God’s sake.”

“Sorry,” I said.

I left Lucy alone for a few minutes.

“You told me yourself that he wanted to break it off.” I spoke in a stage whisper.

As did she. “Break it off because he thought that marrying him—and yes, that’s exactly what I had in mind—would destroy me. He didn’t think I was strong enough to handle it in the long run.”

I touched her sleeve. She jerked away. “I had to ask. I just want to know what happened.”

“What happened”—and here she pushed her beautiful face close to my unbeautiful one—“is this society is so racist it won’t even let you marry the person you love. That’s what happened.” She pulled back. Visibly forced herself to calm down. “If we’d just been two white people, we could have had a wonderful life together. But David was right. That would never happen. Not in this country, anyway. No matter where we went, somebody would get ugly either with us or the kids we had. That’s what happened. Somebody just couldn’t stand the idea that David and I were together. And so they killed him.”

Her voice had steadily risen.

Karen was in the doorway again: “Dammit, you two!”

I waved at her. And left.

I was walking back to my office when somebody behind me called my name. I wasn’t familiar enough with her voice to recognize it yet. Jane Sykes.

“Mind some company?”

“Be my guest.”

“You sound kind of mad.”

“Confused more than mad.”

“I really did lay it on pretty heavy.”

“Yeah, you did.”

“I’m just protecting you and protecting me.”

“More you than me.”

“Stated just like a lawyer.”

We were across the street from the town square. Kids splashing in the wading pool, retirees playing checkers and throwing horseshoes, teenage boys aching for the teenage girls they saw passing by. As much as I wanted to be an adult, I had flashbacks to when the mode of transportation was a Schwinn and you could find a girl who’d ride on your handlebars as you pretended to be in complete control of the bike that was about to go careening into a tree. Memory is a lie, but not a complete lie.

Two decades of cars crawled down the crowded street. I loved the prewar coupes, the preferred cars for pulp cover gangsters riding on the running boards with their guns blazing; the big unapologetic Packards that announced to one and all that even if you didn’t own the entire world, you owned a damn good share of it; and the 1955 Chevrolets, the most radical departure from the accepted look in automobile history. The languid dusty sunlight on them all gave them a feel of being trapped inside a museum.

“So why don’t you buy me dinner tonight, see how it goes?”

“I dunno, Jane.”

“Oh, God.”

“What?”

“I run hot and cold and now you run hot and cold?”

“How about I call you later?”

“All right. But I’ll be at Cliff’s most of the afternoon. I’ve asked him to bring Rob Anderson in. Or haven’t you heard about the tar baby?”

“Yeah, apparently the whole town has.”

She broke into long strides that pulled her far away from me in less than a minute. In less than forty-eight hours I’d gone through love at first sight, fear, embarrassment, wanton sexual need, and rage with her. Sounded like the basis for a promising relationship.

B
Y 6:45 ALL BUT ONE
of my blackmail subjects had shown up and taken a manila envelope. Two of them tried to disguise themselves in slouch hats and heavy coats. In this kind of weather they looked suspicious as hell.

But it was a happy time for them and they thanked me.

The senator hadn’t shown up yet. Given how eager he’d been the morning he’d worn his own disguise, I was surprised he chose to be late.

I kept watching the office door. I also kept watching the office phone. I thought maybe Jane Sykes would decide to call me, since I’d decided not to call her.

I didn’t waste time, though. I had plenty of paperwork to shuffle through and I kept busy right up until 7:20. The senator was now thirty-five minutes late.

I went down the hall to the john, washed up, and combed my hair. Somehow a Swanson TV dinner didn’t sound so good. I decided I’d go to the steak house out on the highway.

I’d left my office door open. I’d also left the lights on. Now the lights were off. This would have alarmed me more if the electrical wiring in this building hadn’t been done by Ben Franklin himself.

The first thing was to get to the fuses Jamie kept in her desk. I was two steps across the threshold when someone moved from the shadows and smashed something hard across the side of my head.

It wasn’t a clean knockout. It wasn’t even a clean knockdown. What it was was a whole lot of pain and confusion on my part. On their part it was not just one but two more applications of something hard against the side of my head.

They got their clean knockdown and their clean knockout.

Now you know and I know what they were after. There was absolutely no other reason to come after me the way they had. They didn’t find it, because I had put the envelope back in the wall safe before I went to the john. The only person I was sure it hadn’t been was the good senator himself. All he would have had to do was ask when he showed up for his appointment.

I went down the hall and got a good look at the lump on the side of my head. Ugly, but not bleeding. I leaned into the bathroom mirror to check my eyes. They looked normal, though I wasn’t sure what I was looking for exactly.

I returned to my office, sat behind my desk, took out a pint of Jim Beam, and had a nice self-indulgent shot. Two shots, in fact. Jamie had left part of a can of Pepsi. I used the rest of it to gulp down two aspirins.

I was starting to calm down. I’d been scared and then mad and then scared-mad and now I was just mad. And puzzled. Why hadn’t the senator shown up, and why had somebody come in his place?

Though you never hear much about them, both parties have political operatives who perform all kinds of services for their employers.

What a service it would be to hand over photos of the senator and his mistress to the man running against him. Now, no opponent would be stupid enough to call a press conference and share the photos with every leering reporter in the state. The opponent couldn’t use the photos in any public way without implicating himself and looking seedy.