Fools Rush In (The Sam McCain Mysteries Book 7) (2 page)

She picked a rubber band from her hair and said, “Nobody has the right to break the law and march in the streets without a permit.”

I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my laughter. “I’m glad you weren’t one of Lincoln’s advisers. He never would’ve gotten rid of slavery. And if you shoot one more rubber band at me, I’ll start charging you a buck for every time you hit me.”

She was mad and so was I. Most of the time our arguments had to do with her snobbery. She was, to her credit, able to rise above most of her prejudices in her courtroom. But when she wasn’t in her judicial robes, she reverted to the coddled, cuddled old-money imperialist she usually was.

The arguments rarely got personal. This one was different. How could you see the shacks the marchers lived in, the degradation they had to put up with every day of their lives, and not in some way share their grief? How could you possibly watch the freedom marchers and not see how righteous they were in their simple but profound demands?

Who gave a shit about parade permits?

“But that isn’t all, McCain.”

“Oh?”

“Pick up the gray envelope on my desk.”

I did so. There were photos inside of Lucy Williams and her boyfriend. Not dirty photos. If Lucy Williams and David Leeds had both been white or both been black, there’d have been no problem. Walking across the U of Iowa campus, his arm around her. Sitting on the same side of a restaurant booth. Her sitting on the handlebars while he was pedaling.

Innocent pictures. Two clean-cut, nice-looking young people in love.

“I see what you’re talking about. Some people’ll be offended by these, but they’re really innocuous.”

“These were sent to the party office in Des Moines. Imagine if they made it into a newspaper.” Then she said: “You once had a client named Richie Neville.”

Maybe I was as slow as the judge frequently accused me of being. I didn’t connect Neville to the photos until I remembered that he was a photographer now. When I’d represented him as a teenager he’d been nothing more than a harmless, garden-variety punk who’d gotten in juvie trouble in Chicago and had been shipped out here by his parents to live with his overly devout aunt.

“You’re kind of jumping to conclusions, aren’t you?”

“The senator’s wife said she is sure she saw him two or three times driving past their house.”

“How does she even know him?”

“He did yard work for them a few times. And now he’s a photographer.”

“Well, gosh, let’s go lynch him then, since we’ve got such solid evidence against him.”

“You’re being ridiculous as usual, McCain. But I’ll bet we could learn a lot by getting into his darkroom.”

“You’re ordering me to break the law?”

She had such a serene smile. “I’m not ordering you to do anything, McCain.” The smile grew richer, deeper. “I’m just saying that if somebody were to be in the vicinity of Mr. Neville’s cabin …”

The river sparkled in the moonlight. The rain had ended and all the foliage gleamed. Above me a raccoon was placing calls to other raccoons in a loud and endearing voice. The pines on both sides of the small, tidy cabin smelled sweet as a summer morning.

The raccoon was still jabbering as I surveyed the place. The exterior of the cabin was brown-painted sheets of plywood. A large window had been cut into the front of it, exposing the darkened interior.

Somebody, probably during one of Richie’s notorious parties, had torn the door off the outhouse. Nobody was sitting in there reading
Playboy
in the dark.

Night birds and the sad solemn cry of an owl. The raccoon had fallen into a peeved silence. Screw them if they didn’t want to answer back.

I wanted to make sure that nobody was around before I approached the door. It looked safe. I walked through the grassy space that served as yard. Before I touched anything, I slipped on the brown cotton gardening gloves I’d bought earlier at the A&P. Not for nothing was I a reader of hard-boiled paperbacks.

Despite the cool night breeze that carried the smell of pine, I felt myself sweating. Something was wrong here. I’d learned never to make assumptions, but I couldn’t ignore the subconscious warning signals my body was sending me.

I reminded myself of my earlier decision. If the door was locked, I wouldn’t go in. And I was assuming the door
would be
locked, what with all the expensive photography equipment inside.

I stabbed a finger at a piece of mid-level door and damned if the pine slab didn’t swing inward.

The gods had decided.

Before going in, I played the light across the first few feet of scuffed and cracked linoleum inside. No evidence of blood.

I went in and played the beam across the destruction that somebody pretty angry had left behind. Neville’s cabin was usually orderly. I’d done some legal work for him and he’d let me fish off his small pier. But the cabin was orderly no longer.

Neville’s pride was his collection of blues records from the thirties and forties. Seventy-eight rpms and forty-fives, flung, broken, and smashed, lying across the debris that had once been a couch. A stuffed armchair, a nine-inch TV, as well as books, magazines, ashtrays, beer cans, Pepsi bottles, and smashed framed photos that had probably meant something to Neville littered the floor.

You always see rooms tossed on the silver screen. What you don’t get is the violence of it, the jagged pieces of glass, the splintered thrusts of wood, and the stench of various liquids mixed together.

The beam revealed the chaos that extended from inside the front door to Neville’s “church,” as he called it. His darkroom. He was a local photographer of weddings, rodeos, and various civic and cultural events. People admired his work and he was always in demand.

I worked my leery way across the cabin, stumbling here, tripping there. The darkroom ran the length of the far wall. The door stood open.

The darkroom was more of a mess than the living area. An enlarger, a print washer, a print dryer, several lenses, a negative carrier, pans, and numerous other darkroom fixtures had been hurled to the floor. The chemical stench filled my nostrils.

Time to get out of here.

I’d just about worked my way across the rubble to the front door when car headlights swept across the front of the cabin.

Company had arrived.

The slight man who emerged from the white Valiant sedan was maybe thirty. He was dressed in the kind of tight dark suit you saw in dance clubs where everybody did the twist—the slash pockets, the pegged pants, and the porkpie hat that the better grade of Chicago hood was wearing this year—and he was altogether as sleek as a stiletto.

But the shades were the startling part of his ensemble. Who the hell wore sunglasses out in the country at night? He leaned in through the open car window and doused his lights and cut off the engine. But he left the shades on.

I stayed inside, hiding. I wanted to see who he was and why he was here. This time when I took a quick look out the window, I saw he’d added one more piece to his outfit. A .45 that he’d just slid out of a shoulder holster.

This was Black River Falls, Iowa, where the worst violence we generally have is limited to high school kids getting into shoving matches after football games with fans of rival teams and engaging in that favorite working-class pastime, bar fights.

A gun?

I decided to step into the door frame rather than wait for him in here. Scare him less than if I was lurking inside the cabin.

I held up the badge I got as a court investigator. “I need you to identify yourself.”

“Shit,” he said.

He was turning and running back to his car before I was able to speak even one more syllable.

He ground the ignition key until the motor exploded into life and then he backed up like a bullet, never turning the lights on. His tires found the gravel road and he fishtailed away with his porkpie hat, and the .45 I doubted he had the legal right to carry. I took my nickel notebook from my back pocket and wrote down the number of his Illinois plates.

I was walking to my car when I heard the whimpering in a wooded area west of the cabin. A dog. I remembered Neville’s beautiful little border collie. Princess had one of those sweet faces that you want to carry in your wallet for emergencies. When the blues get bad, her face could help you get through.

The wooded patch was so dark I couldn’t see anything resembling a path. I let her voice guide me into maybe three feet of undergrowth and then into the woods itself. A half dozen creatures crashed away from me in the bramble. Princess’s whimpering never wavered.

The mournful sound of it scared me. I was afraid of what her voice was leading me to.

And it turned out my instinct was right. I had a damn good reason to be afraid.

“T
HIS MUST BE LUCY’S BOYFRIEND
,” Police Chief Cliffie Sykes said after arriving at Neville’s cabin. “The Negro kid who was seeing Lucy Williams.” He raised his flashlight high enough so that the edge of the beam washed across my face. “Or didn’t you think I knew about that? I bet the judge and the senator sure didn’t want that to get around.”

It’s hard to say which of us Cliffie hates worse, the judge or me. Probably Judge Whitney because he knows that she represents all he and his kin will never be—intelligent, reasonably open-minded, and eager to serve the greater good, the latter stemming not from virtue so much as simple patrician obligation. The best dukes always took care of the peasants.

This particular branch of the Whitney family fled New York due to a bank scandal created by the judge’s grandfather. They came to what was little more than a hamlet and created the town of Black River Falls. They frequently took the train back to New York for a few weeks at a time. I imagine they needed respite from the yokels, my people. Various Whitneys served in all the meaningful town and county offices and ruled, for the most part, wisely and honestly.

But then the Sykes family made a fortune after winning some government construction contracts. They were rich and dangerous. And they moved fast. Before anybody quite understood what was going on, the Sykeses had planted their own kin in most of the important political offices. Within two election cycles all that was left of the Whitney clan was the judge’s office.

She hired me for a simple reason. She wanted to do her best to humiliate Cliffie. Whenever a major crime occurred, she put me on the case. After law school I’d gone back and taken night-school courses in criminology and police science, something, it is safe to say, that neither Cliffie nor his hapless staff had ever done.

We usually identified the culprit—bank robber, burglar, arsonist, and the occasional murderer—before Cliffie did. And thus the animus.

“Somebody had it in for these two,” Cliffie said.

About that, he wasn’t wrong. I’d found two bodies in the woods, Neville and the Negro whose name, Cliffie assured me, was David Leeds. Neville had been shot in the face twice. Leeds had been shot in the neck.

A voice from behind us said: “You think he was sleeping with her, Chief?”

The one and only Deputy Earle Whitmore, who said, on local radio, that if “those freedom marchers ever come up here,” he wouldn’t just use dogs and water hoses, he’d turn poison gas on them. Even for Cliffie that had been a bit much. Earle the Pearl had been forced to apologize to “the law-abidin’ colored people of Black River Falls who know to not stir up no trouble lessen they get trouble right back.” Probably not the apology Cliffie had in mind but it was better than the threat of poison gas.

“I just hate the idea of a colored man gettin’ together with a white gal,” Earle went on. “Makes me just want to go over to them bushes and puke my guts out.”

“Straight from the KKK handbook,” I said.

“Watch your mouth, Earle,” Cliffie said, “or McCain here’ll run and tell everybody what you said.”

“Can’t a man speak his mind?”

“Earle, goddammit, shut up—and I mean it.”

A few months ago Cliffie, in an act of true bravery, had hauled two people from a burning car. He not only got written up admiringly by Stan at the paper, he’d even been interviewed on television. Even though most people still thought him incompetent as a police chief, they no longer laughed about him as a joke. The way he was treating Earle tonight indicated that he was enjoying his well-earned admiration.

“In fact, Earle, go back there and direct some of that traffic that’s comin’ in here all of a sudden.”

Earle stomped away, angry.

“You better watch yourself around him,” Cliffie said. “He don’t like you much.”

“I noticed that.”

“But most people—a colored kid and a white girl—I don’t like it myself.”

The medical examiner came then. He wore his usual black topcoat, black fedora, black leather gloves. He carried a black leather medical bag, the type Jack the Ripper dragged around Whitechapel in the fog.

The TV crew had brought enough lights to illuminate a long stretch of woods. The light was almost as lurid as the corpses themselves, that too-harsh glare you see in crime lab photos.

“How come you were out here tonight, McCain?”

“Neville was my client.”

“I suppose it’s gonna be that attorney-client privilege thing.”

“Afraid so.”

“Did he know this Negro?”

“I don’t have any idea. He never mentioned him, anyway.”

“Judge know about this yet?”

“Not as far as I know. Haven’t called her, anyway.”

He nodded. “There’s gonna be a lot of press on this. That’s all you can see on the news these days. Negro this and Negro that. Personally, the government never did a damn thing for me, but if they want to live off the government, I guess that’s up to them.” Then: “I don’t want you working on this case. I’m gonna find the killer and I’m gonna throw him in jail.”

The New Cliff Sykes. He was now looking to score a double public relations coup. Pull two people from a burning car and then solve a racial murder.

“I can’t promise you that.”

“Well, then I can’t promise you that I won’t throw your ass in jail. There’re a lot of laws against interfering with a police investigation.”