Fools Rush In (The Sam McCain Mysteries Book 7) (8 page)

“You must be something in court. You just spoke everything in perfect sentences.”

“I wasn’t trying to dazzle you, Sam. I was trying to make a point. You and I will be bumping up against each other in a lot of different situations. I know you work for the judge and you know I’m a Sykes, but that’s no reason we can’t be friends. You know, in Chicago, lawyers for the prosecution and lawyers for the defense can actually be friends.” She had an easy touch with wry comments.

“And in a small town, I like the idea of having a friend who knows who Edward Hopper is. But—” She folded her hands on the table and looked at me directly. This particular gray-eyed gaze had to be a killer in court. “But whatever your feelings about any of the Sykeses, including Clifford, I want you to keep them to yourself. I’m well aware of his shortcomings, and one of my first priorities is to straighten out the police department. But he’s my flesh and blood and I know a side of him you don’t. So, no Cliff jokes, no Cliff jibes. If he does something that conflicts with the law, let me know and I’ll take care of it. Otherwise, the subject of Clifford is off-limits. All right?”

“Breathtaking. God, I’m afraid to go up against you in court.”

“I’m serious about it, Sam.”

“I know you are. But that didn’t take anything away from the presentation.”

She sat back in the booth. Yawned. Covered her mouth with that long, graceful hand. “Sorry. I guess I’m not as young as I used to be.”

“Ancient.”

“Thirty-one next month.” Thank God the smile came back. “That’s almost five years older than you.”

“How’d you know that?”

“You think I didn’t research every attorney in the county when I came out here?”

“Do I get to research you?”

“Be my guest. You know how old I am. My husband divorced me four years ago because of all the hours I put in and because I didn’t want children. Now I think maybe I would like to have a child, but the problem is I haven’t met anybody I’d like to get serious with, let alone get married to. As for my time in the DA’s office, I held the highest position ever held by a woman in the Cook County legal establishment. I’m slim but it’s becoming a battle to stay that way. And of all the lawyers in town, you’re the one most interesting to me.”

She tapped the finger where a wedding ring had once resided. “You’re single. That means you can show me the town.”

“Such as it is.”

“Such as it is.”

Then, without warning, she was gathering up her materials and sweeping herself out of the booth. “Want to walk me to my hotel? I haven’t found a place yet.”

“Sure.”

I hadn’t walked a woman home in some time. And I liked it.

“This must be quite a change from Chicago.”

“It is. But I’m enjoying it. I’ll like it even better when I’m moved in somewhere.”

As we walked I felt connected again. Girl-connected with all its rich erotic promise.

And then we were standing in front of the hotel, three wide steps up to a pair of revolving doors and a surprisingly comely interior.

She extended her hand and we shook. “Thanks, Sam. I’ve really enjoyed meeting you.”

And then she was gone. I tumbled down into the womanless darkness that had been my home since Mary had found out that she couldn’t marry me. Her husband Wes, who’d left her for another woman, had gotten Mary pregnant with their third child, unbeknownst to both of them. Since Wes had gotten dumped by his new girlfriend, he saw the wisdom of returning to Mary. She didn’t believe in abortion. She would have the baby—had already had the baby girl, in fact—and Mary and Wes would try again to save their marriage.

I went for a long, melancholy ride in my ragtop, and then I went home to feed the cats.

“I
PLAY A PICKLE, SAM,”
Samantha said on the other end of the phone. “A network commercial, too. The residuals should be really good.”

Samantha, a very appealing copper-haired young woman from right here in Black River Falls, had been in Los Angeles. Couple of years older than me, a small legal infraction known as shoplifting being the way we’d met, she finally decided that maybe “everybody” was right, she should try Hollywood before it was too late. She did the impossible. She got me to keep her three cats for her, Tasha, Crystal, and Tess. I was previously a catdisliker. Not hater. But disliker.

Until I got her cats. And they became my cats by default.

She checks in three or four times a year, usually when she has news of a commercial or a bit part in a movie or a TV show or a stage play. I’ve never summoned the nerve to recommend to her one of my three or four favorite novels,
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
by Horace McCoy. It’s the most scathing of all the Hollywood novels about people who trek out there filled with Cinemascope dreams about the gilded life that will be theirs.

To date, according to her count, she’s had more than a dozen jobs, slept with three bona fide movie stars, endured two failed marriages, one miscarriage and two abortions, and has spent a good deal of her modest income seeing a shrink who has convinced her that the sex they have is a vital part of the therapeutic process, something she admitted while stoned on marijuana and wine.

She checks in on her cats the way a really bad parent would check in on children she never sees, all effusive stagecraft about how much she misses them, thinks about them, even dreams about them. I’m sort of the adoptive cat parent now. Or the cat nanny.

After Samantha and I said our good-byes, I took off my clothes, grabbed a beer from the fridge, turned on the TV just for noise, and then saw the piece of paper by the door. I went over and picked it up and brought it back to the couch.

The cats read it with me, Tasha in my lap, Crystal and Tess on the back of the couch, reading over my shoulder.

Sam—

I saw something last night that might have something to do with those murders. I’m actually kind of scared about it. That’s why I stopped by. I’m staying at a girlfriend’s trailer tonight. Her number is 407-5411. I’d appreciate a call. Don’t worry how late it is.

Rachael Todd

A client of mine in a spooky divorce. A husband so abusive he’d once chased her through the woods with a fire ax. For which he is still serving some well-deserved time.

A Knolls kid, like me, Rachael had dropped out of school in tenth grade and taken up with the Road Devils, some local bikers who fashioned themselves after the Hell’s Angels. At first they’d been poor imitations. But by now they were serious criminals: car theft (the cars driven to Chicago where they were repainted and their registration numbers filed off, sold at auction to used-car lots), arson-for-hire, and numerous charges of assault and battery. Judge Whitney had sent a few of them up, in fact.

Rachael wasn’t especially attractive physically except for her enormous breasts. I’d always felt sorry for her. Nobody’d ever paid her any attention until her breasts sprouted, and then she was reduced to something of a joke by boys and girls alike. I suppose hanging out with the bikers gave her the sense of belonging she’d never found at school.

I’d lost touch with her since the divorce decree two years ago, though I wondered about her occasionally. She’d always be one of those sad-eyed kids nobody at school had ever bothered to bestow humanity on.

I dialed the number. One thing she wasn’t was a hysteric. If she thought she’d seen something, she’d seen something.

No answer.

I dialed and redialed right up to when the yawning finally overcame me and I turned off the TV and went to bed.

It was just before 6:30 the next morning when the clock radio next to my bed came on with the news that a body identified as that of Rachael Todd had been found on the highway, the victim of an apparent hit-and-run.

W
HENEVER I WANT TO
find out what I really think about something, I go to the barbershop, the same barbershop I’ve been going to since my mom quit cutting my hair when I turned three. The two men who ran the shop since the 1920s have retired now, but the other characters are pretty much the same.

The men who collect here, whether they need a haircut or not, are a good cross-section of small-town folks: farmers, blue-collar workers, merchants, a newspaperman or two, and a fair number of retirees.

Pipes, cigarettes, cigars are smoked. Dirty jokes are told. Gossip is exchanged. And politics are argued.

I happened to need a haircut, so after visiting the morgue to learn what I could about Rachael Todd’s death, I spent part of the early morning sitting in a barber’s chair, soaking up not only the commentary but also the wonderful timeless scents of the barbershop—the hot foam for shaving, the aftershaves, the hair tonics, the powder, the smell of the bristles in the whisk broom when the barber is cleaning off your neck and shoulders.

The talk itself this particular morning took a roundabout way of becoming political, traveling from the particular to the general—from the murders of Leeds and Neville to the civil rights struggle on the tube every night.

The only thing that didn’t figure into the mix was Rachael Todd’s death. They’d heard about it but they didn’t know yet that it had some undetermined connection to the murders.

“landed at an odd angle,” the new county medical examiner showed me after tugging out the drawer in which Rachael resided. “Broke her neck.”

His name was Dr. Henry Renning and his duties were part time. He had his own practice to tend to the rest of the time. He was best known for wearing one of the most hilariously lousy toupees in town history and for driving a 1951 cherry MG that everybody, including me, envied the hell out of.

I hadn’t seen Rachael much since handling her divorce. She’d put on considerable weight. In death, at least, she appeared to be much older than her calendar years. She looked sexless now, and she’d been one of those women who made up with an erotic air what she lacked in looks.

“Her blood alcohol was nearly three times the legal limit. The way the accident looks to have happened, I’m not even sure the driver was sure he’d hit anybody. It’s pretty dark on that stretch of highway and she might just have lurched into his headlights.”

“I didn’t know she was a drinker.”

Renning nodded. His rug moved a half inch down his forehead. “The woman who identified her, her sister, said that Rachael here was in AA and had been up to that clinic for alcoholics in Mason City. Twice, in fact.”

First her husband had beaten her up with his fists. Then she’d beaten herself up with liquor.

I became aware of where I was. The bodies in the drawers. The terrible cold stench of the place. The hum of gurney wheels as corpses were moved around, the efficiency of it all as depressing as the sight of a man and woman weeping on the other side of a glass door as I’d come in. Weeping silently because I couldn’t hear them, a scene from an ancient silent movie.

But mostly I was aware of poor Rachael, the left side of her face almost black with bruising from her accident. And various other bruises and small cuts up and down her body. Meat now. Just human meat. I wish Dylan Thomas had been right about death not having dominion. But that was just a poet’s fancy to put up against eternal darkness. Death has plenty of dominion. Plenty.

“Got a suicide I need to check out,” Renning said, his toupee looking like a squirrel sprawled over his bald pate. “We about done here, Sam?”

If there were a list of Top Ten Barbershop Topics over the past few years it would include the birth control pill (“Shit, why didn’t they have somethin’ like that when I was young; McCain, your generation’s got it knocked!”); the Berlin Wall (“Who gives a shit? After what the Krauts did, screw ’em!”); Ernest Hemingway (“All the money and all the broads that guy had and he kills himself?”); the recent trip by Rick Paulson to the Playboy Club in Chicago, the first of our townspeople to enter those sacred doors (“Hefner just walks around in his tuxedo with that damn pipe of his and the gals are all over him!”); and the recent murder of Medgar Evers (“I think the colored people are pushin’ it pretty hard these days but I don’t hold with no murder.”).

“That wife of Williams’s didn’t look so snotty when I seen her at the post office yesterday, I’ll tell you that much.”

“’Bout time we got a Democrat in there, anyway.”

“I had a daughter seein’ a colored boy, I’d whip her ass good.”

“I can tell you I’d take a couple of colored boys I used to serve with in Korea over some of the white boys around here.”

“They say in France they treat Negroes just like white people.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the French. We had to save their ass in the big war and they never have thanked us.”

“I don’t want to be nowhere around ’em. I don’t like lookin’ at them or talkin’ to them or even thinkin’ about them.”

“Segregation’s good for them. They do better when they’re with their own.”

“Ike was the one who named that son of a bitch Warren to head up the Supreme Court. He’s the one who started all this.”

“My son in Des Moines says my grandkids go to school with colored kids and they all get along just fine.”

“Look at Sammy Davis. He don’t care who knows he’s married to a white woman.”

“Well, they fought in the war just like I did. They shouldn’t get shoved around the way they do. You see them little kids when they get them hoses turned on ’em? I went south one time and you can keep it. Didn’t care for one bit of it.”

“I’ll take Nat ‘King’ Cole any day. He’s my kind of colored man. A gentleman.”

“I hear a couple of those bikers really had it in for that Leeds kid.”

Somehow, if you listened long enough and carefully enough, you heard the kind of prairie debate that was going on, in a more sophisticated way perhaps, all across the country. You heard the men good and true and the men confused and struggling and the men who hated, one or two of them who might even be capable of violence against Negroes in the great wrong moment.

And once in a while, no matter what the subject was—and it could be anything from did Marilyn Monroe really commit suicide to why Roger Maris really was entitled to that home run record after all—once in a while you really learned something specific and useful.