First Kill All the Lawyers (13 page)

He should have been an actor, Sam thought as she slit the envelope. His timing was perfect.

Inside were two sheets of paper. One was the folded and refolded note to the Ridleys that had arrived after the surprise party.

Liza was right. It was typewritten, with no errors, no erasures. And her quote was exact:
Did you like your surprise? There’ll be more you’ll like even less.
The words practically jumped off the plain white paper.

Samantha shivered.

“What is it?” George asked.

She handed him the note, and inspected the second sheet, smaller, lined, and inscribed with pencil. But she began to wave it as if it were an engraved invitation from the Princess of Wales.

“This is it! Listen: ‘202 Virginia Circle is where Oglethorpe goes. Lona.’”

“Huzzah!” cried George.

“Can I get you anything else?” asked Horace.

“Tell me something,” Sam said. “How’d you do that so fast? I saw Lona only this morning.”

“Telegraph’s built for speed,” he replied enigmatically and then turned to leave.

“Beats the hell out of computers, doesn’t it?” asked George.

“Now, a computer is just a bunch of zeros,” Horace responded, changing his mind about his exit. “I went and looked at one the last time I was in Rich’s. It was cold. I like dealing with people myself. They can be in a real hurry, if they see that it’s something you need—and something they care about with their hearts. As far as I can see, a computer doesn’t care about anything.”

Peaches appeared at the front door. “Dr. Talbot’s on the phone for you, Sam,” she announced, her voice as cool and noncommittal as if Beau, who hadn’t rung this house that she knew of in almost two decades, did so every day.

As Samantha left the porch, Peaches asked, “So what have you all been talking about? Did I hear computers? I suppose you two old men are thinking about joining the bandwagon of high tech?”

“I knew it was going to come to this,” Horace said to George, “when they gave her that first computer down at the literacy program office.”

“Well, I told you then that there are four-year-old children those machines have taught to read,” Peaches retorted.

“Does that mean you think we’re dumber than four-year-olds if we don’t get one?” George asked.

“I just said then, and I’ll repeat, there’s illiterate and there’s illiterate, if you know what I mean.”

“Horace, would you please buy Peaches a computer while you’re at Rich’s getting the wicker furniture? We might as well, because there’s uncomfortable and there’s uncomfortable, if you know what I mean.”

“I do,” Horace said, “I do indeed know what you mean.”

*

Sam took the call in the kitchen.

“So?” Beau said.

“So what?”

“So what happened when you went to see Queen?” Sam held the receiver out in front of her for a moment and stared at it.

“How are we going to work together on this case if you don’t keep me up on the skinny?” Beau complained.

“There’s a real obvious answer, Beau. We aren’t.”

He was unflappable. “So what do you think? Did she kill him for his money? Or because he was stepping out on her?”

“What makes you think that?”

“Which?”

“That there was another woman?”

“Often is, isn’t there?”

There was a long pause before Sam said, “Yes, Beau. Quite frequently, yes.”

He cleared his throat. “Well, did she give
anything
away?”

Sam looked down at Lona’s envelope, which she was still holding. “Can you take fingerprints off paper?”

“Sure, if we’re lucky.”

She told him about the surprise party note.

“It’s probably been handled to hell and gone. Am I right?”

“Right. Me, George, Lona, Liza, Queen, Ridley, God knows who else.”

“Well, it’s worth a try anyway. But you’re going to have to get me smooth prints of everyone you just named.”

“Mine are on file at the paper.”

“And Ridley’s I can get from the—hell, no,” he said, “I can’t. There
was
no autopsy.”

“But he was an attorney.”

“You’re right. He’s on file with the PD. What about the others? Can you manage them?”

Sam thought about how quickly Lona had worked through Horace earlier in the day. “I think so.”

Beau’s voice was excited. “Now we’re cooking. The physical evidence never lies. That’s why I love it. Your hunches and my facts—we’re gonna be a great team, Ms. Adams.”

“We are
not
.”

“You want to be a glory hog? No problem. You don’t have to give me a word of credit. Just helping you is enough. I’ll be plenty satisfied.”

“Oh, Lord.” What was happening here? It was like a seduction: she kept saying no and he kept going right ahead.

“Send the prints right over when you get them. Or I can pick them up when I get home.”

“What?”

“When I get home tonight. Didn’t I tell you we’ve filed for a divorce? I moved into Mother’s house yesterday. I’ll be right across the street.”

“You
what?
”

And with that bit of news, he rang off.

Ten

The next morning Sam was headed toward the Virginia circle address Lona had given her when she came upon a crash between a fire engine and a garbage truck. A motorcycle cop waved her in precisely the opposite direction from where she wanted to go. She was driving south toward Grant Park, Oakland Cemetery, and Cabbagetown, looking for a place to turn around, when it dawned on her—Cabbagetown! Veering from the right turn she’d been about to make, she winced at the screech of brakes behind her. Herman Blanding, the all-gray man who’d threatened Forrest Ridley’s life, lived in Cabbagetown. He was second on her list; she’d move him up one.

Cabbagetown was a residential community that grew up around the skirts of the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill in the nineteenth century. It initially housed employees of the factory, who at the century’s turn numbered some 700 souls transforming bales of Georgia cotton into finished cloth. As World War II created a demand for sandbags for bunkers and bomb shelters, Fulton Bag grew more prosperous, hiring almost 3,000 workers working in three shifts around the clock. Smokestacks rising from the red brick buildings spewed exhaust across the neighborhood; the reverberating looms shook the small shotgun houses. Charles Dickens would have felt at home in Cabbagetown when Fulton Bag was at its height.

The mill was shuttered now, absorbed into first one conglomerate and then another, and finally closed because its old-fashioned methodology, working from raw material to finished product, made it noncompetitive. But the neighborhood remained, its small one- and two-family tin-roofed frame houses threatened by yet another modern specter, gentrification, as young people seeking close-in, affordable places to live moved in.

“We shall not be moved” was the motto of the residents, holding on in their poor little houses on winding, sometimes unpaved streets. These were descendants of the rural Georgians who’d come from the mountains and the plains to find employment in the big city. “Recalcitrant white trash” was what the real estate speculators called them. “Proud” was what they called themselves as they planted signs reading “Speculators Keep Out” amidst the cabbage roses.

There was a sign, too, on the front porch of Herman Blanding’s house on Pearl Street. The “KEEP OUT!” was printed. Scrawled in a slanting hand below were the words “This means YOU!!”

Any reporter worth her salt ignored such warnings. As she approached the tumbledown, peeling house, Sam cocked her head to the left to correct its fifteen-degree list. On the front porch was piled an amazing collection of goods, the sort often seen around houses in the country. But one rarely found such a hodgepodge of old sewing machines, car parts, furniture, tires, wooden crates, and broken bottles within city limits. Sam picked her way through the littered yard for a better look.

As her foot touched the bottom step, a fiend of hell lunged out of the moldering debris and, with its loud bark and hot breath, nearly took her head off.

She stumbled backwards as if in slow motion, fearing that this long, loud second was her last, aware of her thundering heartbeat, forgetting to take a breath. Then out of the maelstrom, she heard a man call: “Who is it, General Lee? Did you kill ’em yet?”

The torn screen door screeched open on its one remaining hinge, and the all-gray man she had seen at Ridley’s funeral stepped out into a tiny clear space on the front porch. He patted the raging German shepherd, who instantly calmed at his touch. Herman Blanding was monochromatic again today, but this time his garb was no overcoat. He was decked out, cap to boots, in the frayed uniform of an officer of the Confederate States of America.

“General Lee will tear your throat out if you come any closer,” he said in a voice that sounded as if it, like the door, could use oiling. He peered at her with squinting, weak eyes, his hand resting on his sword hilt. His gray hair was like rotten straw peeking out from the edges of his cap.

There was a clanking, and Sam noticed with relief that the dog was on a heavy chain. Of course, Blanding could loose him, but she began to breathe again.

I’m going to stand here and talk to this man, she thought. God, I’m brave. God, I’m terrified.

“
Good day, Mr. Blanding.”

“How do you know my name?” he shrilled. “They’ve been spying on me again!”

“I’m Samantha Adams. I’m here to talk with you about—” But she never finished the sentence.

“Stone Mountain!” Blanding cried, naming the huge granite outcropping near town. “Why…Stonewall, and Lee, and Jeff Davis! It’s a pity, a travesty, I tell you, their faces having to look down at all that harlotry. Skating rinks! Riverboats! They’ve built a goddamned amusement park right there at their feet.”

They don’t have feet, she wanted to say. The carvings of the three Confederate generals, like those on Mount Rushmore, were of heads only. But she didn’t think Blanding wanted to hear that.

“Why, did I think, when I was up on that hill”—he pointed in the direction of Oakland Cemetery, which was just on the other side of the defunct factory—“looking down on the Union troops advancing in the Battle of Atlanta, did I think to myself: General Hood, this rolling mill”—he pointed at Fulton Bag—“this rolling mill is going to make great condominiums one day? Hell, no, missy! I didn’t! I thought: We’ve got to save the mill or we won’t have any armor.” He pointed in a different direction. “We’ve got to save the railroad, or we won’t have reinforcements from Decatur. We’ve got to stop the Yankees in their tracks! That’s what I thought. I didn’t think about any goddamned condominiums!”

“No, sir.” She nodded.

Blanding focused on her as if he hadn’t known she was there until that second. “What’s your name, miss? Would you like to come in and set for a spell,
have a glass of iced tea? I don’t get many visitors. It’d make me proud if you could.”

Sure, General Hood, Sam thought. Yes sirree bob. Never had tea with a Confederate general before.

Sam slid through the screen door that Blanding was holding open for her. General Lee followed, sniffing the hem of her denim skirt. Blanding/Hood brought up the rear.

The front room in which she found herself was as cluttered as the front porch, but this jumble was thematic. The room was a memorial to Susan Blanding, Herman’s wife. Photographs of her, from infancy to late middle age, created a bizarre wallpaper. Her clothes, shoes, stockings, and underwear were flung in little heaps, much as a woman might leave in her boudoir in a flurry of dressing or undressing. Bottles of her perfume were open on a mirrored tray, filling the air with the sweet smell of Shalimar. A small table, which was almost covered with her books and letters, was set for two.

“Were you expecting someone?” Sam asked Blanding, who had disappeared through a curtained door into what she assumed was the kitchen.

“Why, yes, Susan. You.”

Samantha froze. Her blood chilled and flowed more slowly, bumping into floes of fear as she began to realize the dimension of Blanding’s madness.

He reentered the room. “I bought you some more of your favorites, dear.” He was carrying a pitcher of iced tea and, holding it by the string, a box of animal crackers. His sword clanked as he moved.

He patted her on the shoulder. “Sit. Sit down and we’ll have our tea party.” He opened the little box with the circus animals pictured on the outside. “I’ll find you the elephants,” he said. “I know they’re your favorites.”

“They taste better,” Sam said very softly. Maybe she could get through this if she played along.

“You always say that,” Blanding said, and laughed. It was the first time she’d seen him smile. His complexion pinkened, came alive. He had a beautiful smile.

“What have you been doing today,” he asked, “while I was at the store?”

Sam hesitated.

“Have you been visiting with Mrs. Brown again?”

She nodded.