Fools Rush In (The Sam McCain Mysteries Book 7) (4 page)

I could only see the back of the woman Stan was talking to.

I walked over to Stan and slid in next to him.

“Sam, this is Marie Leeds. She’s David Leeds’s sister.”

Marie Leeds possessed one of those faces so regular of feature you wanted to study it. Not great beauty, this face, but certainly pretty. She nodded. “I came out here from Chicago two days ago to spend some time with David.”

“I’m sorry about your brother.”

“If I start talking about him, I’ll cry. What I’d prefer to talk about is how serious this investigation is going to be.”

“She talked to the chief of police,” Stan said, “and said that he was very polite and friendly but she sensed that he might be a little—”

Marie’s smile surprised me. It was a little girl’s smile and it was a treasure. “‘Stupid’ was the word I used.”

Her smile relaxed me and I sensed it had done the same for Stan. We were no longer representatives of the white race and she was no longer a representative of the Negro race. Not that we were such great grand friends but we were at least just human beings talking to each other.

“All the information he gave me came from the newspaper on his desk. Turns out Stan wrote it. Doesn’t the chief file reports?”

“Well, in his own way he does. He used to have a very bright deputy who did most of the work in that area. But then the deputy couldn’t take it anymore and got a job in Cedar Rapids.”

“That deputy he has now—that Earle?—he just sat there with his arms folded the whole time I was talking to the chief. The only thing he said was, ‘This is a small town and your brother acted like it was a big town.’ A font of wisdom.” She looked directly at me. “By that I take it Earle meant that David was seeing a white girl.”

“That’s what we’ve been told,” I said.

Marie shook her head. “An ambitious young man like my brother, his good looks caused him a lot of trouble. He always said he preferred to live the way white people did. If you saw a job opening, no matter what it was, and you thought you could do it, go up and apply for it. And if you saw a girl you wanted to date, go up and ask her.” She looked at Stan now. “Not that he made a big thing out of dating white girls. Most of his girlfriends were Negro. But every once in a while he’d get serious about a white girl for a while—he always taught dance lessons because it was easy money and he sure met a lot of young women.” The wonderful girly smile again. “David was never much for staying with one girl long, whatever their color was. He liked variety.”

“Marie raised him,” Stan said. “Her folks were killed in a fire.”

“You don’t look much older than he was,” I said.

“Seven years older. They died when I was seventeen.” This smile lacked the energy of the others. “Here I said I didn’t want to talk about him and that’s all I
have
been talking about.”

Discreet tears filled the corners of her eyes. She dabbed at them with a piece of tissue.

“I really don’t want to be emotional about this. I want to find out who killed him. And emotional won’t help me get there.” Another dab at her eyes. “I teach seventh grade and that’s what I try to teach my students. Anger, especially righteous anger, can get people up on their feet. But to get things done, you have to hold a tight rein on your feelings.”

“I’m afraid you’re right,” I said.

“That’s why I admire Dr. King,” Marie said. “He’s exactly the sort of person I’m talking about.”

The waitress came, took our order, and fled back to the counter to call it in. She was frantic. By this time the lunch area was jammed. Some customers had to stand behind the stools to eat their lunch.

I’d just picked up my cup of coffee when the frantic waitress returned and said, “Are you Sam McCain?”

I nodded.

“There’s a call for you. There’s a phone at the far west end of the counter.”

I knew who was calling and I knew why she was calling and I knew why I was mad she was calling.

“Just do me a favor and tell her I’m not here.”

“Really?” the waitress said.

“Yeah, really. And I appreciate you doing it for me.”

She hurried away.

“The judge?” Stan said.

“Who else?”

“You have a very strange relationship with her. Really passive-aggressive.”

I glanced at Marie and laughed. “In case you couldn’t guess, Stan’s minor at Northwestern was psychology.”

Marie blessed me with one of her sweet smiles again.

T
HE COLONIAL-STYLE HOUSE
gleamed pure white in the early afternoon sun. Ellen Williams, the senator’s wife, was tending to her garden of roses as I pulled up the drive.

Karen Porter, not only her friend but her partner in their downtown flower shop, was watering plants further downhill. She gave me a big wave and a big smile. I’d always felt much more comfortable with her than with Ellen.

Ellen turned when she heard my engine. She just stared at me. I’d never had the feeling she cared much for me, but because I worked with her good friend the judge, she was always polite.

While the house wasn’t a mansion, it had a mansion’s sprawl, grass so green it looked slightly unreal stretching east to a forest and west to a plateau, where an enormous white gazebo sat twenty yards from a tennis court and covered swimming pool.

Lucy Williams sat in the gazebo with her friend Nancy Adams. Even though Lucy was talking, there was an Andrew Wyeth loneliness in the juxtaposition of the frail blonde girl in the tennis outfit and the forlorn air she radiated even from here.

I parked and walked over to Ellen.

“Hello, Sam,” Ellen said, striving to put some warmth in her voice for me. “Esme called and asked you to call her if you stopped by.”

Ah, yes. Esme. Wasn’t that French for relentless?

“I’ll give her a call when I finish here. I’m sure she explained that she’s asked me to look into this whole thing with David Leeds.”

She was one of those erotically overweight women, the type favored by the Brits at various times in their bloody history. The face was what did it, that sensual mouth more than anything. Even in a pair of slightly baggy yellow walking shorts and a yellow sleeveless blouse, there was a sexual dynamic. I wondered if she was even aware of it. I wondered that especially now when the blue eyes held a quality of fear.

“I wish Lucy had listened to us.” The trowel in her hand pointed upward like a dagger. The gloved hand seemed to tighten on the handle. “We begged her and begged her.” The face tightened, while the dyed red hair blew in the breeze. “She owed it to her father not to get involved. His career is everything to him. He’s the third senator in the family.”

Five generations of Williamses, three senators. By now we were talking divine right. The bitterness in her voice let me know that her husband’s career was everything to her as well. Her daughter didn’t seem to be much more than an encumbrance.

“All right if I talk to her?”

“Personally, I wish you wouldn’t. But Esme says it’s important, so I suppose you should.”

“I won’t keep her long.”

“You can keep her forever for all I care. My poor husband. I’ve never seen him like this. The election was close enough. Now, with this—”

Just then a red MG appeared in the drive. Two young men in tennis whites. Rob Anderson, Lucy’s former boyfriend. Nick Hannity, a noted college football player.

When she saw them, she said, “You know, Rob would forgive her in a minute.”

“For what?”

“For—seeing a colored boy.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t seem impressed. But I am.”

“Were they going out when she started seeing Leeds?”

“No—she’d already broken it off. She thought Rob was getting too possessive and she wasn’t ready to be married to him. They were supposed to be married this summer, you know.” She watched as the two young men in whites strutted toward us. “He’d still marry her, that’s what I meant about his forgiving nature. He’d forgive her and still marry her.”

“I think I’ll go down to the gazebo.” The way she talked about Anderson, he sounded like a master on a plantation. He would forgive her even though they hadn’t been going out at the time she was seeing David Leeds. How big of him.

I was never eager to talk to Rob Anderson or anybody like him. His father was a very successful businessman who walked the dark side of the street, running loan companies that exploited the poor. He’d once made a martini crack about Judge Whitney that had pissed me off unduly. I managed to tromp, with great fervor, on his tennis-shoed foot as I left the party. He knew I’d done it on purpose but he could hardly say that without sounding paranoid, now could he? Especially after I’d made such a show of apologizing.

I think Lucy sensed me rather than saw me as I made my way down the hill to the gazebo. She lighted her new cigarette with her previous one.

She still hadn’t looked at me when I stepped up on the gazebo. “Hi, Lucy. Your mother said I could talk to you.”

“My mother says a lot of things, Mr. McCain.”

Impossibly young, impossibly pretty, impossibly tortured, as you could see with a glance at those enormous brown eyes. The whispered word was that she seemed even more troubled following her stay in a mental hospital. They’d been trying to break her away from David Leeds. It hadn’t worked. Most folks seemed to feel sorry for her parents but not for her.

Nancy Adams, a very pretty slender brunette also in tennis whites, said, “I’m going for a little walk.”

“You don’t have to,” I said.

“It’s all right, Mr. McCain.”

“I’m supposed to play tennis,” Lucy said after Nancy went over to talk to Karen Porter.

Lucy sat, prim and sort of casually regal, on the bench that ran around the interior of the gazebo. Her blonde hair was stylishly wind-mussed and the sorrow-shaped mouth had never looked more kissable than now in her deepest grief. Her long, tanned legs were wonderful.

She looked up at me and said, “I always thought you were kind of nice, Mr. McCain. I’m disappointed you agreed to help them. I suppose it’s because of Esme.”

“People are just trying to figure out what happened, Lucy. Two young men are dead.”

“Some bigot killed them. Have you seen what’s going on in the South? It’s on TV every night. Something like that happened to them.”

“You mean they were killed because David Leeds was a Negro?”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“But then why would they have killed Neville? He was white.”

“Because they were friends. Good friends.”

Judge Whitney had told me that Neville might have been the one to send photos of David and Lucy to the party office in Des Moines. Good friends?

But I didn’t get to finish up my questions because Rob and Hannity were here. Rob was the sinewy type with a kind of mild contempt on his handsome face. He seemed to believe that God had put the rest of us here for his amusement. He walked over to Lucy and said, “If you want a lawyer, Lucy, let me get you a real one.”

“Sorry to hear you flunked out of law school, Rob,” I said. “Not even Daddy could save you this time, huh?”

He didn’t lunge at me. Hannity, good watchdog that he was, did. But Lucy was already on her feet. “For God’s sake. David’s dead and you’re all acting like brats.”

We all froze in place at her words. I heard Rob say to himself, “David.” Scornfully.

“I’ll talk to you later, Lucy,” I said.

Hannity was still glowering at me. He’d beaten up the son of a client of mine. We’d pressed charges. He got probation. He didn’t like me much and I liked him even less. Predators are bad enough. Predators born with silver spoons up their asses are even worse.

“Why the hell would you want to talk to somebody like him?” Rob Anderson said, making sure I heard him.

“Just shut up, Rob. I told you on the phone I didn’t want to play tennis anyway. David’s dead. You don’t seem to understand that.”

Ellen Williams was gone when I reached the house. I took a last look at the gazebo. Hannity was still glaring at me.

Then Ellen was coming quickly down the steps from the screened-in back porch.

“There’s some news, Sam. Wait for me!”

I couldn’t read her excitement. Was the news good or bad? She put her hand on my arm and said, “Esme just called. Sykes just arrested one of those horrible motorcycle hoodlums for killing Neville and Leeds.” She gripped my arm even tighter as her face broke into a smile. “This should help, an arrest this soon. The focus will be on the killer and maybe not on Lucy so much.”

“Just remember Cliffie’s track record,” I said. “He usually arrests the wrong person.”

The eyes reflected instant anger. “Esme tells me that you’re a wiseacre and now I can see that for myself. My husband’s career is on the line here and I give you some good news and you do everything you can to knock it down.” She nodded down to the gazebo. “I’m going to speak to Esme and tell her that I don’t want you around my daughter at all. If she needs a lawyer, we’ll get my uncle. Now, good-bye.”

Only when she turned and walked back to the porch did I notice that all three people in the gazebo were watching me. I wondered if they’d been able to hear what Ellen had said. The way Anderson and Hannity were smiling, I assumed they’d heard every word.

Karen Porter, my one friend here, waved good-bye to me, smiling as always.

Our town likes to claim that its jail once held Jesse James, well-known psychopath and shooter of unarmed people, for a few days back in the bloody prime of the James-Dalton gang. While it’s true that the James boys favored Iowa as a hiding place, they did most of their hiding just inside the Iowa-Missouri border. The man we got, close as we could figure, was a man named Niles Wick, who was a gang straggler.

Of course, in my growing-up years, none of us kids accepted the Niles Wick story. We preferred to believe that the name was simply one Jesse used. In those days, our jail was located one block east of the Royale Theater, the best second-run movie house anywhere, so we could load up on popcorn and a couple of flicks about Jesse—in these Jesse was a persecuted saint of course—and then we could run to the jail and stand on the corner and imagine Jesse looking down at us from behind the bars on the second floor. He looked like either Tyrone Power or Roy Rogers, take your pick. Both men had essayed him in film.