Sam McCain - 05 - Everybody's Somebody's Fool (12 page)

“Just-a-m-m-i-e. “I love Jammie” it says. With a heart.”

“And the tattoo is on—”

his—his shoulder. And you know how he likes to walk around without his shirt on. P’ll laugh at it when they see it. They’ll think Turk is stupid.”

“Gee, I can’t imagine that.”

She shook her cute head miserably and stared off at a fate that not even her worst enemy could have contrived. “And p’ll start calling me Jammie, Mr. C.” A sob. “Sometimes I feel like my life is just over.” She raised

teary blue eyes to me. “Do you ever feel like that?”

“Six or seven times a day.”

She didn’t smile. “Jammie. I just can’t believe he could be that dumb. Even when he was drunk.”

The phone rang.

She watched it as if it were going to do something obscene. “It’s him.”

“Turk?”

“Uh-huh.”

It rang and rang.

“Aren’t you going to answer?”

“I’ll let him suffer.”

“You know, Jamie, it could just possibly be for me. I mean, this is a law office. Not a huge or very successful law office. But a law office nonetheless.”

She shrugged, unfazed by my pompous little speech. “I can tell by the ring it’s Turk. It just sounds a certain way.”

I saw the file folder I’d forgotten to take home. I’d left it on my desk.

“I think I’ll just pick this up and go, Jamie.”

The ringing phone was going to make me psychotic any minute now.

“You’re sure it’s Turk?”

“Sure I’m sure, Mr. C,” she said,

sounding a little peeved. “Can’t you tell by the sound of that ring?”

Whenever Judge Esme Anne Whitney

wore jodhpurs, she always recalled-Galouise cigarette in one hand and snifter of brandy in another—how when she was a lass of fourteen in a boarding school so refined none of the girls there so much as went to the bathroom, Noel Coward appeared and took her and another girl horseback riding on a mild April afternoon.

There were a couple of things wrong with this story and it wasn’t, believe it or not, the Noel Coward part. She really had met famous people of all sorts in her lifetime. The rich are, you see, a very special and very private club. They don’t use anything as vulgar and common as a secret handshake to identify each other. As near as I can figure out the code is conveyed through a

complicated series of rapid eye movements that only they understand. Sort of like the flickering light codes our war ships used during World War Ii.

The parts that bothered me about this old chestnut of hers was (a) the appearance of the horse and (but) the idea of another girl being present.

Judge Esme Anne Whitney is

terrified of horses, will not get within yards of one of them. She’d once dragged me to a horse show to which her friend the governor had invited her and whispered to me, “God, don’t people ever get sick of seeing these creatures emptying their bowels.”

Judge Whitney on a horse? I have my doubts.

As for another girl going along to keep Esme Anne and Mr. Coward company, impossible.

No way would Esme Anne Whitney share such a moment. She would want herself to be the only one with bragging rights to this particular tale.

“Dear Noel,” Judge Whitney said this afternoon, seated on the veranda of her mansion, the maid, a masochist named Nell O’Bannion, having just delivered up another bottle of brandy, “dear, dear Noel.” She took a dramatic puff of her Galouise—Bette Davis had once taken acting lessons from the judge-“dear, dear Noel.”

Then she said, not being great at changing subjects with any grace: “I want his face rubbed in it this time, McCain.”

“You want dear, dear Noel Coward’s face rubbed in it?”

“My Lord, McCain, pay attention will you?

Just because you’re short doesn’t mean you have to be stupid, too. I want Cliffie’s face

rubbed in it.”

“Ah. Cliffie.”

She had her rubber band ready to go. I wondered if Nell O’Bannion had brought her the rubber bands along with her first bottle of brandy. She set down her snifter and her Galouise long enough to load up her forefinger and thumb and fire at me.

She was damned good at her little game. She did a double fake—pretended to be firing from the left and then suddenly shifting to the right and, as I moved my head to the left, surprised me by moving back to the left again. The rubber band hung off my nose momentarily and then dropped to the table. She had a dead aim.

A squirrel sitting on the edge of the patio watched me with great disdain. His expression seemed to question why I didn’t have more self-respect than to sit with a half-fried, jodhpur-wearing, horse-loathing Eastern lady of vast wealth and even vaster disdain for common folk like me. I should’ve told the squirrel that it was none of his damned business. Instead I explained (don’t knock telepathy until you try it) that I needed the money. I made a pittance from my law practice. I earned a modest living by working as Judge Whitney’s investigator.

I watched the squirrel romp off in the direction of the surrounding forest, diving in and out of the frothy colorful waves of crisp autumn leaves. He had an enviable life.

She inhaled half her Galouise and then took a long drink from her snifter. There was a cold beauty in the fine-boned lines of her face.

She’d had innumerable husbands and lovers but always ended up alone. In my way, I liked her in a complicated and melancholy sort of fashion, at least in those moments when my hands weren’t aching to wrap themselves around her elegant throat.

She said, “Jack Coyle.”

“All right, I’ll play along. Jack

Coyle.”

“A social worker who was involved in a case I presided over a while back told me about a rumor she’d heard.”

“Involving Jack Coyle.”

“My, you’re quick today.”

“I thought we might be talking about dear, dear Noel again.”

“I’m handing you some important information and you sit here drinking my brandy making fun of me. You really are a dunce, McCain.”

“Jack Coyle. Tell me.”

More wine. More Galouise.

“This is unconfirmed, of course.”

“My favorite kind of rumor.”

“This particular caseworker had worked as a high school counselor at one time. And one of the students she saw was Sara Griffin.”

She’d hooked me. School counselor.

Sara Griffin. Jack Coyle. Whatever it was, it was bound to be juicy.

“Sara was going through a very difficult time.”

“This was before or after her folks put her in that asylum?”

“Just before. Anyway, the counselor told me that several times Sara referred to this “older man” she was seeing. She never used a name. But one evening the counselor was out at the state park with her kids—they were having a picnic—and down by the boathouse she saw Jack Coyle and Sara Griffin. They weren’t doing anything untoward, you understand. They were standing there talking. But then they got into some kind of argument and Sara ran away in tears. She said that Jack Coyle stalked off after Sara. She didn’t know what happened after that. She had to get back to her kids.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

She smiled. “I couldn’t wait to tell you this, McCain. I wish I could get a picture of your face at this moment. You look absolutely shocked.”

“I am absolutely shocked.” I decided to give her the pleasure of telling me something I already knew. “But it’s just rumor.”

She smiled again. “Cliffie’s in way over his head this time, McCain.” She said this with the relish of deep hatred.

“Yes, he is.”

“He’s going all over town saying that the case is closed and that David Egan was the killer.

But we’re going to prove otherwise, aren’t we, McCain?”

“We sure are.”

“This doesn’t mean I suspect Jack

Coyle.”

“No, of course not.”

“But,” she smirked, “I’d sure love to have a picture of his face when you ask him about poor Sara Griffin. Now take care of this for me will you, McCain?”

“I’ll do my best,” I said, standing up.

The cold beauty smiled again but without any hint of merriment. “That may not be enough on a matter like this, McCain. I’d suggest you aim a little higher than your best.”

Walking to my car, I came up with at least eighteen great cracks to make about middle-aged society women who wore jodhpurs but were terrified of horses. I couldn’t, of course, say any of them out loud.

It was a high school sort of date. Back then I would’ve made sure that my ducktail was combed flat, that I was smiling so much my

lip muscles hurt, that I appeared manly enough to please the father and trustworthy enough to please the mother.

If one of them asked me what I planned to do with my life, I generally said that I hoped to become a doctor and work on a cure for cancer; and if they inquired of my extracurricular activities, it being obvious that athletics did not number among them, I told them that I spent most of my time stocking shelves for the nuns down at the Pantry for the Poor they ran. If they were Protestant parents, I said that I stocked shelves at the Martin Luther Poverty Center.

In other words, it was all Pat Boone bullshit.

Mrs. Dennehy, her husband being understandably absent because of his death, said, “So how is your law practice going, Sam?”

We were in the living room. Brett Maverick was cheating somebody at poker on the Tv screen and Fred, their black Lab, was stinking up my hand with his tongue. Linda was “just about ready.” Or so she’d called out from some secret place outside the small but comfortably furnished living room.

Mrs. Dennehy was of a different generation of Irish Catholics than Emma and Amy

Kelly so she didn’t have quite as many framed paintings of Jesus on the walls. And Jesus wasn’t quite so pretty as in the older paintings.

The more modern ones showed a Jesus who didn’t look like a pushover for just any sob story you decided to lay on him. There were strands of palm from Palm Sunday, to be sure, placed behind the two framed paintings of the Virgin on the wall but not nearly the number my Mom had in the bedroom she shared with my dad all these years. The Pope was nowhere to be found.

“My law practice is going just fine,” I said, thinking of Jamie or Jammie, depending on your taste and level of literacy. “I have a new secretary and business has really picked up.”

“Do you still work for Judge Whitney?”

“Yes, part-time,” I said, “though as my business picks up, I work for her less and less.” I plan to be a doctor someday, Mrs. Dennehy, and search for a cure for cancer.

After that, I plan to rid our planet of racism in all its ugly forms.

“That’s good. No offense, Sam, but she’s pretty hard to take sometimes. She

gave a talk at one of our church suppers and she kept calling us “you people.” It was like she couldn’t bring herself to say the word “Catholic.””

I smiled. Lord, how I smiled. “I think it’s safe to assume she won’t become a papist anytime soon.”

“Mom asks a lot of questions, doesn’t she?”

“Not a lot.”

“Well, quite a few.”

“Quite a few, maybe,” I said, “but not a lot.”

She punched me gently on the arm. “You’re really on your best behavior tonight.”

I laughed. “Wait till later.”

The restaurant was all dark wood, red leatherette booths, candles inside red glass, waitresses in black nylon uniforms, and a trio that apparently hadn’t heard of any music hipper than Lawrence Welk. But they played slow songs and slow songs were what I wanted to hear. It was so dark in there I thought maybe I should’ve worn one of those miner’s hats with the flashlights built into them.

We ate and drank, steaks and whiskey, the whiskey coming from the pint in my suitcoat. Hard liquor is available here only in state-run stores. But Cliffie is pretty understanding of people who bought restaurant setups and used their own bottles.

I went easy on the booze. She drank more than I expected, enough in fact to have some minor difficulty getting her tongue to form words exactly.

“I can’t drink at all.”

“You’re doing fine,” I said.

“I’m just so nervous.”

“Everything’s fine.”

“I’m afraid I’m going

to hyperventilate.”

“You want to go outside?”

She shook her head. “No, I just have to grow up.”

I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by that but I had my suspicions.

“You think we could dance, Sam?”

We danced. She was good. She felt right in my arms, too. A lot of times they don’t. She felt right in other ways, too, that small earnest freckled face of hers so

prairie-girl scrubbed and prairie-girl smart.

We didn’t bother going back to our booth for nearly half an hour. We just danced. And what we couldn’t give voice to our bodies spoke of. Sex, to be sure, but also comfort and care and memories that stretched all the way back to kindergarten when we’d tasted white paste for the first time and learned how to color inside the lines.

“You’re going to ask me to go back to your place tonight, Sam. And I’m going to say yes because I really want to go. Because I’ve been thinking of you all the time since Friday night. But I’m really scared. This has to move very, very slowly, Sam. I’m not feeling very female after the operation and maybe it’s just not going to be worth it for you. In the long run, I mean. Maybe nothing will ever come of it for you.”

“You didn’t need to say any of that stuff, you know.”

“I just had to make it official.”

She had one more drink before we left.

“They like you,” I said, after coming out of the john and seeing how my three cats had made themselves comfortable pressed against her on either side. Tess of course sat in her lap. Tess believes in the divine right of cats. To hell with all that jazz about the divine right of kings.

“You like a drink?” I said.

“No, thanks. I wouldn’t mind using the bathroom, though. I just don’t want to offend your cats by making them move.”

“The only thing that offends these cats is when they run out of food.”

While she was tending to business, I put on the Bobby Darin album he did live at the Copa. When she came back, she sat down, turned off the table lamp, took my arm, put it around her shoulder, and then snuggled up to me.