“You tell me t’shut up one more time, McCain, and I’m gonna throw you through a window.”
“And here I was going to invite you to my birthday party, Lumir. My mom said I could invite all my extra-special friends.” When you’re the least successful lawyer in town, you usually get the dregs for clients. Lumir hadn’t worked up to the dreg level yet. He still had miles to go before he slept.
I tried to walk off my time with Lumir. My little town has a good number of nooks and crannies dating back to the time when the Mesquakie Indians still roamed the prairies and when Thanksgiving was a communal feast in the Presbyterian church. There was, believe it or not, some peremptory coal mining, so a short-haul railroad was built, the roundhouse of which is now the town market; and there was a blacksmith’s barn so big that they had square dances there twice a month. The barn had been refurbished a couple times since it had been built. We wanted to hang on to it.
Two blocks from my office I saw Abe Leifer suddenly tap his chest and sit down quickly on the edge of a bus bench. Abe is the State Farm insurance agent. He’s handled my family’s insurance since the day my older brother—now alas long dead—was born.
“Abe? Abe? You all right?”
Abe was in his late fifties. You usually saw him in one of three brown sportcoats, each subtly different from the other, a white tab-collared shirt and brown slacks. He was a nice-looking man the local barbers always pointed to as an illustration of “a beautiful head of hair.”
Right now, he was pale, sweaty and breathing hard.
“I got to lose some weight, Sam.”
He had put on maybe thirty pounds in the last five years or so. Between his fingers, a Winston burned. Extra weight and cigarettes and middle age are not a good combination.
Just about everybody liked Abe. He’d been wounded twice in the war and as a result spent time occasionally in the Veterans hospital in Iowa City.
A few people stopped to see how he was doing.
“How’s he doing?”
“You doing okay there, Abe?”
“Did you fall down or something, Abe?”
“Is he all right, Sam? What happened here?”
I became Abe’s de facto press representative.
“He’s fine.”
“He just got a little winded is all.”
“He works too hard. You know Abe.”
Etc. and etc.
During the course of fifteen minutes, he got his wind and his color back. He started to look the way he should. But I still didn’t want to leave him alone. Especially after I saw him try to stand up. His knees were wobbly.
“We’re going for a little walk, Abe.”
“Where?”
“The hospital. Two shorts blocks away.”
“Sam, Sam, I’m fine. I just got winded is all. I don’t need any hospital.”
“You have a choice, Abe. You can walk beside me or I’ll carry you and people’ll think you’re my bride.”
“Sam, Sam—”
But he went.
I took him to the emergency room. While I waited for them to call his wife Helen and check him out, I wandered down the hall where I saw Peggy Leigh and Deirdre Murdoch standing outside an office marked Volunteers.
Peggy Leigh, who always tells you as part of her introduction that she’s not the singer Peggy Lee, is well known in town for being able to get everybody of whatever status to give time or money to the hospital volunteer office. She’s one of those short, square-yet-attractive women whose severe gazes can melt steel if need be. You never see her in anything but her uniform which is a blue blazer, white blouse, lighter blue skirt, hose, and flats.
She smiled and said, “Deirdre. Watch out for this guy. He has a way with women. Especially when he gets you in that car of his.”
“I’ve got a neat new car myself,” Deirdre said. “The only trouble is, I have to share it with my Mom. Dad won’t let her have her own car.” She smiled. “She does tend to get into accidents.”
The phone rang inside the office. Deirdre excused herself and rushed into the office.
“She’s getting off early today so she’s working extra hard,” Peggy said. “She works plenty hard as it is.” Then: “Pretty, no?”
“Very.”
“And Daddy rich.”
“Very. The one and only Ross Murdoch.”
“Our next governor.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Oh, you Democrats. When will you admit that this is a Republican state?” She was also a tireless Republican volunteer.
“The state’s changing, Peggy. Won’t be Republican much longer.”
Just then I saw Helen Leifer rush into the emergency room.
“Well, I need to go.”
“Nice to see you, Sam.”
Helen came over to me and took my hand. Her entire body was shaking. “Thanks for being such a good friend, Sam.” She was a sweet-faced little woman bundled up inside a massive tan storm coat that she’d bought at Monkey Wards. I knew that because my mother had one just like it.
Then she was rushing away.
A few minutes after I got back from the hospital, the phone rang.
“Dawdling?” said Judge Esme Anne Whitney, the district magistrate for whom I investigate things.
“Doodling, actually.” And I was. I’d returned a phone call and in the process begun penciling out a sketch of President Lincoln. For some reason, his is the only face I can draw that remotely resembles somebody human.
“Well, I hope you’re better at dawdling than doodling.”
“You’re in an awfully chipper mood, this afternoon, Judge. Did something terrible happen to Chief Sykes?”
“Nothing terrible ever happens to Sykes. The terrible things are the things that Sykes does to our town.”
The Judge is part of a large, rich Eastern family that came out here to Black River Falls, Iowa about a hundred years ago after a litigious argument with the Treasury Department over what it considered some rather—what is the word I want here? — illegal financial maneuverings. Disgraced, the family put some of its remaining millions into building our little town of 25,000 souls. Everything went fine with their Iowa empire here until WWII when the Sykes family, which had come to Black River Falls with the Southern migration of the late last century, got some federal contracts to start building roads and airstrips for the government. The Sykeses, through thrift and theft, made a few million dollars for themselves. And proceeded, before the Whitneys quite understood what was going on, into bribing virtually every local official, bank and prominent merchant into supporting the Sykes slate of candidates.
While the Judge had her millions and her district court, she no longer had the sort of imperious power her family had become accustomed to.
Police Chief Clifford Sykes, Jr. is thus her enemy. It helps that he’s none too bright, marginally crooked, and eager to wrap up major criminal cases before doing any serious investigating. I haven’t kept track, not being a petty sort of person, but I believe that we’ve proven him wrong on the last eight murder cases that fell in his jurisdiction. He doesn’t like us any better than we like him.
“I told a friend of mine you’d help him this afternoon.”
“Is this one of your country club friends? Do I have to unload gold bullion again?”
“In fact, McCain, he is one of my country club friends. One of my nearest and dearest, in case you’re interested. But I don’t know what he wants. He just asked if I could get you out there as soon as possible.”
“Who’s this friend?”
“Ross Murdoch.”
“The guy who’s running for governor?”
“Yes.”
“Why would somebody as rich and successful as he is want me in his mansion?”