They were regular John D.
Rockefellers, they were.
“How about this? I have my own reasons to work on this.”
“It’s Judge Whitney, isn’t it?”
Emma said.
“Is it true she hates Catholics?”
Amy asked.
“Yes, but don’t take it personally,” I said. “She hates just about everybody.”
“Judge Whitney wants to prove that
Cliffie’s wrong so she wants you to find out what happened, am I right?”
“You’re absolutely right. According to her she wants me to “humiliate” him.”
“Cliffie’s so stupid, I doubt he even knows it when he’s being humiliated,” Emma said.
Then crossed herself. “My Lord, listen to me, will you? Saying things like that about the poor man. The Lord saw fit to make him stupid for a reason only the Lord himself can understand. It’s not for me to question the Lord’s reasons for things.”
“We’re just mad because he’s telling everybody that David killed Sara and then killed himself.”
“I don’t blame you. I’m mad, too. And I intend to start proving he’s wrong.”
“When do you think you’ll start, Sam?”
I glanced at my Timex, drained the last of my coffee, and stood up. “How about right now?”
I went to the grocery store for milk and cat food, the cigar store for cigarettes and Sunday papers from the biggest cities I could find, and finally to the Dx for another peek at the wreck of Egan’s black Merc. Jay Norbert was on his haunches with a flashlight, trying to find what I’d asked him to look for inside the tangled metal.
Then I stopped by the office for some papers I’d forgotten. I was a couple feet from my interior office door when I heard the crying.
I’d heard her cry so many times before, I knew who it was immediately.
She cried the day she got a bad hairdo down at the House of Beauty styling salon, she cried the day her teacher informed her that she was getting an F in typing, she cried the day it was announced that Dick and Darla and not John and Jeanie had won the American Bandstand dance contest.
But mostly what she cried about was
Turk, the eighteen-year-old hotshot who’d dropped out of high school so he could “like, you know, make some bread,” which he was currently doing by working at Suds City, the local car wash.
To be fair, I don’t suppose he meant to be as irritating as he was. He wasn’t posing as Jimmy Dean or Marlon; he was irritating all on his own, one of those dumb, puppy-dog kids who will always be seventeen years old. Turk was Jamie’s boyfriend and Jamie was my secretary, loaned to me by her father in lieu of the money he owed me for representing him in a boundary dispute with his neighbor. I wonder if Jamie isn’t the vessel of his retribution.
I’d lost the case for him.
Jamie was the prototype for every teenage girl depicted on the covers of paperbacks where the term “jailbait” is used, a bouncy, giggly and vastly earnest girl who could, at her most dangerous, turn the simple act of boiling an egg into a kitchen explosion that would flatten the house.
I like Jamie. I don’t know why I like her, I don’t even want to like her, and no, it isn’t that heartbreaking teenage body of hers, either.
It’s her sincerity, I guess. She’s sincere about everything, outside of convents for cloistered nuns or the third floor of asylums where they keep the violent ones.
“Oh, Mr. C,” she sobbed when I walked in. “My mascara.”
True, she did have little black snakes wriggling down her nicely shaped cheeks. But they were sincere little black snakes. The Mr. C reference is one she picked up from the Perry Como Tv show, where all the dancers call him “Mr. C.” Jamie thinks this is pretty cool. Someday she’ll realize that because my last name is McCain, I should be “Mr. M.”
She wore a brown sweater that would inspire a rush to cold showers by middle-aged men throughout these United States, and a pair of jeans that defined the rest of that paperback body. She was also smoking a cigarette, something I’d never seen her do before. The cigarette was parked on the edge of a Camel cigarette tin ashtray right next to my framed photo of the sad-sweet face of Shemp, my favorite of the Three Stooges. Himmler of Black River Falls decorated my place right before they sent him up for the third time on the charge of offending the public taste.
“Gosh,” I said, “is everything all right at home?”
“Everything’s fine,” she said with that kind of girly forlornness that teeters self-consciously between tragedy and comedy. “At home, I mean, everything’s fine. But everything’s not fine between Turk and me.”
“Good old Turk. What’d he do now?”
She sniffled. “He misspelled my name.”
Coming from a girl who has often misspelled my name on letters-even though the correct spelling appears in the letterhead at the top-th was quite an accusation.
“I’m sure he didn’t do it on purpose, Jamie.”
She was bawling over Turk misspelling her name?
She sniffled some more. “It’s just that it’s forever.”
“What’s forever?”
“The tattoo.” Said as if I were a mind reader and should have known what she was talking about.
“Ah,” said I, “the tattoo.” The reason for her misery was coming clear.
Only Turk could have pulled this baby off.
“Let me see if I can reconstruct this.”
“It’s terrible, Mr. C. Just horrible.”
“Turk got drunk.”
“Yes. Very, very drunk.”
“And somebody gave him a tattoo.”
“That stupid Phil Craper.”
“And Phil was drunk, too.”
“Phil’s always drunk. He’s a wino.”
“And so Phil is as bad a speller as Turk. And when they went to put the tattoo on they wrote-”
“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?”
Fourteen
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.