“Well, thanks, Kenny.”
“Sure. This thing you’re working on, McCain.
It wouldn’t involve a three-way, would it?”
“May all your future books involve lesbians, my son.”
“Thank you, padre.”
I tried working again but couldn’t concentrate, especially after Jamie came in with one of her girlfriends, whom she insisted was going to help her make some serious headway on all the filing she’d neglected for the past month. The friend was a ponytailed girl with earnest eyeglasses and a sweet serious face. Under her left arm were two books, Tender Is the Night by F.
Scott Fitzgerald and Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell. And she was hanging out with Jamie?
“This is my cousin Carrie, Mr. C. She gets straight A’s.”
I reached out and we shook hands. She glanced at Jamie and said, “I just realized something, Jamie.”
Jamie was pushing a ball of pink bub7um into her erotic mouth. “Realized what, Carrie?”
“If Mr. McCain’s name starts with
“M” why do you call him “Mr. C.”?”
Jamie looked half offended that anybody could possibly be daft enough to ask such a question. “Because they call Perry Como Mr. C.” My
God, Carrie, what are you, an idiot?
Carrie rolled her eyes and said, “Boy, I can see what you meant about the filing. It’s kind of a mess.” She walked over to the window and dragged a long finger through a quarter inch of dust.
“Could stand a little cleaning, too.”
“I promised Mr. C I’d sort of clean things up after my hands heal.” Jamie dangled her hands in front of us. “I was using this Rexall lotion my mom bought me. I wanted to throw it away-I mean, Rexall makes beauty products?-but I used it because she’s always talking about how I waste money and I get real sick of hearing that speech. But look at my hands now.”
I looked at her hands. Her cousin Carrie looked at her hands. I looked at Carrie and Carrie looked at me and then we both looked back at Jamie and Carrie said, “Your hands look fine.”
“To you, maybe, they look fine. But I have to wear them everyday. And believe me, they look terrible after using that Rexall junk. So I have to wait till they’re healed again before I can do any, you know, like cleaning or anything. Typing, no problem. Answering the phone, no problem.
Getting Mr. C some coffee from down the street, no problem. But cleaning-not for a while.”
Two-hour lunches with Turk, no problem.
Tying up the office phone gossiping with her girlfriends, no problem. Misspelling every other word in business letters, no problem. But cleaning- “Well,” I said, “I appreciate you coming in, Carrie. Is forty cents an hour all right?”
“Oh, I don’t want any pay, Mr.
McCain. I get class credit for doing this.
I’m taking business courses.”
“I’m going to teach her how to type,” Jamie said.
Carrie winked at me. “Yes, I’ve seen Jamie type. It’s really something.”
I liked this girl already.
“Well,” Carrie said. “Time to get to work.”
“Yes,” Jamie sighed. “That’s about all we do around here, isn’t it, Mr. C? Work, work, work.”
The poor dear girl.
She sat with her tan suede desert boots up on the edge of the desk, some kind of black stuff staining a quarter inch of them above the sole.
Donny Hughes would be glad to know she was wearing them. I assumed these were the ones he’d gifted her with.
She had an ancient stand-up phone in one hand while the other hand held the receiver to her ear. She said, “Mrs. Russell, Calamity’s getting old. None of us wants to face that but we have to.
I know your boys don’t think he’s “exciting” anymore, but if you want “something to happen to him,” you’ll have to do it yourself.
I couldn’t do that. I see Calamity every day. I love him. So you think about it and if you want your boys to get a new horse, fine, I’ll help you get one, but I sure won’t help
Calamity have an “accident.” Good-bye, Mrs. Russell.” Rita Scully replaced receiver on hook, phone on desk, set her feet on the floor and said, “She wants me to kill her horse. It’s been in the family for ten years, ever since her twins were four years old. Now the boys want something younger and faster but she doesn’t want to pay for two stalls, so she wants me to stage an accident so Calamity won’t be a financial drain anymore. Nice folks out there. Say, McCain, you got a smoke? I’m plumb out.”
“Well, lucky for you, I’m not plumb out.”
I pitched her my pack and my lighter. She grinned. “I pick up words from cowboys at the rodeo. Hence, plumb.”
“So which word did you pick up from the rodeo, “hence” or “plumb”?”
She slid the pack and lighter back across the desk. She took a big gulp of cancer and exhaled it right at where I sat on the customer side of the desk. “Did little Molly send you out here to make me apologize?”
“Haven’t seen Molly since the funeral.”
She wore a black Western shirt with white piping and some lovingly fitted jeans. “I used to beat the crap out of my older brother. My mom said that when boys found that out they’d never take me to dances.”
“They’d be afraid you’d beat them up, too?”
“No, they wouldn’t want to be seen in public with anybody so unladylike is what my mom had in mind. But then I got finished with my braces and lost the fat in my cheeks and this body came along out of nowhere. Boys begged me to go to dances.”
“And they say this isn’t a great country.”
The humor in her eyes vanished so completely it was hard to believe it was ever there. “Molly killed David, you know.”
“And how would that be?”
“The pressure she put him under. Constant pressure to marry her.”
“She thought she could help him.”
She shrugged. “Everybody thought they could help him.” She looked around the office.
Framed black-and-white photos of various horses covered the walls as did numerous, and dusty, framed awards. There was another cluttered, battered desk like hers in the corner with another old-fashioned phone and two filing cabinets that looked even older than mine. Hay from the stables covered the floor. The two windows were almost dirty enough to pass as walls. The rest was the usual tack room stuff competing for space with the office-brass hooks with bridles and reins and bits hanging from them; and saddle racks made from reinforced sawhorses that would support the heavy saddles. Along the floor on the east wall were several pairs of Western boots. What I was most curious about were the chaps. I wondered if she ever wore them.
She said, “We make a nice living here. I hope to raise my kids here. When David was sober and thinking straight, he wanted to live here, too.” She took a bitter drag of her smoke. “But Molly and Sara-they made him feel like somebody important. That’s the one thing I couldn’t give him. I know who I am and what I am. I’m nobody important according to our little burg here. And I also know that you can’t force a guy into marrying you.”
She stubbed out her cigarette. “Got another one?”
I pushed the pack to her. “How’d you end up with David on Saturday night?”
“I saw him cruising around. He looked pretty bombed. I told him he’d better let me drive or Cliffie’d get him for sure.”
“What time did you see him?”
“Eight or so. Why?”
“I’m just trying to reconstruct his day and his night.”
“Can his aunts help you?”
“That’s where I’m headed after this.” Then, “You think Donny Hughes could’ve killed him?” I hadn’t told her about Brenda Carlyle.
She lighted her second cigarette. “He hated David, that’s for sure. There’s just one thing wrong.” She smiled coldly. “You really think he’d have the nerve to do something like that? Little Donny Hughes?”
It was one of those moments when you realize that somewhere, sometime, a woman smiled like that about you. And that you, in turn, sometime, somewhere, smiled that way about a woman.