“Good.”
“He’s got a lot of money stashed away in secret places.”
“We’ll find it.”
“May I come back and talk to you about it when I’m not in such a bitchy mood?”
“Sure. Anytime you want to.”
When she stood up, she consciously composed herself, straightened coat, collar, touched hair, arranged her purse strap just so over her shoulder.
“You probably get a lot of hysterical women in here.”
“You’re not hysterical. Given what you just found out, you were damned well appropriate.”
“Now there’s a nice word to save face with.
“Appropriate.” I was “appropriate” all the way down here.” She smiled for the first time.
“I was “appropriate” when I was going seventy-five miles an hour in a thirty-five zone; and I was “appropriate” when I laid on my horn because some old geezer was doing twenty and I couldn’t get around him. And I was especially “appropriate” when I was guzzling your bourbon like a sailor on shore leave.” She laughed. “Thanks for letting me in on that word. “Appropriate.” I have a feeling I’ll be using that a lot now.”
She went to the door, turned and said, “Thanks, Sam,” and was gone.
Twenty-three
I had a court case in the afternoon. Divorce.
Neither party especially likable. But their little girl was sweet and sad. And neither parent seemed to notice. The kid would lose no matter which parent got custody. They’d both been unfaithful, verbally abusive, and even treacherous to each other. I pretended to be on the side of my male client but it wasn’t easy. The judge, the patron saint of all grumpy old men who existed on whiskey and Tums, favored the lady. So would I if I’d been looking only at her breasts.
After court, I cashed some client checks at the bank and then went around paying off my bills at the grocery store, the record shop, and the gas station.
Back at the office, Jamie and Carrie were still working on refiling everything.
Correction: Carrie was still working on the filing.
Jamie was in the john and didn’t appear for fifteen minutes after I got there.
“See,” she said to Carrie, “you hardly notice them, they look so natural.”
She referred to the huge fanlike false eyelashes she wore. They gave her eyes that feral and cunning look of the B-girls you meet in some of Chicago’s seamier bars. Not that I’ve had experience with those girls, personally.
I returned the calls waiting for me. I noticed that the notes on the call slips were filled out in a neat, easily readable hand and that the descriptions were grammatical and informative.
I said, “Who took all these messages?”
Carrie continued to file, said nothing. Jamie was perched on her desk chair, her compact out, examining her new three-pound eyelashes in the compact mirror. She didn’t shift her gaze but she did say, “Don’t be too hard on her, Mr. C. This was the first time she took your calls. I would’ve done it but I have to save my voice.”
“Save your voice? What for?”
“I’m making Turk take me to this hootenanny in Iowa City tonight. Twelve different folk singers. He doesn’t want to go because his uncle told him that all folk singers are perverts and communists.”
“Who’s his uncle? J. Edgar Hoover?”
Jamie, of course, didn’t get the joke.
But Carrie did. She laughed most pleasantly. Jamie gave her cousin a quizzical look.
I said, “I still don’t get why you have to save your voice?”
“Because I like to sing along. I don’t want my voice to be all scratchy. In fact, I shouldn’t even be talking now.”
I glanced at Carrie, expecting her to let me know somehow that she realized how silly if-I have to admit it-sweet Jamie is. But she turned back to her filing work quickly.
I made some more phone calls. I did some more paperwork.
“Would you like some coffee, Mr. McCain?”
Carrie said after a while.
“Golly, Carrie, I told you to call him Mr. C. Right, Mr. C?”
“I don’t know him as well as you do, Jamie, so I think I’ll just stick to Mr.
McCain.”
“She’s kind of square, Mr. C. But she’s real nice.”
Jamie went back to her eyebrows.
“I made some fresh,” Carrie said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
I generally drink only a single morning cup of the coffee I make here at the office. The rest I inflict on clients.
I didn’t want to insult her, so I said, “Sure. I’ll take a cup.” Not expecting much. She poured, brought it over. I raised the cup, drank it. “This is really good.”
“Thank you.”
I didn’t want to get too effusive.
Eventually even Jamie was going to figure out that her cousin was a much better worker than she was.
I went back to work. Five o’clock was coming on.
When the phone rang, Carrie picked it up and said, “This is Mr. McCain’s law office.
How may I help you?”
My Lord. It was a bit on the formal side, her greeting, but she had a crisp, smart phone voice and sounded pretty damned big-city.
“Oh, yes, your honor, he’s right here,”
Carrie said.
She handed the receiver to me.
Judge Esme Anne Whitney said, “My
God, McCain, a secretary who speaks English? What did you do, kidnap her? What happened to that busty little idiot who’s always fornicating with that juvenile delinquent boyfriend of hers?”
“I assume you have a serious question for me.”
“Indeed, I do. When in the hell are you going to wrap this thing up? If one more person says to me that Egan killed poor Sara Griffin and then committed suicide-”
“That’s when you explain to them that Cliffie’s theory doesn’t make any sense. If Egan wanted to kill himself, he sure wouldn’t have cut his own brake line. He might have driven off the edge of the cliff that way. But cut his brake line? What’s the sense of that?”
“In other words, you haven’t found the killer yet.”
“In other words, I’m working on it.”
“I’m having a small dinner party at my house tonight. I’d love to tell everybody that once again I’ve shown up Cliffie for the boob he is.”
I sighed. “I don’t think this is the kind of thing that works on a timetable like that.”
“Well, if it isn’t,” she said in her most imperious tone of voice, “it should be.”
And with that we-actually, she-hung up.
When I turned my attention to the girls again, Jamie was holding up a doe-colored brushed leather flat for Carrie to see.
“I have to wear these tonight,” Jamie said in a voice only a teenage girl could muster, “it’s the only thing I have that goes with this sweater-and-skirt outfit I bought.”
“What’s the matter with it?” I said.
“She picked up something on the street,”
Carrie said, “some kind of stain.”
“Here, let me see it.”
The stain ran along the bottom side of the shoe, all the way to the toe, where it splayed wide. The discoloration was obvious. She’d stepped in some kind of liquid chemical, apparently, maybe an insecticide the city had sprayed on the sidewalks.
“What’m I going to do?” Jamie said. The last act of Hamlet couldn’t hold any more drama than this moment with the shoe.
I ate in a diner that night and pretended I was in an Edward Hopper painting. Most of the customers were solitary workingmen. In a doctor’s office you wonder what sort of malady the other patients are suffering from. In a diner you wonder what sort of fractured life the customers are suffering from. At suppertime in a small town most men are home with their families. What about these men? Why were they all here?
Then we had one of those charged communal male moments when a pretty redhead came in and sat down and ordered a cheeseburger and a Pepsi. A depth charge of feeling and need had awakened us.