“Rita, where are you?” he asked.
“In town. How are you? And don’t quote Gilbert and Sullivan.”
“You’ve seen the news.” He sounded tense.
“Of course. Want some legal advice?”
“I’m listening.”
“Don’t resign.”
“The chief judge called. He asked me to consider it for the good of the court. He wants my answer tomorrow.”
“Fine. Call him tomorrow and tell him you considered it and you’re not resigning.”
“Kate thinks I should. Lower my profile, all that.”
“Hamiltons don’t run, do they, Fiske? They don’t quit. You have a family name to uphold, don’t you?” I stopped short of explaining about general principles.
“I am innocent, goddamn it.”
Works for me. “Then do your job. Stay away from the press. Leave the rest to me.”
“You sound different, Rita.”
“Do I?”
“Yes. Better. Are you making progress with the investigation?”
“I have the motorcyclist’s address, and I’m on the trail of the black Jags in the area.”
“Wonderful work!”
“And I lost some weight, too.” About a hundred and ninety pounds, name of Paul. “But it’s probably the creme rinse. Nothing like a good conditioner to give a girl some confidence. And a silky shine.”
Cam swung the noisy electric hedge trimmers in a smooth arc from his perch on the stepladder. Above him was a hot midday sun and a mercilessly clear sky. His work boots were scuffed, he wore a sweaty Banana Republic work shirt, and his fifty-dollar khakis had grass stains at the knee. Camille Lopo was the best-dressed one-armed gardener-impersonator in Wayne.
“You’re not getting tired, Cam?” I shouted, over the loud chatter of the trimmer’s greasy teeth.
“Huh?”
“You okay up there?”
“What?” he shouted back.
“You sure you’re not tired?”
He checked his watch. “Almost noon!”
Only Italians would persist in talking over a hedge trimmer. It takes more than Black amp; Decker to shut us up, even when one of us is almost deaf. “You sure you’re not tired?” I fairly screamed.
“There’s a lotta new growth! You can tell ‘cause it’s greener! Yellow-green instead of a dark green!”
“Spoken like a pro!” I yelled back, scanning the grass. I wanted to reexamine every inch of the grounds around the carriage house and Mrs. Mateer’s house, and the newly incorporated Lawns ‘R Us was the only way to do it freely, without the official eyes of the Radnor police or their crime scene logs.
“This is our third lawn, kiddo! I am a pro!”
I felt a guilty pang, making a seventy-year-old do yardwork to serve my own purposes. “I owe you, big time.”
“Baby, I’m busier than a one-armed paper-hanger.” He swung the hedge trimmer on a plane as even as a card table. Sprigs of English hedge fell to either side and landed in mounds on the grass.
“YOU SURE YOU’RE NOT-”
“ASK ME AGAIN AND I’LL CUT YOUR ARM OFF!”
The clipper went back and forth, buzzing in my ear. I was posing as Cam’s assistant, in identical outfit except for my Eagles cap, sunglasses, and Canon camera. I snapped another picture of the hedge. I wanted enlarged photos of the grounds for the jury, taken from my own uniquely distorted perspective.
“Don’t forget to look at the ground!” Cam called out. “For evidence!”
So much for secrecy. I looked down but saw only the buzz-cut surface of Mrs. Mateer’s newly shorn lawn. “You do good work, you know that?” I told him.
“What?” He switched the trimmer off and wiped his brow. The steely hair at his receding hairline was so damp it had returned to its original black. “Maybe this’ll be a new career for me.”
“You’d make more at the track.”
“I don’t know, I liked that sit-down mower. I liked it a lot.” Cam had mowed the lawn with a rented Toro while I stayed out of sight. He was the one who went to Mrs. Mateer’s door because she might have recognized me, even in my disguise. “Felt like a buggy ride, that mower.”
“How do you know what a buggy ride feels like, city boy?”
“Are you kidding? I used to ride around with the iceman. We jumped on the back of the wagon to get the chips.”
I took another picture, one of the house in the distance. Then a shot of Cam getting down from the ladder, just for fun.
“Look at it this way, kid,” he said, tugging the ladder. “We had no problem gettin’ work. We got three lawns right off the bat.”
“That’s because we’re doing it for free, Cam. And you have your charms.”
“It’s the stump, it gets ’em every time.” He flapped his empty sleeve. “Theresa married me because of this stump, I swear. Said she felt sorry for me. When we got in a fight, I used to tell her I got phantom pains, then-bing-it was all over.”
I laughed, but I had banked on it. Who wouldn’t accept a free lawn cleanup from a handicapped senior trying to start a new business? Especially when he’d just done the two houses across the street and they looked terrific?
“So what’s the take so far?” he asked.
“You mean the defense evidence?” I reached into my fanny pack for my official evidence-collecting kit, a gold Lancome makeup case. I had plucked each item from the ground with a Revlon tweezers, put it in its own Baggie, and labeled it with a Clinique eye pencil. “Let’s see, Exhibit A is a Fruit Stripe gum wrapper. Exhibit B is a cigarette butt. We have a plastic figurine of Garfield the cat, in mint condition, as Exhibit C. The smart money’s on Garfield, Camille. He could crack this case wide open.”
“The toy is from the Donovan place?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “That Donovan kid was a brat. I never saw so many toys in a backyard in my life. And that castle thing with the green top and the sliding board? Did you get a load of that?”
“Little monster.” I had tripped on the tetherball pole. “Turd.”
He laughed. “When I was little I had a truck. A red truck. That was it.”
“The rich get richer, Cam.”
“Ain’t it the truth.”
He climbed back up the ladder and switched the trimmers on again. It buzzed away while I flipped through the thirteen bags I had collected. Each one contained apparent backyard trash, so I resumed my treasure hunt, walking along the hedgeline at the back of Mrs. Mateer’s property, eyes to the ground. At the bottom of the hedges were dry dirt, crumbling brown leaves, and at the end, pricey bark mulch.
The sound of the trimmers grew more and more distant. It took me five minutes to reach the property line, where the hedge abutted the equally vast grounds of Mrs. Mateer’s neighbor. The end of the line. Maybe I was wasting my time. And poor Cam’s, who was sweating away, with one arm, on a ladder. I would burn in hell and it would feel a lot like this.
I thought of trying to call Price, the motorcyclist, again, but I had already left three messages on his machine. I had packed a flip phone in my pants pocket in case he called back. If he didn’t, I’d visit him unannounced after this escapade was over.
I pivoted on my sneakers and saw the carriage house in the distance. It was crisscrossed with yellow police tape, sealed but unguarded. Still, I had to be subtle about my snooping because of the neighbors, and the suburbanites who slowed their Range Rovers to gape at the house where a woman bled to death.
I walked all the way back to Cam, nose to the ground like a bloodhound with a law degree, and retrieved a new blue-enameled Ames rake. Lawns ‘R Us was not only the most fashionable fraud on the Main Line, we were the best-equipped. I avoided thinking about what I was going to do with this stupid equipment later and concentrated on raking the hedge clippings into piles that I rolled toward the carriage house.