I laughed. “So that story she hands out about her grandfather coming out here because he wanted to be a gentleman farmer-”
“A total crock.”
We were in town and headed toward the one-story corner brick building where I have my office around back. Dad pulled into the parking lot and said, “Mom wants to know when you’re coming over for dinner.”
“How about next Tuesday?”
“Spaghetti night. She makes the best.”
Mom did housework with military-style orderliness. For years, Tuesday night had been spaghetti night just as Tuesday day had been housecleaning day, just as Wednesday was Swiss steak night and grocery shopping day. She did all these things on a budget so minuscule I felt like a spendthrift every time I bought a candy bar.
Dad said, “You didn’t mention Kenny.”
I looked over at him. “I don’t think he killed her.”
“That isn’t what I was thinkin’ of.”
“Oh?”
“I was thinkin’ of how he was always beating you up.
Ever since you were in kindergarten together. And I could never protect you and I felt like hell about it.
I remember the time he broke your glasses and I drove out to their mansion and I was ready to be all pissed and everything but when I got inside there I was really intimidated. The way they looked at me and talked to me. It should’ve made me even madder. But it just kind of beat me down. I shoulda stuck up for you a lot better, but I didn’t. All he did, Kenny’s old man, was scratch out this check and hand it to me and tell me to never come out there again. I felt ashamed of myself, I really did, kiddo. I really did.”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “You did the best you could, Dad. I wouldn’t have done any better.”
Then he circled back. “So how come you don’t think he killed her?”
“I’m not sure. Just a feeling, I guess.”
He thought a moment and said, “You know what I shoulda done the day I was out at their mansion?”
“What?”
“I had real muddy shoes on. I took them off at the door. I shoulda tracked mud all the way into his den.”
I laughed at the picture of my small father leaving big mud prints on the mansion floor.
It was like watching a really funny Daffy Duck cartoon.
“Well, kiddo,” he said, glancing at his Timex. “I better head back.”
I watched him pull away, and then I walked over to the imperious Judge Whitney’s chambers, the same Judge Whitney whose grandfather had been a federal land swindler.
Nine
The stone courthouse had been built before there were any Whitneys or Sykeses to fight over who would get the building contract. It was three stories high, with a small golden dome that flew the American flag, and had the feel of an Italian Renaissance castle in an Mgm musical with Mario Lanza and Kathryn Grayson. For my taste, it was too fancy by half. Cliff Sykes, Sr., was always hinting he’d like to tear it down and build a new one.
He’d go to the opposite extreme. The one he’d build would look like the prefab home developments he was putting up on both ends of town.
Judge Whitney’s chambers were on the second floor. I’d missed the rush. The outer office, which was nicely carpeted wall-to-wall and filled with mahogany furnishings and several large portraits of Whitney menfolk down the decades, was empty. There was an American flag standing in the corner and a portrait of George Washington on the wall next to it.
Empty like this, and with paintings of all these dead people, there was a hushed, churchlike air about the place.
The air was soon changed by a beautiful face and a beautiful body, namely one Pamela Forrest. She walked through the door with an aluminum coffeepot in her hand. “Want some?”
“Please.”
“The judge has extra cups in there.”
She wore a white turtleneck sweater and a blue jumper. She looked very smart in what should have been a fairly humdrum outfit. She also smelled great. I always wondered if I wasn’t in love with her perfumes and not her at all.
“Is Frazier still in there?”
She made a face. She was speaking sotto voce. “He’s very upset.”
“His daughter’s dead. I don’t blame him.”
“He seems to be holding the poor judge responsible for everything Kenny ever did.”
Over the years, the Eastern Whitneys shipped most of their ne’er-d-wells out here to Iowa.
Kenny’s father had been a womanizer. He went through three wives and numerous affairs before he finally cracked his car up on Hopkins Road one night. Needless to say, he’d also been a drinker. The Eastern branch of the family had sent him out here originally because he’d plundered a trust fund that was to be used for philanthropy.
He ended up routing a lot of the money to some of his European cronies, who sported such dubious titles as prince, duke and viceroy. When the trust fund was nearly depleted, the family put Kenny’s father and Kenny on a plane and dispatched them out here, where the father was to oversee the family’s rather large cattle holdings. He was smart enough to hire a good manager, a former rodeo star whose baptismal name was Tex (presumably after the well-known Saint Tex), and spend the rest of his time chasing ladies. Without a mother-Mom having run off with one of those titled fellows of dubious cachet-Kenny had only his father to raise him, which went a long way to explaining why Kenny had turned out as he had. Kenny’s father had been the drunken twit who’d tossed my dad out of the family manse.
I followed Pamela into the judge’s chambers.
Before I’d even crossed the threshold, two familiar scents obliterated Pamela’s perfume, the odors of Gauloise cigarettes -yes, the ones in the blue packages French people always smoke while they’re talking in subtitles after having sex-and Eiffel Tower brandy.
Except for when she’s in court, you seldom see the judge without a Gauloise and a snifter of brandy on her desk.
Esme Anne Whitney was born in New York City a decade or so before the turn of the century. She’d been schooled abroad for the most part-London, Paris, Rome-all before she was fifteen, when her parents died in a train accident. She was then sent out here to live with her oldest brother, a fairly decent guy as Whitneys go, an honest politician and a man who seemed to have some genuine concern for those less lucky than himself. He ended up as a judge and influenced Esme to attend law school at the University of Iowa. She would have preferred Yale or Harvard but her brother had taken sick and she wanted to be around him. Three years out of law school, she used her influence with then President Coolidge to get herself appointed to her ailing brother’s seat on the bench. She has been there ever since.
She’s an elegant woman. She buys all her clothes in New York and it shows. She’s slender to the point of emaciation, Romanesque in the brazen jut of nose and the impudence of eyes and upper lip. Her head would look great in profile stamped on a silver coin. She wears her graying hair cropped close and only enough makeup to lend drama to her already dramatic features. Her speech is as eccentric as her Gauloises, a touch of Kate Hepburn, a dollop of Ayn Rand, whose books fill the glass bookcase behind her massive leather executive chair.
This afternoon, she wore a gray fitted suit, gray hose and black pumps. She had nice legs. She was propped on the edge of her vast desk, the smoke in one hand, the brandy in the other.
She was speaking to an austere man with white hair and a bad complexion. He wore a blue blazer, white shirt, regimental striped tie, gray slacks. On his blazer pocket, was a fancy crest. Bob Frazier was the only man in the county Judge Whitney would even consider a social peer. Though he was local money-his father having owned outright as many as four short-line railroads at one time-he’d spent most of his school years in London, ending up at Oxford.
I probably would have felt sorrier for him if he hadn’t left his daughter alone for months at a time when she was a young girl. She’d always been a nice kid, but she had a desperate edge. You get that way when you don’t have a parent in your life.