Pamela woke up. “God, Judge
Whitney’s going to kill me if I have dark rings under my eyes. You know how she gets.”
“Tell her it’s none of her business.”
She smiled sleepily. “Right, McCain.
That’s just how you’d handle it, isn’t it? You’re more afraid of her than I am.”
Which was true, I guess. As a young lawyer in a town that already had too many lawyers, I earned more than 60 percent of my income as an investigator for Judge Esme Anne
Whitney. I’d even taken two years worth of criminology courses at the U of Iowa in Iowa City so I could be even more help to the judge, making the forty-mile roundtrip three nights a week until I became the proud owner of my private investigator’s license. But to earn any money with that license, I had to stay on Judge Whitney’s good side. Assuming, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, that she actually had a good side.
The Belding mansion is on Winthrop Avenue, which is where the wealthy of the town first settled. The estates run to three-acre lawns, carriage houses and native stone mansions that have a castlelike air about them. The Belding mansion was big enough to have a moat. But now it was broken up into apartments for “proper” working girls.
I drove through the open iron gates right up to the wide front steps. It was like dropping a girl off at her college dorm.
She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, a rustle of skirt and blouse and coat, a seductive scent of perfume. “Sorry, I wasn’t more fun. You really should find a girl, McCain.”
I started to say something, then she said, “It’s Stu’s birthday. I guess I was preoccupied with that a little bit. That’s why I didn’t talk more.”
“He’s engaged, Pamela. I’m not engaged.
I just thought I’d point that out.”
She shook her head. She has the quiet beauty of the past century, those huge blue eyes and the wide serious mouth that can break into a girly smile with devastating ease. “He won’t marry her.”
“He won’t?”
“He told me he won’t. He said he only got engaged because he’s running for governor in four years and the Republican steering committee said it’d look better if he was engaged. That’s why he got his pilot’s license, too. So people wouldn’t just write him off as a rich boy. He flies sick kids up to the Mayo Clinic all the time, remember.”
“I wonder if she knows that. His fianc@ee.
Why he got engaged to her.”
“The point is, McCain. He loves me, not her.”
“And he told you that?”
“Yes, of course he told me that. In fact, he tells me that twice a week. When he calls.”
What we had here was a young man afraid to displease his folks. Pamela and I grew up in a hilly area north of town called the Knolls. You find a lot of junked cars in the front yards of the Knolls, and at least twice a night, a red siren comes blazing up there, usually to stop a man from beating up his wife and to arrest a teenager who thought that smashing car windows was a Junior Achievement project. Most of the lives there are like the junked cars in the front yards.
This is not the kind of background Stu’s parents wanted to add to their family history, even if the girl did look a lot like Grace Kelly.
Stu loved Pamela but he loved his parents and his social situation more. Pamela didn’t seem to understand this. She’d learned how to dress, how to speak, how to act, how to tell one kind of fork from the other, and she felt that would be enough for Stu. But it wasn’t enough for his folks, and never would be.
She got out and, for the moment, the door was open.
The night air felt good, clear and purifying somehow.
I watched Pamela’s good legs flash going up the steps and then she was gone, and I just sat there inhaling her perfume and remembering what it was like to walk her home from high school on Indian summer afternoons. My life had been so complete at those moments. She was all I’d ever wanted, dreamed of. I wanted that sense of completeness again. I wanted to be fifteen again and have it all ahead for us, for both of us, only this time there’d be no Stu. There’d just be us. Just us.
Two
The call came after I’d been asleep for about two hours. I woke dazed and confused, the way you get when you’re sleeping off whiskey. Not that I get that way very often. Two drinks, I go to sleep. Three drinks, I generally throw up.
My dad’s the same way. Heredity, I guess. For the sake of everybody concerned, I mostly stick to Pepsi.
A sunny dawn sky was at the windows of my apartment, bare black branches like antlers on the panes. I cleared my throat and said hello.
“I’m sorry to bother you, McCain, but I need you to throw your clothes on and get out to Kenny’s place.”
She didn’t need to identify herself. There was only one voice like hers in the entire state. Not only was it imperious, it was somehow Eastern too -Smith College, I think-though she’d lived here all her life, Judge Esme Anne Whitney.
Tasha and Crystal, my cats, were lost among the muss of winter covers, yawning and stretching and deeply resenting being awakened at this time. I’m not a cat guy, actually. Samantha, a local community college drama star, left them with me when she went to Hollywood to become a movie star. She writes me every six months or so to tell she’ll be sending for them as soon as director Billy Wilder gives her a part.
She’s fixated on Billy Wilder.
Meanwhile, I have the cats, and, worst of all, I’ve started to consider them family. I know guys aren’t supposed to like cats (out here, you still occasionally find the stout masculine type who goes out and shoots cats), but I can’t help it. They’ve won me over.
“Does it have to be right now, Judge?” I almost asked, “I just got to sleep.” Then I stopped myself. If I admitted to being out that late, I’d not only have to get dressed, I’d have to listen to a sermon while I was fumbling around with my clothes and shoes.
“Eight hours’ sleep should be plenty for an active young man like yourself, McCain.”
“Yes, I guess it should.”
“Kenny seems to be having some kind of difficulty.”
“Your nephew, Kenny?”
“Yes, my nephew, Kenny. I know you two don’t like each other much but he seems to be-hysterical.”
Her nephew, Kenny, had given me my one and only shiner. Eleventh grade. Mr.
Stearns’ civics class. Kenny and I had started arguing about civil rights. Kenny had a vast ship upon which he wanted to put all Negroes, non-English speakers, atheists, union members, communists, Jews, Catholics and people who’d ever refused to cooperate with the House on Un-American Activities. He inherited his beliefs from his father, Judge Whitney’s brother, who was head of the local bar association. I made a few points that got Kenny snickered at.
One thing a Whitney can’t abide is being ridiculed. Kenny waited for me in the parking lot, in full view of Pamela Forrest.
Kenny was starting fullback for our Wilson Warriors. I stood five-seven and weighed 130 pounds. Hence, my black eye, and my humiliation in front of Pamela.
“I’m not sure I’m the right man for this, Judge.”
“He won’t hurt you.”
“I know he won’t hurt me. I’m bringing my forty-five if I go.”
“Are you serious?”
“Damned right, I’m serious. But I still don’t think I’m the right man.”