She watched me carefully. “I can’t always tell when you’re bein’ sarcastic, but I think you are now. About Merle, I mean. He’s a lot nicer’n you think, McCain. When my cousin Dodi got-well, you know-knocked up, Merle knew just what to do. And it was the same when my brother got his motorcycle stolen. Bobby was up in prison then so Merle took over and he found it that night and he gave the guy who stole it two broken ribs.”
She was about to do some more extolling when one of the customers called her. “You should be nicer to people, McCain.” And then walked away.
There was: the phone bill, the light bill, the water bill, the car repair bill, the grocery bill, and a letter from a guy I’d represented last year on a stolen merchandise charge. He was writing from prison. He said that he couldn’t wait to see me when he got out. I wasn’t sure how to take that. As I recalled, he’d blamed me for pleading him down to accepting stolen goods. He could’ve gotten six-to-eight. He’d been caught with more than $12eajjj worth of hot appliances in his basement, along with an assortment of firearms that were definitely a no-no for a felon like himself. I got him two-to-four, but he hadn’t been happy with me.
He said a really good lawyer would have been able to convince the jury that the stolen merchandise in his basement had belonged to somebody else. About three weeks after he hit prison, his sporadic letters started coming in. Superficially, they seemed to be very happy, chatty letters from grateful felon to happy lawyer. But the way he kept repeating how he was going to look me up when he got out made me extremely nervous, even though he had entrusted the fate of all three of his teenage daughters to me. They had been charged, variously, with armed robbery, armed mayhem, destruction of government property, auto theft and reckless driving. This had been their response to Daddy’s parole application being turned down. Abc-tv was going to do a sitcom with them to run right after Ozzie and Harriet.
My office was one room with carpeting, a tribute to my failed attempt to make a living as a lawyer in a small Iowa town that already had far more lawyers than it needed. I never stayed any longer than I had to. After reading my mail, all of which went into the waste can, I promptly left.
Sixteen
“Mambo,” the lovely Pamela Forrest said when I walked into the office outside Judge Whitney’s chambers.
“Mambo?”
“She’s going to New York on vacation and wants to brush up on her dancing. She’s got that dance step thing you see on Tv all over the floor.”
Along with powder for jock itch, gum for your bad breath and salve for your pig’s hemorrhoids (you have to live in Iowa to get commercials like that), Mother Tv had lately been offering us these big plastic things you put on the floor with dance steps all over them. Just follow the steps and you’re the next Fred Astaire.
“She’s not in a very good mood, McCain,”
Pamela said.
“Boy, there’s a shock.”
“I mean worse than usual.”
“Impossible.”
“I’m not kidding, McCain. She’s really on the warpath.”
“Any particular reason?”
“Didn’t you see the paper this morning?”
“Uh-uh.”
She held it up: Millionaire Kills
Wife, Self. The deck below read:
Prominent Whitney Family Stunned.
Next to a photo of Kenny was a photo not of Susan but of Judge Whitney. The paper is pretty much Democratic and the judge is the polar opposite. She has written them scathing letters for some of their editorial stands. They love to publish them because, despite her obvious intelligence and genuine erudition, she does sound slightly crazed, especially when she defends the John Birch Society.
“Well, they finally got their crack at her.”
“They sure did, McCain. I feel sorry for her.”
“I guess I might as well get it over with.”
“I’ll buzz her.”
While Pamela buzzed the judge and asked her if she needed anything, I looked at all the galoshes lined up against the wall across the hall.
Iowa winter. It was like being back in second grade, in the cloakroom.
The judge was doing her dance steps, following the long sheet of cheap white plastic laid on the floor. The footsteps she followed were black. Up and back, up and back. She was doing the mambo in her judicial robes. I wondered if Oliver Wendell would have approved.
The rumor was he’d preferred the cha-cha.
“What’re you using for music?” I asked.
“In my head.”
“Ah.”
“I listened to three mambo songs over and over last night. I’ve memorized them. It’s like having a portable radio. Except I don’t need the radio.”
“Clever.”
“So what do you think, McCain? Do I look all right?”
As a number of her suitors pointed out, picture Kate Hepburn and you’ve got Judge Whitney. Physically, that is.
Emotionally, Judge Whitney makes Kate seem like a softy. That’s why I grinned watching her mambo. In her way, she not only possesses true patrician good looks, she’s also cute as hell.
“Cute.”
“I look cute?”
“You look cute.”
She didn’t say anything, but she smiled to herself. Beautiful, she’d heard plenty of times.
Cute, not so often. If ever.
“I’m going to do all the nightclubs,” her honor said, slightly out of breath. “One of my ex-husbands even got me a front-row table to see Sinatra.”
“Just be sure he doesn’t beat you up.”
“Who? My ex-husband or Sinatra?”
“I was thinking about Sinatra but if you’re referring to ex-husband number three, Renaldo, that boy had a pretty bad temper, too.”
“It’s the Latin in him.”
“Not to mention the Scotch.”
I went over and sat down and sipped at the coffee I’d swiped from the outer office.
Five minutes later, we got down to work.
She went over and sat behind her desk. She said, “You saw the paper?”
“I saw the paper.”
“I’m taking you at your word that he didn’t kill her.”
“He didn’t kill her.”
She leaned forward on her elbows and glared at me. “Then when the hell are you going to prove it?
I pay you a lot of money.”
“Not a lot.”
“Well, a lot more than most private investigators get.”
“Most private investigators aren’t lawyers.”
She made a face and slumped back in her leather chair. She reached down and pulled the middle drawer of her desk out. Moments later, she strung a rubber band between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. Our little game.
She shot the rubber band. I tilted my head to the right. The rubber band missed me by an inch.
“Your instincts are getting better, McCain.”
“Thank you. I was worried about that.”
“I used to be able to hit you every time.”
She picked up another rubber band. This time, she got me square in the forehead. “My second husband wasn’t worth a damn at this, either. I could always hit him.”
“That’s probably what sank the marriage.
You lost all respect for him.”
“What sank the marriage, my sarcastic friend, was the fact that he was spending my inheritance in very, very foolish ways.”
“Ah.”
Another rubber band. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
She aimed and fired. I leaned to the left on this one but the rubber band glanced off my ear. She smiled. “Nice to see I haven’t lost my touch.” Then she sat forward again, picked up her package of Gaulioses and had herself a cigarette.
“She was unfaithful,” she said. “Susan, I mean.”
“She had reason to be.”
“I realize that my nephew wasn’t exactly a prize, McCain.”
“That’s very perceptive of you.”
“But the fact remains she was unfaithful.”
“Not that he ever was, of course.”
“There’s a difference with a man.”
“The old double standard?”
She shook her head. Exhaled smoke. “Not exactly. A man, at least a man like