I shook my head, finishing up my homemade soup. “I’m not sure. I mean, there’s some evidence he didn’t-at least it looks like evidence to me-but even before that, I just had the sense he didn’t kill her.”
“I have to be careful about what I say around Doris.”
“Oh?”
“You know, you working for the judge and all.”
“Because her husband likes Sykes?”
“Yes. He and the chief go fishing a lot.”
“Right. Probably when they should be out doing their jobs.”
“I wouldn’t know about that. I just mentioned that I have to be careful.”
“I know, Mom.”
“The judge isn’t exactly well-liked by most people, you know.”
I stood up and went over and kissed her on the cheek. “The judge? Not well-liked?” I grinned at her. “You must be talking to the wrong people.”
“Oh, you,” she said. Then took my hand.
I’d never noticed her liver spots before. “I wish you’d stop by more often. I mean, we’re right here in the same town.”
“I know, Mom,” I said. “I’ll try harder. I promise.”
Judge Whitney said, “Blackmail? For what?”
She sat on the edge of her desk, a paradigm of style in her black suit and red blouse, the cut of both vaguely Spanish, a Gauloise going in one slender hand and a snifter of brandy in the other.
“So he never told you about it?” I said.
Irritation shone in her glance and voice.
“McCain, you don’t seem to understand. Kenny and I never communicated unless it was absolutely necessary. Having him out to the house would be like having Adlai Stevenson over for dinner.”
“Heaven forbid.”
“Damned right, heaven forbid. Now the Communists are getting smart. They’ve decided to put up a much more attractive candidate, and with any luck the sonofabitch will win.”
“Who’s that?”
“Jack Kennedy? The senator from
Massachusetts?”
“Ah. He’s a commie, eh?”
“Don’t mock me, McCain. Of course, he’s a commie. All Democrats are commies.”
“I’ll have to ask Ayn Rand what she thinks of that.”
“Ayn Rand?”
“I’ve got a date with her tonight.”
She exhaled smoke dramatically. “What a little turd you can be.”
“She wants me to take her bowling.”
“Damn it, McCain, people are walking around thinking that a Whitney has committed murder and you’re making jokes about Ayn Rand.”
I was going to say that I couldn’t think of anybody I’d rather make jokes about than Ayn Rand but I decided the judge had probably had enough.
“Susan’s the key,” she said, walking back around her desk and sitting down.
The rubber bands started a minute or two later, a volley of them. I’d lean my head right, I’d lean my head left. She was doing pretty good, hitting about 60-65 percent of her shots.
“You’re getting better,” I said.
“Thank you.”
“Did you hear what I said about Susan?”
“I heard.”
“She’s the key. To the blackmail.”
“Why Susan? Why couldn’t Kenny have been the blackmailee?”
“He was too stupid to be blackmailed.
Everything he did, he did in public. And Susan was a very respectable woman until the last few years of her life.”
“That’s what Bob Frazier wanted everybody to believe anyway.”
“Meaning what?” I said.
“Meaning there was always something a little wild about her.”
“You have evidence of this, of course? I mean, she ran around a little, slept with a few guys.
I’m not sure that’s “wild.””
“Not evidence,” she said, firing off another rubber band. She got me right on the chin.
“Instinct.”
“Do you know the Renaulds very well?”
She smiled. “Mr. and Mrs. New
Yorker? The way they always manage to work the magazine into their conversation is amazing. I guess it’s what passes for sophistication out here.”
“He had an affair with Susan,” I said.
“God. He’s so-effete. I’m surprised he’s even interested in women.”
“According to his wife, he’s quite the hot number.”
“Spare me, McCain.” Then, “Anything else I should know?”
“Darin Greene paid me a late-night visit.”
“The football player?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t say. He got scared and ran off.”
“What’s he got to do with this?”
“Well, he and Kenny were friends since boyhood.”
“Yes, just one more reason the Whitneys were so proud of Kenny. I don’t have anything against colored people, McCain-I don’t have a prejudiced bone in my body-but being nice to colored people is one thing but actually having them as friends…” She shook her robber baron head.
“Anyway, Greene and Kenny had a falling out was my understanding-well over a year ago now, I think-s I don’t see what he’d know about any of this.”
“Neither do I. But I was curious why he came up to my place so late at night. Then when I went to this tavern where he hangs out, he took off before I could get to him.”
She shrugged. “I’m more interested in the abortion girl.”
“I don’t know why you think that has anything to do with this.”
“Same reason I’ve always sensed that Susan Frazier wasn’t the sweet girl her father said she was. Instinct.”
“The doc told me it could just as easily have been an accident as a murder. He thinks that both the girl and whoever was helping her could have panicked. The helper runs off, scared, and leaves her there to bleed to death. I don’t know what that could have to do with Kenny and Susan.”
“Instinct, as I said.” And launched another volley. She hit me once, missed three times.
I looked down at the floor around the leather chair I was sitting in. “Who picks up all these rubber bands after I leave?”
“Pamela.”
“Ah.”
“Why, do you think I should pick them up?”
“There’s probably something in the Whitney charter prohibiting it, isn’t there?”
“You’re wasting time again, McCain. Within twenty-four hours, I want to be able to call up the state paper and demand a front-page apology-or I’ll sue them and put them out of business. You’re the only one who can help me with that, McCain.”
I stood up. “I’m back at it right now, your honor.”
“Find out who Susan’s best friend was. Work on her.”
“That’s actually what I was going to do.”
“And don’t bother Pamela on the way out,” she said. “I’ve got her typing something very important.” She exhaled more smoke from her Gauloise. “I don’t know why you don’t give up on her, anyway, McCain. It just makes you look very foolish to the whole town, a young man mooning over a young woman that way. And I’m saying that for your sake, McCain.”
“Thanks, Mom,” I said.
On my way out, Pamela said, “Did you hear about Stu?”
“He was hit by a train?”
“Very funny. He was named Young Lawyer of the Year by the State Bar Association.”
“Goody,” I said, and left.
Twenty-one
The high school had a program where kids who worked got off at 2ccde instead of 3ccae so they could go to their jobs. They also got credit for having the jobs. A commie would look at it as a sweet but dishonest plan by greedy merchants to get cheap labor. I wondered what Ayn Rand would make of it.
It’s funny that at my age, not long out of law school, I was as sentimental as an old man. The girls looked great, shiny and new, and I knew what most of the boys would do, ride around in their cars and then play a little pool or pinball, and then head home for a quick dinner where they would evade every single important question their parents threw at them. God, it all seemed so far away and so wonderful, Mgm wonderful, sort of like an Andy Hardy movie except the girls would let you get to third base and you had all those great Dashiell Hammett and Ed Lacy novels to read.
Now, I had responsibilities and people expected things of me and even at my age I could see a few gray hairs on my head, one of the McCain genetic curses.