Fools Rush In (The Sam McCain Mysteries Book 7)

by Ed Gorman

  I’d forgotten what a cranky bastard I could be in the morning when somebody irritated me.

  “I can see I’ve made a mistake.”

  He turned to go, the long body buried in a long tan trench coat whose collar ran all the way up under the back of his hat.

  “Look, Senator, you got me out of bed this early, so I deserve at least the courtesy of an explanation.”

  He turned back toward me. “You don’t like me and I don’t like you. That’s hardly the basis for a good working relationship.”

  I’m rarely shocked these days. I was shocked. “You want to hire me?”

  He was silent for a time. Those big, dark plastic bug eyes staring at me. “I wanted to hire you because I believe you’re as good as your word.”

  “I like to think I am. I try to be. Sometimes things go wrong, of course. Beyond my control.”

  “But you wouldn’t blackmail me. You’d do the job I hired you to do and that would be that.”

  “You’re talking about Richie Neville.”

  “Yes.”

  “And him having photos of David Leeds and your daughter.”

  “No.”

  This time I think I actually flinched when he answered me.

  No? Not his white daughter going out with a black man? What else would he hire me for?

  “We need to make a deal right now. Before you say anything more.”

  He nodded. “All right. I do want to hire you, then. But given your situation with the judge, can I be assured that you won’t share any information you gather with anybody else?”

  “I’ll give you my word as long as the information I gather doesn’t cover up a crime.”

  “Not a crime—a stupid—” He touched long fingers to his cheek. “I’m so exhausted from worrying about this that I can’t even think clearly.” Then: “Indiscretion. A stupid indiscretion.” Then: “A local woman. A prominent woman. Her brother has a fishing cabin. A very nice one. He’s been in Europe for the past few years. That’s where we—she and I—got together. And that’s where Richie Neville took photographs of us.”

  “Marsha Lane.”

  “My God, how did you know?”

  “Prominent woman. Brother in Europe. Nice fishing cabin. You forget I work downtown. Had to be Marsha Lane.” Then: “I can see what you’re up against. First Lucy and David Leeds. And now Marsha Lane. Your campaign’s going to be a nightmare.”

  He leaned back against the concession stand. He took out a pack of Chesterfields and lighted one with a Zippo. He hadn’t relaxed; he’d damned near collapsed. Even his voice was weaker. “I’ve thought of announcing that I wasn’t going to run again. But my family—if I announced that, the press would be all over. They’d know I was hiding something.” Then: “Ironically, I think I can weather Lucy and her young gentleman. But with Marsha added to it—” He threw his cigarette away. “It’s funny you’re the only one I can trust. But who knows what you’re getting when you hire one of those Chicago agencies. They could be just as mercenary as Neville.” Then: “What a great fix this is, huh? Somebody like you is my only hope.”

  I didn’t like him. He brought out all my class anger. He’d been an overindulged preppy who’d come back here summers to tell everybody of his manly conquests back East. He’d never carried this county because so many people in their forties remembered him all too well.

  But what he was talking about was a principle. Whatever I thought of him, he didn’t deserve to be blackmailed.

  “I’ll tell you what, Senator. I won’t make any kind of deal with you except to say that whatever I find, I’ll turn over to you. I want to see you defeated but not because of some pictures. You don’t pay me anything, I don’t tell anybody about this, and whatever I find is yours.”

  “I’m sorry I shot off my mouth and called you a name.”

  My laugh was harsh. “That was a moment of truth, Senator. We basically hate each other. And a moment of truth coming from a politician is something to be happy about.”

  I started to turn away from him. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Can’t I at least say thank you?”

  This time I was the one who regretted being a bit nasty. I turned back to him and stuck out my hand. We shook.

  “Thanks, McCain.”

  I walked back to my ragtop.

  SEVENTEEN

  DEAR MR SSAMPSON

  Please remit your bill, which is attached. This is the third time we’ve have sent it.

  Sincerely,

  Then, in light pencil: Needs your cig here, Mr. C.

  “Cig” meaning signature.

  “Think you could run this through the typewriter one more time, Jamie?”

  “Was there something wrong with it?”

  “Just a few things.”

  “I really took my time with that one, too, Mr. C.”

  “I just made little marks on it.”

  I placed it on the edge of my desk for her to pick up. She wore a tight mauve blouse and a short tan skirt. She also smelled great. In the face of such things, what are a few typos?

  The phone rang. I grabbed it.

  No greetings and salutations. “Since you’re on salary, would it be too much to ask that you stop by my office?”

  “I’d be honored to.”

  “And I mean now.”

  “Delighted to. Five minutes?”

  “How about three? You’re not that far away.”

  Just as I hung up, the mailman came through the door. His name was Henry Woolsey and he was an unabashed admirer of Jamie’s, fifty-some years notwithstanding.

  “’Morning, Jamie.”

  “’Morning, Henry. I see you broke out your shorts already.”

  “Plenty warm for them. Too bad Sam won’t let you wear shorts.”

  “Why don’t I just let her wear one of those French bikinis, Henry? Would that be good enough for you?”

  Henry’s furiously flushed face contrasted vividly with his white hair.

  “He’s always kidding around like that, Henry,” Jamie said. “He wouldn’t actually let me wear anything like that to the office.”

  Henry started dealing out the pieces of mail as if they were cards and we were playing poker. I immediately saw what all the envelopes had in common. She just looked so innocent poised on the edge of her chair, I had to say it gently: “Gee, I guess I must have forgotten to put stamps on all these envelopes last night. Would you do that for me, Jamie?”

  I was already late for the judge. Three minutes can go by awfully fast.

  “I’ll probably be back in an hour or so,” I said.

  Henry, the lecher, was already helping himself to the coffee. Young women like Jamie were in need of protection, no doubt, and Henry was only too eager to lend a hand.

  He winked at me. “I like that idea you have for a French bikini, Sam.”

  After I brought her up to date, she said, “My spies tell me you spent some time with Jane Sykes.”

  “True enough. Your spies got something right for once.”

  Judge Esme Anne Whitney’s office was one of timeless solemnity: deep leather chairs, rich carpeting, flawless wainscoting, two full walls of legal tomes, and a desk big enough to play a passing fair game of Ping-Pong on. It was always cleared off.

  “Maybe you haven’t noticed, McCain, but the Sykes family is our enemy. They stand for everything we revile—or at least that I revile. And I assumed you did, too.”

  “She’s cleaning up the police force, for one thing. And for another, she’s not going along with all of Cliffie’s arrests.”

  “And she’s very good-looking.”

  “Really? I hadn’t noticed that.”

  “I don’t want you to see her anymore.”

  Per usual, she parked herself on the edge of the desk with a Gauloise and a cup of coffee laced with brandy. No rubber bands this morning, which was an indicator of how seriously she took this.

  “I’m serious, McCain.”

  She looked regal in her fi
tted gray dress and oversized, vaguely African-style earrings. No wonder she’d managed to find four men to marry her. Even in her sixties, she was still a desirable woman, if, that is, you caught her before a day’s worth of sipping brandy-soaked coffee began to take its toll.

  “You can order me not to work with her. That comes under the heading of employment. But you can’t order me not to see her for pleasure. That comes under the heading of private life.”

  This was my morning for shocks as she said, “I thought we were friends, McCain.”

  My instinct was to laugh. The words hadn’t come out right, which I’d put down to bad acting. But then I saw the shimmer of tears in her ice-blue eyes and knew better.

  The judge had never before said anything like this to me. She’d always made it clear that she’d hired me because she couldn’t find anybody any better who lived here in town. Not exactly your ringing endorsement. Never warm, most of the time barely courteous, sometimes damned mean, she was fond of reminding me of her social background and position and my lack thereof.

  And now this. Served with tears yet. But those first tears were now followed by more tears that actually escaped her eyes and sparkled on her cheeks.

  “I just feel so damned alone sometimes, McCain. No friends to confide in except back East; nobody to have dinner with at the end of the day.”

  I knew what I was seeing, of course, but now wasn’t the time to talk about it. In the years I’d been her court investigator, I’d seen her drinking get increasingly serious. And now she was at the point where she needed to make the trip up to the Minnesota clinic that was disguised as a resort for rich people.

  Four, even two years ago, she would never have let me see her so vulnerable. She enjoyed being imperious. She even enjoyed jokes about being imperious.

  I found myself standing up and walking to her. I found myself putting my hands gently on her shoulders.

  And she found herself jerking away from me and snapping, “Don’t you dare ever touch me like that, McCain! I’m your employer, not one of your little strumpets!”

  I thought of explaining myself but realized it wouldn’t help either of us. I’d embarrassed her. I’d damaged her pride. People just didn’t go around touching imperious people the way they would little strumpets.

  There was only one thing left for me to do. I walked to the door. “I’ll give you my word that I will never cooperate with Jane Sykes on a case. If we have a relationship, it’ll be strictly a personal one. And if that’s not good enough, then—”

  “Just get the hell out of here, McCain, and don’t come around until I tell you to.”

  She was drinking deeply from her cup as I quietly closed the door and stepped out into the hallway.

  Walter Margolin had been a particularly obnoxious hall monitor. We’d always had the sense that he was too goody-goody even for the nuns. I remember Sister Mary Rosemary standing behind him while he was ragging on some poor little girl for taking too long at the water fountain. The sister rolled her eyes as Walter became more and more dramatic.

  In his graying crew cut, huge red bow tie, and tan summer-weight suit with enough patriotic pins on it to start a war, Walter was now a grown-up version of a hall monitor.

  He was vice president of loans at First Trust Bank. His desk sat in front of the vault, and it was to him that supplicants came to plead their cases. I’d always thought he should have a kneeler in front of his desk, the way you do in confessionals. Because from what I’d been told, you had to show Walter a great deal of deference and piety before he would even consider your loan.

  He looked up and gave me the hall monitor’s smirk he’d perfected by the time we were in fourth grade.

  “Well, well, well, I knew you’d be in here someday, McCain. Destitute and in dire need of help.” The smirk got smirkier. “Do you remember seventh grade?”

  “Barely. I was drunk for most of it.”

  “Very funny, McCain. I seem to remember a certain juvenile delinquent who dropped a water balloon on my head from the third floor.”

  “I was framed, Walter.”

  “And now,” he said with great satisfaction, leaning back in his executive chair, “you’ve come here to see if I’ll be decent enough to forget how you humiliated me and give you a loan.”

  I tossed the envelope on his desk. “That’s court permission to open Richie Neville’s safe-deposit box.”

  He leaned forward. “That’s not going to happen. Only the person designated as his closest family member can open that now.”

  “Open it up and read it.”

  “You don’t seem to understand, McCain—but then you were never real bright, anyway—that court orders don’t matter. We have our own rules of procedure here.”

  “If you say so, Walter.”

  I snatched back the envelope and headed straight for the large corner office where the bank president resided when he wasn’t attending vital banking conferences in the Bahamas or playing nine rounds at the country club.

  I got what I wanted.

  “Here, Sam, let me take care of that for you. We can open that safe-deposit box right now.”

  There was a tremor in his voice that attracted a few glances and he came upon me so fast he almost bumped into me.

  But he did lead me to the large solemn room in which the safe-deposit boxes were kept.

  There was more than three thousand dollars in cash and four manila envelopes with familiar last names written in ink on them. I took a quick glance inside and found photographic negatives. I didn’t look at any of them.

  The new black Cadillac didn’t belong in one of the three parking slots that came with my office. Neither did the man sitting behind the wheel.

  He got out of his car as soon as I got out of mine.

  “I suppose you’ll grow up someday, Sam, and get an adult car instead of that convertible.”

  “And I suppose you’ll grow up someday, Anderson, and stop bleeding poor people dry.”

  “Nobody else will loan them money. I have to charge the rates I do. And I don’t intend to defend myself to somebody like you.”

  “You just did. Now what the hell do you want?”

  “I want you to leave my son alone. Because if you don’t, you’ll be damned sorry.”

  Rob Anderson’s father was tall, slim, sour, and a professional nag. He owned four loan companies throughout the state that were the last resort for debt-ridden people. I’d seen it calculated that his loan rate ended up being in the fifty-five percent area by the time a loan was paid off. The money he made, and it was as much as anybody made in our town, automatically made him respectable, never mind that he traded on human misery. He was an elder in his Lutheran church, he frequently wrote guest editorials for the newspaper, and he even ran radio spots that were long enough to promote his usurious business and give him forty-five seconds to expound on how America was in the process of losing its moral compass. Whatever the hell that was. He was one of the Midwest grotesques Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis had identified as sui generis long, long ago.

  “I haven’t been bothering him, but the police probably have.”

  “Uh-huh. And who put it in their minds that he had anything to do with that damned colored boy?”

  “I didn’t have to put anything in their minds, Anderson. Your son was engaged to Lucy. But she broke it off because she was sick of the way he treated her. Rob’s a bully to everybody, including Lucy.”

  “Oh? Rob’s a bully? Well, for your information—and even though I’m strictly against this—even now he’s willing to forgive Lucy for running around with that colored boy. Forgive her and take her back. Now does that sound like a bully?”

  “He’s a regular saint, ain’t he?”

  He glared at me. “You’ll never get the Knolls out of you, will you, McCain? No matter how successful you become, you’ll still be that shabby little Knolls boy.”

  I leaned against the trunk of my immature ragtop, tapped a Lucky free, and said, “Wha
t the hell are you doing here? You didn’t come here to tell me to lay off dear sweet Rob. You want something.”

  He pushed his rimless glasses back up his long nose and said, “I have some information for you.”

  “Why don’t you take it to the police? I’m not interested.”

  “Clifford’s a buffoon. At least you’re somewhat intelligent. And Esme and I are bridge partners at the club sometimes.”

  “I still don’t want it.”

  “Why not?”

  I pushed away from the Ford. The summer sunlight fell broken in soft shadows through the trees above. The birds sang with impossible sweetness. And the old garages that lined the other side of the alley behind my building looked like the sort that I’d explored as a kid.

  I didn’t want to be standing here talking to this prissy prick.

  “Anything you say’ll be self-serving. You know it’s logical that your son is a primary suspect. You also know that it’s logical that the police will keep on contacting him until the case is resolved. So you’re here to tell me something that’s going to put the blame on somebody else. Am I right?”

  He looked embarrassed. “You’ve discredited me even before I had the chance to say anything.”

  “Then we’re done here.”

  I started to walk toward my office. He caught up with me. He grabbed my shirtsleeve. I pulled my arm away.

  “Here’s something Rob told me at breakfast this morning. While Neville and Leeds were being killed, my son was visiting his old girlfriend. Her name is Sally Amis and I invite you to call her.”

  “Were they alone?”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “It’ll make a difference in court. Her word alone won’t be good enough, especially if she still has feelings for him. She’d need a witness of her own to corroborate what she says.”

  “She comes from a good family. She wouldn’t lie.”

  “People lie all the time, good families or not.”

  “You’re missing the point here, McCain. Hannity and Rob weren’t together at the time the coroner set for the death. They only got together later. Hannity would have had plenty of opportunity to—”

  “I need to get to work, Anderson.”