Fools Rush In (The Sam McCain Mysteries Book 7)

by Ed Gorman

  She was always fun to clown with. “Not any judges I know on this planet.”

  The small shop was filled as always with the sights and scents of dozens of flowers, arrangements, and potted plants. A pair of women in straw hats were dawdling over carnations while the little boy with them looked as if he’d suddenly found himself in hell.

  Karen, in her usual crisp white button-down shirt, long blue apron, and chignon, still looked as if she should be in a fancy wine ad in The New Yorker. New England, modest wealth, intelligence, quiet beauty.

  “You lucked out, Sam. Ellen’s off running errands.”

  “Am I going to get you in trouble if I go in the back and talk to Lucy?”

  “Not if you happened to have snuck in the back door and I didn’t happen to see it.” She frowned. “I don’t know why Ellen has to see you as the enemy.”

  To me the reason was obvious. Ellen was afraid that Lucy might have killed David Leeds and Richie Neville. Lucy had said herself that David had wanted to break it off. I represented a threat to Ellen and her daughter.

  “I appreciate it, Karen.”

  “Just don’t get me involved. That lady has got a temper.”

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to be here, Mr. McCain.”

  Lucy, in jeans and a black Hawkeye T-shirt, was using a spritzer to water rows of plants.

  “I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

  “How do you think I’m doing? That’s sort of a stupid question, isn’t it?”

  “Now that you mention it, it is. I apologize.”

  “It’s like those stupid reporters asking parents how they feel when something’s happened to one of their kids. ‘How do you feel?’ That really pisses me off, being that insensitive.”

  The rear of the shop had been built as an afterthought, a shedlike area that housed two huge refrigerated glassed-in cases to keep flowers fresh and then plants and seedlings sitting on sawhorses that had been covered with plywood.

  “Have you talked to Rob?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  Spritz, spritz.

  Lucy said: “I did talk to David’s sister. She called me and we had coffee. I liked her very much.”

  I didn’t tell her of David’s real relationship with his “sister.”

  “So do I. I just wish I had some news for her.”

  “A lot of the kids around town think it was Rob.”

  “Or Nick.”

  Spritz, spritz.

  “Or Nick.”

  The smell of damp earth brought back a memory of my Uncle Bob’s funeral. He’d died in Korea. When they buried him here, a light rain had given the grave dirt a particular odor. I smelled that odor here, now, with the spritzed dirt in the various plants.

  “You know anything about Rob trying to get a tar baby made up?”

  She nodded, still not looking at me. “Oh, yes. I heard all about it from a couple of people at the craft store. Good old Rob. God, I don’t know how I could’ve gone out with him all that time.”

  I said, as carefully as possible, “I guess I never really asked you.”

  “Well, then, I’m sure you will. Whatever it is.”

  “I just need to know, just to keep everybody equal, where you were the night Neville and David were killed.”

  Now she looked up. “Why, I was out at Neville’s cabin, killing them. I’m surprised it took you this long to ask. So do you put handcuffs on me here or do we wait until we get in your car?”

  “You could’ve done it, Lucy. You know that.”

  “You stupid ass,” she said, pushing me aside so she could reach another tray of seedlings. “I loved him. I was willing to destroy my father’s career because of him. Why would I kill him?”

  Karen appeared in the doorway. She was irritated: “Hold it down, you two. We’ve got customers, for God’s sake.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  I left Lucy alone for a few minutes.

  “You told me yourself that he wanted to break it off.” I spoke in a stage whisper.

  As did she. “Break it off because he thought that marrying him—and yes, that’s exactly what I had in mind—would destroy me. He didn’t think I was strong enough to handle it in the long run.”

  I touched her sleeve. She jerked away. “I had to ask. I just want to know what happened.”

  “What happened”—and here she pushed her beautiful face close to my unbeautiful one—“is this society is so racist it won’t even let you marry the person you love. That’s what happened.” She pulled back. Visibly forced herself to calm down. “If we’d just been two white people, we could have had a wonderful life together. But David was right. That would never happen. Not in this country, anyway. No matter where we went, somebody would get ugly either with us or the kids we had. That’s what happened. Somebody just couldn’t stand the idea that David and I were together. And so they killed him.”

  Her voice had steadily risen.

  Karen was in the doorway again: “Dammit, you two!”

  I waved at her. And left.

  I was walking back to my office when somebody behind me called my name. I wasn’t familiar enough with her voice to recognize it yet. Jane Sykes.

  “Mind some company?”

  “Be my guest.”

  “You sound kind of mad.”

  “Confused more than mad.”

  “I really did lay it on pretty heavy.”

  “Yeah, you did.”

  “I’m just protecting you and protecting me.”

  “More you than me.”

  “Stated just like a lawyer.”

  We were across the street from the town square. Kids splashing in the wading pool, retirees playing checkers and throwing horseshoes, teenage boys aching for the teenage girls they saw passing by. As much as I wanted to be an adult, I had flashbacks to when the mode of transportation was a Schwinn and you could find a girl who’d ride on your handlebars as you pretended to be in complete control of the bike that was about to go careening into a tree. Memory is a lie, but not a complete lie.

  Two decades of cars crawled down the crowded street. I loved the prewar coupes, the preferred cars for pulp cover gangsters riding on the running boards with their guns blazing; the big unapologetic Packards that announced to one and all that even if you didn’t own the entire world, you owned a damn good share of it; and the 1955 Chevrolets, the most radical departure from the accepted look in automobile history. The languid dusty sunlight on them all gave them a feel of being trapped inside a museum.

  “So why don’t you buy me dinner tonight, see how it goes?”

  “I dunno, Jane.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “What?”

  “I run hot and cold and now you run hot and cold?”

  “How about I call you later?”

  “All right. But I’ll be at Cliff’s most of the afternoon. I’ve asked him to bring Rob Anderson in. Or haven’t you heard about the tar baby?”

  “Yeah, apparently the whole town has.”

  She broke into long strides that pulled her far away from me in less than a minute. In less than forty-eight hours I’d gone through love at first sight, fear, embarrassment, wanton sexual need, and rage with her. Sounded like the basis for a promising relationship.

  TWENTY-TWO

  BY 6:45 ALL BUT ONE of my blackmail subjects had shown up and taken a manila envelope. Two of them tried to disguise themselves in slouch hats and heavy coats. In this kind of weather they looked suspicious as hell.

  But it was a happy time for them and they thanked me.

  The senator hadn’t shown up yet. Given how eager he’d been the morning he’d worn his own disguise, I was surprised he chose to be late.

  I kept watching the office door. I also kept watching the office phone. I thought maybe Jane Sykes would decide to call me, since I’d decided not to call her.

  I didn’t waste time, though. I had plenty of paperwork to shuffle through and I kept busy right up until 7:20. The s
enator was now thirty-five minutes late.

  I went down the hall to the john, washed up, and combed my hair. Somehow a Swanson TV dinner didn’t sound so good. I decided I’d go to the steak house out on the highway.

  I’d left my office door open. I’d also left the lights on. Now the lights were off. This would have alarmed me more if the electrical wiring in this building hadn’t been done by Ben Franklin himself.

  The first thing was to get to the fuses Jamie kept in her desk. I was two steps across the threshold when someone moved from the shadows and smashed something hard across the side of my head.

  It wasn’t a clean knockout. It wasn’t even a clean knockdown. What it was was a whole lot of pain and confusion on my part. On their part it was not just one but two more applications of something hard against the side of my head.

  They got their clean knockdown and their clean knockout.

  Now you know and I know what they were after. There was absolutely no other reason to come after me the way they had. They didn’t find it, because I had put the envelope back in the wall safe before I went to the john. The only person I was sure it hadn’t been was the good senator himself. All he would have had to do was ask when he showed up for his appointment.

  I went down the hall and got a good look at the lump on the side of my head. Ugly, but not bleeding. I leaned into the bathroom mirror to check my eyes. They looked normal, though I wasn’t sure what I was looking for exactly.

  I returned to my office, sat behind my desk, took out a pint of Jim Beam, and had a nice self-indulgent shot. Two shots, in fact. Jamie had left part of a can of Pepsi. I used the rest of it to gulp down two aspirins.

  I was starting to calm down. I’d been scared and then mad and then scared-mad and now I was just mad. And puzzled. Why hadn’t the senator shown up, and why had somebody come in his place?

  Though you never hear much about them, both parties have political operatives who perform all kinds of services for their employers.

  What a service it would be to hand over photos of the senator and his mistress to the man running against him. Now, no opponent would be stupid enough to call a press conference and share the photos with every leering reporter in the state. The opponent couldn’t use the photos in any public way without implicating himself and looking seedy.

  But there was certainly a way the photos could be used privately. This particular tactic had been used before. Opponent takes photos to the senator and demands that the senator withdraw, otherwise the photos will be circulated privately to reporters.

  Some people can tolerate scandal. They can go before their public and apologize with wife and children by their side and go on from there. But there are those who can’t, those who are willing to give up the power that comes with a Senate seat, rather than face a scandal-hungry press that will likely not let go of the subject for some time.

  What the hell was going on here?

  I ate—don’t ask me why in the Edward Hopper diner. Slice of peach pie, cup of coffee. As usual, the place was mostly empty. I was all things at once—tired, restless, angry, baffled.

  I’d brought along my nickel notebook to make out the list I probably should have made out forty-eight hours ago.

  Rob Anderson

  Nick Hannity

  Lucy Williams

  Senator Williams

  Will Neville

  James Neville

  Those were the primary suspects. The Neville brothers had to be included because they had a good reason to kill their little brother—to take over his blackmail business and find the cash he’d already amassed.

  I also needed to make a separate list of those he’d been blackmailing, the names on the manila envelopes I’d handed out tonight. Last names only. I’d been able to guess correctly which family member bearing the name was being blackmailed. Logic and familiarity dictated a husband in one case and a wife in another, whereas the third had been determined by my favorite scientific method, the lucky guess.

  “Your handwriting is worse than mine.”

  She slipped onto the counter stool next to me. Her perfume set off an alarm in my trousers.

  “It was good enough for the nuns,” I said.

  “The nuns always gave boys the benefit of the doubt.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Sure it is. Think back. I went to Catholic school, too.”

  “Since when are Sykeses Catholics?”

  “My dad saw this movie when he was in Italy during the war. You know, one of those corny things where there’s a miracle in the end?”

  “I always hated those movies. They always embarrassed me.”

  “Me, too. But they didn’t embarrass my dad. He wrote my mom that he wanted all of us baptized Catholic right away. He’d already been baptized. So, anyway, after seventh grade, I went to Catholic school. And the nuns preferred the boys.”

  I saw her looking at the list on my notebook page. I flipped the cover closed.

  “I already saw it. I do the same. Make out a list of suspects.”

  The night man came and took her order for coffee and a piece of buttered toast.

  “So how’d it go with Rob Anderson?”

  “He now has a lawyer, and a damn good one. Frank Pierson. Des Moines.”

  “Yeah, he is good.”

  “Pierson allowed us half an hour and he did most of the talking. Anderson just sat there and smirked. God, he’s a jerk.”

  “You ask him about the tar baby?”

  “Of course. Pierson answered that one, too, and said that it was just a prank and that it hadn’t even been constructed.”

  “Because he couldn’t find anybody who’d do it for him.”

  “According to Pierson, even if it had been built, it wouldn’t have any bearing on the case.”

  “I’d like to hear him try that one in court. You could take him apart with it.”

  “I did. In fact, that was the only point I scored. I said it spoke to state of mind and to motive—how much he hated Leeds.”

  “What’d Pierson say?”

  “Said it was tangential and a waste of time.”

  “So I don’t suppose you learned anything new?”

  Her coffee and toast came. She ate fast. “Haven’t had anything since lunch.” Then she turned to me and said, “Even if I did learn something new, I can’t share it with you, Sam. Remember?”

  “Oh, right.”

  “So it’s no fair asking me. I wouldn’t want to damage our relationship.”

  “Some relationship.”

  She swallowed the last of her toast. “You know your problem?”

  “No, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

  “You love being in love. A lot of people are like that. And it’s fun. In the beginning, anyway. It’s like you’re high all the time. Everything is new and exciting—even though you’ve been through it with a number of people before—and it’s like you’re living in this state of grace. And that’s what you’re after.”

  “I probably am. So what’s so wrong about that?”

  “Nothing at all, Sam. I love that feeling, too. But I’ve been through too many ups and downs with men. For once in my life, I want to take my time. And you don’t. You want the exhilaration immediately. Two dates and we’re sleeping together and living in this Technicolor romance. And then in six or seven months it all falls apart.”

  I gave it some honest thought. Because the night man was listening so carefully, I almost asked him what he thought. Maybe we could have a vote and he’d be the tie-breaker.

  “I’ll tell you what. I think after the big heartbreak of my life—a beautiful girl named Pamela Forrest—I think I probably was like that. But I don’t think I’m like that anymore.”

  “You know what, Sam?” She rested her hand on my arm. “I was sort of the same way. Rush into things and then watch it all fall apart. So why don’t we make a pact?” She glanced up at the night man. “How does that sound, sir? A pact?”

  H
e smiled, wiped his hands on his grease-spotted apron. “I get up late in the mornings and my old lady always has soap operas on. This is just like one of those. A pact sounds great.”

  “Do I get to know what this pact is all about?”

  “Why don’t I tell you outside? We have some business to discuss, anyway.”

  As we were leaving, the night man said, “Stop back, you two, so I know how it works out.”

  We all laughed.

  “were you ever in that little wading pool over there, Sam?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “I’ll bet you were cute.”

  “Skinny, that’s for sure.”

  “I can picture you, actually.”

  We were sitting on the steps of the bandstand in the middle of the town square.

  “So how about that pact, laddie?”

  “Laddie?”

  “I heard Maureen O’Hara say that on the late movie last night. If it’s good enough for Maureen, it’s good enough for me.”

  “Yeah, I mean, sure, the pact I mean. Slow and easy.”

  She put out her hand and we shook. We sat silent in the darkness then, watching a lonely dog sniff around the grounds and the teenagers roar by in their custom cars, radios blaring, Roy Orbison and Jan & Dean and Lesley Gore providing the soundtracks for all those high school lives that would make sense only years later to those who had lived them.

  “Did you used to drive up and down the street like they do?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did the beautiful Pamela Forrest ever go with you?”

  “Sometimes, when she was mad at tall, dark, handsome, and very rich Stu.”

  “Her boyfriend?”

  “Up several notches. Her god.”

  “I had one of those in high school. My girlfriends always said that when he was looking into my eyes, he was actually looking at his own reflection.”

  I smiled. “Maybe sadomasochism is the essence of all romantic love.”

  “As long as I get the ‘sadist’ part, I’ll be happy.” Then: “You ready for some business talk?”

  “Sure. Because ‘laddie’ here is getting a little chilly.”

  “C’mon, then, you can walk me back to my hotel and we can talk along the way.”

  And talk we did.

  “Did you talk to the judge today?”