by Ed Gorman
“She’s in the bathroom.”
Jamie was whispering. And pointing. As if I didn’t know where the down-the-hall bathroom was.
“Who are we talking about?”
“Shh. Not so loud, Mr. C. She’ll hear you.”
I seated myself at my desk.
“She came in real mad and then she just sat there and started crying. I don’t blame her. If my brother committed suicide I’d be half crazy, too. I feel sorry for her.” She was still whispering.
Sarah Powers walked in then. “Jamie said it would be all right if we talked.” She stood in front of my desk. The anger Jamie said she’d come in with had probably depleted her momentarily. “I want to thank you for getting me out of jail. I probably owe you some bail money.”
“No bail, Sarah. I told them I wouldn’t press charges against you for hitting me with that steel rod. And I convinced them you weren’t being an uncooperative witness—that you didn’t know any more than you were telling them.”
“Well, I really appreciate it, Mr. McCain.”
“I’m Sam. You’re Sarah.”
No smile, just a nod.
Jamie held up her bottle of Wite-Out, her lifeline to secretarial success. “I’m all out, Mr. C, I need to go get some more.”
I knew she kept half a dozen emergency bottles in her desk. I was impressed that she’d devised such a clever way of excusing herself so I could talk with Sarah. Someday when I’m a little more successful I’ll have an office with two rooms. I will stop people on the street to tell them about this and eventually two men in white will cart me off to the mental institution one town away while I’m babbling, “Two rooms, I tell ya! Two rooms!”
“Good idea, Jamie.”
“You want me to bring you anything, Mr. C?”
“No, I’m fine. Thanks, though.”
Jamie stood up, that wonderful dichotomy of Teenage Babylon body and Donna Reed face. In her pink summer dress—something Wendy and I had bought for her on her birthday—she was a sweet young mother. Married, unfortunately, to a little rat bastard who considered Iowa a surfing state. Have you ever seen a cow surf? Neither have I.
When we were alone, Sarah said, “He didn’t kill himself.”
“Why don’t you sit down, Sarah? You look exhausted.”
“I know my brother. He wouldn’t kill himself.”
“You said you were worried he’d kill himself when he got strung out on that one girl.”
She was still standing up. “I shouldn’t have said that. Deep down I didn’t believe he would have. And I don’t believe it now.”
I pointed to the chair. She finally walked back to the most comfortable chair in the place, the one I’d bought when the largest law firm in the city redid their offices and sold off most of their old furniture.
“He didn’t commit suicide and he didn’t kill her.”
“I believe he didn’t kill her. I’m not as sure about him committing suicide, though for some reason I tend to agree with you. I think he was murdered.”
“You mean that?” She looked younger then, still and always the tomboy, but there was a childlike frailty in the dark gaze now as if she’d finally found a true friend. I could abide her usual anger because I could understand it but it was pleasant to see her almost winsome.
“There’s something I got from one of the girls at the commune. Emma Ewing. She said that just before dusk she saw Bobby Randall’s Thunderbird parked down by the barn. He was talking to Donovan. She was in the house for maybe twenty minutes, and when she came out again his Thunderbird was still there but she didn’t see him anywhere.”
“He comes there a lot?”
The eyes got shrewd. “Nobody told you?”
“Told me what?”
“A lot of us think he’s got a deal with Donovan.”
“What kind of deal?”
“Donovan says that we should only buy drugs from Randall. He said that right after we moved in. He says Randall’s the only one we know isn’t a narc.”
“So he gets a cut from Randall?”
“We can’t prove it but that’s what we think. And you know Donovan went after Vanessa before my brother did. He was way hung up on her. He didn’t go crazy like Neil but he started trying to sleep with every chick in the commune. He even hit on me a couple of times. I mean, guys don’t hit on me unless they’re really hard up.”
“You’ve got to stop that. I do all right with women and look at me.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you.”
“Oh, no? I’m short and I’m not exactly handsome. It’s attitude. I just pretend I’m this cool guy and sometimes it works. And that’s what you’ve got to do.”
“I’m scared of guys.”
“Well, I’m scared of women.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. They’re like this alien species. Just when you think you’ve figured them out a little bit they do something completely unexpected. And you’re standing there looking like a fool.”
She must have been restraining herself to a painful degree because suddenly she was sobbing, her face in her hands. I walked around the desk and stood in back of her chair. I put my hands gently on her shoulders and started muttering all the stupid things people mutter at times like these, a reminder of how difficult it is to really comfort anyone.
I reached over and snatched Jamie’s Kleenex box from her desk. I handed it to Sarah. She plucked one free. It resembled a fluttering white bird in her fingers. She blew her nose but kept on sobbing.
When the phone rang, I took it on Jamie’s desk. Paul Mainwaring didn’t say hello. “I’ve sent you a check for a thousand dollars, Sam. That should be enough for your services.”
“Way too much, actually.”
“It’s done. We have our answers. Now we can get on with our grieving. I appreciate your work on this, Sam.”
“Shouldn’t we wait for the autopsy?”
He wasn’t angry; peeved was the word here. “Autopsy? We already have it. Vanessa was stabbed to death.”
“I mean Neil Cameron’s autopsy.”
“What’s that got to do with anything? Now I’m in a hurry here, Sam. As I said, I’ve sent you a check for a thousand dollars and I’ve thanked you for your work and I’m hanging up now.”
“What if Neil didn’t commit suicide?” I rushed my words, had to because he was about to put his phone down.
Peevishness was now anger. “He did commit suicide, Sam. That’s obvious to everyone except you, apparently. I talked to Mike Potter. His opinion is that Cameron felt guilty about killing my daughter and that he knew he’d spend the rest of his life in prison so he killed himself. Even you should be able to understand that, Sam.”
Yes, even you, Sam. Now quit picking bugs off yourself and begging for bananas and get off the damn phone!
“Potter hasn’t seen the autopsy yet, either. Maybe he’ll change his mind.”
“Good-bye, Sam. I wanted this to be a pleasant little call because right now I’m losing my mind over my daughter’s death and I need a lot of little pleasant moments. But thanks to you I’m all worked up again. Good-bye.”
Sarah was dabbing her eyes with the Kleenex. The sobs had given way to frantic sighs. I got myself a cup of coffee and said, “Where’re you planning to stay?”
“At the commune, why?”
“Everything be cool there for you?”
“Yeah, except for Richard. He’s pissed because all this is likely to get the commune shut down. That’s the only thing he talked about. He didn’t say anything about Neil being dead. I think he still hated him because of Vanessa.”
“But Vanessa ended up doing the same thing to Neil that she did to Donovan, right?”
“The same thing she did to all her boyfriends. They’d get close and then she’d dump them. But Richard couldn’t see it that way. When he’d drink he’d talk about how he’d still be with her if it wasn’t for Neil.”
“So it doesn’t bother you to go back ther
e?”
“The people there are more my friends than Richard’s. They’re tired of him. This Emma I told you about?” A fleeting smile. “She calls him The Overlord.”
Jamie was back with two sacks. One was from the office supply store, the other from the deli. She placed the former on her desk and the latter in Sarah’s lap. “They were having a special on ham and cheese on rye so I thought I’d get you one. I’ll get you some Pepsi from the machine down the hall.”
“She sure is nice.”
“She sure is, Sarah. And so are you. I’m going to find Bobby Randall and meanwhile you’re invited to stay in this luxurious office of mine as long as you want to.”
Jamie returned just as I spoke. “Don’t worry, Mr. C. I’ll take good care of her. I’ll show her some of Laurie’s baby pictures.” She beamed down at Sarah. “Laurie’s my baby.” I was surprised she hadn’t already told our guest all about her. People who’ve been in my office for more than three minutes usually know the whole story by heart.
12
I’d been to Bobby Randall’s place only once. Two years ago a woman who worked in the courthouse asked me to tell him to stop seeing her sixteen-year-old daughter. He was, after all, in his early twenties. His age made him prosecutor bait but she didn’t want to press charges because, she said, her daughter, who was very much taken with the handsome, arrogant Bobby, would never forgive her. The woman told me that she had nightmares of her daughter getting pregnant.
I’d seen Bobby around town. In his red Thunderbird he was hard to miss. His trail of heartbroken women provided tavern talk for other young men. Bobby was not beloved. In the words of the Everly Brothers, he was a bird dog. He seemed to take particular pride in sleeping with women who were affixed to boyfriends, fiancés, and husbands. He had the looks, all dark curly hair and features that were almost pretty, and swagger that would put my favorite draft dodger John Wayne to shame.
As I pulled into the alley where he had turned a three-car garage into his workshop, I heard the competing sounds of rock music and circular saw. I pulled off the gravel onto blanched grass crosscut with tire tracks. This was the visitor parking area.
The doors were wide open, allowing in heat and flying kamikaze bugs. The setup was impressive. Lighting was provided by overhead fluorescents. The walls were covered with shelving and pegboard that contained hammers, pliers, extra saw blades, screwdrivers, and so many other things that I gave up looking. He was cutting two-by-fours on a workbench big enough to play Ping-Pong on. He stood in a T-shirt and jeans on a floor of wood that he’d covered with a linoleumlike surface. Everything was bright and new, as if it would be used for a photo in a trade magazine. The one element that enhanced even the splendor of the workshop was the splendor of the blonde in the very tight Levi’s cutoffs and braless pink T-shirt who sat perched on a stool in the corner. She held a long cigarette in one hand and a magazine in the other. Neither she nor Randall looked up when I entered because neither could hear me above the whine of the saw. The smell of freshly sawn wood took me back to the days when I was little and watched my father make wonderful things in his own tiny workshop.
When he’d shaved as much as he’d wanted to off the two-by-four he reached down for another board and that’s when he saw me. His first reaction was anger. He changed it quickly to a smug smile. “I could have you arrested for trespassing.”
“Who is he, Bobby?” She was the mythic mountain girl in all of Charles Williams’s Gold Medal novels, pure animal sex and ravishing insolence. The voice didn’t work with the body—cigarettes and booze and, likely, drugs.
“He’s a nobody who thinks he’s somebody because he works for Judge Whitney.”
“That bitch. She put my brother in county for six months.”
“You don’t have any friends here, McCain.” He lifted his saw and jabbed it in my direction. “So if I was you, I’d leave right now.”
“You could take him one-handed, Bobby. He don’t even come up to your shoulders.”
Bobby nodded to the blonde who was, for all her looks, a pretty nasty lady.
“She’s got two brothers, McCain. She grew up watching them beat the hell out of each other. She knows about fighting. If she says I can whip your ass, take her word for it.”
“How much dope were you selling Vanessa Mainwaring?”
That got us past the tough-guy talk.
The dark eyes narrowed in fear.
“A murder like that, the police are going to start looking into her background for the county attorney. The drugs’ll come up and your name is going to be in the papers and on TV.” It was bullshit but he was too dumb to know that. “You’re going to find yourself up against some heavy-duty charges. Paul Mainwaring’s going to see that you get put away for a long time.”
The blonde started to say something but stopped herself. She had a scorching glare. I could almost feel my skin shrivel.
“The kind of business you’re in, Bobby, you’ll be lucky to get out in fifteen years.”
“You bastard. You’ve been waitin’ to nail me, haven’t you, McCain?”
“You’re wasting my time, Randall. I want to know how much dope she was buying and what kind.”
“And then you run to the cops.”
“Or that bitch of a judge.” Blondie.
“Your Thunderbird was parked outside the barn where Vanessa’s body was found.”
He finally put the saw down. He made a show of flexing his bicep as he did so. Even in panic he had to peacock it. “So what?”
“Your car was there during the time the coroner said she was killed. So where were you?”
“You don’t have to tell him nothing, Bobby. It’s two against one. All we gotta say is he made alla this up.”
“I just walked around the commune the way I usually do, McCain. I like the fresh air out there.”
God had provided Randall with enviable skills—enviable to me anyway—as a carpenter and handyman. His law degree was apparently still in the mail.
“Mike Potter has checked all the footprints in the barn. He’s accounted for all of them except two. I haven’t mentioned you to him yet. But how would you like it if I went straight from here to a phone and told him to check out all your shoes?”
Even Blondie gulped when I said this. For just a second not even her cunning could disguise her apprehension. I wasn’t sure what they were hiding from me but obviously I’d made both of them nervous.
“Let’s go back to the dope. How much and what kind?”
“This is really bullshit, man. Like I said, I could charge you with trespassing.”
“Yeah, you could. And I could always call Mike Potter. How about if we swap, Randall? You tell me about the drugs and I won’t tell Potter anything if I believe you’re telling me the truth.”
“Don’t tell him anything, Bobby. That bitch judge of his’ll just put you in prison the same way she did Ronnie.”
How could anybody as ravishing—and she was—as Blondie be such a bitch? And not exactly a bright one at that.
“I wouldn’t listen to her, Bobby. She wouldn’t be able to help you when Potter and the county attorney started snooping around. I can help you if you help me now.”
“You back off, Dodie. I gotta be careful here.”
Dodie? I had nothing against the name but somehow she wasn’t a “Dodie.” Dodies are cute and pert in my mind; this Dodie was a long-legged female swashbuckler who used sex and her belligerent mouth to get her way. Dodie?
Dodie slid off the stool and came up to stand next to Randall. She stood hip-cocked and spectacular. Just as long as she didn’t open her mouth. “He’s conning you.”
“Maybe so, but I want to hear him out at least. Why don’t you go in and see about supper?”
“I want to stay here.”
At this rate ol’ Bobby was soon going to get kicked out of the He-Man Club. You know, the guys who don’t take crap off anybody, especially women. Dodie-with-the-unlikely-name was clearly in charge here
.
“All right, but keep quiet.”
“I’ll keep quiet as long as you don’t say anything stupid to this asshole.”
When I thought about it, I could almost feel sorry for Randall.
“How long were you selling her drugs?”
He glanced at Dodie as if seeking her permission to talk. To me he said, “Six, seven months.”
“How often?”
“She was one of my best customers. Every seven or eight days or so.”
“You ever think maybe he’s wired and you’re talking yourself into hard time?”
“I’m not wired, Randall. And you’re doing the right thing. What kind of drugs did she buy?”
This time he didn’t look for permission. “Across the board. At least of the kind I sell. Pot, speed, coke, acid. Once in a while I get weird shit like peyote or something. She liked acid. She loved tripping. The kids at the commune, all they ever want is pot and acid.”
“You get to know her?”
Bobby Randall, cool cat and heartbreaker, blushed, which wasn’t doing much for his image. The blooded cheeks told me that she had likely seduced him the way she’d likely seduced a lot of young men. He had to clear his throat to speak. “Talked to her a little bit.”
“That better be all you did.”
“Dodie, I already told ya nothin’ happened.”
“I seen her. And I seen the way you looked at her.”
“Yeah, well, nothin’ happened.”
“Why was your car there so long last night?”
This time he didn’t blush. He lowered his head and stared at the ground for half a minute. Then he looked up and said, “Remember, it’s two to one. Your word against ours.”
“You can relax, Randall. I think you’re a scumbag but right now I could give a rat’s ass about your drug deals. I want to find out who murdered Vanessa and Neil Cameron. So what were you doing there so long?”
“Don’t tell him anything more, Bobby. He’s got enough to put you away already.”