by Ed Gorman
She was damned good at her little game. She did a double fake—pretended to be firing from the left and then suddenly shifting to the right and, as I moved my head to the left, surprised me by moving back to the left again. The rubber band hung off my nose momentarily and then dropped to the table. She had a dead aim.
A squirrel sitting on the edge of the patio watched me with great disdain. His expression seemed to question why I didn’t have more self-respect than to sit with a half-fried, jodhpur-wearing, horse-loathing Eastern lady of vast wealth and even vaster disdain for common folk like me. I should’ve told the squirrel that it was none of his damned business. Instead I explained (don’t knock telepathy until you try it) that I needed the money. I made a pittance from my law practice. I earned a modest living by working as Judge Whitney’s investigator.
I watched the squirrel romp off in the direction of the surrounding forest, diving in and out of the frothy colorful waves of crisp autumn leaves. He had an enviable life.
She inhaled half her Galouise and then took a long drink from her snifter. There was a cold beauty in the fine-boned lines of her face.
She’d had innumerable husbands and lovers but always ended up alone. In my way, I liked her in a complicated and melancholy sort of fashion, at least in those moments when my hands weren’t aching to wrap themselves around her elegant throat.
She said, “Jack Coyle.”
“All right, I’ll play along. Jack
Coyle.”
“A social worker who was involved in a case I presided over a while back told me about a rumor she’d heard.”
“Involving Jack Coyle.”
“My, you’re quick today.”
“I thought we might be talking about dear, dear Noel again.”
“I’m handing you some important information and you sit here drinking my brandy making fun of me. You really are a dunce, McCain.”
“Jack Coyle. Tell me.”
More wine. More Galouise.
“This is unconfirmed, of course.”
“My favorite kind of rumor.”
“This particular caseworker had worked as a high school counselor at one time. And one of the students she saw was Sara Griffin.”
She’d hooked me. School counselor.
Sara Griffin. Jack Coyle. Whatever it was, it was bound to be juicy.
“Sara was going through a very difficult time.”
“This was before or after her folks put her in that asylum?”
“Just before. Anyway, the counselor told me that several times Sara referred to this “older man” she was seeing. She never used a name. But one evening the counselor was out at the state park with her kids—they were having a picnic—and down by the boathouse she saw Jack Coyle and Sara Griffin. They weren’t doing anything untoward, you understand. They were standing there talking. But then they got into some kind of argument and Sara ran away in tears. She said that Jack Coyle stalked off after Sara. She didn’t know what happened after that. She had to get back to her kids.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
She smiled. “I couldn’t wait to tell you this, McCain. I wish I could get a picture of your face at this moment. You look absolutely shocked.”
“I am absolutely shocked.” I decided to give her the pleasure of telling me something I already knew. “But it’s just rumor.”
She smiled again. “Cliffie’s in way over his head this time, McCain.” She said this with the relish of deep hatred.
“Yes, he is.”
“He’s going all over town saying that the case is closed and that David Egan was the killer.
But we’re going to prove otherwise, aren’t we, McCain?”
“We sure are.”
“This doesn’t mean I suspect Jack
Coyle.”
“No, of course not.”
“But,” she smirked, “I’d sure love to have a picture of his face when you ask him about poor Sara Griffin. Now take care of this for me will you, McCain?”
“I’ll do my best,” I said, standing up.
The cold beauty smiled again but without any hint of merriment. “That may not be enough on a matter like this, McCain. I’d suggest you aim a little higher than your best.”
Walking to my car, I came up with at least eighteen great cracks to make about middle-aged society women who wore jodhpurs but were terrified of horses. I couldn’t, of course, say any of them out loud.
It was a high school sort of date. Back then I would’ve made sure that my ducktail was combed flat, that I was smiling so much my
lip muscles hurt, that I appeared manly enough to please the father and trustworthy enough to please the mother.
If one of them asked me what I planned to do with my life, I generally said that I hoped to become a doctor and work on a cure for cancer; and if they inquired of my extracurricular activities, it being obvious that athletics did not number among them, I told them that I spent most of my time stocking shelves for the nuns down at the Pantry for the Poor they ran. If they were Protestant parents, I said that I stocked shelves at the Martin Luther Poverty Center.
In other words, it was all Pat Boone bullshit.
Mrs. Dennehy, her husband being understandably absent because of his death, said, “So how is your law practice going, Sam?”
We were in the living room. Brett Maverick was cheating somebody at poker on the Tv screen and Fred, their black Lab, was stinking up my hand with his tongue. Linda was “just about ready.” Or so she’d called out from some secret place outside the small but comfortably furnished living room.
Mrs. Dennehy was of a different generation of Irish Catholics than Emma and Amy
Kelly so she didn’t have quite as many framed paintings of Jesus on the walls. And Jesus wasn’t quite so pretty as in the older paintings.
The more modern ones showed a Jesus who didn’t look like a pushover for just any sob story you decided to lay on him. There were strands of palm from Palm Sunday, to be sure, placed behind the two framed paintings of the Virgin on the wall but not nearly the number my Mom had in the bedroom she shared with my dad all these years. The Pope was nowhere to be found.
“My law practice is going just fine,” I said, thinking of Jamie or Jammie, depending on your taste and level of literacy. “I have a new secretary and business has really picked up.”
“Do you still work for Judge Whitney?”
“Yes, part-time,” I said, “though as my business picks up, I work for her less and less.” I plan to be a doctor someday, Mrs. Dennehy, and search for a cure for cancer.
After that, I plan to rid our planet of racism in all its ugly forms.
“That’s good. No offense, Sam, but she’s pretty hard to take sometimes. She
gave a talk at one of our church suppers and she kept calling us “you people.” It was like she couldn’t bring herself to say the word “Catholic.””
I smiled. Lord, how I smiled. “I think it’s safe to assume she won’t become a papist anytime soon.”
“Mom asks a lot of questions, doesn’t she?”
“Not a lot.”
“Well, quite a few.”
“Quite a few, maybe,” I said, “but not a lot.”
She punched me gently on the arm. “You’re really on your best behavior tonight.”
I laughed. “Wait till later.”
The restaurant was all dark wood, red leatherette booths, candles inside red glass, waitresses in black nylon uniforms, and a trio that apparently hadn’t heard of any music hipper than Lawrence Welk. But they played slow songs and slow songs were what I wanted to hear. It was so dark in there I thought maybe I should’ve worn one of those miner’s hats with the flashlights built into them.
We ate and drank, steaks and whiskey, the whiskey coming from the pint in my suitcoat. Hard liquor is available here only in state-run stores. But Cliffie is pretty understanding of people who bought restaurant setups and used their own bottles.
I went easy on the b
ooze. She drank more than I expected, enough in fact to have some minor difficulty getting her tongue to form words exactly.
“I can’t drink at all.”
“You’re doing fine,” I said.
“I’m just so nervous.”
“Everything’s fine.”
“I’m afraid I’m going
to hyperventilate.”
“You want to go outside?”
She shook her head. “No, I just have to grow up.”
I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by that but I had my suspicions.
“You think we could dance, Sam?”
We danced. She was good. She felt right in my arms, too. A lot of times they don’t. She felt right in other ways, too, that small earnest freckled face of hers so
prairie-girl scrubbed and prairie-girl smart.
We didn’t bother going back to our booth for nearly half an hour. We just danced. And what we couldn’t give voice to our bodies spoke of. Sex, to be sure, but also comfort and care and memories that stretched all the way back to kindergarten when we’d tasted white paste for the first time and learned how to color inside the lines.
“You’re going to ask me to go back to your place tonight, Sam. And I’m going to say yes because I really want to go. Because I’ve been thinking of you all the time since Friday night. But I’m really scared. This has to move very, very slowly, Sam. I’m not feeling very female after the operation and maybe it’s just not going to be worth it for you. In the long run, I mean. Maybe nothing will ever come of it for you.”
“You didn’t need to say any of that stuff, you know.”
“I just had to make it official.”
She had one more drink before we left.
“They like you,” I said, after coming out of the john and seeing how my three cats had made themselves comfortable pressed against her on either side. Tess of course sat in her lap. Tess believes in the divine right of cats. To hell with all that jazz about the divine right of kings.
“You like a drink?” I said.
“No, thanks. I wouldn’t mind using the bathroom, though. I just don’t want to offend your cats by making them move.”
“The only thing that offends these cats is when they run out of food.”
While she was tending to business, I put on the Bobby Darin album he did live at the Copa. When she came back, she sat down, turned off the table lamp, took my arm, put it around her shoulder, and then snuggled up to me.
“How’s that for being forward?” she said.
“I’m shocked, you hussy.”
We sat. I knew enough not to make any grand moves; I also knew enough not to talk. Darin was especially good with the Cole Porter songs, gave them a rawness you don’t associate with Porter.
Maybe even gave the lyrics a little more depth.
She kissed me and it was one hell of a kiss.
Another feeling of comfort. Sometimes you can like a lady a whole lot but you just don’t work
well together sexually. Kissing’s pretty important. We fit together perfectly.
It went on a long time and then she eased me away with a small deft hand and said, “I wasn’t sure I could ever feel like that again.”
We nuzzled and snuggled and then we snuggled and nuzzled and then we snuzzled and nuggled and it was great.
On the other side of the screen door a dog and an owl and a Hank Williams album communed with us and the night.
“You know what?” she said.
“You’d better go.”
“I didn’t know you were a mind reader.”
“I want this to work, Linda.”
“So do I.”
“So you’d better go.”
She kissed me again and certain of my body parts reacted by standing straight up and saluting.
“Do you believe in God?” she asked when I was slipping her coat on.
“Most of the time.”
“That’s sort of how I am. In the hospital it was a real struggle. My mom and everybody would bring me rosaries and holy cards and little pieces of palm and I’d feel guilty because sometimes it just all seemed like a joke. If there really is a God don’t you think He’d just talk to us once in a while to let us know He is really there?”
“You’d think. But God, as they say, works in mysterious ways.”
Going down the stairs to my car, she said, “And then all of a sudden I’d have my faith back. I wouldn’t know why it left me and I wouldn’t know why it came back. It just would and I didn’t have any control over it. Sometimes I think I’m crazy.
And I mean clinically.”
“That’s why my favorite part of the Bible—andthe only part that really makes sense to me—is the Book of Job. He asks all the same questions we do. Hey, exactly what’s going on down here, anyway? You got little kids dying, you got people killing each other in wars, you’ve got tycoons letting all these people starve to death. And the best you can come up with is that we have to take it on faith. There’s a Graham Greene line about “the terrible wisdom of God.” I’ve never been able to figure out if that’s a cop-out or the most brilliant thing ever uttered about a deity.”
She laughed. “Maybe it’s both.”
In the car, on the way home, she said, “This is going to be a long haul, Sam.”
“I know.”
“We’ll both naturally want to sleep together.
And probably not too long from now, either. But before we do, I’ll have to show you where I was operated on.
And that’ll be difficult for both of us. Maybe most of all for you.”
“I can handle it, Linda.”
“I hope both of us can handle it, Sam,” she said as I pulled up to the curb in front of her house.
I watched her go in and then the feeling of the high school lark faded away utterly. We were past that. She was already an adult and I was being forced by age and circumstance to try and become one, too.
I drove around for an hour before going back to my apartment. I’d always rushed into love before and in ways this time was no different. But there were Linda’s complexities to consider. In some ways it’s easier to dazzle women as a lover than it is to be a true friend. I wasn’t any Casanova in the sack but I wondered if I was the sensitive guy I liked to imagine myself. She was right. This was going to be tough to handle for both of us.
I knew that tomorrow I’d prepare myself for the night that would eventually come by going to the library and looking up breast cancer. I needed to know a lot more about it. Whenever it was that I finally saw her scars, I wanted to make it as easy as possible for her. For us.
Fifteen
Rita Scully’s father had managed to escape the Knolls by building from scratch a stable that boarded and trained horses. Because he was the only person in the area who had any skill with show horses and jumpers, the gentry—remember here we’re talking about the gentry of Black River Falls, not to be confused with the gentry of Greenwich, Connecticut, or Beverly
Hills, California—turned his business profitable within a year. The Stables, as it was called, had been in business some twenty years but Bud Scully no longer ran it. He had emphysema so bad, he rarely left his wheelchair. His barn manager was named Cal Rice and he was a good man when sober, which was most of the time; immediately after his benders you could find him forlorn and genuinely ashamed in the church basement where the local Aa met seven nights a week.
The meeter and greeter, and the most savvy about show horses and jumpers, was Rita Scully herself. She wore Western even though most of her customers wore riding academy. She sure looked good in an emerald-colored Western shirt with white piping, faded Levis, and black cowboy boots. The shirt set off her green, green eyes and black hair; it set off a couple of other things, too.
I was there at 7 A.M., when she was in the sunlight outside the huge white barn brushing down a colt.
Out on the white-fenced track, a swarthy man walked a pair of huge Palominos. Closer by, a woman with a fierce length o
f hose was scrubbing out a horse trailer.
When she saw me, Rita said, “That’s funny, McCain, I don’t remember inviting you to stop out.”
“All I’m trying to do is figure out what happened.”
“So the judge can show everybody how much smarter she is than Cliffie?”
Like most people in town—l myself, sometimes—she didn’t like either Cliffie or the judge.
“No, so we can figure out exactly
what happened.”
“Exactly what happened,” she said, running the brush over the rippling flesh of the sweet, skinny chestnut colt, “is David got drunk and killed himself. It was an accident. He didn’t commit suicide, no matter what you might think otherwise.”
“There’s a third possibility.”
“Oh, yeah?” She had a hard beauty but a beauty nonetheless. “Oh, I forgot. You’re not only an unsuccessful lawyer, you’re also an unsuccessful private eye.” From her back pocket she took a currycomb. She set the brush on the ground and started combing him. She’d pause every once in a while to kiss him on the neck. She’d always been sexy, Rita
Scully, but I’d never seen her be sweet.
There was something touching about the way she’d kissed the horse. She became a new person to me. She was interesting now in a way she’d never been interesting before.
“What if he was murdered?”
And that stopped her. Stopped her from brushing.
Stopped her from glancing around the grounds to see that everybody was doing his or her job. In the silence you could hear the horses talking and the birds singing and the sound of a tractor in the fields of a nearby farm. The grass was still silver with dew and even the scent of horseshit had a certain homely sweetness about it.
She said, “Now there’s a stupid idea.”
“What’s so stupid about it?”
“He got drunk and smashed up his car.
Case closed.” She went back to brushing the horse.
“He talk to you about getting into an argument with anybody recently?”