Эд Горман: Fools Rush In

So it surprised me that Stan was sitting in a booth. He wasn’t alone.

The girls in my high school class used to play an interesting game called One Word. You were given one word to describe a person. If the game was played with beer present, it quickly degenerated into stupidity. “Fat.” “Icky.” “Smelly.” Anything that would get a giggle.

But if it was played sober, it revealed interesting and sometimes serious perceptions of people you knew.

The word for Stan was “slovenly.” When he’d first come to town ten years ago, he’d been a dude. It was rumored he even swam at the Y in one of those three-piece suits of his. But then his wife left him for an old flame, moved to Denver, and left Stan bereft of hair (he got bald within six months of her leaving) and even more bereft of grooming. He had two suits. He wore one till it got stiff with sweat and various other goodies and then put on the other one. His ties must certainly violate some civil code somewhere, given the fact that they look like an artist’s palette. Except that the colors are stains of various kinds. The spaghetti and the mustard stains are the easiest to guess. The others are more obscure. His only known vice is bowling. As a vet, he spends most of his time at the Legion Lanes, where, upon occasion, he has been known to take home one of the bowling gals. He has a round, good-natured face that gets sort of wan whenever the subject of his wife comes up. She has yet to divorce him. She may just be test-driving this rodeo guy. We’re all afraid that she’ll come back to him someday. Nobody doubts that he’d build her a mansion if she did.

I could only see the back of the woman Stan was talking to.

I walked over to Stan and slid in next to him.

“Sam, this is Marie Leeds. She’s David Leeds’s sister.”

Marie Leeds possessed one of those faces so regular of feature you wanted to study it. Not great beauty, this face, but certainly pretty. She nodded. “I came out here from Chicago two days ago to spend some time with David.”

“I’m sorry about your brother.”

“If I start talking about him, I’ll cry. What I’d prefer to talk about is how serious this investigation is going to be.”

“She talked to the chief of police,” Stan said, “and said that he was very polite and friendly but she sensed that he might be a little—”

Marie’s smile surprised me. It was a little girl’s smile and it was a treasure. “‘Stupid’ was the word I used.”

Her smile relaxed me and I sensed it had done the same for Stan. We were no longer representatives of the white race and she was no longer a representative of the Negro race. Not that we were such great grand friends but we were at least just human beings talking to each other.

“All the information he gave me came from the newspaper on his desk. Turns out Stan wrote it. Doesn’t the chief file reports?”

“Well, in his own way he does. He used to have a very bright deputy who did most of the work in that area. But then the deputy couldn’t take it anymore and got a job in Cedar Rapids.”

“That deputy he has now — that Earle? — he just sat there with his arms folded the whole time I was talking to the chief. The only thing he said was, ‘This is a small town and your brother acted like it was a big town.’ A font of wisdom.” She looked directly at me. “By that I take it Earle meant that David was seeing a white girl.”

“That’s what we’ve been told,” I said.

Marie shook her head. “An ambitious young man like my brother, his good looks caused him a lot of trouble. He always said he preferred to live the way white people did. If you saw a job opening, no matter what it was, and you thought you could do it, go up and apply for it. And if you saw a girl you wanted to date, go up and ask her.” She looked at Stan now. “Not that he made a big thing out of dating white girls. Most of his girlfriends were Negro. But every once in a while he’d get serious about a white girl for a while — he always taught dance lessons because it was easy money and he sure met a lot of young women.” The wonderful girly smile again. “David was never much for staying with one girl long, whatever their color was. He liked variety.”

“Marie raised him,” Stan said. “Her folks were killed in a fire.”

“You don’t look much older than he was,” I said.

“Seven years older. They died when I was seventeen.” This smile lacked the energy of the others. “Here I said I didn’t want to talk about him and that’s all I have been talking about.”

Discreet tears filled the corners of her eyes. She dabbed at them with a piece of tissue.

“I really don’t want to be emotional about this. I want to find out who killed him. And emotional won’t help me get there.” Another dab at her eyes. “I teach seventh grade and that’s what I try to teach my students. Anger, especially righteous anger, can get people up on their feet. But to get things done, you have to hold a tight rein on your feelings.”

“I’m afraid you’re right,” I said.

“That’s why I admire Dr. King,” Marie said. “He’s exactly the sort of person I’m talking about.”

The waitress came, took our order, and fled back to the counter to call it in. She was frantic. By this time the lunch area was jammed. Some customers had to stand behind the stools to eat their lunch.

I’d just picked up my cup of coffee when the frantic waitress returned and said, “Are you Sam McCain?”

I nodded.

“There’s a call for you. There’s a phone at the far west end of the counter.”

I knew who was calling and I knew why she was calling and I knew why I was mad she was calling.

“Just do me a favor and tell her I’m not here.”

“Really?” the waitress said.

“Yeah, really. And I appreciate you doing it for me.”

She hurried away.

“The judge?” Stan said.

“Who else?”

“You have a very strange relationship with her. Really passive-aggressive.”

I glanced at Marie and laughed. “In case you couldn’t guess, Stan’s minor at Northwestern was psychology.”

Marie blessed me with one of her sweet smiles again.

The Colonial-style house gleamed pure white in the early afternoon sun. Ellen Williams, the senator’s wife, was tending to her garden of roses as I pulled up the drive.

Karen Porter, not only her friend but her partner in their downtown flower shop, was watering plants further downhill. She gave me a big wave and a big smile. I’d always felt much more comfortable with her than with Ellen.

Ellen turned when she heard my engine. She just stared at me. I’d never had the feeling she cared much for me, but because I worked with her good friend the judge, she was always polite.

While the house wasn’t a mansion, it had a mansion’s sprawl, grass so green it looked slightly unreal stretching east to a forest and west to a plateau, where an enormous white gazebo sat twenty yards from a tennis court and covered swimming pool.

Lucy Williams sat in the gazebo with her friend Nancy Adams. Even though Lucy was talking, there was an Andrew Wyeth loneliness in the juxtaposition of the frail blonde girl in the tennis outfit and the forlorn air she radiated even from here.

I parked and walked over to Ellen.

“Hello, Sam,” Ellen said, striving to put some warmth in her voice for me. “Esme called and asked you to call her if you stopped by.”

Ah, yes. Esme. Wasn’t that French for relentless?

“I’ll give her a call when I finish here. I’m sure she explained that she’s asked me to look into this whole thing with David Leeds.”

She was one of those erotically overweight women, the type favored by the Brits at various times in their bloody history. The face was what did it, that sensual mouth more than anything. Even in a pair of slightly baggy yellow walking shorts and a yellow sleeveless blouse, there was a sexual dynamic. I wondered if she was even aware of it. I wondered that especially now when the blue eyes held a quality of fear.