Эд Горман: Fools Rush In

“I wish Lucy had listened to us.” The trowel in her hand pointed upward like a dagger. The gloved hand seemed to tighten on the handle. “We begged her and begged her.” The face tightened, while the dyed red hair blew in the breeze. “She owed it to her father not to get involved. His career is everything to him. He’s the third senator in the family.”

Five generations of Williamses, three senators. By now we were talking divine right. The bitterness in her voice let me know that her husband’s career was everything to her as well. Her daughter didn’t seem to be much more than an encumbrance.

“All right if I talk to her?”

“Personally, I wish you wouldn’t. But Esme says it’s important, so I suppose you should.”

“I won’t keep her long.”

“You can keep her forever for all I care. My poor husband. I’ve never seen him like this. The election was close enough. Now, with this—”

Just then a red MG appeared in the drive. Two young men in tennis whites. Rob Anderson, Lucy’s former boyfriend. Nick Hannity, a noted college football player.

When she saw them, she said, “You know, Rob would forgive her in a minute.”

“For what?”

“For — seeing a colored boy.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t seem impressed. But I am.”

“Were they going out when she started seeing Leeds?”

“No — she’d already broken it off. She thought Rob was getting too possessive and she wasn’t ready to be married to him. They were supposed to be married this summer, you know.” She watched as the two young men in whites strutted toward us. “He’d still marry her, that’s what I meant about his forgiving nature. He’d forgive her and still marry her.”

“I think I’ll go down to the gazebo.” The way she talked about Anderson, he sounded like a master on a plantation. He would forgive her even though they hadn’t been going out at the time she was seeing David Leeds. How big of him.

I was never eager to talk to Rob Anderson or anybody like him. His father was a very successful businessman who walked the dark side of the street, running loan companies that exploited the poor. He’d once made a martini crack about Judge Whitney that had pissed me off unduly. I managed to tromp, with great fervor, on his tennis-shoed foot as I left the party. He knew I’d done it on purpose but he could hardly say that without sounding paranoid, now could he? Especially after I’d made such a show of apologizing.

I think Lucy sensed me rather than saw me as I made my way down the hill to the gazebo. She lighted her new cigarette with her previous one.

She still hadn’t looked at me when I stepped up on the gazebo. “Hi, Lucy. Your mother said I could talk to you.”

“My mother says a lot of things, Mr. McCain.”

Impossibly young, impossibly pretty, impossibly tortured, as you could see with a glance at those enormous brown eyes. The whispered word was that she seemed even more troubled following her stay in a mental hospital. They’d been trying to break her away from David Leeds. It hadn’t worked. Most folks seemed to feel sorry for her parents but not for her.

Nancy Adams, a very pretty slender brunette also in tennis whites, said, “I’m going for a little walk.”

“You don’t have to,” I said.

“It’s all right, Mr. McCain.”

“I’m supposed to play tennis,” Lucy said after Nancy went over to talk to Karen Porter.

Lucy sat, prim and sort of casually regal, on the bench that ran around the interior of the gazebo. Her blonde hair was stylishly wind-mussed and the sorrow-shaped mouth had never looked more kissable than now in her deepest grief. Her long, tanned legs were wonderful.

She looked up at me and said, “I always thought you were kind of nice, Mr. McCain. I’m disappointed you agreed to help them. I suppose it’s because of Esme.”

“People are just trying to figure out what happened, Lucy. Two young men are dead.”

“Some bigot killed them. Have you seen what’s going on in the South? It’s on TV every night. Something like that happened to them.”

“You mean they were killed because David Leeds was a Negro?”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“But then why would they have killed Neville? He was white.”

“Because they were friends. Good friends.”

Judge Whitney had told me that Neville might have been the one to send photos of David and Lucy to the party office in Des Moines. Good friends?

But I didn’t get to finish up my questions because Rob and Hannity were here. Rob was the sinewy type with a kind of mild contempt on his handsome face. He seemed to believe that God had put the rest of us here for his amusement. He walked over to Lucy and said, “If you want a lawyer, Lucy, let me get you a real one.”

“Sorry to hear you flunked out of law school, Rob,” I said. “Not even Daddy could save you this time, huh?”

He didn’t lunge at me. Hannity, good watchdog that he was, did. But Lucy was already on her feet. “For God’s sake. David’s dead and you’re all acting like brats.”

We all froze in place at her words. I heard Rob say to himself, “David.” Scornfully.

“I’ll talk to you later, Lucy,” I said.

Hannity was still glowering at me. He’d beaten up the son of a client of mine. We’d pressed charges. He got probation. He didn’t like me much and I liked him even less. Predators are bad enough. Predators born with silver spoons up their asses are even worse.

“Why the hell would you want to talk to somebody like him?” Rob Anderson said, making sure I heard him.

“Just shut up, Rob. I told you on the phone I didn’t want to play tennis anyway. David’s dead. You don’t seem to understand that.”

Ellen Williams was gone when I reached the house. I took a last look at the gazebo. Hannity was still glaring at me.

Then Ellen was coming quickly down the steps from the screened-in back porch.

“There’s some news, Sam. Wait for me!”

I couldn’t read her excitement. Was the news good or bad? She put her hand on my arm and said, “Esme just called. Sykes just arrested one of those horrible motorcycle hoodlums for killing Neville and Leeds.” She gripped my arm even tighter as her face broke into a smile. “This should help, an arrest this soon. The focus will be on the killer and maybe not on Lucy so much.”

“Just remember Cliffie’s track record,” I said. “He usually arrests the wrong person.”

The eyes reflected instant anger. “Esme tells me that you’re a wiseacre and now I can see that for myself. My husband’s career is on the line here and I give you some good news and you do everything you can to knock it down.” She nodded down to the gazebo. “I’m going to speak to Esme and tell her that I don’t want you around my daughter at all. If she needs a lawyer, we’ll get my uncle. Now, good-bye.”

Only when she turned and walked back to the porch did I notice that all three people in the gazebo were watching me. I wondered if they’d been able to hear what Ellen had said. The way Anderson and Hannity were smiling, I assumed they’d heard every word.

Karen Porter, my one friend here, waved good-bye to me, smiling as always.

Our town likes to claim that its jail once held Jesse James, well-known psychopath and shooter of unarmed people, for a few days back in the bloody prime of the James-Dalton gang. While it’s true that the James boys favored Iowa as a hiding place, they did most of their hiding just inside the Iowa-Missouri border. The man we got, close as we could figure, was a man named Niles Wick, who was a gang straggler.

Of course, in my growing-up years, none of us kids accepted the Niles Wick story. We preferred to believe that the name was simply one Jesse used. In those days, our jail was located one block east of the Royale Theater, the best second-run movie house anywhere, so we could load up on popcorn and a couple of flicks about Jesse — in these Jesse was a persecuted saint of course — and then we could run to the jail and stand on the corner and imagine Jesse looking down at us from behind the bars on the second floor. He looked like either Tyrone Power or Roy Rogers, take your pick. Both men had essayed him in film.