“Makes everything tidy, anyway.”
He leaned down and picked up his briefcase.
“Jean and I like you, too, Sam. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to our friendship.”
“Egan didn’t kill her and he didn’t commit suicide.”
He shook his head. “Maybe Egan didn’t commit suicide, Sam, but you may not want to start bothering people who knew Sara. They’re not lowlives. They don’t allow themselves to be pushed around.”
“Unlike the people who come from the Knolls and get pushed around because they don’t have any other choice.”
“You think you’ll ever get over that class anger of yours, Sam?”
“I doubt it.”
He dropped his cigarette to the pavement and twisted his foot on it so it shredded into torn white paper with brown tobacco spilling out.
“You’re one of us now, Sam. You grew up in the Knolls but that doesn’t mean you have to live there the rest of your life-physically or mentally, either one. You don’t want to ruin your chances by making a lot of important people mad. And I’m saying this as a friend.”
To prove it he put a fatherly hand on my shoulder. “You take care of yourself, Sam. I’m hoping you’re going to be a member of our club sometime in the not-too-. tant future. You’d be a real asset. And I’d be happy to talk you up to the board. I really would.”
A minute later, his bronze Buick came to smooth and powerful life, and he backed out of the lot, his briefcase on the seat next to him, as if it were a passenger.
The Griffin house was built inside a large tract of timber. You got the sense they were hiding from something, the way the hardwoods and pines enveloped their home of native stone and glass and wood-homage, I expect, to Frank
Lloyd Wright. There was even a trickle-small Wrightian waterfall behind the long, angular house.
I counted six cars in the drive. All new, all expensive. The Caddy was the most imposing, all white and chrome and sweeping fin. But then Dix Griffin owned the Cadillac dealership.
Mandy Griffin answered my knock.
She was a tall, prim woman in a black sheath dress, her graying hair in a chignon. She had good facial bones, an older woman’s neck, and blue eyes that didn’t look happy to see me at all. “This isn’t a good day, McCain.”
“I realize that but I just wondered-”
“We know what you’re doing and we don’t approve.”
“What I’m doing?”
“Trying to prove that David Egan didn’t kill our daughter. Of course he did.”
Dix was in the door then. As a longtime car dealer, he couldn’t find it in himself to be rude to anybody. After all, he wouldn’t want to kill a potential sale.
“Oh, now, honey,” he said, “McCain’s just doing what that damned Esme Whitney wants him to do. He wouldn’t be doing this on his own so there’s no reason to take it personally.”
He was big, he was hammy, he spoke in a Southern dialect that seemed contrived. He always spoke of his Southern boyhood but he’d lived up here for forty years. The reverse of your friend who goes on a four-day trip to London and comes back with a British accent.
He wore a black suit with a white shirt and dark blue tie. But the shirt collar was open and the knot of his tie rode at his sternum. His fleshy face was boozy red and he was sweaty. He looked as if he were at an event that combined mourning with poker. Hard to believe he was a Yale man-old Southern money-but then William Buckley Jr. got through there so I suppose anything is possible.
“Cliff called just a few minutes ago and told us what you were up to, McCain, and I have to tell you, we agree with him. Egan killed her, all right, and then he killed himself. I’ll give him that much, anyway. He had that much good in him-ffrealize what he’d done and make his peace with the Lord.”
“Somebody cut his brake line.”
“Cliff said you’d say that, too. He said, near as he can tell, somebody cut it after Egan’s car sat out all night.”
“You’re a terrible little man,” Mandy said, “and I want you to get into your car and drive away right now.”
Her voice was loud enough that their other guests started peeking out the front window to get a look at me. Most of them, recognizing me, frowned. Difficult as it is to imagine, I am not a universally beloved figure.
“Don’t you want to know who really killed your daughter, Mrs. Griffin?”
“We do know, McCain,” Griffin said, sliding his arm around his wife’s frail shoulder.
“We’re not going to waste our time-and our feelings -on some damned stupid contest between Esme and Chief Sykes. He’s made his share of mistakes in the past, that’s true, but he also happens to be right on this one. And that’s all we have to say on the subject.”
He closed the door. His guests were lined up in the front window like kids forced to stay inside on a rainy day. I was like an exciting Tv show, the way they watched me get in my ragtop, U-turn on the drive, and head back to the front gates. Fascinating stuff.
I called Linda at the hospital in Iowa City.
“So you just called? Just to say hi? That’s very nice of you. In fact, I was thinking that maybe you’d like to get a pizza tonight. My treat, Sam.”
“That sounds great. I’ll pick you up at seven.”
“Just remember-”
“I remember. We’re going easy. And that’s fine with me.”
“This will get to be a real drag for you someday, Sam. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not sorry at all. I like being with you and that’s all we need to say.”
“Thanks, Sam. See you at seven.”
The librarian gave me a curious look when I asked her where I might find a book on cancer. Having been a librarian here since I was a kid, she was naturally concerned that my reading wasn’t for my mom or dad.
“Everything all right at home, Sam?”
“Everything’s fine, Mrs. Anderson.”
She was the only librarian who’d bought both Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert Heinlien for the library in those long-ago days after the war when the country was on one of its sporadic improve-your-mind campaigns, which always meant promoting the sort of books kids didn’t want to read. A few libraries were forced to give away all their Burroughs books.
She’d shown up at the graduation ceremony for the law school and given me a nice auntly kiss on the cheek as I passed down the aisle clutching my diploma. You don’t forget people like that.
I was pretty self-conscious about it. When I found the book she suggested, I took it to a corner table and kind of hunched over the book.
I wasn’t shocked. I sort of knew what I was going to see. It made me mad looking at the woman whose torso they’d color-photographed. The healthy breast next to the flat line of scar next to it. I thought of Linda and then of my mom and then of my kid sister. I wanted to hold somebody responsible for this. But mad became sad and I thought of my aunt Barb, who’d died of it, and the lady down the street who was fighting it and all of a sudden it seemed overwhelming, like every woman in the world was going to get it eventually. I closed the book. I wanted a cigarette, speaking of cancer. I sat there and thought of Linda and what this must mean to her.
And how she had to live in daily fear that it would come back. Some little routine test, some little sign, and then your doctor was talking about surgery again; or worse, not talking about surgery because it was too late even for that. I still wanted somebody to blame for all this. Random cosmic bad luck wasn’t good enough. I needed to see a Wanted poster with some bastard’s face and name on it.
The cigarette tasted so good, I had two of them, just sitting in my ragtop in the warm, glowing autumn afternoon watching the old guys play checkers on the bird-bombed green park benches.
I wanted Linda with me. A healthy, long-lived Linda. Hard to imagine the darkness of death when I thought of her on so fetching a day.