Molly Blessing was the daughter of the town’s most successful barber. Her dad cuts my hair.
I’ve known her since she was four and used to help her dad sweep up all the hair. She’d told me once that she’d been in love with David since kindergarten. Her parents had never approved. David wasn’t exactly what middle-class parents wanted in the way of son-in-law material.
Molly’s rival, Rita, came from the Knolls, was pretty in a striking jet-haired, green-eyed way, but was neither as refined nor as subtle as Molly. When she and David battled, which was frequently, they often battled with fists. Rita once gave him a black eye, which was an accomplishment for a girl who barely cleared five-one and one hundred pounds.
If there was a pattern in all the breakups and makeups, I couldn’t find it. David would be with one of them for two or three months and then go back to the other. Then he’d start running around, grabbing every girl he could. Then he’d go back to either Molly or Rita. It had to be a rough way to live.
None of this inspired a great relationship between the two girls. Their own battles were frequent and clamorous enough to feed the gossip machine for weeks at a time. They’d never gotten into a fist fight -Molly was as delicate as a long-stemmed glass-but other than that it was no holds barred.
Windshield smashed. Tires stabbed flat.
Insults. Threats. Dirty names on telephone booths and building walls all over town. Molly’s father once got a restraining order against Rita. And Rita’s father threatened to punch out Molly’s father if his daughter ever again wrote “Slut!” on the family’s 1951 Hudson, a bathtub-shaped vehicle that needed no help in disgracing itself.
And on and on, each girl as creatively petty as her rival-the grief, humiliation, rage extending from grade school all the way through high school graduation this past summer.
Molly wore a brown sweater and a short brown-and-yellow checked skirt. The brown kneesocks and penny loafers completed the preppie look. For all her looks, though, there had always been a sense of the frantic about Molly, as if she expected her world to come apart at any moment. I liked her; I liked both Molly and Rita, actually, different as they were. Both of them were good for David.
“Where are you going?” Molly asked when her arms slid away from David.
“McCain’s taking me to the police station.”
She grabbed my arm. “Oh, no, Mr.
McCain. Don’t you know what Cliffie’ll do to him?”
“I know what Cliffie’ll try to do to him, Molly. But I won’t let him.”
“Please, don’t make him go there, Mr.
McCain.”
I took her hand. It was slender but soft, not unlike Molly herself. “Look, Molly, Cliffie has good reason to talk to David. And it’ll only look worse for David if he keeps trying to avoid it. Cliffie could’ve put out an arrest warrant if he’d wanted to, but I convinced him to let me try and find David.
David called me, which is a point in his favor, and which I’ll really play up with Cliffie. And I’ll also play up that David came in of his own volition. That will help, too.”
“Oh, David,” she said, leaning against him, sliding her arm around him. I imagined David was feeling the full force of her love and it had to move him. Very few of us get that kind of love in our lifetimes.
“We’d better go,” I said gently as possible.
We got in the car. Molly hung on
David’s door like a camp follower unwilling to let go of her soldier.
“Will you call me as soon as you finish with Cliffie?” she said.
“I can imagine how your folks are taking this.”
“To hell with my folks,” Molly said, sounding harder and tougher than I’d ever heard her. I was impressed. She said to me, quietly, “I know who killed Sara, Mr. McCain.”
“You do?”
“Rita killed her. She despised Sara.
She dumped manure in the back seat of Sara’s Vw.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
I backed away from her, feeling guilty as hell. She looked lost, waving a feeble, lonely good-bye.
The downtown area was pretty bare for a warm Saturday afternoon. All the trees were doing their fire dances, the air was autumn-melancholy, and the town park was empty except for a young couple who looked enviably in love. He was sort of feeling her up but with some dignity, if you know what I mean.
I pulled in next to two patrol cars and a couple of private cars. In the back of the police station I saw Cliffie arguing with Rita Scully.
Cliffie didn’t see us until we were only a few feet away. Rita didn’t see us because her back was to us. She was shaking her fist in Cliffie’s face. She looked as good from the front as the back, faded jeans and an emerald green sweater loving every bit of her small but perfect body.
“Only you would be stupid enough to believe that David would kill somebody,” she shouted.
“Things happen like that all the time.”
“And why would he drag her out to the Coyles?
That doesn’t make any sense, either.”
“Well, look who’s here,” Cliffie said, smirking.
When she turned and saw David, Rita did exactly what Molly had done. She hurried to him and threw her arms around his neck. Then she kissed him with great open passion.
“He better save up all that good lovin’,”
Cliffie said. “He ain’t gonna be gettin’ much of it in prison. Least not the kind he wants, anyway.”
“He’s not going to prison.”
“Counselor, there’s one thing I admire about you.”
“Only one?”
“Your faith in your own legal abilities.
You’re about as unsuccessful a lawyer as this town has ever seen but you’re always makin’ these grand claims about how you’re gonna save this one and that one from prison.”
Once again, I refrained from reminding Cliffie how often he’d lost to Judge Whitney and me. I was willing to hurt his feelings; that wasn’t it. But his ego would be hurt and he’d be snake-mean to deal with if I reminded him of what a rube he was.
Rita went Molly one better. She started sobbing and she wouldn’t let go of David. You could see how embarrassed he was. But you could also see how aggrieved she was. She had to stand on tiptoes to hold him around the neck. She looked as childlike now as Molly had disappearing in my rearview mirror.
Cliffie said, “All right, Egan. Let’s go inside. Say good-bye to the pretty lady.”
I said, “I want to go along.”
“I’ll call you when you’re needed,
Counselor. First, I want to fingerprint him and get a couple of beauty pictures. We’ll make sure not to ask him anything till you’re with him.” He laughed. “He’s had a lot of time to work up an alibi. I’ll bet it’s a doozy.”
The alibi was what I was worried about.
Married or not, the woman needed to come forward.
David came over. “I’m ready.”
“Just be sure not to tell the counselor here that we worked you over with a rubber hose.”
“Is he always this funny?” David asked me.
“This is the good stuff. Wait till you hear the bad stuff.”
“Two funny guys,” Cliffie said. “Two very funny guys.”
Rita drifted over. She apparently didn’t want to get anywhere near Cliffie.
Given her temper, she might have attacked him.
“You have a hankie, Mr. McCain?”
“Sure.”
She put the hankie to her pert, freckled nose. She had one of those faces doubly pretty because of its vitality.
“He didn’t kill her,” she said.
“I know.”
“But that damned Cliffie’ll railroad him.”
“We won’t let him.”
She looked at me. “Who’ll pay you, Mr.
McCain?”
“We’ll work it out.”
She glanced around the gravel parking lot. The cruisers. The Jeep. Then she looked at the two-story concrete block building. The bars on the windows. The bars never really get to you until you know somebody behind them.
“Will they hurt him?”