“True enough. Your spies got something right for once.”
Judge Esme Anne Whitney’s office was one of timeless solemnity: deep leather chairs, rich carpeting, flawless wainscoting, two full walls of legal tomes, and a desk big enough to play a passing fair game of Ping-Pong on. It was always cleared off.
“Maybe you haven’t noticed, McCain, but the Sykes family is our enemy. They stand for everything we revile — or at least that I revile. And I assumed you did, too.”
“She’s cleaning up the police force, for one thing. And for another, she’s not going along with all of Cliffie’s arrests.”
“And she’s very good-looking.”
“Really? I hadn’t noticed that.”
“I don’t want you to see her anymore.”
Per usual, she parked herself on the edge of the desk with a Gauloise and a cup of coffee laced with brandy. No rubber bands this morning, which was an indicator of how seriously she took this.
“I’m serious, McCain.”
She looked regal in her fitted gray dress and oversized, vaguely African-style earrings. No wonder she’d managed to find four men to marry her. Even in her sixties, she was still a desirable woman, if, that is, you caught her before a day’s worth of sipping brandy-soaked coffee began to take its toll.
“You can order me not to work with her. That comes under the heading of employment. But you can’t order me not to see her for pleasure. That comes under the heading of private life.”
This was my morning for shocks as she said, “I thought we were friends, McCain.”
My instinct was to laugh. The words hadn’t come out right, which I’d put down to bad acting. But then I saw the shimmer of tears in her ice-blue eyes and knew better.
The judge had never before said anything like this to me. She’d always made it clear that she’d hired me because she couldn’t find anybody any better who lived here in town. Not exactly your ringing endorsement. Never warm, most of the time barely courteous, sometimes damned mean, she was fond of reminding me of her social background and position and my lack thereof.
And now this. Served with tears yet. But those first tears were now followed by more tears that actually escaped her eyes and sparkled on her cheeks.
“I just feel so damned alone sometimes, McCain. No friends to confide in except back East; nobody to have dinner with at the end of the day.”
I knew what I was seeing, of course, but now wasn’t the time to talk about it. In the years I’d been her court investigator, I’d seen her drinking get increasingly serious. And now she was at the point where she needed to make the trip up to the Minnesota clinic that was disguised as a resort for rich people.
Four, even two years ago, she would never have let me see her so vulnerable. She enjoyed being imperious. She even enjoyed jokes about being imperious.
I found myself standing up and walking to her. I found myself putting my hands gently on her shoulders.
And she found herself jerking away from me and snapping, “Don’t you dare ever touch me like that, McCain! I’m your employer, not one of your little strumpets!”
I thought of explaining myself but realized it wouldn’t help either of us. I’d embarrassed her. I’d damaged her pride. People just didn’t go around touching imperious people the way they would little strumpets.
There was only one thing left for me to do. I walked to the door. “I’ll give you my word that I will never cooperate with Jane Sykes on a case. If we have a relationship, it’ll be strictly a personal one. And if that’s not good enough, then—”
“Just get the hell out of here, McCain, and don’t come around until I tell you to.”
She was drinking deeply from her cup as I quietly closed the door and stepped out into the hallway.
Walter Margolin had been a particularly obnoxious hall monitor. We’d always had the sense that he was too goody-goody even for the nuns. I remember Sister Mary Rosemary standing behind him while he was ragging on some poor little girl for taking too long at the water fountain. The sister rolled her eyes as Walter became more and more dramatic.
In his graying crew cut, huge red bow tie, and tan summer-weight suit with enough patriotic pins on it to start a war, Walter was now a grown-up version of a hall monitor.
He was vice president of loans at First Trust Bank. His desk sat in front of the vault, and it was to him that supplicants came to plead their cases. I’d always thought he should have a kneeler in front of his desk, the way you do in confessionals. Because from what I’d been told, you had to show Walter a great deal of deference and piety before he would even consider your loan.
He looked up and gave me the hall monitor’s smirk he’d perfected by the time we were in fourth grade.
“Well, well, well, I knew you’d be in here someday, McCain. Destitute and in dire need of help.” The smirk got smirkier. “Do you remember seventh grade?”
“Barely. I was drunk for most of it.”
“Very funny, McCain. I seem to remember a certain juvenile delinquent who dropped a water balloon on my head from the third floor.”
“I was framed, Walter.”
“And now,” he said with great satisfaction, leaning back in his executive chair, “you’ve come here to see if I’ll be decent enough to forget how you humiliated me and give you a loan.”
I tossed the envelope on his desk. “That’s court permission to open Richie Neville’s safe-deposit box.”
He leaned forward. “That’s not going to happen. Only the person designated as his closest family member can open that now.”
“Open it up and read it.”
“You don’t seem to understand, McCain — but then you were never real bright, anyway — that court orders don’t matter. We have our own rules of procedure here.”
“If you say so, Walter.”
I snatched back the envelope and headed straight for the large corner office where the bank president resided when he wasn’t attending vital banking conferences in the Bahamas or playing nine rounds at the country club.
I got what I wanted.
“Here, Sam, let me take care of that for you. We can open that safe-deposit box right now.”
There was a tremor in his voice that attracted a few glances and he came upon me so fast he almost bumped into me.
But he did lead me to the large solemn room in which the safe-deposit boxes were kept.
There was more than three thousand dollars in cash and four manila envelopes with familiar last names written in ink on them. I took a quick glance inside and found photographic negatives. I didn’t look at any of them.
The new black Cadillac didn’t belong in one of the three parking slots that came with my office. Neither did the man sitting behind the wheel.
He got out of his car as soon as I got out of mine.
“I suppose you’ll grow up someday, Sam, and get an adult car instead of that convertible.”
“And I suppose you’ll grow up someday, Anderson, and stop bleeding poor people dry.”
“Nobody else will loan them money. I have to charge the rates I do. And I don’t intend to defend myself to somebody like you.”
“You just did. Now what the hell do you want?”
“I want you to leave my son alone. Because if you don’t, you’ll be damned sorry.”
Rob Anderson’s father was tall, slim, sour, and a professional nag. He owned four loan companies throughout the state that were the last resort for debt-ridden people. I’d seen it calculated that his loan rate ended up being in the fifty-five percent area by the time a loan was paid off. The money he made, and it was as much as anybody made in our town, automatically made him respectable, never mind that he traded on human misery. He was an elder in his Lutheran church, he frequently wrote guest editorials for the newspaper, and he even ran radio spots that were long enough to promote his usurious business and give him forty-five seconds to expound on how America was in the process of losing its moral compass. Whatever the hell that was. He was one of the Midwest grotesques Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis had identified as sui generis long, long ago.