“He was talking to Robert again last night just like Robert was alive. He woke me up and I went into the spare room and stood over him and just listened. He was dreaming about that time he built that soapbox derby car for you boys. It was so wonderful hearing him talk like that. He seemed so happy.”
She put her hand on mine. “By the way, the judge called here for you late last night. She sounded — confused. I was very polite to her. I told her you hadn’t lived here in a long time.”
“She was drunk.”
“Yes, I’m afraid she was. She’s such a fine woman in so many ways. Maybe she needs help.”
“She does for sure. It’s getting her to accept it that’s the problem.”
And Mom said what she always says at such moments, “I’ll add her to my prayer list, honey.”
18
“Hi, is Nancy home?”
Mrs. Adams didn’t look happy to see me. She knew who I was and knew that my appearance on the doorstep of her large, Spanish-style home could not mean anything good.
“You’re Mr. McCain.”
“Yes.”
“We know the judge from our club.”
“I won’t keep her long.” I wanted to get on with it. I didn’t want to discuss her club or her rather extravagant house or her friendship with the judge.
Mrs. Adams was in her mid-forties, I guessed, so tanned from various trips that her skin was becoming lizardlike in places. She wore large sunglasses with white frames. They were girly and seemed frivolous on a face with a sharp, jutting nose and a mouth made for slander. In her blue walking shorts and sleeveless white blouse, she was every woman you saw playing golf at the country club.
“I think I’m going to refuse.”
“That’s your prerogative.”
“You don’t have a very good reputation with people at the club. They’ve been after the judge to fire you for several years now.”
A Negro maid in a crisp gray uniform appeared behind her in the air-conditioned shadows of the large house.
“Good day, Mr. McCain.”
“I need everything you can dig up on Nancy Adams.”
“She isn’t anybody I’ve ever heard of before.” I could hear Kenny Thibodeau take a deep drag of his cigarette. “I need to finish this chapter. I need to read up on lesbians, I guess. This is lesbian novel number nine and I’m running out of ideas for what they can do in bed.”
“That’s pretty much what happened to John Steinbeck, wasn’t it? Didn’t he run out of lesbian ideas for his books?”
“You’re just jealous you don’t have my career.”
“You know, in a weird way I am. I look at all your books in your trailer and I do feel a little pang. That you’ve been able to start and finish so many of them. The one time I tried to write a novel, I never got past page twenty.”
“I didn’t know that. How come you never told me?”
“Embarrassed, I guess.”
Then Kenny said, “I was going to talk to you later in the day, but I guess I might as well tell you now. You asked me to dig up what I could. So far I’ve got two real interesting things.
“The first thing is, Richie Neville had two places to work in. His cabin, and then he rented the upper floor of the Parker House, that supper club out on the highway. That was pretty much a secret.”
“How’d you find out about it?”
“That was pure Sherlockian fortitude, man. I called the photo shop where he bought all his supplies. The guy there said that he liked working with Richie and didn’t mind delivering to the cabin but that the Parker House took an hour back and forth.”
“Good work, Kenny. I have a plaque here with your name on it.”
“And then when I was in Iowa City last night, I went over to where David Leeds lived and asked some of his friends about him. They still can’t believe he’s dead.”
“Yeah, so what’s the one interesting thing?”
“You know his sister you were talking to?”
“Yeah?”
“They said he didn’t have a sister. He was an only child.”
“He was the perfect type of renter for us. Real quiet.”
“How much time did he spend here?”
“Couple of nights a week, two, three I’d guess.”
“He have many visitors?”
“Not that I noticed, anyway. His brother Will.”
Ted Wheeler, the owner of the Parker House, had played football for the Iowa Hawkeyes back in the early fifties. He’d known he wasn’t good enough for the pros, so he did what so many in sports do, he opened an insurance agency. Who wouldn’t want an esteemed Hawkeye as their insurance man?
He’d made so much money with the insurance that he was able to buy an aging restaurant on the highway and turn it into another prosperous business. A bit of a drive for small-town folk not used to driving more than a couple of miles for anything in town, but the drive just seemed to make the evening more special. It was a memorable night going to the Parker House.
I’d found Ted in back of his restaurant hosing off his new, black Jaguar. He was a short, thick man, blond hair thinning now, with a pleasant face that included a badly broken and badly set nose.
The water sparkled rainbows in the late afternoon sunlight and smelled of the rubber hose.
“The police been here to talk to you yet?”
He wiped a massive paw on his T-shirt. “Not yet. I don’t think too many people knew about this place.”
“I’d appreciate a look.”
He shrugged. “Fine by me.” He frowned. “He was a nice kid.”
I didn’t correct him.
“You want me to let you in now?”
“Please.”
“I really appreciate how you took care of my sis that time. The dog ripped her leg up pretty good. But then that shit owner brought in that vet who said that she must have done something to rile the dog herself. He looked pretty good on the stand there, but you brought him down right away.”
“I didn’t have to do much. His story didn’t make a lot of sense. And even if she had riled the dog, he was still responsible for what the dog had done.”
He twisted the hose off. I followed him up the outside stairs leading to the apartment on the second floor.
The front room must have been half the apartment. New linoleum, throw rugs, a pair of couches covered with matching floral slipcovers, a bookcase packed with a lot of Mickey Spillane and dozens of science fiction titles, a three-foot stack of albums that ran to Elvis and rockabilly types, and a refrigerator-freezer packed with every kind of tasty but spurious TV dinner on the market. With the long front window and light of the fading day, there was a pleasant college-dorm feel to the place.
“I need to get back and get the troops ready for tonight,” Ted said. “I always give ’em a little pep talk, you know, like a coach at halftime.” He laughed. “They hate it, think it’s real corny. But it’s a reminder that I expect them to do everything they can to keep the customer happy. You know how that goes. You start out on a job and pretty soon the customer starts looking like the enemy. Hell, I’m the owner and some nights I don’t want to wait on certain customers. The real picky ones, I mean. I’m half tempted to say, ‘Well, since you find so many things wrong with this place, why don’t you go somewhere else?’ But I never would, you know what I mean? I’ve worked too hard to get this place rolling to do anything stupid like that.” He gave me a wave. “Good hunting, Sam.”
I’ve always felt self-conscious picking over the bones of the dead. The left-behind letters and photos and books that seem to contradict what you knew of the person. On one job, trying to learn the identity of the man who’d robbed and strangled an eighty-six-year-old longtime widow, I found a fresh pack of Trojans beneath a silk slip; on another investigation, I found a letter written to the deceased man from the child he never knew he’d had until a few weeks before his death. And then there’d been the brutal street cop with a ninth-grade education who’d been killed by a man he’d beaten a false confession out of, the cop belonging to both a classical records club and the Great Books society.