His name was announced in that sterile tone of all hospital announcements.
“Give her a day or two, Sam. Then come back and see her. I need to go.”
Judge Whitney submitting herself to the structure and vagaries of a clinic. Life lived at the mercy of somebody else’s rules. Unthinkable.
Part Three
21
“Good morning, Mr. C.”
“’Morning, Jamie.”
“My birthday is next week. And guess where Turk is taking me?”
“The Dairy Queen?”
She laughed. “No, a birthday is a big event. He’s taking me to see Frankie Avalon.”
“Is Frankie Avalon still around?”
“He is in Des Moines. Don’t you like him?”
“He’s all right. But I’d take Chuck Berry, personally.”
“He puts too much grease on his hair. Like Jerry Lewis.”
I knew this could go on forever, so I said, “Any calls?”
“Just one. Nancy Adams.”
I got myself seated behind my desk, scanned down the “To Do” list I always make for myself the day before.
“You want her phone number?”
“Sure.” She gave it to me and I dialed. “Nancy Adams, please. This is Sam McCain returning her call.”
“Dammit,” the woman said, after cupping the phone. Or kind of cupping the phone. “Your father and I told you not to call him.” I couldn’t hear what Nancy said. The woman again: “May she call you back? She’s washing her hair right now.”
“Or I could call her back.”
“Well, actually we have to run a few errands after she’s finished with her hair. And she’ll call you after that. Good-bye, Mr. McCain.”
“Did you take the call from Nancy Adams or did the service?” I asked after hanging up.
“The service. It came in before I got here.”
I dialed the three digits to connect with our answering service. “Hi, this is Sam. Did you take the call from a Nancy Adams?”
“Yes, I did, Mr. McCain.”
“Did she say anything other than she’d like me to call her back?”
“Not really. Except—”
“Except what?”
“Well, I sort of had the impression she was sort of nervous. It was her tone, I mean. She didn’t say anything specific. She just sounded real uptight.”
“Thanks, Betty.”
I had three briefs I had to read before I could spend any time on the Leeds murder. Or on what I was going to say to Judge Whitney when the time came to go up and see her and bring up the subject of the clinic in Minnesota.
In the next two hours I caught up on everything pressing. I’d told Jamie to tell everybody I was out. She knew the exceptions were Judge Whitney and my folks. Right now, she didn’t have to worry about the judge.
When I finished, I leaned back in my chair and started mentally plotting out my argument for court tomorrow morning. An especially ugly divorce case. I represented a mill worker who, in response to the affair his wife was having, took their three-year-old daughter for the weekend without telling anybody (a) that he did it, or (b) that he was taking a hotel room in Cedar Rapids.
It was easy to portray the wife as a woman of soiled virtue. But I knew John, the husband, was almost psychotically suspicious of her and had made their lives hell from the start of their marriage. John was a decent man and Sandy was a decent woman. She claimed she was justified in having an affair because he’d had so many himself. The joys of divorce court. Plenty of psychic pain and blame to go around with the kids in the middle.
She came in just before lunchtime.
Turk had made his usual appearance (“Hey, Mr. C, you always look so busy, man, you should relax more.”) his black leather jacket looking like something from West Side Story rather than The Blackboard Jungle.
A few minutes after Turk and Jamie left, Nancy Adams stood in the doorway and said, “Are you busy, Mr. McCain?”
“Hi, Nancy.”
She smiled nervously, a perfect young woman, slim in tan walking shorts and a starched white blouse, possessed of long, tanned arms and legs and a small earnest face. Her dark hair was worn short in a shag. “I wondered if we could talk a little bit.”
“Sure.”
“Don’t think badly of my mom. She just doesn’t want to see me dragged into court or anything. That’s why she said what she did on the phone.” A voice as soft as her brown eyes.
“I know my office isn’t much, but don’t be afraid to come inside.” She was still standing on the threshold.
“Oh, right.”
She came in and took one of the client chairs. “I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing.”
“If you’re telling the truth, then that’s the right thing.”
“That sounds like something you’d hear on TV.”
I laughed. “A little pompous?”
She smiled. She was blushing. “I probably shouldn’t have said that.” I’d been doing that lately — beginning to sound like Dear Abby.
“I have some pop in the refrigerator.”
“No, thanks.” Still busy with her hands. “I guess I may as well just tell you, huh?”
“Probably best, yes.”
She sat up a little straighter. “Well, you know I go out with Nick Hannity. Or I should say, used to go out with him.”
“You broke up?”
“Yes. He... he told you and the police that he was with me during the time David Leeds and Richie Neville were being killed out at the cabin.”
“Yes, he did.”
“Well, he wasn’t. I didn’t see him till much later that night.” She took a deep breath. “And the fact is, he hated David. One night when David and Lucy were having some problems, David came over to my house and we just talked. My folks — please don’t think they’re bad people because they’re not — they were pretty mad about him coming over like that. You know, with my dad’s position and all, he said if people thought I was going out with a Negro then they wouldn’t want to do business with him anymore.”
Another deep breath. “In fact — and this was really embarrassing — David and I were sitting out on the front porch talking and my dad came out and said he wanted to talk to me. He was very cold to David. Wouldn’t say hello or anything after David was so polite to him and everything. Anyway, my dad got me inside the front door and he was so mad he didn’t care if David heard him or not. He just ranted and raved at me the way he does sometimes. He said some very mean things about colored people and David in particular. David couldn’t help but hear him. He told me to go back out there and get rid of David in five minutes or he’d come out there and get rid of him himself. I was afraid to go back out after all the terrible things he said but I didn’t have any choice.”
“What did David say when you went back to the porch?”
“He didn’t say anything. He was gone.” She shook her head. “That was the last time I ever saw him. But that wasn’t all.”
“When was this, by the way?”
“Two nights before they were killed.”
“Fine. Now you said there was something else, too?”
She sat up straight again. “I’d been taking some time off from Nick. He was a year older and he was one of the really cool guys in high school and everybody always told me how lucky I was to be going with him — I just always thought we’d get married. But then I started going to the university in Iowa City and seeing him constantly and — I didn’t like him. I always knew he was sort of a bully, but it really came out when he was on campus. And he got mad if I even said hello to some guy. So when Rob told him about Lucy seeing David — he went insane. He had no reason to be jealous of anything. Even if I’d had a crush on David, I’m not sure how I feel about dating Negroes — I’m being honest here — and I’d sure never date any boy, white or colored, who looked like David.”