“Why not?”
“Just too good-looking. Girls were always making passes at him and right in front of Lucy. I just couldn’t have dealt with that.”
“How did Nick find out that David had been at your house?”
“My dad told him when Nick came over on his motorcycle that night. You should’ve heard Nick. I was really scared. He wanted to go and find David right then. He kept saying he was going to kill him.” She started picking at her fingers.
The phone rang. I excused myself and picked it up. Kenny Thibodeau. “A little news for you. The afternoon Neville and Leeds were shot to death, Rob Anderson asked Ned Flannery to make him up a good-sized ‘tar baby’ with a rope around his neck.” Flannery was a local artisan. “Ned wouldn’t do it, of course. Anderson offered him a hundred bucks.”
I saw Nancy glancing at her watch. She started to stand up. “Hang on a minute, Kenny.”
“I’d better go. I’m s’posed to meet my mom in a few minutes. I’m pretty much done, anyway.”
“Well, thanks for coming in. I really appreciate it.”
As she left, Kenny said, “Pretty sick, huh?”
“Very.”
“I wonder if he got somebody to do it for him.”
“I’ll ask him when I see him.”
“Man, I get all hepped up watchin’ TV and all the Freedom Riders and thinkin’ everybody will get behind all this, they’ll see what bullshit racism is. But it’s like bein’ stoned when you think like that — because when you come down again, nothin’s changed. People’re gettin’ tar babies made.”
“It’s hard to watch TV anymore. You want to put your fist through the screen.”
I heard Kenny strike a match and light a cigarette. “That was pretty cool last night. Those old mountain songs, huh? You still gotta hear this Bob Dylan guy. He’s as good as Woody Guthrie.”
I laughed. “You’ll guarantee that?”
I went over and locked the door. Jamie wouldn’t be back for another fifteen minutes.
The wall safe was behind a framed reproduction of an Edward Hopper painting. I pulled the frame back on its hinges and went to work on the safe. It was good-sized. When I got it open, I pulled out the manila envelopes with the blackmail negatives. Four envelopes.
I set them on my desk, grabbed the phone book, and went to work. I had sealed them all with extra-heavy tape. I hadn’t looked inside. It wasn’t that I was such a moral person. I just didn’t want to know what the negatives would tell me. Because once I knew, it would change my attitude, however subtly, toward the people in the pictures. And two of them, excluding the senator, I considered myself at least casual friends with.
I called each name on the envelopes and said that I’d come into possession of something that Richie Neville had inadvertently left in my office. I wondered if they’d like to stop by and pick it up between five and seven tonight. I gave them each specific times to be here. They all agreed to appear.
Most important, I said that I hadn’t had time to look at the contents and that there’d be no charge. They all sounded relieved. One woman started crying and saying thank you so often, she sounded like the lucky contestant on a quiz show.
The flower shop was nearby. I decided to see if Lucy was working.
Karen porter said, “I still think you should have a nice fresh flower for your lapel. I hear judges are impressed by things like that.”
She was always fun to clown with. “Not any judges I know on this planet.”
The small shop was filled as always with the sights and scents of dozens of flowers, arrangements, and potted plants. A pair of women in straw hats were dawdling over carnations while the little boy with them looked as if he’d suddenly found himself in hell.
Karen, in her usual crisp white button-down shirt, long blue apron, and chignon, still looked as if she should be in a fancy wine ad in The New Yorker. New England, modest wealth, intelligence, quiet beauty.
“You lucked out, Sam. Ellen’s off running errands.”
“Am I going to get you in trouble if I go in the back and talk to Lucy?”
“Not if you happened to have snuck in the back door and I didn’t happen to see it.” She frowned. “I don’t know why Ellen has to see you as the enemy.”
To me the reason was obvious. Ellen was afraid that Lucy might have killed David Leeds and Richie Neville. Lucy had said herself that David had wanted to break it off. I represented a threat to Ellen and her daughter.
“I appreciate it, Karen.”
“Just don’t get me involved. That lady has got a temper.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to be here, Mr. McCain.”
Lucy, in jeans and a black Hawkeye T-shirt, was using a spritzer to water rows of plants.
“I just wanted to see how you were doing.”
“How do you think I’m doing? That’s sort of a stupid question, isn’t it?”
“Now that you mention it, it is. I apologize.”
“It’s like those stupid reporters asking parents how they feel when something’s happened to one of their kids. ‘How do you feel?’ That really pisses me off, being that insensitive.”
The rear of the shop had been built as an afterthought, a shedlike area that housed two huge refrigerated glassed-in cases to keep flowers fresh and then plants and seedlings sitting on sawhorses that had been covered with plywood.
“Have you talked to Rob?”
“Not if I can help it.”
Spritz, spritz.
Lucy said: “I did talk to David’s sister. She called me and we had coffee. I liked her very much.”
I didn’t tell her of David’s real relationship with his “sister.”
“So do I. I just wish I had some news for her.”
“A lot of the kids around town think it was Rob.”
“Or Nick.”
Spritz, spritz.
“Or Nick.”
The smell of damp earth brought back a memory of my Uncle Bob’s funeral. He’d died in Korea. When they buried him here, a light rain had given the grave dirt a particular odor. I smelled that odor here, now, with the spritzed dirt in the various plants.
“You know anything about Rob trying to get a tar baby made up?”
She nodded, still not looking at me. “Oh, yes. I heard all about it from a couple of people at the craft store. Good old Rob. God, I don’t know how I could’ve gone out with him all that time.”
I said, as carefully as possible, “I guess I never really asked you.”
“Well, then, I’m sure you will. Whatever it is.”
“I just need to know, just to keep everybody equal, where you were the night Neville and David were killed.”
Now she looked up. “Why, I was out at Neville’s cabin, killing them. I’m surprised it took you this long to ask. So do you put handcuffs on me here or do we wait until we get in your car?”
“You could’ve done it, Lucy. You know that.”
“You stupid ass,” she said, pushing me aside so she could reach another tray of seedlings. “I loved him. I was willing to destroy my father’s career because of him. Why would I kill him?”
Karen appeared in the doorway. She was irritated: “Hold it down, you two. We’ve got customers, for God’s sake.”
“Sorry,” I said.