Which was not an invitation I usually wanted. The judge kept a considerable number of rattlesnakes in glass cages on the first floor of her house. I was always waiting for one of them to get loose.
I stood up. “I’ll get right on it.” I couldn’t recall ever seeing the judge in such a pensive mood. Usually, when she’s going to war with Cliff Sykes, Jr., she’s positively ecstatic.
But when her cousin was involved, and first cousin at that, I supposed even Judge Whitney — a woman who had buried three husbands, and who frequently golfed with President Eisenhower when he was in the Midwest, and who had been ogled by Khrushchev when he visited a nearby Iowa farm — I supposed even Judge Whitney had her melancholy moments.
She went back to her desk, perched on the edge of it, loaded up another rubber band, and shot it at me.
“Your nerves are getting better, McCain,” she said. “You don’t twitch as much as you used to.”
“I’ll take that as an example of your Christmas cheer,” I said. “You noting that I don’t twitch as much as I used to, I mean.”
Then she glowered at me. “Nail his butt to the wall, McCain. My family’s honor is at stake here. Rick’s a hothead but he’s not a killer. He cares too much about the family name to soil it that way.”
Thus basking in the glow of Christmas spirit, not to mention a wee bit of patrician hubris, I took my leave of the handsome Judge Whitney.
2
Red Ford ragtops can get a little cold around Christmas time. I had everything buttoned down but winter winds still whacked the car every few yards or so.
The city park was filled with snowmen and Christmas angels as Bing Crosby and Perry Como and Johnny Mathis sang holiday songs over the loudspeakers lining the merchant blocks. I could remember being a kid, in the holiday concerts in the park. People stood there in the glow of Christmas-tree lights listening to us sing for a good hour. I always kept warm by staring at the girl I had a crush on that particular year. Even back then, I gravitated toward the ones who didn’t want me. I guess that’s why my favorite holiday song is “Blue Christmas” by Elvis. It’s really depressing, which gives it a certain honesty for romantics like myself.
I pulled in the drive of Linda Palmer’s apartment house. It was a box with two apartments up, two down. There was a gravel parking lot in the rear. The front door was hung with holly and a plastic bust of Santa Claus.
Inside, in the vestibule area with the mailboxes, I heard Patti Page singing a Christmas song, and I got sentimental about Pamela Forrest again. During one of the times that she’d given up on good old Stewart, she’d gone out with me a few times. The dates hadn’t meant much to her, but I looked back on them as the halcyon period of my entire life, when giants walked the earth and you could cut off slices of sunbeams and sell them as gold.
“Hi,” I said as soon as the music was turned down and the door opened up.
The young woman who answered the bell to the apartment opposite Linda Palmer’s was cute in a dungaree-doll sort of way — ponytail and Pat Boone sweatshirt and jeans rolled up to mid calf.
“Hi.”
“My name’s McCain.”
“I’m Bobbi Thomas. Aren’t you Judge Whitney’s assistant?”
“Well, sort of.”
“So you’re here about—”
“Linda Palmer.”
“Poor Linda,” she said, and made a sad face. “It’s scary living here now. I mean, if it can happen to Linda—”
She was about to finish her sentence when two things happened at once. A tiny calico kitten came charging out of her apartment between her legs, and a tall man in a gray uniform with DERBY CLEANERS sewn on his cap walked in and handed her a package wrapped in clear plastic. Inside was a shaggy gray throw rug and a shaggy white one and a shaggy fawn-colored one.
“Appreciate your business, miss,” the DERBY man said, and left.
I mostly watched the kitten. She was a sweetie. She walked straight over to the door facing Bobbi’s. The card in the slot still read LINDA PALMER.
“You mind picking her up and bringing her in? I just need to put this dry cleaning away.”
Ten minutes later, the three of us sat in her living room. I say three because the kitten, who’d been introduced to me as Sophia, sat in my lap and sniffed my coffee cup whenever I raised it to drink. The apartment was small but nicely kept. The floors were oak and not spoiled by wall-to-wall carpeting. She took the throw rugs from the plastic dry-cleaning wrap and spread them in front of the fireplace.
“They get so dirty,” she explained as she straightened the rugs, then walked over and sat down.
Then she nodded to the kitten. “We just found her downstairs in the laundry room one day. There’s a small TV down there and Linda and I liked to sit down there and smoke cigarettes and drink Cokes and watch Bandstand. Do you think Dick Clark’s a crook? My boyfriend does.” She shrugged. “Ex-boyfriend. We broke up.” She tried again: “So do you think Dick Clark’s a crook?”
A disc jockey named Alan Freed was in trouble with federal authorities for allegedly taking bribes to play certain songs on his radio show. Freed didn’t have enough power to make a hit record and people felt he was being used as a scapegoat. On the other hand, Dick Clark did have the power to make or break a hit record (Lord, did he, with American Bandstand on ninety minutes several afternoons a week), but the feds had rather curiously avoided investigating him in any serious way.
“Could be,” I said. “But I guess I’d rather talk about Linda.”
She looked sad again. “I guess that’s why I was talking about Dick Clark. So we wouldn’t have to talk about Linda.”
“I’m sorry.”
She sighed. “I just have to get used to it, I guess.” Then she looked at Sophia. “Isn’t she sweet? We called her our Christmas kitten.”
“She sure is.”
“That’s what I started to tell you. One day Linda and I were downstairs, and there Sophia was. Just this little lost kitten. So we both sort of adopted her. We’d leave our doors open so Sophia could just wander back and forth between apartments. Sometimes she slept here, sometimes she slept over there.” She raised her eyes from the kitten and looked at me. “He killed her.”
“Rick?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Why do I say that? Are you kidding? You should’ve seen the arguments they had.”
“He ever hit her?”
“Not that I know of.”
“He ever threaten her?”
“All the time.”
“You know why?” I asked.
“Because he was so jealous of her. He used to sit across the street at night and just watch her front window. He’d sit there for hours.”
“Would she be in there at the time?”
“Oh, sure. He always claimed she had this big dating life on the side but she never did.”
“Anything special happen lately between them?”
“You mean you don’t know?”
“I guess not.”
“She gave him back his engagement ring.”
“And that—”
“He smashed out her bedroom window with his fist. This was in the middle of the night and he was really drunk. I called the police on him. Just because he’s a Whitney doesn’t mean he can break the rules any time he feels like it.”
I’d been going to ask her if she was from around here but the resentment in her voice about the Whitneys answered my question. The Whitneys had been the valley’s most imperious family for a little more than a century now.
“Did the police come?”