“She rented the pad under the name of Mary Johnson, but the cops don’t figure that’s her real name. Paid a hundred and thirty-five dollars for the place, utilities included.” Murfin, as always, had savored the details.
“What do the cops figure?”
“They figure that she had a boyfriend or maybe even a husband who found out about her and Max and snuffed him out with a knife. Cut his throat. Did you know that’s how it happened?”
“Jesus,” I said, not exactly lying.
“I had to go down and identify him last night on account of Dorothy by then was threatening to kill herself for the thirteenth or fourteenth time. You know what?”
“What?”
“Max didn’t look too bad,” Murfin said. “Not for a guy who’d had his throat cut.”
I told Murfin I’d see him at two o’clock and then I called my Uncle Slick and invited him to lunch. But when I told him where and when I wanted to eat he said, “You can’t be serious.”
“It’s family business now, Slick,” I said, “and I don’t want to talk about it all jammed up against somebody else.”
“Well, at least we could have some wine,” he said.
I said, “I’ll leave that up to you,” and hung up.
After that I called a lawyer. It was about time. His name was Earl Inch, I had known him for years, and he was very expensive because he was very good. I had decided that I needed a very good lawyer. When I told him I was in trouble he said, “Good,” and we set up an appointment for three-thirty that afternoon. It seemed to be turning into a very long day.
Audrey swung around to face me after I hung up the phone and said, “How much trouble are you in?”
“Just enough so that I need a lawyer. And Slick. He can drop a word here and there that probably won’t do any harm.”
“You need any money?”
“No, but thanks for asking.”
“Sally,” she said. “You’re going to have to tell the police about Sally, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Will she be in trouble?”
“I don’t see how.”
“I wish she’d come home.”
“Maybe she will when she gets over the shock.”
“Harvey.”
“What?”
“If I can do anything, well — you know.”
“There’s one thing you can do,” I said.
“What?”
“Come out to the farm Saturday.”
Senator William Corsing’s office was in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, which used to be called the New Senate Office Building even though after a while it wasn’t very new anymore.
The Senator’s outer offices suffered from what all Congressional offices suffer from, a lack of space. The staff members were crowded up against each other, fighting for lebensraum against files, stacks of documents, boxes of envelopes and stationery, and what seemed to be a monumental pile of old copies of the Congressional Record.
But the staff seemed cheerful, busy, and confident that they were doing important work. Perhaps they were. I had to wait only a few minutes before I was shown into the Senator’s office by the young woman with the divinity-fudge voice. I think I must have expected something blond and flighty, but she was a tall, slim, cool-looking brunette about thirty, with smart, even wise brown eyes and a wry smile that let you know that she knew how her voice sounded, but there was nothing she could do about it and, what the hell, sometimes it was useful.
If his staff was cramped for space, the Senator wasn’t. He had a large, sunny corner office furnished by the government with leather chairs and a nice big desk. On the walls were photographs of him in the company of people he was proud to know. Most of them were rich and famous and powerful. The others looked as though they were determined to get that way.
There were also some nice photographs of the Ozarks, a shoe factory, the Mississippi River, some farm scenes, and one of Saarinen’s 630-foot-high stainless-steel catenary gateway arch which a lot of people in St. Louis still think looks like a plug for McDonald’s hamburgers. In addition to the photographs there was a large oil portrait of the Senator in a grave pose that made him look concerned and statesmanlike.
When I first met William Corsing he had been the thirty-year-old boy mayor of St. Louis. That was in 1966. He had very badly wanted to be the boy senator from Missouri, but nobody gave him much of a chance, in fact, almost none at all, and that’s why I had been called in. After a rather bitter campaign, nasty even for Missouri politics, he had squeaked in by less than 126 votes after a statewide recount. In 1972 he had run against the Nixon tide and won by fifty thousand votes. He was now forty-two, still young for the Senate, but nobody called him the boy anything anymore.
He had put on weight, although not enough to keep him from bounding around his desk to shake hands with me. His hair still flopped down into his eyes and he still brushed it away with a quick, nervous combing gesture. But the hair was no longer light brown, it was grey, and although his lopsided, awshucks grin had lost none of its charm, it might have become just a bit more mechanical.
I saw that there were also some new lines in his face, but there should have been at forty-two. His grey eyes, set wide from the beginning of his big, handsome nose, had lost none of their intelligence that bordered on brilliance, and I could feel them running over me in order to assess my own wear and tear. It made me give my moustache a couple of brushes.
“I like it,” he said. “It makes you look a little like David Niven — when he was a lot younger, of course.”
“Ruth likes it,” I said.
“How is she?”
“Still the same.”
“Still wonderful, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re lucky.”
“I know.”
“Sit down, Harvey, sit down, hell, anywhere, and I’ll get Jenny to get us some coffee.”
I sat down in one of the leather chairs and instead of going around behind his desk and sitting behind it, Corsing sat down in a chair next to me. It was a nice touch, and he knew it was a nice touch, and I didn’t mind at all.
Jenny was the tall brunette with the wise eyes and she and the Senator must have used telepathy to communicate, because as soon as we were seated she came into the office bearing a tray with two cups of coffee. “You use one spoonful of sugar, don’t you, Mr. Longmire?” she said and gave me another one of her wry smiles.
I looked at Corsing. “Hell,” he said and grinned, “that’s one you taught me. Always remember what they drink and what they use in their coffee.”
As Jenny was serving us the coffee she said, “I understand that you were with the Senator on his first campaign.”
“Yes, I was.”
“That must have been exciting,” she said.
“It was close,” I said and smiled.
“Are you handling any campaigns this year?” she said.
“No,” I said. “I don’t do that anymore.”
“What a pity,” she said, smiled again, and left.
I looked at Corsing again after Jenny had gone. He nodded, sighed not unhappily, and said, “She’s the one. Has been for four years now. Smart as hell.”
“She seems to be,” I said.
“Heard her over the phone?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What do you think?”
“I think I would have done anything she might have suggested.”
We were silent for a moment and then he said, “Annette’s not any better. In fact, they think she’s worse.”
“I’m sorry.” Annette was the Senator’s wife. The official diagnosis was paranoid-schizophrenia, but nobody was quite sure because Annette hadn’t said a word in four years that I knew of although it must have been six years now. Annette sat quietly in her room in a private sanitarium just outside of Joplin. She would probably sit there the rest of her life.