“Mambo,” the lovely Pamela Forrest said when I walked into the office outside Judge Whitney’s chambers.
“Mambo?”
“She’s going to New York on vacation and wants to brush up on her dancing. She’s got that dance step thing you see on Tv all over the floor.”
Along with powder for jock itch, gum for your bad breath and salve for your pig’s hemorrhoids (you have to live in Iowa to get commercials like that), Mother Tv had lately been offering us these big plastic things you put on the floor with dance steps all over them. Just follow the steps and you’re the next Fred Astaire.
“She’s not in a very good mood, McCain,”
Pamela said.
“Boy, there’s a shock.”
“I mean worse than usual.”
“Impossible.”
“I’m not kidding, McCain. She’s really on the warpath.”
“Any particular reason?”
“Didn’t you see the paper this morning?”
“Uh-uh.”
She held it up: Millionaire Kills
Wife, Self. The deck below read:
Prominent Whitney Family Stunned.
Next to a photo of Kenny was a photo not of Susan but of Judge Whitney. The paper is pretty much Democratic and the judge is the polar opposite. She has written them scathing letters for some of their editorial stands. They love to publish them because, despite her obvious intelligence and genuine erudition, she does sound slightly crazed, especially when she defends the John Birch Society.
“Well, they finally got their crack at her.”
“They sure did, McCain. I feel sorry for her.”
“I guess I might as well get it over with.”
“I’ll buzz her.”
While Pamela buzzed the judge and asked her if she needed anything, I looked at all the galoshes lined up against the wall across the hall.
Iowa winter. It was like being back in second grade, in the cloakroom.
The judge was doing her dance steps, following the long sheet of cheap white plastic laid on the floor. The footsteps she followed were black. Up and back, up and back. She was doing the mambo in her judicial robes. I wondered if Oliver Wendell would have approved.
The rumor was he’d preferred the cha-cha.
“What’re you using for music?” I asked.
“In my head.”
“Ah.”
“I listened to three mambo songs over and over last night. I’ve memorized them. It’s like having a portable radio. Except I don’t need the radio.”
“Clever.”
“So what do you think, McCain? Do I look all right?”
As a number of her suitors pointed out, picture Kate Hepburn and you’ve got Judge Whitney. Physically, that is.
Emotionally, Judge Whitney makes Kate seem like a softy. That’s why I grinned watching her mambo. In her way, she not only possesses true patrician good looks, she’s also cute as hell.
“Cute.”
“I look cute?”
“You look cute.”
She didn’t say anything, but she smiled to herself. Beautiful, she’d heard plenty of times.
Cute, not so often. If ever.
“I’m going to do all the nightclubs,” her honor said, slightly out of breath. “One of my ex-husbands even got me a front-row table to see Sinatra.”
“Just be sure he doesn’t beat you up.”
“Who? My ex-husband or Sinatra?”
“I was thinking about Sinatra but if you’re referring to ex-husband number three, Renaldo, that boy had a pretty bad temper, too.”
“It’s the Latin in him.”
“Not to mention the Scotch.”
I went over and sat down and sipped at the coffee I’d swiped from the outer office.
Five minutes later, we got down to work.
She went over and sat behind her desk. She said, “You saw the paper?”
“I saw the paper.”
“I’m taking you at your word that he didn’t kill her.”
“He didn’t kill her.”
She leaned forward on her elbows and glared at me. “Then when the hell are you going to prove it?
I pay you a lot of money.”
“Not a lot.”
“Well, a lot more than most private investigators get.”
“Most private investigators aren’t lawyers.”
She made a face and slumped back in her leather chair. She reached down and pulled the middle drawer of her desk out. Moments later, she strung a rubber band between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. Our little game.
She shot the rubber band. I tilted my head to the right. The rubber band missed me by an inch.
“Your instincts are getting better, McCain.”
“Thank you. I was worried about that.”
“I used to be able to hit you every time.”
She picked up another rubber band. This time, she got me square in the forehead. “My second husband wasn’t worth a damn at this, either. I could always hit him.”
“That’s probably what sank the marriage.
You lost all respect for him.”
“What sank the marriage, my sarcastic friend, was the fact that he was spending my inheritance in very, very foolish ways.”
“Ah.”
Another rubber band. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
She aimed and fired. I leaned to the left on this one but the rubber band glanced off my ear. She smiled. “Nice to see I haven’t lost my touch.” Then she sat forward again, picked up her package of Gaulioses and had herself a cigarette.
“She was unfaithful,” she said. “Susan, I mean.”
“She had reason to be.”
“I realize that my nephew wasn’t exactly a prize, McCain.”
“That’s very perceptive of you.”
“But the fact remains she was unfaithful.”
“Not that he ever was, of course.”
“There’s a difference with a man.”
“The old double standard?”
She shook her head. Exhaled smoke. “Not exactly. A man, at least a man like
Kenny, wants simple sexual relationships.
And lots of them. A woman like Susan, who feels wronged in her marriage, wants an emotional relationship as well as a sexual one.”
She picked up another rubber band. This time, she missed me. She did another quick one and hit me.
“We’re tied, McCain.”
“The tension is on.”
“Find her lover and you’ll find her killer.
I’m convinced of that.”
“Somebody was blackmailing her.”
“What?”
I told her what Frazier had told me this morning. I also told her about him visiting my apartment.
“What was he looking for?”
“Something to tie me to the blackmail, I guess.”
“He thought you were the blackmailer?”
“He seemed to think that was a strong possibility, anyway. He figures the way I nose around this town for you, I picked up something to blackmail Susan with.”
“What if her blackmailer and her lover were the same person?”
“I’ve thought about that, too,” I said.
“Then I’d say it’s time for you to get your ass in gear,” she said. “Wouldn’t you?”
“Is that a hint?”
“No, that’s an order.”
She glared at the newspaper on her desk.
“I can’t wait until they have to retract that headline.”
“You going to sue them?”
“Oh, no. It’s not the money. I’ve got plenty of that, McCain. I’d much rather have them grovel.”
Anybody else, the line might have been ironic. She was perfectly serious.
I stood up. She brought her hand up from below the desk. Sneak attack. She got me perfectly. Right on the nose. “I win, McCain. Three to two.”
What can I tell you? A sixty-one-year-old woman with four ex-husbands and several fortunes in her past, gloating over an inane rubber band contest.
I turned and started to leave her office. “By the way, I heard Pamela warn you that I was on the warpath. I thought I’d surprise you and be nice.”
“I appreciate that.”
“But now, I really do want to see some results. And I mean fast, McCain.” She smiled sweetly with that elegantly cold face of hers. “Fast.”
I started to leave again but she stopped me. “And that girl you found in the canoe last night?”
“What about her?”
“She has something to do with this.”
“She does?”
Judge Whitney nodded. For all her foibles and excesses, she had good instincts. “Don’t ask me what the connection is yet. But I sense one.”
“She’s a teenage girl.”
“I know she’s a teenager, McCain. But she ties into this somehow. Trust me.”
“The doc’s probably done with his autopsy by now. Maybe I’ll stop over there.”
“Good idea.” Then, “You really think I’m cute?”
I smiled. “Yeah,” I said, “yeah, I d.”
Her grin made her ten years old again, little Esme Whitney sitting in her manse being doted on by Daddy’s manservants.
I went out and picked up my galoshes from the hallway where all the other boys and girls had stashed theirs for the day.