to get carried away some night and kill her. These things almost always escalate. He might not even want to kill her, I said. But he’d do it accidentally.”
“How’d she respond?”
“The way she usually did. That I was just trying to come between them.”
A knock. His nurse. “There’s a call for you from Mercy Hospital, doctor.
Emergency.”
“Thank you.” He walked over to a small sink, ran water, soaked his cigarette, and then pitched it in the ashtray. He turned back to me. “I don’t dislike you quite as much as I thought I would, McCain.”
“Gee, that’s good to know,” I said.
I seem to make friends everywhere I go.
Ten
Rush hour in a town like ours means more milk trucks, more tractors, more hay balers, more combines, and more dump trucks. If you think traffic crawls in Chicago, you should spend three miles behind a plow-pulling tractor, watching its green John Deere ass wiggle and waggle all over the road.
I went straight to my rabbit warren of an office and called Judge Whitney with an update. She was gone for the day.
“Boy, she doesn’t usually leave this early,” I said to the beautiful Pamela.
“It’s nearly four, McCain. That’s not very early. She needed to go to Iowa City for some new shoes. She decided the ones she bought in Chicago aren’t right for her dress after all.”
“Sounds like a big do.”
“It’s Lenny.”
“Lenny?”
“Lenny Bernstein. Or is it com. steen?”
“Stein. And what’s he got to do with it?”
“He’s coming to the university, and he’s invited her to have dinner with him afterward.”
“Leonard Bernstein invited her to dinner?”
“Uh-huh. His secretary called yesterday to set it up. Then Lenny got on the phone himself and talked to her.”
I’ve become immune to the Judge’s name-dropping. A lot of the time I don’t even believe she knows the people she claims to. But every once in a while, one of the names calls her and then I walk around in a state of disbelief for a couple of hours.
Dinner with Leonard Bernstein, no less.
Lenny.
Plenty of bills, no money.
I sat at my little desk with my little Captain Video notebook trying to work out my finances for the next month. I drew two lines down the center of the page. Debits and credits. Just the way Mr. Carstairs taught us in Business Math back in high school. I looked at the sorry figures. My car really needed a new pair of glas-paks, but t’wasn’t to be this month. I took out my huge stamp that says
120 Days Overdue!!!
Please Don’t Make Me
Turn This Over To A Collection Agency and started stamping bills. I sat back and did what I always did: added up my debits and credits. If everybody who owed me money paid me, I’d be in fine shape. But my clients were mostly one step above public defender level and the prospects of their paying me weren’t great.
So the collection agency threat was a joke and everybody around town knew it. Pops Mason may once have been a mad dog of a bill collector, but now that he was in his mid-sixties, some of the cunning had gone out of his pursuits. He was blind in his left eye, had rheumatism, gout, and prostate problems, and he never drank fewer than four quarts of Hamm’s per day. He still pinched ladies a lot too. I knew all about his medical problems because he talked about them constantly to anybody who’d listen. He also had a long spiel about not having had a decent erection since he was fifty-three, a fact he blamed largely on the fluoride in the water. It was his contention that the Communists had been foisting fluoride on us as a way of seeing that our population declined, thus making us ripe for a takeover.
The knock was timid.
“Come in.”
She appeared first: Linda Granger, rangy brunette. Her face was a portrait of good clean freckled midwestern carnality. Normally there was a big-kid grin, and the mischief in the blue eyes was lacerating in its promise of fun and frolic. She dressed well too. Her father was a Brit who’d been a pharmacist in Sussex before Adolf consulted his various astrologers and decided to start a world war. He worked here at the pharmacy until Old Man Reeves startled everybody by taking off for Vegas one night with the Widow Harper and getting hitched. The Reeveses now lived in La, from which they dispatched a blizzard of postcards about celebrities they happened to see. They had a running battle about Robert Taylor. Old Man Reeves insisted that Mr. Taylor had false teeth; Widow Harper angrily disagreed.
Anyway, Linda’s father took over the pharmacy ten years ago, redecorated it, hooked up with the Rexall chain, and proceeded to make himself a wealthy and prominent local citizen.
Today, Linda wore a tight green sweater, jeans, bobby socks, and cordovan penny loafers. That sparkle I always associated with her was gone. Her skin was pale, her eyes dulled, their rims red from crying.
Jeff Cronin looked even worse than he had when I fished him out of the booth at Elmer’s Tap the other day and gave him a ride home: wrinkled white button-down shirt and blue trousers, two-day growth of beard, eyes that didn’t seem to focus. One or both of them smelled of tavern.
“She’s kinda loaded,” he said.
“Look who’s talking,” she said.
“It was her idea to come over here, McCain, not mine.”
“He doesn’t give a damn about our marriage, McCain. I do. That’s why I told him we should come.”
I smiled. “I don’t think I’m following this.”
After I jumped up and took the box holding the lie detector off one of the client chairs, I had them sit down.
Cronin said, “You got a beer?”
“I usually keep a quart in my pocket but I wore the wrong suit today.”
“I need a beer.”
“You’ve had enough beer,” she said. “Is this what it’ll be like being married to you?”
“We’re not getting married, remember?
There’s a little matter of you cheating on me.”
Cronin had a quick temper. He was sliding the ammunition in the chamber now.
She looked at me. Pleading. “Did he tell you why he isn’t marrying me?”
“No. I guess he didn’t.”
“Go on, then, tell him.”
“You want him to know so bad, you tell him.”
“No, you. I want you to hear how ridiculous this sounds in 1957.”
For the first time, Cronin looked uncomfortable.
His gaze fell away.
“Go on,” she said.
He said nothing.
She said, “I spent a long night with Chip O’Donlon once when Jeff and I were broken up.”
“I see.” Chip O’Donlon was a client of mine. Which didn’t save him from being an obnoxious idiot. He was a disgrace to dreamboats around the world.
“They went all the way,” Cronin said miserably.
