“Then why would he have told you about Ellie?”
“Show me he was being cooperative.”
“You don’t think Ellie has anything to do with the murders?”
“I’m not sure.”
We sat in her chambers. She wore a tailored blue suit with a stylish neck scarf.
Gauloise in one hand, brandy in the other. She was forced to set one of them down when she launched her rubber bands.
“Something’s bothering me,” I said.
“What?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know. Just something gnawing at the back of my brain.”
“All that cheap beer you drink.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m a real drinker.”
“Brandy, on the other hand, clears the mind.
Gives you the most wonderful ability to concentrate.”
“You sound like a commercial.”
“I would be happy to endorse brandy. The right brands, of course.”
I stared out the window. “It’s something I know.”
“Something you know?”
“Something I learned in the course of my investigation. But as yet I haven’t seen its relevance. But it’s there. Waving at me.”
“Maybe it’s making an obscene gesture.”
She launched another rubber band. “Very good, McCain. I’ve never seen you duck under that way before. You’re getting good at this.”
“What the hell could it be?” I started up from my chair.
“Don’t start pacing. You drive me crazy.”
“I think better when I pace.”
“You’re too short to pace. When you get behind the couch, I lose sight of you.”
“Har-de-har-har.”
She sighed. “I’ll never understand what you see in Jackie Gleason,” she said. I had used one of Gleason’s signature lines. “He’s so working class.”
“He’s funny and sad at the same time,” I said. “And that’s not easy to be. That’s what makes him such a great comic actor.”
A knock.
“Yes?”
The beautiful Pamela Forrest came in.
She wore a white blouse and a moderately tight black knee-length skirt. Her impossibly golden hair looked like something from myth or fairy tale. But I couldn’t appreciate her this morning. Not with poor Mary in the hospital, not able to remember anything.
“You said to bring this in as soon as it came,” she said, as she reached the Judge’s desk. She set some papers down.
“Thank you, dear.”
Pamela nodded and withdrew. She watched me carefully as she left the room. She must have noticed that I wasn’t frenzied the way I usually was when she was around.
The Judge said, “Get out, McCain. I’m busy. I need to read these papers. Go home and pace or something.” She’d been scanning the legal brief that Pamela brought her. She looked up. “I’d like the case solved by dinnertime tonight. I’m having a judge from the sixth district in, and I’d like to brag a little about how I uncovered the murderer.”
“That would be so unlike you, Judge,” I said.
A dramatic ingestion of Gauloise smoke and then the wave of a languid hand. “Now get the hell out of here. I’m busy.” Then: “Oh, that envelope you wanted me to check on?”
“Yes.”
“Those two initials in the corner were the initials of the clerk who sent it.”
“What did they send?”
“A birth certificate.”
“I’m losing my mind,” Linda Granger said. “And so is Jeff. God, McCain, isn’t there something you can do?”
“Well, he could always grow up.”
“You know that’s not going to happen.”
“I’ll take care of it.” I told her when to be at my office. Then I called Chip O’Donlon. “Hey, Dad.” And told him when to be at my office.
Then the phone rang.
She was crying. I couldn’t understand what she said.
“Slow down, Ellie. Slow down.”
“Cliffie was here. He made me tell him where my dad went. To that line shack. Then he ran out the door. There were two other cars there.
Men with rifles and shotguns. They’re going after him.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll leave for the line shack right now.”
By the time I got there, Cliffie had his men fanned out, encircling a weatherbeaten board shack that looked more like a large doghouse than a railroad storage shed. It was up on the side of a steep autumn-blazed hill, just below a railroad track that climbed ever higher into the limestone cliffs. It was a perfect autumn day for hiking or canoeing or picking out pumpkins to carve into bogeyman faces. Butterflies and grasshoppers and leaf smoke and all that other stuff.
The men wore their hunting gear. Pheasant season didn’t open for a while yet. This would be their dry run for trying out hats, caps, jackets, pants, duck calls, boots, shoes, and weapons. Lots of weapons. Enough weapons to start a small war.
Cliffie was strutting around with a. 45 in one hand and a bullhorn in the other. The way some folks are good with the violin or tuba, Cliffie was good with the bullhorn.
“There’s a very good chance that you can get off on an insanity charge, Mr. Chalmers!” He glanced over his shoulder and gave one of his cronies a big lurid wink. Chalmers didn’t have a prayer of beating a double murder charge on an insanity plea. Not with his criminal past. “So you come out here peaceful-like and we’ll drive you back to town in that brand-new patrol car of mine. It still smells new. You’ll like that, Mr. Chalmers, I promise!”
Cliffie’s police chief magazine mst’ve run an article on how to use psychology, because usually, instead of such awkward enticements as insanity pleas and new-car smells, Cliffie would have been threatening the guy with sure death.
“There’ll be a pizza tonight, Mr. Chalmers!
The boys always chip in and buy a big one delivered. It’s nice ‘n’ hot too. I’m sure they’ll give you some. Our boys’re nice to prisoners, despite what you might have heard to the contrary.”
Cliffie had the distinction of being cited three times in six years for “the worst-run jail” in the state. Endless numbers of prisoners emerged with black eyes, broken noses, missing teeth, snapped wrists, and badly bruised ankles.
As a gag, Cliffie once served up chili that he’d dumped half a pound of ground-up night crawlers in. This is one of those legends that is actually true. Everybody loves a clown.
“I’ll talk to him.”
He wasn’t happy to see me.
“I don’t believe I remember deputizing you, McCain.”
“I’m his lawyer.”
“You get all the important clients, huh?”
“He didn’t kill anybody.”
He stared at me. “She thinks she’s gonna beat me this time, don’t she? Show me up again?”
