She was reacting as if a close friend had died. “Did you know him pretty well, Marsha?”
“He was around here a lot. Sometimes Vanessa would invite him over, but by the time he’d get here some other boy would have picked her up and taken her off. I cared for Vanessa but she was very cruel to boys sometimes. He’d look so sad I’d talk to him. Every so often, if I wasn’t busy and nobody else was around, I’d talk to him for quite a while. My own son is in his thirties and lives in Michigan with his family. I suppose I kind of adopted Neil a little bit. I know he was upset, but I don’t for a minute believe he murdered poor Vanessa-you can tell that to Mr. Mainwaring for all I care-and I just can’t imagine him killing himself, either. I’m sure you think I’m being naive, but those are my feelings.”
“I’m pretty sure what they’re saying is his suicide will close the case.”
“Not for me it won’t. Nobody’ll ever convince me he did either of those things. Oh, there’s the doorbell. People have been sending flowers to the house. I wish they wouldn’t. We’ll just have to drag them all to the funeral home and the church. You’ll have to excuse me now.”
By the time I got back to the Skelly station, the onlookers and reporters had gone. Potter was standing next to a large metal box where his officers had been putting the evidence bags they’d been filling. Potter was talking to two of his men so I had time to scan the plastic bags. A quart of Hamm’s beer, a half-finished sandwich of some kind, a pair of white socks with blood on the toe of one of them, a stadium blanket of deep blue with horizontal yellow stripes, a Greyhound bus schedule, a Swiss army knife, and a small black flashlight. There were many more items beneath these but I assumed Potter wouldn’t be real happy if he saw me pawing through his evidence bags.
“Any sign of a note?” I asked Potter when he walked over to me.
“No, but there might be a good explanation for that, Sam. Maybe he just didn’t have anything to write with.”
“It’s still strange.”
“It’s strange if you want it to be strange. Otherwise it’s as simple as my explanation.”
I nodded to where the ambulance had been. “The doc say anything unexpected?”
“Just that it looked like a suicide. He wanted to get Cameron on the table before he said it officially, but he said any other explanation was unlikely.”
“All the evidence in the bags-will his sister get his belongings at some point?”
“At some point, yes. I imagine this thing’ll end at the inquest. So it shouldn’t take long. He killed himself.”
From what Sarah Powers had told me, Neil Cameron had been a confused and angry man after he came back from Vietnam. The deaths he’d seen-and the lives he’d taken by mistake-had alienated him from not only others but himself as well. He’d come to rely on romance to redeem him, but when that had failed him, failed him because of his own obsessiveness and possessiveness, he’d started getting into even more trouble than he had previously. Then he’d met Vanessa and became even more desperate. Some of these facts would make their way into the inquest. They would convince everybody present that he’d been a prime candidate for suicide. He’d murdered his true love because she wouldn’t have him and then in remorse taken his own life.
“I’d tell your friends at the commune it’s probably time for them to move on, Sam. For everybody’s sake, including theirs. I don’t mind them as long as they don’t break the law, but after all this, the city council’s going to be on their ass for sure. They’ll come up with some ordinance to run them out or to make their lives so miserable they’ll want to leave anyway. Might as well get it over with now.”
“I’ll talk to them. But Richard Donovan has a temper and he isn’t afraid of much. I doubt he’ll listen. And I’m not sure they should be forced to move anyway. If Cameron did kill Vanessa Mainwaring, he acted alone. The others didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Just trying to help. I want a nice, peaceful life. That’s why I came out here. The hippies just seem to agitate a lot of people.”
“And you know why that is, don’t you?”
“The long hair?”
“All the sex. Everybody secretly wants to have as much sex as these kids have. But since they can’t, they take it out on the hippies.”
“You really believe that?”
I smiled. “Sometimes.”
11
The first time I ever heard Judge Whitney call Richard Nixon “Dick” and Leonard Bernstein “Lenny,” I was under the impression that she was making up her so-called relationships with these two gentlemen. But then “Dick” Nixon came and stayed with her at her manse and “Lenny” Bernstein started sending her both birthday and Christmas gifts. There was also the fact that she certainly had the opportunity to meet with them because she took at least four trips a year to New York City, where both men resided. She often said she could “breathe” in New York City, implying of course that she found our little city suffocating. She didn’t try to hide her snobbery and maybe she didn’t believe she was being snobbish. For a conservative Republican she was liberal when it came to civil rights and protecting the poor against the wealthy, and she became enraged whenever a group of local idiots tried to have this or that book banned from the public library.
She was a remarkable woman, given that she’d been married four times, no children, had managed to keep her looks even now into her sixties and, for good measure, had taught Barry Goldwater how to mambo. I’m not sure he wanted to learn how to mambo but the judge can be most persuasive at times. I know about the Goldwater tutorial because there’s a black-and-white framed photo of it on the wall of her judicial chambers.
She’s had her grief. Her deepest love was for her first husband, who was killed in the Pacific when our troops were getting slaughtered there early on. Her fourth husband died behind the wheel of a new Lincoln Continental while drunkenly escorting his drunken secretary to a motel where they were known as frequent guests. This didn’t help her own reliance on alcohol. Finally, she checked herself into a rehabilitation clinic in Minnesota. She was now several years dry and a fervent attendee at AA meetings.
None of this had dulled her edge; nothing could. She was still imperious, and after all these years I wasn’t sure that I wanted her any other way.
She stood in the sunlight arcing through the tall, mullioned window of the old courthouse. In her crisp peach- colored suit, her Gauloise cigarette streaming soft blue smoke from her fingers, she might have been a woman in one of those magazines only rich people read. Staring out at a polo match or the arrival of a head of state.
Without turning to look at me, she said: “My friends at the club very smugly told me that Cliffie has the Mainwaring murder solved and ready for the county attorney. It’s even worse this morning. By the time I got to my chambers, four different people told me that they’d read the local rag, and apparently there’s a quote from Cliffie- more or less in English-that he won’t be ‘outguessed’ on this one. He also said that your friends, those dreadful ‘hippies’ as you call them, should be forced to leave town.” Now she glared at me. “I don’t want that illiterate fool outsmarting us on this one, McCain.”
“He hasn’t yet.”
“Dummies have dumb luck. Maybe he’s right for once.”
She crossed the room with finishing school aplomb and set her quite fine bottom on the edge of her desk, Gauloise in one hand, her glass of Perrier in the other. “If this Cameron boy didn’t kill her, why did he commit suicide?”
“I don’t think it was suicide. And I’m hoping the doc agrees with me.”
“The ‘doc,’” she scoffed. “Somebody brought him as a guest to the club one night and he got three sheets to the wind and started talking about how stupid Republicans are. At the club, if you can imagine.”
“I wish I could’ve been there.”
“You’ll never set foot in our club if I have anything to do with it. You’d be worse than he was. You’d probably start giving your Saul Alinsky speech.”
Saul Alinsky was the Chicago professor famous for teaching groups that were powerless how to organize and become powerful. These groups were always the outsiders, ethnic and political ones looking for justice. “He’s one of
