“You’re not supposed to be here, Mr. McCain.”
“Oh? Why not?”
As he glanced toward the house I heard the back door slam, and in seconds a scrawny woman several inches shorter than me stalked into view, her hands stuffed into the pockets of her faded housedress. She was leathery and intense and I imagined she could hold her own with that sparring partner she’d married. If she’d had a gun I would have been dead. “You get your butt off my property and leave my son alone.” To Tommy: “You go on and get in the house.”
He didn’t bother to show embarrassment. Mrs. Hitler had spoken and her word was so final it was like arguing with wind or sunlight. He turned into a lost puppy, all sunken shoulders and hanging head, tucked the basketball under one arm, and shuffled toward the house as if he was going to be executed.
“If you’re not off my property in sixty seconds I’m calling the law on you.”
I could see her as one of those hardscrabble prairie women of frontier Iowa standing with a shotgun defending her roost and her children while her man was away. Read a history of the frontier and you quickly learn that women worked harder than men. “A woman’s work is never done” had it right. Consequently, they were not to be trifled with. As was the case with this scrappy, wild-eyed woman.
“I take it you got a call from Paul Mainwaring.”
“And so what if I did?” She stepped closer, squinting with a pirate’s eye at the intruder. “You’re no friend of my son’s and Mr. Mainwaring is. He helped my whole family since my husband got injured down to the mill. And he’s going to see to it that Tommy gets into college. Now you get your butt in that car of yours and get out of here.”
Tommy Delaney was watching us from behind the soiled white curtains in the kitchen. He wanted to tell me something. I had no doubt of it.
“All I’m trying to do is find out who really killed Mainwaring’s daughter. For some reason he doesn’t want me to.”
“He said you’d be talking crazy if you showed up out here. And he sure was right. I guess you don’t read the papers, huh? That Cameron boy killed her because he was jealous she was seeing other boys. I’m just glad my Tommy got over her. He used to moon around here like a sick calf. I wouldn’t say this to Mr. Mainwaring, but it seems to me that Vanessa brought a lot of this on herself. You can’t flaunt around the way she did, have all these boys coming after you and treating them the way she did.”
“She didn’t deserve to die.”
In the blue-sky morning, birds bursting from the green, green trees, a sun-scorched cow standing on a distant hill, the little prairie woman was quiet for the moment considering-or reconsidering-what she’d said. “I shouldn’t have put it that way. Whatever she did, she didn’t deserve to die for it.” But pity was not anything to be indulged in. It weakened you. “But she shouldn’t have lived the way she did. She made life hell for a lot of people.”
I kept thinking about Tommy “mooning around like a sick calf.” I needed to talk to him. He’d been part of the Mainwaring family. He might know something that I needed to know.
The phone rang inside. She didn’t take her eyes from me. “That’ll be somebody calling for me. But I’m gonna stand here till you get in that car and drive off. Now move. You don’t have no business here, and if you come back- or you try to talk to Tommy-I’m gonna call Mr. Mainwaring the way he told me to. And then you’re gonna be in trouble. He won’t fool around with you. He’s got the money and the power to put you out of business. And those’re his words. Now go.”
Tommy came to the screen door in back and stuck his head out. “Phone for you, Mom.” He wouldn’t look at me.
She didn’t have the same problem. She started toward me, stopped and scowled at me a final time. “Now you git.”
I scowled right back but I got.
16
The name Cotillion implies debutante coming-out parties and the type of fancy balls where Civil War colonels made plans to deflower the local virgins later on in the gin-crazed night. This particular Cotillion was one of those modern glass-and-stone boxes that were colder than any of the drinks they served. Its reputation for excellent cuisine came, or so I had surmised, from the fact that you paid a lot of money for very little food. This is my small- town side, I know, and when I go out to eat I don’t want to gorge myself but I do want something more substantial than two inches of, say, steak covered with oily sauce and topped with some kind of vegetation that looks like a fungus. Not that it tastes bad; it doesn’t. The food is tasty, no doubt about it. But even a mouse would ask for his money back when he saw the size of the entree.
But it is one of the local status symbols to be seen dining here, and the dearth of a substantial meal is often explained this way: “This is how they serve food in New York.”
“You mean so tiny?”
“Right. Out here we’re raised on meat and potatoes and apple pie. We’re used to stuffing ourselves. But this is how people eat in the big cities.”
I’ve heard this conversation, in various formations, for the five years the Cotillion has been open. If somebody dining here ever said, “You know, for what you get, this food is overpriced,” the roof would collapse.
While I waited for Eve Mainwaring, I chomped on some bread-sticks I’d swiped from the deserted table behind me. One of the waiters caught me. Instead of anger he flashed me the worst look of all, pity.
She arrived a few minutes after twelve. When people are late the least they can do is rush in out of breath and start their apologizing even before they reach the table. Goddesses are excepted from this rule. In fact, I’m pretty sure there’s a constitutional amendment about that.
I’d managed to get a table along the wall that gave us moderate privacy. But I wasn’t sure why I’d bothered. She did as much glad-handing as a politician ten points behind on the day before the election. She was chignon- ready with a golden linen dress and two-inch heels that gave her the air of importance she wanted. Given the heat, the other women here wore simpler outfits, comfort being at least as important as style. By the time she reached our table the public smile had become grotesque, as if it had been pasted on like a Groucho Marx mustache.
As with all good goddesses, apologizing was out of the question. She stood by her chair, apparently waiting for me to leap up and be a gentleman, but after she got over that foolishness, she yanked out the chair and seated herself, the smile still in place. “Do you have a match?”
“You want me to give you a hot foot?”
“Are you supposed to be funny?”
“My five-year-old nephew thinks I’m hilarious.”
“I don’t doubt that. Now be a gentleman and give me a light.”
I pitched the matches across the table.
“You are really a disgusting little man.”
“Do you want to hear what I think about you?”
She lit her cigarette the way a Vogue model would-with that perfect angle of head-and then sailed my matches back to me. “I really don’t give a damn what you think about me. I know you’ve been snooping and that’s what I want to talk to you about. Or wanted to, past tense. I didn’t realize till now that you’re one of them.”
“Martians?”
“Locals.”
“The great unwashed. And you’re right, I am one of them.”
“Then this will be a complete waste of my time and yours. I came here ready to confide in you but now I’d never give you the time of day.”
“You were late.”
She sat back and stared at me. Then she began laughing. It was a very merry laugh and I liked it despite myself. The sound conveyed pleasure and irony. “God, is that why you’re being such a jerk? Because I was late?”
“You owe me an apology.” As soon as the words came out I realized how pathetic they were. An eight-year-
