First Kill All the Lawyers Page 5

  “While I’m still hungry?” Sam snorted. “That’s the other thing I hate about these damned parties. I end up starving. You can’t eat a proper meal while you’re standing around talking, and you can’t have a decent conversation because you’re so busy working the room.”

  “Peaches is making enough tamale pie for leftovers,” George said. “Or we can probably twist Horace’s arm to stop us by the Varsity on the way home.”

  Sam considered that offer for a minute. As much a part of the fabric of Atlanta as the Dogwood Festival, the Varsity was a gigantic drive-in and sit-down chili dog, french fry, and onion ring emporium near Georgia Tech that did so much business it had a glass-walled room devoted solely to the chopping of onions. Sam and Horace were mad about it. Peaches, who sneered at all cooking other than her own, was convinced the place served up sudden death.

  “Okay,” Sam said begrudgingly. “But I’m only doing it to humor you. We’re staying one hour. And we better stop at the Varsity.”

  Samantha wasn’t dressed like a woman who was going to get a chili dog as she walked out the back door on the arm of her uncle. She was wearing a black silk slip of a dress with tiny sparkling rhinestones marching up and down its spaghetti straps. The dress was cut low enough to show off her considerable cleavage. Her color was high, her mouth a slash of scarlet. Her halo of short springy curls glistened like the regularly waxed finish of George’s old black Lincoln.

  “You going to be warm enough, Sam?” Horace asked as he tucked her and George into the back seat.

  “I brought a shawl,” she said, and held up a length of black cashmere with openwork like lace. Horace smiled, for Peaches had admired this shawl so much that Sam had ordered her one like it from San Francisco, except that Peaches’ wrap was the green of an old glass Coke bottle, perfect with her golden-brown complexion.

  Horace straightened the bill of his favorite Atlanta Braves cap in the mirror, then wheeled the ancient Lincoln around the side of the house on the winding brick drive.

  “Mr. Kay’s?” he asked, confirming their destination, and then they were on their way—hell-bent for leather, which was how Horace always drove. He was a superb navigator of the city’s roundabout routes and curving byways, which he considered a huge racecourse, and knew every inch of Atlanta except the new suburbs—which, in his opinion, didn’t matter anyway.

  “So you thought Queen was cold,” George remarked.

  “Glacial,” said Sam. “But Liza says her father’s a real winner. Is he?”

  “Yep. But Forrest Ridley’s always been a puzzlement to me, too. He’s a real Jack Armstrong, all-American. As clean-cut as they come. The right schools. Law Review. We recruited him as an intern, the summer between his second and third years of University of Virginia law school. He’s always pulled more than his load, brought in millions in billable business. Made partner right on schedule, and has been an asset to the firm since the day he came on board.”

  “So what’s the puzzlement?”

  “I always wonder about anyone who has a permanent smile on his face.”

  “Makes you wonder what you’d see if that smile ever cracked, doesn’t it?” Horace interjected from the front seat. “I bet he wasn’t so happy about that party at his house.”

  “What’s that?” George asked.

  “Said I bet Mr. Ridley was upset about that surprise party at his house a time ago.”

  “What party?” asked George. “You been holding out on me?”

  George was referring to Horace’s position as a major operator in the underground telegraph of gossip that connected the household staffs of the city’s Four Hundred. In fact, more than once in his law practice, George had depended upon that telegraph, for the word of a well-placed cook or housekeeper was better than that of a paid snitch, and the information thus gained was rich and substantial rather than a few dry facts that might only scratch the surface of the truth.

  “I guess I forgot. But anyway,” said Horace, settling into the beginning of the story as if he were settling into an easy chair, “what I heard was that one evening a few weeks ago, all these people in black tie started showing up at Ridley’s front door, but he and Miz Queen weren’t expecting them.”

  “How many?” George asked.

  “Well…” Horace pushed back his cap a bit. “Before it was all over, there were about a hundred and fifty.”

  “That many!” Sam exclaimed. “And they weren’t invited?”

  “Oh, they were invited, all right. It was just that the Ridleys didn’t do the inviting. Didn’t know anyone else had done it for them, either. They were just sitting around the house on a Thursday night, I think it was, in their pj’s watching the TV when the first ones arrived.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Sam.

  “They didn’t either. Seems what happened was that somebody sent out a whole bunch of engraved invitations, said it was a surprise party for Mr. Ridley, so there was no RSVP.”

  “What did they do?” George asked.

  “Best they could. Jumped up and got dressed—I hear it was the fastest Miz Queen ever got herself together in her life.” Horace chuckled. “Then they called all over town to restaurants where they’re known and had them send over platters of hors d’oeuvres quick as they could.”

  “So they were good sports about it,” said Samantha.

  “Well, I wouldn’t go that far. They pulled it off, and I guess by the time about half the guests had arrived, the newcomers wouldn’t have known what a surprise it really was, if the others hadn’t told ’em. But after it was over, I heard Miz Queen had a fit. A real hissy. Said it was all Mr. Ridley’s fault—someone making a fool of her.”

  “Well, well, well,” George said. “Isn’t that something?”

  Horace careened the old Lincoln, tires squealing, off Peachtree onto Andrews Road. In moments they would be at their destination.

  “Any theories about who sent those invitations?” Sam asked.

  Horace, who was concentrating on passing a delivery van, shook his head.

  They zipped past palatial estates, each of them set far back from the road behind a carefully manicured park. In this North Side neighborhood of Andrews and Habersham and West Paces Ferry roads, above the springtime fragrance of lilac and wisteria floated the aroma of old money.

  Then they were at the Kays’ gate, where a young college boy in a white jacket greeted them. “Good to see you this evening, Mr. Adams, Ms. Adams,” he said.

  George grinned at Samantha’s surprise. “Edison never does things halfway.”

  “Does he have mug books?” she asked.

  As another young man handed them out of the car under the porte cochere, Horace, who would park the car and then wait for them in a back room where a poker game had probably already started, leaned out the window.

  “I’ll nose around and see what I can find out about those invitations,” he said.

  “You just concentrate on winning,” Sam called behind her. “Then it’s the Varsity, guys. My treat. Or depending on what you take the suckers for, Horace, yours.”

  Five

  Edison Kay stood in his black-and-white marble tiled foyer with arms spread wide. A tall, substantial, fiftyish man with wings of gray in the dark brown hair that he wore long in the old-fashioned planter/politician style, Kay cut an impressive figure.

  “George!” he cried. “Why, it’s been a month of Sundays since I’ve seen you. Delighted that you could make it. Though I wouldn’t give a hoot about you coming if I hadn’t wanted to rest my eyes on the beautiful Miss Samantha.” He laughed expansively, and Sam found herself being gathered up and smothered in a bear hug that smelled of lemony Guerlain 4711 and bourbon.

  Then he pulled back, smiling into her face while still holding her by the shoulders. His was a handsome face, clean-shaven, with a long aristocratic nose and brown eyes that were knowing but not particularly warm.

  “Why, I haven’t seen you since you were fourteen or fifteen years old. I’d h
eard tell that you were back from Baghdad-by-the-Bay, having transmogrified yourself from a young colt into a full-fledged woman, but your Uncle George has been keeping you well hidden.”

  Sam didn’t remember ever having seen this golden-tongued man in her entire life, but then George was saying something about going up to the Kays’ house in Tate one summer, and she smiled politely and said, “It’s good to see you again, too.”

  “Hell!” Edison laughed. “No need to be so formal.” He dropped one arm down to Sam’s waist. “Kay Kay, come see who’s done us the honor.”

  Edison Kay’s wife—whose Christian name made her Kay Kay, which she was always called as if she were named Billie Sue or Mary Ann or one of those other double-barreled Southernisms—was as blond as Queen Ridley and of about the same stature. But there the resemblance ended, for Kay Kay hailed from Fort Worth, and her good-old-Texas-girl voice projected across her foyer as easily as it did across a cow lot.

  “Why, hon,” she said to Samantha, “I’m so glad to see you I could hug your neck.” And then she did so, landing a kiss on Sam’s left ear in the process. “Now, you just come with me.” She took Sam’s hand and pulled her away from Edison. “He’s just a dirty old man, baby, who doesn’t have your best interests at heart. But I’m going to introduce you to every handsome man in this house.”

  And it was some house. A copy of an antebellum Alabama planter’s mansion that had been on the Kay side of the family, the graceful whitewashed brick and columned structure rose to three stories, connected inside by twin staircases. The living room seemed to go on forever, with a dozen conversational areas—blue, gold, and white sofas and chairs grouped around glass tables that held crystal bowls in which magnolias floated. Across the far wall, a series of french doors led onto a brick terrace. The room buzzed with the chatter of a party already in full swing, occasionally punctuated by a bright bugle of sound as two women greeted one another, or the leonine roar that marked the end of a well-told dirty joke.

  “Your home is beautiful,” Sam said to Kay Kay, meaning the compliment.

  “Fifteen thousand heated square feet,” Kay Kay said, and laughed.

  Sam turned and looked at her. Kay Kay’s smile was blindingly white. Sam was suddenly reminded of all those shiny Texas girls who won beauty contests—something in the genes, something in the water.

  “Ed tries to keep me from saying things like that, but, honey, you just can’t stop a Texas girl from bragging.” Kay Kay paused a second and tugged her wine-colored silk bodice down over her generous bosom. “God, am I parched. What do you have to do to get a drink around this joint?”

  At that moment, a waiter carrying a silver tray filled with tulip-shaped glasses of champagne appeared. Behind him was another waiter serving little biscuits filled with Virginia ham and miniature croissants stuffed with crab salad.

  Kay Kay picked off a glass for each of them. Sam held hers politely, biding her time until she could abandon it for some club soda. Kay Kay slugged the wine right down. No doubt about it: well before the evening was over, Kay Kay was going to be a goner.

  Sam looked around the room. “Who are all those people?”

  Kay Kay burst into laughter. “’Swhat I like, a woman who wants to know something and just asks it.” She surveyed the crowd for a minute, narrowing her eyes as if she’d never seen any of them before. She grinned. “Weird-looking bunch of sons-of-bitches, ain’t it? My B list. Not you, of course, darlin’”—a line which, Sam knew, she would repeat twenty times before the evening was over—“but a lot of these folks are here just for professional reasons. Course, we almost always mix business and pleasure, ’cause S and L is our life, but at a big do like this we ask clients and judges and a passel of others.”

  “Judges?”

  “Sure, honey.” Kay Kay turned and looked at her. “Why not?”

  “I never knew the bench fraternized with lawyers.”

  “Well, they’re not exactly the enemy, you know,” Kay Kay said with a hearty Texas laugh, then pointed at a very short, stocky man who was holding a champagne glass in each hand while he gazed squarely into the cleavage of a tall redhead. “That’s Judge Deaver. Now, would you begrudge him that bubbly or those boobs?”

  Sam chuckled along with her hostess, who laughed at all her own lines. Well, now, wasn’t this interesting?

  “Maybe you’ll get to meet our daughter, Totsie,” Kay Kay was saying as she reached for another glass of champagne from a passing tray. “Or maybe not. She’s upstairs hiding.”

  “The shy retiring type?”

  “Hell, no. Totsie’s about as shy as I am. Even when she was a little bit of a thing, she was always leading cheers or twirling her baton or shooting her little rifle. She’s loud like me. Likes a lot of noise. Likes to be noticed, too. Her sole ambition in life is to be beamed into every living room in America—to be Jane Pauley. She’s working on it right now, getting paid about two cents an hour working for Turner Broadcasting.”

  Sam was confused. “You mean she’s working tonight?”

  “Nah.” Kay Kay gestured toward the stairs with her glass. “She’s up there in her room getting over a fight with her boyfriend, Trey. She’s been crying for two days. I told her to slap some cold tea bags over those eyes and get her little tail down here.”

  Just then, as if her mother’s wish were her command, Totsie Kay materialized on the stairs. She was a fresh-scrubbed young blonde in golden-pink silk. Small, but rounded in all the right places, she looked like a dish of peach ice cream. Totsie flashed her mother a smile that was a bit nervous but nonetheless, like her mother’s, almost blinding in its porcelain whiteness.

  “Honey, I’m so glad you’re feeling better.” Kay Kay took Totsie by the arm as if she were a little girl in her pinafore to be pushed forward. “Now, this is Samantha Adams. I know you two have lots to talk about. I’ll see you both later.” With that, Kay Kay exchanged her empty glass for a full one from the tray of a passing waiter. So much for being introduced to every handsome man in the room, Sam thought wryly. “Fenster! You old dog!” Kay Kay cried to an approaching guest, and trailed off.

  Samantha turned back to the daughter, who was still smiling brightly.

  “I follow your byline in the paper,” Totsie said, so softly that Sam had to lean toward her. Was her mother kidding? This sweet young thing a cheerleader? In television? “That was a super series you did on the election scandal. I’ve been wanting to meet you.” Totsie was picking up speed as she went along, and her voice was growing louder. “Daddy said that since you were George’s niece, sooner or later he’d wangle an introduction for me.”

  “Why, I’m flattered,” Sam said, and she was.

  “Actually, really, I mean…I thought,” Totsie stammered, “one day I’d run into you at a Women’s Club luncheon. I mean, Press Club,” she corrected herself, frowning, “Women’s Press Club.” And then she spilled champagne down the front of her pretty dress. “Oh, shit!” Her lip trembled. “Will you excuse me?”

  Before Sam could respond, Totsie evaporated. She fled back up the stairs down which she’d come.

  The girl certainly wasn’t feeling well, Sam thought. She looked positively feverish. If at her age she was letting a fight with her boyfriend get to her this badly, she was going to have miles of bad road ahead. But then, Sam reminded herself, think how badly she herself had let Beau Talbot… She shook her head.

  Perish the thought of Beau Talbot.

  Sam had had a very high incidence of coincidence in her life. It was almost as if she could conjure up people. She thought of them, and then—

  “Excuse me.”

  Oh, God! She whirled. But the handsome frown at her elbow was very young and unfamiliar.

  The frown’s owner bowed slightly. “I’m Trey Nelson. Did I just see you talking with Totsie?”

  “Yes, you did.” Sam’s sigh of relief made his frown deepen. She pointed toward the stairs. “But she spilled her drink and went up to change.”

&nbs
p; Young Nelson excused himself again, ran his hand through his dark red curls, and wheeled, almost bumping into a waiter.

  This was some lovers’ quarrel. Both of them looked shattered.

  Two women passed, their arms intertwined. “Well, who knew where he was from? So I said, ‘Why, I don’t believe I know his daddy.’”

  Which meant the person in question could have been born of a white trash banjo picker and a she-wolf, for all the welcome he was going to get.

  More waiters waltzed by bearing piles of boiled shrimp and red sauce for dunking. Conversation buzzed all around, but none of it lit on Sam. She wished she were home. She could be eating Peaches’ hot tamale pie, or snuggling with Harpo on her chaise, reading.

  Well, she couldn’t just stand here. If she kept moving, it would look as if she were mingling.

  And then, before she knew it, she was.

  “Aren’t you George Adams’s niece, Samantha?” a woman asked as she passed a group gathered beneath a family portrait of the Kays. Wives of Simmons & Lee partners, they made a space in their circle for her and continued their talk. The topic was the opening of summer houses in the firm’s informal compound in Tate.

  “It gets so musty during the winter,” a brunette in red was saying. “I’ve got to get Elspeth and her son up there to give it a good cleaning.”

  “Is she staying the season? I just can’t get Corrine to stay.”

  “I know what you mean, darling, though since May’s husband died she’s more willing. But you, with all those children—maybe I can get May to come over and give you a hand from time to time.”

  “I sure would appreciate it.”

  Suddenly the devil grabbed Sam’s tongue. “It must be hard for them up there,” she said, as if she didn’t know better.

  Polite eyes rolled her way. “Why, whatever do you mean?”

  “Well, isn’t Tate in Forsyth County? Where all those Klan marches and demonstrations were last year?”