First Kill All the Lawyers Page 8

  “And that’s so bad?”

  “It’s all about money, and walking the acceptable straight and narrow, and being us, which is the same as being right. Whatever they are is right. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “Yes,” Sam said softly. It was very familiar. She’d stood in Liza’s shoes many years before.

  “I’m a painter,” Liza said. “I couldn’t do all that.”

  “And your father didn’t force you?”

  “You know, sometimes I used to think that he saw a part of himself in me. A part that wanted to stand up in a partners’ meeting and say, ‘Fuck you.’”

  “Would he ever have done that?”

  “No.” Liza shook her head. “Not really. He’d bought too far into the system for too long. He wouldn’t have had anything left afterwards. He wouldn’t have known what to do after the big silence, after he’d walked out the door.”

  Sam marveled at this young girl. She herself hadn’t been half as smart at her age. Not this kind of smart, anyway.

  “Who would have wanted to hurt your father, Liza?”

  She shook her head again. “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about that since I heard…I’ve been thinking and, well, after Queen…”

  “You really suspect your mother?”

  “I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could throw her. She’s not a nice woman, Sam. She only cares about one person in the whole world—Queen. She thinks she is, you know, a queen.”

  “Funny, her name.”

  “She earned it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She wasn’t christened that. Her real name is Catherine. But she was so taken with herself, even as a child, that her mammy nicknamed her that, and it stuck. I’ve heard her tell that on herself—in one of her rare fine moods.”

  “But you’re implying that she killed your father. That’s a far cry from self-importance,” Sam pointed out. “Why would she want to do that?”

  “Maybe he’d changed his mind about leaving her.” Liza played with a strand of her dark hair. “I don’t know. But they’d been having some awful fights lately.”

  “Anyone else you suspect?” Sam signaled the waiter to bring another beer for Liza.

  “It’s probably nothing…”

  “Nothing’s nothing. Tell me.”

  “Well, Daddy did a lot of pro bono work. I don’t think any of the other partners ever did.” Then she smiled. “Except he said your uncle used to.”

  “Still does.” Sam nodded.

  “Anyway, Daddy always said that besides helping some poor bastard out of a jam, he liked to keep his hand in everyday trial work. His practice was much more esoteric than that.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Bonds. I never understood any of it, except that it all had to do with corporations and tons of money.”

  “Go on,” Sam prodded.

  “Well, about six months ago, he took the case of one of the Mariels in the Atlanta federal pen.”

  “Explain.”

  “You know, the prisoners Castro freed from that awful prison? When they came here, the government put most of them right back in jail, until the political prisoners could be sorted out from the murderers. Anyway, this woman, Maria Ortega, had heard about Daddy’s work and begged him to take on her father’s case. She said her father, Carlos, was a good man who had already served fifteen years for nothing. So Daddy pled his case, and he won.”

  “And?”

  “And within a month after being released, Carlos Ortega killed a grocery store owner’s wife in an armed robbery. The man who owned the store, Herman Blanding, blamed Daddy. At the second trial, which Daddy attended every day because he felt so awful, so responsible, Mr. Blanding stood up when Ortega was convicted and said that it was all Daddy’s fault, that if he hadn’t gotten Ortega out of jail, his wife would still be alive. He came to Daddy’s office a couple of weeks later and said he was going to get him.”

  “Did your dad call the police?” Sam asked.

  “No. He sort of shrugged it off. Not the whole affair, I mean, he lost sleep over that, agonized over it. But not the threat. Queen said he ought to start carrying a gun, but he wouldn’t. He hated guns.”

  “Really?”

  “His younger brother was killed when he was very young. In a hunting accident. Daddy never touched a gun after that.”

  Samantha wanted to ask what Forrest Ridley’s role had been in that accident, but she couldn’t bring herself to form the words. You’re getting soft, she thought. There was a time, Samantha… Yes, there had been times when she’d asked questions that were sharp as knives while the scent of blood was still fresh in the air. Maybe she hadn’t been kidding when she told George she wasn’t doing murders anymore. So what was she doing here? Doing things half-assed, that’s what. Well, hell. Maybe the question wasn’t important. Quit jacking yourself around, Sam, she told herself. To a good journalist, all questions, all answers, are important.

  But she skipped it and went on. “What do you know about your parents’ ‘surprise’ party?”

  Liza managed a laugh. “You mean the one that was such a surprise to Queen?”

  “Your father, too, I thought.”

  “Yeah, but stuff like that rolls—rolled—off his back like water. But Queen”—she laughed again—“Queen was livid. Whoever came up with that one, it worked. She was in such a fit, I thought she was going to make another trip to her plastic surgeon.”

  “Her what?”

  “Queen is a major supporter of Dr. Tuckit in Rio.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No. Well, yes, I’m kidding about his name. Queen has had everything that can be lifted and tucked or pooched out”—Liza gestured at her own modest chest—“till she’s like a bionic woman. When she gets the slightest bit depressed, she flies down to Rio and has something reworked.”

  Well, no wonder she looked so good. “The party,” Sam said. “Did she ever find out who did it?” She remembered then that Horace was going to work on that, but things had happened so quickly that she hadn’t thought to ask him.

  “No. I don’t think so. But there was one thing more.” Liza looked Sam straight in the eyes again. There was something about the girl’s candor that was almost alarming. “The next day, after the party, a note arrived in the mail.”

  “Did you see it?”

  “Yes. Daddy showed it to me.”

  “Handwritten?”

  Liza made a face. “Don’t be silly. Typed. It said, ‘Do you’—no, ‘Did you like your surprise? There’ll be more you’ll like even less.’”

  “Were there?”

  “More surprises? No. Not that I know of.” And then, as the possibility of what that surprise might have been crossed her mind, it was reflected in her blue eyes. “Unless Daddy’s…”

  Sam reached for the girl’s hand. “We’ll find out.”

  *

  Back home, Sam found George in his study. “Liza thinks he was murdered, too.”

  “You think what we have is catching?”

  Sam shrugged. “No one else agrees with us. I just put in a call to Charlie downtown.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “Far as he knows, it’s an open-and-shutter. Said the department wasn’t going out of its way looking for trouble.”

  “Fine attitude for the police,” sniffed Peaches, who was passing the room.

  “How do you know who Charlie is?” Sam asked, startled. Even Hoke didn’t know the name of her contact in the police department.

  “God didn’t give people ears to be used as jug handles,” Peaches replied. “Do you think I’ve lived in this house all these years and don’t know the price of beans?”

  “So much for that, mixed-metaphorically speaking,” George said, grinning.

  “I reckon.” Sam grinned back.

  Eight

  “Ridley would have been proud,” George said as he and Sam stood on the steps of St. Philip’s Cathedral watching the huge cr
owd pour out into the spring sunshine. Everyone who was anyone in town had come to pay their last respects. “You couldn’t have asked for a more beautiful day for a funeral.”

  “I thought beautiful days were for weddings, not funerals,” Sam said.

  “No, no. You don’t want everyone thinking their last thoughts of you on a dreary day, or in the pouring rain. Course, if I had my druthers, I don’t think I’d have gone out the way Ridley did.”

  “Nor would anyone, I imagine.” Sam shivered at the thought of all that water, those rocks, the horror Ridley must have felt as he tipped over the edge and realized he was going for the big fall—if he was alive when he went over.

  “I don’t mean the mu—” George broke off and lowered his voice. “The murder. But when I go, I’d like for it to be prolonged, drawn out.”

  “You can’t mean that!”

  “I do. It’d be like my eyesight going slowly—it’s not such a shock. I have time to look at all the things I love, to memorize them, in a way to say good-bye. I’d like to leave this coil that way, too. With time to say ‘I love you,’ to set things right.”

  Sam thought about her uncle’s words, and then about her beloved Sean, who was there one evening, his sweet face in her hands, the next morning not. She stared off into space, down the steps and across a sea of dark suits and ladies’ navy straw hats, then started as she realized she was looking straight into Beau Talbot’s eyes. He looked away and finished tucking Liza Ridley into the long black limousine by which he was standing. In the midst of Edison Kay’s eulogy of her father, Liza had finally collapsed. Beau, sitting a couple of rows behind the Ridley family, had come forward and taken her out a side door. Now Liza was as pale as the dogwood blossoms in the churchyard, but seemed composed. Beau’s face was somber. He looked back up at Sam and nodded.

  “Well done,” George said, shaking the hand of Edison Kay.

  “Terrible thing. Terrible. I’ve known Forrest as an associate and a friend for thirty years. We started as puppies together.”

  “I remember.” George smiled a little. “Neither of you knew a tort from a tart.”

  “Hell, you’re right about that,” Edison said with a chuckle. “And you taught us the difference, didn’t you, old man?” He ducked his head toward Samantha. “’Scuse us old dogs.”

  Sam was about to reply when Edison suddenly erupted, “What’s that son-of-a-bitch doing here?”

  He was staring at a tall, gangly, gray-haired man in a scruffy old ankle-length gray coat. The man’s complexion was ashen too—he was a monochrome study.

  “Who you talking about?” George’s head turned in the right direction, but he couldn’t see that far.

  “Herman Blanding. That bastard who came into the office threatening Forrest’s life, blamed him for his wife’s death. Hell, I warned Forrest he ought not to mess around with those pro bono cases, with spies, white trash. See how much gratitude you get. Bastards like that!” Edison’s voice was loud. Heads turned.

  So that was Herman Blanding. Sam started toward him. The gray man looked past her, his weak, pink-rimmed eyes staring into Edison Kay’s face; then he turned and shuffled away, disappearing into the crush.

  *

  Shortly after the burial service in Oakwood Cemetery, some of that same well-dressed crush was drinking bourbon and dunking shrimp in cocktail sauce in Queen Ridley’s all-white living room.

  “In the old days, we’d have all sent over baked hams and covered dishes,” said one of the wives Sam recognized from the Kays’ party.

  “Leave it to Queen to have a wake catered. Well, she might as well. It’ll be her last big do for a while.”

  “Why, Kay Kay, you should be ashamed!”

  Sam turned. Yes, it was Kay Kay who would win today’s Nine Lives competition.

  The former Texas beauty queen continued sharpening her claws. “She’ll have to lie low for a while, maybe make another trip to Rio before she comes hunting. You better hold on to Clifford, old girl,” she said to a woman with blued hair standing beside her. “I reckon it’s going to be the big bucks she’s gonna come after. I’m not letting Edison out of the house till Queen’s bagged her a man and tied him to the bedpost.”

  The women clucked, but their eyes encouraged Kay Kay as she warmed up.

  “I been thinking about getting my whole body snatched up from the top of my head,” Kay Kay continued. “Just pull it all up from my toes. It’s what you got to do, girls, if you want to keep up with the competition.”

  Were all unattached women the competition? Sam wondered, snagging a glass of soda from a passing waiter. Was she the competition? Of course she was—which was why she never got invitations from this crowd, not that she cared. You couldn’t take a chance on an extra woman in the game of marital musical chairs.

  “God, you’re beautiful in black.”

  She didn’t even turn her head. She would recognize that voice until the day she died.

  She’d thought about him last night after she’d gone to bed—when she couldn’t avoid the thoughts any longer.

  There had been a time, oh, there’d been a long time when she would have given anything in the world to hear Beau say the things he’d said to her yesterday.

  But now? Now she was grown-up. That’s what she’d decided last night. He’d been only a young girl’s crush—a summer romance, her first lover. The choice of immature judgment. But there’d been nothing substantial between them.

  What about the lust?

  So what about it? So what about it?

  She lusted after lots of people: Mel Gibson, Sam Shepard, x Jeff Bridges. That didn’t mean she’d take off her clothes and lie down in the street for them.

  Well, maybe—if they weren’t movie stars, if she really knew them.

  She knew Beau.

  Which was probably why, when she heard his voice, despite her best intentions the little hairs stood up on the back of her neck.

  “Don’t call me beautiful,” she hissed.

  “I didn’t. I said you were beautiful in black. There’s a difference. But you are beautiful.”

  She tried to move away, but the crowd was too close. Sam turned back to face him. Then the mob shifted and pushed her bosom into his chest. She glared up at him.

  “I’m not saying a word.” He grinned.

  “You’d better not. How’s Liza?”

  Beau’s face sobered. “I put her to bed upstairs with a sedative. She ought to sleep for at least twelve hours. She’s all in.” He paused and took a deep breath, which she shared, of course. “So, what do you think, Sam?”

  “What do I think about what?”

  “About our working on this together.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Verbalize, please,” he said.

  “Because I don’t want to work with you.”

  “So you agree there is something to work on.”

  She shrugged, which, given their proximity, wasn’t such a good idea.

  “Who’ve you talked to?” he continued.

  “Nobody. Well, Uncle George.”

  “And?”

  “Hoke, who thinks I’m nuts.”

  “Well, Hoke is either very off or very on.”

  Sam remembered that the two men were childhood friends.

  “Yes, and?” he pressed.

  “Liza.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “That she thinks someone…” Then Sam realized she couldn’t go on, not with so many ears so close. She shook her head.

  “See,” Beau whispered, leaning down, “we need to get together and talk.”

  “We are together and talking.”

  He ignored that. “Have you spoken with Queen again?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to?”

  She’d been thinking about that. She had lots of questions for the Widow Ridley. But how was she going to approach her? She couldn’t just call. This was a house o
f mourning. She looked into Beau’s eyes as she slipped the pearl and diamond earring from her right ear.

  “What are you going to do with that?”

  “Leave it,” she whispered.

  “Where?”

  “Under there.” She pointed to a chair.

  Beau smiled. “When?”

  “When the crowd moves.”

  “Moves where?”

  “What do you—” Then she looked around. The crowd had moved, but she hadn’t. And of course, he’d let her keep standing there, pressed breast to chest.

  She flung her earring under the chair and sashayed out of the room without a backward glance. She knew the smirk on his face. She didn’t need to look.

  Back home, Harpo met her at the door holding his mouth crooked. The next step, she knew, would be his fake limp.

  “Don’t try to make me feel guilty, dog,” she told him. “I’ve been hard at a funeral.”

  “He wants a bath,” Peaches said. “When I came home from my meeting at the mayor’s office, he was standing in George’s bathroom staring at the tub.”

  “Why do I have a dog who’s a clean freak?”

  “You might get in there yourself and take a long soak. It would relax you some.”

  “Don’t I look relaxed?”

  “No. You look like twenty miles of bad road,” Peaches said flatly.

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m just telling you what I see. Who’d you see today? You see the murderer at Forrest Ridley’s funeral?”

  Sam started to answer What murderer? but she knew Peaches knew better. Peaches knew everything.

  “I might have,” she said. “I don’t know.”

  *

  Upstairs, she gave Harpo a quick shampoo and wrapped him in a towel, then rinsed the tub, filled it with hot water and bath oil, and stepped in. After a quarter of an hour, she reached for the phone.

  “What’s up, Cookieface?” answered Cutting, her best tracker in San Francisco. “Where are you?”

  “In the tub.”

  “God,” he sighed. “It’s times like this I wish I weren’t fifty-nine, fat, and gray.”

  “We can still talk dirty.”

  “Please, my heart can’t stand it.”

  Then Cutting listened carefully to what she wanted. “If Ridley was in a hotel in this town recently, I’ll get it for you, and the names of any roommates,” he promised. “Now, get out of there before you pucker.”