The Outside Man, page 5
I looked quickly around, speaking in a lower voice. “I’d be damned careful with your choice of words. If Henry wanted to lie, he wouldn’t do it about the length of the call—it’s too easy to check. He’d admit the length of the call and lie about its substance. Who would know? That he didn’t makes my point.”
She shrugged. “I’m using this on the eleven o’clock. I just thought you could tell me what they really talked about.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
From a distance Rayfield watched us intently. He seemed out of place, as if staring through a window. “And you’ve got no comment?” she was asking.
“Not a word. Just remember the law of libel. And say hello to Rayfield. It’s nice of him to use this to tuck it to Henry Cantwell, and nice of you to help.” I left her there.
Weaving through the crowd, I reached Kris Ann with her drink as she listened to Susie Threadgill talk avidly about Jason: “And after they threw him out of Phillips for beating some boy half to death, he came home and killed the neighbor’s dog with a pistol, just from meanness. Henry had to beg them not to prosecute. He was so ashamed.”
Clayton Kell edged over. “Adam, I’m sure sorry about this morning. You look ready to kill.”
He said it straight out, not prying, the irony unintended. The usual Clayton, dry-witted and amiably lazy, saw both the world and his role in it as a little bit silly. It was probably a perspective worth having: Clayton puttered around Henry’s bank like a large troll who had gone to prep school, getting by on charm. His secret was that, when it mattered, he was better than that. I relaxed for a moment. “Thanks, Clayt.” I looked around. “Why all the cops and reporters?”
Clayton gave me a thin smile. “The police are here because some nervous people want protection from a madman they’re afraid knows them already. The reporters are pretending to cover the party so they can snoop. I just hope they don’t use Lydia’s murder to dog Henry. He’s been bad enough.”
“How so?”
“You haven’t noticed?”
“Not particularly. I haven’t seen him that much. He’s been lying kind of low.”
“Well, you all are our counsel—you’ve seen how he usually is down there, kind of sleepwalking through business hours like his real life is happening somewhere else. But at least he’s always pretty much the same. The last two months, though, he’s been almost manic-depressive: hiding in his office with the door shut and then bursting out to insist on something foolish. There was one loan in particular, a high-risk deal with this white-shoe developer out of New Orleans where we ended up under-collateralized and in trouble with the Feds. I mean, Henry’s no businessman, but he could usually spot quality.”
“What do you make of it?”
He gave a shrug of vast helplessness. “You know Henry. Very private. But I figure it’s the boy, poor bastard. Henry, that is.” He sipped his drink, asking pointedly, “How goes it with Roland?”
“Same, same. He looks on me as the son he never had.”
Clayton gave another thin smile, and the talk became general between the eight of us: Susie and Tom Threadgill, half-drunk and riding a kind of crazy animation; Clayton and Rennie Kell, gracious and looking oddly alike; Ardrey Carr and his wife, Sandra, dark and thin, whose nerves had been ravaged by Ardrey and four children and now a murder, and who was looking at me strangely. At the last party, Tom Threadgill had asked brightly if everyone still masturbated and when he closed in on me, I’d said no I didn’t have to, I was a hermaphrodite. Clayton had smiled, Tom looked disappointed, and Sandra had clearly been puzzled. From her expression now, she had looked it up.
“Goddamn Atlanta,” Tom Threadgill burst out angrily to Clayton Kell. “Got stuck again in the screwed-up airport. I swear to God, flush a toilet south of Louisville and even the crap goes through Atlanta.”
Clayton nodded politely as I half listened, wondering why either of us bothered. But with the exception of Ardrey Carr—and me—they had all been born with money and large houses to parents who were friends and then gone to prep school together and met during college vacations until they became part of a context, reminding each other of who they were and had always been. I thought perhaps to Kris Ann they were familiar things, like her mother’s crystal or the pictures of Cade she kept. I forgot them and began wondering about Henry’s last call to Lydia until I heard her name and picked up the thread again.
“Poor woman,” Rennie Kell was saying.
“Nobody’s safe.” Sandra Carr’s shrill voice seemed wired to her nerve ends. Next to her Ardrey tottered on his heels. She glanced at him, almost quivering. “You start out thinking you know how your life is going to be …”
Tom Threadgill had forgotten the airport. “Life plans are stupid,” he pronounced. “It’s all contingent. Lydia lives this decorous kind of life that’s supposed to get you loving children and a party for your golden anniversary and instead she ends up murdered, like all along it’s been this big fucking joke.”
Clayton frowned. Sandra Carr turned angrily to her husband. “Let’s go home, dammit. We should never have left the children with that girl.”
“I don’t know,” Susie Threadgill was saying. “It’s more like these other parts of you reach out so no matter how hard you try, they get you. I just wish Lydia had been more authentic—you know, more in touch with herself. Here she was always doing for other people and never anything but nice, and it makes you think inside maybe she was burning up and that somehow it all came out, and then—”
Ardrey Carr leaned forward, ignoring his wife. “They say she was bruised something awful,” he said loudly. “Raped too.”
I realized he was talking to me. The others seemed part of a frieze of rapt-faced people who squeezed their drinks in front of them. I took my time lighting a cigarette.
“They’re right,” I said.
Awareness that I’d snubbed him stained Carr’s face with anger. Sandra Carr turned white. In the silence, Kris Ann turned to me holding out her glass. “I’m dry, Adam,” she said quietly. “Could you get me another?”
She looked coolly to Carr until he stopped glaring and seemed almost to deflate. I waited him out, then took her glass. From a corner Rayfield ran a long appraising look from me to Kris Ann to me again as I went toward the bar.
It was crowded now. There was sweat on Carter’s forehead as he worked among angry, competing voices, watching the party for signals from yet other drinkers, the privileged ones who’d slipped him a hundred dollars at Christmas. West Lounge Winnie watched him blankly, hairdo canted dangerously to one side. Next to her a towering woman who’d been flirting with someone else saw her husband moving toward them. “Here comes Donald,” she drawled. “My God, I despise that man.” Arriving, Donald looked at the pair with great, tragic eyes. “What will the symphony do without Lydia?” he asked, and began to weep. I took my cigarette to the veranda.
For a while I leaned on the railing. The swimming pool below was a turquoise rectangle that shimmered with submerged light. I hardly heard the footsteps.
Frenzied hands choked me by the collar. I wheeled with my fist in the air. The woman shrieked: “Doll lady, fucking doll lady,” in a harsh, crazy voice, over and over.
“Shut up,” I snapped. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
She stopped, staring at her shoes, abashed. My arm dropped. In the dim light she was just a raddled blonde with overripe hips and the pigeon-toed stance of a drunk. “Find your husband,” I said, more reasonably. “You’re drunk.”
“No blood.” She nodded ponderously, as if that were very profound. “No blood.”
She looked at me for approval. Through the window behind her, foolish mouths smiled and lips moved that made no sound. Then there was the sigh of a sliding glass door and a tall man stepped from the ballroom, glancing over his shoulder. “Joanne,” he called in a low voice.
She stiffened, and as the man came out of darkness I placed them both. Dalton Mooring was the president of Maddox Coal and Steel. The woman was his wife.
He stopped short of her. They looked at each other in dim light from the pool, as if I were forgotten. In a strained, weary undertone, he said, “Again.”
She looked pasty and about to vomit. “Better take her home,” I told him.
Mooring spun, eyes angry and luminous, as if he were ready to strike. Subtly, quickly, he reconsidered. “I apologize for my wife,” he said without feeling.
She began to cry with drunkenness and humiliation. He turned and steered her roughly toward the parking lot, avoiding the party. I went to the bar and got Kris Ann her drink.
Driving home, she said, “I’m ashamed I asked you to go.”
“Don’t worry, hon. It was a chance to think about things.”
Kris Ann lay her head back against the car seat. “Like what?”
“Like that Tom Threadgill is the biggest waste of time since the Parcheesi board.”
Kris Ann smiled slightly and was silent. I lit a cigarette. “Was there something wrong with her, Krissy?”
She rolled her head to see me. “Adam, you can’t even be sure what Joanne Mooring was talking about.”
I took a deep drag on the cigarette, its ash an orange circle in blackness. “Maybe. But Susie made sense for once. Something like this happens and you have to look differently at the woman it’s happened to.”
“I don’t,” she answered, “and don’t want to. Lydia was our friend—my good friend.”
For a moment I listened to the low snarl of the motor. “I had a friend once at Notre Dame—Eddie Halloran. Eddie was a skinny, sensitive guy with a nice smile. Everyone liked him. He was quick and funny, but when you needed to talk he had this special knack of listening, and somehow you knew that he could slip into your skin and feel exactly what you felt. When Eddie got beaten up one night in a tough neighborhood off campus I was as mad as anyone else. It never occurred to me to wonder why he’d been there.
“Eventually we all forgot it until about a year later, it happens. Same neighborhood, two guys with a knife take Eddie for a ride and kill him. It turned out he was trying to pick them up. You see, anyone could tell him their problems, but he didn’t want us to know. So he played it too close to the line.”
Kris Ann touched my arm. “You never told me—Adam, that’s so sad.”
“Sad, and to the point. What I’m wondering is why Lydia seemed so remote. If anyone knows besides Henry, it’s you or Roland.”
Kris Ann sat up in the car seat, staring out. “Whatever,” she said tiredly, “I don’t believe it was anything like I think you’re asking. There’s only one time I can ever remember her seeming less than perfect and I only understood it later, if I ever did. It was the summer I was twelve, I guess, and Daddy had a cocktail party on a Sunday afternoon. He would sort of let me be hostess and I was there in a blue silk dress he’d bought, feeling like a lady.”
There was memory in her words. She paused as if to puzzle on it, then went on. “It was around the time that Martin Luther King was here. Claude Acton got drunk out on the patio and started carrying on about how he should be shot. Daddy and Henry and Lydia were there and then she just disappeared.
“A little later I went inside to look at my dress again in the mirror. When I started upstairs I heard someone crying in the first-floor bathroom. It sounded awful. I stopped there on the stairs, and then the door opened.
“It was Lydia. Her face was all tight and drawn so she didn’t look herself. I just stared for a minute. Then I ran upstairs. I don’t know if she saw me but I couldn’t go back outside. The rest of the party I hid in my room—crying too, I’m not sure why. Maybe I was confused about adults.” She shook her head. “I was confused about a lot of things, then. I remember being angry at King because people always fought over him and it had spoiled the party and my new dress.
“Later Daddy asked where I’d been and I told him about Lydia. He didn’t say much, just that he thought Claude’s talking like that upset her because of Grangeville and her father. I found out later that was about when the book came out saying those black men were innocent and that Lydia’s father had fixed the trial so he could run for governor. I think maybe it just stayed with her all her life, like it was something she’d done or couldn’t run from.” She looked sadly ahead. “Maybe she never even decided who it was that had spoiled her party—she was young when it happened, and he was her father. But I never really knew.”
Lydia’s murder lent the story a horrible poignancy. I wondered at the doubleness that caused her to cry over Grangeville, yet hang her father’s portrait on the mantel. Finally I asked, “Did she ever talk about it?”
“Not that I know of. She probably didn’t want to. She must have known how some people felt about her father.”
“Was there anyone she did talk to?”
“Besides Henry? I don’t know, unless it was Etta, her maid.”
“That seems odd.”
“Not really. Etta would have been with her more than most. Why is that important?”
“I’m not sure. There’s something wrong here—something more than Lydia being murdered. I can smell it even if I can’t see it.”
“What you smell is Jason Cantwell.”
I turned to her. “Sperm and all?”
“Yes. He’s twisted enough.” Her voice tightened. “The only way a man like Jason can touch people is to hurt them. If you want one more reason for Lydia’s sadness you can look to Jason. He’s a bad seed, Adam.”
Her intensity surprised me. More softly, I answered, “Even if that’s true there’s this man Rayfield. There’s something off about the way he is with Henry, and how he’s using that phone call, with Lydia not twenty-four hours dead. Roland made a mistake today letting him at Henry. He’ll make others. He’s set on handling this himself.”
“And you?”
“I’m set on keeping Henry alive.”
“So is Daddy.” She looked at me closely. “For four years now there’s been a kind of peace between you, or at least a distance. It’s been easier for you both, for all three of us. We’ve made our adjustments. Please, don’t upset that now.”
I inhaled cigarette smoke, playing back what I heard in her voice. “Is that what you’re afraid of? Or is it having to choose?”
She whirled to speak in anger, then bit her lip and looked away. In a low voice she said, “It’s not just me who has to choose.”
“What does that mean?”
She said nothing for a moment and when she spoke it was not to answer. “I love you and I love Daddy, and I know he’s vulnerable right now. He’s older, he’s without a wife or son or grandchildren and now some of his investments have gone sour. He’s worried and disappointed and maybe even a little frightened, and he’s a proud man not used to that. It’s not the time, Adam. Leave him be.”
I shook my head. “Roland’s not the point. It’s Henry. This is the wrong case for your father to begin a new career in criminal law.”
She faced me now, questioning. Quietly, almost tenderly, she said, “And your father?”
I stubbed the cigarette. “He’s dead, Krissy.”
She didn’t answer. We were silent for the rest of the drive.
The house was as we had left it.
That night I couldn’t sleep. Kris Ann tossed beside me, restless and troubled. Her face in the darkness was Lydia’s.
I smoked three cigarettes and decided to see the maid.
SEVEN
The light turned red and my car as it stopped spat gravel from the street. Two black girls watched me from the doorway of a dingy corner grocery. Near them, three youths on stripped-down bicycles leaned next to a rusted rain barrel, drinking RC from bottles and ignoring the heat and the girls. The tallest wore sunglasses and an Army jacket, the other two, pea hats, and they stared wistfully at the impossible red curves of the nude woman painted on the cinder-block walls of the “Night Time Cafe,” across the street. Above the woman the block letters of a loan company billboard spelled out “Easy Street” below a row of green dollar signs. The air smelled of dirt and gasoline.
When the light changed I drove on toward Etta Parsons’. On my radio Linda Ronstadt gave way to a newsman reading in a tremor of spurious excitement: “Police continue to investigate the bizarre ritual murder of Birmingham socialite Lydia Cantwell. At a press conference this morning, Lieutenant Frank Rayfield outlined the investigation.”
I found her address and pulled to the curb. Rayfield’s radio voice was a monotone. “Since Mrs. Cantwell was found,” he was saying, “we’ve reviewed evidence suggesting a possible psychopathic killer as well as questioned members of the family in hope of preventing any further incident. We now believe that the murderer was known to Mrs. Cantwell and that his motive was personal.”
“They’re already questioning relatives,” Cade had told me a half hour before. “I don’t know what you expect to add.”
We sat drinking coffee in Cade’s office amidst the Sunday quiet of a law firm on its day off. Manila folders for the Cantwell estate were spread on the desk in front of him. The dark hollows beneath his eyes became bruises as he leaned back to await my answer, tenting his fingers in an appraising gesture reminiscent of the three years as an associate I had spent in the same armless chair, responding on cue. The window behind him framed the cement tower of the Cantwells’ bank, and from over his shoulder stared an iron-faced photograph of Henry Cantwell’s father. On a mahogany bookshelf was the portrait of a dark young woman with melancholy gray eyes, Kris Ann’s mother. Next to that Kris Ann smiled down at the traces on Cade’s desk of his taste for money: a jade vase, a Wedgwood teacup, an antique paperweight of hand-blown glass. Beside that was a morning paper headlined SOCIALITE SLAIN above an old picture of Lydia and a bad one of Henry recoiling from the flashbulbs as he left the police station. “They talk to Jason?” I parried.
Cade scowled. “No one’s seen him. I gather that when Henry called him yesterday he started screaming about ‘being trapped.’ Henry thinks Jason meant that the police had gotten there before he’d broken the news. What I think is that Jason knew before anyone. I can’t understand why you find that so difficult to grasp.”
