Bad Moon Rising (16 page)

“I know my husband was at your office. I followed him.”

“Any special reason you're following him?”

“Because he's not himself since Van died and I'm worried about him, what he might do. I was afraid—well, for some reason people don't seem to think he can be violent, he's so easygoing. But I've seen his violent side a few times during our marriage and he can be frightening. And I'm afraid I led him into something—Would it be possible to talk to you? Not at your office. Do you know where the Cotillion is?”

“Sure.”

“How about eleven thirty? And don't worry, I'll pay your hourly fee.”

“I don't care about the fee, Mrs. Mainwaring.”

“We were introduced as Sam and Eve, let's keep it that way. I'll see you at eleven thirty.”

As I hung up, I said to Jamie, “I'm going to eat lunch at the Cotillion.”

“Petty cash, I'll bet.”

One of her many responsibilities was keeping track of the petty cash, never letting it get under fifty dollars. At first I'd been worried she might tell Surfer Boy about it. He'd find a way to con her out of some money. But one day, looking quite happy about herself as she dished out some money for me, she said, “It's a good thing I never told Turk about this. He'd be after me all the time if I did.”

The Cotillion was located on a small hill above the river. Before I reached it, I turned right onto a narrow road that hadn't been asphalted in years. I kept thinking about Tommy Delaney and the way he'd waved to me last night, as if he wanted to tell me something. I still wondered what it was.

This time when I pulled up at his white clapboard house that the casual eye might mistake for abandoned—if houses took on the emotional tenor of their residents, this one reminded me of a wound—there was no screaming, no sound at all except for a crop-dusting plane flying low and poisoning the air and the earth. In the backyard I saw Tommy shooting baskets at a hoop attached to a one-car garage. He brought a football player's zeal to making layups. He made three of them by the time I reached him. He was dribbling his way back to start again when he saw me approach. He pawed a right hand across his yellow high school T-shirt. His red hair was in his face, giving him the blunt, sweaty look of a big hearty animal. Only his blue eyes denied the impression; he seemed to be afraid.

“Morning, Tommy.”

“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

T
he 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 entrée.

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-old sulking because his feelings had been hurt.

She laughed again, damn her. “Well, then, we'll just have to do something about your little feelings being hurt, won't we? I happened to have had a flat and didn't feel up to changing a tire—which I've done many times, I assure you. I didn't want to ruin this dress which I like, so I had to walk up to a house and ask the woman—one of the ‘great unwashed,' as you said—if I might use her phone. She said yes. She was very sweet. I called the service station where we take our cars. The woman let me wait inside and even gave me coffee and a very tasty cookie. Chocolate chip, homemade, if you're interested. I would've called here and left a message for you but I thought the station would send a truck sooner than they did—both their trucks were busy at the same time. But here you were suffering for thirty-four minutes all alone and unloved, cramming breadsticks into your mouth. Flecks of which, by the way, are all over your tie and jacket.”

Fortunately, the waiter appeared and I didn't have to respond to her. Her smile was always smug but now it was downright scornful. Before I could get a word out, she said, “I'll have a glass of Chardonnay and this little fellow here will have a Coke. I'm sorry to see he's been sitting here all this time without ordering anything. They tried to teach him manners at the home but sometimes it's a slow process. We'll need more time to decide what we'll want to eat. And do you happen to have a bib he could use?”

The young waiter's face shifted from confusion to amusement and back to confusion. He wanted to smile about all her imperiousness but was that proper when the guy sitting across from her was from some kind of “home”? This could mean anything from cooties to frontal lobotomy.

After he was gone, she said, “I'm pretty sure that Paul will be joining us. He followed me here.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He doesn't want me to talk to you.”

“I hope he's calmed down some since he was in my office. He was ready for a net and the bughouse.”

And then he was there and in the Cotillion. He was a celebrity. By now the restaurant was filling up with credit-card businessmen who recognized the most resplendent of the peacocks among them. Paul Mainwaring. Where his wife had made a ballet out of finding her table, Mainwaring moved relentlessly, flicking nods and waves to people, but never smiles. We both sat silently watching him invade us which he did with dispatch and economy.

“I don't want to make a scene here, McCain. Otherwise I'd pound your face in right now.”

“And very nice to see you, too, Mainwaring. And thanks for sparing me the trouble of kicking you in the balls while you were pounding my face in.”

The goddess, displeased, rolled her eyes. “Will you two shut up for God's sake? This is ridiculous. And by the way, Paul, I don't appreciate you following me around.”

He pulled a padded brown leather chair closer to his wife and sat down. Then his hand went up like a spear and the waiter rushed for us as if summoned by not one but two popes.

“The usual scotch and water, Mr. Mainwaring?” A slight tremor in the young voice.

“Of course.”

To Eve, the waiter said, “All we have is a lobster bib, Mrs. Main-waring. Would that be all right for this—” He eyed me as if I was road kill. “This little fella?”

“Oh, a lobster bib would be perfect.”

He started to bow from the waist then caught himself. “I'll bring it back with Mr. Mainwaring's drink.”

“Thank you so much.”

Mainwaring's eyes had narrowed; his mouth was a bitter slash. The moment the waiter was out of earshot, he snapped, “You're still doing that stupid ‘bib' gag? Isn't it about time you give it up, Eve?” He had shifted his wrath from me to his wife.