First Kill All the Lawyers (10 page)

“What are you
talking
about? What about your wife?”

“Linda…” He shook his head, frowning. “It was a mistake, for both of us. Now she’s met someone else. I always hoped she would. We’ve filed for a divorce.”

“Well, that’s great, that’s just great!” Sam was out of the booth now. “I don’t give a damn about you or your marriage. Do you understand that?” Heads turned. She was yelling. She couldn’t stop herself. “What makes you think I give a shit about how you feel, about me or anything else? You think you can just waltz back into my life after all these years? Are you crazy?”

“Probably.”

“Well, you can take your crazy and shove it!” She headed for the door, picking up speed, out the door. She was wet. Shit! She’d left her umbrella. Forget it. She slammed the car door. Hard.

When she glanced over, he was standing outside her window in the pouring rain.

“You didn’t hear a word I said,” he yelled.

She looked up at his wet face. “I heard you, Beau.” She rolled the window down just a crack. “I heard every word you said. But you said them about twenty years too late. What you think now has nothing to do with me. I don’t owe you.”

“I never said you did. I just want to spend time with you, Sam. I want to show you how sorry I am that I was such a creep.”

She turned the key in the ignition. “Get away from my car.”

“You going to run over me?”

“Maybe.”

His voice dropped. “Do you hate me that much?”

“Maybe.”

“They say hate’s just the flip side of love.”

She put the car in reverse, and he jumped back as it began to move. She called through the rain, “I wouldn’t count on it.”

She didn’t even want to think about what Beau had said. It was too crazy. It’d make
her
crazy. She punched in a tape of Linda Ronstadt’s greatest hits, turned up the volume, and sang along at the top of her lungs all the way home through the driving rain.

When she got there, George was in the study reading his mail with a magnifying glass. “Have you ever noticed that it’s bills that come in the largest print?” he asked.

Samantha gave him a hug. He hugged her back. They made her feel safe—his hugs.

“Jehoshaphat, you’re wet! What have you been up to this beautiful morning?”

George loved gray days. He said they gave him an excuse to do nothing but read.

Samantha threw herself into a chair facing her uncle and told him about her meeting with Beau, editing out the personal part, sharing with him what she’d learned about Ridley’s death.

“What do you think he was doing up there in Watkin County, anyway?” she asked. “And I wonder how long he’d been there. How long has he been dead? Did he really go to San Francisco? Why? And why was Queen so funny about the trip? Who would want to kill Forrest Ridley?”

“Whoa. Wait a minute. Who said someone killed him? How do you know he didn’t tumble over the falls, just like Dodd said?”

“I didn’t say he didn’t tumble. The words just popped out. But now that I’ve said them, I know that’s it. It was murder, George.”

He peered sharply at his niece, who had the same sixth sense, the same gift and curse, that he had always possessed. “You feel it?”

“In my bones.”

He shifted in his chair. “Well, we’d better get busy.” He chewed on the earpiece of his glasses for a few moments, then said, “You know, Sam, when you got back to the
Constitution
’s
morgue, you ought to do some looking into land up that way.”

“Land? What does that have to do with the price of rice?”

“I don’t know. Just a feeling.”

They
grinned at each other.

“But there’s lots of money changing hands, big money, as the city pushes its way north,” George continued. “There are some folks who commute from almost as far as Monroeville to work in Atlanta. Land values have gone through the roof up there.”

“How about drugs? Didn’t you say sometimes one can almost ski in those mountains on the white powder?”

George shook his head. “Could be. But I don’t think so. I think land’s what you ought to be studying. And I’ll do some asking around.”

“How do you know Forrest Ridley wasn’t just doing a little fishing and was robbed and killed?”

“Man didn’t fish.”

“Camping?”

“Not the type.”

“Hiking?” Sam asked. “I know he went for long walks. Their housekeeper said so.”

“Could be.”

“But you don’t think so?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Then what
do
you think?”

“I think the whole thing’s odd, that’s what I think. I think Forrest Ridley was the kind of man who, except for walking his dog, thought of exercise as the reach
between his office door and that of a limo or taxi. I think he mostly spent his time working and making money, unless…”

“Unless what?”

“Well, Liza told you he wasn’t really happy with Queen.”

“So?”

“So
cherchez la femme,
my dear.”

“You’re a dirty old man, George.”

“Never said I wasn’t.”

Seven

“You’re doing what?”

“Hoke, you’re shouting. I’m not deaf.” Samantha held the phone away from her ear.

“No, but you sure as hell must be dumb. What do you mean, you’re working on the Forrest Ridley story? There
is
no Forrest Ridley story. We have an obit writer, thank you. And a fine job she does, for an old lady who should have retired ten years ago.”

“I think someone murdered him, Hoke.”

“The police say it was an accidental death, case closed. But
you
know better?”

“Sheriff Dodd of Watkin County declared it an accidental death. That’s not the same thing.”

The line was silent except for the sound of Hoke’s sucking on a cigarette—and then he was shouting again. “You’d do
anything
for this corrupt sheriff thing, wouldn’t you? Even if you have to make it up. It’s not Forrest Ridley you’re interested in. It’s the sheriff!”

Sam stared at the receiver in her hand for a minute. It was an interesting coincidence—but no more than a coincidence. “I feel it in my bones, Hoke. There’s something there. You’re going to be sorry if we miss this one.”

“With the power Simmons and Lee wields in this town, I’m not so sure if this is going to be good news or bad news. Providing, of course, that you aren’t just whistling Dixie.”

Sam smiled. She’d hooked him. “Why, Hoke, I don’t know what you mean. I’m not even sure I remember the tune.” And then she hung up the phone—which rang again immediately. “Hello?”

“Sam?”

“Liza? Dear, I’m so sorry about your—”

“Can you meet me at Manuel’s? Now, please? It’s very important.”

*

The bar was fairly empty on this rainy afternoon. Remembering that she hadn’t yet had lunch, Sam settled herself into a booth facing the back door and ordered a dozen oysters on the half shell and a Virgin Mary.

Manuel’s Tavern on North Highland was, like the Varsity, an Atlanta institution. The original barroom with booths along one side was decorated with execrable paintings of proprietor Manuel Maloof’s heroes, FDR and JFK, as well as some pretty awful nudes. Long a favorite hangout of the city’s journalists and drinking liberals, it was a loud, comfortable, masculine watering hole. However, women were not only welcome, but protected by the ever-watchful bartenders. It hadn’t changed a whit in more than two decades. Sam hoped it never would.

“Hi, Sam. How’s George?” Manuel called from the bar. No matter how long a regular was away, Manuel always remembered, even though he had become a power in DeKalb County politics and had other things on his mind.

“Fine. He doesn’t get out as much these days. I’ll have to drag him in soon.”

“You do that. Awful about Forrest Ridley, isn’t it? I remember a party he gave once in one of the back rooms. It was…” Manuel’s words trailed off as he recognized the dead man’s daughter coming through the back door.

Samantha rose. “Over here, Liza.”

The girl’s eyes were hidden behind dark glasses, which completed her all-black costume. She was dressed much the same as the last time Sam had seen her—could that have been only yesterday? But today her black garb wasn’t a punk artist’s affectation. Today it was mourning.

“I’m so sorry,” Sam began as she had on the telephone, and again got no further as Liza waved her sympathy away. The girl couldn’t talk about that now—the fact that her father was dead, that she was never going to see him again, never going to place another basketball bet, never going to hear him call her by his pet name, “Miss.” She could only deal with the tangential.

“She’s locked herself in her room,” Liza said. Sam didn’t have to ask to know she was talking about Queen. “She’s hardly said a word to me—as if
she
were the only one…” Her voice broke. She took a deep breath and regrouped. “She’s constantly on the phone.”

“To whom?”

“I don’t know. She has a private line. But”—Liza removed her dark glasses and stared straight at Sam—“I listened at the door once. She was saying, ‘Well, we don’t have long to wait, not anymore.’”

“What do you think that meant?”

“What do
you
think?”

Sam was tempted to say
I asked you first,
but refrained. “I don’t know. She could be talking about anything. What do you
really
think, Liza?”

“I think someone killed my father.”

The girl’s bluntness took Sam’s breath away. “Why do you think that?”

“He’s—he
was
—not a stupid man. He’s not going to go fooling around up there at the top of Apalachee and just
fall.
It’s clearly marked.”

“You’re sure?”

“Of course, the falls aren’t all that far from Tate, where we’ve always spent at least part of every summer.”

“Your family?”

“All of us. The partners and their families. We’re all one big happy family, don’t you know?”

“You don’t really mean that.”

Liza gestured with one hand. “We
used
to be. When I was a little girl, I loved to go up to Tate. But when I was about fourteen, it started to change. Or
I
started to change. It began to choke me.”

“Tate did?”

“The whole thing. You don’t know what it’s like.”

“Try me.”

“Well, maybe you do.” Liza sighed. “Everyone’s the same. There are rules for everything. What you do. What you say. Who you see. Where you go to school. What you wear, eat, think—or
don’t
think. Everyone follows the party line, the S and L party line.”

“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?”