First Kill All the Lawyers (16 page)

A nice, long, leisurely walk, thought Sam, for a man and his dog.

She found Virginia Circle, then drove slowly, looking at the numbers: 198, 200, 204. She had passed the house. She backed up. No wonder. The lot that was 202, the number Lona had written on the piece of notepaper Sam was holding, was screened by tall overgrown hedges at the street and looked like part of the next-door neighbor’s yard.

Sam parked and walked cautiously down the cracked driveway. A blue cornflower blossomed through the cement. She crept up the front steps. In the mailbox were only supermarket fliers and advertisements for a tire sale. She circled the small house. All the blinds were tightly pulled.

Pulling her wallet out of her purse, Sam scanned her credit cards and chose the brown Saks card. This one’s for you, Bobbie June, she told herself. Slipping it into the back door, she jiggled the doorknob as Sean had taught her. The door swung wide.

It was like a dollhouse, the kind she had always imagined she’d like to live in when she grew old—neat, self-contained, without a lot of fuss and bother.

The fifties kitchen was spotless, all white, except for shiny new yellow floor tiles. There was no sign that anyone lived here, except for a glass coffeemaker on the back of the range. The countertops were bare, though the cupboards revealed a few dishes, coffee cups, wine and champagne glasses, and a box of Sweet ’n Low.

The refrigerator was a different matter. Neatly stacked inside were a dozen bottles of extra-dry Perrier-Jouet champagne. On one shelf was a bag of Blue Mountain Jamaican coffee. In the freezer Sam found containers of chocolate and vanilla Häagen-Dazs ice cream and Gold Brick chocolate sauce.

The living room was absolutely empty, as was the
first bedroom. The second bedroom, however, was a storyteller.

A king-size bed almost filled it. Beneath a white fur throw were sheets of sleek white satin. In the drawer of the bedside table, the only other piece of furniture in the room, were a couple of joints, a roach clip, and an unopened bar of Lindt dark chocolate with hazelnuts. Behind the chocolate was a vibrator, its cord neatly wrapped.

In the bathroom was a collection of toothbrushes in various colors, a tube of toothpaste, and, across the back of the tub, loofah sponges and a set of soaps, oils, and gels—all Chanel No. 5. Stacks of new thick white towels filled the small linen closet.

That was it. No clothes. No pictures. No letters. Only the faint fragrance of Chanel and, as Sam closed her eyes for a moment, the smell of sex.

*

“The place has got to be full of prints. Did you touch anything?” Beau asked.

Sam didn’t answer.

“Sure you did. That’s okay. We can separate yours out.”

“The note?”

“It’s slow going. Horace brought over Queen and Liza and Lona’s prints. But it’s going to take a long while to see if there’s anything else there.”

“So what we’ll find here are Forrest Ridley’s prints and a woman’s.”

Then she heard what she’d just said. Who was this “we”? He’d done it. He’d known the quest would get the better of her, that it would be no trick at all to worm his way in.

“Sounds like it. Sure sounds like a love nest.” He
paused for a long moment. “Chocolate sauce, huh? And satin sheets? Tell me again what was in the bedside drawer.”

“I forget.”

“Then maybe we need to go over there together and take a closer look.”

“Do it yourself. I’ve got more important things on my agenda, like driving up to Monroeville.”

“Not a good idea, Sam. Nothing up there for you. Dodd’s not gonna tell you a thing. You after him because you think he’s implicated in the Ridley case? Or is he just one of your sheriffs? You still pursuing that story?”

“Well, it would sure be tidy if he were both, wouldn’t it?”

“Wouldn’t it? Not damn likely, though. Lightning doesn’t strike twice, you know.”

“I want to go see the falls for myself.”

“Want me to drive you up?”

“You never stop, do you?”

“Not till I get what I want. Nope.”

Thirteen

George grinned when Sam told him about the Virginia
Circle bungalow.

“Didn’t know Ridley had it in him. Sounds like a place I’d have created myself in my younger days.

Horace entered carrying a tray of ham sandwiches, potato salad, iced tea, and a dark beer for George. “Don’t you remember that place over on Baltimore Place that you and Mr. Thompson once took on shares?”

“Hush! Samantha doesn’t need to know what a gay blade I was.”

“And still are.” Peaches delivered her line as she passed down the hallway and kept going.

“You’re talking about an old man who’s half-blind,” George called after her. “How can I be chasing if I can’t even see?”

“Don’t need to see to feel. ’Specially when you don’t have to chase very hard. Or very far.” Peaches’ voice trailed off down the hall.

Sam fixed her gaze on her uncle, who was now savoring his first sip of the cold dark beer. She didn’t know anything about his romantic life, except that when he was young, he’d been married briefly to a beautiful woman with chestnut hair named Eloise. Her picture sat in a cloisonné frame on the baby grand piano. Eloise, his childhood sweetheart and the love of George’s life, had died giving birth to their first son, who was stillborn.

“It took him ages,” Peaches had told Sam, “to even be able to say her name.”

But that had been more than forty years ago, and the tall, dapper George Adams, whose beautiful Egyptian cotton shirts, dark suits, summer linens, and seersuckers all came from Savile Row, grew, as some men do, more handsome each year. His figure was no longer slim, but even his heft was becoming. His dark curls had turned pure white. Those clear blue eyes remained the same as in the old photos Samantha had looked at, only the laugh lines at the corners deepened. Had he not been her kin, she herself would have found him appealing. It didn’t surprise her to hear Horace and Peaches hinting that other women did.

“George, why is it you never talk to me about your women friends?” she asked.

“Well. . .” He paused and wiped his mouth with a linen napkin. “I guess I just think that those things are best left unsaid.”

“But—”

He raised a hand. “If I plan to run off with any showgirls, I’ll let you know.”

They both laughed.

“Now,” he said, “let’s talk about what I’ve been able to find out for you about Watkin County. You’re still set on going up there?”

“Tomorrow morning, bright and early.”

“This should give you something to think about.” He pulled out the notes he’d taken in his now-huge printed hand. He had taken to using children’s wide-ruled school pads as his eyesight dimmed. “I told you I was curious about land development up there. There’s lots of money, I mean big sums, changing hands.”

Sam nodded and picked up Harpo, who had scooted into the room. He snuggled into her lap, turning so she could scratch his ears.

“Well, it was just as I expected. In Watkin County, the sheriff and the tax commissioner are one and the same. So obviously the sheriff knows when land is being sold at auction for taxes. He runs a tiny notice in the paper in practically invisible two-point type, and when the day comes, nobody shows up at the auction except the sheriff and the real estate agent or lawyer with whom he’s in cahoots.”

“And who’s that man?”

“Jeb Saunders.”

“You know him?”

“I sure do. He has an association with Simmons and Lee.”

“Which points the finger at whom? Forrest Ridley? Is that why he was killed? Land deals?”

“No, not Forrest. What’s interesting is what my man—”

“Who?” Sam demanded.

“Let’s just say that some of the firm’s young associates are awfully eager and can find their way around courthouse records like they’re on roller skates, if given the motivation. Anyway, my young man found
the name of Kay Kramer on many of the recent Watkin land deeds. Kay Kramer and Patricia Kay.”

“Kay Kay?”

“Kramer’s her maiden name.”

“And Patricia?”

“Totsie.”

“The Kay women are tied up in this?” Sam asked incredulously.

“No. I don’t think so. I think Edison just used their names as fronts.”

“I never did like that man. Do you?”

“Well, just because we were partners didn’t mean we got into bed together, if you know what I mean.”

“But did you suspect him of this kind of thing?” Sam pressed.

“Not suspect, exactly. But I’ll tell you, it’s no great surprise. The man’s greedy. You can see it in his eyes.”

“So, when’s the next sale? Did your young man find that out?”

There was silence from George’s end of the room.

“Don’t con a conman,” Sam told him. “I learned everything I know from you. And I know when you’re holding out. Give.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Hot damn! What timing! I ask you.” Sam stood, despite Harpo’s grumblings, and strode around the room. “This is great. I’ll go and see it at first hand.”

“You don’t know these people, Samantha. I keep telling you you don’t want to mess with them. They play hardball.”

“That’s all I’ve heard since I started talking about this rural sheriff idea. And you’re the one who turned
me on to it in the first place. Now, it just so happens that we’ve got a sheriff—certainly corrupt, and maybe implicated in Forrest Ridley’s death—and you’re telling me to lay off? Forget it, George. Daylight tomorrow, I’m gone.”

George smiled at her back as she walked out the door, followed close behind by Harpo.

She was the child he’d never had. And he was fearful for her. But in her place, he knew he’d have done exactly what she was doing. Nose right on the trail, hang the consequences.

*

Headed north and slightly east on Route 400, Sam crossed the perimeter highway a little after nine, Peaches having insisted despite her protestations that Sam could not set foot out the door without a proper breakfast.

At the last minute she’d scooped up Harpo, who had been watching her every move before settling down with his resigned and grumpy look, his lower teeth slightly protruding.

“You want to go, Scooter?”

The little dog had danced in a circle.
Go
was his middle name. Now he was settled in her lap, happily snoozing as the miles rolled by.

The suburbs seemed to stretch on forever. George was right: Atlanta was marching northward out of Fulton County and into Forsyth. Sign after sign by the side of the highway announced subdivisions with names like Arrowwood and Bowling Green—little enclaves of tract housing with all the authenticity of Disney World.

Sam remembered then something that Beau told her his daughter Beth had said. Once when they were
driving up this way, she’d asked, “Dad, what is this all
for
?”

Sam, who’d always preferred living in the thick of things, wasn’t sure.

Once off the expressway and onto two-lane Route 19, she left the suburbs behind. This was a land of piney woods and rolling hills that, another county northward, became the Appalachians’ toes. It was kudzu country, where that creeping vine imported from Japan to prevent erosion indiscriminately covered hills and trees, old cars, abandoned houses, and, some said, sleeping cows—its heart-shaped leaves prettily disguising its voraciousness.

Huge chicken coops filled some roadside lots, the results of a new form of sharecropping as the big growers provided the farmers with chicks and feed in exchange for most of the full-grown birds that would later fill supermarket coolers.

This was the sort of land into which Herman Blanding’s house would blend comfortably, Sam thought, where a front yard filled with old trucks, skeletons of station wagons, rusting lawn furniture, and a big television satellite dish was the rule rather than the exception. New double-wide mobile homes were erected right beside tumbledown shacks, the occupants sliding the latter’s contents right over into the former without missing a beat. It was a land where Christmas trees were farmed, as well as gourds and serious timber. It was all-white country, these “sundown” counties where blacks were not welcome after dark. It was provincial, parochial, and overwhelmingly Protestant. A sign on a Baptist church Sam passed read:
Are you a runaway from God? Please call home.
And it was poor country. Though the land was beautiful, it didn’t bring its inhabitants wealth—except recently, to a select few, when large parcels of it were sold.

Sam approached the Monroeville city limits leaning into a roller-coaster curve called Long Pond Bend. She loved the way her car hugged the road. Harpo awakened and licked her hand. He was a great traveler.

“Good boy,” she said. “You can get out in just a moment.”

In that moment she was in the town’s center, and if she’d kept driving for another, she would have been through it. Monroeville was just about a fifteen-second town if you were doing twenty, which was what the speed limit allowed.