First Kill All the Lawyers (20 page)

But Totsie was hardly ready for bed. “That’s all anyone ever does in this goddamned house! In this goddamned town! Just sit around being polite and telling amusing stories until something ugly comes up, something unpleasant, something like real life, and then suddenly everybody excuses themselves from the room. ‘Pardon me,’ they say, ‘I’ve got to check on something.’ Or, ‘I’m so tired. I have to go to bed.’ Well, check on this. I killed Forrest!”

“Totsie, no!” Kay Kay screamed.

“What are you talking about, child?” Edison had the most peculiar look on his face.

“I killed him! I did it!” Totsie was hysterical, totally
out of control. “We came back from San Francisco, though Forrest pretended that he was still there, still gone. And I drove up to the falls with him. We went in separate cars. We took a little cabin up there, at the base of Apalachee.”

Sam remembered seeing the cabins there, up above the campgrounds.

“Forrest said that he had some business he needed to take care of. With
you,
Daddy.” She whirled and pointed her finger at him. “With you and Sheriff Dodd. He said he wanted to tell you that he knew what was going on with the land deals, and the money, and that you had to stop.” Totsie’s breathing was ragged.

Edison shrugged. “It was nothing, honey. Just bending conventions a little among old friends. I’ve known Buford Dodd for a long time.”

“And Jeb Saunders?” Totsie flung the name at him like a weapon.

“Yes, dear.” His voice was soothing, as if he were talking to an upset child. “Jeb’s an associate of the firm. We do a lot of business together.”

“Shut up!” Kay Kay spat the words in her husband’s face. “Shut up! I know what you’re doing. You always do it! You’re twisting this to be what you want. Well, it’s not. It’s not what you want at all. Totsie’s talking about killing Forrest Ridley. Do you understand that?” Veins stood out in her neck; her eyes protruded.

Totsie raced on as if she couldn’t stop. “When he came back to the cabin after seeing you all, he was upset. He said that he had found proof of lots more money that you all had hidden, that you were going to ruin the firm, and that he had to turn you in.

“But
you
said, he said
you
said that he couldn’t do that. That
it
would ruin the firm and my good name. He said
you
said that Mama and I would never be able to hold our heads up in the Driving Club again. That we’d be banned. As if that mattered.” Her laughter was manic.

“I told him that, I told him I didn’t care. All I wanted was for us to be like we used to before I told him about your crooked deals. Why did I ever tell him?” She cradled her wet face in splayed fingers. “If I hadn’t, he’d be alive now.”

“Totsie, Totsie,” her mother crooned, hugging herself with her arms. “It’s not your fault. What these men do is never our fault.”

“It
is,
Mama. You don’t understand. He said that he was going to have to think it all over. That it was probably a good idea if we stopped seeing one another until all this was worked out.

“‘No!’ I screamed. I was crazy. I couldn’t stand the idea that he was going to leave me. I’ve never been so happy, never before in my life. I was crying and pulling on his clothes. I was on my knees begging, ‘No, Forrest, no.’

“‘Baby,’ he said, ‘you don’t understand. This is wrong. It’s all wrong. I have to think this over.’

“And then something snapped inside me. It was like something broke. I just didn’t care anymore. If I couldn’t have Forrest, I couldn’t—I couldn’t go on.”

“Sugar, sugar,” Kay Kay moaned, partly for her daughter and partly for herself. “Oh, Jesus, look where they push you. Right to the brink. And over.”

“I ran out the door to my car,” Totsie said. “But I’d left my keys inside. Then I grabbed my gun from the glove compartment.”

“Oh, Totsie.” Kay Kay’s eyes were wide, like those of a frightened horse.

“I ran out into the dark. I ran faster and faster, I didn’t really know where I was going. I just kept running. I could hear Forrest behind me. He was calling for me to stop. But I kept running, up, up. ‘I’ll kill myself when I get to the top,’ I kept whispering to myself. ‘When I get to the top.’ Then I wouldn’t have this terrible pain inside. It would all be over. It
was
already over, don’t you understand? If I couldn’t have Forrest, I was already dead.”

“Oh, honey,” Kay Kay crooned. “How could you think that?”

It’s easy, Sam thought, don’t you know that? Hanging in there with Edison all these years? Isn’t desertion your greatest fear, Kay Kay? Being alone?

Sam turned and looked at Edison. He was standing completely still, like a stone statue in a rainstorm. It was all washing over him. All just words. He was merely waiting for the facts beneath the emotions, the facts that might relate to him, the facts that might cost him money or power, the important things.

Totsie raced on. “So I kept running and running. A couple of times I fell, and I was afraid that he was going to catch me and stop me. But”—and she smiled then, a wonderful ruined smile that Sam didn’t want to look at too long because she felt it might break your heart—“Forrest wasn’t really much of an athlete. The most exercise he ever got was the walks over to our house on Virginia Circle.” She turned to Sam, who nodded.

“What house?” Kay Kay demanded.

Totsie shook her head. It wasn’t important now.

She pushed on. “And finally I
was
at the top, at the top of the path, the top of the falls. I stood there, holding the gun in my hand, listening to the rush of all that water. Before it comes to the falls it’s very quiet, you know. It’s really just a little stream, but it grows as it falls over, and then it bounces, it spews, it foams. Of course, I couldn’t see any of that in the darkness. I could only
hear
it down below. I stood there, Mama, thinking how glad I was that you taught me to shoot when I was a little girl, and that you’d always insisted that I keep a gun in my car for protection. And then I turned the gun toward my head.”

“Oh, Totsie.” Kay Kay was sobbing.

“But I’d waited too long, listening to the falls. Forrest ran up behind me. He grabbed me. And then the gun went off. There was a report, and he jolted. We had our arms around each other. And then he fell.” She looked at Sam as if Sam could make some sense out of this tale she was telling that didn’t make any sense to her, even though she’d been there. “He fell over the rail, over the falls. I couldn’t even scream. I just stood there, like it was a joke. Like it was a video that any moment I could reverse, and he would come back up the falls, over the rail, and I would hold him again in my arms. Then I would push the stop button, and that would be the end. There wouldn’t be any gunshot. We would stand there at the top of the falls in the dark, and he would whisper in my ear, ‘I love you, baby,’ and then we’d go to bed.” She whispered, “Just like that.”

Totsie stood with her arms open in a circle. Her mother walked into the circle and enveloped her. Edison turned. His face was somber. “Well, Samantha. You can see that this was all a tragic accident.” He placed an arm around her shoulders and, this time, propelled her toward the front door.

“Terribly tragic,” he went on. “I hope we’ll talk about this tomorrow before you share this story with anyone.”

He managed to pat her, but at the same time he was still politely walking her out. “And now, if you’ll excuse us, it’s been a long night. I must put my pretty ladies to bed.”

The door clicked behind her suddenly, and before she knew what was happening, Sam was standing alone in the dark.

Sixteen

Sam shook her head as she wheeled her car down the long driveway. So Totsie had accidentally killed Ridley. And then what? Did she just leave his body there to be discovered and wait for the announcement of his death, which came, ironically enough, at her parents’ cocktail party?

Why would she do that? Because she was afraid she’d be charged with murder? Or because she didn’t want anyone to know about the circumstances?

Or was it simply fear? Had she just panicked? Sam thought about Chappaquiddick. She’d always wondered what she’d do in a situation like that, a fatal accident, but a terribly incriminating one. It was easy to condemn others until you were standing there, looking at a dead body, trying to make a rational
and
moral decision while you were in shock.

But something about Totsie’s story bothered her. It wasn’t that Sam didn’t believe her. She believed that Totsie
thought
that was the way it had happened. Sam
couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but it didn’t feel quite right.

Maybe it was Edison’s reaction to Totsie’s story. He didn’t really seem concerned about her, but rather, curious about what she was going to say. And his being in the vicinity of the accident, even ten miles away—somehow it was like being ten miles away from an atomic bomb.

Sam stopped at the end of the drive, turned left on Andrews, then left on West Paces Ferry Road. She’d take I-75 back home. Though she usually avoided the expressways, she was in a hurry. She wanted to talk to George about all this. And to Beau. In light of Totsie’s story, she wanted to talk with him again about that hole he thought he’d seen in Ridley’s chest—and to tell him to check the note for Kay Kay’s fingerprints.

So Kay Kay had sent those invitations. What else was she capable of doing? Was she capable of murder? And why had she pulled that stunt? It would be a long reach to think a woman her age would go to so much trouble for a practical joke. Why did she dislike the Ridleys so? Or
one
of the Ridleys? Was it Forrest or Queen?

What was it she’d said about Queen at Forrest’s wake? Something about Queen coming after other women’s husbands. Was Queen after
her
husband? It had sounded tonight as if the Kays’ match had hardly been made in heaven, as if the love had gone long ago. But who knew why people stayed together, why they held on, the dependencies and needs they fed for one another? Edison Kay might be a son-of-a-bitch, but he was
Kay Kay’s
son-of-a-bitch, and rich to boot.

On the other hand, why would Queen be interested in Edison Kay? Maybe she knew about Ridley’s affair
with Totsie. Maybe this was her little joke—keeping it all in the family, so to speak. All that plastic surgery…and yet Forrest was seeing a young girl. Was that all a—

Sam’s heart dropped. There was a blue light, damn it, rotating in her rearview mirror.

She jerked her foot off the gas and looked down at the needle. Shit! She’d been doing fifty-five. The speed limit in this neighborhood was probably forty. Should she tell this guy some cock and bull story about being on assignment? Hell, it was worth a try.

She slowed and edged the car off the pavement. The patrol car pulled up right behind her.

She reached into her bag for her driver’s license, registration, and her press card. Though you could never tell with these guys—some of them hated the media. She’d decide when she saw him how to play it.

“Sorry, ma’am, but I’m going to have to ask you to get out of the car.”

“Just a minute.” Sam glanced to her left, but his flashlight was blinding. “If you’ll hold that still a second, I’ll have my license.”

“Please, just step out of the car.”

As he spoke the second time, the voice started to register. Low and rumbling, but pleasant. Beneath the rumble, just below the slow, sweet surface, was a chuckle. She’d heard that voice before. Yesterday? No, the day—

Just as she got it, Sheriff Buford Dodd, who’d been parked in the Kays’ driveway nursing a bottle all during Sam’s interview, grabbed her arm and jerked her out the door.

Seventeen

The handcuffs snapped. The doorlocks popped shut. The
car began to move.

“Well now,
Mrs. Sloan
,” Dodd drawled. In the flash of his nickel-plated lighter she saw his smile. He lit a cigar. “I hope you don’t mind if I smoke.”

So that’s how he was going to play it—gentlemanly and cool. As if he’d just happened to be in the neighborhood. As if he’d invited her for a ride in his car and she’d smilingly accepted, swishing her skirts and showing a bit of ankle as he held the door and handed her inside.

“Not at all. But I do mind these.” She lifted her braceleted wrists.

“I’m sorry about that.” He chuckled. “Unfortunately, we have to do that kind of thing with uppity women. Now, had you minded your own business, had you stayed home…
”
He took a long drag on his cigar, and the car filled with smoke.

They passed the governor’s mansion on their right, an atrocious red-brick reproduction of a Southern plantation house whose first occupant had been Lester Maddox, that baseball bat-wielding racist champion. Just ahead was the green sign for I-75. Dodd turned onto the expressway, headed north.

What was it that sweet, loony Herman Blanding, had said? Something about the devil coming from the north? He’d been talking about Union soldiers, dead these many long years. But there were always men who were willing to wreak havoc on the bodies and happiness of others, whether they were fighting for a cause or were only in it for themselves. There always had been. Probably always would be. These devils favored no direction. They came from everywhere.