First Kill All the Lawyers (3 page)

Harpo picked up his rubber carrot, dropped it on her foot, and growled. Playtime was the only time he ever spoke.

“Here, silly.” She threw the toy to the other end of the long room. The dog chased it, then sat down beside it and stared at her.

“Fetch.”

He didn’t budge.

“Rotten. Spoiled rotten.”

She walked to the other end of the room, picked up the little dog, then turned and gazed out the window across the street toward the Talbot house. She stayed there, her attention focused.

Lights were on downstairs, in the living room, dining room, and kitchen. Miriam Talbot was probably finishing up her dinner dishes. Sam’s eye traveled up the red brick to the second floor. All was dark there, including the front room on the left, which she’d spent her entire nineteenth summer watching, the bedroom that had belonged to Miriam Talbot’s son, Beau.

“Son-of-a-bitch!”

The words startled her, as if someone else had spoken. Harpo squirmed and stared up at her.

“Not you,” she told him, laughing, and put him down on the floor.

But she kept standing there. She threw open the multi-paned casement window and took a deep breath of the evening air. She closed her eyes and thought she could almost smell Miriam’s roses. Beau had once blanketed her with those roses. At that thought, an ancient pain twisted in her gut.

It was amazing. Almost twenty years had passed since Beau had broken her young girl’s heart and caused her to flee Atlanta. All that water under the bridge. She smiled wryly. All that branch water and all that bourbon. All the faces. All the other bodies she’d awakened to. All the roller-coaster ups and downs and all the long, flat, dry spaces. And still she could stand at this window and look across the street to where she’d met Dr. Beau Talbot, the too-handsome intern home for the summer before he began his New York residency, and feel exactly the
same emotions. The excitement. The rush. The exhilaration. And the thrumming, drumming pain.

She clutched the window sash. Jesus! Was it always going to be the same? When she was eighty and wrinkled into some apple-doll caricature of her younger self, would all her emotions remain in place? Not just about Beau, but the same jealousies, loves, hates, the same messy mishmash of emotions one felt about oneself and other members of the human race? Well, why not? She couldn’t remember it ever being any different since she remembered feeling at all; the basic sense of self, the voice inside her head, had always been the same.

Now that voice found words once more, and she threw them out into the April night.

“You son-of-a-bitch!”
she yelled, slammed the window shut for punctuation, and stood there grinning. Well, now,
that
felt better.

She hadn’t yelled all those years ago. She’d pulled her blanket over her head and moaned. It had taken George and Peaches days to get the story out of her. Beau had changed his mind. No, he didn’t want her to follow him to New York, to transfer to NYU. He didn’t want her at all. There was another girl. Someone he’d met before, in Boston. He didn’t know how it had happened; he hadn’t meant for it to. They were getting married right away. He was sorry.

Two weeks later and ten pounds lighter, she had climbed out of her bed and begun to pack. Her destination wasn’t New York, but rather the opposite coast.

“It’s too late to get into Stanford,” George had protested.

Sam had given him a look that said she knew he could help her do anything he wanted. And he could. He’d made the calls and pulled the strings even as he’d argued, insisting there was no reason for her to leave.

But there was. Everywhere she turned, Samantha had run into Beau’s ghost. Every place they had ever been during that long, delicious summer was perfumed with their scent and echoed with the sound of their leftover laughter. No, she couldn’t stay in Atlanta.

“I have to, I must,” she’d said again and again, even as she and George and Peaches piled into that year’s Lincoln and Horace drove them to the airport. All the way to San Francisco she’d hummed under her breath Janis Joplin’s paean to pain, “A Little Piece of My Heart.” Janis had known what she was talking about.

Now Samantha was back.

She’d come home.

It wasn’t the first time, of course. She’d dropped in for occasional brief visits during her California sojourn—just long enough to say hello and good-bye and register the changes.

Atlanta. It
had
changed. And yet …
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
She was only now beginning to discover the static places and the fluid. Whole neighborhoods had disappeared to satisfy the appetite of the freeway monster. There were more Yankee voices. And there were newcomers on the North Side who had never even
been
downtown. But the Varsity still made chili dogs. Manners still counted. And the television preachers still had an audience, as did the fulminating racists—in a town that was now 60 percent black and well into its second black mayor. Ah, Atlanta. Was
she
too Yankee for it now? Could their respective changes find a common ground? Discovering the answers to those questions was going to be interesting.

During those years away when people asked her, as they were wont to do, “Why did you leave the South?” she’d answered flippantly, as was
her
wont, “Because of a summer romance. Because of a broken heart.” She’d said that for years and years and years, long past the time, perhaps, when she should have forgotten.

But this was not a thing that Sam would forget or ever take lightly. She’d come to live in this house when her parents had died. It was Beau’s desertion that had banished her. Now Sean was gone, and she had returned. She stared out at the house where Beau had once lived and heard the old music come back. She softly whistled the refrain to Joplin’s “Ball and Chain.”

Of course, Beau wasn’t the only reason she’d stayed away for so long. Things began, and then they kept rolling. At Stanford, on the rebound, she’d found and married, then later divorced, her bearded draft resister. She’d floated along on that river of bourbon and branch water. Year followed year and things got better and things got worse and then better again, and she’d become Sam Adams, Renowned Girl Reporter. She’d found success and she’d found Sean, and then, hell—it was a life. Which she
certainly
hadn’t lived in California just to avoid Beau Talbot. Why, she hadn’t known for ages that he had moved back home—and become the state’s chief medical examiner.

She turned from the window and plopped herself once again before her dressing table mirror.

She was going to run into him. It was only a matter of time. An investigative reporter could no more avoid a medical examiner than pigs could fly—not unless, of course, she gave up on murder. But murder was her specialty.

Sam’s series on a serial killer in San Francisco had won her journalistic prizes, had earned her the reputation that had gotten her this cushy spot on the
Constitution,
naming her own stories, answering only to the managing editor.

Yet she’d heard herself telling George recently that she was thinking about pursuing other avenues, leaving the blood and gore to some other reporter. She’d had her bellyful of middle-of-the-night morgue visits, of psychopaths, of interviewing families who were neck-deep in grief.

George had nodded when she told him all this. And she knew that he knew that she was lying through her teeth.

Two

The first time Samantha had stepped into managing editor Hoke Toliver’s office, he’d stubbed out one of the hundred cigarettes he would smoke that day and said, “Dammit, there are so frigging many reasons I can’t sleep with you.”

It was an interesting beginning, Sam thought, not that she hadn’t heard some doozies in her time. “Shoot,” she’d said. “I’ll admit I’m curious.”

“How old are you?”

“In the 35-to-40 ozone. None of your business.”

“See, I
knew
you were younger than Lois.”

“Lois?”

“My wife.”

“Lois doesn’t like you sleeping with younger women?”

“Nope. Makes her crankier than a prom queen with a fresh zit on her nose.”

“Well, that’s one,” Sam had remarked.

“Two, I saw you across the room at a meeting last
week, and I promised myself I’d never sleep with anybody in the program.”

“Which one?”

“Which one what?”

“Which A.A. meeting?”

“The one at St. Philip’s.”

“I didn’t see you.”

“I know.” He’d pulled his mouth down at the corners, run one hand through the first crew cut she’d seen since the late fifties, and with the other hauled up his sagging pants. “I was sitting over in smoking, hiding my stupefyingly good looks under a bushel, ’cause I didn’t want you to get distracted from the qualifying speaker.”

“Fat chance,” she’d said.

Not that he wasn’t good-looking; he was, in a crew-cut, hound-doggish sort of way. But at that particular meeting, the woman who had been talking about her experiences with alcohol could have stood off Joan Rivers in mouth-to-mouth combat.

“So if you don’t find fresh meat at meetings, and I assume you don’t hang out in bars anymore, where do you find the lucky darlings?”

He’d tweaked his own jowls, which flapped in the lingering blue haze in his office, lit another cigarette, and answered, “At my health club.”

Samantha had to laugh.

“The third reason is that you’re smarter than I am. Or that’s what the new boss-man, the one we imported all the way from
New
York, says.”

“Does, does he?”

“Yep. Says you’re the smartest thing he’s ever seen in a skirt.”

“Or out—” She’d caught herself, but Hoke was far
too fast. He was already grinning as he said, “Yep, out of one, too. And I imagine Mr. Boss’s seen some real smart skirtless women up there in
New
York.”

Samantha knew better than to rise to that kind of bait, particularly since she knew that Hoke was, in more ways than one, blowing smoke. But she hadn’t been able to resist.

“Did it ever occur to you that there’s a fourth reason we might not sleep together?”

“Yep, I did think that like every other smart woman, you might occasionally have an extraordinary moment of the dumbs when you might choose to pass up such a stud hoss as myself, but I figured it’d pass. You’d get over it.”

*

Sam was standing in his office now. “Hoke, I want to do a series on the corruption of rural sheriffs.”

“’Scuse me,” he said, hitting himself on one ear. “I thought you said you wanted to commit suicide. I must have misunderstood you, right?”

Samantha flopped down in the reasonable facsimile of a wooden chair that sat before his battered desk. “Why is everybody so skittish on this subject?”

“Like who?”

“Like my Uncle George.”

“I’ve always respected George Adams’s judgment. One of the finest barristers the South has ever known. Question is, why’re you here seeking a second opinion?” He lit one cigarette off another. “Now, why don’t you mosey on over to Macon and do something with that mother-raper’s been working the fancy neighborhoods? Be a lot safer. And get you the front page.”

“Hoke, did you know that Billy Gene Chandler
from Raritan County used to lock up women so he could have sex with them?”

“You want to trade stories, woman?” Hoke leaned back in his chair and exhaled a plume of smoke. “Well, you’ve come to the right place. I’ll tell you one: Sheriff Nelson over in Cleveland County
personally
killed a white Yankee reporter lady who came around asking questions about the Klan.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“It doesn’t matter what you believe. He did it. ’Course, he made it look like an accident. He’s also murdered a couple of traveling salesmen and I don’t know how many nameless vagrants.”

“Why?”

“Why?”
Hoke shook his head. “’Cause he has a taste for it. He
likes
it. It makes him feel good. Plus, in the case of the reporter, Nelson rides with the Klan himself sometimes and didn’t want her jerking on
his
bedsheets. Now, if you want more, there are the badge-toting boys who still sell moonshine up in north Georgia, though not so many of ’em these days ’cause there’s lots more money in drugs. I guess they got to supplement that 25 thou they’re dragging down somehow. And simple graft just ain’t as profitable as it used to be.”

“What else?”

“What else you want? Want to hear about the gambling, the cockfights, the dog racing, the prostitution, the little girls they auction off to the richest dirty old man? You just imagine any old pot full of shit you can think of, and you’re going to find a sheriff with his finger in it.”

“So why doesn’t somebody do something about it?” Sam demanded.

“Sister-baby, that’s what I love about you California liberals.”