TWO

“Panic is the first enemy of the lawyer,” Cade had once told me. So when the first police came—two uniformed patrolmen in a squad car—I tried to blank out everything but the envelope.

The young man rushed past me through the front door, slamming it behind him. The other stopped in front of me. He was short and paunchy, with pale blue eyes and a creased clown’s face so sad it must have always seemed close to tears. “What happened?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Sure.” His voice was patient and unsatisfied. “Just how you found her.”

I swallowed. “I got here maybe fifteen minutes ago, on business. Mrs. Cantwell’s our client—” I paused, deleting the envelope. “No one answered, and the door was unlocked. That wasn’t like her; she was a careful woman. So I stepped inside to check.”

The door opened behind me. “Called in the body,” the young man said. “Rayfield’s coming himself. You’ll want to see this.”

His partner nodded and turned back to me. “You’d better come inside, Mr. Shaw.” I didn’t move. “Come on,” he said, almost gently.

I followed him to the sitting room without looking at Lydia. He pointed me to a sofa across from the fireplace where I couldn’t see the dining room or her body. “You’ll have to wait here for Homicide,” he said, and left.

“Jesus Christ,” someone muttered. It was the older man’s voice, coming from the dining room, low and close to tender.

“Look at the picture,” his partner said.

There was silence. “We got a creep maybe—someone who’ll do it twice.”

“Might could be rape. It’s funny—Rayfield was sending Watkins until I said her name, and then he decided to come himself.”

“Look around you,” the older man said. “She used to be somebody.”

There was no malice in that, just fact and a little kinship, as though Lydia Cantwell had taken a great fall quickly and thus qualified for sympathy. My throat was dry.

The front door opened, there were murmured greetings, and footsteps near the body. A new voice—soft and flat—asked, “Called the medical examiner?” “Yessir,” the older man said, and then two plainclothesmen walked into the sitting room.

The thin one had a neat mustache, wire-rimmed glasses, and the meticulous intense look of a demolition expert. But it was the second man who held my attention. He was perhaps fifty, with a large potato face and small cobalt eyes at once pained and bleak and totally absorbed, the eyes of a bitter saint. They lit on me, appraising.

“I’m Rayfield,” he said and inclined his head toward the younger man. “This is Sergeant Bast.”

I nodded without speaking. Four uniformed police came briskly through the front door with ropes, cameras, and sketch pads, headed for the dining room. The last one carried a black doctor’s bag. “Ready to go, Lieutenant,” he called.

Rayfield glanced over. “Rope it off,” he ordered, and walked out.

The young patrolman appeared next to a vase of white chrysanthemums, watching me. I didn’t look up.

“Feel her armpits?” someone asked. “She’s room temperature.”

Another said, “She’s eight hours old, anyhow. They get this cold no way to tell for sure. Rape test’s not much good.”

“Do it anyway,” Rayfield said. Cameras began spitting.

The impersonal noise of strangers—doors opening, footsteps, orders, slamming drawers—came to me like the sound of television through an open window. Someone clambered up the stairs. I lit a Camel, forcing myself to watch Rayfield as he backed into the sitting room. He was around six-two, thick-bodied and awkwardly careful of movement, as if trapped in his own skin. His suit and tie were just something to wear, his gray wavy hair was cut military-style, his stare at the Cantwells’ furnishings abstemious and disapproving. He turned to me, asking, “You’re her lawyer?”

“That’s right.” My mouth was acrid with vomit taste and I needed some water. Instead I took a deep, harsh drag of cigarette smoke and stood.

Bast materialized with a note pad. Rayfield took out a black notebook and asked, “Mrs. Cantwell invite you?”

I noticed that his hair tonic lent him a not unpleasant whiff of the barber shop: the smell of my father. “Not exactly,” I answered. “I was on the way home from the office.”

“Then she wasn’t expecting you.” His flat drawl might have passed for witlessness if I hadn’t lived in the South, or caught the sharpness of his eyes.

“I’m not sure—she’d talked yesterday with my father-in-law.”

“But you didn’t call her.”

“No.”

“Then why’d you come?”

“Private business. Law business, that’s all.”

“What was it?”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant. That’s covered by the attorney-client privilege.”

Bast’s eyes rose from his notes. “Give me the semen slide,” someone said in the living room. Rayfield drawled, “She’s dead now, Mr. Shaw,” in a voice so flat and uninflected that his words held the barest trace of irony.

“Not just her. The family.”

His eyebrows raised. “Dead?”

“No. Clients.”

“Just who are we talking about?”

“Her husband, for one. Henry Cantwell.”

Rayfield paused, head angled to look at me as if revising some impression. His thumb began clicking the ballpoint. I noticed then that his hands were at odds with the rest of him: pale and delicate, with long piano-player’s fingers, his nails fastidiously trimmed. In a monotone he asked, “You a friend of Henry Cantwell’s?”

From the side Bast glanced hastily at Rayfield. “His friend, and lawyer,” I answered.

Rayfield’s pen stopped clicking. His tone was cool, accusing. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know.” Then it hit me that Henry might be dead or in trouble. It hit me hard, like sudden knowledge in a man not smart.

“What’s the problem, Mr. Shaw?”

“Nothing.”

“Then where is he?”

I turned to Bast. “There’s an envelope under the front seat of my car—the Alfa Romeo. You’d better get it.”

Bast looked to Rayfield. But Rayfield was staring at me, voice now taut as he asked, “Did Henry Cantwell do this?”

“Get the envelope,” I repeated to Bast.

Rayfield kept staring. But Bast nodded and went through the front door. In the minute it took him to come back Rayfield said nothing, his eyes never moving until Bast gave him the envelope. He pulled the document, reading its caption. “Her will?”

“Her new will. She never got to sign it.”

He flipped its pages as Bast read over his shoulder. He finished, said nothing, and started again, more slowly. “Take another smear,” said someone near Lydia. I reached to stub my cigarette in one of her ashtrays, jabbing twice before it went out. Finally, Rayfield asked, “Isn’t there a son?”

I nodded. “Jason.”

“But not in here.”

“No. Not in there.”

Rayfield looked up. “How old’s he now?”

“Mid-twenties.”

“Know where he lives?”

“Just that he goes to the university. Sort of a perpetual student.”

Rayfield turned to Bast. “Better find the boy.”

Bast left. Rayfield rolled up the will and began tapping it in his palm. He turned suddenly, walking toward Henry’s picture until he stood in front of it. Without turning, he asked, “Who’s your father-in-law?”

“Roland Cade.”

Rayfield turned slowly back to me, eyes widening slightly before they dropped to the will. He stared at it in pensive silence, pen held to his lips. Abruptly, he said, “We’d better call him,” and went to the kitchen.

The young patrolman still watched me. Police talked near Lydia. An awed voice said, “Take a man to do like that.”

“Maybe a strong woman,” someone answered.

I went to the window.

The sun had climbed, filtering through the pines in yellow shafts. Beyond the grounds, I knew people were living their same lives, and at the club couples were playing mixed doubles, or drinking. But I couldn’t envision it. When Rayfield returned I was staring at nothing.

“You must be worried about Henry Cantwell,” he said softly from behind. “Would that be like him, being gone?”

His tone seemed strangely kind. But when I played it back I heard a faint, tense undertone. I turned and said in a flat voice, “I wouldn’t know.”

Rayfield watched me for a moment, then looked down at the will again. “Mrs. Cantwell,” he said almost musingly, “what was she like?”

I had no answer.

For me it had never changed from that first engagement party. Mercedes and long Lincolns had eased up the drive as Henry and Lydia greeted each new arrival. Poised and perfectly coiffed, she’d begun as my youthful notion of a great lady, except that I’d watched too long. Guest upon guest, the precise same smile came and went without quite touching her eyes, and her hugs of greeting resembled acts of will. She seemed to play out the party like a role she knew expertly, which stifled her, real only in a quick turn of the head, one sudden worried glance toward Jason. And for seven years after, she kissed my cheek, remembered when we’d last talked and asked how I was, listening closely to my answer with her head slightly tilted—a minuet of courtesy which, when over, left behind nothing but itself. I’d wondered for a while, then just stopped. “She was our friend,” I said now. “It’s hard for me to talk about.”

The older man from the squad car had appeared next to Rayfield. “No sign of forced entry, sir,” he put in.

“Upstairs, too?”

“Yessir.”

Rayfield seemed almost to smile without changing expression. “Mrs. Cantwell,” he said to me. “How’d she get her money?”

“For Christ’s sake, Lieutenant, we’re not talking about some bird that crashed into a picture window. I knew her.”

“That’s right,” he said bluntly. “Past tense. She’s been strangled by someone who looks like he could do this again to some other friend of yours. That’s why we’re talking.”

We stared at each other. “Her mother was a Maddox,” I finally said. “Maddox Coal and Steel.”

He jotted that in his notebook. “What about her father’s side?”

I pointed toward the portrait. “Remember the Grangeville case?”

Rayfield turned to look. “The one way back, where they executed those two Negroes for rape.”

“He was the judge who sentenced them.”

Rayfield’s face was devoid of expression. “You’re not from here, are you?”

I knew where “here” was. “No. Cleveland.”

“And Cleveland’s where your people are.”

“That’s right.”

I’d tracked his thoughts, so I wasn’t surprised when he said in a flat voice, “Grangeville was a long time back,” and shut the notebook. It was then that it struck me that he had asked almost nothing about Henry Cantwell.

“Clean her up,” someone said. I winced, involuntarily, and then Cade walked through the door.