SEVEN

The light turned red and my car as it stopped spat gravel from the street. Two black girls watched me from the doorway of a dingy corner grocery. Near them, three youths on stripped-down bicycles leaned next to a rusted rain barrel, drinking RC from bottles and ignoring the heat and the girls. The tallest wore sunglasses and an Army jacket, the other two, pea hats, and they stared wistfully at the impossible red curves of the nude woman painted on the cinder-block walls of the “Night Time Cafe,” across the street. Above the woman the block letters of a loan company billboard spelled out “Easy Street” below a row of green dollar signs. The air smelled of dirt and gasoline.

When the light changed I drove on toward Etta Parsons’. On my radio Linda Ronstadt gave way to a newsman reading in a tremor of spurious excitement: “Police continue to investigate the bizarre ritual murder of Birmingham socialite Lydia Cantwell. At a press conference this morning, Lieutenant Frank Rayfield outlined the investigation.”

I found her address and pulled to the curb. Rayfield’s radio voice was a monotone. “Since Mrs. Cantwell was found,” he was saying, “we’ve reviewed evidence suggesting a possible psychopathic killer as well as questioned members of the family in hope of preventing any further incident. We now believe that the murderer was known to Mrs. Cantwell and that his motive was personal.”

“They’re already questioning relatives,” Cade had told me a half hour before. “I don’t know what you expect to add.”

We sat drinking coffee in Cade’s office amidst the Sunday quiet of a law firm on its day off. Manila folders for the Cantwell estate were spread on the desk in front of him. The dark hollows beneath his eyes became bruises as he leaned back to await my answer, tenting his fingers in an appraising gesture reminiscent of the three years as an associate I had spent in the same armless chair, responding on cue. The window behind him framed the cement tower of the Cantwells’ bank, and from over his shoulder stared an iron-faced photograph of Henry Cantwell’s father. On a mahogany bookshelf was the portrait of a dark young woman with melancholy gray eyes, Kris Ann’s mother. Next to that Kris Ann smiled down at the traces on Cade’s desk of his taste for money: a jade vase, a Wedgwood teacup, an antique paperweight of hand-blown glass. Beside that was a morning paper headlined SOCIALITE SLAIN above an old picture of Lydia and a bad one of Henry recoiling from the flashbulbs as he left the police station. “They talk to Jason?” I parried.

Cade scowled. “No one’s seen him. I gather that when Henry called him yesterday he started screaming about ‘being trapped.’ Henry thinks Jason meant that the police had gotten there before he’d broken the news. What I think is that Jason knew before anyone. I can’t understand why you find that so difficult to grasp.”

“The sperm test. By your theory, Jason would have had to rape his mother, then kill her. Or is it the other way around?”

Cade flushed. “I don’t find incest that amusing.”

“It’s not that credible, either, and if Rayfield thought so he wouldn’t be leaning on Henry. And that business of the telephone call makes Henry look bad.”

“I take it you’re suggesting I mishandled Rayfield.”

“All that I’m suggesting is that we make a few careful inquiries on who Lydia might have seen lately.”

“By stumbling around after the police, looking worried as hell? That’s sheer foolishness.”

“Look, when it comes to people like the Cantwells, Rayfield’s on foreign ground. We’re in better shape to ask questions and understand the answers.”

Cade shook his head. “I would have thought that anyone who’d found Lydia like that would be damned glad there are police to handle it. And your Stafford Lumber trial is set for May. You should know by now that defending a five-million-dollar job-discrimination suit is full-time work.”

“You mean especially when your client thinks that manumission was contrary to God’s law.”

“Peyton Stafford’s eccentricities are beside the point,” Cade snapped. “You’re a lawyer. Sometimes a lawyer’s job is not to feel anything.”

Cade raised his head in the prideful pose he shared with Kris Ann. Our eyes locked in a strange, distasteful intimacy, as though whatever we said didn’t really matter, that what mattered was something else we never spoke but understood in the way of two animals circling each other in darkness. “Is is possible,” I asked, “that Lydia Cantwell had a lover?”

Cade’s stare turned hard. “It would contradict any notion people had of her. What’s your basis for that?”

“The sperm. If it’s not Jason, then it’s rape or an affair, and we’d better start wondering which. And who.”

“Good God,” Cade burst out. “Try to appreciate what you’re saying. Reputation is a fragile thing, lost in strange ways, often small ones and often unfairly. There will always be people now who think Lydia’s murder reflects on Henry. You forget that this is basically a small town—society’s small here, everyone’s known, and no one ever forgets. It’s not like the North. Slander Lydia with this kind of nonsense and you’ll just add to the gossip.”

I shrugged. “I’m not so sure that the Suzy Knickerbocker school of criminal defense will work here.”

Cade eyed me carefully. Then he leaned forward, chin resting on his folded hands, as if musing. “You know, Adam, I begin to see it more clearly. A young man, a little bored with his work, perhaps disappointed with himself, and then suddenly a friend is in trouble and it’s only the young man who’s sensitive enough to understand the friend, and smart enough to save him. The police are on a witch hunt, and the friend’s lawyer is only involved out of ego—he’s an older man and the young man can see how others in their firm have indulged him until he’s become like a spoiled child, blind to his own limitations.” He paused to give me a look of infinite comprehension. “Isn’t that how it is?”

His grasp of my view of him, the disparaging inversion of my motives until they were those I saw in him, left me off balance. I took a long swallow of coffee. “That’s fascinating, Roland. Maybe you should try it out on Henry.”

Cade’s eyes flashed. His mouth opened, then closed. In a cold voice he said, “You’ll do no good with this.”

“You can’t know that.”

“It’s enough that I think it. If you want to survive in this firm you’ll do what I tell you and no more.”

“Unless Henry overrules you.”

“He’s still in shock, for God’s sake.”

“That was my point yesterday. Unlike Rayfield I’m willing to wait until Henry knows what he’s saying. We can talk to him tomorrow.”

Cade looked astonished. “You’d do that, wouldn’t you? Even with what he’s gone through.”

I sipped some coffee. “If I have to.”

Cade considered me a moment longer. Then he picked up a file with an air of infinite weariness. “Go ahead, then,” he answered, suddenly bored. “I’ve got real work to do. But it goes no further than the Parsons woman. I want an end to this before you ruin Henry.”

I stood, surprised but ready to leave. “I’ll try not to get him arrested,” I murmured, and closed the door carefully behind me.

I opened the door and got out, looking up and down the street. The ripe morning sun captured its neglect with merciless clarity. The place next to Etta’s had boards for windows and a picket fence like a row of bad teeth. But her own house was whitewashed, with red roses growing behind the neat square of lawn and honeysuckle near the porch. I went there and knocked.

The door was opened by a light-skinned black woman with processed hair and obsidian eyes which seemed centuries old. A shadow crossed her face. “You’re Mr. Shaw.”

It was less question than an affirmation of surprise: I was out of place here, had ventured where I did not belong. “May I come in?”

She backed reluctantly into a living room whose formal couch and coffee table I recognized as having once been Lydia’s. They mixed incongruously with faded brown walls and the faint smell of camphor, as if this were a halfway house between poverty and the Cantwells’. The blinds were drawn and the absence of sun lent the room the brooding sepia tinge of an old color photograph whose tints have blurred. On the coffee table was a miniature of Lydia Cantwell’s mutilated portrait.

Etta pointed me to a cane-back chair, arranging herself on the couch with ankles crossed and hands folded in her lap. “How may I help you, Mr. Shaw?”

She had almost no trace of an accent.

The chill I felt was more than roses or a picture. It was her careful movements, the air of courteous interest to match a cool, inquiring voice, even the way she tilted her head like it was something fine. It had all belonged to Lydia Cantwell.

“I’m trying to help Mr. Cantwell,” I said at last.

“Mr. Cantwell called here yesterday, crying.” Her throat tightened. “I couldn’t understand it any more than him. I’d been with her for twenty years.”

I nodded. “Perhaps if we could talk about that.”

Her look was sad yet prideful. “I don’t know what good that will do.”

“I know this is hard, Mrs. Parsons, but I’m trying to learn why anyone would kill her. You and she must have talked over the years.”

“Some.”

“About Jason?”

Her face set in the impassivity of an Aztec mask. “I heard they fought last week,” I prodded.

The small shrugging gesture she made was more a curling of shoulders. “They fought some—off and on.”

Her tone was guarded. “She’s dead now,” I began, then realized that Rayfield had used those words to me. “What I mean is that she’s got no confidences now as important as helping Mr. Cantwell.”

She watched me without answering. “Do you know what they fought about?” I tried.

Her gaze moved to Lydia’s picture. “They were in the library,” she finally said. “I didn’t hear much except that Mrs. Cantwell was upset.”

“Exactly what did you hear?”

“Something about politics.” Bitterness pulled at the corners of her mouth. “I can never make sense out of what Mr. Jason says, just a lot of craziness and screaming.”

“What did Jason have to scream about?”

“Money, what she thought or did about things—it didn’t matter between him and her. He loved her, and he hated her, too.”

There were echoes in the words. “Enough to kill her?” I asked softly.

Her veiled glance swept the room, returning to the picture. It seemed to check her anger. She folded her arms. “I don’t know.”

I tried switching subjects. “Did Mrs. Cantwell have many visitors? I mean, during the day?”

She seemed relieved. “Surely,” she nodded, “what with her committee work and things.”

I hardened my voice. “Anyone special?”

Her eyes grew large with understanding. Reflexively she said, “What do you mean?”

I hesitated, suddenly wondering whether Rayfield had been there or was coming later, and then I saw what Cade had meant: “So Mr. Shaw came to see you, Mrs. Parsons?” “Yes, sir.” “And what did he want to know?” Leaning forward, I asked, “Have the police been here?”

She stiffened. The fetor of too much bad history came to me in the darkened room: a black woman, cornered; a white man wanting answers. I pushed all that aside. “Have they?” I demanded.

She shook her head. “No.”

“They will, Mrs. Parsons, and when they do, they’ll ask the same things and you’ll tell them, because you have to. All I’m asking is that you do that much for Henry Cantwell.”

She eyed the floor in confusion. For an instant I felt close to something. But when she looked up, her head was tilted in that haunting angle of repose. “I’ll tell them she and Mr. Cantwell got on fine, if that’s what you mean.”

“It’s partly what I mean.”

“Mrs. Cantwell was a good woman,” she said coldly. “It won’t help Mr. Cantwell or anyone else to try to know everything about her.”

She began smoothing her skirt.

I knew then it was useless. In her reactions—the crumbling poise retrieved by her symbiotic grasp of the dead woman’s personality—was an unsettling glimpse of her own life. Over time, she had become half of someone else, until now she protected not just Lydia Cantwell. She protected herself.

I stayed long enough to ask the gardener’s name.