TEN

At six o’clock Monday morning I acted out my fear of growing older: running four miles, doing push-ups and sit-ups and lifting weights, punching the heavy bag I’d hung in the basement, and generally battling what Kris Ann had smilingly identified on my thirtieth birthday, before leading me upstairs to forget it all, as the instinct we’d never be back in college. The instinct drove me harder than usual. Then I showered and dressed, kissing Kris Ann hastily as she uncurled from sleep. She awoke suddenly to say that the funeral was at two, as if recalling a bad dream. I checked the locks again on the way out.

The city was hot and drowsy. Bankers and businessmen in lightweight suits ambled toward new glass towers or older cement ones with dime stores, jewelers, and one-story diners squatting in between. I passed a newsstand, saw the headline, DISCREPANCY IN CANTWELL STATEMENT, and stuffed the dollar I’d reached for back in my pocket. In front of our building a wizened black man with no body below the hips lolled in a wagon, begging. I gave him the dollar, pushed through the revolving door, and caught an elevator.

The fifty-one lawyers of Cantwell, Brevard, Winfield, and Cade rented the top two floors of the brown bank building, which had housed them for sixty years. It was the partnership’s pride that there was no need to move: as Cade had put it, over bourbon at the club, we were beyond showing off. Our reception area featured oak paneling with the firm name lettered in discreet gold script, a linen-suited receptionist, wing chairs for clients, and Business Week to read. Framed oils of the sacred dead—Messrs. Cantwell, Brevard, and Winfield—presided over the room like guarantors of probity. Coming off the elevator, I thought again that Cade had worked thirty years to be suitable for framing.

The receptionist looked up at me, vaguely flustered. She was a bony, middle-aged widow with a kind of fading elegance, a proprietary air, and a low, husky voice. I said good morning.

She gave a quick nod, like a hiccup. “It’s horrible about Mrs. Cantwell,” she managed.

“Yes, it is. She was here just last Friday, wasn’t she?”

She glanced toward a wing chair. “Right over there, waiting for Mr. Cade. It’s strange now to think about.”

“Did she say anything to you?”

“Just hello. Usually we’d chat; she always remembered to ask after my son. But Friday she seemed upset.”

“In what way?”

She looked back at the chair. “I can tell by watching people how they feel about their business here. Mrs. Cantwell sat quite straight in her chair, with her ankles crossed and her arms folded, looking at everything and nothing, if you know the look. Once she flipped a magazine and put it down without reading it. She acted as women do when they’re here on some upsetting problem.”

“But she didn’t tell you what, or why?”

“Oh, no.” She shook her head sadly. “I didn’t know until I read about the will. I suppose that would be upsetting. My son would never behave like that.”

“Then you should count your blessings. By the way, I’m not taking calls from reporters. And tell them my wife isn’t either. They can try Mr. Cade.”

“Very well, Mr. Shaw.”

I went toward my office.

The corridors droned with machines and work. In the library a table of shirt-sleeved associates read law books while another associate stood at a computer terminal that could spit out citations to any legal opinion in the last hundred years containing a phrase he wanted, like “sanctity of contract.” The morning crew in the word-processing center typed on machines that recorded their work on a screen, corrected errors, and replayed the final copy at six hundred words a minute. Their new supervisor, a brisk young woman who went to college nights, waited by the telex for a wire from London or Brazil or wherever steel companies did business. Down the hall more computers were translating the daily time sheets for each lawyer and paralegal into monthly bills to be reviewed by a senior partner and sent to clients. As I passed, Johnny Bentham emerged holding a sheaf of time sheets. “Morning, Johnny,” I said.

“Morning, Adam.” He stopped, uncomfortable. “Damned awful weekend you had. Terrible about Lydia, just unbelievable.”

“Unbelievable,” I agreed.

He shifted awkwardly, a great shambling man with the owlish look of a tax partner, unsure of what to say. “That’s a mess about Henry being gone,” he ventured, “and now that phone call. The papers keep bringing that up.”

“Of course they do.”

He scratched his cowlick. “Yeah, this is all fun to them—the biggest thing to hit Birmingham since Martin Luther King, my wife says. I just hope we can keep the firm off the front page.”

“Henry, too. But it’s not easy with that will.”

He looked at me sharply. “Well, you did what you thought best about that, I’m sure.”

I guessed my handling of the will had been the subject of discussion. “I couldn’t see getting Henry arrested.”

“Sure,” he persisted. “Still, when it’s all said and done it’s going to turn out to be some psychopath. I mean, with the picture and all. Some real sickie, you’ll see.”

“We all will.” I glanced at the time sheets in his hand, hoping for a change of subject. “Sending out six years of back bills?”

“Checking on the associates. I want to see who’s putting in the hours.” He decided to end on a hearty note. “I’m sure you’ll be glad to get back into some normal work yourself.”

“I’m sure,” I said, and went to my office.

My secretary looked up blandly from her desk. “Mr. Taylor just left word about the Stafford case,” she told me. “He said to call when it’s convenient.”

I stepped inside and dialed. “Hello, Nate.”

“Adam.” Nate Taylor’s black-accented voice was roughly what Otis Lee’s would have been after Harvard Law School and enough trial work to give him bleeding ulcers at thirty-three. “I told your secretary not to rush you to the phone. I figured you might not be in the mood.”

“Consider yourself a diversion.”

“All right. I’ve been sitting here reviewing the evidence of job discrimination by that fine gentleman of the old school, Peyton Stafford. I thought before I went to the trouble of proving at trial what you know to be true I’d see about talking settlement.”

“I’m always glad to talk. Peyton’s a little less flexible.”

“You’ve got no defense, Adam. Tell him that.”

“It’s not quite true, though. Reread my deposition of your lead plaintiff. No jury’s going to put some guy with four drunk citations in charge of a lumber mill.”

“Clients lie to you all the time,” he said matter-of-factly. “Even yours. My other plaintiffs are clean and your man has discriminated. Those are the facts.”

“Okay. We’ll sit down next week. I’m just telling you, don’t come expecting the sun, stars, and moon. You’re not getting them.” I said goodbye and hung up.

“Shit,” I said aloud.

I looked down at the list. Most days I came to the office, drank one cup of black coffee, and went over the list of things to do I’d written the day before. Staring now at Friday’s list—eight numbered items with the first three crossed off—I knew with a cold, clear certainty that I didn’t give a damn.

I surveyed my office—a framed law license, two shelves of law books, and some comic prints of English barristers—until I came to my grandfather’s dartboard on the far wall, pocked with contests between my father and me. I reached in my desk drawer for a dart.

It was wooden, with frayed feathers and weighted in front. I threw it. It struck the seven with a soft thud. I took another and began thinking. Lydia Cantwell’s killer had a key, or she had let him in. He had raped her, or they had made love. And then he had strangled her with such intensity of hate that afterward he needed satisfaction from a picture. I threw again. It bounced off the metal ring of the bull’s-eye and onto the floor.

I snatched a third dart from my desk drawer. There was a quick rap and the door opened. I looked up, surprised.

Nora Culhane’s dark green eyes caught the dart in my hand with a sardonic glance. “Interrupting anything?”

“Any day now. What do you want?”

“I thought we might try having a civil conversation.”

“Why? The last time we tried that you were setting up my client. Now your so-called ‘discrepancy’ is this morning’s headline. You people are building pressure to indict Henry Cantwell whether the evidence is there or not.” I threw the dart. “What the hell do you care—he gets indicted, you get a raise, and by the time he’s acquitted, railroaded, or just plain broken you’re Birmingham’s first anchorwoman. You don’t need me for that.”

She hesitated, glancing downward. “Look, Mr. Shaw, we’re both trying to find things out. Maybe if you’d quit being so emotional, we could help each other, okay?”

Her voice was cool enough. But her eyes were uncertain.

Maybe, I thought, she would know something useful.

Maybe, too, I’d sensed an ambivalence beneath the toughness, as if she were inhabiting a role she didn’t yet believe. It didn’t make me like her, exactly—I just liked myself less. But two hours later, when she asked why I’d agreed to lunch, all I said was, “Because I guessed you were Irish.”

We were sitting in a flagstone courtyard bordered by bamboo plants, ferns, and trees in wooden planters. More trees grew from spaces in the flagstone to form a leafy arbor. In the air was the lilting talk of women in silk and the clatter of plates. Black waitresses in print dresses dipped among the tables. “So you’re an ethnologist,” Culhane said dryly.

“It’s just that you couldn’t be anything else, even if the name weren’t yours. Next time you’re home—which I’d guess is Boston—look for women with china skin and bright green eyes or maybe freckles, and see that if their hair isn’t reddish or black it’s the kind of auburn you have. They’ll be Irish.”

“You’re quite observant.”

“No great trick if you’re Irish, too. Frankly, though, I came to persuade you to lay off Henry Cantwell.”

“He’s too logical to ignore,” she said bluntly. “And I’ve talked to anyone who’ll stand still.”

“Including Jason?”

“Jason slammed the door in my face.”

“I wouldn’t fool with him. His problem may be worse than bad manners.”

She nodded. “He’s pretty frightening. But Rayfield doesn’t seem to be looking his way.”

“So I gather. And you?”

She took a cigarette from her purse and snapped a lighter at it. “I think the Cantwells’ problems were bigger than just Jason.”

“Based on—?”

“Several things. To start, there’s something I got from a friend of Mrs. Cantwell’s who’s just been divorced. They last spoke just two weeks ago. Lydia steered the conversation around to the divorce: how long it took, whether the woman had to appear in court, that kind of thing. Her friend recalls that she was very curious.”

“From which you surmise what?”

Culhane raised an eyebrow. “I thought you’d tell me.”

“I couldn’t begin to.” She gave me a look of cool disbelief. “Seriously,” I added, “if Lydia Cantwell had wanted a divorce she’d have come to the firm.”

“You’re telling me she didn’t?”

“I’d know if she had. Just who is this woman?”

New arrivals were drifting past us to be matched with namecards on empty tables. Next to us a plump-armed blonde squealed, “Marilyn, you look so thin,” to a newcomer who didn’t at all. Culhane shook her head. “I told her she’d be anonymous.”

“Anonymous, or nonexistent?”

Her voice cooled. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean maybe you fed me a line to see if we were handling a divorce.”

“My source exists,” she snapped. “You know, you must really hate news people.”

“I prefer ‘dislike,’ or maybe ‘distrust.’ Whatever made you pick this business?”

“Whatever makes you care?”

“I was cleverly searching for a change of subject.”

She stabbed her half-smoked cigarette into an ashtray. “Basically because I’d divorced my husband and needed work, if that’s any of your business.”

“What happened?”

She shrugged. “Charles was a heart surgeon I married in Boston when he was still a resident and liked playing his guitar. Then he got a position at the Med Center here and stopped liking anything but cutting chests. Eventually I got tired of begging for attention and asked him to move out. For a while I felt depressed and worthless and jogged five miles a day to keep it together. Finally one of my apartment neighbors who’s a cameraman suggested I try news—after all, I was presentable and maybe even bright. By then I was sick of jogging and missing Boston. So I went to the station and asked for a job.”

A thin, silent waitress in shocking blue tennis shoes interrupted with iced tea and a small blackboard with the fare scribbled in chalk. We stopped to order. It was hot even in the shade and our salt was stuck in its shaker. I asked for another one, and the waitress left, undelighted with me and her job.

“So what happened next?” I asked Culhane.

“The news director tried to screw me.” Her voice held a note of warning. “He didn’t, and I began to enjoy the work. It licenses my curiosity—asking questions, meeting people. I even like the hurry. The downside is hassling for airtime and never finishing a story; a thirty-second spot is for shit, you tell nothing. So when you get a story you can stay with, like this, you jump on it.”

“One man’s tragedy—”

“Is my opportunity. Look, I didn’t kill Lydia Cantwell, I’m just covering the story.”

Her role as tough newslady interested me. I was getting an impression of where she stood: a late-blooming new woman, throwing out the makeup with her husband, paying the bills and liking it, but still not quite sure where she fit. “How long have you done this?”

“News?” She sipped some tea, her gaze growing distant. “Around two years, I guess.”

I guessed she’d counted back to the divorce and been pulled into the vortex of memory, wondering how it had all happened and who she’d been before. I quoted a line of poetry. “‘I see my life go drifting like a river from change to change …’”

She looked up as if troubled. “You’re good at divining mood,” she said. “Who wrote that?”

“Yeats.”

She smiled fractionally. “You’re quite Irish yourself. Except that ‘Adam’ sounds very Old Testament.”

“My father’s idea. My middle name is Francis.”

“Your father had a point. Have you ever been there—Ireland?”

“Once. It was green and beautiful and very poor, and it rained too much and was cold. It felt like I’d been there before.”

Culhane nodded. “I felt that, too.”

Our waitress brought two crab casseroles that smelled and tasted good. Culhane ate with small, thoughtful bites. As we were finishing she said, “The next thing is that Henry Cantwell’s strange.”

“Is he now?”

“Of course.” She sounded impatient. “I’ve talked to the people who should know him best. They start by saying he’s a fine gentleman, mention the family—down here they still like to know where you’re from and who ‘your people’ are. It gives them a handle on you. But they all end up saying they don’t know him very well and that he seems off somewhere, almost secretive.”

“You do understand what that’s about?”

She shook her head.

“Mother of God, Nora, his wife’s just been murdered. They’re all preparing for Henry to have sinister secrets. At least try to distinguish between reticence and guilt.”

She was plainly galled. “We’re talking about strangeness, not reticence. People at his bank will tell you the past couple of months he’d be listless, then become totally irrational. Two months ago he threatened to resign if they didn’t approve a loan for some shaky project in New Orleans that made no sense, got the bank in a mess, and then he retreated to his office and was hardly seen for days.”

“I’ve heard all about that. Look, Henry’s big problem is being born with money and a bank when he should have been an English professor. I agree with anyone who says he’s out of place negotiating loans with some slab-handed wheeler-dealer whose life’s dream is to finance trips to Las Vegas and season tickets on the fifty through some real-estate scam. But that’s no crime, just a sad incongruity.”

She sloshed the tea in her glass, as if examining it for something important. “What about affairs?”

I was getting annoyed. “Henry’s never shown the slightest interest in any woman but Lydia, except perhaps the ones in books. You’re not dealing with Richard Burton, just a slightly dreamy middle-aged gentleman who likes to read. Nothing strange about him. If you want strangeness, try Rayfield.”

“Why him?”

“Because he’s got the look of a classic obsessive-compulsive personality. He began acting like Henry was one of his obsessions before he’d even met him.”

She shrugged. “Maybe he’s afraid Cantwell will do it again.”

“That’s droll.”

“I’m serious. There are a lot of scared people out there.”

“And Rayfield’s helping to scare them.”

The waitress came with key-lime pie. Culhane took a bite before saying, “Rayfield is sort of a Jesuit: no other interests, no family or friends outside the police and not many of those, no women anyone’s heard of. All he wants is to track down sin—you know, ‘man the hunter.’ He even told one of our people once that the relationship between him and a suspect is a personal thing, like he almost breathes with the guy. It’s a little obsessive, sure. But I don’t think he’s off about Cantwell. Put together what bits I know: in the last two months Henry begins acting irrational, Lydia shows an interest in divorce and is killed, and then Henry forgets to tell Rayfield about what obviously was a twelve-minute quarrel. You don’t have to be brilliant to guess that one of them was having an affair.”

“Just irresponsible. Do yourself and Channel Seven a favor. Watch what you say.”

She looked at me seriously. “We’ve got lawyers, too. I’m just telling you not to invest too much in this.” She took another bite. “Incidentally, what does your client say about his little lapse on the telephone call? I’ll be happy to report it.”

“I haven’t asked him.”

She shot me an incredulous glance. “I’m glad I don’t have your driving lack of curiosity.”

“Yeah, well, I thought I’d wait until after the funeral. I’ve lived in the South for a while and developed some manners.”

She reddened. “All right,” she said curtly, then checked her watch. “I’m late for work. Better eat your pie.”

The check arrived as we finished. We split the bill and hurried silently to the car. She looked wryly across from the passenger seat, as if trying to ease the strain. “No Holy Mother on the dashboard?”

“I’ve given all that up.”

“Have you really?” she asked, more serious.

“Haven’t you?”

“Yes and no. I still remember things like my first confession: the priest chewed peppermint Lifesavers, I could smell them through the screen. I was too terrified to laugh.”

I started the car. “You got the whole dose, then.”

“Lord, yes. Mother says the Rosary every day. I remember when a Russian family moved in behind us, poor people. One morning I caught Mother sprinkling holy water in their backyard. She was saving them from communism.”

“Back then you couldn’t be too careful,” I smiled. “Even Ike had it. Anyhow, we all have our mothers.”

“Do we not. Where is your family?”

“Cleveland. My mother, anyhow. My father’s dead.”

“What does she do?”

“Works for the clerk of courts. Files things, mostly.”

I turned from the parking lot toward downtown. Culhane’s hair rippled in the breeze. “So how did you get to Birmingham?” she was asking.

“My wife’s from here.”

“Is she the tall, dark-haired woman?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I saw her at the party. She’s absolutely beautiful.”

“She is that.” We were near downtown. “Tell me where to drop you.”

She pointed to a parking garage. I pulled over and stopped. “One thing,” I asked. “How’d you get past our receptionist?”

“I said I was late for our appointment.” She got out and gave me a fleeting smile. “Thanks for the time.”

“Sure.”

She walked to her car. I drove off to take Kris Ann to the funeral.