Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (10 page)

    We went down to the river, where he keeps three wooden rowboats during the day. I carried the oars he'd handed me. We got the boat into the water and he said, "They know you're comin'?"

    "Just thought I'd drop in."

    He shook his angular graying head. "They don't like it when you surprise them. I took a birthday cake out to old Dorothy a couple of years ago. You know, a surprise for the old gal. I thought the bastards was gonna lynch me." Then he laughed. "But you sneak up real nice and quiet, you might get a gander of Chris Tomlin sunbathin' nude up on the bluff there."

    "Chris Tomlin?" Though I found her sexual in a quiet way, there was something so earnestly grad school about her, I couldn't imagine her lying outside in the buff.

    "She's a hot number, the way I hear it."

    That's another thing about Ernie, he's a gossip. If the candy machine guy was reliable only 50 percent of the time, Ernie is reliable less than that. He once tried to tell me that our mayor - a Sykes-clan cousin of advanced age who has suffered two heart attacks and is known to have hemorrhoids so bad he'll start stamping his feet and jerking up and down in his chair right in the middle of a city council meeting - was having an affair with a "high yella" woman in Cedar Rapids. Sure, Ernie.

    I got in the boat.

    "Water's rough today, McCain. Be careful."

    I nodded. He gave me a good shove.

    I needed the fresh air. The water lapped blue and wide between the steep cliffs topped by birches and oaks and hardwoods, their leaves igniting in blazing yellows and umbers and mauve. Downriver you could see fishermen standing in their motorboats, casting. Rowing felt good; the Iowa air purified me. Even my hangover began to recede.

    Steps had been built into the side of the clay-and-shale hillside. I tied the boat and climbed them.

    The house resembled a movie set, one of those giant Tudors where Greer Garson and Ronald Coleman always lived, the exterior walls of brick and native stone acrawl with venerable tangles of vine, two soaring chimneys sending gray smoke into the autumnal blue sky to deflect the chill, mullioned windows and massive doors like the accoutrements of medieval castles. To the right of the Tudor, and set far back next to woods beyond the clearing, was a small house of the same brick and stone. A girl of four or five rode a red tricycle up and down the empty asphalt drive, ringing a handlebar bell as pure and clear as her thoughts.

    I heard voices out back and walked around the massive house. Someday, I'd have one just like this. A wife and two kids and my red ragtop. And maybe write a mystery or two. And pose for photos in houndstooth jackets with briar pipes in my teeth and cats in my arms like Raymond Chandler.

    Dana Conners was raking leaves into a wheelbarrow next to an old black Ford panel truck with the passenger door stove in. Near her, next to a garden shed, Dorothy was picking up handfuls of leaves from another wheelbarrow and putting them into a large open incinerator. She seemed to be taking no chances. She squirted some kind of fire starter on them, tossed in a match, and the whole thing went whoosh!, like an effect in a movie.

    "She doesn't take any chances, does she?" I said.

    "Dorothy? She loves to burn stuff. If I didn't know better, I'd say she was a pyromaniac."

    Just then, the little girl on the tricycle rang her bell again. I smiled in her direction.

    "She's sweet, isn't she?" Dana said. She wore a tan turtleneck and a Western belt, jeans, and cordovan Western boots. Lissome as always but still a bit dazed-seeming.

    "She sure is. Hope I have one just like her someday."

    She looked at me carefully. "You're a sentimental man."

    "I suppose."

    "Richard was, too. But he didn't want people to know. Thought it would damage his reputation as a negotiator." Her blue eyes shone abruptly with tears; her model's body bent oddly, as if wounded in some way. "I loved him, McCain. Probably more than I should have."

    I wasn't sure what that meant, but it didn't seem appropriate to question her about it.

    Dorothy came over, taking off her brown cotton work gloves. Man's blue work shirt, dark glasses, wrinkled pair of chinos with patches of apple-green paint on them. Apple-green paint on the worn penny loafers, too. "Cliffie's been out here twice. He's a fool. He seems to think that either Dana or I killed Richard. He even asked us for alibis."

    "And you had one?" I said.

    "God," Dorothy said. "You too?"

    "Of course we had one," Dana snapped. "We were together, in fact - shopping. We drove into town together."

    "Why not ride with Richard?"

    "Because," Dana said, "he didn't have an appointment till half an hour later."

    "There," Dorothy snapped. "Are you satisfied?"

    "Believe it or not, Dorothy," I said, "Cliffie had every right to ask you that question."

    "He was my son."

    "Murder among family members isn't unheard of."

    "I thought you were smarter than that, McCain," she said.

    She made a face, stepped away, and went back to the incinerator.

    "The doctor gave her a sedative," Dana said. "I don't think it's working very well. She's agitated all the time." She paused. "It's ridiculous to think she did it."

    "Yes," I said. "It probably is. But you have to ask."

    "I've never heard you defend that moron before."

    "Well, when he's right, he's right."

    She knew I was studying her. "And it's just as ridiculous to think that I killed him."

    "Had you been getting along?"

    "Very well, for your information." Then: "Do you know what this feels like? Dorothy is mourning a son and I'm mourning a husband, and here you are asking if one of us killed him. We're trying to arrange things for his funeral and that's not fun at all."

    "Somebody murdered him."

    "So the Judge wants to beat Cliffie to the punch as usual, is that it? Show that her boy McCain is smarter than Sykes's boy Cliffie and can solve the murder faster. God, I wish she'd grow up!"

    I said, "You're not interested in who killed him?"

    Some of the anger drained from her face. She leaned on the handle of the rake she'd been using. "That's the funny thing. I do and I don't. I mean, on the one hand, sure I want to see who did it brought to justice. But on the other hand, what difference will it make? Richard will still be dead. Dorothy and I will still be alone."

    Chris Tomlin appeared with a big collie in tow. They went over to the little girl on the tricycle. The golden dog jumped up playfully on the girl and began licking her. The girl giggled and screamed at the same time; Chris, laughing, pulled the dog off.

    "I wonder what Bill Tomlin will do," I said.

    "I wonder the same thing. He leached off Richard all his life."

    "That seems a little harsh. Richard always said he couldn't have accomplished anything without Bill helping him."

    "Richard was a very generous man. He overpraised everybody, and I include myself. And Bill never had the good sense to be appreciative. They've been fighting a lot lately. Bill demanded co-author credit on the biography. Not 'as told to' but full co-author credit."

    "They argued?"

    She smiled coldly. "I seem to have handed you another suspect, haven't I?"

    "Did you ever see the man named Rivers up here?"

    "No," she said. "But I've given that some thought."

    "What kind of thought?"

    "What if they were in cahoots."

    "Rivers and Bill?"

    "Yes. What if Bill was going to tell Rivers some secrets about Richard, secrets Rivers and his people could use to discredit him when the book came out."

    She wouldn't make a bad detective. But then why, if you followed her implication far enough, would Bill have killed Rivers? "I'll think about that. Now I'd like to talk to Chris - Mrs. Tomlin."

    "You and every other man in this town."

    This time I inquired about her enigmatic statement. "That mean anything in particular?"

    "It means what it means," she said, pulling on her own brown cotton work gloves. "Maybe she'll make you a drink and you can have a nice long discussion about Aristotle."

    Her bitterness was startling. You wouldn't think a woman with her looks and style would ever have anything to be bitter about.

    "I take it you don't get along?"

    "Good-bye, McCain."

    She took her rake and went back to work. Then turned around. "Don't forget what I said about Bill and Rivers. There really may be something there. And you might check out Jeff Cronin too. When Richard disappeared a couple of weeks ago? The night he came stumbling home through the pasture, somebody told us they saw Cronin's Studebaker up on the west hill."

    "Richard disappeared?"

    "He didn't tell you about that?" She seemed almost curious now. "He missed an important meeting. Maybe, like he told me, it was nothing. Said it was car problems. He got a lift most of the way home. Had to walk the rest of the way. But later I heard Cronin's car had been seen up there the same night. He's the last person Richard would take a ride from."

    I wondered if that was what Conners had wanted to tell me. The incident that "required more of an explanation." I'll say it did! Why would Cronin's car be up there? For one thing, it was posted land and Cronin and Richard were enemies. And for another, it was a strange coincidence that Cronin should be up there the night Richard "disappeared."

    Chris Tomlin saw me coming. Her little girl was off the tricycle now and running around in noisy circles with the dog.

    There aren't fashion magazines for women like her. They defy fashion. Crisp blue button-down shirt. A pair of Sears jeans. Argyle socks. White Keds. Maybe it's the short red hair. Or the tortoise-shell rims on the glasses. But most probably it's the hard wry intelligence in the brown eyes and the hint of wildness in the slightly large mouth. Of course, that fine little body didn't hurt, either. As the paperback writers would say, she gave the impression of being the intellectual sort who had a PhD in S-E-X.

    "My ears are burning."

    "Gosh," I said.

    "You were talking about me, weren't you?"

    "You two aren't the best of friends?"

    She shook her head. "It's so strange. I'm the one who should be intimidated. I mean, look at her, for God's sake. A goddess. But I guess because our husbands are professional men, she's intimidated by the fact that I have a graduate degree and she doesn't."

    "There's more than one way to be intimidated."

    She laughed. "I'd swap her that face and body for every single thing I know about T. S. Eliot. Are you working for the Judge?"

    "Uh-huh."

    "Gosh, am I a suspect?"

    "Probably."

    "Finally," she said. "Something exciting in my life. Nothing against your little town, but not much happens here."

    "A lot of people like it that way."

    She shrugged. "Don't I know it. Bill never wants to leave. We have a running battle about it. There are four large universities that would love to have him. And for very, very decent money."

    "Maybe he'll change his mind now that Richard's dead."

    The giggle-scream. The big collie had playfully knocked the little girl to the ground and was licking her again. The little girl was all balled up to protect herself, rolling back and forth on the grass.

    "Excuse me a second," she said, and ran off to redeem her child. "It's all right, Nicole!" she called, as she ran. "Roscoe, you leave her alone now!" Then, when she reached him: "Bad dog! Bad dog!"

    She got Nicole to her feet and brushed off her jeans and green sweatshirt. Then she gave Roscoe a talking-to and damned if the dog didn't sit there and look as if he understood every word she was saying.

    She set them to playing again. I figured Roscoe was probably good for another two - three minutes before he jumped Nicole and started lapping away on her sweet little face.

    "So we were saying -?" she said when she got back.

    "I was saying maybe Bill will want to leave, now that Richard's dead."

    She looked very serious. "That's going to be interesting. They've been together since college."

    "Dana says they've been arguing."

    She smirked. "Good old Dana. Did she tell you Bill shot him? That's what she told Cliffie. He came charging over, all ready to arrest poor Bill."

    "Bill had an alibi?"

    "Yes. But he didn't need one. Think about it. Richard's book was going to be a best-seller. They would've worked out the argument they were having. Bill would have made a small fortune. And it would have given him a great publishing credit. But not without Richard. Richard had to be alive to promote his biography. The book'll still come out, but it won't have the same impact."

    From what I knew of publishing, she was right. The book would be controversial and Richard would have been in great demand for TV and radio interviews.

    "So Bill was where when Richard was killed?"

    "Walking."

    "I see."

    "With Nicole and me and Roscoe."

    "Ah."

    "Down by the river. This time of year, it's so beautiful. You don't look as if you believe me."

    "I'll have to check with Nicole."

    Her mouth opened in a slow, tempting smile. "Maybe Roscoe would be better. He's very good with alibis."

    Just then, Roscoe started barking at the sight of a small green Saab four-door that had pulled into the drive. I could see Bill Tomlin inside. Classical music filled the car. Engine and music died. He got out, carrying his briefcase. He'd gone casual today. Western, actually. Levi's jacket and jeans, work shirt, black Western boots.