Fools Rush In (The Sam McCain Mysteries Book 7) Read Online Free PDF Page B

forever for all I care. My poor husband. I’ve never seen him like this. The election was close enough. Now, with this—”
    Just then a red MG appeared in the drive. Two young men in tennis whites. Rob Anderson, Lucy’s former boyfriend. Nick Hannity, a noted college football player.
    When she saw them, she said, “You know, Rob would forgive her in a minute.”
    “For what?”
    “For—seeing a colored boy.”
    “Oh.”
    “You don’t seem impressed. But I am.”
    “Were they going out when she started seeing Leeds?”
    “No—she’d already broken it off. She thought Rob was getting too possessive and she wasn’t ready to be married to him. They were supposed to be married this summer, you know.” She watched as the two young men in whites strutted toward us. “He’d still marry her, that’s what I meant about his forgiving nature. He’d forgive her and still marry her.”
    “I think I’ll go down to the gazebo.” The way she talked about Anderson, he sounded like a master on a plantation. He would forgive her even though they hadn’t been going out at the time she was seeing David Leeds. How big of him.
    I was never eager to talk to Rob Anderson or anybody like him. His father was a very successful businessman who walked the dark side of the street, running loan companies that exploited the poor. He’d once made a martini crack about Judge Whitney that had pissed me off unduly. I managed to tromp, with great fervor, on his tennis-shoed foot as I left the party. He knew I’d done it on purpose but he could hardly say that without sounding paranoid, now could he? Especially after I’d made such a show of apologizing.
    I think Lucy sensed me rather than saw me as I made my way down the hill to the gazebo. She lighted her new cigarette with her previous one.
    She still hadn’t looked at me when I stepped up on the gazebo. “Hi, Lucy. Your mother said I could talk to you.”
    “My mother says a lot of things, Mr. McCain.”
    Impossibly young, impossibly pretty, impossibly tortured, as you could see with a glance at those enormous brown eyes. The whispered word was that she seemed even more troubled following her stay in a mental hospital. They’d been trying to break her away from David Leeds. It hadn’t worked. Most folks seemed to feel sorry for her parents but not for her.
    Nancy Adams, a very pretty slender brunette also in tennis whites, said, “I’m going for a little walk.”
    “You don’t have to,” I said.
    “It’s all right, Mr. McCain.”
    “I’m supposed to play tennis,” Lucy said after Nancy went over to talk to Karen Porter.
    Lucy sat, prim and sort of casually regal, on the bench that ran around the interior of the gazebo. Her blonde hair was stylishly wind-mussed and the sorrow-shaped mouth had never looked more kissable than now in her deepest grief. Her long, tanned legs were wonderful.
    She looked up at me and said, “I always thought you were kind of nice, Mr. McCain. I’m disappointed you agreed to help them. I suppose it’s because of Esme.”
    “People are just trying to figure out what happened, Lucy. Two young men are dead.”
    “Some bigot killed them. Have you seen what’s going on in the South? It’s on TV every night. Something like that happened to them.”
    “You mean they were killed because David Leeds was a Negro?”
    “Yes. Exactly.”
    “But then why would they have killed Neville? He was white.”
    “Because they were friends. Good friends.”
    Judge Whitney had told me that Neville might have been the one to send photos of David and Lucy to the party office in Des Moines. Good friends?
    But I didn’t get to finish up my questions because Rob and Hannity were here. Rob was the sinewy type with a kind of mild contempt on his handsome face. He seemed to believe that God had put the rest of us here for his amusement. He walked over to Lucy and said, “If you want a lawyer, Lucy, let me get you a real one.”
    “Sorry to hear you flunked out