First Kill All the Lawyers (5 page)

“Well, my goodness! I find that hard to believe, Samantha. But never mind.” Queen reached over and patted her on the knee. “We can take care of that.”

Sam started to protest, but then she reminded herself that she needn’t worry. It was all politesse. The moment she was gone, Queen would forget all about her.

“Now, where shall we have our lunch? In the little dining room or in the sunroom? Or we could eat out on the back veranda. Come.” Queen stood.

How could the woman sit in polished cotton without creating creases? But then, Queen was not a woman to brook
any
kind of wrinkles.

“I’ll show you the house.”

This was an old Atlanta tradition, the obligatory house tours that went up and down, on forever through room after room of impeccable decorator decor, floors you could eat from. Queen Ridley’s palace was no exception.

Her decorator had carried the all-white theme everywhere. There was white in every luxurious fabric imaginable, and even the old wide-planked floors had been bleached to bone. Glints of brass and the dark cherry of English antiques provided contrast to the acres of powdery white.

They passed Lona in the kitchen arranging a salad of fancy greens—endive, watercress, arugula—and goat cheese. Not a bite of chicken in sight. Nouvelle cuisine had hit the Old South. Sam was relieved to be wrong for a change.

“You can serve us out back,” said Queen.

Again, that elided “Yes’m.”

Settled into wicker chairs at a table covered in white-on-white checks, they sipped fresh drinks, and Samantha complimented Queen on her beautiful yard. Azaleas abounded.

“Forrest spoils me so,” Queen was saying. “In addition to Lona full-time, I have a gardener in every day and a houseman three times a week. I don’t know what I’d do without them.”

What do you do
with
them? Sam wondered. But she knew the answer to that—the same things beautifully useless women had always done to fill their days: endless rounds of hair appointments and fittings and luncheons, teas and parties, club and tennis dates, all of which didn’t amount to a hill of beans.

“I do wish I could meet Forrest. He’s not home, is he?”

“Ah-ha!” Queen laughed. “I’d almost forgotten, dear, that George said Liza had called him about her ‘missing-in-action’ father.” Sam could hear the implied quotes. “She is the
most
headstrong girl sometimes. I must apologize for her. But”—and she gave Sam a dazzling smile—“if she hadn’t called George, he probably wouldn’t have called me, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to extend an invitation to you, and we wouldn’t be having lunch today.” Her laughter tinkled like the ice in her second drink. “So, maybe I should thank Liza.”

Lona slid the salad plates and a basket of tiny biscuits onto the table.

“I’m curious about why she would be so upset at not hearing from her father.” Samantha bit into a biscuit light as air. “Didn’t George say something about a family tradition of betting on ball games?”

Lona moved to a side table and stood there rearranging some already perfectly arranged flowers.

“Oh, they’ve been doing that since she was practically a baby,” Queen answered. “You know how men are, always want their firstborn to be a boy.” She lowered her voice the way Southern women always do when they talk about childbirth, one of their favorite topics. “And when it turned out that Liza was to be our only child, such a
difficult
delivery, I think Forrest encouraged her to be interested in boyish things.”

“But surely he’s missed calling her on a Saturday morning before.”

“Of course! I think Liza’s a little hysterical these days. She recently broke off with her boyfriend.” Queen smiled. “You know how young love is.”

“Yes, of course. And where did you say Forrest is? Away on business?”

Queen turned to the sideboard, where Lona was still standing. “Lona, did you forget something?”

“No’m, I was just straightening this table,” she said, and then evaporated.

Queen smiled. “Aren’t we forever at the mercy of our help? I swear, I think Lona would quit if she couldn’t snoop into all my business.”

Sam nodded, wondering what Queen’s business was. “Did you say Forrest was in San Francisco?”

“Why, yes, he is. He’s been there over a week. Such a
lovely
city. Do you miss it?”

“Sometimes.” Determined not to let Queen sidetrack her, she pushed for details. “Lovely hotels, too. What’s Forrest’s favorite?”

Queen turned to her with wide blue eyes. “Why, I don’t rightly believe I know.
Mine
is the Stanford Court. Mr. Nassikas there always remembers Forrest and me from when we used to stay with him in New Orleans at the Royal Orleans. We get
such
grand treatment. But Forrest doesn’t stay there when he’s on business.” She took a long pull on her drink and set it down emphatically on the tabletop. She was about to change the subject again. “Now, tell me,” she said, turning and placing a hand on Sam’s arm, “why you never married and had children.”

Sam wrote a question in her mental notebook—Why
wouldn’t
Queen tell her where Ridley was staying?—then answered, “I was married, when I was very young.”

“Well, it’s still not too late for you to have children. You don’t know what you’re missing.”

“I’m sure you’re right—about what I’m missing. But I’m ‘aunt’ to lots of friends’ children. I’m afraid I never would have been very good in the bad times. I like children when they’re dry and cute—and for about an hour. Then I want to give them back.”

Queen laughed. “No, little girls aren’t
all
sugar and spice.”

“Not even Liza?”

“Oh, goodness no. I mean, we think she’s perfect, of course, because she’s ours, but she always has been a
different
child.”

“Difficult?” Then Sam bit her tongue. What the hell was she doing? She knew no mother was going to come clean on her offspring. And implying criticism was no way to find out.

“Heavens, no! Just toodles along to a different drummer. But she’s doing beautifully at Agnes Scott even though she wanted to go away to school. She’s a painter, you know.”

“What would have been her first choice?”

“Of schools? Probably Parsons, or anywhere else in New York. The child is
crazy
about New York. She even looks like a New Yorker. Have you spent much time there?”

“I’ve visited it often. But why—”

Then Queen firmly steered the conversation once again onto travel, where it stayed until they finished lunch.

After her third drink, Queen excused herself and pushed back from the table. “There’s a powder room down that hall.” She gestured. “I’ll be back in just a minute.”

Sam sat stirring her iced tea with a silver spoon. Then she lifted the long-stemmed spoon and turned it over. Tiffany. Of course.

“May I give you some more?”

Sam jumped. She hadn’t heard Lona enter the room. She nodded.

Lona poured the tea from the pitcher she was carrying, then stood motionless. She gave Sam a long look, and in that moment Sam could see a decision being settled upon.

“Miss Liza is
not
hysterical.” She spoke so softly Sam could barely hear her. “She is the sanest child I’ve ever known.”

Sam whispered back, for at any moment Queen might walk back into the room. “Then you think she has reason to be worried about her father?”

“If
she
thinks she does, she—” And then her voice rose. “Oglethorpe! Get out!” A rangy Dalmatian bounded in. He ignored Lona’s hissed reprimand and leaned his front paws on Sam’s skirt.

“Down, boy!” she said, laughing. Oglethorpe gave her a wet kiss, then retreated.

“That dog’s a mess!” Lona said, but Sam could tell she didn’t really mean it. “He’s always so bad, underfoot every time I turn around, ’specially when Mr. Ridley’s away.”

“He’s especially attached to his master?”

“He’s attached to anybody who’ll put up with him. But Mr. Ridley, he takes Ogle for a long walk every night, walks with this big galoof running along beside.” Lona laughed. “They
are
a sight!”

“Nobody else walks him?”

“I do, but he goes too fast for me. And he wants to go too far, always in the same direction Mr. Ridley walks him.” She gestured over her shoulder in the vicinity of Piedmont Park. “I can’t be every night walking all over hill and dale. I’ve got other things to study than that dog.”

“Like bringing us some of your delicious lime sherbet for dessert,” Queen said as she glided back into the room, placed one hand lightly on Lona’s shoulder, and turned her heading out so that she had no choice but to go. Sam had seen less graceful moves
on the dance floor. Queen might not have a career, Sam thought, but she was a pro.

A quarter hour more of polite chitchat followed. Queen poured coffee from an antique silver service (most definitely the kind hidden from the Yankees) then managed to squeeze Sam’s hand as she handed her the cup. “There now. Haven’t we had the loveliest visit?”

Which meant, Sam knew,
Enough of this tête à tête. Drink up and get out.

Sam smiled and muttered all the right things: enjoyed it…how nice…beautiful house…have you over soon. Then the two women brushed cheeks, and Sam went home.

She couldn’t remember ever having been patted and touched so much by another human being and yet left so cold.

Three

“That’s bullshit,” Liza Ridley said flatly.

“Then you wouldn’t characterize your parents’ relationship as ideal?”

“I would characterize it as miserable.” Liza gestured with both hands, her small, stubby fingers stuck straight out on the Formica tabletop.

Samantha and Liza Ridley were sharing an order of ketchup-doused french fries and sipping fountain cherry colas at Horton’s, the coffee shop cum department/drug/bookstore on Oxford Road just across the street from Emory.

Sam had smiled when Liza suggested the meeting place, for she’d spent many happy hours in Horton’s during her own youth, browsing through the jumble of merchandise that ranged from notebooks to mops to makeup, gossiping with friends, writing papers in between hamburgers and Cokes, perhaps in this very booth.

When Uncle George had suggested the night before that Sam might want to give Liza a call, she’d protested that she wasn’t spending her entire day on a young girl’s imaginary problem. But after talking with Queen, she’d found herself stopping in a phone booth on Juniper and dialing Liza’s number at Agnes Scott.

Damn you, George, she thought. He knew that between her sense of obligation (even if it were
his
obligation) and her curiosity, she’d make that phone call. Liza had been eager. She was at Horton’s in fifteen minutes.

Sam inspected the petite young woman on the other side of the booth. Liza Ridley at twenty-one was a beauty—not an orthodox burst of Southern blondness, but small, with long dark hair, a pale complexion, blue eyes, and a heart-shaped face. Her mother was right about one thing: dressed from head to toe in black, Liza did look as if she’d be more at home on the streets of New York’s punk East Village.

When Sam asked about her work, Liza had pulled a plastic envelope of slides from her voluminous black leather bag. The pieces they showed were collages of photographs of frogs, whales, and huge fish cut from magazines and pieced together with heroic swirls of paint. The themes were birth, death, sex, transfiguration. There was a lot more than met the eye to
this
little brunette, Sam thought.

“They’re absolutely miserable with one another,” Liza was saying. “I
know
why Queen hangs in there. She’d be nowhere without my father.”

“Money?”

“Everything. She’d be
nothing
without him.”

“Well, she’d keep the house, wouldn’t she, and her friends?” But Sam knew she was playing the devil’s advocate. She knew what Liza was going to say. She just wanted to hear her say it.

Liza laughed. “You’ve forgotten how it works in Atlanta. She
is
who my dad is. And if she doesn’t have him, forget it. I’ve seen it happen with her friends. I’ve heard her talk about it. And it doesn’t even have to be divorce. Her friend Marjorie—nine months after her husband’s heart attack, she killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills.”

“From grief?”

“From loneliness. From being frozen out. For women like Queen—”

Sam couldn’t help but interrupt. “Do you always call your mother Queen?”

“Ever since she asked me to, when I was three years old.” Liza smiled an odd smile, leaned her head back, and dropped a ketchup-covered french fry into her mouth from above. “Anyway, nobody ever invited Marjorie anywhere again, except to lunch. But never to dinner parties with the men, or to house parties in the summer up at Tate or at the lake. And never on couples trips.”

“Why?”