Bad Moon Rising by Ed Gorman Page B

life.
    â€œI’d tell your friends at the commune it’s probably time for them to move on, Sam. For everybody’s sake, including theirs. I don’t mind them as long as they don’t break the law, but after all this, the city council’s going to be on their ass for sure. They’ll come up with some ordinance to run them out or to make their lives so miserable they’ll want to leave anyway. Might as well get it over with now.”
    â€œI’ll talk to them. But Richard Donovan has a temper and he isn’t afraid of much. I doubt he’ll listen. And I’m not sure they should be forced to move anyway. If Cameron did kill Vanessa Mainwaring, he acted alone. The others didn’t have anything to do with it.”
    â€œJust trying to help. I want a nice, peaceful life. That’s why I came out here. The hippies just seem to agitate a lot of people.”
    â€œAnd you know why that is, don’t you?”
    â€œThe long hair?”
    â€œAll the sex. Everybody secretly wants to have as much sex as these kids have. But since they can’t, they take it out on the hippies.”
    â€œYou really believe that?”
    I smiled. “Sometimes.”

11
    T he first time I ever heard Judge Whitney call Richard Nixon “Dick” and Leonard Bernstein “Lenny,” I was under the impression that she was making up her so-called relationships with these two gentlemen. But then “Dick” Nixon came and stayed with her at her manse and “Lenny” Bernstein started sending her both birthday and Christmas gifts. There was also the fact that she certainly had the opportunity to meet with them because she took at least four trips a year to New York City, where both men resided. She often said she could “breathe” in New York City, implying of course that she found our little city suffocating. She didn’t try to hide her snobbery and maybe she didn’t believe she was being snobbish. For a conservative Republican she was liberal when it came to civil rights and protecting the poor against the wealthy, and she became enraged whenever a group of local idiots tried to have this or that book banned from the public library.
    She was a remarkable woman, given that she’d been married four times, no children, had managed to keep her looks even now into her sixties and, for good measure, had taught Barry Goldwater how to mambo. I’m not sure he wanted to learn how to mambo but the judge can be most persuasive at times. I know about the Goldwater tutorial because there’s a black-and-white framed photo of it on the wall of her judicial chambers.
    She’s had her grief. Her deepest love was for her first husband, who was killed in the Pacific when our troops were getting slaughtered there early on. Her fourth husband died behind the wheel of a new Lincoln Continental while drunkenly escorting his drunken secretary to a motel where they were known as frequent guests. This didn’t help her own reliance on alcohol. Finally, she checked herself into a rehabilitation clinic in Minnesota. She was now several years dry and a fervent attendee at AA meetings.
    None of this had dulled her edge; nothing could. She was still imperious, and after all these years I wasn’t sure that I wanted her any other way.
    She stood in the sunlight arcing through the tall, mullioned window of the old courthouse. In her crisp peach-colored suit, her Gauloise cigarette streaming soft blue smoke from her fingers, she might have been a woman in one of those magazines only rich people read. Staring out at a polo match or the arrival of a head of state.
    Without turning to look at me, she said: “My friends at the club very smugly told me that Cliffie has the Mainwaring murder solved and ready for the county attorney. It’s even worse this morning. By the time I got to my chambers, four different people told me that they’d read the local rag, and apparently