Mom Among the Liars Read online

  “I would like to point out to Mr. McBride,” Dryden went on, “that criminals are people who have been convicted of crimes. In our society, people who have been acquitted of crimes are not considered to be criminals—not yet anyway—though Mr. McBride would no doubt like to change all that, and make himself judge and jury as well as prosecutor. As for the charge that I’ll be soft on crime—a prosecutor who loses as many cases as Mr. McBride does can hardly be said to be tough on crime, can he? In convicting criminals—just as much as in defending them—you have to hit your target with everything you’ve got, you have to bring up your big guns, you have to be a fighter, like me—not a bumbler, like my opponent.”

  And so on, until the squeaks drowned her out too. “Of course,” said Joe Horniman, “Dryden never had a client who was guilty, did she? They’ve all been pure as the driven snow. For instance, that oil man’s son a couple years ago who ran over those two little kids in his Porsche while he was drunk—”

  “Absolutely right,” said Grantley. “What she specializes in is taking advantage of legal loopholes.”

  “And what your boss specializes in,” Joe said, “is opening up the loopholes so that defense attorneys can take advantage of them.” Joe gave a little wink at Ann Swenson, as if to acknowledge her superior skill along these lines.

  The loudspeaker broke in again, letting through some more of Dryden’s words.

  “—callousness and carelessness, those are the two Cs that have characterized the way Mr. McBride has done his job. My way of doing the job will be characterized by two entirely different Cs—competency and compassion. From now on the district attorney’s office will be a kinder, gentler place for everybody, accused and accuser alike—”

  Squeaks again, then the loudspeaker allowed the end of Dryden’s speech to come through. “But I realize I’ve made one innacurate statement in my description of my opponent,” she said. “I’ve talked about defending my clients in court against him. Actually I can’t recall ever defending a client in court against Mr. McBride personally—though sometimes I’ve had to defend them against the accusations he throws around so liberally in his statements to the press. As everyone in this room knows, Mr. McBride seldom appears in court, seldom takes personal charge of any of the cases his office handles—especially the cases that involve serious crimes. He turns all that over to his assistants. For a long time what we’ve had here in Mesa Grande is an absentee DA.”

  A kind of half growl, half yelp burst out of McBride. I could see Ed Brock putting a hand on his arm.

  Dryden sailed on calmly. “I’d like to offer Mr. McBride a suggestion—no, let’s call it a challenge. The next murder case that comes along, Marvin, how about you taking charge of it yourself, right from the start, and seeing it straight through to the finish? Just to show the citizens of Mesa Grande that you haven’t forgotten how to do it.”

  McBride’s head snapped up. “That’s a lot of bull, Doris, and you know it! It’s always been my policy to give my associates as much experience and responsibility as possible. That’s how an efficient office ought to be run. I oversee everything myself, I’m on top of every detail, whenever there’s any disagreement my judgment prevails—but you have to know how to delegate authority, how to work with a team. You can’t be a grand-stander. That may be okay for you criminal attorneys, but in the DA’s office you have to be above ego—”

  “In other words,” Dryden said, grinning out at the audience, “our district attorney isn’t going to accept my challenge. He doesn’t have the guts.”

  “Guts! You’re saying I don’t have guts?” I could see McBride’s eyes flashing and his lips quivering. If there’s one thing little bantam cocks like him don’t like to have doubts cast on, it’s their manhood. “Damn right I’ll take charge of the next murder case that comes to our office! And incidentally, it would give me the greatest pleasure if you turned out to be the defense attorney for the killer! Like you’ve defended so many in the past—”

  * * *

  It was hard to say who won this little duel of words. Dryden had McBride on the ropes for a while, but he didn’t stay down for long. You had to give the little shit his due, his powers of recovery were phenomenal.

  Anyway, the fur soon stopped flying, and the mayor made a smarmy little speech about the free exchange of opinions being the lifeblood of democracy. Then the presiding Woman Voter intoned a few peremptory thank yous to the guests of honor, and no waiters appeared to pour more coffee, so everyone reached for coats. It was close to eleven, according to my watch.

  In the anteroom outside the banquet room, there was a large crush of people. Ann and I found ourselves pushed up against McBride, and I could see now that the design on his red, white, and blue tie consisted of a lot of little American flags. Just like him, I thought, during a political campaign he would wrap the American flag around his neck.

  “Glad to see you, Dave,” he said, without much gladness in his voice. But to Ann he gave a big broad smile and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Ann, sweetie, you’re looking great! I can’t figure out why that husband of yours spends so much of his time in the operating room. Believe me, if I had a beautiful creature like you waiting for me at home—” Then McBride threw his arms around her, stuck his face next to hers, and gave her a big hug. Over his shoulder I could see Ann sighing, with an amused philosophical twist to her lips.

  “Oh, by the way, honey,” McBride said, when he finally freed Ann from his embrace, “I don’t like to throw cold water on a happy occasion like this, but I’ve been looking over that budget of yours for next year, the one you’ll be submitting to the City Council in a month. I notice you’re asking for a big increase for your department.”

  “We need the money, Marvin,” Ann said, her voice perfectly steady, but my hand was on her arm and I could feel the muscles tightening up. “Everything’s costing more these days.”

  “That’s exactly the point,” McBride said. “Everything’s going up in my operation too. Something’s got to give, the deadwood has to be pruned, right? Anyway, I don’t want it to catch you by surprise, I’ll be opposing this increase of yours. In fact, I’ll be recommending to the council that the public defender’s budget be decreased.”

  “You don’t mean that!”

  “It’s a question of priorities, sweetheart. Do we spend the taxpayers’ money to catch the crooks or let them go? Besides, admit it now, you’ve got a lot of padding on that budget of yours. For instance, Dave has this kid working for him, you just put him on the payroll, this assistant investigator. Now come on, Dave, just between us, what do you need an assistant investigator for? We all know what a terrific job you do, you’re worth at least two men—” McBride broke off. “Well, this is no place for us to talk business. You want to thrash this all out, Annie, I’ll be available at the same old stand, just as soon as I’ve got this election behind me.”

  “Or maybe not,” Ann said quietly.

  “What do you mean— Oh, I get it!” McBride gave out one of his most explosive guffaws. “I wouldn’t worry about that if I were you! I’m not sure of much in this world, but the one thing I am sure of is how the voters of Mesa Grande feel about me. We love each other, don’t you know that? It’s a marriage that was made in heaven.”

  “There’s a lot of divorce going around these days,” I said. Which you may think was an unfair crack, hitting a man when he was down. But from the rumors I’d been hearing, McBride wasn’t having much trouble consoling himself since his wife kicked him out. Or before, for that matter.

  A little later Ann and I made it to the Richelieu lobby. We could see through the revolving doors that the weathermen’s anxiety had been justified. The balmy spell was over; thin icy slivers were shooting down; they might or might not develop into snow. As we started out, we met Doris Dryden putting on her coat. It was a black coat, sleek and simple and beautifully cut, covered with the kind of fur that costs a bundle but doesn’t call attention to itself.

  Ann greeted her
with congratulations. “That was lovely, the way you maneuvered McBride into putting himself on the line for the next murder case that comes along.”

  “Oh, that wasn’t hard,” Dryden said. “He’s so pathetically vulnerable. He can’t bear the idea that anybody might think his balls were smaller than King Kong’s. I’m always suspicious of these macho types who go around flexing their genitals. McBride’s wife kicked him out of her bed ten years ago, did you know that—long before their current separation? Now was that because he wanted too much from her, or because he couldn’t give her as much as she wanted? I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting the woman, so I can’t say for sure.” She laughed, then she sighed. “Given the odds, though, there won’t be any murders before election day. We never get more than two or three a month so how can we expect to be lucky enough—”

  “You’re not throwing in the towel, I hope,” Ann said. “A nice clean knockout a week from Tuesday—I’m depending on you more than ever, Doris.”

  “Oh, I intend to give you something a lot bloodier than that,” Dryden said. “Those balls McBride’s always bragging about—the day after the election he’ll be eating them, scrambled, for breakfast.”

  The tight little smile on Dryden’s face made me glad I wasn’t running against her for anything.

  TWO

  Since Mom moved to Mesa Grande, it has become a tradition that I go over to her house on Sunday morning and she serves me breakfast.

  Her house was a compact little two-story structure, white with red shutters, in a pleasant but modestly priced neighborhood; a surprisingly large number of them were still left in town. I had tried to persuade her not to cut into her savings to buy it. My own house, located a few miles away, had a couple of extra bedrooms I never used. Mom could easily have moved in with me. But she had vetoed this idea from the start. “Positively not,” she said. “I believe in the declaration from independence. People should have privacy, they shouldn’t have to give up their freedom to their loved ones.”

  “But I wouldn’t do that, Mom, I promise you. I’ll come and go as I please. I’ll live my life the same way I would’ve done if you hadn’t moved in.”

  “Who’s talking about you? I’m the one that’s declaring my independence. For twenty years I worked my elbows to the bone keeping house for you and your father. Then your father died, and you moved out, and for the last twenty years I’m living alone and liking it. So now you want I should go back to working my elbows again?”

  So she bought the house, and also a car, a snazzy little Japanese sports job that was painted bright red, and she quickly established for herself a nice independent social life. It centered on the synagogue sisterhood, the Senior Citizens Bridge and Canasta Club at the YMCA, and her neighbors, whom she got to know by name after a couple of weeks.

  I’ve been living in my neighborhood for three years now, and I haven’t set foot in any of the neighboring houses, and the neighbors haven’t set foot in mine. But Mom has this knack for getting people to open up to her after two minutes’ acquaintanceship. She listens to them talk about their troubles, nods and looks sympathetic, and they never find out how sharply, unsentimentally, and worst of all accurately she’s sizing them up and making her judgments.

  Her Sunday breakfasts are lavish, consisting not only of the usual eggs, sausages, and pancakes, but also of three or four kinds of fresh fruit, homemade pastries, chicken salad, and some variety of smoked fish. She will never, however, let me refer to this feast as “brunch.” “Brunch yet!” she says, with one of her magnificently contemptuous snorts. “This is a word I never heard when I was a girl. It was invented by lazy good-for-nothings who wanted to lie in bed on Sunday mornings. Brunch is what you eat after twelve noon. In this house, if you came so late, there wouldn’t be any food left.”

  So I arrived for breakfast that Sunday morning at my usual time, eight-thirty. Last night’s icy drizzle had petered out without turning into snow, but there was still a sharp chill in the air. Nothing in the world except Mom’s cooking could have got me out of bed this early on such a Sunday morning.

  Roger Meyer showed up too. Roger is my chief assistant in the public defender’s office. “Deputy investigator” is his official title, and what it means is that he takes care of a lot of the legwork: an important responsibility, since my legs have started letting me know recently that fifty-four years is a long time to be subjected to constant use. Roger is also my soundingboard when a case confuses or baffles me. He’s a smart kid, a Yale graduate of two years ago, with a degree in criminology. He has brains and commonsense, when they aren’t undermined by his only real fault: He goes to the movies too much, so sometimes his ideas about life come less from experience of the world than from Hollywood’s version of it.

  He’ll grow out of that though. Since he took this job under me he’s already gone through a few things that have shaken him into reality in spite of himself.

  One of those things had happened about six months earlier. It involved a girl, and I’ve gone into the details of it elsewhere. But Roger was still feeling depressed over it, so Mom was trying to make up for it in the best way she knew. She piled food up on his plate. “Eat, eat,” she kept saying to him. “You don’t take seconds from my blueberry pancakes, you’ll fade away, your mother will never forgive me.”

  Roger was tall, his shoulders were broad, his face was shining with sun and good health. The danger of his fading away in the near future seemed negligible to me.

  Once he was stuffed to Mom’s satisfaction, we got back to the discussion we had been having. I had told Mom and Roger all about the League of Women Voters dinner last night, and McBride’s talk with Ann and me after it was over. Roger began to look depressed, so I quickly added that of course his job wasn’t in any danger. Nobody was going to cut the public defender’s budgets, McBride was just giving a display of wind.

  And the same was true, I went on, about his accepting Doris Dryden’s challenge. “If he ever did have to face her in court,” I said, “she’d wipe up the floor with him. Even if there’s a murder case tomorrow, even if he makes a big noise about taking charge of it personally, it couldn’t possibly go to trial till after the election. By that time he’ll be safely reelected, so he’ll find a way to weasel out of it.”

  “Why wouldn’t he take charge of the next murder case strictly out of pride?” Mom said. “You told me already many times what a swelled-up head he’s got, what a high opinion of himself. So maybe he wouldn’t agree with you Doris Dryden could wipe up the courtroom floor with him. Maybe he thinks he’ll wipe up the floor with her. For making a man deaf and blind to what’s real and what isn’t, a big ego is better even than a big bank account. You never knew your Uncle Hymie, but he’s a perfect example. He had both, as a matter of fact—”

  Mom expounded for a while about her late brother-in-law Hymie, who made a fortune in the junk business and tried to get himself elected into the New York Athletic Club, which back in the 1930s was strictly closed to Jews. The story, I have to admit, was fascinating; it showed what lengths a man will go to so he can play cards with people he doesn’t like and who he knows don’t like him. Maybe the story was even true. But eventually I pulled the conversation back to the point.

  “Even if McBride was egotistical enough to make a fool of himself in court,” I said, “Ed Brock would never let him do it. Ed isn’t blinded by ego, or by anything else. Marvin McBride is his creation, his brainchild. He’s spent the last twelve years making sure that his child smells like roses, and he wants it to go on for another twelve years. He won’t let McBride do anything to throw all that away.”

  “The voters won’t stand for that,” Roger said. “When he runs for reelection the next time, they’ll remember how he broke his promise.”

  “The next election is three years from now,” I said. “Voters never remember anything that far back. Voters forget what happened three months ago.”

  I could see how disturbed Roger was. I had hit him where he
lived, in his idealism. “If that was true, there’d be no hope for democratic government. I mean, democracy depends on an informed responsible electorate. Sooner or later the voters will get wise to McBride, they’ll rise up and kick him out!”

  “Like in that movie?” I said, and I couldn’t help putting a load of sarcasm into the word movie. “Sorry, kid. If Mr. Smith really went to Washington, they’d kick his teeth in. Or buy him out after the first reel.”

  “I remember that movie,” Mom said. “With that tall actor who opens and closes his mouth before he talks. A nice-looking boy.”

  “Jimmy Stewart,” Roger said. “Of course I know it’s only a movie. Our system won’t change that easy in real life. But still, in principle, there’s a lot of validity to—”

  “It isn’t just our system,” I said, “or any other system. It’s the basic nature of politicians. There’s only one fundamental for politicians. Get elected. They’ll do anything and say anything to bring in the votes. They couldn’t care less what anything really is, only how it looks. For politicians image is everything. In other words, basically, all politicians are, by definition, liars.”

  “You don’t think you’re just a little bit exaggerating?” Mom said. “I never met any politicians personally, but it don’t make sense to me they should be different from other types people. Don’t they have to take off their clothes from the outside in? Didn’t every one of them have a mother once? So why should you turn them into the Abdominal Snowman or the Lox Ness Monster yet? There have to be good ones and bad ones, and plenty with the good and the bad all mixed up together.”