by Ed Gorman
“What’re you using for music?” I asked.
“In my head.”
“Ah.”
“I listened to three mambo songs over and over last night. I’ve memorized them. It’s like having a portable radio. Except I don’t need the radio.”
“Clever.”
“So what do you think, McCain? Do I look all right?”
As a number of her suitors pointed out, picture Kate Hepburn and you’ve got Judge Whitney. Physically, that is.
Emotionally, Judge Whitney makes Kate seem like a softy. That’s why I grinned watching her mambo. In her way, she not only possesses true patrician good looks, she’s also cute as hell.
“Cute.”
“I look cute?”
“You look cute.”
She didn’t say anything, but she smiled to herself. Beautiful, she’d heard plenty of times.
Cute, not so often. If ever.
“I’m going to do all the nightclubs,” her honor said, slightly out of breath. “One of my ex-husbands even got me a front-row table to see Sinatra.”
“Just be sure he doesn’t beat you up.”
“Who? My ex-husband or Sinatra?”
“I was thinking about Sinatra but if you’re referring to ex-husband number three, Renaldo, that boy had a pretty bad temper, too.”
“It’s the Latin in him.”
“Not to mention the Scotch.”
I went over and sat down and sipped at the coffee I’d swiped from the outer office.
Five minutes later, we got down to work.
She went over and sat behind her desk. She said, “You saw the paper?”
“I saw the paper.”
“I’m taking you at your word that he didn’t kill her.”
“He didn’t kill her.”
She leaned forward on her elbows and glared at me. “Then when the hell are you going to prove it?
I pay you a lot of money.”
“Not a lot.”
“Well, a lot more than most private investigators get.”
“Most private investigators aren’t lawyers.”
She made a face and slumped back in her leather chair. She reached down and pulled the middle drawer of her desk out. Moments later, she strung a rubber band between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. Our little game.
She shot the rubber band. I tilted my head to the right. The rubber band missed me by an inch.
“Your instincts are getting better, McCain.”
“Thank you. I was worried about that.”
“I used to be able to hit you every time.”
She picked up another rubber band. This time, she got me square in the forehead. “My second husband wasn’t worth a damn at this, either. I could always hit him.”
“That’s probably what sank the marriage.
You lost all respect for him.”
“What sank the marriage, my sarcastic friend, was the fact that he was spending my inheritance in very, very foolish ways.”
“Ah.”
Another rubber band. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
She aimed and fired. I leaned to the left on this one but the rubber band glanced off my ear. She smiled. “Nice to see I haven’t lost my touch.” Then she sat forward again, picked up her package of Gaulioses and had herself a cigarette.
“She was unfaithful,” she said. “Susan, I mean.”
“She had reason to be.”
“I realize that my nephew wasn’t exactly a prize, McCain.”
“That’s very perceptive of you.”
“But the fact remains she was unfaithful.”
“Not that he ever was, of course.”
“There’s a difference with a man.”
“The old double standard?”
She shook her head. Exhaled smoke. “Not exactly. A man, at least a man like
Kenny, wants simple sexual relationships.
And lots of them. A woman like Susan, who feels wronged in her marriage, wants an emotional relationship as well as a sexual one.”
She picked up another rubber band. This time, she missed me. She did another quick one and hit me.
“We’re tied, McCain.”
“The tension is on.”
“Find her lover and you’ll find her killer.
I’m convinced of that.”
“Somebody was blackmailing her.”
“What?”
I told her what Frazier had told me this morning. I also told her about him visiting my apartment.
“What was he looking for?”
“Something to tie me to the blackmail, I guess.”
“He thought you were the blackmailer?”
“He seemed to think that was a strong possibility, anyway. He figures the way I nose around this town for you, I picked up something to blackmail Susan with.”
“What if her blackmailer and her lover were the same person?”
“I’ve thought about that, too,” I said.
“Then I’d say it’s time for you to get your ass in gear,” she said. “Wouldn’t you?”
“Is that a hint?”
“No, that’s an order.”
She glared at the newspaper on her desk.
“I can’t wait until they have to retract that headline.”
“You going to sue them?”
“Oh, no. It’s not the money. I’ve got plenty of that, McCain. I’d much rather have them grovel.”
Anybody else, the line might have been ironic. She was perfectly serious.
I stood up. She brought her hand up from below the desk. Sneak attack. She got me perfectly. Right on the nose. “I win, McCain. Three to two.”
What can I tell you? A sixty-one-year-old woman with four ex-husbands and several fortunes in her past, gloating over an inane rubber band contest.
I turned and started to leave her office. “By the way, I heard Pamela warn you that I was on the warpath. I thought I’d surprise you and be nice.”
“I appreciate that.”
“But now, I really do want to see some results. And I mean fast, McCain.” She smiled sweetly with that elegantly cold face of hers. “Fast.”
I started to leave again but she stopped me. “And that girl you found in the canoe last night?”
“What about her?”
“She has something to do with this.”
“She does?”
Judge Whitney nodded. For all her foibles and excesses, she had good instincts. “Don’t ask me what the connection is yet. But I sense one.”
“She’s a teenage girl.”
“I know she’s a teenager, McCain. But she ties into this somehow. Trust me.”
“The doc’s probably done with his autopsy by now. Maybe I’ll stop over there.”
“Good idea.” Then, “You really think I’m cute?”
I smiled. “Yeah,” I said, “yeah, I d.”
Her grin made her ten years old again, little Esme Whitney sitting in her manse being doted on by Daddy’s manservants.
I went out and picked up my galoshes from the hallway where all the other boys and girls had stashed theirs for the day.
Seventeen
I didn’t have far to go to find the morgue; it’s in the basement of the courthouse.
They try to disguise it as much as possible.
There’s a nice-looking middle-aged receptionist. There’s a waiting area with a plump, comfortable wine-colored couch; a table filled with current issues of magazines; and a coffeepot that’s always percolating.
Doc Novotony is a distant relative of Cliffie, Sr., and as such his credentials have been questioned a few times. Exactly what is the Cincinnati Citadel of Medinomics, anyway? And exactly where is the Thayer Medinomics Hospital where he interned? The state medical board wouldn’t give
Novotony his license until he battled them all the way to our state supreme court, which decided, begrudgingly, that Novotony was more or less qualified to practice medicine here. But it was a split decision,
with the minority report being pretty scathing.
Cliffie, Sr., installed Novotony as the county medical examiner. Novotony then proceeded to shock everybody by being a pretty decent M.E. with but two failings-anytime Cliffie, Sr., wanted results to come out a certain way, that was exactly how those results came out.
And then there’s the matter of how he dresses.
Iowa isn’t the equal of Texas in its football fervor but for some folks around here, it comes damned close. Doc Novotony, all 260 pounds and five-foot-six of him, is a good example. No matter what the occasion, and I include funerals here, you almost always see him in his black-and-gold Iowa Hawkeye football jersey and his black-and-gold cap and his black slacks with the thin gold piping down the side. He gets kidded a lot, but apparently not enough to change his clothes.
He came out to greet me after Rita, his secretary, had walked back to tell him I was here. He has psoriasis on one side of his face. It has spread over his hands. He has obligingly dispensed with handshaking. He smelled of death, or those morgue chemicals that I associated with death. They smell the same in the places where they put animals to sleep. I took a cat in once and followed the vet back to his special death room. I wished I hadn’t.
“Hear you had a little trouble last night, McCain,” he said. Then smiled. “Little skinny-dipping with that pretty Mary Travers, huh?”
Rita shook her head and rolled her eyes.
She always looked embarrassed by her boss.
“Too bad you got the eye for Pamela Forrest, McCain,” Doc Novotony said.
“That Mary’s a good-lookin’ gal. Plus she’s got some nice wheels on her, if you know what I mean.”
Rita did some more eye-rolling.
“I just said that to get Rita’s goat,” he laughed. “Got to liven this place up a little bit.” He picked up Rita’s package of Chesterfield’s and lit one. “I owe you one.”
“You owe me a carton,” Rita said. This time she shook her head, but I sensed genuine amusement with her boorish boss. He wore you down and won you over. Like professional wrestling: you watched despite all your best judgment.
“I’m here about the girl in the canoe.”
“You want to see her?”
“Not especially.”
“Oh, that’s right, I forgot you’ve got a queasy stomach.” He looked over at Rita.
“He shoulda been here to see that guy that fell into that corn grinder last week. Now, there was a mess for you.”
“Maybe you could let me borrow some photos sometime,” I said.
He grinned. “I don’t know why Cliff hates you so much. I think you’re pretty funny, McCain. And Rita’s always tellin’ me how cute you are.”
“I’ve never said that in my life, McCain,”
Rita said.
“I was just teasin’ her again. Hard as hell to get her goat, you ever noticed that, McCain?”
Then, he nodded to the back and said, “C’mon.”
“I actually do think you’re cute,
McCain,” Rita said as we were leaving. “It’s just that I’ve never said it to the doc here. I like short guys.”
“Does that include me?” the esteemed graduate of the Cincinnati Citadel of Medinomics said.
“Oh, yeah,” she said, “you just get me all hot and bothered.”
“I should fire her someday, don’t you think, McCain?”
“Actually,” Rita said, “there are two guys in this town I can count on, the Doc here being one of them. And the other one being my cousin. He’s never let me down.”
The morgue wasn’t big. There were six body drawers and two tables. There was a new tile floor and a desk and two military-green filing cabinets. The shades were drawn. Everything was shadowy. Only one of the tables had a body on it, concealed beneath a sheet. I thought of that great scene in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, my favorite movie, where the man sees his duplicate laid out on a pool table – and suddenly pulling the sheet back. Ever since then, Kevin McCarthy has been my favorite actor. And Dana Wynter, his costar, became my favorite actress, gorgeous and elegant beyond compare.
Doc had remarked about my queasy stomach. I guess he figured something was wrong with me for not liking to look at dead people. Or smell them.
When he drew back the sheet, and I got a look at her, all of her, I said, “My God, what did they do to her?”
“Abortion. Bad one. Some butcher.”
“Son of a bitch.” I was thinking of my sister.
“Cliff, Jr., called the sheriff over in the next county. This is the missing girl. They finally Id’d her because of a long surgical scar on her back. This is her. Sixteen. Melinda Carnes. Her dad’s a dairy farmer near Alburnett.”
“What the hell did he do to her?” This time, I didn’t get sick. I got angry.
“You never know about these amateurs,” he said, covering her up again. “They use all kinds of instruments when they try and abort these girls.
Some of them know what they’re doing, some don’t.
The worst thing’s usually infection. It can kill a girl a few days down the line. But you see a butcher job like this and you wonder.”
“About what?”
“About if it was on purpose.” He took his Hawkeye cap off and scratched his head.
“Why the hell would somebody do this on purpose?”
His eyes narrowed as he looked up at me.
“Maybe he hates women. Or maybe he hates sinners. You know, one of those religious types, figures a girl’s got it coming for sleeping around before she’s married, and he decides he’s gonna help God out a little and punish her right here on earth. So he cuts her up.”
“But could this have been an accident?”
“Oh, sure. That’s the hell of it. One of these amateurs gets lucky a few times and he thinks he’s a doc. But then his luck runs out and he gets frustrated and he panics a little, and boom, the girl hemorrhages and dies. Most cases like this, the cutter gets scared and runs off and it takes the girl a while to die. Only thing that could save her is somebody passing by and gettin’ her to a hospital on time. This gal didn’t have that kind of luck, unfortunately.”
He put his Hawkeye cap back on. “Her parents are on their way over to identify her for sure. I’m only gonna show them her face.
Figure that’s the humane thing to do.”
He clipped off the light. We walked back through the cool and shadowy room to the reception area.
Rita was on the phone. Everything still smelled of death. I wanted to leave.
“I’m earnin’ my money this week, I’ll tell you that,” he said as he walked me out into the hallway. “First, Kenny Whitney and his wife and now this.”
I thought of what Judge Whitney had said, that somehow the two cases were related. That still didn’t make any sense to me.
The doc smiled at me. “I don’t know why the judge wanted you to come down here, McCain.”
He winked at me. “She probably knows somethin’ we don’t.”
“She didn’t want me to come over here,” I lied.
“Right. You came down here because you like dead people so much.” Before I could say anything, “And tell her that as a newly eligible bachelor, I’d love to take her to the Valentine’s Ball the Jaycees are puttin’ on this year.” He was currently separated from wife number three.
“I’ll give her the message,” I said.
I’d give her the message. And then she’d give me the response, and it’d be one that the doc sure wouldn’t want to hear.
I automatically started to shake hands and then I remembered the psoriasis and how he spent his time handling corpses. I just gave him a little wave and got out of there, taking the steps two at a time.
Eighteen
I walked around downtown for ten minutes. The fresh air restored me. It was sun-golden with life. Quite a contrast to the bowels of death in the morgue.
I smiled at all the pretty ladies who worked in the various stores, trapped behind
plate glass in their starchy blouses and fashionable bows.
I wanted to set them all free. We’d have a parade down Main Street. We’d be happy and immortal. It was like being drunk and I realized it was irrational, some kind of life-affirming panic reaction to the morgue, but so be it. I doted on the hitching posts. I was old enough to remember when farmers still occasionally rode horses into town and latched them to these posts. I stood in front of the Civil War memorial.
I could remember a stirring program Alistair Cooke had done on it for Omnibus one Sunday afternoon. And how on the local news that night, they’d read a list of all two hundred boys and men from this county who’d died in that war. And then I stood in front of the Methodist church staring up at its looming spire and I felt a stirring of deity in my irreligious heart. I wanted so badly to believe and it was with great sorrow that I did not.
And then the exhilaration was gone. I wasn’t leading a parade and I certainly wasn’t immortal. I was a hayseed standing on a hayseed street in a hayseed town and just then a manure wagon lumbered past spewing dung-tinged bits of hay as if to confirm my hayseed status. Maybe I needed to hang out in the morgue more often to appreciate my life. Then the beautiful frenzy was gone.
I walked over to a phone booth and called the hospital where Lurlene Greene worked. She sounded scared when they finally got her to the phone, scared as if I was going to tell her bad news.
I felt sorry for her. Her color and her husband had both put her through unimaginable hells.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Lurlene, but I’m trying to find Darin.”
A pause. “He didn’t come home last night, Mr. McCain.” She was whispering. She obviously didn’t want to share her business with coworkers. She sounded weary and worn.
“Any idea where I could find him?”
“You know where the Trax is?”
“Yes.”
“They serve colored there. That’d be my only guess.”
“I’ll try it. Thanks.”
Her voice got even lower. “You see him, Mr. McCain, you tell him his little daughter is running a bad fever and he should be home where a father belongs.”
“I’ll tell him, Lurlene.”
She was crying, then. “I just don’t know what to do no more, Mr. McCain.”
