by Ed Gorman
“All right then. For my sake. And hers. For all our sakes.”
Greene glared at him some more. Then he swung his giant head away.
Frazier looked down at his gun.
“McCain, you go to the front door and tell Sykes I’m bringing Greene out and if anybody tries anything funny, he’s going to answer to me.”
“I’ll tell him,” I said.
I looked at Greene. He was staring at the floor, his shoulders slumped.
I walked down the hallway toward the lights in the front yard. I was thinking about the talk of abortion. Where had Susan gotten hers? And where was my sister, Ruthie, tonight?
The lights in front were stronger now. There were more of them. There were also more people. It was starting to look like a football crowd. Only they didn’t want to settle for games. They wanted the real thing.
I crunched pieces of glass as I walked to the front door and opened it.
“Sykes!” I yelled before turning the corner where the crowd could see me. I didn’t want some yokel thinking I was Greene. “It’s me, McCain.” I had my hands up.
“Hold your fire!” Sykes shouted over his bullhorn.
I felt stupid, my hands up in the air and all, like one of the guys Robert Stack catches every week on The Untouchables, but I kept them there in case one of the more enthusiastic members of the mob got any ideas.
Sykes walked over to me.
“No deals,” he said.
“No deals? What deals?”
“No deals with your colored friend.”
“Nobody’s asking for any deals.”
“What was all the gunfire?”
“Nothing much,” I said. “The important thing is Frazier’s bringing Greene out. Frazier’s got a gun and he’s in good shape. He just wants to make sure nobody-the crowd or you-tries anything on Greene.”
“Me?” he snapped. “I’m the law here.
I’ll do what I damned well please.”
“That part of the oath you take when you’re chief?
“I’ll do what I damned well please”?”
But he was already moving away from me, putting the bullhorn to his mouth, instructing everyone to move back, saying that Frazier and Greene were coming out.
He also told them not to do anything stupid and to keep their mouths shut when Frazier and Greene appeared. I had to admit, for once he was doing a competent job as a cop.
I headed on to my car up the hill. I wanted to get back to town. I needed to find Ruthie. I also needed to call Judge Whitney and bring her up to date.
A couple of out-of-town reporters rushed me and tried to get me to talk but I just kept on moving. One of them put his hand on my shoulder.
I spun around and faced him and he shrunk away.
Maybe all those teenage days of trying to look like Robert Ryan were paying off.
I was about twenty yards from my car when I saw a somewhat familiar form emerging out of thick fog.
Rita Havers, Doc Novotony’s secretary at the morgue. She wore a leather car coat with the collar up and jeans. She also wore a jaunty little golf cap. She was proof that a woman well into her forties could easily still be damned good-looking. Fog encased her like iridescent coils illumined by moonlight, lending her an almost extraterrestrial radiance. The dampness was even worse now. A lot of people with arthritis would be having a bad bone-chilled night.
“Hi, McCain,” she said.
“Hi.”
“Doc’s busy at the hospital so he sent me here to see what was going on. He always counts on me to help him out.”
“It’s all over.”
“Nobody dead?”
“Nobody dead.”
She smiled. “Good. Now I can go back home. Jack Paar’s got Eddie Fisher on tonight. I’m a big Eddie Fisher fan.”
Her earlier words came back. “You said “he can always count on me.””
“Uh-huh. Doc Novotony.”
“When I was in the morgue, you said that about somebody else.”
“I did?”
“Yeah, don’t you remember? You said that there was somebody your cousin could always count on. That he never let her down.”
“Oh,” she said, “yes.” Obviously remembering now. “I never should have said that.”
“Why?”
“Well, you know. It’s family business.
Private family business.”
“You said she was pregnant and he helped her out.”
She shook her head and then looked with sudden longing at the crowd. She wanted to be down there with them. She wanted to be anywhere except here with me, answering questions about private family matters. “I’ve got to go.”
I touched her arm. “This could be very important, Rita. Where did she get her abortion?”
“McCain, look, you’re really putting me on the spot here.”
“I mean to put you on the spot, Rita.
It’s very important that I know that name.”
She looked longingly downhill to the lights and the crowd. You could tell by a sudden hush that Frazier and Greene had appeared. They hadn’t gotten the bloodshed they’d wanted but at least they’d gotten something. A colored man arrested.
Maybe Sykes would work him over later.
“Please, Rita. Please help me.”
She sighed. “It was Jim.”
“Jim?”
“You know. Jim the handyman.”
“He did the abortion?” The name, the personal style, the way he was perceived by the community-none of it fit. Jim the handyman was Jim the abortionist?
“Yes. She said he laughed about it. How he was a handyman in every sense of the word.”
“Jim,” I said. “Jim the handyman.” I thought of all the medical supplies he’d bought at the Rexall earlier. Maybe they weren’t for his animal menagerie. Maybe they were for the girls he aborted.
I kissed her on the cheek and ran back up to my car.
Part III
Twenty-six
There’s an area on the edge of town that reminds me of my one and only trip to beautiful New England. Narrow, spiraling roads with trees set very near the gravel. Hollows that reap fog so thick you can’t even see the lights of farmhouses. A lot of dense hardwood forests that glow with the moonlight trapped in the fog that drips from the trees like moss.
I kept the ragtop in second gear all the way. A couple of times, the fog-mazed roads curving abruptly, I nearly ended up in the ditch. I kept the radio off. I needed to concentrate on my driving.
The owl song didn’t make the foggy night any cheerier. Nor did the coyote cries. The car continued to grope its way to Jim’s.
I slowed down every time I saw a country mailbox, looking for Jim’s place.
I used my spotlight on six metal mailboxes before I found the right one. There were no lights buried in the fog. But the box identified Jim the Handyman along with his address.
I pulled the car over to the edge of a gully; I didn’t want to turn in the drive, let him know I was coming. I also didn’t want anybody to run into it and kill themselves-or damage the ragtop.
I grabbed the flashlight out of the glove compartment. Clicked it on. Nothing. I tried the same trick as the kid at the Dx station: I whomped it against my hand. Light flickered on and off. I whomped it harder. The bulb lit up full glow and stayed steady. This whomping business couldn’t be underestimated.
The fog was a damp hand, pressed clammy across my face. I couldn’t see three feet ahead. The owl again, and the coyote, and the tramp and crack of my footsteps on gravel.
I started up the drive. I had to sneak in.
If he heard me, he might panic and accidentally kill Ruthie. I kept thinking of the poor girl in the canoe.
I’d only been to Jim’s once. He had a large frame house with a long, shallow front porch. He had refrigerators and parts of furnaces and lawn mowers and Tv sets and all other kinds of junk on the porch. He’d mentioned that these were “dead” items, the ones on the porch,
and that he’d be hauling them to the dump soon. He then expressed his displeasure about how the dump was run.
I doubted that any of the dead items had been hauled away as yet. He’d said this four or five years ago. I tramped on. I kept waiting for the outline of the house to impress itself on the shifting fog. But nothing. I was in the netherworld.
It took me a while to reach the house. I knew I was near because of the smells. These were smells of a meal cooked, a tobacco pipe smoked, of oil and metal rust and sweet sawn lumber.
I stumbled on the first porch step. I didn’t make much noise, fortunately. I went up the rest of the steps on my hands first, groping, exploring. Far within the house, I heard voices. But they were so muffled, I couldn’t tell who they belonged to, or what was being said.
When I was on the porch, I stuck my right hand out and began slowly walking ahead, one careful step at a time. No lights shone from inside. The fog was blinding even on the porch.
I touched a screen door, my fingers running down its coarse surface. The screening was loose enough so that I could push it against the inside door and feel if there was a window. I couldn’t remember what the wooden door looked like. It felt like a slab of pine.
If the screen door made noise, Jim would likely hear it. But I didn’t have much choice.
I stepped back and eased the door open a half inch at a time. Except for a faint thrumming sound made by the spring connecting door to frame, there was no sound at all. I put my hand on the knob of the inside door. It was locked. Great.
I had to go back down the stairs. Though I moved slowly, I still managed to slip on the edge of the mist-covered last step. Somehow, I stayed upright.
I went around the side of the house. The ground was muddy. The exterior of the house smelled of wet wood. My soles made the acquaintance of several plump, juicy pieces of what stank like dog shit. There’s nothing like the feeling of your foot telling your brain what you just stepped in.
I had to feel my way around the corner of the house. The fog seemed even more impenetrable back here. For safety’s sake, I continued to keep my hands on the house as I made my way across the back. After a few minutes, I bumped into the fruit cellar door. A lot of houses in the Midwest have them. The prairie wives would put up preserves, fruits and vegetables, and pickle certain kinds of meat and then stash them in the fruit cellar, where it was much colder than on the upper floors. A prairie form of refrigeration.
There would likely be steps from the cellar leading up into the house. Sneaking in through the cellar would be easier than getting in any other way. I decided to try it.
I groped my way along the slant of the exterior cellar door. I found a latch. No padlock. I undid the latch and raised the door.
I’ve never opened a grave so I can’t say for sure what they smell like. But the cold and sour rushing odor of the cellar reminded me of dead animals I’d seen rotting in scorching sunlight.
I crept downstairs, following the stuttering beam of my flashlight. There was no flooring, just hard-packed earth. The walls were covered with rotted wooden shelves that held ancient Mason jars containing the sort of indefinable but creepy stuff you see floating in large bottles in carnivals. The ceiling was a crosshatch of electrical wiring. For a handyman, Jim didn’t seem to worry much about fires.
A red-eyed rat watched me with malignant curiosity. He probably didn’t get many visitors.
I hurried across the wide basement to the sharply pitched wooden steps leading to a door on the first floor. My flashlight chose this moment to go dark.
I set a cautious foot on the bottom step and proceeded to work my way carefully up to the door. I was almost afraid to try the knob.
What if it too was locked?
But it wasn’t.
I turned the knob all the way to the right and opened the door. A refrigerator motor shuddered on and off; a faucet drip went pock-pock-pock. The kitchen.
The voices were louder and clearer now. One of the voices was Jim’s. The other’s was Ruthie’s.
I went left. There was a dining room, or what was supposed to be a dining room. It held four large tables. In the gloom, I could see that appliances of every kind, dozens of them, filled the table. The dust in this room started to make me sneeze. I slapped my hand over my nose and held my breath. I didn’t sneeze.
The room where the voices were coming from was on the west side of the house. No wonder I hadn’t been able to see the light. I tiptoed to the end of the dining room. A door was outlined in yellow light. Behind the door were Ruthie and Jim.
I moved up to it one slow step at a time. I kept waiting to step on a bad stretch of board -a loud squeak would fill the entire house.
All the time, they were talking.
“You sure you know what you’re doing, Jim?”
“If you don’t think I can do it, you shouldn’ta come out here.”
“Don’t get mad, Jim. I’m just scared, that’s all.”
“I done this when I lived up in Wisconsin and I done this when I lived over to Missouri.
I had me a lot of practice, if that’s what you’re askin’.”
He was saying all the right things to convict himself later on. I was glad I’d snuck in rather than barge in.
“All right, Jim. All right.” She sounded ready to cry.
“Now you just lie back and we’ll get down to work.”
Now was the time.
I got myself ready. Took a deep breath.
Reached down and grabbed the knob. Prepared myself to charge into the room. And found that the door was locked.
“I’m out here, Jim!” I shouted and started rattling the knob.
He shouted something that I couldn’t hear. The lights went out in the room.
“It’s my brother!” Ruthie said.
A pistol exploded. He shot through the door.
Twice. The sound was vast. I’d been to the side of the door, stripping off my jacket so I could grab him easier when I smashed inside. I hadn’t counted on him having a gun.
“No!” Ruthie shouted. “Don’t shoot him!
Please don’t!”
“Shut up, you stinkin’ little whore!” Jim shouted.
A moment later, more gunfire. One, two shots. I flattened myself against the wall.
Ruthie screamed at him, “You bastard!
Leave him alone!”
“You little slut!” he said.
I heard sliding doors being thrown open, slamming into their respective walls.
“He’s getting away!” Ruthie cried.
I finally understood the layout of the house. He had set up his abortion mill in the front parlor and was now going out through the sliding doors that opened on the hallway.
Ruthie turned the light on. I peeked in.
He had an old medical examination table in the middle of the parlor and two white glass-fronted cabinets filled with medicines of various kinds.
“Are you all right?”
“Fine.”
“I’ll be back.”
I headed for the door and was immediately confronted by a wall of fog.
I wasn’t going to run. It was too dangerous when you didn’t know the terrain. But I went after him. Walking steadily, calmly, quietly as possible.
His footsteps receded. I kept moving forward steadily, touching a damp tree here, a fence post there, tactile reassurance that this was reality not nightmare.
And then, somewhere in the fog ahead, I heard a moaning sound. A human moaning sound. A Handyman Jim moaning sound.
“Aw, shit, McCain. You got to help me.
I broke my leg real bad.”
Not hard to imagine in this fog, tripping and turning your leg into several shards of angled white bone jabbing through hairy flesh.
It took me a few minutes, but I found him. I just followed the cries and the curses. I wondered if the girl he’d killed and put in the canoe had cried this way.
“Here I am, McCain. Help me.”
I could see
the faint outline of him in the murk. The fog masked some of the pain on his face, but not much of it.
He had the left leg of his Osh-Kosh overalls pulled up. White bone poked through.
He kept rocking back and forth and grimacing and tentatively touching his fingers to the exposed bones.
I knelt down next to him and took the ankle of his broken leg and turned it violently to the right. With any luck, his scream could be heard all the way into town. He was sobbing, pleading, almost delirious. “Oh, God, what’re you doing, McCain? What’re you doing?”
Technically, it probably wasn’t good police procedure, what I was doing. But it was fast anyway.
It took three leg twists to get it all out of him. How he’d aborted Susan Whitney and then started to blackmail her and killed her with Darin Greene’s gun believing Greene would take the rap, but then Kenny had to come along and spoil everything by killing himself with a . 45 and making Sykes assume that only a. 45 had been used. How he’d been operating on the girl I’d found in the canoe, but he’d done something wrong. And how he’d killed another girl up in Wisconsin.
“Why’d you kill Susan?” I said.
He was kind of late answering so I gave his leg another twist for good measure. I wondered if you had to join a union to be a sadist. A guy could get to like this stuff.
“I took out the baby. It was a coon.
Greene thought she was in love with him.” He snorted bitterly. “Think of that, a jig like Greene and a upperclass gal like Susan. Them jigs, I tell ya.”
“Why’d you kill her?”
He knew enough to answer right away. “I was blackmailing her. Threatened to tell her father about Darin Greene. She made three payments was all. Then I went over there one night to get some more money and she was pretty drunk. She picked the phone up and said she was gonna call Judge Whitney and tell her everything, including how I was doin’ all these abortions. I guess I just got mad. She’d threatened me one other time before with this. I seen where she kept it. I went and got it-and I shot her. I couldn’t believe it. It was like watchin’ somebody else do it. Like it wasn’t me at all.”
Then, “But I was gonna be real careful with your sister,” he said. “Honest to God, I was, McCain. Honest to God, I was.”
