by Ed Gorman
Mom and Dad are like that, but not to an obnoxious degree. Every time Mom opens her big new Kelvinator double-door refrigerator, she says, “I just don’t know how I got along all these years without it.” And whenever she carries a load of laundry down to the basement, she stops and looks at me and says, “I wish my mother’d lived long enough to see my laundry room. She’d just go crazy about it.” For Dad, it’s the large shop in the basement. No more cold garages on winter nights; no more leaky roofs that rust out tools. Dad’s got a regular workshop down there and he loves it. You can smell freshly sawn lumber and hear the table saw whining through wood so new it’s sometimes green.
I could smell the soup the minute Mom opened the door. Tomato bisque. Homemade. How could I say no?
Over lunch, I said, “Ruthie isn’t here, is she?”
“Ruthie? She’s in school.” She gave me a funny look for asking such a stupid question.
Mom is pretty. I suppose most boys think their mothers are pretty. But mine really is. Not that there’s much of her to be pretty. Eighty-nine pounds and five-foot-one. Dad had to win her away from an accountant named Nesmith. Mom always says it was because of Dad’s curly red locks. She said he had the most beautiful hair she’d ever seen. Dad always looks uncomfortable when she says that. And then Mom’ll get a little teary and talk about what a good man he’s been to her all these years and how she just can’t imagine what her life would’ve been without him. They still dance in the kitchen on Saturday nights, the radio playing the old tunes, Benny Goodman and Harry James and Artie Shaw, and still make out in front of the TV and jump up like teenagers whenever one of us kids show up.
“So everything’s going all right with her?” I said around a spoonful of tomato bisque. I tossed the words off, as if I was just making conversation.
But now I’d gotten her curious. “Why wouldn’t everything be all right?”
“Just wondering was all, Mom. I saw her over in town a couple of days ago and she looked tired.”
“Oh,” Mom said. She looked satisfied that I’d explained my curiosity. “It’s her grades. You know how hard she studies. She’s got a bunch of tests coming up. So she stays up all night. The poor kid.”
The phone rang. Mom went to the yellow wall phone. “It’s so handy to have a phone in the kitchen.”
I smiled.
It was a friend of hers wanting a recipe. Mom consulted a card file she kept. She read it slowly, giving her friend plenty of time to write down each ingredient.
I was getting groggy. The soup and the kitchen-warmth and the slow way Mom was talking made me want to go upstairs and pick up a Ray Bradbury paperback and read for a while and then drift off to sleep, the way I used to in high school. I’d always been in such a hurry to grow up. Now I wondered if high school was the best time I’d ever have.
When she hung up, she came back and sat down, her shoulder-length dark hair showing inevitable streaks of gray, her sweet little face still wrinkle-free. Dad was the one showing his age and sometimes when I looked at him I felt so sad I had to look away.
“What time’s her last class these days?”
“Ruthie’s?”
“Uh-huh.”
“She usually gets out at two forty-five.”
“Oh.”
“And then heads over to Sheen’s.”
Sheen’s was a clothing store where Ruthie worked two hours after school every day, putting in a full day on Saturdays. Saving for college.
She was watching me. “You know what’s funny?”
“Funny weird or funny ha-ha?”
“Funny weird.”
“What?”
“That you haven’t mentioned anything about Kenny Whitney.”
“Not much to mention.”
“Doris’ husband—Doris down the street here—he’s a cop and he says that the judge doesn’t think Kenny killed his wife.”
“Neither do I.”
“You don’t? How come?”
I shook my head, finishing up my homemade soup. “I’m not sure. I mean, there’s some evidence he didn’t—at least it looks like evidence to me—but even before that, I just had the sense he didn’t kill her.”
“I have to be careful about what I say around Doris.”
“Oh?”
“You know, you working for the judge and all.”
“Because her husband likes Sykes?”
“Yes. He and the chief go fishing a lot.”
“Right. Probably when they should be out doing their jobs.”
“I wouldn’t know about that. I just mentioned that I have to be careful.”
“I know, Mom.”
“The judge isn’t exactly well-liked by most people, you know.”
I stood up and went over and kissed her on the cheek. “The judge? Not well-liked?” I grinned at her. “You must be talking to the wrong people.”
“Oh, you,” she said. Then took my hand. I’d never noticed her liver spots before. “I wish you’d stop by more often. I mean, we’re right here in the same town.”
“I know, Mom,” I said. “I’ll try harder. I promise.”
Judge Whitney said, “Blackmail? For what?”
She sat on the edge of her desk, a paradigm of style in her black suit and red blouse, the cut of both vaguely Spanish, a Gauloise going in one slender hand and a snifter of brandy in the other.
“So he never told you about it?” I said.
Irritation shone in her glance and voice. “McCain, you don’t seem to understand. Kenny and I never communicated unless it was absolutely necessary. Having him out to the house would be like having Adlai Stevenson over for dinner.”
“Heaven forbid.”
“Damned right, heaven forbid. Now the Communists are getting smart. They’ve decided to put up a much more attractive candidate, and with any luck the sonofabitch will win.”
“Who’s that?”
“Jack Kennedy? The senator from Massachusetts?”
“Ah. He’s a commie, eh?”
“Don’t mock me, McCain. Of course, he’s a commie. All Democrats are commies.”
“I’ll have to ask Ayn Rand what she thinks of that.”
“Ayn Rand?”
“I’ve got a date with her tonight.”
She exhaled smoke dramatically. “What a little turd you can be.”
“She wants me to take her bowling.”
“Damn it, McCain, people are walking around thinking that a Whitney has committed murder and you’re making jokes about Ayn Rand.”
I was going to say that I couldn’t think of anybody I’d rather make jokes about than Ayn Rand but I decided the judge had probably had enough.
“Susan’s the key,” she said, walking back around her desk and sitting down.
The rubber bands started a minute or two later, a volley of them. I’d lean my head right, I’d lean my head left. She was doing pretty good, hitting about 60-65 percent of her shots.
“You’re getting better,” I said.
“Thank you.”
“Did you hear what I said about Susan?”
“I heard.”
“She’s the key. To the blackmail.”
“Why Susan? Why couldn’t Kenny have been the blackmailee?”
“He was too stupid to be blackmailed. Everything he did, he did in public. And Susan was a very respectable woman until the last few years of her life.”
“That’s what Bob Frazier wanted everybody to believe anyway.”
“Meaning what?” I said.
“Meaning there was always something a little wild about her.”
“You have evidence of this, of course? I mean, she ran around a little, slept with a few guys. I’m not sure that’s ‘wild.’”
“Not evidence,” she said, firing off another rubber band. She got me right on the chin. “Instinct.”
“Do you know the Renaulds very well?”
She smiled. “Mr. and Mrs. New Yorker? The way they always manage to work the magazine into their
conversation is amazing. I guess it’s what passes for sophistication out here.”
“He had an affair with Susan,” I said.
“God. He’s so—effete. I’m surprised he’s even interested in women.”
“According to his wife, he’s quite the hot number.”
“Spare me, McCain.” Then, “Anything else I should know?”
“Darin Greene paid me a late-night visit.”
“The football player?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t say. He got scared and ran off.”
“What’s he got to do with this?”
“Well, he and Kenny were friends since boyhood.”
“Yes, just one more reason the Whitneys were so proud of Kenny. I don’t have anything against colored people, McCain—I don’t have a prejudiced bone in my body—but being nice to colored people is one thing but actually having them as friends …” She shook her robber baron head. “Anyway, Greene and Kenny had a falling out was my understanding—well over a year ago now, I think—so I don’t see what he’d know about any of this.”
“Neither do I. But I was curious why he came up to my place so late at night. Then when I went to this tavern where he hangs out, he took off before I could get to him.”
She shrugged. “I’m more interested in the abortion girl.”
“I don’t know why you think that has anything to do with this.”
“Same reason I’ve always sensed that Susan Frazier wasn’t the sweet girl her father said she was. Instinct.”
“The doc told me it could just as easily have been an accident as a murder. He thinks that both the girl and whoever was helping her could have panicked. The helper runs off, scared and leaves her there to bleed to death. I don’t know what that could have to do with Kenny and Susan.”
“Instinct, as I said.” And launched another volley. She hit me once, missed three times.
I looked down at the floor around the leather chair I was sitting in. “Who picks up all these rubber bands after I leave?”
“Pamela.”
“Ah.”
“Why, do you think I should pick them up?”
“There’s probably something in the Whitney charter prohibiting it, isn’t there?”
“You’re wasting time again, McCain. Within twenty-four hours, I want to be able to call up the state paper and demand a front-page apology—or I’ll sue them and put them out of business. You’re the only one who can help me with that, McCain.”
I stood up. “I’m back at it right now, your honor.”
“Find out who Susan’s best friend was. Work on her.”
“That’s actually what I was going to do.”
“And don’t bother Pamela on the way out,” she said. “I’ve got her typing something very important.” She exhaled more smoke from her Gauloise. “I don’t know why you don’t give up on her, anyway, McCain. It just makes you look very foolish to the whole town, a young man mooning over a young woman that way. And I’m saying that for your sake, McCain.”
“Thanks, Mom,” I said.
On my way out, Pamela said, “Did you hear about Stu?”
“He was hit by a train?”
“Very funny. He was named Young Lawyer of the Year by the State Bar Association.”
“Goody,” I said, and left.
21
THE HIGH SCHOOL HAD a program where kids who worked got off at 2:45 instead of 3:15 so they could go to their jobs. They also got credit for having the jobs. A commie would look at it as a sweet but dishonest plan by greedy merchants to get cheap labor. I wondered what Ayn Rand would make of it.
It’s funny that at my age, not long out of law school, I was as sentimental as an old man. The girls looked great, shiny and new, and I knew what most of the boys would do, ride around in their cars and then play a little pool or pinball, and then head home for a quick dinner where they would evade every single important question their parents threw at them. God, it all seemed so far away and so wonderful, MGM wonderful, sort of like an Andy Hardy movie except the girls would let you get to third base and you had all those great Dashiell Hammett and Ed Lacy novels to read.
Now, I had responsibilities and people expected things of me and even at my age I could see a few gray hairs on my head, one of the McCain genetic curses.
I sat there and listened to a local station that played rock and roll in the afternoon. I was nostalgic about rock, because it’d changed, too. They played a lot of Fabian and the Kingston Trio and, God almighty, novelty songs like “Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini.” And then I started thinking about Buddy Holly again and how Jack Kerouac said that even at a very young age he’d had this great oppressive sense of loss, of something good and true vanished, something he could never articulate, something he had carried around with him as young as age eight or nine, maybe when his brother died. I guess I had, too, this melancholy, and somehow Buddy Holly dying at least gave me a tangible reason for this feeling. Maybe it’s just all the sadness I see in the people around me, just below the surface I mean, and the fact that there’s nothing I can do about it. Life is like that sometimes.
Ruthie came out the front door as I’d expected. I was parked up the street. She looked preoccupied and didn’t see me. She just started walking fast toward downtown, which was three blocks north. It was overcast now and the temperature was dropping and the school seemed shabby suddenly, shabby and old, and the sense of loss I had became anger and I felt cheated then, as if my past really hadn’t been all that wonderful, as if I’d made up a fantasy about my past just because I was afraid to face adulthood. Maybe Joyce Brothers, the psychologist who’d won all that money on the TV show The $64,000 Question before everybody found out some of it was a fake, maybe she could explain my sudden mood swings. Nobody in this little Iowa town could, that was for sure.
When Ruthie reached the corner of the school grounds, I was there waiting. She got in.
I said, “Did you try that stuff?”
She stared straight ahead. She looked pale and tired. “It didn’t work.”
“Oh.”
“And it really burns down there now.”
“Maybe—”
“Just don’t give me any advice right now, okay?” She still didn’t look at me.
“Okay.” Then, “How’re you feeling, physically, I mean?”
“I’m too tired to know. Let’s just not talk, all right?”
“All right.”
“Could I turn that off? Why can’t they play anything decent?”
She snapped off the radio. The song had been “The Purple People Eater.” Then, “I’m sorry I’m so bitchy.”
“It’s all right. I’d be bitchy, too.”
“I just need to handle this.”
“Don’t do anything crazy, Ruthie.”
“I don’t think I’m the ‘crazy’ type, do you?”
“No, I guess not.”
“I’ve got a couple of girls working on a couple of things for me.”
“Like what?”
“I’m not sure. They just both said they could probably come up with something.”
“God, Ruthie, didn’t you hear what happened to the girl they found last night?”
“Oh, I heard, all right. But it was obviously somebody who didn’t know what he was doing.”
“You shouldn’t let anybody except a doctor touch you.”
“It doesn’t have to be a doctor. It’s not a tough thing to do if you know what you’re doing.”
“You’re scaring the hell out of me, Ruthie.”
“My life’s over if I have this baby.”
“I know, Ruthie. But still—”
“Here we are.”
I pulled over to the curb. Sheen’s Fashion Fountain was the most expensive woman’s apparel shop in town. It was where you bought your girlfriend a gift if it was her birthday or if you’d really, really pissed her off.
She opened the door right away. I had one of those momen
ts when she didn’t look familiar. Her fear and grief had made her a stranger. I reached over and touched her cheek. “I love you, Ruthie. You know that. I wish you’d let me help you.”
“I did this to myself. It’s my responsibility.”
“You need a ride home tonight?”
“I can ride with Betty.”
Betty was one of the older clerks. She drove to work and lived about two blocks from Mom and Dad.
“I know some people in Cedar Rapids,” I said. “They may know a doctor there.”
She leaned over and returned my cheek kiss. “Thanks. But let me see what my friends come up with first, all right?”
“Just please let me know what’s going on.”
“I promise.”
She got out of the car. I sat there in gloom, gray and cold as the overcast afternoon itself. Then a car horn blasted me. I was in a No Parking Zone and holding up traffic.
22
MAGGIE YATES LIVED ABOVE a double garage on the grounds of a burned-out mansion. One of the servants had lived in the garage during the better days of the manse. Now it was rented out as an apartment. Maggie’s bike lay against the wooden steps leading up the side of the garage and Miles Davis’ music painted everything a brooding dusky color. I had to knock a couple of times in order for her to hear me above the music.
Maggie was dressed in black. Black turtleneck, black jeans, black socks. Her long red hair was, as always, a lovely Celtic mess and her Audrey Hepburn face was, also as always, a lovely Celtic mess of winsomeness and melancholy.
The walls behind her told the story. Photographs of Albert Camus, Jack Kerouac, James Dean, Charlie Parker and Eleanor Roosevelt covered one wall, while album covers of Gil Evans, Jerry Mulligan, Odetta and Dave Brubeck covered another.
Maggie was the town’s resident beatnik. She was somewhere in her early thirties, had graduated from the University of Iowa and was holing up here, she said, so she could write her novel. A lot of times I’d pull up outside and I could hear her banging away on the portable typewriter that sits on the table next to a large window overlooking what used to be a duck pond. As yet, she hasn’t let me see as much as a paragraph of the book. But she keeps promising that I’ll be the first to read it.
