The Day the Music Died

by Ed Gorman

  “Is she going to see him anytime soon?”

  “Tomorrow morning. They both drew Saturday. She can talk to him then.”

  “You know what it’s like otherwise, without a real sawbones.”

  “No shit. Girl around here had her friend try it with some kind of automobile suction device. Killed her.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of. She feels guilty about it and wants to handle it fast before my folks find out. So she might try something stupid.”

  “I think Sue can have an answer for you sometime tomorrow afternoon.”

  “That’d be great.”

  “You still got the same phone number?”

  “Yeah. But it’d probably be easier if I called you.”

  “Fine. Try me around two, three in the afternoon.”

  “I really appreciate this, Wyatt.”

  “No sweat. I just hope we can help you out.”

  Now I needed to find Ruthie. Her friend Gloria drove a new yellow VW bug that she’d received for her sixteenth birthday from her godfather. I swung by her folks’ home. The bug wasn’t there. I then began a systematic check of the places where the teenagers hung out. I even drove out to Howard Johnson’s again. I spent forty-five minutes on my search and had just about given up when I saw a yellow bug swinging out of the drive of a pizza place out on the south highway.

  I honked the horn. Gloria recognized me. I waved and signaled for her to pull over to the curb.

  As I approached the car, I could see that Gloria was alone. Would she have any idea where Ruthie was? I felt good about my call to Wyatt. I should have phoned him as soon as I found out Ruthie was pregnant.

  Gloria rolled down the VW window and turned down a Frankie Avalon song on the radio.

  “Hi,” she said. She had a small, freckled face with a slight overbite and a rather pointed chin. She wore a thin yellow parka that almost matched the color of her bug, which I suppose was the idea.

  “Hi. I’m looking for Ruthie. Have you seen her?”

  I could have won a few million from Gloria in a poker game. Though her lips were shaping themselves into a lie, her eyes glanced guiltily away. “Uh, uh-uh.”

  “Have you heard from her, then?”

  “No, I haven’t heard from her, either.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “What is?”

  “My mother’s under the impression she’s staying all night at your place.”

  “Gee, that is funny.”

  I said, “Why don’t you turn your engine off?”

  For the first time, she showed a little bit of fear. “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want you to leave until you tell me the truth.”

  She shifted into first and said, “I’d better be going now.”

  I reached in and grabbed the steering wheel. “Damn it, Gloria, you remember the girl they found last night? The dead one who’d had the abortion?”

  She sank back in the seat.

  “Did you hear what I said, Gloria?”

  “Yes, I heard.”

  “You know what’s going on with Ruthie, right?”

  She took a moment but finally, she nodded.

  “Where is she, Gloria?”

  She looked up at me. “I don’t know.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I really don’t. She didn’t tell me. She just asked me to cover for her, you know, with your mom, in case she asked if Ruthie was staying at my house tonight.”

  “Gloria, if she goes to some quack who doesn’t know what he’s doing—”

  “Honest to God, she didn’t tell me. She just said she’d figured out a way to take care of it. Honest. That’s all she said.”

  I believed her. Her face had shifted from guilt to exasperation. Now she was telling me the truth and I was acting as if I didn’t believe her.

  “Do you ever hear of anybody around here who does these operations?” I said.

  “You mean like doctors?”

  “Doctors or anybody. A nurse, maybe.”

  “Uh-uh. Most girls go out of state. There’s a place in Kansas City where my sister went.”

  I should’ve called Des Moines sooner. I could have stopped this from happening tonight.

  “If you see her or hear from her—”

  “I’ll tell her to call you. I really will. But right now I’m kind of freezing my butt off. These heaters—”

  “That’s all right. Thanks for talking.”

  “She’ll be all right. I’m sure she will.”

  “I hope you’re right, Gloria.”

  The yellow bug headed up to the corner and then turned right when it got a green arrow on the traffic signal. Mist and fog were setting in. You get a lot of both in the valley. I wondered about my little sister. I should have done so much better protecting her.

  I walked back to the phone booth and called Judge Whitney. The brandy was flowing. I could hear it in her voice.

  “I hope you’ve called to tell me that you’ve found the real killer, McCain.”

  “Not yet.” But I did tell her about my day and some of the strange things that happened.

  “Do you think the colored man could have killed Susan, McCain?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Find out why he and Kenny had a falling-out. There might be something in that.” She sounded as if she’d just had the most brilliant deductive thought in the world. But I’d been wondering that all day long.

  “There’s also the fact,” I said, “that Renauld was in med school. He might be our man.”

  “The Leopold Bloom’s guy?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wouldn’t think he’d have the guts. All the blood. He’d probably say eek.”

  The brandy was flowing indeed. “What’s the music playing?” I said.

  “You really don’t know?”

  I let her feel superior as hell. “I really don’t know.”

  “Why, it’s Chopin, of course. I’m very surprised you don’t know.

  “That question wasn’t on my exam when I got my private investigator’s license.”

  “But back to the case. You know who I’ve also been thinking about?”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Bob Frazier.”

  “So have I.”

  “Really?”

  “Between his temper and his pride,” I said, “I could see him going out there and killing Susan in a rage. She’d certainly humiliated him enough times in the past couple of years. And Kenny had humiliated him for years. Maybe he just couldn’t handle it anymore.”

  “But then why would Kenny kill himself?”

  “Maybe it was the same with Kenny,” I said. “In fact, I’m almost sure it was. I was there when he did it, don’t forget. He was a very weary and very sad guy. I sensed that he was at the end of things. A pretty good number of alcoholics kill themselves when they feel they’re at the end.”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t know,” she said imperiously. Then, “Where are you now, McCain?”

  That’s when I heard the sirens. Two, maybe three squad cars. That was a lot, even for a Friday night. Once in a while you got that many headed to a single scene if it was a bad accident out on some lonely road. But generally, given the fact that only four cars worked on weekend nights, one car covered most incidents.

  “McCain?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Are those sirens?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Any idea what’s going on?”

  “No. But there’s a DX service station that has a police band radio. I’ll head over there.”

  “If it’s anything important, you be sure to call me.”

  “I will.”

  “I still can’t believe you didn’t know that was Chopin.”

  The DX station had glossy promo pictures of Buddy Holly all over the front window. There was going to be a Buddy-a-thon on a local radio station Sunday afternoon. The place was lit up but I didn’t see anybody working. I bought a nickel Coke and some peanuts
. I vaguely remembered from health class that peanuts were good energy food. The toilet flushed and the kid came out. He’d apparently been in there dipping his head in an oil can. His long, dark hair glistened with grease. He wore greasy coveralls with the collar turned up. Way up. He looked like Batman.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  “You want some gas, daddy?”

  Since I needed a favor from him, I decided not to call him “sonny.”

  “I need your police radio.”

  “You’re that lawyer that works for the judge, right?”

  “Right.”

  “She yanked my license last year for six months. The bitch.”

  “You were innocent, of course.”

  “I accidentally bumped this old lady when she was crossing the street. I guess it sort of knocked her down.”

  “Well, the judge can be unreasonable sometimes, no doubt about it.”

  “You know the funny thing?”

  “What?”

  “She’s actually a good-lookin’ gal.”

  “The judge?”

  “Sure. For an old broad, I mean.” He winked. “Maybe if I woulda asked her out, she wouldn’ta yanked my license.”

  He should have pleaded diminished capacity. “How about the police radio?”

  “It don’t work too good. In fact, it’s shut off right now.”

  “I’d really appreciate it if you’d give it a try.”

  He grinned. “You was wonderin’ about them sirens, too, huh?”

  “Yeah. I love chasin’ sirens.”

  “Me, too, except my chickie, she gets scared when we get over ninety. Her brother was on this motorcycle and he rear-ended this lumber truck and man they had to scrape him off the back end and that’s no shit. So ever since, anyway, she gets scared when you hit around a hundred. You know how chicks are.”

  The front area of the station was a small box with a counter, a twirl rack of state road maps, a red Coke machine, Hawkeye calendars for every sport except marbles, cans of oil stacked neatly along the bottoms of the plate-glass windows and a glass cabinet up on the wall with new fan belts and the like.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, hoping that my hands didn’t automatically go after this little twerp all on their own.

  The kid went behind the counter and produced a long, narrow radio. He plugged it into an outlet that was conveniently set into the countertop. A tiny amber light clicked on in the tuning bar of the radio. “Well, the sumbitch came on, anyway. Sometimes, it won’t even do that.”

  “It won’t, huh?”

  “Nope. I wanted to take it apart and work on it, but Wally won’t let me because of the refrigerator.”

  “What refrigerator?”

  “Oh, you know, the one out in back where the mechanics used to keep their sandwiches and stuff like that.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “Well, me and Merle, he’s this friend of mine that Wally don’t like much, we spent two nights takin’ it apart, you know, tryin’ to figure out why it was makin’ all that noise, and the damned thing caught on fire.” He shook his head. “Sumbitch was just char and ashes.”

  “That’s why Wally won’t let you work on the radio?”

  “Yeah, you know how Wally is. He took some night classes out to the community college and now he thinks his shit don’t stink. You know how college guys are.”

  He started wrenching the tuning knob back and forth and swearing at it and shaking his head.

  “Hey,” he said as he continued to twist the knob back and forth, “how about that Buddy Holly, huh?”

  “Yeah. God, it was awful.”

  “You know I bet them guys, them singers, I bet they get more ass than a toilet seat.”

  “Yeah, I s’pose they do.”

  He reached in a drawer and pulled out the longest screwdriver I’ve ever seen. God only knew what he was going to do with it. He started taking off the back of the radio. “You know what I wonder?” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “You think any of them singers ever get to screw any of them chicks on Bandstand?”

  “That I wouldn’t know.”

  “You think Dick Clark ever screws ’em?”

  “Most of them are underage.”

  “Hey, man, that kinda shit goes on all the time in Hollywood. Underage girls, queers, dope addicts, everything, man.”

  “Yeah, except it’s in Philadelphia.”

  “I thought Bandstand was in Hollywood.”

  “Nope. Philadelphia.”

  “No shit,” he said, amazed at the mysteries of existence. And that’s when the radio blasted him back into the big red Coke machine. His screwdriver had discovered electricity. “Whoa!” he said. “You see them sparks! That was really cool! Wait ’til I tell Merle!”

  He came back to his radio and said, “Man, this little booger sure got a kick, don’t it?”

  “Sure seems that way. Well …” I said, starting to back up to the door.

  “Just a minute, man. Lemme try one more thing. Sometimes, if ya just whomp it a little.”

  Which was when he started pounding the radio against the edge of the counter. Not a timid let’s-try-this-and-see-if-it-works pounding, either. He was really whaling away. I expected to see the radio break into three or four pieces. Instead, it did something phenomenal. It started working.

  Myrna Potts, the nighttime police dispatcher, came through loud and clear. “Backup highway patrol car to Kenny Whitney’s house on two-two-four-five Pine Valley Road. One more on its way. Repeat. One more backup car on its way.”

  Kenny Whitney’s house? I wondered. Who would be out there now? And why?

  “I gotta remember and tell Wally that,” the kid said. “Hell, he’s got himself a good radio again. Just took a little whompin’ is all.”

  But there was no more time to listen to the sage of the DX. I was out the door and into my ragtop.

  25

  I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT was going on, but it knotted up my stomach pretty fast.

  There sat Kenny Whitney’s house and in a semicircle around it were three local squad cars, a highway patrol car and an ambulance. Every vehicle had a spotlight trained on the house. Two of Cliffie’s deputies had shotguns pointed directly at the place. Cliffie had a bullhorn.

  I parked on the hill and walked down the gravel road. There had to be fifty gawkers. They were bundled up and ready for a siege. This was the something you couldn’t get on TV. You could smell the jungle thrill on them. This was a doozy, all right.

  But why would anything be going on at Kenny’s house? He was dead. The house was empty.

  Paddy Hanratty, Jr., cleared it up for me.

  He’d been standing with his proud father, two dumpy fat guys in hunting jackets, cowboy hats and tumescent bulges of chewing tobacco pressing against their cheeks.

  Paddy, Jr., came over, spat right at my foot, barely missing and said, “Looks like we’re gonna have us some coon huntin’ tonight.”

  I said, “Care to put that into English?”

  He looked truly shocked. “You mean you don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “That coon friend of yours, that Greene fella.”

  “What about him?”

  “He broke into the house a little while ago and then managed to get Frazier out here somehow. Now he’s got a gun on Frazier and won’t let him go ’til he confesses to killin’ Susan. He brought Frazier to the winda a while ago and shouted it out to Sykes over there. You know, about Frazier bein’ the killer ’n’ all.”

  My stomach got worse. I looked around at the faces of the gawkers and knew what some of them were so excited about now. These weren’t the good people of the town; they were the haters. The good people far outnumbered them, but they were not here.

  There was likely going to be a killing tonight. That was excitement enough. That the dead man might be an uppity Negro like Darin Greene made the prospect of death even more agreeable.

/>   I stalked away from Jr. and went over to Cliffie. He looked to be in his glory. The bullhorn was a nice touch. The western-style holster rig seemed to ride ever lower on his hips, just the way Wild Bill would have worn it seventy years ago, when he was turning himself into legend.

  There was press and they were notably excited, too. Not often small-town reporters get a story like this. This was drama, unlike most of the violence they covered—some farmer killing his wife and then himself in the middle of the night for reasons nobody would ever quite understand, faint, vanished cries lost to the lonely winds around the prairie farmhouse. Three cameras were working constantly, the flashbulb light brief and ghostly.

  Up here, at the edge of the driveway that faced the windows of the living room and then dipped below the main floor into the garage, people were passing thermoses around. Apparently, they were expecting a long siege. The sharpshooter deputies didn’t take any coffee. They looked reluctant to put their weapons down at all.

  Mist and fog and swirling red emergency lights the color of fresh blood only enhanced the drama. Cliffie had finally gotten himself into a movie.

  I said, “I want to go in there.”

  He’d been sipping coffee from a thermos cup and staring at the house. He turned slightly and took the cup from his mouth. “You think my luck could be that good? Gettin’ rid of three of the most obnoxious people in the valley? Greene, Frazier and you?”

  “Now that’s a responsible comment, Chief. Why don’t you share it with the press?”

  “Hell, I’m not afraid of those dip-shits. I give ’em a piece of my mind whenever I feel like it. Them reporters don’t like any of my family, and I could give a good moose turd.”

  “I’m serious. I want to go in there.”

  “For what?”

  “To bring them both out alive if possible.”

  He took another sip of coffee. “I’m not sure you’d be doin’ the coon any favors.”

  “No?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. That’s not the kind of boy who takes to bein’ locked up. And that’s where he’s gonna be for a long, long time after tonight. Unless he kills Frazier. Then we’re gonna hang him, come fall.”

  “I want to go in there.”