The Day the Music Died

by Ed Gorman

  “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.

  26

  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 the 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 barged 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!” R
uthie 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.”

  Just for the hell of it, I gave his ankle another good twist.

  27

  THE NEXT DAY WAS Saturday and I guess I should tell you about it in sequence. I’ll make it as brief as possible.

  I woke Ruthie up and we had a long talk and then we went out to the kitchen where Mom and Dad were eating breakfast and told them about her condition. Dad was pretty mad at first but then Ruthie sat in his lap and cried and Dad had a few tears in his eyes as well. Ruthie promised to get the boy over here in the afternoon for a talk with Mom and Dad. And to bring his folks along. Mom and Dad weren’t sure how they felt about anything yet. There hadn’t been time. Ruthie walked me out to my car and we stood there hugging each other until our noses got cold.

  In the afternoon, I stopped by the judge’s office and rehashed everything that had happened the night before. She was calling the Eastern branch of her family before I got out the door.

  The family name would not be burdened with a murderer after all. Just land swindlers and other assorted reprobates disguised as leading businessmen.

  In the evening, I went to the Buddy Holly dance. I worked up a good sweat dancing. I danced with anybody who’d have me. Believe it or not, I’m not universally beloved. Around eight, Pamela came in with her date, Stu. I assumed his fiancée was out of town. He was a whole lot taller than I was and a whole lot smoother with the women and a whole lot better dressed and a whole lot better looking. Other than that, I had no reason to resent him at all.

  Mary and Wes came later. Mary looked really pretty in a buff blue sweater and a tight blue skirt and bobby sox and saddle shoes and this really fetching blue bow in her hair. Wes made sure not to look at me. But every once in a while, I’d look over at Mary when they were slow-dancing and I’d feel sad, and I’d just want to hold her, but I didn’t know why. I mean it was Pamela I was in love with, but it was Mary I wanted to hold.

  Around nine, when they started playing slow songs all the time, I left. I didn’t have anybody to pair up with. I started feeling like an outsider, the way I do a lot of times, and so I just went outside and got in my ragtop and drove home and fired up the boob tube and sat on the couch having a Pepsi and letting the cats use me as a bed. There was an Audie Murphy movie on. Being short and Irish, he was a sort of hero of mine.

  Audie was just about to shoot all the bad guys when the phone rang. “Yes.”

  “What’re you doing, McCain?”

  “Judge Whitney?”

  “Of course. Who did you think it was?”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Not exactly.” I could tell she’d been drinking. “But I need you to come out here.”

  “To your house?”

  She sighed impatiently. “Yes, McCain. To my house. Where the hell else would I be?”

  “For what?”

  “Just get out here.”

  The manse is of red brick. Three stories. White shutters. And white fencing that gives the hundred acres the look and feel of a Kentucky bluegrass horse ranch. Except in the dead of winter.

  Her maid, Sophie, a Norwegian woman who is even crankier than the judge, let me in and led me to the den.

  Mambo music blared out of a stereo.

  The judge wore a festive red blouse and a pair of black slacks and one-inch black heels. Her mambo-lesson footsteps were sprawled all over the floor between the built-in bookcases and in front of the fireplace, black footsteps on a long stretch of white plastic, a brandy in one hand and a Gauloise in the other. And she was following her mambo-lesson footsteps with great fervor.

  Sophie gave me her usual frown and left.

  “Be wi
th you in a minute, McCain. Help yourself to the dry bar.”

  I had a beer. From the can. It was my petty protest about being inside the fortress of the master class, as Karl Marx used to call them.

  “You could always use a glass,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I always could.”

  She shook her head with elegant disdain and then went back to her dancing. She was getting good, and she looked good too, in the blouse and slacks.

  The music ended.

  “Well, get ready,” she said.

  “Ready?”

  “To be my mambo partner. I tried a bunch of other people, but they were all busy. The instructions say that on the tenth night, I should have a live human partner.”

  “You’re kidding. That’s why you called me out here?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Now get over here.”

  There wasn’t any use arguing. I put my beer down, stubbed my Pall Mall out and went over and became her dancing partner.

  “God, McCain,” she said, when I was in her arms, “I never realized before just how short you are.”

  As my dad says, life is like that sometimes.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Sam McCain Mysteries

  Part 1

  1

  “GEE,” THE BEAUTIFUL PAMELA Forrest said. “He actually looks kinda dopey.”

  And he did.

  Here he was, the world’s first nuclear-powered bogeyman, and he looked like the uncle everybody feels sorry for because he’s fat and sloppy.

  Nikita Khrushchev. Premier of the Soviet Union. The world’s number one Russian. Not to mention Communist.

  On this warm sunny twenty-first day of September, 1959, “Nikki,” as some of the press had taken to calling him, had come to a large Iowa farm as part of his trip to the United States. A farmer-businessman named Roswell Garst had invited him here. Garst had quite the spread.

  “And his suit looks so cheap,” the beautiful Pamela went on. “And he sweats so much.”