by Ed Gorman
I was afraid to ask. “What did he say about leaving his wife?”
She looked at me, and I couldn’t ever remember seeing her more lovely. “He said yes, McCain. He said he wants to marry me. I still can’t believe it. He’s going to tell Donna about us tonight.”
There’s a great F. Scott Fitzgerald story called “Winter Dreams,” in which the protagonist falls in love with this girl when he’s barely a teen and loves her throughout his life. He becomes all the things she wanted for a husband: rich, powerful, successful. And yet she always eludes him. She ends up having a pretty terrible life—marrying a faithless alcoholic, losing her looks—and when this is recounted to him many years later he isn’t sure what to feel. He still loves her too much to feel good about her dashed hopes. But what he mostly feels is nothing, his care having been blunted by losing her so many times. He wants to cry—maybe for himself; maybe for her; maybe for both of them—but nothing comes. His grief over not having her was something to cling to. Now there is just emptiness.
I guess I felt that way. She didn’t gloat. I mean, she knew her happiness meant my doom. So she would move beyond me forever. The worst part of it was Stu. His ambition was to become governor. He stood a good chance. But now he was willing to sacrifice it for Pamela. He loved her as much as I did, maybe more. How could I blame him?
Just at dusk, with clouds and shadows tinted in that midwestern violet, I stopped to put up the top. She used the rest room of the tiny gas station. I leaned against the car, smoking a Lucky, and for just a moment, and utterly without warning, tears stung my eyes. God, I’d loved her for so long. And now it was done.
I’m not a drinker. Like my dad, I’m small and I just don’t have the capacity. By the time I dropped her off and tooled back downtown, the liquor store was closed. They keep strict hours, and you have to sign for every bottle you take out so the state has a record of it. This is what you get when boozers and teetotalers work out a compromise.
But there were bellhops at all four hotels who could provide you with a bottle for twice what it would cost you at the liquor store. I wasn’t even sure I wanted one. But it seemed like the kind of thing Robert Ryan would do in one of his crime movies, and sometimes in my head—and this is sort of embarrassing because I’m going on twenty-six years old—sometimes in my head I’m Robert Ryan. I used to be Gene Autry, but at least then I had an excuse. I was seven years old.
I got a fifth of Old Grand Dad and drove back to my apartment. Mrs. Goldman, the widow who owns the house and lets out two upstairs apartments—I’d call her my landlady but if you ever saw her you’d never call her a landlady—wasn’t home, so I knew I’d be drinking alone.
Things got fuzzy pretty quick. I told you I just don’t have the capacity. I hauled out some old photos of Pamela, and then I didn’t have any trouble crying at all. I had to damned near nail my hand down to keep from calling her and telling her what a mistake she was making. Around two I started vomiting, and the first time I tried to flop into bed I missed and hit the floor face first. Then I vomited some more and then I tried the bed again. I did a little better. I got most of my body on the mattress. The rest is a blank.
“C’mon, now, don’t be a baby.”
“You really didn’t have to do this.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Why?”
“Because you asked me to.”
“I did? When?”
“When you came down last night.”
“I came down last night?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Maybe four.”
“Oh, my God, I’m sorry.”
“You told me all about Pamela. And then you told me you were afraid you’d never be able to get up in the morning. And that you had too much to do to sleep in. So I said I’d make sure you got up.”
What she’d done was serve me breakfast in bed, Mrs. Goldman. I always say that when Lauren Bacall gets older, she’ll look like Mrs. Goldman—if she’s lucky. When her husband died and left her this two-story Victorian, people wondered if she’d be able to get along. She’s doing just fine, thank you.
Especially where I was concerned. She had me sitting up in bed drinking coffee, smoking a Lucky, and eating off a breakfast tray that offered three poached eggs, two slices of buttered toast with strawberry jam, and a glass of orange juice.
My three cats wanted to share the meal. Mrs. Goldman and I had to fight them off. Tess was the most creative. She started at the foot of the bed and tunneled all the way up, so that her head appeared right next to my toast.
Mrs. Goldman said, “You have to get all this down, McCain. Isn’t your first appointment for nine?”
“Umm-hmm. With the Judge.”
“Well, it’s eight-fifteen. You still have to take a shower.”
“I really appreciate this.”
She touched my sleeve. “I was rebounding when I met my husband. I’d loved this guy all the way through college and he wouldn’t give me a second look. The first six or seven times I went out with Ken I thought he was the dullest guy I’d ever known. How could anyone compare? But you know, after a couple of months, Ken became my whole life. And he stayed that way for almost thirty years. That’ll happen to you, too, McCain. Wait and see.”
“I sure hope so.”
She stood up. “I hope you’re not going to waste that food I’ve been slaving over for the past half hour.”
“Ah. The guilt approach.”
“You’re darn right,” she said. “The guilt approach. Now eat.”
I ate.
3
IF I WERE A portrait painter—and believe me, there’s never any danger of that happening, given the fact that my fifth grade art teacher once delicately asked my mom if I’d ever suffered a head injury—I’d paint Judge Esme Anne Whitney in one of her tailored suits with a nice small white scarf tucked into the neck. In one hand there’d be a Gauloise cigarette burning and in the other a snifter of brandy. She’s handsome rather than pretty, though she’s damned handsome and damned imposing, something pretty rarely is. She’s one of those people who’d look upper-crust even if she were starkers. Something in the genes, maybe. She doesn’t need clothes to announce her social standing. She’s in her early sixties, though she doesn’t look it, and God knows she’d never admit it. The Gauloises and the brandy are with her everywhere but in court. I strongly suspect she even imbibes under water, in the swimming pool she had installed two summers ago. She came out here to lend a hand when a relative got in trouble. Her family money ran this town at that time. Somehow the years came and went and she never left, even though the Sykes clan—our visiting family from the land of Hillbillia—took over shortly after the war.
The meeting this morning stretched into an hour, an unlikely length, given the Judge’s crowded docket. At any given time, I’m working on three or four investigations for her court. A good thing I got my private investigator’s license. It supported my law school sheepskin, which was little more than a bragging point for my family.
I was reporting on the third and final investigation—the Judge had asked me to check out a new merchant’s background, which she suspected would be criminal—when Pamela buzzed her from the outer office. Pamela sounded slightly frazzled. Something she rarely sounds.
Pamela gulped and said, “Gosh, Judge, do you know who’s on the phone for you?”
The Judge rolled her eyes. I think she chose Pamela as her secretary because Pamela knows how to dress in the eastern fashion and is in all respects a lady. This isn’t to say that the Judge has any respect for her. Pamela is an employee and the Judge has no respect for anybody who works for her. I know.
“J. Edgar Hoover!” Pamela said.
“I hope you didn’t sound like such a ninny when you were talking to him,” the Judge said. “Pamela, he calls me all the time. But usually at home in the evening. We’re old friends. It’s nothing to get excited about. Now put him on the line.”
“Yes, ma’am.”<
br />
Then: “Edgar. Hello, darling. What’s the weather like there?… Yes, it’s a beautiful fall day here, too. How’s Clyde?… Well, that’s very thoughtful of you, Edgar, and I appreciate it…. I’ll be in New York all Christmas week; I’ll just fly down to Washington for your New Year’s Eve party…. You mean when I was showing you how to rhumba? Don’t be silly. I wasn’t hurt at all. I was just limping to make a joke! You’re a wonderful dancer, Edgar. My Lord, everybody knows that…. Well, thank you very much for the invitation. But I’m sure we’ll talk before then.”
She hung up.
“Excuse me if I sound like a ninny too,” I said, “but was that really J. Edgar Hoover?”
“No, McCain, it was an imitator I hired just to shake up Pamela.” A sip of brandy. A deep drag on the Gauloise. “Of course it was. He’s an old family friend.” She leaned forward and somehow the angle revealed the girl in the woman. She was suddenly back in sixth grade and whispering a secret to the boy across the aisle. “Between us, he’s the most brutal dancer to ever set foot on a floor. I spent twenty minutes teaching him the rhumba and two weeks recovering. My foot probably should’ve been in a cast. On the other hand, his friend Clyde could give Fred Astaire a few pointers. He’s great.” Another sip. Another drag. “Now, where were we?”
“I was going to tell you what I found out about Harold Giddins.”
“Oh, that’s right. But before you do, I want to say that you look terribly hung over this morning.”
“I got a bit carried away last night.”
“A little fellow like you has to be careful.”
“Thank you.”
“No offense intended. But you’re obviously not a drinker.” She said this, taking yet another sip of her brandy. It was 10:32 in the A.M. “Before we get to Giddins, I had a very strange call this morning from Dana Conners. She said Richard talked to you yesterday about somebody trying to kill him.”
I hesitated, knowing that Conners didn’t want me to acknowledge this to anybody. But I didn’t have any choice. “Yes.”
“And exactly when were you going to tell me about this?”
“As soon as I thought it was appropriate.”
“I’m going to give him some hell for not telling me first, you can bet on that.”
Then she did it. First time this morning. Brought her hand up, a rubber band strung between her thumb and forefinger. Like a bow and arrow. She shot the rubber band, and it got me right on the forehead and hung there. The hangover had left me with damp skin that acted as an adhesive.
“There’s another reason you shouldn’t drink, McCain. Slows your reflexes. You look damned silly with that rubber band on your forehead, believe me. Now swipe it away.”
I swiped it away.
“That’s the case I want you to concentrate on. Richard’s, I mean. As you know, I don’t have any liking for his tolerance but we have so many friends in common, he’s—”
“He’s a Brahmin.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“He’s a peer. Acceptable to your little circle of rich people.”
“It’s rich people who built this country.”
“Yes, on the backs of poor whites, Negroes, Mexicans, and Chinese, mostly.”
“Now you sound like Richard.”
“I don’t care for the man personally, but I do agree with some of his ideas.”
“You don’t care for Richard? You’re both sort of… commies, McCain. No offense.”
The way she said commies was actually sort of cute. Always just the slightest hesitation before saying it. As if she were going to get her mouth washed out with soap as soon as she uttered it.
She said, “Find out what’s going on. Dana thinks it’s our friends Cliffie and Jeff Cronin.”
I laughed. “How does it feel to be on the same side as those two?”
A sip of brandy. “Oh, please. I’m hardly on the same side. About the only thing we have in common is our belief that poor Joe McCarthy got driven out by the liberals.”
“Ah, yes. Saint Joe. I’d forgotten.”
“You would’ve mocked Napoleon if you’d lived back then.”
“Not to mention Caligula.”
She got me again. This rubber band rested on top of my head. “Now that’s something you don’t see very often.”
“No, I’ve noticed that. Your rubber bands rarely land up top. Maybe we should inform the people at Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.”
“You really shouldn’t drink, McCain. Your reflexes are awful. I rarely get you twice in one day. Not anymore, anyway.”
I stood up and went to the door.
“I won’t try to hit you again today. It’d be like shooting fish in a barrel.”
“Your largesse knows no bounds.” I put my hand on the knob.
“It’s very frustrating when you’re hung over, McCain. You take away one of the few pleasures our little burg here affords me. You could think of me and my needs once in a while, for God’s sake, couldn’t you?”
Big-city investigators rely on private sources of information far more than they do on legwork. A town our size doesn’t have stool pigeons per se, but it does have a group of old folks who know more about what’s going on than any cop, county attorney, or newspaper reporter. And, conveniently enough, they can be found most days around a bridge table out at the Sunset Care Home.
You hear a lot of arguments against nursing homes, but this one actually has a reason to exist—besides the greed of the owners, I mean. The eighteen souls who live there all had the misfortune of losing their children down the years so there is nobody else to take care of them. The facility, a long, barracklike building, is set at the base of piney hills. There’s a clean creek running nearby, horses in a pasture, picnic tables and an outdoor grill, and some nice hiking trails for those so inclined. The staff is competent, friendly, and actually likes the people it serves.
I got there, as I usually do, just at noon so I wouldn’t interrupt any TV shows. It’s visits that keep these folks apprised of all the gossip, rumor, and scuttlebutt I find useful. These folks talk to a wide range of people every day—doctors, deliverymen, workmen, ministers, visitors, each other—and they listen carefully and retain what they hear. And then they begin to speculate among themselves about what they’ve heard. And they start to form impressions. You could call it gossiping, I suppose, but it’s subtler and more refined than that. It’s the kind of deduction that detectives and DA’s make when they’re putting together a case.
You have to be careful and make sure you get around to every one of them. You don’t want to leave anybody out. I also bring small gifts from time to time.
I hadn’t talked to Helen Grady in some time. Helen frequently eats alone if she’s reading one of her Mickey Spillane novels. Helen, eighty-two, a grandmother seven times over, is Spillane’s most faithful fan. She’s read all the books many times but says her memory is just bad enough that by the time she starts over again she’s forgotten the plots.
The lunchroom was sunny. The windows were open. The repast today was hamburger, fresh-cut green beans, peaches in syrup, and a slice of cherry pie. It made me hungry.
All but Helen were divided up at two long tables. Tom Swanson winked at me and said, “Helen’s finishin’ up One Lonely Night. That’s where the woman turns out to be a man.”
And then they started talking about the difficulty of using bifocals. I walked over to the only table for two. “Hi, Helen.”
She looked up from her paperback. “Hey, it’s the gumshoe.”
Helen loved hard-boiled talk. She wore a flowered housedress, pince-nez reading glasses, pancake makeup that looked like real batter, and lipstick that told me she hadn’t been wearing eyeglasses when she’d put it on. “Sit down and take a load off.”
“Thanks.”
“So how you be, shamus?”
“Pretty good, I guess.”
“Any damsels in your life?”
“Not so’s you’d notice.”
/> She paused, then waggled the paperback at me. “Hammer’s in big trouble. Commies. And they’ve got Velda.”
“Let me know how it comes out.”
She frowned at the glass sitting next to her cleaned-up luncheon plate. “All they serve in this joint is iced tea. What a gal wouldn’t give for a shot of the real stuff.”
“Real stuff?”
“Pepsi.”
“Ah.”
“Doctor said it’s got too much acid for my stomach.” She dog-eared the book. “A stoolie gets lonely, gumshoe. Here you are, six or seven times the last couple months, making the rounds, and you don’t visit your favorite stoolie.”
“I’ll try and do better. I promise.”
A melancholy came over her wide white face. She looked teary. “Husband’s birthday today. He woulda been eighty-eight.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Had this damn thing on his neck. Big ugly thing. Kept telling me it was a goiter. Goiter my foot, I said. Took me three years to get him to the doc’s and by then it was too late. I shoulda pushed him more.” She was starting to cry. That was one reason I didn’t visit her as often as I once did. She phased in and out of the past. Sometimes it seemed to attack her.
“Did I ever tell you that before? About that thing on Fred’s neck?”
“I think you mentioned it once or twice, Helen.”
She sighed. “I ever tell you why he married me?”
“I don’t think so.” She had, of course. Many times.
“I was the Corn Queen of ’Twenty-nine. I ever show you a picture of me back then?”
“Yeah. Once.”
“I was somethin’.” She really had been something. But time is never kind.
“But even with bein’ Corn Queen and all, I still had to chase him. He didn’t chase me. Oh, no. Wasn’t a gal in the whole county who hadn’t cocked their hats for him. He’d inherited better’n nine hundred acres from his dad and didn’t owe a dime on ’em. And he was good-lookin’ besides. You think the gals weren’t after him?”
