by Ed Gorman
SIX
“HAVE YOU HEARD THE radio in Cedar Rapids?” Judge Esme Anne Whitney snapped at me on the other end of the phone.
“Guess I haven’t.”
“Well, so much for this story not touching the senator.”
“They named him?”
“They didn’t have to. They named Lucy as a ‘very good friend’ of David Leeds. Said that they were coeditors of an off-campus literary magazine.”
“No other implication?”
“No other implication, McCain? Do you have gravel for brains? If this is the first story, imagine what it’ll be tomorrow or two days from now. They’ll find people in Iowa City who’ll say they were dating. They’ll probably even find a few of them here.”
“How long will you be in your office?”
“Aaron will be here with the car in five minutes. Then I’m going home. I need to make a very important phone call tonight on California time.” I heard her lighter come ablaze. One of her numerous Gauloises. “There’s not much we can do about the press now. But we can wrap this thing up as fast as possible.”
“Cliffie’s already arrested somebody.”
“(A) You know all about Cliffie’s track record. We’ve proved him wrong on ninety percent of his arrests. And (B) the thug has already been released. Jane Sykes is back in town, and one of the first things she did was look at the so-called evidence that Cliffie had on the man and she immediately told Cliffie to let him go.”
Then I told her everything Lucy and I had discussed. “Lucy can’t believe there’s a Sykes who could get a degree at Brown.”
“I’m told she’s even an opera fan.”
“She must be a Republican.”
“You and your stupid Republican jokes. If you ever grow up, you’ll be one of us, McCain. I promise you that.”
She rarely said good-bye and this late afternoon was no exception. She simply slammed the receiver down.
“Far as I’m concerned, my brother died because of that colored boy. No other reason at all.”
Will Neville was watching a Maverick rerun when I knocked on the screen door of his apartment on the upper floor of an old house whose stucco had mostly fallen away.
Now I sat in a living room filled with furniture that looked as old as the house. I sat on a horsehair sofa. He had a big Cubs pennant on one wall and a Hawkeye pennant on another. There were cardboard boxes everywhere, overflowing with things as various as kitchen utensils and dusty, brittle-looking shoes. It was one of those suffocating little prisons, his apartment, with faded rose wallpaper and tiny mouse droppings littered across the scraped hardwood floor.
“Just moved in, huh?”
“No. Why?”
I glanced around the room again. “I was just wondering, all the boxes.”
He shrugged sturdy shoulders. “Just haven’t had time to unpack them yet. Sometimes I live here and sometimes I live with my older brothers in Chicago. Not that it’s any of your business.”
He wore a Stanley Kowalski T-shirt and a pair of work pants. He had a belly that could have accommodated a set of twins. He was hairy in a dirty way. I wondered if he’d ever considered shaving his arms.
“Like I said, far as I’m concerned, my brother died because of that colored boy. No other reason at all.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Why do I say that? My brother didn’t have no enemies. Everybody liked him. Some bastard followed Leeds out to my brother’s place and decided to kill both of them. To confuse people.” He made a face and then noisily gulped half a can of the A&P beer he’d been swigging all along. He made everything official by belching. “You knew my brother.”
“Sort of.” I’d actually represented him in a Peeping Tom incident a few years earlier. I felt he was falsely accused in that one. But by the time the trial was over, I’d come to feel he was a pretty dark guy.
“Well, then you’d know, nobody would want to kill him.”
“He ever talk about knowing David Leeds?”
“Said Leeds stopped out there a couple of times.”
“He say why?”
“Said he wanted to learn about photography. I suppose they have colored photographers in Chicago, you know, for the colored trade and all. I didn’t think nothing of it, but I wasn’t real happy with him spending much time with Leeds.”
“Had you ever met Leeds?”
“No, but you know how people are. They see you spending a lot of time with a colored boy, they start to wonder about you.”
“I guess I don’t understand.”
“You know, they start thinking maybe something’s wrong with you. Think maybe you can’t get white friends or something.” He smirked. “Especially hangin’ around a colored boy that gives dance lessons.”
“He did anything he could for college money.”
“Still and all, a boy who teaches dance lessons? Ain’t real manly.”
The smirk again. “You wouldn’t see me givin’ no dance lessons.”
It was too tempting. Instead I said, “I see. Did your brother seem happy lately?”
“Happy? No shit, he seemed happy. He come into this job over in Des Moines. Some studio named Brilliance I think it was. Brilliant or Brilliance, one of those. Said that their best photographer got sick and they had this real important job they had to do fast. And they needed somebody as good as the sick guy. So they called my brother. He made so much money on it he slipped me a hundred bucks so I could get caught up with my light bill and shit like that. But that’s what I mean, the kinda guy who would slip you a hundred, who’d want to kill him? I’m just glad my folks aren’t alive to have to see this. And like I said, it’s all this Leeds’s fault. You get a colored boy pokin’ around a white gal, you got trouble. And that’s just what he got, ain’t it? Trouble.”
SEVEN
AFTER DRIVING TWO BLOCKS, I realized I was probably being followed. I say probably because there were an awful lot of white 1961 Plymouth Valiants on the road. I was pretty sure that this was the Valiant that had been at Neville’s cabin the night before. But I needed a closer look at the license plate. Once I got one and confirmed it was the Valiant I wanted, I let him follow me for another three blocks.
When we got to a red light, I yanked on the emergency brake and jumped out of my ragtop. I brought one of the two guns in my glove compartment with me.
He was slow to realize what I was going to do. The corner we were at was empty except for us. The small shops on both sides of the street were closed. The only activity was half a block away at the Dairy Queen. It was dusk.
He started putting his Valiant in reverse, but before he got anywhere, I shoved my .45 through his open window and put it right to his head.
“Pull over to the curb.”
“What for?”
“Pull over to the curb.”
“You bastard. Nobody pulls a gun on me.”
“I just did. Now pull over to the curb.”
I could see he was considering just flooring the Valiant and peeling away. But then he had to gauge how crazy I might be. You never know with people who pull guns.
He pulled over to the curb.
“Now turn off the engine and step out of the car.”
“You know, a cop could drive by here anytime, asshole, and your ass would be grass.”
“Turn off the engine and step out of the car.”
“You’re gonna regret this.”
“Not as much as you are.” But he finally turned off the engine. I opened the door for him. He stepped out.
Then I plucked his car keys from his hand.
And that was when I shot him right in the face. It was my mood, I guess. I didn’t even worry about the consequences. I felt my life was at an end and nothing mattered.
“You bastard,” he said.
He looked pretty pathetic there in his tight black suit with the pegged trousers and gold tie bar and porkpie hat, a denizen of a Chicago twist club if I’d ever seen one. And all that water running
down his face.
“A squirt gun?”
“Yeah, I had a gunsmith modify a squirt gun so it’d look like the real thing.” I nodded to the DQ down the street. “Let’s go.”
“you know, they keep introducing all these new flavors and cones and malts and stuff. But if you ask me, you can’t beat your basic chocolate sundae. How’s your cone?”
“How’s my cone? This is how my cone is.”
We were sitting on a bench on the far side of the DQ so we could call each other foul names without offending all the moms and kids lined up for treats at the counters.
He took his cone and threw it hard against the blacktop parking lot. “That’s how my cone is. Now give me back my car keys.”
“You don’t want me to squirt you again, do you?” I was aggravating the hell out of him and enjoying myself. Life was good again. I would find the Right Woman after all.
I pulled my wallet out and showed him my two pieces of identification. One was private investigator. The other was court investigator.
“The last one’s the one you have to worry about. I have the power to arrest you.” I decided not to point out that every other American citizen has the same right. “So let’s cut the bullshit and you tell me who you are and what you were doing out at Neville’s cabin the other night.”
“And if I don’t?”
“And if you don’t, I take you right to jail.”
“For what?”
“For being at a murder scene and not reporting it.”
And that was when one of Cliffie’s finest pulled up next to where our cars had been pulled in, not with any great talent for careful parking, to the curb.
The car had the red lights flashing but no siren.
“Get over here, McCain. You’re getting a ticket.” He was a young guy named O’Brien and he was ticket-happy.
I made the mistake of turning to O’Brien to explain to him that I was working on a case for the judge when the man next to me damn near vaulted up from the bench and started running away.
“I’ll be back!” I shouted to O’Brien.
And O’Brien shouted: “Where the hell you think you’re going?”
There were three of us—Mr. Twist, me, and O’Brien, running across the parking lot toward the busy avenue that ran adjacent to the DQ.
And for a block, it was really a race. None of us was in danger of becoming a track star. None of us was in danger of becoming graceful. None of us was in danger of catching the others.
The sidewalk we were racing down was no beauty. A lot of cracks, a lot of places where the concrete had stove in to create jagged points.
So we stumbled a lot. And shouted curses at the other guys because somehow the stumbling was their fault.
We attracted our share of attention from the traffic streaming by at 40 mph. There was something about three grown men in pursuit of each other. And even more, there was something about a cop in uniform waving his gun in the air and shouting “Stop or I’ll shoot!”
You don’t get this kind of realistic TV on Dragnet, that’s for sure.
When it happened, it was over so quickly I had to wonder if what I’d just witnessed had actually taken place.
Mr. Twist had jumped from the sidewalk to the avenue and attempted to race across the street.
Insane on his part.
Cars going by fast enough and close enough that they were starting to resemble those streaming photographs where everything is a streaking blur.
And then he just leapt into the traffic stream.
But a streamlined, new two-tone blue Oldsmobile slowed him down instantly by hitting him at 40 mph or so and then punting him to the opposite curb, where he landed—from what I could see—next to a fire hydrant.
He’d screamed while still in midair. Or at least I thought I’d heard him scream. Maybe it was screeching tires, all the drivers trying to halt speeding cars.
The white-haired man in the Olds was out of his car and running to the opposite curb before O’Brien and I, who now stood side by side, could even start into the street.
O’Brien started using his traffic whistle and, holding his left arm up to stop traffic completely, gave us a chance to get to the mystery man.
I’ve never had any interest in seeing human beings ripped apart or smashed up inside and turned into a big blood-leaking chunk of human hamburger. A lot of people seem to regard a glimpse of stuff like this as a treat.
So I wasn’t all that hot on seeing what was left of our feckless friend who tried to outmaneuver tons of speeding Detroit iron.
But he didn’t look that bad.
His right arm was obviously broken. He was bleeding through a busted nose and ripped-up lips. And his left foot had somehow lost its shoe. But no human hamburger.
“Take over. I’ll call for an ambulance.” O’Brien started running back to his car.
“Stay back.”
The crowd was small for now. Maybe fifteen people from cars and the DQ. In a few minutes it would look like a movie opening.
Comments:
“Is he dead?”
“He looks dead.”
“Hell, he isn’t dead.”
“Oh, yeah, what’re you, a doctor now?”
I knelt next to him. His eyes flickered open a few times, but despite the moans, I wasn’t sure he was conscious.
I checked his wrist pulse and his neck pulse.
“How’s his pulse, mister?”
Might as well answer. “Pretty good. Better than I would’ve thought, in fact.”
O’Brien, breathless, sweaty, was back. “Ambulance on the way.” He haunched down next to me. “Who is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re sitting at the Dairy Queen talking to him and you don’t know?”
I didn’t want to discuss it with eavesdroppers around.
A siren worked its way from the hospital five blocks away, that sad scary sound. The nuns always had us say a prayer for the person in need whenever we heard a siren. Probably not all that bad an idea.
Two more uniformed cops.
“Let’s go back to our cars,” I said to O’Brien. I wasn’t going to tell him much, just enough to explain why I didn’t know the injured man’s name.
By the time we got back to the DQ, he seemed to be satisfied that this was all the result of some guy following me around in the white Valiant for reasons I didn’t understand.
He said, when we came into the stark, bug-swarmed fluorescent light of the DQ, “Think I’ll have a cone. You want one?”
“Nah. Got an appointment I need to keep.”
“Guess I won’t give you a ticket, after all.”
“Appreciate it.”
And then I was gone.
EIGHT
THE HANNITY HOUSE WAS one of the new ranch styles that sat in scornful superiority above all the little Levittown-like boxes in the valley below.
The boxes had been built back in ’49 and ’50 when the American Dream everybody had fought for in the war seemed to be coming true.
But in a decade, the boxes had begun to show the perils of houses built so hastily and so ineptly. The pastel exteriors that had shone like dewy flowers in morning light had faded. Windows had dislodged from cheap frames and sliding tracks. And the yards the developers had promised never quite came to look like yards, just thin stretches of grass on dirt.
But moon shadow was merciful. As my ragtop climbed the winding hill leading to the imposing homes at the top, I was able to remember how much I’d always wanted to live in one of those boxes when I was in my early teens. We’d moved from the Knolls, where the poorest of working families lived, to the glamour of a housing development. I could still remember a kid telling me that many of the homes there had actual extension telephones. That’s right, more than one phone in the house so you could talk to your friends—and hopefully that someday girlfriend—in the privacy of your own room. For some stupid reason the extension phone had struck me as an invention much super
ior to that of the airplane or medical advances.
I’d never dreamed big enough to think that I’d someday live up on the hill above the boxes. The boxes, with a real laundry room for Mom, a basement shop for all of Dad’s tools, and a sunny room for my often sad little sister—who could want more than a housing development house?
A yellow Lincoln was parked in the driveway of the Hannity house. From inside, fairly loud, came Sinatra singing Jerome Kern—as much as I loved rock, I was beginning to learn my American popular composers—and tinny martini laughter.
I pulled up, killed the lights, and then watched as the double garage door ground its way upward, revealing two cars parked inside, one a black Lincoln and one a 1962 buff-blue Chevrolet.
My ragtop sat directly behind the Chevrolet. Nick Hannity was just about to climb into the Chevrolet when he turned and saw my car.
In the grainy garage light, almost in silhouette, he looked bigger than ever. Football hero, tormentor of Lucy Williams and David Leeds, and now insolent swaggerer making his way to my car.
No way was I going to let him trap me inside. I opened the door and got out.
As he approached, he said, “You’re trespassing, asshole.”
“Wrong-o, Hannity. I’m a licensed investigator and I’m investigating. Legally.”
“Yeah? Well, then I’m gonna illegally throw your ass off of my property.”
When I was growing up, even though I was small, I always figured for some balmy reason that I was just naturally stronger and tougher than kids younger than me. And most of them seemed to go along with it. I wasn’t a bully, but in the way of the playground and the backyard, I usually got younger kids to do what I told them to.
Then one sixth-grade autumn day when I was walking home with my friend Carl Sears, generally known as a puncher, some stupid kid in fifth grade started mouthing off behind us. His prey seemed to be Carl. I wondered if the stupid kid knew who Carl was.
Couple more blocks, Carl just sort of laughing at it. And then Carl turning without warning and hooking a right hand into the kid’s face with enough force to knock the stupid kid back a good three or four feet.
