by Ed Gorman
When I reached her, she said, “So if you hear him even so much as mumble, be sure to get in there and try to catch what he’s saying. Even if it doesn’t make any sense.”
“Sure, Miss Sykes.” His eyes dazzled with fondness for the beautiful, stylish lady in front of him.
She didn’t say anything to me, just nodded at the elevator. The doors were open, so we stepped inside.
“I know you can talk,” I said, “I heard you just now telling that cop something.”
“I’m saving it till we get to the cafeteria. I’m starving.”
The typical hospital cafeteria. The nonmedical staffers sitting together enjoying leisurely lunches. The doctors and the nurses seeming in a bit more of a hurry.
Just once I’d like to play doctor. Walk around with a stethoscope dangling around my neck. In my high school days I’d been convinced that that was the easiest way of all to attract girls. While all the other boys were making fools of themselves trying to attract the most unattainable of girls, there I’d be walking up and down the ol’ high school corridors, very cool in my white medical jacket and ’scope, a perfect combination of raw male sexuality and deep medical seriousness. Dr. Sam McCain, M.D.
She didn’t order as if she were starving. Fruit cocktail, a bowl of chicken-rice soup, and a 7UP. I had a burger and a Pepsi.
“Now can we talk?”
“Sure.”
“Have we found out his name yet?”
“‘We’ certainly have, Sam. James Neville.”
“The same Neville as Richie Neville?”
“Half brother. They share a father.”
“Any kind of record?”
“A long one. The biggest rap was for extortion. Served six years in Joliet. Armed robbery as a juvenile.”
Will Neville, the man who blamed David Leeds for the murder of his brother, hadn’t bothered to mention any James Neville. I’d have to talk to him again.
A doctor interrupted us. Young. Nice-looking. No wedding ring. Leaning unnaturally close to Jane as he spoke. “I hope you got my invitation.”
“I did, Dr. Higham. And I appreciate it.”
“And even more, I hope you’ll consider joining me.”
“I’ll get back to you.”
He glanced at me and said, “I didn’t know that DAs trafficked with defense attorneys.”
Then she won my heart. “When they’re as charming as Sam they do.”
His smile was more of a grimace. Just the way I wanted it. He said good-bye and left.
“He made the mistake of pawing me at the party Judge Martin gave for me. Very possessive. Not the right approach, not for me anyway.”
“Me, either. I hate to be pawed.”
“Very funny, McCain. Now tell me what you’re going to do about Neville upstairs?”
“About Neville upstairs I plan to see his slug of a brother. And then I plan to find this biker.” I told her what I’d heard in the barbershop.
“Now that’s interesting, if it’s true.”
Not until then, me being a slow learner, especially when I’m so taken with a woman, did I realize what was happening here.
“We’re working together.”
“Yes, we are, Sam. And that’s just the way I planned it. I confide in you, you confide in me. Neither Clifford nor Judge Whitney has to know. The point is to serve justice, as stuffy as that sounds.”
“This is like a secret club.”
She smiled, shaking her head. “Here’s my unlisted number at home. You’d better write it down.”
Then she went and spoiled our little movie moment. “And please don’t call me at this number unless it’s business. I need my private time, Sam.”
“Yeah, me too,” I said, though that’s all I’d had since Mary had gone back to Wes. Private time.
I needed more information about James Neville. It was likely he was staying in one of the local hotels, maybe even the one my old friend Dink worked at. I called his home.
“Dink, please.”
“He isn’t here right now.”
“Please, Mrs. Dink—”
“Are you trying to be funny?”
“You don’t recognize my voice?”
“The TV’s up too loud.”
“Look, I know he’s there because you won’t let him go out unless he’s going to work.”
“He tell you that?”
“It was my idea.”
“Oh, then this is McCain.”
“Yes.”
“Darn right he don’t go out. He only gets in trouble.” I didn’t tell her that I was calling to get him in some trouble for me.
“Well, I wonder if I could talk to him.”
“They didn’t cancel his bail, did they?”
“No, but I need him to do me a favor.”
Suspicious. “What kind of a favor?”
“He’s still at the hotel every day?”
“Yeah, his uncle’s the only one who’d hire him.”
“Good. Then I need to talk to him.”
“I don’t want him in no more trouble.”
The way I had figured it out, he wouldn’t have to get in any trouble if he did what I told him.
“He’ll be fine.”
“And I didn’t appreciate that ‘Mrs. Dink.’”
“I apologize.”
“I’ll go get him.”
When he came on the line, Dink said, “The wife, she don’t care for you much.”
“I called her Mrs. Dink.”
“That ain’t why. She said you shoulda got me off on probation.”
“I did get you off on probation. Then you stole that cop’s billfold. That’s why you’re headed back to court.”
“Oh, yeah, I guess she forgot that.”
“Listen to me. I need you to do something for me.”
He listened.
“Thanks, McCain.” He lowered his voice. “I’ve been needin’ to do something illegal. I’m goin’ nuts here.”
“It’s not illegal. Not if you do it the way I told you.”
“Well, at least it’s sneaky. That’s a start in the right direction.”
“Remember what you need to do, now.”
“You knock something off on the bill?”
“You mean the bill neither you nor your parents have paid me anything on for five years?”
“I guess you got a point there.”
“Call me as soon as you do it.”
THIRTEEN
I DROVE PAST BOTH of the garages where the bikers tended to hang out when they weren’t at the Iron Cross, the tavern on the edge of town where the local gendarmes had to come in full force several times a week to break up fights. The local gendarmes often looked worse than the bikers when it was all done.
But there were no signs of Harleys or Indians anywhere. I assumed they were out on the highway or at one of their enclaves in the nearby woods.
I found a Debbie Todd Carlyle in the phone book and drove on out to the hardscrabble little acreage where chickens seemed to have taken over. They were everywhere. I had to park on the edge of the gravel road. There were too many of them in the drive to scatter.
Debbie, a heavyset woman in a red-and-black checked flannel shirt and jeans, stood with her hands on her hips watching me approach. She didn’t look happy.
When I had to slow down because I was entangled in chickens, she said, “You might as well go back to town, McCain. I don’t plan to talk to you.”
“I just came out to buy some chickens.”
“You know where you can shove your chickens.”
“Any special reason you seem to hate me? Your sister and I were good friends.”
“Good friends, my ass. She’d still be alive if it wasn’t for you. She shoulda kept her nose out of it.”
I was marooned on the front lawn amidst a sea of gabby white chickens. The one-story house in front of me needed a coat of paint and the 1949 Pontiac up on blocks needed a left front door.
“She was murdered.”
“You think I don’t know that, McCain? That’s exactly what I told her would happen, butting in like that.”
They pecked, they squawked, they shat. Their heads jerked back and forth. They were pretty ugly creatures when you came right down to it. But you had to feel sorry for them. They had but one mission on this planet. To be consumed.
I worked myself through a clutch of them, drawing a few feet closer to the small, old house.
“If you know she was murdered, Debbie, you should want to help me.”
“And end up like she did?”
“Did she tell you what she saw?”
“No, she didn’t. I told her not to. I didn’t want to get caught up in all this crap.” She had a broad face that would have been attractive if she’d wanted to make it so with a little soap and makeup. But she was a widow—her husband had died in a freak accident with a combine—and a doggedly antisocial one at that.
“So you might as well get out of here, McCain. I don’t know nothing about what she saw or didn’t see. That’s between you and her.”
“She’s dead, Debbie. You’re the only one who can help me.” Then: “She saw something, Debbie. Something to do with the murders the other night. You were her best friend. She must have told you something.”
“I said that she didn’t, McCain. Now I’m going back inside and finish my lunch.”
And that was all. She turned, went back inside, and closed and locked the door behind her.
And left me with the chickens. Their squawks were putting me on edge. “How about keeping it down?” I said.
Which, of course, did me a lot of good. If anything, they seemed suddenly louder.
They trailed me back to my ragtop. A pied piper I was. I got in my car and started up the engine. I decided to go up to the far end of the road and take the blacktop back to town. Shorter route and less damage to the machine than on this scaly road.
I roared the mufflers three or four times. The chickens scattered. I didn’t want to grind one of them to death beneath my wheels.
I set off, turning up the radio as I did so. The local stations still played Elvis’s “Return to Sender” from last year. I liked hearing Elvis sing just about anything, though I already missed his original sound when he was with Sun Records and covering songs like “Milk Cow Boogie” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” Hard to grow up out here without at least a sneaking fondness for real country music.
Also hard to grow up out here without a real desire to protect your blood kin. People like Debbie always bothered me. I just didn’t understand how you could write off a sister the way she had.
FOURTEEN
“I WOULDN’T GO IN there if I was you.”
“It’s a public place, isn’t it?”
“Not really. Especially not to fuzz.”
“Technically, I’m not fuzz. I’m private.”
“Yeah, but you work for the judge. You know how many Devils she’s sent up?”
“Two, that I remember.”
“Well, you remember wrong. Four. And two of ’em are still doin’ time.”
The Iron Cross was a one-story concrete-block building that had been painted black, apparently to suit the mood of the bikers who drank there. At this hour of the day the front and sides of the place were packed with motorcycles. The jukebox inside trembled with gut-bucket rock and roll. And the laughter was of the coarse, ugly kind of pirates in all those buried-treasure movies.
The man I was talking to was named Ray Peters. He was a sort of honorary biker. He’d lost a leg and an arm in Korea and now got around on a single crutch. The word his brother gave me—his brother being a nonbiker who ran illegal crap games and was frequently in need of my legal services—was that Ray never felt right around “normal” people. So he dressed in a sleeveless denim jacket, jeans tucked into motorcycle boots, and an eyepatch he justified wearing by saying that his left eye had been damaged in Korea, too. He had one big problem that I could see. Take away the rebellion and what you had was a sad, lonely, and very decent guy.
“How about I do you a favor?” he said, as if to prove my point. His blond-gray hair was so thin on top the sun had already baked his scalp brick red.
“A favor?”
“You tell me who you want to see and I’ll go in and get him and see if he’ll come out.”
“Won’t that get you in trouble?”
A bleak smile. “Nah. They don’t pick on gimps till real late at night.”
“Nice folks.”
“They don’t pity me, anyway, McCain. And they don’t make fun of me. You take your nice, normal people—they wouldn’t let me fit in even if I wanted to.”
Even if some of that was paranoia, I knew how he felt. Or should I say I presumed to know how he felt? Being short and coming from the Knolls had made me into an outsider of sorts, too. But I was strictly a tourist. There was a French saying I’d picked up from a Graham Greene novel—“Embrace your fate.” I was pretty sure mine was a whole lot easier to embrace than poor Ray’s. He had to live his out every second of every moment when another human eye was on him.
“So who is it you want to see?”
“De Ruse.”
He laughed. “Man, you picked just about the meanest son of a bitch in the whole wolf pack. De Ruse. You sure you want to talk to him?”
“Yeah.”
“You packin’?”
“I’ve got my old .45 in the glove compartment.”
“Maybe you should transfer it to your coat. One of the guys who’s still servin’ time is his brother.”
“Good thing I’m a mean son of a bitch myself, huh?”
He laughed again. “I don’t know about mean. Crazy might be closer.”
He adjusted his crutch and said, “You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
When the door opened, a hurricane of dank smells violated the soft, sunny afternoon. Smoke, beer, whiskey, marijuana, and a toilet that the UN might cite as a weapon of mass destruction.
De Ruse came right out.
The muscles in his arms rippled like crawling snakes.
His green eyes gleamed with enormous malice.
He was alone.
He didn’t need anybody else.
He was strutting.
With his big loop earring and his bare chest and his red Indian-style bandana around his blond head, he looked like somebody who’d give Spiderman a whole raft of shit, Spidey being the only comic book I still read.
He threw the right hand from at least a foot and a half away. Given his short legs, just throwing it should have knocked him off balance. It didn’t. And traveling such a distance, and it being only one punch, its power should have been cut at least in half. It wasn’t.
There was quick, sharp, overwhelming pain, and then there was nothing.
I woke up sometime later with my wrists bound up in the necktie I’d been wearing and the rest of the tie wrapped around the rear bumper of my ragtop.
De Ruse was dragging me around the dusty lot of the Iron Cross to the great and abiding amusement of maybe twenty Road Devils.
The Road Devilettes, or whatever you called them, laughed especially hard. I knew right then and there that I probably wasn’t ever going to sleep with any of them, much as that was to be desired, with their beehive hairdos and witches’ brew cackles.
The point wasn’t to hurt me, it was to humiliate me. The soil was loose and sandy and he probably wasn’t even going fifteen miles an hour. The big fear was pieces of glass scattered across the lot, but the worst I got was the occasional scrape from small rocks. He was being careful without seeming to understand that simply by knocking me out he was already in trouble and probably on his way back to the state pen.
He went in wide circles. I didn’t try to get loose. That would give them too much pleasure.
He drove close enough to them so that they could spit on me, which they took the opportunity to do. But at least they didn’t hit my face. I imagined that my trousers and jacket
were beyond even the healing powers of dry cleaning.
And then he decided to give me a little scare. He floored it. We tore across a long sandy patch that ended up near a creek at maybe forty miles an hour. Now there was pain.
Behind us the Devils were shouting and applauding.
And then it was over.
He shut off the ignition and shouted “Beers’re on me!” and then ran back to the crowd.
This was how the truly cool guy would handle himself. He had not given me any formal verbal recognition. He’d hit me, he’d dragged me around. But he hadn’t acknowledged me as a person in any other way.
And he still hadn’t.
They hailed their hero and then went back into the tavern, thunder of jukebox, unholy stench of toilet.
Leaving me to start the process of getting to my feet and untying myself. It didn’t take long and it wasn’t difficult. Restoring my dignity would be another matter altogether.
I was in the process of taking off my loafers and dumping the sand out when I heard the tavern door open. But I was already prepared for a return match.
Ray crutched his way over to me. “You all right?”
“All right? A tough guy like me?”
We both smiled at that one.
“He can be a real asshole sometimes.”
“I find that hard to believe, Ray. Seemed like a real nice fella to me.”
He moved a few feet closer for a better look at me. “No offense, but you sound kinda crazy.”
And I suppose I was. In a business like mine, whether I’m investigating for myself or the judge, you meet people who do their best to belittle you any way they can. I used to be able to deal with it. But as I got older I got tired of insults, innuendos, jibes. And when I got tired enough, I’d push back. These were almost always verbal battles.
But being punched out and dragged across a parking lot for the entertainment of a bunch of bikers—that was a special kind of debasement.
What I should’ve done was find a phone and call out the gendarmes to arrest him. And that had been my first impulse. But then I remembered that not only had I been humiliated, I hadn’t even done my job, which was to ask him about being spotted at the murder scene the other night.
