by Ed Gorman
“Your vast law office, huh? I’m sure you’ll be sitting on the state supreme court any day now. And be sure to take that stupid secretary you have along with you.” Then he chastened himself: “I came here to offer you some help with this case.”
“And to get your son off the hook?”
“Well, what if I did, McCain? You’ll do the same thing if you ever quit sleeping around and get serious with a decent woman. You’ll protect your children just as fiercely as I do.”
“Not if they’re like your son, I won’t.”
I went inside.
I never told my dad I didn’t care much for hunting mushrooms. I like the outdoors if you have something entertaining to do while you’re out there. Mushroom-hunting never fell into that “something entertaining” category for me.
But I always went because it meant I got to be alone with him. And he, or so my mom always said, could maybe forget for a while that my brother had died of polio.
What I liked best about being around him was his stories. His weren’t the kind that won you the biggest laughs on Saturday night front porches where the vets from the war gathered. He’d won himself some medals, but he never talked about them. At boot camp he’d saved a buddy’s life by dragging him mostly dead from a flooded river. But his stories were rarely about derring-do.
His favorite subject was how radio developed, and I expect just seeing those words set down like that you can see why my father was never a renowned bullshit artist.
But when he’d start talking about how he’d built his first crystal set and how he’d then raised money for his Depression-era family by building crystal sets for other families, it was fun to hear. And then he’d talk about the Red Network and the Blue Network and how for a long time there was never such a thing as a network that covered the United States all at the same time—the West Coast was usually recorded for later play—and how radio stars like Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy and the Shadow became just as big as any movie star.
He could also tell you the history of New Orleans jazz, the evolution of the cowboy movie from the silents to the singing cowboys, the days when Orson Welles was the radio voice of the Shadow, and the ten most memorable days of the big war, Pacific and European; all of it bedazzled me.
I remembered all this as I knelt next to the cot Mom had fixed up for him in the spare room after he got out of the hospital two weeks earlier, the nightstand holding a stack of his beloved Luke Short westerns and two bright yellow packages of Juicy Fruit for when he got the urge to smoke, an urge he would never be able to indulge again.
He slept peacefully, a small and tidy man, his hair gone all to white and that little Irish mug a bit impish even now. The doctor had told me but not Mom (and I wasn’t about to tell her, either) that with luck, Dad could live another six, seven months if he didn’t have any more major heart attacks. But even without an attack, his heart wasn’t going to hold out much longer.
I held his small, coarse, wrinkled hand now and touched my cheek to it. This was when I needed my boyhood faith, my blind certainty there was a God, and for a few moments I banished all cynicism and disbelief. Maybe it wasn’t like the believers said, all that angel stuff, but maybe we did live on in some fashion, the essence of each of us anyway, and then I couldn’t help it, I touched my cheek to his hand again and started crying.
“He’s looking good, isn’t he?” Mom said, serving my favorite, tomato soup and toasted cheese sandwich.
He had, of course, looked blanched, dead.
“He looks great.”
“I know you don’t go to Mass anymore, Sam, but I think you can see what all of us praying has done for your father.”
I nodded, spooned some more soup into my mouth. She finally started to eat and I watched her, still the possessor of her young-woman elegance even in a faded housedress; “the prettiest Irish girl of her time” the old monsignor had told me one day as I was cleaning up the altar after serving Mass. I’d wondered if he might have had a crush on her.
But there was no denying the weariness that claimed her. The step a little slower, the response to a question or a remark a few seconds late in coming, and something new of late, sighs so long extended they were like notes in dirges.
“He was talking to Robert again last night just like Robert was alive. He woke me up and I went into the spare room and stood over him and just listened. He was dreaming about that time he built that soapbox derby car for you boys. It was so wonderful hearing him talk like that. He seemed so happy.”
She put her hand on mine. “By the way, the judge called here for you late last night. She sounded—confused. I was very polite to her. I told her you hadn’t lived here in a long time.”
“She was drunk.”
“Yes, I’m afraid she was. She’s such a fine woman in so many ways. Maybe she needs help.”
“She does for sure. It’s getting her to accept it that’s the problem.”
And Mom said what she always says at such moments, “I’ll add her to my prayer list, honey.”
EIGHTEEN
“HI, IS NANCY HOME?”
Mrs. Adams didn’t look happy to see me. She knew who I was and knew that my appearance on the doorstep of her large, Spanish-style home could not mean anything good.
“You’re Mr. McCain.”
“Yes.”
“We know the judge from our club.”
“I won’t keep her long.” I wanted to get on with it. I didn’t want to discuss her club or her rather extravagant house or her friendship with the judge.
Mrs. Adams was in her mid-forties, I guessed, so tanned from various trips that her skin was becoming lizardlike in places. She wore large sunglasses with white frames. They were girly and seemed frivolous on a face with a sharp, jutting nose and a mouth made for slander. In her blue walking shorts and sleeveless white blouse, she was every woman you saw playing golf at the country club.
“I think I’m going to refuse.”
“That’s your prerogative.”
“You don’t have a very good reputation with people at the club. They’ve been after the judge to fire you for several years now.”
A Negro maid in a crisp gray uniform appeared behind her in the air-conditioned shadows of the large house.
“Good day, Mr. McCain.”
“I need everything you can dig up on Nancy Adams.”
“She isn’t anybody I’ve ever heard of before.” I could hear Kenny Thibodeau take a deep drag of his cigarette. “I need to finish this chapter. I need to read up on lesbians, I guess. This is lesbian novel number nine and I’m running out of ideas for what they can do in bed.”
“That’s pretty much what happened to John Steinbeck, wasn’t it? Didn’t he run out of lesbian ideas for his books?”
“You’re just jealous you don’t have my career.”
“You know, in a weird way I am. I look at all your books in your trailer and I do feel a little pang. That you’ve been able to start and finish so many of them. The one time I tried to write a novel, I never got past page twenty.”
“I didn’t know that. How come you never told me?”
“Embarrassed, I guess.”
Then Kenny said, “I was going to talk to you later in the day, but I guess I might as well tell you now. You asked me to dig up what I could. So far I’ve got two real interesting things.
“The first thing is, Richie Neville had two places to work in. His cabin, and then he rented the upper floor of the Parker House, that supper club out on the highway. That was pretty much a secret.”
“How’d you find out about it?”
“That was pure Sherlockian fortitude, man. I called the photo shop where he bought all his supplies. The guy there said that he liked working with Richie and didn’t mind delivering to the cabin but that the Parker House took an hour back and forth.”
“Good work, Kenny. I have a plaque here with your name on it.”
“And then when I was in Iowa City last nig
ht, I went over to where David Leeds lived and asked some of his friends about him. They still can’t believe he’s dead.”
“Yeah, so what’s the one interesting thing?”
“You know his sister you were talking to?”
“Yeah?”
“They said he didn’t have a sister. He was an only child.”
“He was the perfect type of renter for us. Real quiet.”
“How much time did he spend here?”
“Couple of nights a week, two, three I’d guess.”
“He have many visitors?”
“Not that I noticed, anyway. His brother Will.”
Ted Wheeler, the owner of the Parker House, had played football for the Iowa Hawkeyes back in the early fifties. He’d known he wasn’t good enough for the pros, so he did what so many in sports do, he opened an insurance agency. Who wouldn’t want an esteemed Hawkeye as their insurance man?
He’d made so much money with the insurance that he was able to buy an aging restaurant on the highway and turn it into another prosperous business. A bit of a drive for small-town folk not used to driving more than a couple of miles for anything in town, but the drive just seemed to make the evening more special. It was a memorable night going to the Parker House.
I’d found Ted in back of his restaurant hosing off his new, black Jaguar. He was a short, thick man, blond hair thinning now, with a pleasant face that included a badly broken and badly set nose.
The water sparkled rainbows in the late afternoon sunlight and smelled of the rubber hose.
“The police been here to talk to you yet?”
He wiped a massive paw on his T-shirt. “Not yet. I don’t think too many people knew about this place.”
“I’d appreciate a look.”
He shrugged. “Fine by me.” He frowned. “He was a nice kid.”
I didn’t correct him.
“You want me to let you in now?”
“Please.”
“I really appreciate how you took care of my sis that time. The dog ripped her leg up pretty good. But then that shit owner brought in that vet who said that she must have done something to rile the dog herself. He looked pretty good on the stand there, but you brought him down right away.”
“I didn’t have to do much. His story didn’t make a lot of sense. And even if she had riled the dog, he was still responsible for what the dog had done.”
He twisted the hose off. I followed him up the outside stairs leading to the apartment on the second floor.
The front room must have been half the apartment. New linoleum, throw rugs, a pair of couches covered with matching floral slipcovers, a bookcase packed with a lot of Mickey Spillane and dozens of science fiction titles, a three-foot stack of albums that ran to Elvis and rockabilly types, and a refrigerator-freezer packed with every kind of tasty but spurious TV dinner on the market. With the long front window and light of the fading day, there was a pleasant college-dorm feel to the place.
“I need to get back and get the troops ready for tonight,” Ted said. “I always give ’em a little pep talk, you know, like a coach at halftime.” He laughed. “They hate it, think it’s real corny. But it’s a reminder that I expect them to do everything they can to keep the customer happy. You know how that goes. You start out on a job and pretty soon the customer starts looking like the enemy. Hell, I’m the owner and some nights I don’t want to wait on certain customers. The real picky ones, I mean. I’m half tempted to say, ‘Well, since you find so many things wrong with this place, why don’t you go somewhere else?’ But I never would, you know what I mean? I’ve worked too hard to get this place rolling to do anything stupid like that.” He gave me a wave. “Good hunting, Sam.”
I’ve always felt self-conscious picking over the bones of the dead. The left-behind letters and photos and books that seem to contradict what you knew of the person. On one job, trying to learn the identity of the man who’d robbed and strangled an eighty-six-year-old longtime widow, I found a fresh pack of Trojans beneath a silk slip; on another investigation, I found a letter written to the deceased man from the child he never knew he’d had until a few weeks before his death. And then there’d been the brutal street cop with a ninth-grade education who’d been killed by a man he’d beaten a false confession out of, the cop belonging to both a classical records club and the Great Books society.
Picking over all these bones through the years, I realized how little we know of each other. We judge each other without having all the information. Many times the quiet life of the soul has little bearing on the noisy life of the body.
But, after an hour of searching, I came to the conclusion that the exterior Richie had been pretty much like the interior one. Girly magazines, several handguns, books on weightlifting and advice on picking up ladies, several photography magazines that did double duty as girly books (the models in the photography magazines infinitely more mysterious and sexual than those in the girly magazines), and six different kinds of aftershave. Apparently the book on picking up ladies swore by aftershave as a tool of seduction.
I found the hidey-hole because I tripped over the register grate in the floor. Its black paint had long ago faded so that the grate was almost gray now. It had collected a furry tissue of dust on it. One thing was out of place. The east end of it was ajar, raised about a quarter inch from the floor. Maybe he’d been in a hurry pushing it down. Or maybe he simply hadn’t noticed.
I got down on my knees and went to work. He hadn’t made it especially difficult to find the envelopes once you figured that maybe the grate hid, in turn, a more artful hiding place.
My hand went left, my hand went right, waggling, wiggling, crawling until it reached what felt like a large manila envelope that was concealed beneath a piece of cardboard that had been spray-painted black and then carefully covered with mice turds and large furry dust devils. You wouldn’t look twice at how it had been concealed. It appeared to be a natural part of the heating system.
The envelope was heavier than it looked, an 8 x 10 standard issue that had been used for mailing before. It bore Richie’s name and the address of this place.
I grabbed a Falstaff from the refrigerator and seated myself in an armchair. The contents of the envelope radiated evil thoughts. I knew I’d found what I was looking for.
Twenty minutes later, having gone through all twenty-one photographs, I realized that he hadn’t been much of a Peeping Tom. He hadn’t needed to be. Who needed sweaty naked flesh when it was much easier to get a couple of simple shots of two adulterous people holding hands as they left a boathouse or two adulterous people walking into a motel room or two adulterous people furtively kissing goodnight as they stood between their respective cars. In divorce court, these would be a bonanza. You didn’t need pornography to make your case. Context alone was enough. Kissing and holding hands was pretty much a carnal act with photos like these.
But these weren’t local folks. Given the various settings, I could see that these had been taken in Chicago. The blackmail franchise had apparently started in Chicago and had been brought to Black River Falls.
I slid the photos back in the envelope and carried my beer can to the kitchen counter. The prig side of me had taken over again. I hated thinking about the misery these photos had wrought.
NINETEEN
“HOW DID YOU FIND OUT?”
“Guy who writes dirty books found out.”
“You have interesting friends.”
“And useful.”
“Will you be able to believe anything I tell you from now on?”
“It won’t be easy.”
“My first husband.”
“Beg pardon?”
“He had an affair right after we got married. Right after. I found out and tried to leave him. He convinced me to stay for three months and give it a try. But it didn’t work.”
“Because you couldn’t believe him. You were suspicious all the time.”
“You’ve been through it?”
&
nbsp; “Both ends of the gun. Cheater and cheatee. Once somebody lies to you it’s hard to believe them again.”
“Maybe next time around I should try being the one who cheats.”
Marie Leeds’s hotel had a taproom full of road-weary salesmen, half of whom stood at one end of the bar and told dirty jokes, the other half of whom sat at the bar and stared at their drinks, as if by trying hard enough maybe they could levitate them.
We were sitting at one of those knee-knocking little cocktail tables that get wobbly pretty fast. A candle encased in a tube of red glass flicked rose-colored light across our faces.
“How about we start with your real name, since you aren’t really his sister.”
“The first name really is Marie.”
“Gosh, I know we’re on the right track now.”
“And my last name is Denham.”
“And you knew David Leeds how?”
She leaned back and picked up her package of Tareytons, got one going, put an explosion of smoke in my direction, and said, “I was his English teacher in high school. He came from a bad home situation. I sort of adopted him. I gave him the small apartment above my garage and that’s where he spent his senior year.”
“His folks didn’t have any objections?”
“His father was dead. His mother was an alcoholic and not easy to get along with. We had our battles, she and I. David made the mistake of telling her he had a crush on me. It didn’t last long, but the damage was done.”
“She thought you were sleeping together?”
“Yes.”
“Were you?”
She smiled. It was slow and sweet, that smile, suggestive of whatever you wanted it to suggest. “I wish I could say yes. Maybe things would’ve turned out differently. David was extremely impulsive. He never got into big trouble, but he certainly got into his share of scrapes. Maybe it would have allowed me to keep tighter control of him.” The smile slowly disappeared. “But, no, I didn’t. My mama didn’t raise me to do things like that.”
“Why did you register at the hotel here as Leeds?”
“Because I was pretending to be his sister.”
