by Ed Gorman
“You mentioned scrapes. What kind of scrapes?”
“Girl scrapes mostly.” She smiled. “He wasn’t just handsome. He was Negro and handsome. A lot of white girls were curious about that. But he also got into scrapes out here. Somebody at the hotel told me David caught Hannity cutting the tires of his scooter. I guess Hannity’s a pretty big guy. But David was so mad he plowed right into him.”
“When was this?”
“My understanding is that it was a couple of weeks ago.”
Rob Anderson’s father had hinted that Hannity might be worth checking into. The two young men hadn’t been together during the time of the murders. This had all been self-serving, a dad trying to help his son, but Marie had given me one more reason to look Hannity up again. “I’ll be lucky if I don’t get my own tires slashed. I rented a car this afternoon and drove around. Most of the people were very nice to me. But there’re a few—they always want you to apologize somehow for existing because you’re different than they are. And they think they know you just because of your skin color. And worst of all, they hate you. You can see it in their eyes. You’re something vile to them. I’m not sure I could live in your town.”
“You just said it was a minority of people who were like that.”
“That’s all it takes, Sam. A handful. Being just as hateful as they can be. The Klan doesn’t have all that many members, but they’ve never been stronger because we’re finally standing up for our rights. It doesn’t take many bad guys to cause a lot of pain and consternation. Look at poor Medgar Evers.”
“I’m sorry for the bad ones you met here.” I laughed but without pleasure. “The old love-hate thing I have for this town. Most of the folks here are decent. Not saints, nothing like that. Decent people. But there are always a few—”
“Hannity and Anderson might get away with it because their people have money and influence.”
“In most cases, money and influence can buy you out of trouble. But not a double murder like this. Every paper in the state is covering this. The race angle’s in everybody’s mind. Anybody who’s charged will be prosecuted right up to the maximum sentence.”
She put her cigarettes in her purse and sat up straight, with her hands folded in front of her. She was ready to shove off.
“Those Freedom Riders, that’s why most people around here’ll want to see justice. Even some of the folks who hate us see what’s happening to the riders and Dr. King and they know it’s not right. They’re doing our suffering for us.”
“You’re probably right. A lot of the haters probably don’t like watching fire hoses and dogs put on little kids.”
Her smile was bitter. “Thank God for the wee ones. They can get to adults the way we can’t. It’s the old plantation thing—the pickaninnies sure are cute till they grow up. Then they’re just more colored folks to put the lash to. David paid the price for that. He stayed real cute right into his twenties and somebody around here didn’t like that. Didn’t like that at all.”
TWENTY
CLAMMY SWEAT. OTHERWORLD DARKNESS. Nightmare. My conscious mind trying to reject—to banish—the hellish sounds that forced blood to run dripping from my ears. The cats were in my nightmare, too, each of them crawling beneath the covers to free themselves from the tortured voice that refused to stop.
And then I was sitting up and wide awake the way movie people always are right after nightmare time. Disoriented for a few moments. Trying to comfort the cats that now clung to me as if I were their father.
And still that noise—
Aw, shit.
And then I realized what it was. Kenny Thibodeau’s new girlfriend Noreen De Grasso, who fancied herself the nation’s only serious rival to Joan Baez in the folksong singing business.
Trying to untwist my boxers, I stomped over to the open window next to the back door. Had to be 100 degrees in here and it was nearly ten at night. The window air conditioner Mrs. Goldman had bought for my apartment was brand-new not long ago and was already in the shop getting repaired. She’d let me pick out the one I wanted. Some picker-outer.
I found a pack of smokes on the kitchen counter and fired one up before I yelled down there and told them to cool it.
But the way they were passing that half-gallon jug of Gallo back and forth, it was unlikely they even heard me.
Finally Kenny looked up and saw me in the window and waved.
“Hey, man, we’ll be right up!”
This was how I’d lived for six, seven months—this being a few years before even Mary dumped me—after it became clear that the beautiful Pamela Forrest and I were never getting married. I had planned, in my early twenties, to try to become something remotely resembling a grown-up. But the heartbreak was such that all I wanted was to stay numb. Kenny was eager to show me the wastrel route and I went along willingly.
That six or seven months was a frenzy of self-indulgence that was at least manic and maybe even clinical. In memory, everything runs speeded up, the way the old silent films look to us today.
Piling in and out of cars, apartments, movie theaters, taverns, the abodes of girls you were somewhat serious about, the girls you selfishly used for lonely sex (and who were using you right back the same way)—anything and everything was never enough. Two hours’ sleep before you went to work? No sweat, man. Your car never having more than a quarter tank of gas because you’d spent all your money on girls and beer? Cool. Waking up on the floors of strangers and strangers waking up on your couch and pissed in their psycho hangovers because you weren’t serving breakfast, and their girlfriends commandeering your toilet for an hour or two—
And the people you only vaguely remember through the haze of alcohol—my haze was pretty transparent; two beers and I was drunk and doing my yodeling impression—loners and losers and grotesques and dangerous people who somehow stayed with your group through barhopping, dancing, pissing in tavern parking lots, breaking up fights, starting fights—somehow they were always with you. One night this guy pulled a knife on Kenny because he said Kenny’s porno was grabbing the money and attention that he, the knife-wielder, should rightly claim for his own writing, which just happened to be Literature. Another night I’m in bed with this girl who was far gone drunk but still very sexy and when I rolled over there was a steely lump of something beneath the sheets and it turned out to be a .38 because “I always take a gun along with me the first time I sleep with a guy because he might be, you know, creepy or something.” True tales of the bedroom. Would-be communists, anarchists, pregnant girls stepping out on their husbands (more true bedroom tales), and of course the entire range of ex-cons you always stumble on in the taverns where the girls go.
But all this was in another part of the galaxy. Whoever that moron had been who’d lived that way sure wasn’t me anymore. I just gave it all up and went back to being a pretty serious young man.
Kenny hadn’t.
So they tromped up the stairs and I grabbed a pair of Levi’s cutoffs and slammed a six-pack of Schlitz down on the coffee table and readied myself for the siege.
Coming through the door, Noreen said, “Man, do I have to take a dump!”
Kenny howled. “Isn’t she something?”
“‘Something.’ I think you hit it, Kenny. You know what time it is?”
“Aw, hell. Relax.”
He helped himself to one of the beers on the coffee table and said, leaning forward, “You know what she did, man?”
I was afraid to ask.
“She wrote a song for you.” He put a finger to his lips and went sssh. “But act surprised when she tells you.”
Could this be real? Maybe this was one of those real tricky nightmares that went on for a long time.
I hate the prig side of me. The unkind, snotty thoughts. But Noreen brought them out in me. It wasn’t just her singing. She always wore short skirts and no underwear and when she sprawled on my couch it was impossible not to look. She just helped herself to whatever she wanted from fridge or cupboard. A
nd a couple of nights she asked if she could sleep on my couch because she was pissed at Kenny. And she didn’t bathe very often. She said she had read an article in some health magazine—one can only imagine what kind of magazine that was—that if you bathed or showered more than once a week you caused a “frisson on your epidermis.” And as she always said when she was finishing up, “A lot of scientists are signing on to that, McCain. This isn’t just, you know, bullshit or anything.” I was pretty sure that most of these “scientists” had probably been educated on the lost continent of Atlantis.
And one more thing—as I heard her exploding from the bathroom door—she never washed her hands after attending to her toilet needs.
“You asshole,” she said, “I heard you telling him I wrote a song about him.” She whacked him pretty hard across the back of the head. He giggled.
She jumped on the couch, managing to snag her acoustic guitar in the process, and landed with enough force to make one end of the couch jump a quarter inch. What’s remarkable about this is that she weighed only about a hundred pounds. She was five-two, junkie-thin, with scraggly black hair down to her ass and a face that was pretty in a sort of psycho way. Not even Norman Bates could have claimed eyes as crazy as her baby-blues.
Whenever I saw Noreen and Kenny together, I wondered how Kenny could have given up his former longtime girlfriend Cindy Baines, a sweet, smart, pretty nurse who loved Kenny in a way that was moving to see. But Cindy hadn’t wanted the abortion he browbeat her into having. And after that things weren’t right. She spent several long evenings at my house telling me how much she loved him but also how much she felt sad about the abortion. She still wanted to marry Kenny, but she wanted him to understand how the abortion had devastated her. Ultimately everything came to a sad end and Cindy moved to Omaha.
As for Kenny …
As she strummed her guitar in preparation for the song she’d written for me, she said, “Did Kenny tell you I’m in regression therapy now?”
“No, he didn’t mention that. I guess I’m not sure what that is.”
“You know, like they take you back to past lives.”
“This shit is so cool,” Kenny said. “I’m gonna try it for myself.”
“I was an Egyptian princess.”
“Isn’t that cool?” Kenny said, chugging beer. “She’s an Egyptian princess.”
This was bringing back all those insane nights in my degenerate period. Everybody was so drunk or so stoned on bad marijuana that everything that was said made a kind of sense. Did he just say he kept a dolphin under his bed? Did she just say that she was a telepath? Did he just say that he’d once fought Rocky Marciano and beat the crap out of him? Sure, why not, everybody was so stupid on booze and grass, anything that was said was perfectly fine. Down the rabbit hole.
So why not an Egyptian princess?
Every time I was around Noreen I realized, despite feeling like an outsider, how middle-class I really was.
“So go on, Noreen. Play him the song you wrote about him.”
I prepared my face to contort itself into an expression of seeming pleasure that would extend from the first to the last note she played. What choice did I have? I had to like it, didn’t I?
“You know the song ‘John Henry,’ Sam?” Noreen said.
“‘John Henry was a steel-drivin’ man’? Sure.”
“Well, that’s what this is pretty much except it’s ‘Sam McCain was a law-abidin’ man till they pushed him too far.’”
That was another thing about Noreen’s songs. They were never Noreen’s songs. She purloined the music from famous songs and just rewrote the lyrics, most of which were so radical politically they made me feel positively GOP.
“The deal is, see, in this song,” Kenny, ever helpful, said, “you bring this innocent man to court but the corrupt jury that’s bought off by the robber barons, they find this guy guilty. And so you track every one of the jurors down and shoot ’em.”
“Great,” I said. “A mass murderer.”
“See, you screwed it up again, Kenny,” Noreen said. “The last one he doesn’t shoot, he stabs.”
“Oh, sorry, babe.” To me: “The last one you stab.”
“Got it. The last one I stab.”
I don’t know about you folks but I believe in miracles. Big miracles and sort of smaller, everyday miracles alike. I mention this because right then the phone rang.
“Don’t answer that,” Kenny said.
“Why the hell not?”
“Because she’s psyched to sing you your song.”
The phone continuing to ring.
“He’s right, Sam. I’m ready now.” Starting to strum again. Ready. Psyched.
I picked up the phone.
“Am I calling too late?” Jane Sykes said.
“No. Not at all.”
Kenny was pantomiming “hang up” with his hand slamming down an invisible phone. Noreen was rolling her eyes at me and looking generally disgusted with humankind, especially those who served on juries.
“Have you heard what happened tonight?”
And I saw how I could get rid of them.
“Hold on a minute. I didn’t realize this was going to be official business,” I said to Jane and set the phone down. I stood up and said, “I’m sorry but you’ll have to leave. This is something I have to deal with alone.”
“Can’t you take the phone into the crapper?” Noreen said. “We couldn’t hear it then.”
“Much as I enjoy sitting in the crapper, the phone cord doesn’t reach that far, Noreen.”
I grabbed the phone and said to Jane, “Just one more minute.” I put the receiver down and said, “C’mon now, you guys, you gotta leave.”
“Well, this is really bullshit,” Noreen said.
“She was really psyched.”
“I write a whole goddamn song for him and he kicks me out,” Noreen said to herself.
But Kenny, finally understanding how pissed I was, grabbed her hand and started dragging her toward the back door.
“I write a song just for him and—”
I missed the rest because the door had slammed on her. Kenny was still on the inside of the door: “This is pretty rude, man.”
“Is it as rude as waking somebody up on a work night to play some lousy song?”
“Lousy? You haven’t even heard it yet.”
Kenny and I have had a love-hate relationship since grade school. We were definitely in hate mode now.
“’Night, Kenny,” I said, pushing the door open and giving him a little shove into the night.
The last thing I heard from them was Noreen strumming and singing “Sam McCain was a law-abidin’ man till they pushed him too far.” I was glad I couldn’t hear anything more.
Back on the phone, Jane said, “I’m sorry if I interrupted anything.”
“Just a murder.”
“What?”
“A double murder, actually. Two people who woke me up and decided to have a party. So what’s going on?”
“Rachael Todd—the one we thought was killed because she was going to tell you something about Leeds and Neville?”
“Yeah.”
“A sixty-six-year-old woman walked into Cliff’s office tonight—of course Cliff wasn’t there—and confessed to being the hit-and-run driver. She was coming back from her sister’s and realized that she couldn’t see very well without her glasses but assumed she could make it home without any problem. Well, there was a problem. Rachael Todd sort of stumbled out in front of the woman’s car and that’s how the woman hit her. The woman’s name by the way is Dot Taylor, and the deputy who looked over her car said you can still see blood and a little bit of hair on the right front bumper and fender.”
“I don’t know if this is good news or bad news. You know, in mystery novels you’re never supposed to have a coincidence like this.”
“Well, I guess it gives us one less thing to worry about.”
“But we still don’t know what she was
going to tell me.”
A pause. “I notice you said ‘me.’”
“Oh. Right.”
“I was under the assumption that we were still working together. I haven’t heard from you in a while.”
“Well, I’ve been—”
“Before you tell a lie, which will really piss me off, let me tell you what’s going on. She got to you, didn’t she?”
“She?”
“God, c’mon, Sam. Just admit it. The judge found out that we were together socially and got all uptight about it. Right?”
My turn to pause. “Yeah, right.”
“And so she just naturally extrapolated from there that we were probably working together, too.”
“Pretty much.”
“And you gave in to her.”
I took a long time to answer it. “The judge and I have a very complicated relationship. She helped me when I set up shop and nobody else would. She helped me get my private investigator’s license, which isn’t easy in this state. And she’s steered a lot of business my way.”
“You gave in to her.”
“And she’s—she’s in a kind of strange position now. She needs some help.”
“Her drinking.”
“Are you mocking me here?”
Extended sigh. “A little, I guess. I mean you’re making it sound more like a love affair than a business relationship. But I apologize, Sam. I guess it hurts my pride that you chose her over me. But that makes sense. You’ve been friends—or whatever you are—for a long time.”
“That doesn’t mean we can’t see each other socially.”
Nervous laugh. “I probably screwed that up for us, Sam.”
“How?”
“I said a lot of awkward things the first night we met. I was trying not to flirt with you but it sort of came out that way, and I’m sorry it did. The truth is, Sam, I don’t know what I’m looking for—if I’m looking for anything. I like to work hard because then I don’t have to think about it. I like you very much, but you’re very different from the other men I’ve been with. There weren’t that many—three, really—but they ran to a type and you don’t fit that type at all. And you’re so different from them and—”
