by Ed Gorman
I took out my cigarettes and placed them on the table. I sat close enough to give her drags.
She didn’t thank me but her tone changed. It was as if she was suddenly too tired to argue. “Neil wasn’t like this before he went to Nam. He was just a nice, normal kid. But when he came back—They actually had to put him in a mental hospital for three months.”
“Tell me how he changed.”
“He’d always been kind of quiet. Got average grades. Never got in trouble. Wasn’t a big reader but he loved going to movies. He went to junior college—this was in Des Plaines where we grew up—and he really liked it. He started getting interested in books for the first time. But then he got his draft notice. They didn’t think junior college was good enough for a deferment so they shipped him off. He didn’t write much, and when he did, he didn’t really tell me anything. He’d talk about the food and the local customs but nothing about how he felt or anything. In his letters he didn’t sound the same anymore. I always figured he’d tell me everything when he got back.”
“Did he?”
“No. But a kid he served with told me about something that happened to Neil over there. They were approaching this sort of hamlet—there were five of them—and there was firing from two of the huts. While four of them worked on the two huts, Neil swung around and checked out the other three. He heard noise in one of them and opened fire. When he looked in to see who’d been in there he found two little girls. They’d been huddled in the corner. His bullets had torn them apart. He said Neil was never the same after that. When they’d go into Saigon all Neil wanted to do was get drunk and start fights. My brother Neil, fighting? He might have been in a few shoving matches on the playground but that was the extent of it. And now he was always picking on bigger and tougher guys who were sure to hurt him pretty bad. You don’t have to be a psych major to know that he wanted somebody to punish him, do you?”
Her shoulders slumped and she exhaled long and hard. Not even hatred can exhaust you the way love can. “He was that way when he got back home, too. He had nightmares that woke up the whole house. My biggest fear was that he was going to kill himself. And in a way he tried to. All the fights and two drunk driving arrests and confrontations with half the people he ran into. I thought when he met this girl Jenny he might come out of it at least a little ways. He cleaned himself up physically and cut way back on the alcohol. He was always decent to me. I think I was the only person he’d ever really trusted.”
“It went well for three or four months, with Jenny I mean. One night he even told me he was thinking about going back to junior college because she was going to enroll there for a year before going on to a state school. He even said they might get married. But then she started breaking up with him all the time. I couldn’t figure out why. Then one day I ran into her at a restaurant in a mall and she told me everything. She was only nineteen and she just wasn’t ready for the kind of commitment my brother wanted. She said they’d agree not to talk about marriage but then the subject always came up and he’d get angry and she’d get scared.”
“Was he ever violent with her?”
“No. She said that wasn’t what scared her. She had the same fear I did, that he’d take his own life. She was afraid to break it off completely because of that but she couldn’t deal with Neil anymore, either. Then she said something that I’ve never forgotten. Neil told her that the only time he didn’t have nightmares was when things were going well with them. Then I realized how dependent he was on her. She made him feel good again—much better than the army counselor in Nam he saw who just kind of ran him through his office once a month. I sympathized with her. And Jenny was a sweet girl. She told me that she’d decided that the easiest way out was to go to the University of Illinois for freshman year and leave in a week.”
“She went and that’s when the trouble really started. He lost his job, he gave his best friend a black eye, and he swung on a cop who was trying to arrest him for drunk and disorderly. He managed to escape, and that’s when he disappeared for a while. I was the only one he contacted. He knew if he came back he’d have to go to county jail or maybe even prison and he said he couldn’t do it. But I convinced him he couldn’t keep running like that. I got him a good lawyer. He served six months in county in Illinois. After he got out he drifted to Iowa City and that’s where he met Richard. Richard invited him to live at the commune. Neil got a job in town working at a discount store. I’d just graduated college and had free time so I came here to live in the commune and try to straighten him out. He’d already been seeing Vanessa Mainwaring. I met her a few times and liked her. I think Neil had learned about not pushing too hard. They seemed very happy together. Then they had this argument. I never knew what it was about. I guess they started shouting at each other on Mainwaring’s front lawn and he came out and told Neil to go home. Apparently he’d liked Neil up to that point, but you see somebody shouting at your daughter, you’re going to defend her.”
“How long after that was she murdered?”
“Two nights.”
I asked the question she didn’t want to hear. “Do you know where he is right now?”
“No.”
“If you knew, would you tell me?”
“No. And please don’t give me any speeches. I don’t want to be the one responsible for the police finding him. I know he didn’t kill her.”
“Does that mean that you have proof?”
“It means I know my brother.”
I said it again. “If he’s on the run and they catch him and he won’t give up, he might get himself killed.”
“You think I haven’t thought of that?”
Harry Renwick knocked softly twice, then opened the door. “Time’s up, Sam.” He walked over to where Sarah sat. “We’ll get you out of those cuffs.”
The smile was unexpected. “He means once he gets me back to my cell.”
“Best I can do, Miss.”
“Tell Sykes that I’m officially her lawyer, will you, Harry?”
“Sure. He figured you would be. Oh—he’s pretty mad about you saying John Wayne was a draft dodger.”
“It’s true.”
“Yeah, I read that in the newspaper a long time ago. I decided I’d better not bring that up to the chief. You know how he feels about John Wayne.”
Sarah Powers seemed lost. She glanced around the room. A man told me once that the only time he’d been in jail the whole experience was like a nightmare. This was county, not even hard time, and he only did thirty days for a drunk driving charge. He said all those prison movies were fake. They never dealt with how oppressive it was to be forced to live with men who had spent their lives cheating, stealing, beating people. And enjoying it. That was what scared him the most. The way they bragged about it. Then, he said, there were the smells. He said there were even men who laughed about the smells. I wondered if Sarah was having a similar experience here. Yes, the jail was new, and yes, she obviously considered herself worldly and tough. But she was really just a middle-class woman terrified for her brother. And now, I suspected, terrified for herself.
Sarah Powers said, “I’m sorry about knocking you out.”
I just nodded.
Harry Renwick had good radar. “I’ll keep an eye on her for you, Sam.”
I think she would have hugged him if she hadn’t had the cuffs on. Now she had at least one friend here. My first cigarette was long gone. I lighted a second and let her take a deep drag. Then I handed Harry my nearly new pack. “These are hers.”
“They sure are,” he said, taking the Luckies from me.
6
Sunlight blasted me into temporary blindness as I walked from the station to my car. Only when I was halfway there did I see the three people standing two cars from mine: Paul Mainwaring, his daughter Nicole, and Tommy Delaney. Delaney was a local high school football hero and former boyfriend of Vanessa.
He had a little kid’s face—all red hair and freckles and pug nose—set atop an NFL
body. In his black Hawkeye T-shirt you could see why he was so feared on the field. He started toward me, but Paul Mainwaring himself put a halting hand on his shoulder.
The car I referred to happened to be a new white four-door Jaguar.
I usually found myself defending Paul Mainwaring. For all his work with the military and inventing things vital to war—he was a prominent military engineer—he had a true interest in helping the poor and had given thousands of dollars to the local soup kitchen and church relief funds. The irony wasn’t lost on me; I’d always wondered if it was lost on him.
The face he showed now, as he broke from the group and walked toward me, stunned me. The white button-down shirt, the chinos, and the white tennis shoes spoke of the preppy he would always be. The silver hair was disheveled for once. The sunken, bruised eye sockets and the unshaven cheeks and jaws revealed a man lost in not only despair but confusion. Even his walk was uncertain.
Tommy Delaney broke in front of him, aiming himself directly at me.
“Tommy, get back there where you belong.”
Tommy gave me the practiced look that probably made even the toughest kids in high school run when he turned it on them. I just watched him as he fell into sulking. Behind him, Mainwaring’s daughter Nicole started sobbing and put her hands to her face. I was embarrassed to be in Mainwaring’s presence. I’d had the young man thought to be the killer of his daughter and I’d lost him because I wasn’t clever enough to outthink a twenty-two-year-old girl. I wanted to say something but I wasn’t sure what that would be.
“Paul, I owe you an apology.”
He brushed it away. “It wasn’t your fault, Sam. Don’t listen to all this. I was in the army for four years. Things just go wrong sometimes. The girl admitted that she struck you on the back of the head with a steel rod and knocked you out. I don’t know anybody who could stand up to that.”
I wanted him to repeat what he’d just said. I couldn’t quite believe it after just one hearing. I was already known as the man who’d been outsmarted by a young girl. It was absurd—as Paul said, anybody can be felled by a steel rod smashing into your skull—but when you have enemies they work with what they’re given. And yet the one who should despise me the most for my stupidity was telling me that getting smacked in the head was the reason I wasn’t able to arrest Neil Cameron. Not because I was incompetent.
“I let myself down, Paul.”
He extended his hand and we shook. I wasn’t sure why we shook.
Then he offered his second surprise. “I want to hire you, Sam.”
I allowed myself the luxury of a smile. “Right. I can see that. I come highly recommended.”
“As I said, things happen. You’ve done some good work as a private investigator. And you know all the kids out at that commune. If anybody knows where Cameron might have gone, they do.”
“I’m not sure they trust me.”
“They trust you more than they do Cliffie. I’ve asked him a number of times to stop harassing them but all I get are those speeches Reverend Cartwright gives. All the marijuana and sex. By now Cliffie must’ve run every one of them in at least once. They certainly won’t cooperate with him.”
“I’m representing Sarah Powers, Paul. You should know that up front.”
He blinked only once. “I didn’t know that.”
“That’s why I think you should look for somebody else.”
“She of course says Neil didn’t kill Van.”
“That’s what she says.”
“And you believe her?”
“In a case like this I only represent people I think are innocent. I want to find Neil and have him turn himself in.”
“What if he’s guilty?”
“Then he’s guilty. If he’s not, then I want to find the person who really killed Van.”
“Then there’s no conflict. I still want to hire you.”
“I wish you’d think it over. I can recommend a few people in Cedar Rapids or even Des Moines. It might be better to let them handle it instead of me.”
For the first time I saw resentment—anger—in the long, angular face. “You have a stake in this now, too, Sam. You need to prove to people you’re not the fool they say you are.”
He’d meant for his words to hurt. He’d succeeded. “I’ll send a check to your office. I appreciate this, Sam.” He spoke through a kind of pain I’d never had to deal with. “Maybe I’ll call you tomorrow.”
He turned and walked back to his people and his Jag. His daughter came to him and slid her arm around his waist. She tilted her head against his chest as he guided her to their car.
Tommy walked a few feet toward me and said, “Hope no girls beat you up on the way home, McCain.”
“Get back here,” Mainwaring shouted without turning around.
Of course Tommy gave me the famous soul-freezing evil eye before he did what Mainwaring said. I wondered what he’d look like if I was fortunate enough to back over him six or seven times.
A few years ago, before Jamie married her wastrel boyfriend Turk and bore him a baby girl as sweet as Jamie herself, I always checked out the clothes she wore. She had one of those stunning bodies you see on the covers of paperbacks, usually under the title Teenage Tease or some such thing. The wholesome pretty face only made her more appealing. These days I checked her for signs of bruises and cuts. In the first year of their marriage Turk had given her a black eye. I returned the favor by giving Turk a black eye. I’m not tough, but I’m tougher than Turk. I also drew up divorce papers that Jamie refused to sign. She loved him and he would change, she said.
These days I had her solemn word that if he ever got physically violent with her again she was to tell me immediately. I made her promise on her mother’s life. A good Catholic girl, she took such oaths seriously.
Turk still had his surfing band, probably the only one in landlocked Iowa—despite the fact that surfing bands were now seen as wimpy and irrelevant. And he was still going to be on American Bandstand, though American Bandstand was fading fast. And he was still going to have several gold records. And he was still, when the time was right, planning to become a movie star. And he still didn’t want to get a job because working conflicted with his songwriting and practicing. He couldn’t even babysit his little daughter. That was left to Jamie’s mother. These artistes, they need their time to create.
Today Jamie wore a sleeveless yellow blouse and a richer yellow miniskirt. She was easy to scan for bruises. I didn’t see any. She also wore a pair of brown-rimmed eyeglasses. She’d started having headaches so I’d paid for her visit to an optometrist and then for the glasses. I still wondered about the headaches. I didn’t trust Turk. Somehow in the course of our years together she’d become my little sister and I’d be goddamned if anybody was going to hurt her or baby Laurie.
Jamie’s typing skills had improved marginally and she’d learned how to answer the phone professionally and take down information without mistakes. She gave me my messages and a cup of coffee. That was another thing she handled capably. Our new automatic coffee brewer. Me being me, I still couldn’t make a decent cup of coffee, even with that new machine I’d bought on sale at Sears. But Jamie had triumphed.
As I went through my phone messages, I glanced up once and saw the way Jamie straightened all four of the framed photographs of one-year-old Laurie she had on her desk. Not that they needed straightening. But touching them brought her peace you could see in her face. At these times I always wanted to kill Turk. He should honor her for her sweetness and loyalty. Maybe I could get him convicted as a Russki spy and get him deported. After I beat the shit out of him.
7
In grade school we always swapped comic books. Kenny Thibodeau tended to like Superman and The Flash. I went more for Batman and Captain Marvel. In junior high we swapped paperbacks. Mickey Spillane and Richard S. Prather were early favorites though soon enough I discovered Peter Rabe and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others. Kenny discovered John Steinbeck and Henry
Miller. In high school I’d picked up on all the Gold Medal crime writers such as Charles Williams, while Kenny had discovered Jack Kerouac and the Beats. At none of these junctures was it possible to predict what Kenny would bring to the table—literally the table in the booth at Andy’s Donuts where I’d gone straight from jail—on this already hot and humid morning.
Baby pictures.
His daughter Melissa was two and a half years old. She wasn’t just the center of Kenny’s life, she was all of Kenny’s life. Yes, he still wrote his soft-core sex novels and he still wrote his men’s magazine “Die Nazi Die!” articles, but those he did almost unconsciously these days. Automatic pilot. His conscious attention was devoted to Melissa. All this was reflected in his attire. Not a vestige of the former Beat. Short, thinning brown hair. Pressed yellow short-sleeved cotton shirt and pressed brown trousers. I mention pressed by way of introducing his wife, Sue. As Kenny always joked, by marrying him Sue had inherited both a husband and a son. Kenny needed help and Sue, loving and amused, was there to provide it.
“This one’s of Melissa and the cocker spaniel we got her last week.”
Even though we had gone past picture number twenty I had to admit this one of Melissa in her frilly sundress leaning down to kiss the puppy on the head was pretty damned cute.
“And here’s one—”
I held up my hand. “I don’t mean to be rude, Kenny, but I’ve got a lot to do today.”
For only a moment he looked hurt, then he grinned. “Yeah, Sue says I drive people nuts with my pictures. Just be glad I haven’t invited you out to see the slide show I made of all the pictures we have of her.”
