by Ed Gorman
The sadness looked wrong hanging on the beefy teenager. He should be flattening players on the field or pouring himself a sloppy beer at a kegger or making it with a comely cheerleader in the backseat of a car. All that energy, all that popularity, all that raw strength—but now he was stooped again, bereft as an orphan in those Dust Bowl photographs of the Depression ’30s. It wasn’t difficult to imagine that he’d cried about this—or even that he might cry about it now, as soon as he was out of my sight.
“Did you want to tell me something, Tommy? I kind of got that sense a minute ago.”
“Nah—I mean—” After a glance at Kenny and then at me, he said: “I just wanted to apologize.”
He turned and left, quickly becoming part of the crowd.
“I wonder what he wanted to tell you, McCain.”
“Yeah, I wonder, too.”
15
I was working my ass off eating a bagel and reading the morning paper’s version of the events that followed Kenny and me leaving the good Reverend Cartwright’s play last night. Apparently things had settled down enough for the program to continue. My favorite line in the story was: “According to most estimates, Pearson’s Peak is not considered a mountain.”
“Did you like the coffee this morning, Mr. C?”
“Great as usual.” Jamie was sensitive about her coffee.
“I tried a new brand. I thought you might notice.”
I put the paper down. “I was going to mention it the minute I stopped reading. Whatever brand it is, keep on buying it. It’s terrific.”
Her smile pleased me. I enjoyed seeing Jamie happy. Lately her blue eyes had lost their luster and her slight shoulders slumped. Between motherhood and her surfer-boy lazy bastard husband, she deserved to smile every once in a while.
Which was when our door opened as if a pair of battering rams had been thrust against it. Jamie jumped in her seat, her hands covering her mouth, a sharp noise caught in her throat.
He stood in the doorway with his finger pointed at me as if it was a weapon. “You son of a bitch.” Then he glared at Jamie. “Get her out of here. And I mean now.”
Jamie was already crying. I hurried around the desk. When my hands went to her shoulders I felt how rigid her entire body was. “Why don’t you go somewhere for half an hour or so?”
“But where will I go, Mr. C?”
“The café down the street would be a good place. Get a donut and some coffee. It won’t be as good as our coffee, of course.”
She didn’t laugh, just plucked a Kleenex from the box on her desk and blew her nose—a hardy blow indeed. I helped her up from her chair, grabbed her purse, and slid it under her arm.
All the time our guest stood there trying to restrain himself from attacking me.
“Will you be all right, Mr. C?”
“I’ll be fine, Jamie. Now you go on and have a coffee break.”
“But it’s not even nine yet—”
“Get her the hell out of here right now, McCain.”
I walked her quickly to the door. Four steps across from the threshold she started to turn around to say something. I closed the door.
“You son of a bitch.”
“You said that already, Paul.”
After I was seated again, I said, “You could always sit down.”
But Paul Mainwaring was seething. “I should tear your head off, McCain. But I’ve got stockholders and they wouldn’t be happy about the bad publicity.”
“Some people wouldn’t consider it bad. They’d think you were a hero.”
“That’s just the kind of glib bullshit I’d expect from you.” He was calming down enough to consider using the chair. He eyed it with great suspicion, as if it was about to attack him. “You’ve been asking a lot of questions that don’t need to be asked. Dragging my family’s name through the mud. I wanted you to find out who killed my daughter. But for some goddamn reason you started investigating my whole family.” He was so angry he was spluttering.
“Sit down and tell me what you’re so upset about.”
In his blue golf shirt and chinos, he looked like any other millionaire playing hooky from the office. Except for the throbbing veins in his neck and temple. “I want you to stop right now. Period. And if you don’t, I’m going to use every cent I have to make sure you won’t have any business in this state again. I’m going to file a nuisance suit against you and leak all kinds of things about you to the press. There’s a guy in Chicago who is famous for handling cases like this. He’s destroyed a number of people. He doesn’t care if he wins or loses the case as long as the other guy has to go on relief.”
“Sounds like a nice fella. I’d like to meet him sometime.”
His rage was back. He pounded my desk with enough power to cleave it in two. Or maybe three. “I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with you. I must have been out of my mind.” Then he caught himself. “Twenty thousand dollars.”
“Twenty thousand dollars. Nice round sum.”
“It’s yours if you give me a letter saying that you will never again work on the case of my daughter’s murder and will never try to contact anybody even marginally involved.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but you yourself just said you hired me to find out who killed Vanessa.”
“You’re not stupid, McCain. But you don’t seem to understand that we know who the killer was. He took his own life. There is no more case. And there is certainly no reason to be investigating Eve. She’s very upset right now and I don’t blame her. Whatever she does with her life is her business. Do you understand that?”
Giving me the impression that he knew all about Eve’s lovers. “Yes.”
“Yes, you’ll sign that document?”
“Yes, I understand why you’re pissed and why she’s pissed. But I was just trying to do my job.”
“So you won’t sign the document?”
“No, I won’t.”
He came up out of his chair with blood in his cheeks and spittle on his lips. “Then you’re going to be very sorry. And if you ever approach my wife—or anybody in my house for that matter—I’ll have you arrested.”
There was no point in arguing. He needed to keep battering me with threats. He was exorcising the demons of a dead daughter, a faithless wife, and now a minor private detective who could besmirch his reputation. Hating me made sense. He’d suffered more than anybody should have with the death of his daughter. I was only adding to his grief.
He leaned over my desk and jabbed a finger at me. “I thought you were a man of honor, McCain. But you had me fooled. You’re just another grubby little opportunist.”
Again there was no reason to defend myself. If I was an opportunist, I was a badly paid one. And even if I did manage to uncover the real murderer, nobody would be particularly interested past the usual twenty-four-hour time limit before another more interesting crime story came along. The trial would revive interest several months down the line, but meanwhile I’d still be buying my boxer shorts at Sears and trying to find the station with the cheapest gas prices.
“You just remember what I said.” But gone was the anger. In its place was only exhaustion. It was as if he, not me, had been the victim of his rancor. He even swayed a bit, like somebody who just might faint on you. His face was streaming with sweat and his shirt splotchy and dark in places.
As I watched him leave, he seemed to be a much older man than the one who’d come here maybe fifteen minutes ago. I heard his footsteps in the hall, slow, even shuffling, and then the exterior door opened and closed. It was several minutes before I heard his Jag fire up.
Jamie returned with a cardboard cup of coffee from the deli. She looked around as if Mainwaring might be hiding someplace, ready to pounce on her.
“He’s gone.”
“I was ready to call the police, Mr. C.”
“I’m fine. He’s upset about his daughter dying and it’s affected his judgment, that’s all. There can’t be anything worse than losing your chil
d.”
“Oh, God, don’t even say that. I look at little Laurie and I want to cry sometimes, thinking of all the terrible things that could happen to her. Sometimes I just want to lock us in a room and never leave so I can keep an eye on her all the time. But I have to go out. And Turk would help but he’s, you know, busy with all his stuff.”
Yes, too much to ask Surfer Boy to help with his child. I knew I’d soon be having one of those dreams where I separated Turk’s head from his shoulders. I knew that broadsword would come in handy someday. Sam McCain, Barbarian.
I used line two to make several calls about pending cases, one in response to a bail bondsman who seemed to blame me for the disappearance of our mutual client.
“Sure, you don’t have to worry, McCain. You get your fat fee one way or the other.”
“Right. I inherited this stupid bastard from his brother, who told me that while he did have a .38 in his pocket when the cops stopped him inside the supermarket, he wasn’t planning to rob it. The only reason I took it is because the county attorney got way ahead of himself here. Even though this dipshit had a gun on him, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he was going to rob the place. There’s no evidence of that. I decided to help him out because I thought the law was overstepping. I got the county attorney to drop the robbery charge but he didn’t have a license for the gun. And he had three priors.”
A businessman’s deep sigh. “I should’ve gone into the funeral business like my old man.”
“I don’t blame you. Getting to handle corpses all day is something I couldn’t pass up, either.”
A laugh rumbled from the phone. The guy was on the Pall Mall diet. “If you see this bastard, run him over for me, will you?”
“Will do.”
As I was hanging up, line one rang and Jamie answered in her clear sweet voice and said, “One moment, please. I’ll see if he’s available.” She put the line on hold and said, “It’s Mrs. Eve Mainwaring.”
Was she calling to tell me the same thing her husband just had—that I was to stay out of her life? I lifted the receiver and said, “Hello.”
“I know my husband was at your office. I followed him.”
“Any special reason you’re following him?”
“Because he’s not himself since Van died and I’m worried about him, what he might do. I was afraid—well, for some reason people don’t seem to think he can be violent, he’s so easygoing. But I’ve seen his violent side a few times during our marriage and he can be frightening. And I’m afraid I led him into something—Would it be possible to talk to you? Not at your office. Do you know where the Cotillion is?”
“Sure.”
“How about eleven thirty? And don’t worry, I’ll pay your hourly fee.”
“I don’t care about the fee, Mrs. Mainwaring.”
“We were introduced as Sam and Eve, let’s keep it that way. I’ll see you at eleven thirty.”
As I hung up, I said to Jamie, “I’m going to eat lunch at the Cotillion.”
“Petty cash, I’ll bet.”
One of her many responsibilities was keeping track of the petty cash, never letting it get under fifty dollars. At first I’d been worried she might tell Surfer Boy about it. He’d find a way to con her out of some money. But one day, looking quite happy about herself as she dished out some money for me, she said, “It’s a good thing I never told Turk about this. He’d be after me all the time if I did.”
The Cotillion was located on a small hill above the river. Before I reached it, I turned right onto a narrow road that hadn’t been asphalted in years. I kept thinking about Tommy Delaney and the way he’d waved to me last night, as if he wanted to tell me something. I still wondered what it was.
This time when I pulled up at his white clapboard house that the casual eye might mistake for abandoned—if houses took on the emotional tenor of their residents, this one reminded me of a wound—there was no screaming, no sound at all except for a crop-dusting plane flying low and poisoning the air and the earth. In the backyard I saw Tommy shooting baskets at a hoop attached to a one-car garage. He brought a football player’s zeal to making layups. He made three of them by the time I reached him. He was dribbling his way back to start again when he saw me approach. He pawed a right hand across his yellow high school T-shirt. His red hair was in his face, giving him the blunt, sweaty look of a big hearty animal. Only his blue eyes denied the impression; he seemed to be afraid.
“Morning, Tommy.”
“You’re not supposed to be here, Mr. McCain.”
“Oh? Why not?”
As he glanced toward the house I heard the back door slam, and in seconds a scrawny woman several inches shorter than me stalked into view, her hands stuffed into the pockets of her faded housedress. She was leathery and intense and I imagined she could hold her own with that sparring partner she’d married. If she’d had a gun I would have been dead. “You get your butt off my property and leave my son alone.” To Tommy: “You go on and get in the house.”
He didn’t bother to show embarrassment. Mrs. Hitler had spoken and her word was so final it was like arguing with wind or sunlight. He turned into a lost puppy, all sunken shoulders and hanging head, tucked the basketball under one arm, and shuffled toward the house as if he was going to be executed.
“If you’re not off my property in sixty seconds I’m calling the law on you.”
I could see her as one of those hardscrabble prairie women of frontier Iowa standing with a shotgun defending her roost and her children while her man was away. Read a history of the frontier and you quickly learn that women worked harder than men. “A woman’s work is never done” had it right. Consequently, they were not to be trifled with. As was the case with this scrappy, wild-eyed woman.
“I take it you got a call from Paul Mainwaring.”
“And so what if I did?” She stepped closer, squinting with a pirate’s eye at the intruder. “You’re no friend of my son’s and Mr. Mainwaring is. He helped my whole family since my husband got injured down to the mill. And he’s going to see to it that Tommy gets into college. Now you get your butt in that car of yours and get out of here.”
Tommy Delaney was watching us from behind the soiled white curtains in the kitchen. He wanted to tell me something. I had no doubt of it.
“All I’m trying to do is find out who really killed Mainwaring’s daughter. For some reason he doesn’t want me to.”
“He said you’d be talking crazy if you showed up out here. And he sure was right. I guess you don’t read the papers, huh? That Cameron boy killed her because he was jealous she was seeing other boys. I’m just glad my Tommy got over her. He used to moon around here like a sick calf. I wouldn’t say this to Mr. Mainwaring, but it seems to me that Vanessa brought a lot of this on herself. You can’t flaunt around the way she did, have all these boys coming after you and treating them the way she did.”
“She didn’t deserve to die.”
In the blue-sky morning, birds bursting from the green, green trees, a sun-scorched cow standing on a distant hill, the little prairie woman was quiet for the moment considering—or reconsidering—what she’d said. “I shouldn’t have put it that way. Whatever she did, she didn’t deserve to die for it.” But pity was not anything to be indulged in. It weakened you. “But she shouldn’t have lived the way she did. She made life hell for a lot of people.”
I kept thinking about Tommy “mooning around like a sick calf.” I needed to talk to him. He’d been part of the Mainwaring family. He might know something that I needed to know.
The phone rang inside. She didn’t take her eyes from me. “That’ll be somebody calling for me. But I’m gonna stand here till you get in that car and drive off. Now move. You don’t have no business here, and if you come back—or you try to talk to Tommy—I’m gonna call Mr. Mainwaring the way he told me to. And then you’re gonna be in trouble. He won’t fool around with you. He’s got the money and the power to put you out of business. And those’re his w
ords. Now go.”
Tommy came to the screen door in back and stuck his head out. “Phone for you, Mom.” He wouldn’t look at me.
She didn’t have the same problem. She started toward me, stopped and scowled at me a final time. “Now you git.”
I scowled right back but I got.
16
The name Cotillion implies debutante coming-out parties and the type of fancy balls where Civil War colonels made plans to deflower the local virgins later on in the gin-crazed night. This particular Cotillion was one of those modern glass-and-stone boxes that were colder than any of the drinks they served. Its reputation for excellent cuisine came, or so I had surmised, from the fact that you paid a lot of money for very little food. This is my small-town side, I know, and when I go out to eat I don’t want to gorge myself but I do want something more substantial than two inches of, say, steak covered with oily sauce and topped with some kind of vegetation that looks like a fungus. Not that it tastes bad; it doesn’t. The food is tasty, no doubt about it. But even a mouse would ask for his money back when he saw the size of the entrée.
But it is one of the local status symbols to be seen dining here, and the dearth of a substantial meal is often explained this way: “This is how they serve food in New York.”
“You mean so tiny?”
“Right. Out here we’re raised on meat and potatoes and apple pie. We’re used to stuffing ourselves. But this is how people eat in the big cities.”
I’ve heard this conversation, in various formations, for the five years the Cotillion has been open. If somebody dining here ever said, “You know, for what you get, this food is overpriced,” the roof would collapse.
While I waited for Eve Mainwaring, I chomped on some bread-sticks I’d swiped from the deserted table behind me. One of the waiters caught me. Instead of anger he flashed me the worst look of all, pity.
