by Ed Gorman
2
“YOU DON’T PUT SALT IN YOUR BEER ANYMORE, HUH?”
“No, I read this article about salt intake.”
Kenny Thibodeau, our town’s soft-core pornographer and writer of tall tales for men’s magazines, looked across the table and smiled. “I don’t have to tell you about ‘articles,’ do I?”
“This one’s legit, Kenny. By a doctor.”
“I’m a doctor.”
“Yeah, of ‘sexology.’”
When not writing books with titles such as Satan’s Sisters and Pagan Lesbians, or “true” articles such as “Hitler’s Love Maidens” and “The Wild Rampage of the Sex-Crazed Pirate Women!” Kenny writes a sex advice column under the name Dr. William Ambrose, “PhD and renowned Sexologist.” He cribs all his material from the Playboy Sex Advice column. His real name appears on none of this material. He’s saving that for the serious novels I know he has in him, though I’m not sure he himself knows that anymore. There’s one more reason for the pen names. J. Edgar Hoover and politically ambitious DAs across the country have been trying to send soft-core editors and writers to prison. Two publishers were already serving time. Their number-one target is comedian Lenny Bruce, of course. He was recently sentenced to jail again.
“So what happened at the demonstration tonight? I’d have been there except Sue had a doctor’s appointment in Iowa City and her car’s in the garage. I had to give her a ride.”
In high school Kenny’s idols were Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. He was messianic about the entire Beat movement. I was his only convert. I even subscribed to the Evergreen Review, which was the bible of the movement. One summer Kenny drove to the Beat Mecca, San Francisco, where he spent three days running in City Lights Bookstore. This was where he also met the soft-core publisher who convinced him he could make a reasonable living writing the stuff. Until two years ago Kenny still wore the uniform: the goatee, the dark clothes, the hipster talk. Then he met Sue and she changed him, which explained the short hair, blue button-down shirt, and chinos he was wearing tonight.
“Bennett really flipped out, huh?”
I described what happened. Including the angry appearance of Linda Raines.
“Yeah. She gives bitches a bad name.” He stood up. “Have to hit the can.”
I gave myself over to the pleasures of Nealy’s, the front part of which used to be a drugstore and the back half of which is a tavern. The east wall in the front still has the old glassed-in wooden cabinetry used for the pharmacy. There’s a soda fountain across from it where four or five generations of blue-collar boys and girls made each other happy and broke each other’s hearts.
You’ll find the town’s two finest pinball machines here, as well as a pretty good shuffleboard table. There are booths along one wall where you can bring the plump roast beef sandwiches—their only menu item—and relax. It’s a workingman’s place, so country music fights rock for dominance on the jukebox and three blackboards chart the betting on various baseball, football, and basketball games. When Cassius Clay came on the scene, they started betting on boxing, too.
After Jane Sykes decided to go back to the husband she’d divorced, I sort of took up residence here. One night I even got belligerent and got into a fistfight out on the sidewalk in back. Since I’d started it, I was on an informal probation here for two weeks. It was like being back in Catholic school after you got caught dropping a water balloon out of the second-story window. I apologized to the guy and we were now friendly if not friends, though I still wince when I see him. Not the finest entry on the biographical sheet.
Kenny returned bearing two glasses of beer. He stretched out in the booth. “What a family. Bennett and all his military bullshit and Linda acting like Scarlett O’Hara and the kid—Bryce—I had some hope for him, though. I’d see him at the library a lot when he was in high school.”
“I thought he was a football player.”
“Just because you don’t like sports, you think everybody who plays is an idiot.” Kenny loved football games.
“You’re right. That was a stupid thing to say.”
“God, I must’ve caught you on an off night.”
“Nah. I’m just worried about my dad. I was just being sanctimonious because I’m in a bad mood, I guess.”
“I need to pick up Sue pretty soon here. Maybe you should stop by and see your folks.”
Gloom tends to paralyze me. I can sit and brood for long angry hours. Between the ruined peace rally and my mom’s whispers over the phone this afternoon, I felt alone and useless. Kenny’s suggestion got me going again.
“Thanks for saying that.”
“Saying what?”
“To go see my folks.”
“Yeah, that was a pretty brilliant idea if I say so myself.”
“Make a joke, asshole. It’s what I needed to hear.”
He pushed out of the booth and stood up. “I’m going to start charging you for these ideas I have.” Then he was gone.
There was a time when my mother was eager to tell my father which TV show she wanted to watch. And he was just as eager to tell her which show he preferred. As near as I could figure, they pretty much split even on their respective TV choices.
But now as they sat in the living room, I saw they were watching a Western show called Laredo, which meant that my mother would not be seeing Bewitched, which was on at the same time. She wanted the shrunken man next to her on the couch to see whatever he wanted. Though neither of us ever said it out loud, my mother and I knew that my father’s heart condition would take his life any time now. Of course the doctors had told him three different times over the past four years that he was about to die. But this time it felt different. It felt scary.
I’d come in the back door and stood in the darkness of the dining room just watching them sit there together. She had his hand in her lap. She’d told me a few days ago that she spent most of her time thinking back over their lives. How they’d grown up in the Hills and how they’d gone dancing every weekend and won prizes they were so good, and how my father doted on the three of us kids and stood crying outside our bedrooms the night he got his draft notice five weeks after Pearl Harbor. She said he wasn’t worried about dying; he was worried that something would happen to us while he was gone. And then after the war getting a job so good at the plant that they were able to buy a modest house in a respectable neighborhood and live out at least a few of those American dreams the politicians were always bragging about. The most devout dream of all in Black River Falls was to escape the poverty of the Hills.
He’d lost nearly twenty-five pounds and he’d never been a big man anyway, a scrappy Irisher whose two favorite pastimes were bowling and reading Westerns. Watching him now, how even the slightest move either caused him to gasp or wince, I was afraid I was going to cry. I was a child again facing the unthinkable. I’d come here after seeing Lou Bennett fall apart. I suppose I wanted to reassure myself that my own dad was all right.
When I walked into the room, my mom smiled. In the flashing colors from the TV screen I was able to see my father’s face clearly now. He was asleep. My mom put a finger to her lips. I sat down next to my dad and slid my arm around him. Part of the time I watched the screen, though none of the frantic storyline registered. But mostly I looked at my dad, the TV beam tinting his bald pate, the white werewolf hair sprouting from his ear and the scents of him I’d known since my earliest days. I remembered him when he came home from the war. I’d never felt more loved or doted on, nor had my sister or brother. We were a family again. The years the war had put on my mother vanished. She was a young woman again.
I started fighting tears then, couldn’t help it. The old Verlaine line always came back to me like a bitter plea: Why are we born to suffer and die? There was no explanation for life, let alone for death.
I reached across the back of my father and took my mother’s hand. She nodded. She’d given up her own reluctance to cry. Her eyes gleamed.
I left to the
sounds of a gunfight and then horses riding fast out of town.
3
“I GET REAL NERVOUS.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You know, maybe this time they won’t get together at all.”
“Umm-hmm.”
“Turk says my breasts aren’t as big as hers.”
That got my attention. Mention of Turk always gets my attention.
“He told you that?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did you slap him?”
“No. It kind of hurt my feelings, but then Turk always says he’s just being honest when he says stuff like that.”
Well, I thought, then maybe it’s time I laid a little truth on Turk.
Jamie Newton became my secretary in a version of a slave auction. I’d represented her father in a boundary dispute. It was a long shot and we lost. He couldn’t afford to pay me, so he gave me his teenaged daughter as a part-time secretary. She was quite a looker. She could have modeled for half of those paperback covers depicting ripe young teenage girls who used their jailbait wiles to seduce men into killing people for them. But that was only how she looked. She was actually sweet and considerate. The problem was that she was also sort of dumb. She couldn’t type, file, or take telephone messages with any precision. Twice a day I want to fire her, but I know that she would never understand. All her life, people have told her how stupid she is. Firing her would only confirm her worst fears. She now worked full-time for me.
“Maybe you should be honest with him sometime.”
My office is about the size of two prison cells. It’s furnished with two desks and two chairs I bought over the years at county condemnation sales. There are two filing cabinets that I bought at Sears and a bookcase that I’d had growing up. Since our desks faced each other, Jamie didn’t have any trouble watching me.
“I wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings. Plus I really can’t think of anything wrong with him.” Those gentle blue eyes stayed on mine. “You look mad or something, Mr. C.”
“I’m just thinking he shouldn’t talk to you that way.”
“But he’s going to be famous someday. With his band. I’ll be sitting home in front of the TV and there he’ll be on Dick Clark. The Surfer Bums. It’s such a great name. That’s why we go to all those beach movies at the drive-in. So he can learn how to dress like a surfer and stuff.” Then: “But he always laughs at me because I get so scared. You know, when Frankie and Annette have all their fights I worry that they’ll never get back together.”
Oh, Jamie, goddammit. You could do so much better than that asshole.
“And I like Annette so much that when he says her breasts are bigger than mine it doesn’t really bother me that much, Mr. C.”
The “Mr. C,” by the way, comes from the Perry Como TV show. She thought it was pretty cool how all the people on the show addressed Como that way. No, my name doesn’t start with a “C,” but that’s a minor detail to Jamie.
“Are you still giving him money?”
She blushed. “Well, he needs to buy surfer clothes. He has to go to Cedar Rapids to buy them. Things’re expensive there.” She’d asked me to advance her money a few times, which I’d been happy to do until she told me what it was for.
“He could always get a job.”
“But then when would he practice?”
“At night.”
“Well, he’s pretty sure he’ll be getting a record contract one of these days. Then he’ll pay me back. And he looks so cool when he dresses like the Beach Boys.”
“That’s another problem, Jamie. The surfer thing. He’s from Iowa. We don’t have many oceans here.”
The phone rang. There’s a black one on her desk and a black one on mine. She smiled like a child about to do something to impress a parent. She lifted the receiver, put it to her ear and said, “Law office.” Then she cringed and made a face. “The McCain law office.” She gave me one of her embarrassed heartbreaking smiles by way of apology and waggled the phone at me. She hadn’t asked the caller’s name or the reason for calling, but at least I didn’t have to worry about her forgetting to write down the information. I was here to write it down myself.
“This is Sam McCain.”
“Where the hell are you, Sam?” Kenny Thibodeau said.
“What’re you talking about?”
“Bennett. Somebody killed him last night. I’m out here now. I left a message with Jamie and—” Pause. “She must’ve forgotten.”
“I’m on my way.”
Jamie had begun typing with two fingers. When she’d started, she’d only used one. I’m pretty sure that’s what they mean by progress.
Police Chief Clifford Sykes, Jr. once told a newspaper reporter that “fingerprints weren’t all that useful when you come right down to it.” He said that because he and a pair of his crack deputies had failed to dust for prints before letting the press and the neighbors walk all over a crime scene. Cliffie could not conduct a single investigation without destroying evidence. While that was bad for jurisprudence, it was great for Judge Whitney, whose family power had been ripped away by Clifford Sykes, Sr. She was always glad to see the Sykes clan humiliate and debase themselves.
The Bennett estate was one of those places people liked to drive by just for a look and a daydream. The three-story manor house and the white-fenced fiercely green pasture where their prize horses ran were something out of a painting of old Kentucky when slaves knew their place and the master walked the grounds with a riding crop in one hand and a long-barreled Navy revolver in the other.
The drive was filled with three police cars, an ambulance, and the yellow Caddy convertible of the county medical examiner, who went by the name of Harry Sykes, if that last name tells you anything.
Kenny’s black Harley was parked next to the gated entrance. I pulled off the gravel road, parked, and walked up to him. It was just now nine thirty and the temperature was eighty-four.
“I see Jamie came through for you again, huh? She forgot to tell you I called.”
“Isn’t her fault. She’s having trouble with Turk.”
“Yeah, I shouldn’t have said that. Jamie’s my buddy.”
“She needs to lose him. Fast.” I nodded to the estate. “What happened?”
“Your friend Molly was here and got the basic details and headed back to write it for the paper. I guess Linda got up this morning and couldn’t find her old man in the house. She said that he walked the grounds at night when he couldn’t sleep, but when she went looking for him she found him out on the far side of the pavilion. Somebody’d stabbed him twice in the neck and once in the back.”
“She say anything about suspects?”
“No. And neither did William Hughes. He was headed into town. He said what Linda did, that the old man liked to walk the grounds at night. He looked shook up. I’ve never seen him like that.”
Bennett had served in two wars, the big one as well as Korea. As a captain during the Inchon landing, one of the most decisive battles of the Korean conflict, he’d saved the wounded William Hughes’s life by dragging him to safety and being shot twice in the chest while doing it. Hughes became Bennett’s assistant after the war. The man ran his errands, drove for him when Bennett didn’t want to slide behind the wheel, and served as an informal secretary. Bennett was known to pay Hughes very well and treat him respectfully, which was surprising because there were few others he treated that way. It was especially surprising because Hughes was a Negro.
“He said Cliffie’s decided that Doran killed him. I guess they had some kind of run-in last night.”
“I know they did, Kenny. I was there.”
“No, I mean afterward. In front of the Royale. After Bennett left the hospital he seemed a lot calmer. Then he went to the bar in the Royale and had some drinks. When he came out he saw Doran across the street. He ran over there and they got into an argument and Bennett punched him.”
I kept thinking of Lou Bennett coming apart over his son last night at the pea
ce rally. Then I thought about how bad this looked for Doran.
As Kenny talked, I watched one of Cliffie’s deputies walking down the long drive toward us. This was Bill Tomlin. He was no genius, but at least he knew that fingerprints mattered.
He walked up to us and said, “Morning, men.” He was all khaki and campaign hat, playing his part in Cliffie’s Western fantasy. Pancho Villa would be swooping down on us very soon now. “I’m kind of embarrassed about this—I mean you’re standing on public land—but the chief wants you both to leave.”
“What the hell, Bill,” I said. “Public land, like you said. He can’t make us move.”
He had a moon face and a moon belly. His armpits and parts of his sleeves were dark with sweat. He glanced over his shoulder as if allknowing Cliffie might be listening. “You know how it is. He ain’t got a real good track record with you. With murders and everything. You and the judge are always right and he’s always wrong. I guess it makes him nervous that you’re anywhere in the vicinity.”
“Tell Cliffie for me he’s a moron,” Kenny said.
Tomlin smiled. “I’ll let you tell him that yourself.”
“Aw, forget it, Kenny. C’mon. I’ve got work to do, and so do you.”
“I’d appreciate it, McCain,” Tomlin said.
“But do me a favor, Bill.”
“Sure, McCain.”
“Tell him to go to hell.”
4
SHE HADN’T LOST HER TOUCH WITH THE RUBBER BANDS. EVER since she’d hired me, Judge Esme Anne Whitney would sit on the edge of her desk and fire them at me. Up until a few years ago, she would have been partaking of brandy while she did this; but a trip to a Minnesota clinic where alcoholics were treated had taught her—despite all her noisy bitter initial objections to the truth—that she was an alcoholic and had to give up drinking completely.
This morning she wore a tan linen suit, yellow blouse, tan hose, and brown pumps. The imperious and finely wrought beauty was remarkably intact, the short silver hair only adding to the appeal. And the other important things were intact, too—her endless self-regard, her impatience, and her judgment that at sixty-some years of age, who knew how to run the world better than she did?
