by Ed Gorman
“Who set the fire?”
“I think you’ve figured it out already.”
“I’m asking you again, who set the fire?”
He shrugged. He’d put on some weight. His uniform shirt revealed a small belly and a collar that was too tight. “Davenport and Raines.”
“And Lou personally called you about doctoring the fire report?”
“Yeah. Lou and I were friends. It really got to me when somebody killed him. And now Davenport’s dead.” He dragged on his smoke. “Somebody’s paying us back for Karen being killed.”
“We need to stop them.”
“Maybe it’s better. Maybe that’s what we’ve got coming.”
“Maybe so. But that’s not for you to decide. That’s what we’ve got courts for. And by the way, Lynn Shanlon seems to be missing.”
He eased off the stool. I took two steps back. He still had a gun, and he still had a reason to try and escape. “I was thinking she was the one who killed the two of them. She has the biggest stake in all this. If Karen had been my own sister, I’d go after everybody involved.”
“I need to take you in now.”
“I figured.”
“The first thing is, you have to hand your .45 over to me.”
He touched the holster. “I’ve had this since Korea. Killed two Chinks with it on the same day. My old man always told me how good it felt to kill somebody. But he was a bullshitter. At least I didn’t feel good about it. I didn’t feel anything. I was just doing my job. I didn’t even talk about it with my soldiers. When they killed somebody, you never heard the end of it. But I was quite a bit older than they were. Maybe it would’ve felt good to me if I’d been their age.”
All the time he talked I watched his gun hand. Maybe he was using his words to snake charm me into carelessness. I start watching him instead of watching his gun hand.…
He did it in the same kind of swift motion as when he’d pointed it at me. He handed it over without any kind of ceremony. He just laid it across my open palm.
“I’d like to talk to my wife.”
“Fine.”
We didn’t talk now. He went first out the garage door and into the staggering heat. The back of my shirt was swimming-hole wet and my armpits were heavy with water. He walked to the back door. He didn’t look back. He went inside.
I walked up to where Nina was still working on the car. She was hunched down, scrubbing the front left tire. She dipped a wiry brush into a soapy bucket of water.
“You find him, Mr. McCain?”
“Yeah.”
“He talk to you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“He in trouble?”
“The Grand Inquisitor.”
She grinned. “Dostoyevsky. I read that last year. The Brothers Karamazov is one of my favorite novels.”
She stood up. Bones making a cracking sound. “I must be getting old.” The grin again.
Then we heard the scream.
“My mom,” she said and flung her brush into the soapy water of the bucket. “I need to see what’s wrong.”
Her mother had been told the truth; that was the problem. Her husband would most likely be going to prison. The family would be disgraced. And what about finances? Mrs. DePaul had to be thinking about that, too, with Nina soon to be starting college.
Nina ran alongside the house, half-crashed through the backyard gate, and disappeared. There was no other scream, but there was plenty of sobbing. Mrs. DePaul sounded as if she was on the verge of insanity. The wailing was stark and inappropriate in this expensive housing development. This was the kind of wailing you heard in Negro ghettos and in poor white neighborhoods, where mothers worn down by years of terrible news about mates and children reached some kind of end game and broke down entirely, unable to handle even one more call from the police or crawl their way one more time to identify one more body in the morgue.
In the midst of the wailing, DePaul appeared in the backyard gate. He closed it behind him just before he started walking toward me. He’d changed clothes. In his white shirt and blue trousers and tasseled black loafers he walked with the military stride I’d seen so often. Some of his self-confidence was back.
“My attorney says I should drive myself to the police station and not talk to you at all any more.”
“I’m an officer of the court, DePaul. If you don’t want to talk to me, that’s fine. Your lawyer’s right. But I want to deliver you personally to the police station.”
“You must want your picture in the paper.” It might have been a joke, but I knew better. His wife whooped again. He cringed. His eyes roved to the house. “I wish she was tougher.”
“I’m assuming you told her.”
He looked at me again. “That’s what I get for telling her the truth, I guess. All through the years, I’ve kept bad news away from her as much as I could. She just goes all to hell. She’s a nervous type anyway.” He took his cigarettes from his shirt pocket. “You’re not thinking of handcuffing me or anything, are you? Because if you are, you’re going to find yourself in a fight.”
“That’d probably cheer your wife up, seeing you and me trying to punch each other out.”
“Goddammit, McCain, at least let me have a little dignity. I don’t want people in town to see me in handcuffs.”
The wailing was loud again now. It had that lonely sound of wolves on winter nights.
“You’re getting worked up for nothing, DePaul. You brought up handcuffs, I didn’t. I don’t even have any handcuffs.” He was letting paranoia take him. He was worried about his dignity. Even in a small city jail like Cliffie’s, the cell would take his dignity away in a way he’d never experienced before.
“C’mon, McCain. Let’s get out of here before Nina comes back. I couldn’t face her now. Later—but not now.”
I’d just backed to the end of the driveway when Nina opened the front door and watched us leave. She didn’t wave or call out. She just watched. Once we were in the street and ready to head downtown, I waved to her. She didn’t wave back. DePaul kept his head down, pretending not to see her.
“You can look up now, DePaul. We’re a block past your house.”
“My wife’ll hate me the rest of her life.”
“Maybe not. You can’t judge her right after you’ve told her what you’ve done. Even if you didn’t mention going to prison, she can figure it out for herself.”
“The same with Nina, Nina’ll probably hate me the rest of her life too.”
He just might have been right in that particular judgment. Nina just might hate him all her life. She just well might.
24
CLIFFORD SYKES, JR. SAT ON THE EDGE OF HIS DESK AS I TOLD him everything I knew about David Raines and Ralph DePaul. I detected a certain pleasure in his eyes when I was talking about Raines. Raines had never made his contempt for “the hillbilly” a secret. But the pleasure became sadness when I told him about his friend DePaul. His jaw muscle worked and he smoked in a chain.
We’d been at it for half an hour. He’d told Marjorie he wouldn’t be taking any calls, and he yelled at anybody foolish enough to knock on his door.
“Lou and Ralph. They were my friends.”
He slid off the desk and rubbed his butt. Apparently it had gone to sleep. Then he walked behind his desk and sat down. The news had shocked him into humility. He hadn’t yet called me a shithead or an asswipe, two of his more recent names for me. But then I hadn’t insulted him either.
“Lou helped build this town. He employed a hell of a lot of people and he was always behind making things better. He had that foundation and it donated a lot of money. Hell, Lou built that swimming pool for those colored kids just last year.” He was talking to himself. He was still trying to convince himself that this was real. “And poor Ralph’s wife. She’s real high-strung and she’s had a lot of health problems. This sure won’t be good for her. This is the kind of thing that can kill people.” I remembered her scream as I stood on the DePaul drive ea
rlier. The terrible grief of it. “Him and that damned gambling. I warned him about it. He used to sneak off to the Quad Cities. Friend of mine spotted him over there several times. I brought it up to Ralph, and he promised me he wouldn’t do it any more. He lied. And he just got in deeper.”
He leaned back in his chair. He chewed on the inside of his cheek, and then he said: “If all this is true, McCain—and it probably is—that still leaves us with two murders.” Despite the air conditioning, his tan khaki shirt was spotted with sweat. “Somebody who wanted to pay them back for being involved in that fire.”
“That’s how I read it.”
“You got any ideas?”
I swallowed a smile. I imagined Judge Whitney’s face when I told her that he’d actually asked my opinion. The old judge would have ordered up a bottle of the best. The new judge would just sip her ginger ale.
I lied, because I felt as if I’d done all the work so far and I wanted to finish it off myself. “Not really. Just possibilities.”
“What kind of possibilities?”
“Just ideas that I still need to think through.”
The way he looked at me, I knew he would soon be calling me names again. “You’re hiding something.”
“I’m really not, Chief. I just need time to think my ideas through.”
“That’s the trouble with you, McCain. All talk and no action.”
Let’s see, I’d brought him Raines and DePaul while he’d brought nobody. Most of the time I would have defended myself, but now all I wanted was to leave. “I’m just trying to take my time with things.”
“What’ll they do to Ralph?”
“If he cooperates right now, that’ll help. Hell, Chief, your cousin’s the district attorney. You can put in a good word for Ralph.”
“Yeah, he’s my cousin all right, but we had this family reunion out to the park last weekend and I guess I kind of called him a cheat. You know, at cards? I had a few too many beers, I’ll admit that, and he was whopping me every hand, so I shot my mouth off. My wife, she made me call him the next day and apologize. The jerk.”
“He wouldn’t accept your apology?”
“He called me a clown.”
“That’s too bad.”
“‘Clown’ is worse than ‘cheat,’ isn’t it?” But he didn’t wait for an answer. “I guess I can always ask my dad to talk to him about Ralph. He’s scared of Dad just like everybody else.”
He was so damned dopey, I sort of liked him for a fleeting moment. I used his funk to say, “I need to be going, Chief.”
He waved me off. “I suppose Raines’ll bring in some hotshot from Chicago for his lawyer.”
“Probably.”
And then he brought me back to reality. He smiled like a plump idiot baby and said, “Nobody’d want some dipshit lawyer like you, that’s for sure.”
All the way down the hall, as I headed for the front door, I could hear him laughing.
As soon as I opened the outer door to my office, I heard their voices. Jamie and Wendy. I got myself a Pepsi from the machine I shared with the store up front and then strolled into my office. I say strolled because the heat had started to slow me down considerably. I didn’t mind the moisture in my shorts all that much, but the sweat on the bottoms of my feet bothered me. I felt as if I was walking on sponges.
I walked over and kissed Wendy on the top of her head; then I went to my desk, dropped into my chair, and let the rumbling window air conditioner work its noisy miracle. I rolled the Pepsi bottle back and forth over my forehead.
“You look tired, Mr. C.”
All I could manage was a grunt in response.
“Jamie and I were just saying you work too hard.”
Another grunt.
“That’s why I stopped in, Sam. How about grilling some shrimp and eating some potato salad I made? That’s my specialty. Then a relaxing evening on my veranda, where it’s cool as soon as the sun starts to go down.”
“He’ll never be able to say no to that, Mrs. Bennett.”
“Oh, you never know about Sam, Jamie. He might tell me that he’s too busy.”
“But Mr. C needs some time off and this sounds really good.”
“You and I know it sounds good, but does he know it sounds good?” Wendy looked like a coed in a light-blue blouse, dark-blue culottes, and white tennis shoes.
“I wouldn’t miss it. Thank you very much for the invitation.”
“See,” Jamie said. “I told you.”
An odd smile broke wide on Wendy’s face. “Tell him your news, Jamie.”
“What news?” The artificial air was beginning to chase the sweat from me.
“You know when I asked you for an advance?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, I started thinking about what you said. And then I started thinking about all the money I’ve already given Turk, Mr. C. And you know what I came up with?”
“No. What?”
“I decided to tell him that I wouldn’t loan him any more money because I was broke myself, always borrowing ahead and everything. And even when he started yelling at me, I didn’t change my mind. I did it just the way Mrs. Bennett told me to.”
“Wendy told you to do it?”
“Yes, Mr. C. We just started talking while we were waiting for you, and I was telling her about Turk and everything, and she said that if he really loved me, he’d get a job and not keep asking me for money. A surfer band from Iowa kind’ve confused her, too, I think. Anyway, she told me just what to say and that’s what I did.” She smiled at Wendy. “It was kind of funny, she was coaching me while I was talking. I had a hard time not laughing.”
“I’m very proud of both of you.”
“And, oh yeah, William Hughes called. He said he’d call you back.”
“Didn’t say what he wanted, though?”
“Huh-uh. He said he was in Cedar Rapids and would call when he got back.”
I sat up straight, set the Pepsi bottle on the desk and said, “How long ago did he call?”
“About two hours ago, I guess.”
Two hours would have given him plenty of time to drive back from Cedar Rapids. I reached in the drawer and retrieved the phone book. Lou Bennett wasn’t listed. But then why would he be? All rich men in small cities are, fairly or unfairly, resented by a share of the populace. Having your number listed would be asking for nuisance calls of all kinds.
Then I realized that the heat really had slowed my thought process. Sitting across from me, and looking quite plucky for all the heat, was Linda Raines’s sister-in-law.
“I’m assuming you know the number of the Bennett estate?”
“Sure.”
I wrote it down as she gave it to me, and then I picked up the receiver and dialed.
The voice I heard on the other end was strained, tight. “This is the Bennett residence.”
“Who’s speaking, please?”
“This is the maid.”
“This is Sam McCain. Is Linda there?”
There was a long pause. “She can’t come to the phone right now. I’m sorry, Mr. McCain.”
“Then how about William Hughes? Is he around?”
Even though I didn’t hear another voice, I pictured somebody coaching her, the way Wendy had coached Jamie. “I’m afraid he’s busy, too.” She paused, and then like an actor who’d suddenly remembered her line she said: “They’re working on plans for the funeral.”
“I see.”
The temptation was to ask if everything was all right, but obviously it wasn’t all right; and if I asked it, I’d only be putting her in more difficulty. “Would you please ask one of them to call me at my office?”
“Yes, of course. Good-bye now.”
“Don’t you want my number?”
This time I did hear another voice. An angry director not happy with how his ingénue was performing.
“Oh, yes, Mr. McCain. I’m sorry. Of course I want your number. What is it, please?”
I gave i
t to her, but I doubted she wrote it down.
“Please have them call me. It’s important.”
“I will. Good-bye, Mr. McCain.”
After I hung up, I sat there sorting through everything I’d just heard. Something was wrong out at the Bennetts’. Maybe it was just an angry family argument. Maybe Linda and Hughes were going at each other. That’s not uncommon following a death. Old grudges are aired and bitterness thrives. I had a client once who wanted me to sue her sister for belting her in the eye. They’d argued over who had really been their dead daddy’s favorite. I finally talked her out of the suit but lost her as a client.
“What’s wrong, Sam?”
“I’m not sure. The maid sounded as if there was some kind of trouble there. I think somebody was telling her what to say.”
“Linda’s probably hysterical with David in jail. She can be hell on wheels when she’s upset.”
“I like that,” Jamie said, “hell on wheels.”
“By the way, Sam, hell on wheels reminds me. Tomorrow night Cartwright is going to try again. He couldn’t get all those Beatles records burned, so now he’s going to stand on that little bluff out at the lake and throw them into the river.”
I wished I had time to enjoy the image of Cartwright firing the Satan-spawned records into the dark waters, but that would have to wait. The Pepsi and the air conditioning had helped revive me, but not enough for the trip I needed to make now.
“I need to go down the hall.” Jamie knew what I meant. She always said “little girls’ room,” so I decided to euphemize my own duties.
Wendy looked confused.
“He means the little boys’ room,” Jamie said.
“Thank you, Jamie.”
“You’re welcome, Mr. C.”
Wendy found this amusing. She looked even better when she was laughing.
In the john, I took off my shirt and proceeded to the tiny sink. I ran cold water, grabbed three paper towels, and started washing my upper body. Then I stuck my head under the faucet and began scooping cold water on my head. Two doors down, I could get a cup of atomic coffee. It didn’t taste very good, but one cup could keep you awake for as long as a month.
