by Ed Gorman
“He can’t make me say anything I don’t want to say.”
“He can try.”
“He’s such an idiot.”
“You can be an idiot when your old man runs the town,” I said.
“That’s why I like Iowa City so much better.
You have a lot more privacy. And they wouldn’t put up with Cliffie for thirty seconds. And it’s a lot more sophisticated. I see a lot of foreign movies there. I never thought I could get used to the subtitles but I have.”
I sensed she was going to tell me whatever she’d hinted at back on the patio. But she was going to work up to it.
She said, “You know he left me.”
“I heard that, yes. I’m sorry.”
“Something happened to me and as much as I hate to say it, I guess I can’t really blame him for leaving.” She hesitated. “He just couldn’t handle it is all.”
“Sounds like you’re taking all the blame for whatever happened.”
“Oh, it isn’t blame so much as … just being real about it.”
Then we didn’t talk for some time. I headed back to town. The river was nice this time of night, speeding down the long, narrow asphalt with the moonlight on the dark water and campfires on the far shore up near the bend. A Piper Cub glided above the birch trees.
“Did you hear that I’d been sick?” she said.
“No, I hadn’t. What was wrong?”
“Oh, you know, a woman thing.”
“Are you all right now?”
“Well, the doctors think everything is going well.” She tried to smile but it didn’t quite work and the sadness was back on her face. “And I pray a lot. I pray all the time.” Then, “I don’t want to—let me put it another way. I’d like to make out with you tonight, Sam. But I can’t. I hope you won’t get mad.”
“I’ll try and control that psychotic temper of mine.”
She reached out and put her hand on my shoulder.
“I’m having a hard time with some—things—Sam.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t feel very … female these days.
Do you know much about breast cancer?”
And then all her comments made sense. Same thing had happened to an aunt of mine.
“A little, I guess.”
“Well, I didn’t feel very female after the operation. And when my husband saw me—undressed me the first time—it wasn’t his fault, but I could see how repelled he was and—and I was repelled, too. Every time I’d look in the mirror. They had to take my right breast.”
She didn’t cry. She simply looked out at a passenger train snaking, its lighted window like the glowing skin of a rattler, across the Midwest midnight.
“Right now, Sam, I just couldn’t handle making out.”
Four
“So you have no idea how it got there?”
“God, Sam, how many times do I have to tell you? I don’t have any idea at all.”
“And you weren’t out there last night?”
“No. Not even close.”
“And you can prove that?”
David Egan said, “I can prove it but I’d rather not.”
I sat on the edge of my desk and lighted a Lucky. He put his hand out. I pitched him the pack.
He said, “All I’ve got is the habit, Sam. I’ll need a match, too.”
I’d been planning to go to Iowa City for the Hawkeye game that day. But not now. Not with the events of last night. I’d have to send Dad and Mom on alone.
David Egan was the local heartbreaker.
Even my part-time secretary, Jamie—who was so in love with her boyfriend, Turk, that she wore two of his rings, both suitably stuffed with pink angora, one on her wedding finger, the other on a chain around her neck—her cheeks flushed, and she dithered even more than usual when Egan was around.
She claimed Egan looked just like Tony Curtis—which came as news to me and, I assumed, would come as news to Tony. Egan had been raised by two maiden aunts after his drunken father rambled west and got himself killed under mysterious circumstances and his mother died young of heart disease. There were two distinct David Egans. Now that he was in trouble, he was the humble Egan. But there was a harsh side, too, the self-pitying side that always let you know how tough his life had been and implied it should be your turn to have a little of his hard luck. This only seemed to attract the girls, who foolishly thought they could use maternal skills to take away his bitterness. He was a heartbreaker and proud of it.
He was also an obsessive drag racer and that was how I knew him. I’d had to represent him in court several times because his souped-up black Mercury just dragged him into trouble again and again.
“We’ve got two things we need to clarify before Cliffie finds you,” I said
to Egan.
Cliffie had gone looking for Egan last night. But Egan had gotten the word first and hidden out in the abandoned grade school. He called me around dawn. It was now nearly 9 A.M.
“I could really use some breakfast,” he said, the way any seventeen-year-old kid would. And then he made a rasping sound that quickly became a wheeze. His asthma. The one flaw in the portrait of the teenage rebel as seen on drive-in screens throughout the land. The one flaw that marred the snapshot of this particular seventeen-year-old in his James Dean red nylon jacket, white T-shirt, and jeans was the fact that he was about to be charged with murder.
He fought his asthma a few minutes.
“I could use some breakfast myself, David.
But right now we’ll have to make do with this really shitty coffee I made. Then we’re going over to Cliffie’s and you’re going to turn yourself in.”
“You sure about this, McCain?”
“Positive. But now I want to know about Sara Griffin.”
He shrugged. “Then I’ll need another cigarette.”
I tossed the pack back.
“First of all, what were you and Sara Griffin arguing about yesterday?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“Then go get another lawyer.”
“Hey, man, what bug crawled up your ass?”
“You don’t help me, David, there’s no way I can help you. We’re just wasting each other’s time.”
“Shit,” he said and stared down at his hands.
Without looking up, he said, “All my life I’ve been screwed.”
“No time for your self-pity, David.
Answer my question. What were you arguing about last night?”
“I asked her to marry me and she said no.”
Well, well. People had said crazier things to me but at the moment, I couldn’t think of any. The daughter of one of the richest families in town and David Egan, seventeen-year-old
high-school dropout, asks her to marry him.
“Did you slap her?”
“No. I just—I sort of brushed her. I pulled back at the last minute. I
really did.”
“What was your relationship with her?”
“I am—was—in love with her.”
“Were you intimate?”
“You mean did I sleep with her?”
“Yes, did you sleep with her?”
“No. There was … somebody else.”
“Who?”
He scowled. “I never knew.”
I hesitated, making sure I could make myself be understood without sounding harsh. “She was beautiful and she was rich and she was seventeen. Why did you think she might say yes when you asked her to marry you?”
A smirk. “That isn’t what you want to say, man. You want to say why was I dumb enough to fall in love with somebody out of my class.”
“All right. If that’s the way you want to put it.”
He paused, stared down at his hands again. “I don’t know how to say this exactly. I—she—when I was with her I felt … special. I didn’t feel like some punk who hung around with a bunch of simps from the Knolls. I was part of her world. They have a maid, man. And three cars. A
nd their house—hell, it’s a mansion—it’s so big I used to get lost walking around in it. I was somebody when I was there. I don’t know how else to say it. There wasn’t any other girl who made me feel that way.”
“What was wrong with Rita?”
“Her old man owns some horse stable. Big deal.”
“How about Molly?”
He shrugged. “Molly—she’s like me. She wants to improve herself. Step up the ladder, so to speak. I think that’s cool. But it doesn’t help me. I need somebody who’s already there.
Somebody with a maid and three cars in the garage.”
I walked over and got myself some more coffee.
“That’s number one. You were arguing because Sara rejected you. Now number two. Where were you last night?” I went back to my perch on the desk.
“I can’t tell you who I was with.”
“Why not?”
“Because I gave my word.”
“I need to know, David. And right now.”
“I can’t, McCain. I really can’t.”
“Why wouldn’t this person want to help you?”
“Because,” he said, “she’s married.”
“Great, David,” I said, “just great.”
Five
I had just locked the outside door to my office when I heard a young woman’s voice say, “Oh, God, David, there you are!”
By the time I reached my ragtop, sleek, copper-haired Molly Blessing was in David’s arms, sobbing joyfully into his neck.
Before meeting up with Sara Griffin, David had spent his youth going back and forth between Molly and Rita Scully. Most people found it pretty funny, the way he’d drop one and go back to the other. But a few, me among them, found it more sad than comic.
Molly Blessing was the daughter of the town’s most successful barber. Her dad cuts my hair.
I’ve known her since she was four and used to help her dad sweep up all the hair. She’d told me once that she’d been in love with David since kindergarten. Her parents had never approved. David wasn’t exactly what middle-class parents wanted in the way of son-in-law material.
Molly’s rival, Rita, came from the Knolls, was pretty in a striking jet-haired, green-eyed way, but was neither as refined nor as subtle as Molly. When she and David battled, which was frequently, they often battled with fists. Rita once gave him a black eye, which was an accomplishment for a girl who barely cleared five-one and one hundred pounds.
If there was a pattern in all the breakups and makeups, I couldn’t find it. David would be with one of them for two or three months and then go back to the other. Then he’d start running around, grabbing every girl he could. Then he’d go back to either Molly or Rita. It had to be a rough way to live.
None of this inspired a great relationship between the two girls. Their own battles were frequent and clamorous enough to feed the gossip machine for weeks at a time. They’d never gotten into a fist fight —Molly was as delicate as a long-stemmed glass—but other than that it was no holds barred.
Windshield smashed. Tires stabbed flat.
Insults. Threats. Dirty names on
telephone booths and building walls all over town. Molly’s father once got a
restraining order against Rita. And Rita’s father threatened to punch out Molly’s father if his daughter ever again wrote “Slut!” on the family’s 1951 Hudson, a bathtub-shaped vehicle that needed no help in disgracing itself.
And on and on, each girl as creatively petty as her rival—the grief, humiliation, rage extending from grade school all the way through high school graduation this past summer.
Molly wore a brown sweater and a short brown-and-yellow checked skirt. The brown kneesocks and penny loafers completed the preppie look. For all her looks, though, there had always been a sense of the frantic about Molly, as if she expected her world to come apart at any moment. I liked her; I liked both Molly and Rita, actually, different as they were. Both of them were good for David.
“Where are you going?” Molly asked when her arms slid away from David.
“McCain’s taking me to the police station.”
She grabbed my arm. “Oh, no, Mr.
McCain. Don’t you know what Cliffie’ll do to him?”
“I know what Cliffie’ll try to do to him, Molly. But I won’t let him.”
“Please, don’t make him go there, Mr.
McCain.”
I took her hand. It was slender but soft, not unlike Molly herself. “Look, Molly, Cliffie has good reason to talk to David. And it’ll only look worse for David if he keeps trying to avoid it. Cliffie could’ve put out an arrest warrant if he’d wanted to, but I convinced him to let me try and find David.
David called me, which is a point in his favor, and which I’ll really play up with Cliffie. And I’ll also play up that David came in of his own volition. That will help, too.”
“Oh, David,” she said, leaning against him, sliding her arm around him. I imagined David was feeling the full force of her love and it had to move him. Very few of us get that kind of love in our lifetimes.
“We’d better go,” I said gently as
possible.
We got in the car. Molly hung on
David’s door like a camp follower unwilling to let go of her soldier.
“Will you call me as soon as you finish
with Cliffie?” she said.
“I can imagine how your folks are taking this.”
“To hell with my folks,” Molly said, sounding harder and tougher than I’d ever heard her. I was impressed. She said to me, quietly, “I know who killed Sara, Mr. McCain.”
“You do?”
“Rita killed her. She despised Sara.
She dumped manure in the back seat of Sara’s Vw.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
I backed away from her, feeling guilty as hell. She looked lost, waving a feeble, lonely good-bye.
The downtown area was pretty bare for a warm Saturday afternoon. All the trees were doing their fire dances, the air was autumn-melancholy, and the town park was empty except for a young couple who looked enviably in love. He was sort of feeling her up but with some dignity, if you know what I mean.
I pulled in next to two patrol cars and a couple of private cars. In the back of the police station I saw Cliffie arguing with Rita Scully.
Cliffie didn’t see us until we were only a few feet away. Rita didn’t see us because her back was to us. She was shaking her fist in Cliffie’s face. She looked as good from the front as the back, faded jeans and an emerald green sweater loving every bit of her small but perfect body.
“Only you would be stupid enough to believe that David would kill somebody,” she shouted.
“Things happen like that all the time.”
“And why would he drag her out to the Coyles?
That doesn’t make any sense, either.”
“Well, look who’s here,” Cliffie said, smirking.
When she turned and saw David, Rita did exactly what Molly had done. She hurried to him and threw her arms around his neck. Then she kissed him with great open passion.
“He better save up all that good lovin’,”
Cliffie said. “He ain’t gonna be gettin’
much of it in prison. Least not the kind he wants, anyway.”
“He’s not going to prison.”
“Counselor, there’s one thing I admire about you.”
“Only one?”
“Your faith in your own legal abilities.
You’re about as unsuccessful a lawyer as this town has ever seen but you’re always makin’ these grand claims about how you’re gonna save this one and that one from prison.”
Once again, I refrained from reminding Cliffie how often he’d lost to Judge Whitney and me. I was willing to hurt his feelings; that wasn’t it. But his ego would be hurt and he’d be snake-mean to deal with if I reminded him of what a rube he was.
Rita went Molly one better. She started sobbing and s
he wouldn’t let go of David. You could see how embarrassed he was. But you could also see how aggrieved she was. She had to stand on tiptoes to hold him around the neck. She looked as childlike now as Molly had disappearing in my rearview mirror.
Cliffie said, “All right, Egan. Let’s go inside. Say good-bye to the pretty lady.”
I said, “I want to go along.”
“I’ll call you when you’re needed,
Counselor. First, I want to fingerprint him and get a couple of beauty pictures. We’ll make sure not to ask him anything till you’re with him.” He laughed. “He’s had a lot of time to work up an alibi. I’ll bet it’s a doozy.”
The alibi was what I was worried about.
Married or not, the woman needed to come forward.
David came over. “I’m ready.”
“Just be sure not to tell the counselor here that we worked you over with a rubber hose.”
“Is he always this funny?” David asked me.
“This is the good stuff. Wait till you hear the bad stuff.”
“Two funny guys,” Cliffie said. “Two very funny guys.”
Rita drifted over. She apparently
didn’t want to get anywhere near Cliffie.
Given her temper, she might have attacked him.
“You have a hankie, Mr. McCain?”
“Sure.”
She put the hankie to her pert, freckled nose. She had one of those faces doubly pretty because of its vitality.
“He didn’t kill her,” she said.
“I know.”
“But that damned Cliffie’ll railroad him.”
“We won’t let him.”
She looked at me. “Who’ll pay you, Mr.
McCain?”
“We’ll work it out.”
She glanced around the gravel parking lot. The cruisers. The Jeep. Then she looked at the two-story concrete block building. The bars on the windows. The bars never really get to you until you know somebody behind them.
“Will they hurt him?”
“No.”
“Cliffie hurt you that time.”
Couple years back Cliffie, half
drunk, had a good time jabbing me with his nightstick. Hard enough to inflict real pain and draw real blood. I’d brought an excessive force suit against him, then agreed to drop it if he went on the local radio station and apologized to me. He did it. He made a joke of it in places. And he hinted that he’d been justified in doing it. But he did it and that was enough for me.
