by Ed Gorman
stole from Raymond Chandler but I’m not sure.
“Could you elaborate a little?” I said.
Kenny took a hit from his Kool. I could taste that menthol crap even over here. “He did lawn work for her husband, Mike. It was pure D. H. Lawrence. Brenda and Mike haven’t gotten along in years. She starts talking to Egan—and nobody can sling the lady bullshit like that kid—and there you go.”
“Instant paperback novel.”
“You bet.”
“Still going on?”
“On and off. You know Egan’s problem. When he’s with one girl, he wants to be with another girl. I’ll bet he could get laid if he went to Berkeley.”
“I’ll bet he could get laid just walking down the street.”
He grinned. “I always wanted to be handsome.”
“I always wanted to be tall and handsome.”
“Well, I always wanted to be tall and handsome and rich. And have a schlong out to here.”
I laughed. “You pretty much covered the bases.” Then, “Then there’s always Sara Griffin.”
“Sad case.”
“Man, I guess.”
“They covered it up by saying she went to England on some kind of foreign exchange thing.”
“Yeah,” I said. “She went to the nuthouse.
How’d you find out?”
He inhaled deeply of his box of burning cough drops. “This nurse I interviewed for Nympho Nurses. I put it in a
nuthouse, figured that’d be a different angle.
And that way I could put transvestites and ax murderers and people who rip out their own eyeballs all in the same novel.”
“Didn’t Fitzgerald do something like that right after Gatsby?”
“Very funny.”
“So this nurse …?”
“This nurse told me about this time this girl managed to sneak away from the nuthouse and meet her lover in this nearby motel.”
“Her lover?” New information. “How old was she?”
“Let’s see, Sara probably would’ve been fifteen, probably.”
“This nurse tell you who her lover was?”
“They never found out. All they know is that it was some older man. His forties maybe. This is what they got from the motel guy, anyway.”
“What happened to Sara?”
“More shock treatment. Kept her a month longer than they’d originally planned.”
“Then she came back here?”
“Finished high school. And met your client David Egan. Which wasn’t exactly what her folks wanted. They’d spent a lot of time and laid out a lot of jack keeping her away from this older man, and then she picks up with Egan. For her it was strictly friendship. For him, he went gaga. That’s why he dropped out of high school.
He was so brokenhearted over her, he couldn’t concentrate. But what can you expect from somebody who came from his background? He’s had a rough life.”
“That’s crap, Kenny,” I said, more sharply than I needed to. “A lot of killers come from wealthy families and a lot of very good, hard-working, moral people come from the slums.”
“Wow, sounds like you’re going over to the other side. You going to that Dick Nixon rally tomorrow night? I plan to go. I hear his wife is going to wear a bikini.”
“Asshole,” I said. “It’s just that half the criminals I represent give me the same story. They have bad lives so they want to make sure other people have bad lives, too. I get tired of it. David could at least be honest with these girls.”
“Tell him, not me.”
“I plan to.”
I stood up.
“You reading anything good these days?” Kenny said.
“A lot of Gil Brewer.” Brewer was a good Gold Medal writer, whose paperbacks with the luridly swanky covers I always buy and that seem to distress nearly everybody in town. They think I should be reading great literature—which I do, actually—even though they themselves haven’t read a novel since the teacher threw them to the floor and jammed Silas Marner down their throats.
“Yeah, he’s great. Got that melancholy down. Always about a woman. He can break your heart. One of these days I’m gonna write a Gold Medal.”
“I wish you would, Kenny. You’re a good writer.” He was. Amid all that writhing and gasping and groaning you found some eminently sound social observation and some very nicely turned sentences in Kenny’s books.
“Thanks for thinking so, McCain. But everytime I sit down to write a Gold Medal—I just freeze up. I just think I’m not good enough to pull it off.”
“Just pretend you’re writing your usual stuff.
Your books aren’t all that far from Gold Medal, anyway. Kind of sneak up on yourself.”
“Yeah, the way I did when I slept with Sandy Mitchell.”
“You slept with Sandy Mitchell?”
“Yeah, didn’t I ever tell you?”
“You slept with the homecoming queen and you didn’t tell me?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I’ll bet.”
Most guys couldn’t have gotten close to Sandy Mitchell with a bag of diamonds and a submachine gun. And here was the merry pornographer sleeping with her.
“We happened to be on a picnic with some other people on that little island—Tule Island—ou on the river. Anyway, they all went back in the big boat and asked if we’d take the
rowboat back. It was a rental. And then this storm came. And we sort of got marooned there on the island. With all this leftover beer and stuff. And you know how it goes, we were both drunk and one thing led to another, that sort of thing.
But right when it was really getting serious, I thought what if I can’t do it? What if I can’t perform with the homecoming queen? What am I doing with a homecoming queen? I mean, she hadn’t been homecoming queen for a while—th was just a couple of years ago—and she wasn’t wearing her crown or anything. But still and all, the idea of me with a homecoming queen was pretty intimidating. Here she was offering herself to me and what if I couldn’t do anything? It’d be all over town. I could write all the jokes myself. He can write it but he can’t do it. I just didn’t have any right to be with a homecoming queen.”
“I don’t either.”
“Exactly. You don’t either. Few do, in fact, when you think about it. Very few do.
Anyway, what I did was pretend she was this girl I dated the summer I worked at the fair.
With the blackheads and the stuff on her teeth?”
“I always felt sorry for her,” I said.
“So did I but it didn’t make it any easier. Anyway, once I put her face on Sandy’s face, I didn’t have any trouble at all. I was batting in my own league again and everything was fine.”
“And then she went and married Nick Dixon.”
He smiled. “The coolest kid in high school. And if you don’t believe me, just ask him.”
“Yeah, excessive modesty wasn’t
exactly a problem he had.”
“So now that’s two things you’re not going to tell anybody about, right, McCain?”
“Two? What else besides Berkeley?”
“That I was afraid I couldn’t do it with a homecoming queen.”
Sandy Mitchell. He was one lucky
pornographer, he was.
Ten
In my high school days I always tried to have a date on Saturday nights. Tried, but usually failed. So I cruised the streets with some buddies who were every bit as hard up as I
was. The bowling alley; the pizza joint; the Y, where they had mixers; all the usual places where guys went to find the girls who didn’t want to have anything to do with them.
The last resort was the Dx station, which the custom cars and street rods used as their home base. They only came out at night, like vampires, shined, chromed, sculpted masterpieces that even the drunkest biker—who always made clear that he thought that street rod owners were femmy—pd awe and respect. You could tell this because they didn’t stove-in the str
eet rod doors or smash in the windshield.
The custom car crowd didn’t like us any more than they liked the bikers. We were just pimply kids who couldn’t even get chicks on Saturday nights—the custom boys always had plenty of good-looking chicks—and so when we asked them our dopey questions, their answers were short on information and long on contempt.
But there they’d be on the drive, six or seven of the finest mechanical animals rubes like us had ever seen. Andfora while it was enough in the accompanying blare of Chuck Berry and Little Richard to walk around and around these beasts and take in as much of their beauty as we could handle without fainting dead away.
The lone car on the drive tonight was David Egan’s chopped and channeled black Merc.
David leaned against it, cigarette hanging at an angle from the corner of his mouth, his James Dean uniform natty as always. I don’t mean to imply he never changed his clothes. I was pretty sure he did. He didn’t smell, anyway. But his wardrobe seemed to consist of interchangeable James Dean duds, so that even when he changed red nylon jackets, snowy white Tshirts, and jeans, his clothes looked exactly the same.
The smells of gasoline, cigarettes, and oil were pleasant on the Saturday night air as I pulled in.
Dean had taken him over completely tonight, giving me that little two-finger salute while he watched me walk toward him with squinched-up eyes. I always wondered if old folks secretly wanted to imitate Lawrence Welk.
I said, “No girl on Saturday night?”
“I could ask you the same question.”
“Yeah. But I have an excuse. I’m short and stupid.”
He smiled. “I don’t know why you’re always putting yourself down.”
“I do,” I said. Then, “It’d be nice if you’d write a condolence note to the Griffins.”
“For what?”
In the first hours following the murder, David had been frightened enough to show only his nicest side.
David the lost boy. But there was the other side, a cold and arrogant side. And I felt I was just about to hear it.
“Because she was a nice, decent, troubled kid and because some sonofabitch murdered her.”
“You think I did it, don’t you?”
“David, she’s dead, all right? Her folks will never get over it, no matter how long they live.”
“Sure they will. They’re always flying off to Europe and soaking up the gin and name-dropping so much it’s embarrassing. Sara couldn’t stand them.”
He smirked. “And neither could I. But they had a nice house.”
I shouldn’t have done it but I did. I grabbed him by the collar of his James Dean jacket and flung him the length of his car.
“Hey, you little prick,” he said.
“She’s dead, David. You could at least be decent to her folks.”
He straightened his jacket and T-shirt and gave me the squinted-eyes routine again.
“Just get out of here, McCain.”
“She’s dead, David. Her parents deserve a note of condolence.”
“They’ll just throw it away.”
“Even if they do, it needs to be written.”
The sullen face was all his own. “All the shit I’ve had to go through.”
“That doesn’t give you any right to treat women the way you do.”
“They know what they’re getting into.”
It was a bad movie line. The desperado.
The rebel no woman could tame. You could hear it coming through a tinny drive-in speaker now.
“You’re taking your life out on them, David, and they deserve better. Sara and Rita and Molly are good young women.”
“They hire you to say that?”
I said, “I don’t want to represent you anymore, David.”
He came off the car and said, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“There are other lawyers in town. I’ll arrange for one of them to help you. But I’m done.”
“That’ll make it look like I’m guilty.”
Then, “You can’t do this, McCain. You really can’t.”
“You going to write that note to the Griffins?”
“All right, God, if that’s what you want me to do.”
“That’s a start. And knock off the heartbreaker bullshit. Everybody knows you love ‘em and leave ‘em, David. But you may have to face a jury here pretty soon. And you’re gonna need all the friends you can get.”
He smirked again. “Maybe I should wear a cassock and a Roman collar.”
“It wouldn’t hurt, David.” I got sick of him from time to time—his childhood hadn’t corrupted him but his reaction to his childhood, his self-pity, certainly had—but I hadn’t ever been as sick of him as I was at this moment.
I walked away to my ragtop.
“I knew you were bluffing, McCain. I knew you wouldn’t really drop me.”
I said nothing. Just drove away. Leaving a bad imitation of James Dean standing alone in the muzzy yellow light of the gas station drive.
In the rearview mirror, I watched as he slipped his hands in his back pockets, pure James Dean. And now, unfortunately, pure David Egan.
Eleven
I’d been in my apartment only a couple of minutes before there was a knock on the inside door. Mrs. Goldman.
“I baked some cookies,” she said, “and thought you might like some.”
“Say, thanks.”
She handed me a plate with a dozen
chocolate-chip cookies on them. Mrs.
Goldman is a widow. She lived in this house for years with her husband and then decided to rent out the upstairs when he died. Lauren Bacall can only hope she looks as good at fifty as Mrs. Goldman does. In her crisp white blouse and blue skirt, she looked
thirty-five. An envelope was tucked inside her right arm. “I’m also delivering this. I
found it on the porch. I don’t know why they didn’t put it in the mailbox.”
The phone rang. Mrs. Goldman smiled.
“I’ll let you catch that, Sam.”
“Thanks for the cookies.”
On the phone, Mom said, “I really had a good time at the game today, dear. I just wanted to thank you.”
“My pleasure. Did you enjoy it?”
“Very much. Even though I didn’t exactly understand a lot of what was going on. There are an awful lot of people on that field at one time. It gets confusing.”
I smiled at the thought of Cliffie’s cheer, “Kill those bastards!” If people would have shouted it, I think Mom would have mentioned it.
“Well, I’m glad you had a good time.”
“You sound sort of rushed, dear. Is everything all right?”
“Just got in the door. Haven’t even had time to get my sport coat off.”
“Well, I’ll let you go. But I just wanted to thank you for the tickets. That halftime show was great. I think that was my favorite part.”
In the interest of good health, I fixed a peanut butter, mayo, and mustard sandwich before plowing into the cookies. That particular sandwich recipe probably doesn’t sound all that good but you should give it a try.
I watched Mike Hammer with Darren
McGavin, which was pretty good; and a Lone Wolf rerun with Louis Hayward. It was always sort of sad to see once-prominent actors have to resort to humiliating cheap-O Tv shows. I wondered if fading Tv stars worried about me the way I worried about them.
I’d inherited three cats—Tasha,
Crystal, and Tess—f a girl who’d left them with me while she went to La to become a star.
She was waitressing in Redondo Beach and the cats were still mine. I’d never been what you call favorably disposed to felines but they’d grown on me.
They were nice enough to give me a portion of the bed around ten o’clock. The stuff on Tv looked bad so I picked up the Steinbeck I was rereading, In Dubious Battle, and lost myself in the bleak rage of the early labor movement. For me it was his best book.
I was asleep by eleven-t
hirty. The
phone rang at just before midnight according to the glowing hands of my alarm clock.
One of these nights it’s going to be Natalie Wood telling me how lonely she is and that she’s always wanted to see Black River Falls, Iowa, and couldn’t she please come out and stay with me a few months.
It was Molly Blessing, who barely took time to introduce herself.
“I’m really scared, Mr. McCain.”
“What about, Molly?”
“David got real drunk tonight.”
“Where is he?”
“That’s the thing. I’m not sure. And that’s not the worst part, he’s going to drag tonight.”
“Where?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. He said the cops always check out the spots everybody uses, so they were going to find a different place.”
“Why didn’t you go with him?”
“He said he was going to pick up that bitch Rita. I’m a lot better for him than Rita is. I try to get him to stop drinking and drag racing. She just encourages him to keeping doing them.
I know I sound like a goody-two-shoes but if you really love somebody, Mr. McCain, shouldn’t you want them to do the right thing?”
“I agree, Molly. But right now the
important thing is to find David.”
“He said you two had had an argument tonight. That you threatened to dump him.”
“I got pretty mad, I guess.”
“You’re the only one he can rely on, Mr.
McCain—if you didn’t represent him, I don’t know what would happen to him, I mean a lot of people think he killed Sara.” Then, “I’m at the AandW. At the phone booth. Could you pick me up and we’ll go looking for David?”
“Yeah, maybe between us we can figure out where he went.”
“He’s so drunk, he’s—”
“All we can do is hope for the best. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
“I really appreciate this.”
“I appreciate your calling, Molly. We need to stop him.”
She waited on the corner for me. Even given the sudden autumnlike turn in the temperature, the AandWill was crowded with cars, kids, and brave short-skirted carhops on roller
skates.
Molly got in quickly. “I’m glad you put the top up. I’m kinda cold.”
