by Ed Gorman
“And she was troubled, too, the poor thing,”
Emma said. “Her father putting her in that mental place. And those electroshock treatments. There was a thing on Tv about them. They’re really scary to watch.”
“Imagine what it’s like to go through them,” Amy said.
“Anyway, we want you to have something, Sam,”
Emma said.
And from the pocket of her apron she took a small white envelope and placed it carefully next to my coffee cup. “This is the best we can d. But we’ll have more for you in the future.”
Inside the envelope was one hundred dollars in denominations of twenty.
“What’s this?”
“We’re hiring you,” Emma said.
“To do what?”
“Prove that David didn’t kill poor
Sara.”
“And that he didn’t commit suicide,” Amy said.
“He was like our son, Sam. He had a pretty rough reputation and a lot of it he deserved. But he doesn’t deserve to be remembered as a murderer and a suicide.”
“And you know Cliffie, Sam,” Amy said.
“At mass this morning, Mrs. Corroon said that Mrs. Kerry’s husband, Earl, saw Cliffie at the Bluebird Caf@e this morning and Cliffie was telling everybody how he’d wrapped everything up already. David killed Sara and committed suicide.”
“Yeah, I heard that particular bit of Cliffie wisdom myself. But I can’t take this money.”
“Why not?”
“Because if I do I’ll fall off the wagon again.”
“What wagon?” Amy said.
“He means he’ll start drinking again,” Emma said. “But since when did you have a drinking problem?”
“Couple years now. Every time I get my hands on any money, I go on a bender.”
Emma smiled at her sister. “He doesn’t want to take our money because he thinks we’re poor.”
“Why, we’re not poor, Sam,” Amy said.
“Even after we took this out of the jar we keep in the basement-we just don’t trust banks since the Depression and all-we’ve got seventy-five dollars left. And people with seventy-five dollars aren’t exactly poor, you know.”
They were regular John D.
Rockefellers, they were.
“How about this? I have my own reasons to work on this.”
“It’s Judge Whitney, isn’t it?”
Emma said.
“Is it true she hates Catholics?”
Amy asked.
“Yes, but don’t take it personally,” I said. “She hates just about everybody.”
“Judge Whitney wants to prove that
Cliffie’s wrong so she wants you to find out what happened, am I right?”
“You’re absolutely right. According to her she wants me to “humiliate” him.”
“Cliffie’s so stupid, I doubt he even knows it when he’s being humiliated,” Emma said.
Then crossed herself. “My Lord, listen to me, will you? Saying things like that about the poor man. The Lord saw fit to make him stupid for a reason only the Lord himself can understand. It’s not for me to question the Lord’s reasons for things.”
“We’re just mad because he’s telling everybody that David killed Sara and then killed himself.”
“I don’t blame you. I’m mad, too. And I intend to start proving he’s wrong.”
“When do you think you’ll start, Sam?”
I glanced at my Timex, drained the last of my coffee, and stood up. “How about right now?”
I went to the grocery store for milk and cat food, the cigar store for cigarettes and Sunday papers from the biggest cities I could find, and finally to the Dx for another peek at the wreck of Egan’s black Merc. Jay Norbert was on his haunches with a flashlight, trying to find what I’d asked him to look for inside the tangled metal.
Then I stopped by the office for some papers I’d forgotten. I was a couple feet from my interior office door when I heard the crying.
I’d heard her cry so many times before, I knew who it was immediately.
She cried the day she got a bad hairdo down at the House of Beauty styling salon, she cried the day her teacher informed her that she was getting an F in typing, she cried the day it was announced that Dick and Darla and not John and Jeanie had won the American Bandstand dance contest.
But mostly what she cried about was
Turk, the eighteen-year-old hotshot who’d dropped out of high school so he could “like, you know, make some bread,” which he was currently doing by working at Suds City, the local car wash.
To be fair, I don’t suppose he meant to be as irritating as he was. He wasn’t posing as Jimmy Dean or Marlon; he was irritating all on his own, one of those dumb, puppy-dog kids who will always be seventeen years old. Turk was Jamie’s boyfriend and Jamie was my secretary, loaned to me by her father in lieu of the money he owed me for representing him in a boundary dispute with his neighbor. I wonder if Jamie isn’t the vessel of his retribution.
I’d lost the case for him.
Jamie was the prototype for every teenage girl depicted on the covers of paperbacks where the term “jailbait” is used, a bouncy, giggly and vastly earnest girl who could, at her most dangerous, turn the simple act of boiling an egg into a kitchen explosion that would flatten the house.
I like Jamie. I don’t know why I like her, I don’t even want to like her, and no, it isn’t that heartbreaking teenage body of hers, either.
It’s her sincerity, I guess. She’s sincere about everything, outside of convents for cloistered nuns or the third floor of asylums where they keep the violent ones.
“Oh, Mr. C,” she sobbed when I walked in. “My mascara.”
True, she did have little black snakes wriggling down her nicely shaped cheeks. But they were sincere little black snakes. The Mr. C reference is one she picked up from the Perry Como Tv show, where all the dancers call him “Mr. C.” Jamie thinks this is pretty cool. Someday she’ll realize that because my last name is McCain, I should be “Mr. M.”
She wore a brown sweater that would inspire a rush to cold showers by middle-aged men throughout these United States, and a pair of jeans that defined the rest of that paperback body. She was also smoking a cigarette, something I’d never seen her do before. The cigarette was parked on the edge of a Camel cigarette tin ashtray right next to my framed photo of the sad-sweet face of Shemp, my favorite of the Three Stooges. Himmler of Black River Falls decorated my place right before they sent him up for the third time on the charge of offending the public taste.
“Gosh,” I said, “is everything all right at home?”
“Everything’s fine,” she said with that kind of girly forlornness that teeters self-consciously between tragedy and comedy. “At home, I mean, everything’s fine. But everything’s not fine between Turk and me.”
“Good old Turk. What’d he do now?”
She sniffled. “He misspelled my name.”
Coming from a girl who has often misspelled my name on letters-even though the correct spelling appears in the letterhead at the top-th was quite an accusation.
“I’m sure he didn’t do it on purpose, Jamie.”
She was bawling over Turk misspelling her name?
She sniffled some more. “It’s just that it’s forever.”
“What’s forever?”
“The tattoo.” Said as if I were a mind reader and should have known what she was talking about.
“Ah,” said I, “the tattoo.” The reason for her misery was coming clear.
Only Turk could have pulled this baby off.
“Let me see if I can reconstruct this.”
“It’s terrible, Mr. C. Just horrible.”
“Turk got drunk.”
“Yes. Very, very drunk.”
“And somebody gave him a tattoo.”
“That stupid Phil Craper.”
“And Phil was drunk, too.”
“Phil’s always drunk. He’s a wino.”
>
“And so Phil is as bad a speller as Turk. And when they went to put the tattoo on they wrote-”
“Just-a-m-m-i-e. “I love Jammie” it says. With a heart.”
“And the tattoo is on-” his-his shoulder. And you know how he likes to walk around without his shirt on. P’ll laugh at it when they see it. They’ll think Turk is stupid.”
“Gee, I can’t imagine that.”
She shook her cute head miserably and stared off at a fate that not even her worst enemy could have contrived. “And p’ll start calling me Jammie, Mr. C.” A sob. “Sometimes I feel like my life is just over.” She raised teary blue eyes to me. “Do you ever feel like that?”
“Six or seven times a day.”
She didn’t smile. “Jammie. I just can’t believe he could be that dumb. Even when he was drunk.”
The phone rang.
She watched it as if it were going to do something obscene. “It’s him.”
“Turk?”
“Uh-huh.”
It rang and rang.
“Aren’t you going to answer?”
“I’ll let him suffer.”
“You know, Jamie, it could just possibly be for me. I mean, this is a law office. Not a huge or very successful law office. But a law office nonetheless.”
She shrugged, unfazed by my pompous little speech. “I can tell by the ring it’s Turk. It just sounds a certain way.”
I saw the file folder I’d forgotten to take home. I’d left it on my desk.
“I think I’ll just pick this up and go, Jamie.”
The ringing phone was going to make me psychotic any minute now.
“You’re sure it’s Turk?”
“Sure I’m sure, Mr. C,” she said, sounding a little peeved. “Can’t you tell by the sound of that ring?”
Fourteen
Whenever Judge Esme Anne Whitney wore jodhpurs, she always recalled-Galouise cigarette in one hand and snifter of brandy in another-how when she was a lass of fourteen in a boarding school so refined none of the girls there so much as went to the bathroom, Noel Coward appeared and took her and another girl horseback riding on a mild April afternoon.
There were a couple of things wrong with this story and it wasn’t, believe it or not, the Noel Coward part. She really had met famous people of all sorts in her lifetime. The rich are, you see, a very special and very private club. They don’t use anything as vulgar and common as a secret handshake to identify each other. As near as I can figure out the code is conveyed through a complicated series of rapid eye movements that only they understand. Sort of like the flickering light codes our war ships used during World War Ii.
The parts that bothered me about this old chestnut of hers was (a) the appearance of the horse and (but) the idea of another girl being present.
Judge Esme Anne Whitney is terrified of horses, will not get within yards of one of them. She’d once dragged me to a horse show to which her friend the governor had invited her and whispered to me, “God, don’t people ever get sick of seeing these creatures emptying their bowels.”
Judge Whitney on a horse? I have my doubts.
As for another girl going along to keep Esme Anne and Mr. Coward company, impossible.
No way would Esme Anne Whitney share such a moment. She would want herself to be the only one with bragging rights to this particular tale.
“Dear Noel,” Judge Whitney said this afternoon, seated on the veranda of her mansion, the maid, a masochist named Nell O’Bannion, having just delivered up another bottle of brandy, “dear, dear Noel.” She took a dramatic puff of her Galouise-Bette Davis had once taken acting lessons from the judge-“dear, dear Noel.”
Then she said, not being great at changing subjects with any grace: “I want his face rubbed in it this time, McCain.”
“You want dear, dear Noel Coward’s face rubbed in it?”
“My Lord, McCain, pay attention will you?
Just because you’re short doesn’t mean you have to be stupid, too. I want Cliffie’s face rubbed in it.”
“Ah. Cliffie.”
She had her rubber band ready to go. I wondered if Nell O’Bannion had brought her the rubber bands along with her first bottle of brandy. She set down her snifter and her Galouise long enough to load up her forefinger and thumb and fire at me.
She was damned good at her little game. She did a double fake-pretended to be firing from the left and then suddenly shifting to the right and, as I moved my head to the left, surprised me by moving back to the left again. The rubber band hung off my nose momentarily and then dropped to the table. She had a dead aim.
A squirrel sitting on the edge of the patio watched me with great disdain. His expression seemed to question why I didn’t have more self-respect than to sit with a half-fried, jodhpur-wearing, horse-loathing Eastern lady of vast wealth and even vaster disdain for common folk like me. I should’ve told the squirrel that it was none of his damned business. Instead I explained (don’t knock telepathy until you try it) that I needed the money. I made a pittance from my law practice. I earned a modest living by working as Judge Whitney’s investigator.
I watched the squirrel romp off in the direction of the surrounding forest, diving in and out of the frothy colorful waves of crisp autumn leaves. He had an enviable life.
She inhaled half her Galouise and then took a long drink from her snifter. There was a cold beauty in the fine-boned lines of her face.
She’d had innumerable husbands and lovers but always ended up alone. In my way, I liked her in a complicated and melancholy sort of fashion, at least in those moments when my hands weren’t aching to wrap themselves around her elegant throat.
She said, “Jack Coyle.”
“All right, I’ll play along. Jack
Coyle.”
“A social worker who was involved in a case I presided over a while back told me about a rumor she’d heard.”
“Involving Jack Coyle.”
“My, you’re quick today.”
“I thought we might be talking about dear, dear Noel again.”
“I’m handing you some important information and you sit here drinking my brandy making fun of me. You really are a dunce, McCain.”
“Jack Coyle. Tell me.”
More wine. More Galouise.
“This is unconfirmed, of course.”
“My favorite kind of rumor.”
“This particular caseworker had worked as a high school counselor at one time. And one of the students she saw was Sara Griffin.”
She’d hooked me. School counselor.
Sara Griffin. Jack Coyle. Whatever it was, it was bound to be juicy.
“Sara was going through a very difficult time.”
“This was before or after her folks put her in that asylum?”
“Just before. Anyway, the counselor told me that several times Sara referred to this “older man” she was seeing. She never used a name. But one evening the counselor was out at the state park with her kids-they were having a picnic-and down by the boathouse she saw Jack Coyle and Sara Griffin. They weren’t doing anything untoward, you understand. They were standing there talking. But then they got into some kind of argument and Sara ran away in tears. She said that Jack Coyle stalked off after Sara. She didn’t know what happened after that. She had to get back to her kids.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
She smiled. “I couldn’t wait to tell you this, McCain. I wish I could get a picture of your face at this moment. You look absolutely shocked.”
“I am absolutely shocked.” I decided to give her the pleasure of telling me something I already knew. “But it’s just rumor.”
She smiled again. “Cliffie’s in way over his head this time, McCain.” She said this with the relish of deep hatred.
“Yes, he is.”
“He’s going all over town saying that the case is closed and that David Egan was the killer.
But we’re going to prove otherwise, aren’t we, McCain?”
“This doesn’t mean I suspect Jack
Coyle.”
“No, of course not.”
“But,” she smirked, “I’d sure love to have a picture of his face when you ask him about poor Sara Griffin. Now take care of this for me will you, McCain?”
“I’ll do my best,” I said, standing up.
The cold beauty smiled again but without any hint of merriment. “That may not be enough on a matter like this, McCain. I’d suggest you aim a little higher than your best.”
Walking to my car, I came up with at least eighteen great cracks to make about middle-aged society women who wore jodhpurs but were terrified of horses. I couldn’t, of course, say any of them out loud.
It was a high school sort of date. Back then I would’ve made sure that my ducktail was combed flat, that I was smiling so much my lip muscles hurt, that I appeared manly enough to please the father and trustworthy enough to please the mother.
If one of them asked me what I planned to do with my life, I generally said that I hoped to become a doctor and work on a cure for cancer; and if they inquired of my extracurricular activities, it being obvious that athletics did not number among them, I told them that I spent most of my time stocking shelves for the nuns down at the Pantry for the Poor they ran. If they were Protestant parents, I said that I stocked shelves at the Martin Luther Poverty Center.
In other words, it was all Pat Boone bullshit.
Mrs. Dennehy, her husband being understandably absent because of his death, said, “So how is your law practice going, Sam?”
We were in the living room. Brett Maverick was cheating somebody at poker on the Tv screen and Fred, their black Lab, was stinking up my hand with his tongue. Linda was “just about ready.” Or so she’d called out from some secret place outside the small but comfortably furnished living room.
Mrs. Dennehy was of a different generation of Irish Catholics than Emma and Amy
Kelly so she didn’t have quite as many framed paintings of Jesus on the walls. And Jesus wasn’t quite so pretty as in the older paintings.
The more modern ones showed a Jesus who didn’t look like a pushover for just any sob story you decided to lay on him. There were strands of palm from Palm Sunday, to be sure, placed behind the two framed paintings of the Virgin on the wall but not nearly the number my Mom had in the bedroom she shared with my dad all these years. The Pope was nowhere to be found.
