by Ed Gorman
“My law practice is going just fine,” I said, thinking of Jamie or Jammie, depending on your taste and level of literacy. “I have a new secretary and business has really picked up.”
“Do you still work for Judge Whitney?”
“Yes, part-time,” I said, “though as my business picks up, I work for her less and less.” I plan to be a doctor someday, Mrs. Dennehy, and search for a cure for cancer.
After that, I plan to rid our planet of racism in all its ugly forms.
“That’s good. No offense, Sam, but she’s pretty hard to take sometimes. She gave a talk at one of our church suppers and she kept calling us “you people.” It was like she couldn’t bring herself to say the word “Catholic.””
I smiled. Lord, how I smiled. “I think it’s safe to assume she won’t become a papist anytime soon.”
“Mom asks a lot of questions, doesn’t she?”
“Not a lot.”
“Well, quite a few.”
“Quite a few, maybe,” I said, “but not a lot.”
She punched me gently on the arm. “You’re really on your best behavior tonight.”
I laughed. “Wait till later.”
The restaurant was all dark wood, red leatherette booths, candles inside red glass, waitresses in black nylon uniforms, and a trio that apparently hadn’t heard of any music hipper than Lawrence Welk. But they played slow songs and slow songs were what I wanted to hear. It was so dark in there I thought maybe I should’ve worn one of those miner’s hats with the flashlights built into them.
We ate and drank, steaks and whiskey, the whiskey coming from the pint in my suitcoat. Hard liquor is available here only in state-run stores. But Cliffie is pretty understanding of people who bought restaurant setups and used their own bottles.
I went easy on the booze. She drank more than I expected, enough in fact to have some minor difficulty getting her tongue to form words exactly.
“I can’t drink at all.”
“You’re doing fine,” I said.
“I’m just so nervous.”
“Everything’s fine.”
“I’m afraid I’m going to hyperventilate.”
“You want to go outside?”
She shook her head. “No, I just have to grow up.”
I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by that but I had my suspicions.
“You think we could dance, Sam?”
We danced. She was good. She felt right in my arms, too. A lot of times they don’t. She felt right in other ways, too, that small earnest freckled face of hers so prairie-girl scrubbed and prairie-girl smart.
We didn’t bother going back to our booth for nearly half an hour. We just danced. And what we couldn’t give voice to our bodies spoke of. Sex, to be sure, but also comfort and care and memories that stretched all the way back to kindergarten when we’d tasted white paste for the first time and learned how to color inside the lines.
“You’re going to ask me to go back to your place tonight, Sam. And I’m going to say yes because I really want to go. Because I’ve been thinking of you all the time since Friday night. But I’m really scared. This has to move very, very slowly, Sam. I’m not feeling very female after the operation and maybe it’s just not going to be worth it for you. In the long run, I mean. Maybe nothing will ever come of it for you.”
“You didn’t need to say any of that stuff, you know.”
“I just had to make it official.”
She had one more drink before we left.
“They like you,” I said, after coming out of the john and seeing how my three cats had made themselves comfortable pressed against her on either side. Tess of course sat in her lap. Tess believes in the divine right of cats. To hell with all that jazz about the divine right of kings.
“You like a drink?” I said.
“No, thanks. I wouldn’t mind using the bathroom, though. I just don’t want to offend your cats by making them move.”
“The only thing that offends these cats is when they run out of food.”
While she was tending to business, I put on the Bobby Darin album he did live at the Copa. When she came back, she sat down, turned off the table lamp, took my arm, put it around her shoulder, and then snuggled up to me.
“How’s that for being forward?” she said.
“I’m shocked, you hussy.”
We sat. I knew enough not to make any grand moves; I also knew enough not to talk. Darin was especially good with the Cole Porter songs, gave them a rawness you don’t associate with Porter.
Maybe even gave the lyrics a little more depth.
She kissed me and it was one hell of a kiss.
Another feeling of comfort. Sometimes you can like a lady a whole lot but you just don’t work well together sexually. Kissing’s pretty important. We fit together perfectly.
It went on a long time and then she eased me away with a small deft hand and said, “I wasn’t sure I could ever feel like that again.”
We nuzzled and snuggled and then we snuggled and nuzzled and then we snuzzled and nuggled and it was great.
On the other side of the screen door a dog and an owl and a Hank Williams album communed with us and the night.
“You know what?” she said.
“You’d better go.”
“I didn’t know you were a mind reader.”
“I want this to work, Linda.”
“So do I.”
“So you’d better go.”
She kissed me again and certain of my body parts reacted by standing straight up and saluting.
“Do you believe in God?” she asked when I was slipping her coat on.
“Most of the time.”
“That’s sort of how I am. In the hospital it was a real struggle. My mom and everybody would bring me rosaries and holy cards and little pieces of palm and I’d feel guilty because sometimes it just all seemed like a joke. If there really is a God don’t you think He’d just talk to us once in a while to let us know He is really there?”
“You’d think. But God, as they say, works in mysterious ways.”
Going down the stairs to my car, she said, “And then all of a sudden I’d have my faith back. I wouldn’t know why it left me and I wouldn’t know why it came back. It just would and I didn’t have any control over it. Sometimes I think I’m crazy.
And I mean clinically.”
“That’s why my favorite part of the Bible-andthe only part that really makes sense to me-is the Book of Job. He asks all the same questions we do. Hey, exactly what’s going on down here, anyway? You got little kids dying, you got people killing each other in wars, you’ve got tycoons letting all these people starve to death. And the best you can come up with is that we have to take it on faith. There’s a Graham Greene line about “the terrible wisdom of God.” I’ve never been able to figure out if that’s a cop-out or the most brilliant thing ever uttered about a deity.”
She laughed. “Maybe it’s both.”
In the car, on the way home, she said, “This is going to be a long haul, Sam.”
“I know.”
“We’ll both naturally want to sleep together.
And probably not too long from now, either. But before we do, I’ll have to show you where I was operated on.
And that’ll be difficult for both of us. Maybe most of all for you.”
“I can handle it, Linda.”
“I hope both of us can handle it, Sam,” she said as I pulled up to the curb in front of her house.
I watched her go in and then the feeling of the high school lark faded away utterly. We were past that. She was already an adult and I was being forced by age and circumstance to try and become one, too.
I drove around for an hour before going back to my apartment. I’d always rushed into love before and in ways this time was no different. But there were Linda’s complexities to consider. In some ways it’s easier to dazzle women as a lover than it is to be a true friend. I wasn’t any Casanova in the sack but I wonder
ed if I was the sensitive guy I liked to imagine myself. She was right. This was going to be tough to handle for both of us.
I knew that tomorrow I’d prepare myself for the night that would eventually come by going to the library and looking up breast cancer. I needed to know a lot more about it. Whenever it was that I finally saw her scars, I wanted to make it as easy as possible for her. For us.
Fifteen
Rita Scully’s father had managed to escape the Knolls by building from scratch a stable that boarded and trained horses. Because he was the only person in the area who had any skill with show horses and jumpers, the gentry-remember here we’re talking about the gentry of Black River Falls, not to be confused with the gentry of Greenwich, Connecticut, or Beverly
Hills, California-turned his business profitable within a year. The Stables, as it was called, had been in business some twenty years but Bud Scully no longer ran it. He had emphysema so bad, he rarely left his wheelchair. His barn manager was named Cal Rice and he was a good man when sober, which was most of the time; immediately after his benders you could find him forlorn and genuinely ashamed in the church basement where the local Aa met seven nights a week.
The meeter and greeter, and the most savvy about show horses and jumpers, was Rita Scully herself. She wore Western even though most of her customers wore riding academy. She sure looked good in an emerald-colored Western shirt with white piping, faded Levis, and black cowboy boots. The shirt set off her green, green eyes and black hair; it set off a couple of other things, too.
I was there at 7 A.M., when she was in the sunlight outside the huge white barn brushing down a colt.
Out on the white-fenced track, a swarthy man walked a pair of huge Palominos. Closer by, a woman with a fierce length of hose was scrubbing out a horse trailer.
When she saw me, Rita said, “That’s funny, McCain, I don’t remember inviting you to stop out.”
“All I’m trying to do is figure out what happened.”
“So the judge can show everybody how much smarter she is than Cliffie?”
Like most people in town-l myself, sometimes-she didn’t like either Cliffie or the judge.
“No, so we can figure out exactly what happened.”
“Exactly what happened,” she said, running the brush over the rippling flesh of the sweet, skinny chestnut colt, “is David got drunk and killed himself. It was an accident. He didn’t commit suicide, no matter what you might think otherwise.”
“There’s a third possibility.”
“Oh, yeah?” She had a hard beauty but a beauty nonetheless. “Oh, I forgot. You’re not only an unsuccessful lawyer, you’re also an unsuccessful private eye.” From her back pocket she took a currycomb. She set the brush on the ground and started combing him. She’d pause every once in a while to kiss him on the neck. She’d always been sexy, Rita
Scully, but I’d never seen her be sweet.
There was something touching about the way she’d kissed the horse. She became a new person to me. She was interesting now in a way she’d never been interesting before.
“What if he was murdered?”
And that stopped her. Stopped her from brushing.
Stopped her from glancing around the grounds to see that everybody was doing his or her job. In the silence you could hear the horses talking and the birds singing and the sound of a tractor in the fields of a nearby farm. The grass was still silver with dew and even the scent of horseshit had a certain homely sweetness about it.
She said, “Now there’s a stupid idea.”
“What’s so stupid about it?”
“He got drunk and smashed up his car.
Case closed.” She went back to brushing the horse.
“He talk to you about getting into an argument with anybody recently?”
“He got into arguments all the time. It was just the way he was. That’s why Molly was so bad for him. She wanted to change him. Nobody could change David. He was what he was.” She glared at me. “And I loved him just the way he was.”
“How about Sara Griffin?”
Before she could answer, the woman who’d been hosing out the horse trailer came over and said, “That left tire’s bad, Rita. I s’pose we can patch it again but one of these days we’re gonna need a new one.”
“Well, see what they say at the station. If we can get along without buying a new one, let’s do it.”
The woman nodded and went back to her trailer.
She had a tire jack laid out on the grass and went quickly to work taking the left tire of the trailer off and then transferring it to the back of a battered old Ford pickup.
“So you were saying what, McCain?” She went back to the brush, much longer strokes this time, the colt making satisfied little noises in its throat. She gave it another quick kiss.
“I was starting to ask you about Sara Griffin and Egan.”
She wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. “I was waiting him out.”
“I’m not following you.”
“Waiting for him to grow up a little. See that when it came down to having a wife and kids, I was the one. Not Molly. Not Sara. She gave him status but I gave him love. No matter what happened, he always came back to me.”
“Or Molly. Couldn’t have been too good for your ego, him seeing all those other girls.”
She shrugged. “I got used to it. Anything I’ve ever really wanted, I’ve gotten. I lived in the Knolls just long enough to know that when you want something, you have to go through hell to get it. But if you have patience and you don’t care what other people think, you’ll get it.”
“You happen to know where he was Friday night?”
“He didn’t kill Sara.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
She stopped brushing the colt. I reached my hand out and stroked its neck. She was a beauty, a poem of elegant awkwardness and vulnerability.
“He was with one of his tramps. He didn’t want to get her into trouble, so he wouldn’t say who it was.”
The trainer walking the horses on the track called out her name.
“It doesn’t matter now anyway, does it, McCain, who he was with? He’s dead. Now, I need to get to work. If that’s all right with you, I mean.”
Jay Norbert was in the can when I got to the Dx station. All three bays were in use and the far edge of the drive held four cars waiting to be serviced. Rock and roll blasted from the bays, and on the drive two old-fashioned merchants stood in straw hats and suspenders looking at the remains of Egan’s car and shaking their heads.
“Damned Italian food,” Norbert said, coming out of the john about ten minutes after I’d arrived. He had a copy of the local newspaper. “Plays hell with my stomach. I picked up colitis when I worked for Uncle Sam.”
We walked out to the tangled remains of David Egan’s Merc. Three teenage boys stood there studying it.
“He went right off the edge,” one of them said.
“Drunker’n a skunk.”
“My brother said he got more ass than a bicycle seat.”
Ah, youth.
After Norbert shooed them away, he said, “C’mere a minute.”
We walked around to the side of the Merc. The crash had smashed the motor mounts. The engine was tilted so badly it was almost upside down.
He took a long yellow-handled screwdriver out of the back pocket of his uniform and said, “Look at this.”
He tapped the hose leading from the brake fluid to the brakes themselves with the tip of his screwdriver.
“You have to look close.”
I leaned in, squinted.
“Pretty crude,” he said.
“I’ll say.”
“I figure whoever did it either didn’t know anything about cars or tried to make it look like they didn’t know anything about cars.”
He was right. When you got close enough, it was plain to see the slash in the hose.
“Probably figured that the crash would destroy everyth
ing,” he said.
“Including the hose.”
“So nobody could tell it was cut.”
“He couldn’t have stopped if he wanted to,”
I said.
“Yeah, not even if he’d been sober.” He took a pack of Marvel cigarettes from his uniform pocket and tamped one out. “I’d offer you one, Sam, but you’d hate me for life. The wife buys these damned things because the AandPeople always has them on sale.” He lit up, coughed.
“What’ll Cliffie make of this?”
“He won’t like it.”
He grinned. “That’d sure be too bad, wouldn’t it?” Anybody who’d served in the military resented Cliffie because his two uncles on the draft board had managed to keep him from serving. He stared at the car we stood in front of. “This was a hell of a rod. He told me one night that if he took half as good care of all his girlfriends as he did the Merc, he’d probably have a lot happier life.”
I nodded to the phone booth. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
I should’ve been happy about giving Cliffie the bad news, spoiling his neatly resolved case.
But I was thinking about Egan. He hadn’t exactly been my favorite client, but he’d earned a good share of his anger and bitterness.
He’d wanted to improve his lot by using the daughters of the local gentry to prove that he was just as good as everybody else. He’d wanted respect and dignity but he got neither in his death.
It was the sort of trashy story-drunken girl-stealing, good-looking kid is murdered in a hick town where he lived with two maiden aunts -t the more lurid of the true detective magazines would buy. Not much respect or dignity there.
When Cliffie came on the line, I said, “You need to get over to the Dx station right away.”
“What the hell for, Counselor? I’m busy. I can’t sit around all day like you.”
“Just get the hell over here.”
A pause. “You’re gonna pay for that, you know. Talkin’ to me like that.”
“Yeah, well, there’re a lot of things I’m gonna have to pay for someday. Just get over here.”
