by Ed Gorman
“God, McCain, you’re such a moron, I can’t believe it. You actually think I murdered David and those two others?”
“You’ve got oil on your shoes.”
“And you’ve got rocks in your head.”
I wasn’t sure at first what she slipped from the pocket of her red Western shirt. It was a cigarette and somehow not a cigarette.
When I realized what it was, and what she was going to do with it, I thought that it looked wrong. She shouldn’t be wearing Western gear. She should be in black, a beatnik girl in a shabby, crowded apartment where cool jazz fought pretentious conversations for domination in the room.
But it didn’t seem to bother her. She was Annie Toke-ly of the West. She put the reefer in her lips and lit up. Then she closed her eyes and let the magic do its work. The smell was, as always, sweet and stark, and more than a little scary. An attorney caught in a place where marijuana was being smoked would lose his ticket, even if he could prove that he hadn’t actually smoked any himself.
She took two long hits. “I get pretty frisky when I smoke this reefer, McCain.” She giggled. It was a marijuana giggle, friendly as a puppy and just a wee bit daft. “If I don’t keep smoking this stuff, all I do is lie on my bed and cry about David. Excuse me.”
She took two more long hits.
“Your folks know you smoke this?”
She was holding it in her lungs and didn’t want to exhale. She shook her head. When she exhaled, she said, “Are you kidding? My dad’d take a riding crop to me.” Then, “I didn’t kill him. Or any of them.”
“Then who did?”
“Isn’t that supposed to be your job?”
“I’m always up for a little help.”
“Just a sec.”
Another deep inhalation.
The exhalation came in a ragged burst.
“Guess who I called today, McCain?”
“Who?”
“Molly.”
“For what?”
“I figured now was the time to be friends again.
We’re both mourning David. We should comfort each other.”
“What’d she say?”
Sly smile. “She hung up on me. But that’s Molly. Always takes awhile to bring her around.”
“She’s a nice kid.”
“And I’m not, I suppose?”
She didn’t wait for my answer. She took another deep hit. The reefer was burning to ash quickly.
“You really want me to answer that?”
She looked as if she were inhaling helium, the way her head seemed to rise and swell as she held the smoke deep in her lungs. Then the explosion.
“I don’t sleep around, McCain.
David’s the only guy I ever slept with, in fact. I don’t drink much. I go to church. I try to help people whenever I can. You seem to think I’m some kind of slut.”
“Molly’s under the impression that you were bad for Egan.”
“Molly’s under the impression that everybody was bad for David-except her, of course.”
“Did you get Egan started on marijuana or the other way around?”
But she was taking the last drag on the reefer.
All the Iowa City and Chicago hipster parties I’d touristed my way through came back. I swear I could hear a couple of sexy Northwestern coeds discussing Sartre.
Boom. She exhaled.
“You didn’t know your client very well, McCain.”
“Meaning what?”
“His asthma. And all his allergies. He tried smoking reefers a couple of times and his glands swelled up on him and he had this miserable asthma attack. He didn’t like it when I smoked grass. He said it made me too crazy. He took a whole bunch of my joints and kept them in his room. He’d only let me smoke one a week. He told me he got his aunts to try it once. Thought it’d be funny. They loved it.” The sly smile again. “Be sure and tell Molly that, will you? That I’m not some slut? That I didn’t seduce him into drugs or anything? I really think now is a good time to be friends again. She was my best friend for ten years. We used to trade dolls and clothes and do overnights all the time. Even when I hated her for David, I missed her. I couldn’t talk to anybody-not even David-the way I used to talk to her.”
She snubbed out the reefer between thumb and forefinger and popped it into her mouth the way she would a vitamin pill.
“Thrifty girl,” she said, after swallowing it.
“I always eat the roach. Why waste it?” Then, “I can see you now.” She stumbled over her words.
The reefer was taking effect. “Racing out here in your deerstalker cap. Thinking you had me because of the oil stain on my desert boots.” The marijuana giggle again. “Poor McCain.”
Her eyes gleamed merrily. “A wasted trip.”
“Not at all,” I said, standing up. “You told me something important that I needed to know.” Then, “I’ve got a lot of horseshit on my shoe.”
“Occupational hazard around here.”
“There a hose anywhere I could wash it off?
I’ve got one more stop to make tonight.”
“East side of the barn there’s a hose we use for the water trough. So where’s this next stop of yours, anyway?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
Another giggle. “God, I haven’t heard that since fourth grade.” She shrugged. “I don’t really give a shit where you’re going, anyway.” She pulled out the center drawer of the desk and came up with a Snickers, ripping the wrapper off with spectacular ferocity. “Boy, when I get like this, McCain, high and all like this, I’ll bet I could eat twenty of these things in a row and not miss a beat. I might puke somewhere along the line but I’d go right back to eating if I did.”
Gone gone gone, she was.
Gone gone gone.
“Tell Molly I love her, McCain.”
“I’ll tell her,” I said, starting for the door.
Giggle giggle. “And tell her that I’d like to trade dolls again.”
A couple of minutes later, I used the hose to wash away the horse feces and then made my way carefully to my car.
This time I used the driveway instead of the ravine and the grassy hill.
Twenty-four
It was the world of my grandfather and grandmother. The world of all those long-ago folks who’d fled their beloved land because it no longer fed or tolerated them. And so they came to the new country and mixed old with new-supermarkets and cars with fins and Joe McCarthy with crucifix and holy Mary and holy water to be sure; and brogues and lilts and song in their voices, and joy and fear and resentment and great vast hope in their eyes. The tiny old women at daily mass, their heads covered in cheap faded scarves; the whiskey-faced, knuckle-swollen union leaders shouting at the scabs who’d crossed the picket line; and the sweet, young, skinny-legged girls in their school uniforms up in the choir loft intoxicated by the scent of incense and the sound of the bells ringing out in the belfry as they had in Belfast and Donegal and Kerry. And now they had Bing Crosby and his songs from the old country on their phonographs, and Jackie Gleason and Bishop Sheen on their televisions, and so many sports figures they were uncountable. And one of them, the son of a bootlegger, might soon become president-imagine that, president-ofthe entire country. Old and new.
I felt the crush of all that history as I heard light footsteps beyond the door. And felt it still as the porch light came on in the smoky autumn night. And there stood Amy Kelly.
“Why, hello, Sam. You timed it just right.
Emma made a cake this afternoon. C’mon in.”
I went inside and everything had changed. It was no longer a cozy, bright little home. I’d never noticed before how long and dark the shadows were, how stained the wallpaper was, how threadbare the area rugs looked. And how lumpy and beaten the furnishings were.
Most of all, their faces had changed. Emma came in and stood next to Amy. And their faces were grotesque. Not in the monster-movie way but in the way their eyes regarded me
-cold, alien eyes-^the saintly women who were not saintly at all.
They tried, of course, to pretend we were still living inside that Norman Rockwell painting this house and these women had always inhabited. To those who didn’t really know them, anyway. Including me.
Emma, as you would expect, sensed my real business here long before her sister did.
Amy said, “Would you like a couple spoons of ice cream with your cake, Sam? It’s chocolate cake. And vanilla ice cream.”
Emma said, in a voice both strained and harsh, “He isn’t here for cake and ice cream, sister.
Now please be quiet.”
Amy started to say something else-she looked shocked at the sudden change in her sister’s mood -but her sister said, “Go upstairs, Amy.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“I said to go upstairs.” She grabbed Amy’s arm with her left hand and gave her a little push on the back with her right. “Go upstairs now and play some music on the radio in your room. I want to hear that music and want you in your room.”
Amy turned to me for explanation and support.
“What’s going on here, Sam?”
“I think Emma’s right, Amy. Why don’t you go upstairs?”
I’d wondered if it had been both of them.
Now I knew better.
Amy started reluctantly, almost as if she’d forgotten how to walk, to the staircase.
“Don’t you think one of you owes me an explanation? This is my house, too, you know.”
“Get up there, sister. And no more dawdling.”
The child had been ordered, once and for all, to her room. The child was smart enough, finally, to go.
She put a hand on the banister, swept her housedress about her as if she were Scarlett O’Hara, and disappeared on the second tier of the stairway.
“Why don’t we sit in the kitchen and drink a little Irish coffee?” She sounded friendlier now.
Amy’s leaving had apparently freed her somehow.
And so we did.
“You want a full shot in it?”
“Half,” I said. “I’m no drinker.”
She smiled. “Neither am I. Not until lately, anyway.” For the first time I heard sorrow and perhaps fear in her voice. “But then everything’s changed now, hasn’t it?” She put a full shot in her coffee.
We sat at a small table that smelled of its oilcloth covering. The ancient refrigerator throbbed. The faucet dripped. The Jesus of the kitchen lithograph looked just as sad as I felt.
“You know what’s funny?”
“What?”
“I never liked him.”
“That surprises me.”
“Right from the start he was moody and angry and belligerent. And he started stealing from us when he wasn’t even quite seven years old. I even thought of sending him to an orphanage-Lord knows we didn’t have the money to send him to some private school-but Amy wouldn’t hear of it. He was Amy’s boy. No matter what he did, she found some way of excusing it. If I was hard with him, she’d sneak into his room and give him money, to make him feel better. She never saw the way he used her. So she let him get away with everything.”
I lit a cigarette. The kitchen had never seemed this small, this oppressive before. I wondered if it felt the same way to her.
Emma smiled as radio music came on upstairs. Dance band music from the thirties.
“Poor Amy. I treat her so bad sometimes.”
“I’ve been trying to put this together, Emma.
From what you just told me, I can see why you have lost your temper with David. But why Sara?”
“You’re not that good at it, Sam. David killed Sara, I didn’t. Right in the backyard here. They’d been upstairs arguing for half an hour at least. Her parents thought she was home.
But she snuck out and came over here. David said they were going out. She looked very embarrassed about all the arguing. He killed her in the car right out there in the backyard, like I said. I watched him put her in the trunk. When he came home that night, I told him I was going to the police.
I made him tell me everything. He put her body in the Coyles’ gazebo so Cliffie would think that Jack Coyle had killed her. I guess they’d been having some kind of unholy affair-Lord, a man of that age. Then after he dumped the body, he tore out to Brenda’s house. She was drunk, of course.
He’d convinced her that he’d been there for an hour longer than he actually was. He told me that he was going to pretend to save her reputation by not telling Cliffie who he’d been with. Then at the last minute, he’d tell Cliffie her name and he’d have his alibi.”
“Then you went ahead and cut his brake line.”
She sighed. Dropped her eyes to the worked and wrinkled hands that surrounded her coffee cup.
“I’m going to have a hard time telling Father Laymon that in confession.”
“And then Brenda,” I said quietly.
A sip of her coffee. A hand at the back of her neck, as if she were having pain. And a deep ragged sigh.
“She wanted money to leave her husband-j run out on him. She wanted two thousand dollars from me. Can you imagine that? Where would somebody like me get two thousand dollars?”
“She was blackmailing you?”
“Trying to. She called me three different times. She was drunker every time she called. She’d figured out that David had tricked her into giving him an alibi. She said that the way things stood, a lot of people thought David had just committed suicide. That he didn’t have nerve enough to do it the way most people do. So he cut his brake line.
He wouldn’t know when or where or how it would happen. He’d just get in a drag race and-”
She raised her gaze to me directly. “She was so miserable, I probably did her a favor.
That’s a horrible thing to say. But it’s true. I don’t think much of her husband-the way he’s always swaggering around like he’s still the big sports hero-but he deserved a better wife than her.
I almost felt sorry for her.”
Her gaze shifted past me and she smiled then at something I couldn’t see. “You’re getting sneaky in your old age, sister.”
I turned and saw Amy in the doorway. In little more than a whisper, she said, “You should’ve talked to me, Emma. I could’ve helped you.
I’d never desert you, Emma. I want to go where you go.”
Just before she moved away from the kitchen door, sobbing, everything in the house took on its old, comfortable self. I liked all the old mismatched furnishings, and the thrum of that damned refrigerator motor, and the smell of the oilcloth.
We listened as Amy, still sobbing, ran up the stairs, slamming her door when she reached her room.
“She’s never going to forgive me, Sam.”
“Maybe never forgive you. But she’ll understand you. Someday.”
“At my age, I don’t have a lot of somedays left, Sam.”
I let her cry for a while and then I went around the table and raised her to her feet and took her in my arms. She had the bones of old age, so fragile and yet so sharp, and flesh that was dried freckled tissue covering the lean meat of mortality.
I sat down in her chair and put her on my lap and said, “We’re going to figure out how to handle Cliffie tomorrow morning when I take you in. And then we’re going to get you the best criminal lawyer in the state, all right?”
And when she raised her ancient face, she was no longer monster or ghoul, but a young Irish girl again-for just that moment I saw the girl she’d been, Easter hat and Christmas dress and first-date hair ribbon-and when I held her this time, I was holding all those years, an entire life, in my arms and I felt her heartbeat slow and the nervous spasm in her left arm cease and heard her crying become little more than sniffles.
She said, “Will you go talk to Amy for me, Sam? I’d really appreciate it.”
Twenty-five
I drove around and then I didn’t drive around, sitting in a tavern where the gents along the b
ar were arguing Kennedy-nixon, coming up in two weeks, and then I drove around again but not for long because I just kept thinking of Amy sobbing, “If our father ever knew what his daughter did-I’m so glad my folks are dead and don’t have to see this.
And killing poor David.” And finally, realizing for the first time the practical implications of this terrible night: “Who’ll I live with now, Sam? Emma’s my whole life, my whole life.”
The lights shouldn’t have been turned on. Neither should the Tv. My first thought was a burglar of some kind, but who’d burgle my little apartment?
Or maybe a dissatisfied client or his emissary. You lose a trial, sometimes they have kin gunning for you. Hell, if a plotline like that is good enough for Gunsmoke, it’s good enough for Black River Falls.
I saw her through the window in the door. All comfy-cozy on the couch. Tasha, Crystal, and Tess all pushed tight against her at various points in her body.
She looked like she belonged there.
When she heard my key in the door, she jumped up and rushed toward me.
“I’ve really been worried about you. Mrs.
Goldman let me in again. She’s sure a nice woman.”
“She sure is.”
I came in. Took off my suitcoat, balled it, and tossed it for two points on the chair. “Needs to be dry-cleaned, anyway.”
“Oh.”
“I thought maybe you were a burglar.”
“I don’t think I could ever be anything as exciting as a burglar. And besides, I’m very happy being a nurse.”
“You sure are pretty.”
“I’ve missed you, Sam. I’m just confused about everything.”
“Me, too.”
We still weren’t touching in any way. We were maybe half a foot apart. The cats were on the couch, watching us. They wanted some action.
“Sam, have you ever just slept with a woman? No going all the way, I mean?”
“Honest?”
“Honest.”
“I’ve tried.”
“It didn’t work?”
“I don’t think she really wanted it to work and I know I didn’t want it to work.”
“Oh.”
