Breaking Up Is Hard to Do (The Sam McCain Mysteries Book 6)

by Ed Gorman

  I switched off the ignition, grabbed my .38 and flashlight and got out of the car. The wind off the river, which was behind a screen of birches, was hard cold. The stench was of fish.

  I went to the side window and poked my flashlight right up against the glass. Murdoch hadn’t even tried to make it resemble any kind of hunting or sport cabin. It was furnished in solid middle-class New England furniture. Ethan Allen from the looks of it.

  I saw nothing out of place. But I also saw no evidence of Ross. Had he gone for a walk? Was he maybe asleep in the bedroom?

  I went back to the front door. Took out my handkerchief and proceeded to make my way inside without leaving any fingerprints. I stood in the living room and flipped on the wall light. Everything was dusty, including the 21-inch Admiral table model TV. The screen was opaque with dust. I called out his name several times. My voice sounded alien to me in the gloom.

  A door opened on a spring that needed oiling. Then slammed shut.

  The kitchen. I ran through the alcove at the other end of the dining room, straight into the dark kitchen. I flipped on the overhead light. Standard issue, like the rest of the house. Newish but dusty stove-refrigerator-counter-cupboards. The kitchen had an empty feeling to it, like a stage kitchen in a TV commercial. Open the cupboards and you’d find nothing more than mice droppings. Open the refrigerator and you’d see nothing but empty metal racks.

  All this—the run through the dining room, my assessment of the kitchen—took less than half a minute. I hurried out the back door that somebody had just let slam.

  The warm sweat from inside turned to frozen sweat in the cold night. Maybe ten yards separated back yard from woods. I shone my flashbeam at the dusty wall of hardwoods. There were three narrow paths between four widely separated trees. Each seemed to angle off in a sharply different direction.

  I heard something, or thought I heard something. But by then it was already too late.

  I was struck from behind with more violence than had ever been visited upon my head before. I’d been punched hard, struck glancingly with a piece of sturdy wood, even kicked just above the temple. But never anything like this. This was the sky falling on me.

  I doubt I remained conscious for more than two seconds. There was this spike of pain that obliterated all other senses, a spike that tore through my head front to back like a bullet. And yet I somehow knew I hadn’t been shot. Something else…

  And then there was just the darkness. I’m sure I didn’t help myself any by slamming my head against the frosty ground. But at least I didn’t feel it for longer than a millisecond…

  Pain. Stabbing pain, numbing pain, blinding pain, pain from which there was not a moment’s escape. My senses seemed to switch on one by one. A car in the distance trying to pull away, slamming into gear, scraping a tree—hearing. The hardwood wall I’d seen before being knocked out—seeing. The cold ground, dead grass scratching my cheek—feeling. But they were all faint senses and impressions. Nothing could be as strong as the unyielding, throbbing pain.

  I think it took something like two weeks to lever myself to my feet. I know I dropped to my knees a few times in the process. Then I saw the clothesline pole and crawled over to it. Good old clothesline poles. They never let you down. I wrapped my arms around it and began to pull myself to my feet. Good old clothesline pole. I hung on to it like a drunk in an old vaudeville sketch hanging on to a street light.

  I stood there a good long time. I wasn’t sure if the pain lessened or I was simply adjusting to it. Still a raw bitch of malice and mendacity and torture. But not quite as bad as it had been when I’d first come to.

  I managed to light a cigarette. And after a few minutes I saw the rock. It took me a few more minutes to reach it, to grasp it in my hand. It was the size of a hardball but jagged. One edge of it had a healthy sampling of my hair, blood and scalp on it. A perfect weapon.

  I let it drop to the ground and then I turned to face the house. I needed to go back in there and finish looking around. Maybe my assailant had left something behind.

  I moved carefully, trying not to generate more pain.

  The lights were out. I went into the darkness. The door of a small metal fusebox was open in the kitchen. I was able to see what my assailant had done. Had run out the back door, circled around to the front of the house, come back inside just as I was leaving, pulled the fuse from the box and got rid of it, and then eased outside where he launched the rock. The Cubs could use a pitcher this good.

  I finished looking through the house with my flashlight.

  There wasn’t any shock when I found him. I’d pretty much expected to find him. I couldn’t tell you why. Just some sense of where this whole thing was going, all the information of the past two days starting to assume a recognizable shape.

  I found Ross Murdoch sitting on the toilet with the lid down. I was glad that my beam was narrow. I wouldn’t have wanted to see it all. He’d used a .38 and a good half of his head was adhered to the wall behind him in patches of hair and slime and streaky splashes of blood. What remained of his head was angled to the right, resting on his shoulder as if his neck had been snapped in some remarkable way. The gaze of the dead eyes was a roadkill gaze—that awful look of eternal shock and terror you see on possums and raccoons and squirrels that have been run over.

  His right arm was flung across the sink. The .38 dangled from his finger.

  I looked around for a note he might have left, even though I was pretty sure this hadn’t been any suicide. No note, of course.

  I looked for footprints, fingerprints, smudges, anything that would help tell the story of what had happened in this bathroom. The roomness suddenly got to me. The ghosts of it. Pretty ladies daubing on makeup in the mirror above the sink. Adulterous men taking nervous stock of themselves in the same mirror. Women crying, drunks trying to sober up with face splashes of ice-cold water, somebody being sick. And now this dead man. This would alter the small room forever. The energy of it, those ghosts that record every single moment of every single room they haunt.

  I went to the kitchen and worked on my wound as well as I could. It hurt like hell to touch it even with a warm wet rag. I sat down and smoked another cigarette and consciously tried to gather myself. There was no phone. I would have to go back to town to find one. I’d put the top down. I’d freeze but it would sharpen my senses.

  There wasn’t any point in looking at him again. There wasn’t any point in staying around. There wasn’t any point in denying the thought that had been taking shape since I’d been in Peggy Leigh’s office earlier—and since I’d gotten the phone call from Janice Wilson. That Deirdre could easily have left the hospital at any time during her scheduled hours—and come back without anybody noticing. Especially if she moved quickly enough.

  As I pulled away from the front of the summer house, I remembered the sound of a car that had been pulling away as I’d lain there with my head smashed in. I put on my high beams and crawled along the narrow road slowly, examining every foot of the road on either side of me. I was nearly at the end of it before I saw what I needed to see.

  I stopped, got out, went over to where a car had angled between two widely spaced trees to hide in deep undergrowth. It had been a rough entrance and an even rougher withdrawal. The whole area looked as if a piece of heavy equipment had smashed it down. I could still smell the fumes of the gasoline needed to push the car through the nearly impenetrable undergrowth.

  I spent several minutes examining brush and trees alike. There were two places where you could see that the car had scraped up against a coarse surface. I took out my Cub Scout knife and took a sample of the scrape and then set the sample inside my handkerchief.

  I put my flashlight beam on the scrape. Easy enough to see who the car belonged to. The same yellow paint on a certain little foreign car.

  NINETEEN

  I FOUND A PHONE BOOTH next to “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” a honky-tonk visited at least once a week by cops and an ambulance. The
m there boys do like their fightin’.

  I called Spellman and told him what I’d found and what I’d figured out. He argued against what I had planned next. I told him to give me an hour. I told him this was the best way, the surprise method. He still didn’t like it but he agreed to an hour, at which point he was calling Cliffie if he didn’t hear from me otherwise.

  A man in a black leather jacket and a face shiny with blood came staggering out of the door along with his equally drunken pal. A country singer with the unlikely name of Ferlin Husky wailed on the night, accompanied by some very nice picking on the slide guitar.

  The man’s friend, who was walking along next to him, said, “Tried to tell you she was his wife, dummy. That’s why he got so mad.”

  “All I did was grab her tit. I didn’t even grab both of ’em.”

  I could hear this one in court. Your honor, my client grabbed but one of her tits, not both. I ask you, is a one-tit-grabber really a menace to society? Judges are very sympathetic, as you know, to such brilliant pleas.

  I made up some pretty good speeches on the drive out there. The accusation, the denial, the final confession. My parts in them, anyway. She’d have to come up with her own and I was sure she would.

  I was beginning to understand it, the motive I mean. Maybe I was even a little sympathetic about it.

  I’d been spared the kind of household atmosphere she’d grown up in, so I couldn’t judge her. I might have reacted the same way. I had a friend whose mother had an affair years ago and it seemed to have had a permanent effect on every member of the family. The husband was never quite able to forgive the wife; the wife was bitter because the husband would never acknowledge how many times he’d let her down before she had the affair; and the three kids had to listen to their mother being called a whore a couple times a week. They also had to minister—like ambulance drivers—to whichever parent was in the more mental anguish at the moment. They went on to have terrible marriages themselves, the kids. Too glibly Freudian to say that this was because of what they’d gone through with their own parents—but then it must have given them a pretty dark and scary view of marriage.

  The lights were on. I knocked. I waited two minutes. No response. I rang the bell. Two minutes. No response. And then suddenly the door was opening and she was there.

  If she suspected why I was here, she disguised it well. “I’d say winter’s not far away.”

  “It sure isn’t.”

  “It’s good to see you. C’mon in.”

  I followed her inside.

  She wore a white blouse and black slacks. Her bottom was tops. She had put a red ribbon in her dark hair, the red of it matching the rich red of her lipstick. A little touch of the exotic.

  “Anything to drink, Sam?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Any news?”

  “Not anything you don’t already know.”

  I think she knew, then. Our eyes met, held.

  “Listen to the wind, Sam.”

  We were in the den. She was fixing herself a drink at the dry bar. I’d declined. She kept her back to me.

  “Autumn wind always sounds so lonely, don’t think you, Sam? Like a little girl crying.”

  I was standing. Now I sat. “A little girl crying because her father was rarely home. A little girl crying because her father spent all his time with other women. Driving the little girl’s mother into depressions so bad that she had to be hospitalized.”

  She still hadn’t turned around. “Sounds like a novel you’re writing.”

  “The father would have left them but he wanted to be governor someday. No way a divorced man would ever be governor in this state. Somehow the girl found out about her father’s indiscretions—maybe stumbled across some letters; maybe eavesdropped on a phone call, could’ve been a number of ways—and realized that this was what was destroying her mother. The mother got worse and worse. The girl pleaded with her father to give up his women, to live a decent life. But the father just kept right on living the way he always had. And the girl grew up hating him for what he’d done to her mother. She didn’t care about herself and what he’d done to her. Her hatred made her strong. All she cared about was her mother and how she’d been destroyed. The girl was strong. The mother wasn’t.”

  She walked from the dry bar to the leather couch that faced my leather chair. She sat down, put her head back against the chair, closed her eyes.

  She was right about the wind. In the silence you could hear a child crying. A lonely little girl, say—a lonely little girl who didn’t really care much about the fact that she was attractive and rich and clever. She just wanted her mother to be happy. That was all.

  She closed her eyes and tilted her head back against the chair. “I don’t suppose it was all that difficult to figure out, was it, Sam?”

  “Not after I realized that you’d found out about the blackmail money Karen Hastings wanted. And about the relationship she had with your father and those three other men. You had dinner that night at the Embers with Karen Hastings, didn’t you? I imagine that’s when you told her how much you were afraid of a scandal and that you’d pay her what she wanted even if the men wouldn’t. A week later you called her and told her to come to your house and collect her money. You killed her in the basement and put her in the bomb shelter. You knew everybody would think your father killed her. You didn’t want to prevent a scandal. You wanted to create one. You knew that when the body was discovered, the whole story would come out and he would be destroyed. You wanted him to suffer. And you pulled it off, kiddo. He suffered all right. He was a scandal and a dirty joke and he’d never be able to walk down the streets of this town again without somebody smirking at him. Of course, walking down the street was sort of a moot point, wasn’t it? He’d be in prison for murder.”

  We listened to the wind some more.

  “You going to say anything?” I said.

  “Nothing to say, Sam.”

  “What made you decide to kill him tonight?”

  Her eyes were still closed. Her breasts rose and fell with her soft sighs. I imagined that she’d spent a lot of sad hours like this, trying to shut out the world.

  “Deirdre?”

  “Do we have to talk, Sam?” Then: “I read this story once. About this little girl and all these terrible things happened to her. But then somehow she figured out that she was just part of a dream the man upstairs was having. The entire universe existed only in his mind. She was miserable and so was everybody in the world. So she went upstairs with a butcher knife and killed him.”

  She was silent for a time.

  “Then what happened, Deirdre?” I said softly.

  “Then there was just—nothing. She didn’t exist because the terrible man couldn’t have his terrible dreams any more.”

  “That’s pretty sad.”

  “Maybe not, Sam. Maybe it was better that she didn’t exist. That nobody existed. Then they couldn’t hurt each other or betray each other.”

  She began to cry, then, in little spasms of delicate grief. “Why don’t you just call the police, Sam, and we’ll get it all over with.”

  “I can give you a little more time.”

  “No, Sam.” She sat up in the chair and looked at me. “Please. Now. We’ll just get it over with.”

  I called all the people I needed to call, including Cliffie, and then went over to the bar in the den and had a drink. I went to the bottom of the stairs twice and shouted up to Deirdre. I doubted she’d try to escape. She answered both times.

  There were two cop cars. Cliffie came on his motorcycle. All three had sirens blaring. The first contingent of press wasn’t far behind. Cliffie had obviously called them.

  He came up to me where I stood on the steps, in the glare of patrol car headlights. He’d had time to put on his white Stetson and his swagger.

  “I figured it was her all along,” he said.

  “Sure you did. That’s why you arrested her father.”

  “Ever think
I was trying to set a trap for her?”

  “The mind boggles,” I said.

  “Where the hell is she?”

  “I’ll go get her.”

  He turned and waved at a cop with a shotgun. “Earle, get over here.” To me he said, “Earle’n me’ll go inside with you.”

  I couldn’t fault the police procedure but I knew why he was doing it. So he could bring her out on the porch personally. In handcuffs. His hand on her arm. Cliffie Sykes, Jr. Bad-ass.

  “All right,” I said.

  “Nice of you to give me permission and all,” Cliffie said.

  I couldn’t tell you today which came first, the scream or the gunshot. I don’t believe I’d ever heard a scream or a gunshot that sounded quite as loud as these did. They seemed to paralyze everybody for long seconds.

  And then Cliffie, Earle and his shotgun, and I were running inside to the staircase. Cliffie and I reached the first step at the same time. I pushed him out of the way and took the stairs two at a time.

  The weeping guided me to the master bedroom. The door was closed. I flung it open. What I saw didn’t make sense at first. Deirdre’s mother hadn’t gone to the hospital after all.

  Irene sitting on the chair of her enormous makeup table, her face in all four mirrors. She wore a simple blue dress. Her right hand was on the table and in her right hand was a large handgun. Above her there was a large oval crack in the ceiling plaster. A snowfall of the stuff was all over her hair and shoulders.

  Cliffie damned near knocked me down getting into the room. He had his gun drawn.

  The weeping came from Deirdre, who was in a chair by the fireplace. Curled up in a fetal position.

  The other cops were crammed in the doorway, watching.

  Cliffie said, “You take your hand off that gun, Missus. You’re just gonna make everything worse for everybody. I came here to arrest your daughter for murder. And I’d advise you not to get in the way.”

  She didn’t do it right away. Instead, she just looked up at him. I had a sense that she was lost to reality for all time. There was a sadness about her that you see in the faces of the hopeless on the wards of mental hospitals. They’re so sedated they walk zombie-style down the halls, slippers slapping, heads down.