by Ed Gorman
She lifted her hand from the gun and said quietly to me, “I killed all three of them, Sam. Deirdre realized this tonight when I took her car and went out to the summer house.” She raised her regal head to Deirdre, still in the chair. “She’s protected me all her life. While I was the one who should have been protecting her. I was selfish. I should’ve divorced Ross a long time ago. Deirdre would have been so much better.”
She glanced down at her large, muscular hands. “They were terrible people, Sam. Terrible people.” Then she went on to explain that Kevin Hastings had tried to blackmail her directly and showed her the Embers receipt and told her he knew what was going on. And then she saw a way to destroy them all—expose the men for what they were, rid everybody of the Hastingses.
Then she looked back at me. “I killed them, Sam. Not Deirdre.”
And I knew she was telling the truth.
TWENTY
HALF A DAY AFTER Washington announced that a deal had been struck with Russia, that Khrushchev would be dismantling the missile sites, there was a party in the park. A sure sign that it’s a real true community party is when very old people dance. And dance they did. There was a polka band and that was their muse. Other sure signs of a true community party was free burgers, free potato salad, free pop, free beer. The youngest teenagers raced around the park performing antic pranks, while the older teenagers flirted, or yearned to flirt, or hung out with kids who weren’t afraid to flirt. It seemed like every woman there had an armload of babies, bouquets of babies. The men from wars past played horseshoes and smoked corncob pipes or Luckies or Camels and talked about how Jack Kennedy had redeemed himself from his invasion of Cuba.
Late in the afternoon a bunch of kids, all of whom tried to look like either Elvis or Buddy Holly or eerie amalgams of both, replaced the polka band and swung into rock. This brought out little ones as wee as three and kids of eight and up. I did all my dutiful dancing with cousins somewhere around my age. In small towns, you were expected to. They’d been fine for dunking in pools, beating in races, locking in closets, scaring the hell out of in dark rooms, laughing at the first time you ever saw them in makeup or high heels, even have useless idle verboten crushes on from time to time. Now it was time to act like a grown-up and dance with them. One of them was pregnant, one of them was drunk, one of them was gorgeous and one of them listed eight things I’d done to her over our mutual childhood that she still planned to pay me back for, including dropping an Ex-Lax tablet into a Pepsi.
For these hours, euphoria—which had to be going on all over the world—euphoria triumphed in Black River Falls, Iowa. Sundown came with a clear and melancholy beauty, with even some of the very oldest dancing to Buddy Holly songs … and people who didn’t usually speak to each other there were talking with Pepsi and Pabst cans in their hands.
The world had been spared the worst war of all. And for these exquisite hours we were bound up, each of us, in our common humanity.
I was finishing off a Pepsi when I felt fingers on my arm. I turned and saw Mary who said, “How much would you charge to dance with me?”
I looked at that shy sweet face, that face I’d been looking at since we’d had our kindergarten photo taken together, and said, “This is your lucky day, ma’am. Sam McCain is having a sale. For you he’s absolutely free.”
“Well, that sounds reasonable enough.”
“It sure is good to see you, Mary.”
She laughed, taking my hand. “Shut up and dance, Sam.”
A ballad would’ve been nice. But even bopping to “Great Balls of Fire,” it was romantic as hell anyway. Because everything was romantic at this moment in the history of old planet Earth. Everything.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
For the tenacious first editor who
Keeps me honest and keeps me laughing—
Mindy Jarusek
Turn the page to continue reading from the Sam McCain Mysteries
PROLOGUE
I AM SITTING HERE waiting for social caseworker Jenny Kosek to finish testifying on behalf of my client Dink Holloway, the nickname stemming from the fact that he’s about five-two and weighs just over one hundred pounds.
The May day is so warm and sky-blue that I want to get out of court and just run my red Ford ragtop up and down the old river road. It’s like sitting in school on such a day and watching the minute hand on the wall clock piss you off by moving so slowly. Surely the nuns sneak in at night with screwdrivers and trick the timing mechanism in some way.
Of course, back in my school days I wasn’t a lawyer and I wasn’t accountable for the fate of an eighteen-year-old compulsive thief named Dink. Now I can’t gaze out the window. I have to pay attention.
With this case Dink graduates from juvenile to adult court and I can tell you that the judge, who dealt with him when she worked juvie, is not happy to see him.
Jenny Kosek has clearly been seduced by Dink’s charm. She doesn’t even seem to mind that he is married and has at least one child somewhere among the local population. Quite an accomplishment for somebody of his callow years. He’s a leading man in miniature, and the miniature gives him an advantage not even Charlton Heston and Rock Hudson have—most women want to (a) mother him and (b) put him on the path of the righteous.
Now, I’m as much given to a sociological view of criminality as anybody else in my time. Yes, poverty breeds crime; yes, it’s difficult to escape the temptations of crime when your old man beats on your old lady and you have holes in your shoes; and yes! If only we combine patience with punishment, we will surely rehabilitate our criminals.
Even given my misgivings about Dink—I only took the case because his mother literally slapped my hands together and began, in between pleas, kissing them— Jenny’s review of his history had me convinced that Dink deserved all the sociological pity and patience we could bestow on him. When Jenny described Dink’s stealing the car only so he could take his dying grandmother back and forth to her medical appointments … well, as much as I’d laughed at him when he’d laid that particular myth on me—“You should be able to come up with a lot better stories than that by now, Dink! Shit, you’ve been stealing stuff since you were two!”—somehow there in the courtroom, and coming at the end of Jenny’s longish retelling of the Dink story, somehow I felt kind of moved by it. Maybe the little prick wasn’t as bad as he seemed.
And even the judge, Harriet “Hang ’em” Hillman, dabbed once or twice at her eyes.
A month earlier there’d been some trouble in court, a man exploding when his brother testified against him. The man pounded his brother into unconsciousness before the guards at the back or the bailiff at the front could stop him.
Now, there was a cop in blue standing next to our table. He’d been glaring at Dink the whole day. As Jenny herself got choked up, the cop glowered at Dink again. He’d probably had to deal with too many Dinks in his time.
Jenny left the witness stand and the judge started to get up so she could go to her chambers and consider all she’d heard today. But then she stopped herself, sat back down, and said, “While I would ordinarily sentence you to time in prison—at least two years—I see a mitigating circumstance in the fact that you stole the car to help your grandmother. I condemn your lawlessness, but I applaud your humanity. I’m going to sentence you to five years of probation. You are to report to your probation officer twice a month. He or she will be assigned to you sometime in the next few days. Do you realize how fortunate you are not to be going to prison?”
We were standing up now.
“Yes, Judge,” Dink said, sounding little-boy sincere as only he can. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. You’ve given me an opportunity to turn my life around completely.”
Jenny choked on her tears so loudly, the effect was that of a gunshot.
All the usual followed: standing while the judge was leaving, interested people in the pews heading for the doors, the prosecutor coming over to shake my hand and tell me as always how much he
liked my red ragtop, Jenny kissing me on the cheek and coming close to kissing Dink on the mouth, and the cop looking irritated that we were all standing around because he obviously wanted to get out of here and get back to shooting people.
So, finally, when it was all over and Dink and I were out in the hall and heading for the great outdoors, me thinking that maybe the judge was wise not putting Dink in the slammer—it was just then that the cop from the courtroom came exploding through the doors and said, “There you are, you little bastard!”
He didn’t honor law or social rules. He just grabbed Dink by the hair, held him up a foot or two off the marble floor, and said, “Gimme back my billfold.”
Dink looked at me with those spaniel eyes and said, “I didn’t take his wallet, Mr. McCain. I really didn’t!”
But the cop wasn’t waiting. He jammed his right hand into the right pocket of Dink’s lightweight jacket and pulled out a billfold.
“Oh, God, Officer! I don’t have any idea how that got in there! I really don’t.”
Dink had, of course, picked the cop’s back pocket. I was wondering what old Hang ’em Harriet would have to say about giving Dink another chance now.
Don’t worry. We’ll see more of Dink later.
PART ONE
ONE
ON THE DRIVE OVER, I decided to leave it in the hands of the gods.
If Richie Neville’s cabin door was unlocked, I’d go inside. If not, I’d turn right around in my red Ford ragtop and head back to my office. I wouldn’t pick his lock, as I’d considered doing. State bars frown on lawyers who work night jobs as felons.
Neville lived just outside the city limits of Black River Falls, which, in this August of 1963, had reached 37,000 in population, thanks to an influx of young marrieds who looked upon us as a suburb equidistant from Cedar Rapids and Iowa City.
God had just flipped the switch and filled the early evening sky with stars. The stretch of river to my right was serving as a racetrack for speedboats, and on the far shore, among the moonglow birches, you could see campfires—hot dogs and s’mores and portable radios bursting with rock and roll—and in the ragged piney hills above, a freight train rattling through the prairie night.
Too good a night to risk my primary career as an attorney and my secondary career as a private investigator for the court of Judge Esme Anne Whitney.
But something ugly was going on, and it was that very same Judge Whitney, who was also risking some serious legal trouble of her own, who’d convinced me that we both had to put a stop to it now.
For ten minutes I traveled a narrow gravel lane, and then I descended into a wooded hollow that smelled of loam and skunk and apple blossoms.
I pulled the ragtop off the road and stashed it behind a copse of hardwoods.
The rest of the trip would be on foot.
“You mean her Negro boyfriend?”
“Yes, McCain, I mean her Negro boyfriend. His name is David Leeds.”
We were in her courthouse office. This was about an hour before I left for the cabin. Thunder booming. Rain slashing the mullioned windows. And Her Honor, perched on the edge of her desk, shooting rubber bands at me and hitting me every other time or so.
She had a small box of the damned things on one side of her, and on the other side she had a snifter of brandy. Someday, years from now, when I was dying from a terminal illness and nothing mattered anymore, I’d find the courage to tell her about an organization called AA.
She tamped herself another smoke from her blue packet of Gauloise cigarettes. She was a good-looking woman in her early sixties. She escaped to New York whenever possible and that showed in the cut of the designer suits she favored and the faintly snotty way she dealt with plebeians such as me.
“Do a lot of people know about it?”
“They stay in Iowa City most of the time, thank God. He’s in school there. But it’s bound to get around. That’s the first problem.”
“Well, she’s what, twenty, twenty-one? It’s sort of up to her, isn’t it?”
“Why don’t you just call me a bigot and get it over with?”
I smiled. “I was saving that for later, Judge.”
“The fact is, I’m not a bigot at all. I merely want to see Senator Williams get reelected. And since he’s a Republican, I’m sure you’re more than happy about his daughter seeing a Negro.”
She hooked another rubber band to her thumb and finger and let fly. It struck my small Irish nose and bounced off.
“I’ve never met Leeds. But I guess he’s very bright. He’s in law school, I understand.”
“He’s a Negro. A very handsome young man of twenty-one, I’m told, but a Negro nonetheless. And I say that with no prejudice whatsoever. You’ll remember that it was my party, the Republicans, that freed the slaves.”
“Oh, I already knew you weren’t a bigot. You have a Negro gardener, a Negro horse groomer, and a Negro maid.”
“I know you’re being sarcastic, McCain, but that’s just because your party didn’t free the slaves.”
There were several hundred arguments that came to mind but they’d be lost on her.
“So what we have,” I said, “is a semipopular Republican senator in a tight reelection race this coming fall who doesn’t want it known that his innocent young white daughter is dating a Negro.”
She eased off the edge of her desk and walked over to one of the long windows, where she looked out at the wind-lashed summer trees. The rain tormented the glass. She held her elbow in the palm of her right hand and smoked with her left. I saw a watery portrait of her in the dark pane.
“You know what people see on television every night on the news, McCain. All these civil rights marches. All these threats those people make. Everything was fine a few years ago. I just don’t know what happened. Anyway, most people are already stirred up by everything they see on the evening news. And if it were to be known that their beloved senator—and he is beloved no matter what you say, McCain—if they knew that the daughter of their beloved senator—a very beautiful young girl who has had every advantage a wealthy father could possibly have given her—if they knew that she threw everything away, including propriety and moral values … well, how could they ever vote for him?”
Now I got up, grabbed a bunch of her rubber bands, and walked over by the window. I began firing them at her from the side.
“So let me understand this, Judge. When you see all those impoverished people who haven’t been able to vote or find decent jobs or send their kids to decent schools or do anything about all the police brutality generation after generation—it irritates you?”
She picked a rubber band from her hair and said, “Nobody has the right to break the law and march in the streets without a permit.”
I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my laughter. “I’m glad you weren’t one of Lincoln’s advisers. He never would’ve gotten rid of slavery. And if you shoot one more rubber band at me, I’ll start charging you a buck for every time you hit me.”
She was mad and so was I. Most of the time our arguments had to do with her snobbery. She was, to her credit, able to rise above most of her prejudices in her courtroom. But when she wasn’t in her judicial robes, she reverted to the coddled, cuddled old-money imperialist she usually was.
The arguments rarely got personal. This one was different. How could you see the shacks the marchers lived in, the degradation they had to put up with every day of their lives, and not in some way share their grief? How could you possibly watch the freedom marchers and not see how righteous they were in their simple but profound demands?
Who gave a shit about parade permits?
“But that isn’t all, McCain.”
“Oh?”
“Pick up the gray envelope on my desk.”
I did so. There were photos inside of Lucy Williams and her boyfriend. Not dirty photos. If Lucy Williams and David Leeds had both been white or both been black, there’d have been no problem. Walking across the U of Iowa camp
us, his arm around her. Sitting on the same side of a restaurant booth. Her sitting on the handlebars while he was pedaling.
Innocent pictures. Two clean-cut, nice-looking young people in love.
“I see what you’re talking about. Some people’ll be offended by these, but they’re really innocuous.”
“These were sent to the party office in Des Moines. Imagine if they made it into a newspaper.” Then she said: “You once had a client named Richie Neville.”
Maybe I was as slow as the judge frequently accused me of being. I didn’t connect Neville to the photos until I remembered that he was a photographer now. When I’d represented him as a teenager he’d been nothing more than a harmless, garden-variety punk who’d gotten in juvie trouble in Chicago and had been shipped out here by his parents to live with his overly devout aunt.
“You’re kind of jumping to conclusions, aren’t you?”
“The senator’s wife said she is sure she saw him two or three times driving past their house.”
“How does she even know him?”
“He did yard work for them a few times. And now he’s a photographer.”
“Well, gosh, let’s go lynch him then, since we’ve got such solid evidence against him.”
“You’re being ridiculous as usual, McCain. But I’ll bet we could learn a lot by getting into his darkroom.”
“You’re ordering me to break the law?”
She had such a serene smile. “I’m not ordering you to do anything, McCain.” The smile grew richer, deeper. “I’m just saying that if somebody were to be in the vicinity of Mr. Neville’s cabin …”
The river sparkled in the moonlight. The rain had ended and all the foliage gleamed. Above me a raccoon was placing calls to other raccoons in a loud and endearing voice. The pines on both sides of the small, tidy cabin smelled sweet as a summer morning.
