Sam McCain - 01 - The Day the Music Died

by Ed Gorman

  Then she fell in love with somebody else.”

  “Don’t tell me anything more. Save it for your lawyer.”

  “All I was going to say was that when she asked me for a divorce last night, I couldn’t handle it. I took down a bottle of whiskey—I’d gotten used to having it around, you know, for when we had company and stuff—and then I really started knocking down the drinks. After two years of being dry, they really hit me hard.”

  “So then you killed her?”

  He shrugged again. “Then I killed her.”

  The funny thing was, I didn’t believe him. “Why’re you telling me this?”

  “That I killed her? Because it’s the truth. We may as well get it over with. With Sykes and all. Man, will that hillbilly be

  gloating. He’ll actually have a member of Judge Whitney’s family in his jail.

  He’ll probably play Webb Pierce

  records all day long.” Webb Pierce was the country-western favorite of the moment. A small Iowa town like this, people liked to show their sophistication by shunning country music. Badge of honor.

  “I still want to know why you’re telling me this.”

  “I told you. Because I just want to get it over with. It’s pretty obvious that I killed her, isn’t it?” Then he drained off his drink. I stood up. “I’m going to walk over to the phone and call Sykes.”

  “Fine. That’s what I want you to do.”

  “I’m also going to call Bob Tompkins for you. He’s the best criminal attorney in this part of the state. Your aunt has a lot of respect for him.”

  He looked at me abruptly. “I don’t want to have to see her again.”

  I wasn’t sure who he meant. “Who?”

  “You know. Susan.”

  “Okay.” Then, “It’s freezing in here.”

  “Yeah, after I shot her, I guess I went a little nuts. I smashed out some windows and stuff.”

  I still didn’t believe he’d killed her and I still didn’t know why. I went to the phone and called Cliff Sykes, Jr., and listened to him try to hide his glee. Then I called Judge Whitney and repeated what I’d told Sykes.

  I also told her I’d like to invite Bob Tompkins in. She said she thought that was a good idea.

  I had just hung up when the shot sounded. I glanced at the empty breakfast nook behind me.

  I had a feeling he’d been better at it this time. A kind of sorrow came over me, one I hadn’t counted on driving out here. I’d always hated him and with good reason. But he’d been sad this morning, human-animal sad, a creature frenzied and forlorn and crazed, and he wouldn’t let me hate him anymore, the son of a bitch, no matter how much I might have wanted to.

  I went upstairs and found him on the bed. He looked even older now, a lot older.

  Six

  Two hours later, I got to play

  celebrity. I’d needed a haircut for two weeks so I walked from my tiny law office to Bill and Phil’s. The walk helped; the cold air woke me up, the golden sunlight lent me an air of hope. Sometimes, I’d think about Pamela, sometimes I’d think about Kenny, and sometimes I’d think about Buddy Holly and Richie Valens.

  Bill Malley gave me my first haircut when I was two or three. My folks have a photo of me sitting on a board stretched across the arms of his barber chair with his barber sheet drawn up to my neck. He always gave little kids suckers, the way dentists do. Adults, he just gives speeches. Bill’s favorite topics are communism (he’s against it), fluoride (he’s against it), civil rights marches (he’s against them), Senator McCarthy (he was for him) and Sammy Davis, Jr. (he’s against him).

  By rights, I should go to Phil, who’s a Democrat like myself. But Phil has a halitosis problem that could melt a metal wall.

  Both chairs were filled, one of them by Jim Truman. He was a handyman who worked out of his house on the edge of town, along a scenic leg of the Cedar River. The joke was that he wanted to be buried in an Osh-Kosh coffin because everything else he wore—cap, shirt, bib overalls-carried the Osh-Kosh label. He’d come here a few years ago after the Korean War, in which he’d lost his leg below the knee. Now he wore an artificial one. The Fix-It Man was what he had painted on the front of his trailer. He was a marvel of arcane knowledge and physical dexterity.

  He could fix everything from a blender to a car engine.

  He always said he couldn’t fix Tv’s but folks knew that was because he didn’t want to hurt Benny Welsh’s business, Benny being the guy who first started selling and repairing Tv’s here in the late forties.

  My celebrity was a result of my being at the Whitney place when Kenny took his life.

  I’d waited around for Sykes and his incompetents to show up, told them what I knew, then headed back for town.

  When I got done repeating my account

  for the boys in the barbershop, Bill said, “Probably fluoride.”

  “Huh?” I said.

  “Sure,” he said. “It rots your brain just the way the commies want it to.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “Well, figure it out for yourself, Counselor,” he said. A lot of people called me “counselor” as a joke, mostly because I’ve still got a baby face and freckles. “Guy brushes his teeth as much as Kenny did, and the water’s got fluoride in it, how long before the guy goes psycho and kills somebody?”

  Phil rolled his eyes. “There goes those commies workin’ overtime again.”

  “Well, you laugh now, my friend, but someday when you see the mayor turned into a zombie and walkin’ down the street with an ax in his hand—”

  “Hell, the mayor’s already a zombie,”

  Phil said. “He don’t need no fluoride to help him.”

  The men in the chair laughed. Bill and Phil had their mutual excoriation polished smooth as a vaudeville routine.

  “Thanks for taking care of that contract for me,”

  Jim Truman said. “I really appreciate it, Mr. McCain.”

  “My pleasure.”

  Truman had a long, angular face and brown eyes that had an almost cowlike docility, leading to the rumor that he might be slightly retarded in his deliberate, Osh-Kosh way. But he wasn’t retarded. He just took his time, which was what made him such a good craftsman. He’d done a lot of home repairs for my folks and charged them about the fairest prices you could ask for.

  Phil said, “They hear anything more about that girl?” to no one in particular. It was his way of starting us on a new topic of conversation.

  “What girl?” I said dutifully.

  “Next county over. Been missing four days now. Reason I asked, she’s a shirttail cousin of one of my customers. He said she’s a real nice little gal.”

  “Real nice little gal” translated

  to virginal. I like to sit in the barbershop and smell the hair oil and the talcum powder and the butch wax and the smoke from the various cigarettes, cigars and pipes. I like the friendship of the men and the sense you get when you have three or four

  generations of them sitting in the same room arguing about the Cubs or the Republicans or the latest scandal in Hollywood. An

  old-timer’ll tell you about his Model-T, a Ww2 vet’ll tell you what is was like in a Japanese concentration camp, somebody just back from Chicago’ll tell you about the latest skyscraper going up. What I don’t like is the local gossip, the cruelty of it. In a small town, you get punished for being different in any way, and sometimes when you sit in a small-town barbershop you get a sense of what Salem must have been like during the witch trials.

  Reputations get smeared, sometimes ruined permanently. Women get ripped up especially hard. A divorc@ee is inevitably a whore, and a widow is invariably a pent-up, frustrated sex machine. The modern version of the lynch mob: They hang you with innuendo and lies.

  Jim Truman said, “Maybe she ran

  away.”

  Bill shook his head. “This cousin of hers says she wasn’t the runnin’-away type.”

  Win Sullivan, the banker in Phil’s chair, laughe
d and said, “Maybe she ran into Sammy Davis, Jr., the way he’s been stealin’ white gals lately.”

  Everybody laughed. Davis had been in the news for all his affairs with white women. I always felt sorry for him. He was a very talented guy but you could see how nervous and probably scared he was. Three southerners had recently run up on the stage where Nat King Cole was playing to a white audience and beaten him up.

  America was a dangerous place for certain kinds of people.

  And so it went until it was finally my turn in the chair. I dozed off and dreamed of the beautiful Pamela Forrest. We were out canoeing on a gentle blue lake and she was telling me how much she loved me.

  “All done, Counselor,” Bill said,

  waking me up.

  No lake. No canoe. No Pamela.

  I was out on the street again and the aftershave Bill had slapped on stung pretty good in the February winds.

  Over the noon hour, at the Woolworth lunch counter and the Rexall soda fountain and the

  courthouse cafeteria, the town had a dilemma.

  They couldn’t decide which they should talk about first, the murder-suicide out at the Kenny Whitney place, or the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly.

  I was at Rexall having a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee, and reading a new Peter Rabe paperback. I always sat at the far end of the counter because that’s where the metal paperback rack was. It creaked rustily and threatened to fall over every time you turned it. I usually read while I was eating. I was a big fan of Gold Medal books. For twenty-five cents (plus a penny for the governor, as folks in Iowa like to say), you could get the likes of a brand-new novel by Rabe or Charles Williams or, my favorite, John D. MacDonald.

  They were well-written, intelligent books, too, despite the lurid covers. Of course, when you told people that, they’d just wink at you and say, “Sure they are.” Then they’d nod to the cover with the seminaked girl and wink at you again.

  “How about some more coffee?” a female voice asked. And I looked up into the pretty and almost impossibly sweet face of Mary Travers.

  Mary works days behind the counter at Rexall. She was the brightest girl in our class but her dad got throat cancer just before Mary started at the U of Iowa. She never did make it to college.

  Mary is the girl my mom and dad want me to marry and God, I wish I could make myself love her. A lot of times I get so mad at Pamela that I try to make myself love Mary.

  We went out several times, even went to the county fair three nights running, and we ended up making out pretty passionately at the drive-in. Mary had loved me just about as long as I’d loved Pamela. She’d lived down the block from me up in the Knolls. I’d finally gone to the senior prom with her after it was clear that Pamela wasn’t going at all because Stu Grant was going with someone else. I’d bought Mary a corsage and even managed to prevail upon an older cousin to buy me a pint of Jim Beam. He also gave me a rubber, a Trojan, and I hadn’t even asked him for it.

  “Maybe you’ll need it,” he said. “It’s Mary,” I said. “I won’t need it. I don’t think of her that way.” “Mary is beautiful, cuz. Every guy in town’d like

  to be with Mary, even if she is an egghead.” But at the dance, the whiskey made me sad and I couldn’t stop thinking of Pamela. Mary sensed this and then she got sad, too, and we ended up out at Tomahawk Park on the cliffs, drinking until we both got sick, and then just sitting there and listening to the wilder kids who were strewn all over the park in dark hideouts of delicious sin. A lot of girls were going to lose their virginity tonight.

  Senior prom night was the time to do it. I was sitting there smoking a Pall Mall and drinking one of the Pepsis that Mary had brought along. She handed me the Trojan. “It fell out of your pocket, McCain.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’ve never seen one before.”

  I was going to say something sophisticated—something Robert Mitchum would say—y know, trying to impress her, but this was Mary. “I’ve seen them, but I’ve never used one before.”

  “Did you go in and buy it yourself?”

  “Rolly kind of gave it to me.”

  “Did he kind of give you the whiskey, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Russian hands and roamin’ fingers,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “Your cousin,” she said, “Rolly. I went on a hayrack ride with him one night. Talk about fast.”

  Then, “I’m sorry I threw up,

  McCain.”

  “Oh, that’s all right. I threw up, too.”

  She said, “I mean maybe you were thinking we might—y know, use the rubber. I mean, I don’t know if I’d actually have done it. But I guess now we’ll never know.”

  I didn’t say anything. She started to cry and I didn’t know what to do and I sort of slid my arm around her and while I was doing it I could see down the front of her formal. She had small breasts but they were very sweet. I mean there’s all kinds of breasts when you think about it, noisy breasts and quiet breasts and angry breasts and melancholy breasts and sincere breasts and superficial breasts and arrogant breasts and shy breasts and probably lots of other kinds, too; her breasts were just very sweet, like Mary herself.

  I guess that was the first time I wanted to love her. I mean I couldn’t love her, not in

  the way she wanted me to, because I loved Pamela that way. But right then, if God had given me a choice, I would’ve said reach in my brain and take Pamela out and put Mary in.

  Because it would’ve made her so happy if I could have loved her that way. Pamela didn’t care if I loved her at all. But Mary would have been all shiny and new and fine with it, just a few stupid words that you hear on the jukebox all the time, and she would have been so happy. So I held her and I kissed her and then we really started kissing and then we started rolling around on the grass and then it got real serious and while we didn’t use the Trojan, we came damned close, damned close, and then we were in my older brother’s 1946 Plymouth and headed out on the highway to where there was supposed to be a beer party at the old quarry and the radio was blasting Gene Vincent and Carl Perkins and the prairie night air was so cool and fresh and she sat so close to me and I was so almost in love with her that I didn’t have a single thought of Pamela for at least an entire hour.

  And now, all these years later, in the sort-of maid’s outfit that Rexall made her wear, Mary filled my coffee cup and watched my face and said, “I just wondered if you’d heard.”

  “You mean about you and Wes?”

  “Umm-hmm.”

  “Yeah, I did. And congratulations.”

  “Thanks.”

  “He’s a very nice guy.” Actually, he was a nice guy except when it came to me. He didn’t like me at all, and I supposed I understood why.

  “Yes,” she said, “he sure is.” Then, “I just decided it was time to have kids, McCain.”

  She was speaking in a code I understood. What she was really saying was that she was tired of waiting around for me to come to my senses.

  “I’m happy for you, Mary. I really am.”

  She looked as if she was going to say something else but just then two high school girls sat down at the counter. They were best friends. You could tell because they were dressed identically. Poodle haircuts, pink sweaters and large pink skirts decorated with dancing poodles and dancing 45Rpm records. The Pink Monster had invaded their brains and taken them over while they slept. The inevitable bobby sox and

  saddle shoes completed the ensemble. The only thing that kept these two girls from looking like twins was that one was tall and willowy and blonde and the other was short and stout and brunette.

  While Mary took their orders for

  cheeseburgers and fries and Cokes, I wandered over to the magazine stand. Ike was on the cover of Time again, responding to the Russian general who’d boasted recently that the Ussr had atomic weapons superior to ours. And Dick Nixon was on the cover of Newsweek hinting that he just might run for president in 1960.
The movie magazines had just come in and were lined neatly in a row, covers featuring Natalie Wood on a motorcycle, Tab Hunter in a cowboy outfit, Brigitte Bardot in a bikini, and Marlon Brando staring somberly out at the world. I picked up Manhunt, which had a new Shell Scott story in it, and started back to the counter.

  I didn’t recognize her at first. I know how odd that sounds. She was, after all, my kid sister, Ruthie, all the years we’d lived in the same house over on Clark Street together, how could I not recognize her? I guess because I always think of Ruthie being happy, but she didn’t look happy now. She looked furtive.

  She was at the far end of a medicine aisle and it was easy to see what she was doing because she was so bad at it. She was shoplifting. Fortunately for her, there weren’t any store employees around. My instinct was to run down the aisle and stop her, but there wasn’t time. Her hand flicked out snake-qk, grabbed a small box of some kind, and dumped it in her open purse. Then she started looking frantically around for a way out of the store.

  She didn’t appear to be in danger of becoming a great criminal mastermind.

  She started up the aisle and, when she saw me, she froze in place and started looking frantically around again. I walked up to her and slid my arm through hers and whispered, “Why don’t you put it back, Ruthie?”

  Ruthie got the standard-issue McCain looks. There’s a factory somewhere in Indiana, I think, that mass-produces McCains. A family reunion looks like one of those vast General Motors storage lots but instead of hundreds of identical Chevrolets, it’s McCains. The outsize blue eyes, the freckles, the slightly imperious nose

  and the kid-grin. Even Great-grandfather McCain, God love him, looked like he was twenty when he smiled. Even with his store-boughts.

  Ruthie wore a black winter coat, open so I could see her black sweater and tight tweed skirt. She had a cute little pink barrette in her short blond hair. She’d bloomed in the past year or so, our little Ruthie, not only pretty but sexy, if I can say that without getting too Freudian. Mom and Dad said our driveway never wanted for junky cars with teenage boys behind the wheels.