Sam McCain - 01 - The Day the Music Died

by Ed Gorman

  On the way over to my place, I played the radio real loud. I tried to drive all thought of Ruthie from my mind. The potassium wasn’t going to work. I didn’t know if anything would work.

  This was going to devastate my whole family.

  Twelve

  Mrs. Goldman’s house had once been what she laughingly called “a starter mansion,”

  meaning that it was a lot more house than she and her husband could afford at the time, but not enough of a house to qualify as one of the true mansions you saw on the other side of town. Mr. Goldman, who was in the real estate business, didn’t live long enough to make his final fortune. He left his wife, Sandra, enough term insurance to pay off the house and support herself by taking in boarders. The place was a two-story gingerbread Victorian. I had half of the huge upstairs as my apartment. I also had a stall in the garage and my own back entrance for when I came in late. Two meals, breakfast and dinner, were included in the price of the rent. Mrs. Goldman was a great cook. She was also a frustrated writer and photographer.

  She was always working on her history of the town. She was doing a great job. We’d spent a lot of long nights together watching her Tv set and talking about her book and the plans I have

  for when my law practice gets rolling.

  When I came into the vestibule tonight, I peeked through the French doors on the first floor.

  She was sitting in a chair reading a novel. The Tv was on but the sound was turned down. She’d explained once that it was like having company you didn’t have to pay any attention to. She was a tall, slender, striking woman in her early fifties. She’d been dating a dentist from Cedar Rapids for several years but I didn’t have the sense that marriage was imminent.

  She waved me in.

  “You missed a nice meal.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Meat loaf.” Then she smiled. “There’s enough left for a sandwich later if you get hungry.

  I’ll make it for you if you want.”

  “Well, I’m going to that skating party.”

  “Oh, those poor singers. The rock and roll ones.”

  “Yes.”

  She shook her elegant head. She wore a white blouse, a dramatic black belt, gray slacks and black flats. When Lauren Bacall gets older, she’ll probably look something like Mrs. Goldman. If she’s lucky.

  “And poor Susan Whitney.”

  “I didn’t know you knew her.”

  “Oh, you know, from Leopold Bloom’s. As you know, I don’t care for the couple that run it, but it is a pleasant place to spend an hour or two occasionally. Especially if they’re not there and it’s just a clerk.”

  I thought of Steve Renauld and his relationship with Susan Whitney and of her remark that she could only sleep with men she felt sorry for.

  “The kind of man her husband was, I guess I’m not surprised,” she said.

  Maybe at breakfast I’d tell her my theory that Kenny hadn’t killed her. For now, I wanted to get my skates and head for the rink. I was hoping to see Pamela there.

  “Well, I’ll talk to you in the morning.”

  “How come you’re limping?”

  Maybe I’d tell her about Cliffie, too, in the morning. “Oh, I slipped on the ice.”

  She put her novel on her lap and leaned forward in the chair. “Say, did you come home about three-thirty this afternoon?”

  “No, why?”

  “I thought I heard somebody up in your room.

  I can’t be sure. But I thought I heard footsteps up there and then something scraping the floor.”

  “It wasn’t Andrea?” Andrea being the English teacher who rents the other half of the upstairs.

  She teaches at the state-run school for the deaf.

  She’s one of those secretive women who always look vaguely frightened. She lugs home armloads of mystery novels from the library, Mignon Eberhardt seeming to be her favorite, and rarely says a word.

  “No, she doesn’t get home until at least four-thirty.”

  I raised my eyes to the ceiling, as if I had X-ray vision and could see through the floor right into my apartment. It’d be pretty cool to be Superman. Just beam your eyes right through the floor. But among my many goals, turning myself into Superman was probably the least achievable.

  “This was about three-thirty?”

  “Yes. And it wasn’t you?”

  “No, no it wasn’t me.”

  “I could’ve been mistaken.”

  “I’ll go have a look.”

  “I hope I don’t seem like some old busybody.”

  I smiled. “Hardly.”

  “Would you like me to come up there with you?”

  “No, I’ll be fine.”

  “I have my husband’s handgun from the war.”

  “I appreciate it. But that’s fine.”

  “I’ll be happy to give you the gun. It’s a forty-five.”

  It came into my head, then, something that had been wedged in there uncomfortably ever since Cliffie had put it there about forty-five minutes ago.

  He said that Susan had been killed with a .32.

  But the gun Kenny had fired at me through the window, and the gun he used to kill himself with, was a .45. So where had the .32 come from? And I hadn’t seen a .32 anywhere in the house.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” I said. “I just thought of something.”

  Then, “Well, I guess I’ll go

  upstairs.”

  “You sure you don’t want the gun?”

  “Even if there was somebody up there, he’s long gone by now.”

  We talked a bit more and then I

  closed the French doors and started up the stairs that rose from the vestibule. I clicked on the stairway light, something I don’t always do, and went up the steps. I could tell Andrea was home because there was a line of light beneath her door.

  Otherwise I’d have had no idea if she was home or not. She was utterly silent. The other door, down the hall from hers, was mine. The line beneath it was dark. I put my ear to the door and listened. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  I used my key and let myself in. Darkness.

  I had two large rooms and a bath. The only light came through a window from a streetlight a quarter block away. I walked toward it. There was a table with a lamp to the side of that window. I clicked on the light.

  If there had been somebody in here, he or she was awfully neat. At least in the living room.

  Nothing whatsoever looked different or disordered.

  Mrs. Goldman keeps my place very neat.

  She raised two sons and always says the trick with boys is never let their rooms go more than two days unchecked. So she dusts and vacuums and picks up twice a week before the governor has to declare my place an official disaster area.

  It’s a pleasant furnished apartment. The furniture isn’t new but it’s clean and comfortable and the place was wallpapered fresh only a month before I moved in. When the window’s open, you can still smell the fresh wallpaper paste, which is a smell I’m inexplicably fond of. There’s a great shower and a very firm mattress. My favorite spot is the recliner where I read my crime paperbacks. There’s a lamp that hangs right over my shoulder for plenty of light, and a small table to my left where I can set my ashtray and Pall Malls and a can of beer or a Pepsi. Now if I just had Pamela living here with me …

  I tried the bedroom. Nothing looked disturbed in there, either. The cats trailed behind me. They didn’t want to miss anything. I

  half-expected one of them to put on her deerstalker cap and the other to produce a magnifying glass. They’d probably have better luck than I was having.

  Where it went wrong was in the bedroom closet.

  Just last night I’d set a pair of loafers down on the floor to take to the shoe repair shop for new heels. I remembered doing this.

  There was no mistake. But the shoes had been sat back up on the closet shelf with two pairs of old tennis shoes. The intruder had gotten confused and fi
gured that all three pairs of shoes belonged on the shelf. Somebody had been in here.

  I was just about to switch off the bedroom light and go back to the living room when I noticed the shoe print on the floor. It looked familiar but at first I wasn’t sure why. The dirty snow he’d tracked in had made the shoe impression clear.

  I went over to my bedside table; I keep a flashlight there. It isn’t half the size of Cliffie’s but it’s handy and serviceable when there’s a power outage or I hear strange noises in the darkness. The noises usually turn out to be raccoons. I made the mistake of putting out food for a couple of baby raccoons one night, and now I have a whole family of them working their way up my back stairs several nights a week. But they’re all so cute I can’t break it off.

  I followed the footprints from my bedroom to the door. The pattern of the prints resembled a waffle iron. An image came to me: Robert Frazier, sitting in the leather chair across from Judge Whitney, and the imposing, expensive winter shoes he wore. I remembered thinking they looked like rubber cleats. They’d make a pattern similar to the one on my floor. But why the hell would Frazier be in my apartment? What would he be looking for?

  I felt better. Yes, there’d been an intruder in my apartment and yes, I now knew who it had been. Or thought I did, anyway. Now, all I needed to know was why he’d been up here.

  I went and got my skates. They were black and dusty. At least the blades looked reasonably sharp. A skater, I’m not. I changed clothes, too, jeans and a button-down blue shirt and a black pullover sweater. I was glad to get out of my suit and tie. They always feel confining to me and I feel like an impostor in them, like I’m a kid pretending to be a grown-up. Which, come to think of it, maybe I am.

  As I changed clothes, the two cats sat on the bureau watching me. I wasn’t all that interesting but the Tv wasn’t on so I’d have to do.

  They have their programs. For some unfathomable feline reason, they loved westerns,

  especially the gunplay and the cattle stampedes.

  I tossed my skates over my shoulder as casually as I could, hoping I resembled one of those ski bums you always see in whiskey ads. You know, the ones with the perfect teeth. For what they’ve spent on their teeth, we could build several new schools.

  A few minutes later, I was down in the driveway trying to get the car to run smoothly.

  I kept using the choke and swearing a lot. That was a combination that always seemed to work.

  Thirteen

  The skating rink was packed. I had to park on a graveled shelf looking down on the rink.

  Parking spots were hard to find.

  It’s a great rink, built just a few years ago. The rink itself is kidney-shaped, carved out of a plot of timber that runs to firs and jack pines and hardwoods. On the southeast edge of the rink is the warming house, a log cabin-style structure where you can buy hot chocolate, hot dogs, popcorn and Pepsi, plus get warm around an old-fashioned potbellied stove.

  Probably the prettiest the rink ever looks is at holiday time. Two nights before Christmas, there’s a costume pageant of people on skates.

  It’s probably not quite up to Broadway standards but it’s pretty to watch and the choir always sounds great. The rink is a place where a lot of romances start and a lot of romances end. The couple you saw last year positively enraptured with each other are this year enduring sporadic fights and glowering silences. Or they’re with new mates.

  The music over the loudspeakers was a lot better than usual tonight. Out here, they play a lot of music that was popular five years ago, like the Ames Brothers and Eddie Fisher. They can’t quite bring themselves to play rock and roll unless it’s by the Chipmunks or the McGuire Sisters, but tonight, the air was filled with Buddy Holly and “That’ll Be the Day” and, man, it made me feel great, all charged up and convinced that Pamela Forrest was going to fall in love with me.

  She would, anyway, if I could ever find her.

  I spent my first half-hour skating around the rink looking for her. To no avail. Not

  a sign of her on the rink or in the warming house.

  As for the skating, I stuck to the outside of the rink. Fewer people noticed me falling down that way. Every once in a while, I’d get going pretty well and I’d think that I’d suddenly somehow mastered the ice, and then the ice would dump me again. It’s not good for your ego to have five-year-old girls giggle and point at you.

  I was going to give them the bird but then I thought that that probably wouldn’t look real mature on my part.

  I was thinking about going home—I was spending more time on my butt than on my blades—when Mary Travers slipped an arm through mine and drew me out into the center of the rink where the grown-ups and young show-offs were skating. She smelled wonderful, and looked even better, her jaunty raspberry-colored beret angled beautifully across her silky chestnut-colored hair and her cheeks tinted with the night’s air.

  She wore a heavy turtleneck sweater that matched her beret, jeans and a pair of white high-top skates that flashed artfully whenever she made one of her elegant, practiced moves.

  “You should hire me, McCain.”

  “For what?”

  “To teach you how to skate.”

  “You don’t think I’m any good?”

  “I saw those little girls laughing at you.”

  “Yes, and I’m planning to sue them, too.”

  She laughed and squeezed my arm tighter and took me around the rink. It was fun. I didn’t have to do anything. She was strong and fleet enough for both of us.

  She said, “I don’t see Pamela

  anywhere.”

  “Well, I don’t see our friendly druggist —i.e., your fianc@e—anywhere, either.”

  “He’s at a city council meeting.”

  I was going to say something snide but decided against it. She deserved her happiness. She was the most decent person I’d ever known, and if I could have, I would have fallen in love with her in a second. I wanted her to be happy.

  “Does he know you’re here?” I said.

  “No.”

  “How’d you manage that?”

  “I didn’t. I just told him I wasn’t sure what I was going to do.”

  “So you came out here?”

  “Looks that way, doesn’t it?” She smiled but I could see the sadness in her eyes this time, the sadness I always put there without meaning to.

  We skated some more. I kept looking around for Pamela.

  Mary said, “I really don’t want to marry him, McCain.”

  “I know.”

  “He always reminds me I’m from the Knolls, like he’s doing me a favor or something by marrying me.”

  “So why don’t you just call it off?”

  “I want kids.”

  “His kids?”

  “Well …”

  We skated some more. She kept good strong hold of my arm. You could smell stove smoke from the warming house and every once in a while somebody would skate by with a hot dog and you could smell mustard and ketchup.

  “He’s going to build them a house.”

  “Build who a house?” I said.

  “My folks.”

  “He’s going to build your folks a house?”

  “That’s going to be my wedding present.”

  “Wow.”

  “He owns this land up on Ridgedale, where they’re putting in a new development. That’s where he’s going to build it. They’ll be out of the Knolls and into a brand-new house. He’s even going to furnish it for them.”

  I looked at her. “And he’s going to hold it over your head the rest of your life.”

  A male voice came on the loudspeaker and said, “We’d like to have a moment’s silence to commemorate the deaths of the fine young men who died in a plane crash not very far from here.”

  And I kind of felt it, even though all the other stuff was going on, Kenny and Susan dead and Ruthie pregnant and Mary marrying the wrong man—even with all that turmoil, there was still room to think
about Buddy Holly and Richie Valens and the Bopper and to feel sorry for them and their families. I know they say that young men consider themselves invincible. I guess that changed for me a couple of years ago when I was doing my stint as a weekend warrior with the National Guard. I’d wanted to go on to law school so the Guard was the only way I could avoid the draft.

  One rainy Saturday when I was

  off-loading a supply truck in the warehouse, this skinny kid from Cedar Rapids hops in another truck and tromps on the gas. He always liked to lay down a strip of rubber in reverse. The sound echoing off the warehouse ceiling was pretty cool, I had to admit. He always ended his routine wascoming within inches of the wall behind him and then slamming on the brakes. Everybody liked to watch him. He was a crazy son of a bitch.

  But this one day Belaski, this Polish farmer, he was walking behind the truck when the kid was backing up at sixty miles an hour. And the kid didn’t see Belaski and, no matter how loud we screamed, he didn’t hear us warning him about Belaski, either. It’s a terrible way to put it, but he just squashed Belaski against the concrete block wall like a bug. Belaski popped and oozed like a bug, too. The major on duty that weekend made me and my friend and fellow law-school partner Dick Freidman clean up with a hose after the ambulance took Belaski away. No more sense of invincibility for me. Not ever again. And I thought of Belaski now as Mary and I stood there on the skating rink. And I got sad and scared and confused the way I do sometimes because no matter how we try to explain it—through religion or randomness, it doesn’t matter-existence just doesn’t seem to make any sense.

  I had a philosophy instructor at the U of I say that the only question that mattered in all of philosophy was Verlaine’s “Why are we born to suffer and die?” All else was irrelevant, my instructor said. And sometimes, without wanting to, I let myself slip into that frame of mind.

  But I never stayed there long. I was afraid to.

  Even if it all ultimately means nothing, you’ve got to play the game not only for yourself but for the people you love.

  Like looking around at the rink now. All the generations. And mostly good people, too. Handing down the best and most sacred things from one era to another.