by Ed Gorman
“Heaven forbid.”
“Damned right, heaven forbid. Now the Communists are getting smart. They’ve decided to put up a much more attractive candidate, and with any luck the sonofabitch will win.”
“Who’s that?”
“Jack Kennedy? The senator from
Massachusetts?”
“Ah. He’s a commie, eh?”
“Don’t mock me, McCain. Of course, he’s a commie. All Democrats are
commies.”
“I’ll have to ask Ayn Rand what she thinks of that.”
“Ayn Rand?”
“I’ve got a date with her tonight.”
She exhaled smoke dramatically. “What a little turd you can be.”
“She wants me to take her bowling.”
“Damn it, McCain, people are walking around thinking that a Whitney has committed murder and you’re making jokes about Ayn Rand.”
I was going to say that I couldn’t think of anybody I’d rather make jokes about than Ayn Rand but I decided the judge had probably had enough.
“Susan’s the key,” she said, walking back around her desk and sitting down.
The rubber bands started a minute or two later, a volley of them. I’d lean my head right, I’d lean my head left. She was doing pretty good, hitting about 60-65 percent of her shots.
“You’re getting better,” I said.
“Thank you.”
“Did you hear what I said about Susan?”
“I heard.”
“She’s the key. To the blackmail.”
“Why Susan? Why couldn’t Kenny have been the blackmailee?”
“He was too stupid to be blackmailed.
Everything he did, he did in public. And Susan was a very respectable woman until the last few years of her life.”
“That’s what Bob Frazier wanted everybody to believe anyway.”
“Meaning what?” I said.
“Meaning there was always something a little wild about her.”
“You have evidence of this, of course? I mean, she ran around a little, slept with a few guys.
I’m not sure that’s “wild.””
“Not evidence,” she said, firing off another rubber band. She got me right on the chin.
“Instinct.”
“Do you know the Renaulds very well?”
She smiled. “Mr. and Mrs. New
Yorker? The way they always manage to work the magazine into their conversation is amazing. I guess it’s what passes for sophistication out here.”
“He had an affair with Susan,” I said.
“God. He’s so—effete. I’m surprised he’s even interested in women.”
“According to his wife, he’s quite the hot number.”
“Spare me, McCain.” Then, “Anything else I should know?”
“Darin Greene paid me a late-night visit.”
“The football player?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t say. He got scared and ran off.”
“What’s he got to do with this?”
“Well, he and Kenny were friends since boyhood.”
“Yes, just one more reason the Whitneys were so proud of Kenny. I don’t have anything against colored people, McCain—I don’t have a prejudiced bone in my body—but being nice to colored people is one thing but actually having them as friends …” She shook her robber baron head.
“Anyway, Greene and Kenny had a falling out was my understanding—well over a year ago now, I think—s I don’t see what he’d know about any of this.”
“Neither do I. But I was curious why he came up to my place so late at night. Then when I went to this tavern where he hangs out, he took off before I could get to him.”
She shrugged. “I’m more interested in the abortion girl.”
“I don’t know why you think that has anything to do with this.”
“Same reason I’ve always sensed that Susan Frazier wasn’t the sweet girl her father said she was. Instinct.”
“The doc told me it could just as easily have been an accident as a murder. He thinks that both the girl and whoever was helping her could have panicked. The helper runs off, scared, and leaves her there to bleed to death. I don’t know what that could have to do with Kenny and Susan.”
“Instinct, as I said.” And launched another volley. She hit me once, missed three times.
I looked down at the floor around the leather chair I was sitting in. “Who picks up all these rubber bands after I leave?”
“Pamela.”
“Ah.”
“Why, do you think I should pick them up?”
“There’s probably something in the Whitney charter prohibiting it, isn’t there?”
“You’re wasting time again, McCain. Within twenty-four hours, I want to be able
to call up the state paper and demand a front-page apology—or I’ll sue them and put them out of business. You’re the only one who can help me with that, McCain.”
I stood up. “I’m back at it right now, your honor.”
“Find out who Susan’s best friend was. Work on her.”
“That’s actually what I was going to do.”
“And don’t bother Pamela on the way out,”
she said. “I’ve got her typing something very important.” She exhaled more smoke from her Gauloise. “I don’t know why you don’t give up on her, anyway, McCain. It just makes you look very foolish to the whole town, a young man mooning over a young woman that way. And I’m saying that for your sake, McCain.”
“Thanks, Mom,” I said.
On my way out, Pamela said, “Did you hear about Stu?”
“He was hit by a train?”
“Very funny. He was named Young Lawyer of the Year by the State Bar Association.”
“Goody,” I said, and left.
Twenty-one
The high school had a program where kids who worked got off at 2ccde instead of 3ccae so they could go to their jobs. They also got credit for having the jobs. A commie would look at it as a sweet but dishonest plan by greedy merchants to get cheap labor. I wondered what Ayn Rand would make of it.
It’s funny that at my age, not long out of law school, I was as sentimental as an old man. The girls looked great, shiny and new, and I knew what most of the boys would do, ride around in their cars and then play a little pool or pinball, and then head home for a quick dinner where they would evade every single important question their parents threw at them. God, it all seemed so far away and so wonderful, Mgm wonderful, sort of like an Andy Hardy movie except the girls would let you get to third base and you had all those great Dashiell Hammett and Ed Lacy novels to read.
Now, I had responsibilities and people expected things of me and even at my age I could see a few gray hairs on my head,
one of the McCain genetic curses.
I sat there and listened to a local station that played rock and roll in the afternoon. I was nostalgic about rock, because it’d changed, too.
They played a lot of Fabian and the Kingston Trio and, God almighty, novelty songs like “Pink Polka-Dot Bikini.” And then I started thinking about Buddy Holly again and how Jack Kerouac said that even at a very young age he’d had this great oppressive sense of loss, of something good and true vanished, something he could never articulate, something he had carried around with him as young as age eight or nine, maybe when his brother died. I guess I had too, this melancholy, and somehow Buddy Holly dying at least gave me a tangible reason for this feeling.
Maybe it’s just all the sadness I see in the people around me, just below the surface I mean, and the fact that there’s nothing I can do about it. Life is like that sometimes.
Ruthie came out the front door as I’d expected. I was parked up the street. She looked preoccupied and didn’t see me. She just started walking fast toward downtown, which was three blocks north. It was overcast now and the temperature was dropping and the school seemed shabby suddenly, shabby and old, and
the sense of loss I had became anger and I felt cheated then, as if my past really hadn’t been all that wonderful, as if I’d made up a fantasy about my past just because I was afraid to face adulthood. Maybe Joyce Brothers, the psychologist who’d won all that money on the Tv show The $64eajjj Question before everybody found out some of it was a fake, maybe she could explain my sudden mood swings. Nobody in this little Iowa town could, that was for sure.
When Ruthie reached the corner of the school grounds, I was there waiting. She got in.
I said, “Did you try that stuff?”
She stared straight ahead. She looked pale and tired. “It didn’t work.”
“Oh.”
“And it really burns down there now.”
“Maybe—”
“Just don’t give me any advice right now, okay?” She still didn’t look at me.
“Okay.” Then, “How’re you feeling, physically, I mean?”
“I’m too tired to know. Let’s just
not talk, all right?”
“All right.”
“Could I turn that off? Why can’t they play anything decent?”
She snapped off the radio. The song had been “The Purple People Eater.” Then, “I’m sorry I’m so bitchy.”
“It’s all right. I’d be bitchy, too.”
“I just need to handle this.”
“Don’t do anything crazy, Ruthie.”
“I don’t think I’m the “crazy” type, do you?”
“No, I guess not.”
“I’ve got a couple of girls working on a couple of things for me.”
“Like what?”
“I’m not sure. They just both said they could probably come up with something.”
“God, Ruthie, didn’t you hear what happened to the girl they found last night?”
“Oh, I heard, all right. But it was obviously somebody who didn’t know what he was doing.”
“You shouldn’t let anybody except a doctor touch you.”
“It doesn’t have to be a doctor. It’s not a tough thing to do if you know what you’re doing.”
“You’re scaring the hell out of me, Ruthie.”
“My life’s over if I have this baby.”
“I know, Ruthie. But still—”
“Here we are.”
I pulled over to the curb. Sheen’s Fashion Fountain was the most expensive woman’s apparel shop in town. It was where you bought your girlfriend a gift if it was her birthday or if you’d really, really pissed her off.
She opened the door right away. I had one of those moments when she didn’t look familiar.
Her fear and grief had made her a stranger.
I reached over and touched her cheek. “I love you, Ruthie. You know that. I wish you’d let me help you.”
“I did this to myself. It’s my
responsibility.”
“You need a ride home tonight?”
“I can ride with Betty.”
Betty was one of the older clerks. She drove to work and lived about two blocks from Mom and Dad.
“I know some people in Cedar Rapids,”
I said. “They may know a doctor there.”
She leaned over and returned my cheek kiss.
“Thanks. But let me see what my friends come up with first, all right?”
“Just please let me know what’s going on.”
“I promise.”
She got out of the car. I sat there in gloom, gray and cold as the overcast afternoon itself. Then a car horn blasted me. I was in a No Parking Zone and holding up traffic.
Twenty-two
Maggie Yates lived above a double garage on the grounds of a burned-out mansion. One of the servants had lived in the garage during the better days of the manse. Now it was rented out as an apartment. Maggie’s bike lay against the wooden steps leading up the side of the garage and Miles Davis’ music painted everything a brooding dusky color. I had to knock a couple of times in order for her to hear me above the music.
Maggie was dressed in black. Black turtleneck, black jeans, black socks.
Her long red hair was, as always, a lovely Celtic mess and her Audrey Hepburn face was, also as always, a lovely Celtic mess of winsomeness and melancholy.
The walls behind her told the story.
Photographs of Albert Camus, Jack
Kerouac, James Dean, Charlie Parker and Eleanor Roosevelt covered one wall, while album covers of Gil Evans, Jerry
Mulligan, Odetta and Dave Brubeck
covered another.
Maggie was the town’s resident beatnik. She was somewhere in her early thirties, had graduated from the University of Iowa and was holing up here, she said, so she could write her novel. A lot of times I’d pull up outside and I could hear her banging away on the portable typewriter that sits on the table next to a large window overlooking what used to be a duck pond. As yet, she hasn’t let me see as much as a paragraph of the book. But she keeps promising that I’ll be the first to read it.
She said, “C’mon in. But I better warn you, McCain. My period started today. And you know I just don’t like to do it when I’m menstruating.”
I tried my best to sound hurt. “You
think the only reason I come over here is for sex?”
“Sure,” she said. “And that’s the only reason I let you in. I mean, I get my
jollies, and you do, too.”
I guess this was the brave new world Hugh Hefner talks about all the time. You know, frank and open discussions between the sexes about so-e-it. In some ways, I like it. It’s nice coming over here and spending a couple of hours in Maggie’s bed and then just leaving and going back to my own little world. I usually make it over here once or twice a week. She has a great body. She says I’m the only “civilized” person in town except for Judge Whitney, whom she says is a “fascist.” That’s why she sleeps with me, she says, me not being one, a dope or, two, a redneck. She won’t accept compliments or anything remotely like affection. One time I said to her, “You really are beautiful, Maggie.” She said, “Can the crapola, McCain. You’re here because you need sex. That’s all that’s going on here.”
I always felt cheated. I want to say lovey-dovey stuff, maybe for my sake as much as hers. The lovey-dovey stuff is nice to say even if you don’t mean it—or sometimes even if it’s being said to you and you know she doesn’t mean it. It’s like having a smoke afterward.
She said now, “I’m in sort of a hurry.
Pete Seeger’s in Iowa City tonight. I was just getting ready. My ride should be here any time.”
I tried very hard not to look at the sweet smooth curves of that body packed into the black sweater and black jeans. Why not combine a little sex with detection? Hadn’t Mike Hammer shown us the way?
The apartment consisted of a large living room that looked surprisingly middle-class given all the jazz musicians and literary heroes on the walls; a small bedroom with a very comfortable double bed and a kitchen and bathroom big enough for only one person at a time.
“I didn’t know you hung out with Susan Frazier,” I said.
She was opening her purse, checking her billfold for money. “Oh, I never really “hung out” with her. She was interested in art so we went to Leopold Bloom’s a few times and I explained Picasso and Chagall and Van Gogh to her. I mean, not that I know all
that much myself. God, the guy that runs that store is such a pretentious asshole. You ever notice that?”
“No, I never did,” I said deadpan.
“He’s one of my favorite people.”
She whipped her head up and giggled at me.
“McCain, you’re a certified nut, you know that?”
Now, she was at the closet, digging out a heavy coat.
I said, “You know much about her personal life?”
She put her coat on. Looked at herself in a mirror by the door. “What’re you going to do tonight, McCain? Stay home and watch Father Knows Best?”
I’d made the mistake o
f telling her that Tv shows like that were necessary to society because, corny as they were, they gave us a sense of right and wrong. I believed that. She didn’t.
A car horn sounded.
“My ride,” she said. “Gotta hurry.”
“Hey,” I said. “Just one question.”
“I really am in a hurry, McCain,” she said, grabbing her purse from the coffee table.
“She ever tell you she was in any kind of trouble?”
“Just once,” she said, as she opened the door and ushered me out onto the tiny porch.
“What’d she say?”
As she was locking the door from the outside, she said, “She called one night pretty drunk and said it was going to be all over town very soon.”
“What was?”
Maggie turned and faced me. “She never got around to telling me. She passed out. She couldn’t drink worth a damn.”
Then I was following her down the stairs two steps at a time, asking her a few more questions.
I half ran after her to the waiting car.
Inside was a slim, balding guy who wore sunglasses and a black turtleneck. I hadn’t known that Maggie was dating vampires, but I was happy for her. A mordant jazz song could be heard when she opened the door and slid inside. Then song, Maggie and vampire were gone.
I sat in the library until five-thirty. Every ten minutes or so I’d go over and try Debbie Lundigan’s phone number. I
wanted to find out if Susan Whitney had ever talked to her about the blackmail. There was no answer.
I finally gave up on the phone and drove over there. Debbie lived in an old house that had been converted into two apartments, one up, one down.
It was actually a big house, but then you needed the extra space to share with all the rats and cockroaches.
Winter dusk. The sky a moody rose and black with bright tiny stars and a bright quarter moon.
Frost already glittering on the windshields of parked cars. To reach Debbie’s place you had to climb rickety stairs up the north side of the green-shingled house. You could smell the dinner from the ground-floor apartment, something homey with a tomato base.
I was just about to start up the steps when somebody came from the shadows and said, “Who the hell’re you?”
At first, I couldn’t see him. He was more shadow than substance. He came a few steps closer and I saw him a lot better. He was imposing. The uniform was regulation army but the decorations were anything but. He was a paratrooper, all spit and polish, caged energy and rage.
