by Ed Gorman
“I wish I knew,” I said.
The half-hour drive to Cedar Rapids was pleasant. Fall is my season. The melancholy scent and the delicate beauty of the land, made all the more delicate by its brevity.
The office was on the west side of the river, above a corner grocery store that stank of rotting meat. The owner pointed me to the side of the stucco building and a flight of stairs that led to a door beyond which you could hear babies crying and adults coughing.
The nurse was pretty, much like Susan had been. Young Dr. Jensen’s taste in women seemed to run to type. She said she was sorry but that since I hadn’t phoned ahead for an appointment, I’d just have to wait my turn.
Babies always cry when they see me. I set three or four of them exploding just by sitting down.
Mothers scowled at me for existing. What sort of telepathy or voodoo had I performed on their sweet little dears?
The people in the waiting room looked poor, that class below the working class that not even the war was able to help economically. I suspected that Jensen dealt with them because they were the only clientele he could get. But I had to give him his due for bringing help and comfort to people that most of society despises. In America, being poor is a sin if not a perversion.
Coughers coughed and sneezers sneezed, and a couple of old men hawked up enough phlegm to make me swear off eating for months. It was a swell way to spend seventy-three minutes.
I killed time by taking out my notebook and reading over what I’d written about the case so far. A couple of the mothers made faces when they saw Captain Video staring at them. One infant kept pointing at me and sobbing. I gave his mother my best “I’m sorry” look but she wasn’t mollified.
I started looking my way through the magazines.
The room was long and narrow, much like a boxcar, the cracked walls painted a mustard yellow. There were a lot of framed bromides about staying healthy, but they looked so old and decrepit they mocked their own wisdom. The chairs were mismatched, and so were the three tables upon which magazines were heaped. There were so many magazines, I got the impression that people were using this office as a dumping spot for periodicals they wanted to dispose of. Magazines of every kind: family, how-to, adventure, knitting, horseback riding, grain importing. And not a single one displaying cleavage. I found a Collier’s with a John D. MacDonald novelette in it and read that.
He wore physician whites and a black serpentine stethoscope. His wild curly red hair was a lot longer than it should have been, and too many midnights had painted gray swaths beneath his green eyes. The equipment was sorely out of date, an examining room and two slender glass-fronted cabinets holding medicine.
He was busy with a clipboard when I walked in. He glanced up and said, “Just sit on the table. I’ll be with you in a sec.”
It was a couple hundred secs actually. Then he looked up at me and did a double-take Red Skelton would have considered hammy.
“You,” he said, pure accusation.
“The one and only.”
“You were at the dance the other night.”
“Right.”
“What the hell’re you doing here?”
I took my notebook out from inside my sport jacket and held it up.
He gawked and looked as if he wanted to giggle. I’d forgotten to flap the cover back.
“Never mind the cover,” I said. “This is where I keep my list of suspects.”
“Oh, great,” he said. “A cop with a Captain Video notebook-”
“I’m not a cop. I work for Judge
Whitney of the District Court.”
“That snooty bitch. What the hell’s she got to do with any of this?”
“She wants to see justice done.” I sounded like Broderick Crawford on Highway Patrol. “I’ll bet.”
He walked over to the door and put a giant hand on the knob. “Get out.”
“I have a witness who saw you arguing with Susan a few weeks ago. The witness says you gave her a very hard shove.”
He didn’t sound quite so sure of himself suddenly. “A shove is a long way from murder.”
“It could be the first step toward murder.”
His hand came away from the knob. He leaned against the east wall. “We had an argument was all.”
“About what?”
He sighed. “I used to go out with her when she worked for Squires. Then she fell in love with him. And he ditched his wife and took up with her.
But we never quite let it die, me ‘n’ her.”
“She didn’t let it die or you didn’t?”
He hesitated. “Me, I guess.”
“Everybody I know says she was still in love with Squires.”
“She was. That’s what we were arguing about.”
“I’m not following you.”
“She was still in love with him but he wasn’t still in love with her.”
“Oh? How do you know that?”
“I followed him several times.”
“For what?”
“I thought maybe Susan would see him for what he was. You know, if I could prove he was running around on her.”
“And was he?”
He snorted. “Hell, yes, he was.”
“Anybody special?”
“Not that I could see. Just general nooky.”
I took out a Lucky. He nodded to the pack and I gave him one too. When I got us fired up, I said, “You told Susan this.”
“Yes.”
“And she believed you?”
“Not at first. But she believed me after I showed her some pictures of him at a motel.”
“You’re a busy boy.”
“I love her.” He hesitated. “Loved her, I mean. And she loved me too. At one time. I look at that prick and I can’t figure out what women see in him. He’s the kind of guy who steals your woman just to prove he can do it. And then laughs in your face.”
“He ever laugh in your face?”
“Once.”
“When was that?”
“He saw me at an outdoor concert in Iowa City. He was with Susan. When she introduced us, he said, “Oh, yes, the young man who’s always calling you when I’m not home.” Then this big smirk.”
“You know there’s a possibility he beat her?”
“Possibility? Are you kidding? Of course I knew. I had to treat her a couple of times.”
“She didn’t want to leave him?”
“Leave him? Hell, she wanted to help him. It just brought out her maternal side. She talked about how his mother had been so cold to him.
He didn’t trust women. Deep down he was scared of them. She figured it was a small price to pay-taking a beating every once in a while-ffhelp straighten him out.”
“Been reading too much Freud.”
“No shit,” he said. “I hate all that crap. It was force-fed us in med school.
And that’s what I kept trying to tell her. That it didn’t matter why he beat her-even if her Freudian psychology was right-what mattered was that he did beat her and that’s all that counted. I told her he was going to get carried away some night and kill her. These things almost always escalate. He might not even want to kill her, I said. But he’d do it accidentally.”
“How’d she respond?”
“The way she usually did. That I was just trying to come between them.”
A knock. His nurse. “There’s a call for you from Mercy Hospital, doctor.
Emergency.”
“Thank you.” He walked over to a small sink, ran water, soaked his cigarette, and then pitched it in the ashtray. He turned back to me. “I don’t dislike you quite as much as I thought I would, McCain.”
“Gee, that’s good to know,” I said.
I seem to make friends everywhere I go.
Ten
Rush hour in a town like ours means more milk trucks, more tractors, more hay balers, more combines, and more dump trucks. If you think traffic crawls in Chicago, you should spend three miles behind a plow-pulling
tractor, watching its green John Deere ass wiggle and waggle all over the road.
I went straight to my rabbit warren of an office and called Judge Whitney with an update. She was gone for the day.
“Boy, she doesn’t usually leave this early,” I said to the beautiful Pamela.
“It’s nearly four, McCain. That’s not very early. She needed to go to Iowa City for some new shoes. She decided the ones she bought in Chicago aren’t right for her dress after all.”
“Sounds like a big do.”
“It’s Lenny.”
“Lenny?”
“Lenny Bernstein. Or is it com. steen?”
“Stein. And what’s he got to do with it?”
“He’s coming to the university, and he’s invited her to have dinner with him afterward.”
“Leonard Bernstein invited her to dinner?”
“Uh-huh. His secretary called yesterday to set it up. Then Lenny got on the phone himself and talked to her.”
I’ve become immune to the Judge’s name-dropping. A lot of the time I don’t even believe she knows the people she claims to. But every once in a while, one of the names calls her and then I walk around in a state of disbelief for a couple of hours.
Dinner with Leonard Bernstein, no less.
Lenny.
Plenty of bills, no money.
I sat at my little desk with my little Captain Video notebook trying to work out my finances for the next month. I drew two lines down the center of the page. Debits and credits. Just the way Mr. Carstairs taught us in Business Math back in high school. I looked at the sorry figures. My car really needed a new pair of glas-paks, but t’wasn’t to be this month. I took out my huge stamp that says
120 Days Overdue!!!
Please Don’t Make Me
Turn This Over To A Collection Agency and started stamping bills. I sat back and did what I always did: added up my debits and credits. If everybody who owed me money paid me, I’d be in fine shape. But my clients were mostly one step above public defender level and the prospects of their paying me weren’t great.
So the collection agency threat was a joke and everybody around town knew it. Pops Mason may once have been a mad dog of a bill collector, but now that he was in his mid-sixties, some of the cunning had gone out of his pursuits. He was blind in his left eye, had rheumatism, gout, and prostate problems, and he never drank fewer than four quarts of Hamm’s per day. He still pinched ladies a lot too. I knew all about his medical problems because he talked about them constantly to anybody who’d listen. He also had a long spiel about not having had a decent erection since he was fifty-three, a fact he blamed largely on the fluoride in the water. It was his contention that the Communists had been foisting fluoride on us as a way of seeing that our population declined, thus making us ripe for a takeover.
The knock was timid.
“Come in.”
She appeared first: Linda Granger, rangy brunette. Her face was a portrait of good clean freckled midwestern carnality. Normally there was a big-kid grin, and the mischief in the blue eyes was lacerating in its promise of fun and frolic. She dressed well too. Her father was a Brit who’d been a pharmacist in Sussex before Adolf consulted his various astrologers and decided to start a world war. He worked here at the pharmacy until Old Man Reeves startled everybody by taking off for Vegas one night with the Widow Harper and getting hitched. The Reeveses now lived in La, from which they dispatched a blizzard of postcards about celebrities they happened to see. They had a running battle about Robert Taylor. Old Man Reeves insisted that Mr. Taylor had false teeth; Widow Harper angrily disagreed.
Anyway, Linda’s father took over the pharmacy ten years ago, redecorated it, hooked up with the Rexall chain, and proceeded to make himself a wealthy and prominent local citizen.
Today, Linda wore a tight green sweater, jeans, bobby socks, and cordovan penny loafers. That sparkle I always associated with her was gone. Her skin was pale, her eyes dulled, their rims red from crying.
Jeff Cronin looked even worse than he had when I fished him out of the booth at Elmer’s Tap the other day and gave him a ride home: wrinkled white button-down shirt and blue trousers, two-day growth of beard, eyes that didn’t seem to focus. One or both of them smelled of tavern.
“She’s kinda loaded,” he said.
“Look who’s talking,” she said.
“It was her idea to come over here, McCain, not mine.”
“He doesn’t give a damn about our marriage, McCain. I do. That’s why I told him we should come.”
I smiled. “I don’t think I’m following this.”
After I jumped up and took the box holding the lie detector off one of the client chairs, I had them sit down.
Cronin said, “You got a beer?”
“I usually keep a quart in my pocket but I wore the wrong suit today.”
“I need a beer.”
“You’ve had enough beer,” she said. “Is this what it’ll be like being married to you?”
“We’re not getting married, remember?
There’s a little matter of you cheating on me.”
Cronin had a quick temper. He was sliding the ammunition in the chamber now.
She looked at me. Pleading. “Did he tell you why he isn’t marrying me?”
“No. I guess he didn’t.”
“Go on, then, tell him.”
“You want him to know so bad, you tell him.”
“No, you. I want you to hear how ridiculous this sounds in 1957.”
For the first time, Cronin looked uncomfortable.
His gaze fell away.
“Go on,” she said.
He said nothing.
She said, “I spent a long night with Chip O’Donlon once when Jeff and I were broken up.”
“I see.” Chip O’Donlon was a client of mine. Which didn’t save him from being an obnoxious idiot. He was a disgrace to dreamboats around the world.
“They went all the way,” Cronin said miserably.
“That’s not true, at least I don’t think it is.”
“She doesn’t remember. She sleeps with a guy and she doesn’t even remember.”
“I’m pretty sure I didn’t,
McCain. But I wanted to be honest with Jeff.
I wanted him to know everything about me. You know?”
“Honest.” Cronin scoffed. “Some honest.
We break up a couple of days, and she screws Chip O’Donlon.”
“It was a month we were broken up,” she said, “and I’m seventy-five percent sure I didn’t sleep with him.”
“That leaves twenty-five percent,” Cronin said. “And he’s telling everybody he did sleep with her.”
“Gee,” she said, “a math whiz. And he figured it out all by his lonesome.”
“So,” I said, “the problem is that your feelings are hurt that she spent time with O’Donlon?” I tried to sound as if this wasn’t a much bigger problem than having stubbed a toe. “I sure don’t see any reason to call off a marriage because of that.”
“That isn’t the problem,” Cronin said. He made a fist. The knuckles I’d noticed the other day had scabbed over but still looked pretty bad.
“Oh?”
“The problem is that if she did sleep with O’Donlon, then he nailed her before I did.”
“What a great way to put it,” Linda said.
“He nailed me.”
I said. “You mean that the night she spent with O’Donlon she was still-” his-a virgin.”
“Ah.”
“Now you see the problem. She was a virgin the night she went up to his place.” He turned to her and said, with genuine grief, “It’s nothing personal, Linda. It’s just I was raised to believe that a man should always marry a virgin.”
“Maybe I should’ve lied to you.”
“Yeah,” he said, sounding miserable again.
“Maybe you should’ve.”
I did the only thing I could think of. I took out the pint of Old Grand Dad f
rom the bottom drawer, set three paper cups on the desk, and poured us each a hard jolt.
Linda teared up drinking hers. Cronin coughed. I felt my sinuses drain. A drinker I’m not.
“I guess I don’t know what you want me to do,” I said to Linda.
“Talk to him.”
“Cronin’s stubborn.”
“He’s also stupid.”
“Quit talking about me like I’m not here.”
“I don’t want to put you on the spot, McCain, but who do you agree with, him or me?”
“Thanks for not putting me on the spot.”
“Well, somebody has to talk some sense into that thick head of his.”
“I agree with you, Linda,” I said.
“Thanks a lot,” Cronin said.
“She was being honest with you, Cronin.
She wanted to get your marriage off to a good start. And now you’re punishing her for it.”
“What if he nailed her?”
“Will you quit using that word?” she snapped.
I said, “Do you love Jeff?”
“Of course I do, McCain. You know that.
I’m crazy about him.”
“Do you love her?”
“Yeah. The bitch.”
“Oh, really nice,” she said.
“You think we could try that again? Do you love her?”
“Yeah. Pretty much I do.”
“Then you should get married and forget all about this.”
His scabbed knuckles came toward me. It looked as if he were slowing a punch in slow motion. “I just want to hit something.”
“That wouldn’t do much good,” she said.
“God, Cronin. Look at her. She’s a wonderful girl and she loves you!”
“Yeah, well, people will know she’s not a virgin when we get married. I don’t have to tell you how the guys’ll be laughing about that for the next twenty years.”
“I really don’t think I slept with him,” she said. “I really don’t.”
“Well, there you go,” I said. “She’s really pretty sure she didn’t. And anyway, whether she did or not isn’t anybody else’s business anyway.”
“Damn right,” she said. “You listen to him, Jeff. What he’s saying makes sense. It isn’t anybody else’s business.”
“Yeah, but I’d know,” he said, thumping his chest. “In here. And if my folks ever hear, they won’t want me to marry her.”
