by Ed Gorman
"I read you."
"Used to be the Catholics was tryin' to take over this country, but they couldn't pull it off so they handed it off to the Jews. Now the Jews are tryin' it and they use the colored to help 'em."
"That's the truth, McCain," Deputy Roger Weed said solemnly, "whether you think so or not."
I looked over at Conners. "He wasn't a commie. I admit he wasn't real easy to like, but I think deep down he was really concerned about the average person getting a better deal."
Cliffie smiled sourly at his deputy. "Ain't that just what the commies say they're doin'?"
"You better listen to him, McCain. This is a man who's put a lot of brain hours into readin' up on commies. Plus he sees I Was a Communist for the FBI ever' time it's on at the drive-in."
"Me 'n the missus never miss it," Cliffie said.
But I'm going to stop here. You can pretty much write the rest of the dialogue yourself. Before Conners's wife and brother get here, that is. Cliffie sounded as if he wanted to present a medal to the killer; guy had done the town, the county, the state, the country a favor. He didn't even ask me many more questions about what Conners might have wanted to tell me. Or if he'd hinted at the name of his killer. He just said that commies came to bad ends and he didn't need any more proof than that dead guy across the room there.
Let's pick up the scene about twenty minutes later. The room has three more people in it now, including Doc Novotny. Now, while Doc's medical degree comes from an institution called (and I'm not kidding) the Cincinnati Citadel of Medinomics, he actually seems to know what he's doing most of the time.
But let's skip past Doc coming in and get to the part where Conners's mother and brother are standing on the threshold, staring at the shape beneath the sheet on the stretcher. You can see right away where Richard Conners got his looks. Even at seventy, Dorothy Conners is a damned good-looking and imposing woman. The cliche is that it's all in the genes and bones, and you know what? I think this particular cliche is true. Look at her. Those cheekbones, that fierce but elegant nose, and those blue eyes, so much furious intelligence and sexuality in the eyes. Almost as much as in the erotic mouth. Not even the gray hair or the wrinkles around eyes and mouth can diminish the ferocity of her appeal. But aside from the face, she's her age in terms of fashion. Unremarkable blue dress beneath unremarkable black coat. Plain black purse. Scuffed black walking shoes. White anklets.
God help you if you made her angry. She'd stand up in church or at the city council meeting or in a five-and-dime to denounce you if she believed you were in any way taking advantage of your fellow man. There's a hard prairie woman in her, the woman who trekked west in a wagon that broke down every other day, who felled trees alongside her husband, who adjusted to living in a soddy rather than a cabin; the woman who fought off Indians, rattlesnakes, cholera; the woman who watched half her children die before age eight, worked far longer hours than her farmer husband, and saw many of her prairie woman friends commit suicide before age thirty. She is against the death penalty, for liquor by the drink, for the right to have an abortion, for integration, for the right to put "dangerous" books into the libraries. And while I agreed with her on many issues - just as I'd agreed with her son Richard - she was something of a scold, with a scold's self-righteousness and smugness. She was also tireless once she got going. All of which may explain how Richard turned out as he did.
Cliffie stopped lecturing me about commies when Dorothy Conners walked into the room without acknowledging any of us and stood over the sheet hiding her son. She pulled it back just far enough to see his face. Then she quickly covered it up again. Her expression was hard, controlled. No sign of grief, not even anger.
Then she looked at Cliffie and said, "I'm giving you twenty-four hours to find out who killed him, Sykes. And if you don't have somebody in jail by then, I'm calling the governor. He's a Democrat and owes me a favor. I'll have him send out some state investigators to work independent of you on this."
"Now wait a minute here, Mrs. Conners," Cliffie said, starting to rise from his chair. "You don't have no right to - "
She looked at me. "I need to get some groceries." Then, to Cliffie: "Twenty-four hours, Cliffie. I mean it."
About the last thing Cliffie liked was being called Cliffie. About the second to the last thing he liked was being threatened.
"Bitch," Cliffie said, when she'd gone. "Fucking bitch."
FIVE
Richard Conners was unduly fond of his Jaguar. It was an easy way to demonstrate his social superiority, as only a true liberal could. People would stand on the corner and point to it the way they would at a UFO.
But Conners had always been anxious about parking it. Somebody might run into it. Or break into it. So he made this deal with Mike's Auto Repair. Mike Burleigh owned an empty garage in the same alley where he had his repair shop. It was downtown, so it was a convenient parking spot. Conners rented the small garage from him. Whenever he drove into town, he ran his car in there and locked the garage door, and the Jag, all sleek and silver, was safe.
I doubted if Cliffie had checked out the garage yet. Maybe he didn't even know about Conners's arrangement with Mike.
I walked over there. I wanted to take full true measure of the gentle autumn day, but I couldn't quite. I kept seeing Conners falling through my doorway, dead.
When you're a kid, alleys are about the neatest places there are except maybe for cellars and basements. Alleys are perfect for any kind of game you want to play: war, cowboys-and-Indians, even science-fiction games. Alleys have neat places to hide, neat places to fall dead and give little dying speeches like they do in the movies, and neat places to jump off of. Alleys are universes unto themselves.
That's when you're a kid. When you're older, you tend to smell the garbage in the cans, and notice the town drunk sleeping off another sad bender behind a couple of empty crates, and be slightly offended by all the dirty words kids have scrawled on the garage walls.
This alley dated back to at least the turn of the century. Dozens of businesses had come and gone here in that time. It was narrow and without shade because there were no trees. The backs of the two-story wooden buildings gave it the feeling of a small canyon. The liveliest place was Mike Auto's Repair. Auto shops tend to be noisy places. I went directly to the garage Conners had rented. Nothing special about it at all. A one-stall garage. There was a clasp where a Yale lock had held the door in place. But the lock was gone. The door opened sideways. I pulled it far enough to get inside.
The interior smelled of faded sunlight, car oil, the feces of a dozen different creatures. It was the kind of garage where a lot of us got our first kisses. Little boys and girls playing together and then experimenting with kisses, and maybe a little more, the way couples on TV were always doing it.
I looked around. Except for the Jaguar, nothing notable presented itself. I saw a spider in a web, a caterpillar crawling along the edge of a two-by-four, a robin dead and mummified in a corner. An odd little nook of existence.
The handprint wasn't hard to find once I got close. Three of them, in fact: handprints made in blood. I could picture Richard, after being shot, reeling from the car, falling against the wall here. Leaving his print, his palm wet from touching his wound.
I spent a few minutes there and then went over to Mike Burleigh's place. Mike had been a classmate of mine from kindergarten through high school. We'd never been close friends, but I'd see him at all the auto shows and stock car races and that was enough to make us friendly. He went to work for the guy who'd once been the dominant auto repair man in town. A couple years ago, Mike had bought him out. Now he was the main man.
Mike was bulky in his white DX coveralls. Not only were the coveralls greasy, so was his bald head. A wriggle of black grease looked like a birth defect right across the center of his pink dome.
"Hey, counselor."
"Hi, Mike. I take it you heard about Richard Conners."
He frowned. "That's the kind of thi
ng scares the shit out of you, isn't it? I mean, Des Moines or Cedar Rapids or one of the river towns - sure, stuff happens there. But Black River Falls?" He shook his head again.
"You didn't happen to talk to Conners today, did you?"
"Not today. Sometimes, he brings his car in for me to work on. Says he's finally getting me trained to work on a Jag. Personally, I wouldn't want the damned thing. Too much trouble."
"But he didn't come in today?"
"Nope. Just pulled into the garage and walked to wherever he was going. Which is what he usually does - did, I guess I should say now."
"You didn't hear a gunshot by any chance, did you?"
"You kidding?"
Wrenches clanging when they hit the concrete floor, Chuck Berry on the radio, mechanics shouting back and forth in echoing voices - there was my answer.
Before I went back to my office and got my car, I walked up and down the alley three times. I had no idea what I was looking for exactly. The backs of the various retail shops offered me no help at all.
***
I took the long way home, which led me past Trawler College, nine red-brick buildings built over a twenty-year period, sitting on a vast wooded hill. There had always been a fortresslike air about the place, as if it wanted to repel all the nonsense and vulgarity to be found in the town below. If you believed its brochure, Trawler was considered "the Harvard of small midwestern liberal arts colleges." The claim would have been stronger if it had cited a source. Presumably, the Trawler English professors wouldn't let you get away with such stuff.
This was the year that college kids discovered folk music. Or the Tin Pan Alley version of it, anyway. The Kingston Trio was the hottest act on campuses, and boys and girls alike wore a lot of bold-striped shirts in their honor. A harmless diversion - it was better than listening to Fabian, anyway - until they started updating and sanitizing some of the old labor songs. Then I wanted to reach for my gun. Those songs were based on the lives of immigrants who had struggled and suffered all their lives. Turning them into hummable sap for college kids irritated me. For the most part, Trawler students are rich Chicago kids who flunked out of or couldn't get into other schools. They drive cars far superior to those of most town folks and make frequent trips to nearby Cedar Rapids and Iowa City (we're pretty much between the two), where they spend their parents' money with abandon. This isn't to say they're bad kids or stupid kids. Not at all. It's just that they've never been very cordial to the people of Black River Falls, and that has left some resentment in town. As for the school itself, I'd taken two night school courses there. The instructors were damned good. I might even have gone there for my BA but my folks could never have afforded it. I went to the U of Iowa.
Folk music seemed to come from every dorm window. I wanted to hear Chuck Berry or Little Richard or Elvis. I needed my sinus passages cleared.
Even though dinnertime was near, and most of the faculty should be home, there were two or three little clutches of them in the lobby area of the first building I came to. They ran to crew cuts, Hush Puppies, button-down shirts, black-rimmed eyeglasses, cardigans, and dark trousers. A few pipes, mostly cigarettes. One Negro, a handful of women. A few of them recognized me and nodded. Most of them spoke low, the way you would in a funeral home. You could tell they'd been shocked, not in any dramatic way but in a quieter, more lasting way, perhaps. One of their own - no matter how much they might have disliked him - had been killed. One more measure of their own mortality.
A tall woman in a blue crew-neck sweater, Peter Pan collar, and a gray skirt came over to me: Nan Richmond. I'd helped her with some vandalism she'd suffered. Turned out to be an ex-boyfriend. Her hair had started to streak gray in the two years since I'd last seen her.
"Oh, God, McCain," she said, "it's so awful. He died in your office?"
I nodded. "Though he was pretty much dead when he got there."
"I understand he drove. How could he have?"
"He kept his Jaguar in a garage a block away - whenever he came downtown, I mean. He was always afraid somebody would run into it. My guess is somebody was waiting for him in the garage."
"That damned car of his." Shook her head. "A hick in a fancy car like that." She glanced over at the black professor. "Nigger rich, if you know what I mean. Same difference."
"I guess I never thought of him as a hick."
"You never really get over the circumstances you were born into. I can't. Nice middle-class Irish Catholic girl from Long Island. I keep trying to leave all my prejudices behind and be more sophisticated, but it's never easy." She smiled. "Parents are like Jesuits. Once they get ahold of you, they never let go." Then: "Oh, Jeez, got to run. My little one's at the baby-sitter." People figured, her being a college prof and a divorcee at that, she'd be easy to get into bed. I've got two bottles of wine and a whole lot of begging to say otherwise. I guess I've never had much luck with the so-called "easy" ones, but then, come to think of it, I haven't had much luck with the "hard" ones either.
I drifted down the hall. Nobody paid any special attention because the men's room was down there around the corner. So was Conners's office. I figured that Cliffie, being Cliffie, probably hadn't thought to seal his office for evidence. That would be too much like actual modern-day law enforcement. And I was right. The short hall had two offices on one wall, an office and a men's room on the other. There was an exit sign above the door ahead of me. The ideal office setup. You could sneak out without anybody seeing you.
I saw a very pretty young Negro woman slowly twisting a knob on a door. She was unaware of me at first. She gave the impression of sneaking in. I wondered why. When she saw me, she jumped back from the door and said, "Oh, poor Dr. Conners." She wore a white frilly blouse and a tan skirt with argyle knee socks. With her tortoise-shell eyeglasses, she looked modern and imposing. "I'm Margo Lane. I am - was - his student assistant." Her dark eyes glistened with tears; her perfume gave off an intoxicating heat. "I'm sorry. I need a cup of coffee and a cigarette." She gave a startled little cry and pushed past me.
Between the offices on the west wall was a bulletin board thumbtacked with a variety of colorful brochures offering student scholarships, study vacations, summer jobs, and enlistment in all the armed forces. The draft hung heavy on every young man's mind. It was why I'd joined the National Guard. Ike was sending advisers to a place called Vietnam, but it didn't look like it would become anything serious. It was probably a good time to enlist and get it out of the way.
I heard a chair scrape against the floor on the other side of Conners's closed door and knew something was wrong. Could be his wife or mother, but I guessed otherwise.
I needed some of Helen Grady's hard-boiled talk to get me in the mood for what I was about to do. But I figured the best - probably, only - weapon I had was surprise.
The door was unlocked, which helped. I flung it inward and there he was, hunched over Conners's desk, pulling out a drawer.
He managed to look totally unperturbed. "Hi," he said. "Help you with something?"
"Yeah," I said, "you can tell me who you are and what you're doing here."
"Oh, I'm sorry." He slid the drawer closed and stood up. He was a city fellow, vaguely military. Even with the gray Brooks Brothers suit, the white oxford shirt, and the red-gray-black regimental striped tie - military. He had a lean, angular, feral face. The mouth was too thin and the ears were slightly pointed. He had great teeth. They sparkled. He was thirty or so. "I'm a cousin of the Conners family."
"I see."
"And you are?"
"I'm Sam McCain. I was working for Conners."
"Good for you."
He didn't make a fuss of it. Simply brought it out of a very secretive shoulder holster. A Luger, for God's sake. "If you've got half a brain, hayseed, this gun should be scaring the shit out of you."
"It'd make a hell of a lot of noise."
"Yeah, but you wouldn't be around to hear it."
"So who are you?"
He ha
d a nice grin. Like on TV. But it was a cold grin, the same kind of cold amusement as in the gray eyes. "You fucking farm boys. Whaddaya think I'm gonna do? Hand you my ID and write down my home phone number?"
"I'd appreciate it if you would."
Then he said: "Wait a minute. You're the lawyer he talked to. When you were seeing Khrushchev."
"Were you there?"
"No. And it's a good thing I wasn't. Would've taken every ounce of self-control I had not to shoot that sonofabitch."
"Khrushchev or Conners?"
He grinned. "Both." Then: "Take two steps back and close the door. Real easy. Then take two steps forward and put your hands above your head."
"We going to do some calisthenics, are we?"
"You're pretty bright for a shitkicker."
"You're pretty friendly for a psycho."
He laughed. He actually laughed. Then he motioned with the gun the way they do in the movies. I took two steps back and closed the door gently. I had no thought of escape. I had no doubt he'd shoot me on the spot and worry about his escape afterward. Then I took two steps forward and put my hands above my head.
I had never been hit by anything so hard in my life. It did more than double me over, it felt as if it had tripled me over. One punch into my sternum. I went to my knees. I fell to my face. I couldn't see. I couldn't hear. I felt nauseated.
He went back to searching through drawers. A couple times, he laughed and said, "How you doin', shitkicker? I figured you country boys could take it better'n that."
Standing up took a lot of effort. I pushed through the pain. He kept glancing at me, making sure I was still sufficiently disabled. Now he was going through a closet. "You better hope I find what I'm looking for, hayseed. Because otherwise I start in on you again."
