by Ed Gorman
I took out my Luckies and offered him one. He took it. It was one of those little gems that come along every once in a while. You smoke and they start to blunt your taste and you know that the only reason you're smoking is addiction and habit. But then every once in a while one of them will taste so good you remember why you started smoking. I try to remember that, every time the doctor has me get a chest X-ray.
Trucks on the highway. Cold wind from the river. Nat "King" Cole singing low and melancholy on a radio. Natalie letting go with little bursts of emotional pain every minute or so.
"That would tend to piss a guy off," Swacka said.
"Somebody going through your stuff like that?"
"Damned right."
He was ready to lead a manhunt. But I was fading. I wanted bed. Pamela came to me for a moment. She blew me a kiss. Tonight Natalie would be in bed with me instead, and that, I told myself, was fine with me.
She came out and said, "C'mon, McCain. Take me away from here. I just want to walk away and never see it again."
Then she was crying, probably from the same exhaustion that was beginning to hobble me. She slid her arm around my waist and tried to move me toward the ragtop.
"I have to finish up my report," Swacka said. "No sense you two staying."
"Thank you, officer," she said. "I appreciate your professionalism and courtesy."
Oh, he was dazzled all right. She could do that to you.
"My pleasure, miss," he said, all shy shit-eating grin. "My pleasure, you bet."
***
We slept. She was a good sleeper. She knew how to wrap herself around me without killing the circulation in any part of my body. Her hair smelled sweet and her flesh was warm and smooth. The cats liked her. When she got comfortable, they pressed themselves to her and got comfortable, too. Just an All-American family, we were.
***
The sound of the shower woke me. She was apparently an early riser. And a singer. It was a Broadway musical song. I had my first cigarette lying on my back, Tasha lying on my stomach. Natalie had a pot of coffee going. It smelled as good as coffee does on a chilly morning camping trip.
I got the radio on and am happy to report they were playing some Elvis from his Sun Records years. That's still the best Elvis, you ask me. They did what they called a "double-decker," two songs by the same cat. So we got "You're a Heartbreaker" and "Mystery Train," which may just be the best thing he's ever recorded.
And then came the knock.
Natalie, apparently accustomed to long leisurely showers, was not troubled because she too was doing a double-decker. One from My Fair Lady and one from The Music Man.
I got a robe on and went to the door.
Raymond Chandler always says that any time he gets stuck in a story, he just has somebody come through the door with a gun in his hand. In this case, it was a her, the fetching young Negro woman Margo Lane. The gun looked wicked. Something the Germans came up with, no doubt. She carried a gray suede purse you could hide a Cadillac in. At first I didn't remember her. But then I remembered the aftermath of Conners falling dead in my office and me going out to the college where he taught. She'd introduced herself as one of his students. Now I knew better.
"You bastard," she said, marching me backward into my own apartment.
"And nice to see you again too, Margo," I said, not forgetting my duties as host. She wore a gray suit with gray suede pumps and white gloves. Even the reds had gone the white glove route. Lenin would not have been happy.
"Why'd you toss my room last night?" she demanded.
"Your room was tossed too? Somebody was busier than hell."
"Yes, and I know who it was: you."
"Why would I toss your room?"
We were being treated to a belted-out rendition of "On the Street Where You Live."
"Who's that?" she said.
"Just a friend."
"For a squirt, you sure seem to have a lot of 'friends.'"
"Thank you, and by the way, I really hate the word squirt."
"You do? Tough shit. Now tell me what you were looking for."
"You're mad but you don't even know what I was looking for? This is crazy."
"I just want to know if you know."
"Know what?"
She studied me and didn't seem especially pleased with what she learned. "Maybe you really don't know."
"What don't I know?"
The singing stopped and the bathroom door opened. Natalie came out in a white terry-cloth robe with a white terry-cloth towel wrapped turban-style around her head and said, "Oh, shit."
"Natalie? What the hell are you doing here?" Margo Lane said.
Natalie made an enigmatic but cute face and sighed. "The same thing you are, I suppose."
"You slept with the squirt here?" Margo asked, smirking.
"Don't be so smug, Margo. Do I have to remind you about Cleveland and that three-hundred-pound meat packer you spent a weekend with?"
Margo laughed. "All in the name of duty. You ever going to let me forget about that?"
"I will, if you don't ever tell anybody about this one. No offense, McCain."
Who were they? What the hell were they talking about? I knew I'd been insulted, but I was too confused to feel its sting.
Natalie helped herself to my cigarettes.
"I could use one of those," Margo said.
Natalie lit another one and took it over to her.
"Sit down, Margo," Natalie said. "I'll get us some coffee."
"So how was the shrimp?" Margo said as Natalie poured.
"Not as bad as you might think."
Not exactly a tribute.
"I ended up with a farm boy the other night," Margo said. "He kept rubbing my skin. Like it was going to come off on his fingers or something."
Natalie poured two cups, carried them on saucers over to the small table, and sat down. I obviously wasn't invited.
Natalie said, "Why don't you go take a shower, McCain? We need to talk."
"If she's a communist," I said to Natalie, "who the hell are you?"
"You really haven't figured it out yet, have you?" Margo Lane said scornfully. "Man, you plow jockeys need to get a full deck of cards before you sit down to play with us city slickers. She's America First, you dumb shit."
"What?"
You know how in spy novels the beautiful woman who turns out to be a foreign agent weeps and begs for forgiveness right before our hero is forced to shoot her? Well, I was just about to pour myself a cup of coffee when Natalie said, "There isn't that much coffee to go around, McCain. I'd appreciate it if you'd just leave it for us and go take your shower."
"I can't have my own coffee?"
"How can you take his whining?" Margo Lane said to Natalie. "It'd drive me bat shit."
"It does," Natalie said.
My ego couldn't take anymore. I headed for the shower. But at the last minute, I turned and said, "Was he actually your brother, Natalie?"
Natalie smiled. Margo exploded. "Boy, you really are slow. Of course he wasn't her brother. He was just this mad dog anticommunist who fucked up the whole assignment and got himself killed."
"And just for the sake of squirts and dumb shits everywhere, what was the assignment?"
Natalie sipped her coffee - correction: my coffee - and said, "Think about it, McCain. Rivers and Cronin kidnap Conners and take him to that old show barn. We find a cap for a hypodermic needle there."
"Sodium Pentothal," I said. "They injected him with it. Truth serum."
"Highly exaggerated track record," Margo Lane said. "It works about twenty percent of the time. It makes some people so psychotic it scrambles everything they say. They start to hallucinate - and that's what they tell you about. Not the information you're after but the fact that in their minds these purple guys from Venus are chasing them. And some people lie under the influence. They've lied so much about their lives the serum can't unmask the lie."
"So," Natalie said, "you have to be very carefu
l about the information you get. You have to be able to put it in the context of the person you're dealing with." She smiled at Margo. "Remember that chemistry professor in LA who convinced us he'd created this elixir that would let people live for three hundred years?"
"What a wasted month that was," Margo said.
"I don't understand," I said, looking at both of them sitting there, all friendly and everything. "If you're on one side and she's on the other, why're you working together?"
"Oh, we're not working together at all," Natalie said. "If I had to, I'd kill old Margo here in a minute. And she'd kill me even faster. But we always get the 'girl' assignments. So since we're together so much, why not have a friendly rivalry?"
"What did Cronin get from Conners, a confession?"
"Supposedly they made a tape. Supposedly, Conners talks about his links to the communists," Natalie said. "That's why we want to get our hands on it. I want any names and dates and places he might have given. We'll use it to destroy his reputation, show that one more liberal icon really was a communist."
"And we want the tape to destroy it," Margo said. "We have a lot of agents in place in this country. A tape by Conners could expose them all."
"So where do you look for this tape?"
"Well, with Rivers dead, that leaves only Cronin," Natalie said. "I was hoping you could lead me to him. That's why I was hanging around. But - no luck."
"We have to find Cronin," Margo said.
"You two scare the shit out of me," I said.
Natalie giggled and Margo laughed. "Good," Margo said.
***
I was just drying off in the bathroom when the phone rang. I opened the door. Natalie and Margo were gone. No surprise there.
I got the phone on the fifth ring.
"You need a butler," Judge Whitney said.
"Now there's a practical idea," I said.
"Did you see the Channel Three news last night?"
"Afraid I missed it."
"Well, two of my friends were downstairs and happened to be watching television. And afterward they said they had no idea this kind of 'witch hunt' was going on out here."
"I'll bet the poor dears were so distressed they choked on their caviar."
"You base your whole idea of rich people on those idiotic Three Stooges movies you watch on TV. Caviar isn't nearly as fashionable as it once was."
"I'll bet the fish are glad to hear that."
"So what're you doing about all this, McCain? I'd planned a nice bucolic week for my friends, and now all they'll talk about is how the scare is still going on out here. It's embarrassing."
"Actually, I'm working on it."
"That's what you always say when you're stumped. From what I hear, you're spending most of your time squiring that young Russian girl around town."
"Not anymore."
"What does that mean?"
I sighed. "Never mind."
"Well, get this thing over with, will you? My God, isn't it enough that I have to live here? Do I have to defend these people too?"
"I'll call you later today, Judge."
She clicked off.
TWELVE
Sometimes you just need to slow down. So much happens to you so quickly, you can't make any emotional sense of it. Take the commie and the anti-commie. Deadly enemies, one would suppose, and Natalie had assured me she'd be delighted to kill Margo if need be, but there they were swapping jokes about the various questionable lays they'd endured ("Not as bad as you might think" leaving a lot to be desired in the Ringing Endorsement Department) and speculating together on how best to conduct the case they were on. Joe McCarthy would be seriously pissed if he'd been alive to hear this.
I drove to the office with the top down. It was a ridiculously gorgeous day of squirrels lugging nuts to hiding places, piles of burning leaves sending intoxicating aromas into the air, and sweet-faced middle-aged women looking good in jeans and flannel shirts and work gloves raking the hell out of their lawns. There's a certain type of middle-aged bottom that I've come to appreciate in my dotage.
First place I went was my office. Probably several hundred thousand dollars' worth of checks waiting there for me and a note from the tax people saying that because I was such a wonderful guy I wouldn't have to pay tax on a penny of it.
There weren't any checks. On the other hand, there weren't any bills either. I made some phone calls, did some paperwork, and then decided I needed a milkshake and a paperback crime novel. I was running low on Harry Whittingtons.
The walk to Rexall was pleasant indeed. I visited with Old Lady Spritzer, Old Man Doggins, Father O'Malley, Coach Wylie, Fire Chief Bradford, Principal McCune, and the leader of our town's first and only rock-and-roll band, Ronnie "No Chin" Hanes. The nickname pretty much explains itself. He's tried for years to get folks to call him "the Seminole" because he insists he's 1/158th Indian or something like that, but "No Chin" seems to have stuck.
Every conversation went the same way: starting out with the weather, then talking about the good harvest the farmers were having, and then puzzling aloud as to who could've killed Conners and Rivers, and just where the heck was Jeff Cronin anyway, his wife and kids worried sick?
The Rexall lunch hour was winding down. There was a line at the cash register paying for ham sandwiches and hamburgers and chocolate cake, but there was only one person at the counter, Bob Steinem, who manages the A&P. He reads science fiction the way I read crime. What he was reading this lunch break was an Ace Double Book called Lest We Forget Thee, Earth by somebody named Calvin M. Knox. I couldn't see what the book on the flip side was.
Mary Travers gave me a glass of water and a weary smile. She wore a blue crew-neck sweater with a crisp white Peter Pan collar and a gray knee-length skirt. In her hair was a sweet little baby-blue barrette. "I hear you've been busy, Sam."
Mary is the girl everybody says I should marry. And they're probably right. Speaking in strictly superficial terms, she's as good-looking in her dark-haired way as Pamela is in her golden-haired way. And speaking in terms a little more meaningful - though I can be as superficial as the best of them, and don't let anybody tell you different - she was the smartest girl in our class and would've gone on to college but her dad got throat cancer the year we graduated high school, and her mom already had a long list of pretty serious ailments, so Mary stayed home to take care of them. These days, she was engaged to Wes Lindstrom, a pharmacist and son of the man who owned this Rexall. She doesn't love him and she knows it, and I know it, and I reckon Wes knows it too. I'd feel sorry for him if he wasn't such an imperious, judgmental jerk. He always reminds her what a big favor he's doing her by taking her out of the Knolls and building her a house on the "respectable" side of town. Aw, hell, I do feel sorry for him. You marry somebody and you have the right to expect them to love you to the same degree, or at least not to have anybody else in their heart. But she loves me and I love Pamela, though I love Mary too in some inexplicable way. It's sexual - she really is a quietly sexual girl - but there's something so fundamentally good about her that sometimes I can just stand there and watch her and feel this horny sorrow and respect lash me to her. Then I can't keep my hands off her. Which is why I stay away. I've hurt her too much already. I don't owe it to her to love her - anymore than Pamela owes it to me to love me - but I have an obligation not to deceive her.
"Yeah, very busy," I said. "You know, keeping the world safe for democracy."
She grinned. She's got one of those surprised-and-delighted young-girl grins. And I love to make it happen. I play her face the way I do a pinball machine. But instead of racking up points I try to rack up smiles.
"Oh, yes, I feel much safer, now that I know you're watching out for us."
"How're the malts today?"
"Good as always."
She didn't have to ask. Pineapple malt was my regular. Maybe I can't hold liquor because of my size, but you should see me pour down the malted milks.
She set my malt down and said,
"Wes and I are going to take a little break."
"What?"
She nodded. "Same old thing."
Think things through about us. "Gee, I never see you except in here."
"He just can't get us out of his head. No matter what I say."
"Oh, hell, he'll come back, Mary."
She started wiping the counter with long, lovely hands. "You remember when you were little and you just knew that someday everything would make sense to you and everything would be fine?"
I smiled. "Sure."
"When's that day going to come, Sam?"
"I don't happen to know personally, but I'm sure Kookie does."
The kid grin. "You still hate him, huh?"
"Yeah; yeah, I really do."
Are there TV and movie stars who really bug you? I mean, on a personal level? They just irritate you so much you want to back over them with a dump truck? Edd "Kookie" Byrnes, the boy sexpot of the otherwise enjoyable detective show 77 Sunset Strip, had that effect on me. Every time he came on, I wanted to take my gun out and start blasting away.
Bob Steinem stood up, left a tip for Mary, and said, "Don't worry, McCain. I hate him too. Every time I see his face I want to punch it."
"Do I detect some jealousy here?" Mary said innocently. "Or maybe even some intimidation?"
"That jerk doesn't intimidate me any," Steinem said, as he walked to the cash register, "and I'm sure he doesn't intimidate McCain here, either."
After she'd cleaned up Steinem's dishes, she said, "Any idea yet who killed Conners and what's-his-name? Rivers?"
"Not yet."
"And no word on Cronin?"
"Nobody's seen him." Then I started talking about it. From the beginning, I mean. Everything. From the day we went to see Khrushchev to this morning, when it turned out that Natalie wasn't Rivers's sister at all but one of his fellow operatives. I told her about Margo, too.
"She had lunch in here yesterday. Really beautiful woman. Nice and friendly."
