by Ed Gorman
"Good. Can we keep this between us?"
"Sure. I'm not a talker, you know that." And he wasn't. Then: "You ever want a deal on a TV, Sam, you go talk to Tom. He'll fix you up."
"Thanks, Ralph."
"Well, I better get back to my books. Payroll is this afternoon."
He gave a little wave and was gone.
***
As I opened the door to my office a few minutes later, I heard the sounds of Jamie working merrily away at the typewriter. She must have been doing six or seven words a minute.
"Hi, Mr. C," she said, with her usual Teen Queen enthusiasm. "Bet you're surprised to see me here, huh? We had an in-service day at school so my dad said, You scoot your butt right down to Mr. C's office - well, actually, he doesn't call you Mr. C, he calls you Mr. McCain, I'm the one who calls you Mr. C. So here I am."
Lucky me.
"I've already typed this letter I found on your desk."
"Letter?" I said, going over to the coffeepot and setting it up for the day.
"If I drink coffee when I'm having my time of month, you know, I break out."
"Gosh," I said. "Imagine that."
"My whole family has crazy periods."
"Even your dad?"
She grinned. "Mr. C made a funny." She wore a simple blue skirt and tight buff blue blouse. She was cute and she was fetching and she drove me nuts.
I sat down at the desk and looked it over. On a large piece of white paper, she'd written Shammus.
"I'm not sure what this means, Jamie."
"What what means, Mr. C?"
"This note. Shammus."
"Oh, you know, like on TV."
"Like on TV?"
"Yeah, you know, what they always call a private eye. A shamm-us."
"That's shame-us."
"Oh, well, close enough. I just wrote it down so I'd remember to tell you that your pigeon lady called."
"My pigeon lady?"
"Yeah, shammuses have pigeons they go to, and the pigeons tell them stuff."
"That's stool pigeons." I was beginning to understand her, and the implication of that was frightening. We were doing George Burns and Gracie Allen here.
"Yeah. Close enough. Stool pigeons." She went back to her typing. Flying along with those two fingers. Then she blew a giant pink dome of bubble gum and said, "You ever notice how typing is hard on your fingernails, Mr. C?"
"Do you tell me who my stool pigeon is or do I guess? Could it be Helen Grady?"
"At the old folks' home?"
"Yes."
"Then that's her. You guess good."
"Does she want me to call her?"
"Uh-huh."
Another giant pink dome. "I'll have that letter for you in a minute."
I still didn't know what the hell letter she was talking about.
I called Helen Grady. The line was busy. I watched the coffee brew. I thought about calling Mary. I couldn't sort out my feelings. In some way, I loved her deeply. I just couldn't figure out which way that was and if it was the kind she needed. Or the kind I needed. Or - shit. Sometimes, I just want to reach up there and give myself a lobotomy. Life without thought would be so much easier.
I tried Helen Grady again. Still busy. I was jittery. I thought about the drive-in last night. Cronin. There was a possibility that Natalie or Margo had killed him. And killed Conners and Rivers, too. When I'd first met them, my ego had blinded me. These cute girls weren't harmless propagandists. I now believed they were quite capable of murder.
I tried Helen a third time. Still busy.
"Ouch," Jamie said. "Shit." Then: "Oh, fudge."
I'd been staring at the phone. When I looked up, I found Jamie at the coffeepot. She was shaking her hand. "Pardon my French, Mr. C, but I spilled hot coffee all over my hand and all over your letter."
"Are you all right?"
"I was going to surprise you, and now look." She seemed about to cry. "I ruined your coffee and I ruined your letter."
"It's all right, Jamie. Let me see the letter, will you?"
She brought it over. I read it. If she hadn't just burned her hand with the coffee, I probably would've swore. But I just said, "Well, we can worry about this letter later. There's some ointment in the cabinet over there. In a shoe box along with some Band-Aids. Go put some on."
"Gee, thanks."
What she'd done was taken a letter I'd scribbled off in longhand on February 2, 1957 - more than two and a half years ago - and retyped it. Even though it was clearly rubber-stamped, in red, file copy. I'd been looking at it in reviewing a current case. I solemnly promised myself never to leave another file copy letter on my desk.
She came back and said, "I think maybe I need to rest this hand." She held it up the way she would a sick puppy.
"It looks pretty bad."
"Well, Turk said I have nice hands."
"Who's Turk?"
"My boyfriend this year."
"Ah, the 1959 model."
"Say again?"
"Never mind. I wasn't insulting your hands. You do have very nice hands. I just meant that it looks a little red where it was burned."
It didn't, of course. But I knew she was leading up to taking off the rest of the day, and I wanted to help her on her way.
"I think I may be running a fever, too."
"Those burns are fast acting."
"Maybe if I took the rest of the day off I could come charging back in here on Monday."
"A great idea."
"You're a peach, Mr. C."
I said, "You know, that's something I've always wondered about."
"What is?" She was even perkier now that she knew she'd soon be free and in the greasy clutches of a kid named Turk.
"My name is McCain but you always call me Mr. C."
"Oh, that," she said, as if explaining to a chimpanzee how to use a spoon. "It's because M and C are too hard to say. I mean, Mr. Mc doesn't sound right. So I dropped the M and just call you Mr. C because it's easier."
I sighed. "You're starting to look kind of pale, Jamie. If I were you I'd get out of here as fast as I could."
"Thanks for being so understanding, Mr. C."
And then, thank the Lord, she was gone.
I tried Helen Grady again, and this time I got through.
"Hello, doll," I said, in my best Peter Gunn voice.
"Hello, shamus. How's the gumshoe business?"
"Oh, not so bad. My trench coat needs a cleaning, though."
"I'll bet. All that blood." Then: "I've got a little free info if you're interested."
"Slather my ears with it, gorgeous."
"Seems there's this fishing cabin about two miles west of Ilten Basin. Owned by Bill Grant, the photographer? Well, he and Conners went way back. Way back. So Grant gave Conners a key to the cabin."
"I'm on the same streetcar you are so far, doll baby."
"Well, guess who used to bring his girlies out there? In particular, a certain Chris Tomlin?"
Chris Tomlin at a fishing cabin with Conners. Bill Tomlin in the garage just before Conners is killed. Does a shamus have to have somebody draw him a picture?
"Mind if I ask who's been giving you this inside dope?"
"You know the Bransons?"
"Those strange folks who're always writing the paper about UFOs?"
"They live up there. And they're always sittin' on their front porch with binoculars lookin' for UFOs. So they see everything. And the mister, his mom's in the home here with me - "
"And they saw - "
"Several times they saw them together, gumshoe. Several times. You should maybe swing by there and give 'em the third degree. Watch out for Mrs. Branson, though."
"How come?"
A chuckle. "You'll find out."
***
The trouble was this: So Bill Tomlin kills Conners because Conners is sleeping with Chris. Fine. Happens all the time. But who killed Rivers and Cronin? Why would Tomlin kill them? Was Chris sleeping with them too? Unlikely. The life o
f a shamus is not an easy one.
On the way to the woods - dirt roads winding into sparkling autumnal wilderness - I had a Pamela attack. God, how could she do this to me after all we'd meant to each other? But only half the equation was true; she'd meant a lot to me. I loved her and hated her and wanted to protect her and wished her the absolute worst. And God did I miss her!
This particular leg of the river is about a mile from the dam. On a good day you can see all the way downstream to a large dock where the dance boat rests. A century ago, river boats up from the South plied these waters, docking with minstrels and dry goods. The one trouble with the area is the spring flooding, which is why, after a few major floods, the rich rebuilt on the bluffs about half a mile due east.
The Bransons had stayed behind. They were local legends. They lived in a little wooden shack that had first been condemned by the county in 1950. They also kept mongrel dogs they'd raised to kill. And the place was a health hazard. The last time they cleaned the interior was sometime around FDR's first inauguration. They'd had one child, a girl. One spring day, the Bransons had come to town in their clattering old pickup and driven straight to Doc Gibbons's office. The missus carried a large brown paper grocery sack in and set it on the receptionist's desk. The receptionist was busy on the phone at the time. The missus left the sack behind and walked back to the truck, and they headed home to their shack. A few minutes later the nurse opened the sack and found the body of a growth-stunted five-month old girl inside, filthy and naked. This was back in '50. I guess the Bransons figured that if old Doc Gibbons delivered her, they should bring her back to him when she died. Judge Whitney had wanted them charged with something - anything - but the Bransons were distant kin of the Sykes clan so all that was done was to condemn the shack. The little girl had died of natural causes, a kidney ailment. Living in a house filled with rats, dog feces, rotten food, and overflowing chamber pots probably hadn't helped her any, but it wasn't a death the county attorney could make a case of.
I saw a gag postcard once that read welcome to our hillbilly home. The drawing showed a grandpa hillbilly sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch of his tumbledown shack, a shotgun laid across his lap and a large collection of buxom beauties a la Daisy Mae in Li'l Abner surrounding him.
Well, with the Bransons, all you needed to do was put two rocking chairs on the porch - one his'n and one her'n - and instead of buxom beauties surround them with snarling, slavering, enraged dogs of every size and description. The shotgun? Make that two shotguns.
You know how I say I'm no hero? Well, I'm about to offer you absolute proof of this.
I didn't get out of the car. I pulled up so that my door faced their porch only ten feet away. No possibility I was going to get out.
The his'n and her'n motif kept right on going. They both wore bib overalls, blue T-shirts, and straw hats of the sort Huck Finn preferred. And one more thing - I swear this is true - they both had glass right eyes. Identical blue right eyes. And they both chewed tobacco. I could see why Helen Grady had warned me. He spat his tobacco into a Folgers coffee can next to his chair, but her tobacco went everywhere. She just lip-flung it wherever she felt like.
And then the mister, he performed a miracle of sorts.
Every one of the dogs was jumping up and down, barking, baying, growling, eager to leap from the porch, dive on my car, tear off the doors, smash in the windows, and turn me into another Spam creation for dinner.
But all he said - and not in a particularly loud voice - was "Shut up!"
And they shut down. As if they were electronic and the switch had been turned.
He hadn't even looked at them. He just said it.
An eerie silence settled upon us.
The only sound for two or three long minutes was her spitting tobacco in the general direction of my ragtop.
He said, "That's some fancy automobile."
"Yeah, I guess it is."
"You're that Sam McCain, ain't you?"
"Yes, I am."
"I had a boyfriend had a fancy automobile once," she said.
"Gosh," I said.
"She had a passel of boyfriends."
"I can sure see why."
" 'Course, she's put on a little weight since then."
That was another thing. Neither of them could've weighed a hundred pounds. They looked emaciated. What did she used to weigh, sixty?
"She carries it well," I said, just to keep things rolling.
The cabin looked to be one room, with tarpaper covering a good deal of roof and exterior wall. The lone window was boarded up with raw two-by-fours. The brick chimney was a jumble. And the stench was ungodly, even from ten feet away.
"Do somethin' fer you, mister?" she said. She couldn't decide whether to look hostile or curious, so she settled for both. She was as sinewy and tough-looking as her husband. They could've been anywhere between forty and seventy. You just couldn't tell. I couldn't, anyway.
"I'm working on the Conners case."
"That be Richard Conners?" he said. "The one who got hisself killed?"
I nodded.
The woman spat tobacco and then laughed. "He sure had a little one."
I wasn't sure I'd heard her correctly. "I beg your pardon?"
Husband said, "We used to watch him. Sneak up and peek through the window. They never did catch us. The wife here always made jokes about how little he was." He smiled. "She ever makes a crack like that about me, she'll be sportin' two glass eyes, I can tell ya that."
"No reason to say anything like that 'bout you, Rolly." She went on. "He got some lookers out to that cabin, though. I got to give him that."
"You ever see Chris Tomlin with him?"
"Did better than that," she said, and spat. "We seen Conners and the Tomlin gal inside the cabin - and then we seen Bill Tomlin, her old man, sneak up and peek in the window. We was back in the timber, watchin'."
"You sure it was Bill Tomlin?"
"Positive," Rolly said.
"We seen his pitcher in the paper," she said. "It was him, all right."
"Did he confront them?"
"What's that mean?"
"Did Tomlin start an argument with them or anything?"
"Nope," he said. "Just watched, then took off."
"And you saw him out there a couple of times?"
"Maybe even three," she said, and spat.
The smell was getting to me. And I figured the dogs would soon enough break out of their hypnotic spell and attack me. All the chawing and spitting was getting to me too. I wondered if they took their wads out when they ate.
I slipped my car in gear. "Well, I appreciate your time."
"Hope our dogs didn't bother you none," he said. "Some folks're scared of 'em."
"Those cute puppies?" I said, and sped away.
FIFTEEN
I pulled into my parking space. Jamie had left traces of her perfume in the office. Oh, and lipstick smudges on the speaking end of the telephone receiver. She liked to work intimate when she was on the phone. I wiped off the worst of it and starting calling around for Bill Tomlin.
He wasn't at home, he wasn't at the small office Conners had kept in town, and he wasn't at the library where he spent most afternoons.
I did some work on legal cases and straightened the place up - someday I'd ask Jamie to help me, which should be a treat - and then I went back to calling around for Bill Tomlin.
Chris answered this time.
"Is Bill around?"
"We just got in. We were over at the funeral parlor with Dorothy. The wake's tomorrow night and that's when all the celebrities start coming. Hubert Humphrey and Jack Kennedy both said they'd be here."
"That's because the primaries are coming up."
"Oh, c'mon, McCain, you don't think Jack Kennedy's got any sort of chance against Hubert, do you?"
"You never know."
"The way he runs around? And he's not much of a thinker. Hubert and Richard went way back." Then: "I'll put Bill on."
/>
Bill came on.
"You thirsty?"
"Just had a Pepsi, matter of fact."
"I was thinking of something a little stronger."
Hesitation. "What's going on, McCain?"
"We need to talk."
"About what?"
"A fishing cabin you visited from time to time."
Another hesitation. "You in real estate now?"
"This is getting awful cute. Meet me at the Home Run Club in half an hour."
***
What I really wanted to do was sit there and listen to Ray Charles. They had a couple of his songs on the jukebox. Just sit there sipping a 3.2 Hamm's draft, my head against the corner of the booth, my legs stretched out in front of me, just digging the music the way I had in high school, my head not stuffed with murder and red scares and zombies who sat solemn and silent in sunny back yards, the human debris of communist brain-washing. It was after work, and the motif was relief and relaxation. A lot of pure high prairie laughter, especially along the bar, where white collar drank with blue collar and nobody noticed.
He wasn't much bigger than I was, Bill Tomlin. He ordered a Falstaff and said, "You're smarter than I thought you were."
"Thanks."
"Of course, I had a pretty low opinion of you to begin with, so I'm not sure it's all that great a compliment."
"Fuck yourself, Tomlin. Fuck your education and fuck all your celebrity friends and fuck all your bullshit arrogance. I'm ready to throw this beer in your face and you give me half a reason to and I'll do it. You understand?"
