Sam McCain - 04 - Save the Last Dance for Me

by Ed Gorman

  “Yeah, I can see where that could get to be a problem.”

  “Like my mom was watchin’ Little Women the other night on the boob tube.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And all I could think of was how I could

  turn it into a sleaze book. Like all the sisters are grown up now but they’re lesbos.”

  “Little Lesbos.”

  “That’s exactly the title I was thinking of.

  Exactly, man.”

  “I’d hold off on that one awhile, Kenny.”

  “Yeah, for one thing, the people who read my books —they probably wouldn’t see the parallel to Louisa May Alcott anyway.”

  Little Lesbos.

  At least it was alliterative.

  A squat, plump puppy followed me out of the town square and all the way to the sidewalk, then went bounding back to his people.

  The heat wasn’t too bad yet—st in the low seventies—j the sort of temperature plump little puppies love.

  Six

  “I wouldn’t expect you to like him, McCain.

  He’s a cultured gentleman.”

  “Yeah, some cultured gentleman, the way he went after Alger Hiss.”

  “Alger Hiss is pink right down to his lace panties.”

  “Nixon himself said that.”

  “Wrong,” she said, pleased, as always, to correct me. “That was Harry Truman himself, McCain.”

  “Bull roar.”

  “Bull roar yourself. Look it up. Harry Truman, the darling of the lefties, had a crony out in California he wanted to run for congress.

  Felt the man could beat Nixon. Then Helen Gahagan Douglas came along and decided to run against Nixon. It was Harry Truman who started the story she was a commie. And Harry Truman who came up with that remark about being pink down to her panties. Dick Nixon merely picked it up.”

  I would’ve argued with her but the tale was just unlikely enough to be true. Ever since Ike got in, Democrats have tended to canonize Truman. But you don’t want to look too closely or too long at him. Most of us, me certainly included, don’t hold up under that kind of scrutiny.

  Judge Esme Anne Whitney was

  fashion-model elegant as ever,

  poised, prim, and regal against the long windows on the east wall. White summer suit, white pumps, Gauloise cigarette, glass of brandy. We were in her chambers—s much mahogany it was like living in the heart of a tree—and yes it was but eleven A.M. and yes, you did read correctly, a glass of brandy in her slender hand. She claims it helps her concentrate. The amazing thing is that she never shows the merest effect.

  I laughed. “Haven’t we had this argument before?”

  Judge Esme Anne Whitney didn’t

  laugh. Just took another dramatic drag on her Gauloise. “Don’t worry, McCain.

  I won’t make you meet him when he comes out here.” She shook her head. “You and Ike.”

  “Me and Ike?”

  “The General can’t stand him. And poor Dick has always done everything he can to please the man.

  I like Ike very much, as you know—he and my father used to down shots together in New York after the first war —but I don’t think he’s ever been very fair about Dick.” She turned on me. “And that’s why I want you to get this ridiculous snake mess cleared up. My Lord, we’ll look like hillbillies. Snakes and Ozark faith healers. Good grief. The man is an intellectual, for God’s sake.” She

  frowned. “For once I don’t even care about humiliating Cliffie for the sake of my family honor. I just want the culprit caught and put away.” She set herself on the edge of her desk.

  The smoke from her Gauloise was diamond blue in the sunlight.

  I lit a Lucky Strike.

  “You know how the cops always look around to see who’s at a crime scene?”

  “Rudimentary police science, McCain.”

  “Well, I happened to notice two people at the crime scene last night. And you know them both.”

  “Oh?”

  And then she fired the first volley of the morn.

  She launched a rubber band slung on her thumb and forefinger. She’s good at it. Nine times out of ten she hits me. But she was a little slow this morning. I just angled my head a bit to the left and the rubber band went right on by.

  “Who are we talking about here, McCain?”

  “We are talking about here, Judge, the good Reverend Thomas C. Courtney and

  Sara Hall.”

  “You just don’t like Protestants.”

  “Well, aside from the fact that most of my good friends are Protestants, and that I sometimes go to hear Reverend Cosgrove’s sermons because he’s the most Christ-like man in the whole town, I’d say I do pretty well by you folks. And he’s a very conservative Methodist.”

  “You’ve never liked Tom. I think you’re jealous of him, in fact.”

  I smiled. “And I probably should be. He seems to have more lady friends than I do.” There had been whispers about Courtney and some of his flock.

  As in fleeced.

  “You just couldn’t resist saying that, could you?”

  I kept on beaming. “No, I couldn’t. And I still find it damned strange he’d be out there at the time Muldaur died.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning nothing other than I find it damned strange. I find Sara Hall being out there even stranger.”

  “Maybe she went for a ride. She says she does that sometimes when she feels the urge to take a drink. That was something she learned at her Mayo program. You know, to keep yourself occupied in some way.”

  “So she goes for rides with Courtney?”

  “What’s wrong with that? He’s her minister. And it’s better than taking a drink, she says.”

  She got me with her rubber band this time. Pearl Harbor sneak attack, as I’d been wont to say on the playgrounds of my youth.

  “So maybe they were just driving by and saw the ambulance and—”

  “I think I’ll talk to her.”

  “For God’s sake, McCain, why?”

  “For the same reason I’m going to talk to Courtney. They aren’t the type that chase after ambulances. They didn’t belong there. Ergo, they’re worth talking to.”

  “Ergo,” she said, taking a dramatic drag on her Gauloise.

  Her chambers weren’t as exciting as they’d once been. In the old days, I came here to see the beautiful Pamela Forrest, to try and get her to go out with me. Nobody could make me feel as bad as Pamela when she turned me down and it was wonderful, anyway. I was drunk on her. And the Judge hated it, was always

  symbolically hosing me off with harsh words about leaving Pamela alone.

  But Pamela was gone. I was still in love with her. It hurt but it wasn’t a wonderful hurt anymore. It was a hurt hurt. And for the first time in my life I realized that it was a hurt I’d have to work on getting over. She was out of my life —living elsewhere in shame—and she was never going to be in my life again.

  “I want you to promise me you won’t go see her.”

  “We’re talking Sara Hall?”

  “We are, as you say, talking Sara Hall.”

  “She just happened to be out there.”

  “She just happened to be out there.”

  “A country-club lady out at a hillbilly church where they use rattlesnakes in their religious ceremonies?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re not even curious why she was out there?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” I said, standing up so as to avoid the rubber band she’d just shot at me, “you’re the boss.”

  “Yes, I am, McCain,” she smiled with her imperious mouth, “and don’t you forget it.”

  How I came to talk to Sara Hall twenty minutes later is something I’m not necessarily proud of. I mean, it’s the sort of duplicitous thing only a counselor-at-law could come up with. Or a Republican.

  Let me put it to you as a philosophical question.

  Say there’s this woman you wan
t to ask some questions. Now, you’ve already given your word that you won’t go see her.

  But what if you happen to be driving by her house and you see her backing out of her driveway in her new DeSoto convertible?

  And what if you just happen—not having anything else better to do and the day being so beautiful and all and you owning a red ‘ea ragtop and it needing to go for a drive to clean some of the engine sludge away and all—y just happen to follow her to our town’s first, only, and very tiny—twelve stores-enclosed shopping mall.

  And what if you just happen to follow her inside?

  And wait while she’s in The Moderne

  Woman? And when she comes out, she runs into you.

  You will notice, I believe, the subtle difference between me running into her and her running into me. Which, technically, she did. She could’ve gone right, she could’ve gone left, but instead she chose—completely of her own volition—ffwalk straight.

  Now, to be technical again, it is true that I abruptly moved over from my rightward position to be in front of her when she chose—of her own volition—ffwalk straight ahead. But that’s hardly my fault, is it? There was a sudden draft from the nearby air-conditioning duct, and is it my fault I didn’t want to catch a head cold and be laid up for weeks? Possibly in traction?

  “Hi, Sara.”

  “Oh, hi, McCain.”

  Neither time nor alcohol could ever quite dim her beauty. She had a kind of sensibly erotic face, the schoolmarm whose ripe lips told of discreet and memorable pleasures. The brown eyes were sad—y don’t drink as much as she did and look happy—but again they were not without aesthetic pleasure, fine brown eyes they were, even with their melancholy, and not without a hint of high intelligent humor even in their gentle pain.

  White sleeveless blouse, tan tailored skirt, no hose, brown flats. Nice arms.

  “That’s funny. I just saw the Judge a while ago.”

  “I talked to her this morning,” she said.

  “She’s very excited about Richard Nixon coming out here. It’s all she talks about these days.” Then, “Nice seeing you.”

  People ebbed and flowed around us. From the record store came the sound of Jerry Lee Lewis.

  Teenagers sparked over by the hot-dog counter.

  “Say,” I said, ever the sly one. “I saw you last night.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes. Out at Muldaur’s church.”

  She actually blushed. “Oh. … We were just passing by. And saw the ambulance and everything.”

  “I thought maybe you knew somebody there. I saw Reverend Courtney.”

  The flush had faded. An abrupt coldness came into eye and voice. “Yes, we’d taken a ride together. He … helps me sometimes. You know, with—” She hesitated. “You know I

  went to the Mayo Clinic.”

  She looked humiliated. Hard to look at pain so fresh in those lovely eyes.

  “It’s all right, Sara.”

  “Well, he helps me sometimes. Sort of counsels me.”

  But if he was the kind and gentle counselor, why had her first reaction been anger when his name came up? And going for a ride together? But then I’d probably been reading too many books by Dr. Edmond DeMille, astksta Kenny Thibodeau, and was suspicious of even the most generous acts.

  “I really need to go. I’m sorry.”

  “I didn’t mean to bring up anything unpleasant, Sara.”

  “I know. It’s all right.”

  She touched shapely fingers to the edge of her erotic mouth. “It was nice seeing you.”

  Wanting to keep her here as long as I could, hoping something useful would just spurt from her, unbidden, I said, “How’s your daughter?”

  A tiny tic at the outer corner of her left eye. I didn’t make much of it. Coincidence.

  “Fine. She’s just fine.” But she sounded tight again, the way she had about Courtney.

  “I heard her sing at the springfest in the park.

  She’s got a beautiful voice.”

  She smiled, looking happy for the first time.

  “Folk music. The Kingston Trio eighteen hours a day.” Then the tic came back. “I need to go. Bye.”

  I gave her a long minute, then I followed her. There was a bar on the edge of the mall. I hoped I hadn’t driven her to it. I felt guilty and confused. Everybody always clucked about her “nervous personality” but her response to what I’d said seemed awfully dramatic.

  She acted as if I’d accused her of something sinister.

  She went into a bookstore. I sat on a bench and smoked a Lucky. I was there two or three minutes when I saw Reverend Courtney appear from the far end of the L-shaped brick mall. He wore a yellow golf shirt and chinos and white Keds. He looked like Yale’s most successful graduate of recent vintage.

  He went into the bookstore, apparently not seeing me, and emerged a bit later in the company of Sara Hall. She looked angry again.

  Angry but on the verge of cracking, her feelings threatening to overwhelm her.

  He had her by the arm, led her to The House of Beef. I’d been there a few times. It was cave-dark, cavern-cold. It was the preferred trysting place. The martinis were good, the food better. All the upwardly mobile young men who imagined themselves to be cool—a la Peter Gunn or Tony Curtis I suppose—called the place “The House,” the way Frank Sinatra would.

  I wondered if she’d drink. I wondered if she’d cry. I wondered if she’d get

  violent. She’d seemed on the verge of all three. And then I wondered if she was in love with Courtney. It was the kind of thought I didn’t especially want to have. I’d always liked Sara Hall.

  Seven

  I spent half an hour at the gas station where I get my ragtop worked on. Being a

  Saturday, they were busy with cars up on the hoist. I’d stopped in just to schedule a time for a tune-up but I liked the particular atmosphere of the place—the smell of gasoline and oil, the clank of tools hitting the concrete, the hoist that lifts and lowers the cars—andthe male camaraderie that is second only to a barbershop. Taverns don’t count for camaraderie because alcohol skews everything. But barbershops and gas stations … that’s where men are men. And someday I plan to be one of them.

  The topics today included how bad the Cubs were doing, how muchsthow little they looked forward to Nixon visiting our town, the high-school girls parading up and down the sidewalk in short-shorts (“God, I wish they woulda worn ‘em that short back when I was in school!”), how Jack Kennedy’s wife walked like she had a cob up her ass (republicans) or looked like a glamorous movie star (democrats), and finally how Muldaur’s murder was inevitable, him being the center of “all them nuts out to his church.”

  The gas-station consensus was that one of Muldaur’s own had done him in. Nobody mentioned Muldaur’s affinity for cheating on his wife. In fact, they didn’t offer any specific reason for his being killed. They

  just felt that anybody who messed around with snakes the way he did was bound to come to no good.

  I stopped by Rexall for lunch, bought a new John D. MacDonald paperback and a copy of Galaxy, which I read through while I ate my burger and fries. While I was sitting at the counter, I saw Muldaur’s sergeant-at-arms towering above the patent medicines in aisle three.

  He wore a worn, blue work shirt and was the strapping size of Muldaur himself, but there was nothing messianic about his face. He looked well-attached to reality, and not all that happy about whatever his particular reality was doing to him. I left a tip and slid down off the stool.

  I started toward him but decided this wouldn’t be a good place to talk. There was a lull in business.

  Too easy for people to overhear. The quiet would intimidate him.

  I followed him outdoors after he bought a carton of Wings and a bottle of

  Pepto-Bismol. He made his way toward a pickup truck that had once been a

  Model-T. The back half had been sawed off and two-by-fours set in behind the front seats. It was the
kind of truck that got a lot of poor families through the Depression.

  After he’d climbed in and started the engine, which sounded pretty damned smooth given the age of the vehicle, I went up to him and said, “I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”

  “So what?”

  “You remember me from the other night?”

  “Yeah. You were with that Jew girl.”

  “What makes you think she was Jewish?”

  “They smell.”

  “Why don’t you keep your filthy mouth shut?”

  “You just can’t take the truth.”

  “What truth?”

  “That bringing a Jew in there is what killed him.”

  “So it was her fault, huh?”

  He patted a Bible on the seat next to him.

  It had an outsize golden cross on its imitation leather cover. And next to the Bible was a stack of his leaflets about Jews and Catholics.

  “Jews killed Our Lord. They start trouble wherever they go.”

  I wanted to laugh. I’d had the same problem with Hitler. He was, for all his evil, laughable. His theories of a “pure race”

  were ridiculous on their face. Thousands and thousands of years ago, the Vikings visited most places on the planet. And they were one randy bunch of guys, let me tell you. There hadn’t been a “pure” race since. In fact, it’s doubtful even the Vikings were a pure race. That’s the trouble with evil sometimes—it turns into farce.

  Jews smell. The presence of a Jew had caused a murder to take place. Uh-huh.

  “I’m curious about something.”

  He ground the car into gear. Sounded as if the transmission teeth needed a little work. I notice stuff like that.

  “I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

  “I saw you slap a woman the other night.

  Was that your wife?”

  He grabbed me. So quickly, so skillfully that I wasn’t sure what happened till it was over. He flung me back across the sidewalk, propelling me into a corner mailbox.

  He pulled away.

  I shouted, trying to recover at least a modicum of dignity for the interested bystanders, “Was Muldaur sleeping with your wife? Was that why you slapped her?”

  A guy the town seemed to employ as a wise guy—he’d always been here, I’d never seen him gainfully employed, he just kinda wandered around and made sarcastic remarks, a modern version of the Greek chorus—sd, “Good thing he took off.