Sam McCain - 04 - Save the Last Dance for Me

by Ed Gorman

  Otherwise you would’ve killed him, McCain.”

  The groundlings who were standing around all looked at me and laughed.

  I wasted an hour walking around to the various print shops. Half of them were closed on such a baking Saturday afternoon and the other half claimed that they didn’t know anything about who’d printed the leaflets and the slick pamphlets that came from Muldaur’s church and were plastered all over town. Most people of all denominations found them disgusting and complained about them in The Clarion letters column.

  In a small town like ours, you have to be very careful of who you offend. There were just enough Catholics that printing Muldaur’s hate mail could cost you any Catholic business you had.

  But if anyone knew anything, they weren’t talking about it. Only one person gave me anything remotely resembling a lead.

  He said that there was a former press operator who now had a small press in his basement and did odd jobs. He’d taken a full-time job in the Amana factory where they made freezers because the pay was so much better. The guy said he didn’t know if Parnell, the former press operator, had done the Muldaur work but that he was probably worth checking out. He gave me Parnell’s address. I thanked him. I’d gone

  to Catholic school with Parnell. We hadn’t been friends, but then we hadn’t been enemies.

  Reverend Courtney was sitting on his church steps talking to a dowager in a summer frock and a large summer hat. They looked quite handsome, the church of native stone magnificent in the afternoon light, the large front lawn well-tended and very green, a watercolor cover from The New Yorker perhaps, even a breeze cooperating by fluttering the long blue ribbon that trailed from the dowager’s hat.

  Her name was Helen Prentice, and she and her husband were not only wealthy but also generous. There wasn’t a hospital, library, or

  auditorium within a hundred miles in any direction that the Prentices hadn’t contributed substantially to.

  “Hello, Sam,” Helen said, extending her hand. We shook. I’d met her at various soirees at Judge Whitney’s house.

  “Afternoon, Helen.”

  She checked her watch. “I need to run.”

  Courtney, now in dark slacks and a white shirt, started to raise himself from the church step but she stopped him with a gloved white hand.

  “The last time I checked, Reverend, I wasn’t royalty. There’s no need to stand.” She smiled at me. “George and I really enjoyed sitting with you at the Judge’s dinner table last month. You’re a very funny young man.” Then back to Courtney. “See you in the morning at the ten o’clock service.”

  When she was out of earshot, or so he assumed, he said, “There goes one very rich lady, McCain.”

  “I’d think that a man who’d dedicated himself to following in the footsteps of Jesus might also point out that she’s a very decent person, too. Very generous with her riches.”

  “Nice to know you’re not afraid of being

  pompous.”

  I said, “How was the food at The House today?”

  He wasn’t intimidated. “I knew you were an unsuccessful lawyer. I guess I’d forgotten that you were an unsuccessful gumshoe, too.”

  “You and Sara Hall just happened to be driving around last night and ended up at Muldaur’s church completely by coincidence?”

  “That’s right, McCain.”

  He looked vital and modern standing against the massive medieval-style doors of the church.

  “I’m sorry I got you Catholics in a tizzy by quoting Dr. Peale. It’s a free country, you know. Or so they tell me, anyway.”

  “Right now, I’m more interested in you and Sara Hall. What were you really doing out there last night?”

  He smiled. He had great teeth, of course.

  Movie-star teeth. “As I said, I’m told it’s a free country. Or didn’t they teach you that in that second-rate law school you went to?”

  He came down off the steps and walked over to where a rake leaned against an elm. From his back pocket he took a pair of brown work gloves, cinched them on, and started raking.

  As I walked back to my office, I

  noticed leaflets on car windows, placed under windshield wipers. A block before I reached my place I saw a boy of maybe twelve toting an armload of the leaflets and getting punched in the face by a much bigger kid. The Flannagan boy. Flannagan was no doubt displeased with the anti-Catholic nature of the leaflets. But mostly he just liked punching kids smaller than him. Flannagan, who’d played fullback on the Catholic school junior varsity squad until they realized he didn’t have any talent, was born to bully.

  I got between them and gave Flannagan a shove.

  “What’re you stoppin’ me for, McCain? You see that shit he’s got about Catholics? He says we ain’t Americans.”

  “You’re a lot bigger than he is,

  Flannagan.”

  “I don’t care. He still deserves

  to be punched.”

  Nice to know that Muldaur’s work was living on beyond him. He’d brought the town to a boil in life —andthe water was still hot now that he’d died.

  “Who told you to pass these out?” I said to the kid. He wore bib overalls with a striped T-shirt. He had freckles and a cowlick and a squirt of blood in his right nostril from Flannagan’s fist. And bare feet. I was surprised he wasn’t dancing a jig.

  “God told me to,” he said.

  I almost laughed.

  “God,” Flannagan said. “My ass.”

  “You shouldn’t talk like that. Dirty, I mean,”

  the kid said. “My mom says Catholics and Jews talk like that all the time.”

  Now I’ll double back on what I said earlier about the foolish side of evil. There’s nothing more frightening than a youngster who has been completely indoctrinated by his parents. He’s as soulless as a robot and as deadly as an assassin. You can’t reason with him because the “on”

  switch in his brain doesn’t operate. His parents turned it off permanently long ago.

  “Why don’t you let me take those?” I said.

  I reached for the leaflets and he jumped back a foot.

  “No! You’re a dirty Catholic just like Flannagan here.”

  “You call me a dirty Catholic again and I’ll knock you out.”

  “Shut up, Flannagan,” I said. “Kid, I want the leaflets.”

  “They’re mine and you can’t take them away from me.”

  “Let me handle him, McCain,”

  Flannagan said, “c’mon.”

  And with that, not unexpectedly, the kid took off running down the sidewalk. Flannagan lunged, as if he were going after him. I grabbed him by the shoulder.

  “I should be able to hit him if I want to,”

  he said.

  “Yes,” I said, “that’s one of your inalienable rights. Punching kids who weigh forty pounds less than you do.”

  “He hates Catholics.”

  “Or at least his parents do.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind.”

  His moon face tightened into a sneer. “You mind if I go now, your royal highness?”

  “Always a pleasure to see you, Flannagan.”

  There are some people you just don’t want on your side.

  As I climbed into my ragtop and headed home, I tried not to think about some of the feelings that Jack Kennedy seemed to stir up. Otherwise reasonable, decent people still had their bias toward Catholics in office. William Jennings Bryan always said that he wished he hadn’t run for president because it taught him just how deep anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish bias ran in this country. Things had improved since then but, as with Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, even respectable ministers felt safe in talking about Kennedy as a stalking horse for the pope.

  Then there were the unrespectable people—the Klan, the Nazi sympathizers left over from the American Bundt days of the big war, the small-town radio ministers, the pamphleteers of every description. There’d been an article in Time magazine a fe
w years back noting that any fund-raising letter or pamphlet with the word “Jew,” “Communist,” “Catholic,” or

  “Negro” in its headline would earn twice as much money as a letter or pamphlet without. Judging by the entertainment shows on the tube, everything was just okey-dokey here in the land of Lincoln. But we knew better, didn’t we?

  Eight

  I parked in back of my apartment house, meaning to wash my car the way I usually did on late Saturday afternoons. Mrs. Goldman had a nice two-stall garage with a hose.

  I was about halfway to the house when I heard the music. It wasn’t all that loud but it was an odd choice for Mrs. Goldman. Miles

  Davis. I wondered when she’d gotten interested in jazz. She liked Broadway tunes and singers like Patti Page and Kay Starr.

  I had just reached the stairs that run up the back and lead to my apartment when I realized that the music was coming from my place, not Mrs. Goldman’s.

  The windows were open and so, partially, was the back door. I went inside.

  She sat in the big leather armchair. She wore a white blouse that displayed her lovely breasts discreetly, a pair of dark

  blue shorts that did equally nice things for her long legs, and a pair of white tennis shoes.

  She had a tanned, tight body and that impish damned face that could go sentimental on you all of a sudden and make you sad. I’d never had a crush on a married woman before and I didn’t want to now. But here she was in my apartment. There was a half-full bottle of JandBut scotch and a Peter Pan peanut-butter glass sitting on the arm of the chair.

  “You bastard,” she said from the couch, where she was reclining.

  “Nice to see you too, Kylie.”

  “You’re late,” she said, all hot accusation.

  “Late for what?”

  “For our job interview.” She was slurring her words but I’ll spare you the drunk dialect.

  “Kylie, did you by any chance drink half of that bottle of scotch?”

  “What half bottle of scotch?”

  “The one next to your hand.”

  “My hand?”

  She was in fine shape. A drinker she was not.

  I’d seen her get snockered once on two beers. The toll the scotch took had to be devastating.

  “So where were you?”

  “Working, actually,” I said.

  “Working actually? Who’s actually?” Then she grinned, looking pretty damned cute. “I told a funny.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “You’re late.”

  “You said that. But I didn’t realize we had an appointment.”

  She shook her head. She was so loaded she had to squint one eye to see me. There were probably multiple me’s, the way I’d be perceived by a fly. “Job interview.”

  “What job interview are we talking about?”

  “We aren’t talking about a job interview.

  I am talking about a job interview.”

  “All right.” I went over and sat down on the couch and got a Lucky going. “And what job interview would that be?”

  “I want to hire you to kill my husband.”

  “Well, that sounds reasonable enough. What’s the pay?”

  “I could give you a hundred down. And a hundred more later on. When I get my

  paycheck.”

  “Well, I do have a gun, I guess.”

  She squinted again. Her head was rotating as if on a track of ball bearings. “You got any bullets?”

  “A few.”

  “How many’s a few?”

  “Probably a couple dozen.”

  “Good, ‘cause I want you to shoot him at least that many times.” Then, “Where’s that damned bottle?”

  “I think it got on a bus and went

  to Cleveland in self-defense.”

  She either didn’t hear—or didn’t care to hear—my joke.

  “There it is.”

  Watching her pour a drink was like watching a high-wire act. There was a lot of danger. It did things to your bowels and heart and the palms of your hands. Somehow she managed to get it poured without (a) cracking the glass when the neck of the bottle slammed against the rim, (but) spilling any on the chair, or (can) spilling any on herself.

  “Then I want you to set him on fire.”

  “Shoot him first. Then set him on fire.

  Got it.”

  “He’s a jerk. I just can’t believe how much of a jerk.”

  “You know, Miles Davis may not be the best music for you to be listening to right now,” I said.

  “I need to be sad.”

  “Well, ole Miles’ll help you get

  there.”

  “Who you want to hear? Frankie Avalon?”

  “Why don’t I just turn it off?”

  I got up and turned it off and then went over to the refrigerator. “You had anything to eat lately?”

  “Last night.”

  “You haven’t eaten since last night?”

  “Too mad to eat.” And again her head rolled free on the ball bearings. “That jerk.” Then she belched. It was a cute little belch. “Excuse me.”

  “How about a bologna sandwich?”

  “Didn’t I just say excuse me?”

  “Yes, you did. And you are excused. Now how about I fix you a bologna sandwich?”

  “With ketchup?”

  “If you want some.”

  “I’m not all that hungry.”

  “You need some food. Believe me.”

  “The first place you should shoot him is right in the crotch.”

  “Poetic justice, eh?”

  “Damn right.”

  I made her a bologna sandwich.

  She said, as I was making it, her head rolling around more violently than ever, “What happened to Ray Charles?”

  “You weren’t listening to Ray Charles. You were listening to Miles Davis.” We liked a lot of the same jazz records.

  “I was not. I was listening to Ray Charles.

  “Green Dolphin Street.””

  “You were listening to Miles Davis, and “Green Dolphin Street” is Tony

  Bennett, anyway.”

  I served her a sandwich on a saucer. “Sit up.”

  “Why?”

  “So you can digest this better.”

  “What happened to Dakota Staton?”

  Dakota being a jazz singer we both liked very much.

  I decided not to go back through it. “I turned off the music.”

  She stared—through a fly’s eye again, no doubt —at her sandwich, looking as if nobody’d ever before put such a thing in front of her. “Did I tell you you should shoot him in the crotch?”

  “Duly noted.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means, yes, you told me, and yes, I’ll remember it.”

  “What’s this?”

  “A bologna sandwich.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You need to eat. Now, c’mon.”

  Her head wobbled and she glanced up at me.

  “How come you’re so short?”

  “How come you’re so drunk?”

  “Shoot him in the crotch twice.”

  “Eat.”

  “We should get some grenades, is what we should get.”

  She ate.

  Two bites. Then, “You know what I found in his billfold?”

  “What?”

  “Picture of her.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “He carries a picture of her around with him.”

  “C’mon, just eat.”

  “Just like she’s his wife or something.”

  “Eat.”

  She ate, all right. About six, seven bites alt. Then it—anda lot of the scotch—came right back up. Luckily I got her to the john in time.

  There was a fan going in the bedroom window. I positioned her as comfortably as possible on the bed and then let my three cats Tasha, Crystal, and Tess—well, technically, a friend of mine named Samantha left t
hem with me when she went to Hollywood hoping to find gold and glamour-situate themselves around her.

  The next four hours were pretty boring so let’s just say that I watched some Tv, I fixed myself a couple of burgers, I fed the cats, and I looked in on Kylie every once in a while. I felt bad for her. Having chased the beautiful Pamela Forrest all those years, I knew all about heartbreak. Or at least I fancied I did. Me and Robert Ryan. But actually never having been married … wow, your mate comes home and admits that he’s seeing somebody else—which is what I guessed had happened—t was head-in-the-oven time.

  The heat broke around nine. Kylie got up and went in the john. She wasn’t in there very long.

  I got a glimpse of her when she came out.

  She was walking that stiff-armed way Boris Karloff always does when he plays

  Frankenstein’s monster. She went right back to bed.

  I barely heard the knock. The fan was kicking out and the Tv was on. I wouldn’t have noticed the door at all if Tess hadn’t trotted over there. She’s kind of a watch cat.

  She can’t bark but if you come in and she’s got her doubts about you, she bites you on the ankle.

  He let himself in. And Tess bit him on the ankle.

  “Hey!” he said.

  He was tall and blond and handsome, I suppose, but in a preppy way I’ve always resented. Or been jealous of. Take your pick.

  The one and only Chad Burke.

  “What’s with your cat? She bit me.”

  “She’s discriminating.”

  He said, “She here?”

  “Yeah.”

  He looked around. “Where?”

  “Bedroom.”

  I’d gotten up and walked over to him. He started toward me now. Angry. “You didn’t screw her, did you?”

  “No,” I said. “And I guess you didn’t, either. Your new girlfriend wouldn’t like that, would she?”

  The anger vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

  He ran a long, artistic hand through his curly blond hair. He looked miserable. “All I asked her for was a little time. I didn’t say I’d leave her. I just said I needed to work through it. She made a big deal of it.”

  “Gee, how insensitive of her.”