by Ed Gorman
“I told her when I married her, writers are pretty messed-up people. Being creative isn’t easy. You know, like actors.”
I decided not to tell him that (a) he wasn’t a writer but a grad school dabbler, (but) that even if he was a real writer it didn’t give him any license to cheat on his wife, and (can) everybody knew that most actors were morons anyway.
He said, “You really didn’t screw her?”
“I really didn’t screw her.”
“That’s what I figured she’d do. You know, go out and sleep with you. She likes you.”
“She did want to hire me to kill you. But that was for money. She didn’t mention anything about sex.”
He didn’t smile.
“That’d just make things worse,” he said, “she goes out and starts grudge-screwing people.”
“But it’s all right if you nail your student?”
“That’s different. That doesn’t have anything to do with spite. I’m half in love with her.”
“Ah. Now I get the distinction.”
He glared at me. “I’m not asking for your approval, McCain. I could give a shit what you think about me. Now, I’ve got my car out back and I’m going to go in there and get her and take her home. And you’re not going to stop me.”
“She’s your wife, Chad. But let me tell you something.”
He waved me off. “Believe me,
I’ve heard it all already. All day long I’ve heard it. She called her folks and they called my folks. All I’ve done all day is argue with people. And try and justify myself. What can I say? Diane is good for my writing.
I’m just more creative when she’s in my life.”
And then he got a little more intimate.
Male-to-male. “And she’s not the prude Kylie is. I mean, this is a terrible thing to say but Kylie isn’t so hot in the sack.”
I hit him. Right in the mouth. And he hit me. Right in the mouth. I wasn’t tough but then neither was he. What he was was tall. So I kept pounding him in the stomach and in the ribs. And he kept pounding me on the top and the sides of the head.
The cats all scattered, howling. We knocked a floor lamp over, then a table lamp.
And that’s when Kylie came out, sweet in her mussed hair and wrinkled clothes, her little-girl fist grinding sleep out of her eyes. “Is this a dream?”
“It sure isn’t a dream,” Chad said.
“Some friends you’ve got. He hit me.”
She surveyed the living and kitchen areas.
“God, you guys broke stuff. That’s what woke me up.” Then, “You okay, McCain?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“I see.” Chad pouted. “You ask about him but you don’t ask about me. I just happen to be your husband.”
And a writer, too, Chad. Don’t forget you’re a deeply tormented writer.
This time when Tess went to the door, it was the inside one. I expected I knew who it was.
I opened it and there she stood, the best-looking landlady in the universe. Tall, graceful, gray subtly streaking her long, dark hair, mid-fifties. Mrs. Goldman. One
beautiful babe. “Are you all right, Sam? I heard all this commotion and—” She looked behind me to where Kylie and Chad stood. “Oh, hello.
I’m Kate Goldman.”
Chad said, “He attacked me.”
Mrs. Goldman smiled. “You’re an awful lot bigger than he is.”
“And for what it’s worth, McCain,” Chad said, “I’m not so sure I believe you about you and Kylie.” Then, to Kylie: “Will you get your damned shoes on so we can get out of here?” Then, to me: “And if I find out you weren’t
telling me the truth, McCain, you’re going to be damned sorry, believe me.”
Kylie went on her groggy, uncertain way.
Got her tennis shoes on untied and came back to the living room. “I’m sorry, McCain.” Then she gave me a peck on the cheek.
“You kiss him right in front of me?” Chad said. He looked at Mrs. Goldman. “Did you see that? Right in front of her own husband, she kisses him!”
“Yes,” Mrs. Goldman said. “I was
shocked.”
He frowned. He had quite a frown. “I should’ve known you’d be just like him.”
“Chad’s folks bought him a new car,”
Kylie said brightly. “Maybe I’ll get lucky and puke all over it.”
As they left, Tess bit him on the ankle again. He tried to kick her but she was too quick for him.
The air was unsettled, like a battleground in the aftermath.
“Gosh, I sure hope to see a lot more of him, McCain.”
“You no doubt will. He’s going to be famous.”
“Oh?”
“He’s a writer. Just ask him.”
“That poor girl. I see her at temple every once in a while in Iowa City. But I’ve never really gotten to know her. How could she have married a jerk like that?”
Kate Goldman’s husband, who was by all accounts a very nice guy, died several years ago. Mrs. Goldman now dated men from the synagogue in Iowa City. I was personally pulling for this history teacher at City High.
One night on the porch downstairs he’d told me about his time in Italy during the war and then we ended up talking about paperback writers. His two favorites were David Goodis and Day Keene. I was hoping he’d run for president some day.
“Gosh,” Mrs. Goldman said, “I really like your new friend here, Sam.” She fanned herself with a slender hand. She wore a crisp pink blouse and black walking shorts and black flats. If Lauren Bacall had any luck, she’d end up looking just like Kate Goldman when she got older. “This place is a
mess.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t your fault.”
I got the broom and dustpan and we got busy.
Afterward, I poured us each a beer and we sat around and talked about Dick Nixon coming to town and how Jack Kennedy was holding up, and then we talked local news, her wanting to know all about my visit to Muldaur’s church. “Boy, I sure wouldn’t handle any of those snakes.”
A summer storm started right after Mrs.
Goldman left, August heat lightning stalking the sky like huge electric spiders. It got hotter and even more humid for a time and then it got much cooler suddenly. I lay on my bed with a beer and a cigarette reading a collection of Irwin Shaw short stories. The rain came around ten o’clock, a Biblical rain. In the valley where the city park was the sewers would flood and some of the park benches and picnic tables would float a few yards away, and at the next city council meeting somebody would stand up and suggest that we chain the benches and the tables to nearby trees so this catastrophe would never be visited upon us again.
Whenever the call came—in that state that is neither sleep nor waking—I was standing at the altar and a guy in a funny religious hat and a lot of funny religious capes and vestments was reading from one of Kenny Thibodeau’s racy novels—I think the title was Lesbo Lawyers—and saying, “I now pronounce you husband and wives.” And there I stood with the beautiful Pamela Forrest and the fetching Mary Travers and-“Hullo.”
“McCain?”
“I think so.”
“Very funny.”
“What time is it?”
“Four thirty-seven. You should be up.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you have any idea why I’m calling?”
“Do I win a prize if I guess right?”
“I’m calling because I figured that you hadn’t heard the news yet.”
“What news?”
And then she told me and I abruptly came awake.
“I want you to get over there before
Cliffie mucks everything up.”
“I’m on my way, Judge.”
“When you get done over there, call me.”
“How’d you find out about it?”
“I keep a police radio on very low next to my bed. If anything important happens, the dispatcher begins to screech. Th
at wakes me up.”
There was something very lonely about that but then the lady’d had four—or was it five?—husbands so I guessed she was lonely by choice.
I jerked on some clothes and ran downstairs to my ragtop.
Part Ii
Nine
The way I got all this—mostly from an auxiliary cop named Coggins who had a thermos full of wonderful-smelling coffee—was that around midnight Iris Courtney started worrying about her husband. She told Cliffie (coggins apparently being present) that shortly after that time she got a strange call from her husband. He said that she was not to worry but that he was involved in something and would explain when he got home. She said he’d sounded anxious but not afraid. At three a.m., frightened now, she walked out to the garage to see if something might have happened to him.
She recalled hearing a story on the radio about a man who pulled his car into the garage, had a heart attack, slumped over on the seat, and was not discovered until morning when it was too late.
She didn’t want this to happen to her husband.
She went out and checked the garage. She saw that his car was there and immediately began to panic. She began to frantically search the alley. And that’s when she looked between her garage and the one belonging to their neighbors. He was lying on his back, staring up at the quarter-moon that looked so fresh after the rain. She saw that he’d been stabbed many times in the chest. His yellow shirt was soaked dark with blood. A neighbor’s dog was crouched nearby —a rather stupid-looking beagle, she noted—staring at the corpse as if it could not understand what was going on here. Usually, the minister was so friendly and playful with the dog. She immediately went in and called the police station.
She was inside the rectory with Cliffie now.
Dawn was still an hour away but
neighbors were beginning to drift into the alley where Doc Novotony was looking over the corpse.
Everybody looked well turned-out given the time of day. Most of them had put on street clothes.
Few wore robes.
Coggins kept them away from the strip of grass between the garages by waving the beam of his red-capped flashlight to the right. “Nothing to see, folks.
Don’t get in the doc’s way now.”
Dick Coggins was the best of the auxiliary cops. In fact, he was smarter than any of the cops on the regular force. But because he wasn’t a member of the Sykes clan, and despite scoring high on all the state tests for peace officers, he was kept on reserve status. In the meantime, he drove a panel truck for an office-supply company and played a lot of softball. He could throw a softball about as fast as anybody I’d ever seen. He was tall, trim, wore his dark hair in a crew-cut and spoke with a faint Virginia drawl. He’d spent his first eleven years there.
“I should’ve figured you’d be here, Sam,” he said. “I could’ve brought your book back.”
He borrowed my textbooks on
criminology and police procedure. He knew all about crime scenes and how to set them up.
“You able to beat Cliffie to the punch tonight?”
He smiled. “Well, I got here before he trampled all over everything. I’ll give all the evidence to Theresa at the hospital, same as I did with Muldaur’s stuff.”
Theresa was a lab tech and a girl he dated.
Since Cliffie hated to send anything to the state lab—feeling apparently that it robbed him of his authority as el comandante—Theresa was the best we could do locally.
“I’ll call her.”
“Sure.”
The press was here now. A rumpled, sleepy reporter with a microphone and a heavy tape recorder slung over his shoulder wandered from one neighbor to the other asking all the usual obvious, stupid questions. I’m waiting for the wife of a recently murdered man to say to a reporter, “How does it feel to have your husband murdered?
I’ll tell you, It feels great. He was an arrogant, overbearing jerk and I want to thank whoever killed him. I can finally live like a normal human being now that old Ralph
is gone.” Just once.
The crowd grew. The ambulance team took the body away. Doc Novotony yawned a lot.
Cliffie gave the radio guy one of his Dick Tracy Crime Fighter speeches—th case was going to be wrapped up within forty-eight hours and you had his word on it—and then said (honest), “Some people thought that Reverend Courtney was sort of a snob and thought he was better than the rest of us because he was from back east, but I felt that deep down he was just a regular guy. Let’s not forget that he was a Cubs fan.”
Maybe they’d let him give the graveside remarks.
I had to appear before Judge Ronald D.
K. M. Sullivan that morning. Don’t ask what the initials stand for. Local lawyers insist that they translate to Duly Krazy Mick. And that would certainly apply. D.K.M. has two modes—ccfused and very, very, which is to say extremely, pissed off. He has been known to hum, whittle an apple and eat it, do deep breathing exercises, and flip coins while you’re making your case before his bench. He berates you for the color, cut, and cleanliness of your suit. He reminds you when you need a haircut. He has advised young women to wear more uplifting bras and young men to wear toupees because the sunlight streaming through his courtroom windows is brilliant when bounced off a bald pate. His nose runs, his eyes collect pounds of green stuff in the corners, and the last time he brushed his teeth we were bombing Berlin. He is, as near as anyone can guess, somewhere between two hundred and four hundred years old. Like those turtles.
He said, “And what offense against humanity has Mr. Larkin committed today, Mr.
McCain?”
“He’s been charged with obstructing justice.”
“Obstructing justice?” He made it sound as if he’d never heard the words before.
“He is alleged to have struck an officer who was trying to arrest Mr. Larkin’s lady friend.”
“And why was the officer trying to arrest Mr.
Larkin’s lady friend?”
“Because allegedly his lady friend had kicked the officer in the crotch area.”
“And for what reason had his lady friend kicked the officer in the crotchtal area?”
The crotchtal area? Crotchtal? D.K.More always tried to make things sound a little more dignified than they are. Hence, crotchtal area. And by the way, all the things he makes me explain?
Most judges read the charges before they have you address the bench. But D.K.M. saves time by having you do all his prep for him.
“She kicked him in the crotchtal area because he called her a name.”
“And what name would that be, Mr. McCain?”
“He called her a hooker.”
“A what?”
“A hooker. It’s slang for prostitute.”
“Ah, a strumpet.”
“Something like that.”
“So the officer of the law calls the lady friend of Mr. Larkin a strumpet and she kicks him in the crotchtal area and when the officer of the law tries to arrest her Mr. Larkin steps in and strikes the officer of the law in the face?”
“That’s correct, Your Honor.”
“Good. Now I understand. And by the way, Mr.
McCain, you really need a haircut.”
I wanted to kick him in the crotchtal area.
I didn’t get in to see Judge Whitney until much later that morning. And when I did get to her chambers, I found two men and two women I’d never seen before. They had the taint of fussiness about them, a certain archness that stamped them as her kind of folk, not mine. One of the women was a nice-looking redhead. Which reminded me of Kylie Burke. I wondered how she was doing.
Her world had to be coming apart. No matter that she was too good for him. She’d always been so clearly gaga over him that it was painful to watch.
The Judge was giving orders like a field commander. “Then, Rick, you know how I want the tent set up. And Randy you know how I wanted the cake to be made—eight tiers. And Darla I want the food to be as colo
rfully arranged as Michele’s flowers—in fact, you two should get together and see if there’s some way you could coordinate some things.”
Maybe a gardenia sandwich, I thought.
All this was for Richard Milhous Nixon, of course.
I had seen the Judge a-flutter and
a-twitter before but these had been on separate occasions. But I’d never seen her both
a-flutter and a-twitter at the same time. This was something to behold.
Oleg Cassini had become her designer of choice and so on her four-trips-a-year to New York City she stocked up on Cassini duds the way factory workers stocked up on Monkey Wards work clothes. Today, she wore a handsome tan linen suit with matching pumps. Her short hair looked freshly washed and combed. And she strode the length of her office with runway elegance. She was all crazed, nervous energy, terrified that she’d make less than a good impression on old Milhous.
That’s why you have to be careful about being a-flutter and a-twitter at the same time. It can really make you crazy—y’re like an engine with the idle running too fast.
“Now, does everybody know what they need to do?”
Cowed, terrified, they glanced at each other and then looked back at the Judge. They nodded like frightened puppies who’d just pooped on the new carpeting.
“Good, because I don’t need to tell you, there’ll be hell to pay for anybody who screws up.”
I felt sorry for them. God, I felt
sorry for them.
She waved them dismissively away. They left with great hurried relief.
“So,” she said when the last of them had closed the door, “this thing is getting worse and worse.”
She went over to her desk, poured herself some brandy, plucked a Gauloise from her cigarette case and lighted it with a small aluminum box that somehow produced fire.
“They’re connected,” she said, exhaling a gulf stream of blue smoke. “Muldaur and Reverend Courtney.”
“I sure think so.”
“But how?”
“Not a clue. Not so far.”
“I don’t want these ridiculous murders hanging over our heads when Dick gets here.”
A chic sip. She was a damned good-looking woman and knew it. “You have one of your famous lists?”