by Ed Gorman
“I’ll get the books, Mrs. Beamer.”
I waited around, looking at the new Hemingway editions Scribner’s had published over the past year. If I ever got money, these were the kinds of editions I would buy. Steve came back but two more customers came in.
There was no point waiting anymore.
I walked to the front door. The matron with the D. H. Lawrence books was just ahead of me.
“I hope I don’t get arrested for having pornography,” she laughed.
“I’m a lawyer,” I said. “Call me if you need me.”
She giggled naughtily.
It was nearing lunchtime. I decided to stop by my folks’. I started to go get my ragtop.
Somebody said, “Hey. Hey, you!”
When I turned, I saw the girl from Leopold Bloom’s running to catch up with me.
“I overheard what you were talking about with Steve. About Susan Whitney?”
I nodded.
“He had this real battle with her on the phone the day before she died.”
“How do you know it was her?”
“Oh, it was her all right. He was obsessed.
He called her all the time and threatened her. He couldn’t let go.”
I thought about what Eileen had said about this girl and Steve. “Eileen thinks you and Steve are about to have an affair.”
She laughed. Her face was tinted red from the cold. It was a healthy and appealing red. “An affair? Are you kidding? They both give me the creeps. All that melodramatic artsy-craftsy bullshit.” She leaned closer.
“She’s got a stack of romance novels in the back she’s always reading and he’s got a bunch of dirty paperbacks. You hear the crap she gave me about a fifteen-minute break? They don’t know it yet but this is my last day. I’ve got a better job in Iowa City.”
“Well, good luck, and thanks for telling me that.”
She laughed again. “I think it’d be cool if Steve had killed her. At least he would’ve done something with his life. What a douche bag that guy is.” Then, “Say, do you know Maggie Yates?”
The name jolted me. I wondered if she knew about Maggie Yates and me.
But she quickly went on. “I saw Maggie and Susan in the store together a few times. You might ask Maggie about her. She’s kind of crazy, but I like her.”
“Maybe I should look her up.”
“You know where she lives?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I know where she lives.”
I should. I’d slept there often enough.
“Thanks for your help,” I said.
She gave me a pert little salute, cute as hell, and then turned and walked away. Iowa City already had a million great-looking girls.
Why couldn’t she stay here?
Twenty
The colors in housing developments always get me. Orchid and mauve and puce, among others.
Colors I don’t associate with houses. The other thing that always gets me is how many Tv antennas there are. The houses look as if they’re hooked up for direct contact with Mars.
But despite my misgivings about housing developments-ll villages whose dynamics Nathaniel Hawthorne would have understood very well -I was glad for Mom and Dad that they had this place. Mom not only got a new place out of the Knolls but also a garbage disposal, a telephone with an extension in another part of the house, a sundeck and a full basement. Dad got a garage, a big backyard and a look of pride when he sat on the small front porch with his can of Falstaff and listened to the Cubs on the radio.
Personally, I like an older house with fewer neighbors. And a lot less excitement. All the people who bought houses out here lived through the Depression, and most of the men fought in the war. So this is nirvana to them. This is what they dreamed of in the years following the stock market crash, and when they were overseas watching their friends die. And so there’s an edge of desperation here, everybody always telling one another how lucky they are and how happy they are. Steak is the talisman: a family that can have steak twice a week is in good shape. And these days most blue-collar families can eat steak just about as often as white-collar families. It’s as if they’re scared it’ll all go away if they don’t constantly remind themselves of their great good fortune.
Mom and Dad are like that, but not to an obnoxious degree. Every time Mom opens her big new Kelvinator double-door refrigerator, she says, “I just don’t know how I got along all these years without it.” And whenever she carries a load of laundry down to the basement, she stops and looks at me and says, “I wish my mother’d lived long enough to see my laundry room. She’d just go crazy about it.” For Dad, it’s the large shop in the basement. No more cold garages on winter nights; no more leaky roofs that rust out tools. Dad’s got a regular workshop down there and he loves it. You can smell freshly sawn lumber and hear the table saw whining through wood so new it’s sometimes green.
I could smell the soup the minute Mom opened the door. Tomato bisque. Homemade. How could I say no?
Over lunch, I said, “Ruthie isn’t here, is she?”
“Ruthie? She’s in school.” She gave me a funny look for asking such a stupid question.
Mom is pretty. I suppose most boys think their mothers are pretty. But mine really is.
Not that there’s much of her to be pretty.
Eighty-nine pounds and five-foot-one. Dad had to win her away from an accountant named Nesmith. Mom always says it was because of Dad’s curly red locks. She said he had the most beautiful hair she’d ever seen. Dad always looks uncomfortable when she says that. And then Mom’ll get a little teary and talk about what a good man he’s been to her all these years and how she just can’t imagine what her life would’ve been without him. They still dance in the kitchen on Saturday nights, the radio playing the old tunes, Benny Goodman and Harry James and Artie Shaw, and still make out in front of the Tv and jump up like teenagers whenever one of us kids show up.
“So everything’s going all right with her?” I said around a spoonful of tomato bisque. I tossed the words off, as if I was just making conversation.
But now I’d gotten her curious. “Why wouldn’t everything be all right?”
“Just wondering was all, Mom. I saw her over in town a couple of days ago and she looked tired.”
“Oh,” Mom said. She looked satisfied that I’d explained my curiosity. “It’s her grades. You know how hard she studies. She’s got a bunch of tests coming up. So she stays up all night. The poor kid.”
The phone rang. Mom went to the yellow wall phone. “It’s so handy to have a phone in the kitchen.”
I smiled.
It was a friend of hers wanting a recipe. Mom consulted a card file she kept. She read it slowly, giving her friend plenty of time to write down each ingredient.
I was getting groggy. The soup and the kitchen-warmth and the slow way Mom was talking made me want to go upstairs and pick up a Ray Bradbury paperback and read for a while and then drift off to sleep, the way I used to in high school. I’d always been in such a hurry to grow up. Now I wondered if high school was the best time I’d ever have.
When she hung up, she came back and sat down, her shoulder-length dark hair showing inevitable streaks of gray, her sweet little face still wrinkle-free. Dad was the one showing his age and sometimes when I looked at him I felt so sad I had to look away.
“What time’s her last class these days?”
“Ruthie’s?”
“Uh-huh.”
“She usually gets out at two forty-five.”
“Oh.”
“And then heads over to Sheen’s.”
Sheen’s was a clothing store where Ruthie worked two hours after school every day, putting in a full day on Saturdays. Saving for college.
She was watching me. “You know what’s funny?”
“Funny weird or funny ha-ha?”
“Funny weird.”
“What?”
“That you haven’t mentioned anything about Kenny Whitney.”
“Doris’ husband-Doris down the street here-he’s a cop and he says that the judge doesn’t think Kenny killed his wife.”
“Neither do I.”
“You don’t? How come?”
I shook my head, finishing up my homemade soup. “I’m not sure. I mean, there’s some evidence he didn’t-at least it looks like evidence to me-but even before that, I just had the sense he didn’t kill her.”
“I have to be careful about what I say around Doris.”
“Oh?”
“You know, you working for the judge and all.”
“Because her husband likes Sykes?”
“Yes. He and the chief go fishing a lot.”
“Right. Probably when they should be out doing their jobs.”
“I wouldn’t know about that. I just mentioned that I have to be careful.”
“I know, Mom.”
“The judge isn’t exactly well-liked by most people, you know.”
I stood up and went over and kissed her on the cheek. “The judge? Not well-liked?” I grinned at her. “You must be talking to the wrong people.”
“Oh, you,” she said. Then took my hand.
I’d never noticed her liver spots before. “I wish you’d stop by more often. I mean, we’re right here in the same town.”
“I know, Mom,” I said. “I’ll try harder. I promise.”
Judge Whitney said, “Blackmail? For what?”
She sat on the edge of her desk, a paradigm of style in her black suit and red blouse, the cut of both vaguely Spanish, a Gauloise going in one slender hand and a snifter of brandy in the other.
“So he never told you about it?” I said.
Irritation shone in her glance and voice.
“McCain, you don’t seem to understand. Kenny and I never communicated unless it was absolutely necessary. Having him out to the house would be like having Adlai Stevenson over for dinner.”
“Heaven forbid.”
“Damned right, heaven forbid. Now the Communists are getting smart. They’ve decided to put up a much more attractive candidate, and with any luck the sonofabitch will win.”
“Who’s that?”
“Jack Kennedy? The senator from
Massachusetts?”
“Ah. He’s a commie, eh?”
“Don’t mock me, McCain. Of course, he’s a commie. All Democrats are commies.”
“I’ll have to ask Ayn Rand what she thinks of that.”
“Ayn Rand?”
“I’ve got a date with her tonight.”
She exhaled smoke dramatically. “What a little turd you can be.”
“She wants me to take her bowling.”
“Damn it, McCain, people are walking around thinking that a Whitney has committed murder and you’re making jokes about Ayn Rand.”
I was going to say that I couldn’t think of anybody I’d rather make jokes about than Ayn Rand but I decided the judge had probably had enough.
“Susan’s the key,” she said, walking back around her desk and sitting down.
The rubber bands started a minute or two later, a volley of them. I’d lean my head right, I’d lean my head left. She was doing pretty good, hitting about 60-65 percent of her shots.
“You’re getting better,” I said.
“Thank you.”
“Did you hear what I said about Susan?”
“I heard.”
“She’s the key. To the blackmail.”
“Why Susan? Why couldn’t Kenny have been the blackmailee?”
“He was too stupid to be blackmailed.
Everything he did, he did in public. And Susan was a very respectable woman until the last few years of her life.”
“That’s what Bob Frazier wanted everybody to believe anyway.”
“Meaning what?” I said.
“Meaning there was always something a little wild about her.”
“You have evidence of this, of course? I mean, she ran around a little, slept with a few guys.
I’m not sure that’s “wild.””
“Not evidence,” she said, firing off another rubber band. She got me right on the chin.
“Instinct.”
“Do you know the Renaulds very well?”
She smiled. “Mr. and Mrs. New
Yorker? The way they always manage to work the magazine into their conversation is amazing. I guess it’s what passes for sophistication out here.”
“He had an affair with Susan,” I said.
“God. He’s so-effete. I’m surprised he’s even interested in women.”
“According to his wife, he’s quite the hot number.”
“Spare me, McCain.” Then, “Anything else I should know?”
“Darin Greene paid me a late-night visit.”
“The football player?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t say. He got scared and ran off.”
“What’s he got to do with this?”
“Well, he and Kenny were friends since boyhood.”
“Yes, just one more reason the Whitneys were so proud of Kenny. I don’t have anything against colored people, McCain-I don’t have a prejudiced bone in my body-but being nice to colored people is one thing but actually having them as friends…” She shook her robber baron head.
“Anyway, Greene and Kenny had a falling out was my understanding-well over a year ago now, I think-s I don’t see what he’d know about any of this.”
“Neither do I. But I was curious why he came up to my place so late at night. Then when I went to this tavern where he hangs out, he took off before I could get to him.”
She shrugged. “I’m more interested in the abortion girl.”
“I don’t know why you think that has anything to do with this.”
“Same reason I’ve always sensed that Susan Frazier wasn’t the sweet girl her father said she was. Instinct.”
“The doc told me it could just as easily have been an accident as a murder. He thinks that both the girl and whoever was helping her could have panicked. The helper runs off, scared, and leaves her there to bleed to death. I don’t know what that could have to do with Kenny and Susan.”
“Instinct, as I said.” And launched another volley. She hit me once, missed three times.
I looked down at the floor around the leather chair I was sitting in. “Who picks up all these rubber bands after I leave?”
“Pamela.”
“Ah.”
“Why, do you think I should pick them up?”
“There’s probably something in the Whitney charter prohibiting it, isn’t there?”
“You’re wasting time again, McCain. Within twenty-four hours, I want to be able to call up the state paper and demand a front-page apology-or I’ll sue them and put them out of business. You’re the only one who can help me with that, McCain.”
I stood up. “I’m back at it right now, your honor.”
“Find out who Susan’s best friend was. Work on her.”
“That’s actually what I was going to do.”
“And don’t bother Pamela on the way out,” she said. “I’ve got her typing something very important.” She exhaled more smoke from her Gauloise. “I don’t know why you don’t give up on her, anyway, McCain. It just makes you look very foolish to the whole town, a young man mooning over a young woman that way. And I’m saying that for your sake, McCain.”
“Thanks, Mom,” I said.
On my way out, Pamela said, “Did you hear about Stu?”
“He was hit by a train?”
“Very funny. He was named Young Lawyer of the Year by the State Bar Association.”
“Goody,” I said, and left.
Twenty-one
The high school had a program where kids who worked got off at 2ccde instead of 3ccae so they could go to their jobs. They also got credit for having the jobs. A commie would look at it as a sweet but dishonest plan by greedy merchants to get
cheap labor. I wondered what Ayn Rand would make of it.
It’s funny that at my age, not long out of law school, I was as sentimental as an old man. The girls looked great, shiny and new, and I knew what most of the boys would do, ride around in their cars and then play a little pool or pinball, and then head home for a quick dinner where they would evade every single important question their parents threw at them. God, it all seemed so far away and so wonderful, Mgm wonderful, sort of like an Andy Hardy movie except the girls would let you get to third base and you had all those great Dashiell Hammett and Ed Lacy novels to read.
Now, I had responsibilities and people expected things of me and even at my age I could see a few gray hairs on my head, one of the McCain genetic curses.
I sat there and listened to a local station that played rock and roll in the afternoon. I was nostalgic about rock, because it’d changed, too.
They played a lot of Fabian and the Kingston Trio and, God almighty, novelty songs like “Pink Polka-Dot Bikini.” And then I started thinking about Buddy Holly again and how Jack Kerouac said that even at a very young age he’d had this great oppressive sense of loss, of something good and true vanished, something he could never articulate, something he had carried around with him as young as age eight or nine, maybe when his brother died. I guess I had too, this melancholy, and somehow Buddy Holly dying at least gave me a tangible reason for this feeling.
Maybe it’s just all the sadness I see in the people around me, just below the surface I mean, and the fact that there’s nothing I can do about it. Life is like that sometimes.
Ruthie came out the front door as I’d expected. I was parked up the street. She looked preoccupied and didn’t see me. She just started walking fast toward downtown, which was three blocks north. It was overcast now and the temperature was dropping and the school seemed shabby suddenly, shabby and old, and the sense of loss I had became anger and I felt cheated then, as if my past really hadn’t been all that wonderful, as if I’d made up a fantasy about my past just because I was afraid to face adulthood. Maybe Joyce Brothers, the psychologist who’d won all that money on the Tv show The $64eajjj Question before everybody found out some of it was a fake, maybe she could explain my sudden mood swings. Nobody in this little Iowa town could, that was for sure.