by Ed Gorman
“What?”
“Off. O-f-f.”
“Off? What the hell’re you talking about?”
“Off. That so hard to understand? Off.”
“But why?”
“Because I said so, that’s why.”
It was one of those moments of unreality we all have once in a while. The people and the place look familiar, but something makes you think you’re in a parallel universe where everything is subtly different.
Eight-nine years Cronin had been going out with Linda Granger, and three-four years they’d been engaged, and now the wedding was suddenly off?
The dating possibilities in Black River Falls are limited. In our high school class, for instance, there were twenty-two boys and eighteen girls. That isn’t a huge base to pick a mate from, especially when you eliminate the ones who find you obnoxious, the ones who find you ugly, the ones who find you boring, and the ones who find you embarrassing. In my case, that left with me a six-girl potential, Pamela and Mary included. The alternative, to increase the mate pool, was to date someone younger or older. Boys tended to date someone younger, girls someone older.
Or you could date someone from Crowley, which was twenty miles away, who we beat the shit out of every year in basketball, making it all right for us to date them. Or Nashburn, which was thirty miles away, who beat us every year in basketball, making it not all right to date them.
Cronin, the drunk guy in front of me, the guy who kept reeling around even though he was sitting down, had accomplished the most amazing feat of all: right in our very own class he’d discovered a girl who was (a) nice, (but) smart, and (can) very pretty. And who also just happened to have a pair of knockers that should be enshrined somewhere, the Boobs Hall of Fame, perhaps, which I
believe, if I’m not mistaken, is somewhere in Pennsylvania.
And here was Cronin, that very same ungrateful drunk guy, sitting in front of me telling me the marriage was off and giving me the impression that he was the one who’d called it off.
“What the hell’s going on, Jeff?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“The hell it doesn’t.”
He stared some more at his glass. “Only friends a man should have are animals. They never let you down.”
“Linda’s never let you down. She’s a good woman.”
Glaring at me. “She is, huh? You know that for a fact?”
“Yeah. I do. I’ve known her all my
life. She’s a good woman, just like I said.”
“Well, old buddy, I guess there’s good and there’s good, isn’t there?”
When you’re drunk, you think you’re just full of profundities.
“What the hell’s that mean, Jeff?”
“It means what it means.”
“Thanks for clearing it up.”
“Wedding’s off.”
“Yeah, you said that.”
As big a guy as he was, and a pretty good drinker too, he must have been putting them away a long time. He was about ready to pass out. I doubted he’d had breakfast.
“You can’t drive like this.”
“Hell if I can’t.”
“You’ll wake up in the drunk tank if you d. And you might kill somebody in the process.”
“I wouldn’t mind killing somebody about now.”
Tears came without any warning. No big sob scene, just the tears of a guy unskilled in the ways of letting go with the gentler emotions. “And right now the person I’d like to kill is myself.”
Those were his last words for a while.
His face hit the table pretty hard, knocking over his beer glass. It was empty.
I leaned out of the booth. “Elmer?”
“Yeah?”
“You give me a hand?”
“Passed out, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“I shoulda cut him off.”
“Yeah, you shoulda.”
He came over.
It was hell getting Jeff into my car.
Four
My office is a single room on the side of the local dime store. You reach it by climbing three untrustworthy wooden steps.
On the tiny porch was a small white box with a white envelope Scotch-taped to it: Mr.
McCain. I carried it inside.
The reason I work for Judge Whitney is so I can afford such luxuries as indoor plumbing, electric lights, and a mattress. In a town with too many lawyers already, a tyro doesn’t exactly get the highest-paying clients.
Take this little box. Helen Reynolds, a sweet weary woman who cleans rooms out at the Sunset Motel, has a fifteen-year-old son who has been in and out of trouble with the law since he was twelve. Mostly minor offenses: toilet-papering the trees of girls he has crushes on, overturning garbage cans in alleys, and writing dirty words on the sides of buildings. Buggsy Siegel he’s not. But he seems to be in court every month or so. Maybe if his dad hadn’t died in Korea the kid would’ve turned out better. You never know about those things and you can make an argument either way.
Anyway, none of the other lawyers will take his cases. No money in them. Helen lives in a two-room apartment and drives a
Hudson, one of the big ones that looks like an overturned bathtub. So I take his cases.
And in lieu of pay she makes me angel food cakes with a lot of nice frosting on them. Every three-four weeks I get one. This was my payment on account.
The mail was three overdue bills, an invitation to a s@eance Halloween party (Maybe Bridey Murphy will be there!) thrown by a very successful tort lawyer, and a note folded in half.
Hi McCain—I need to talk to you. Called and stopped by.
Mary
Mary Travers is the girl I should marry.
She’s smart, sweet, sensible, and as
good-looking in her dark-haired way as Pamela Forrest is in her blond-haired way. She had a straight-A average in high school and had hopes for college, but then her dad got sick so she had to stay home and help support the family. She works the lunch counter down at the Rexall. A couple of nights, especially on high school graduation night, we came close to going all the way. She’d caught the McCain virus in junior high just as I’d caught the Pamela virus in fourth grade. And neither of us could find a cure. There was a time, right after high school, when she pursued me actively. But no more. I ate lunch at the Rexall a few times a week, and those were the only times I’d see her.
The way she looked at me, I knew she still loved me. And the way I looked at her, she knew I was still in love with Pamela. We were miserable.
I had just sliced myself a piece of cake with my letter opener when the phone rang.
“Hi, McCain.”
“Hi, Mary. I got your note.”
“I knew Susan Squires really well.”
“That’s right. You did.”
“I wondered if we could get together and talk.”
A ruse for a sort of date?
“Sure.”
“You could stop by the house.”
The house she referred to was the one she’d grown up in in the Knolls. My dad had gotten a good job after the war and we’d moved to a new house in one of the thousands of Levittown-style developments that had spread across the country. Washers and dryers. A new car every couple of years. A Tv antenna on the roof. Steak once a week. The Gi Bill.
A chance for your kids to go to college. Uncle Miltie. Howdy Doody. Ed Sullivan.
The promise of America, especially to those who had grown up in the despair of the Depression and had gone off to war.
A lot of returning Gi’s did well but Mary’s dad had not. He’d seen Japanese soldiers slice up his friends with machetes and then hang them like slabs of beef off palm trees.
He had a “nervous condition.” Couldn’t hold any job long. Went into depressions so bad they had to put him in the bughouse a couple of times.
And now he had cancer. Mary still lived at
home to help him and her mother, who wasn’t all that healthy
either. I felt terrible about not being in love with Mary. Sometimes I got down on my knees and actually prayed that I’d stop loving Pamela and start loving Mary. That’d make so many people happy. Including me.
“There’s a hayrack ride tonight,” I said.
“I saw that.”
“You want to go?”
“Are you serious? With me?”
“Sure. I’ll pick you up at seven.”
“That’s only three hours, McCain.”
“You’ll look beautiful; you always do.”
“I was going to tell you about Susan.”
“Tell me tonight.”
“I’d feel guilty going. With Susan dead and all.”
“It’s just what you need.”
“I guess it probably is.”
I could hear how happy I’d made her, and that made me happy. Maybe I couldn’t fall in love with her but I loved her.
“Seven o’clock then.”
I was just turning off the desk lamp when the knock came. A client. A small
practice like mine, they just drop by when they need to. Most of the time it’s all right. But now I had things to do.
“C’mon in.”
I knew the moment I saw her what was going to happen. You don’t run into that many Gaelic goddesses. It’s probably the hair: a bloody mane of it, the color of red at the epicenter of a fire and reaching all the way down to the sleekly jutting hips. A white silk blouse and no bra, a pair of tight tan slacks resembling jodhpurs and tucked into a smashing pair of knee-length riding boots, and a face as erotic and innocent as those photography magazines with the young women of Paris. Maggie Yates. The twenty-eight-year-old would-be writer everyone in town loved to gossip about. No bra was bad enough, but she also wrote letters to the local paper defending communism, marijuana, and pornography. Every male in town over the age of ten lusted after her but she would tryst only with me, as she frequently said, “Because even though you’re no genius, McCain, you at least know who Isadora Duncan is.” She lived above a garage on an allowance and was finishing up
a novel she said was a combination of Peyton Place and The Dubliners. She went to the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City for a semester and dropped out to write. She is being supported by a fashion-model sister in New York who sends her a check and cast-off clothes once a month (hence the expensive duds). Her parents died when she was young, and she has made mention of a trust fund that will someday be hers, the source of which is—mysterious. But then eastern money is always mysterious, you make money on money, on embossed sheets of paper. Out here you amass money through substantial and three-dimensional ways, with corn, cows, or ointments for pig hemorrhoids.
“I was just downtown,” she said, “and wanted to see if you were busy tonight.” Then: “God, I’ve got to get out of this town.”
“Why?”
“Why? Did you hear what I just said? I was just downtown? There isn’t any downtown here, McCain, just three or four blocks of really pathetic old stores. I’m starting to sound like I belong in this place.” She shook her head.
“God, as soon as I finish my novel, I’m heading straight back to New York.”
“I’m in kind of a hurry.”
She grinned. “How much of a hurry?”
She’d caught me staring at her breasts.
“Well, you know. A hurry.”
“You just wet your lips and gulped.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. And you know what that means, don’t you?”
“What?”
“That you’re horny.”
“Why does it mean that?”
“Because your crotch just moved too. That thing of yours is bouncing around in there.”
I sighed. “Well, can I tell you I like you?”
“Aw, McCain, we’ve talked and talked about that.”
“It just makes me feel better is all.”
“You’re so old-fashioned.”
“Yeah, I probably am.”
“Did you read that Fran@coise Sagan novel I gave you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, didn’t you notice how people’re always doing it and they never tell each other
that they like each other? That’s a sign of true sophistication. Going all over the place and screwing people you hate.”
“They’re French.”
“What’s that got to do with it?” she said.
“The French’re capable of anything. Look at World War Two. How long did they hold out, an hour and a half?”
This time, she sighed. “Ok, but you can only say it once.”
“That’s good enough for me. Let’s hop to it.”
So we hopped to it. Pleasuring her was a pleasure. But fornicate we did. She was some fornicator she was. She’d taught me any number of things about lovemaking, things I longed to try out on Pamela. Things I was sure that stupid rich handsome and successful Stu would never know.
The fornication was, as always, great. She smelled good, tasted good, moved good, whispered good. As soon as we finished, she started to push me away. “Thanks, McCain. That was nice.”
“Wait a minute. You didn’t let me say it yet.”
“Aw, shit, I forgot. Hurry up, will you?
My butt’s starting to freeze.”
I looked at her gorgeous eyes. She was incomprehensible to me. A creature from a future world. Most girls not only begged but demanded some choice words of amour afterward. She despised them.
“Can’t you at least pretend you like it?” I said.
“Just hurry up.”
I was still in the saddle and it felt wonderful; it’s as good a place to be as there is, and I wanted to stay there for a minute or two, maybe joke around a little or something, but I knew I had to hurry so I said, “I really do like you, Maggie. You’re crazy and you scare the shit out of me but I’m fascinated by you and I like the hell out of you and I can’t help it.”
“Great,” she said, giving me a shove.
We dressed on either side of the desk.
Underwear elastic snapping. Feet stomped into shoes. Zippers running their patterns.
She was all dressed and lighting a Camel when she said, “By the way, you know that prick David Squires, his wife just got killed.”
“Yeah?”
“I ever tell you he put the make on me one night at his summer home?”
“You’re kidding.”
“Uh-uh. Wanted me to go down in the basement with him. Told me it was a lot of fun to do it standing up. Just like Hemingway did, he said. I guess he was trying to impress me with his vast knowledge of literature.”
“How’d he know Hemingway did it standing up?”
“I guess because of that scene in A Farewell to Arms.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot.”
“What a jerk.”
“Hemingway?”
“No, Squires. He’s this big
capital-punishment jerk. Schmuck. I’d like to capital-punish him sometime.”
That was another cool thing about Maggie Yates.
She knew all these great Yiddish words from New York. Hearing them and saying them made me feel very cool.
I started to kiss her good-bye but remembered that a good-bye kiss was another no-no.
“See you, McCain,” she said. And was out the door.
So David Squires had put the make on her. Interesting. What if he were a chaser? What bearing might that have on this case?
On the way over to Keys Ford-Lincoln, I listened to the national radio news. The big Edsel Day had been something of a bust all over the country. A lot of people had found the car ugly.
And a lot more found it overpriced.
The cleaning crew was already at work on the grounds. There were dead balloons and pennants and Pepsi cups and gum wrappers and cigarette butts covering the tarmac everywhere. The celebration had been scheduled to last until evening with a country-western band and a barbecue. Dick had obviously called it off.
No pol
ice cars. Cliffie had done his usual thorough job. The body had been discovered less than four hours ago and Cliffie was already long gone.
I wheeled the ragtop around back and went in the service door. Keys’s big yellow Lincoln convertible was parked nearby so I assumed he was still there.
He was there, all right. In his office.
With a cigar and a bottle of Wild Turkey that he was pouring straight into a Pepsi paper cup.
He had his shirt open, his tie off, and his cordovan Florsheim wing tips up on his desk.
His wife sat on the edge of a wooden chair.
She wore a green dress that looked light enough for summer. For such a big-boned woman, she moved with appealing grace. Her perch on the chair was delicate.
“I feel like calling Edsel Ford at home,”
he said, “and telling him what a piece of shit his car is.”
“I still like it,” his wife said. “But obviously the public doesn’t share my taste.” She rose. “Well, dear, I’m going to go spend some of your money.”
“Buy me a couple of gallons of
bourbon,” he said.
She winked at me. “Be sure he doesn’t do anything foolish, Sam.”
He made a sound that faintly resembled a laugh. “I do foolish things all the time.
Nobody’s been able to stop me yet.” The bitterness surprised me. She looked embarrassed by it.
She nodded to both of us and left.
“Damn, she’s a nice lady,” Keys said.
“Don’t know why the hell she puts up with me.”
Then: “Drink?”
“No, thanks.”
He gunned some more of his own.
He sighed. “First the Edsel. And now Susan Squires.”
“Yeah, I was meaning to ask about her. She used to work here, you said?”
“Two years. Back when she dropped out of college.”
My question didn’t seem to surprise him at all. “Was she seeing David Squires while she worked here?”
“The last year or so. He was here so often, I damn near offered to put him on payroll.”
“I take it you didn’t like it.”
“She was the receptionist. She had to meet people and be nice to them. Most people don’t appreciate how important a good receptionist is. They’re your first contact with the public. A receptionist who is rude or unhelpful gives you a bad