by Ed Gorman
We might have been two friends out strolling for an evening, just walking along, looking out at the moon-silver river, the big pavilion just ahead of us. You could hear the summer echoes, kids and their folks laughing and dogs barking and radios blasting and cars honking merrily as they pulled in loaded with more families and more dogs and more hot dogs and more Pepsi.
He got me in the ribs with his flashlight and doubled me over. It was the second shot, the one in the stomach, that dropped me to my knees.
“Counselor’s been a bad boy,” he said. And then kicked me quickly in the groin.
I’m not much of a pain fan. I know that some people think that spiritual growth can come from pain but I’ll leave that for the philosophers to figure out. I just don’t like pain—not from a dentist, not from a surgeon, not from a drunk, and not from a psychotic chief of police who once told a local fawning radio reporter that he considered his job that of “town tamer, you know, like Wyatt Earp and Bill Tilden and all those men.”
“You were supposed to wait at the murder scene ’til I told you you could go.”
I didn’t say anything. He circled me. When he got square with my back, he gave me a wedge of rattlesnake boot in the kidney. I cried out.
“That’s the first thing that pissed me off today, McCain. The second thing was you starting the story that Kenny Whitney didn’t kill his wife.”
At which point, I got another boot toe driven deep into my kidney.
Ruthie suddenly lurched from the car and said, “You leave my brother alone, you asshole. And I don’t care if you’re the chief of police or not.” I guess she really had believed he was just going to talk to me.
“Nice talk for a young lady,” Sykes said.
“Get back in the car, Ruthie. Please.”
“He doesn’t have any right to hit you.”
“We’ll talk about it later, Ruthie. Please just get back in the car now.”
“You asshole,” she said to Sykes.
“I could run you in,” Sykes said. “Talking to a lawman like that.”
“Too bad I don’t have a necktie, then you could tie me to the jail cell and beat me.” A few years back, Sykes, Sr., had arrested Lem Tompkins, a hardware store clerk who was a rival for Sykes, Jr.’s girlfriend. Sykes, Sr., accused Tompkins of driving while intoxicated then took him back to the cell where he tied him to the bars and beat him pretty badly. Lem ended up in the hospital for a week. Sykes, Sr., somehow managed to convince the town that Lem, who’d been in trouble for breaking and entering a few years back, had attacked Sykes, Sr. Judge Whitney demanded Sykes’ resignation. But the town was in a bind—their choice being the cold, imperious arrogance of the old money Whitneys versus the cold, imperious arrogance of the new-money barbarians at the gate as represented by the Sykes family. It isn’t much of a choice but I guess I’d lean toward the upper-crust intelligence of the Whitneys. The town leaned toward the Sykeses. Sykes, Sr., kept his job.
Ruthie finally got back in the car. I just kept thinking of her pregnant. Little Ruthie. My kid sister. Knocked up.
“Now, this is a nice simple case of murder and suicide,” Sykes was saying. “And anybody who says anything different is full of shit. Including that bitch you work for. She’s just trying to salvage what she can of her family’s reputation. Well, Counselor, I could give a shit about her family’s reputation. There’s going to be an inquest in the morning and I want this whole thing wrapped up by noon and I don’t want any interference from you or your boss. She was shot four times with the thirty-two we found four feet from her body. The county doc tells me that death was probably instantaneous. Then you got there and talked to Whitney and he went upstairs and shot himself. We understand each other, Counselor?”
I was cold, I had to pee, my ribs felt broken and my kidney felt on fire. My nose was running from the wind. I felt humiliated, and angry. Someday, I was going to have the pleasure of smacking Cliffie in the face, and to hell with the consequences.
“We understand each other, Counselor? I hear any more stories about Kenny not being the one who killed Susan, I’m running you in. Got that?”
He stood in front of me now, over me. He looked like he was enjoying my cigarette pretty well. “Now, get on your feet so I can walk you back to your car.”
Pain had silenced me. Getting to my feet was difficult. At one point, I thought I might pitch over backward, but I kept pushing my legs to stand straight up. Finally, I was able to stand up without wobbling.
We walked back to my car, our footsteps loud as they crunched gravel. We moved much more slowly than before.
“She’s not going to do it to me again, Counselor. And neither are you. This is one murder case that I’ve got in the bag.”
Cliffie and Judge Whitney have this game: he arrests somebody for murder and she hires me to prove that the person is innocent. She doesn’t care about justice any more than Cliffie does. He just wants an arrest so he can close the case and prove to the town that he’s a detection wizard; she just wants to humiliate him. If somebody innocent gets hurt in the cross fire, so be it. Neither cares. Their war has been going on for a long time now and is likely to continue.
At the car, he said, “Tell Judge Whitney she doesn’t have to be at the inquest tomorrow. Everything is laid out. I’ll be there and so will the county attorney.” He smiled. “My cousin Phil.” Then, “Oh, and Judge Hardy. He’ll be there, too. I kept trying to get to Judge Whitney but seems she was in meetings all day.”
An inquest like this would generally fall under Judge Whitney’s jurisdiction, but Cliffie was way ahead of us. He’d gotten his crony Judge Hardy and his cousin the county attorney to preside over the inquest. Being beneficiaries of the Sykeses’ largesse, they’d say whatever Cliffie told them to.
I got in the car. He held the door open. He kept looking at Ruthie. He probably imagined that she found him sexy. His gun hand rode on the bone handle of his holstered weapon. “You’re the smart one in the family, Ruthie. You tell this brother of yours to stay out of trouble. All right?”
She just glared at him.
Cliffie grinned. “Well, good night. And be sure to give my best to your folks.”
“Are you all right?” Ruthie said as soon as I closed the door.
“I’ll live.”
“But that’s illegal, what he did.”
“I’m all right, Ruthie.” I reached over and patted her hand. “Really.”
“That’s the kind of person I’m going after when I’m a lawyer. The man who hides behind the law. They’re the worst kind of law.”
“Right now, I’m more worried about your situation than I am about Cliffie.”
I started my car. It trembled to life. I gave it a quarter-inch of choke. After a few seconds in which nothing seemed to happen, in which the motor continued to tremble, the choke kicked in and the gas flow evened out and the motor ran smoothly.
Sykes was gone by now. I drove back to town. The windows in the houses gleamed silver with flickering TV images. Every once in a while you’d see teenagers walking with skates slung over their shoulders, headed for the rink. I had KOMA on the radio. They were playing nothing but Buddy Holly and Richie Valens and rock stars were calling in and saying how great those guys had been and how much they’d be missed.
I looked over at Ruthie. “So what’re you going to do?”
“Try the potassium.”
“When?”
“Probably tomorrow.”
“You let me know right away.”
“Just don’t tell anybody.”
“God, are you crazy? Who would I tell?”
“Does that mean you’re ashamed of me?”
She wasn’t as cool inside as she was trying to pretend. “Of course I’m not ashamed of you. You’re my sister. I love you.”
“You don’t think I’m a whore?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, sometimes I wonder if maybe I’m not.”
“You slept with one boy. That�
��s hardly being a whore.”
“One-and-a-half.”
“Huh?”
“Remember Roger?”
“The kid with the stutter?”
“Yeah.”
“I let him get to somewhere between second and third base.”
“Oh.”
“But only once. At a New Year’s Eve party when we were sophomores. And I’d had some wine.”
“That still doesn’t make you a whore.”
“Sometimes I just worry that Father Gillis is right.”
“You mean about how most girls who go all the way in high school end up in Chicago as prostitutes?” I said.
“Prosties.”
“Huh?”
“That’s what Father Gillis calls them.”
“Oh.”
“So he sounds like he knows what he’s talking about. You know, like Frank Sinatra or somebody. He gave the girls this lecture about a year ago. After mass one Sunday.”
“If every girl in this town who went all the way in high school ended up in Chicago on the streets, there wouldn’t be room for anybody else to walk.”
She giggled. Then, “I’m not a whore.”
“I know you’re not.”
“But that’s what people’d say if they found out.”
I pulled up in the driveway of our folks’ place. I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “This’ll all work out.”
“Maybe the potassium’ll really work.”
She kissed me back on the cheek then slid out of the car. “I’ll call you tomorrow. And thanks for being such a nice brother.”
“My pleasure.”
“And Cliffie is still an asshole.”
On the way over to my place, I played the radio real loud. I tried to drive all thought of Ruthie from my mind. The potassium wasn’t going to work. I didn’t know if anything would work. This was going to devastate my whole family.
12
MRS. GOLDMAN’S HOUSE HAD once been what she laughingly called “a starter mansion,” meaning that it was a lot more house than she and her husband could afford at the time, but not enough of a house to qualify as one of the true mansions you saw on the other side of town. Mr. Goldman, who was in the real estate business, didn’t live long enough to make his final fortune. He left his wife, Sandra, enough term insurance to pay off the house and support herself by taking in boarders. The place was a two-story gingerbread Victorian. I had half of the huge upstairs as my apartment. I also had a stall in the garage and my own back entrance for when I came in late. Two meals, breakfast and dinner, were included in the price of the rent. Mrs. Goldman was a great cook. She was also a frustrated writer and photographer. She was always working on her history of the town. She was doing a great job. We’d spent a lot of long nights together watching her TV set and talking about her book and the plans I have for when my law practice gets rolling.
When I came into the vestibule tonight, I peeked through the French doors on the first floor. She was sitting in a chair reading a novel. The TV was on but the sound was turned down. She’d explained once that it was like having company you didn’t have to pay any attention to. She was a tall, slender, striking woman in her early fifties. She’d been dating a dentist from Cedar Rapids for several years but I didn’t have the sense that marriage was imminent.
She waved me in.
“You missed a nice meal.”
“Sorry.”
“Meat loaf.” Then she smiled. “There’s enough left for a sandwich later if you get hungry. I’ll make it for you if you want.”
“Well, I’m going to that skating party.”
“Oh, those poor singers. The rock and roll ones.”
“Yes.”
She shook her elegant head. She wore a white blouse, a dramatic black belt, gray slacks and black flats. When Lauren Bacall gets older, she’ll probably look something like Mrs. Goldman. If she’s lucky. “And poor Susan Whitney.”
“I didn’t know you knew her.”
“Oh, you know, from Leopold Bloom’s. As you know, I don’t care for the couple that run it, but it is a pleasant place to spend an hour or two occasionally. Especially if they’re not there and it’s just a clerk.”
I thought of Steve Renauld and his relationship with Susan Whitney and of her remark that she could only sleep with men she felt sorry for.
“The kind of man her husband was, I guess I’m not surprised,” she said.
Maybe at breakfast I’d tell her my theory that Kenny hadn’t killed her. For now, I wanted to get my skates and head for the rink. I was hoping to see Pamela there.
“Well, I’ll talk to you in the morning.”
“How come you’re limping?”
Maybe I’d tell her about Cliffie, too, in the morning. “Oh, I slipped on the ice.”
She put her novel on her lap and leaned forward in the chair. “Say, did you come home about three-thirty this afternoon?”
“No, why?”
“I thought I heard somebody up in your room. I can’t be sure. But I thought I heard footsteps up there and then something scraping the floor.”
“It wasn’t Andrea?” Andrea being the English teacher who rents the other half of the upstairs. She teaches at the state-run school for the deaf. She’s one of those secretive women who always look vaguely frightened. She lugs home armloads of mystery novels from the library, Mignon Eberhardt seeming to be her favorite, and rarely says a word.
“No, she doesn’t get home until at least four-thirty.”
I raised my eyes to the ceiling, as if I had X-ray vision and could see through the floor right into my apartment. It’d be pretty cool to be Superman. Just beam your eyes right through the floor. But among my many goals, turning myself into Superman was probably the least achievable. “This was about three-thirty?”
“Yes. And it wasn’t you?”
“No, no it wasn’t me.”
“I could’ve been mistaken.”
“I’ll go have a look.”
“I hope I don’t seem like some old busybody.”
I smiled. “Hardly.”
“Would you like me to come up there with you?”
“No, I’ll be fine.”
“I have my husband’s handgun from the war.”
“I appreciate it. But that’s fine.”
“I’ll be happy to give you the gun. It’s a forty-five.”
It came into my head, then, something that had been wedged in there uncomfortably ever since Cliffie had put it there about forty-five minutes ago. He said that Susan had been killed with a .32. But the gun Kenny had fired at me through the window, and the gun he used to kill himself with, was a .45. So where had the .32 come from? And I hadn’t seen a .32 anywhere in the house.
“Are you all right?”
“Fine,” I said. “I just thought of something.” Then, “Well, I guess I’ll go upstairs.”
“You sure you don’t want the gun?”
“Even if there was somebody up there, he’s long gone by now.”
We talked a bit more and then I closed the French doors and started up the stairs that rose from the vestibule. I clicked on the stairway light, something I don’t always do, and went up the steps. I could tell Andrea was home because there was a line of light beneath her door. Otherwise I’d have had no idea if she was home or not. She was utterly silent. The other door, down the hall from hers, was mine. The line beneath it was dark. I put my ear to the door and listened. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
I used my key and let myself in. Darkness. I had two large rooms and a bath. The only light came through a window from a streetlight a quarter block away. I walked toward it. There was a table with a lamp to the side of that window. I clicked on the light.
If there had been somebody in here, he or she was awfully neat. At least in the living room. Nothing whatsoever looked different or disordered. Mrs. Goldman keeps my place very neat. She raised two sons and always says the trick with boys is never let their rooms go more than two days unc
hecked. So she dusts and vacuums and picks up twice a week before the governor has to declare my place an official disaster area.
It’s a pleasant furnished apartment. The furniture isn’t new but it’s clean and comfortable and the place was wallpapered fresh only a month before I moved in. When the window’s open, you can still smell the fresh wallpaper paste, which is a smell I’m inexplicably fond of. There’s a great shower and a very firm mattress. My favorite spot is the recliner where I read my crime paperbacks. There’s a lamp that hangs right over my shoulder for plenty of light, and a small table to my left where I can set my ashtray and Pall Malls and a can of beer or a Pepsi. Now if I just had Pamela living here with me …
I tried the bedroom. Nothing looked disturbed in there, either. The cats trailed behind me. They didn’t want to miss anything. I half-expected one of them to put on her deerstalker cap and the other to produce a magnifying glass. They’d probably have better luck than I was having.
Where it went wrong was in the bedroom closet. Just last night I’d set a pair of loafers down on the floor to take to the shoe repair shop for new heels. I remembered doing this. There was no mistake. But the shoes had been set back up on the closet shelf with two pairs of old tennis shoes. The intruder had gotten confused and figured that all three pairs of shoes belonged on the shelf. Somebody had been in here.
I was just about to switch off the bedroom light and go back to the living room when I noticed the shoe print on the floor. It looked familiar but at first I wasn’t sure why. The dirty snow he’d tracked in had made the shoe impression clear.
I went over to my bedside table; I keep a flashlight there. It isn’t half the size of Cliffie’s but it’s handy and serviceable when there’s a power outage or I hear strange noises in the darkness. The noises usually turn out to be raccoons. I made the mistake of putting out food for a couple of baby raccoons one night, and now I have a whole family of them working their way up my back stairs several nights a week. But they’re all so cute I can’t break it off.
I followed the footprints from my bedroom to the door. The pattern of the prints resembled a waffle iron. An image came to me: Robert Frazier, sitting in the leather chair across from Judge Whitney, and the imposing, expensive winter shoes he wore. I remembered thinking they looked like rubber cleats. They’d make a pattern similar to the one on my floor. But why the hell would Frazier be in my apartment? What would he be looking for?