by Ed Gorman
I had the feeling that whatever Richard had waiting for me wasn’t going to change the minds of either the judge or the two people who kept writing letters about me.
On the porch, Wendy and Barb were smiling. I remembered Wendy telling me that Barb was one friend who hadn’t deserted her after her husband died in Vietnam, when she took up the bottle and inhabited a lot of beds that did her no good at all. Both women had warm girly laughs and the sound was sweet on the air, overwhelming the sitar music from inside. Oh, yes, somebody was playing sitar music now. I realize that not liking sitar music marks one as a boor and a likely warmonger and maybe even satanic, but I can’t help it. Sitar music should only be played for deaf people.
“Oh, oh,” Wendy said.
Barb smiled at me. “Wendy said you’d look a certain way if you were going to go see a client and dump her at home.”
“‘Dump,’” I said, “is a pretty harsh word.”
“How about push me out of the car at a high rate of speed?”
They reverted to their girly laughter, leaning together in that immortal conspiratorial way women have of letting men know that they are hopelessly stupid. I could imagine them at twelve, merrily deflating the ego of every boy who passed by.
“I promise not to go over ninety,” I said, lamely continuing the joke.
“Well, I’ll have to let you two finish this,” Barb said, as if I hadn’t spoken. “My husband’s in watching TV, and I’d better get in there before he loses all his clients. He made the mistake of telling Walton from the brokerage that if he was ten years younger, he’d probably be a hippie himself. Walton didn’t think that was funny. Then they started arguing about the cops beating up all those kids. You know how Walton is. He thought Ike was a Communist. And he was serious.”
Wendy slumped against me as soon as Barbara got inside. “Whew. It just caught up with me. One minute I was sober and the next minute I was—”
“—drunk?”
“Again. That’s the weird thing. I kind of sobered up but now—”
“Let’s get going. I know this curve where I’m going to push you out. It’ll be fun.”
“Yeah, well, the first thing you’ll have to do is help me to the car. I’m really dizzy. All that drinking I used to do. I must be out of practice.”
She wasn’t kidding. I had to half carry her to the car.
2
A month earlier a gang of bikers had invaded the compound and smashed up the farmhouses and made several of the male hippies strip. For a few people in Black River Falls—anywhere you live there are a few people—it was a tough call. Who was more despicable? Drunken bikers or hippies?
The commune had a history. Shortly after the war two brothers decided to get a GI loan for a large farm they would work together. They built two modest clapboard houses about forty yards apart and proceeded to marry and raise their respective families. They were decorated warriors and popular young men who’d been raised on a farm in a smaller town twenty miles west of Black River Falls. Everything went according to Norman Rockwell for the next nine years, but then, true to many of the stories in the Bible, one brother began to covet the other brother’s wife. Well, in fact, he did quite a bit more than covet, and when the cuckold caught his brother and wife making love in the shallow wooded area behind the outbuildings, he became so distraught he ran back to his home, killed their only child (a girl of seven) and then killed himself.
The survivors left the farm, the bank foreclosed, and despite the efforts of a couple of other farmers to buy it and lease it out to starter farmers who couldn’t afford the purchase price, the land refused to cooperate. There was a scientific explanation for this, as a state agronomist repeated to anybody who listened, but locals preferred the notion that the land was “cursed” because of what had happened on it.
The hippies came two years ago. Twenty or so of them stayed in the main house, the white one; another fifteen or so stayed in the smaller, yellow house. Some of them worked in town; some of them raised a good share of the food they ate; and a handful, from my observation, were so stoned most of the time that they couldn’t do much more than tell you what they’d seen in their last acid vision.
Peace and love, brother. Age of Aquarius. Brotherhood of Man. Every once in a while, stoned on nothing stronger than beer, I’d get caught up in one of the many rock songs that espoused those precepts. But then I’d remember Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, both of whom had died earlier this year, and I’d remind myself of how naïve it all was. There was no peace and love in the slaughter of Vietnam or in the streets of bloody Detroit or Los Angeles.
In some respects I felt sorry for the hippies. I understood in a theoretical way what they were rebelling against. Our country was war-happy and our culture was pure Madison Avenue. What I didn’t understand were the ways they’d gone about expressing their distrust of society. I’d look at their babies and wonder what kind of lives the little ones would have. The same for the sanctimony of their language. Without seeming to realize it they were just as doctrinaire as the straight people they put down.
Then there were the drugs, which was how I’d gotten involved with the hippies. Since no other lawyer in town wanted to deal with them, and since the public defender’s office had only two attorneys, who worked eighteen-hour days as it was, I decided to help as many as I could. Clifford Sykes, our police chief, was jailing everybody who even looked as if he could spell marijuana (something I doubt Cliffie himself could do).
Marijuana I had no problem with. But I couldn’t see the social or spiritual benefits of dropping acid. I’d heard too many stories from the emergency room about young people who never quite recovered from their trips. In March two high schoolers had contrived a suicide plan and had, while acid fractured their minds, locked hands and jumped off Indian Point. They were skewered on the jagged rocks below.
These days chickens, cats, and an arthritic old dog had declared the weedy yard in front of the larger, two-story white farmhouse their private domain. A rusted plow and an old-fashioned refrigerator with the cooling coils on top sat on the edge of the yard, remnants from the farm before it had been deserted by the owners long ago. The enormous garden was in back. They were dutiful about keeping it plentiful. No matter how much pot, acid, and cheap wine filled the night they were up early to work their land. They’d planted corn, carrots, beets, spinach, lettuce, and cabbage. Using a battered wood-fired stove, they also baked bread. That was another surprise. One of them gave me a slice with strawberry jam on it one day, and damned if it didn’t taste good.
I snapped off the ignition key and slid out of the new Ford convertible I’d bought after my old Ford ragtop got too expensive to keep fixing up. Or maybe I got it to signal my father, who’d died three years ago, that in my thirties I was finally becoming the man he’d wanted me to be.
Now, as I stood under the glowing span of moon and stars, a song by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young began streaming from the main house. A breeze fresh as a first kiss made me close my eyes for a moment and ride along with it to long-ago summers when my red Ford ragtop and the lovely Pamela Forrest had been my primary concerns.
When I turned to look at the house I saw Richard Donovan coming down the steps. His father was a colonel in the army, and Richard had inherited his military bearing. Richard even had a uniform of sorts—blue work shirt, brown or black corduroy trousers. They were always clean. The girls usually wound up doing the laundry for the boys—feminism, the new “ism,” had yet to make its mark on this commune—but Richard did his own. I’d seen him hanging his own shirt and a pair of trousers on the clothesline one day. He told me he didn’t trust anybody else to keep his stuff the way he wanted it.
In the windows on either side of the front door, faces watched us silently. Whatever had happened out here, everybody knew about it and they were waiting to see how I was going to react when Richard finally told me what was going on.
He was handsome in a severe, gaunt way. There was some
thing of the Old West in the face, pioneer stock I suppose, and now anxiety filled the blue eyes and bulged the hinges of his jaw.
“We have an audience, Richard.”
“They’re scared.”
“Of what?”
“Of what I’m going to show you. They’re like little children. If I wasn’t here this place wouldn’t exist.”
Nobody would ever accuse Donovan of being modest. Or having a sense of humor. He was the absolute lord and master of this place as well as the final arbiter. The first few times he paid me to represent him—he didn’t seem to have a job so I wondered where the cash came from—he lectured me on how the country was going to be once the government “abdicated” and people like him took over. I didn’t like him much, and I suspected the feeling was mutual.
His gaze roamed to the tumbledown, once-red barn downslope from us. In my high school summers I’d detasseled corn, the hottest and hardest work I’d ever done, eight a.m. to seven p.m., in temperatures frequently rising to one hundred. By noon you’d eaten your weight in bugs. At the end of the day, waiting for the bus to take us day laborers back to town, I’d always throw myself on any amount of hay I could find in the cooling barn and go instantly to sleep. This barn, however, looked as though it might collapse on me while I slept.
He nodded in the direction of the lopsided structure and started walking. The ground here was hard and lightly sand-covered. The voices from the watchers grew louder as the music stopped. Some of them were on the porch now. They knew a lot more about what was going on than I did.
The barn was within several yards of the woods and the woods were less than a city block deep. Behind them ran a two-lane gravel county road. High school kids wanting to raise some hell had gotten on the commune property by coming up this way. They waited till late at night when the hippies were asleep and a good share of them stoned as well. They smashed a few windows and spray-painted some swastikas on the houses. Donovan was the only one who confronted them. He jumped on the leader of the kids and broke his nose and arm. Cliffie Sykes had been persuaded to charge only the kids. But the parents of the boy who Donovan had hurt had now sued him in civil court. I’d handle the trial when it came up.
There was no door on the barn. Shadows deeper than night awaited us inside. Donovan stalked right in. I lost him for a few seconds. That’s how dark it was. Then suddenly there was light in the form of a dusty kerosene lantern put to life with a stick match he blew out a second too late. He’d burned his fingers and cursed about it.
It was a conventional barn layout with stalls for animals and space for storing equipment. The haymow above us was accessible only by a ladder. The stalls were packed with boxes. This was a storage area. Since a good share of these kids—like some of the other hippies across the land—came from prosperous families, I wondered if they’d brought along some of the goodies from the old days.
The smells ranged from old manure to wood soaked by decades of rain. A few brittle bridles hung from posts; horses had probably been commonplace. As had a leaky ceiling; ruts from tractor tires still gouged the dirt floor in places. Tin signs from the thirties had been nailed to the walls, pop and cigarettes and chewing tobacco and gasoline. This was a time trap; if you stayed here long enough you could probably hear ghost music from that era.
“Nobody here knows anything about this. I want to make that clear.”
“I take it somebody’s dead.”
“Yes.” His face was taut with sudden anger. “They’ll probably be out here with pitchforks and torches when they find out.”
“You’re getting ahead of yourself. Calm down.”
“Yeah, calm down. All the bullshit we have to put up with just trying to live our lives. You live in a shithole of a town.”
He was already getting tiresome. “Show me where the body is.” He looked as if he was going to start preaching at me again. “Now.”
Donovan walked to a stall that held fewer boxes than the others. “Here.” Then: “Superdog kept barking so loud I had to see what was wrong. He brought me over here. At first I thought he was crazy. I mean, who cared about these boxes? But then I took them down. I should trust our dog more.”
The boxes were quickly stacked outside the stall. A filthy brown blanket had been thrown over a human body. A small, slender foot with a very white sock protruded from the bottom of the blanket.
I started forward but he stopped me. “I know who she is. She came out here a lot. The whole commune is in real trouble now. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the cops didn’t kill her and plant her here to make us look bad.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Well, right now crazy sounds pretty sane to me.”
“Who is she?”
“The minute I say her name you’ll know how much trouble we’re in.”
“Humor me. Who the hell is she?”
“It’s Vanessa Mainwaring.”
“What the hell was Paul Mainwaring’s daughter doing out here?”
The laugh was cruel. “A little high-class for pigs like us?”
“Don’t give me any more of your overthrow bullshit right now, Donovan, or I might tell you to go to hell and I’ll walk away. Don’t forget, there isn’t another lawyer in town who’ll work with you.”
I pushed him out of the way and grabbed a rusty rake. Awkward as it was, I managed to ease it under the blanket until I could gently lift it and set it aside. Because I knew her father, I’d seen her a number of times. Now, as she lay on her side, her profile was statue-perfect.
I hunched down. The wounds I could see were concentrated around her heart. There were six of them. Somebody had been very angry with her and had let a knife convey the rage. In books, beautiful dead women always retain some remnant of their beauty. Not so in real life. Heartbreaker that she’d been, now the skin was gray, and the tongue lolling out of the right side of her mouth looked lurid and sickly. Vivid blue eyes stared into eternity; even the dark hair was dusty and flecked with straw.
I looked up at Donovan. “How many people were in this stall to look at her?”
“Just about everybody. Why?”
“You’re not stupid, Donovan. You’ve never heard of a crime scene? The cops’ll look for all kinds of evidence. People tramping around in here’ll just make it tougher for them.”
“Cliffie’s a moron. He won’t look for any evidence at all.”
I pushed against my thighs to stand up and face him. “Cliffie’s daddy hired a so-called police commander to do all the serious work. The old man got tired of everybody bitching about his son. The police commander’s name is Mike Potter and he was a detective in Kansas City for six years before he had a heart attack and decided to look for a nice little nook to spend the rest of his career. He’s good. And the first person he’ll want to talk to is you. And one of the first questions he’s going to ask is how many people tramped around in the barn after you found her body.”
“You mean I was supposed to stop them?”
He wanted to argue. His question had been an accusation. “Who put the blanket on her?”
“I did.”
“What time did your dog start barking?”
“Maybe an hour and a half ago. And listen—I’m not some zombie, man. I’m sorry she’s dead, if that’s what you’re worried about. But I also kinda run this place, you know. I’ve got to worry about everybody else, too.”
“Who did she know out here?”
“Everybody. She tried hard to fit in but most of the people didn’t like her.”
“Why not?”
He took the time to slide a package of Pall Malls out of his shirt pocket. He was stalling.
“Why didn’t they like her?”
“Because of Neil, Neil Cameron.”
I’d had to represent Cameron a few times. He had a temper. When townspeople hassled him, he hassled back. “What about Neil?”
“She kind of jacked him around.”
“He went out with her?”
T
his time he got a full one-act play out of lighting his cigarette with a stick match. “Some people said he was obsessed with her. When she broke up with him he just kind of …”
“Kind of what?”
He shrugged lean shoulders. “You know what it’s like when you’re dumped. You get crazy for a while.”
“Was he still crazy these days?”
He was good at evasion. “I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.”
“Where do I find Cameron now?”
“I’m not sure. His sister would know.”
“Sarah Powers?”
“Oh, that’s right. You handled a couple of cases for her, too.”
Neil and Sarah had different last names because their parents were killed before the kids were even ten, and different sets of aunts and uncles raised them.
“Sarah doesn’t like you very much.”
“Then we’re even. I don’t like Sarah very much, either.”
She was one of the troublemakers out here. She’d been ticketed for parking the van in a No Parking zone and then had screamed at the cop while he was making out her summons. Then she got in another screaming match with a check-out woman at one of the supermarkets, accusing the woman of overcharging her because she was a hippie. Two weeks ago she was in a record store telling all the customers that they should steal anything they wanted, that the filthy capitalists were ripping off the country and getting away with it. The owner of the store called me and said if I didn’t remove her in five minutes—she had threatened to punch him if he touched her—he’d call the police. Fortunately, I’d been in my office and got there in time. The owner was a twenty-eight-year-old who fancied himself to be very counterculture. I wondered how he was feeling about things now that he’d heard Sarah’s everything-for-free rap.