by Ed Gorman
“You have a slide show? Seriously?”
“With music.” He sipped his coffee. “Don’t worry, you’ll get to see it one of these days.”
“That sounds like a threat.”
The timbre of his laugh hadn’t changed since we were in fourth grade. “It is. But I’m sure you want to talk about the girl who got killed last night.”
Kenny was the unofficial historian of Black River Falls for our generation. Every once in a while he’d talk about this huge novel he was going to write someday, a kind of Peyton Place about our own small city. Despite his reputation for writing smutty books, people liked Kenny and confided in him. He knew secrets nobody else did. He’d been helping me with cases since the day I’d hung out my shingle.
“Do you know anything about her?”
“I know one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“She’s been seen with Bobby Randall on occasion.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Wild child. Lot of trouble for her old man.”
“Bobby Randall deals drugs.”
“That’s my point. A lot of trouble for her old man.”
“I’m representing Sarah Powers. She’s the sister of Neil Cameron, the guy everybody’s looking for. They’re both part of the commune. You ever hear of Bobby Randall hanging out at the commune?”
“Oh, sure. They had some real head-trippers out there for a while. Right after Donovan and the rest of them came here. Randall was the only source they had so they dealt with him. But finally the head-trippers moved on. Randall still goes out there. I think he had something going with one of the girls at the commune for a while, but she broke it off with him for some reason. He’s a heartbreaker.”
I took a moment to finish my glazed donut. This coffee shop was one of the few small businesses that hadn’t shriveled up since the new mall opened. The larger downtown stores had all moved to the mall, taking with them a good deal of traffic and thus business. The mayor had been frothy with reassurances that the mall would increase business for everybody because shoppers who’d trekked to Iowa City or Cedar Rapids would now be happy to shop here again. The younger people thought it was pretty cool of course. But the older ones—and the ones like Wendy and me, touched by a spiritual old age on occasion—saw it as one of those generational betrayals that are a part of growing up. The young betray the old until they are old enough to be betrayed by the next generation. I’m sure the good Reverend Cartwright has an explanation for such things.
“You hear much about the Mainwaring family?”
“Just that it’s sort of gone to hell since Mrs. Mainwaring died and Mainwaring married again. I know the Mainwaring kids really don’t like her.”
“She’s pretty exotic.”
“Yeah, and from what I hear not a real warm person. But she went to Smith and worked on the Bobby Kennedy campaign and drives a Jag. I know you like Mainwaring but he’s really a snob. And I still don’t understand how a guy who makes stuff for war can pretend to be such a liberal.”
“You think he’s pretending?”
“Don’t you?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe he’s just sort of blind to himself.”
“I don’t trust him. I was in a peace march in Iowa City last month and I saw him on the sidewalk talking to a guy I was pretty sure was a fed.”
“How can you tell?”
“Didn’t you read that article in Esquire about how the feds who check out peace marches dress? Short hair, T-shirts, and jeans. Hoover likes his boys to wear uniforms. And they all drive black Fords with blackwalls because Hoover gets a deal on them.”
One thing about Kenny—he’d never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like. “Maybe he’s changed things because of that article.”
“I doubt it. I admit I’m being paranoid but I still don’t trust Mainwaring. I mean his business is with the federal government.” He checked his wristwatch. “Melissa’s at her grandmother’s right now. I had to leave her there while I went to have Alan check my blood pressure. He sure is a smart-ass.”
“You should’ve heard him last night when he was sewing me up.”
“He was always like that.” He slid out of the booth. “We were too mature to act like that, as I remember.”
“Right. All the times we both called his glasses Mount Palomars. Real mature.”
As if I hadn’t spoken, he said: “I’ll have some new pictures of Melissa next time I see you.”
I wanted to ask if that was a threat or a promise but I was too mature to do it.
My early boyhood was spent in the section just past the city limits called the Hills. This was where the poor white people lived. Even sociologists would have had a hard time defining the Hills because there were degrees of poverty even here. Depending on where you lived in the Hills, your home was either lower-class livable or little more than a shack. If you lived in one of the shacks, which far outnumbered the tiny one- and two-bedroom homes, you saw a lot of the local gendarmes. A fair number of men dealt in stolen property; a fair number of men couldn’t seem to stay out of bloody fights; and a fair number of men let the bottle keep them from steady jobs. In the midst of all this the more reliable people like my parents and many others tried to carry on respectable lives. Kenny lived in one of the shacks but was saved and redeemed by his early interest in books. My mother and father were both readers, Dad with his pulps and paperbacks and Mom with her magazines (one of them, The American, carried Nero Wolfe stories frequently, introducing me to mystery fiction around age eight or so), and encouraged my brother and sister to be readers as well.
The worst part of my early life was when my older brother Robert died of polio. He had been, no other word, my idol, all the things I could only hope to be. When I got old enough I drove his 1936 Plymouth. My sister Ruth was sure that Robert visited her at night in ghost form. And I remember hearing my father half whispering to my uncle Al that he was worried about my mother, that maybe she would never get over it and be herself again. We still went back to the Hills to lay fresh flowers on my brother’s grave in the cemetery where Hills people buried their dead. In the worst of my depression after losing the woman I was sure would be my wife, I found myself waking one birdsong morning next to his gravestone. I had drunkenly confided in my brother—for that matter I’m not quite sure I ever really got over his death either—hoping he’d bring me solace.
Tommy Delaney lived in one of the small houses, this one isolated by the fact that it sat on a corner. Where there should have been neighbors on the west side of his place there were only three empty tracts. The city had made an effort to destroy the worst of the houses and shacks.
I heard the voices before I’d quite closed my car door. Man and woman; husband and wife. The ugly noise of marriage gone bad. There had been a time after Robert’s death when my parents had gone at each other. As I later learned in my psych classes at the U of Iowa, this was not an uncommon reaction to the loss of a child. But their rages terrified my little sister and me. I’d take her to her tiny room and give her her doll and cover her with a blanket, anything to stop her sobbing. I’d sit on the bed till she went to sleep. They always promised, in whispers, that they’d never do it again. But they did of course. They were too aggrieved over the loss of their son not to.
The Delaney home was the size of a large garage but not as tall. The once-white clapboard was stained so badly it resembled wounds. The eaves on one side dangled almost to the ground. The two cement steps had pulled a few inches away from the front door. In addition to the screaming, a dog inside started barking, explaining the dog shit on the sunburnt grass. But not even a dog could compete with the cutting words of the argument.
There was a rusted doorbell. I tried it. Somewhere, faintly, it chimed. Not that this deterred the screamers. Either they hadn’t heard it or they didn’t care that they had company.
The door opened and there Tommy Delaney stood, massive in his Black River Warriors black T-shirt with the familia
r yellow logo. He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes but he was too late. I could see he’d been crying, the same way my sister had always cried when our parents had played gladiators over the body of their oldest son.
Then he suddenly stepped on the concrete stairs. His weight was enough to make them wobble. I backed down to the ground. He reached back and jerked the door shut. That was when I noticed the tic in his left eye. Kids respond differently to parental warfare. The big tough football player had developed a tic. He’d probably developed other problems, too, ones less obvious.
He blushed. Blood went up his cheeks like a rising elevator. “They’re just havin’ a little disagreement.” The tic got worse. Heavy fingers pawed at it as if they could destroy it.
“How about walking over to my car? Maybe it’ll be easier to talk there.” It wouldn’t be—not with this battle going on—but at least we wouldn’t be right next to it.
“I don’t know what you’re doing here.”
“I’m trying to find out who murdered your friend Vanessa.”
“You know who murdered her.”
“I know who people think murdered her. That doesn’t mean they’re right.”
The baby face sagged in the brutal light of a ninety-two-degree day. For all his power, he looked drained. I doubted he’d slept much. “You stick up for the hippies. I always told her not to go out there. I told her there’d be trouble. Neil Cameron was crazy. You should read some of the letters he wrote her. He belonged in a bughouse.”
“Tell me about the letters.”
The tic had slowed some. I had to give his parents one thing—they had the strength of boxers who could go fifteen rounds easy. If anything, they were louder than ever.
“I only read a couple of them. But they were nuts.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything about the letters.”
“Just the way he said stuff. That he’d kill himself if she didn’t come back to him. And that they had this sacred bond that couldn’t be broken. And that sometimes he stood on her street late at night staring up at her bedroom window and that he thought about just getting a ladder and kidnapping her.”
His father shouted a particularly ugly word at his mother. Delaney glanced over his shoulder. When he turned back to me he resembled a little boy who had just heard something terrible but mystifying. Maybe his father had never used that particular word before. The tic got bad again.
“Sorry you have to listen to that.”
“Yeah, why would you give a shit?”
“Maybe because I heard things like that for a while myself when I was young.”
“Yeah, well—” He swiped his hand across the tic again. But for the first time agitation left his eyes.
“You know the Mainwaring family.”
“Not for much longer. I think Mainwaring’s going to tell me he doesn’t want me there anymore. He liked the idea of a football hero hanging around his place but I think the novelty’s worn off.”
He was smarter and shrewder than I’d given him credit for. “Were you in love with Vanessa?”
“What the hell kind of question is that? It’s none of your damned business.” Then: “For your information, I thought I was but when I saw how she treated me and every other guy around her, I just enjoyed the free ride and let her go her own way.”
“What free ride?”
A smile loaded with malice. He angled himself toward the house where the spiritual murder was taking place. “The free ride of staying in a mansion where there was peace and quiet and eating better than I ever had. They even have a maid. All you have to do is say you want a Pepsi or a piece of pie and she goes and gets it for you. They even have guest rooms. It’s like staying in a nice hotel. Mainwaring let me stay overnight any time I wanted to, and I wanted to a lot.”
I waited a moment before asking my next question. We just stared at each other. Then I said: “All I’m asking is one favor. I want you to think about who might have wanted Vanessa dead besides Neil Cameron.”
“He killed her. You know it and I know it.”
“I don’t know it, Delaney. But I’d appreciate it if you’d think about it and give me a call.” I handed him a card.
As he studied the card, the shrill got shriller in the house behind us. He shuddered. His entire upper body just shook for ten seconds or so. Then he sighed: “Maybe I’ll think about it. Maybe not. Right now I’ve gotta get back in there before it gets any worse.” He made a face. “I have nightmares he’s gonna kill her sometime.”
Then he was gone, trotting across the dead brown grass to the hell house.
8
“Was Jesus a hippie? I think not. Did Jesus smoke pot? Did Jesus listen to the Rolling Stones? Did Jesus burn the American flag? No, he didn’t. And Jesus never said vile things about the Vietnam War, either.”
Reverend Cartwright’s midday radio show.
It wasn’t really a manor house but it tried to be, a three-story native stone building of twenty-five rooms, nine baths, and two dining rooms, not to mention a fireplace that you could walk into. Not while logs were burning, of course. The home lay on fifteen acres of green trimmed lawn with gasp-inducing hedges and stone-edged ponds on which swans swam, and pines of such sweet perfume you got dizzy. Behind the house was the bright red barn where Eve Mainwaring had the six horses she ran in her white-fenced three-acre domain. All four doors of the garage were open, revealing the fact that Mainwaring didn’t think much of American car making. There was a Porsche, two Mercedes sedans, and a Jaguar. All of recent vintage.
I’d called ahead. Mainwaring had told me to come around to the back veranda where he was having lunch. The day was well on its way to reaching the predicted ninety. From an open upstairs window I heard The Byrds’ version of Bob Dylan’s “Tambourine Man.” As I looked up I saw a young female face, framed by long dark hair, watching me. The youngest of the Mainwarings, Nicole. She leaned back, out of sight.
Mainwaring sat beneath a large blue umbrella at a table of glass and chrome. He appeared to be staring out at the swimming pool. The water was blue and chemically fresh, no doubt. It was also empty.
I was still behind him when he said, “She always swam in the mornings. When it got cold she swam indoors. She rarely missed a morning.”
I didn’t have to ask who he was talking about. I walked across the fieldstone veranda and seated myself at his table. It was cooler under the umbrella. He wore a starched white short-sleeved button-down shirt, tan military-style walking shorts, white socks, and white tennis shoes. Before him was a plate that held two halves of an English muffin and two poached eggs. One half of the muffin, covered with strawberry jam, had been nibbled on. The eggs hadn’t been touched. They looked like the eyes of a comic monster. Next to his coffee cup lay his package of Chesterfields. “I don’t eat breakfast. I run three miles and then have breakfast for lunch.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. Good for you or tell him how my day starts. You know, peeing and having a cigarette as soon as possible. But that doesn’t sound quite as impressive as a three-mile run, I guess.
There were no amenities.
“I wanted you to talk to Nicole, Sam. But she and I had a disagreement this morning so she’s up in her room sulking.” He took a long drag on his cigarette. In the shade of the umbrella his silver hair didn’t glow quite as much. “Eve will be joining us in a few minutes.” He paused. His harsh blue eyes showed pain. “She was what we were arguing about, of course. Neither of the girls accepted her. They never gave her a chance.”
“That’s a tough transition sometimes. A stepmother.”
“They never gave her a chance.”
I was expected to agree with him.
“I see.”
Then, appearing in the French doors behind us, was a sight rare even in the upper-class homes of our town. A maid, a real one, in a gray uniform and everything. White and fiftyish and from the looks of her, Irish. If she spoke with a brogue I’d suspect that we’d been transported into a
sitcom.
“Will there be anything else, Mr. Mainwaring? I need to get going on the laundry.”
“Marsha, this is Sam McCain. He’ll be working with me for a while. Have you had lunch, Sam?”
I lied. “I have, yes. But I’d appreciate some coffee.”
“Why don’t you bring us a fresh pot, Marsha?”
“Sure. Anything else, Mr. McCain?”
“No. But thanks for asking.”
After Marsha had left, Mainwaring said, “You’re like I was at first. Nervous about having somebody wait on me all the time. Marsha was Eve’s idea. Ironically, the girls like Marsha much more than they do Eve.”
I didn’t correct the tense he was using. It was difficult to get it right when one daughter was alive and the other one was dead.
“Have you started work yet, Sam?”
A breeze carried the scent of the water in the pool. I was trying to say the unsayable. “I’ve been trying to get some background on Vanessa.”
Paul Mainwaring’s eyes narrowed and a bitter smile crossed his face. “Then you know she was something of a tease. Maybe even something of a whore.”
Fathers aren’t supposed to say that about their daughters. Other people say it and fathers say you’re a g.d. liar.
“That’s a little harsh.”
“No, it’s not, unfortunately. She was a very nice young girl even after her mother died. She was an A student, helped around the house and spent a lot of time making sure that Nicole and I were all right. I sent her to a counselor just to make sure that she wasn’t hiding any deep problems. I was afraid that maybe she was really depressed but covering it up. The counselor said she was a remarkably mature fifteen-year-old and that she was dealing with Donna’s death very well. All that changed when I brought Eve here and told the girls that I was getting married to her. They didn’t even pretend to like her. We had the wedding here. The girls went somewhere else. Wouldn’t come under any circumstances. In fact they stayed at their aunt’s in Cedar Rapids for two weeks before they came back. And it was right after that that Vanessa started changing. It was very conscious on her part. She got into the whole hippie thing. Didn’t wear a bra. I could smell the pot in her room. She also started bringing boys up to her room, something I’d never allowed before. I found some unused Trojans on her desk one day. She’d left them there on purpose so I’d be sure to see them. She wanted me to see them. She wanted to hurt me.”