by Ed Gorman
“You see the game yesterday, McCain?”
“Couple innings on TV.”
“I’m taking a cyanide capsule with me next time I go. They screw up like they did yesterday, I’ll just slide it under my tongue and that’ll be that. The way my oldest boy’s been carryin’ on, that doesn’t sound all that bad anyway.” Hack. “So what can I do for you?”
I told him about Eve. Gave him all the details about her background I’d managed to put together.
“If this isn’t all bullshit she must be quite the doll.”
I told him about Vanessa’s death. “The girls couldn’t stand her. After talking to her this morning it was easy to see why.”
“Solid gold bitch, huh?”
“Yeah, and one who seems to enjoy the role.”
“I’ll probably need twenty-four hours on this. I take it you’re on an expense account.”
“Yeah.”
“Then no discounts. For you personally I’d go twenty-five percent off.”
“Hey, I appreciate that.”
“You do good work, kid.”
“Well, you do good work, too, Pete.”
The big agencies had access to people and documentation all over the country. The starting point would probably be Dartmouth, where she’d been a professor. They’d likely work backward from there.
I’d been talking on line one. As soon as I began lowering the receiver, line two rang. Jamie answered, “Sam McCain’s law office.” She sounded official as hell. She listened and then said: “He’s right here, Commander Potter.” She nodded to me. I picked up; she hung up.
“Hi, Mike, what’s going on?”
“You know that old Skelly station near the roundhouse? Been closed down for a couple years?”
“Sure. Why?”
“Well, somebody spotted Cameron there and I jumped in the car and found him.”
“You bringing him in?”
“Yeah, Sam. But there isn’t any hurry. He put a .45 to his head and killed himself.”
PART TWO
10
The station had been abandoned in the late ’40s, the reason being that the ones in town were new and bright and easy to get to. This was a holdover from the early ’30s, a two-pump station that sold only gas and oil, no car repairs. Kids had smashed out the windows and animals had used the drive as a bathroom. The front door had been chained shut. If you looked through one of the dust-coated front windows you could see a large movie poster advertising a Betty Grable film circa 1945 when Betty was already slipping in popularity.
Three squad cars and an ambulance were parked on the east side of the station. I pulled up behind them and walked to the back of the place where a green wooden storage shed was tucked into a stand of hardwoods. Potter was explaining to two uniforms how he wanted them to gather evidence, who would start where, and so on. The ambulance boys leaned against the open rear doors of their big white box, looking slightly bored and taking it out on their cigarettes. As usual, the joyous birdsong reminded me that the so-called lower orders could give a shit about the travails of the plodding creatures that lumbered across their land. Nature presented them with their own travails.
Potter set his men to work and then walked over to me. “I’d let you have a look at him but we’re still gathering evidence. I wanted you out here so I could tell you firsthand what I saw when I got out here. He’s in the back of the shed. He had a blanket and some sandwiches in a brown paper bag. Obviously somebody helped him. From what I could see, he didn’t have any marks on his arms or hands or face. No signs of a struggle, in other words, in case you’re thinking somebody killed him and then planted the gun in his hand. He fired a .45 above his right ear. The exit wound is a big bastard, bigger than usual. The doc is on his way. He’ll be able to guesstimate when Cameron did the deed. Now, I’m sure you have a lot of questions, so if you want to wait around for a couple of hours—there’s a pretty good burger joint about a mile from here—we’ll probably have a lot more information for you.”
“I’m sure your boss will take this as an admission of guilt.”
“Right now I do, Sam. And if you can step back and be a little objective, you should, too. You’ll say everything’s circumstantial and it probably is, but he was obsessed with the girl, she broke it off with him, and he killed her. That’s not exactly a new story. He hides out, he’s afraid and probably sorry for what he’d done, and he kills himself.”
“Where did he get the gun?”
“Where did he get the sandwiches and the blanket? Probably the same place.”
“I’ll get to see the blanket and gun?”
“As long as the chief isn’t here. He’s still pissed off about your John Wayne crack. Being a draft dodger and all.”
“Good thing I didn’t tell him that Superman can’t actually fly.”
He shook his head and smiled. “You two really hate each other, don’t you?”
“I don’t hate him as much as he hates me.”
“Yeah, I kind of figured that was the case.” He waved to a squad car that had just pulled up. “Now I gotta get back to work.”
I drove back to town. When I saw a phone booth outside a Howard Johnson’s I pulled over. I had Paul Mainwaring’s phone number scribbled in the small notepad I carry in my left back pocket. Marsha the maid answered.
“I’m afraid he’s at the funeral home, Mr. McCain. The burial will be tomorrow. Mr. Mainwaring just wants to get it over with.”
“Well, will you please give him this message, Marsha? The police have found Neil Cameron’s body in a shed in back of that old Skelly station on the edge of town.”
Her gasp—and it was indeed a gasp—surprised me. “Oh, my Lord.”
“Are you all right, Marsha?”
“He was such a nice boy. I liked him so much.”
She was reacting as if a close friend had died. “Did you know him pretty well, Marsha?”
“He was around here a lot. Sometimes Vanessa would invite him over, but by the time he’d get here some other boy would have picked her up and taken her off. I cared for Vanessa but she was very cruel to boys sometimes. He’d look so sad I’d talk to him. Every so often, if I wasn’t busy and nobody else was around, I’d talk to him for quite a while. My own son is in his thirties and lives in Michigan with his family. I suppose I kind of adopted Neil a little bit. I know he was upset, but I don’t for a minute believe he murdered poor Vanessa—you can tell that to Mr. Mainwaring for all I care—and I just can’t imagine him killing himself, either. I’m sure you think I’m being naïve, but those are my feelings.”
“I’m pretty sure what they’re saying is his suicide will close the case.”
“Not for me it won’t. Nobody’ll ever convince me he did either of those things. Oh, there’s the doorbell. People have been sending flowers to the house. I wish they wouldn’t. We’ll just have to drag them all to the funeral home and the church. You’ll have to excuse me now.”
By the time I got back to the Skelly station, the onlookers and reporters had gone. Potter was standing next to a large metal box where his officers had been putting the evidence bags they’d been filling. Potter was talking to two of his men so I had time to scan the plastic bags. A quart of Hamm’s beer, a half-finished sandwich of some kind, a pair of white socks with blood on the toe of one of them, a stadium blanket of deep blue with horizontal yellow stripes, a Greyhound bus schedule, a Swiss army knife, and a small black flashlight. There were many more items beneath these but I assumed Potter wouldn’t be real happy if he saw me pawing through his evidence bags.
“Any sign of a note?” I asked Potter when he walked over to me.
“No, but there might be a good explanation for that, Sam. Maybe he just didn’t have anything to write with.”
“It’s still strange.”
“It’s strange if you want it to be strange. Otherwise it’s as simple as my explanation.”
I nodded to where the ambulance had been. “The doc say anything un
expected?”
“Just that it looked like a suicide. He wanted to get Cameron on the table before he said it officially, but he said any other explanation was unlikely.”
“All the evidence in the bags—will his sister get his belongings at some point?”
“At some point, yes. I imagine this thing’ll end at the inquest. So it shouldn’t take long. He killed himself.”
From what Sarah Powers had told me, Neil Cameron had been a confused and angry man after he came back from Vietnam. The deaths he’d seen—and the lives he’d taken by mistake—had alienated him from not only others but himself as well. He’d come to rely on romance to redeem him, but when that had failed him, failed him because of his own obsessiveness and possessiveness, he’d started getting into even more trouble than he had previously. Then he’d met Vanessa and became even more desperate. Some of these facts would make their way into the inquest. They would convince everybody present that he’d been a prime candidate for suicide. He’d murdered his true love because she wouldn’t have him and then in remorse taken his own life.
“I’d tell your friends at the commune it’s probably time for them to move on, Sam. For everybody’s sake, including theirs. I don’t mind them as long as they don’t break the law, but after all this, the city council’s going to be on their ass for sure. They’ll come up with some ordinance to run them out or to make their lives so miserable they’ll want to leave anyway. Might as well get it over with now.”
“I’ll talk to them. But Richard Donovan has a temper and he isn’t afraid of much. I doubt he’ll listen. And I’m not sure they should be forced to move anyway. If Cameron did kill Vanessa Mainwaring, he acted alone. The others didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Just trying to help. I want a nice, peaceful life. That’s why I came out here. The hippies just seem to agitate a lot of people.”
“And you know why that is, don’t you?”
“The long hair?”
“All the sex. Everybody secretly wants to have as much sex as these kids have. But since they can’t, they take it out on the hippies.”
“You really believe that?”
I smiled. “Sometimes.”
11
The first time I ever heard Judge Whitney call Richard Nixon “Dick” and Leonard Bernstein “Lenny,” I was under the impression that she was making up her so-called relationships with these two gentlemen. But then “Dick” Nixon came and stayed with her at her manse and “Lenny” Bernstein started sending her both birthday and Christmas gifts. There was also the fact that she certainly had the opportunity to meet with them because she took at least four trips a year to New York City, where both men resided. She often said she could “breathe” in New York City, implying of course that she found our little city suffocating. She didn’t try to hide her snobbery and maybe she didn’t believe she was being snobbish. For a conservative Republican she was liberal when it came to civil rights and protecting the poor against the wealthy, and she became enraged whenever a group of local idiots tried to have this or that book banned from the public library.
She was a remarkable woman, given that she’d been married four times, no children, had managed to keep her looks even now into her sixties and, for good measure, had taught Barry Goldwater how to mambo. I’m not sure he wanted to learn how to mambo but the judge can be most persuasive at times. I know about the Goldwater tutorial because there’s a black-and-white framed photo of it on the wall of her judicial chambers.
She’s had her grief. Her deepest love was for her first husband, who was killed in the Pacific when our troops were getting slaughtered there early on. Her fourth husband died behind the wheel of a new Lincoln Continental while drunkenly escorting his drunken secretary to a motel where they were known as frequent guests. This didn’t help her own reliance on alcohol. Finally, she checked herself into a rehabilitation clinic in Minnesota. She was now several years dry and a fervent attendee at AA meetings.
None of this had dulled her edge; nothing could. She was still imperious, and after all these years I wasn’t sure that I wanted her any other way.
She stood in the sunlight arcing through the tall, mullioned window of the old courthouse. In her crisp peach-colored suit, her Gauloise cigarette streaming soft blue smoke from her fingers, she might have been a woman in one of those magazines only rich people read. Staring out at a polo match or the arrival of a head of state.
Without turning to look at me, she said: “My friends at the club very smugly told me that Cliffie has the Mainwaring murder solved and ready for the county attorney. It’s even worse this morning. By the time I got to my chambers, four different people told me that they’d read the local rag, and apparently there’s a quote from Cliffie—more or less in English—that he won’t be ‘outguessed’ on this one. He also said that your friends, those dreadful ‘hippies’ as you call them, should be forced to leave town.” Now she glared at me. “I don’t want that illiterate fool outsmarting us on this one, McCain.”
“He hasn’t yet.”
“Dummies have dumb luck. Maybe he’s right for once.”
She crossed the room with finishing school aplomb and set her quite fine bottom on the edge of her desk, Gauloise in one hand, her glass of Perrier in the other. “If this Cameron boy didn’t kill her, why did he commit suicide?”
“I don’t think it was suicide. And I’m hoping the doc agrees with me.”
“The ‘doc,’” she scoffed. “Somebody brought him as a guest to the club one night and he got three sheets to the wind and started talking about how stupid Republicans are. At the club, if you can imagine.”
“I wish I could’ve been there.”
“You’ll never set foot in our club if I have anything to do with it. You’d be worse than he was. You’d probably start giving your Saul Alinsky speech.”
Saul Alinsky was the Chicago professor famous for teaching groups that were powerless how to organize and become powerful. These groups were always the outsiders, ethnic and political ones looking for justice. “He’s one of my heroes.”
“What’s wrong with William F. Buckley?”
“Too prissy and too smug.”
“I’ll mention that to Bill when I see him next month.”
“I have several other things you could tell him, but you wouldn’t want those words to come from your mouth.”
A dramatic drag on the Gauloise: “So if he didn’t kill her, who did?”
“Right now there are several possibilities. I wanted to ask you if you’d ever heard anything at your club about Eve Mainwaring.”
She stretched her legs out, inspected them. Long and slender, perfectly turned. She had good wheels and knew it. “Personally, I like her. She’s a bit standoffish, but that’s only because when she first started coming there all the usual sex fiends started chasing her.”
“Paul didn’t object?”
“Paul wasn’t around. God, that man travels more than LBJ. She usually came with one of the other club women.”
“So you haven’t heard anything about her?”
“That she sleeps around? Of course. I’ve heard it. But I don’t believe it. I’ve talked to her a number of times. It turns out she loves Lenny’s music.”
“Ah.”
“Don’t think I don’t know what’s behind that ‘Ah.’ When I told her that Lenny was a friend of mine, she was fascinated and wanted to hear all about him. I consider that a sign of intelligence and sophistication.”
“So you don’t think any of the scuttlebutt about her is true?”
“I most certainly don’t.”
“I don’t suppose she’s a fan of Dick Nixon, too.”
Another momentary indulgence on her cigarette: “I wouldn’t be crude enough to ask, McCain. That’s something people like you would do. She did say, however—and I had absolutely nothing to do with this—that she didn’t think much of Hubert Humphrey. I’ll let you make up your own mind on that.”
“She’s supp
orting George Wallace?”
She slipped off the desk. “I’ve had enough of you for today. Now get busy. I want to put a stop to all this nonsense about Cliffie having solved the case.”
“If I pull it off will you invite me to your club?”
She couldn’t help it. She smiled. “They’d eat you alive, McCain. And they wouldn’t laugh at even one of your stupid jokes. Now get going.”
The main floor of the courthouse held what was called a luncheonette. For employees of the courthouse it was perfect for quick breakfasts, quick lunches, and twenty-minute coffee breaks. Next to it stood a small stand run by a blind man named Phil Lynott. He’d gone to the Vinton School for the Blind back in the mid-’40s and had been running the stand ever since. He sold newspapers, cigarettes, cigars, and pipe tobacco. He was a rangy, balding man who wore dark glasses. He could tell you where every single item was. He could retrieve said item in seconds. Just about everybody liked him. One time a smart-ass, on a bet, tried to steal a newspaper. A big defense lawyer who’d played tackle for the U of Iowa got the culprit around the neck and damn near choked him to death. Phil had had no such trouble since.
“Hi, Phil. Did Cartwright finally convert you?”
Phil laughed. “You know he’s on in the afternoon now, too.” He nodded to his small black plastic radio.
“Oh, goody.”
“Whatever else you can say about him, he’s great entertainment.”
“… and so tonight in the park my flock will be presenting a one-act play called Jesus Meets a Hippie. This is something the entire family will want to see, especially if you’ve got boys or girls who think they might want to grow their hair long and take drugs and fornicate before marriage. As I said to my wife just the other night, when I think of all that fornicating I just can’t get to sleep.”
Phil’s laughter rang off the sculpted halls of the courthouse. “‘Don’t bother me now, honey, I’m thinking of all that fornication.’” He was still laughing when I pushed through the heavy glass doors and stepped into the ninety-six-degree afternoon.