by Ed Gorman
One time when he was in my office, I went to the john and came back to find him sucking in his gut and putting the moves on Jamie. She was wily enough to say, “My dad wears the same aftershave you do.” A thirty-eight-year-old self-described stud (“Hey, chicks dig me and Elaine could never understand that, the bitch.”) being compared to a God-only-knows-how-old Granddad-type? He got back to business, which meant running down his ex some more and winking at me every time he mentioned “chicks.” Number one, I hate people who wink and number two, his winks looked like tics.
The judge, a man who had no time for Judge Whitney or me, called me to the bench and leaned over and whispered: “Am I right in thinking that these two are among the biggest assholes who’ve ever appeared before me?”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
He settled mutual custody on them and ordered both of them to take parenting classes. They sputtered and spluttered and called “outrage,” in the middle of which the judge brought the hammer down, stood up, and left.
“Parenting classes? Who does that asshole think he is?”
“Maybe you’ll meet some chicks there.” I grabbed my briefcase and got out of the courtroom fast so I wouldn’t have to talk to him anymore.
The sun was so hot at ten thirty I had a science fiction image of people staggering down the sidewalk and falling into the street, their hands waving desperately in the air like drowning victims. I smoked a cigarette and took my time getting back to the office. I passed at least six people who told me how hot it was. I wouldn’t have known that otherwise.
My office is located in the rear of a building that has been many things up front. The current tenant who took the front section and thus eighty-five percent of the entire place was an auto parts store.
I walked alongside the building and when I turned I saw Jamie sitting on the steps leading to our office. She had tears in her eyes. She smoked a cigarette and sniffled. When she saw me she just sat there. No signal of recognition.
“What’re you doing out here, Jamie?” I said.
“He told me to sit out here.”
“Who’s he?”
“Mr. Mainwaring.”
“What the hell’s going on?”
Her blue eyes shone with tears. “I just did what he told me, Mr. C. He scares me.”
“So he’s inside now?”
“Uh-huh.”
I took her hand. “It’ll be all right. Why don’t you take an early lunch and do a little shopping?”
“Will you be all right?”
“Never better.”
“I really don’t like him, Mr. C.”
“I don’t either. But now he’s my problem, not yours. Now go have some good food at the deli and put it on the office account.”
“Are you sure that’s all right?”
“Well, I’ve talked to the owner of this here law office and he said it was fine with him.”
She was picking tears off her cheek with a little girl finger. And now she smiled. “I always tell people you’re the funniest man I’ve ever known, Mr. C.”
I didn’t have to walk all the way into my office. He half dived out of it to grab me before I reached the threshold. He used his size to shove me hard against the hall closet. “Where is she? Where did you send my daughter?”
He’d become a grotesque. The blue eyes were crazed and the words were cries. Drool trickled from the left side of his mouth. He was slick with sweat and it wasn’t from the heat. And then his hands reached for my throat. I tried to push off the closet door but he was too quick. I could feel the fingers on the sides of my neck. I had just enough room to knee him in the groin.
He didn’t fall down, he just went into a crouch. He turned away from me so I couldn’t see his misery. Even in this situation he was a man of great pride.
I went into my office and sat down at my desk. I pretended to be fascinated by all the pink phone slips waiting for me. He was resourceful. In less than a minute he started groaning out insults. “I’m going to see that you’re in prison for a long time, you little bastard.” And: “If she dies, you’ll be an accessory to murder.”
That one got my attention and bothered me. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“At least own up to what you did, you slimy son of a bitch.” The voice was stronger now and he was out of his crouch. As he came through the door he winced with every step. But his rage was as good as several shots of bourbon. “I don’t know how you could ever be so goddamned irresponsible. I knew you were dirt, McCain, but she’s a seventeen-year-old girl.”
He sank into Jamie’s chair. His ferocity was wearing him down. He stretched a hand to her desk as if for support. The next sound was a wail. “He’ll kill her.”
“Paul, damn it. Look at me. Tell me what you’re talking about.”
“You know damn well what I’m talking about. She’s going to have an abortion because you told her to.”
“Paul, that’s crazy. I didn’t even know she was pregnant.”
“Oh, sure. I suppose you didn’t see her yesterday afternoon, either.”
“Yeah, I did see her. And what we talked about most of the time was how she and Van learned that you were doing the same thing Eve was and that you were in a wife-swapping group. And how much she and Van hated it.”
“Don’t put the goddamn blame on me. This is your fault. She’s looking up some butcher who’ll abort her. She doesn’t know about sleazy things like that. That’s your territory. You and your great friend Neil Cameron. He’s the one who seduced her.”
I had my elbow on the desk. Now I rested my head on my hand and took a deep breath. There are moments when the brain can’t—or refuses to—comprehend and process all the information it is presented. Pregnant. Abortion. Neil Cameron. My voice sounded mournful. “What makes you think she’s looking for an abortion?”
“She told Marsha she was having one and was driving over to see some guy. This was about twenty minutes ago.”
“Oh, God.”
“No shit, huh? Finally sinking in, McCain? Maybe having second thoughts about what you told her?”
I slammed my fist so hard against the desk top that I numbed my hand. “I didn’t know she was pregnant and I sure as hell didn’t tell her to get an abortion. Do you understand that?”
For the first time clarity came into his eyes. The lunacy waned. “Then who told her about this abortionist?”
“I have no idea. And even if I get around with lowlifes sometimes, I don’t know anything about an abortionist in Black River Falls. There was one but he’s doing time in Fort Dodge.”
Wailing now. “Then where is she?”
“Shut up for a minute.”
I grabbed the receiver and started dialing. Kenny answered on the third ring. At this time of day he’d be working on his portable typewriter slamming through “Cannibal Warriors of the Third Reich!” or something similar.
“Yeah?” He did not like being interrupted.
“I’ve got a big problem here, Kenny, and I’m really in a hurry. Is there anybody you know of who’s peddling abortions these days? I know it’s been quiet since Thompson got sent up to Fort Dodge for killing that girl.”
“Supposedly there’s some guy in Milburn. His name is Windom or something like that. I don’t know that for a fact. But I heard it from one of the kids who always comes out here to get his copies of my stuff autographed.”
Even Kenny was a star of sorts. “That’s all you know?”
“Yeah, I’m sorry, that’s the best I can do.”
“Thanks, Kenny. That’s a start anyway.”
Mainwaring was on his feet. “What did he say?”
“Milburn. Some guy named Windom. But he says the only way he heard it is that some kid who wants his books autographed told him.”
“People want that trash autographed?”
This coming from Mr. Open Marriage and Mr. Wife Swap. But now wasn’t the time to respond.
We took his Jaguar. Milburn was fifteen mi
les away. We both smoked. Any time we pulled up behind a car or truck Mainwaring leaned on the horn as if he thought they’d be so afraid that their vehicles would just take flight and clear a path for us.
“If he laid a hand on her, I’ll kill him.”
“First of all, we don’t even know that he’s the guy. So it would make sense to stay a little cool until we find out.”
“You don’t give a damn, she’s not your daughter.”
“No, but believe it or not, I like her and I don’t want some butcher cutting her up.”
All I got was a snarl.
Despite the heat, autumn could be seen in the hills, the tips of trees burning into golds and browns and reds and that scent of fall on a few vagrant breezes. For all the stupendous colossal magnificence of the Jag, the damn air conditioning wouldn’t work so we had the windows down.
Milburn runs to maybe fifteen thousand and is known mainly for the Pioneer Days celebration it throws on Labor Day, complete with costumed people and a lot of artifacts from the middle of the last century. It gets a lot of state press, and some big national advertisers sponsor a good share of the expenses.
As we entered the town limits I had the feeling that the place was a big old dog lying on its side in the boiling heat. The shopping district, which ran four blocks, showed a lot of empty parking spaces and only a few people on the sidewalks. A tractor was ahead of us at a stoplight so Mainwaring went into one of his rants about how hillbillies should be shot–stabbed–set on fire for getting in the way of the movers and shakers who by divine right were running this planet. Since (A) farmers aren’t hillbillies and (B) I’m pretty sure that there had to be some hillbillies in my bloodline dating back to the early 1800s, I started thinking about shooting–stabbing–setting him on fire.
Finally I saw a Sinclair station and said, “Pull in.”
He swept the beast onto the drive and I was out the door, him shouting, “What the hell are you doing?”
I like gas stations—the smells of oil and gas and the clang and clank of the guys working on cars in the garage. I like good old gas station conversations, standing around and saying nothing much with a Pepsi and some peanuts and a cigarette with some other guys who are also saying nothing much. This time all I wanted was a phone book which, in the case of Milburn, was about as thick as a comic book.
The middle-aged guy in the green uniform who came out of the garage wiping his hands on a rag looked like the man to ask. “Can you tell me how I’d find Sullivan Road?”
“Sure. Easy to get to from here. You go down two blocks to the Woman’s Shop—big store right on the corner—and you turn right and go straight for—let’s see—eight blocks. Maybe nine. Anyway, Sullivan Street is off that road there. You’ll see a street sign.”
“Thanks.”
“We don’t see many of those around here.”
He meant the Jag. “Yeah, but the air-conditioning doesn’t work.”
He had a great midwestern grin. “You’re kidding.”
“’Fraid not. Well, thanks.”
“You took long enough,” Mainwaring said when I got in the car.
“Shut up and listen.”
“I’m not used to people telling me to shut up.”
“Tough shit. Now listen.”
I gave him directions. They were easy to follow but we went through the honking again. I wanted to find Nicole, too, but without a siren on the Jag, other vehicles just weren’t going to shoot up on lawns to get out of our way.
Sullivan Road was where houses went to die. Most of the homes were built in the ’20s from what I could see, two-story white clapboards adjacent to garages not much bigger than closets. Porches leaned and chimneys toppled and shutters hung crooked. On a few of them you could see porch swings that hung from only one chain. The cars were also old, blanched colors and monster rust eating its way across the length of the vehicles.
“This is just the kind of place I expected it’d be,” Mainwaring said.
“We’re looking for Seventeen twenty-four.”
“Some rathole.”
“We’re on the sixteen hundreds now.”
“If he’s touched her, I’ll kill him.”
“You already said that. There’s Seventeen-oh-two.”
“There’s her car!”
The way he grabbed the door handle I thought he was going to leap out of the car before he even slowed down. There was a space across from Nicole’s silver Mustang. Mainwaring pulled in. I had to grab his shirt as he tried to vault from the car. “We don’t know what we’re walking into here. So let me handle this, you understand?”
“Take your hand off me. This is my daughter you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, well if you’re so concerned about your daughter, then we go in there cool and calm.” He was so pissed I reasoned that the only way to get his attention was to shock him. “What if he’s operating on her? He hears us breaking in and he slips and makes a mistake? You want to be responsible for that?”
His eyes closed tight. An anxious breath. “Oh, God, my poor little Nicole.”
“I’ll handle things. All right?”
“All right.”
“Let’s go.”
The white picket fence around the scorched grass leaned inward, in some spots so low it was only a few inches from the ground. The gate was missing. The walkway to the door was cracked into jagged points. A variety of animals had used the east side of the lawn for a toilet. Apparently the right side didn’t have any toilet paper.
Mainwaring dragged himself now, as if afraid of what lay ahead. He must have still been thinking of the image of the abortionist’s tool slipping when he heard our invasion. He muttered to himself but I wasn’t sure what he was saying.
In the short distance between the car and the screenless screen door I was already soaked with sweat. We were going to hit ninety-four today according to the dubious wisdom of the weatherman.
There was a bell but I stuck my hand through the frame of the screen door and knocked. The neighborhood was quiet. The loudest sound was the power mower we’d passed about half a block away.
I knocked again. This time a male voice behind the door said something. Then the man who I assumed owned the voice did a foolish thing. He went to the east window and edged the dirty white curtains back and looked out. Straight into my face. I jabbed a finger at the door. The curtain dropped back.
Just to annoy him I knocked again. This time he opened the door. He was a short, heavyset man who had more hair on his body than a papa gorilla. A white T-shirt only emphasized the thick, hirsute chest and arms.
“Help you with something?”
Mainwaring’s strength was sufficient to hurl me off the low doorstep and grab on to the hairy man with enough force to drive him back inside so fast I didn’t have time to quite understand what was happening. I piled through the doorway right behind him. By now Nicole, who was seated on a badly soiled light blue couch, was pounding on her father’s back as he bent over to smash his fist again and again into the hairy man’s face. The man was on his knees. His face was already bloody.
I pushed Nicole aside so I could slam my fist into the side of Mainwaring’s head. But he had true madness on his side. He was gone into a realm where only murder would satisfy him. Prisons are filled with men like him, men who pay for a single explosive moment with long stretches behind bars.
The hairy man was crying and pleading. Mainwaring didn’t stop hitting him until I kicked him so hard in the back of his left knee that he slowed and turned just enough for me to hit him almost square in the face. The hairy man was smart enough to slide away.
Nicole was back on the couch, sobbing now, sounding as crazed as her father, striking her fists against her thighs again and again.
I shoved Mainwaring toward her. “Take care of your daughter.”
Dazed, he stumbled toward the couch and sat down next to her. He still didn’t know what to do. He just sat there, still trapped in the vestiges of his rag
e. Then she surprised both of us by throwing herself into his arms and finally he was her father again, and he held her and began crying along with her.
I followed a trail of blood dots on faded linoleum to a small bathroom where the hairy man was splashing water on his face and cursing with a good deal of eloquence.
“That son of a bitch is gonna be payin’ me a lot of money by the time I get through with him.”
“Are you Windom?”
He whipped around and glared at me. “No, I ain’t Windom. Windom moved about four months ago when me’n the missus moved up from Anamosa. She’s at work and this is my day off from the railroad.” He put a hairy paw to his nose. “This look broke?”
I stepped closer. “Doesn’t look like it but I’m not a doc.”
He was still trembling. So was I for that matter.
“I’m gettin’ me a lawyer.”
“I don’t blame you. I’ll help you find one. I’m Sam McCain.” I put my hand out and he shook after hesitating. Blood bubbled on the left side of his mouth. “You need to go to an emergency room and get checked out. What’s your name, by the way?”
“Ryan. Nick Ryan.”
He grabbed a towel, wincing as he wiped his face. “Bastard is lucky I didn’t have my glasses. I can’t see much without ’em.” Finished drying his face, he said, “She ain’t been here but maybe fifteen minutes and I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. She said she was in trouble and didn’t I know what she meant. Then she started cryin’. If the wife was here she woulda known what to do but you know how it is when women cry—especially a young one like her—I just got her a bottle of pop and an ashtray. Young kid like that, I felt sorry for her. Then her old man busts in and tries to kill me. What’s this Windom s’posed to have done, anyway? This is the second girl come here since we moved in.”