Sam McCain - 05 - Everybody's Somebody's Fool

by Ed Gorman

  I was hoping to find Egan’s smashed-up car at the Dx station where I trade.

  It sat in front of an open bay waiting for its autopsy. The motor might be salvageable —probably was—z well as some of the custom accoutrements that private owners would pay decent money for.

  Jay Norbert was looking it over and nodding his head in rhythm to whatever his customer was saying.

  The car itself was a great alien metal beast to be pondered and studied. A lot of people would want to know what had gone wrong. Had it been the car or Egan or both?

  The customer walked away just as I

  approached. Jay had just gotten out of the army.

  He’d been a good mechanic when he went in; he was an even better one now that he was out. He was a skinny twenty-two-year-old who was already losing his hair. He always kept his uniform spotless. His boss had opened another gas station across town and put Jay in charge of this one. A doctor in a nearby town had done some questionable things during the pregnancy of Jay’s wife; that was why I knew his story. We were suing the doc.

  “Sonofabitch,” Jay said. “There isn’t enough left here to haul to the junkyard.”

  “The poor bastard.”

  “I didn’t like him but I sure wouldn’t wish this on him.”

  “Why didn’t you like him?”

  “He came on to Marie one day.” Marie being his wife, a pretty farm girl. “Right in front of me, too. I started to say something but Marie dragged me away. Was hard workin’ on his car when he came in.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Oh, what’s that?”

  “His car. I was wondering if you’d check something for me.”

  He smiled. “Cliffie was in. He’s already got it figured out, he says.”

  “Really? This should be good.”

  “Friday night Egan kills the girl,

  see, and Saturday night he’s so guilty he gets all gooned up and then runs his car right off the road. Case closed.”

  “Man, that Cliffie. When he puts that brain of his to use, stand back and watch the sparks fly.”

  He laughed. “I suppose it could’ve

  happened that way.”

  “He didn’t kill her.”

  I was just walking back to my car when Donny Hughes pulled up. His heavily chromed black leather jacket was just as inevitable as his waterfall blond ducktail. “Holy shit. No wonder he died.” His entire face tightened as he looked at the remains of Egan’s Merc.

  “That’s right. You keep on drinking and drag racing, that could be you.”

  He stayed in his street rod, an elbow on the open window of the driver’s side. “Wonder how Rita’s doin’?”

  “I wouldn’t bother her right now.”

  “Things may change, McCain. With Egan dead, maybe she’ll see how much I dig her.

  I buy her gifts all the time. Just bought her a pair of desert boots and a new green sweater.

  You should see that sweater on her.”

  “I wouldn’t move in on her just yet, Donny. I think the mandatory grieving time is something like an hour and a half in this state.”

  “Hey, McCain, I didn’t mean—”

  I waved him off and went to my car. It never takes long for the “good friends” to move in on the spoils.

  Scrambled eggs, blueberry muffins, three strips of perfectly cooked bacon, orange juice—th was the breakfast Emma and Amy Kelly had fixed for me.

  Theirs was an immigrant Irish house, a tiny white clapboard box on a tiny lot with a tiny garage on its back edge. A

  well-scrubbed living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, and two bedrooms packed with doilies, small statues of the Virgin and assorted saints, an eleven-inch Tv screen, and framed paintings of Christ that managed to be sad and somehow lurid at the same time.

  We ate in the dining room on a table that smelled of its new oilcloth covering with a decades-old record player scratching out Irish jigs from the living room.

  Emma looked as composed, even cold, as she had on the highway last night. Amy’s eyes were red and ruined and her flesh was gray.

  Emma said, “I suppose you’ve heard what that stupid ass Cliffie is saying.”

  “That it was suicide?”

  Emma nodded. “He isn’t Catholic. He doesn’t understand. For a Catholic to take his own life—”

  his—eternal damnation,” Amy said.

  “He got drunk and wrecked his car. That’s all that happened. And he didn’t kill that Sara Griffin girl, either. He loved her.”

  “That’s exactly what he said? That he loved her?”

  “He told both of us that,” Emma said. “And she was the only girl he’d ever said that about.”

  “When did he say that?”

  She looked at Amy. “Tuesday?”

  “Monday, I think,” Amy said. “It was right after “The Lucy Show.””

  “You and your “Lucy Show”,” Emma said.

  She reached over and patted her sister’s hand.

  “We each have our favorite shows and argue about which of them is best. I like Jackie Gleason.”

  “He’s not a very good Catholic is what I read in the papers,” Amy said. “He’s married but he runs around on his wife all the time.”

  “They’re separated,” Emma said.

  “That doesn’t matter in the eyes of the church,”

  Amy said. “He still shouldn’t be running around on her.”

  I wondered if Jackie Gleason’s ears were burning. His sex life was being discussed with some force by two elderly Catholic ladies in rural Iowa.

  “David wanted to marry Sara,” Amy said.

  “He treated her differently from the others.”

  “How so?”

  “For one thing,” Amy said, “he had to chase her rather than the other way around.”

  “And she was troubled, too, the poor thing,”

  Emma said. “Her father putting her in that mental place. And those electroshock treatments. There was a thing on Tv about them. They’re really scary to watch.”

  “Imagine what it’s like to go through them,” Amy said.

  “Anyway, we want you to have something, Sam,”

  Emma said.

  And from the pocket of her apron she took a small white envelope and placed it carefully next to my coffee cup. “This is the best we can d. But we’ll have more for you in the future.”

  Inside the envelope was one hundred dollars in denominations of twenty.

  “What’s this?”

  “We’re hiring you,” Emma said.

  “To do what?”

  “Prove that David didn’t kill poor

  Sara.”

  “And that he didn’t commit suicide,” Amy said.

  “He was like our son, Sam. He had a pretty rough reputation and a lot of it he deserved. But he doesn’t deserve to be remembered as a murderer and a suicide.”

  “And you know Cliffie, Sam,” Amy said.

  “At mass this morning, Mrs. Corroon said that Mrs. Kerry’s husband, Earl, saw Cliffie at the Bluebird Caf@e this morning and Cliffie was telling everybody how he’d wrapped everything up already. David killed Sara and committed suicide.”

  “Yeah, I heard that particular bit of Cliffie wisdom myself. But I can’t take this money.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if I do I’ll fall off the wagon again.”

  “What wagon?” Amy said.

  “He means he’ll start drinking again,” Emma said. “But since when did you have a drinking problem?”

  “Couple years now. Every time I get my hands on any money, I go on a bender.”

  Emma smiled at her sister. “He doesn’t want to take our money because he thinks we’re poor.”

  “Why, we’re not poor, Sam,” Amy said.

  “Even after we took this out of the jar we keep in the basement—we just don’t trust banks since the Depression and all—we’ve got seventy-five dollars left. And people with
seventy-five dollars aren’t exactly poor, you know.”

  They were regular John D.

  Rockefellers, they were.

  “How about this? I have my own reasons to work on this.”

  “It’s Judge Whitney, isn’t it?”

  Emma said.

  “Is it true she hates Catholics?”

  Amy asked.

  “Yes, but don’t take it personally,” I said. “She hates just about everybody.”

  “Judge Whitney wants to prove that

  Cliffie’s wrong so she wants you to find out what happened, am I right?”

  “You’re absolutely right. According to her she wants me to “humiliate” him.”

  “Cliffie’s so stupid, I doubt he even knows it when he’s being humiliated,” Emma said.

  Then crossed herself. “My Lord, listen to me, will you? Saying things like that about the poor man. The Lord saw fit to make him stupid for a reason only the Lord himself can understand. It’s not for me to question the Lord’s reasons for things.”

  “We’re just mad because he’s telling everybody that David killed Sara and then killed himself.”

  “I don’t blame you. I’m mad, too. And I intend to start proving he’s wrong.”

  “When do you think you’ll start, Sam?”

  I glanced at my Timex, drained the last of my coffee, and stood up. “How about right now?”

  I went to the grocery store for milk and cat food, the cigar store for cigarettes and Sunday papers from the biggest cities I could find, and finally to the Dx for another peek at the wreck of Egan’s black Merc. Jay Norbert was on his haunches with a flashlight, trying to find what I’d asked him to look for inside the tangled metal.

  Then I stopped by the office for some papers I’d forgotten. I was a couple feet from my interior office door when I heard the crying.

  I’d heard her cry so many times before, I knew who it was immediately.

  She cried the day she got a bad hairdo down at the House of Beauty styling salon, she cried the day her teacher informed her that she was getting an F in typing, she cried the day it was announced that Dick and Darla and not John and Jeanie had won the American Bandstand dance contest.

  But mostly what she cried about was

  Turk, the eighteen-year-old hotshot who’d dropped out of high school so he could “like, you know, make some bread,” which he was currently doing by working at Suds City, the local car wash.

  To be fair, I don’t suppose he meant to be as irritating as he was. He wasn’t posing as Jimmy Dean or Marlon; he was irritating all on his own, one of those dumb, puppy-dog kids who will always be seventeen years old. Turk was Jamie’s boyfriend and Jamie was my secretary, loaned to me by her father in lieu of the money he owed me for representing him in a boundary dispute with his neighbor. I wonder if Jamie isn’t the vessel of his retribution.

  I’d lost the case for him.

  Jamie was the prototype for every teenage girl depicted on the covers of paperbacks where the term “jailbait” is used, a bouncy, giggly and vastly earnest girl who could, at her most dangerous, turn the simple act of boiling an egg into a kitchen explosion that would flatten the house.

  I like Jamie. I don’t know why I like her, I don’t even want to like her, and no, it isn’t that heartbreaking teenage body of hers, either.

  It’s her sincerity, I guess. She’s sincere about everything, outside of convents for cloistered nuns or the third floor of asylums where they keep the violent ones.

  “Oh, Mr. C,” she sobbed when I walked in. “My mascara.”

  True, she did have little black snakes wriggling down her nicely shaped cheeks. But they were sincere little black snakes. The Mr. C

  reference is one she picked up from the Perry Como Tv show, where all the dancers call him “Mr. C.” Jamie thinks this is pretty cool. Someday she’ll realize that because my last name is McCain, I should be “Mr. M.”

  She wore a brown sweater that would inspire a rush to cold showers by middle-aged men throughout these United States, and a pair of jeans that defined the rest of that paperback body. She was also smoking a cigarette, something I’d never seen her do before. The cigarette was parked on the edge of a Camel cigarette tin ashtray right next to my framed photo of the sad-sweet face of Shemp, my favorite of the Three Stooges. Himmler of Black River Falls decorated my

  place right before they sent him up for the

  third time on the charge of offending the public taste.

  “Gosh,” I said, “is everything all right at home?”

  “Everything’s fine,” she said with that kind of girly forlornness that teeters self-consciously between tragedy and comedy. “At home, I mean, everything’s fine. But everything’s not fine between Turk and me.”

  “Good old Turk. What’d he do now?”

  She sniffled. “He misspelled my name.”

  Coming from a girl who has often misspelled my name on letters—even though the correct spelling appears in the letterhead at the top—th was quite an accusation.

  “I’m sure he didn’t do it on purpose, Jamie.”

  She was bawling over Turk misspelling her name?

  She sniffled some more. “It’s just that it’s forever.”

  “What’s forever?”

  “The tattoo.” Said as if I were a mind reader and should have known what she was talking about.

  “Ah,” said I, “the tattoo.” The reason for her misery was coming clear.

  Only Turk could have pulled this baby off.

  “Let me see if I can reconstruct this.”

  “It’s terrible, Mr. C. Just horrible.”

  “Turk got drunk.”

  “Yes. Very, very drunk.”

  “And somebody gave him a tattoo.”

  “That stupid Phil Craper.”

  “And Phil was drunk, too.”

  “Phil’s always drunk. He’s a wino.”

  “And so Phil is as bad a speller as Turk. And when they went to put the tattoo on they wrote—”

  “Just-a-m-m-i-e. “I love Jammie” it says. With a heart.”

  “And the tattoo is on—”

  his—his shoulder. And you know how he likes to walk around without his shirt on. P’ll laugh at it when they see it. They’ll think Turk is stupid.”

  “Gee, I can’t imagine that.”

  She shook her cute head miserably and stared off at a fate that not even her worst enemy could have contrived. “And p’ll start calling me Jammie, Mr. C.” A sob. “Sometimes I feel like my life is just over.” She raised

  teary blue eyes to me. “Do you ever feel like that?”

  “Six or seven times a day.”

  She didn’t smile. “Jammie. I just can’t believe he could be that dumb. Even when he was drunk.”

  The phone rang.

  She watched it as if it were going to do something obscene. “It’s him.”

  “Turk?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  It rang and rang.

  “Aren’t you going to answer?”

  “I’ll let him suffer.”

  “You know, Jamie, it could just possibly be for me. I mean, this is a law office. Not a huge or very successful law office. But a law office nonetheless.”

  She shrugged, unfazed by my pompous little speech. “I can tell by the ring it’s Turk. It just sounds a certain way.”

  I saw the file folder I’d forgotten to take home. I’d left it on my desk.

  “I think I’ll just pick this up and go, Jamie.”

  The ringing phone was going to make me psychotic any minute now.

  “You’re sure it’s Turk?”

  “Sure I’m sure, Mr. C,” she said,

  sounding a little peeved. “Can’t you tell by the sound of that ring?”

  Fourteen

  Whenever Judge Esme Anne Whitney

  wore jodhpurs, she always recalled-Galouise cigarette in one hand and snifter of brandy in another—how when she was a lass of fourteen in a boarding school so ref
ined none of the girls there so much as went to the bathroom, Noel Coward appeared and took her and another girl horseback riding on a mild April afternoon.

  There were a couple of things wrong with this story and it wasn’t, believe it or not, the Noel Coward part. She really had met famous people of all sorts in her lifetime. The rich are, you see, a very special and very private club. They don’t use anything as vulgar and common as a secret handshake to identify each other. As near as I can figure out the code is conveyed through a

  complicated series of rapid eye movements that only they understand. Sort of like the flickering light codes our war ships used during World War Ii.

  The parts that bothered me about this old chestnut of hers was (a) the appearance of the horse and (but) the idea of another girl being present.

  Judge Esme Anne Whitney is

  terrified of horses, will not get within yards of one of them. She’d once dragged me to a horse show to which her friend the governor had invited her and whispered to me, “God, don’t people ever get sick of seeing these creatures emptying their bowels.”

  Judge Whitney on a horse? I have my doubts.

  As for another girl going along to keep Esme Anne and Mr. Coward company, impossible.

  No way would Esme Anne Whitney share such a moment. She would want herself to be the only one with bragging rights to this particular tale.

  “Dear Noel,” Judge Whitney said this afternoon, seated on the veranda of her mansion, the maid, a masochist named Nell O’Bannion, having just delivered up another bottle of brandy, “dear, dear Noel.” She took a dramatic puff of her Galouise—Bette Davis had once taken acting lessons from the judge-“dear, dear Noel.”

  Then she said, not being great at changing subjects with any grace: “I want his face rubbed in it this time, McCain.”

  “You want dear, dear Noel Coward’s face rubbed in it?”

  “My Lord, McCain, pay attention will you?

  Just because you’re short doesn’t mean you have to be stupid, too. I want Cliffie’s face

  rubbed in it.”

  “Ah. Cliffie.”

  She had her rubber band ready to go. I wondered if Nell O’Bannion had brought her the rubber bands along with her first bottle of brandy. She set down her snifter and her Galouise long enough to load up her forefinger and thumb and fire at me.