by Ed Gorman
“He got into arguments all the time. It was just the way he was. That’s why Molly was so bad for him. She wanted to change him. Nobody could change David. He was what he was.” She glared at me. “And I loved him just the way he was.”
“How about Sara Griffin?”
Before she could answer, the woman who’d been hosing out the horse trailer came over and said, “That left tire’s bad, Rita. I s’pose we can patch it again but one of these days we’re gonna need a new one.”
“Well, see what they say at the
station. If we can get along without buying a new one, let’s do it.”
The woman nodded and went back to her trailer.
She had a tire jack laid out on the grass and went quickly to work taking the left tire of the trailer off and then transferring it to the back of a battered old Ford pickup.
“So you were saying what, McCain?” She went back to the brush, much longer strokes this time, the colt making satisfied little noises in its throat. She gave it another quick kiss.
“I was starting to ask you about Sara Griffin and Egan.”
She wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. “I was waiting him out.”
“I’m not following you.”
“Waiting for him to grow up a little. See that when it came down to having a wife and kids, I was the one. Not Molly. Not Sara. She gave him status but I gave him love. No matter what happened, he always came back to me.”
“Or Molly. Couldn’t have been too good for your ego, him seeing all those other girls.”
She shrugged. “I got used to it. Anything I’ve ever really wanted, I’ve gotten. I lived in the Knolls just long enough to know that when you want something, you have to go through hell to get it. But if you have patience and you don’t care what other people think, you’ll get it.”
“You happen to know where he was Friday night?”
“He didn’t kill Sara.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
She stopped brushing the colt. I reached my hand out and stroked its neck. She was a beauty, a poem of elegant awkwardness and vulnerability.
“He was with one of his tramps. He didn’t want to get her into trouble, so he wouldn’t say who it was.”
The trainer walking the horses on the track called out her name.
“It doesn’t matter now anyway, does it, McCain, who he was with? He’s dead. Now, I need to get to work. If that’s all right with you, I mean.”
Jay Norbert was in the can when I got to the Dx station. All three bays were in use and the far edge of the drive held four cars waiting to be serviced. Rock and roll blasted from the bays, and on the drive two old-fashioned
merchants stood in straw hats and suspenders looking at the remains of Egan’s car and shaking their heads.
“Damned Italian food,” Norbert said, coming out of the john about ten minutes after I’d arrived. He had a copy of the local newspaper. “Plays hell with my stomach. I picked up colitis when I worked for Uncle Sam.”
We walked out to the tangled remains of David Egan’s Merc. Three teenage boys stood there studying it.
“He went right off the edge,” one of them said.
“Drunker’n a skunk.”
“My brother said he got more ass than a bicycle seat.”
Ah, youth.
After Norbert shooed them away, he said, “C’mere a minute.”
We walked around to the side of the Merc. The crash had smashed the motor mounts. The engine was tilted so badly it was almost upside down.
He took a long yellow-handled screwdriver out of the back pocket of his uniform and said, “Look at this.”
He tapped the hose leading from the brake fluid to the brakes themselves with the tip of his screwdriver.
“You have to look close.”
I leaned in, squinted.
“Pretty crude,” he said.
“I’ll say.”
“I figure whoever did it either didn’t know anything about cars or tried to make it look like they didn’t know anything about cars.”
He was right. When you got close enough, it was plain to see the slash in the hose.
“Probably figured that the crash would destroy everything,” he said.
“Including the hose.”
“So nobody could tell it was cut.”
“He couldn’t have stopped if he wanted to,”
I said.
“Yeah, not even if he’d been sober.” He took a pack of Marvel cigarettes from his uniform pocket and tamped one out. “I’d offer you one, Sam, but you’d hate me for life. The wife buys these damned things because the AandPeople always has them on sale.” He lit up, coughed.
“What’ll Cliffie make of this?”
“He won’t like it.”
He grinned. “That’d sure be too bad, wouldn’t it?” Anybody who’d served in the military resented Cliffie because his two uncles on the draft board had managed to keep him from serving. He stared at the car we stood in front of. “This was a hell of a rod. He told me one night that if he took half as good care of all his girlfriends as he did the Merc, he’d probably have a lot happier life.”
I nodded to the phone booth. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
I should’ve been happy about giving Cliffie the bad news, spoiling his neatly resolved case.
But I was thinking about Egan. He hadn’t exactly been my favorite client, but he’d earned a good share of his anger and bitterness.
He’d wanted to improve his lot by using the daughters of the local gentry to prove that he was just as good as everybody else. He’d wanted respect and dignity but he got neither in his death.
It was the sort of trashy story—drunken girl-stealing, good-looking kid is murdered in a hick town where he lived with two maiden aunts —t the more lurid of the true detective magazines would buy. Not much respect or dignity there.
When Cliffie came on the line, I said, “You need to get over to the Dx station right away.”
“What the hell for, Counselor? I’m
busy. I can’t sit around all day like you.”
“Just get the hell over here.”
A pause. “You’re gonna pay for that, you know. Talkin’ to me like that.”
“Yeah, well, there’re a lot of things I’m gonna have to pay for someday. Just get over here.”
The drive got busy. Norbert even had to call one of his mechanics away from his bay to help scrub windows and pump gas. A mechanic can make a station a lot more money than a gas jockey can.
Cliffie made a point of not showing up for half an hour. I sat in the station and listened to tire irons clank on the concrete floor of the service bays and tinny juvenile rock and roll. Frankie Avalon was just never going to replace Chuck Berry on anyplace but Dick Clark’s show.
Cliffie came in and said, “Maybe you haven’t heard, Counselor, but the little
matter with Egan is all wrapped up.” He was all khakied up as usual. “He killed Sara and feeling guilty about it killed himself. And if you didn’t work for our dear, sweet Judge Whitney, you’d be able to admit I’m right.
What’d she put you up to now?”
“Let’s go look at the car.”
He looked shocked by what he saw. “Crazy sonofabitch. He mst’ve really wanted to die.”
“Come over here.”
“What for?”
“Look at something.”
He sighed and came over. I made the same case Norbert had made to me.
“Oh, no,” Cliffie said.
“Oh, no, what? Somebody obviously cut that connection.”
“You think I’m gonna fall for this shit?”
“What shit?”
“Somebody cut this, all right. But after the wreck.”
“After? Why would somebody do that?”
“Mischief. Some butthole buddies of his decided to have a little fun with me so they cut the line to make it look good.”
I saw Norbert and waved
him over.
“Morning, Chief,” he said when he reached us.
“I’m kinda busy, Sam. What can I do for you?”
“He thinks the brake fluid line was cut while the car was sitting here on your drive. I just thought maybe you could clue him in.”
“The hell of it is, Sam, I can’t.”
“What?”
“I can’t say exactly when it was cut. You could get the state crime lab to check it out for you, I suppose. If I had to bet that the line was cut before the wreck, that’s how I’d bet. But I can’t prove it. Sorry.”
“The state crime lab,” Cliffie said, “couldn’t find their ass with both hands.”
“I’m requesting that you call them in.”
Cliffie smirked at Norbert. “See how free he is with taxpayers’ money? Good ole McCain, the taxpayers’ friend.” He smiled at me. “I’ll take it under consideration, as you legal types like to say, Counselor. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. I’m a busy man and those fancy-pants crime-lab boys don’t like drivin’ over here for something like this.”
“This is very important,” I said.
“Sez you. Me, I say this case is
wrapped up. Them two old ladies who raised him don’t want people to think he killed himself, so they put a bee in your bonnet about proving it was murder. And that judge of yours figures this is another way to try and humiliate me. All of which adds up to exactly jack shit as far as I’m concerned.” He nodded to the gas station. “Norbert, I need to use your crapper.”
And that, as far as the khaki-clad, crapper-needing chief of police was concerned, was that.
Sixteen
Just before noon, I stopped by the courthouse to talk to the judge. She was in a conference. As I was walking out the back door to where I’d parked my ragtop, I fell into step next to Jack Coyle. He never looked nattier than when he was in his hand-tailored blue suit.
He carried a briefcase and a scowl. “Your friend Judge Whitney gave me one hell of a headache this morning. I’m handling a property matter for a Des Moines firm and need a little more time to prepare myself. She denied it.”
“You should never go up against her on Monday mornings. Or Tuesday mornings, come to think of it. Or—” But I stopped joking because he wasn’t smiling.
“Now, Jean wants to move, too.”
“Move?” I said.
“Build a new house. And in the meantime rent one. She’s into a lot of supernatural things.
I think it’s all crazy but of course I don’t want to hurt her feelings.”
“Sara Griffin haunting your place, you mean?”
“Not haunting precisely. But something like that.
I mean, I’m kind of uneasy being there myself.
My God, a dead girl—”
“I still don’t understand that part of it.”
“What part of it?”
We were now outside in the parking lot. A mix of people came and went as we stood there talking.
Dotted everywhere were pairs of other lawyers talking.
“If Egan did kill Sara, why did he
leave her in your gazebo? I don’t
get the connection.”
“I don’t, either. But he mst’ve been psychotic. He killed her, after all. Maybe he was driving around with the body in his car and—”
I said, “Did you know her?”
“Sure. She was a damned sweet kid. She had her troubles but she was sweet.”
He made a point of meeting my eye when he said it, a courtroom trick. You can’t tell a lie when you’re looking somebody in the eye, can you?
Sure. Good liars can, and do, all the time.
“Your daughter knew her, I understand.”
“They were friends.”
“Sara spend much time around your house?”
This time when he stared at me, there was a suggestion of anger in his All-American blue eyes. “Are you trying to get at something here, Sam?”
“Just trying to understand why the killer would put the body in your gazebo.”
He set his briefcase down, pulled out a package of Viceroys from his suit jacket pocket and lit up with a nice, small, silver Ronson lighter. He didn’t offer me a smoke.
“So you’ve heard the stories.”
“Not plural. Singular. Story.”
“I gave her some tennis lessons. Her psychiatrist told her that exercise would help her with her mood. Exercise, that whole bit.
She didn’t have any special interest in tennis.” He smiled. “She just thought the women in their tennis whites looked very nice. She was a nice-looking girl. And I’m not exactly an old fart. I’ve been known to get an erection once in a while. All the guys at the country club followed her around like horny dogs. I suppose I felt some manly pride in spending so much time with her. But nothing happened. The stories are bullshit.”
“Meaning you’d have no idea why somebody would put her body in your gazebo?”
This smile was malicious. “I swear to God, Sam, working for the judge is starting to poison your mind. You were a nice, clean-cut, sensible young man when you hung out your shingle. I’m sorry to see you’re becoming such a paranoid. I love Esme—she’s a good friend of ours—but for once I think Cliffie’s right. David Egan killed Sara and then felt so guilty about it he
killed himself.”
“Makes everything tidy, anyway.”
He leaned down and picked up his briefcase.
“Jean and I like you, too, Sam. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to our friendship.”
“Egan didn’t kill her and he didn’t commit suicide.”
He shook his head. “Maybe Egan didn’t commit suicide, Sam, but you may not want to start bothering people who knew Sara. They’re not lowlives. They don’t allow themselves to be pushed around.”
“Unlike the people who come from the Knolls and get pushed around because they don’t have any other choice.”
“You think you’ll ever get over that class anger of yours, Sam?”
“I doubt it.”
He dropped his cigarette to the pavement and twisted his foot on it so it shredded into torn white paper with brown tobacco spilling out.
“You’re one of us now, Sam. You grew up in the Knolls but that doesn’t mean you have to live there the rest of your life—physically or mentally, either one. You don’t want to ruin your chances by making a lot of important people mad. And I’m saying this as a friend.”
To prove it he put a fatherly hand on my shoulder. “You take care of yourself, Sam. I’m hoping you’re going to be a member of our club sometime in the not-too-.tant future. You’d be a real asset. And I’d be happy to talk you up to the board. I really would.”
A minute later, his bronze Buick came to smooth and powerful life, and he backed out of the lot, his briefcase on the seat next to him, as if it were a passenger.
The Griffin house was built inside a large tract of timber. You got the sense they were hiding from something, the way the hardwoods and pines enveloped their home of native stone and glass and wood—homage, I expect, to Frank
Lloyd Wright. There was even a trickle-small Wrightian waterfall behind the long, angular house.
I counted six cars in the drive. All new, all expensive. The Caddy was the most imposing, all white and chrome and sweeping fin. But then Dix Griffin owned the Cadillac dealership.
Mandy Griffin answered my knock.
She was a tall, prim woman in a black sheath dress, her graying hair in a chignon. She had good facial bones, an older woman’s neck, and blue eyes that didn’t look happy to see me at all. “This isn’t a good day, McCain.”
“I realize that but I just wondered—”
“We know what you’re doing and we don’t approve.”
“What I’m doing?”
“Trying to prove that David Egan didn’t kill our daughter. Of course he did.”
Dix was in the door then. As a longtime car dealer, he couldn’t find it in himself to be rud
e to anybody. After all, he wouldn’t want to kill a potential sale.
“Oh, now, honey,” he said, “McCain’s just doing what that damned Esme Whitney wants him to do. He wouldn’t be doing this on his own so there’s no reason to take it personally.”
He was big, he was hammy, he spoke in a Southern dialect that seemed contrived. He always spoke of his Southern boyhood but he’d lived up here for forty years. The reverse of your friend who goes on a four-day trip to London and comes back with a British accent.
He wore a black suit with a white shirt and dark blue tie. But the shirt collar was open and the knot of his tie rode at his sternum. His fleshy face was boozy red and he was sweaty. He looked as if he were at an event that combined mourning with poker. Hard to believe he was a Yale man—old Southern money—but then William Buckley Jr. got through there so I suppose anything is possible.
“Cliff called just a few minutes ago and told us what you were up to, McCain, and I have to tell you, we agree with him. Egan killed her, all right, and then he killed himself. I’ll give him that much, anyway. He had that much good in him—ffrealize what he’d done and make his peace with the Lord.”
“Somebody cut his brake line.”
“Cliff said you’d say that, too. He said, near as he can tell, somebody cut it after Egan’s car sat out all night.”
“You’re a terrible little man,” Mandy said, “and I want you to get into your car and drive away right now.”
Her voice was loud enough that their other
guests started peeking out the front window to get a look at me. Most of them, recognizing me, frowned. Difficult as it is to imagine, I am not a universally beloved figure.
“Don’t you want to know who really killed your daughter, Mrs. Griffin?”
“We do know, McCain,” Griffin said, sliding his arm around his wife’s frail shoulder.
“We’re not going to waste our time—and our feelings —on some damned stupid contest between Esme and Chief Sykes. He’s made his share of mistakes in the past, that’s true, but he also happens to be right on this one. And that’s all we have to say on the subject.”
He closed the door. His guests were lined up in the front window like kids forced to stay inside on a rainy day. I was like an exciting Tv show, the way they watched me get in my ragtop, U-turn on the drive, and head back to the front gates. Fascinating stuff.