by Ed Gorman
on dates wearing clean underwear.
Twenty-two
I slept. It was escape sleep. Sometimes you sleep because you’re tired, sometimes you sleep because you’re bored. I slept because I didn’t want to think anymore. Not about three murders, not about Linda.
In the morning I got up and burned myself a decent breakfast, showered, got into a fresh suit and tie, and got to the office half an hour earlier than usual.
Molly came along soon after.
God had sent her from on high. She’d brought two cardboard containers of steaming hot coffee from the caf@e down the street.
“I just thought you might like some coffee.”
She waited patiently while I took a couple of calls from the courthouse about two of my trials being postponed. She looked wan and worn but somehow that only enhanced her kind of coltish beauty.
When I was done, she said, “I just wanted to see how things were going.”
“Not well. Mostly running into walls.”
“God, that was terrible about Brenda.”
“She saw something or she knew something.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
I took some coffee. “There’s a
possibility that one of her boyfriends killed her.
Jealousy, something like that.”
“She coached our softball team one summer.
She was a nice woman. I didn’t like to think of her sleeping around like that.”
I smiled. “I hope you can always stay that forgiving and sweet, Molly. I really mean that, too.” More coffee. “I wasn’t running her down. I was just stating a fact. She did sleep around.”
“Yeah, I guess she did,” she said. “A little bit, anyway.”
I liked that “a little bit, anyway.” A last effort to save her friend’s reputation.
“So, one of the men she slept with could have killed her, in which case her murder doesn’t having any bearing on what I’m doing.”
“Do you really think it was one of her men friends?”
she said.
“Maybe—but I’m going to assume it
was because of the timing. Sara dies, David dies, she dies. All in a very short period of time.
There’s some connection. It sure feels that way, anyway.”
“David was in a pretty bad way the last time I saw him. He told me he was starting to steal money just so he could keep taking Sara out.
It was funny—I really hated him for telling me something like that. But I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him, either.”
I’d been sitting back in my chair, the heel of my oxford on the edge of the desk. I sat up straight. “Stealing money? He told you that?”
“Yes. And I was scared for him. I told him he could go to jail. Maybe even prison if he kept doing it. But he said he couldn’t stop himself.”
“Did he say where he was stealing it from?”
“No. And I really didn’t want to know anyway, Sam. I didn’t want to get
dragged into it.”
“He was getting wilder and wilder.”
“Yes, and drinking more and more. The last month or so, I rarely saw him sober.”
“Do you have any sense of where he might have been getting his money?”
“No, I’m sorry, Sam, I really
don’t.” Then, “I shouldn’t say this but Sara wasn’t a very nice girl, Sam. I know she had her troubles. But she shouldn’t have led him on that way. She’d tell him she was still in love with this older man and could never love him, but then when he wouldn’t call her for a few days, she’d call him. She’d always draw him back in. And he’d come running every time.”
She daubed a tear with a fingertip. “I’ve got a whole day ahead of me? I didn’t run my eye makeup, did I?”
“Nope. Beautiful as always.”
“Oh, sure.”
“You don’t think you’re beautiful?”
“I’m too gawky to be beautiful. I
don’t have any grace. But thanks for saying so.”
She gathered coat and purse and stood up and said, “I didn’t know if that would help you or not. About him stealing money.”
“It’s sure worth following up.”
I spent the rest of the morning working the
telephone. I called the Dx station, several clothing stores, and a custom car shop in Cedar Rapids that David always talked about. The money angle was something new. Maybe it wouldn’t lead anywhere but it gave me a purpose and energy I hadn’t been able to tune into this morning.
He owed nearly $10 at the Dx station, nearly $250 at three different clothing shops, and had several small items on order from the custom car shop. The guy I spoke to said that David would have to pay cash before they’d give him the items. He said they’d given David credit once but that he’d been months overdue in paying it back.
Stolen money was my first surprise that morning.
The second surprise was on the way as I was checking out David Egan’s financial troubles.
I was on the phone with a client who’d been accused of stealing chickens from his neighbor. Though he wouldn’t admit he’d done it, he did say that he was sure his neighbor had been stealing chickens from him. I wondered if Oliver Wendell Holmes had ever handled a
chicken-stealing case. I was just hanging up when my office door opened and Jean Coyle came in.
Tear-reddened eyes. A trembling left hand.
A cigarette in the right hand. A forlorn elegance as she sat in the chair and listened to me wind things up with my client. All of a sudden I didn’t have much interest in chicken rustling, not that I had all that much in the beginning.
She took many, many drags on her
cigarette, not inhaling a one of them.
As soon as I hung up, she waved her cigarette in the air and said, “This is for dramatic effect. I don’t even know how to smoke these things.”
“The red eyes are all you need for dramatic effect. Why don’t you put it out?”
I pushed the ashtray across the desk. She was, as always, the compleat suburban house mistress. A long gray coat of suede and leather patches, a starched white collar on her blouse, and an impeccable hairstyle.
After punishing her cigarette several times over, she finally got every tiny piece of flame out.
“You want to know how much I hated her?” Her voice wavered, went weak, came back strong in the same short question. “He—what’s the
phrase the kids use—knocked her up.”
“He being—”
his—my husband, Jack.”
“And she being—”
“The recently deceased Sara Griffin.”
Then, “Is that bitchy enough for you? Talking about a poor dead girl like that?”
“Yeah. I heard.”
I reached into my bottom drawer and hauled out a pint of Old Grandad. I shoved it across to her. She knew just what to do. Uncapped it, wiped off the neck with her palm, and took a swig a farmhand would have a hard time getting down.
“Mind if I keep this for a while?” she said.
“Be my guest.”
“If I get drunk and try to seduce you, please say no.”
“It just so happens I’m wearing my chastity belt.” Then, “Could we go over this he-she business a little bit more?”
“He knocked her up.”
“And you know this for sure?”
She snorted. “Are you kidding? The
sonofabitch told me himself. He said when they make the autopsy public today, they’ll announce she was pregnant.” Then, “Will you handle my divorce for me?”
“Of course. If you’re sure that’s what you want.”
“If I’m sure that’s what I want? My God, Sam, how could I live with a man like that?
He promised that first time they had an affair that it was all over. Then—and he told me this, too-he started seeing her again three months ago. And he got her pregnant. It just all came down on me when she was killed.
That I’m all tied up in this somehow.” She leaned over toward the bottle. “Do I want another drink?”
“Probably not.”
“You’re always so damned sensible.”
“Me? Are you kidding?”
“Well, you’re a lot more sensible than I’m being at the moment, anyway.”
I said, “I’m going to ask you a question and you’re probably going to hate me for it.”
“You’re going to ask me if he killed her.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve thought about it ever since last night.
He says he didn’t, of course.” She was starting to be her usual proper self.
The self I liked because she was so elegant to watch. Proper doesn’t have to be stuffy. “He made a good case for himself.”
“That being?”
“That being, say he did kill Sara Griffin.
Why would he kill Egan and Brenda?”
I took a swig myself. “That’s where I’m hung up, too. I’m trying to figure out what connects them.”
“That’s where I keep ending up, too. He wouldn’t have any reason to kill them, too. But I hear Cliffie is promoting the idea that one of Brenda’s lovers killed her and that Egan killed himself.”
“Good old Cliffie.”
She said, “Maybe I’d just have one more small drink.” I pushed the pint back over to her. She took a mincing little drink. “I’m terrible.”
“Yes, Jean, you are terrible. Right up there with Hitler and Rasputin.”
“I mean wanting my own husband to be charged with murder. I didn’t know I had that kind of spite in me. It’s not the sort of thing you want to know about yourself. I mean, it’s so selfish to even think about. My Lord, think of our girls. It would destroy their lives.” Then, “But I am going to divorce him.”
“Good.”
“He’s got a lot of money stashed away in secret places.”
“We’ll find it.”
“May I come back and talk to you about it when I’m not in such a bitchy mood?”
“Sure. Anytime you want to.”
When she stood up, she consciously composed herself, straightened coat, collar, touched hair, arranged her purse strap just so over her shoulder.
“You probably get a lot of hysterical women in here.”
“You’re not hysterical. Given what you just found out, you were damned well appropriate.”
“Now there’s a nice word to save face with.
“Appropriate.” I was “appropriate”
all the way down here.” She smiled for the first time.
“I was “appropriate” when I was going seventy-five miles an hour in a
thirty-five zone; and I was “appropriate”
when I laid on my horn because some old geezer was doing twenty and I couldn’t get around him. And I was especially “appropriate”
when I was guzzling your bourbon like a sailor on shore leave.” She laughed. “Thanks for letting me in on that word. “Appropriate.” I have a feeling I’ll be using that a lot now.”
She went to the door, turned and said, “Thanks, Sam,” and was gone.
Twenty-three
I had a court case in the afternoon. Divorce.
Neither party especially likable. But their little girl was sweet and sad. And neither parent seemed to notice. The kid would lose no matter which parent got custody. They’d both been unfaithful, verbally abusive, and even treacherous to each other. I pretended to be on the side of my male client but it wasn’t easy. The judge, the patron saint of all grumpy old men who existed on whiskey and Tums, favored the lady. So would I if I’d been looking only at her breasts.
After court, I cashed some client checks at the bank and then went around paying off my bills at the grocery store, the record shop, and the gas station.
Back at the office, Jamie and Carrie were still working on refiling everything.
Correction: Carrie was still working on the filing.
Jamie was in the john and didn’t appear for fifteen minutes after I got there.
“See,” she said to Carrie, “you hardly notice them, they look so natural.”
She referred to the huge fanlike false eyelashes she wore. They gave her eyes that feral and cunning look of the B-girls you meet in some of Chicago’s seamier bars. Not that I’ve had experience with those girls, personally.
I returned the calls waiting for me. I noticed that the notes on the call slips were filled out in a neat, easily readable hand and that the descriptions were grammatical and informative.
I said, “Who took all these messages?”
Carrie continued to file, said nothing. Jamie was perched on her desk chair, her compact out, examining her new three-pound eyelashes in the compact mirror. She didn’t shift her gaze but she did say, “Don’t be too hard on her, Mr. C. This was the first time she took your calls. I would’ve done it but I have to save my voice.”
“Save your voice? What for?”
“I’m making Turk take me to this
hootenanny in Iowa City tonight. Twelve different folk singers. He doesn’t want to go because his uncle told him that all folk singers are perverts and communists.”
“Who’s his uncle? J. Edgar Hoover?”
Jamie, of course, didn’t get the joke.
But Carrie did. She laughed most
pleasantly. Jamie gave her cousin a quizzical look.
I said, “I still don’t get why you have to save your voice?”
“Because I like to sing along. I don’t want my voice to be all scratchy. In fact, I shouldn’t even be talking now.”
I glanced at Carrie, expecting her to let me know somehow that she realized how silly if—I have to admit it—sweet Jamie is. But she turned back to her filing work quickly.
I made some more phone calls. I did some more paperwork.
“Would you like some coffee, Mr. McCain?”
Carrie said after a while.
“Golly, Carrie, I told you to call him Mr. C. Right, Mr. C?”
“I don’t know him as well as you do, Jamie, so I think I’ll just stick to Mr.
McCain.”
“She’s kind of square, Mr. C. But
she’s real nice.”
Jamie went back to her eyebrows.
“I made some fresh,” Carrie said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
I generally drink only a single morning cup of the coffee I make here at the office. The rest I inflict on clients.
I didn’t want to insult her, so I said, “Sure. I’ll take a cup.” Not expecting much. She poured, brought it over. I raised the cup, drank it. “This is really good.”
“Thank you.”
I didn’t want to get too effusive.
Eventually even Jamie was going to figure out that her cousin was a much better worker than she was.
I went back to work. Five o’clock was coming on.
When the phone rang, Carrie picked it up and said, “This is Mr. McCain’s law office.
How may I help you?”
My Lord. It was a bit on the formal
side, her greeting, but she had a crisp, smart phone voice and sounded pretty damned big-city.
“Oh, yes, your honor, he’s right here,”
Carrie said.
She handed the receiver to me.
Judge Esme Anne Whitney said, “My
God, McCain, a secretary who speaks English? What did you do, kidnap her? What happened to that busty little idiot who’s always fornicating with that juvenile delinquent boyfriend of hers?”
“I assume you have a serious question for me.”
“Indeed, I do. When in the hell are you going to wrap this thing up? If one more person says to me that Egan killed poor Sara Griffin and then committed suicide—”
“That’s when you explain to them that Cliffie’s theory doesn’t make any sense. If Egan wanted to kill himself, he sure wouldn’t have cut his own brake line. He might have driven off the edge of the cliff that way. B
ut cut his brake line? What’s the sense of that?”
“In other words, you haven’t found the killer yet.”
“In other words, I’m working on it.”
“I’m having a small dinner party at my house tonight. I’d love to tell everybody that once again I’ve shown up Cliffie for the boob he is.”
I sighed. “I don’t think this is the kind of thing that works on a timetable like that.”
“Well, if it isn’t,” she said in her most imperious tone of voice, “it should be.”
And with that we—actually, she—hung up.
When I turned my attention to the girls again, Jamie was holding up a doe-colored brushed leather flat for Carrie to see.
“I have to wear these tonight,” Jamie said in a voice only a teenage girl could muster, “it’s the only thing I have that goes with this sweater-and-skirt outfit I bought.”
“What’s the matter with it?” I said.
“She picked up something on the street,”
Carrie said, “some kind of stain.”
“Here, let me see it.”
The stain ran along the bottom side of the shoe, all the way to the toe, where it splayed wide. The discoloration was obvious. She’d stepped in some kind of liquid
chemical, apparently, maybe an insecticide the city had sprayed on the sidewalks.
“What’m I going to do?” Jamie said. The last act of Hamlet couldn’t hold any more drama than this moment with the shoe.
I ate in a diner that night and pretended I was in an Edward Hopper painting. Most of the customers were solitary workingmen. In a doctor’s office you wonder what sort of malady the other patients are suffering from. In a diner you wonder what sort of fractured life the customers are suffering from. At suppertime in a small town most men are home with their families. What about these men? Why were they all here?
Then we had one of those charged communal male moments when a pretty redhead came in and sat down and ordered a cheeseburger and a Pepsi. A depth charge of feeling and need had awakened us.
The isolated looks of the men at the U-shaped counter changed into interested, lively looks. The girl had redeemed us all, at least for a few minutes. She’d reacquainted some of us with our lust. For the more romantic, including me, she’d stirred not only lust but that great longing for something resembling true love. She was nice enough to bless each of us with her version of a papal smile (Bless you, my horny lost children) and to stretch a little bit every once in a while so we could see the lift of her small but lovely breasts.