by Ed Gorman
She ate quickly. Probably had a date.
We all took turns pretending not to watch her.
And then she stood up.
She paid her bill and turned toward the door, which she got halfway open before stumbling. It’s something we all do, unless we’re Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly. But usually nothing happens.
We right ourselves and continue on stumbling through.
Then it happened.
First, her entire left side sank down a couple of inches. And then her sweet bow-shaped mouth opened to let out a small sharp cry of pain.
Damned near every one of us came off our counter stools.
What had happened was that she’d not only twisted her ankle, she’d also snapped off the heel of her pump.
We all pushed and shoved to be the one who got to help her back to her seat. The Three Stooges would have been proud of the melee
we created. Even with her pain she was able to smile at what dopes men were.
The waitress poured her a free cup of coffee. A man who claimed to have been a medic in the navy had the pleasure of feeling up the ankle she’d turned. Another man offered to drive her to the hospital. Apparently he thought she was in need of some heavy-duty surgery.
You never can tell about sprained ankles. One minute the person’s fine and dandy; the next minute there they are, laid out on the floor, waiting for a funeral home director to stick a red rose in their pale dead fingers. Those darned sprained ankles.
I got out of there and drove around for a time, melancholy as always at dusk. Mostly I thought of Linda and how attached I felt to her after only a few dates. But that appeared to be another brief relationship in a life of brief relationships.
And then I had a thought I should have had some time ago. You don’t need to hit me over the head with a board. You need to hit me over the head with a board and an anvil.
Shoes.
The redhead in the diner had lost her heel.
Jamie had soiled her brushed leather flat.
And Rita Scully had stains on her new desert boots that could easily have come from oil.
Rita knew where Egan kept his car in his aunts’ backyard. Easy enough to sneak in there and cut the brake line, late on some moonless night.
But the ground was soaked with oil from Egan working on his car all the time.
A quick way to stain a brand new pair of light-colored desert boots.
The stables were closed for the night. Moonlight traced the two-story stucco house where the Scullys lived. The light in the windows looked warm and comfortable against the autumn night. The stars sent me all the usual greetings and warnings and reassurances that I’d never been able to understand.
There’d be frost for sure in a few hours.
I parked on the gravel road on the hill below the stables. I went down to a narrow dry creek then up a burr-filled hillside to a barbed-wire fence that just might have been as old as I was.
Even from here I could smell the horse manure and the hay from the barn. The business office, which is where I wanted to go, was dark. Probably locked. Good thing a client of mine, headed back to prison and in no need of them, had given me his burglary tools. Even so, he still owed me $350, which I would see just about the time we put a man or woman on Pluto.
A few minutes later, I joined the stained shoe club. I stepped in horseshit so fresh I actually skidded half a foot or so on it.
It was sort of like ice skating, sort of.
I’d had this fear that the horses would hear me or smell me or take some kind of psychic notice of me and start whinnying their asses off.
Apparently, they were all watching Tv or reading because they didn’t so much as whimper as I crossed in front of the barn doors.
I ducked behind the office and then peeked out again at the lighted windows. I couldn’t see any shadow figures moving behind the curtains but I could hear a burst of laughter and then what sounded like somebody talking loudly to a person up the inside stairs.
I spent a minute trying to get the crap off my shoe by running it through a patch of grass.
I’m not sure it helped much but it made me feel in control of the situation—take that, horseshit—and that’s all that matters.
The only tense moment was getting the door open. I have six picks and three keys. And of course the one I wanted was the last one I tried. I kept glancing up at the house.
Nobody seemed to be peering out.
I got the door open, feeling pretty damned clever, and then I half jumped inside.
I hadn’t taken into account what the effect of horse poop could have on the sole of an oxford when it came in contact with a linoleum floor.
Before I could get the door closed, which would at least have muffled the sound, I slid and tripped forward, cartwheeling my arms as I slammed into the side of a tall metal storage cabinet, the one next to where Rita kept all her shoes and boots lined up. I also said a dirty word.
Well, I didn’t say a dirty word. I
shouted a dirty word.
And then I held my breath, like a tot who can’t have another piece of cake and so decides to take his own life right in front of his
mommy and show her, by God, what happens to mean, selfish women like her.
Oh, did I hold my breath.
I expected Mr. Scully to come running out here with a couple of flame-throwers and a boxful of grenades. Cliffie would love this, me being caught breaking into some place with burglary tools. And the judge would fire me for sure.
Nothing happened.
I can’t say I was disappointed but I was surprised. The house wasn’t that far away.
Surely they must have heard-But apparently not.
Now I needed to move and move quickly. I dug out the tiny flashlight I carry with me to use in such circumstances—and to check out the tonsils of the girls I date when they say they’re not feeling well and guess they’ll go home early-and the shoes and boots weren’t there.
A few minutes later, I was completing my search of the office when somebody snapped the ceiling light on.
“I could shoot you and get away with it, you know that, don’t you?”
I turned and looked at Rita Scully.
“Three murders aren’t enough, Rita?”
“Oh, shit, McCain. Give it a rest.”
She came in, walked over to her desk, sat down, and said, “How the hell’d you get in here?”
“Where are the boots?”
“What boots?”
“The boots that were lined up against the wall over there.”
“I took them up to the house.”
“Why?”
“Why? What difference does it make to you?”
“A lot of difference. Now tell me why you took those boots up to the house.”
“You are one goofy sonofabitch, you know that?”
“The desert boots Donny Hughes bought you.
Those are the ones I want to see.”
“The desert—” She stopped herself and a cold, superior smile made her particular kind of loveliness hard and mean. “You mean these?”
She pushed back from the desk in her chair and then set both of her desert boots on her desk. “Pretty exciting boots, huh?”
“I thought they were too small for you.”
“My dad let me use these stretchers he had. That helped a lot.” She waggled
one of the boots at me. “Pretty exciting, huh, McCain?”
I peered down at it. “Oil stain.”
“Exactly right. If this were a game show, you’d win a refrigerator.”
“You snuck over there, didn’t you?”
“Snuck over where?”
“Snuck over to Egan’s late at night and cut his brake line and got your boots all oily doing it.”
“God, McCain, you’re such a moron, I can’t believe it. You actually think I murdered David and those two others?”
“You’ve got oil on your shoes.”
“And you’ve got rocks
in your head.”
I wasn’t sure at first what she slipped from the pocket of her red Western shirt. It was a cigarette and somehow not a cigarette.
When I realized what it was, and what she was going to do with it, I thought that it looked wrong. She shouldn’t be wearing Western gear. She should be in black, a beatnik girl in a shabby, crowded apartment where cool jazz fought pretentious conversations for domination in the room.
But it didn’t seem to bother her. She was Annie Toke-ly of the West. She put the reefer in her lips and lit up. Then she closed her eyes and let the magic do its work. The smell was, as always, sweet and stark, and more than a little scary. An attorney caught in a place where marijuana was being smoked would lose his ticket, even if he could prove that he hadn’t actually smoked any himself.
She took two long hits. “I get
pretty frisky when I smoke this reefer, McCain.” She giggled. It was a marijuana giggle, friendly as a puppy and just a wee bit daft. “If I don’t keep smoking this stuff, all I do is lie on my bed and cry about David. Excuse me.”
She took two more long hits.
“Your folks know you smoke this?”
She was holding it in her lungs and didn’t want to exhale. She shook her head. When she exhaled, she said, “Are you kidding? My dad’d take a riding crop to me.” Then, “I didn’t kill him. Or any of them.”
“Then who did?”
“Isn’t that supposed to be your job?”
“I’m always up for a little help.”
“Just a sec.”
Another deep inhalation.
The exhalation came in a ragged burst.
“Guess who I called today, McCain?”
“Who?”
“Molly.”
“For what?”
“I figured now was the time to be friends again.
We’re both mourning David. We should comfort each other.”
“What’d she say?”
Sly smile. “She hung up on me. But
that’s Molly. Always takes awhile to bring her around.”
“She’s a nice kid.”
“And I’m not, I suppose?”
She didn’t wait for my answer. She took another deep hit. The reefer was burning to ash quickly.
“You really want me to answer that?”
She looked as if she were inhaling helium, the way her head seemed to rise and swell as she held the smoke deep in her lungs. Then the explosion.
“I don’t sleep around, McCain.
David’s the only guy I ever slept with, in fact. I don’t drink much. I go to church. I try to help people whenever I can. You seem to think I’m some kind of slut.”
“Molly’s under the impression that you were bad for Egan.”
“Molly’s under the impression that everybody was bad for David—except her, of course.”
“Did you get Egan started on marijuana or the other way around?”
But she was taking the last drag on the reefer.
All the Iowa City and Chicago hipster parties I’d touristed my way through came back. I swear I could hear a couple of sexy Northwestern coeds discussing Sartre.
Boom. She exhaled.
“You didn’t know your client very well, McCain.”
“Meaning what?”
“His asthma. And all his allergies. He tried smoking reefers a couple of times and his glands swelled up on him and he had this miserable asthma attack. He didn’t like it when I smoked grass. He said it made me too crazy. He took a whole bunch of
my joints and kept them in his room. He’d only let me smoke one a week. He told me he got his aunts to try it once. Thought it’d be funny. They loved it.” The sly smile again. “Be sure and tell Molly that, will you? That I’m not some slut? That I didn’t seduce him into drugs or anything? I really think now is a good time to be friends again. She was my best friend for ten years. We used to trade dolls and clothes and do overnights all the time. Even when I hated her for David, I missed her. I couldn’t talk to anybody—not even David—the way I used to talk to her.”
She snubbed out the reefer between thumb and forefinger and popped it into her mouth the way she would a vitamin pill.
“Thrifty girl,” she said, after swallowing it.
“I always eat the roach. Why waste it?” Then, “I can see you now.” She stumbled over her words.
The reefer was taking effect. “Racing out here in your deerstalker cap. Thinking you had me because of the oil stain on my desert boots.” The marijuana giggle again. “Poor McCain.”
Her eyes gleamed merrily. “A wasted trip.”
“Not at all,” I said, standing up. “You told me something important that I needed to know.” Then, “I’ve got a lot of horseshit on my shoe.”
“Occupational hazard around here.”
“There a hose anywhere I could wash it off?
I’ve got one more stop to make tonight.”
“East side of the barn there’s a hose we use for the water trough. So where’s this next stop of yours, anyway?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
Another giggle. “God, I haven’t heard that since fourth grade.” She shrugged. “I don’t really give a shit where you’re going, anyway.” She pulled out the center drawer of the desk and came up with a Snickers, ripping the wrapper off with spectacular ferocity. “Boy, when I get like this, McCain, high and all like this, I’ll bet I could eat twenty of these things in a row and not miss a beat. I might puke somewhere along the line but I’d go right back to eating if I did.”
Gone gone gone, she was.
Gone gone gone.
“Tell Molly I love her, McCain.”
“I’ll tell her,” I said, starting
for the door.
Giggle giggle. “And tell her that I’d like to trade dolls again.”
A couple of minutes later, I used the hose to wash away the horse feces and then made my way carefully to my car.
This time I used the driveway instead of the ravine and the grassy hill.
Twenty-four
It was the world of my grandfather and grandmother. The world of all those long-ago folks who’d fled their beloved land because it no longer fed or tolerated them. And so they came to the new country and mixed old with new—supermarkets and cars with fins and Joe McCarthy with crucifix and holy Mary and holy water to be sure; and brogues and lilts and song in their voices, and joy and fear and resentment and great vast hope in their eyes. The tiny old women at daily mass, their heads covered in cheap faded scarves; the whiskey-faced, knuckle-swollen union leaders shouting at the scabs who’d crossed the picket line; and the sweet, young, skinny-legged girls in their school uniforms up in the choir loft intoxicated by the scent of incense and the sound of the bells ringing out in the belfry as they had in Belfast and Donegal and Kerry. And now they had Bing Crosby and his songs from the old country on their phonographs, and Jackie Gleason and Bishop Sheen on their televisions, and so many sports figures they were uncountable. And one of them, the son of a bootlegger, might soon become president—imagine that, president—ofthe entire country. Old and new.
I felt the crush of all that history as I heard light footsteps beyond the door. And felt it still as the porch light came on in the smoky autumn night. And there stood Amy Kelly.
“Why, hello, Sam. You timed it just right.
Emma made a cake this afternoon. C’mon in.”
I went inside and everything had changed. It was no longer a cozy, bright little home. I’d never noticed before how long and dark the shadows were, how stained the wallpaper was, how threadbare the area rugs looked. And how lumpy and beaten the furnishings were.
Most of all, their faces had changed. Emma came in and stood next to Amy. And their
faces were grotesque. Not in the monster-movie way but in the way their eyes regarded me—cold, alien eyes—^the saintly women who were not saintly at all.
They tried, of course, to pretend we were still
living inside that Norman Rockwell painting this house and these women had always inhabited. To those who didn’t really know them, anyway. Including me.
Emma, as you would expect, sensed my real business here long before her sister did.
Amy said, “Would you like a couple spoons of ice cream with your cake, Sam? It’s chocolate cake. And vanilla ice cream.”
Emma said, in a voice both strained and harsh, “He isn’t here for cake and ice cream, sister.
Now please be quiet.”
Amy started to say something else—she looked shocked at the sudden change in her sister’s mood —but her sister said, “Go upstairs, Amy.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“I said to go upstairs.” She grabbed Amy’s arm with her left hand and gave her a little push on the back with her right. “Go upstairs now and play some music on the radio in your room. I want to hear that music and want you in your room.”
Amy turned to me for explanation and support.
“What’s going on here, Sam?”
“I think Emma’s right, Amy. Why don’t you go upstairs?”
I’d wondered if it had been both of them.
Now I knew better.
Amy started reluctantly, almost as if she’d forgotten how to walk, to the staircase.
“Don’t you think one of you owes me an explanation? This is my house, too, you know.”
“Get up there, sister. And no more dawdling.”
The child had been ordered, once and for all, to her room. The child was smart enough, finally, to go.
She put a hand on the banister, swept her housedress about her as if she were Scarlett O’Hara, and disappeared on the second tier of the stairway.
“Why don’t we sit in the kitchen and drink a little Irish coffee?” She sounded friendlier now.
Amy’s leaving had apparently freed her somehow.
And so we did.
“You want a full shot in it?”