by Ed Gorman
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 rude 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.
I called Linda at the hospital in Iowa City.
“So you just called? Just to say hi? That’s very nice of you. In fact, I was thinking that maybe you’d like to get a pizza tonight. My treat, Sam.”
“That sounds great. I’ll pick you up at seven.”
“Just remember-”
“I remember. We’re going easy. And that’s fine with me.”
“This will get to be a real drag for you someday, Sam. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not sorry at all. I like being with you and that’s all we need to say.”
“Thanks, Sam. See you at seven.”
The librarian gave me a curious look when I asked her where I might find a book on cancer. Having been a librarian here since I was a kid, she was naturally concerned that my reading wasn’t for my mom or dad.
“Everything all right at home, Sam?”
“Everything’s fine, Mrs. Anderson.”
She was the only librarian who’d bought both Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert Heinlien for the library in those long-ago days after the war when the country was on one of its sporadic improve-your-mind campaigns, which always meant promoting the sort of books kids didn’t want to read. A few libraries were forced to give away all their Burroughs books.
She’d shown up at the graduation ceremony for the law school and given me a nice auntly kiss on the cheek as I passed down the aisle clutching my diploma. You don’t forget people like that.
I was pretty self-conscious about it. When I found the book she suggested, I took it to a corner table and kind of hunched over the book.
I wasn’t shocked. I sort of knew what I was going to see. It made me mad looking at the woman whose torso they’d color-photographed. The healthy breast next to the flat line of scar next to it. I thought of Linda and then of my mom and then of my kid sister. I wanted to hold somebody responsible for this. But mad became sad and I thought of my aunt Barb, who’d died of it, and the lady down the street who was fighting it and all of a sudden it seemed overwhelming, like every woman in the world was going to get it eventually. I closed the book. I wanted a cigarette, speaking of cancer. I sat there and thought of Linda and what this must mean to her.
And how she had to live in daily fear that it would come back. Some little routine test, some little sign, and then your doctor was talking about surgery again; or worse, not talking about surgery because it was too late even for that. I still wanted somebody to blame for all this. Random cosmic bad luck wasn’t good enough. I needed to see a Wanted poster with some bastard’s face and name on it.
The cigarette tasted so good, I had two of them, just sitting in my ragtop in the warm, glowing autumn afternoon watching the old guys play checkers on the bird-bombed green park benches.
I wanted Linda with me. A healthy, long-lived Linda. Hard to imagine the darkness of death when I thought of her on so fetching a day.
The judge would be wanting to hear from me, and since I had nothing much to report I thought that maybe it was time I visit Brenda Carlyle, which I’d been putting off. Her husband, Mike, had gotten all the way to Chicago in the Golden Gloves just before he left for Korea. He worked at his old man’s lumberyard and spent his idle hours beating the crap out of any guy who so much as glanced at his wife, which wasn’t easy not to do, believe me, her being one of the most quietly erotic women ever born in our little valley here. She is not innocent of her charms.
In high school, I’m told, she used to pursue various boys and, when done with them, turn them over to Mike for summary punishment.
Mike either didn’t know that she’d approached the boys, rather than the other way around, or he chose not to know.
Certain legends were passed among the panting young men in our town. Many of them concerned Brenda.
Most of the stories were variations on the stuff the panting young men had read in the sort of books Kenny Chesmore writes. You know, that she liked to stand on certain husband-gone nights draped only in the gauziest of teddy-bear nighties and try to lure foolish boys inside in the way a sea siren would. That she rewarded the best high school footbal
l player of the year with a special night all their own. And that at Christmastime she gave herself to the young man who struck her as the most exciting.
But remember, folks, this is Black River Falls, after all, and there isn’t much else to do but think up stories like these.
I decided to stop by the lumberyard and make sure that Mike was at work. Didn’t want him to surprise me by opening the door of his home.
The lumberyard always unmanned me. I come from a long line of handymen. If a tornado knocks your house down tonight, my dad and a couple of his brothers will have it standing, good as new, twenty-four hours later. I have trouble pounding nails in straight. Or getting screws to stay in. And anything I painted always came out striped, as if I’d used several subtly different colors. When I was in tenth grade my dad asked me to help him install a new window over the kitchen sink. We got the window in all right, but when I was putting the shutter back on, my hammer accidentally slammed a corner of it and shattered glass all over my mom, who was innocently washing dishes. My dad never asked me to help him again and I couldn’t blame him.
But the lumberyard dazzled me with all its manly secrets and rites of passage: whine of electric saw, smell of fresh cut lumber, stacks of wood in the yard, men in big overalls, their pipes tucked into the corners of their mouths as they loaded lumber into the backs of their trucks, their tool belts packed with all sorts of arcane instruments that would be lost on me. I had a pair of bib overalls but the legs were too long. And I had some tools but Mrs. Goldman kept them because she used them-and used them well-mch better than I did.
I saw him and he saw me. He didn’t like me. One night in a bar his wife had grabbed me and swung me out onto the dance floor. It was fast dancing but he still hadn’t liked it. He had a good memory. He’d been glowering at me ever since that night. And that had been at least four years ago.
He didn’t wear overalls. He wore a shirt and tie and trousers. He was huge but quick and deft for his size. He picked up a pile of two-by-fours and dropped them in the bed of a truck.
No reason to stay there. I turned and walked away, inhaling the perfume of fresh sawn lumber.
I got in my ragtop and drove maybe three blocks to the narrow road that would take me to the Carlyle house when I decided I’d better check in at my office.