Breaking Up Is Hard to Do (The Sam McCain Mysteries Book 6)

by Ed Gorman

  “She liked the idea?”

  He laughed but without pleasure. “She loved it. We didn’t find out why till later. She was wanted by the Chicago police for extortion.”

  I sat back in my chair. “This is about the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard of.”

  “There were a couple stories just like it back east. That’s where we got the idea. We just assumed we’d be better at it.”

  “And you didn’t see any of the pitfalls?”

  He shook his head. “You don’t need to remind me, Sam. Right away there was jealousy among the men. Two of them developed crushes on her. One of them I think fell in love with her. And then there was the fact that she started seeing other men on the side. I didn’t get jealous of that—the more I got to know her, the less I wanted to do with her—but I couldn’t figure out what we were paying for. She was ours. We were paying her way.”

  “And then she started shaking you down.”

  He looked surprised. “God, she wanted more and more money all the time.”

  “That kind of arrangement, Ross. They always come back for more.”

  “She didn’t wait for that. She said she’d contact my political enemies. Sell them the story. She changed. In Chicago she seemed so—sweet.”

  “She was planning this all along. The first time she probably didn’t know how wealthy you were. Then she found out you were running for governor. You were going to be a very big payday for her.”

  “I knew that, of course. All I could think of was getting through the election.”

  “There’s also a good chance that she would also have sold her story to your so-called enemies, anyway.”

  “Oh, God, you know I hadn’t thought of that. You really think she would’ve done it?”

  “I can’t say for sure. But probably. How about the others? How much did she get from them?”

  “The same for all of us. We divided all the payments by four.” He tried a clumsy joke. “I wonder if you can divide a murder four ways.”

  “It’ll be tough. You’ve got her body in the basement.”

  “I didn’t put it there. I really didn’t. And I certainly don’t know who killed her.”

  Now it was my turn to get up and pace. I suppose that’s sort of impolite, in somebody else’s office and all, but I needed some kind of exercise suddenly. Sitting in the chair just made me realize how hopeless his situation was. For one thing, he might very well have killed her himself, put the body in the bomb shelter, and then concocted this fancy tale of “discovering” her down there. Surprise, surprise.

  I went over to the window and looked out on the day. “I’m going to assume for the minute that you didn’t kill her.”

  “Gee, thanks, Sam. I already said I didn’t.”

  “As I said, I’m assuming that. But I’m not ruling it out.”

  “I didn’t kill her, all right? I didn’t kill her.”

  “Then that leaves two likely possibilities.” I turned back to him. “One of your three friends killed her. Or somebody we don’t know about. Yet.”

  “I’m going to let you call this one, Sam. That’s why I got you out here.”

  I checked my watch. “Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to call Cliffie and get him out here. Tell him you just discovered the body.”

  “But won’t the coroner set the time of death?”

  “Maybe. But even if he sets it five hours before you call Cliffie, all you have to say is that you didn’t go down into the basement until right before you called.”

  He gazed up at me with glassy, dazed eyes. “It’s funny. Being governor meant so much to me and now—”

  I walked back toward his desk. “Right now your biggest concern has to be staying out of prison.” I headed for the door. “You don’t want Cliffie to think that you called me before you called him.”

  He just sat where he was, still slumped. “Call him, Ross,” I said, “call him right now.” I sounded as I were speaking to a naughty child.

  FOUR

  I GET DOWN ON MY hands and knees every night and thank Khrushchev for being such a rotten, treacherous old bastard. Thanks to him this is the golden era of my sex life.”

  You’ve heard of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck. Everybody has.

  But how about Brad Brand? Rod Randall? Ty Tolan? They’re all writers, too. In fact, they’re all the same guy, our little burg’s only living professional dirty book writer, Kenny Thibodeau. Since Bible-thumping district attorneys across the land are trying to make political names for themselves sending “smut peddlers” to prison, everybody in the dirty book industry uses phony names these days.

  There’s no explicit sex in these books and good sturdy bourgeoisie morality always wins out in the end. The covers suggest otherwise, of course, and it is often the covers, some of which are excellent examples of commercial art, that these politically ambitious district attorneys rave on about. If you can churn them out quickly enough, and Kenny can, you can make a sort of living at writing them.

  According to Kenny, it isn’t easy to come up with Hot Rod Harlots, Motel Minx and Surfin’ Sinners all in the same month without having your brain collapse.

  “In the last eight days, I’ve slept with four girls who usually wouldn’t piss on me if I was on fire,” Kenny continued. “And it’s all because they think we’re going to get nuked by the commies.”

  Kenny himself has been mistaken for a commie by local members of such organizations as the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Catholic Church, the Presbyterian Church and the Amish. You can also throw in several biker gangs, my parents, his parents and the parents of any girl he’s ever dated. It’s not the fact that he writes dirty books—that just makes him a deviate—it’s the fact that he has a little black tuft of beard, a black beret, a black turtleneck sweater, black jeans, tan desert boots and a pair of thick-lensed black-rimmed glasses. He is, in other words, a stereotypical beatnik, our resident beatnik in fact. And as everybody knows, beatniks are—in addition to being smelly, profane, lazy and pretentious—commies.

  We were in my office. I was looking over my phone notes that Jamie Newton had left behind during her two hour shift. Jamie’s still in high school. I represented her father in a property dispute. He told me afterward that he couldn’t afford to pay me so he’d give me his daughter for two hours a day as my secretary. In theory that sounded all right. But after seeing the first letter she ever typed for me—and after trying to decipher a couple of phone messages—I decided that she was his secret revenge. We’d lost the case. Jamie was my punishment and no matter how hard I begged, he wasn’t going to break our deal. “Fair’s fair,” he always said. He wasn’t taking her back.

  Jamie returned from the john saying, “Turk didn’t call, did he, Mr. C?”

  On the Perry Como TV show, his regulars always refer to him as Mr. C. Thus Jamie refers to me as Mr. C. That my last name begins with M bothers her not at all. Turk is her boyfriend, who is a kind of parody juvenile delinquent, the kind you see in Hollywood movies. You know, the fierce bad boys in West Side Story.

  Kenny ogled Jamie all the way to her typewriter. He took special note of how she seated herself. Jamie is the girl paperback cover artists have in mind whenever they’re illustrating a “jail bait” novel. Though she dresses well thanks to earning free clothes as a department store model, she has a body that not even the primmest of dresses could disguise. Plus she’s got a sweet sensual face that belies her body. She’s actually innocent and decent and that’s what you see in her blue blue eyes and her little-kid smile.

  “No, he didn’t call, I’m afraid.”

  “He had to go to traffic court this morning.”

  “Wasn’t he just in traffic court a couple weeks ago?”

  “Chief Sykes really has it in for him. He won’t cut Turk any slack at all. Turk was just going thirty miles over the speed limit last night and Chief Sykes arrested him. He’s got that big yellow Indian, you know. Turk s
ays cops shouldn’t be allowed to ride motorcycles because it puts drivers at a disadvantage. You know, when you’re trying to outrun them.”

  “Nobody ever puts anything over on Turk,” I said. “He’s thinking all the time.”

  “He said he’s going to say that in court this morning, Mr. C. About the cops having the advantage with their motorcycles.”

  “That should get him ten to twenty on a chain gang,” Kenny laughed. If Jamie understood what he meant, she didn’t let on. She set to typing. That is, after she was done with her ritual. I figured at her fastest Jamie could type thirty words a minute, at least twenty of which were misspelled. In order to accomplish this amazing feat, certain things had to be in place. A fresh bottle of Pepsi with a long straw bobbing up inside the neck. A Winston cigarette burning uselessly in her pink plastic ashtray. And the latest issue of one of her teen magazines angled across the corner of her metal typing desk. The magazine was there, waiting and ready, for when she took one of her breaks.

  I jerked my head at Kenny, indicating that we should go outside. My crowded, dusty little one-room office wasn’t a place for exchanging confidential information.

  “We’re going down to the drug store for a Coke,” I said to Jamie.

  “Sure thing, Mr. C,” she said, leaning over the typewriter and jamming down hard on a particular key.

  “We’ll be back in twenty minutes or so,” I said.

  “This darn thing. Is there a k in concern? I’m pretty sure it’s c, isn’t it?”

  “You could always look at the one thousand spelling words book I got you. I’m sure you’ll find ‘concern’ in there.”

  “Oh, yeah, right. That spelling book. I always forget about it. In fact—” And she began gaping around for it as if it might be playing hide-and-seek, “I haven’t been able to find it lately. You think you could get me another one?”

  Oh, yeah; her father was one sly guy. I lose his case and he gives me Jamie.

  The only thing that had stayed the same at the Rexall drugstore was Mary Travers, whose name was now Mary Lindstrom. She was still possessed of the pale skin and dark hair and naturally pink mouth and soft blue gaze that I’d almost fallen in love with. She was the girl everybody said I should marry. Which I probably would’ve done if it hadn’t been for my obsession with the beautiful Pamela Forrest. Mary had had the same kind of obsession with me. And for about the same length of time, starting in second grade.

  She’d had two children rather quickly but still looked young and vital. Since her husband Wes owned the Rexall—he was a pharmacist who’d inherited the place from his father—she worked the counter sometimes. She was shy as ever. There had always been a sad erotic quality to her shyness and sometimes now when I saw her on the street I felt not only lust but loss. I’d probably made a bad choice in passing her by.

  She served us our coffees quickly, too busy to say much. The place was crowded. I glanced around. They’d redecorated a year ago. Everything was new and bright and plastic. I missed the old ice cream chairs and the crooked paperback rack that squeaked when you turned it around and the booths where you could sit on Saturdays and watch all the girls come and go. The sandwich counter was the last vestige of the old place. The booths were gone, replaced by glass counters filled with everything from watches to perfumes. It’s funny, isn’t it, how we can get as sentimental about places as we do people? Sometimes I walk around this old town of ours and I’ll see a hitching post where horses used to be tied, which I can still sort of remember. They kept them right up till the time of Korea. Or the grade school where I spent three years before they retired it in favor of a new red brick building. Or the ancient Rialto theater where your parents never wanted you to go because there were supposedly rats lurking in every dark corner—but it only cost eight cents and the holy trinity could be seen there regularly, Gene and Roy and Hoppy. We call them inanimate, all these places of our youth, but they aren’t really, not after we’ve invested them with memories and melancholy.

  I said, “You want to make twenty bucks?”

  “I get to play Shell Scott?”

  “I thought you liked to play Mike Hammer.”

  “I’ve been reading a lot of Zen stuff, man. Mike Hammer is too violent.”

  “Maybe you should be Miss Marple.”

  “Very funny.” He sipped his coffee. “Actually, I’d rather be Miss Marple than Hercule Poirot. He’s such a little twit.”

  “Yeah; I like Miss Marple better, too.”

  “Maybe I’ll be Philip Marlowe. I’m in a kind of Philip Marlowe mood lately.”

  “Whatever that means. Can we get back to the subject?”

  “You want me to dig up dirt on—whom?”

  Kenny Thibodeau could make a lot more money as an investigator than he does as a dirty book writer. But I suppose it’s a matter of prestige. Just about anybody can be a gumshoe but very few among us could write Nympho Nurses. Kenny knows, or knows how to get, information on virtually everybody in town. I use him a lot. He really does like to play private eye.

  “Start with Ross Murdoch.”

  “You’re kidding. He’s going to be governor.”

  I didn’t want to elaborate on that. “I’ll have some other names for you later. You’ll be busy for a while.”

  “Maybe get some material for a book. I’m hoping one of these cases for you turns up some really raunchy stuff one of these days.”

  He slid off the stool. “I still miss that paperback rack. The old metal one.”

  “Yeah, so do I.”

  “That new layout they’ve got over there—all those shelves and everything—it’s too respectable for people like us, McCain.”

  “I agree.”

  “God, we’re getting old, McCain.”

  “Yeah, our mid-twenties. We’ll have chrome walkers before you know it.”

  The way Mary kept glancing at me, I knew she wanted to talk. I was happy to wait around. In addition to somebody I daydreamed of sleeping with from time to time, she was pure, nice woman. She had to give up college when her dad got throat cancer. I never once heard her complain or feel sorry for herself.

  “How’ve you been?” she said when the rush was over.

  “About the same as the last time we talked. That was about fifteen years ago, right?”

  She smiled. “Seems more like thirty. It’s just going so fast. We’ll actually be thirty one of these days. Do you ever think about it?”

  “I’m too boyish to think about stuff like that.” Then: “I think about it all the time.”

  She leaned forward and said, “Wes asked me for a divorce last week and I said yes. He met a lady pharmacist at a convention. He’s been driving to Des Moines to see her.” Her tone was flat. If she was sad about it, she hid it well.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not sure I am, Sam. To be honest, I mean.”

  “You have any suspicions beforehand?”

  “Yes. I mean, by the end it got to be obvious. It’s funny—Pamela Forrest finally got her dream: you know, finally getting Stu Grant to marry her and now I hear she’s miserable. And Wes finally got his, getting to marry me, and now he’s found someone else.”

  “So how do you feel about all this?”

  She shrugged her slender shoulders. “Oh, you know, mixed feelings. It wasn’t ever much of a marriage. You know how jealous he is about everybody. If I wasn’t home doing housework or behind the counter here at the store, he was worried I was cheating on him. He accused me of it so much I almost called you a couple of times to make it true.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t.”

  “So am I. I’m not the cheating type. He would’ve dragged me down with him.”

  “So now what?”

  “Well, his father’s really angry. His mother never liked me. Coming from the Hills the way I did …well, you know. She pretty much thought I was trash and that her precious Wes was marrying below his station. But his father and I always got along. He’s kind of cranky at the
store here but you should see him when he’s with his two grandkids. One day he was so happy to be picking up Ellie, he just burst into tears.”

  “Man, that goes into ‘Believe It Or Not.’”

  “Right now, of course, they’re pretty mad at Wes, too. He’s pretty much taken over the pharmacy here. And they’re embarrassed by what he’s done. So they’re making sure he gives me the house and the second car and a decent amount of child support. I’ll keep working here with longer hours and they’ll pay for all my insurance. Knowing Granddad, he’ll also be buying clothes for the kids. He’s always shopping for them.”

  A customer. Coffee and a Danish that was probably starting to dry out from the morning. But they’re good that way. Just a tad bit old. I got one for myself. She spent ten minutes subduing the new crowd. Then came back to me.

  She asked me how the woman I’d most recently dated was doing. “I heard she moved to Rochester.”

  “Well, I kind of thought that might turn into something. But she went up there so many times that she fell in love with her oncologist. They’re getting married in six months.” She’d been another girl I’d grown up with in the Hills, same as Mary and Pamela. She moved to Iowa City, worked her way through nursing school, and married a guy from Rock Island. Everything went reasonably well until she found out she had breast cancer. He couldn’t handle it. He finally just ran away. We dated for a couple of months and it was fun. She is a very good woman. The sex was wonderful. But then she started talking about this oncologist in terms that weren’t doctorly. How he reminded her a little of Tony Curtis. How he’d played quarterback at the U of Minnesota. How he had this really nifty frontier-style cabin on a lake up near the Canadian border. Wasn’t too hard to figure out what was going on. We hadn’t been in love. We’d been lonely and wanted to think we were in love but when she told me she’d decided to move up there, I think we were both relieved that our little charade was over.

  “It’s kind of funny, Sam.”