by Ed Gorman
As I was walking out the door, he said, “You think the Russians are gonna run that blockade ole Kennedy set up?”
“I sure hope not.”
“Scares the hell out of me,” he said. “Scares the hell out of me.”
Jim Gilliam turned out to be a very slick public relations man. The Brooks Brothers suit, the filter cigarettes, black horn-rimmed glasses, the smooth empty patter. Shrewd eyes that approved of very little they saw.
He stood in the doorway of the Murdoch mansion, blocking my entrance.
“I wish I could let you in but Mr. Murdoch is still in the meeting.”
“That’s one long meeting.”
“Well, that’s how political campaigns are, Mr. McCain. Night and day. Day and night.”
“Cole Porter.”
“Pardon me?”
“‘Night and day. Day and night.’ That’s a Cole Porter song.”
“Oh, right,” he said. “The song. Very good, Mr. McCain. You should go on a game show.”
I blurted her name as soon as I saw her crossing from one part of the huge house to the other. “Deirdre!”
She turned, peered into the darkness of the vestibule, and then came walking toward me. “Is that you, Sam?”
“Yep. But Jim here won’t let me in.”
“What’s that supposed to mean—he won’t let you in? He’ll let you in if I tell him to. And I’m telling him to right now.”
She looked irritated and Gilliam looked irritated. Just then a big gray tomcat went walking by. He looked irritated, too, come to think of it.
“He happens to be a friend of mine, Jim.”
“I’m just trying to protect your Dad.”
“Sam’s helping my Dad, Jim.”
“But the meeting—”
“It’s not a political meeting. It’s just his three best friends is all.”
I didn’t know how much Gilliam knew—if anything—about dead girls in bomb shelters or four men who chipped in to support the same mistress but I could see that he knew something. Or knew at the very least that his candidate had some kind of terrible personal problem. Now he didn’t look irritated. He looked nervous. Extremely.
Deirdre seemed unaware of any tension. She said, “C’mon in, Sam. You can meet Mom. We were just drinking some hot cocoa in the family room.”
Gilliam stepped aside. “I’m just trying to do my job, Sam. Nothing personal.”
“I know.” And I did. I’d been put in the same position many times. Screening people is not a way to make friends.
I tapped him on the elbow to show no hard feelings.
“God,” she said, as she led me to the family room. “This campaign is terrible. It’s like we’re all prisoners. We have to watch everything we do and say. Even where we go and who we see. I’m pretty sure Dad’s going to win. And I’m pretty sure things’ll be even worse in the governor’s mansion.”
But the governor’s mansion was getting lost in the midst of scandal. You could barely see it from here. And each hour it grew fainter and fainter.
“Mom, this is Sam McCain.”
The family room was painted white with bold colorful paintings on the wall and blonde Swedish furniture gathered around the twenty-seven inch TV console. A magazine advertisement.
“It’s very nice to meet you, Sam. My husband and Deirdre both say very nice things about you.”
“It’s all that money I pay them.”
Deirdre nudged me in the ribs. “I told you he was a wise-guy, Mom.”
“Would you care for some hot cocoa?” Mom said. “I was just going out to the kitchen to get some more for myself.” She slid a rather short, wide hand at me. “My name’s Irene, by the way.”
“Nice to meet you, Irene.” In her tan slacks and brown turtleneck sweater and dark silken hair cut short, her body gave the impression of strength and activity. Dressed for action. She was a big woman but it appeared not to be fat, just the shape of her natural body.
“Would you like some cocoa, Sam?” Deirdre said.
“Sure.”
“I’ll go help Mom, then. We’ll be right back.”
“Thanks. Cocoa sounds good.”
As soon as they’d left the room, I hurried through the house, looking for the den where I’d talked earlier in the day with Ross Murdoch.
I kept a lookout for Gilliam. He had every right to ask me why I was walking alone through the house. Especially if he happened to catch me with my ear pressed to the door of the den.
But I didn’t see him. And I found the den with no trouble. A low rumble of male voices pressed against the other side of the door but no intelligible words escaped.
His three best friends, Deirdre had said. The men who had to make a damned quick decision. The men who had reputations and minor fortunes to lose once this thing got out. The men who would be the most likely suspects of all when Cliffie finally came into possession of the body. And Ross Murdoch would be at the head of that suspect list.
I knocked softly, one of those two-knuckle jobs.
I wasn’t sure anybody’d heard me. They kept right on talking. And then, in delayed response, the low male rumble stopped entirely. Silence. Followed by footsteps.
Ross Murdoch opened the door and said, “Damn.”
“Same to you.”
“I didn’t mean it that way, Sam. It’s just so damned—confusing.”
I peered into the den. Three men sat in chairs collected around his huge desk. They all half-turned to see what annoying little bastard had interrupted their meeting. I recognized all of them. Community leaders, as they were always referred to in the local newspaper.
“I guess you got here just in time,” Murdoch said. “We were about to take a vote.”
“I don’t want him in here,” said prissy Peter Carlson.
“Neither do I,” said grumpy Gavin Wheeler.
“Isn’t he that asshole private eye?” said mean Mike Hardin.
“I guess you may as well come in,” Murdoch said.
“Yeah, sounds like they’re really looking forward to me joining in the fun.”
He laughed wearily. “They’re just afraid you’ll back me up and try to talk them out of it.”
“Talk them out of what?”
He sighed deeply. “They want to take the body out of the bomb shelter and throw it in the river.”
“Say,” I said. “That’s a really good idea. Juries love to hear little tidbits like that. That way they don’t have to spend a lot of time convicting you. They can probably be out of the jury room in under ten minutes.”
Murdoch laughed.
Mean Mike Hardin said, “See, I told you he was an asshole.”
SEVEN
SINCLAIR LEWIS HAD WRITTEN, and not as uncharitably as memory has it, of their fathers and grandfathers. I know stuff like this because at the U of Iowa I took my major in English and my minor in pre-law.
Lewis called them boosters, by which he meant that they promoted themselves, their communities and their country with the relentless fervor of marchers in a Fourth of July parade. They believed, and took as their secular religion, a former president’s statement that “The business of America is business.”
Fine and dandy. Not anything wrong with that. The trouble was that they defined themselves, their communities and their country in pretty restrictive ways. You needed to be the right color, the right religion and the right political philosophy to be their friends and to share in their success.
In this case, the four men sitting in Ross Murdoch’s den had inherited modest wealth from their fathers and had doubled or tripled that wealth all by themselves. They were bright and savvy men. They had served in the big war or in the Korean war, one of them in both, so you sure couldn’t question their very admirable patriotism. Two of them had their own airplanes; one of them ran a Canadian resort as an escape and a side business; and one of them wanted very much to be governor. What always surprised me was their bitterness and anger, which they rarely expressed whe
n they were sober. But I’d been Judge Whitney’s uneasy and self-conscious guest at the country club a few nights and had stood at the bar with men very much like these. In their cups, they sounded as if they were the most oppressed minority in the country. Their world was coming apart. The colored athletes at the U of Iowa were sleeping with respectable white girls. The goddamn Japs were starting to flood the free markets with low-priced trash. The State Department wanted American farmers to share all their agricultural secrets with these little countries that would turn around and undercut American crop prices. Rock-and-roll was mostly queers and horny Negroes who belonged in prison just on general principles. Edward R. Murrow, who’d always been a troublemaker, had taken up the cause of Mexican farm workers and so now the big farmers had to worry about a federal agent hiding behind every tree. And, despite all the warnings from Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale, you had a Catholic in the White House who was probably on the phone to the Pope three times a day.
Part of their boozy unhappiness had struck me as sheer age. You saw some of it in the blue collar taverns where I drank and belonged. I wasn’t idealizing them. They had plenty of their own prejudices and rages. But then it didn’t sound as if all the world was conspiring to overthrow them. They were men lamenting all the girls they should’ve screwed—God, if I’d only known then what I know now—and usually imaginary chances they’d had to invest in this or that scheme to become millionaires overnight much as Jackie Gleason tried to become every Saturday night as “Ralph Kramden,” the working-class fool with a heart of embarrassing but endearing dreams. They wanted to be young and virile again; they were worried their kids were going to be cut in the next bunch of layoffs at the plant because their seniority was so low; they were melancholy that as much as they loved their wives and their wives loved them there just wasn’t that spark there any more, You shoulda seen her when she was nineteen, McCain, at the swimming pool in Jackson Park. She’d walk out into the sunlight and the guys would just cream their jeans right there. Right on the spot. Cream their jeans. And I was one of ’em. And she picked me. Me!”
But generally there wasn’t the rage, the rancor I found in the booster class. The workers had simpler and thus less frustrating hopes—they just wanted their kids to do better than they did and to be safe and to not get in any trouble with the law or nothing like that. But the country club men—they had dreamed far larger dreams and saw evidence everywhere that it was all going away for them.
“So you’re suggesting what exactly?” said Mike Hardin. Third string guard at a small liberal arts college in New Hampshire. His law office covered with framed photos of himself in his football days. He was the preferred lawyer of the wealthy in this part of the state. And for good reason. He was smart and wily and commanded a courtroom with an easy grace I could only envy.
“Mike. You’re a lawyer. Listen to what you’re saying.” I said this after fifteen minutes of listening to several nit-wit alternatives to just calling Cliffie.
“Don’t give me any lectures, McCain. You’re nobody, I mean in case you hadn’t noticed.” He had one of those taut, angular faces that reflected perfectly the mood of the moment.
“For God’s sake, Mike,” Ross Murdoch said. “You’re nobody and I’m nobody—we’re all nobody.”
“I’d forgotten how humble you are, Ross,” Hardin said. “But I guess that’s why you’ve always been morally superior to the rest of us.”
“Shut the hell up, Mike,” Gavin Wheeler said. Wheeler was in his forties, looked sixty. He was always dressed in a three-piece suit, the assumption being, I guess, that the vest hid his enormous belly. He was bald and had the largest hands I’d ever seen. He’d been a wrestler at the U of Iowa and a damned good one. He’d seen the future as soon as he’d come back from the big war. He and a rich cousin had started four TV stations. They now had ten stations here and in Missouri and were very, very rich. “We acted like a bunch of stupid bastards when we agreed to bring her out here. I still can’t believe we did it. But we did and now she’s downstairs—dead. Listening to McCain here—we’ve been kidding ourselves. We’ve made things a lot worse for ourselves already. We’ve waited a whole day to call the law. But I’m throwing in with McCain. I say let’s call Cliffie now and salvage what we can of it.”
Peter Carlson had a yacht on the Mississippi, a twin-engine Bonanza at the Cedar Rapids airport, and a Hugh Hefner pad in Chicago. He divided his time between running his stock brokerage and gossiping. You couldn’t pass him on the street without him stopping you to tell you something nasty about somebody you knew. And if he didn’t have gossip, he always had his scorn. He had one of those smug, imperious temperaments that intimidated you through its malice.
“I just want to say one thing,” Carlson said. He was a slim, short, preppy-looking man who always managed to work in the fact that he’d graduated from Yale. That is, if you’d managed to miss the enormous Yale class ring on his finger. If the Yale Alumni Association had recommended Yale tattoos, I’m sure he’d have one his forehead. “Think of our wives, think of our kids, think of our parents when this hits the newspapers and the TV sets. Our lives are over. No matter who killed her and put her down in that bomb shelter. Our lives are over no matter how it turns out. We’ll always be the four civic leaders who set up a woman—let’s face it, a very high-priced whore—in an apartment so we wouldn’t have to travel very far when we wanted a little nookie on the side. Are you ready to face that?”
Mike Hardin half-leaped from his chair and started pacing. “Face it. We’re screwed either way we go.” He made huge frustrated fists of his hands. He wanted to rip something apart. If I’d been in his situation, I’d have reacted the same way. He walked over to the window and looked outside. Nobody talked. A grandfather clock in the corner made the only sound.
“The longer you wait, the worse it’ll be,” I said. “And even if you try to hide the body, it’ll be found and you’ll still have to face all the same problems.”
“I’m willing to call Cliffie right now.” Ross Murdoch held an unlit briar pipe. A pacifier for older tots. “And I’m going to be the number one suspect.” He sighed again. “And it’s going to be the end of my political career.”
He’d obviously been thinking realistically about everything in the hours I’d been away.
“Your career is finished, Ross,” I said. “But all four of you’ll be suspects.”
“Us?” snapped Peter Carlson. “It’s not our bomb shelter. It’s Ross’s. We don’t live here.”
“No, but you were one-fourth of the deal.”
“Does he have to be here, Ross?” Carlson said. “He’s some two-bit lawyer. He doesn’t know jack shit.”
“Well, I’m not a two-bit lawyer and I say he’s right on the money,” Hardin said. “Hell, yes, we’re all going to be suspects. The workers in and out all day. Doors opened wide. I imagine there were times when nobody in the family was home when the bomb shelter was being worked on. Anybody could’ve slipped in. Any one of us. She probably weighed a little over a hundred pounds. She wouldn’t be hard to move in if you got in right after the workers were done for the day and the family was gone. Were you all gone yesterday, Ross?”
“I was in Iowa City. I’ll have to check with my wife and daughter. The maid usually leaves around four. She leaves the dinner for us in the stove. We like to eat early, around five.”
“There you go. You see what I mean?” Hardin said. “This house is big enough that people on the second floor wouldn’t hear anybody if they snuck into the basement and were quiet about it.”
“Cliffie isn’t that smart,” Gavin Wheeler said.
“Cliffie won’t have to be smart,” Murdoch said. “I know enough people in the capital that I can insist on the state boys getting involved. I want to find out what the hell happened.”
Gavin Wheeler said, “My own TV stations’ll cover this. I’ll be sittin’ at home watchin’ my own TV station treat me like a common criminal. Damned good thing it�
�s privately held. Stockholders’d kick my ass out for sure.”
“We’re all going to have those problems,” Murdoch said. “People’ll be shocked when they hear this. And then they’ll start laughing. And they’ll laugh at us the rest of our lives. It’ll be like when Carmichael took bankruptcy.”
Andy Carmichael had owned twenty-some mom and pop grocery stores throughout the state. He wasn’t afraid of the huge supermarkets that had just reached the outlying Midwest. He said that people in our kind of towns would resist them. Would hate the size. Would hate the impersonal service. Would hate all the hoopla that always goes along with places like that. Two supermarkets came into town in 1950 and by 1952 all of Carmichael’s stores were out of business and he’d gone bankrupt. He took to walking with his head down so he wouldn’t have to acknowledge anyone on the street. He took to staying home for days, sometimes weeks at a time. He took to solitary and severe drinking. And then one night he took to putting a .45 in his mouth and pulling the trigger. Just once is all it takes. It wasn’t Jews, Negroes, homosexuals, or even Catholics—despite the name he was a virulent anti-Papist Protestant—that had done him in. It was capitalism in its simplest and most ruthless form.
Murdoch set his pipe on the desk, walked around so he could face everybody and said, “I’m going to call Cliffie. Sam, you shouldn’t be here. That’ll make things look bad for you and bad for us. I’m going to tell one lie that I want you all to agree with. That I didn’t discover the body until just before dinner. That way it won’t look as if we even considered covering all this up. I found the body, called you gentlemen over, and we all arranged to be here when the law arrived. Is that all right?”
“I won’t swear to it under oath,” I said. “In fact, I think it’s a very bad idea. Lies never work in investigations like these.”
Murdoch shook his head. “I’m going to take the chance.”