by Ed Gorman
“That’s up to you, Ross.”
I nodded to the four of them. “Good luck.”
I had almost closed the door—hoping I wouldn’t hear any disparaging whispers about myself—when Peter Carlson, obviously wanting me to hear it, said, “What a nickel-dimer he is. I don’t want him around any more, Ross, and I mean it.”
All the way out to my car I wondered which was more insulting, nickel-dimer or asshole. I am frequently involved in such philosophical debates.
I was so lost in asshole versus nickel-dimer that I didn’t even see her until I opened the door and got in the car. She sat smoking a cigarette in the passenger seat.
Her hair was in a ponytail now and she wore a crew neck sweater, white shirt and jeans. She looked like a high school girl. “Hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.”
“God, I love making out in cars, don’t you? And I don’t mean that as an invitation.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“And then smoking afterward. And drawing your initials in the steam on the window. And pretending that nobody can ever hurt you as long as you never leave the car. And as long as the night never ends.”
She was bringing back a lot of memories and for a long wonderful moment I rode on the crest of them, surfer style. But then I began wondering what she was doing out here.
She spoke before I could ask her.
“I just had to get away from my mom for a while.”
“I thought you got along.”
“We do. But—today’s been a real strain on her.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
She said, “She’s been eating Miltowns all day.”
“Still the tranquilizer of choice.”
“She’s terrified and so am I.”
“Of what?”
“Oh, please, Sam. Something terrible’s going on, isn’t it? Dad won’t let anybody go in the basement and if you even go near it, he explodes. He’s usually very calm. Then his three so-called ‘friends’ have this secret meeting in the den.”
“Why ‘so-called’?”
“Well, both Hardin and Carlson have tried to put the make on me ever since I was fourteen. Hardin even got me drunk one night at this New Year’s Eve party and really felt me up.”
“Our esteemed counselor?”
“Our esteemed counselor.”
“Anything else I should know about?”
She angled herself over so that she could lay back against the window. “I love the feeling of a cold car window on your skin. If I had a blanket I could probably go to sleep right here.”
“It’s my company. I have that effect on people. I once put an entire stadium asleep by telling them my life story. And I only got up to age two before they all nodded off.”
She smiled. “I’ll bet a lot of girls have told you how cute you are.”
“I’ll bet a lot of guys have told you how beautiful you are.”
“‘Pretty,’ I’ll go along with. Beautiful—no.”
“You never did finish telling me about our esteemed counselor Hardin.”
“I know. I just feel kind of funny—you know. Talking about private family things.”
I didn’t want to push her. Make her any more suspicious about what was going on all around her. I just said, “Well—and please don’t tell anybody else this—the same thing happened to me.”
“What same thing?”
“With Hardin. He got me drunk one night and felt me up, too. But then he dropped me when he found out I couldn’t mambo.”
She laughed. “You must’ve been crushed.”
“Well, not really. His breath is pretty bad.”
She leaned over and kissed me. “You really are an idiot, you know.”
“So give me some dirt on Hardin. He’s a competitor of mine in a way. I just enjoy hearing things about competitors.”
She shrugged and then leaned back against the window.
“Well, it’s not anything hot or sexy. It’s just this housing development in Des Moines. Wheeler and Dad went ahead and invested in it and made a lot of money. They didn’t invite Hardin or Carlson in. Hardin and Dad actually got into a fist fight in the den over it. Hardin was adamant about it for months. He seems to believe that they made some kind of agreement to always act as a group. And that any time there’s an investment opportunity, they should all be told about it. You know, have the right to turn it down at least.”
“So he gets along with Wheeler?”
“Oh, God,” she said and put her head back against the seat. “I really shouldn’t say this. But I had two drinks and that always turns me into a snitch. You know how in the big war they always said ‘Loose lips sink ships’?”
“There were posters everywhere that said that.”
“Well, after two or three drinks, I sink a lot of ships.”
“Meaning?”
She couldn’t decide if she wanted to sink any more ships. While she was deciding, I saw a car pull up at the distant entrance to the place and cut its lights. I recognized the car immediately. A white and blue 1955 Chevrolet. The car that changed automobile styles around the world. Probably my all-time favorite design. There were still a number of them around. But I had the feeling I knew whose car it was.
“My father once accused Wheeler of cheating him in a land deal. They patched things up but they’ve never been very close since. I think the only reason they see each other at all is because they have so many investments together.” She tamped out another cigarette. “So now it’s your turn.”
“My turn?”
“You have to tell me what’s going on with my father. And why you keep looking in your rearview mirror.”
“There’s a car parked near the entrance to your drive.”
“A burglar?” she said lightly.
“A reporter.”
“Not the intrepid Don Arbogast.”
I laughed. “Yes, indeed. The intrepid Don Arbogast, the man who gave narcolepsy a bad name.”
Don was, depending on whom you believed, in his seventies or eighties. It was believed that he had something naughty on his employer. How else could he keep his job? He hobbled around on a walker half the time. And the other half—as when he was covering trials—he sat in the back and snored. He was a decent guy and had once been a first-rate reporter. These days he’d get lucky once in a while and stumble into a story that really mattered.
“Well, at least we don’t have to worry about him coming up here and bothering us. He can’t walk that far.”
“I think I’ll check him out,” I said.
“Hey,” she said. “You’re supposed to tell me what’s going on with my father.”
“C’mon now, I need to talk to Arbogast before he leaves.”
“Leaves? He’s probably asleep.”
And he probably was.
I leaned across her and opened the door. “I need to hurry.”
“This isn’t fair.” She was still keeping the tone light, a kind of mock petulance. But her eyes were anxious. She rightly suspected that something was badly wrong.
She got out of the Ford and said, “I hope I’ll see you tomorrow. By then maybe I’ll know what’s going on around here.”
I drove away.
The intrepid Don Arbogast was just getting out of his nifty mobile when I pulled up alongside him on the road in front of the Murdoch place.
I always felt sorry for him. Couldn’t help it. His wife had died ten years ago, his kids were grown and dispersed throughout the galaxy, and he had no life but his reporting job. The paper had two young reporters to do the heavy work. The publisher just sort of let Don do whatever he wanted to.
I wished he hadn’t dyed his hair black. I wished he didn’t wear drape-style sports coats of the kind most often seen on Elvis Presley. I wished he didn’t wear bow ties, pinkie rings and a snap-brim fedora. He didn’t seem to understand that all this was lost in the old-man shuffle and the old-man drool.
I rolled down my window and said, “Kinda n
ippy tonight, Don.”
“Yeah, but I dig cold weather.”
Which was another thing. He used a lot of “cool” slang. Oh, Don Don Don.
“You having engine trouble?” I said, nodding to that enviably cherry vehicle of his.
“Huh?” He cupped his hand to his ear like a hearing horn.
“YOU HAVING ENGINE TROUBLE?” I guess I forgot to mention the hard-of-hearing thing.
“No, man, I’m just checkin’ out a tip.”
“What kind of tip?” My stomach started to feel funny, tense and vaguely sick.
“Somebody called and said there was a dead body in the Murdoch place. He’s runnin’ for senator, you know.”
“Governor, actually.”
“Huh?” Again with the hand to the ear.
I decided to let this one pass. “You remember who called you with the tip, Don?”
This one he heard. His face broke into a smile that made him look twenty years younger. “You think I’d fink on a source of mine?” And then those old sad-dog brown eyes got a lot brighter. He was like a boxer who is flat on his back at the count of nine but who suddenly springs to his feet and starts throwing killer punches. That was why you couldn’t ever dismiss him. Just when you thought he could never put a story together, he’d give you a tale that would rock you. “And by the way, McCain, what’re you doing out here?”
“Just visiting Deirdre.”
“She’s got some caboose on her, don’t she?”
“She sure does.” And she did.
“The wife, she had a caboose like that. Kept it, too, right up to the end.”
I smiled. “She was a good woman, Don.” A little woman, quick and attractive, her well-known sorrow being that she’d never been able to have kids. Out of a Hamlin Garland or Willa Cather story, in her way.
I thought of driving back to the house and warning them about Don. But what was the point? Cliffie would be out here soon enough and Don would have his story. What I was more interested in was who had called him and tipped him.
And then I had reason to realize all over again how you could underestimate this old guy. He leaned back through his car window and brought forth a pair of binoculars. High-powered ones from the looks of them. He scanned the driveway. “That’s interesting.”
“What is?”
“Just a sec.”
Our idling motors made a good deal of noise and my headlights speared through gathering ground fog.
“Looks like Hardin, Wheeler, and Carlson. Their cars, I mean. Somethin’ must be up. That tip was a good one.”
“Probably just having a business meeting of some kind.”
“Guess I’ll drive up there and see if they’ll talk to me.”
“Well, good luck, Don.”
“Bet them boys are gonna be surprised to see me.”
I sure couldn’t argue with him about that one.
EIGHT
I FOUND A PHONE booth downtown and called the motel where Hastings was staying. A woman was on the desk now. She told me he hadn’t come back yet, that she’d just checked the rooms—they’d had trouble with teenagers trying to sneak into vacant rooms—and there was no sign of him. She said that her father, the guy I’d bribed with money enough for a burger and a pack of smokes with some change left over, had given her instructions to call me right away when she saw him.
I called Kenny Thibodeau, Pornographer and unofficial Private Eye.
“Hey McCain, how they hangin’?”
“Y’know, Kenny, you really should quit saying that to everybody who calls.”
“I don’t say it to chicks.”
“Yeah, but I mean what if the Pope or somebody called you?”
“Why would the Pope call me?”
“I’m just saying for instance the Pope.”
“I’d say, Hey, Padre, how they hangin’?”
I laughed. “I don’t think you’ve changed much since we were in fifth grade.”
“Well, I didn’t know how to write dirty paperbacks back then.”
“I guess that’s a good point. So what did you dredge up for me from all these mysterious sources of yours?”
“Hardin’s broke.”
“Hardin? He’s one of the wealthiest lawyers in the state.”
“California cleaned him out.”
“What happened in California?”
As I leaned against the inside of the booth, I saw a group of people coming through the doors of the Presbyterian church across the street. They held long white candles that burned in golden nimbuses. There were maybe forty of them in a long line of pairs. A cross-section of folks, white collar and blue collar alike. Rich and poor. They walked down the street saying the Lord’s Prayer. Not hard to figure out the occasion. They were praying to whatever gods there be that this planet and its people would not be subjected to what Hiroshima and Nagasaki had had to endure. And were still enduring. Today’s bombs were many times more powerful than those had been.
“Hey, McCain, you still there?”
“Hey, Kenny, how they hangin’?”
“Very funny.”
“I got distracted. So tell me about California.”
The long line reached the end of the block and turned toward the business section. There would be a rally tonight where people from all four churches would meet in the town square to pray and sing hymns. According to Walter Cronkite, this was going on all over the country. Khrushchev had yet to respond in any fashion to the naval blockade.
“Condos. Sank about everything he had in condos with his brother-in-law out there. I guess they both got dazzled when this old movie star—Rex Thomas, you remember him, right after the war?—anyway this Thomas guy was building these condominiums on the ocean front. First thing Hardin did was ask for safety of the land to be evaluated. You sink all this money into building condos and they tumble into the ocean some night, you got some real problems.
“Anyway, the guy Hardin hires—some guy this LA lawyer recommended—he says you’d have to be crazy to build where Rex Thomas wants to. So Hardin and his brother-in-law are all ready to pull out but Thomas convinces them to get a second opinion.”
“I think I can see this one coming.”
“So they get this guy they meet who’s checking out the land for some other investors and Hardin gets along with him—naturally the guy is impressive—and so Hardin says let’s let this guy check out the land. If he says it’s all right—”
“Rex Thomas knows the guy. Told him to pretend to be checking out the land for these other mysterious investors.”
“Then you can write the rest of this yourself, man. Hardin and his brother-in-law give Rex Thomas practically everything they’ve got. The condos get built.”
“And tumble into the ocean?”
“Not yet. It’s going to happen. But it hasn’t happened yet.”
“So how did Hardin lose his money?”
“What Thomas—who is now in Europe somewhere marrying this countess and making the same kind’ve of swashbucklers he used to make in Hollywood—what Thomas did was cheapjack the shit out of the construction. They’re like a thousand times shoddier than regular housing developments. I mean, the toilets don’t flush, the doors fall off, the air conditioning sounds like a B-52 when you start it up. Like that.”
“So Thomas cheapjacked the work and pocketed the difference.”
“And that difference may be as much as two hundred thousand dollars.”
“They can’t sue?”
“Chapter Thirteen. Thomas set up his own corporation and ran everything through there. Soon as the first residents moved in, he declares Chapter Thirteen and skies over to Europe to marry this countess chick.”
“‘Skies’?”
“Yeah. I read that in Variety the other day.”
“So he’s broke.”
“Just about. But I’m not sure what any of this would have to do with whatever’s going on that you won’t tell me about.”
“I don’t either. I�
��ll have to run it through my giant brain several times before I can figure it out.”
“Well, that’s all I’ve got.”
“Thanks, Kenny.”
“You owe me a meal.”
“You like drive-up windows?”
“A real meal, McCain. A real meal.”
After I’d hung up, I stood outside the phone booth in the chill night, smoking my Lucky and listening to the singing of the group that had just left the church. It was hopeful and despairing at the same time, that trapeze flight of our existence.
I was on the right side of town to check out Hastings’s motel so I decided to break a few laws tonight, pick his lock and peek inside. On the way over, I thought of the four grim men sitting in Ross Murdoch’s den. Murdoch would pick up the phone and call Cliffie, and Murdoch’s life in a very real sense would end. As would the lives of the other three men. All the people who’d envied them, all the people they’d pushed around to get their way, all the home-grown moralists would become an angry Greek chorus. From the pulpit, though their names would not be used, they would be denounced as libertines and used as examples of our corrupt age; and in the taverns they would be denounced as laughing-stocks and used as examples of how rich guys had all the advantages when it came to women.
I passed a shiny new motel with late model shark-finned cars in all the parking lots and a general air of prosperity in the landscaping, the signage and the clean, inviting, brightly lit front office.
I parked half a block from Hastings’s motel. No air of prosperity here. A kind of prairie grimness: low-echelon traveling salesmen; beer tavern romeos and romeoettes trying to blot out the burden of spouses and kids waiting so hungrily for them at home; and sad itinerant families with too many kids and never enough money, traveling to where some magazine told them were good-paying jobs that always seemed to be have just been filled when they arrived. Then back into their rusty beaten old trucks and on to the highway again, satisfied to settle for minimum wage and three squares a day—if they can only find it.
Country music twang; sitcom robot laughter; slap and tickle, thrust and groan—all the familiar sounds of motel life behind those heavy dusty faded curtains and loose doors a ten-year-old could open if you gave him a few minutes.
I used my old Cub Scout pocket knife. Best eighty-nine cents I’d ever spent. I was inside in less than thirty seconds.