by Ed Gorman
I used a penlight to look around. There was a briefcase that didn’t reveal a lor besides his taste in reading. Three western paperbacks by Luke Short. At least he had good taste in frontier stories.
I found what I wanted in a manila envelope. I sat down in a chair and lighted a cigarette and started looking through all the clippings. In case he decided to burst through the door, I put my .38 in my lap.
There was, it seemed, a magic act known as “The Majestic Magic-ans.” Judging by the clippings, they played every kind of venue there was, from the seamier lounges in Vegas to VFW halls in Beloit, Wisconsin. Most of the clippings weren’t reviews, just notices that “The Majestic Magic-ans” were about to or had appeared there.
There were two reviews and both of them were moderately favorable as to the magic part of the show but almost lascivious when it came to the male reviewer discussing the “beautiful assistant Shandra.” She sure as hell was beautiful, especially half-naked in her Magic-ans costume. The only time I’d seen her she was dead back there in the bomb shelter.
The magician was a plucky little guy in a cheap tux and a top hat. According to the reviews his name was Michael Reeves and Shandra was his sister. I knew him, of course, as Hastings the bounty hunter. Seeing them together in the newspaper photos I saw, for the first time, a family resemblance. General shape of head; the shape of the eyes. On her the physical details were beautiful; on him they were undefined, unfinished somehow, not long enough in the kiln perhaps, the way a little kid’s face is unfinished.
In the back of the envelope were several glossies of various luminaries standing with the Magic-ans. They ran to TV stars who no longer had shows to sports stars who didn’t get in the game as much as they used to. The men always managed to have a possessive arm slung around Shandra’s neck. One of them—and this made me laugh out loud—was quite obviously peering down her very low-cut gown. All the glossies were scribbled with all the usual show-biz bullshit accolades. “Greatest magic act I’ve ever seen!” “To two dear friends!” I wished just one of them would have been honest and said, “I’d pay a million bucks to get into your knickers, Shandra!” You know, break the monotony of all the hype and get to the real subject at hand.
I had to take a leak and so I did. And while I was standing there at the john I smelled it. There’s no other odor like it.
I got done, zipped up, washed my hands in the rusty sink, turned around and faced the narrow closet door. He probably hadn’t taken to smelling too bad when the owner’s daughter made a quick sweep of the room earlier. And there would have been no reason for her to look in the closet.
I took a deep breath and opened the closet door and damned if he didn’t fall straight out at me the way closeted corpses always did in “Abbott and Costello” movies.
I pushed him back inside quickly. Propping up corpses is way down on my list of things that give me pleasure, right next to emptying bedpans and listening to Paul Harvey.
But I still had to hold him up with one hand while I used my penlight to find the wound that had killed him. Didn’t take long. Somebody had used something heavy to smash in the back left side of his head. Wouldn’t take all that much.
I had to slam the door shut quick so he wouldn’t fall out again. I heard his forehead bounce off the inside of the door. If he hadn’t been dead, he sure was now.
Then I went to the phone and dialed the police station. The dispatcher, who was a good guy, told me all about the body in the bomb shelter and said that every cop on the shift was out there except for Lonesome Bob Tehearn who was, by any reckoning, in the fates-worse-than-death category when you wanted help with a murder investigation. But I needed somebody to come out here, listen to my story, and then take over.
“Well, I’ll see if I can find him. You know, Lonesome Bob takes an awful lot of naps,” the dispatcher said, “and sometimes he sleeps right through my calls.”
“Well, if you can wake him up, please send him over here.”
“I’ll do what I can, McCain. But it may take a little while. Especially if he’s at the park. He’s got this little nook there where he really sacks out. I like it better when he just pulls into an alley downtown. The teenagers usually spot him and start throwing stuff at his car. That way he don’t sleep so long.”
Lonesome Bob Tehearn was Cliffie’s first cousin, in case you’re wondering how he’d lasted so long on the force.
Lonesome Bob arrived thirty-five minutes later. He was a tall, lanky hound dog of a man with stooped shoulders and a grin he grinned frequently and seemingly for no reason at all. He was also the proud owner of a truckload of cheap after-shave. It was so strong that if you ever stood downwind of it, tears would start streaming down your cheeks.
He got the name “Lonesome Bob” in the days after World War II when he found himself being asked to be the best man at the wedding of the girl he’d been engaged to all the time he was overseas. The groom had formerly been Bob’s best friend, a 4-F’er on account of an old knee injury. Or so he said, his uncle on the draft board notwithstanding.
For reasons unfathomable to most of our species, Lonesome Bob accepted, thus making everybody at the wedding extremely nervous as they waited for him to pull out a gun and kill the bride and groom. But no such thing happened.
Lonesome Bob had never married. He lived in a small cabin a mile out of town, the exterior walls being decorated with license plates from all over the world. Most folks couldn’t stand to go inside Lonesome Bob’s cabin because of all the squirrel meat he fried and ate. Lonesome Bob liked to say that eating squirrel took care of two of his passions—hunting and eating.
People tell me that squirrel meat tastes pretty good but I’ve never been able to get close enough to it to find out. The stench’ll make blood start firing from your ears.
While Lonesome Bob went in and looked at Hastings, or whatever his real name was, I called my apartment to see how the beautiful Pamela Forrest was doing.
Doing pretty well, I thought the instant she said hello. She was drunk and giggly. I’d gotten over being mad at her. She hadn’t humiliated me all those years; I had humiliated me all those years. Not her problem that I was foolish enough to hang on to the bumper while her car dragged me over burning coals and broken glass. I was trying to be rational and reasonable about all those heartbroken years I’d spent pursuing her because I’d decided that sleeping with her tonight sounded pretty damned good. Bygones be bygones and all that. At least until dawn.
“Hey! Sam baby!”
Sam baby? “You sound like you’re in a pretty good mood.”
“Best mood I’ve been in a long time.” Then she hiccoughed. “God, am I bombed.”
“Gee, really. I hadn’t noticed.”
“You’re so—what’s the word?”
“Sarcastic?”
“Yeah. Right. Sarcastic.”
“Well, I was worrying you might be depressed or something was why I called. But you seem to be doing all right.”
Then she got coy, playful. I’d never heard her be coy and playful before. I actually hated coy and playful. “Wait’ll you get here, Sam baby. You’re gonna be surprised.” And before I could say anything: “And you know what else, Sam baby?”
“Y’got me.” Talking to drunks is so much fun.
“Every one of your cats loves me.”
“That’s nice.”
“They fight over who gets to sit in my lap.” Hiccough.
“Y’know, you might think of drinking a little coffee. There’s some instant in the cupboard.”
“Boy, am I drunk.”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Said about what?”
“Said about instant coffee in the cupboard.”
“When did you say that? And anyway, I hate instant coffee.”
I couldn’t take any more. “I’ll see you in a while.”
“Toodles, Sam baby.” And then she giggled and dropped the receiver.
I walked to the back of the room. L
onesome Bob had Hastings laid out on the floor.
“How’s it going?” I said.
“He’s dead.”
“I know he’s dead. I mean, did you find anything useful?”
He’d been haunched down next to the corpse, playing the beam of a silver flashlight over the body. When he stood up, his knees cracked. “All that scientific stuff. I don’t get it at all. I leave that to Cliff. About all I could tell you about this guy was that somebody smashed his head in.”
Lonesome Bob and the beautiful Pamela Forrest could have a very interesting conversation right about now. But I was just bitter because poor Lonesome Bob here was something of a dope and the beautiful Pamela Forrest was going to cheat me out of a night of sex by being unconscious by the time I got back to my apartment.
“Say,” said Lonesome Bob, “I just thought of something.”
“What’s that?”
“You didn’t kill this fella, did you?”
“No; no, I didn’t, Lonesome Bob.”
He narrowed his hound dog eyes and said, “Don’t kid me now, McCain. Did you kill this fella?”
“I didn’t kill him, Lonesome Bob. He was dead before I got here.”
He studied me some and said, “That’s why I don’t need that scientific crap. I just look people right in the eye and I can tell if they did somethin’ or not.”
“Well, saves a lot of time that way. Did I pass, by the way?”
He looked down at Hastings. “You didn’t kill this fella. I could see that in your eyes.”
“Well, thanks, Lonesome Bob. All right if I get out of here?”
“Sure. Time Cliff gets here—he’s out to the Murdoch place; dead gal in the bomb shelter, if you can believe that—I can just sit here and catch me a couple of winks.”
“You look like you could use a rest.”
“Law enforcement ain’t no easy job, let me tell you that.”
“I can see that, Lonesome Bob. I can see that.”
NINE
I WENT OUTSIDE AND sat in the car and opened the package Hastings had given me that morning. My Cub Scout knife proved useful again.
I turned on the overhead light and looked inside the King Edward cigar box. It was like waiting and waiting and waiting for your birthday to arrive when you’re six. And then your folks give you a temptingly wrapped package and you open it and find a dog turd.
This wasn’t a turd. But it was a letdown. I had no idea what to expect but I sure didn’t expect this. A receipt from the Cedar Rapids restaurant, the Embers. I studied the amount, the date, the penciled-in initials, presumably belonging to the waitress.
A strange man had given me a strange, inexplicable package to deliver. And now he was dead and so was the woman it had been intended for.
I slipped the package under my car seat, got out, locked the door and walked over to the phone booth. The Judge needed an update.
“My Lord,” she said. “My Lord. They’ve ruined their lives.” She generally has snappy replies to the grimmest of griefs. She holds herself above travail, unless it’s her own. She was about eight-thirty drunk. She’d be a lot more so by the time eleven rolled around. But even at eleven she’d be coherent and able to make reasonable decisions. “Ross and Gavin are good friends of mine. So are their wives. And I’m Deirdre’s godmother. My Lord, this is going to sink them all.” A sip of her drink, probably a martooni as Tony Randall always says in those moronic Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies my dates always insisted we see. “You don’t think Ross killed her, do you?”
“I don’t think so. But there’s a lot I don’t know yet. He could have.”
“You men should all be castrated. Every one of you.”
“Including all four of your ex-husbands?”
“Especially them.”
Now that was more like the Judge I knew and occasionally, when I tried real hard, liked.
“For a woman. All for a woman. My God, they must be insane.”
“I suppose they thought it was rational. You chase around, people see you and you get a rep. You have your own concubine in an apartment that’s not even in your own home town—you cut your risk a whole lot.”
“Unless somebody happens to kill her and it all comes out in the investigation.”
“Well,” I said, “there’s always that, I guess.”
“I think I’m actually going to cry. I know you don’t believe that, McCain. But it’s true. All the lives that were ruined today. All those poor women. I even feel sorry for the men, though they don’t deserve it. What a stupid idea.” Another sip. “And what about the election? I hadn’t even thought about that till now.
Where’s the party going to get another candidate?”
“Well, Republican candidates shouldn’t be that hard to find.
Most of them are in prisons on bunco charges.”
“Hilarious wit you have there, McCain. Just hilarious.”
“Well, I need to be getting on home. Been a very long day.”
“All right, McCain. Good night.” I had the sense that she was crying even before she hung up.
I had a burger and fries at a diner. I played four Patsy Cline songs on the counter-mounted juke box units. I tried not to think about anything except that Patsy shouldn’t have had to die so young and that I’d never heard another singing voice that could quite make of loss and sadness what hers did.
Then I started thinking about Pamela. I sure hoped we were going to have sex tonight. It’d been a while for me and I was as much lonely as I was horny. Maybe I should’ve asked Lonesome Bob how he dealt with it all the time.
Two guys from the factory down the street came in on their nine o’clock break and ordered coffee and pie, peach for one, cherry for the other. They wore ball caps with union pins on them and denim jackets with U of Iowa Hawkeye buttons, black and gold. They made good money at their jobs. Their union had just settled a possible strike and had gotten most of what it wanted. This was a high old time in our country, the best since the end of the war. As for how it would be in the future—that was all up to Mr. Khrushchev and that feckless Russian hayseed grin of his.
“They all chipped in and paid for this whore,” one of them was saying to the other as the waitress poured their coffees. “Ross Murdoch.” A laugh. “I guess he won’t be governor anytime soon.”
“What about Ross Murdoch?” the waitress said.
“Haven’t you heard the news?”
“I usually turn it on but I got treated to a Patsy Cline concert tonight.” She looked right at me while she said it.
“Just be happy I didn’t play Lawrence Welk,” I said.
She was done with me. “So what’s this about Ross Murdoch? You know, he stops in here every once in a while. Bein’ political, of course. Pretendin’ he’s just like one of the regular folks. Mr. High and Mighty. Even when he don’t try to be High and Mighty he is.”
“And Hardin, too,” the second man said. “And a coupla other rich boys.”
“Think of that,” the waitress said, after hearing the story. She put a quarter inch space between her thumb and forefinger and held them up. “He came this close to bein’ governor. Can you imagine that? This close.”
I waggled two rumpled dollar bills at her and dropped them next to my plate. She smiled. Sixty cents of that was a tip.
So the word was out, I thought. A scandal that would temporarily distract the public mind from the missile crisis. The end was near, at least for the four men back at Ross Murdoch’s place.
I didn’t know how one 110 pound woman could make all that noise. As soon as I opened the back door to my apartment and pushed inside, I found out.
One woman couldn’t make all that noise. But two women can.
Ever since fourth grade, two girls have dominated my life. Sort of the way Betty and Veronica have always dominated Archie’s life. The problem with that comparison being that Archie is a comic book character frozen in time. Which, come to think of it—having Betty and Veronica in their nubile p
rime forever—is not exactly a bad fate.
My life isn’t frozen in time. The other day in the mirror I noticed a gray hair. Though I haven’t put on any weight since college, my face isn’t as sharply defined as it once was. And hanging around gas stations and talking about drag races and street rods isn’t as much fun as it used to be.
And the surprises life springs on me get more and more baffling.
Sure, I’d seen my Betty and Veronica together all our lives. We were in the same classes, we went on the same class outings, we attended the same junior and senior proms. And they’d always been friendly if never exactly friends.
But I’d never seen them together, if you know what I mean. Never as grown women. Hell, Mary had two kids. And certainly never sitting together at the little dining table in the middle of my apartment, all three cats and a bottle of bourbon and two glasses on the table.
“She’s pretty drunk,” Mary said, giggling. She had that red hair ribbon in her dark hair. I could remember it as far back as senior year in high school. It brought out the sweet erotic clarity of her elegant face. She wore a buff blue blouse and jeans and white Keds tonight.
“Oh, no,” the beautiful Pamela Forrest said. “She’s the drunk one.”
“I thought we were drinking scotch,” I said.
Mary smiled. “That was gone by the time I got here. I brought this bottle. It’s Johnny Walker. That’s pretty good, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. It’s great. But—”
Easy to see that Mary was feeling nothing more than a little buzz. Pamela was the sloshed one.
Mary said, “I called to see if you were home. Pamela answered and we started talking and she asked me to come over and keep her company. My mom’s watching the kids for a couple of hours. Wes’s with his girlfriend.”
Pamela, who could barely sit up straight, said, “He’s such a jerk.” Then she managed to angle her head up to me and with one eye squinting said: “We’ve been havin’ a mighty good talk about ole McCain.” Then her head made what seemed like a complete circle and she fixed me with that single blue eye again and said, “We decided that you’re a very nice guy but sort of a dickhead, too.”