by Ed Gorman
“That’s why I’m leaving him, McCain. ‘The way she flirts.’ God, I never flirt.”
“The party at Judge Armstrong’s house? That Peruvian bastard.”
“He was an Argentinean bastard.”
“Well, whatever he was, he had his eyes down your blouse.”
“There isn’t all that much to see down my blouse, Stu. I shouldn’t have to tell you that, of all people.”
“How many times did you slow dance with him?”
“Twice.”
“Oh, bullshit, Pamela. Don’t make it worse by lying about it.”
I just let them go. I doubted they even noticed. I grabbed fresh clothes and repaired to the shower. When I came out, I was ready to go.
Stu wasn’t on the couch.
Then I heard a moaning sound.
I turned. They were on the bed. They were under the covers and I do believe he was inside her, the noises she was making.
But she was still able to look around his arm at me and say, “We made up, McCain. He told me he’d never be jealous again.”
“Good for you, Stu.”
I’m not sure Stu was hearing much at the moment. He just sort of continued to work away down there.
“So tonight Stu’ll make you a steak,” she said around his arm again. And then: “Oh, by the way, Judge Whitney called for you last night. You better call her.”
“God, honey, can’t you pay a little attention to me?”
“Oh, Stu,” she said, eradicating my existence. “Oh, Stu Stu Stu.” And giggled giggled giggled.
At the office, I called Judge Whitney in her chambers. “My God, Pamela had nerve enough to come back to town?”
“Surprised me, too.”
“And Stu?”
“Yep.”
“Well, at least when my family had to endure a scandal, we went as far away as we could. All the way out here. And we never went back to our little town, either. But people these days—well, they’re staying at your apartment and probably having a great old time.”
“Sure sounded like it when I left this morning.”
“Spare me the details, McCain. I have tender ears.” Then: “Tish Hardin called me late last night from the hospital.”
“Is she sick?”
“She isn’t. But her husband Mike is. He sat in a steaming hot bath last night and slashed his wrists. She got him to the hospital and took him in the back way. She’s afraid that this’ll make people think he killed that Hastings woman.”
“Under the circumstances, I’d have to say that that would cross my mind, too.”
“He’s at St. Mallory’s. Go see him, talk to him.”
“I doubt he’ll talk to me.”
“It’s important that you at least try.”
“Let me check my mail and my calls. I’ll get over there as soon as I can.”
“I’m due in court in ten minutes, McCain. Call me later on this morning. After eleven.”
“All right.”
“And McCain?”
“Yes?”
“I think you should marry Mary Travers.”
I laughed. “What brought that on?”
“Well, everybody in town knows what’s happened to her. And everybody also knows that she’s still in love with you. She’s a very sweet girl.”
“I didn’t know you gave advice on romance.”
“You should know by now, McCain, that I give advice on anything I feel like.” She hung up.
THIRTEEN
HE WAS ON THE top floor in a cul-de-sac, the nearest room half a hallway distant. A nurse had just stuck a thermometer in his mouth as I walked in. The white room gleamed with sunlight. A wall-mounted TV was muted. The image was that of Garry Moore, a comforting image.
He gave me a little nod. The nurse gave me a nod, too. She was old and tough and serious, the master sergeant type. He looked like Mike Hardin. He didn’t even look pale. Both his wrists were bandaged pretty good, though.
I lighted a cigarette and walked over to the window and looked out on the town. In the daylight it’s Norman Rockwell. For all its foibles and shortcomings, it’s a good town with good people. The exceptions to the latter generally don’t bother you with anything worse than brief burst of malicious gossip or pontification. You could see the changes, though. Like the shopping center distant on the north edge of town. The downtown merchants were scared of it, and rightly so. We had recently added a McDonald’s near the community college. There was talk of a chain pizza coming here next year. And then there were the commuters who lived in the large, expensive housing development to the west. Four bedrooms, three baths, two-and-three stall garages. The Interstate would swing by here in another couple years and the number of commuters would triple after that. Judging by things they wrote in the newspaper letter columns, they seem to regard us and our customs as “quaint.” Some of the quaintness irritated them. They especially hated farm smells and slow traffic when they were trying to get to their jobs in the morning. I don’t believe that a Jaguar or a Mercedes-Benz had ever so much as passed through our little town till the high-powered executives arrived. It was the brave new world of 1962.
After the nurse squeaked out the door, Hardin jammed a cigarette between his lips, fired it up with an expensive lighter, and said, “Pretty stupid, huh?” He held up his wrists to show me. He held them up the way he would little kittens.
“Pretty stupid.” We still didn’t like each other but this was no time to play tough guy.
“I can tell you what everybody’s saying.”
“That you killed her and her brother and then tried to kill yourself rather than face prison.”
“Yup. ‘Former University Football Star Murders Mistress.’”
“You should write headlines for a living.”
He smiled. It was a wide and deep and sincere smile, too. The suicide attempt had transformed him into a relaxed, friendly human being. “I’ll have to consider that since I’m soon going to be broke. If not behind bars.”
“You kill her?”
We watched each other for a while. Just watched. No particular expressions. Then he glanced out the window and back at me.
“I was always kind of an asshole to you, wasn’t I, McCain?”
“Me and a lot of other people, though this probably isn’t the time to say it.”
“I’m going to be changing that. Or trying, anyway. My wife’s only going to stick with me if I try. I wasn’t a hell of a lot better with her than anybody else. And the worst thing is that I’ve been that way pretty much all my life. I knew it, too. And I didn’t care. I don’t know that my two boys’ll ever forgive me.” Then: “You think I killed her?”
“Nope.”
“How come?”
I shrugged. “Just don’t is all. Couldn’t tell you why. Just a sense I got.”
“Do you usually guess right?”
“About twenty percent of the time.”
He laughed. Then gave me a full rich phlegmy minute of a cigarette cough. He said, “I didn’t kill her. I sure thought about it when her brother started shaking me down, though.”
“He was shaking you down?”
“Nobody told you?”
“No.”
“Hell, he was shaking all of us down. I got pretty mad and threw him around one night.”
“When was this?”
“Two weeks ago.”
“You talk to Karen Hastings about it?”
“Yeah. She got real mad. Or pretended to, anyway. Told me how much she hated her brother. How she’d traveled with him with his magic act. He’d do the divorce detective routine. Get her in bed with some rich old bastard, hide behind the curtains and take snapshots of them. And then sell the pictures to the guy for a lot of money. She was honest enough to say that she hadn’t minded living that way for several years but then she just wanted out. That’s when we met her. That’s why she agreed to the setup we had. She thought it would get her away from her brother.”
“He told me h
e couldn’t find her.”
“Bullshit. He’s been out here from day one. She said he had a lot of nasty things going on the side in Chicago but that when he’d run out of money, he came back here and got some from her. Then recently he got the idea of shaking all of us down. Murdoch tells me the little guy hired you?”
“He told me he wanted me to deliver a package. To a woman. That’s all he told me.”
“You ever deliver it to her?”
“She was dead before I got to her.”
He lay his head back on the pillow. For the first time he looked like a sick man. Drained. Weak. “I don’t think my life was supposed to turn out this way. I was always supposed to be the hero. The good-looking football star. Now I’ll be a creep to everybody.”
“Maybe not to the people who matter to you.”
He smiled. “You gonna go ‘Dear Abby’ on me, McCain?”
“Nah. It’s too early in the day for that. I only go ‘Dear Abby’ after a couple of beers.”
I was in court for two hours. My client had been charged with shoplifting. He was seventy-six years old.
Judge Frank Clemmons said, “Sid, what the hell’re we going to do with you?”
There were only four people in the pews. One of them gasped when Clemmons, who was nearly as old as Sid Cosgrove, said “hell” in court. The other three laughed. Clemmons fixed them with the evil eye.
“Sid, now I’ve looked into your Army pension and your social security and your savings account and for the life of me I can’t figure out why you shoplift. You’re not rich but you’re set up pretty good. You don’t have any reason at all to shoplift. Now the first three times you got caught, I’m told that the store just let you make restitution. But you know how Ken Potter is, especially when he’s having a bad day with his rheumatism. Well, looks like you caught him on one of them bad days, Sid, because here you are in court. Now what’ve you got to say for yourself?”
“I just like to have a little fun.”
“That’s your defense? That you like to have a little fun?”
“Sure. I sit out to the danged nursing home all day with nothin’ to do. So every once in a while I walk into town and have myself a little fun. They all know I shoplift by now. So it’s even more fun. See if I can grab somethin’ without them catchin’ me.”
“Well, you’ve been caught four times. That’s not a very good record.”
“Yeah, but it gives us all somethin’ to talk about at suppertime. Instead of hearin’ the same war stories over and over again. Or lookin’ at pitchers of everybody’s grandkids or great-grandkids. Or listenin’ to everybody bitch about their aches and pains. We’re old—seems logical that we’d have aches and pains. What’s the point in complainin’ about ’em?”
“So you shoplift to sort of entertain yourself?”
“Most fun I’ve had in years. People see how old I am and they expect me to fall over dead any minute. So it’s fun to show ’em I’ve still got the stuff.”
Sid made a pretty good case for himself. It was a pretty unique defense and you could see that Judge Clemmons was enjoying himself except when he looked out and saw Ken Potter the dime store owner glaring at him. I would say in fact that Sid was well on his way to becoming a folk hero except that he blew it by falling asleep right then and there. Just dropped off to slumber-land with no warning. And talk about your wall-rattling snoring. Folk heroes aren’t supposed to do that. And it says so very plainly in the folk hero book of rules. At least it did last time I looked.
I was standing on the courthouse steps, Sid’s niece having taken him back to the rest home, when a voice behind me said, “I would’ve put him in jail.”
“Sure you would’ve,” I said when she stood next to me.
“At least for seventy-two hours.”
“Sure you would’ve.”
“Well, at least forty-eight.”
“Not even twenty-four.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“First of all, the jail wouldn’t know what to do with anybody that old. And second of all, even as mean as you can get, you’re not that mean. Well, not usually.”
She gave me one of her rare smiles. She was an undisclosed fifty-something. And still a damned good-looking woman. Hand-tailored business suits, white scarves at the neck, dark hose, one-inch heels, just a touch of gold at the wrist. Standard operating gear for Judge Esme Anne Whitney. All the attire bought, of course, in New York City, which she escaped to three or four times a year.
The day was so ridiculously gorgeous I wanted to run around in circles and give out with Indian whoops. Like a little kid. Maybe roll around in piles of autumn leaves. And then later carve out a jack o’lantern.
“They’re all friends of mine and they’re all ruined,” she said.
“Yeah. I know.”
“I talked to Peter Carlson earlier today. He seems to think that when they find the killer that this’ll start to fade. I felt very sorry for him. But they were so stupid. This was like some fraternity boy prank or something. Keeping a woman, the four of them. My God.” She shook her sculpted head. Great graying hair cut short to emphasize the features of her face. “I know this’ll sound pompous, McCain. But I want to help our little town. If you’ve seen any of the state papers, we’re the laughingstock. ‘Peyton Place Comes to Iowa.’ We don’t deserve that.” She gave me a second rare smile. “Believe it or not, I realized when I saw all those nasty innuendos in the papers that I love this little town. It’s not very sophisticated and there isn’t much to do and the Sykeses haven’t spent a dime on anything remotely resembling culture—but the people are decent and the town’s a nice, safe place to live.”
I looked at her and laughed. “Why, Anne Esme Whitney, I can’t believe it. You’re actually sentimental about our little town here.”
Then she did it. Dipped into the small slash pocket of her custom-tailored suit and pulled out a rubber band. I wasn’t quick enough. She got me on the nose. She loved shooting rubber bands at me, the way Sid liked shoplifting I suppose. Made me really look forward to my own years of senility.
“It’s up to you, McCain.”
“To me? What’s up to me?”
“To find the killer and get this part of it over with at least.”
“Believe me, I’m trying.”
“I’m going to say something and you’ll probably disagree with me. But at least think about it for a while.”
“Fair enough.”
“I don’t think any of them killed her.”
“I’m going to surprise you and say that I agree with you.”
“Why, McCain, you’re much smarter than I ever realized.”
I tapped out a smoke from the pack. “No matter how I think it through, I can’t see any of them doing it. They had too much to lose. Even though each one of them is trying to convince me that one of the others did it.”
“Crime of passion?”
“Possibly. But only with Karen Hastings. Killing the brother had to be premeditated.”
“So that leaves us with whom?”
“Somebody who wanted to destroy them by forcing the whole thing out in the open. Not only destroy their reputations but implicate them in a murder besides. That leaves us with the wives of the four men and a mysterious man in a black Corvette.”
“Where he does he fit in?”
“He visited Karen Hastings a number of times recently, I’m told. From the insignia on his license plate, I take it he’s an MD.”
“Keep me posted, McCain.”
“I will.”
FOURTEEN
THE DOCTOR’S NAME WAS Ned Evans. His office was out on First Avenue, the main drag in Cedar Rapids. Every once in a while you’d see an interurban track shining through the bricks. Somewhere in this area was the last of the blacksmith barns. Cedar Rapids had always been a special place for me because it was there I got to shake hands with Hopalong Cassidy. He was the most Irish man I’d ever seen except for my cousin Donald, who came he
re from County Cork. In his black outfit and big dramatic black hat, Hoppy looked like somebody from a different species. Everybody else looked small and incompetent compared to him.
The small city shone like a trophy in the early afternoon sun. I stopped at a drive-in for lunch. The carhops didn’t wear roller skates. Penny loafers seemed to be the general choice in shoes. I heard four or five girl-group songs. There was a guy named Phil Spector, a record producer, and that was his specialty, girl groups, wondrous girl groups, and they were so good that when you heard them sing you almost resented it when the following song was sung by a guy. Man, their sounds were so sweet and light and melancholy, they just took you out of reality.
I listened to the radio while I ate. There still hadn’t been any response from Russia, though its ships could be seen heading toward Cuba. President Kennedy had called a news conference and then an hour later canceled it. I spent a few minutes with mutant dreams. All those drive-in movie images of radioactive beasts that had formerly been men. I always felt sorry for the mutants. They hadn’t asked to be mutants. But that’s the way life was. Some of us got the hero roles and the rest of us got to be the ragged, smelly, bulge-eyed mutants. Guess which of us got the women.
The office was in a new two-story building of glass and metal. Very futuristic, like something on the covers of one of my old science fiction magazines. Most of the cars in the parking lot were new. With their huge fins they looked futuristic, too. I always wanted to be one of those guys on science fiction paperback covers. Very tense in their futuristic clothes, a ray gun in their hand, and a lovely scantily clad blonde accompanying them. Just give me a time machine and say goodbye.
Evans’s receptionist was young and dark-haired and pretty. She was also competent. While she was taking notes from the phone—lab results, I guessed, given some of the information she was repeating—she inserted a form onto a clipboard and handed it to me along with a pencil. She nodded to an empty chair across the room.