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

by Ed Gorman

  “Yeah, he looks important all right,” Dad said.

  “Gee, I’m sure glad Abbott and Costello started making movies again,” I said.

  “So how are you, son?”

  “Don’t let him off the hook so easily,” Mom said. “We don’t hear from him for nearly a week, he deserves a little razzing.”

  Mom and Dad are a matched set. Mom is five-two and most of her hair is still red. Dad is five-six and most of his hair has gone to hair heaven. Toward the end of my high school years, Dad got promoted at the factory where he’d worked since coming back from the war, and for the first time our family moved to a respectable neighborhood, lived in a house and drove a respectable used Ford. My sister Ruth lived in Chicago. She’d moved there after getting pregnant when she was seventeen. Nobody was happy about it but she sure wouldn’t get an abortion, not even in sinful Chicago. Even though I thought that was the best solution, my folks were shocked when I even brought it up. She’d have to give prior notice before she came back here so we could give the most important of the gossips plenty of time to work up their most venomous scorn. Sometimes, as now, I’d look across the table and imagine Ruthie still there, that sweet Mick face of freckles and slightly imperious nose and great gladifying lopsided McCain smile. Granddad wore it even in his coffin. Her life had been peaceful and almost perfect until her pregnancy and since then it had been nothing but travail in Chicago—a mother who worked and left her kid at the YMCA center; a number of hopeless, hapless, unhealthy affairs; a boozy slur in the voice when she called sometimes; and a sense I shared with Mom and Dad that she wasn’t Ruth any more, not the Ruth we’d known, and that she was as sad about it as we were. But none of us had any idea what to do about it. Sometimes I’d think of her and I swear to God I just wanted to die right on the spot, my entire body and mind in pain—take my gun and put it to my temple and just fire it before I had time to back out of it—it was just so hard to think about how much I loved her and was helpless in the face of her grief and sorrow.

  But this was a sunny morning and Captain Kangaroo was on TV in the living room—Mom still watched it because Ruth had always watched it in the morning; I suppose it was a way of keeping her with us—and Mom was saying, “I think they could plead insanity and get away with it.”

  Around a mouthful of pancake, I said, “Who should plead insanity because they could get away with it?”

  “She means Ross Murdoch and those other three. That’s all she’s been talking about. I keep trying to tell her things like that go on all the time.”

  “Why, a situation like that is no better than prostitution,” Mom said.

  Dad said, “That’s what you can do when you have money.”

  Mom said, “You can have your own geisha woman if you have money is what you’re saying? There aren’t any better things to do than that?”

  Dad said, “If you have a lot of money you can do that and still do all the other better things, too.”

  Mom said, “It’s their wives I feel sorry for. And their children. My Lord, the gossips will have a field day.”

  “Already are,” I said. “Everywhere I go people tell me Murdoch jokes.”

  “She must’ve had some temper,” Dad said.

  “How’s that? And may I have some syrup?”

  “You see how polite he is since he moved out of the house?” Mom said.

  Dad winked at her, making sure I saw it. “Maybe he should have moved out sooner. He’d be even more polite by now.”

  “Maybe I didn’t raise him right,” Mom said.

  “Oh, Lord,” Dad said, “I wish those magazines had never been published.”

  Mom was a reader of parental magazines. How to train Little Bobby not to poop in his soup; hit the kitties with his hammer; say dirty words to company before he reached the age of three. You know the magazines I’m talking about. Like most women of her generation, Mom spent a number of hours per week perusing these rags and then torturing herself with the certain knowledge that she had failed me as a loving mom, tutor and inspirer of lofty goals.

  “So what’s this about her temper?”

  “Scotty McBain down to the plant?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. I was working on the three strips of delicately wrought bacon.

  “He said she had some temper.”

  “Who did?” I said.

  “That gal they were keeping.”

  “Karen Hastings?”

  He nodded. He was working on his bacon, too.

  “How did Scotty McBain know she had a temper?”

  “In the summer he’s got this canoe rental deal he runs on the side. His wife works there during the day and then he takes over when he’s done at the plant.”

  “Oh. Right. I forgot.”

  “Anyway, this Hastings gal, she used to go around with this gal got a trailer right up the road from where Scotty’s got his canoe renting deal. Very nice looking gal.”

  “What’re you doing, honey?” Mom asked me.

  “Writing.”

  “Writing what?”

  “I’m putting what Dad says in my notebook so I’ll remember to follow up on this.”

  “Are you working on this thing?” Dad said.

  “Uh-huh. Go ahead.”

  Dad shrugged. “Well, it isn’t any big deal. This gal—I don’t remember her name—and the Hastings gal, they’d rent canoes together, see. And so one day they were climbing into their canoe and a couple guys—smart-asses, you know—started makin’ remarks. You know how guys get. And Scotty said they were pretty drunk, besides. He wouldn’t rent ’em a canoe. So anyway you got these two really good lookin’ gals and these two smartasses and the gals kinda play along while they’re getting their canoe ready and then one of the guys kinda pats the Hastings gal on the rump. And man. Scotty says he never saw a woman hit a man as hard as she did that guy. Really rocked him. And she wasn’t much bigger than your mom. Scotty said the guys were really mad but they backed off and left.”

  “Scotty still working at the plant?”

  “Nope. He retired about the time I did.”

  “I still say I feel sorry for their families.” Mom said. “And their poor kids.”

  “Well, most of their kids are grown up by now,” I said.

  “I hear Murdoch hired a Chicago lawyer, huh?”

  “Yep. Very big-time guy. Seems all right.”

  “He’s going to need Perry Mason,” Mom said. “That poor woman dead in his bomb shelter.”

  “‘Poor woman’?,” Dad said. “I thought you said she was just a prostitute.”

  “Well, that doesn’t mean anybody had the right to kill her. She could’ve made a good confession and started her life over again.”

  My mom is of the belief that everybody is Catholic. Or secretly wants to be. Or should be. Or will be. Someday. If we just wait patiently long enough.

  This time, it was me my dad winked at. “What if she was Methodist?”

  “Well, she still could’ve started over. Nobody had the right to kill her.”

  “Murdoch must have really panicked,” Dad said. “Leaving her there in that bomb shelter. Say, is that as fancy as everybody says?”

  “The bomb shelter?” I said. “It sure is.”

  “We’re having another prayer vigil tonight,” Mom said softly. “I’m just asking God that Khrushchev comes to his senses.” She took Dad’s hand. He smiled at her. “We’ve had our lives. It’s the children I’m worried about. They should have their chance to live.” She looked at me. “You could always come to the vigil tonight, Sam.”

  “It’d be nice,” I said, “if I get the time.”

  “That means,” Dad said, “there’s not a chance in hell he’s going to be there.”

  Mom actually smiled. “You think I don’t know that?”

  I decided to start the meeting with Spellman and his investigator Del Merrick with a shocker. I’d awakened in the middle of the night with an idea we should have considered all along.

  “We
’re assuming that Ross Murdoch didn’t murder Karen Hastings,” I said.

  They both nodded. They looked as if they’d slept in. Spellman even had sleep lines on one side of his face. Merrick was a middle-aged man with rusty-colored hair and a good blue suit.

  “That’s right,” Spellman said. “You’re not going to tell me that he killed her, are you? Nobody’d leave a body in his own house like that.”

  “True—or probably true. Maybe he got into a situation where he killed her and couldn’t figure out a way to get rid of the body.”

  Spellman’s face was knitted with irritation. “So you are saying he killed her.”

  “No, I’m just saying let’s re-think the assumptions we’ve made so far. I’ve made them, too. But I’ve been thinking about a different way this could have happened.”

  Spellman said, “Well, let’s hear it. No offense, McCain, but we’re sitting with the best criminal investigator I’ve ever worked with. If he thinks it’ll fly, then it’ll fly.”

  Merrick actually blushed from the praise. I liked him right away. A modest man. He said, “My old man was a lot better than I was. He went head-to-head with old J. Edgar twice and won both times. Found the killers before Hoover’s men did. Hoover kept trying to nail him after that. You didn’t embarrass Hoover and get away with it.”

  I drank some coffee and said, “I don’t think Ross Murdoch killed her. I don’t think he knew anything about the body until, as he said, he opened the bomb shelter.”

  “So how did the body get carried inside?” Spellman said.

  “That’s the assumption I want to knock down. First of all, the entire family was gone the day before the body was discovered. Ross was at a meeting in Des Moines, Mrs. Murdoch was visiting her other sister in Iowa City, and Deirdre was at the hospital here working as a candy-striper.”

  “A what?” Merrick asked.

  “A volunteer. They call them candy-stripers. She was at the hospital from nine in the morning until around six-thirty. Her parents got home just before she did. Their part-time maid had fixed dinner for them. Mrs. Murdoch heated the dinner and they ate together.”

  “So you’re saying somebody brought Karen Hastings’s body in while the family was gone?” Spellman said. “They still had to sneak her in past the workmen.”

  “Nobody snuck her in,” I said.

  “You’re losing me here, McCain. If Ross didn’t kill her and nobody snuck the body in, then how did she end up in the bomb shelter?”

  “This is the part I should’ve thought of before. The workers all left at five. That left roughly an hour and a half that the house was empty. This is where we have to start looking at the other three partners in the deal. It wouldn’t be difficult for one of them to call Karen and tell her to meet them at Murdoch’s place. She’d been wanting to leave town and take a lot of money with her. That would be the lure to get her there. All the caller had to say was that they’d come up with the money and that they’d hand it over.”

  “Wouldn’t she think that meeting at Murdoch’s was strange?” Merrick said.

  “Not if the caller said that the Murdochs had some kind of dinner or something they had to attend. And that it’d be safe to meet her there.”

  “So the caller gets her in the house, kills her, leaves her in the bomb shelter,” Spellman said, “and Ross Murdoch gets charged with murder.”

  “That makes more sense than hauling a body past all those workmen,” Merrick said. “I didn’t like that theory at all. Way too risky. And even if all the other workmen had gone home, there’d be the chance that somebody would see a truck or a car pull in about then. I checked the Murdoch road. A lot of people use it to and from work.”

  “So one of the three really has something against Murdoch,” Spellman said.

  “Some old grudge, maybe, that we haven’t learned about yet.”

  Merrick looked at Spellman. “Sam here knows all the players. I say let’s turn him loose on this.”

  “No offense, Sam, but it’s just a theory.”

  “Still makes more sense,” Merrick said, “than hauling a body around. You kill her in one place and then wrap her up and stash her in a car trunk and take her someplace else. A lot of things could go wrong. But if you could get her into the empty house, kill her and leave her there—a lot safer than transporting her all over hell.”

  “You’ve saved yourself blackmail money,” I said, “and you’ve turned Ross Murdoch into a murderer. How does he explain a body in his bomb shelter?”

  “Cliffie comes and arrests you,” Spellman said, “and the entire potential jury pool has already assumed your guilt.”

  “Like I say,” Merrick said, “I think Sam here should start working this idea right away. He knows the players and he knows the town. I want to spend the day looking at all the crime scene data that idiot chief-of-police claims to’ve collected. He’s got one guy on his staff who graduated from the academy in Des Moines and knows something about crime scenes. Hopefully, the chief let him handle all the scientific evidence.”

  “He probably did,” Spellman laughed. “Cliffie was too busy primping for the cameras and telling everybody how he was going to make life safe again here in Dodge City. How the hell’d this guy ever get his job?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  Spellman smiled. “I’ll bet it is.”

  Scotty McBain sat outside his shack of an office. The day was too sweet with warm autumn to be inside. He sat in his chair and had his feet propped up on an empty wooden Pepsi case stood on its end. He was reading a Fredric Brown paperback, The Screaming Mimi.

  “You’ve got good taste in books.”

  He looked up and smiled. He’s got a small, terrier-like face with a large mouth and easy grin. “Hey, if it ain’t the perfesser.”

  Dad’s friends from the plant started calling me that when I got the undergraduate scholarship to the U of Iowa. I was not only the first kid in my family to go to college, I was the first to go down at the plant. Simple reason. I was born during the war. Their kids were born after. They’d be hitting college in a few years.

  Scotty wore a faded khaki shirt and trousers. A uniform, like. He took his feet down from the Pepsi case and stood up, touching his hands to his lower back. “I’m gettin’ old.” Before I could disagree politely, he said, “You can have your pick today.”

  He nodded to two stacked rows of aluminum canoes set against the front left wall of his office. Most of them were in good condition. A few yards away, the river ran, smelling faintly of fish. Out on the water a red speedboat moved fast and vivid through the water. The small dock he’d built for himself was a spot for keggers during the summer. The men, mostly veterans who worked with Dad at the plant, would play a softball game (it was jokingly called The Very Slow Pitch League) and then end up drinking beer half the night at Scotty’s dock. Dad used to take me along sometimes when I was ten or so. I loved the war stories. Even then I knew they were exaggerated for effect but I didn’t care. Every once in a while the stories weren’t bravado, though, and one of the guys would choke up and start crying, thinking of some friend dead back there in Europe or the South Pacific, and it was funny because it was the only time I’d ever seen a male person cry when the other male persons around him didn’t get uptight or ashamed. Couple of them would go over to the guy and slide their hand around his shoulder and kinda stay there like that till the guy stopped crying. My cousin was like that when he came back from Korea. Up and down the emotional scale a lot. He finally ended up in the bughouse, though nobody in the family ever brought it up. If somebody asked how Tim was doing, Mom and Dad would just say that he was “away for a while.”

  “No canoes today, Scotty. Sorry. I’m working on something and I was hoping maybe you could help me a little bit.”

  “Me? Now that’s a new one. Some kind of criminal case, you mean?”

  “Uh-huh. I’m told there’s a woman lives up the road in a trailer. Used to be friends with Karen Hastings.”
r />   He frowned. “Ross Murdoch. That boy’s in trouble.” Stuck a Chesterfield between his lips. “Too bad. He was the only one of those rich guys who was decent. He’d come out here once in a while with his daughter when she was high school age. They were both real nice. Just average people, like. Not puttin’ on any airs or anything, not askin’ for any special treatment. They’d always go to that little summer house he kept over there on that hill across the bend down there. You can’t see it from here. But he enjoyed it, I know that much.” He grinned. “Wouldn’t be bad, though, havin’ a girl as good lookin’ as Karen was stashed away somewhere.”

  “She come down here a lot?”

  “Not a lot but four, five times a summer. Janice Wilson was the one who came down a lot.”

  “She the one lives up the road in the trailer?”

  “Uh-huh. Little silver Airstream. Just about right for one woman, I guess. She gave me a beer one day after I worked on her car. Sat inside her trailer. She’s got it fixed up pretty good.” A smile. “Just like she’s got herself fixed up pretty good. She just wore a halter and shorts that day. Tell you, I felt like I was eighteen again. Smart gal, too. Lotsa books in her trailer. A little distant, though, that’s the only thing. She’s friendly and all but you never feel she’s opening up at all. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “S’pose Cliffie’ll be checkin’ her out, too.”

  “I suppose.” I stared out at the choppy water. Then back at Scotty. “I hear she’s got a temper.”

  He laughed. “Yep. She sure does. Especially with men who put the make on her real obvious-like. She’s strictly look-but-don’t-touch.”

  “Ever see her with anybody except the Hastings woman?”

  He thought a moment. “Nope. Don’t think so.”

  “No other girl friends? No male friends?”

  “I’ll give it some thought, Sam. But off the top of my head, I’d say no. Wasn’t like she hung around here or anything.”

  I looked up the road. “Well, I’ll see if she’s in. See if she’ll talk to me.”

  He gave me a friendly fake-punch on the arm. “Sure wish I was your age again and got to hang around gals like Janice Wilson. Sure wish I was.”