Riders on the Storm

by Ed Gorman

  “I need to find out more about Steve Donovan.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “If Will didn’t kill him, who did?”

  “He had enemies. I don’t think he was ever faithful to his wife. A man named Thad Owens caught Donovan making out with Thad’s wife and he dumped her because of it. I know of at least two times when his wife was going to leave him. And then his business partner and he had a big falling-out.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. I knew Donovan liked the ladies but I didn’t know that his wife had threatened to leave him and I didn’t know anything about his business partner.”

  “But won’t Paul be doing the same thing?”

  “He’s a policeman and he’ll go at it his way. But I grew up here. And I have a source he doesn’t. Kenny Thibodeau.”

  “I know this sounds snobbish but I’m so glad he’s not a beatnik anymore.”

  Given the situation, I felt guilty about laughing. “I don’t think anybody’s been called a ‘beatnik’ in several years.”

  “Will always says I’m a square. But you know what I mean about Kenny. He dresses like a normal person and he’s married and they have that sweet little girl. It doesn’t even bother me that he writes those dirty books anymore. I even bought one at a used-book sale last year. I was embarrassed and the woman who sold it winked at me when I put it in my purse, but I enjoyed it. I thought it would just be filth but it was a really good story and it wasn’t all that sexy anyway. Kenny’s a good writer.”

  “And because he writes that column for the newspaper, people tell him things all the time.”

  “That’s another thing I’m happy for him about. He really makes the history of this town interesting.”

  “And people confide in him because of it. It’s weird. They tell him what’s going on now, too. So he’s a good source.”

  She leaned back in her chair and stretched her arms out like a comely kitten taking a break. “Umm. This was nice.”

  “What was?”

  “Just now. Talking about what you’re going to do. And talking about Kenny. For a little while there I forgot all about where we are and why we’re here. I was so far gone I even started thinking about what I was going to make Peggy Ann for lunch. But she’s at my sister’s until further notice. Right now, for a few days at least, I’m afraid I won’t be much of a mother. I’ll just sit around and brood.”

  I’d been distracted by all this, too. All too soon I would need to be in court. While I should have done more prep, I was confident I could handle it. The insurance company would likely settle before the judge appeared. They’d made two offers in the past two weeks but we’d declined them. I was pretty sure this would be an offer we could accept.

  “I was just sitting here waiting for you, Sam. I guess I’ll go back home now.”

  As we left the station, she pecked me on the cheek again, squeezed my hand, and then set out for a home without child or husband. Or maybe even future.

  5

  I GOT JAMIE NEWTON IN TRADE. WHEN I EXPLAIN THIS TO PEOPLE I frequently get a lewd smile, especially after they’ve seen her.

  It happened this way. Her father is an argumentative freelance home repairman who got it in his head that his neighbor had illegally seized a portion of the Newton backyard. He came to me to set up a lawsuit because I have a deserved reputation for taking on cases that others won’t, i.e., they don’t pay enough. Or, all too often, not at all.

  Cam Newton slapped down a hundred-dollar bill on my desk so I said I’d help him. I also said that our chance of winning was slim owing to the fact that the amount of land he wanted ceded back didn’t amount to much more than a few yards. He naturally said that didn’t matter, that it was the principle of the thing.

  Then he told me the real truth, that his neighbor had insulted Cam’s wife one night by smirking that she was a “hefty gal.”

  We lost the case and Cam lost his money—“lost” as in he couldn’t find the other five hundred dollars he owed me. I guess the dealer must have just given him that new Dodge.

  He then proposed that his high school-aged daughter would “work off” his debt. I learned quickly not to use that phrase. The smirkers did everything but light up and ring bells the few times I said it.

  The fact that Jamie couldn’t type, answer phones, operate the Xerox, take dictation, or make tolerable coffee (hers was almost but not quite as bad as mine) didn’t make her any less sweet. Though she dressed like the teenage girls on paperback crime novels—tight blouses and skirts, bobby socks and saddle shoes—her naïveté was both endearing and sometimes dangerous.

  The latter applied to her choice of boyfriends. Turk was the leader of a local surf band much like the Beach Boys. Since Iowa was a landlocked state, the resemblance to the great Brian Wilson ensemble was strained at best. And as an artist he needed free time with his band for their inevitable—according to him—appearance on American Bandstand which would coincide with their album hitting numero uno which would coincide with the launching of their first world tour.

  She believed all this and was willing to hand over half her paycheck to support Turk’s absolute certain triumph around the world. I knew better than to suggest that she might reconsider Turk as a worthy mate. She got married and got pregnant. Turk was last heard from working in a car wash in Davenport. He’d left after he realized that being married to a sweet, wonderful young woman with a child just got in the way of running Iowa’s only surf band.

  Motherhood changed her. She managed to complete secretarial courses at a local business college and learned to be an excellent secretary. She even went through the filing cabinets she’d wildly misarranged years ago. Now I didn’t have to look for Merle Hennings in F or K or Z. He was right there in H, God love ’im.

  Her style in clothes had changed, too. With that freckled country-girl face, so open and pretty, and that body nothing short of a feed sack could hide, she now looked like the kind of secretary you saw in the skyscrapers of Chicago. Very uptown, right down to the newly affected blond pageboy. She can afford this look because one of my clients is the best department store in town. I’m their security adviser. I get a large discount on what I buy there, and so by agreement does Jamie. I also give her a “clothing allowance.” Despite the fact that she doesn’t feel “ready” to date again, I want her to meet a decent guy who can convince her that not all males are like the vanishing Turk, whose name I never understood because he’s black Irish.

  She was typing as I walked into my one-room office that rests in the rear of a single-story building that houses in front a Laundromat. Not to worry. The longest any business has lasted up front is eleven months. The Laundromat has been here five months. Somewhere there is a moving van circling and circling and circling, waiting to descend on the Laundromat when it folds. Maybe that XXX bookstore will find a home yet.

  “I know Will didn’t kill anybody, Sam, even though everybody I talk to says he did. They keep talking about how he was in that mental hospital those times. I had a cousin who was in a mental hospital for about three months a few years ago and she’s fine now.”

  “That’s all you have to say is ‘mental hospital’ and he doesn’t stand a chance.”

  “Some people in this town are narrow-minded.”

  “It isn’t just this town. It’s worldwide.”

  “Really? Everywhere?”

  “Just say ‘mental hospital’ and it doesn’t matter if you’re speaking Chinese or Spanish, you’ve convicted the guy.”

  She just frowned. “Anyway, I’ve laid everything out for you. For court.”

  And so she had. About all that was left for me to do was walk to the county courthouse. Then the phone rang and it was for me.

  Greg Egan had served in Nam in 1966. For only eight weeks. As a grunt he’d been in some terrible fighting. So terrible that today he was confined to a wheelchair due to the fact that his legs had been surgically removed just below the knees. In some respect
s he was the conscience of a small group of vets who’d had physical and mental problems in assimilating back home. The wife he’d left behind him when he’d gone to Nam was still behind him. She drove him to the VA three times a week. They were starting the prosthetic process.

  “Hi, Sam. I figured you’d know what was going on. All I hear from the news is that Will is a cold-blooded murderer who spent two terms in the bughouse. The murder stuff, that’s got to be bullshit, right?”

  “I’m sure he’s innocent, Greg, but there are some extenuating circumstances.” I explained the situation as quickly as I could.

  “Because that asshole Donovan beat him up? Will is one of the nicest guys I’ve ever known.”

  “I agree, but as much as I’d like to, I can’t blame the police for making certain assumptions at this point.”

  “Think if Cliffie was involved.” Then, “I know you gotta run. Five of the guys called me in the last fifteen minutes. I said I’d call you and see what was going on. Anything we can do, you know you got it, Sam. I don’t have any legs but I’ve still got a pretty good mind.”

  I wanted to say you didn’t need to say that, Greg, but he was used to people pitying him without quite taking him seriously as a human being. I wondered if Senator O’Shay ever realized things like that.

  “I’ll keep you posted, Greg.”

  “Say hi to Karen for us. A very sweet lady.”

  “She sure is that.”

  On the walk to the courthouse I didn’t think about Will or Karen, I thought about O’Shay. What might have been a political embarrassment for him had been turned into a victory. O’Shay would get to rail again about the “sickness” of the country—and what better example of that sickness than the murder of a brave soldier, a man he’d favored for Congress. Soldiers never “died,” they were always “cut down in their prime.” Apparently he was unaware that men as old as fifty-five were fighting and dying over there, too.

  A press conference was inevitable. He hadn’t been scheduled to return to Washington for a few days so he’d likely stage a splashy performance here. If I were one of his aides I would suggest he stage it down in the basement of the funeral parlor where they prepared the corpses for burial. But that would be too much of a reminder about what the good old president Nixon and his de facto vice president Henry Kissinger were really up to, wouldn’t it?

  Then I started thinking about Will again. I was so tight and angry that I took a pit stop in the john on the second floor of the courthouse. I splashed chilly water on my face and since I was alone—I’d carefully checked—I got down and did twenty push-ups. My max. These gave me a sheen of sweat and for some reason sweating usually relaxed me. I wanted to represent my client as well as I could. I was pretty confident.

  I wished I was as confident about Will.

  6

  IN THE LATE 1950S A LARGE NUMBER OF BOYS WANTED TO BE James Dean or Elvis or maybe Ricky Nelson. My friend Kenny Thibodeau and I had different aspirations. Kenny wanted to be Jack Kerouac and I wanted to be the actor Robert Ryan.

  Kenny did something about his aspirations. If he couldn’t be Kerouac, he could at least meet him. And so in the summer of 1958 Kenny drove to San Francisco to meet Mr. Kerouac. Kenny spent several days hanging in and around City Lights Bookstore where all the important Beat writers hung out. He did meet the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who also happened to own the bookstore, and he did see, among others, such Beat writers and poets as Gregory Corso and even the famous Allen Ginsberg. But no Kerouac.

  A few days before he was to leave, Kenny read some of his poems to some tourists. A man who’d been listening came up to him afterward and offered him a job writing what we’d called at Catholic school “right-handers” (some imagination required here), books with brazenly sexy covers and titles but with almost prudishly written “erotic” scenes inside. Kenny was expected to write one book a month for four hundred dollars.

  The man gave Kenny a cardboard box full of what he called his “product” and after shaking hands as Kenny was about to depart said, “Kid, think lesbian.”

  At the moment Kenny was shoving not one of his monthly paperbacks but a magazine called Real Man’s Adventure across the table to me.

  The mostly naked women with bullwhips had swastikas all over the tatters of their skirts and shirts. A rugged American-hero type was tied to a pole. The lashes had slashed his bare chest mercilessly. “Nazi Gal Killers Made Me Their Sex Slave.” I thumbed my way to the contents page to see what pen name he’d slapped on this one. “Burt Scaggs.” Manly, very manly.

  “Ten cents a word. Eight thousand words—the second lead in the magazine—and I did it in two afternoons. And they want more from me.”

  I asked what I thought was the logical question. “If he’s their sex slave why are they beating him?”

  “They’re sadists. All Nazis were sadists.”

  “Wow, all this and historical accuracy.”

  He smiled. Kenny had a good novel in him. He’d shown me the part he’d written. I truly believed—and I hoped he did, too—that he would finish the book in a year or so. He was a hell of a good storyteller and a number of his soft-core novels really had strongly developed characters.

  We were sitting in the café where the town’s lawyers hung out before and after court. I’d won the case for my client. Kenny had agreed to meet me here.

  “You know what time it is.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  Melissa Thibodeau was in danger of becoming the most photographed little girl in the state. But she was so damned pretty and sweet, who cared?

  The new photographs showed her in her new bonnet and Sunday dress. I did the expected oohing and aahing, but it was sincere oohing and aahing. I was Melissa’s godfather.

  “She’s beautiful. Thanks for letting me see them.”

  I handed them back and then he spoke the mantra. “No way anybody’s going to convince me that Will Cullen ever killed anybody.”

  “I know. That’s what most people I’ve talked to say. But when you put it together as it stands right now you see why Foster thinks he’s got a case.”

  “I hear average citizens call him ‘Paul.’”

  “Yeah, I don’t know about that. It’s like a political gimmick. It creates a false sense of security. He’s a cop. You can only trust cops so far.”

  “Wow. You sound like some guys I know who drop too much acid. Mr. Paranoid. Maybe he’s just a nice guy.” He leaned forward and dragged his billfold out of his right back pocket.

  I went through everything again; the kicker was the tire iron.

  “Yeah, I see what you mean. But it’s not Will. He’s just not like that.”

  “No, he isn’t. But I need to move on this. I don’t know enough about Donovan to really get going on checking him out. I need to spend time in the library, for one thing. And Karen told me a couple of things. I guess he and his business partner had a falling-out.”

  “Yeah, big time. Donovan forced him out. Or his new partner did, this Lon Anders.”

  “That’s been proven?”

  “Yeah. The old business partner, Al Carmichael, dropped into this depression and finally just said screw it. He let Donovan buy him out for pennies on the dollar. He lives in Pittsburgh now and works for an outfit named ChemLab. I’ve known Carmichael for a long time. You remember him?”

  “Right. Al. He had that cool racing bike when we were in seventh grade. Then he went to public school.”

  I told him about the angry husband Karen had alluded to.

  “Thad Owens. That happened two, three years ago. He caught Donovan and the wife making out at a party. The wife broke down and told him all about her affair with Donovan. He’s remarried and could care less about Donovan now. He’s got a newborn with the second wife and enjoys himself. I run into him at the supermarket every once in a while.”

  “Well, I can scratch off those two.”

  Kenny touched the knot in his tie. Yes, tie. These days instead of looking like
the comic beatnik Maynard G. Krebs of the late lamented Dobie Gillis show, Kenny affected button-down shirts, chinos, and cordovan penny loafers. His weekly newspaper column gave him some real prominence. There were still people who complained about his books but nonetheless he was asked to talk to groups as respectable as Kiwanis and Rotary. “Don’t worry, I’ve got somebody for you.”

  “Who?”

  “I’ve heard Anders is as much of a player as Donovan was. And he’s a big pilot. Was a fighter in Nam in the mid-sixties and now has his own big-ass plane. I’ve also been told that lately Donovan and Anders had been arguing pretty violently behind closed doors. But nobody could figure out why. I guess one day Anders came to work with a black eye and wouldn’t come out of his office until just about everybody had left that night.”

  “Then they really weren’t getting along.”

  “I guess Donovan started hanging around his cousin again to the point that some people thought the cousin was a bodyguard. Your old friend Teddy Byrnes.”

  “You’re kidding me. I thought he was still doing time.”

  “Been out for a month.”

  Teddy Byrnes had been a member of the Night Devils, a biker gang associated with at least three murders over the years. They’d started after the big war when gangs like them came to prominence. In those days Marlon Brando in The Wild One was their patron saint. But there was a difference between movie violence and real violence. They had escaped punishment for their suspected murders but they had been busted for numerous burglaries, assaults, and armed robberies. Their legend terrified people. Whenever they roared into a park on a sunny Sunday afternoon the picnickers fled.

  Teddy Byrnes had been a punk among punks. A pretty-boy psychopath who enjoyed beating people. No guns or knives for him. Just beating them. He’d been in our class for three years but got expelled and went to public school. One beating in particular convinced the county attorney that he had Byrnes nailed, but the victim suddenly declined to testify. Then Byrnes’s luck changed. He severely beat a man outside a tavern one rainy night. What he didn’t know was that a police officer who’d been checking doors in the downtown area just happened to have turned the near corner and was walking toward Byrnes and his victim. The officer saw everything.