by Ed Gorman
He’d want to know everything if he was going to frame Chalmers. It was the only rational reason Squires would ever have come to me for help.
Nothing else made sense.
“What happened to Helen?”
“Married a doctor. Lives in downstate Illinois.”
“What happened to the baby?”
“Abortion. Her old man knew a doc in La.” He took a deep drag on the cigarette. “Funny. Couple of times she sent me a postcard in the can. On the date she had the baby cut out of her. Said she still thought about me sometimes. And the kid. She’s a nice gal.
Nothing like the rest of her family.”
“You think Squires knew about the cards she sent?”
“Probably not.”
“So he just wants to frame you for old times’ sake?”
“I smacked him around pretty hard one day.”
“When was this?”
“His office. When he was questioning me about the stickup. I lost my temper and went for him.
Took a couple of guys to pull me off him.”
Humiliation was something a man like Squires would never forget.
“What happens to Ellie if Cliffie arrests you?”
He shook his head. Looked up at the clear, starry night. In the distance you could hear the high school marching band practicing for homecoming weekend.
“That’s what I’m scared of.”
“You want a lawyer, right?”
“Right.”
“You’ve got one. Cliffie makes a move on you, call me.” I dug out one of the cards I always carry. “Day or night.”
“I’ll do my best to pay you.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. Squires was using me and I resented it. Paying him back would be pay aplenty.
“I still have dreams about Helen.”
“Apparently she still has dreams about you too.”
“Two people who should be together, and somehow it never happens.”
I tried not to think of the beautiful Pamela.
Especially with Mary missing.
“Call me if you need me.”
“I really appreciate this, McCain.”
Upstairs, I phoned Squires at home.
No answer. I tried his office. No answer.
Then I decided to give Judge Whitney the satisfaction of telling her she was right.
Brahms was loud in the background when her man Andrew picked up. He has an accent. Some think it’s British. Some think it’s German.
I think it’s strictly Warner Brothers.
He’s from St. Louis, for God’s sake.
She said, in her brandied evening voice, “I hope you’re working hard.”
“Very hard.”
“Good. Then I can enjoy my loafing.”
“I just called to say you were right about Squires.”
I brought her up to date.
“Looks to me as if he wanted to learn everything a competent cop would find out about the murder. He didn’t want anything to get in the way of his framing Chalmers.”
“You don’t have any doubts about Chalmers’s story?”
“Not really.”
“Now don’t take offense, McCain, but I know how you people from the Knolls stick together.”
“Not any more than you country-club people do.”
“I don’t know what you’ve got against country clubs. It’s a good thing I know you like money.
Otherwise I might start suspecting you were a Red.”
“I think he’s telling the truth.”
“Once Cliffie arrests him, you may have a hard time convincing anybody about Squires’s part in all this.” A pause. I could hear her sipping, then taking a deep drag on her Gauloise.
“Have you considered the possibility that Squires is more than an opportunist?” I asked.
“Meaning what?”
“Well, one way we could look at this is that he’s simply taking advantage of a situation he didn’t have anything to do with. Somebody murdered his wife; on the spur of the moment, Squires decides to frame your friend Chalmers.”
“On the other hand-”
“On the other hand, of course, Squires is behind the whole thing. He killed his wife and had Chalmers all ready to go as chief suspect.”
“That’s how you see it?”
“Maybe he was tired of Susan. Maybe she wouldn’t let him out of the marriage-or threatened a scandal if she left him. He’d beaten her up pretty badly several times. A guy with political ambitions sure wouldn’t want that kind of thing out and about.”
“But Squires seems so unlikely-”
“Now you’re going country-club on me. Just because he gets a manicure doesn’t mean he’s not a killer.”
“By the way, I noticed that Lenny Bernstein doesn’t have manicured nails. Isn’t that strange?”
“V. Isn’t that the eleventh commandment: Thou shalt have manicured nails?”
“On the other hand, he’s most courtly and devastatingly handsome.”
“How nice for the two of you. Can we get back to the murder now?”
“I thought you just might be interested when somebody of Lenny’s stature pays a visit to this cow pie of a state.”
“Why don’t you share that metaphor with the Chamber of Commerce? I’m sure they’d love it.”
Another gulp of brandy. “So, before you get any more tiresome, McCain, what do you propose to do next?”
“I propose to find Mary.”
I told her about Mary’s strange absence.
“She’s a beautiful and intelligent girl.
I’m sure she’s fine.”
God only knew what that meant, but it was getting late and the brandy was flowing freely.
“I’m going to try and find Squires too.”
“Why?”
“So I can resign. I don’t want to be part of his charade anymore.”
“That seems like a sensible idea. Good night, McCain. Just as long as we catch the real murderer before Cliffie does, that’s all that matters.”
I started to say good night but she’d already hung up.
Twelve
The next two days were frantic. There was no word about Mary. And I kept calling the Illinois number about the ‘ee Chevy. No answer.
One of Cliffie’s third cousins had run into a manure wagon and had twice failed to appear for his scheduled court appearance before Judge Whitney. She found this intolerable. I spent most of the following forty-eight hours hunting down Bud “Pug” Sykes. He worked as a county assessor and had long displayed an affection for the bottle. I’m sure he was hiding out. This was between Cliffie and the Judge. Pug was incidental.
I found him the next county over. He was sitting through a western double feature with Also “Lash” La Rue and Monte Hale. I’d never cared for these gentlemen. “Lash” was a little too ornate for me; Monte, I’m sorry to say, always looked a little dense. Pug had been kind enough to park out in front of the theater, making it easy for me to see his license plate.
On the drive back, he said, “I got t’get me one of them whips. Like that Lash La Rue.” He was holding up family tradition: food stains on his work jacket, shirt, and trousers, and a dab of mustard on one cheek.
“I can see where that’d come in handy. A bullwhip like that.”
“Bet cousin Cliff’d like one too.”
I was so used to people calling him Cliffie, Cliff sounded strange.
“Cliff told me I didn’t have to go to that there hearing unless I wanted to,” he said. “And I didn’t want to.”
“You’re in violation of the law, Pug. You have to show up. You be nice to the Judge, and she’ll be nice to you.”
Pug snorted. “Cliff always says, “I wouldn’t screw that old bitch with your dick, Pug.”” He giggled. “That Cliff.”
“Yeah,” I said. “A million laughs.”
He was still giggling. “Hell, who needs Jackie Gleason when you got Cliff around?”
A
s soon as I dropped Pug off at
Judge Whitney’s office, I went straight to Mary’s house. The street was sunny and lazy in another Indian summer afternoon. A small girl in pigtails rode a rusty old tricycle furiously up the cracked sidewalk. Then she stopped. She wanted to watch me walk up to the Traverses’ door.
She could have been Mary or Pamela fifteen years earlier, that smart little face, that clean but mended dress. The good ones in the Knoll never gave in to the temptation to go around dirty. Maybe they had little money and even less hope, but by God they were clean.
Miriam Travers had gotten old before her time. Life hadn’t been easy. She’d lost a brother in the big war and a son in Korea, and now her husband had serious heart problems and her daughter was missing. The face was still pretty, the body still slender, but there was a defeated air about her, like a village that has been sacked by a particularly brutal army.
“Did you find her?” For just that moment, with hope in her lovely gray eyes, the hair was girlishly dark once more and the faded housedress a stylish frock. Miriam Travers was a young woman again, and life ahead looking happy.
“I’m afraid not, Miriam.”
She hadn’t said hello or invited me in.
She’d just burst out with her hopeful question before I could speak or move. And now there was a death in her, one of those deaths you experience every time a phone rings and you plead with God that the news will be good.
She collapsed into my arms. There’s no other way to express it. She didn’t put her arms around me, she just fell forward. I held her. I didn’t try to move her back into the house. I simply held her. She smelled of coffee and a faint perfume. She didn’t cry or tremble or even move much. She was trying to hide. She needed to put her face deep into a darkness where she could not be reached by any more bad news.
Then Bill Travers was behind her, a wraith in a robe. He’d been a ruddy and robust man just a few months ago. The heart attack had taken both qualities from him. He’d lost at least forty pounds and moved uncertainly, like a bad actor playing a withered old man. His loose slippers slapped the floor and a bronchial-sounding cough filled his throat.
He slid his arms around her, and she turned with great sudden grace inside his embrace. And then she began crying. Sobbing.
“I’d like to go up to Mary’s room,” I said to the pale man impersonating Bill Travers.
He nodded. By the time I reached the narrow staircase, he was leading his wife carefully to the couch.
Time travel.
I remembered the day. Who didn’t? Very-Just Day. End of the long and murderous war. Dad coming home. Six hundred thousand dads coming home.
There were Mary and I in the army caps our fathers had sent us, tiny American flags in our mitts, grinning at the camera. We had our arms over each other’s shoulders.
There were other photos of the two of us: dances, bonfires, horseback rides, hot afternoons at the public swimming pool; later on, hot afternoons at the sandpits, high school beer cans glinting off the sunlight.
And Mary evolved in each one. More and more beautiful and graceful. A cutup, to be sure -clowning in a sport coat of her father’s as a ten-year-old me watched; smoking a cigarette at her thirteenth birthday party (a very sophisticated lady until, as Miriam had predicted, she rushed to the john and threw up), me looking gawky and dumb in the background, shorter even than most of the girls; Mary in a talent contest lip-synching (as I recall) to “Music! Music! Music!” by Teresa
Brewer, dressed up in a tux and top hat-and yet always with those wise and sober blue eyes. The Knolls and its despair and its violence had taught her, as it had taught too many of us, things we shouldn’t have known at such tender ages, things that marked us forever.
Time travel.
I sat on the bedspread in the pink room, looking at the pennants and dolls and silly carnival gifts she collected over the years, at the desk where she’d done her straight-A work at the bookcase jammed both with classics and the occasional John D. MacDonald or Peter Rabe I’d given her. The room was scented with sachet and sunshine and memories. The autumn leaves brushed the open window. I could reach out and pluck one, like taking a plume of fire. I walked over to the desk and started going through the drawers.
I found it under a stack of papers: an envelope from the Dearborn County Courthouse, Dearborn, Iowa. It was a number-ten white business envelope with a window. The window was empty. I had no idea to whom it had originally been addressed. The postmark read December 2, 1955. Nearly two years ago. I turned it over. I recognized Mary’s handwriting immediately. She had learned the Palmer Method well.
328-6382
Susan
I stayed a few more minutes, found nothing more.
I stood in the doorway, overwhelmed with her, no thoughts of anybody but her.
I went downstairs.
“I put Bill back to bed. He shouldn’t have gotten up in the first place. It was my fault for carrying on the way I did. I’m sorry.”
Miriam sat on the edge of the couch. I sat down next to her. Slid my arm around her.
“You ever see this before?” I showed her the envelope.
“No. Where’d you find it?”
“Mary’s room. She ever tell you about writing the Dearborn Courthouse for anything?”
“Not that I remember.”
I put it back in my pocket.
“You think it means something?”
“Probably not. But it’s the only thing I found I couldn’t explain.”
She gave me a kiss on the cheek. “You’re such a good boy, Sam.”
“And you’re a good woman, Miriam.”
“If anybody can find her, I know it’ll be you.”
“Oh, I’ll find her all right, Miriam,”
I said.
“I’ll just keep saying prayers. I want to light some candles as soon as I can.”
I gave her a squeeze and stood up. She started to stand too. “No need. I’ll be fine.”
I walked to the door. “I saw that Very-Just Day photo up there.”
She smiled. “You kids were so cute.”
“That was a happy day.”
“I still think of it,” she said, “whenever I need a little cheering up.” Then: “But we were so na@ive back then. I remember your mom and I talking about how all our troubles were over. You know, after the war, nothing would ever seem like much trouble at all.”
Then: “I didn’t figure on Bud being killed.”
It was a sad, defeated house now. I needed to get out of there.
Thirteen
I spent an hour and a half in my office the next morning calling every friend of Mary’s I could remember. Then I spoke to the two women she worked with at Rexall. No help whatsoever.
In an effort to calm myself, I took the lie detector out of its box, dragged a small coffee table over by my desk, and set it up.
Or tried to. I spent a full hour working with it. I got the On button to glow red. That was about it. You know how in the movies that metal arm is always making jagged lines on the printout paper? The damned thing wouldn’t budge for me.
What I was doing was killing time. Waiting for the magic hour of 11ccde A.M. I’d made a call earlier and asked what time the boss man went to lunch.
The Rollins Building is what passes for a skyscraper here. Four stories, ornate 1920’s facing, right down to gargoyles perched on the corners of every floor.
Squires came out walking fast. There was always that briskness about him. Dapper as usual.
Another dark blue suit, this one with pinstripes, gold collar pin, seawater-blue necktie, gray hair perfectly combed.
A sweet time for walking, so sunny, so filled with the pretty women of Black River Falls doing their shopping or pushing their strollers in the small stores that make up the downtown.
I fell into step next to him. “Hello, counselor.”
“I’ve been waiting to hear from you.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Oh? I hope that means you’ve come up with something.”
“I sure have.”
“Good. Let’s hear it.”
Other than his first unhappy glance at me, he’d stared straight ahead. It would be a pleasure to snap his head around and see his startled eyes.
“The news is that you killed your wife and you’re trying to frame Mike Chalmers for it.”
His head not only snapped around, he stopped walking. “What the hell’re you talking about?”
He spoke in a loud whisper.
“I was a little skeptical when you showed up at my place that night. A man like you could afford any investigator in the state. Why me? You told me the truth about one thing: because I know the territory. So I’d hear plenty of gossip.
Hear if anything would get in the way of setting up Chalmers. Like a witness who saw you at the murder scene. I was like a mine-sweeper. And now you think you’re in the clear. Thanks to all the crap you’ve been feeding Cliffie, he’s more convinced than ever that Chalmers is his man. And he’s going to arrest him very soon.”
“Chalmers is his man.”
“You’re a jealous man, counselor.
You like to keep your women locked away from everybody else. And when they disobey you, you like to beat them. Or maybe you beat them just for the fun of it.”
“Do you realize I could sue you for slander for what you just said?”
“Care to try? And Mary Travers is missing. I think you may be behind that too.”
“I’m firing you. Right here and right now.”
“I’ll send you a bill.”
“After what you’ve just accused me of, do you honestly think I’d pay it?”
“No, I guess you wouldn’t. But let me tell you something. I won’t let you get away with it.”
Cold smile. “You won’t, huh?”
“No. I won’t.”
The smile stayed but now it turned nasty. “You think the Judge has the power to go up against Cliff when he makes up his mind?” I noticed he no longer called him Cliffie.
“It’s happened before.”
“Well, it won’t happen this time. Chalmers is the man. No doubt about it. He had the motive, the method, and the means, as they taught us in law school. He’s obsessed with me and has been ever since I put him behind bars, where he belongs.”