by Ed Gorman
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.”
&
nbsp; “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.”
“You framed him then too. Because of your sister.”
His features froze. “I take it he’s your client now?”
“He is.”
“So he’ll have ample opportunity to tell you a lot of lies about my poor sister. Did he also tell you that he raped her and that’s how she became pregnant?”
“If he raped her, why didn’t you charge him with it?”
“And put my own sister through a rape trial?
I happen to love her very much.”
“You think your sister would tell me that if I called her?”
“If you do call her, McCain, you’ll be a very, very sorry man, believe me.” He paused and then said, “My uncle owns the plant where your father works. And I’m my uncle’s favorite nephew.”
“I’ll mention our conversation to the union rep at the plant.”
“Not even a union man can save his
job if I put the word in Don’s ear.”
I sighed. “Just when I think you couldn’t get any more despicable, Squires, you manage to come up with something worse. You lie awake nights planning this stuff?”
“Yes.” The cold smile again. “When I’m not busy planning world domination.” He had a nice expensive watch and shot his cuff to peek at it. “My stomach tells me it’s lunchtime.”
“That’s funny. My stomach tells me you make me sick.”
I sat in a caf@e and had a cup of coffee and a wedge of apple pie with a piece of cheddar on it. I smoked three Luckies. I plotted what I was going to do to our friend Squires. You know how you start thinking of all these neat ways of getting rid of somebody. Mussolini would have been proud of some of the things I thought up.
I was at a stoplight on my way to my office when the black Ford appeared. The mystery blonde in the black sunglasses looked more fetching than ever: white turtleneck, black silk head scarf, blood-red nail polish. That wry sexy smile. And that throbbing Chuck Berry music.
The light changed.
I floored it.
I shouldn’t say I floored it, the entity in control of me floored it.
Here I was, this hardworking young attorney trying to be mature and respectable when this being took possession of my body and made it do all sorts of crazy and degrading things—l, drag racing.
I laid down twenty feet of black rubber.
I beat her to the next stoplight and waited for her to catch up.
This time, she discarded the smile. In its place was a pout. Pure Brigitte Bardot. She started jabbing the accelerator. Her glas-paks thundered. She was going to put me in my place.
My glas-paks roared back at her.
People on the corners stared at us: the red Ford; the black Ford. The erstwhile counselor-at-law; and the gorgeous girl.
About to put the pedal to the metal.
Red light …
Yellow light …
Green li–Which was when Cliffie pulled into view on his big Indian motorcycle catercorner from us.
Wouldn’t he just love to give me a ticket so stiff it would let him yank my license for a year or two?
The black Ford sped away faster than was strictly wise, given Cliffie’s hunger for ticketing people. He gave her the bad eye but didn’t move.
She beat me to the next light and then disappeared again, turning an illegal right on red.
School was getting out. I sat there waiting for the grade-schoolers in the crosswalk. Their clothes were new. The school year was only a couple of weeks old. I remembered what it was like, buying school clothes in August, your folks taking you to the department store all worried about the money they’d barely been able to scrape together. Buy good clothes had been my folks’ reasoning, they last longer. I always went for Buster Brown shoes as a tyke because of his dog Tige and Smilin’ Ed McConnell on the radio. I also liked clothes that either looked Western—because of Roy and Gene-or futuristic—because of the Flash Gordon serials they ran over and over at the Rialto.
The new-shoe smell was almost as good as the new-car smell. And the first few times I wore them, I treated my clothes with the deference shown toward something Christ had personally blessed, careful of everything I ate and drank.
Then the crosswalk was empty.
This time, I didn’t lay rubber. I drove away like the nice respectable attorney I am.
I smelled him before I saw him.
I don’t suppose that’s a nice thing to say, even about Cliffie, but it’s true. There was just this odor, a kind of generalized Cliffie odor, wafting its way out the open window and my office door.
I wondered how many other times he’d broken into my office.
He had his cowboy-booted feet up on my desk, his campaign hat pushed back on his fat head, and a cigar butt stuffed into the corner of his mouth. He wore his holster rig complete with billy club.
“What the hell’s that thing?” he said,
pointing to the sprawl of gear on the coffee table.
“A lie detector. Something I’d like to get you hooked up to sometime.”
“I don’t need no lie detector. I just look a man straight in the eye. That’s all I need.”
“My hero,” I said.
He said, “You got troubles, counselor.”
“I do, huh?”
“You certainly do.”
“Well, why don’t you make yourself comfortable, Chief, and tell me about them.”
“You thinkin’ of suin’ me or some other lawyer bullshit like that, you just forget about it. I’m the law and I got a perfect right to be here.”
I nodded to the Pepsi bottle and piece of waxed paper on my desk. “You got a perfect right to drink my Pepsi and eat my sandwich?”
“That beef was a little tough.”
“Gee, I’m sorry to hear that.”
“You got to buy grade-A meat,
counselor. Tastes a whole lot better than the gristle you been buyin’.”
I sat down in one of the client chairs.
“What the hell do you want, Cliffie?”
That sat him up straight as I knew it would.
I was sick of his ugly self parked in my chair. He was all things slothful. “I thought we agreed you wasn’t to call me that.”
“When you break into my office, all bets’re off.”
He had his elbows planted hard onto the surface of my desk. “You just like to rile me, don’t you, counselor?”
I sighed. “Get to it. What the hell’re you doing here?”
“Ok then,” he said, and extracted from his lips the wet cigar butt. “You been botherin’ a friend of mine.”
“That being David Squires.”
“Then you admit it?”
“I don’t admit anything.” Then: “He tell you he hired me?”
“
What’re you talkin’ about? Why would Squires hire you?”
“Because he killed his wife. And he thought maybe he might have left a couple of loose ends. Maybe a witness, or something dropped at the scene of the crime. He knew you’d be too stupid to figure it out so he hired
me.”
“Bullshit. He arranged for me to get that Lawman of the Year award last year from the Skeet Shooters Association over to Fort Madison.”
“He was kissing your ass, Cliffie. You can help him. If you couldn’t, he wouldn’t even speak to you.”
Cliffie was angry and hurt and confused.
“Well, you can bet your ass I’m gonna ask him about that. About him hirin’ you.”
He looked pretty bad just then, Cliffie did. Knowing you’ve been betrayed will do that to a person. Just saps all your strength and focus.
He said, like a kid, “He really hired you?”
Somehow I couldn’t take any more pleasure from hurting him. “It wasn’t anything really big.”
“I mean, you don’t get Lawman of the Year award unless them fellas really think you’re doin’
your job.”
“I expect not.”
Then, trying to regain some dignity, he said, “But Chalmers was the one what killed her, that Squires girl.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I don’t have proof yet, but I think I will have pretty soon. So before you arrest Chalmers, I’d appreciate it if you’d call me first.”
He stood up. Rage had replaced hurt in those dog-brown dog-stupid eyes of his.
“We’ll see how Mr. Fancy Squires
likes it next time he wants a favor done and stupid ol’ me tells him no.”
“That’s right. You’ve got to stand up for yourself.”
“Just because I ain’t educated.”
“Right.”
“And just because I ain’t pretty like him.”
“Right.”
“And just because I got this here skin condition and can’t bathe often as I should.”
“Right.”
“And just because people think the only reason I got this job is because my old man runs the town.”
“Right.”
“Well, I’ll show Mr. Fancy.”