Sam McCain - 04 - Save the Last Dance for Me (11 page)

Oleg Cassini had become her designer of choice and so on her four-trips-a-year to New York City she stocked up on Cassini duds the way factory workers stocked up on Monkey Wards work clothes. Today, she wore a handsome tan linen suit with matching pumps. Her short hair looked freshly washed and combed. And she strode the length of her office with runway elegance. She was all crazed, nervous energy, terrified that she’d make less than a good impression on old Milhous.

That’s why you have to be careful about being a-flutter and a-twitter at the same time. It can really make you crazy—y’re like an engine with the idle running too fast.

“Now, does everybody know what they need to do?”

Cowed, terrified, they glanced at each other and then looked back at the Judge. They nodded like frightened puppies who’d just pooped on the new carpeting.

“Good, because I don’t need to tell you, there’ll be hell to pay for anybody who screws up.”

I felt sorry for them. God, I felt

sorry for them.

She waved them dismissively away. They left with great hurried relief.

“So,” she said when the last of them had closed the door, “this thing is getting worse and worse.”

She went over to her desk, poured herself some brandy, plucked a Gauloise from her cigarette case and lighted it with a small aluminum box that somehow produced fire.

“They’re connected,” she said, exhaling a gulf stream of blue smoke. “Muldaur and Reverend Courtney.”

“I sure think so.”

“But how?”

“Not a clue. Not so far.”

“I don’t want these ridiculous murders hanging over our heads when Dick gets here.”

A chic sip. She was a damned good-looking woman and knew it. “You have one of your famous lists?”

“I have one of my famous lists.”

My crime instructor at the university said that a good detective always writes down names and incidents and then begins to connect them, like

children’s puzzles where eventually the connected lines draw a picture. In this case, the picture of a killer.

“The night Muldaur was murdered, both Sara Hall and the now-deceased Reverend Courtney just happened to show up. I find that strange. I mean, why would they be way out in the boonies like that?

That’s the first thing on my list. The second thing is that when I went out to Muldaur’s trailer the day after the murder the daughter said she knew who’d killed her father but then her mother told her to shut up. Also, there was a crazy hillbilly there named Ned. He was exchanging bullets with the Muldaurs, which they explained to me was just a mountain tradition and not anything to worry about. He claims that Muldaur owes him money for collecting snakes. He’s worth following up on and so is the daughter, Ella. Item three on my list is Sara Hall again. I know you told me not to bother her but I just happened to run into her out at the shopping mall.”

“I’ll bet you just happened to run into her.”

“She looked very rocky. Scared, angry, confused. Take your pick. Or maybe all three. Anyway, after she left me she met the good Reverend Courtney. They went into The House of Beef together.”

“I wonder what that was all about.”

“So do I.”

Her face twisted with displeasure. “She wasn’t having an affair with him, was she?”

“She’s your friend, Judge. You’d know better than I would.”

She walked over to the long, leaded window that overlooked the courthouse lawn. She loved to pose dramatically in front of it. Maybe she was practicing for Milhous.

“Did she ever mention Courtney to you?” I said. “Did she say why he was counseling Dierdre?”

“Not really. But Dierdre’s always had problems. Depression. She saw her father drown.”

The story was well-known locally. Extremely wealthy man trying out his brand-new Chris-Craft one late Fourth of July on the river when a speedboat being driven by a monumentally drunken local playboy smashed into him. The wealthy man—Art Hall—drowned after rescuing his wife and daughter.

Dierdre went back in the water after her father.

Bystanders had to restrain her from doing it again. She spent a fair amount of time in a mental hospital shortly after that. She was thirteen years old at the time, probably seventeen now.

The playboy had some good lawyers. He quickly moved to California and had not been heard from since.

You saw Dierdre walking around town. One of her doctors had apparently told her that exercise was good for combating depression. So she walked. Everywhere. Day and night. She had yet to finish high school. She hadn’t attended the previous semester. Depression. She had a prim, Victorian beauty except for the troubled eyes. She favored heavy sweaters, jeans, white Keds. Even in the summer, when other people wore the least the law would allow, there would be Dierdre in her cable-knit sweater. Walking.

“You want to talk to Sara?”

She shook her head. “I’ll have you do it. I value her friendship too much. She’ll resent it coming from me.”

“She’ll resent it coming from me, too.”

She smiled. “Yes, but I don’t really give a damn about that, do I? Now get out there and find out what’s going on, McCain. When my people ran this town, we didn’t have any unsolved murders, believe me.”

The thing was, for all the puffery, the statement was probably true. If nothing else, the Whitneys are bright and tidy and efficient civil servants.

At the door, she said, “Muldaur being killed did one good thing, anyway.”

“What?”

“No more of those damned anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic flyers he was putting out. And I say that as a Protestant, McCain. You know I don’t have a prejudiced bone in my body. I’m very happy that all you people came over here on your little boats.”

I could tell she wanted some sort of Nobel peace prize for saying what she’d just said.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have one on me to give her.

137

I heard girlish giggling as I walked through my office door. Kylie was parked with great poise upon the edge of my desk and Jamie was sitting behind her typewriter stand. They both were smoking filtered cigarettes and drinking Pepsi from bottles.

“God,” Kylie was saying, “so how did you get your clothes back?”

“That’s the thing,” Jamie was saying. “We didn’t. The dog dragged them off. We never found them again.”

“Then how’d you get home?”

“We drove back on dirt roads and then we had to take alleys all the way to my house.

I had to get a blanket from the garage and sneak into the house. I was afraid my dad was gonna wake up and see me in my birthday suit.”

Giggling again. They were as drunk as they could get on Pepsi. There was something sweet about it.

Kylie was a city girl with a brain and Jamie was a small-town girl with a body. And yet here they were fast friends, at least for this small inconsequential moment in this backwoods town in this backwoods state on this backwoods planet in the vast, indifferent universe. Every once in a while, I try to put things into perspective. It was those damned philosophy courses I took.

I went behind my desk and sat down. Kylie, cautiously erotic in a prim white blouse and tight royal blue skirt, pushed her Pepsi at me and said, “Jamie’s been telling me about the night she and Turk went skinny-dipping.”

“Good old Turk,” I said.

“Mr. C’s never met Turk,” Jamie

said.

“And I’m the poorer for it, no doubt,” I said.

“Turk sounds sort of cool, actually,”

Kylie said, relishing the effect her words would have on me.

“Oh, yes, very cool,” I said.

“As opposed to short, mouthy guys who aren’t cool.”

Jamie giggled. “I think she’s talking about you, Mr. C.”

At which point a horn sounded.

“Turk!” Jamie said. “He’s picking me up for lunch!”

“I hope he’s got clothes on,” Kylie laughed.

“She’d make you a great girlfriend,” Jamie said of Kylie. “I mean, if you weren’t all hung up on that snob Pam Forrest. And if Kylie wasn’t married.”

“You have a succinct way of stating a problem,”

Kylie said.

“I don’t know what succinct means but it sounds sort of dirty.”

The horn again.

“He’ll have to come in sometime so I can meet him,” I said.

“He doesn’t like lawyers.”

“Oh? How come?”

“That time he ran over that nun? This lawyer his dad got really didn’t have any respect for Turk. I mean, the nun wasn’t even hurt much. It wasn’t his fault she was so short. He just couldn’t see her behind the dump truck he was backing up.”

“Turk’s father owns a construction company,” I explained to Kylie.

“Ah,” Kylie said.

“I mean, she sprained her ankle was all,”

Jamie said. “It wasn’t like she died or anything.”

The horn. For the third time.

“He isn’t real patient sometimes,” Jamie explained. Then, “Gee, I’ve got a lot of other stories about stuff me’n Turk did, Kylie. We’ll have to get together again sometime.”

“You know,” Kylie said, sounding sincere.

“I’d actually like that.”

Jamie was wearing a pair of jeans so tight they should be illegal. Unfair to lechers like me.

Kylie sat down in the client chair. “She really made me feel better. She’s not a genius but there’s an innocence and an energy that’s really great to be around.”

“Great. So you’re feeling better.”

“Much better, actually. I can’t believe it.”

And then her body sort of collapsed in on itself and she started sobbing. “I’ve been up and down like this ever since he told me about his affair,” she managed to say.

I didn’t have any Kleenex so I went into the can and got several fistfuls of toilet paper.

She said, when she’d gathered herself,

“I should leave him, shouldn’t I?”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, no, what?”

“No advice. You give people advice on matters of the heart, you lose them as friends forever.”

“But I’m asking for advice. That absolves you of all responsibility.”

“You say that now—but later …”

“C’mon, McCain. You really think I should leave him, don’t you?”

I took her hand in mine and gently said, “You know what I really think?”

“What?”

“That we should go get some lunch.”

She jerked her hand away. “Coward.”

“Damn right I’m a coward. I have three fewer friends today because I advised them on their affairs of the heart. They won’t speak to me.

Now, let’s go.”

The wading pool in the town square was packed with tots. You could hear them squealing, summer music on a summer breeze. There was a drowsy, siesta feeling such as you always read about in the western novels of Mr. Max Brand, for whom I’d formed a real affection. I’d read two of his when I was twelve and then kept on reading. His heroes were always brooders and mourners and failures and daydreamers and that lent his stories a uniqueness and depth most westerns just don’t have, John Wayne forgive me. He was especially great at describing Mexico. And that, at least in my imagination, was how our little town felt at this noontime. Some dusty Mexican pueblo where this really neat-looking short guy rides in on a white horse and all the se@noritas come running. It was so hot here today tires were losing tread simply by revolving against the steamy pavement.

Kylie spotted them before I did. On the windshield of a pink-and-white Nash rambler. And on the windshield of a nice new Pontiac convertible. And on the window of a Dairy Queen panel truck.

Flyers.

She snatched one up. Glanced at it.

Flicked it in my face.

Why The Jews Want Jfk

To Win!

The Zionist Powers Behind The

Kennedys!

The rest you can imagine for yourself.

“But didn’t old man Kennedy hang around with Hitler?” she asked.

“Liked the man very much. Considered him a friend.

That’s one of the reasons the Kennedys have to keep old Joe out of sight. A lot of people still resent the old bastard.”

“Then why do they think the Jews are behind Kennedy?”

“I guess I don’t know,” I said.

“Maybe for the same reasons the Jews are stashing all their guns in church basements.”

“These people are nuts!” she said with great authority. “As my folks always pointed out.”

Her folks were (a) university professors and (but) Jewish, in a time when it was not universally fashionable to be either. Kylie’d grown up in Madison, Wisconsin, one of the most lovely and exciting cities in the U.S.

“Well, they get to economize on this election, anyway,” I said.

We started walking again. She started fanning herself with her fingers. She had wonderful long fingers. Artistic, I guess you’d say. She also had a very artistic ass.

“How are they economizing?”

“Well, when the Klan and the other crazies get all riled up around election time, they usually take the Jews and the Catholics on separately. But since Kennedy has a lot of Jewish advisers, they’ve decided they can save on their printing bills by doubling up. The only thing they didn’t get to is the

Eleanor-Roosevelt-is-a-lesbo-thing.”

“Eleanor Roosevelt is a lesbian?”

“That’s what all the pamphlets say. Say, I wonder if Kenny Thibodeau has heard that one. There’s a political novel in it for him.

Lesbo Legislators.”

She laughed. “He’s actually an interesting guy.”

“Yeah, he is.”

“He goes away to all these big cities and comes back and tells us what’s going on. You know, trends and stuff. I even read a couple of his novels.”

“Shameless hussy,” I said.

“He can write people well. I was surprised.

I asked him why he doesn’t write a serious book and you know what he told me?”

“What?”

“He said that every time he tries, he freezes up. Blocks. But that he can write his porno just fine because he knows it’s just trash and doesn’t matter. I sort of feel sorry for him.”

“You feel sorry for everybody.”

“Look who’s talking.”

Al Monahan has two bus-stop benches on either side of the entrance to his caf@e. Nice for eating outdoors on hot days, which we did.

I had iced tea and a cheeseburger. She had iced tea.