Sam McCain - 04 - Save the Last Dance for Me (22 page)

Just moved things around a little. I stepped down even harder.

“You’re going to tell me that you bought strychnine at Clymer’s two days after Muldaur was murdered and then planted it in Sara Hall’s garage.”

“I’m not gonna tell you anything.”

“Which leads me to believe that you didn’t kill Muldaur or Courtney. But somebody you care about did. And now you’re protecting her.”

I took my foot off his hand.

“Get up.”

He didn’t, of course. He just kind of lay there wriggling his hurting hand around, working it like a piece of equipment that was on the fritz.

Then I went and stepped on it again.

He clearly wanted to deny me the

satisfaction of giving me the big dramatic scream. But he did make one of those real strange throat noises.

“Get up.”

This time he did, using his good hand to swat away some of the floor dirt he’d gotten on his Osh Kosh overalls.

We’d just left the shadows of the garage when Pam Oates opened the screen door at the back of the house and said, “You all right, Bill?”

“You just go on inside, woman,” he snapped.

“You ever think I worry about you, Bill?”

“Were you worried about me those times you were with Muldaur?”

This was a long way from the home life depicted on “Father Knows Best” every week. Oates hated her and loved her. He needed to forgive her and it was obvious he couldn’t. Not yet. Maybe someday.

Sometimes, something happens that you can’t forgive. And it kills you because you can’t forgive. You drag it along with you your whole life and remember it at odd moments and no matter how old you get, that one thing still retains its fresh and vital pain.

And a part of you knows that the other person has gone on and probably never thinks about it at all.

She closed the screen door quietly and disappeared behind it.

“She killed him,” I said, “because she wanted to end it and he didn’t. And then she tried to blackmail Courtney—give you two enough money to go on the run—but he said no and she got mad and stabbed him.”

“You should write books, McCain.”

Moving, all the time moving. Along the side of the garage in the blistering, bleaching sun.

The rattlers were getting loud now. My mental picture of them was getting clearer and clearer.

We reached the back edge of the garage and there they were. Same cage. Same number of

rattlers. Out there in the scathing sun. As much as I could, I felt sorry for the damned things.

I prodded Oates forward with the barrel of my .45.

“Now we’re going to find out how holy you are, Mr. Oates.”

“What’re you talking about, McCain?”

“I noticed that you never handle the snakes yourself. Not the night Muldaur died, not

the time you tried to force me to shove my hand into the cage. Now it’s your turn.”

“Oh, no. I ain’t stickin’ my hand in there.”

“Sure you are, Oates. Or I’m going to shoot you in the arm. And if you still won’t do it, I’m going to shoot you in the leg. And I’m gonna tell Cliffie I did it in

self-defense. He hates you people even more than he hates me. So he’ll go along.”

“No,” he said. “No. You can’t do this.”

All his mountain swagger was gone.

He glanced over his shoulder at me.

“I have nightmares about these snakes, McCain. I really do.”

“I thought you were so holy.”

“Nobody’s holy, McCain.”

“Then how do some people handle these snakes?”

“They’re just lucky, I guess. Please don’t make me handle them, all right?”

“Then tell me the truth about the strychnine.”

“I can’t do that, McCain. No matter what.

Just please don’t—”

This could’ve been a briar-patch routine.

Please don’t throw me in that briar patch, oh, my, don’t. But I doubted it. His eyes were starting to look frantic, the stigma of real bowel-wrenching fear.

Looked like he was going to tell me all the things I wanted to hear.

We reached the cage.

The rattlers didn’t look any prettier or any friendlier.

“Reach down and open the lid.”

“I—c’t do it, McCain.”

“Well, you’ll have to do one or the other.”

He just shook his head.

I surprised both of us by firing a shot that missed his head by about three inches.

He jerked, sobbed. He was too fierce for jerking and sobbing. Or so I’d thought. You want bad guys to be bad in every way and that included not responding to stress the way we common folk do.

This wasn’t any briar patch.

Between my bullet and the snakes and the burden of holding his secrets, he was in a bad, bad way.

I clubbed him on the side of the head with my .45. Got him hard on the ear. And then I changed gun hands and planted a fist

into his stomach. What he did was puke. Not a lot. But his whole stomach, not so much from my punch but from all the tension he was feeling, backed up on him.

This time when I hit him on the side of the head, he dropped to his knees right next to the snake cage, which is where I’d wanted him in the first place.

“Open it,” I said.

The snakes were as crazy at this moment as he was, and he knew it.

“No.”

I kicked him in the hip.

“Cast your burden on the Lord, and He will sustain you.” He was starting in with the Bible again. He was begging the Lord to get him out of here and I couldn’t really blame him.

“Open it up, Oates.”

“For thou hast been to me a fortress and a refuge in my day of distress.”

“Open it up, Oates.”

Either he’d run out of Bible quotes or he’d finally realized that he didn’t have much choice here.

He put his long, shaking hand to the lid of the cage.

And that was when somebody shoved a metal rod into the base of my back.

“I want you off our land, Mr. McCain.

You don’t have no call to treat a man like you’re treating him.”

“You should’ve seen the way he treated me, Mrs. Oates.”

Oh, yeah, well he punched me first, Sister Mary Francis. I’d used that line all the way through grade school and it was nice to know that a variation of it still applied.

“I just want you to go. I just want all this over with.”

“Somebody killed two men, Mrs. Oates.

I’m wondering if it was you.”

“Don’t say nothin’ to him,” Oates said.

“Maybe Courtney was killed because he’d run out of money to pay the blackmailer,” I said, “and the blackmailer was afraid Courtney might go to see Cliffie.”

“You heard what I said,” Oates snapped.

“Don’t say nothin’ to him.”

So he was inclined to see things the way I did.

He thought his wife killed the men and he had planted the strychnine to make it appear that Sara Hall was the guilty one.

“You need to leave now, Mr. McCain,” she said.

I didn’t have much choice.

He took the rifle from her and sent her to the house and then, after dropping my gun in the pocket of his overalls, he walked me back to the car.

“She let the Devil take her a few

times,” he said, as if I’d just accused the missus of something. “But she has cleansed herself since. She ain’t even afraid of the snakes, which shames me. The man of the house shouldn’t show fear.

But I just can’t stand those things.”

“She killed those men, Oates.”

“You don’t know that for a fact.”

“Maybe not. Though I think you do.”

The sun was so hot not even the dust wanted to rise when an old truck passed by in front of the yard. I was betting the chickens wished they had electric fans.

“You don’t trouble us no more,” he said when we reached the ragtop.

“You really think things’re this easy, Oates?”

“You don’t dwell on things, sometimes the good Lord just takes them away.”

“The good Lord may but then Cliffie brings them right back.”

“You can’t prove anything. And anyway, you know how them Sykeses don’t like to be showed up. You tell him about that strychnine and he’ll say “so what?” Strychnine is sold all the time.

He’s got Sara Hall all zeroed in on and nothin’s gonna change his mind.”

Oates was probably right. I didn’t know for a fact that Pam had killed anybody. I just had a suspicion that he had a suspicion that his wife had killed the two men. But that was surmise, not fact.

I got in the Ford and did a little backside-dancing. The seats, back and bottom, were blast-furnace hot. The steering wheel was probably going to brand my palms for life.

“You get away from here now,” he said. “And you don’t come back.”

The seats were still scorching when I got back to town.

299

The drive-in was showing a Vincent Price “Triple Terror” feature that night. His lisp didn’t do much for me but he was effective in a hammy sort of way. They advertised this in “spooky” lettering on their big sign out front.

That sounded good. Lots of buttery popcorn from the concession stand, a nice breeze off the surrounding cornfields, and my arm around any girl I could find who’d go out with me. A bachelor my age in a small Iowa town has slim pickings.

Girls are either married off or knocked up by the time they reach twenty; by twenty-five they’re having baby number three or four. I would have daydreamed about taking the beautiful Pamela Forrest tonight but she’d never have gone to the drive-in.

She would have called it “uncouth,” a word she picked up from an old Bette Davis movie we saw together on Tv one night.

I didn’t recognize the car in my drive.

The garage door was open, Mrs.

Goldman’s car was gone. Meaning this gink didn’t have sense or courtesy enough not to block her when she came back home.

The car was a forest-green Mg. It looked dashing in the way of many things British. That’s one thing the Brits have got all over us, the dashing stuff. We have better cooking, prettier girls, and a higher class of rock stars. But they’ve got a corner on the dashing stuff.

I parked at the curb and walked around back.

He was sitting on my steps, smoking a cigarette with one hand, patting his hair with another. Maybe there was an invisible photographer somewhere about to take his picture.

America’s favorite unknown literary genius.

Just ask him.

When he looked at me, he frowned. “This wasn’t easy for me to come here. I want you to know that.”

He sounded as if he wanted me to pin a medal for valor on him.

“You could always leave,” I said. “Like right now, for instance.”

“Let’s get one thing straight. I think you’re a two-bit hayseed lawyer who works for a fascist judge in an intolerable little burg.”

“Ok, now I’ll tell you what I think of you.”

“You didn’t let me finish. You see me as an untalented, spoiled, rich boy who is cheating on a very sweet young woman who was stupid to fall in love with me in the first place and is even dumber to stay with me now that she knows the truth. At least part of the truth.”

“Part of the truth?”

He looked suitably miserable for what he was about to say, a stage figure in his inevitable white button-down shirt and chinos.

“The truth is I’ve never been faithful. The day after our wedding night—in Paris, thanks to the largesse of my parents—I screwed the maid.”

“The maid?”

“She was eighteen. You wouldn’t have believed her tits.”

“And Kylie was—”

his—out shopping.”

“The old screw-the-maid-with-the-big-titswhile-the-ll-woman-is-out-shopping routine. And you are ashamed of yourself, of course.”

“Of course. You think I’m proud of it?”

“Yeah, I do. Because there was a little smirk in your voice when you told me about it. You like being the conqueror, and you know what? The big lug just can’t help himself. He’s just a charming rogue, isn’t he? There’s just enough of me like you to recognize it, Chad. But where I’m not like you is that I’d never do it while I was married. I’d at least get a divorce before I went back to chasing.”

He was wringing his hands now. He didn’t know how to wring his hands worth a damn. His hand-wringing made him look prissy.

“That’s why I’m here.”

“I’m not following.”

“I’m here to ask you a favor.”

You know how things come clear all of a sudden and you just know, almost word for word, what you’re about to hear, but you reject it because you don’t think that anybody would have the arrogance to ask?

“Don’t ask me,” I said.

I dug out a Lucky and got it going.

“You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”

“Sure, I do.”

“All right, what is it?”

“You’re going to ask me to go find Kylie and tell her that you’ve decided you’re in love with your little undergrad after all and that it’s time—painful as it is, and you’re sorry as all hell—ffget a divorce.”

I had to give him his courage.

Without hesitation, he said, “That’s not an easy thing to ask a guy.”

He wanted another medal.

“You didn’t ask a guy, dip-shit. I

asked a guy.”

“Well, I guess that’s sort of right. But I would’ve asked if you hadn’t asked yourself first.”

“You are a living, crawling, slimy piece of shit.”

“You think I don’t know it? I know I’m a bastard. And I don’t even know why. I just keep falling in love. It’s not just getting pussy, McCain. It really isn’t. I

really, truly fall in love. But it never lasts very long.”

“You fell in love with the maid?”

“You’re not gonna believe this—I damned near asked her to marry me.”

And I felt sorry for him. I wasn’t even sure why. But every once in a while you see somebody the way they really are—it only takes a second of seeing them that way—and then you can’t hate them quite as much as you did. It’s a curse.

Then he did me a favor and went back to his whining. “I’m jeopardizing my inheritance here, you know.”

I was running out of medals to pin on this guy.

“It’s funny,” he said. He took out his pack of Viceroys. “My parents were against me marrying her because she was Jewish. They’re not anti-Semitic or anything—Kylie’s folks weren’t all that hot about me marrying her, either—j that they’re pretty strict Catholics and everything —but now—I mean, I’ve kept them up on developments and everything—now they’re taking her part in this. They’ve really gotten to love her.”