Sam McCain - 04 - Save the Last Dance for Me (6 page)

“He owed me for that last batch.”

“And you came here with your shotgun?” I said.

“You ever hear of sending somebody a bill?”

“That’s how we settled things in the hills.”

“He’s right, mister,” Viola said. “We wouldn’t actually hurt nobody. Just

make a lot of noise. And what’re you doin’ out here, anyway?”

“Just wondered if you’d had any ideas about who might’ve poisoned your husband.”

“I sure do,” the girl said.

“You hush, Ella.”

I studied their eyes. Ella had been crying.

Viola was wiping tears from her eyes. Ella seemed unsteady, ready to erupt. Viola looked calm. Different people react differently to the death of a loved one. Still, Viola’s reaction made me curious. Ella kept touching a rashed spot just below her knee. She’d rubbed something on it.

“You tellin’ me you don’t have no money?”

“That’s what I’m tellin’ you, Ned.”

“I suppose they give you credit down at the Tv store.”

“John hisself bought that set. I don’t know nothin’ about it.”

“I bet.”

I said, “You were going to say something, Ella.

About who might have killed your father.”

“Ella wasn’t gonna say nothin’ and

Ella ain’t gonna say nothin’,” Viola said. “You understand that, girl?”

Ella, a whipped dog, nodded slowly. She suddenly seemed winded, washed out. She looked older today, maybe sixteen or seventeen.

“And as for you, mister, I want you off my property.”

“You seem to forget your husband hired me.”

“Yeah. To find out who wanted to kill him.”

She smiled with dirty teeth. “And you done a whale of a good job at finding out who, didn’t you?”

Ned’s whole body did a delighted kind of puppet-dance. “Hee-hee, she sure got you on that one, city boy.”

That was probably the first time a man from Black River Falls, Iowa, had ever been called a city boy. In a way, it was flattering.

I glanced back at his junky motorcycle, big-ass old Indian, and the sidecar with all the artillery in it. “You expecting a war any time soon?”

“I sure am, city boy. And when it comes, I’ll be ready for it.”

I’d suddenly run out of things to say to these people.

I felt sorry about leaving Ella behind—

she was young enough there might still be hope for her—but there wasn’t anything I could do short of kidnapping her. And if I did that, Ned here would probably get out his bow and arrow.

I went around and got in my ragtop.

What exactly, you may ask, is the

Cincinnati Citadel of Medinomics? Many before you have asked and many after you will do likewise.

As near as I can figure, it’s a diploma mill. The “Medi” part I get (medicine), but the “nomics” thing I think they stuck in there just because it sounds sort of vaguely official.

Its most prestigious, and only, local graduate is Doc Novotony, who is yet another relative of Cliffie’s. Doc had to battle the state medical board to get his ticket but they finally had to give in after the state supreme court ordered them to. Cliffie, Sr. made Doc the county medical examiner, which was all right with everybody because he did so with the tacit understanding that Doc, who is actually a great guy, would never actually touch a living human being. He would work only on corpses, people figuring how much harm can you do to a stiff? And if he didn’t have a stiff to work on, he generally sat in his office in the morgue in the basement of the courthouse, chain-smoked his Chesterfields, gnawed on his Klondike candy bars, read his scandal magazines (“Kim Novak’s Naughty Nite Out With The Football Team!”), and avoided damaging his five-six, 220-pound figure by doing any exercise at all.

“Hey,” he said when I walked in, his feet up on his desk as usual. It being Saturday morning, his voluptuous middle-aged receptionist Rita, with whom he was or wasn’t having an affair, depending on which town gossip you talked to, wasn’t here. He wore floppy loafers, red Bermuda shorts, a polo shirt with a Hawkeye insignia on it (he was quoted as saying once that he was neither Jew nor Christian but Hawkeye, meaning a fan of the various University of Iowa Hawkeye teams), and a smile on his face. He almost always looked happy, as if he were spiting the corpses tucked in the drawers all around him.

“Cliffie said you’d be here, McCain, and that I wasn’t supposed to tell you anything.”

“Good ole Cliffie.”

“How come you’re interested, anyway?”

I shrugged. “I was out there when he died.

Plus I got a phone call.”

His blue eyes became downright merry. “Herr Himmler?”

Which is what he called Judge Whitney, my three-quarter-time employer.

“Uh-huh.”

“Why would she give a damn about Muldaur?”

“She doesn’t. But Richard Nixon’s going to swing through here after he stops in Cedar Rapids and she’s afraid we’ll all look like a bunch of rubes to him if we’ve got a murder going involving a minister who used snakes in his church.

She’s going to have dinner with Nixon. Said she doesn’t want our little town to sound like a bunch of mountain crackers.”

He beamed. “Richard Nixon? Really?

I’m gonna vote for him. I guess I’ve got to give the old broad one thing—she sure is connected.”

As she was. In the past few years, she’s golfed three or four times with Ike and dined with celebrities as various as Leonard Bernstein, Dinah Shore, and Jackie Gleason; next month she was scheduled to be on the same Chicago dais as Claire Booth Luce and Dr.

Joyce Brothers.

“So what’s the word on Muldaur?” I said.

He took his feet down. “You want all the mumbo jumbo or English?”

“English will do fine.”

“He was poisoned.”

One thing about those Cincinnati Citadel of Medinomics graduates—y can’t put anything over on them.

“Anything a little more specific?”

“Ah, you do want the mumbo jumbo. I appreciate the opportunity to sound like I know what I’m talking about.” He cleared his throat.

Pulled up his baggy trousers. The spotlight was his. “Technically, he died from exhaustion.”

“Exhaustion? You’re kidding. I thought you said he was poisoned.”

“He was. Strychnine has that effect. You know all those convulsions he had?”

“God, they were terrible.”

“They literally wore him out. Yes, he was poisoned, and that asphyxiated him. But the convulsions were so severe he also had a

heart attack brought on by sheer exhaustion.”

“God, what a terrible way to go.”

“Been better poetic justice if one of his vipers got him. But the vipers wouldn’t have done half the damage the poison did.”

“But doesn’t poison like that taste terrible?”

“Yeah, but the way he worked himself up during those ceremonies … He might have swallowed it and not realized it. He wouldn’t have had to drink a whole hell of a lot of it. Cliffie talked to one of the churchgoers who said Muldaur was always guzzling Pepsi. Somebody coulda put it in that.”

“I need to talk to his wife.”

“Cliffie said she wasn’t any help.”

“Yeah, she probably didn’t respond

well to when Cliffie clubbed her.”

Doc grinned. “I shouldn’t put up with you making fun of my beloved cousin that way. Without him I wouldn’t be medical examiner of this here county. And I wouldn’t be permitted to wear my stethoscope in public, either.”

“Now, that would be a shame. You look very good strutting down the street in your stethoscope.”

He giggled. “That’s what the ladies tell me, counselor.”

“Exhaustion, huh,” I said, thinking about everything he’d told me. Then an image of Muldaur convulsing came to me. Seeing something like that diminished our entire species. I’d always known we were vulnerable. I just didn’t like to be reminded of it in such a grotesque fashion.

I guess I should explain about our dunking.

It’s one of our darkest family secrets.

Everybody in my family dunks. We dunk doughnuts, we dunk coffee cake, we dunk sandwiches, my kid sister, at least before she moved to Chicago, dunked her French fries in her Pepsi. In moments of great excitement I’ve been known to dunk a slice of pizza in my glass of beer. Maybe it’s genetic. You don’t want to know about family reunions, believe me. The inclination to dunk affects multiple generations. Eighty, ninety McCains planted at various picnic tables in a public park. Dunking. All at the same time.

Anyway, after visiting Doc, I

stopped over to ask my dad about a guy who used to work at the plant and then all of a sudden there were three of us at the kitchen table, dunking long johns in our coffee.

My dad’s three biggest dreams had come true. He produced a kid who became a professional man, he bought a house, and he paid saved-up cash for a 1958 Plymouth that has the fin-length of a shark.

My mom’s three biggest dreams have come true, too. My dad returned safely from the war, her sister survived breast cancer, and she finally got the Westinghouse washer-dryer combination she’s always wanted, thanks to the way Betty Furness hawks them on Tv.

My dad was mid-dunk when I said, “So did Walter ever tell you why he dropped out of Muldaur’s church?”

“He sure did.”

“How come?”

He held up his finger, meaning please let him finish swallowing. He’s a little guy, which is where I get it, and when Mom’s in high heels they look sort of funny together, not mother-son but more like big sister-ll brother, but when they get out on the dance floor to Benny Goodman, their musical tastes having ossified around 1946, they are dazzling, gray hair, girdle, shoe lifts, bald head, and all.

“Muldaur tried to get frisky with his wife.”

“What? You’re kidding.”

“Oh, no,” Mom said. “One of the women at the beauty parlor said that the same thing happened to her daughter-in-law. Apparently, he was a frisky man.”

I don’t have to tell you what frisky means.

Dad rarely uses vulgarities and Mom never does. That particular genetic streak ended with me, I’m afraid.

I wondered if Cliffie knew anything about this. Muldaur was not only a religious bigot but a ladies’ man as well. Two motives had already surfaced for his being killed. There would likely be more. There usually are in homicide investigations. You take a guy like Muldaur, you might find six, seven people who’d considered killing him, each with very specific and unique reasons of their own.

Part of my mom’s long john got

soaked and fell in her coffee. She used her spoon to rescue it, then ate it like a piece of cereal. I’m more careful with my dunking. More timid, I guess. I’m well aware of how pieces get too wet and fall off. I don’t want that to happen to me.

“Where’d Walter move to, anyway?”

“Cedar Rapids. Penick and Ford plant.

He’s got a brother-in-law there who’s a big shot in the union.”

“He didn’t happen to move because of Muldaur, did he?”

“Heck, no. Walter? He knew what he

was getting into when he married Jinny.”

“What he was getting into? What’s that mean?”

“You know,” my dad said, as if we were telepaths. “Her, uh, bosoms.”

“She had big knockers, as the men like to say,”

Mom said, “your father included.”

“Yeah, now that I think about it,” I said, “I guess she did.”

“Guys were always gettin’ frisky with her,”

Dad said. “Muldaur was just one more. His wife was the one who thought the snake stuff was so neat, anyway. So when she told Walter about Muldaur askin’ her to meet him out to the old Tyler farm, he just told her that he didn’t ever want her to go back there to church.”

“You know who you should talk to,” Mom said.

“Who?”

“Kenny Thibodeau.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. He wrote a long article on

Muldaur and his church, back when he worked for The Clarion.”

Kenny Thibodeau was a local kid who graduated from the University of Iowa journalism school in 1955 or so. He came back to town here, became the assistant editor of the local paper, got himself married, had a son, took up golf, and could even be seen ushering at the Pentecostal church on Sunday morning.

Then he read On The Road by Jack

Kerouac and claimed to have the same kind of vision St. Paul had on the road to Damascus, or wherever he was going. Well, not exactly the same, of course. Paul claimed to have seen God and renounced all sin. Kenny Thibodeau, on the other hand, claimed to have seen Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassidy. And instead

of renouncing sin, he embraced it. All kinds of sin. He left his wife and child and moved to the West Coast. He reappeared a year later, his wife and child long gone, no longer the buttoned-down, crew-cutted Kenny we’d known and ignored. He was a beatnik. I hate that word, it’s a press word, but that’s what he was.

He had the goatee, he had the black horn-rimmed glasses, the black

turtleneck, the black chinos, the black socks, and, worst of all, the Jesus sandals.

I’m no fashion plate but there’s something about socks and sandals that rankles. At least he’d spared us the beret.

Kenny had been coming and going ever since. He went to London, Paris, San Francisco, New York. And always returned. He

supported himself by writing pornography, or what the moralists called pornography, anyway. Paperbacks with sexy covers and suggestive titles but virtually nothing explicit inside. Lesbo Lodge was one of his, as was Life of a Lesbo. Kenny

lived in a trailer near the west end of town.

We had coffee whenever we ran into each other. I enjoyed him without quite approving of him. And I disapproved of him because I was probably jealous.

He traveled, he supported himself writing, albeit somewhat scandalously, and he was always going to Iowa City on the weekends and coming back with wild tales of undergraduate English majors who “know how to swing, man, and I do mean swing.”

I’d never thought of asking Kenny for actual hard information. I’d never suspected Kenny of having any hard information. But maybe Mom was right. Maybe before he’d taken up marijuana, cheap wine, and Zen there had been an actual fact or two rolling around inside his mind.