The Day the Music Died (24 page)

“No!” Ruthie shouted. “Don’t shoot him! Please don’t!”

“Shut up, you stinkin’ little whore!” Jim shouted.

A moment later, more gunfire. One, two shots. I flattened myself against the wall.

Ruthie screamed at him, “You bastard! Leave him alone!”

“You little slut!” he said.

I heard sliding doors being thrown open, slamming into their respective walls.

“He’s getting away!” Ruthie cried.

I finally understood the layout of the house. He had set up his abortion mill in the front parlor and was now going out through the sliding doors that opened on the hallway.

Ruthie turned the light on. I peeked in. He had an old medical examination table in the middle of the parlor and two white glass-fronted cabinets filled with medicines of various kinds.

“Are you all right?”

“Fine.”

“I’ll be back.”

I headed for the door and was immediately confronted by a wall of fog.

I wasn’t going to run. It was too dangerous when you didn’t know the terrain. But I went after him. Walking steadily, calmly, quietly as possible.

His footsteps receded. I kept moving forward steadily, touching a damp tree here, a fence post there, tactile reassurance that this was reality not nightmare.

And then, somewhere in the fog ahead, I heard a moaning sound. A human moaning sound. A Handyman Jim moaning sound.

“Aw, shit, McCain. You got to help me. I broke my leg real bad.”

Not hard to imagine in this fog, tripping and turning your leg into several shards of angled white bone jabbing through hairy flesh.

It took me a few minutes, but I found him. I just followed the cries and the curses. I wondered if the girl he’d killed and put in the canoe had cried this way.

“Here I am, McCain. Help me.”

I could see the faint outline of him in the murk. The fog masked some of the pain on his face, but not much of it.

He had the left leg of his Osh-Kosh overalls pulled up. White bone poked through. He kept rocking back and forth and grimacing and tentatively touching his fingers to the exposed bones.

I knelt down next to him and took the ankle of his broken leg and turned it violently to the right. With any luck, his scream could be heard all the way into town. He was sobbing, pleading, almost delirious. “Oh, God, what’re you doing, McCain? What’re you
doing
?”

Technically, it probably wasn’t good police procedure, what I was doing. But it was fast anyway.

It took three leg twists to get it all out of him. How he’d aborted Susan Whitney and then started to blackmail her and killed her with Darin Greene’s gun believing Greene would take the rap, but then Kenny had to come along and spoil everything by killing himself with a .45 and making Sykes assume that only a .45 had been used. How he’d been operating on the girl I’d found in the canoe, but he’d done something wrong. And how he’d killed another girl up in Wisconsin.

“Why’d you kill Susan?” I said.

He was kind of late answering so I gave his leg another twist for good measure. I wondered if you had to join a union to be a sadist. A guy could get to like this stuff.

“I took out the baby. It was a coon. Greene thought she was in love with him.” He snorted bitterly. “Think of that, a jig like Greene and a upperclass gal like Susan. Them jigs, I tell ya.”

“Why’d you kill her?”

He knew enough to answer right away. “I was blackmailing her. Threatened to tell her father about Darin Greene. She made three payments was all. Then I went over there one night to get some more money and she was pretty drunk. She picked the phone up and said she was gonna call Judge Whitney and tell her everything, including how I was doin’ all these abortions. I guess I just got mad. She’d threatened me one other time before with this. I seen where she kept it. I went and got it—and I shot her. I couldn’t believe it. It was like watchin’ somebody else do it. Like it wasn’t me at all.”

Then, “But I was gonna be real careful with your sister,” he said. “Honest to God, I was, McCain. Honest to God, I was.”

Just for the hell of it, I gave his ankle another good twist.

T
HE NEXT DAY WAS
Saturday and I guess I should tell you about it in sequence. I’ll make it as brief as possible.

I woke Ruthie up and we had a long talk and then we went out to the kitchen where Mom and Dad were eating breakfast and told them about her condition. Dad was pretty mad at first but then Ruthie sat in his lap and cried and Dad had a few tears in his eyes as well. Ruthie promised to get the boy over here in the afternoon for a talk with Mom and Dad. And to bring his folks along. Mom and Dad weren’t sure how they felt about anything yet. There hadn’t been time. Ruthie walked me out to my car and we stood there hugging each other until our noses got cold.

In the afternoon, I stopped by the judge’s office and rehashed everything that had happened the night before. She was calling the Eastern branch of her family before I got out the door.

The family name would not be burdened with a murderer after all. Just land swindlers and other assorted reprobates disguised as leading businessmen.

In the evening, I went to the Buddy Holly dance. I worked up a good sweat dancing. I danced with anybody who’d have me. Believe it or not, I’m not universally beloved. Around eight, Pamela came in with her date, Stu. I assumed his fiancée was out of town. He was a whole lot taller than I was and a whole lot smoother with the women and a whole lot better dressed and a whole lot better looking. Other than that, I had no reason to resent him at all.

Mary and Wes came later. Mary looked really pretty in a buff blue sweater and a tight blue skirt and bobby sox and saddle shoes and this really fetching blue bow in her hair. Wes made sure not to look at me. But every once in a while, I’d look over at Mary when they were slow-dancing and I’d feel sad, and I’d just want to hold her, but I didn’t know why. I mean it was Pamela I was in love with, but it was Mary I wanted to hold.

Around nine, when they started playing slow songs all the time, I left. I didn’t have anybody to pair up with. I started feeling like an outsider, the way I do a lot of times, and so I just went outside and got in my ragtop and drove home and fired up the boob tube and sat on the couch having a Pepsi and letting the cats use me as a bed. There was an Audie Murphy movie on. Being short and Irish, he was a sort of hero of mine.

Audie was just about to shoot all the bad guys when the phone rang. “Yes.”

“What’re you doing, McCain?”

“Judge Whitney?”

“Of course. Who did you think it was?”

“Is something wrong?”

“Not exactly.” I could tell she’d been drinking. “But I need you to come out here.”

“To your house?”

She sighed impatiently. “Yes, McCain. To my house. Where the hell else would I be?”

“For what?”

“Just get out here.”

The manse is of red brick. Three stories. White shutters. And white fencing that gives the hundred acres the look and feel of a Kentucky bluegrass horse ranch. Except in the dead of winter.

Her maid, Sophie, a Norwegian woman who is even crankier than the judge, let me in and led me to the den.

Mambo music blared out of a stereo.

The judge wore a festive red blouse and a pair of black slacks and one-inch black heels. Her mambo-lesson footsteps were sprawled all over the floor between the built-in bookcases and in front of the fireplace, black footsteps on a long stretch of white plastic, a brandy in one hand and a Gauloise in the other. And she was following her mambo-lesson footsteps with great fervor.

Sophie gave me her usual frown and left.

“Be with you in a minute, McCain. Help yourself to the dry bar.”

I had a beer. From the can. It was my petty protest about being inside the fortress of the master class, as Karl Marx used to call them.

“You could always use a glass,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “I always could.”

She shook her head with elegant disdain and then went back to her dancing. She was getting good, and she looked good too, in the blouse and slacks.

The music ended.

“Well, get ready,” she said.

“Ready?”

“To be my mambo partner. I tried a bunch of other people, but they were all busy. The instructions say that on the tenth night, I should have a live human partner.”

“You’re kidding. That’s why you called me out here?”

“Of course,” she said. “Now get over here.”

There wasn’t any use arguing. I put my beer down, stubbed my Pall Mall out and went over and became her dancing partner.

“God, McCain,” she said, when I was in her arms, “I never realized before just how short you are.”

As my dad says, life is like that sometimes.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Sam McCain Mysteries

“G
EE,” THE BEAUTIFUL PAMELA
Forrest said. “He actually looks kinda dopey.”

And he did.

Here he was, the world’s first nuclear-powered bogeyman, and he looked like the uncle everybody feels sorry for because he’s fat and sloppy.

Nikita Khrushchev. Premier of the Soviet Union. The world’s number one Russian. Not to mention Communist.

On this warm sunny twenty-first day of September, 1959, “Nikki,” as some of the press had taken to calling him, had come to a large Iowa farm as part of his trip to the United States. A farmer-businessman named Roswell Garst had invited him here. Garst had quite the spread.

“And his suit looks so cheap,” the beautiful Pamela went on. “And he sweats so much.”

I smiled. “Too bad he doesn’t look more like Frankie Avalon, huh?”

She smiled back. “Yes. Or Rock Hudson.”

Just then there was a small ruckus toward the back of the crowd. Protesters with signs that read
DEATH TO THE COMMIES
and
BETTER DEAD THAN RED
jeered old Nikki. While most Iowans despised communism, they believed in being polite to visitors. And they were curious about Khrushchev and were tired of the Cold War. Recently, a company had been going door-to-door selling bomb shelter kits for $2,500. That was the price of a new Chevrolet. Nothing is more admirable than turning a buck on the terrors of nuclear holocaust. The last ten years, grade school counselors had seen an increasing number of little ones who had nightmares about nuclear war. It was the age of the atom, all right. Just about every commercial you saw on TV had something atomic in it. Atomic-powered cars, refrigerators, toothpaste. Personally, I never went anywhere without my atomic-powered jockey shorts.

The crowd—farmers, businessmen, teachers, school kids—were shouting for the protesters to be quiet. Roswell Garst, the farm’s owner and a very wealthy hybrid seed corn pioneer, had set up a press conference in his front yard. Reporters were asking Khrushchev questions about Russian farming. He would good-naturedly turn such inquiries aside (Russian agriculture was a sad joke) by poking the bellies of two plump farmers. Capitalism, he said, feeds it workers very well. Then he grinned his baby-faced grin and poked himself in his porky belly. And so does communism feed its workers well, he said.

Everybody loved it. He might have his plump finger on the trigger of the nuclear bomb, but he was as hammy as Jerry Lewis.

“Boy,” Pamela said, “could I use a drink. And a smoke.”

Pamela is the girl I’ve loved since fourth grade. Being that we’re both in our mid-twenties now, that’s a long time. One other thing I should mention is that Pamela has been in love with Stu Grant since ninth grade. Stu is a rich handsome attorney-at-law who was a golden boy halfback for the Iowa Hawkeyes and whose assets include an inheritance valued at slightly over a million dollars. That he’s married now hasn’t quelled her ardor much at all.

Two generations ago, her people had a lot of money. The money they lost in the Depression. But they kept their pride and pretensions. Pamela doesn’t believe that good girls ever smoke outdoors. Your guess is as good as mine as to
why
good girls don’t smoke outdoors. But then your guess is probably also as good as mine as to why Pamela wears a pair of sweet little white gloves just about every time she leaves the house. She wore them today with the blue silk dress with the built-in petticoat and the dark blue leather clutch purse. She was the prototype of all upper-class blond heartbreakers.

“Sounds like a good idea,” I said. It’d been a long day. We’d had to get up early for the drive from Black River Falls, and now, with vermilion shadows stretching across the meadows, it was time to go. We’d seen him. I just wish he’d looked more like George Raft, was all.

We left the crowd, passed through the protesters—“Joe McCarthy was right!” one of them shouted, over and over again—and that’s when we came upon the bold new black Lincoln of Richard Conners. We were just in time to see his wife Dana—his fifth wife, in case you’re counting, and a woman thirty years younger than he—shove Chris Tomlin, and I do mean shove, toward the Lincoln. Chris was an ethereal redhead, very pale, slight and sexual in a quiet but powerful way. She was the wife of Bill Tomlin, the Harvard roommate of Richard Conners. Bill Tomlin had been one of the best political speechwriters in D.C. before going to work for Conners. He’d been along for all of Richard’s adventures and was now in charge of organizing his papers for the Conners biography that Bill himself might write. Both Conners and Tomlin were there and they got between the women immediately. They were all wealthy and attractive people. You didn’t expect scenes from them.