The Day the Music Died (27 page)

You have to be careful and make sure you get around to every one of them. You don’t want to leave anybody out. I also bring small gifts from time to time.

I hadn’t talked to Helen Grady in some time. Helen frequently eats alone if she’s reading one of her Mickey Spillane novels. Helen, eighty-two, a grandmother seven times over, is Spillane’s most faithful fan. She’s read all the books many times but says her memory is just bad enough that by the time she starts over again she’s forgotten the plots.

The lunchroom was sunny. The windows were open. The repast today was hamburger, fresh-cut green beans, peaches in syrup, and a slice of cherry pie. It made me hungry.

All but Helen were divided up at two long tables. Tom Swanson winked at me and said, “Helen’s finishin’ up
One Lonely Night.
That’s where the woman turns out to be a man.”

And then they started talking about the difficulty of using bifocals. I walked over to the only table for two. “Hi, Helen.”

She looked up from her paperback. “Hey, it’s the gumshoe.”

Helen loved hard-boiled talk. She wore a flowered housedress, pince-nez reading glasses, pancake makeup that looked like real batter, and lipstick that told me she hadn’t been wearing eyeglasses when she’d put it on. “Sit down and take a load off.”

“Thanks.”

“So how you be, shamus?”

“Pretty good, I guess.”

“Any damsels in your life?”

“Not so’s you’d notice.”

She paused, then waggled the paperback at me. “Hammer’s in big trouble. Commies. And they’ve got Velda.”

“Let me know how it comes out.”

She frowned at the glass sitting next to her cleaned-up luncheon plate. “All they serve in this joint is iced tea. What a gal wouldn’t give for a shot of the real stuff.”

“Real stuff?”

“Pepsi.”

“Ah.”

“Doctor said it’s got too much acid for my stomach.” She dog-eared the book. “A stoolie gets lonely, gumshoe. Here you are, six or seven times the last couple months, making the rounds, and you don’t visit your favorite stoolie.”

“I’ll try and do better. I promise.”

A melancholy came over her wide white face. She looked teary. “Husband’s birthday today. He woulda been eighty-eight.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Had this damn thing on his neck. Big ugly thing. Kept telling me it was a goiter. Goiter my foot, I said. Took me three years to get him to the doc’s and by then it was too late. I shoulda pushed him more.” She was starting to cry. That was one reason I didn’t visit her as often as I once did. She phased in and out of the past. Sometimes it seemed to attack her.

“Did I ever tell you that before? About that thing on Fred’s neck?”

“I think you mentioned it once or twice, Helen.”

She sighed. “I ever tell you why he married me?”

“I don’t think so.” She had, of course. Many times.

“I was the Corn Queen of ’Twenty-nine. I ever show you a picture of me back then?”

“Yeah. Once.”

“I was somethin’.” She really had been something. But time is never kind.

“But even with bein’ Corn Queen and all, I still had to chase him. He didn’t chase me. Oh, no. Wasn’t a gal in the whole county who hadn’t cocked their hats for him. He’d inherited better’n nine hundred acres from his dad and didn’t owe a dime on ’em. And he was good-lookin’ besides. You think the gals weren’t after him?”

“I’m sure they were.”

“He married me because I could sing, he said. His mom had this old piano, and she’d been dead a long time and nobody had sung in the house for years. So one day I was out there and I sat down at the piano and sang some of the popular songs, and that’s when he said he fell in love with me. We had three kids, and his favorite nights were when we’d all get around the piano and sing.” She choked back sudden tears. “I kept tellin’ him and tellin’ him about that damn thing on his neck. But he just wouldn’t do anything about it.”

I gave her my white handkerchief. She turned a good deal of it damp. I told her to keep it. I said, “Feel like playing stool pigeon?”

She grinned. “Sure, gumshoe.”

“You hear any word on Richard Conners?”

“What kind of word?”

“That somebody might want to hurt him.”

“A lot of people want to hurt him.”

“Like who?”

“Jeff and that crowd. They’re trying to get him kicked off the Trawler faculty.”

“Anybody else but that bunch?”

“You’d think they’d be proud of him. He’s the most prominent man ever come from this town. I don’t agree with his politics, but I’m proud of him anyway.” She spoke for the majority of citizens, I’m sure. Then, as if the question had just now registered: “I haven’t heard of anybody trying to get him, though. ’Less it’d be a husband.”

“A husband?”

“Our Richard gets around.”

“He does?”

“Do I have to draw you a picture?”

“You mean sleeping with?”

She laughed, and the laugh exploded into a cough. I had to get some iced tea down her before the hacking stopped. She was so big and yet so delicate—death is always imminent at her age and state of health—that the kind of useless pity you feel for the dying came over me. All I can say is that on the other side everybody damned well better have brand-new cars to drive and new episodes of
Gunsmoke
to watch three nights a week.

“Who told you this?” I said, when she was all right again.

“I’m a stoolie, gumshoe. I don’t reveal my sources.”

“C’mon, Helen.”

“The candy machine guy.”

“How’d he know about it?”

“He talks to a lot of people on his route.”

“Any specific names?”

“None that he shared.”

“He reliable, you think?”

“At least fifty percent of the time.”

I laughed. “Now there’s a recommendation.”

“Conners a client of yours?” she asked.

“Not exactly. I mean, we haven’t made anything official.”

“That’s the kind of thing can get a man killed. You should tell your client that.”

I spent the middle hours of the afternoon finishing work on one of the Judge’s other cases. This one involved a property dispute between two lonely old widowers whose only pleasure in life was harassing their neighbors, whom they resented for having actual lives. I got the two of them to sit down in a tavern. One preferred to talk without his dentures in, which is always pleasant, and the other kept passing the kind of deadly gas the Germans used in the First World War. The Judge had decided to bring back some old traffic charges against one and some old drunk-and-disorderly fines against the other—unless they agreed to drop their case. The Judge was too busy for such Mickey Mouse antics, I’d been told to tell them, and it was past time these two dipshits started acting their age, which was somewhere around ninety.

“She really called us that?” one of them asked.

“Dipshits, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, that’s
exactly
what she called you.”

“That gal’s got some mouth on her, don’t she?” he said. They agreed to drop the suit.

My next stop was a phone booth outside the service station where I get my Ford worked on. I’d noticed a strange little squeal when I turn right abruptly. I take better care of my car’s health than I do my own. I had Gil run it up on the hoist for a quick peek. Gil had been in the news lately because—in response to a competitor of his who stuffed twelve college freshmen into a phone booth—Gil had stuffed forty college freshmen into a Volkswagen. Gil was a mechanic on bombers back in the war. He’s the Toscanini of motors. He told me he couldn’t keep up with all the business that came in as a result of the VW thing. I’m not sure that’s the greatest recommendation for a service garage, but in Gil’s case it worked out.

I’ve got this little office stuck in the back of a large building that keeps changing businesses. Right now, it’s a paint store. My office has its own small parking lot and entrance. A lot of law firms these days play what they call Muzak, very bland instrumental music kept very low. It’s supposed to keep spirits (and productivity) high.

I wonder what the inventor of Muzak would think of Jamie Newton’s form of Muzak: namely, Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire” played very loud. I know my clients sure like it (“How the hell come you’ve got rock-and-roll blaring in the background every time I call there, McCain, and who’s that idiot you’ve got answering the phone?”).

A small-town attorney gets paid in many ways. Food is a favorite. Last summer I settled a bill in exchange for a quarter of beef. I get free lunches at a restaurant for defending an arson case brought against them. I did some work for a local farmer, and I’m looking at five years’ worth of freshly picked vegetables.

Lloyd Newton, a worker out at the glass-making plant, was the first to ever give me his daughter.

Jamie is seventeen, sexy, freckled, cute, and totally incompetent. She fashioned herself after all the bad girls you see on those jailbait paperback covers. You know, the white socks, the penny loafers, the tight dungarees rolled up to display the elegant calf, the tight white blouse with collar turned up and bullet bra pointing the fetching breasts toward ecstasy, the erotically lipsticked mouth, and the jarringly innocent ponytail.

I walked in and went over to the radio and turned down the sound. I like Jerry Lee Lewis well enough but not during working hours.

She was too busy typing to notice me. I’m a two-finger typist myself. Jamie is even more energy-efficient. She only types with one finger, which she can do with no trouble at all while making a huge pink plastic dome of the bubble gum she constantly chews. It’s like watching a frog’s throat sac expand and diminish all day.

She hit a final key and said, “There!”

Then, like a teen princess awakening, she looked up and said, “Gee, Mr. C! I didn’t even hear you come in! I was really working on this business letter!”

Savvy, no; enthusiasm, yes.

And then she handed me the letter. I’d scribbled it out for her in longhand. She’d typed it for me.

Mr. Ardur Shermin

Presidunt

Sherman Farm Implents

Sepotember 24, 1959

Dear Mr Shermun,

My accountent informs me that your account with my law office is in serus arrears. While I don’t generally turn things ovr to a collection agency, I’m afraid I must consder doing so now unless you make arranggements with me within thre working days.

You will find my phone numer and address on this leterhead. Please avail yourself of my offer or I will be farced to take other action.

Sincerely,

Samm McCainn

“And it only took me an hour and a half!”

“Gosh,” I said, “that beats your old record, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah!” she said proudly. Then yawned. “Boy, that just about wore me out!” She was talking, as she always did, in sentences that ended in exclamation points. Or, as she’d type it out for me, in exxclametion pointes!

“Well, I can certainly see why you’d be tired after work like this.”

“Really?” she said. “Because you know, sometimes I get this feeling you don’t like think I’m doing, you know, a real good job!”

“Are you kidding? This office hasn’t been the same since you started coming here.”

“Well, Dad thought you might be mad about my accidentally flicking my cigarette ashes on some of your papers that time. You remember? When they caught fire?”

“Oh, dimly. Way in the back of my mind.”

She yawned again. “You think I could take a break? Maybe get a cherry Coke or somethin’? That typing really took it out of me.”

“A break? After work like this? You should get a whole week off!” She had me talking in exxclamation pointes now too. Or, if you prefer, two.

Then I was taking her elbow and escorting her to the door and stuffing a dollar and a half in her hand. “I don’t need to see you ’til next week. This is just a little bonus.”

“Next week! But Dad said I was supposed to come in every day!”

“But you’ve done such a great job, you’ve finished all your work for the week!”

“Oh, great! Wait ’til I tell Dad! He’ll be surprised! He thinks I’m kinda stupid!”

“Well, the next time I see him, I’m gonna set him straight on that one!”

“See ya, Mr. C!”

“See ya, Jamie!”

After she was gone, I went back to my desk, sat down, opened the middle left drawer, and took out the sheet of typing paper that read
JAMMIE. HOURS
. She’d even managed to mistype her own name. While she had a decent heart, a secretary she wasn’t. I couldn’t tell her old man that, of course. Who wants to hear that his daughter is a dope? It’s one thing for
you
to say it about your daughter but quite something else for anybody else. She’d been in an hour and a half today so I wrote down
6.
The deal was she was to work a hundred hours and our debt would be canceled. I was adding hours on every chance I got.

Then the hangover caught up with me. Coffee and cigarettes had held it at bay for most of the day but then, as I sat at my desk, I felt my eyes start to close and my entire body collapse in on itself. No energy left at all.

I took the phone off the hook. I took the cushion off the chair and put it on the floor. I took the blanket from the closet—two blankets, actually, one bottom, one top—undressed, laid myself down, and went to sleep. There are some hangovers only the sandman can cure. And from time to time, I’m called upon to take an extended nap on the floor in order to rally myself and better serve my clients.

An hour later, I was awakened by a gentle knock on my door. I said, “Just a minute,” trotted down the hall to the bathroom we shared, splashed water on my face, squirted Ipana in my mouth, brushed my teeth with my finger, and climbed into my clothes.

My instant impression was that he was drunk. He didn’t look as regal or imposing as he usually did, either. Maybe it was because he was reeling back and forth on his heels, the way a drunk does before he lands on his face. But then, registering almost simultaneously, was the lurid red hammer and sickle somebody had painted on his forehead. He wore a heavy tweed topcoat, and when he started falling toward me, his bloody lips parted and fresh blood came out in a dark red gush. He said something—or maybe just
tried
to say something—just before I got him under the shoulders and began dragging his considerable body inside.