Ticket to Ride (12 page)

The linen suit today was mauve with a silk bone-colored blouse. She was a damned good-looking woman, as she well knew. She was even better-looking now that she'd given up alcohol.

“His girlfriend thinks I'll solve the case and by then he'll have enough material for his book.”

“I want to solve the case—God, imagine if Cliffie actually beats us, what that would do to my family honor, a Whitney being bested by a Sykes—but there's always a first time.”

“That's what I told her.”

“He hasn't confessed, I hope?”

“No. But he told them he doesn't remember everything. And there's a witness who puts him out in front of the mansion.”

“You Reds are certainly dopes.”

“I'm not a Red and neither is he. I'm a Democrat and he's a con artist who's using the anti-war movement to get girls and mooch room and board.”

“Admirable. Trotsky would have loved him.” She took a long drink and then smiled coldly at me. “Bourbon is so refreshing at eight thirty in the morning.”

“Very funny.”

She leaned back. The posture and the cold gray eyes told me she was all judge now. “Poor Lou.”

“You feel sorry for him, but not for all the kids he wanted to send to Vietnam. He was a warmonger.”

“I'm not going to let you get away with that, McCain. Whatever else he might or might not have been, Lou Bennett was a patriot. We don't have any choice. We have to fight this war. And you and your beatnik friends aren't going to stop us with your childish demonstrations.”

I would have clicked my heels, but I wasn't wearing the right kind of shoes.

There are two kinds of relationships that get the most attention in Black River Falls. Divorces and the dissolution of business partnerships. The first is always juicier, because most of the time there is an extra lover involved. You get to scorn somebody and feel morally superior. That's hard to beat.

Business partner break-ups rarely involve sex, but they do sometimes involve extralegal activities such as fraud and embezzlement. Even without breasts and trysts being mentioned, such nefarious business practices can get pretty interesting. Three years ago, two men who owned the same bar got into a fight after hours, and one killed the other with a tire iron. That's not as good as the high-school teacher who impregnated one of his students her senior year, but it'll do on a slow night.

Roy Davenport had been partners with Lou Bennett in three businesses, all related to agriculture. A farm implement store, a dairy, and a trucking company that delivered cattle to slaughterhouses. Davenport and Bennett were distant relatives—I got all this information by calling Kenny as soon as I left the judge's office—and the proper part of the business community was not happy that Bennett would choose to work with a man who had a criminal record. He'd served four years at the Fort Madison penitentiary for embezzling from the used-car lot where he'd worked over in Moline. Bennett defended his man by saying that he deserved a second chance, an odd comment coming from Bennett, given his belief that every citizen above age twelve should be tried as an adult.

I wanted to talk to Davenport about his relationship with Bennett. All I knew so far was that a woman named Sally Crane had come between them.

I thought of this as I pulled my ragtop up the slanting gravel drive that led to a green ranch-style house that spread all the way across the long hilltop. A man in jean cut-offs and a Cubs T-shirt was spraying water from a hose, obviously trying to raise the dead brown grass that covered the hill. The sun had scorched everything.

He had a cigar in his mouth, and when he glanced up from his watering, his eyes fixed on me with anger and malice. Roy Davenport was the scourge of Rotary and the scourge of city council meetings. He brooked no fools. The problem was that he considered everybody but himself to be a fool.

I parked and got out of the car. I started walking toward him. He aimed the hose at me. We played a little game. I'd jump aside just as he'd try to spray me. He could have splashed me any time he wanted to, but I guess this was more fun for him. He got the lower part of my trousers once. He laughed behind his cigar. Finally he threw the hose aside and said, “Hold it right there, McCain. What the hell're you doing here?”

We were still ten yards apart. His legs were spread, and he was punching a fist into the palm of the opposite hand as if he was ready for a brawl.

“I want to talk to you about Lou Bennett.”

“Then you wasted your trip. I've got nothing to say.”

“Did you kill him?”

He had a good big theatrical laugh for me. “Sure. You got a confession I can sign?”

“From what I hear, you had a good reason. I think her name was Sally Crane.”

“You've been hanging around that little newspaper girl, Molly or whatever her name is. She wouldn't let go of it either, when Lou and I parted company. Good thing she's got some nice tits, or I would've been a whole lot rougher with her.”

“Hate to disappoint you. She wasn't the one who told me.”

The door from the breezeway opened, and a vision in a white bikini appeared. She was ridiculously blonde and ridiculously voluptuous. And tanned. She did the kind of runway walk a girl can learn only from a small-town modeling school, way too stiff and way too self-conscious. She came bearing a large glass jar of what appeared to be pickles.

Unlike the master of the place, she had a smile for me. She held the jar up with both hands and said, “I can't get the lid off. I don't know why they put these on so tight.”

I had to retrieve my eyes from somewhere deep inside her bikini top. She probably hadn't read much Chaucer, but what the hell.

She carried the jar over to Davenport. He was swelling himself up to play the hero here. He put out a big paw and then closed it around the jar as she handed it to him.

He had a he-man chuckle for her. “Good thing I'm around, or you'd be in a hell of a fix.”

“I sure would be, Roy.” She was a supplicant now, worshipping this godlike being with a look of wonder in her empty green eyes.

Elmer Fudd, Turk, Roy Davenport—did they know the real true secret of getting and holding women?

I have to say I enjoyed it. The big man set upon the jar with scorn and purpose in his eyes. He even glanced at me as if to say Watch, this is how one tough sumbitch takes care of a jar lid.

The first time he tried to open it, nothing happened. He lifted it up and glared at it as if it wasn't what it appeared to be. Somebody had obviously given him a ringer. This lid must've been welded on. This must've been one of those gags they pulled on unsuspecting strangers on Candid Camera.

He tried again, of course. No luck this time either. The third time he went at it, his face got red and his eyes began to bulge.

“Are you all right, Roy?” the girl said.

“Shut up, Pauline.”

The fourth time he vised the jar between his knees. I could have pointed out that this would make getting any kind of serious grip on the lid just about impossible, but that would've spoiled my fun. I just watched.

He had no luck with the knee approach, nor with the next one, the under-the-arm routine. “What the hell are you lookin' at, McCain? Get your ass off my property.”

“You're not going to fight again, are you, Roy?” She sounded nervous, maybe even scared.

“How about letting me try it?” I said.

The distant sounds of trucks on the highway, of birds and dogs and a hot breeze pushing the abundant leaves of the oaks and hardwoods of the windbreak.

“I guess you didn't hear me, McCain. You get the hell off my land.”

I didn't blame him, really. Most men, me included, want to look competent and cool and strong. A person of the female extraction hands you a jar with a tight lid and you want to John Wayne it. You want to hear that pop when the jar opens and you want to feel the moist lips on your cheek when she retrieves the jar from your outsize manly hands and gives you a kiss of eternal feminine gratitude.

“Maybe he can help us, Roy—”

“You shut the hell up and get back in the house and take this damned jar with you. You hear me?”

“But you always want pickles on your burgers.”

“Well, maybe this time I don't.”

There was real pain in her dark eyes. She'd failed her master. She took the jar from him and lowered her head in shame.

When she turned to walk back to the house, she cut a wide path. I don't think she intended to. I think she was feeling so rejected she wasn't paying any attention to where she was walking. But she came so close to me that I didn't have any trouble lifting the jar from her hands.

“Hey—” she started to object.

“You son of a bitch. You give her that jar back.”

My dad has a trick. It doesn't always work. And it only works after you've tried to open the jar a few times by conventional means.

I raised my knee. I banged the jar once against my kneecap, then kept turning it so that I hit it on different sides, just the way my old man does. I did this very quickly. And just as quickly, I clamped the jar into one hand and started wrestling with the lid. It popped open.

She started to smile but realized what that would get her. It would get her Roy. She swiped the jar from me and said, “You shouldn't ought to have done that.” Then she stomped away. She wanted to make sure that Roy understood how much she hated me.

Roy picked the hose up again. He held his thumb over the tip so it wouldn't spray.

“She's right, asshole. You shouldn't ought to have done that.”

“Bad for your image, huh?”

“Nah, bad for your health.”

“I think I heard that one on Dragnet last night.”

“Lou and me had our problems. I hated him, but I didn't hate him enough to kill him. And that's all you need to know. And if you think I'm shittin' you about it bein' bad for your health, just keep pushing and you'll find out.”

I smiled at him. I couldn't beat him in a fight, but I sure could have the pleasure of irritating the hell out of him. “First you choke me and now I bet you're going to spray me when I walk back to my car. I don't think a real tough guy would do that—it's kind of a sissy thing if you ask me—but it's your call. Roy. You want to be a sissy and spray me, it's up to you.”

And with that I started the trip back to my ragtop, congratulating myself on my use of reverse psychology. By telling him it was a sissy thing to do, I'd ensured he wouldn't spray me. Who wants to get wet?

When I was about ten feet from the ragtop, he started spraying the hell out of me.

15

A
FTER GETTING INTO DRY CLOTHES,
I
WALKED OVER TO THE
library.

Trixie Easley was explaining the Dewy Decimal System to an impatient-looking high-school girl wearing a Stones T-shirt. I was hoping Trixie would explain it to me when she finished with the girl. I waved to her and walked to the back of the library where the newspaper files are kept in outsize bound books.

Lynn Shanlon's words about the fire that had taken her sister's life had stayed with me, at least enough to make me want to read up on it.

I had no trouble finding the story. Coverage spread over four days, ending with a photo of the funeral service. Each piece included a reference to smoking in bed. There was no mention of the fact that she rarely smoked.

There was a sidebar with a photo of the man who had the final say on the origins of the blaze, Fire Chief Ralph DePaul. Sight of him made my stomach clench and my jaw tighten. I'd had many run-ins with this self-appointed protector of All That Was Right and Good in our community. He was always hinting that there were Communists teaching our children and pornography being sold under the counter in two different stores. A few times, he came close to naming Kenny as a Commie pornographer, but backed off. He was smart enough to know that Kenny would sue him.

His conclusion was that the fire had been accidental due to smoking. He then started into his stump speech about American values. He made it sound as if we were the only country that tried to do anything about fires. Apparently, foreigners just let their homes burn down without trying to stop the flames in any way. DePaul was always announcing that he was planning to announce that he was running for mayor, but somehow he never got around to it.

There was very little about Karen Marie Shanlon. She lived and died without making much of an impression on the town; that was the sense of the biographical material. Born, graduated high school, worked as a secretary, never married, died. The cold statistics that define most of us. No mention of her gracious beauty, the limp that had always kept her an outsider, the love her sister felt for her.

I closed the big book and sat there for a time. I should have been thinking about poor Karen. Instead, I was thinking about how much I despised Fire Chief DePaul.