Fools Rush In (The Sam McCain Mysteries Book 7) (3 page)

“Yeah? Name one.”

He spluttered. This was the old Cliffie, not the new, composed, beloved Cliffie. Well, beloved goes a wee bit too far, I guess.

“I don’t pretend to be a lawyer. I never had the advantages you did.”

Much as I didn’t feel like laughing with two young men lying dead at my feet, I couldn’t help it. “No offense, but your old man owns this town. He could’ve sent you to Harvard if he’d wanted to.”

Then I laughed again for picturing Cliffie storming around the Harvard campus, picking fights wherever he went.

“I’ve given you fair warning, McCain. And I’m going to put it in writing, too. I’m going to write you a letter and I’m going to keep the carbon. So when I take you to court, I’ll have the evidence.”

Four reporters had just spied Cliffie and were hurrying over. Superman had nothing on our esteemed police chief. Clark Kent had to go into phone booths to change. Cliffie could swell up into the hero he’d recently become with virtually no effort at all. And he could do it standing in place.

One of the reporters said, “Do you think the March on Washington is going to inspire this kind of violence?”

Three days from now there was going to be a march on Washington, D.C., that the Kennedy administration was only reluctantly going along with. The national press was obsessed with it. Any local story that had any element of race in it was an excuse to bring it up. There was one hero in the land, at least for me: Dr. Martin Luther King. Despite J. Edgar Hoover’s predictable warning that the march would be filled with “communists and agitators,” Dr. King’s hopes for the march buoyed everybody who believed that race had to be dealt with seriously for the first time since Reconstruction. The march was discussed on radio, TV, at picnics, family meals, church gatherings, fancy bars, blue-collar bars, everywhere. The topic was inescapable.

So of course, as the reporters gathered around him, Cliffie said, “Just what march on Washington are you boys talking about?”

The chest expanded. The campaign hat that was the same tan as the khaki uniform was tilted a more dramatic angle. And of course, his right hand dropped to the handle of his holstered handgun.

Slap leather, pardner.

As I walked back to my car, I heard one of the reporters say, “You mean you haven’t heard about the March on Washington, Chief?”

The grounds were getting crowded. The gathering of ghouls had already begun. The triple features at the drive-in weren’t that hot tonight, why not drive out and stand around a murder scene instead? True, nobody sold popcorn out here, but there was the chance you would get to glimpse a real true corpse. You wouldn’t see nothing like that at no drive-in. No chance.

“you sure you don’t want no wine, Sam? It’s the good stuff. That Mogen David.”

Cy (for Cyrus) Langtry claimed he wasn’t sure how old he was. He came up here with his grandmother, who had been a slave in Georgia before the war. He had spent most of his fifty years in Black River Falls as a janitor, first at city hall and later at the grade school. I imagined he was at least in his mid-seventies.

I went directly to his place from the cabin where the murders had taken place. He’d known David Leeds well. I wanted to be the one to tell him.

Anytime the temperature was above fifty-five you saw Cy on the front porch of his one-story stucco house so close to the river that, as Cy liked to joke, he could probably fish out his back window if he wanted to.

At night he played records. His vision was so bad television was wasted on him. He’d sit on this thronelike rocker, in a white T-shirt, brown cardigan sweater, and gray work trousers. He usually wore sandals with no socks. He was now a shrunken little man with a raspy laugh and a thick pair of glasses that did him no good at all. I was never sure why he wore them. Next to him on the floor he kept his Mogen David and two glasses, the second one for any guest who might drop by.

When I pulled up, he was playing his favorite singer, Nat “King” Cole. Cy liked to tell the story of how back before the war he used to go to Moline, Illinois, some weekends to see Cole play when he’d make a Midwestern swing of the better cafes.

I’d been around him all my life without ever really knowing him, until two years ago when the city tried to claim eminent domain and seize his property for some sort of warehouse. His daughter, who lived closer to town than Cy did, came to me and asked if I’d represent him for what she could afford to pay me. The way eminent domain is frequently used has always pissed me off. The rich get their way. I took it on for free, not because I was such a swell guy but because I didn’t like the idea of kicking Cy out of the home where he’d lived with his wife and kids for so long.

Sarah, Cy’s daughter, got to know David Leeds when he’d been going through her neighborhood one day looking for yard work. She’d taken him out to Cy’s place a few times. David loved listening to Cy’s stories. And, as Sarah said, he didn’t seem to mind the free wine, either. Cy always kidded David about all the jobs he did to support his college habit. Yard work, car-washing on Saturdays, farm work when he could get it, and employment as a dance instructor a few nights a week. That was the one Cy couldn’t get over. But David was a good-looking kid, he had that big-city patina about him, and he worked for a studio that taught all the dances on
American Bandstand,
while ballroom dancing and the like were left to Arthur Murray.

The plan was for David to sleep on Cy’s couch all summer. There was a big detasselling operation that worked out of town here. Detasselling paid better than even factory jobs and you damned well earned it. I detasselled for two summers and I rarely had dates. Too tired even on the weekends I didn’t work.

“You sound kinda funny tonight, Sam.”

“Guess I’ll have some of that wine.”

“Help yourself.”

I did, downing half a glass of it in a single gulp. Bombs away.

Crickets and river splashing on rocks and lonesome half-moon and the sound of distant ghost trains.

I spent a minute or so trying to figure out how to tell Cy about it, and then I just said, “Somebody murdered David tonight, Cy.”

I don’t know how I expected him to react. He rocked back and forth. He said nothing, then “Figured it’d be something like that, the way you sounded, so funny and all.”

“I’m sorry. I’m going to find them.”

“You sound like Marshal Dillon on
Gunsmoke
.”

“I’m not tough, Cy. You know that. But I can get things done when I need to.”

“Whites killed him.”

“Probably.”

“Bastards.”

I had never heard him use language like that. It shocked me because it came from him and then saddened me because I heard the tears that overcame the rage in those words.

“Bastards.” A lifetime of anger, frustration, humiliation, fear, and ruined hopes in that single word.

The night birds had never sounded more mordant as we sat in the terrible echoes of that single word, of all the sorrow in that single word.

“He wasn’t perfect. Drank too much. Ran around with white girls too much. He even tole me one night we was helping ourselves to the jug here about how he pulled off a couple robberies back in Chicago. But that don’t give no white bastard the right to kill him.”

“It sure doesn’t.”

“And anyways, he tole me that when a friend of his got sent up, he quit doin’ bad stuff and buckled down and got himself a partial scholarship.” Clink of bottle neck on glass. This time he didn’t offer me any. He sat back and started rocking in his chair. “I think he knew something was comin’.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“That white girl, Lucy. He said she was all tensed up lately. So many people on them. Her folks and that rich boy she used to go out with. And then them bikers always following him around and makin’ fun of him. She told him she had nightmares about something terrible happenin’ to him.”

“How did
he
feel about it all?”

“Oh, it was getting to him, too. Reason he always liked our town here was because folks were nice to him. He said he never seen so many nice white folks. The bikers and them like that, they didn’t like him. But I mean most folks—we got a nice little town here, Sam. Still is. Even when he was goin’ out with Lucy, people still hired him for the jobs he did. And was nice to him and everything. But there’s always a few—”

I stood up.

“I’ll find them, Cy, the ones who did it.”

“There you go soundin’ like Marshal Dillon again.” He’d allowed himself the one joke. Then: “The colored, we’ve had to put up with shit like this all our lives. I want you to get ’em, Sam, and get ’em good and don’t let that stupid bastard Cliffie get in your way, either.”

Rage and tears, rage and tears. Job was the only book of the Bible that held any meaning for me. Rage and tears against the unfathomable ways of God. Or as Graham Greene put it, “the terrible wisdom of God.” If there was a God. And if not, rage and tears against the unfathomable randomness of it all.

“You do me a favor and go in there and turn up Nat for me?”

“Sure.”

Cole was singing “Lost April,” one of my favorite songs of his. The wan melancholy of it matched my mood exactly.

“Y
OU KNOW, MR. C,
you should write a book about all your experiences. Look at Sherlock Holmes. He wrote a lot of books.”

In case you haven’t met her before, Jamie is my secretary. She was free when she was part time, now she was full time and I paid her.

I’d represented her father in a property-line case and he ceded her to me as a form of payment. We don’t discuss the fact that she was nineteen when she graduated high school—she once vaguely alluded to the fact that she had to take eleventh grade over again because she couldn’t remember the lyrics to the school fight song—nor do we mention the fact that if murder was ever declared legal the first person I’d shoot was her boyfriend, Turk, who combines the most annoying mannerisms of Marlon Brando and James Dean and that New Zealand tribe said to wash themselves only once every full moon because they fear water will eat their flesh.

Judging by the responses of my male clients, Jamie will never have to want for men eager to woo her. She’s one of those women blessed with a face and body that will keep her looking like jailbait until she’s well into her thirties. The fact that she can only type sixteen words a minute, and not all of them exactly what you would call words, and that she frequently forgets to write down phone messages—they are as nothing compared to the luxurious promise of that body and the merry gleam of those blue eyes.

“He isn’t still alive, is he?”

I’d been studying a brief I needed in court this morning and had been trying hard not to pay attention to her usual babble. My terrible secret is that I have my own fantasies about Jamie—how could I not?—and I even like her because for all of her mindless prattle, there is a genuine sweetness in her that’s rare in our species. She’s a good, if daft, kid. And it doesn’t hurt that, as demonstrated this morning, she’s picked up on the see-through-blouse trend.

“Sorry, Jamie. What did you say?”

“Sherlock Holmes, Mr. C.”

The “Mr. C,” by the way, comes from the Perry Como TV show. All of Perry’s regulars call him Mr. C. Jamie thinks this is pretty cool. That my name starts with “Mc” doesn’t deter her in the least.

“Sherlock Holmes?”

“Yes. I was saying he wrote all those books and you should, too. You know, about your experiences.”

“Ah. I see.”

“Like what happened last night out at that cabin. That would make a chapter in itself.”

“Yeah, but I sure couldn’t write like Sherlock.”

“Is he still alive, by the way?”

The phone, in its mercy, rang.

“Well, you made the wire services this morning,” Stan Green said. “AP and UPI both. Do I get an exclusive if I buy you lunch?” Stan is the
Clarion’s
managing editor and one of its three reporters.

“That would depend on whether you can take a late lunch and if you’re willing to spend at least sixty-five cents for my food. That would mean ham, lettuce, mayo on white bread with the crusts cut off and a small fountain Coke at Woolworth’s.”

“You are one crafty bastard, McCain. One-ish?”

“One-ish will do it.”

“God, I hate politicians.” A phone rang behind him. “Gotta go.”

“Turk wants to write a book,” Jamie said after I hung up.

I looked at her. She’s one of those girls who wears ponytails well. I just smiled at her for making me feel good for at least these few moments. She really is sweet.

“Of course,” she said, “I’d end up doing most of the writing.”

I was still within the wonderful beatific moment she’d inspired with her odd innocence and her jutting blouse. Jamie and Turk writing a book together? Of course. All things were possible in my beatific if transient world.

The most valued item in Woolworth’s wasn’t anything on sale. It was a booth in the luncheonette. There were five of them. The rumor was that you had to get up before dawn and stand at the Woolworth’s front door until they opened. Then you had to leap over entire aisles of merchandise and catapult into a booth, which you had to occupy for hours before the lunch menu was available.

So it surprised me that Stan was sitting in a booth. He wasn’t alone.

The girls in my high school class used to play an interesting game called One Word. You were given one word to describe a person. If the game was played with beer present, it quickly degenerated into stupidity. “Fat.” “Icky.” “Smelly.” Anything that would get a giggle.

But if it was played sober, it revealed interesting and sometimes serious perceptions of people you knew.

The word for Stan was “slovenly.” When he’d first come to town ten years ago, he’d been a dude. It was rumored he even swam at the Y in one of those three-piece suits of his. But then his wife left him for an old flame, moved to Denver, and left Stan bereft of hair (he got bald within six months of her leaving) and even more bereft of grooming. He had two suits. He wore one till it got stiff with sweat and various other goodies and then put on the other one. His ties must certainly violate some civil code somewhere, given the fact that they look like an artist’s palette. Except that the colors are stains of various kinds. The spaghetti and the mustard stains are the easiest to guess. The others are more obscure. His only known vice is bowling. As a vet, he spends most of his time at the Legion Lanes, where, upon occasion, he has been known to take home one of the bowling gals. He has a round, good-natured face that gets sort of wan whenever the subject of his wife comes up. She has yet to divorce him. She may just be test-driving this rodeo guy. We’re all afraid that she’ll come back to him someday. Nobody doubts that he’d build her a mansion if she did.