I was heading out to talk to Pam Oates when I saw her husband’s truck parked at Clymer’s Seed and Feed. Clymer’s sold just about every kind of seed and feed for farm and animal life there was. The Chamber of Commerce always mentioned Clymer’s because it was a good draw for small communities nearby. And when people drove their pickups and panel trucks in to buy things at Clymer’s, they just naturally spent money other places in town, too.
The place was long, narrow, and sunny and contained various scents that combined to form an earthy perfume. The one thing Clymer’s did that some folks objected to was open on Sundays. But the place was crowded, so not everybody took offense.
I saw Bill Oates in the back, talking to a salesman about cattle feed. Special varieties were hard to come by at the co-op, I was told. They sold only the most popular brands and types.
I didn’t want him to see me. He wasn’t going to like what I was about to do.
The salesman was a kid named Bobby Fowler.
This would be a summer job. He’d be a freshman at the university in a few weeks. He looked like 1953: crew cut, high pants, checkered short-sleeved shirt buttoned all the way to the top. He even had a plastic pencil holder jammed into his pocket, with a variety of pens and pencils stuck in it. Still the acne problem. Still the teeth problem. Crooked and unsightly.
I’d always liked him. He used to come by the house on his ancient, clattering Schwinn with the ancient, worn saddlebags and the big light on the handlebars. He had this obvious and tormented crush on my sister, Ruthie. She was way too pretty and cool for him. Never cruel to him, the way the other kids were, but she wasn’t going to sacrifice anything for him, either. The Ruthie McCains of the world just didn’t go out with the Bobby Fowlers.
After talking with Kenny Thibodeau, I realized that one person who had a reason for killing both Muldaur and Courtney was indeed Bill Oates. Muldaur had been sleeping with his wife and Courtney did in fact represent an income source to him. Not inconceivable that he knew about Dierdre and Courtney. Maybe Muldaur had told Pam and Pam had told her husband.
And maybe Oates had poisoned Muldaur, taken care of Courtney, and then planted the rat poison in Sara Hall’s garage.
And if he was going to buy rat poison, Clymer’s would be a good place to do it.
Oates was talkative. They spoke for another five minutes. Bobby kept tapping the feed bags the way he’d seen the more experienced salesmen do, and once he even put a brown oxford on the edge of a bag and shot his trouser cuff. The way the pros did.
Oates didn’t look especially impressed. He was not, apparently, hearing what he wanted to hear, because every few minutes or so he’d shake his head and look unhappy. Not angrily, just stubbornly. You ain’t impressin’ me, kid, and you might as well quit tryin’. Something like that.
Oates finally left and I walked over to Bobby.
“Gee, hi, Sam.”
“Hi, Bobby. You getting ready for college?”
“Yeah.” He smiled. “I guess there’re a lot of chicks there.” Those teeth were killers.
“There sure were when I went there.”
The pain came up fast and without warning, luminous in the depths of his eyes like tumors.
“So how’s Ruthie?”
Fitzgerald was always doing that in his stories.
Having some guy think about some girl who’d deserted or betrayed him long, long years ago.
But when he thought of her the pain was still fresh as a knife slash.
“Getting along. She put the kid up for adoption.”
“Yeah. She was too young for a kid, anyway.”
I guess that’s why I’d always liked Bobby.
He had his Ruthie McCain and I had my beautiful Pamela Forrest. All The Sad Young Men, as Fitzgerald titled one of his collections.
“She seeing anybody there in Chicago?”
“I don’t think so. She’s getting her high-school diploma at night and working during the day.”
“That’s great.”
“Yeah.”
“Tell her I said hi.”
“I sure will.”
He glanced around nervously, as if he were about to share a nuclear secret with me.
“She ever visits, tell her I’d like to see her.”
“I’ll do that.”
And then he said, “I’m gettin’ my teeth fixed.”
And I, of course, did the social and polite and really bullshit thing and said, “Your teeth? What’s wrong with your teeth?”
“They’re all kinda snaggly and stuff. Got all that green stuff stuck in the crevices and all. Anyway, my cousin Pete is gonna be a dentist in Cedar Rapids and he says he can fix me up. Says he needs the practice and’ll do it for nothin’.”
“Gosh, that’s great, Bobby.”
“You could mention that to Ruthie, too.”
“I’ll be sure to.” Then: “You know, Bobby, I could use a little favor.”
“Sure, Sam.”
And if I do it will you be sure to tell Ruthie? I was using him. I had to.
“Does the store here keep records of the poisons it sells?”
“Some of them.”
“Strychnine?”
“Oh, the Muldaur guy, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“I read Mickey Spillane all the time.
I love murder stuff.”
It was a town full of blooming private eyes.
“But didn’t Cliffie arrest Sara Hall?”
“He did. But she didn’t do it.”
“You figure Cliffie’s wrong again?”
“I figure Cliffie’s always wrong.”
A grin. With those teeth.
“So if she didn’t do it, who did?”
“Bobby, listen, I can’t really talk about it, you know?”
“Mike Hammer’s like that.” Bobby tapped his head. “Keeps it all right up here in his head.
Won’t even share it with the cops. No matter how often they beat him up.” Then: “But there might be another way to check on the poison.”
“How?”
“If the person who bought it has a credit account with us.”
“Say, I never thought of that.”
“So whose file should I look in?”
I half-whispered.
“You were just talking to him.”
“Oates? Bill Oates? You think Bill Oates did it?”
A megaphone couldn’t have made his voice any louder.
“Gosh, Bobby. You think Mike Hammer would bellow out somebody’s name like that?”
He blushed.
“Damn, I’m sorry, Sam.”
“Could you check in Oates’ file?”
“Sure. But it’ll take me a few minutes.”
While he was gone, I walked around. I’m the same way in feed and seed stores that I am in hardware stores. They unman me. Grown-up men know how to use hammers, nails, saws, two-by-fours and lintels. And just so do grown-up men know about soil and plant life and mulch and peat moss. In fact, those are manly code words, mulch and peat moss and two-by-fours and lintels.
I’m not a grown-up man. I walk around with holes in my socks and the elastic loose on my shorts and I can’t get it right with a girl yet-except maybe for Mary Travers, but I’ve already screwed her life up enough and don’t want to do it anymore damage-and I know my twenty-fifth birthday’s coming early next year.
But I won’t be any older. Not where it counts.
Not in the head. Not in the soul. You know that Famous Artists School where you can write away and they teach you how to draw? There should be a Famous Grown-Ups School where real true adults give you all their secrets for being an adult.
The only comforting thing is, I’m not alone. You see guys with white hair and slumped-over backs walking around who say things just as callow and stupid as the things I say. They need to join the Famous Grown-Ups School, too.
I tried faking it.
I walked around and tapped an important hand on a mulch bag and said to a passing couple, “Mulch. Good old mulch. How can you go wrong with mulch?”
I think they went and called the mental hospital eighteen miles due west of us.
I did the same thing with peat moss. Except I sniffed it. An elderly lady named Florence Windom was watching me and said,
“Are you smelling that, McCain?”
“Yes’m.”
“Smelling peat moss? I never heard of such a thing.”
“Most people don’t know about it. That’s why they always end up buying the bad stuff.”
“I’ll have to tell Merle. Thanks for the tip, McCain.”
I would probably have done some more walking around -I was trying to combine strolling and swaggering which, when you think about it, isn’t all that easy to do-when young Bobby came back.
“Strychnine,” he said.
“Is there a date when he bought it?”
He gave me the date.
“That’s two days after Muldaur was killed.”
“Is that bad?”
“Yeah, it is, Bobby. And I’m not even sure what it means.”
“You going to ask him about it?”
“I sure am, Bobby.”
It was then I saw that the couple I’d made the mulch remark to had joined Florence Windom in whispering together and pointing at me. And smirking.
You try and give people a little good advice, and what do you get?