Nina De Paul was washing the family Chrysler. She’d splashed herself with the hose. Water gleamed on her thin legs. She had the radio turned to an Iowa City station that played classical music. I sure did like her, but I imagined that that book Pat Boone wrote about dating would call her taste “square.” Kenny and I and our various dates had had a lot of fun passing the book around and laughing at all his bullshit advice. I strongly suspected that even now Pat was virginal. His music sure was.
“Hi, Mr. McCain.”
“You must be dangerous with a hose.” Her glasses were spackled with water, too.
“I just sprayed my legs to cool off. I have a lot of great ideas like that.” The grin was quick and pretty.
“Is Ralph around?”
She took the soapy rag she was using and pointed to the garage. “He’s been in there for about an hour. He got a phone call and then I heard my mom start crying and then he went to the garage. She’s in her room. She doesn’t want me to come in. I don’t know what’s going on. And I don’t know why he’s in the garage. There’s nothing in there. I mean he doesn’t have a little shop area like some men do. I was going to peek in, but since my mom’s so upset, I don’t want to make things worse by getting him mad at me.”
“You say the phone call was an hour ago?”
“Maybe forty-five or fifty minutes, now that I think about it. They always rerun Maverick in the afternoon, and that was on when the call came.”
“You like Maverick?”
“Yeah, but I like it better when it’s James Garner and not Jack Kelly. What’s so funny?”
“You. Funny and sweet.” I stared down the drive to the garage. It would hold only one car. Even if DePaul had wanted a shop with a workbench and some tools, there wouldn’t have been room enough for it. “There’s a window on the side closest to the back yard?”
“Uh-huh. That’s where I was going to peek in.”
“I’ll give it a try.”
“Whatever it is, he was so upset he wasn’t even yelling. That’s the real bad sign with him. If he’s not yelling. He was like that when our cocker spaniel got run over last year. We’ve got another TV set in the basement. He basically stayed down there alone for three or four days. My mom would take him his meals down there. I felt sorry for him. It made him seem more human to me. The funny thing was, he’d never paid much attention to Reggie when he was alive. It’s like he was afraid to show how much he cared about him or something. He wants everybody to know how tough he is.”
“Thanks, Nina.”
A crow sat on the crest of the garage roof watching me, shiny in the sunlight. The humidity was so bad, I felt as if I was plodding through glue.
I opened the wooden gate carefully, trying to minimize the noise. I left it open. I took long cautious steps along the side of the garage until I reached the small window. I wanted to check him out before I let him know I was here. He might have hidden something in the garage-the mysterious letter came to mind-and maybe I’d get lucky and catch him with it in his hand. I realized how stupid the thought was. The heat was obviously deep-frying my brain.
He sat on a wooden stool, the heel of one shoe caught on the crossbar beneath the seat. Instead of street clothes, he wore the shirt, belt, and trousers of the Army. The leather holster at his side was empty. The. 45 resided in his hand.
I always wondered if I’d get there someday. It had all gotten away from DePaul, and maybe it would someday all get away from me too. I suppose a good many of us have thought of how we’d do it if it came to that. A bullet was probably the most sensible way. Hard to miss with a bullet. The river, tall buildings, poison, I wasn’t sure why, but they didn’t seem right for me.
I walked to the door near the wooden gate. I knew I could get killed for my trouble but there was no way to sneak in. I opened the door. It made a scraping sound. He heard me. He slowly raised his head and studied me for a moment. I went inside.
I’d seen a number of my clients in jail suffering from clinical depression. Their responses were always lugubrious, like those of an engine that didn’t want to fire. You sometimes wondered if they were awake in any real sense.
The garage smelled of heat, oil, dust, dirt. Garages had been neat places to play in my boyhood days. You could close the door and feel that you were in command of your own little world, a cowboy world or an outer space world or a Superman world.
But we were way beyond play worlds now. His despondence was as palpable and oppressive as the heat.
“Did Sykes send you? He called me.”
“No. I came on my own.”
“So you know?”
“Some of it, not all of it.”
He raised the gun and pointed it at me. “This’d be something in the morning paper, wouldn’t it? If I shot you and then took my own life?”
“Why don’t you put the gun away?”
“You’re scared, aren’t you?”
“Sure. And you’re scared, too, even with the gun.”
He kept the gun in his hand, but he bent his head and went back to looking at the floor. His bitterness broke his gloom. “My old man screwed up at the end too. Had a good life but got hooked up with some Florida people pulling a land scam. Colonel DePaul. Perfect record until then. Died by hitting an embankment at ninety miles an hour. Everybody knew he’d done it on purpose, but nobody would say it out loud.”
“What made you get involved with the fire?”
His anguished blue eyes were focused on me again. “For years I’ve been driving over to the Quad Cities to do a little gambling. Usually took my wife and made a weekend of it. We had some good times. And then I just got hooked. I’d drive over there two or three times a week. And it wasn’t fun any more. It was serious. If I’d lose, I’d go over to win some of my money back. If I’d win, I’d go because I figured I was on a roll.”
“How much have you lost?” But given what the judge had learned from the bank, I thought I already knew.
“Most of our retirement. A pretty good share of our savings.”
“So your wife knows?”
“She knows about the money. She doesn’t know that I let Lou pay me off.” His heel came off the stool. In a single swift movement, he dropped his gun arm and jammed the. 45 into his holster. “I never did have my old man’s guts.”
“If you cooperate, they’ll go easier on you.”
“Nina’ll be happy. She never liked me.”
“She won’t be happy. She may not like you much, but she doesn’t hate you. Mostly, she’ll be worried about her mother.”
A snort. “Her mother. I’ve been a piss-poor husband this time, too. Swore I’d really be different on the second go-round, and for a few years I was. But I slipped back into my old ways. My mother always called my old man a tyrant, and that’s what I am too. And Nina’s got every right not to like me. I wasn’t much of a stepfather, either.”
“You could be out in a few years.”
“I’d never make it. I’d die in there.”
“Not if you were careful.”
His head sank again. He’d shut me out.
“Listen to me, DePaul. I need to get some things clear. Then I’ll help you with Sykes. I promise.”
“What a way to end up. I take a bribe and then I fink on everybody.”
“They killed a woman. You’re doing what you should.” I paused. “You want a smoke?”
“Yeah. That’d be good. I guess I left mine inside.”
I walked my pack over to him. Handed it over. He drew one out. I put my Zippo to work. In the dusty sunlight through the window in back, the smoke had a hallucinatory tumbling richness to it. I took one for myself. I needed him to give me the two names out loud.
“Who set the fire?”
“I think you’ve figured it out already.”
“I’m asking you again, who set the fire?”
He shrugged. He’d put on some weight. His uniform shirt revealed a small belly and a collar that was too tight. “Davenport and Raines.”
“And Lou personally called you about doctoring the fire report?”
“Yeah. Lou and I were friends. It really got to me when somebody killed him. And now Davenport’s dead.” He dragged on his smoke. “Somebody’s paying us back for Karen being killed.”
“We need to stop them.”
“Maybe it’s better. Maybe that’s what we’ve got coming.”
“Maybe so. But that’s not for you to decide. That’s what we’ve got courts for. And by the way, Lynn Shanlon seems to be missing.”
He eased off the stool. I took two steps back. He still had a gun, and he still had a reason to try and escape. “I was thinking she was the one who killed the two of them. She has the biggest stake in all this. If Karen had been my own sister, I’d go after everybody involved.”
“I need to take you in now.”
“I figured.”
“The first thing is, you have to hand your. 45 over to me.”
He touched the holster. “I’ve had this since Korea. Killed two Chinks with it on the same day. My old man always told me how good it felt to kill somebody. But he was a bullshitter. At least I didn’t feel good about it. I didn’t feel anything. I was just doing my job. I didn’t even talk about it with my soldiers. When they killed somebody, you never heard the end of it. But I was quite a bit older than they were. Maybe it would’ve felt good to me if I’d been their age.”
All the time he talked I watched his gun hand. Maybe he was using his words to snake charm me into carelessness. I start watching him instead of watching his gun hand…
He did it in the same kind of swift motion as when he’d pointed it at me. He handed it over without any kind of ceremony. He just laid it across my open palm.
“I’d like to talk to my wife.”
“Fine.”
We didn’t talk now. He went first out the garage door and into the staggering heat. The back of my shirt was swimming-hole wet and my armpits were heavy with water. He walked to the back door. He didn’t look back. He went inside.
I walked up to where Nina was still working on the car. She was hunched down, scrubbing the front left tire. She dipped a wiry brush into a soapy bucket of water.
“You find him, Mr. McCain?”
“Yeah.”
“He talk to you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“He in trouble?”
“The Grand Inquisitor.”
She grinned. “Dostoyevsky. I read that last year. The Brothers Karamazov is one of my favorite novels.”
She stood up. Bones making a cracking sound. “I must be getting old.” The grin again.
Then we heard the scream.
“My mom,” she said and flung her brush into the soapy water of the bucket. “I need to see what’s wrong.”
Her mother had been told the truth; that was the problem. Her husband would most likely be going to prison. The family would be disgraced. And what about finances? Mrs. DePaul had to be thinking about that, too, with Nina soon to be starting college.
Nina ran alongside the house, half-crashed through the backyard gate, and disappeared. There was no other scream, but there was plenty of sobbing. Mrs. DePaul sounded as if she was on the verge of insanity. The wailing was stark and inappropriate in this expensive housing development. This was the kind of wailing you heard in Negro ghettos and in poor white neighborhoods, where mothers worn down by years of terrible news about mates and children reached some kind of end game and broke down entirely, unable to handle even one more call from the police or crawl their way one more time to identify one more body in the morgue.
In the midst of the wailing, DePaul appeared in the backyard gate. He closed it behind him just before he started walking toward me. He’d changed clothes. In his white shirt and blue trousers and tasseled black loafers he walked with the military stride I’d seen so often. Some of his self-confidence was back.
“My attorney says I should drive myself to the police station and not talk to you at all any more.”
“I’m an officer of the court, DePaul. If you don’t want to talk to me, that’s fine. Your lawyer’s right. But I want to deliver you personally to the police station.”
“You must want your picture in the paper.” It might have been a joke, but I knew better. His wife whooped again. He cringed. His eyes roved to the house. “I wish she was tougher.”
“I’m assuming you told her.”
He looked at me again. “That’s what I get for telling her the truth, I guess. All through the years, I’ve kept bad news away from her as much as I could. She just goes all to hell. She’s a nervous type anyway.” He took his cigarettes from his shirt pocket. “You’re not thinking of handcuffing me or anything, are you? Because if you are, you’re going to find yourself in a fight.”
“That’d probably cheer your wife up, seeing you and me trying to punch each other out.”
“Goddammit, McCain, at least let me have a little dignity. I don’t want people in town to see me in handcuffs.”
The wailing was loud again now. It had that lonely sound of wolves on winter nights.
“You’re getting worked up for nothing, DePaul. You brought up handcuffs, I didn’t. I don’t even have any handcuffs.” He was letting paranoia take him. He was worried about his dignity. Even in a small city jail like Cliffie’s, the cell would take his dignity away in a way he’d never experienced before.
“C’mon, McCain. Let’s get out of here before Nina comes back. I couldn’t face her now. Later-but not now.”
I’d just backed to the end of the driveway when Nina opened the front door and watched us leave. She didn’t wave or call out. She just watched. Once we were in the street and ready to head downtown, I waved to her. She didn’t wave back. DePaul kept his head down, pretending not to see her.
“You can look up now, DePaul. We’re a block past your house.”
“My wife’ll hate me the rest of her life.”
“Maybe not. You can’t judge her right after you’ve told her what you’ve done. Even if you didn’t mention going to prison, she can figure it out for herself.”
“The same with Nina, Nina’ll probably hate me the rest of her life too.”
He just might have been right in that particular judgment. Nina just might hate him all her life. She just well might.