“You’re saying she has amnesia?” Miriam Travers said.
Dr. Watkins pawed at his jowly face.
He still wore a black rinse on his once-gray hair and still filled his showerhead with aftershave lotion.
He stank of it the way frontier docs, according to legend, had stunk of John Barleycorn. His wife had died two years ago. He was sixty-four and had just started dating. There were a lot of gentle jokes about his love life.
“Now that’s one of those five-dollar words I hate to use,” he said, fiddling with his stethoscope. The only hospital in Black River Falls was a sixteen-bed affair. If you were very bad off, you went to Cedar Rapids; worse than that, you went to Iowa City. He peered down at Mary, asleep in her hospital bed. She’d been cleaned up but you could still see bruises. “She’s had some kind of terrible shock. So right now she’s not remembering too good.”
“But she didn’t even recognize me!”
Miriam said. She’d held back tears for quite a while now. It was 2ccjj A.M. and she was spent. She had a very sick husband at home and a daughter whose state had yet to be determined.
I slid my arm around her. She leaned against it, frail and weary.
“Again, Miriam, we don’t know what happened. But obviously something pretty bad did. Amnesia, as they like to call it on television, comes in all kinds of forms. It rarely lasts very long. I expect in a day or two she’ll be saying hello to you when you walk into the room.”
“But where has she been? What happened to her?”
Miriam said.
Those were the questions of the evening. I’d brought her straight to the hospital. She’d slept most of the way. Not once had she shown any recognition of me. A couple of times, I wondered if she was still alive.
“As I told you, Miriam, there’s no sign of concussion. She has feeling in all her extremities. Her limbs are functioning well. And the bumps and scrapes she has are relatively minor. Cleaning them up made them look a lot less threatening. Her injuries mostly seem to be psychological. And there again, once she gets her physical strength back, she’ll be better able to deal with whatever happened to her.”
“Was she… raped?” Miriam asked, obviously dreading the answer.
“Not that we could tell.”
“I didn’t tell Bill about any of this,” she said to me.
“Good,” I said.
“I’m not sure he could stand to hear it.”
I gave her another squeeze.
“Now, I recommend some bedrest for you too.
You’re nearly as worn out as your daughter. You need some sleep. And you also need some help around the house.”
“We can’t afford it.”
“I’ve got a high school girl who plans to go to med school at the university. She helps out in my office ten hours a week. I pay her thirty-five cents an hour. She wants to get as much experience as she can. I’ll have her give you a call.”
“That’s very nice of you, doctor.”
He smiled. “Well, isn’t that what doctors are supposed to be, Miriam?
Nice?”
On the way back home, she said, “She was going to tell you something.”
“Yes.”
“I wish I knew what it was.”
“So do I.”
She turned and looked at me. “I shouldn’t say this, Sam. But she loves you so much.”
The streets were empty. A rising wind whipped the streetlights around, casting shifting patterns of tree leaves on the street. The cars along the curb looked like slumbering animals. All the house windows were dark.
She said, “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“It’s fine, Miriam. It’s fine. It’s just I don’t know what to say back.”
She put her hand on my shoulder. “That’s all right, Sam.”
“I keep wondering about that envelope from the county.”
“So do I. I don’t know why she’d write them. What would she be looking for?”
“I’ll have the Judge call over there,” I said. “The woman I spoke to didn’t want to wade back through all her correspondence.
That’s what she said, anyway. She was speaking to a peon so she didn’t have to worry. You know how bureaucrats are. But she won’t try that with the Judge.”
“Judge Whitney is some woman. I wish I could be more like her in some ways.”
I laughed. “Not all ways, huh?”
She smiled sadly. “No, I wouldn’t ever want to be as stuck-up as she is. You know, you think people are stuck-up sometimes just because they’re shy or because they’ve been hurt and they’re afraid to be hurt again. But with the Judge you know she’s stuck-up because she really does consider herself superior.”
“Oh, yes. Very much. Maybe it was all the Connecticut water she drank growing up.”
“Is there something wrong with Connecticut water?”
“Well, the longer you drink it,” I said, “the bigger your head seems to get. There must be a connection somewhere.”
The sad smile again.
When we reached her house, she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “You’re a good man.”
“Thanks, Miriam.”
There were a lot of lies, social lies, I could have told just then but I didn’t have the spiritual energy. You know, that everything was going to be fine.
Mary would be fine. Bill would experience a miraculous recovery. And she’d open her bankbook and find an extra $100eajjj in her account, the angels having deposited it before fluttering their way back to heaven.
“Good night, Miriam.”
I returned her kiss. I started to get out of the car but she said, “I’m not quite that feeble yet, Sam.”
I watched her walk to the door. There were a lot of people like her in our town: good, solid, hardworking people who took care of their own. Her bad luck had bent her but it hadn’t beaten her. She moved slower than I’d ever seen her move before.
On the porch, after getting the front door open, she turned and waved back to me.
I went home.
TV had long ago signed off. The Cedar Rapid stations never broadcast past midnight; often they went off after the eleven o’clock news. I was drained but not sleepy. I spent half an hour twisting the rabbit ears back and forth, trying to form pictures out of the noisy snow on my screen. I had a pair of rabbit ears that were the envy of Mrs. Goldman’s apartment house. They must have weighed twenty pounds and had more buttons and dials and doodads and doohickeys than most intergalactic spaceships. If you knew all the right codes and combinations, it would also mow your lawn and give milk. It was quite a rig. Most nights anyway. But not tonight. Every once in a while, an image would sort of form and I’d hear dialogue and get my hopes up, but then the signal would fade and there would just be snow again. I gave up. That’d be one of the nice things about living in Chicago. You could watch Tv all night.
I sat in my reading chair and drank a beer.
So many questions, including the identity of the girl in the black Ford ragtop. Would I have been in the right spot to find Mary if the mystery lady hadn’t challenged me to a race? Was she some kind of guardian angel? And Mary’s amnesia. The doc was probably right.
Temporary amnesia was probably fairly common in accident victims. But it was still disturbing that she couldn’t recognize her own mother.
I picked up a John D. MacDonald novel called Dead Low Tide. I’d read it a couple of times before. I always came back to it. It made me feel better in the way saying a prayer made me feel better. The ritual of repetition. There are no heroes in John D. novels, and that’s probably why I like them. Every once in a while his man will behave heroically, but that still doesn’t make him a hero.
He has a lot of faults and he always realizes, at some point in every book, that he’s flawed and less than he wants to be. I think that’s why John D.’s books are so popular.
Because we all know deep down we’re sort of jerks. Not all the time. But every once in a while we’re jerks and we have to face it and it’s never fun. You see how deeply you’ve hurt somebody, or how you were wrong about somebody, or how you let somebody down. But facing it makes you a better person. Because maybe next time you won’t be quite as petty or arrogant or cold.
Good books are always moral, contrasting how we are with how we should be. And the good writer knows how to do this without ever letting on. All this is according to F. Scott Fitzgerald, as taught in lively and deft style by Dr. Harold Gelbman at the University of Iowa.
Forgive me. It was late at night and I was in a ruminative mood. Creak of old house.
Jet plane far above roaring into darkness, contrail across prairie moon. Needing to take a leak but too lazy to get up. Hungry but too tired to fix anything. Sleepy now but too comfortable to walk to bed. Dozing with one cat on my lap, one cat on the arm of the chair, and one cat sleeping on the back of the chair with her head resting on the top of my head. And snoring. Cats can snore pretty good when they’re up to it.
And then the phone rang.
It’s a measure of how deeply asleep I was that I jumped up as if I’d been poked. The cats jumped up, too, scattered quickly.
I was baffled for a moment, staring at a small black jangling instrument I’d never seen before.
I couldn’t imagine what its purpose was.
And then I snatched up the receiver.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
“Hello!”
“Mr. McCain?” Very faint.
“Yes?”
“It’s me. Ellie. Ellie…
Chalmers.”
“Hi, Ellie.”
“I’m sorry if I woke you up.”
“Just reading is all.”
Silence.
“Ellie?”
“Yes.”
“Is there something you want to tell me?”
“He’ll be mad if I do.”
“Who will?”
“My dad.”
“Maybe I can help you.”
“I’m just scared is all.”
“What happened?”
“Sykes came to where Dad works today and hauled him out in front of everybody. They pick on him a lot anyway, on account of he was in prison.”
“What happened?”
“Sat in the squad car and accused him over and over of killing the Squires woman and now Squires. A lot of the men would sneak up to the door and watch Sykes workin’ him over. It hurt Dad’s feelings. Now he says Sykes is gonna arrest him for sure.”
“So what’s your dad going to do?”
Long silence. “Run away.”
“That’s the worst thing he could do.”
“That’s what I keep tellin’ him.”
“He won’t get far.”
“He’s got money. Somebody was out here today and left a package for him.”
“You know who it was?”
“Uh-uh. There was just this big manila envelope on the doorstep. Dad’s name on it.
There wasn’t any stamp or anything.”
“How do you know it was money?”
“I saw Dad open it and put it in his suitcase.”
“What’s supposed to happen to you, he runs off like that?”
“He said to go see you. That you’re his lawyer now and you’d know what to do.”
“I’m on my way out.”
“I’d really appreciate it.”
“You just hold him there as long as you can.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“I appreciate the call, Ellie. You did the right thing.”
“He didn’t kill those people.”
“I know he didn’t, Ellie. I know he didn’t.”
Pale red fire bloomed in bursts against the dark moon-streaked sky. A war scene. It might have been night fighting in Korea.
When I reached the top of the hill looking down on Chalmers’s acreage, I saw the source of the pale red bursts: two police cruisers.
Because the house was isolated from its neighbors, there were no onlookers. A cop with a shotgun stood in front of the door. I pulled up.
“He ain’t gonna be happy to see you,” Pat Jarvis said.
As far as I could tell, the only thing the Jarvis family had ever done, except butter up the priests, was produce a daughter with breasts so enormous even the withered monsignor could be seen eyeing them. Patrick had none of her charm.
“Chalmers got away, and Cliff, he figures you had somethin’ to do with it.”
Nice going, Mike, I thought. Give
Cliffie an excuse to blow your ass off when he finally catches up with you.
“I go inside?”
“If I don’t shoot you in the back, you’ll know it’s Ok.”
“Very funny.”
A grin. “Ol’ Cliff’s pissed, and I ain’t ki. in’.”
I went inside. He didn’t shoot me in the back.
Cliffie saw me and said, “I should plug you right here.”
“There’s a witness,” I said, nodding to Ellie. She wore a high school sweatshirt, jeans, and white soiled sneakers without socks.
“You told him to do it, didn’t you?”
He lunged at me. His face was booze red.
His eyes were pretty much the same color.
“You really think I’d tell him to run? I’d lose my right to practice.”
“I gave shoot-to-kill orders, in case you’re interested.”
Ellie started crying.
“Great, Cliffie,” I said. “Why don’t you scare her some more? The guy’s only her father.”
I sat next to her in the old high-ceiling farm living room. There’d probably been a horsehair couch in here at one time, and a Windsor chair, and a soft Victorian kerosene lamp and a Victrola. There was an overhead light on now. Bare. Merciless. The charm of the place had long ago fled.
She stopped crying and just looked scared. “He wants to kill him.”
“No, he doesn’t. He just likes to talk.
Don’t you, Chief?” I was careful not to call him Cliffie. This wasn’t the time.
He glared at me. “She’s old enough to understand what he done.”
“He didn’t do anything,” I said.
“Yeah? And you can prove that?”
“Yeah, I can. I just need a few more hours.”
I had no idea what I was talking about. The point was to make Ellie feel better. She sat prim and proper, sort of gangly, and more than sort of sweet.
He looked at Ellie. “Well, I hope for his sake she’s more cooperative with you than she was with me. It’d be a damn sight better if Chalmers turned hisself in instead of me findin’ him.”
He looked around the room again, rubbed his jaw, and then left. The emergency lights died. No red-soaked bursts of illumination in the front window anymore.
I lit a Lucky.
“Can I have one?”
“Technically, I shouldn’t do this, you know.”
“Aw, shit, Mr. McCain, just give me one, all right? I’ve been smoking for years.”
I gave her one. Lit it for her.
“He’s probably out at the old line shack.” She told me where it was.
“I thought he was going to run away.”
“He said he wanted time to think.”
“You know, Cliffie’s going to put a tail on me. Everywhere I go, his tail will go. I go to the line shack, I’ll lead him right to your dad.”
She coughed on the cigarette.
“I thought you said you’d been smoking for years.”
“Well, not steady, I didn’t say. I have to smoke a couple each time before I quit coughing.”
“Ah.”
“He wants to kill him. Cliffie, I mean.”
“He wants to kill anybody he even suspects is a criminal. And that means just about everybody.”
“Is his old man as stupid as he is?”
“Just about.”
“How’d he make all that money, then?”
I could tell she was enjoying this little respite from worrying about her father.
“Right time, right place. He had a local construction company. When the Sykeses took over, Cliffie applied for the Chief’s job.”
“So Old Man Sykes stepped in?”
“So Old Man Sykes appointed him.”
Then: “How long do you think your dad’ll be at the line shack?”
“Probably all night.”
“You plan on going there?”
“He told me not to.”
“Then don’t.”
“You think Cliffie’ll kill him?”
“No. I’ll see to that.”
“Really?” She coughed.
“Really. And meanwhile, why don’t you give up the cigarettes?”
“I will if you will.”
I smiled and kissed her on the forehead.
“Whatever happened to respect for your elders?”
Cliffie’s tail was even more amateurish than I’d expected. He followed me about half a car length back. The car was unmarked, true, but the man was in his police uniform. One sort of canceled out the other.
I was thinking about Dr. Todd Jensen. I’d been wanting to talk to him anyway. Now I wanted to talk to him as soon as possible, which meant early morning. His past with Susan Squires had always been murky. I needed to know about it in detail now, especially since he’d been identified as one of the people at Dick Keys’s garage the other night.
Bed.
All three cats piled near my feet.
No trouble sleeping. Except that every time I moved, one or two of them meowed in protest. It was Ok for them to move, you understand, but not for me.
They have that written in their contract.
I was standing outside the good doctor’s door at eight o’clock, exactly fifteen minutes before his nurse arrived. She still didn’t look as if she found me much of an improvement over a leper.
“He isn’t in.”
“I’ll wait.”
I sat in the reception room and went through all the boring magazines. She made coffee. She didn’t offer me any. We both kept looking at the clock on the wall to her left.
I said, “If I give you a dime, can I have a cup of coffee?”
“A quarter.”
“Hell, I can go down to the corner and get a cup of coffee for a dime. Good coffee. And a free refill.”
“Then I’d suggest you go down there.”
“You really don’t like me, do you?”
“What was your first clue?”
“What the hell did I ever do to you?”
“I don’t like your face. I hate baby faces. That’s number one. And second, I hate people who get Dr. Jensen riled up.
He’s hard enough to deal with when he isn’t riled up. But you put him in a pissy mood for two days.”
“I just asked him some questions.”
“That’s all it took.”
“How about fifteen cents?”
“How about,” she said, “twenty?”
“Deal.”
He came in just as I was finishing up my coffee. He wore a jaunty brown leather jacket, white shirt, necktie, chinos, and desert boots. And sunglasses. Dr. Heartthrob.
“What the hell’re you doing here?” he said to me, as he picked up his phone messages.
“Looking for a few fashion tips.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means we need to talk.”
“Someday I’m going to punch your face in.”
“I guess I don’t remember that part of the Hippocratic oath.”
“He’s such a nuisance,” his nurse said.
“He got here before I did. Tried to mooch a cup of coffee.”
“She charged me twenty cents. Ten cents of that belongs to you.”
“Why don’t you shut the hell up, McCain?
I’m sick of you. What the hell’re you doing here anyway?”
“Somebody saw you at the murder scene Friday night.”
“Bullshit.”
“I’ll give you his phone number if you want.”
“Should I call the police, doctor?” the nurse said.
He glared at me. “I’ll talk to him.”
She looked surprised. “Mrs. Malone is your first patient. She’ll be here in ten minutes.
You know how she hates to wait.”
“Screw her,” he said.
I walked through the doorway of his examining room. He reached past me and pushed the door shut. Then he took two steps back and swung at me.
All that time spent ducking the Judge’s rubber hands has trained me for such a moment. I moved my head, and his hand went right into the door. Which was when, small but determined Irishman that I am, I brought up my knee. Unimaginative but effective. I got him square too.
He turned around and leaned on his examining table and started groaning, probably the way his male patients did when he gave them prostate exams.
I opened the door. “Nurse, could we have a cup of coffee in here?”
“You sonofabitch,” he said.
She hurried in with the coffee. She looked at the way he was hunched over his examining table, the paper on it crinkling as his big hands bore down.
“My Lord, what happened?”
“I had to perform some minor surgery. He’s in recovery now.”
“Doctor?” she said.
He didn’t turn around and he didn’t speak.
“I think he’s still a little groggy from the anesthetic,” I said.
“Just get the hell out of here, Audrey!” he shouted over his shoulder.
“He isn’t quite himself,” I said, rolling my finger around my temple to indicate he was temporarily insane.
She made a ugly face at me and backed away.
This time, I closed the door. I started sipping the coffee she’d brought and then went to the back of the room and sat myself down where I could see his face.
“So tell me about Friday night.”
“Screw you.”
“You sleep with a lot of your patients, do you?”
“I don’t sleep with any of my patients.”
“You slept with Susan Squires.”
“That was different.”
“Oh?”
“I was in love with her.”
“That why you killed her?”
He looked at me as if he were just coming out of a deep trance. “Hey.”
“What?”
“I thought that coffee was for me.”
“Oops. I forgot.”
He was still wincing. “She always said you were a dipshit.”
“Who did?”
“Susan.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Every time we’d see you, she’d say, “What a little dipshit that guy is.””
And then I did believe it because it sounded right.
Some things sound right and some don’t, and this one did.
And I felt like hell. I’d thought we were friends, Susan and I. You can never be sure what people really think of you, I guess.
“That make you feel better?” I said.
“Damned right it did.”
“You’re a petty bastard.”
“Yeah, well, I’d rather be a petty bastard than a dipshit.”
“And they say the art of sophisticated conversation is dead.”
He didn’t say anything and then he said, “I was there but I didn’t kill her.”
“Why were you there?”
He went over and sat down. He didn’t say anything for a while. Hung his head. “We’d been seeing each other again.” He was still wincing.
“Squires know?”
“I don’t think so.”
“And you were trying to get her to leave him?”
“Yeah. But she was pretty screwed up about the kid.”
I knew what he was going to say then.
“Ellie Chalmers.”
“She’s Susan’s kid?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. I delivered her.”
“You the father?”
“She wouldn’t tell me who the father was.
That’s why she left town. Everybody thought it was because she was trying to get out of the Squires thing.”
“Ellie doesn’t know.”
He shook his head. “Fayla was her mother as far as Ellie knew. But every once in a while the whole deception bit would get to Susan and she’d drive out to the acreage and park near there with her binoculars and just look at the kid doing chores. Can you believe that shit? I felt sorry for her. Hell, I loved her. I told her if we ever got married I’d figure out some way to get Ellie to live with us.”
“Chalmers knew this?”
“He knew she wasn’t his kid. But he pretended she was for Fayla’s sake.”
“What’d Fayla get out of it?”
“Fayla and Susan went to school together.
Fayla was the ugly duckling and Susan sort of adopted her. Fayla would do anything for Susan.
Fayla couldn’t have kids, so Ellie became her kid.”
His pain erupted again. He grimaced and pushed down on his groin. “You sonofabitch.”
“I don’t usually do stuff like that. But when a guy your size swings on me, I don’t have much choice.”
“I’m gonna punch your face in someday.”
“How come you didn’t tell me about Ellie the first time we talked?”
He did some more writhing. He was a pretty good writher. “I didn’t think it had anything to do with Susan’s death. But now, with David dead, I don’t know what the hell’s going on. I figured you should know. If you care about Ellie as much as you seem to, I assume you’ll be discreet about all this.”
I stood up. Drained my coffee cup. “You want me to get you a cup of coffee?”
“I don’t want jack shit from you.”
I sort of figured he’d respond that way.
On my way out, I asked Audrey to take one in.
“He still could’ve killed her,” I said.
“Dr. Jensen?”
“Uh-huh.”
I ducked just in time. Judge Whitney was shooting rubber bands again.
“Then why would he have told you about Ellie?”
“Show me he was being cooperative.”
“You don’t think Ellie has anything to do with the murders?”
“I’m not sure.”
We sat in her chambers. She wore a tailored blue suit with a stylish neck scarf.
Gauloise in one hand, brandy in the other. She was forced to set one of them down when she launched her rubber bands.
“Something’s bothering me,” I said.
“What?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know. Just something gnawing at the back of my brain.”
“All that cheap beer you drink.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m a real drinker.”
“Brandy, on the other hand, clears the mind.
Gives you the most wonderful ability to concentrate.”
“You sound like a commercial.”
“I would be happy to endorse brandy. The right brands, of course.”
I stared out the window. “It’s something I know.”
“Something you know?”
“Something I learned in the course of my investigation. But as yet I haven’t seen its relevance. But it’s there. Waving at me.”
“Maybe it’s making an obscene gesture.”
She launched another rubber band. “Very good, McCain. I’ve never seen you duck under that way before. You’re getting good at this.”
“What the hell could it be?” I started up from my chair.
“Don’t start pacing. You drive me crazy.”
“I think better when I pace.”
“You’re too short to pace. When you get behind the couch, I lose sight of you.”
“Har-de-har-har.”
She sighed. “I’ll never understand what you see in Jackie Gleason,” she said. I had used one of Gleason’s signature lines. “He’s so working class.”
“He’s funny and sad at the same time,” I said. “And that’s not easy to be. That’s what makes him such a great comic actor.”
A knock.
“Yes?”
The beautiful Pamela Forrest came in.
She wore a white blouse and a moderately tight black knee-length skirt. Her impossibly golden hair looked like something from myth or fairy tale. But I couldn’t appreciate her this morning. Not with poor Mary in the hospital, not able to remember anything.
“You said to bring this in as soon as it came,” she said, as she reached the Judge’s desk. She set some papers down.
“Thank you, dear.”
Pamela nodded and withdrew. She watched me carefully as she left the room. She must have noticed that I wasn’t frenzied the way I usually was when she was around.
The Judge said, “Get out, McCain. I’m busy. I need to read these papers. Go home and pace or something.” She’d been scanning the legal brief that Pamela brought her. She looked up. “I’d like the case solved by dinnertime tonight. I’m having a judge from the sixth district in, and I’d like to brag a little about how I uncovered the murderer.”
“That would be so unlike you, Judge,” I said.
A dramatic ingestion of Gauloise smoke and then the wave of a languid hand. “Now get the hell out of here. I’m busy.” Then: “Oh, that envelope you wanted me to check on?”
“Yes.”
“Those two initials in the corner were the initials of the clerk who sent it.”
“What did they send?”
“A birth certificate.”
“I’m losing my mind,” Linda Granger said. “And so is Jeff. God, McCain, isn’t there something you can do?”
“Well, he could always grow up.”
“You know that’s not going to happen.”
“I’ll take care of it.” I told her when to be at my office. Then I called Chip O’Donlon. “Hey, Dad.” And told him when to be at my office.
Then the phone rang.
She was crying. I couldn’t understand what she said.
“Slow down, Ellie. Slow down.”
“Cliffie was here. He made me tell him where my dad went. To that line shack. Then he ran out the door. There were two other cars there.
Men with rifles and shotguns. They’re going after him.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll leave for the line shack right now.”
By the time I got there, Cliffie had his men fanned out, encircling a weatherbeaten board shack that looked more like a large doghouse than a railroad storage shed. It was up on the side of a steep autumn-blazed hill, just below a railroad track that climbed ever higher into the limestone cliffs. It was a perfect autumn day for hiking or canoeing or picking out pumpkins to carve into bogeyman faces. Butterflies and grasshoppers and leaf smoke and all that other stuff.
The men wore their hunting gear. Pheasant season didn’t open for a while yet. This would be their dry run for trying out hats, caps, jackets, pants, duck calls, boots, shoes, and weapons. Lots of weapons. Enough weapons to start a small war.
Cliffie was strutting around with a. 45 in one hand and a bullhorn in the other. The way some folks are good with the violin or tuba, Cliffie was good with the bullhorn.
“There’s a very good chance that you can get off on an insanity charge, Mr. Chalmers!” He glanced over his shoulder and gave one of his cronies a big lurid wink. Chalmers didn’t have a prayer of beating a double murder charge on an insanity plea. Not with his criminal past. “So you come out here peaceful-like and we’ll drive you back to town in that brand-new patrol car of mine. It still smells new. You’ll like that, Mr. Chalmers, I promise!”
Cliffie’s police chief magazine mst’ve run an article on how to use psychology, because usually, instead of such awkward enticements as insanity pleas and new-car smells, Cliffie would have been threatening the guy with sure death.
“There’ll be a pizza tonight, Mr. Chalmers!
The boys always chip in and buy a big one delivered. It’s nice ‘n’ hot too. I’m sure they’ll give you some. Our boys’re nice to prisoners, despite what you might have heard to the contrary.”
Cliffie had the distinction of being cited three times in six years for “the worst-run jail” in the state. Endless numbers of prisoners emerged with black eyes, broken noses, missing teeth, snapped wrists, and badly bruised ankles.
As a gag, Cliffie once served up chili that he’d dumped half a pound of ground-up night crawlers in. This is one of those legends that is actually true. Everybody loves a clown.
“I’ll talk to him.”
He wasn’t happy to see me.
“I don’t believe I remember deputizing you, McCain.”
“I’m his lawyer.”
“You get all the important clients, huh?”
“He didn’t kill anybody.”
He stared at me. “She thinks she’s gonna beat me this time, don’t she? Show me up again?”
“This has nothing to do with Judge Whitney.”
“Oh, no? She don’t care if this man is guilty or not. Just as long as she makes me look bad. Well, I’ll tell you somethin’.
It ain’t gonna happen this time. I got the right man, and there ain’t a damned thing she can do about it.”
“Then you won’t mind if I go talk him into surrendering?”
He said, “Billy.”
Billy Wymer instantly stepped forward, the forty-seven-year-old juvenile delinquent who does a good share of Cliffie’s bidding.
“Cuff him.”
“My pleasure, Chief.”
“What the hell’re you doing?” I said.
Wymer’s a big guy with green stuff always in the corners of his dull blue eyes and a kind of moss on his stubby little teeth. His mouth is usually leaking too. When he laughs, which is frequently, especially when something cruel is taking place, he does so without sound: his mouth wide open, his mossy teeth on display, and no sound whatsoever. Like a silent movie scene.
He snapped the cuffs on me. “Got ‘im, Chief.”
“Good goin’, Billy!” As if he’d just accomplished something major, like discovering a cancer cure or finding a new planet in the solar system. Then Cliffie smiled at me. “I tried psychology on this pecker, McCain. You heard me yerself.”
“I sure did. That new-car-smell stuff would certainly have made me surrender. They could’ve used you when Dillinger was around.”
He raised his bullhorn and aimed it at the shack. “Ninety seconds is what you got, Chalmers! You give yourself up or we open fire!”
“You can’t threaten him like that,” I said.
“I can’t, counselor?” His eyes scanned the men. “You men get ready.”
Rifles and shotguns glinted and gleamed in the fall sunlight. A lot of the men were grinning.
“This is McCain, Chalmers! Give yourself up right away!” Now that I understood Cliffie probably wasn’t bluffing, it was important to haul Chalmers out of there pronto.
“Scared the shit out of you, didn’t I, counselor?” Big grin on his stupid face.
“Sure wish I had a photo of you just now.
Sure wish I did.”
“C’mon out, Chalmers!” I shouted again.
He cried back, “They’ll shoot me!”
“They’ll shoot you if you don’t come out, Chalmers!”
“Forty-five seconds!” Cliffie said over the bullhorn.
“Chalmers, he’ll start shooting! He really will!”
“I didn’t kill those people!”
“I know you didn’t. But you have to come out before I can help you!”
“Twenty-five seconds!”
“Chalmers! For God’s sake! Get out of there!”
He came out. First he peeked around the door like a guilty kid. He had something in his hands.
It was sort of funny and sort of sad and sort of pathetic.
“What the hell is that?” Cliffie said.
From his fingers dangled a rosary.
“Don’t shoot me, all right?”
“Tell him you won’t shoot.”
He raised his bullhorn again. “You men put your weapons down!”
None of them looked happy about doing so.
Chalmers came slowly down from the cabin.
Arms stretched out for cuffs, black rosary beads hanging from his right hand.
When he reached me, he looked at my handcuffs and said, greatly disappointed, “How the hell you gonna help me, McCain? You’re handcuffed too.”
“Thanks for pointing that out,” I said.
Cliffie was magnanimous and let me drive myself back to town. Sans handcuffs.
Cliffie double-parked out front so everybody’d be sure to see him bringing in Chalmers. Just in case anybody was too dense to miss all his subtle machinations, he stood in the middle of the street with his bullhorn. He wanted an audience and got one immediately: decent folk in faded housedresses and work-worn factory pants and shirts and little kids squinting into the sun to see what dangerous specimen the chief had brought in this time.
He could have pulled up behind the building, of course, and nobody would have seen him.
“Stand back, everybody,” he said. “We’re bringing in a desperate criminal.”
Even the old ladies giggled about that one.
Desperate criminal. Cliffie loved melodrama almost as much as a keynote speaker on the Fourth of July.
He repeated himself: “Stand back, everybody.”
Then he handed the bullhorn to Billy, yanked his own sawed-off from the front seat, opened the back door, and said, “You take it nice and easy now.
You try anything, and your teeth are gonna be chewin’ lead.”
I hadn’t heard the “chewin’ lead” one before.
I hoped I didn’t have to hear it ever again.
Chalmers, pale, forlorn, about as dangerous as a ground squirrel, got out of the patrol car with his head hung low. Embarrassed.
Cliffie gave him a hard shove. Chalmers turned to glare at him. Cliffie shoved him again.
I grabbed his elbow. “What’s your problem?”
“He ain’t movin’ fast enough, counselor.
That’s my problem. Now take your hands off me.” And with that he gave me a shove too. I knew better than to push back. He had an audience. He’d love to put on a show with me as the foil.
Inside the police station, there was a lot of noise as shoes scuffled down the narrow, dusty hallway to the interrogation room. Keys jangled. Sam Brownes creaked. Men coughed.
Prisoners in the back shouted, wanting to know what was going on. The door to the cells was ajar. They wanted some kind of diversion. Cliffie wouldn’t let them have radios or magazines or books.
“How about opening a window?” I said.
“I’m sorry it don’t smell better for you, counselor,” Cliffie said.
It smelled of sweat, puke, and tobacco. It was a dingy little place not much bigger than a coffin.
There was a single overhead light and a card table with a wire Webcor tape recorder on it. There were also signed black-and-white publicity stills of Norman Vincent Peale and Richard Nixon.
Cliffie pushed the still-handcuffed Chalmers in a chair and sat next to the card table. He got the recorder turned on and rolling, and said, “I’m recording every word you’re going to say, Chalmers.
You understand?”
Chalmers looked at me. I nodded. Then he looked at Cliffie and nodded.
It was what you might expect. Cliffie came up with twenty different ways to ask the same question which was, basically, Why’d you kill them?
He was doing a terrible job. The County Attorney’s crew would have to interrogate Chalmers themselves.
He blubbered on.
It was forty-seven minutes exactly before Cliffie needed to go to the can. I needed to talk to Chalmers.
“I’ll be back,” Cliffie said. “Don’t you touch nothin’, counselor.”
We exchanged unfrly glances and he left.
I leaned over and whispered in Chalmers’s ear, “Who sends you the check every month?”
He looked surprised and shook his head.
“It’s important,” I said.
“No it’s not.”
That’s what I’d been trying to remember: the curious monthly check.
“It don’t have nothin’ to do with any of this.” He was whispering too.
“I think it does. Ellie isn’t your daughter.”
“Who told you that?”
I nodded to the machine.
He whispered again, “Who told you that?”
“I figured it out. Now I need to know where your check comes from.”
He looked as if he was considering telling me when Cliffie came back in.
“You didn’t try ‘n’ erase that machine, did you?”
“Cliffie, I wouldn’t try and erase the machine. I’d try and erase the tape.”
“You goddamned college boys.”
“Yeah, we’re taking over the world.”
“Shut up, now. We’re going back to the questions.”
Another thrilling half hour. Cliffie’d verbally lunge at Chalmers and I’d object; Cliffie’d lunge again, I’d object again. It was a dull little legal dance.
“You’re gonna need a lawyer, bub.”
“I got a lawyer,” Chalmers said.
“I mean a real one.”
“This is the comedy part of his act,” I said.
A knock at the door. A cop leaned in.
“The mayor says he needs to talk to you, Chief.”
“He say about what?”
“He never does, Chief.”
Cliffie sighed. “I finally start gettin’ somewhere with this killer I got here and the mayor calls.”
“Life’s tough,” I said, “when you’re a celebrity.”
“Someday I’ll celebrity you, McCain,”
Cliffie said, standing up, which is no easy task when you weigh what he does. “And don’t try and erase that”-he caught himself in time-? tape, either.”
“I’m proud of you, Cliffie.”
Another exchange of scowls and Cliffie was gone.
I started whispering again. “Who sends you the checks every month?”
“I don’t know. They’re just in my mailbox.” He looked angry. “It doesn’t have anything to do with these murders. You know what would happen to that kid if this town ever figured out who her real old man was?”
“Believe it or not, I think she’d like to know for herself. I think she could put up with anyone who made fun of her. And anyway, you’re underestimating people here. They’d be good to her. They’d understand.”
“I know a few who wouldn’t.”
“A few. But not many.”
He sighed and started to raise his hands to wipe his face. He’d forgotten about the handcuffs. “These damned things.”
“Tell me before Cliffie comes back,” I whispered. “Who sends you the checks?”
Footsteps in the hall. Cliffie’s steps, thunderous. Door being flung open.
And then, in that millisecond, Chalmers leaned close and told me.