Breaking Up Is Hard to Do (The Sam McCain Mysteries Book 6) (2 page)

Then she was rushing away.

A few minutes after I got back from the hospital, the phone rang.

“Dawdling?” said Judge Esme Anne Whitney, the district magistrate for whom I investigate things.

“Doodling, actually.” And I was. I’d returned a phone call and in the process begun penciling out a sketch of President Lincoln. For some reason, his is the only face I can draw that remotely resembles somebody human.

“Well, I hope you’re better at dawdling than doodling.”

“You’re in an awfully chipper mood, this afternoon, Judge. Did something terrible happen to Chief Sykes?”

“Nothing terrible ever happens to Sykes. The terrible things are the things that Sykes does to our town.”

The Judge is part of a large, rich Eastern family that came out here to Black River Falls, Iowa about a hundred years ago after a litigious argument with the Treasury Department over what it considered some rather—what is the word I want here?—illegal financial maneuverings. Disgraced, the family put some of its remaining millions into building our little town of 25,000 souls. Everything went fine with their Iowa empire here until WWII when the Sykes family, which had come to Black River Falls with the Southern migration of the late last century, got some federal contracts to start building roads and airstrips for the government. The Sykeses, through thrift and theft, made a few million dollars for themselves. And proceeded, before the Whitneys quite understood what was going on, into bribing virtually every local official, bank and prominent merchant into supporting the Sykes slate of candidates.

While the Judge had her millions and her district court, she no longer had the sort of imperious power her family had become accustomed to.

Police Chief Clifford Sykes, Jr. is thus her enemy. It helps that he’s none too bright, marginally crooked, and eager to wrap up major criminal cases before doing any serious investigating. I haven’t kept track, not being a petty sort of person, but I believe that we’ve proven him wrong on the last eight murder cases that fell in his jurisdiction. He doesn’t like us any better than we like him.

“I told a friend of mine you’d help him this afternoon.”

“Is this one of your country club friends? Do I have to unload gold bullion again?”

“In fact, McCain, he
is
one of my country club friends. One of my nearest and dearest, in case you’re interested. But I don’t know what he wants. He just asked if I could get you out there as soon as possible.”

“Who’s this friend?”

“Ross Murdoch.”

“The guy who’s running for governor?”

“Yes.”

“Why would somebody as rich and successful as he is want me in his mansion?”

“No offense, McCain, but that’s the very question I asked him.”

“Why would I take offense at that, Judge? Gosh, I know I’m a low-born swine.”

“This is no time for being cute, McCain. He sounded sort of—strained. But then who wouldn’t be with the election this close. Everybody’s pulling for him but with all that left-wing money flooding the state, who knows what’ll happen.”

By “left-wing money,” the Judge means money given by labor unions, teachers’ unions, and any other groups that try to help the downtrodden and despised. You know, the scum of the earth.

“I can’t get out there for a while.”

“Well, I’m going to lean on you a little here and play boss. I want you to get out there as soon as you can. I don’t like to hear my good friends agitated this way.” She lighted a cigarette, something she does to the tune of two packs a day. “He was so excited about his fancy new bomb shelter the last few weeks. He seems to have forgotten all about it now. Get out there as quickly as you can, McCain.”

All this is taking place during what the press had come to call the Cuban Missile Crisis. For the past four days a confrontation had been building.

And now it was a crisis. Jack Kennedy had proof that Khrushchev was on the cusp of installing Russian missiles on Cuban soil. Missiles that could easily reach America. So Kennedy had now set up a naval blockade and essentially dared Khrushchev to try and run it. The world didn’t want to think about what Khrushchev would do. The prospect of nuclear war had frozen everybody in place. You went to work, you played with your kids, you made whoopee with your wife, you paid your bills, you raked beautiful Indian-summer leaves. But no matter where you went or what you did, the subject of the missile crisis was there. If you didn’t bring it up, a friend did. In television interviews teachers explained how difficult it was to make children understand what was going on without giving them nightmares.

I’d grown up with air raid drills, with duck-and-cover, with movie and TV melodramas inspired by good old Uncle Joe McCarthy. According to him, there were more commies in the US of A than there were Americans. I’d had plenty of nightmares myself. But all that had been nothing more than practice. This could well be the nuclear war, the nuclear holocaust, the nuclear winter we had been dreading ever since 1945.

During the past four or five years, bomb shelters had become popular. Most people couldn’t afford anything fancy. They’d find a spot in their basement that could be walled off with brick or concrete block or some other fortification and then just kind of hope for the best. Most of these homemade shelters were worthless. When the nukes hit, you needed to be in some place deep and well protected.

People like Ross Murdoch, who had the wherewithal to have their shelters professionally built, just might survive for a time in their shelters. They’d been designed by architects who followed government guidelines, and they’d been built by construction men and carpenters who knew what they were doing.

The day was warm, bright, smoky with autumn haze in the piney hills. Hard to believe that all the houses, stores, schools, roads and so on could be turned into ash and rubble in an hour or two. The older you get, I’m told, the more the idea of your own extinction becomes easier to grasp, if not make your peace with. But the extinction of virtually everybody and everything you’ve grown up with? Now that was a tough one. A damned tough one. I found myself saying little fragments of prayers, something I hadn’t done in a while.

Ross Murdoch lived in a brick house that was half-hidden behind huge fir trees. I parked my red ’51 Ford ragtop in front of the front steps, got out and walked up the steps to the door.

I looked out over the land surrounding the house. Pine trees and carefully landscaped grass. A high meadow with horses, the color of chestnuts; a green John Deere in a distant field that was hauling a wagon full of new trees to be planted; and a leg of river that looked silver-blue in the sunlight. The aromas of autumn were every bit as alluring as the colors of autumn. It was one of those sweet soft days when you wished you were a bird. Or at least somebody who didn’t have to work.

I heard a voice say “Hello? May I help you?” and when I turned around I saw a young woman in a white blouse and black slacks leaning against the doorframe. She was watching me with obvious amusement. Then, “Oh. Hi. We almost met at the hospital.” Then, “You’re easily distracted, I take it?”

“Distracted?” She was the young woman who’d been talking to volunteer Peggy Leigh. She certainly got your attention.

“You knock on the door and then turn around and get so caught up in the sights that you forget all about the knock.”

“Guilty as charged.”

A gamin grin. She put forth a slender but strong hand. “I’m Deirdre Murdoch.”

“Sam McCain.”

“C’mon in, Sam. Dad’s in the den.” Then: “Oh, how do you like my car?”

I’d noticed the sleek new yellow foreign machine as I’d wheeled into the driveway. “Italian?”

“British.”

“I’m not up on my foreign cars but it’s a beaut, that’s for sure.”

The interior of the house had the feel of a museum about it. Everything fought for your attention and approval. The number of rooms seemed countless. Each room I glimpsed on the way down the parqueted main corridor looked like a furniture display in an expensive Chicago store.

“I’m not sure why he wants you here. He’s just very—” She looked troubled herself. “Did you ever see
Invasion of the Body Snatchers?”

“One of my three all-time favorite movies.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, Dad’s been like one of the pod people lately. And today—I’d swear he wasn’t my father at all.”

She was a beauty, I suppose, but there was a freckled, young-girl vividness about that sweet little face and that great gleaming gash of a smile that overwhelmed you when she glanced over at you.

“Mom’s very upset, too. Whatever’s bothering him, he’s keeping it to himself. At first I thought it might be the bomb shelter. You know how it is when you get things built. It’s never very smooth. And a lot of things went wrong with the shelter. It wasn’t anybody’s fault, really. It’s just that Dad’s a perfectionist. He wanted to make the shelter into a place he could go to be absolutely alone. Drink a beer or two and watch some TV. Or play some of his old Louie Armstrong records. He loves Dixieland jazz. It just got finished a couple of days ago. Mom and I were hoping that that would make him happy. But it didn’t. He’s just kept on—brooding. That’s the only word I can think of.”

“The campaign’s got to be taking its toll on him by now.”

“I know. But—but this is like a personality change. Like a pod person.” We walked up to the door of the den. She knocked once and then opened the door.

The den was a sanctuary of wall-to-wall books, several Vermeer lithographs, genuine Persian rugs, a desk a fighter jet could land on, and so much leather furniture the cattle population must have been seriously depleted when the manufacturer was putting it together. The sunlight angling through the window gave the wide, deep room a serenity that belied all those dead animal eyes staring at me.

Ross Murdoch was a slender six-footer in a white shirt, blue slacks and cinnamon-colored cowboy boots. He was handsome in a conventional middle-aged way. He didn’t try to prove his masculinity with his handshake, which I appreciated, and he spoke quietly when he offered me a chair. “Care for a drink?”

“No thanks, Mr. Murdoch.”

“‘Ross.’”

“No thanks, Ross.”

“And ‘Sam’s’ okay?”

“Sam’s fine.”

“I’ll be down at the stables, Dad.”

“Thanks, honey.”

“Nice to meet you, Sam,” she said and sounded as if she really meant it. Then she was gone.

I sat in one of the deep leather chairs. He sat, somewhat anxiously, on the edge of his enormous desk. He raised himself up on one side and dug something out of his front pocket. He flipped it in the air toward me. I caught it. A silver dollar.

“That’s when money was money,” he said.

“My early birthday present?”

“The Judge told me you were a smart-ass. Usually, I don’t mind smart-asses but unfortunately now’s not the time. As you’ll see.” He took a very deep breath and then a very deep drink from the bourbon-filled glass he had on his desk. “The silver dollar’s to hire you. Lawyer-client. I’ve got a check for a thousand dollars for you in my desk with your name on it. I want you to look at something for me.”

First I get two hundred and fifty dollars for delivering a letter and now I was being offered $1000 to look at something. I was going to be small-town rich. Or at least small-town comfortable. I started mentally listing all the bills I could pay off.

“That’s a lot of money.”

“You’re going to earn it.”

“Doing what exactly?”

He got up and started walking around, sometimes facing me, sometimes not. Sometimes he seemed to be talking to me, at others he seemed to be talking to himself.

“Sam, I’m going to withdraw from the governor’s race.”

“Are you serious?”

“Afraid I am.” He pressed slender fingers to his forehead as if he had a headache. “I’ve made my peace with it. I don’t like it but I don’t have any choice.”

“Have you talked it over with anybody yet?”

“Not yet. The Judge puts a lot of faith in your skill and integrity.”

News to me, I thought.

“What I need now is legal advice.”

“I don’t mean to be immodest but there are sure more experienced lawyers than me around.”

“Yes. But I don’t trust them. I need somebody I can have absolute trust in. Maybe later on I’ll hire some additional lawyers. But for right now I want a sensible, homegrown young man with the kind of credentials Esme says you have.”

“Well, I’m flattered. But—”

He held his hand up to stop me from speaking. “We have something in common. Cliffie Sykes. He hates me because Judge Whitney is one of my best friends. He’s tried to arrest me on four different occasions for minor infractions of the law—and I’ve beaten him very publicly at his own game. He always said he’d get even and now—well, now he may have a chance.” Then: “Sure you wouldn’t want a drink?”

“I’m fine.”

He walked over to a dry bar and took care of his glass again. He added a spritz of water. He turned back to me and said, “This time I may have handed myself over to him.”

“You’ve lost me.”

He started pacing again. “Have you heard about my bomb shelter?”

“I think everybody in town has.”

“Well, it’s all true. A big room that’s half living room with the other half being bunk beds enough for twelve. Comfortable beds.”

“I’d like to see it.”

“You will. In just a few minutes. But right now I need your word that everything I say is between us.”

“Lawyer-client privilege.”

“Sam, I’m not going to elaborate on what I want you to do for me. I need you to check things out for yourself. I need you to go down to the bomb shelter and look it over and then come back upstairs. Then we’ll talk and I’ll tell you what I know.”

The right side of his mouth had developed a tiny tic. His long slender left hand twitched twice.

“You like things mysterious, Ross.”

“I’ll explain everything—afterward.”

“That’s what you hired me for? To look in your bomb shelter?”

“That’s one of the reasons, Sam. The other reason—well, you’ll find out for yourself.”

“I can’t ask any questions?”