Breaking Up Is Hard to Do (The Sam McCain Mysteries Book 6) (8 page)

“What is?”

“Just a sec.”

Our idling motors made a good deal of noise and my headlights speared through gathering ground fog.

“Looks like Hardin, Wheeler, and Carlson. Their cars, I mean. Somethin’ must be up. That tip was a good one.”

“Probably just having a business meeting of some kind.”

“Guess I’ll drive up there and see if they’ll talk to me.”

“Well, good luck, Don.”

“Bet them boys are gonna be surprised to see me.”

I sure couldn’t argue with him about that one.

I
FOUND A PHONE
booth downtown and called the motel where Hastings was staying. A woman was on the desk now. She told me he hadn’t come back yet, that she’d just checked the rooms—they’d had trouble with teenagers trying to sneak into vacant rooms—and there was no sign of him. She said that her father, the guy I’d bribed with money enough for a burger and a pack of smokes with some change left over, had given her instructions to call me right away when she saw him.

I called Kenny Thibodeau, Pornographer and unofficial Private Eye.

“Hey McCain, how they hangin’?”

“Y’know, Kenny, you really should quit saying that to everybody who calls.”

“I don’t say it to chicks.”

“Yeah, but I mean what if the Pope or somebody called you?”

“Why would the Pope call me?”

“I’m just saying for instance the Pope.”

“I’d say, Hey, Padre, how they hangin’?”

I laughed. “I don’t think you’ve changed much since we were in fifth grade.”

“Well, I didn’t know how to write dirty paperbacks back then.”

“I guess that’s a good point. So what did you dredge up for me from all these mysterious sources of yours?”

“Hardin’s broke.”

“Hardin? He’s one of the wealthiest lawyers in the state.”

“California cleaned him out.”

“What happened in California?”

As I leaned against the inside of the booth, I saw a group of people coming through the doors of the Presbyterian church across the street. They held long white candles that burned in golden nimbuses. There were maybe forty of them in a long line of pairs. A cross-section of folks, white collar and blue collar alike. Rich and poor. They walked down the street saying the Lord’s Prayer. Not hard to figure out the occasion. They were praying to whatever gods there be that this planet and its people would not be subjected to what Hiroshima and Nagasaki had had to endure. And were still enduring. Today’s bombs were many times more powerful than those had been.

“Hey, McCain, you still there?”

“Hey, Kenny, how they hangin’?”

“Very funny.”

“I got distracted. So tell me about California.”

The long line reached the end of the block and turned toward the business section. There would be a rally tonight where people from all four churches would meet in the town square to pray and sing hymns. According to Walter Cronkite, this was going on all over the country. Khrushchev had yet to respond in any fashion to the naval blockade.

“Condos. Sank about everything he had in condos with his brother-in-law out there. I guess they both got dazzled when this old movie star—Rex Thomas, you remember him, right after the war?—anyway this Thomas guy was building these condominiums on the ocean front. First thing Hardin did was ask for safety of the land to be evaluated. You sink all this money into building condos and they tumble into the ocean some night, you got some real problems.

“Anyway, the guy Hardin hires—some guy this LA lawyer recommended—he says you’d have to be crazy to build where Rex Thomas wants to. So Hardin and his brother-in-law are all ready to pull out but Thomas convinces them to get a second opinion.”

“I think I can see this one coming.”

“So they get this guy they meet who’s checking out the land for some other investors and Hardin gets along with him—naturally the guy is impressive—and so Hardin says let’s let this guy check out the land. If he says it’s all right—”

“Rex Thomas knows the guy. Told him to pretend to be checking out the land for these other mysterious investors.”

“Then you can write the rest of this yourself, man. Hardin and his brother-in-law give Rex Thomas practically everything they’ve got. The condos get built.”

“And tumble into the ocean?”

“Not yet. It’s going to happen. But it hasn’t happened yet.”

“So how did Hardin lose his money?”

“What Thomas—who is now in Europe somewhere marrying this countess and making the same kind’ve of swashbucklers he used to make in Hollywood—what Thomas did was cheapjack the shit out of the construction. They’re like a thousand times shoddier than regular housing developments. I mean, the toilets don’t flush, the doors fall off, the air conditioning sounds like a B-52 when you start it up. Like that.”

“So Thomas cheapjacked the work and pocketed the difference.”

“And that difference may be as much as two hundred thousand dollars.”

“They can’t sue?”

“Chapter Thirteen. Thomas set up his own corporation and ran everything through there. Soon as the first residents moved in, he declares Chapter Thirteen and skies over to Europe to marry this countess chick.”

“‘Skies’?”

“Yeah. I read that in
Variety
the other day.”

“So he’s broke.”

“Just about. But I’m not sure what any of this would have to do with whatever’s going on that you won’t tell me about.”

“I don’t either. I’ll have to run it through my giant brain several times before I can figure it out.”

“Well, that’s all I’ve got.”

“Thanks, Kenny.”

“You owe me a meal.”

“You like drive-up windows?”

“A real meal, McCain. A real meal.”

After I’d hung up, I stood outside the phone booth in the chill night, smoking my Lucky and listening to the singing of the group that had just left the church. It was hopeful and despairing at the same time, that trapeze flight of our existence.

I was on the right side of town to check out Hastings’s motel so I decided to break a few laws tonight, pick his lock and peek inside. On the way over, I thought of the four grim men sitting in Ross Murdoch’s den. Murdoch would pick up the phone and call Cliffie, and Murdoch’s life in a very real sense would end. As would the lives of the other three men. All the people who’d envied them, all the people they’d pushed around to get their way, all the home-grown moralists would become an angry Greek chorus. From the pulpit, though their names would not be used, they would be denounced as libertines and used as examples of our corrupt age; and in the taverns they would be denounced as laughing-stocks and used as examples of how rich guys had all the advantages when it came to women.

I passed a shiny new motel with late model shark-finned cars in all the parking lots and a general air of prosperity in the landscaping, the signage and the clean, inviting, brightly lit front office.

I parked half a block from Hastings’s motel. No air of prosperity here. A kind of prairie grimness: low-echelon traveling salesmen; beer tavern romeos and romeoettes trying to blot out the burden of spouses and kids waiting so hungrily for them at home; and sad itinerant families with too many kids and never enough money, traveling to where some magazine told them were good-paying jobs that always seemed to be have just been filled when they arrived. Then back into their rusty beaten old trucks and on to the highway again, satisfied to settle for minimum wage and three squares a day—if they can only find it.

Country music twang; sitcom robot laughter; slap and tickle, thrust and groan—all the familiar sounds of motel life behind those heavy dusty faded curtains and loose doors a ten-year-old could open if you gave him a few minutes.

I used my old Cub Scout pocket knife. Best eighty-nine cents I’d ever spent. I was inside in less than thirty seconds.

I used a penlight to look around. There was a briefcase that didn’t reveal a lor besides his taste in reading. Three western paperbacks by Luke Short. At least he had good taste in frontier stories.

I found what I wanted in a manila envelope. I sat down in a chair and lighted a cigarette and started looking through all the clippings. In case he decided to burst through the door, I put my .38 in my lap.

There was, it seemed, a magic act known as “The Majestic Magic-ans.” Judging by the clippings, they played every kind of venue there was, from the seamier lounges in Vegas to VFW halls in Beloit, Wisconsin. Most of the clippings weren’t reviews, just notices that “The Majestic Magic-ans” were about to or had appeared there.

There were two reviews and both of them were moderately favorable as to the magic part of the show but almost lascivious when it came to the male reviewer discussing the “beautiful assistant Shandra.” She sure as hell was beautiful, especially half-naked in her Magic-ans costume. The only time I’d seen her she was dead back there in the bomb shelter.

The magician was a plucky little guy in a cheap tux and a top hat. According to the reviews his name was Michael Reeves and Shandra was his sister. I knew him, of course, as Hastings the bounty hunter. Seeing them together in the newspaper photos I saw, for the first time, a family resemblance. General shape of head; the shape of the eyes. On her the physical details were beautiful; on him they were undefined, unfinished somehow, not long enough in the kiln perhaps, the way a little kid’s face is unfinished.

In the back of the envelope were several glossies of various luminaries standing with the Magic-ans. They ran to TV stars who no longer had shows to sports stars who didn’t get in the game as much as they used to. The men always managed to have a possessive arm slung around Shandra’s neck. One of them—and this made me laugh out loud—was quite obviously peering down her very low-cut gown. All the glossies were scribbled with all the usual show-biz bullshit accolades. “Greatest magic act I’ve ever seen!” “To two dear friends!” I wished just one of them would have been honest and said, “I’d pay a million bucks to get into your knickers, Shandra!” You know, break the monotony of all the hype and get to the real subject at hand.

I had to take a leak and so I did. And while I was standing there at the john I smelled it. There’s no other odor like it.

I got done, zipped up, washed my hands in the rusty sink, turned around and faced the narrow closet door. He probably hadn’t taken to smelling too bad when the owner’s daughter made a quick sweep of the room earlier. And there would have been no reason for her to look in the closet.

I took a deep breath and opened the closet door and damned if he didn’t fall straight out at me the way closeted corpses always did in “Abbott and Costello” movies.

I pushed him back inside quickly. Propping up corpses is way down on my list of things that give me pleasure, right next to emptying bedpans and listening to Paul Harvey.

But I still had to hold him up with one hand while I used my penlight to find the wound that had killed him. Didn’t take long. Somebody had used something heavy to smash in the back left side of his head. Wouldn’t take all that much.

I had to slam the door shut quick so he wouldn’t fall out again. I heard his forehead bounce off the inside of the door. If he hadn’t been dead, he sure was now.

Then I went to the phone and dialed the police station. The dispatcher, who was a good guy, told me all about the body in the bomb shelter and said that every cop on the shift was out there except for Lonesome Bob Tehearn who was, by any reckoning, in the fates-worse-than-death category when you wanted help with a murder investigation. But I needed somebody to come out here, listen to my story, and then take over.

“Well, I’ll see if I can find him. You know, Lonesome Bob takes an awful lot of naps,” the dispatcher said, “and sometimes he sleeps right through my calls.”

“Well, if you can wake him up, please send him over here.”

“I’ll do what I can, McCain. But it may take a little while. Especially if he’s at the park. He’s got this little nook there where he really sacks out. I like it better when he just pulls into an alley downtown. The teenagers usually spot him and start throwing stuff at his car. That way he don’t sleep so long.”

Lonesome Bob Tehearn was Cliffie’s first cousin, in case you’re wondering how he’d lasted so long on the force.

Lonesome Bob arrived thirty-five minutes later. He was a tall, lanky hound dog of a man with stooped shoulders and a grin he grinned frequently and seemingly for no reason at all. He was also the proud owner of a truckload of cheap after-shave. It was so strong that if you ever stood downwind of it, tears would start streaming down your cheeks.

He got the name “Lonesome Bob” in the days after World War II when he found himself being asked to be the best man at the wedding of the girl he’d been engaged to all the time he was overseas. The groom had formerly been Bob’s best friend, a 4-F’er on account of an old knee injury. Or so he said, his uncle on the draft board notwithstanding.

For reasons unfathomable to most of our species, Lonesome Bob accepted, thus making everybody at the wedding extremely nervous as they waited for him to pull out a gun and kill the bride and groom. But no such thing happened.

Lonesome Bob had never married. He lived in a small cabin a mile out of town, the exterior walls being decorated with license plates from all over the world. Most folks couldn’t stand to go inside Lonesome Bob’s cabin because of all the squirrel meat he fried and ate. Lonesome Bob liked to say that eating squirrel took care of two of his passions—hunting and eating.

People tell me that squirrel meat tastes pretty good but I’ve never been able to get close enough to it to find out. The stench’ll make blood start firing from your ears.

While Lonesome Bob went in and looked at Hastings, or whatever his real name was, I called my apartment to see how the beautiful Pamela Forrest was doing.

Doing pretty well, I thought the instant she said hello. She was drunk and giggly. I’d gotten over being mad at her. She hadn’t humiliated me all those years;
I
had humiliated me all those years. Not her problem that I was foolish enough to hang on to the bumper while her car dragged me over burning coals and broken glass. I was trying to be rational and reasonable about all those heartbroken years I’d spent pursuing her because I’d decided that sleeping with her tonight sounded pretty damned good. Bygones be bygones and all that. At least until dawn.