Sam McCain - 04 - Save the Last Dance for Me (12 page)

“I thought you wanted some lunch.”

“Iced tea is lunch,” she said

defensively.

“I’d hate to hear you argue that in court.”

“Want to take the case?”

“You should eat,” I said.

“You should stop being a mother hen.”

“That’s the most effective diet in the world.

Heartbreak.”

“It sure is.”

“When’s the last time you ate?”

“Last night. A piece of pizza.”

I was about to do a little more mother-henning when I saw them.

Sara and Dierdre Hall. Jaywalking from the other side of the street.

“Be right back,” I said and jumped up, setting my lunch down.

I caught them just as they reached their baby-blue DeSoto convertible. They were dressed pretty much the same—pink summer blouses, white pedal pushers, white dressy sandals. And the darkest sunglasses this side of Elizabeth Taylor.

They looked alike, too. Quiet beauty all the richer the longer you studied it.

“Hi, Sara, I wondered if I could call you this afternoon.”

“Get in the car, Dierdre.”

“Mom, didn’t you hear him?”

“Didn’t you hear me, Dierdre? I said to get in the car.”

“Sara, we really do need to sit down and talk.”

“Mom, do you have any idea how embarrassing this is? Why don’t you at least answer him?”

“I’ll answer him when you get in the car.”

“This is very embarrassing, Mr.

McCain. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. Your mom’s obviously having a bad day.”

“My mom’s always having a bad day.”

Dierdre got in the car. Crossed her arms across her chest.

“I have nothing to say to you,” Sara Hall said to me.

“I’m trying to help you, Sara.”

“How noble.”

“Would you prefer if I just started talking right here? In front of your daughter?”

“Yes, Mother,” Dierdre said. “That’d be fun, wouldn’t it?”

“I resent this,” Sara Hall said.

“So do I. You owe me some answers.”

“I don’t owe you anything. And I plan to take this up with Judge Whitney, believe me.”

I knew better than to say that the Judge already knew I’d be talking to Sara. “I’d appreciate it if you’d be at my office at four o’clock.”

“If she isn’t there, I will be, Mr.

McCain.”

That was another point I’d make on my list.

Muldaur’s daughter and Hall’s daughter offering to cooperate even though their mothers refused to.

“I’ll see you at four,” Sara Hall said, and got into her car.

I could see them pantomiming an argument as the swept-fin convertible swept away. I had the sense that it was an argument they’d had many times. I wondered what it was about. I felt sure it had some bearing on the murders.

“Ah,” I said, sitting down next to Kylie on the bench again and picking up my lunch. “Just the way I like it. My cheeseburger’s cold and my iced tea’s hot.”

“I’m now a black-belt in fly-shooing. It looked like Pearl Harbor on your burger.” She sipped her iced tea. “So, did you learn anything?”

“Just that Sara and Dierdre Hall don’t seem to get along very well.”

“Any idea why?”

“Not yet.”

“Meaning you plan to find out?”

“Of course. Before Richard Milhous

Nixon gets here and finds out that we have murders just like everybody else.”

“He says he’s not sure if he loves

her.”

“I take it we’re not talking about Nixon anymore.”

“He says he knows he’s being unfair to me and he wouldn’t blame me if I just walked out.

We really got into a terrible argument—the people downstairs were banging on the wall and everything—and then we ended up making love practically all night. And then when he was leaving for school this morning—even though he doesn’t have any classes today—I asked him if I’d see him tonight and he said that he had a date with her.”

“Ah.”

“That’s all you’re going to say? Ah? What kind of comment is that?”

“A non-comment. I’m staying out of this, remember?”

“Well, pretend it’s you and not me. What would you do, then?”

“That’s how it sorta was at the end with Pamela. We finally made love one night and as soon as we were finished the phone rang. It was good ole Stu and she went rushing off to him.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you take her back?”

“She never came back. Not really, anyway.

She snuck away a few days later because Stu was having second thoughts about dumping his wife and family and the governorship.”

“What governorship?”

“Everybody figured it was his turn to be governor.”

“But he’s here now.”

“Yes, he is. Rebuilding his image after running away with a hussy.”

“And where’s Pamela?”

“Hiding somewhere. I’m not sure where, exactly.”

“What if she called and asked you to get married?”

“I don’t know. That’s the only answer I can give you.”

“She walked all over you.”

“Yes.”

“And ditched you for somebody else.”

“Yes.”

“And you’d still consider taking her back.”

“I’d consider it, I suppose.”

“Well, that’s exactly how I’d feel, McCain. I’d consider it.”

“We’re a couple of fools,” I said, “is what we are.”

“Damned fools.”

“Double-damned fools.”

“We’re really pathetic, you know that?”

“Do I know it? Do I know it? I make myself sick I know it so much.”

And that’s when I saw this guy working his way up the street, slipping leaflets under windshield wipers.

“I’ll call you at work this afternoon,” I said.

“I’m really going to need you tonight, McCain.”

“Good. Because I’m really going to need you, too.”

She grabbed my hand. “You are?”

“Sure I am.” And then I did something I really shouldn’t ought to have done. I leaned over and gave her a kiss right on the mouth. A married woman—well, a somewhat married woman—right on the mouth.

Just the kind of thing I’d expect from you, I could hear my ninth-grade nun, Sister Mary Florence, saying. Just the kind of thing I’d expect from you.

John Parnell was a chunky guy with a limp that resulted from a grade-school tractor accident. He wore a lime-colored

T-shirt and jeans and sandals. He was bending over a Ford station wagon to slap a leaflet beneath its windshield.

“Hi, John.”

He backed himself off the car hood he’d been bent over and said, “Hey, McCain, how ya doin’?”

“Fine. Or I was till I saw you putting those leaflets on car windows.”

He grinned. “Yeah, that’d make the nuns mad, wouldn’t it?”

I nodded to the stack of leaflets in his car.

He was still the freckled, snub-nosed guy I’d always known. I couldn’t connect him to the leaflets.

“You printed them and now you’re distributing them?”

“Yep. That’s what God wants me

to do, McCain.”

“He told you that?”

“Now you’re being blasphemous, Sam.”

Maybe this wasn’t the old Parnell I’d known.

“You’re a Catholic, Parnell, and you’re handing this stuff out?”

He shook his head. “Not anymore I’m not.

A Catholic, I mean.”

“Since when?”

He shrugged. “Well, the wife—I’m not sure you ever met her, gal from Sioux City I met when I was doing my printing apprenticeship up there—anyway, she was raised as an evangelical. And what with one thing and another she kinda got me interested in the whole thing. She always says you should feel bad when you go to church.

And I tried ‘em all—Lutheran, Baptist, Presbyterian. But they always tried to make you feel good. But bad’s the only way you know your religion’s workin’ for you. When you feel terrible.

And that’s what we both liked about Reverend Muldaur. His whole deal was how unworthy we all are. And I believe that, McCain. You might believe something else—but that’s what I believe, McCain.”

“But the snakes—”

“That’s what people don’t understand.”

“What don’t people understand?”

“They’re not snakes.”

“They sure looked like it to me.”

“They’re devils. Really and truly.

Devils. Evil spirits. I’ve held them. I can feel their evil. I truly can. But they didn’t bite me because Reverend Muldaur cleansed my soul before he handed me the snakes.”

“But all this bullshit about Jews and Catholics—”

“I don’t use words like bdds. anymore, Sam. But I’ll tell you, they’re both out to conquer the world. They know they can’t do it alone, so they’ve joined forces. And the only people who can stop them are people like me.” He leaned forward confidentially. He smelled of sweat and onions.

“And there’re a lot of people in this town who believe the same way I do, Sam. But they don’t want people to know it.”

“So you just gave him all this printing free?”

“Heck, no. A friend of his paid for it.”

“What friend?”

He leaned toward me again. He mst’ve had an onion sandwich with some onion rings and onion juice on the side. “Like I said, Sam, there’re a lot of folks in this town who agree with everything we do. And one of them was nice enough to pick up the tab for the printing. I just charged my costs.

No profit. That wouldn’t be right, seeing’s how I was doing it for the Lord.”

Parnell, Parnell, what did somebody drug you with? How can you possibly believe this crap?

Then I realized it was time for me to go pick up the rabbi and the monsignor. We were doing some target practice this afternoon with the guns in the church basement.

“I’d really appreciate it if you told me who paid for the printing, John. I’m trying to find out who killed Muldaur.”

“I know you are. We all hear the Judge is trying to get it all cleaned up before Nixon gets here. Now, there’s a guy with almost as many Jew friends as Kennedy has. Hard to know who to vote for.”

I couldn’t deal with it any longer.

“You’re making me so damn sad, Parnell.”

“And you’re making me sad, too, Sam. I saw you over there eating with that Jewess. She’s not fit company for a true Christian, Sam.”

“Well, she’s fit company for me. She’s a damned good woman, in fact.”

He shook his head. He really did seem sad. “The ways of the flesh, Sam, the ways of the flesh.”

At one time, the two-room house had probably looked pretty nice sitting all alone by the fast creek in the curve of a copse of pine. It looked like one of those houses a fella could order himself from the Sears Roebuck catalog late in the 1890’s. Such homes came with assembly instructions; the fancier kits even included hammers and other tools. You could see some of these Sears houses standing well into the 1940’s, by the grace of spit and God, as the old saying had it.

Ned Blimes, whose last name and current address I’d learned by asking around, didn’t seem to be at home as I pulled my ragtop behind a stand of pine to the west of his house. I didn’t want my car to pick up any

stray bullets.

A dainty man, he wasn’t. His meals apparently included a lot of self-shot squirrel meat because the grass on the side of his place was strewn with carcasses. Several gleaming crows hovered nearby. I’d interrupted their meal. I’ve never been able to tolerate the smell of squirrel meat frying. The air was coarse and bloody with it.

I knocked on the front door of the shack-like house. The lone front window was filled with cardboard and just a jagged remnant of the glass that had once covered it.

The crows went back to eating. The pollen got to me and I sneezed. And somebody poked something in my back.

The smell told me it was Yosemite Sam himself.

“Put your hands over your head.”

“This high enough?”

“Higher.”

“This is as high as I can go.”

“What’chu want, McCain?”

“I wanted to ask you some questions.”

“About what?”

“About Muldaur.”

“Don’t want to talk about Muldaur.”

“Why not?”

“Because that was part of the bargain.”

“What bargain?”

He guffawed. Or whinnied. I couldn’t be sure. Maybe it was a guffaw-whinny. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

“Gee, I haven’t heard that one since third grade.”

“Huh?”

“How about taking the gun out of my back?”

“Then how about you gettin’ in that car of yours and gettin’ the hell out of here?”

Then he started marching me back to my car.

I still had my hands above my head. There was a variety of animal poop all over the buffalo grass. I am happy to report that my black penny loafers didn’t touch any of it.

“What happened out there the day you took Muldaur snakin’?”

“Who tole you somethin’ happened?”

“You did.”

“I did? When?”

“When I saw you at Muldaur’s

place. You said something like “He was the only one who made any money that day.””

“Shit,” he said.

“What?”

“You sure I said that?”

“I sure am.”

“Then I shouldn’t’ve. Me’n my big mouth.”

We’d reached my car.

He prodded and poked me with the barrel of his rifle. I got in and got behind the wheel.

“You just forget I said anything, mister.”

“I’m not going to.”

“Well, you damned well better,” he said.

“You can’t make me.”

“Bet I can,” he said, and put the tip of the rifle about three inches from my face.

“You always talk like you’re in third grade?”

“Do you? Now you get the hell out of here and you don’t bother me no more, you understand that?”

When I got back to the office, I got out my list and added a few more items.

Why were Sara and Dierdre Hall so angry at each other?

Who paid Parnell the printing costs?

What happened the day Muldaur and Ned Blimes went snaking? Jamie had left me a typed note:

I Finisshed Up Tyyping Earlie

So Me And Tturc Went Swimming.

This Time Wit Our Close On.

He-he. I Cracked A Funnie,

Mrr C. Jamie

Well, she was coming along, anyway, God love her. A couple of times she’d even mistyped her own name—?Jammie” and “Jaamie”—s hanging around Turk—excuse me “Tturc”—was apparently starting to pay off. The first time I’d interviewed her for the job, she’d told me, “My dad says he hasn’t got a lot upstairs, Turk I mean, and maybe he doesn’t. But he’s got a lot of common sense. Like one day this big dog was really growling at me and he had this kind of foamy stuff dripping from his mouth. And you know what Turk said?