Sam McCain - 04 - Save the Last Dance for Me (19 page)

Things get all out of proportion for us. Something mildly amusing becomes unbearably hilarious.

Something modestly sad becomes a cause for great theatrical tears.

Tonight, for instance, Art Carney did a routine on “The Honeymooners” that made me laugh so hard I had to dash (well, stumble forward quickly) to the bathroom before I yellowed my Sears underwear; and then on “Gunsmoke” they had this story about a young crippled girl who becomes a gunfighter in order to avenge her brother, and man, tears were dripping off my chin when she got killed in the end.

I had the great good sense to go to bed shortly after that.

Sometime in the sticky murk of sleep—not even the fan cooled things off in any substantial way—the phone rang. Rang several times.

Rang loud enough to stir me but not loud enough to make me pick it up.

I fell back to sleep.

The phone started ringing again and this time, I picked it up.

“Hullo.”

“McCain?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“Never.”

“This is Judge Whitney.”

“Yes, I recognized you. You’re sort of hard to confuse with anybody else.”

“Get some coffee in you and then head for the jail.

I’ll meet you there.”

“The jail? What for?”

“Cliffie, Jr., in his infinite wisdom, has just arrested Sara Hall for murdering Muldaur and Courtney.”

249

You have to wonder how word could spread at three o’clock in the morning. No air-raid sirens had sounded, no words were bellowed from the loudspeakers the city had planted in various places, no Paul Revere had hopped in his car and driven up and down the dark streets announcing that Sara Hall had been arrested for murder.

And yet there they were, maybe as many as fifteen of them, looking like the kind of crowd you always saw in westerns, the low-murmuring crowd that could turn into a lynch mob when the guy in the black hat appeared and stirred them up.

Except people in those westerns didn’t wear pink hair curlers that made them look like Martians, or Cubs baseball caps and Monkey Ward sleeveless undershirts that emphasized hairy, beachball-like stomachs. And in westerns Annette Funicello wasn’t playing on car radios.

Main Street was empty otherwise, and shadowy, and like the people in the crowd, it suggested a movie, too, small-town Americana. I glimpsed a shooting star and then heard the steady sound of a plane lost in the clouds. Any kind of plane sound suggested only one thing to Americans these days. That’s why we taught civil defense in our schools—?Duck and cover”—and that’s why forty percent of us, according to the Eastern newspapers, were busy building some form of bomb shelter. There were a lot of jokes going around about what Hugh Hefner would put in his bomb shelter.

One of Cliffie’s cousins—a dense deputy named Jebby Sykes—stood in front of the front door of the jail with a shotgun in his arms.

He didn’t look scared. He looked sleepy and he looked rumpled.

“Hey, where you goin’, McCain?”

“Little pecker, he thinks he’s hot stuff, don’t he?”

“Him and that damn Judge Whitney!”

I should have known that it would not be the hard-working people of town who would tumble out of bed in the middle of the night to see somebody prominent thrown in jail.

No, it would be Cliffie’s vast array of cousins, shirttail kin, and mutants who would find this so thrilling. Just imagine, one of them high-tone women who bathed regularly and

wore clean clothes spending the night in Uncle Cliffie’s jail. Who could ask for a bigger thrill than that?

“You got cause to be here, McCain?”

He got all swole up the way

unimportant people do when they’re trying to be important, all swole up with his badge and his wrinkled uniform and his Remington shotgun, all swole up keeping the hair-curlers and the Cubbies caps at bay, all swole up because nobody had ever let him be before. And it was almost sad. That was the terrible thing about the Sykes family. But every once in a while their coarseness, vulgarity, greed, ruthlessness, and stupidity made you sad, too. They were, in the cosmic sense, your brothers and sisters. And there wasn’t a damned thing you could do about it.

“I’m supposed to meet Judge Whitney here, Jebby.”

“She’s inside. But that don’t mean I got to let you in.”

“Are you still mad because I caught your fly ball that day?”

“You damn right I—” Then stopped himself.

“What fly ball he talking about, Jebby?”

said a mostly toothless man.

“Never you mind, Cousin Bob,” Jebby said.

He looked pained. “Cliff said I was to pack you people up in your cars and get you back home.

Otherwise he’s gonna gnaw on me somethin’

terrible. Now, will you do that for me?”

“Maybe she’ll try’n escape,” somebody said.

“Yeah, and then Cliff would have to shoot her,”

said another.

“Now, we wouldn’t want to miss somethin’ like that,” said the first.

Jebby scowled.

“She ain’t gonna escape. She’s really ladylike. How’d she ever get outta jail?

No, now you folks get back home before Cliff gets mad at me. Please. I

promise to have my mama make you some of her special rhubarb pie for the family reunion this year.”

“Enough for everybody, Jebby?”

“Enough for everybody.”

A woman said, “You know how Cliff can be on people who work for him. Maybe we better leave Jebby here alone.”

“She escapes, though, don’t forget them dogs of mine,” a man said.

I wanted to ask if anybody had any tanks or B-52’s. Sara Hall was a

dangerous woman. You couldn’t be too careful.

They all said their good-nights, and now there was something peaceful about them and their shabbiness made me feel guilty for always holding myself to be so superior to people like them, and then they left.

“That was a home run. You stole it.”

“I didn’t steal it,” I said.

“It was over the center field fence.”

“Yeah, but I caught it, didn’t I?”

He looked at me squarely. He was just faintly cross-eyed.

“That would’ve been the only homer I ever hit.

I wanted my folks to be proud of me. My daddy was at that game. He had that heart condition.

I wanted him to see me do good at somethin’ because he always said I was like him, that I wasn’t good at nothin’. He died about two weeks later.”

Ninth grade that had been. Ten years ago.

I’d felt so damned good about making the catch, all the way back to the wall in the American Legion baseball park built over by the old swimming pool, all the way back to the wall, snatching it from being a certain home run. God, I’d strutted around. Major leagues, here I come. But knowing all the time that I was just about like Jebby, I wasn’t much good at things either, not the manly things so treasured by all boys, not good with hammer, not good with football, not good with car engine, not good with simple physical labor that required even the dimmest skill. And for that wonderful moment—my teammates patting me on the back and telling me what a great player I was—I was good at the manly and thus important things. It had been pure fluke to catch it and now here was Jebby telling me that it had been pure fluke to hit it.

“God, I’m sorry I brought it up,

Jebby. I just said it to piss you off.”

He shrugged. “I don’t blame you,

McCain. Neither of us was worth a shit.” He smiled. His slightly crossed eyes smiled, too. “It was time for one of us losers to have a little bit of luck, wasn’t it? You was never mean to us Sykeses the way some of them was, so if anybody had to catch that homer of mine, I’m glad it was you.”

Then he stood back and said, “The Judge, she’s in Cliff’s office.”

The Judge was in Cliffie’s office, all right. He was crouching in his desk chair, doing everything but covering his face with his arms, while she shouted at him and blew Gauloise smoke in his face. Not even his crisp khaki uniform and all the framed photos of him holding various types of rifles, shotguns, howitzers, could make him look in control of this moment.

“The idea of arresting one of this town’s most upstanding citizens—and my best friend—is ridiculous. You know and I know, Cliffie, that this is just one more of your little games to embarrass me as the only intelligent representative of law and order in this town!”

Oh, she was blistering. Oh, she was bombastic. Oh, she was absolutely right.

What sort of reason would Cliffie have for arresting poor Sara Hall? And she did all this in a white shirt, dark slacks, and a blue suede car coat that cost a lot more than my ragtop.

“You always have to arrest somebody, don’t you, and it’s always the wrong person, isn’t it?” she concluded.

Which is what I asked him as soon as the Judge saw me and gave me the floor. “You had to arrest somebody, didn’t you, Cliffie? You just can’t let a few days pass without throwing somebody in that pigsty of a jail of yours, can you?”

“We clean it once a week. And we clean it good.”

“Yeah, but the drunks puke in it every night,”

I said.

“I don’t want to coddle prisoners the way you two do. The smell of puke’ll be an incentive to stay out of jail.”

The Judge looked at me and said, “He’s medieval.”

“And moronic.”

“And malevolent.”

“And malignant.”

“And a lot of other M words,” she sneered, “if we just had time to go through them all.”

With “malevolent” and “malignant”

Cliffie’s face had gone blank. He was still trying to figure out what they meant.

“I’m holding her on a charge of first-degree murder,” he said, sitting up straight,

trying to convince us, and himself, that he was back in control.

“You’re forgetting something, Cliffie,” I said.

“What?”

“She’s the judge with jurisdiction in this case.” I pointed to the Judge.

“Yeah? Big deal.”

“It is a big deal, Cliffie,” I said.

“She can set bail.”

“And I’m setting bail right now,” the Judge interjected. “Ten dollars.”

“That’s crazy! Nobody sets a ten-dollar bail in a murder case.”

“I do,” Judge Whitney said.

“I’m gonna file a motion,” he said.

“What sort of motion?” I said.

“To the state Supreme Court.”

Actually, they’d probably not only hear his motion but also agree with him that a ten-dollar bail was ridiculous.

“Do you have a fin on you?” Judge Whitney said. Sometimes, she tries to sound like Barbara Stanwyck.

“I think you mean a sawbuck.”

“A sawbuck. Do you have one?”

I nodded and got out my wallet. Have you ever noticed how rich people never seem to carry cash?

Could that possibly account for how they got rich in the first place?

I slapped it down on Cliffie’s desk.

“I hereby grant this bail,” Judge

Whitney said. “Now go get Sara.”

“You gotta fill out forms.”

“You’ll have your forms in the morning. Now go get Sara.”

“Stash!”

Stash was the night deputy.

“Why’d you arrest her, Cliffie?” I said.

“Don’t call me Cliffie or I’ll

arrest you.”

“You didn’t have anything on her.”

“The hell I didn’t.”

“Oh? Like what?”

“Like a tip to look in her garage. And guess what I found there?”

Stash, a guy with a ducktail haircut that was greasier than Jerry Lee Lewis’, peeked in and said, “Uh-huh.”

“Stash, go get the Hall broad and bring her here.”

He finger-popped Cliffie and said, “Gotcha, Chief.”

“The Hall broad,” the Judge said under her breath.

“So what did you find?” I asked after Stash and his very loud heel-clips disappeared to the back and the jail.

“I found a can of strychnine just where the caller said it would be.”

“Was the caller a man or woman?”

“I don’t have to tell you squat.”

“Man or woman, Cliffie?”

He grinned. “Well, it was one or the other.”

“Moronic,” the Judge said.

“No, we used that word already.”

“Mediocre, then.”

I smiled. “That’s almost a compliment for somebody like Cliffie.”

Stash and his heel clips were back. A disheveled Sara Hall fell into the arms of her friend the Judge and the Judge, without once looking back at Cliffie or saying good-bye to me, left with Sara in tow. On the other side of the door, Sara glanced back at me and I knew then that she knew I’d broken my word to her and told the Judge about Dierdre’s pregnancy.

It wasn’t a hateful glance, just a weary one.

I’d betrayed her and she’d never trust me again.

I suppose in the cosmic scheme of things it didn’t matter a whole hell of a lot. But I certainly felt ashamed of myself, and sad that she’d never again count me as a friend.

“Ten dollars,” Cliffie said. “I can’t believe it.”

“Hell, Cliffie,” I said, watching him again, “she could’ve made it five.”

A weeping Dierdre was led into the long dining room ten minutes after we arrived at Judge Whitney’s. The Judge ordered breakfast for everybody and then we all sat down with cigarettes and coffee—the Judge, of course, drinking brandy—fffigure out exactly what to do next.

“Was it your rat strychnine he found?” I asked Sara.

“I’d never seen it before.”

“Did he present you with a search warrant?”

“Yes.”

“Where were you while all this was going

on?” I asked Dierdre.

“Being sick,” she said. “I’m still sick.”

She touched her stomach. “The baby.”

“Did Cliffie dust for fingerprints?”

“Not that I saw. He came to the front door and pounded and pounded till I woke up. He left his emergency lights on. Which woke up all the neighbors, of course. It was very embarrassing.”

“So then he led you out to the garage?”

“Yes. Then he started looking around.”

“And he found the poison.”

She nodded. Then: “I’m picturing it now.

He just picked it up. He couldn’t have looked for fingerprints.”

“Good old Cliffie.”