The Day the Music Died
A Sam McCain Mystery
Ed Gorman
To Roz, Madeline and Marty—the Greenbergs of Green Bay—with fondness, gratitude and love
Preview:
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?
He wasn’t really happy; he was only watching happiness from close to instead of from far away.
—Graham Green,
“The Basement Room”
1
S
HE DIDN’T SAY MUCH
after we left the Surf Ballroom that night, Pamela Forrest.
Which meant one of three things. (1) She didn’t like Buddy Holly nearly as much as I did. (2) She was worried ’bout the long trip back to Black River Falls on the wintry roads of February 3, 1959. (3) She was thinking about Stu Grant, the wealthy young man she’d been in love with since ninth grade, the only problem being that I’d been in love with
her
since fourth grade.
Or maybe it was my ragtop that made her silent. She knew how much I prized my 1951 red Ford convertible with the custom skirts, the louvered hood and the special weave top. The trouble was, despite the custom convertible top, the Ford could get pretty cold when the night winds blew across the dead Iowa cornfields, and the head-winds were enough to push the car into the next lane every once in a while. There was a bad snowstorm around the area of the ballroom. It took us forty-five minutes to drive out of it.
I had the noisy heater on full tilt and as a consequence I had to turn the radio way up to be heard over it. I was playing the rock and roll station out of Oklahoma City, KOMA: 100,000 clear-channel watts of pure pleasure. Gene Vincent was on now, and there was the promise of Little Richard’s new song within the half hour. We had a three-and-a-half hour drive ahead of us, so I was going to need all the rock and roll I could get.
“You think we could change the station?” the lovely Pamela Forrest finally said.
“The station?”
“Please. That stuff’s giving me a headache.”
“Gee, then tonight must have been terrible for you. You should’ve said something.”
“I knew how much it meant to you, McCain, seeing Buddy Holly and those other people. I didn’t want to spoil it for you.”
“Then you didn’t even like Holly?”
She sighed. “Don’t take this the wrong way, McCain, but I still like Perry Como better.” Then, “And Stu’s teaching me about opera. That’s what he listens to all the time. That, and classical music.”
“Good ole Stu.”
“I told you, didn’t I, that he was nominated for Outstanding Young Lawyer of the Year, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, I dimly recall you mentioning it six or seven thousand times.”
“That doesn’t mean you’re not a good lawyer, McCain.”
“I’ll try and remember that.”
“Or that you won’t be a judge someday yourself.”
“Who said he was going to be a judge?”
“Well, how’s he ever going to get on the Supreme Court if he isn’t a judge first?”
Good old Stu. Modesty had never been a problem for him.
I couldn’t take talking about Stu’s plan to become the Supreme Ruler of the Known Universe anymore, so I changed the station. I couldn’t find Perry Como for her. But I did find Jerry Vale and some other crooners. This seemed to satisfy her. She snuggled up on her side of the car, her astonishingly lovely legs up on the seat and covered with her long, brown coat. She stared out the window.
Despite a full moon, there wasn’t much to see. After a snowfall like the one we’d had the past two days, rural Iowa in the moonlight looks like the surface of an alien world—long, white, empty stretches of land where the wind stirs up dust devils of chill snow every once in a while. The only signs of life are the distant lights of snug little farmhouses tucked in windbreaks of oak trees or jack pine. Every once in a while, there’d be what they call a hamlet, a block or so of darkened buildings, usually a co-op and a general store and a gas station. There might be a tavern open, Johnny Cash brooding and lonely and dangerous in the prairie night. Then darkness again as you hit the highway, the hamlet suddenly vanished, like a dream on waking.
“You aren’t, you know,
expecting
anything are you tonight, McCain?”
“Nah.”
“Because I was very careful not to mislead you.”
“I know.”
“It’s nothing personal.”
“Sure, it’s personal,” I said. “But it’s not
personal
personal.”
She laughed. “Boy, you say some strange things sometimes.”
After about forty miles, the heater started to do some good. I wished I could do some good. I’d tried several conversation starters but none of them had worked. She’d mutter something in return, then go back to staring out the window.
I said, “So if you don’t like rock and roll, why’d you go tonight?”
I guess you pretty much know the answer I wanted. The one where she’d say, “Because I just wanted to be alone with you, McCain.”
Instead, she said, “Because I owe you for helping me move.”
“Oh.”
“That was hard work.”
“Oh.”
“So I just figured I should pay you back.”
Two weeks ago, on very short notice, she’d had the chance to move into an apartment in the old Belding mansion. The apartment had a fireplace, veranda and large living room. She needed help. I offered my services and those of Leonard Dubois, Leonard being one of my legal clients. I got him a bench parole for his earnest attempt to become a burglar and he’s been grateful ever since. Not grateful enough to pay me, of course, so I figured I might as well get some work out of him. We spent all day Saturday and half a day Sunday getting Pamela moved in. It didn’t rain half as much as predicted. Both days when we finished, I asked Leonard to empty his pockets. He only stole stuff on Saturday. I guess by Sunday he’d learned his lesson. Maybe this is what rehabilitation means.
About halfway home, Pamela put her feet on the floor and her head against the back of the seat and went to sleep. She snored, but not loudly, and sometimes she whistled when she snored, like a teakettle. It was cute and it made me sentimental about her and when I get sentimental about her, I get scared because then I realize that I’m probably going to be in love with her the rest of my life. It’s hard to figure, why I’m in love with her, I mean. Her grandfather’s wealth had been lost in the Depression. Her parents were forced to live in the Knolls for several years, but they always drove their shiny eight-year-old Packard and always managed to get themselves invited to country club do’s. And there was Pamela, beautiful little yearning eight-year-old Pamela, too good for us in the Knolls but not good enough for the rich kids. And I guess I kind of felt sorry for her or something because one day I woke up and I was in love with her and it was like an incurable disease.
She started talking in her sleep. It was very earnest, the talk, but I had no idea what she was saying. And then she was awake. For a moment, she looked disoriented, lost. Then, she said, “Oh,” and sat back again and stared out the window.
“You were dreaming.”
“Yes.”
“You were talking, too.”
“Yes, I remember. To my mom. I was telling her that we were rich again. She used to tell me what it was like to walk downtown on Saturday morning with Granddad, how big and handsome he was. She said he was nice, too, always giving people money when he felt they deserved it. He’d been poor when he was a kid. She said it was really neat, walking down the street with him and people smiling at them and tipping their hats and stuff like that.” Then her voice got teary. “I’d just like to be able to tell her before she dies that we’re rich again. I love her so much.” Her mother had a heart condition. The prognosis wasn’t good.
We got into Black Rivers Falls, population 26,750 or thereabouts, around three in the morning. I drove straight through the business district. Most of the stores had been built in the twenties and thirties. There were a lot of gargoyles and Roman numerals chipped into the stone and concrete. The snow-covered city park was fronted by the statue of a Yankee general who was now used as target practice by militaristic pigeons, and the octagonal band-stand had been defaced by the chalked name of various rock stars including, my god, Pat Boone. But the modern world was here, too, a shiny red Corvette in the window of Daniels’ Chevrolet and an Edsel in the window of Loomis’ Ford, Tony Curtis and Rock Hudson on the marquee of the Avalon. Even the taverns were dark. An overhead red light was getting whipped around pretty good in the windy intersection and snow was starting to stick on the sidewalks.
Pamela woke up. “God, Judge Whitney’s going to kill me if I have dark rings under my eyes. You know how she gets.”
“Tell her it’s none of her business.”
She smiled sleepily. “Right, McCain. That’s just how
you’d
handle, it, isn’t it? You’re more afraid of her than I am.”
Which was true, I guess. As a young lawyer in a town that already had too many lawyers, I earned more than 60 percent of my income as an investigator for Judge Esme Anne Whitney. I’d even taken two years worth of criminology courses at the U of Iowa in Iowa City so I could be even more help to the judge, making the forty-mile roundtrip three nights a week until I became the proud owner of my private investigator’s license. But to earn any money with that license, I had to stay on Judge Whitney’s good side. Assuming, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, that she actually
had
a good side.
The Belding mansion is on Winthrop Avenue, which is where the wealthy of the town first settled. The estates run to three-acre lawns, carriage houses and native stone mansions that have a castlelike air about them. The Belding mansion was big enough to have a moat. But now it was broken up into apartments for “proper” working girls.
I drove through the open iron gates right up to the wide front steps. It was like dropping a girl off at her college dorm.
She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, a rustle of skirt and blouse and coat, a seductive scent of perfume. “Sorry, I wasn’t more fun. You really should find a girl, McCain.”
I started to say something, then she said, “It’s Stu’s birthday. I guess I was preoccupied with that a little bit. That’s why I didn’t talk more.”
“He’s engaged, Pamela. I’m not engaged. I just thought I’d point that out.”
She shook her head. She has the quiet beauty of the past century, those huge blue eyes and the wide serious mouth that can break into a girly smile with devastating ease. “He won’t marry her.”
“He won’t?”
“He told me he won’t. He said he only got engaged because he’s running for governor in four years and the Republican steering committee said it’d look better if he was engaged. That’s why he got his pilot’s license, too. So people wouldn’t just write him off as a rich boy. He flies sick kids up to the Mayo Clinic all the time, remember.”
“I wonder if she knows that. His fiancée. Why he got engaged to her.”
“The point is, McCain, he loves me, not her.”
“And he told you that?”
“Yes, of course he told me that. In fact, he tells me that twice a week. When he calls.”
What we had here was a young man afraid to displease his folks. Pamela and I grew up in a hilly area north of town called the Knolls. You find a lot of junked cars in the front yards of the Knolls, and at least twice a night, a red siren comes blazing up there, usually to stop a man from beating up his wife and to arrest a teenager who thought that smashing car windows was a Junior Achievement project. Most of the lives there are like the junked cars in the front yards.
This is not the kind of background Stu’s parents wanted to add to their family history, even if the girl did look a lot like Grace Kelly. Stu loved Pamela but he loved his parents and his social situation more. Pamela didn’t seem to understand this. She’d learned how to dress, how to speak, how to act, how to tell one kind of fork from the other, and she felt that would be enough for Stu. But it wasn’t enough for his folks, and never would be.
