The Day the Music Died (13 page)

I stayed in the tub an hour. I had to keep replenishing the hot water supply. I’d get it just hot enough that I could break a sweat.

Then Mary said, “Well, I’d better get going. It’s almost nine o’clock. Wes’s meeting’ll be breaking up pretty soon.”

She stood on the other side of the half-opened door. I got a brief glimpse of her beret. “Thanks for taking care of me,” I said.

“My pleasure.”

We didn’t say anything, which was, in its own way, terrible.

“Well,” she said.

“Thanks again.”

“Sure.”

“Maybe I’ll stop by tomorrow for lunch.”

“Great. Maybe I’ll see you then.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Well,” she said.

“Well, good night.”

“’Night.”

I listened to her going down the back stairs. I don’t know if footsteps can actually sound sad but hers seemed to. And I, of course, felt like shit. Wes was a pompous ass and what was I doing letting her marry somebody like him? Why the hell did I have to be so hung up on Pamela? I could picture Mary walking home alone, in and out of those pools of light cast by streetlights, pausing on corners like a good little girl to look both ways even though there wasn’t any traffic, fetching in her beret and with those earnest brown eyes of hers. She’d walk the two blocks home from here and then a girlfriend would drive her out to get her car at the rink in the morning before work.

I stayed in the tub another half hour. My thoughts drifted to two subjects, the cleatlike soles on the bottoms of Robert Frazier’s shoes, and the fact that Susan Whitney had been killed by a .32. Judge Whitney wanted me to prove that her nephew wasn’t a murderer—a wife beater, a gambler, a drunk and a bully, yes, but not, God forbid, a murderer.

I watched twenty minutes of
Jack Paar
and then went to bed. I tried to read but I kept dozing off, the paperback falling on my chest. Finally, I clipped the light off and gave in to sleep.

I don’t wake up easily. You wouldn’t want me as your first line of defense. About the time the Russian Army was marching down Main Street, my eyelids would slowly be opening.

But something woke me. There was winter wind, more November than February, and a shutter next door banging. And there were footsteps. I began to picture one careful footstep after another pressing down on the wooden stairs leading to my back entrance.

I slipped out of bed in the darkness. Both Tasha and Crystal looked seriously disturbed. They tried to cover their fear with yawns but I could tell they were scared.

I wore pajama bottoms. I carried the Louisville Slugger, Mickey Mantle model, that I keep next to my bed for good luck—good luck to split open the skull of any uninvited nocturnal guest.

I crept to the back window. Eased back the shade a quarter-inch. Looked down upon the backyard.

Blue midnight snow. A sentry row of silver garbage cans. A small shed where the lawn mower and other yard equipment is kept, the smell of mown grass intoxicating and powerful inside the tiny shed, a contraband sniff of summer. A narrow alley where tots rode brooms all summer long, said brooms turned into fiery steeds with a child’s alchemy.

No sign of anybody. Everything so still, except for the windstirred crystals of blue midnight snow, that it might have been a painting.

No sign of anybody.

And then the inching wood-aching sound of secret steps on stairs.

My visitor was working his way up to the door.

I gripped the bat and stood next to the back door, the one he’d have to come through. Surprise is always the best weapon.

Three, four, five, six steps. I decided, given how my calves hurt from my tiptoeing, that I’d probably pass on my next chance to become a ballet dancer. That stuff hurts.

I was at the door. And so was he. The topmost step creaked.

I got my bat ready. I reached out and gripped the doorknob. And then I jerked the doorknob as hard as I could.

Forgetting that it was locked.

That’s one of the problems with being awakened from a sound sleep. You don’t think clearly.

He heard me. My guest heard me and started down the stairs about eight times faster than he’d come up them. I wasn’t going to chase him in pajama bottoms and bare feet.

I ran back to the kitchen window, flung back the shade and looked down on the backyard where my retreating guest was leaving heavy footprints in the blue snow.

No mistaking who he was. There was only one person that big in town who could run that fast: an ex-football player named Darin Greene.

A
L MONAHAN LOST BOTH
his legs on Guam. When he got home, he took a small inheritance he’d come into and opened his restaurant downtown. Folks didn’t have much hope for him. Much as they felt sorry for him, and much as they liked him and much as they appreciated the sacrifice he’d made as their wartime surrogate, there were already three cafes that catered to the daytime crowds. But Al surprised them. He could zip around his restaurant in his wheelchair right smartly, and he was a damned good cook. It took a year, and a couple of modest bank loans, but Al finally got the place in the black and eleven years later had the restaurant where all the local Brahmins chose to eat breakfast and lunch. Al had one wall fixed up like a war memorial. Everybody in town who’d served in the big war got his photo on the wall plus newspaper stories citing any medals or awards he’d won. Al got in a flap with some Korean War vets, Al claiming, like a lot of other WWII vets, that Korea wasn’t a war, it was a United Nations police action, and that they therefore weren’t really veterans of a bona fide war. People figured that he had a right to his bigotry, having lost two legs in the big war, but Al wasn’t alone. A lot of veterans’ groups didn’t want to let in Korean-era vets, either. Al came to his senses one day when the front door of his place opened up and a man rolled in a wheelchair. Both his legs and an arm were gone, lost in Korea. A few hours later, the man’s photo was up on the wall, as well as the newspaper clipping about his purple heart and silver star, and Al had himself a new cook trainee.

Al’s was crowded as always. I sat down at the counter and ordered my four pancakes, hash browns, orange juice, coffee and Pepsi. I’m pretty much a Pepsiholic. Mom always says she’s surprised I don’t take it intravenously while I sleep.

Juanita, the voluptuous farm-girl waitress, took my order and sashayed to the back to call it in, her hips swinging in time to the rhythms of Jo Stafford’s cheery “Mockingbird Hill” played low on the jukebox. You would find no rock and roll on Al’s jukebox. Al’s favorite song was “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” He never tired of the dog barking in the bridge of the song. As a culture maven, he’s a great short-order cook.

When the voluptuous Juanita brought my coffee, she asked me about falling into the pond last night, and then everybody along the counter joined in, too. The consensus was that I was lucky. A farmer said that there were places in that pond that were twenty-feet deep. Then we started talking about the dead girl in the canoe. Her identity seemed to be a mystery and it was getting on to 7:30
A.M.
But they were working very hard—“they” being Cliffie, on the assumption that she was the missing girl.

He was late arriving. Most mornings, he was already here when I took my place at the counter. Not today. He would have been busy with funeral arrangements for his daughter, Susan. But folks out here are creatures of strong habit. I knew a guy who went for a mile walk every morning and he went no matter what, even during a tornado one day. He wasn’t hurt, but he’d seen a couple of trees uprooted.

He came in late and took his special place. He wouldn’t dare have let anybody else have it.

The smells were good here. Bacon and coffee and pancake batter on the scorching griddle. Al had ventilated the place well. You didn’t get much scent of sour grease. The odors were lulling me into grogginess—two nights without much sleep had dulled me considerably; I’m always amazed at how Mike Hammer and those guys do it, go sleepless for days on end, and are keen on lots of sex and violence to boot—and then I looked over at him.

Being the Brahmin of Brahmins, Robert Frazier had his own reserved booth in the back. Every day, the lesser Brahmins trooped back there to pay homage. Occasionally, they’d be asked to sit down and talk. This happened about as often as the Pope said, “Hey, how about a game of craps?”

This morning he was dressed in a homburg and an expensive dark topcoat. I didn’t get a chance to look at his shoes until he was about halfway back to his private booth. The shoes were the big cleated mothers he’d worn yesterday at the judge’s office, the same shoes he’d worn while paying me a visit yesterday.

I let the lesser Brahmins have at him. They were brief today. They’d walk back there, making sure their sorrow masks were in place, and then let the lies filling their mouths spill forth. How much they’d liked Susan and what a great father he’d been to her and how sorry they were for him. Frazier was reviled but he was also feared. He wasn’t actually ruthless, I suppose; he was simply without empathy. If you made a mistake to his advantage—in a business or a personal matter—he’d simply act as business textbooks said he should act. He’d destroyed any number of so-called friends and had done so without any apparent regret. I’d always had the sense that it was all one big poker game to him and there were no personal hard feelings. Not on his part anyway.

They spent twenty minutes with their various genuflections and mea culpas. His grief and rage were there to see and they fed on them: it must have been tasty stuff to many of the lesser Brahmins, Frazier’s grief and rage. Maybe he’d know now how they felt when he decided to up the ante and cause a few players to drop out, devastating family bank accounts in the process. Tasty stuff, indeed.

Juanita served him; she was his favorite. He usually looked at her with the great avaricious eyes of the richest man in the valley. You could see him hope he would someday add her pelt to his belt. She’d only started here a couple of months ago. He’d probably dry-runned various approaches already. There would be outright bribery, but that would probably offend her; there would be offering her a job in one of his businesses, but that could mean trouble after he’d sucked her youth dry and she was still there; and there would be the emotional approach, the I’m lonely approach, though the indignity of such a posture would be impossible for such a proud man to endure. He was, I assumed, still contemplating his line of attack.

But not today.

Today, he paid hardly any attention to her. She took his order and walked away. He didn’t even watch her voodoo hips sway magically.

I let him eat his breakfast. For a big man, and especially one so surly, he ate with surprising delicacy. It was like watching a heavyweight fighter with a broken nose and a flattened ear knit doilies.

When I walked over and he raised his head to see who dared to interrupt his after-breakfast cigar, he said, “I don’t have any time to talk, McCain.”

“You made me do a lot of extra work, Mr. Frazier.”

“Work? What the hell’re you talking about?” He looked like a cartoon war profiter, the big Roman senator head with the deep scowl on the wide mean lips, the fat cigar stuck with great disdain in the corner of the mouth.

“My floor. Those shoes of yours left tracks all over the floor. I had to scrub them up.”

“I still don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do, Mr. Frazier. Sure you do.”

We stared at each other a long moment and then he said, “Sit down.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m going to tell the judge about this, of course. You harassing me like this.”

“She’ll probably ground me and won’t let me have any caramel corn for a week.”

“Did I ever tell you how much I dislike you, McCain?”

“No. But I kind of got that message a long time ago.”

I sat down. I lit up a Pall Mall. I sat back in the booth and looked at him. And said nothing. It was good cop technique, which I learned at the police academy. Silence frequently makes people more nervous than pointed questions.

“I loved her.”

“I’m sure you did, Mr. Frazier.”

“And I could see this coming, the way he got when he drank and everything.”

“He got pretty bad, no doubt about it.”

“So why the hell are you bothering me, McCain?”

I said, calmly, “I wasn’t kidding about wiping up those footprints. Do you know how much I hate doing housework?”

Juanita started over toward us, raising her pad for action. Frazier waved her angrily away.

“What is it you want from me?”

“I want to know what you were looking for in my apartment.”

“I wasn’t in your apartment.”

“Sure you were.”

He put his cigar in the ashtray and then put his head back against the booth and closed his eyes. He stayed that way for at least a minute. I became aware of all the sounds around me. Cafes are noisy places when you actually sit down and listen to them. Waitresses should wear earplugs, like flight crews.

He raised his head and opened his eyes. He looked at me and said, “I wanted to see if you were the one blackmailing him.”

“Blackmailing Kenny?”

“The son of a bitch, whoever it is, has already cost me a lot of money.”

“Anybody else know about this?”

“If you mean the judge or that clown Sykes, no. As for anybody else, Susan knew about it. And the blackmailer.”

“I take it you know why he was being blackmailed.”

“You may not believe this, McCain, but I don’t.”

“He asked you for money?”

“Yes.”

“And you gave it to him?”

“Yes.”

“But he didn’t tell you anything more?”

He looked at me some more.
“He
didn’t ask for money. Susan did.”

“And she didn’t say why?”

“All she said was that it was something that would devastate our family.”

“Did you ask her if she had any idea who was blackmailing them?”

“I did. But she said she didn’t have any idea at all.”

“Do you know how the blackmailer got the money, by mail, or was it dropped off somewhere?” The private investigator’s license I kept up to date was finally getting some real use. It had cost $45 and I was using the hell out of it this morning.