Breaking Up Is Hard to Do (The Sam McCain Mysteries Book 6) (17 page)

Law enforcement people say that they’re trained to spot things other people don’t notice. I must’ve been out sick the days they were conducting these courses at the police academy in Des Moines, because I miss things even the blind can see.

Not until I’d gone to the john, checked my service for phone messages, turned up the heat, pulled on a ragged U of Iowa sweatshirt, and sat myself down in my recliner did I notice the imposing round foil-wrapped plate in the center of the table.

I went over and inspected it. Tess was there to help me. She knew, as I did, that it was a plate covered with food. Tess has gone to drama school the past two years. She knows how to look up at you with those large intelligent eyes and make you want to cry. And share. “I’ll tell you what. You can have it all if it’s anything like liver and broccoli. How’s that?” I was thinking that if cats knew how to give you the finger, that’s what she would have been doing just then. Cats are smart. They know all about stuff like liver and broccoli.

It was a white meat chicken sandwich with lettuce, tomato and mayo, a small chilled tin of V-8, several carrot sticks and a good hunk of chocolate cake. There was a tiny card that read
From a secret admirer who thinks you’re getting too skinny. Mary.
Mrs. Goldman would have let her in. She was one of the many people who thought that Mary and I should’ve gotten married a long time ago.

I had to keep pushing Tess away. “You can have half the carrot sticks.” Oh, yeah; she definitely would’ve given me the finger if she could.

I ate sitting in the recliner. I then polished off the beer, smoked a few cigarettes and thought about Mary. Looks, smarts, tenderness, laughs. That was Mary. But Mary also offered love so strong it was sometimes overwhelming, smothering. Always had, always would. Just her nature. And now Mary offered two kids in tow as well.

I didn’t find the teddy bear until I slid under the covers. A big brown teddy bear wearing a lawman’s badge. A tiny note Scotch-taped to it:
Your Secret Admirer.
God, it was corny but there in the wind-whipped prairie night it felt good to know that she was out there, thinking of me.

“Who’s this guy?” my dad said at seven-thirty the following morning.

“I don’t know. He claims to be our son. He just showed up here a few minutes ago. Says he lived with us for a long time. But I’m not sure we have a son, do we? If we have, I haven’t seen him in a long, long time.”

“Years and years,” Dad said.

“You have any ID?” Mom said, dishing up the pancakes and the bacon and setting it in front of me. The milk and orange juice and daily vitamin were already in front of me on the kitchen table.

“How come he gets to eat first?” Dad said. “We don’t even know if he belongs to us.”

“Whoever he is, he seems to think he’s real important. Says he’s got a big meeting at nine and has to be ready for it.”

“Yeah, he looks important all right,” Dad said.

“Gee, I’m sure glad Abbott and Costello started making movies again,” I said.

“So how are you, son?”

“Don’t let him off the hook so easily,” Mom said. “We don’t hear from him for nearly a week, he deserves a little razzing.”

Mom and Dad are a matched set. Mom is five-two and most of her hair is still red. Dad is five-six and most of his hair has gone to hair heaven. Toward the end of my high school years, Dad got promoted at the factory where he’d worked since coming back from the war, and for the first time our family moved to a respectable neighborhood, lived in a house and drove a respectable used Ford. My sister Ruth lived in Chicago. She’d moved there after getting pregnant when she was seventeen. Nobody was happy about it but she sure wouldn’t get an abortion, not even in sinful Chicago. Even though I thought that was the best solution, my folks were shocked when I even brought it up. She’d have to give prior notice before she came back here so we could give the most important of the gossips plenty of time to work up their most venomous scorn. Sometimes, as now, I’d look across the table and imagine Ruthie still there, that sweet Mick face of freckles and slightly imperious nose and great gladifying lopsided McCain smile. Granddad wore it even in his coffin. Her life had been peaceful and almost perfect until her pregnancy and since then it had been nothing but travail in Chicago—a mother who worked and left her kid at the YMCA center; a number of hopeless, hapless, unhealthy affairs; a boozy slur in the voice when she called sometimes; and a sense I shared with Mom and Dad that she wasn’t Ruth any more, not the Ruth we’d known, and that she was as sad about it as we were. But none of us had any idea what to do about it. Sometimes I’d think of her and I swear to God I just wanted to die right on the spot, my entire body and mind in pain—take my gun and put it to my temple and just fire it before I had time to back out of it—it was just so hard to think about how much I loved her and was helpless in the face of her grief and sorrow.

But this was a sunny morning and Captain Kangaroo was on TV in the living room—Mom still watched it because Ruth had always watched it in the morning; I suppose it was a way of keeping her with us—and Mom was saying, “I think they could plead insanity and get away with it.”

Around a mouthful of pancake, I said, “Who should plead insanity because they could get away with it?”

“She means Ross Murdoch and those other three. That’s all she’s been talking about. I keep trying to tell her things like that go on all the time.”

“Why, a situation like that is no better than prostitution,” Mom said.

Dad said, “That’s what you can do when you have money.”

Mom said, “You can have your own geisha woman if you have money is what you’re saying? There aren’t any
better
things to do than that?”

Dad said, “If you have a lot of money you can do that and
still
do all the other better things, too.”

Mom said, “It’s their wives I feel sorry for. And their children. My Lord, the gossips will have a field day.”

“Already are,” I said. “Everywhere I go people tell me Murdoch jokes.”

“She must’ve had some temper,” Dad said.

“How’s that? And may I have some syrup?”

“You see how polite he is since he moved out of the house?” Mom said.

Dad winked at her, making sure I saw it. “Maybe he should have moved out sooner. He’d be even
more
polite by now.”

“Maybe I didn’t raise him right,” Mom said.

“Oh, Lord,” Dad said, “I wish those magazines had never been published.”

Mom was a reader of parental magazines. How to train Little Bobby not to poop in his soup; hit the kitties with his hammer; say dirty words to company before he reached the age of three. You know the magazines I’m talking about. Like most women of her generation, Mom spent a number of hours per week perusing these rags and then torturing herself with the certain knowledge that she had failed me as a loving mom, tutor and inspirer of lofty goals.

“So what’s this about her temper?”

“Scotty McBain down to the plant?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. I was working on the three strips of delicately wrought bacon.

“He said she had some temper.”

“Who did?” I said.

“That gal they were keeping.”

“Karen Hastings?”

He nodded. He was working on his bacon, too.

“How did Scotty McBain know she had a temper?”

“In the summer he’s got this canoe rental deal he runs on the side. His wife works there during the day and then he takes over when he’s done at the plant.”

“Oh. Right. I forgot.”

“Anyway, this Hastings gal, she used to go around with this gal got a trailer right up the road from where Scotty’s got his canoe renting deal. Very nice looking gal.”

“What’re you doing, honey?” Mom asked me.

“Writing.”

“Writing what?”

“I’m putting what Dad says in my notebook so I’ll remember to follow up on this.”

“Are you working on this thing?” Dad said.

“Uh-huh. Go ahead.”

Dad shrugged. “Well, it isn’t any big deal. This gal—I don’t remember her name—and the Hastings gal, they’d rent canoes together, see. And so one day they were climbing into their canoe and a couple guys—smart-asses, you know—started makin’ remarks. You know how guys get. And Scotty said they were pretty drunk, besides. He wouldn’t rent ’em a canoe. So anyway you got these two really good lookin’ gals and these two smartasses and the gals kinda play along while they’re getting their canoe ready and then one of the guys kinda pats the Hastings gal on the rump. And man. Scotty says he never saw a woman hit a man as hard as she did that guy. Really rocked him. And she wasn’t much bigger than your mom. Scotty said the guys were really mad but they backed off and left.”

“Scotty still working at the plant?”

“Nope. He retired about the time I did.”

“I still say I feel sorry for their families.” Mom said. “And their poor kids.”

“Well, most of their kids are grown up by now,” I said.

“I hear Murdoch hired a Chicago lawyer, huh?”

“Yep. Very big-time guy. Seems all right.”

“He’s going to need Perry Mason,” Mom said. “That poor woman dead in his bomb shelter.”

“‘Poor woman’?,” Dad said. “I thought you said she was just a prostitute.”

“Well, that doesn’t mean anybody had the right to kill her. She could’ve made a good confession and started her life over again.”

My mom is of the belief that everybody is Catholic. Or secretly wants to be. Or should be. Or will be. Someday. If we just wait patiently long enough.

This time, it was me my dad winked at. “What if she was Methodist?”

“Well, she still could’ve started over. Nobody had the right to kill her.”

“Murdoch must have really panicked,” Dad said. “Leaving her there in that bomb shelter. Say, is that as fancy as everybody says?”

“The bomb shelter?” I said. “It sure is.”

“We’re having another prayer vigil tonight,” Mom said softly. “I’m just asking God that Khrushchev comes to his senses.” She took Dad’s hand. He smiled at her. “We’ve had our lives. It’s the children I’m worried about. They should have their chance to live.” She looked at me. “You could always come to the vigil tonight, Sam.”

“It’d be nice,” I said, “if I get the time.”

“That means,” Dad said, “there’s not a chance in hell he’s going to be there.”

Mom actually smiled. “You think I don’t know that?”

I decided to start the meeting with Spellman and his investigator Del Merrick with a shocker. I’d awakened in the middle of the night with an idea we should have considered all along.

“We’re assuming that Ross Murdoch didn’t murder Karen Hastings,” I said.

They both nodded. They looked as if they’d slept in. Spellman even had sleep lines on one side of his face. Merrick was a middle-aged man with rusty-colored hair and a good blue suit.

“That’s right,” Spellman said. “You’re not going to tell me that he killed her, are you? Nobody’d leave a body in his own house like that.”

“True—or probably true. Maybe he got into a situation where he killed her and couldn’t figure out a way to get rid of the body.”

Spellman’s face was knitted with irritation. “So you
are
saying he killed her.”

“No, I’m just saying let’s re-think the assumptions we’ve made so far. I’ve made them, too. But I’ve been thinking about a different way this could have happened.”

Spellman said, “Well, let’s hear it. No offense, McCain, but we’re sitting with the best criminal investigator I’ve ever worked with. If he thinks it’ll fly, then it’ll fly.”

Merrick actually blushed from the praise. I liked him right away. A modest man. He said, “My old man was a lot better than I was. He went head-to-head with old J. Edgar twice and won both times. Found the killers before Hoover’s men did. Hoover kept trying to nail him after that. You didn’t embarrass Hoover and get away with it.”

I drank some coffee and said, “I don’t think Ross Murdoch killed her. I don’t think he knew anything about the body until, as he said, he opened the bomb shelter.”

“So how did the body get carried inside?” Spellman said.

“That’s the assumption I want to knock down. First of all, the entire family was gone the day before the body was discovered. Ross was at a meeting in Des Moines, Mrs. Murdoch was visiting her other sister in Iowa City, and Deirdre was at the hospital here working as a candy-striper.”

“A what?” Merrick asked.

“A volunteer. They call them candy-stripers. She was at the hospital from nine in the morning until around six-thirty. Her parents got home just before she did. Their part-time maid had fixed dinner for them. Mrs. Murdoch heated the dinner and they ate together.”

“So you’re saying somebody brought Karen Hastings’s body in while the family was gone?” Spellman said. “They still had to sneak her in past the workmen.”

“Nobody snuck her in,” I said.

“You’re losing me here, McCain. If Ross didn’t kill her and nobody snuck the body in, then how did she end up in the bomb shelter?”

“This is the part I should’ve thought of before. The workers all left at five. That left roughly an hour and a half that the house was empty. This is where we have to start looking at the other three partners in the deal. It wouldn’t be difficult for one of them to call Karen and tell her to meet them at Murdoch’s place. She’d been wanting to leave town and take a lot of money with her. That would be the lure to get her there. All the caller had to say was that they’d come up with the money and that they’d hand it over.”

“Wouldn’t she think that meeting at Murdoch’s was strange?” Merrick said.

“Not if the caller said that the Murdochs had some kind of dinner or something they had to attend. And that it’d be safe to meet her there.”

“So the caller gets her in the house, kills her, leaves her in the bomb shelter,” Spellman said, “and Ross Murdoch gets charged with murder.”

“That makes more sense than hauling a body past all those workmen,” Merrick said. “I didn’t like that theory at all. Way too risky. And even if all the other workmen had gone home, there’d be the chance that somebody would see a truck or a car pull in about then. I checked the Murdoch road. A lot of people use it to and from work.”