Breaking Up Is Hard to Do (The Sam McCain Mysteries Book 6) (3 page)

“Not right now. Just please do what I ask, Sam. Please.”

I wondered if Deirdre was at the door. Listening. Probably. I would be, if he was my father. I didn’t yet know what was wrong but I could sense that despite his apparent self-control, he was coming apart in little ways. Little ways that would lead to a complete loss of self-control very soon now.

Deirdre, as I’d suspected, was walking away very quickly—too quickly—when I opened the door. She disappeared into shadows near the front door.

At this point, he was sighing every thirty seconds or so. Quick, ragged sighs that just might portend a heart-attack. Maybe his body would turn on itself and kill him.

He walked to a door, opened it. “Down the stairs. The various rooms are marked. You won’t have any trouble finding it.”

“You’re not going down there with me?”

Another sigh. “I’d prefer not to.” Even his hand was glazed with sweat now. It shone like the brass doorknob it held.

Deirdre came up. “Want me to go with him, Dad?”

“No!” He said it with such anger that he sounded like a different person entirely. “I need you to stay out of this, Deirdre. I’ve told you that already.”

“Want me to go to my room and play with dolls or something, Dad?” She was now as angry as he’d been. She obviously didn’t like being treated so coldly, especially in front of a guest. But she was quick to relent. “I was just trying to help, Dad.”

Now it was his turn to sound apologetic. “I’m sorry, honey. It’s just—things.” He couldn’t even finish the sentence. “All this’ll be over soon. I’m sure Sam here can help me.”

Deirdre and I looked at each other. Her expression was much like mine. I wasn’t quite sure what would “all be over soon.” The answer was apparently in the bomb shelter. As to what I’d be “helping” him with, I had no idea.

“I guess I will go upstairs, actually,” Deirdre said, the brown eyes melancholy. Easy to picture her as a little girl confused and disappointed by the secret world of adults. “Well, good luck, Sam.”

“Thanks.”

“Hope I see you again, Sam.”

“I’ll make a point of it.”

When she’d gone, he said, “You made a friend. Her fiancé broke off their engagement a little over a year ago. This is the first time I’ve seen her show any interest in a male since then.”

“Well, I know one other male she sure seems to care about.”

“Oh?”

“You. That’s pretty easy to see.”

“Yes,” he said, being mysterious again. “And that sure doesn’t make any of this any easier, either.” Then: “Here, Sam. Down these stairs and to the right you’ll find the bomb shelter.”

T
HE BASEMENT STEPS WERE
spiral-style. And steep. I was about halfway down them, when the whole thing started to feel unreal. He was scared to the point of dysfunction. He wanted to pay me a thousand dollars but wouldn’t say why. And now he wanted me to check out his bomb shelter.

The basement was divided into rooms with doors. I was in a basement unlike any I’d ever seen before. Usually there’s a sink and washer where Mom does the laundry. And a coal bin left over from Grandpa’s day. And a furnace that sounds like a bomb blast every time it comes on. And in the various corners are stacks of magazines running from
Colliers
to
The Saturday Evening Post
and wooden cases of empty Pepsi bottles. And then you’ve got your galvanized buckets and your mops that look like gray seaweed and your collection of ancient dusty cleaning fluids. And all sorts of other stuff that should’ve been thrown out long ago but somehow never was. The smells would be laundry soap, dust, dampness, and mildew from the stacks of newspapers. You would see an occasional bug, an occasional crack in the floor, an occasional cobweb on the unfinished ceiling.

Not so in Ross Murdoch’s basement.

The basement was laid out in a maze of narrow hallway, walls and doors. It smelled of the fresh lime green paint on the walls and of the air conditioning that really wasn’t necessary on an Indian summer day like this one. There were no bugs, no cracks in the floor and, God forbid, no cobwebs. Each door was marked with a neatly painted sign.
FURNACE ROOM, LAUNDRY ROOM
, and two others,
BOMB SHELTER
was what I was looking for and
BOMB SHELTER
was what I found.

The shelter was pretty much as it had been described. Very good living room and kitchen furnishings took up half of it; the other half offering six sets of bunk beds and a couple huge armoires. In the kitchen area there were enough boxes and crates of canned foodstuffs to keep a small army going for a year or so. Same with cigarettes, cigars, soda pop and alcoholic refreshments. There was a large carpet that looked to be the indoor-outdoor stuff that would hold up for a while. And the electrical generator in the east corner was imposing both for its size and its fire-engine red color. There were plenty of lamps, a portable 17-inch TV and a large Zenith radio that had so many buttons it could probably tune in Mars if you wanted it to. Home sweet home.

The dead woman spoiled everything.

She was sprawled on the brown corduroy-covered couch. Arms flung wide, silver silk blouse torn to reveal small breasts contained in a white bra, blue skirt pushed up to mid-thigh. She wore blue hose and silver flats. She had wonderful flawless legs. The purple bruising on her neck likely showed the means of her death. Some murder victims look horrible, their expressions reflecting clearly the terrors and suffering they went through. Other corpses appear almost peaceful. As if their passing had not been all that bad; or as if their passing had been something that they might have secretly wished for.

If the young woman’s skin hadn’t just now given a trace of the blue tint that would soon invade it, you’d have thought she was just resting, waiting to be called to dinner.

Her face was the most interesting part of the picture, not because it was so beautiful, which it was, but because it belonged to the young woman whose black-and-white glossy Hastings had shown me earlier this morning.

I walked the length of the room. Cliffie wouldn’t search it properly so I assumed it would fall to me. I spent twenty minutes down there. I imagined Ross Murdoch was wondering what I was doing. But he was scrupulous about staying out of my way. He’d looked scared enough to put me in charge, something he probably wasn’t used to. Everything about him spoke to being the king of the walk.

I didn’t find anything remarkable. I’d been hoping for something obvious. A button. A footprint. A note saying: “Yes, I killed her. Here’s my home phone number. I’ll be waiting for your call.”

But no such luck. Police science would have to take over from here. Cliffie had a recent graduate of the Police Academy as his number two now. He wasn’t a genius but he was competent and if Cliffie let him do his job—“Who cares about all this mumbo-jumbo!” I’d heard Cliffie snap at the guy one night—he might actually come up with some interesting ideas.

Now it was time to go back upstairs.

“You’ll have TO tell me everything, Ross. Everything. That’s the only way I can help you.”

He didn’t say anything. He just sat slumped behind his desk. He just looked sad, scared. I wondered if he was in shock.

I leaned forward, put my elbows on the front of the desk and looked right at him. “Who was she, Ross? I already know who she is. But I want to hear you say it. And then I want to hear you say that she was your girlfriend.”

“Her name is Karen Hastings. She wasn’t
my
girlfriend. She was
our
girlfriend.”

“What?”

“Three of my best friends from here—we went to a business convention in Chicago. She was a hostess in a booth. We all got drunk together—and more than once—over the four days we were there.” The men in his group were, like many men their age who’d taken Jack Kennedy as an icon, into sailing, hot air ballooning and, inevitably, a mean game of touch football.

“Meaning you four and the woman?”

“Yes. And then we decided—you know how things can sound perfectly sensible when you’re drunk—that we all needed some excitement in our lives but that running around on the side was too risky. But what if we all chipped in and set up a mistress in a nice apartment not far from where we lived? Shared the expenses and shared the woman. This was two years ago. Before I’d decided to run for governor.”

“I think the word you want here is
prostitute.”

“Yes. But of a very special kind. So anyway, we all pitched in and arranged for a very nice apartment and for a monthly allowance and for a clothing allowance. We even paid for her life insurance. And to have her visit a doctor every two months.”

“She liked the idea?”

He laughed but without pleasure. “She loved it. We didn’t find out why till later. She was wanted by the Chicago police for extortion.”

I sat back in my chair. “This is about the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard of.”

“There were a couple stories just like it back east. That’s where we got the idea. We just assumed we’d be better at it.”

“And you didn’t see any of the pitfalls?”

He shook his head. “You don’t need to remind me, Sam. Right away there was jealousy among the men. Two of them developed crushes on her. One of them I think fell in love with her. And then there was the fact that she started seeing other men on the side. I didn’t get jealous of that—the more I got to know her, the less I wanted to do with her—but I couldn’t figure out what we were paying for. She was ours. We were paying her way.”

“And then she started shaking you down.”

He looked surprised. “God, she wanted more and more money all the time.”

“That kind of arrangement, Ross. They always come back for more.”

“She didn’t wait for that. She said she’d contact my political enemies. Sell them the story. She changed. In Chicago she seemed so—sweet.”

“She was planning this all along. The first time she probably didn’t know how wealthy you were. Then she found out you were running for governor. You were going to be a very big payday for her.”

“I knew that, of course. All I could think of was getting through the election.”

“There’s also a good chance that she would also have sold her story to your so-called enemies, anyway.”

“Oh, God, you know I hadn’t thought of that. You really think she would’ve done it?”

“I can’t say for sure. But probably. How about the others? How much did she get from them?”

“The same for all of us. We divided all the payments by four.” He tried a clumsy joke. “I wonder if you can divide a murder four ways.”

“It’ll be tough. You’ve got her body in the basement.”

“I didn’t put it there. I really didn’t. And I certainly don’t know who killed her.”

Now it was my turn to get up and pace. I suppose that’s sort of impolite, in somebody else’s office and all, but I needed some kind of exercise suddenly. Sitting in the chair just made me realize how hopeless his situation was. For one thing, he might very well have killed her himself, put the body in the bomb shelter, and then concocted this fancy tale of “discovering” her down there. Surprise, surprise.

I went over to the window and looked out on the day. “I’m going to assume for the minute that you didn’t kill her.”

“Gee, thanks, Sam. I already said I didn’t.”

“As I said, I’m assuming that. But I’m not ruling it out.”

“I didn’t kill her, all right? I didn’t kill her.”

“Then that leaves two likely possibilities.” I turned back to him. “One of your three friends killed her. Or somebody we don’t know about. Yet.”

“I’m going to let you call this one, Sam. That’s why I got you out here.”

I checked my watch. “Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to call Cliffie and get him out here. Tell him you just discovered the body.”

“But won’t the coroner set the time of death?”

“Maybe. But even if he sets it five hours before you call Cliffie, all you have to say is that you didn’t go down into the basement until right before you called.”

He gazed up at me with glassy, dazed eyes. “It’s funny. Being governor meant so much to me and now—”

I walked back toward his desk. “Right now your biggest concern has to be staying out of prison.” I headed for the door. “You don’t want Cliffie to think that you called me before you called him.”

He just sat where he was, still slumped. “Call him, Ross,” I said, “call him right now.” I sounded as I were speaking to a naughty child.

I
GET DOWN ON MY
hands and knees every night and thank Khrushchev for being such a rotten, treacherous old bastard. Thanks to him this is the golden era of my sex life.”

You’ve heard of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck. Everybody has.

But how about Brad Brand? Rod Randall? Ty Tolan? They’re all writers, too. In fact, they’re all the same guy, our little burg’s only living professional dirty book writer, Kenny Thibodeau. Since Bible-thumping district attorneys across the land are trying to make political names for themselves sending “smut peddlers” to prison, everybody in the dirty book industry uses phony names these days.

There’s no explicit sex in these books and good sturdy bourgeoisie morality always wins out in the end. The covers suggest otherwise, of course, and it is often the covers, some of which are excellent examples of commercial art, that these politically ambitious district attorneys rave on about. If you can churn them out quickly enough, and Kenny can, you can make a sort of living at writing them.

According to Kenny, it isn’t easy to come up with
Hot Rod Harlots, Motel Minx
and
Surfin’ Sinners
all in the same month without having your brain collapse.

“In the last eight days, I’ve slept with four girls who usually wouldn’t piss on me if I was on fire,” Kenny continued. “And it’s all because they think we’re going to get nuked by the commies.”

Kenny himself has been mistaken for a commie by local members of such organizations as the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Catholic Church, the Presbyterian Church and the Amish. You can also throw in several biker gangs, my parents, his parents and the parents of any girl he’s ever dated. It’s not the fact that he writes dirty books—that just makes him a deviate—it’s the fact that he has a little black tuft of beard, a black beret, a black turtleneck sweater, black jeans, tan desert boots and a pair of thick-lensed black-rimmed glasses. He is, in other words, a stereotypical beatnik, our resident beatnik in fact. And as everybody knows, beatniks are—in addition to being smelly, profane, lazy and pretentious—commies.