Breaking Up Is Hard to Do (The Sam McCain Mysteries Book 6) (9 page)

“Hey! Sam baby!”

Sam baby? “You sound like you’re in a pretty good mood.”

“Best mood I’ve been in a long time.” Then she hiccoughed. “God, am I bombed.”

“Gee, really. I hadn’t noticed.”

“You’re so—what’s the word?”

“Sarcastic?”

“Yeah. Right. Sarcastic.”

“Well, I was worrying you might be depressed or something was why I called. But you seem to be doing all right.”

Then she got coy, playful. I’d never heard her be coy and playful before. I actually hated coy and playful. “Wait’ll you get here, Sam baby. You’re gonna be surprised.” And before I could say anything: “And you know what else, Sam baby?”

“Y’got me.” Talking to drunks is so much fun.

“Every one of your cats loves me.”

“That’s nice.”

“They fight over who gets to sit in my lap.” Hiccough.

“Y’know, you might think of drinking a little coffee. There’s some instant in the cupboard.”

“Boy, am I drunk.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Said about what?”

“Said about instant coffee in the cupboard.”

“When did you say that? And anyway, I hate instant coffee.”

I couldn’t take any more. “I’ll see you in a while.”

“Toodles, Sam baby.” And then she giggled and dropped the receiver.

I walked to the back of the room. Lonesome Bob had Hastings laid out on the floor.

“How’s it going?” I said.

“He’s dead.”

“I know he’s dead. I mean, did you find anything useful?”

He’d been haunched down next to the corpse, playing the beam of a silver flashlight over the body. When he stood up, his knees cracked. “All that scientific stuff. I don’t get it at all. I leave that to Cliff. About all I could tell you about this guy was that somebody smashed his head in.”

Lonesome Bob and the beautiful Pamela Forrest could have a very interesting conversation right about now. But I was just bitter because poor Lonesome Bob here was something of a dope and the beautiful Pamela Forrest was going to cheat me out of a night of sex by being unconscious by the time I got back to my apartment.

“Say,” said Lonesome Bob, “I just thought of something.”

“What’s that?”

“You didn’t kill this fella, did you?”

“No; no, I didn’t, Lonesome Bob.”

He narrowed his hound dog eyes and said, “Don’t kid me now, McCain. Did you kill this fella?”

“I didn’t kill him, Lonesome Bob. He was dead before I got here.”

He studied me some and said, “That’s why I don’t need that scientific crap. I just look people right in the eye and I can tell if they did somethin’ or not.”

“Well, saves a lot of time that way. Did I pass, by the way?”

He looked down at Hastings. “You didn’t kill this fella. I could see that in your eyes.”

“Well, thanks, Lonesome Bob. All right if I get out of here?”

“Sure. Time Cliff gets here—he’s out to the Murdoch place; dead gal in the bomb shelter, if you can believe that—I can just sit here and catch me a couple of winks.”

“You look like you could use a rest.”

“Law enforcement ain’t no easy job, let me tell you that.”

“I can see that, Lonesome Bob. I can see that.”

I
WENT OUTSIDE AND
sat in the car and opened the package Hastings had given me that morning. My Cub Scout knife proved useful again.

I turned on the overhead light and looked inside the King Edward cigar box. It was like waiting and waiting and waiting for your birthday to arrive when you’re six. And then your folks give you a temptingly wrapped package and you open it and find a dog turd.

This wasn’t a turd. But it was a letdown. I had no idea what to expect but I sure didn’t expect this. A receipt from the Cedar Rapids restaurant, the Embers. I studied the amount, the date, the penciled-in initials, presumably belonging to the waitress.

A strange man had given me a strange, inexplicable package to deliver. And now he was dead and so was the woman it had been intended for.

I slipped the package under my car seat, got out, locked the door and walked over to the phone booth. The Judge needed an update.

“My Lord,” she said. “My Lord. They’ve ruined their lives.” She generally has snappy replies to the grimmest of griefs. She holds herself above travail, unless it’s her own. She was about eight-thirty drunk. She’d be a lot more so by the time eleven rolled around. But even at eleven she’d be coherent and able to make reasonable decisions. “Ross and Gavin are good friends of mine. So are their wives. And I’m Deirdre’s godmother. My Lord, this is going to sink them all.” A sip of her drink, probably a martooni as Tony Randall always says in those moronic Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies my dates always insisted we see. “You don’t think Ross killed her, do you?”

“I don’t think so. But there’s a lot I don’t know yet. He could have.”

“You men should all be castrated. Every one of you.”

“Including all four of your ex-husbands?”

“Especially them.”

Now that was more like the Judge I knew and occasionally, when I tried real hard, liked.

“For a woman. All for a woman. My God, they must be insane.”

“I suppose they thought it was rational. You chase around, people see you and you get a rep. You have your own concubine in an apartment that’s not even in your own home town—you cut your risk a whole lot.”

“Unless somebody happens to kill her and it all comes out in the investigation.”

“Well,” I said, “there’s always that, I guess.”

“I think I’m actually going to cry. I know you don’t believe that, McCain. But it’s true. All the lives that were ruined today. All those poor women. I even feel sorry for the men, though they don’t deserve it. What a stupid idea.” Another sip. “And what about the election? I hadn’t even thought about that till now.

Where’s the party going to get another candidate?”

“Well, Republican candidates shouldn’t be that hard to find.

Most of them are in prisons on bunco charges.”

“Hilarious wit you have there, McCain. Just hilarious.”

“Well, I need to be getting on home. Been a very long day.”

“All right, McCain. Good night.” I had the sense that she was crying even before she hung up.

I had a burger and fries at a diner. I played four Patsy Cline songs on the counter-mounted juke box units. I tried not to think about anything except that Patsy shouldn’t have had to die so young and that I’d never heard another singing voice that could quite make of loss and sadness what hers did.

Then I started thinking about Pamela. I sure hoped we were going to have sex tonight. It’d been a while for me and I was as much lonely as I was horny. Maybe I should’ve asked Lonesome Bob how he dealt with it all the time.

Two guys from the factory down the street came in on their nine o’clock break and ordered coffee and pie, peach for one, cherry for the other. They wore ball caps with union pins on them and denim jackets with U of Iowa Hawkeye buttons, black and gold. They made good money at their jobs. Their union had just settled a possible strike and had gotten most of what it wanted. This was a high old time in our country, the best since the end of the war. As for how it would be in the future—that was all up to Mr. Khrushchev and that feckless Russian hayseed grin of his.

“They all chipped in and paid for this whore,” one of them was saying to the other as the waitress poured their coffees. “Ross Murdoch.” A laugh. “I guess he won’t be governor anytime soon.”

“What about Ross Murdoch?” the waitress said.

“Haven’t you heard the news?”

“I usually turn it on but I got treated to a Patsy Cline concert tonight.” She looked right at me while she said it.

“Just be happy I didn’t play Lawrence Welk,” I said.

She was done with me. “So what’s this about Ross Murdoch? You know, he stops in here every once in a while. Bein’ political, of course. Pretendin’ he’s just like one of the regular folks. Mr. High and Mighty. Even when he don’t try to be High and Mighty he is.”

“And Hardin, too,” the second man said. “And a coupla other rich boys.”

“Think of that,” the waitress said, after hearing the story. She put a quarter inch space between her thumb and forefinger and held them up. “He came this close to bein’ governor. Can you imagine that? This close.”

I waggled two rumpled dollar bills at her and dropped them next to my plate. She smiled. Sixty cents of that was a tip.

So the word was out, I thought. A scandal that would temporarily distract the public mind from the missile crisis. The end was near, at least for the four men back at Ross Murdoch’s place.

I didn’t know how one 110 pound woman could make all that noise. As soon as I opened the back door to my apartment and pushed inside, I found out.

One woman couldn’t make all that noise. But two women can.

Ever since fourth grade, two girls have dominated my life. Sort of the way Betty and Veronica have always dominated Archie’s life. The problem with that comparison being that Archie is a comic book character frozen in time. Which, come to think of it—having Betty and Veronica in their nubile prime forever—is not exactly a bad fate.

My life
isn’t
frozen in time. The other day in the mirror I noticed a gray hair. Though I haven’t put on any weight since college, my face isn’t as sharply defined as it once was. And hanging around gas stations and talking about drag races and street rods isn’t as much fun as it used to be.

And the surprises life springs on me get more and more baffling.

Sure, I’d seen my Betty and Veronica together all our lives. We were in the same classes, we went on the same class outings, we attended the same junior and senior proms. And they’d always been friendly if never exactly friends.

But I’d never seen them
together,
if you know what I mean. Never as grown women. Hell, Mary had two kids. And certainly never sitting together at the little dining table in the middle of my apartment, all three cats and a bottle of bourbon and two glasses on the table.

“She’s pretty drunk,” Mary said, giggling. She had that red hair ribbon in her dark hair. I could remember it as far back as senior year in high school. It brought out the sweet erotic clarity of her elegant face. She wore a buff blue blouse and jeans and white Keds tonight.

“Oh, no,” the beautiful Pamela Forrest said. “She’s the drunk one.”

“I thought we were drinking scotch,” I said.

Mary smiled. “That was gone by the time I got here. I brought this bottle. It’s Johnny Walker. That’s pretty good, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. It’s great. But—”

Easy to see that Mary was feeling nothing more than a little buzz. Pamela was the sloshed one.

Mary said, “I called to see if you were home. Pamela answered and we started talking and she asked me to come over and keep her company. My mom’s watching the kids for a couple of hours. Wes’s with his girlfriend.”

Pamela, who could barely sit up straight, said, “He’s such a jerk.” Then she managed to angle her head up to me and with one eye squinting said: “We’ve been havin’ a mighty good talk about ole McCain.” Then her head made what seemed like a complete circle and she fixed me with that single blue eye again and said, “We decided that you’re a very nice guy but sort of a dickhead, too.”

Mary whooped a laugh. “Pamela!”

“Well, that’s what we said, wasn’t it?”

“That’s what
you
said.”

Pamela hiccoughed. “Oh, right. That’s what’s J said.” She tried to fling an arm in my direction but she didn’t make it very far. Then she just stared at her arm as if she’d never seen it before. Then—I wasn’t sure whom she was addressing here, maybe her arm—“Guy chases me ever since fourth grade and then I show up at his office one day and you know what he tells me?”

Mary looked embarrassed and sorry for her. “You know, maybe you should lie down for a little bit. Not long. It doesn’t have to be long. Just a little bit.”

Pamela was not dissuaded. “You know what he tells me? A) That he doesn’t love me any more and—” Paused. Had lost her place. “C) That he wasn’t even sure he wanted to sleep with me.” She leaned forward and tried to pet one of the cats. “What’s her name?”

“Tasha.”

“She’s beautiful.”

“Yes, she is.”

“I’m going to get a cat,” Pamela said. “I’m going to buy a sports car and get me a cat.”

Then she turned vaguely in Mary’s direction and said, “Any man ever turn you down before? I mean when you offered him yourself? Just
offered
yourself, no strings attached? And he turned you down?”

“Our friend McCain here used to turn me down all the time.”

“See,” she said, her head trying to make a complete circle again, “I told you he was a dickhead.”

I swooped her up. Yep. As sure as Rhett swept up what’s-her-name, I swept her up into my arms. There wasn’t any grand staircase, of course, so I just carried her across the room to the double bed in the far corner and set her down on it gently.

“Hey,” she said resentfully. “Hey, hey.” The booze had apparently shortened her vocabulary.

I got her tennis shoes off and then her socks and then her jeans and then her blouse. “Hey,” she said again.

“Sleep, Pamela.”

“I came up here to have a romantic evening and look what I get.”

“Sleep.”

“Sit down here and hold my hand. My dad always used to do that when I was little.” I’ll spare you the dialect. She was slurring the words to the point of incoherence.

“Night, Pamela.”

“Mary’s so sweet.”

“Mary’s very sweet. And so are you.”

“Oh, don’t bullshit me, McCain. I’ve never been sweet a day in my life. I’m just what Stu said I was, a selfish bitch. Or self-centered. One or the other. Self-centered or selfish.” Then her head flopped dramatically to the right.

By the time I was draping her jeans and blouse over the back of a chair, she was snoring.

I went back to the table and sat down and poured myself a shallow drink. I sipped it.

“I’m scared,” Mary said.

“Yeah. I sensed that.”

“She had this whole dream-life all planned out. She’d be with Stu and everything would be great. But the way she and Stu got together, everybody in town sees her as a homewrecker and a whore. And when she actually got to know Stu, she didn’t like him at all, let alone love him.” She picked up a package of Viceroys and lighted one.