Sam McCain - 02 - Wake Up Little Susie (21 page)

“That make you feel better?” I said.

“Damned right it did.”

“You’re a petty bastard.”

“Yeah, well, I’d rather be a petty bastard than a dipshit.”

“And they say the art of sophisticated conversation is dead.”

He didn’t say anything and then he said, “I was there but I didn’t kill her.”

“Why were you there?”

He went over and sat down. He didn’t say anything for a while. Hung his head. “We’d been seeing each other again.” He was still wincing.

“Squires know?”

“I don’t think so.”

“And you were trying to get her to leave him?”

“Yeah. But she was pretty screwed up about the kid.”

I knew what he was going to say then.

“Ellie Chalmers.”

“She’s Susan’s kid?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. I delivered her.”

“You the father?”

“She wouldn’t tell me who the father was.

That’s why she left town. Everybody thought it was because she was trying to get out of the Squires thing.”

“Ellie doesn’t know.”

He shook his head. “Fayla was her mother as far as Ellie knew. But every once in a while the whole deception bit would get to Susan and she’d drive out to the acreage and park near there with her binoculars and just look at the kid doing chores.

Can you believe that shit? I felt sorry for her.

Hell, I loved her. I told her if we ever got married I’d figure out some way to get Ellie to live with us.”

“Chalmers knew this?”

“He knew she wasn’t his kid. But he pretended she was for Fayla’s sake.”

“What’d Fayla get out of it?”

“Fayla and Susan went to school together.

Fayla was the ugly duckling and Susan sort of adopted her. Fayla would do anything for Susan.

Fayla couldn’t have kids, so Ellie became her kid.”

His pain erupted again. He grimaced and pushed down on his groin. “You sonofabitch.”

“I don’t usually do stuff like that. But when a guy your size swings on me, I don’t have much choice.”

“I’m gonna punch your face in someday.”

“How come you didn’t tell me about Ellie the first time we talked?”

He did some more writhing. He was a pretty good writher. “I didn’t think it had anything to do with Susan’s death. But now, with David dead, I don’t know what the hell’s going on. I figured you should know. If you care about

Ellie as much as you seem to, I assume you’ll be discreet about all this.”

I stood up. Drained my coffee cup. “You want me to get you a cup of coffee?”

“I don’t want jack shit from you.”

I sort of figured he’d respond that way.

On my way out, I asked Audrey to take one in.

“He still could’ve killed her,” I said.

“Dr. Jensen?”

“Uh-huh.”

I ducked just in time. Judge Whitney was shooting rubber bands again.

“Then why would he have told you about Ellie?”

“Show me he was being cooperative.”

“You don’t think Ellie has anything to do with the murders?”

“I’m not sure.”

We sat in her chambers. She wore a

tailored blue suit with a stylish neck scarf.

Gauloise in one hand, brandy in the other. She was forced to set one of them down when she launched her rubber bands.

“Something’s bothering me,” I said.

“What?”

“That’s just it. I don’t know. Just something gnawing at the back of my brain.”

“All that cheap beer you drink.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m a real drinker.”

“Brandy, on the other hand, clears the mind.

Gives you the most wonderful ability to concentrate.”

“You sound like a commercial.”

“I would be happy to endorse brandy. The right brands, of course.”

I stared out the window. “It’s something I know.”

“Something you know?”

“Something I learned in the course of my investigation. But as yet I haven’t seen its relevance. But it’s there. Waving at me.”

“Maybe it’s making an obscene gesture.”

She launched another rubber band. “Very good, McCain. I’ve never seen you duck under that way before. You’re getting good at this.”

“What the hell could it be?” I started up from my chair.

“Don’t start pacing. You drive me

crazy.”

“I think better when I pace.”

“You’re too short to pace. When you get behind the couch, I lose sight of you.”

“Har-de-har-har.”

She sighed. “I’ll never understand what you see in Jackie Gleason,” she said. I had used one of Gleason’s signature lines. “He’s so working class.”

“He’s funny and sad at the same time,” I said. “And that’s not easy to be. That’s what makes him such a great comic actor.”

A knock.

“Yes?”

The beautiful Pamela Forrest came in.

She wore a white blouse and a moderately tight black knee-length skirt. Her impossibly golden hair looked like something from myth or fairy tale. But I couldn’t

appreciate her this morning. Not with poor Mary in the hospital, not able to remember anything.

“You said to bring this in as soon as it came,” she said, as she reached the Judge’s desk. She set some papers down.

“Thank you, dear.”

Pamela nodded and withdrew. She watched me carefully as she left the room. She must have noticed that I wasn’t frenzied the way I usually was when she was around.

The Judge said, “Get out, McCain. I’m busy. I need to read these papers. Go home and pace or something.” She’d been scanning the legal brief that Pamela brought her. She looked up. “I’d like the case solved by dinnertime tonight. I’m having a judge from the sixth district in, and I’d like to brag a little about how I uncovered the murderer.”

“That would be so unlike you, Judge,” I said.

A dramatic ingestion of Gauloise smoke and then the wave of a languid hand. “Now get the hell out of here. I’m busy.” Then: “Oh, that envelope you wanted me to check on?”

“Yes.”

“Those two initials in the corner were the initials of the clerk who sent it.”

“What did they send?”

“A birth certificate.”

“I’m losing my mind,” Linda Granger said. “And so is Jeff. God, McCain, isn’t there something you can do?”

“Well, he could always grow up.”

“You know that’s not going to happen.”

“I’ll take care of it.” I told her when to be at my office. Then I called Chip O’Donlon. “Hey, Dad.” And told him

when to be at my office.

Then the phone rang.

She was crying. I couldn’t understand what she said.

“Slow down, Ellie. Slow down.”

“Cliffie was here. He made me tell him where my dad went. To that line shack. Then he ran out the door. There were two other cars there.

Men with rifles and shotguns. They’re going after him.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll leave for the line shack right now.”

By the time I got there, Cliffie had his men fanned out, encircling a weatherbeaten board shack that looked more like a large doghouse than a railroad storage shed. It was up on the side of a steep autumn-blazed hill, just below a railroad track that climbed ever higher into the limestone cliffs. It was a perfect autumn day for hiking or canoeing or picking out pumpkins to carve into bogeyman faces. Butterflies and grasshoppers and leaf smoke and all that other stuff.

The men wore their hunting gear. Pheasant season didn’t open for a while yet. This would be their dry run for trying out hats, caps, jackets, pants, duck calls, boots,

shoes, and weapons. Lots of weapons. Enough weapons to start a small war.

Cliffie was strutting around with a .45 in one hand and a bullhorn in the other. The way some folks are good with the violin or tuba, Cliffie was good with the bullhorn.

“There’s a very good chance that you can get off on an insanity charge, Mr. Chalmers!” He glanced over his shoulder and gave one of his cronies a big lurid wink. Chalmers didn’t have a prayer of beating a double murder charge on an insanity plea. Not with his criminal past. “So you come out here peaceful-like and we’ll drive you back to town in that brand-new patrol car of mine. It still smells new. You’ll like that, Mr. Chalmers, I promise!”

Cliffie’s police chief magazine mst’ve run an article on how to use psychology, because usually, instead of such awkward

enticements as insanity pleas and new-car smells, Cliffie would have been threatening the guy with sure death.

“There’ll be a pizza tonight, Mr. Chalmers!

The boys always chip in and buy a big one delivered. It’s nice ‘n’ hot too. I’m sure they’ll give you some. Our boys’re nice to prisoners, despite what you might have heard to the contrary.”

Cliffie had the distinction of being cited three times in six years for “the worst-run jail” in the state. Endless numbers of prisoners emerged with black eyes, broken noses, missing teeth, snapped wrists, and badly bruised ankles.

As a gag, Cliffie once served up chili that he’d dumped half a pound of ground-up night crawlers in. This is one of those legends that is actually true. Everybody loves a clown.

“I’ll talk to him.”

He wasn’t happy to see me.

“I don’t believe I remember deputizing you, McCain.”

“I’m his lawyer.”

“You get all the important clients, huh?”

“He didn’t kill anybody.”

He stared at me. “She thinks she’s gonna beat me this time, don’t she? Show me up again?”

“This has nothing to do with Judge Whitney.”

“Oh, no? She don’t care if this man is guilty or not. Just as long as she makes me look bad. Well, I’ll tell you somethin’.

It ain’t gonna happen this time. I got the right man, and there ain’t a damned thing she can do about it.”

“Then you won’t mind if I go talk him into surrendering?”

He said, “Billy.”

Billy Wymer instantly stepped forward, the forty-seven-year-old juvenile delinquent who does a good share of Cliffie’s bidding.

“Cuff him.”

“My pleasure, Chief.”

“What the hell’re you doing?” I said.

Wymer’s a big guy with green stuff always in the corners of his dull blue eyes and a kind of moss on his stubby little teeth. His mouth is usually leaking too. When he laughs, which is frequently, especially when something cruel is taking place, he does so without sound:

his mouth wide open, his mossy teeth on display, and no sound whatsoever. Like a silent movie scene.

He snapped the cuffs on me. “Got ‘im, Chief.”

“Good goin’, Billy!” As if he’d just accomplished something major, like discovering a cancer cure or finding a new planet in the solar system. Then Cliffie smiled at me. “I tried psychology on this pecker, McCain. You heard me yerself.”

“I sure did. That new-car-smell stuff would certainly have made me surrender. They could’ve used you when Dillinger was around.”

He raised his bullhorn and aimed it at the shack. “Ninety seconds is what you got, Chalmers! You give yourself up or we open fire!”

“You can’t threaten him like that,” I said.

“I can’t, counselor?” His eyes scanned the men. “You men get ready.”

Rifles and shotguns glinted and gleamed in the fall sunlight. A lot of the men were grinning.

“This is McCain, Chalmers! Give yourself up right away!” Now that I understood Cliffie probably wasn’t bluffing, it was important to haul Chalmers out of there pronto.

“Scared the shit out of you, didn’t I, counselor?” Big grin on his stupid face.

“Sure wish I had a photo of you just now.

Sure wish I did.”

“C’mon out, Chalmers!” I shouted again.

He cried back, “They’ll shoot me!”

“They’ll shoot you if you don’t come out, Chalmers!”

“Forty-five seconds!” Cliffie said over the bullhorn.

“Chalmers, he’ll start shooting! He really will!”

“I didn’t kill those people!”

“I know you didn’t. But you have to come out before I can help you!”

“Twenty-five seconds!”

“Chalmers! For God’s sake! Get out of there!”

He came out. First he peeked around the door like a guilty kid. He had something in his hands.

It was sort of funny and sort of sad and sort of pathetic.

“What the hell is that?” Cliffie

said.

From his fingers dangled a rosary.

“Don’t shoot me, all right?”

“Tell him you won’t shoot.”

He raised his bullhorn again. “You men put your weapons down!”

None of them looked happy about doing so.

Chalmers came slowly down from the cabin.

Arms stretched out for cuffs, black rosary beads hanging from his right hand.

When he reached me, he looked at my handcuffs and said, greatly disappointed, “How the hell you gonna help me, McCain? You’re handcuffed too.”

“Thanks for pointing that out,” I said.

Cliffie was magnanimous and let me drive myself back to town. Sans handcuffs.

Cliffie double-parked out front so everybody’d be sure to see him bringing in Chalmers. Just in case anybody was too dense to miss all his subtle machinations, he stood in the middle of the street with his bullhorn. He wanted an audience and got one immediately: decent folk in faded housedresses and work-worn factory pants and shirts and little kids squinting into the sun to see what dangerous specimen the chief had brought in this time.

He could have pulled up behind the building, of course, and nobody would have seen him.

“Stand back, everybody,” he said. “We’re bringing in a desperate criminal.”

Even the old ladies giggled about that one.

Desperate criminal. Cliffie loved

melodrama almost as much as a keynote speaker on the Fourth of July.

He repeated himself: “Stand back, everybody.”

Then he handed the bullhorn to Billy, yanked his own sawed-off from the front seat, opened the back door, and said, “You take it nice and easy now.

You try anything, and your teeth are gonna be chewin’ lead.”

I hadn’t heard the “chewin’ lead” one before.

I hoped I didn’t have to hear it ever again.

Chalmers, pale, forlorn, about as dangerous as a ground squirrel, got out of the patrol car with his head hung low. Embarrassed.

Cliffie gave him a hard shove. Chalmers turned to glare at him. Cliffie shoved him again.