Sam McCain - 02 - Wake Up Little Susie (6 page)

He was there, all right. In his office.

With a cigar and a bottle of Wild Turkey that he was pouring straight into a Pepsi paper cup.

He had his shirt open, his tie off, and his cordovan Florsheim wing tips up on his desk.

His wife sat on the edge of a wooden chair.

She wore a green dress that looked light enough for summer. For such a big-boned woman, she moved with appealing grace. Her perch on the chair was delicate.

“I feel like calling Edsel Ford at home,”

he said, “and telling him what a piece of shit his car is.”

“I still like it,” his wife said. “But obviously the public doesn’t share my taste.” She rose. “Well, dear, I’m going to go spend some of your money.”

“Buy me a couple of gallons of

bourbon,” he said.

She winked at me. “Be sure he doesn’t do anything foolish, Sam.”

He made a sound that faintly resembled a laugh. “I do foolish things all the time.

Nobody’s been able to stop me yet.” The bitterness surprised me. She looked embarrassed by it.

She nodded to both of us and left.

“Damn, she’s a nice lady,” Keys said.

“Don’t know why the hell she puts up with me.”

Then: “Drink?”

“No, thanks.”

He gunned some more of his own.

He sighed. “First the Edsel. And now Susan Squires.”

“Yeah, I was meaning to ask about her. She used to work here, you said?”

“Two years. Back when she dropped out of college.”

My question didn’t seem to surprise him at all. “Was she seeing David Squires while she worked here?”

“The last year or so. He was here so often, I damn near offered to put him on payroll.”

“I take it you didn’t like it.”

“She was the receptionist. She had to meet people and be nice to them. Most people don’t appreciate how important a good receptionist is. They’re your first contact with the public. A receptionist who is rude or unhelpful gives you a bad

impression of the place.”

“Was she rude and unhelpful?”

“She wasn’t rude very often. But unhelpful, yes. At least for the last six-seven months she worked here. She was caught up in her affair with Squires. They’d have an argument and she’d come in to work looking teary and worn out. Started calling in sick a lot. You know how it is when you’re in love. Sometimes you have a hard time concentrating. And he’s still married all this time. You’d think they would’ve been a little more discreet.”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking of Pamela and her affair with Stu. “Yeah, you would.”

“I didn’t want to fire her. But I was glad when she finally quit.”

“Because of the scandal?”

“Hell, yes. It wasn’t real good for business, believe me. She just couldn’t take it anymore. She went to stay with some relative.

By that time, I sure as hell didn’t blame her.”

“Why was she here now?”

“Oh, hell, we’re still friends. After she and Squires finally got married and everything settled down, she dropped in all the time. Everybody here still liked her.”

I was writing all this down in my notebook.

“What’s wrong with Howdy Doody?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“Your notebook. Noticed you’ve got a Captain Video. They out of Howdy Doody, were they?”

I felt my cheeks burn. “I got a deal on these.”

“Msta been some deal”—he smiled—?make you carry a notebook like that around. Captain Video, I mean.”

I changed the subject. “Cliffie spend much time here?”

“They’re having corn on the cob over at the Eagles tonight and then showing two Abbott and Costello pictures. Cliffie’s like a kid about that kind of stuff. You think he’d hang around and do his job when they’ve got corn on the cob boiling in those big pots?”

The office was small. He had a lot of family photos on the wall and a badly thrumming Pepsi machine in the corner. There were also more plaques, these from the Ford Motor Company, one of them having to do with clean

rest rooms. Not the kind of thing you’d want on your tombstone: He Kept A Clean

John.

“You notice if he did anything with that broken taillight cover?”

“He didn’t. I asked my boys if they knew anything about it and they didn’t. Gil said it wasn’t there when he left last night at seven but it was here this morning when he came in at six.”

“So Cliffie didn’t take it?”

“Far as I know, he didn’t even look at it. Think the cleaning crew finally picked it up and tossed it in one of the cans out back.”

“Mind if I look?”

“That’s some job you’ve got, McCain.

Scrounging around in waste cans.”

“I didn’t get a law degree for nothing.”

He laughed. “Yeah, and everybody in this town is proud of you.” Then: “Poor Susie. Just can’t figure out how she got in that Edsel. Why couldn’t it have been the Pontiac dealer down the street? I know that sounds sort of mean, but between the bad publicity with the Edsel and the murder ….

Sure you don’t want a drink?”

“No, thanks. I’ve got to put that law degree of mine to use.”

He smiled. “Thanks for making me feel better, McCain. I appreciate it.”

The sky was darker now, stains of mauve and gold and amber, a few thunderheads brilliantly outlined with the last of the day’s sunlight. There’s a loneliness to Saturday night, at least for me, that no amount of noise and movement can ever assuage.

There’re a lot of popular songs about Saturday night, about how you live all week for it to roll around so you can go out and have yourself a ball. But deep down you know it’ll never be quite as exciting as you want it to be, need it to be, and the lonesomeness will never quite go away. I think my mom used to feel this when my dad was in Europe during the war.

She’d kind of fix herself up on Saturday night and then sit in the living room by herself with her one highball in her hand and a Chesterfield in her fingers. Even when she’d laugh at the radio jokes there’d be a lonesomeness in her eyes that made me sad for her and scared for my dad. But we were lucky. Dad came home.

There were five large trash barrels out back.

A big lonely mutt hung around watching

me.

It took me twenty minutes to find what I was looking for. I couldn’t decide whether to start on the barrels from the left or right. If I’d started from the left I would have been out of there in five minutes. So of course I started from the right. This is the kind of frustration that the nuns always said was good for us. Taught us humility and patience. I never was sure about that. It was like attributing not eating meat on Friday to Jesus. All the things that poor guy had on his mind, did he really have time to worry about cheeseburgers?

By the time I finished, my shirtsleeves were grimy and my fingernails were black. In the center of the fourth barrel, I found what I was looking for. Whoever had picked it up had been thoughtful enough to put it in a paper bag for me. Even the little pieces.

“Ok, now, McCain. Close your

eyes.”

Mrs. Goldman is a widow who rents out rooms. I’d call her my landlady, but that term always paints a mental picture of a dowdy middle-aged woman with flapping house slippers and pink curlers in her hair. Unless of course you read the occasional Midwood “adult”

novels they sell under the counter down at Harkin’s News. In those books landladies are invariably twenty years old and cursed with nymphomania and they’re always asking the narrator if he’d “like to earn a little discount on his rent.”

I figure Lauren Bacall will probably look like Mrs. Goldman when she reaches her mid-fifties: tall, elegant, quietly imposing. Mrs. Goldman’s husband died six years ago. She hasn’t had a single date since. Until tonight. She goes to temple in Iowa City every Saturday. She recently met an optometrist there, a man around sixty and a widower. He was taking her out for steaks and dancing tonight.

“Ready?”

“Ready, Mrs. Goldman.”

“And you’ll be honest?”

“Absolutely.”

Mrs. Goldman keeps the downstairs for herself. There are three apartments upstairs. She’d bought herself some new duds and wanted my

opinion of them. I’d never seen her this nervous before. It was cute.

“Here I come, ready or not!”

She came down the hall from the bedroom into the living room and she was gorgeous. Really. She’d bought a black shift and black hose and black pumps and one of those little French-style hats that Audrey Hepburn wears whenever she wants to get William Holden all hot and bothered.

“Holy moly.”

“You think he’ll like it?”

“Are you kidding? He’ll break down in tears.”

She smiled. “You never overstate things, McCain. That’s one of your finest qualities.”

She leaned over and gave me a motherly kiss on the cheek. “I appreciate the compliment. I need it. I keep running to the bathroom every five minutes, just the way I used to when I started dating my husband. I have a bladder that’s very sensitive to romantic feelings.”

She smelled great too.

Then: “Oh. David Squires stopped

by to see you.”

“David Squires? Are you sure it was him?”

She laughed. “Are you saying that I should have Dr. Kostik check my eyes tonight? I know David from the Fine Arts committee at the library.”

“God,” I said, stunned. “Why would he want to see me? He and the Judge despise each other.”

“That’s what I was thinking. But his wife was murdered, so maybe he needs to talk to you. The poor man.”

Dillon’s Stables had a huge red barn for dances and three big hayracks for rides. I wore a T-shirt, a denim jacket, jeans, and desert boots. To get in the Western mood I wore a red kerchief around my neck.

Mary was dressed in a similar outfit. Her mahogany-colored hair was pulled back into a ponytail. A hundred male eyes did

terrible things to her. She was a beauty. No doubt about that.

From inside the barn came music:

Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly. This was a young crowd tonight. If Dillon had his way he’d still be playing songs from the ‘dj’s. Fortunately, his twenty-year-old daughter chose the music. Just because you dressed Western didn’t mean you had to listen Western.

Especially when you had your hair swept back into a duck’s ass.

The hayracks filled up pretty fast.

Mary and I got on the third one. We sat high on the stack, about four feet up. A friendly old mare pulled the wagon, following an ancient Indian trail along a creek painted silver by moonlight. The night was chilly, the hay smelled fresh and clean, and the mare was sweetly scented of field dust and road apples.

“Did you ever try and count the stars?” Mary asked.

“Not after they let me out of the mental hospital.”

She nudged me. She had a cute way of doing that. She’d done it since grade school.

For some reason I’ve always taken great pleasure in being nudged by her.

“They made me do that at Girl Scout camp. Sit up all night and count the stars.”

“Nice girls.”

“Yeah, but I was dumb enough to do it.”

There were six other couples. One of the guys had a guitar. He played some Gene Autry and Roy Rogers songs, and then he played Vaughn Monroe’s “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” I still like to lie on my stomach and look out the window to see if I can spot any of the ghost riders he sings in that song. It isn’t hard to spot them. Not if you had an imagination like mine. Big silver ghost horses and cowpokes trailing across the midnight sky.

“She was a nice woman.”

“Susan Squires?”

“Ummm.”

“Why’d she marry him?”

“She was in love with him.”

“Poor girl.”

Some of the other couples were already making out. A Tribute to Gonads seemed to be the theme of the evening. I had my arm around Mary but that was it.

“She stopped in for lunch at Rexall,”

Mary said.

“About a week ago.”

“She say anything?”

“She just kept toying with an envelope. She was so nervous, she left it behind.”

“Anything on the outside?”

“Just the return address for a county courthouse. I’ve got it at home. She called later that afternoon. Sounded scared. Wanted to meet me for a Coke downtown. But Dad got very sick. They’re trying this new medication on him. I had to help Mom.”

“That was the last you heard from her?”

“Yes. Now I feel guilty. I mean,

I had to help Dad and Mom. But I feel as if I let Susan down.”

“You sure she sounded scared?”

“Positive. I knew her well enough to know that.”

“Know much about her marriage?”

Before she could answer, the wagon gave a sudden jerk and stopped. We had crested a hill. Below us spread the town of Black River Falls.

This should have been the makeout point of choice for all the town’s teenagers, but the mud-ribbed roads and brambled roadsides made it too hard to get to.

The sight was gorgeous. If you grew up in a city, a town of 25eajjj probably doesn’t look like much. But spread out this way, the lights vivid against the prairie night, it was a lovely spectacle. For all its flaws and

shortcomings, I loved the old town. Back in the stables, they had a wall posted with photos of various generations who had gone on hayrack rides, all the way back to the 1880’s, when the men wore bowlers and the women wore huge picture hats. There were doughboys from World War One and dogfaces from World War Two. There were flappers and Frank Sinatra’s bobby-soxers and Johnnie Ray’s teary teens. And somehow I was a part of it, just like Mom and Dad and Sis and Grandad and Grandma were part of it, and that made at least a little sense of life for me, being part of a town and a tradition, and if that was all I ever got, it was enough.

Then we were moving again, the wagon jostling left and right, bouncing up and down, the kid with the guitar singing a Frankie Laine song called “Moonlight Gambler.” He did a

pretty good job of it too.

“She ever talk about her marriage?”

“Just kind of hinted about it from time to time.”

“Anything specific?”

“Well, that he spent a lot of time away from home. His legal practice and everything.”