Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (5 page)

    "Jamie, huh?" He winked at Roger Weed again. "You better remember how old she is, McCain. Wouldn't want to see you get into any kind of trouble."

    Or trbble, as Jamie would type it.

    "You don't have to worry about that."

    "He a client of yours, was he?"

    "I assume that's why he wanted to see me."

    "He say why?" Cliffie loves pressuring me with stupid questions and I love confusing him, which doesn't, believe me, make me work hard enough to break a sweat on a day when it's 102 degrees in the shade. There's just one thing about Cliffie. True, he's a racist bigoted bully, but you tend to forget that when you see him with his little daughter, who has spina bifida. He's so purely loving at that moment you think it's somebody in a Cliffie disguise. I can't figure it out, how anyone can have two such disparate parts. But as my dad says, life is like that sometimes.

    "He said he thought somebody might be trying to kill him."

    If I hoped that might get a big reaction, it didn't. Cliffie said, "Lot of people around here wanted to kill him. He was a commie."

    "He wasn't a commie."

    "Oh, yeah, I'd expect you to say that. You're sort of a commie yourself. I seen you out there that day with all them colored people."

    "We were picketing a restaurant that always made Negroes eat in the back."

    "I don't have a prejudiced bone in my body, McCain, but I'll tell you one thing you don't know about the colored. You can trick 'em real easy. And that's just what the commies are doin'. The colored, they think they're doin' one thing - they're always hollerin' about their civil rights and stuff - but they're really doin' somethin' else. What they're really doin' is what the commies want 'em to do. And commies mean Jews. You read me?"

    "I read you."

    "Used to be the Catholics was tryin' to take over this country, but they couldn't pull it off so they handed it off to the Jews. Now the Jews are tryin' it and they use the colored to help 'em."

    "That's the truth, McCain," Deputy Roger Weed said solemnly, "whether you think so or not."

    I looked over at Conners. "He wasn't a commie. I admit he wasn't real easy to like, but I think deep down he was really concerned about the average person getting a better deal."

    Cliffie smiled sourly at his deputy. "Ain't that just what the commies say they're doin'?"

    "You better listen to him, McCain. This is a man who's put a lot of brain hours into readin' up on commies. Plus he sees I Was a Communist for the FBI ever' time it's on at the drive-in."

    "Me 'n the missus never miss it," Cliffie said.

    But I'm going to stop here. You can pretty much write the rest of the dialogue yourself. Before Conners's wife and brother get here, that is. Cliffie sounded as if he wanted to present a medal to the killer; guy had done the town, the county, the state, the country a favor. He didn't even ask me many more questions about what Conners might have wanted to tell me. Or if he'd hinted at the name of his killer. He just said that commies came to bad ends and he didn't need any more proof than that dead guy across the room there.

    Let's pick up the scene about twenty minutes later. The room has three more people in it now, including Doc Novotny. Now, while Doc's medical degree comes from an institution called (and I'm not kidding) the Cincinnati Citadel of Medinomics, he actually seems to know what he's doing most of the time.

    But let's skip past Doc coming in and get to the part where Conners's mother and brother are standing on the threshold, staring at the shape beneath the sheet on the stretcher. You can see right away where Richard Conners got his looks. Even at seventy, Dorothy Conners is a damned good-looking and imposing woman. The cliche is that it's all in the genes and bones, and you know what? I think this particular cliche is true. Look at her. Those cheekbones, that fierce but elegant nose, and those blue eyes, so much furious intelligence and sexuality in the eyes. Almost as much as in the erotic mouth. Not even the gray hair or the wrinkles around eyes and mouth can diminish the ferocity of her appeal. But aside from the face, she's her age in terms of fashion. Unremarkable blue dress beneath unremarkable black coat. Plain black purse. Scuffed black walking shoes. White anklets.

    God help you if you made her angry. She'd stand up in church or at the city council meeting or in a five-and-dime to denounce you if she believed you were in any way taking advantage of your fellow man. There's a hard prairie woman in her, the woman who trekked west in a wagon that broke down every other day, who felled trees alongside her husband, who adjusted to living in a soddy rather than a cabin; the woman who fought off Indians, rattlesnakes, cholera; the woman who watched half her children die before age eight, worked far longer hours than her farmer husband, and saw many of her prairie woman friends commit suicide before age thirty. She is against the death penalty, for liquor by the drink, for the right to have an abortion, for integration, for the right to put "dangerous" books into the libraries. And while I agreed with her on many issues - just as I'd agreed with her son Richard - she was something of a scold, with a scold's self-righteousness and smugness. She was also tireless once she got going. All of which may explain how Richard turned out as he did.

    Cliffie stopped lecturing me about commies when Dorothy Conners walked into the room without acknowledging any of us and stood over the sheet hiding her son. She pulled it back just far enough to see his face. Then she quickly covered it up again. Her expression was hard, controlled. No sign of grief, not even anger.

    Then she looked at Cliffie and said, "I'm giving you twenty-four hours to find out who killed him, Sykes. And if you don't have somebody in jail by then, I'm calling the governor. He's a Democrat and owes me a favor. I'll have him send out some state investigators to work independent of you on this."

    "Now wait a minute here, Mrs. Conners," Cliffie said, starting to rise from his chair. "You don't have no right to - "

    She looked at me. "I need to get some groceries." Then, to Cliffie: "Twenty-four hours, Cliffie. I mean it."

    About the last thing Cliffie liked was being called Cliffie. About the second to the last thing he liked was being threatened.

    "Bitch," Cliffie said, when she'd gone. "Fucking bitch."

    

    

    Richard Conners was unduly fond of his Jaguar. It was an easy way to demonstrate his social superiority, as only a true liberal could. People would stand on the corner and point to it the way they would at a UFO.

    But Conners had always been anxious about parking it. Somebody might run into it. Or break into it. So he made this deal with Mike's Auto Repair. Mike Burleigh owned an empty garage in the same alley where he had his repair shop. It was downtown, so it was a convenient parking spot. Conners rented the small garage from him. Whenever he drove into town, he ran his car in there and locked the garage door, and the Jag, all sleek and silver, was safe.

    I doubted if Cliffie had checked out the garage yet. Maybe he didn't even know about Conners's arrangement with Mike.

    I walked over there. I wanted to take full true measure of the gentle autumn day, but I couldn't quite. I kept seeing Conners falling through my doorway, dead.

    When you're a kid, alleys are about the neatest places there are except maybe for cellars and basements. Alleys are perfect for any kind of game you want to play: war, cowboys-and-Indians, even science-fiction games. Alleys have neat places to hide, neat places to fall dead and give little dying speeches like they do in the movies, and neat places to jump off of. Alleys are universes unto themselves.

    That's when you're a kid. When you're older, you tend to smell the garbage in the cans, and notice the town drunk sleeping off another sad bender behind a couple of empty crates, and be slightly offended by all the dirty words kids have scrawled on the garage walls.

    This alley dated back to at least the turn of the century. Dozens of businesses had come and gone here in that time. It was narrow and without shade because there were no trees. The backs of the two-story wooden buildings gave it the feeling of a small canyon. The liveliest place was Mike Auto's Repair. Auto shops tend to be noisy places. I went directly to the garage Conners had rented. Nothing special about it at all. A one-stall garage. There was a clasp where a Yale lock had held the door in place. But the lock was gone. The door opened sideways. I pulled it far enough to get inside.

    The interior smelled of faded sunlight, car oil, the feces of a dozen different creatures. It was the kind of garage where a lot of us got our first kisses. Little boys and girls playing together and then experimenting with kisses, and maybe a little more, the way couples on TV were always doing it.

    I looked around. Except for the Jaguar, nothing notable presented itself. I saw a spider in a web, a caterpillar crawling along the edge of a two-by-four, a robin dead and mummified in a corner. An odd little nook of existence.

    The handprint wasn't hard to find once I got close. Three of them, in fact: handprints made in blood. I could picture Richard, after being shot, reeling from the car, falling against the wall here. Leaving his print, his palm wet from touching his wound.

    I spent a few minutes there and then went over to Mike Burleigh's place. Mike had been a classmate of mine from kindergarten through high school. We'd never been close friends, but I'd see him at all the auto shows and stock car races and that was enough to make us friendly. He went to work for the guy who'd once been the dominant auto repair man in town. A couple years ago, Mike had bought him out. Now he was the main man.

    Mike was bulky in his white DX coveralls. Not only were the coveralls greasy, so was his bald head. A wriggle of black grease looked like a birth defect right across the center of his pink dome.

    "Hey, counselor."

    "Hi, Mike. I take it you heard about Richard Conners."

    He frowned. "That's the kind of thing scares the shit out of you, isn't it? I mean, Des Moines or Cedar Rapids or one of the river towns - sure, stuff happens there. But Black River Falls?" He shook his head again.

    "You didn't happen to talk to Conners today, did you?"

    "Not today. Sometimes, he brings his car in for me to work on. Says he's finally getting me trained to work on a Jag. Personally, I wouldn't want the damned thing. Too much trouble."

    "But he didn't come in today?"

    "Nope. Just pulled into the garage and walked to wherever he was going. Which is what he usually does - did, I guess I should say now."

    "You didn't hear a gunshot by any chance, did you?"

    "You kidding?"

    Wrenches clanging when they hit the concrete floor, Chuck Berry on the radio, mechanics shouting back and forth in echoing voices - there was my answer.

    Before I went back to my office and got my car, I walked up and down the alley three times. I had no idea what I was looking for exactly. The backs of the various retail shops offered me no help at all.

    

    

    I took the long way home, which led me past Trawler College, nine red-brick buildings built over a twenty-year period, sitting on a vast wooded hill. There had always been a fortresslike air about the place, as if it wanted to repel all the nonsense and vulgarity to be found in the town below. If you believed its brochure, Trawler was considered "the Harvard of small midwestern liberal arts colleges." The claim would have been stronger if it had cited a source. Presumably, the Trawler English professors wouldn't let you get away with such stuff.

    This was the year that college kids discovered folk music. Or the Tin Pan Alley version of it, anyway. The Kingston Trio was the hottest act on campuses, and boys and girls alike wore a lot of bold-striped shirts in their honor. A harmless diversion - it was better than listening to Fabian, anyway - until they started updating and sanitizing some of the old labor songs. Then I wanted to reach for my gun. Those songs were based on the lives of immigrants who had struggled and suffered all their lives. Turning them into hummable sap for college kids irritated me. For the most part, Trawler students are rich Chicago kids who flunked out of or couldn't get into other schools. They drive cars far superior to those of most town folks and make frequent trips to nearby Cedar Rapids and Iowa City (we're pretty much between the two), where they spend their parents' money with abandon. This isn't to say they're bad kids or stupid kids. Not at all. It's just that they've never been very cordial to the people of Black River Falls, and that has left some resentment in town. As for the school itself, I'd taken two night school courses there. The instructors were damned good. I might even have gone there for my BA but my folks could never have afforded it. I went to the U of Iowa.

    Folk music seemed to come from every dorm window. I wanted to hear Chuck Berry or Little Richard or Elvis. I needed my sinus passages cleared.

    Even though dinnertime was near, and most of the faculty should be home, there were two or three little clutches of them in the lobby area of the first building I came to. They ran to crew cuts, Hush Puppies, button-down shirts, black-rimmed eyeglasses, cardigans, and dark trousers. A few pipes, mostly cigarettes. One Negro, a handful of women. A few of them recognized me and nodded. Most of them spoke low, the way you would in a funeral home. You could tell they'd been shocked, not in any dramatic way but in a quieter, more lasting way, perhaps. One of their own - no matter how much they might have disliked him - had been killed. One more measure of their own mortality.

    A tall woman in a blue crew-neck sweater, Peter Pan collar, and a gray skirt came over to me: Nan Richmond. I'd helped her with some vandalism she'd suffered. Turned out to be an ex-boyfriend. Her hair had started to streak gray in the two years since I'd last seen her.