“I just want to say one thing,” Carlson said. He was a slim, short, preppy-looking man who always managed to work in the fact that he’d graduated from Yale. That is, if you’d managed to miss the enormous Yale class ring on his finger. If the Yale Alumni Association had recommended Yale tattoos, I’m sure he’d have one his forehead. “Think of our wives, think of our kids, think of our parents when this hits the newspapers and the TV sets. Our lives are over. No matter who killed her and put her down in that bomb shelter. Our lives are over no matter how it turns out. We’ll always be the four civic leaders who set up a woman—let’s face it, a very high-priced whore—in an apartment so we wouldn’t have to travel very far when we wanted a little nookie on the side. Are you ready to face that?”
Mike Hardin half-leaped from his chair and started pacing. “Face it. We’re screwed either way we go.” He made huge frustrated fists of his hands. He wanted to rip something apart. If I’d been in his situation, I’d have reacted the same way. He walked over to the window and looked outside. Nobody talked. A grandfather clock in the corner made the only sound.
“The longer you wait, the worse it’ll be,” I said. “And even if you try to hide the body, it’ll be found and you’ll still have to face all the same problems.”
“I’m willing to call Cliffie right now.” Ross Murdoch held an unlit briar pipe. A pacifier for older tots. “And I’m going to be the number one suspect.” He sighed again. “And it’s going to be the end of my political career.”
He’d obviously been thinking realistically about everything in the hours I’d been away.
“Your career is finished, Ross,” I said. “But all four of you’ll be suspects.”
“Us?” snapped Peter Carlson. “It’s not our bomb shelter. It’s Ross’s. We don’t live here.”
“No, but you were one-fourth of the deal.”
“Does he have to be here, Ross?” Carlson said. “He’s some two-bit lawyer. He doesn’t know jack shit.”
“Well, I’m not a two-bit lawyer and I say he’s right on the money,” Hardin said. “Hell, yes, we’re all going to be suspects. The workers in and out all day. Doors opened wide. I imagine there were times when nobody in the family was home when the bomb shelter was being worked on. Anybody could’ve slipped in. Any one of us. She probably weighed a little over a hundred pounds. She wouldn’t be hard to move in if you got in right after the workers were done for the day and the family was gone. Were you all gone yesterday, Ross?”
“I was in Iowa City. I’ll have to check with my wife and daughter. The maid usually leaves around four. She leaves the dinner for us in the stove. We like to eat early, around five.”
“There you go. You see what I mean?” Hardin said. “This house is big enough that people on the second floor wouldn’t hear anybody if they snuck into the basement and were quiet about it.”
“Cliffie isn’t that smart,” Gavin Wheeler said.
“Cliffie won’t have to be smart,” Murdoch said. “I know enough people in the capital that I can insist on the state boys getting involved. I want to find out what the hell happened.”
Gavin Wheeler said, “My own TV stations’ll cover this. I’ll be sittin’ at home watchin’ my own TV station treat me like a common criminal. Damned good thing it’s privately held. Stockholders’d kick my ass out for sure.”
“We’re all going to have those problems,” Murdoch said. “People’ll be shocked when they hear this. And then they’ll start laughing. And they’ll laugh at us the rest of our lives. It’ll be like when Carmichael took bankruptcy.”
Andy Carmichael had owned twenty-some mom and pop grocery stores throughout the state. He wasn’t afraid of the huge supermarkets that had just reached the outlying Midwest. He said that people in our kind of towns would resist them. Would hate the size. Would hate the impersonal service. Would hate all the hoopla that always goes along with places like that. Two supermarkets came into town in 1950 and by 1952 all of Carmichael’s stores were out of business and he’d gone bankrupt. He took to walking with his head down so he wouldn’t have to acknowledge anyone on the street. He took to staying home for days, sometimes weeks at a time. He took to solitary and severe drinking. And then one night he took to putting a .45 in his mouth and pulling the trigger. Just once is all it takes. It wasn’t Jews, Negroes, homosexuals, or even Catholics—despite the name he was a virulent anti-Papist Protestant—that had done him in. It was capitalism in its simplest and most ruthless form.
Murdoch set his pipe on the desk, walked around so he could face everybody and said, “I’m going to call Cliffie. Sam, you shouldn’t be here. That’ll make things look bad for you and bad for us. I’m going to tell one lie that I want you all to agree with. That I didn’t discover the body until just before dinner. That way it won’t look as if we even considered covering all this up. I found the body, called you gentlemen over, and we all arranged to be here when the law arrived. Is that all right?”
“I won’t swear to it under oath,” I said. “In fact, I think it’s a very bad idea. Lies never work in investigations like these.”
Murdoch shook his head. “I’m going to take the chance.”
“That’s up to you, Ross.”
I nodded to the four of them. “Good luck.”
I had almost closed the door—hoping I wouldn’t hear any disparaging whispers about myself—when Peter Carlson, obviously wanting me to hear it, said, “What a nickel-dimer he is. I don’t want him around any more, Ross, and I mean it.”
All the way out to my car I wondered which was more insulting, nickel-dimer or asshole. I am frequently involved in such philosophical debates.
I was so lost in asshole versus nickel-dimer that I didn’t even see her until I opened the door and got in the car. She sat smoking a cigarette in the passenger seat.
Her hair was in a ponytail now and she wore a crew neck sweater, white shirt and jeans. She looked like a high school girl. “Hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.”
“God, I love making out in cars, don’t you? And I don’t mean that as an invitation.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“And then smoking afterward. And drawing your initials in the steam on the window. And pretending that nobody can ever hurt you as long as you never leave the car. And as long as the night never ends.”
She was bringing back a lot of memories and for a long wonderful moment I rode on the crest of them, surfer style. But then I began wondering what she was doing out here.
She spoke before I could ask her.
“I just had to get away from my mom for a while.”
“I thought you got along.”
“We do. But—today’s been a real strain on her.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
She said, “She’s been eating Miltowns all day.”
“Still the tranquilizer of choice.”
“She’s terrified and so am I.”
“Of what?”
“Oh, please, Sam. Something terrible’s going on, isn’t it? Dad won’t let anybody go in the basement and if you even go near it, he explodes. He’s usually very calm. Then his three so-called ‘friends’ have this secret meeting in the den.”
“Why ‘so-called’?”
“Well, both Hardin and Carlson have tried to put the make on me ever since I was fourteen. Hardin even got me drunk one night at this New Year’s Eve party and really felt me up.”