“Stu,” I said, “I’ve made an ass of myself in front of so many people, they’d fill a stadium.”
His face showed surprise. “Really?”
“Hell, yes, if I don’t make an ass of myself at least twice a day, I can’t sleep at night. I just lie there and think of all the opportunities I missed.”
He gave me his courtroom smile. Before he’d wrecked his legal career by fleeing town with a woman named the beautiful Pamela Forrest, he’d been one of the highest paid attorneys in the state. There was talk of the governor’s mansion or at least a state supreme court appointment. “You’re being a lot nicer to me than you should be. One more?”
“Be my guest.”
He poured. He drank. He sighed. “And all this insane stuff with Ross Murdoch and his three buddies. Keeping a woman. Incredible. I knew it’d all catch up to them some day.” He took one more drink. “He said he’d nail them.”
“Who?”
“Little guy. They had a magic act. I met her when she first came out here, but I didn’t know why she was here. But her brother did. He found out what she was up to. I heard them arguing as I was leaving the courthouse one day. She’d been in the driver’s license bureau, I guess. Anyway, I was waiting for an elevator and just stood in the hall while they kept going. That’s how I found out what she was really doing about it.”
“He was mad because she was a concubine?”
“Hell, no. He was mad because she was cutting him out of the money. She’d done things like this in the past but he always got some of the proceeds. He kept shouting that he didn’t have a magic act or a woman to sell.”
“I’ll be damned,” I said.
“At this rate, McCain,” he said, pointing a final time to the bottle for permission, “we’ll all be damned.”
TEN
I WASN’T READY FOR SLEEP. They were half an hour gone and I sat in the easy chair with the warm remains of a beer and my little ten cent Woolworth notebook that fits just about any pocket you care to name.
I was making one of my famous lists, the way this cop had taught us in night school. He said there were two kinds of forms you should fill out for every incident. The official one, for which the state provided the form. And your own, which you provided for yourself. He urged us to make up our own form. He said, for instance, to use emotional words when you were conducting an investigation. I kept the example he gave us tucked into every one of my notebooks.
AL DUFFY
Arrogant
Evasive
Wife afraid of him
Say this was a fire investigation and you’re the detective assigned to liaison with the fire department folks. The first thing they’ll want to eliminate is arson, which is generally motivated by money or revenge. When you look at Al Duffy’s attributes (as you perceive them), you’ll look doubly close at the possibility of arson just because of his attitude. The way he bullies his wife with angry glances and interruptions may be significant here. Maybe she’s on the verge of confessing to what they’ve done.
I made my own list.
ROSS MURDOCH
Distracted
Depressed
Afraid
MIKE HARDIN
Angry
Frantic
Then I stopped myself. These little profiles were going to be essentially the same for all of them. Who wouldn’t be distracted, depressed, afraid? Who wouldn’t be angry and frantic?
I should be writing down motives instead of moods.
But why would any of them kill their hired woman and her brother? Their deaths guaranteed that the whole setup would become public and destroy them.
It was more likely that somebody who hated one or all of them had found out about their concubine and decided to inflict the worst kind of revenge—public humiliation and the destruction of their reputations. Plus there was a good chance that one or two of them might even be tried for murder.
Men like these would have made innumerable enemies. Some deserved, some not. Successful people are targets.
But if it was revenge, then it was done by somebody who’d really thought everything through. He would have had to murder the woman, hide her body in a container and then get inside the house.
Daunting as this seemed, it certainly wasn’t impossible with all those workmen going in and out. The men would be working for several different companies, so what was one more man from one more company? He’d have to go in at the very end of the day, of course. If Murdoch was telling me the truth and really hadn’t gone down to the shelter between approximately five p.m. and the next morning (a fact I’d noted in my notebook), then all the killer had to do was sit back and wait. Think of Murdoch’s face when he saw the dead woman. Think of Murdoch’s panic. His shame.
I went to bed around three o’clock. I read fifty pages of the new Charles Williams Gold Medal novel which was, as always, well-crafted and fetchingly written. There was a darkness in Williams’s books that you couldn’t find even in Jim Thompson. Thompson’s darkness was the darkness of the insane. Williams’s darkness was the darkness of the sane. A subtler and ultimately more terrifying doom.
I lay in the luxury of Pamela’s various scents—sleep, body heat, perfume. I got a useless erection and then fell asleep, my second-to-last thought being that in the morning I needed to get a list of all the companies that had worked on the bomb shelter. My very last thought was to wonder if Mike Hardin’s financial loss in any way played into the murders. But I was too tired to puzzle it through.
I HAD BREAKFAST in the café down the street from my office. I had the waitress pour the coffee directly into my eyes. You wake up faster that way.
No need to wonder what the various conversations were about. There is nothing quite so pleasing as watching the mighty fall. And if they fall because of a sex scandal it’s really a lot of fun. Like hearing that John Wayne was really a transvestite. You know—that shadow between the public image and the private person. A few years ago Confidential magazine had made a lot of money with just such tales.
From what I could hear, the murder wasn’t nearly as interesting to the downtown folks as the idea that they’d hired the woman to share sex. The double homicides would play in later. But for now the whole idea of having your own kept woman—this was the stuff of legend. It was good for at least three generations and maybe more. Who cared about dead people when you had a beautiful lady putting out for the four men who kept her in relative luxury?
I was at the counter, paying my bill, when Deirdre came in. The morning was chilly enough to rouge her cheeks with wholesome red spots and to draw silver dragon-breath from her perfect little nostrils. “I went to your office. Decided I’d just start walking up and down the street. I really need to talk to you.” She wore movie star sunglasses, very dark and provocative.
A lot of the patrons knew who she was. It became a bad cowboy movie suddenly. The gunfighter everybody’s afraid of walks in and conversation goes silent. Everybody watching. Staring.
She kept her eyes averted. If she looked at them, it would just reconfirm the hell her life had become. There was a fifteen-year-old boy whose father had shotgunned and raped a waitress. The mother was too ashamed—and angry—to attend the trial. I was hired as the public defender. The father was the kind of bully who probably should have been drowned when he was a couple months old. Definitely mentally deformed. But the boy was there. Every day. Sat right up in the first pew, too. Just wanted his old man—abominable as he was—to know that there was still blood between them and that he was there to offer the man his support. All the smirks and name-calling and even threats the kid had to endure—but by God he was there every day the court was in session. When the Amish drive someone from their community, they do so by “shunning” them. The kid had been shunned but he stood up to it.