He gave me a little nod. The nurse gave me a nod, too. She was old and tough and serious, the master sergeant type. He looked like Mike Hardin. He didn’t even look pale. Both his wrists were bandaged pretty good, though.
I lighted a cigarette and walked over to the window and looked out on the town. In the daylight it’s Norman Rockwell. For all its foibles and shortcomings, it’s a good town with good people. The exceptions to the latter generally don’t bother you with anything worse than brief burst of malicious gossip or pontification. You could see the changes, though. Like the shopping center distant on the north edge of town. The downtown merchants were scared of it, and rightly so. We had recently added a McDonald’s near the community college. There was talk of a chain pizza coming here next year. And then there were the commuters who lived in the large, expensive housing development to the west. Four bedrooms, three baths, two-and-three stall garages. The Interstate would swing by here in another couple years and the number of commuters would triple after that. Judging by things they wrote in the newspaper letter columns, they seem to regard us and our customs as “quaint.” Some of the quaintness irritated them. They especially hated farm smells and slow traffic when they were trying to get to their jobs in the morning. I don’t believe that a Jaguar or a Mercedes-Benz had ever so much as passed through our little town till the high-powered executives arrived. It was the brave new world of 1962.
After the nurse squeaked out the door, Hardin jammed a cigarette between his lips, fired it up with an expensive lighter, and said, “Pretty stupid, huh?” He held up his wrists to show me. He held them up the way he would little kittens.
“Pretty stupid.” We still didn’t like each other but this was no time to play tough guy.
“I can tell you what everybody’s saying.”
“That you killed her and her brother and then tried to kill yourself rather than face prison.”
“Yup. ‘Former University Football Star Murders Mistress.’”
“You should write headlines for a living.”
He smiled. It was a wide and deep and sincere smile, too. The suicide attempt had transformed him into a relaxed, friendly human being. “I’ll have to consider that since I’m soon going to be broke. If not behind bars.”
“You kill her?”
We watched each other for a while. Just watched. No particular expressions. Then he glanced out the window and back at me.
“I was always kind of an asshole to you, wasn’t I, McCain?”
“Me and a lot of other people, though this probably isn’t the time to say it.”
“I’m going to be changing that. Or trying, anyway. My wife’s only going to stick with me if I try. I wasn’t a hell of a lot better with her than anybody else. And the worst thing is that I’ve been that way pretty much all my life. I knew it, too. And I didn’t care. I don’t know that my two boys’ll ever forgive me.” Then: “You think I killed her?”
“Nope.”
“How come?”
I shrugged. “Just don’t is all. Couldn’t tell you why. Just a sense I got.”
“Do you usually guess right?”
“About twenty percent of the time.”
He laughed. Then gave me a full rich phlegmy minute of a cigarette cough. He said, “I didn’t kill her. I sure thought about it when her brother started shaking me down, though.”
“He was shaking you down?”
“Nobody told you?”
“No.”
“Hell, he was shaking all of us down. I got pretty mad and threw him around one night.”
“When was this?”
“Two weeks ago.”
“You talk to Karen Hastings about it?”
“Yeah. She got real mad. Or pretended to, anyway. Told me how much she hated her brother. How she’d traveled with him with his magic act. He’d do the divorce detective routine. Get her in bed with some rich old bastard, hide behind the curtains and take snapshots of them. And then sell the pictures to the guy for a lot of money. She was honest enough to say that she hadn’t minded living that way for several years but then she just wanted out. That’s when we met her. That’s why she agreed to the setup we had. She thought it would get her away from her brother.”
“He told me he couldn’t find her.”
“Bullshit. He’s been out here from day one. She said he had a lot of nasty things going on the side in Chicago but that when he’d run out of money, he came back here and got some from her. Then recently he got the idea of shaking all of us down. Murdoch tells me the little guy hired you?”
“He told me he wanted me to deliver a package. To a woman. That’s all he told me.”
“You ever deliver it to her?”
“She was dead before I got to her.”
He lay his head back on the pillow. For the first time he looked like a sick man. Drained. Weak. “I don’t think my life was supposed to turn out this way. I was always supposed to be the hero. The good-looking football star. Now I’ll be a creep to everybody.”
“Maybe not to the people who matter to you.”
He smiled. “You gonna go ‘Dear Abby’ on me, McCain?”
“Nah. It’s too early in the day for that. I only go ‘Dear Abby’ after a couple of beers.”
I was in court for two hours. My client had been charged with shoplifting. He was seventy-six years old.
Judge Frank Clemmons said, “Sid, what the hell’re we going to do with you?”
There were only four people in the pews. One of them gasped when Clemmons, who was nearly as old as Sid Cosgrove, said “hell” in court. The other three laughed. Clemmons fixed them with the evil eye.
“Sid, now I’ve looked into your Army pension and your social security and your savings account and for the life of me I can’t figure out why you shoplift. You’re not rich but you’re set up pretty good. You don’t have any reason at all to shoplift. Now the first three times you got caught, I’m told that the store just let you make restitution. But you know how Ken Potter is, especially when he’s having a bad day with his rheumatism. Well, looks like you caught him on one of them bad days, Sid, because here you are in court. Now what’ve you got to say for yourself?”
“I just like to have a little fun.”
“That’s your defense? That you like to have a little fun?”
“Sure. I sit out to the danged nursing home all day with nothin’ to do. So every once in a while I walk into town and have myself a little fun. They all know I shoplift by now. So it’s even more fun. See if I can grab somethin’ without them catchin’ me.”
“Well, you’ve been caught four times. That’s not a very good record.”
“Yeah, but it gives us all somethin’ to talk about at suppertime. Instead of hearin’ the same war stories over and over again. Or lookin’ at pitchers of everybody’s grandkids or great-grandkids. Or listenin’ to everybody bitch about their aches and pains. We’re old—seems logical that we’d have aches and pains. What’s the point in complainin’ about ’em?”
“So you shoplift to sort of entertain yourself?”
“Most fun I’ve had in years. People see how old I am and they expect me to fall over dead any minute. So it’s fun to show ’em I’ve still got the stuff.”
Sid made a pretty good case for himself. It was a pretty unique defense and you could see that Judge Clemmons was enjoying himself except when he looked out and saw Ken Potter the dime store owner glaring at him. I would say in fact that Sid was well on his way to becoming a folk hero except that he blew it by falling asleep right then and there. Just dropped off to slumber-land with no warning. And talk about your wall-rattling snoring. Folk heroes aren’t supposed to do that. And it says so very plainly in the folk hero book of rules. At least it did last time I looked.