“Gee, thanks, Sam. I already said I didn’t.”
“As I said, I’m assuming that. But I’m not ruling it out.”
“I didn’t kill her, all right? I didn’t kill her.”
“Then that leaves two likely possibilities.” I turned back to him. “One of your three friends killed her. Or somebody we don’t know about. Yet.”
“I’m going to let you call this one, Sam. That’s why I got you out here.”
I checked my watch. “Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to call Cliffie and get him out here. Tell him you just discovered the body.”
“But won’t the coroner set the time of death?”
“Maybe. But even if he sets it five hours before you call Cliffie, all you have to say is that you didn’t go down into the basement until right before you called.”
He gazed up at me with glassy, dazed eyes. “It’s funny. Being governor meant so much to me and now—”
I walked back toward his desk. “Right now your biggest concern has to be staying out of prison.” I headed for the door. “You don’t want Cliffie to think that you called me before you called him.”
He just sat where he was, still slumped. “Call him, Ross,” I said, “call him right now.” I sounded as I were speaking to a naughty child.
Four
I get down on my hands and knees every night and thank Khrushchev for being such a rotten, treacherous old bastard. Thanks to him this is the golden era of my sex life.”
You’ve heard of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck. Everybody has.
But how about Brad Brand? Rod Randall? Ty Tolan? They’re all writers, too. In fact, they’re all the same guy, our little burg’s only living professional dirty book writer, Kenny Thibodeau. Since Bible-thumping district attorneys across the land are trying to make political names for themselves sending “smut peddlers” to prison, everybody in the dirty book industry uses phony names these days.
There’s no explicit sex in these books and good sturdy bourgeoisie morality always wins out in the end. The covers suggest otherwise, of course, and it is often the covers, some of which are excellent examples of commercial art, that these politically ambitious district attorneys rave on about. If you can churn them out quickly enough, and Kenny can, you can make a sort of living at writing them.
According to Kenny, it isn’t easy to come up with Hot Rod Harlots, Motel Minx and Surfin’ Sinners all in the same month without having your brain collapse.
“In the last eight days, I’ve slept with four girls who usually wouldn’t piss on me if I was on fire,” Kenny continued. “And it’s all because they think we’re going to get nuked by the commies.”
Kenny himself has been mistaken for a commie by local members of such organizations as the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Catholic Church, the Presbyterian Church and the Amish. You can also throw in several biker gangs, my parents, his parents and the parents of any girl he’s ever dated. It’s not the fact that he writes dirty books—that just makes him a deviate—it’s the fact that he has a little black tuft of beard, a black beret, a black turtleneck sweater, black jeans, tan desert boots and a pair of thick-lensed black-rimmed glasses. He is, in other words, a stereotypical beatnik, our resident beatnik in fact. And as everybody knows, beatniks are—in addition to being smelly, profane, lazy and pretentious—commies.
We were in my office. I was looking over my phone notes that Jamie Newton had left behind during her two hour shift. Jamie’s still in high school. I represented her father in a property dispute. He told me afterward that he couldn’t afford to pay me so he’d give me his daughter for two hours a day as my secretary. In theory that sounded all right. But after seeing the first letter she ever typed for me—and after trying to decipher a couple of phone messages—I decided that she was his secret revenge. We’d lost the case. Jamie was my punishment and no matter how hard I begged, he wasn’t going to break our deal. “Fair’s fair,” he always said. He wasn’t taking her back.
Jamie returned from the john saying, “Turk didn’t call, did he, Mr. C?”
On the Perry Como TV show, his regulars always refer to him as Mr. C. Thus Jamie refers to me as Mr. C. That my last name begins with M bothers her not at all. Turk is her boyfriend, who is a kind of parody juvenile delinquent, the kind you see in Hollywood movies. You know, the fierce bad boys in West Side Story.
Kenny ogled Jamie all the way to her typewriter. He took special note of how she seated herself. Jamie is the girl paperback cover artists have in mind whenever they’re illustrating a “jail bait” novel. Though she dresses well thanks to earning free clothes as a department store model, she has a body that not even the primmest of dresses could disguise. Plus she’s got a sweet sensual face that belies her body. She’s actually innocent and decent and that’s what you see in her blue blue eyes and her little-kid smile.
“No, he didn’t call, I’m afraid.”
“He had to go to traffic court this morning.”
“Wasn’t he just in traffic court a couple weeks ago?”
“Chief Sykes really has it in for him. He won’t cut Turk any slack at all. Turk was just going thirty miles over the speed limit last night and Chief Sykes arrested him. He’s got that big yellow Indian, you know. Turk says cops shouldn’t be allowed to ride motorcycles because it puts drivers at a disadvantage. You know, when you’re trying to outrun them.”
“Nobody ever puts anything over on Turk,” I said. “He’s thinking all the time.”
“He said he’s going to say that in court this morning, Mr. C. About the cops having the advantage with their motorcycles.”
“That should get him ten to twenty on a chain gang,” Kenny laughed. If Jamie understood what he meant, she didn’t let on. She set to typing. That is, after she was done with her ritual. I figured at her fastest Jamie could type thirty words a minute, at least twenty of which were misspelled. In order to accomplish this amazing feat, certain things had to be in place. A fresh bottle of Pepsi with a long straw bobbing up inside the neck. A Winston cigarette burning uselessly in her pink plastic ashtray. And the latest issue of one of her teen magazines angled across the corner of her metal typing desk. The magazine was there, waiting and ready, for when she took one of her breaks.
I jerked my head at Kenny, indicating that we should go outside. My crowded, dusty little one-room office wasn’t a place for exchanging confidential information.
“We’re going down to the drug store for a Coke,” I said to Jamie.
“Sure thing, Mr. C,” she said, leaning over the typewriter and jamming down hard on a particular key.
“We’ll be back in twenty minutes or so,” I said.
“This darn thing. Is there a k in concern? I’m pretty sure it’s c, isn’t it?”
“You could always look at the one thousand spelling words book I got you. I’m sure you’ll find ‘concern’ in there.”
“Oh, yeah, right. That spelling book. I always forget about it. In fact—” And she began gaping around for it as if it might be playing hide-and-seek, “I haven’t been able to find it lately. You think you could get me another one?”
Oh, yeah; her father was one sly guy. I lose his case and he gives me Jamie.
The only thing that had stayed the same at the Rexall drugstore was Mary Travers, whose name was now Mary Lindstrom. She was still possessed of the pale skin and dark hair and naturally pink mouth and soft blue gaze that I’d almost fallen in love with. She was the girl everybody said I should marry. Which I probably would’ve done if it hadn’t been for my obsession with the beautiful Pamela Forrest. Mary had had the same kind of obsession with me. And for about the same length of time, starting in second grade.