“Did you hear that I’d been sick?” she said.
“No, I hadn’t. What was wrong?”
“Oh, you know, a woman thing.”
“Are you all right now?”
“Well, the doctors think everything is going well.” She tried to smile but it didn’t quite work and the sadness was back on her face. “And I pray a lot. I pray all the time.” Then, “I don’t want to-let me put it another way. I’d like to make out with you tonight, Sam. But I can’t. I hope you won’t get mad.”
“I’ll try and control that psychotic temper of mine.”
She reached out and put her hand on my shoulder.
“I’m having a hard time with some-things-Sam.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t feel very… female these days.
Do you know much about breast cancer?”
And then all her comments made sense. Same thing had happened to an aunt of mine.
“A little, I guess.”
“Well, I didn’t feel very female after the operation. And when my husband saw me-undressed me the first time-it wasn’t his fault, but I could see how repelled he was and-and I was repelled, too. Every time I’d look in the mirror. They had to take my right breast.”
She didn’t cry. She simply looked out at a passenger train snaking, its lighted window like the glowing skin of a rattler, across the Midwest midnight.
“Right now, Sam, I just couldn’t handle making out.”
Four
“So you have no idea how it got there?”
“God, Sam, how many times do I have to tell you? I don’t have any idea at all.”
“And you weren’t out there last night?”
“No. Not even close.”
“And you can prove that?”
David Egan said, “I can prove it but I’d rather not.”
I sat on the edge of my desk and lighted a Lucky. He put his hand out. I pitched him the pack.
He said, “All I’ve got is the habit, Sam. I’ll need a match, too.”
I’d been planning to go to Iowa City for the Hawkeye game that day. But not now. Not with the events of last night. I’d have to send Dad and Mom on alone.
David Egan was the local heartbreaker.
Even my part-time secretary, Jamie-who was so in love with her boyfriend, Turk, that she wore two of his rings, both suitably stuffed with pink angora, one on her wedding finger, the other on a chain around her neck-her cheeks flushed, and she dithered even more than usual when Egan was around.
She claimed Egan looked just like Tony Curtis-which came as news to me and, I assumed, would come as news to Tony. Egan had been raised by two maiden aunts after his drunken father rambled west and got himself killed under mysterious circumstances and his mother died young of heart disease. There were two distinct David Egans. Now that he was in trouble, he was the humble Egan. But there was a harsh side, too, the self-pitying side that always let you know how tough his life had been and implied it should be your turn to have a little of his hard luck. This only seemed to attract the girls, who foolishly thought they could use maternal skills to take away his bitterness. He was a heartbreaker and proud of it.
He was also an obsessive drag racer and that was how I knew him. I’d had to represent him in court several times because his souped-up black Mercury just dragged him into trouble again and again.
“We’ve got two things we need to clarify before Cliffie finds you,” I said to Egan.
Cliffie had gone looking for Egan last night. But Egan had gotten the word first and hidden out in the abandoned grade school. He called me around dawn. It was now nearly 9 A.M.
“I could really use some breakfast,” he said, the way any seventeen-year-old kid would. And then he made a rasping sound that quickly became a wheeze. His asthma. The one flaw in the portrait of the teenage rebel as seen on drive-in screens throughout the land. The one flaw that marred the snapshot of this particular seventeen-year-old in his James Dean red nylon jacket, white T-shirt, and jeans was the fact that he was about to be charged with murder.
He fought his asthma a few minutes.
“I could use some breakfast myself, David.
But right now we’ll have to make do with this really shitty coffee I made. Then we’re going over to Cliffie’s and you’re going to turn yourself in.”
“You sure about this, McCain?”
“Positive. But now I want to know about Sara Griffin.”
He shrugged. “Then I’ll need another cigarette.”
I tossed the pack back.
“First of all, what were you and Sara Griffin arguing about yesterday?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“Then go get another lawyer.”
“Hey, man, what bug crawled up your ass?”
“You don’t help me, David, there’s no way I can help you. We’re just wasting each other’s time.”
“Shit,” he said and stared down at his hands.
Without looking up, he said, “All my life I’ve been screwed.”
“No time for your self-pity, David.
Answer my question. What were you arguing about last night?”
“I asked her to marry me and she said no.”
Well, well. People had said crazier things to me but at the moment, I couldn’t think of any. The daughter of one of the richest families in town and David Egan, seventeen-year-old high-school dropout, asks her to marry him.
“Did you slap her?”
“No. I just-I sort of brushed her. I pulled back at the last minute. I really did.”
“What was your relationship with her?”
“I am-was-in love with her.”
“Were you intimate?”
“You mean did I sleep with her?”
“Yes, did you sleep with her?”
“No. There was… somebody else.”
“Who?”
He scowled. “I never knew.”
I hesitated, making sure I could make myself be understood without sounding harsh. “She was beautiful and she was rich and she was seventeen. Why did you think she might say yes when you asked her to marry you?”
A smirk. “That isn’t what you want to say, man. You want to say why was I dumb enough to fall in love with somebody out of my class.”
“All right. If that’s the way you want to put it.”
He paused, stared down at his hands again. “I don’t know how to say this exactly. I-she-when I was with her I felt… special. I didn’t feel like some punk who hung around with a bunch of simps from the Knolls. I was part of her world. They have a maid, man. And three cars. And their house-hell, it’s a mansion-it’s so big I used to get lost walking around in it. I was somebody when I was there. I don’t know how else to say it. There wasn’t any other girl who made me feel that way.”
“What was wrong with Rita?”
“Her old man owns some horse stable. Big deal.”
“How about Molly?”
He shrugged. “Molly-she’s like me. She wants to improve herself. Step up the ladder, so to speak. I think that’s cool. But it doesn’t help me. I need somebody who’s already there.
Somebody with a maid and three cars in the garage.”
I walked over and got myself some more coffee.
“That’s number one. You were arguing because Sara rejected you. Now number two. Where were you last night?” I went back to my perch on the desk.
“I can’t tell you who I was with.”
“Why not?”
“Because I gave my word.”
“I need to know, David. And right now.”
“I can’t, McCain. I really can’t.”
“Why wouldn’t this person want to help you?”
“Because,” he said, “she’s married.”
“Great, David,” I said, “just great.”
Five
I had just locked the outside door to my office when I heard a young woman’s voice say, “Oh, God, David, there you are!”
By the time I reached my ragtop, sleek, copper-haired Molly Blessing was in David’s arms, sobbing joyfully into his neck.
Before meeting up with Sara Griffin, David had spent his youth going back and forth between Molly and Rita Scully. Most people found it pretty funny, the way he’d drop one and go back to the other. But a few, me among them, found it more sad than comic.