“You may not be the right man but you’re the only man I can reach. Now get out there.”
I reached over and petted Tasha, who was an elegant tabby. Then I stroked Crystal, a black-and-white beauty with a Disney profile.
“You could always call Cliff Sykes.”
“Are you always this hilarious at five seventeen A.M.?”
“I’m at my most hilarious at five seventeen A.M.”
Cliff Sykes is the local police chief. For four generations, Whitney money ran this town. Then Sykes, Sr., got rich during Ww2 building training facilities for the Army-Air Force. Now Sykes money runs the town. Judge Whitney always refers to him as “that damned hillbilly” and she isn’t far wrong.
“Get out there, McCain, and find out what’s going on. He sounded pretty bad.”
“His house?”
“His house.”
Then she hung up.
I decided to wear my pink shirt from last night. You remember a couple of years ago when everything went pink? Well, I went right along with it. I am the proud owner of three pink dress shirts and the damned things never seem to fade, frazzle, stain or wear out. I am happy to report, however, that I do not own a pink tie, pink socks or a pink sport coat. Moderation in everything.
I shaved, took what my mom always called a sponge bath (face, neck, pits, crotch, backside with a soapy washcloth), went heavy on the Old Spice, easy on the Wildroot hair cream.
As I got dressed, I called Val’s
Diner and had them put up a three-cup paper container of coffee for me. I picked it up on the way out of town. The local gravel roads being what they are, I had a nice soaked spot right in my crotch. Pretty smart, putting a coffee container between my legs as I sped over roads so rough your voice trembled when you talked. Not for nothing did I toil in the intellectual fields of the University of Iowa.
I was a couple of miles out of town-racing along under several Air Force jets whose direction indicated that they’d probably come from Norfolk, Nebraska, where there was a base, which I was personally thankful for, given the fact that I just assumed someday Mother Russia would drop the atomic bomb-when the word came on the radio news.
Plane crash. Buddy Holly. Richie
Valens. Big Bopper. Taking off from the town where we’d seen them at the Surf Ballroom last night. It’s odd how we are about celebrities. We invent them to suit ourselves and they stay that way until the press gives us a good reason to think otherwise. I liked Buddy Holly because he was kind of gawky and I liked Richie Valens because he was Mexican. They didn’t fit in and I’ve never fit in either. So they were more than really great rock and rollers, they were guys I identified with. I was tired and then I was sad for two guys I’d never really known, and I thought of how my aunt had been that day in 1944 when she learned that my uncle had been killed in Italy, her just sitting at my folks’ kitchen table with a bottle of Pabst and a pack of Chesterfields and the Andrews Sisters on the record player in the living room, a woman who never drank or smoked, just sitting there and staring out the warm open April window, staring and saying nothing, nothing at all even when the day cooled and became dusk, even when the dusk darkened and became night, saying nothing at all.
Three
Six years ago, Kenny Whitney had married one of the most beautiful girls in the valley, and set her up inside the huge Tudor-style home he’d built for her, and expected her to stay happy while he went right on with his single style of life. Lots of whiskey. Lots of poker. Lots of fights.
Lots of girls.
The house was eight miles southeast of town.
Some of the rural mailboxes still wore their Christmas decorations. The cows in the barnyards exhaled steamy breath that joined with the vapor that rose from their cow pies. The chimneys of the farmhouses all had snakes of gray smoke uncoiling into the blue sky, and here and there yellow school buses were picking up shivering little kids hugging books and lunch pails. My own personal pride and joy had been a Roy Rogers lunch pail, with Roy’s arm slung around Trigger’s neck and a six-gun dangling from his fingers. That was until Hopalong Cassidy appeared on the Tv screen in 1948. Kids are fickle. I went all out for Hoppy.
Hat, shirt, jeans, socks, boots, six-shooters and, if I’m not mistaken, underwear. Who’d be crazy enough to go anywhere without his Hoppy underwear?
Nothing remarkable about the Tudor. No cars visible on the long drive or on the apron of the three-stall garage. No tire tracks in the light snow that had dusted the town last night, nobody in or out for some time. Then I noticed the chimney, the only chimney I’d seen this morning without smoke.
I swung into the drive. Nothing moved. I sat in the ragtop scouting out this side of the house.
I didn’t notice the frost at first. I did notice the downstairs window that was missing a pane, jagged edges of glass rimming the interior of the frame, the kind of damage caused by something hurled through the window.
A sweet-faced border collie came around the far side of the garage. She looked hungry and scared and lost, sniffing the ground. She came over to the car and I opened the door. Even in the cold, she smelled sweetly canine. I got out of the ragtop and rubbed the collie’s face lightly, trying to get her warm. The temperature was somewhere around ten degrees above zero.
My new friend stayed right with me all the way across the back drive, right up until somebody poked a rifle out of an upstairs window and fired at me.
The collie jerked away to the right and I threw myself on the snow and started rolling to the left.
Then the second shot exploded.
The criminology and police courses I took at the University of Iowa weren’t all held in the classrooms. We’d spent a week at the police academy in Des Moines and had learned a number of things about facing down an armed opponent. I even did pretty well in boxing, which was an elective you could take at night.
I had my. 45 out and had rolled flat against the house, over some prickly bushes. He’d have a hard time getting me in range from the upstairs window now.
In town, the rifle shots would attract instant attention. Out here they’d simply be attributed to a hunter.
“Get the hell off my land,” he shouted. No mistaking the voice. Kenny Whitney. King of the world. Just ask him.
“Your aunt sent me.”
“I don’t care who sent you. You don’t get off my land, I’ve got the right to shoot you.”
“I hate to tell you this, but that isn’t how the law works, Kenny.”
“Yeah, well, then maybe it’s how the law should work.”
I stood up and brushed myself off. Unless I stepped away from the house, I was safe. “I want to talk to you, Kenny.”
“You go to hell.”
Then something strange happened. There was a silence, a long one, and then I heard a man sobbing. Kenny was crying. Out here in the boonies, a beautiful if cold sunny day, the chink of tire chains in the distance, a big United plane coming in low, preparing to land in Cedar Rapids-and Kenny Black-Eye Whitney was crying. I probably should have enjoyed the sound, hearing him as vulnerable as the rest of us humans.
But it cut into me, that sound, the grief and horror in it. And then the shot came and I didn’t have any doubt who the target was. The target was Kenny himself.
Four
The back door was locked. I smashed one of the fractional windowpanes with the butt of my. 45, then reached inside past the cotton curtains and found the doorknob. I pushed on the door and followed it inward.
I’d always been curious about the place-e year the local paper ran a photo spread on its most recent improvements-but now wasn’t the time to pause and gawk. I needed to get upstairs.
But I only got as far as the living room.
Susan lay on her back on the floor. She wore a modest white terry-cloth robe. There was blood all over the front of it. There was blood on her face, too. The bottoms of her feet were dirty. I don’t know why I noticed that, but I did. It’s the kind of thing doctors record at autopsies. They’d made some pretty crude jokes, the times I’d sat in.