Thirteen
I spent an hour and a half in my office the next morning calling every friend of Mary’s I could remember. Then I spoke to the two women she worked with at Rexall. No help whatsoever.
In an effort to calm myself, I took the lie detector out of its box, dragged a small coffee table over by my desk, and set it up.
Or tried to. I spent a full hour working with it. I got the On button to glow red. That was about it. You know how in the movies that metal arm is always making jagged lines on the printout paper? The damned thing wouldn’t budge for me.
What I was doing was killing time. Waiting for the magic hour of 11ccde A.M. I’d made a call earlier and asked what time the boss man went to lunch.
The Rollins Building is what passes for a skyscraper here. Four stories, ornate 1920’s facing, right down to gargoyles perched on the corners of every floor.
Squires came out walking fast. There was always that briskness about him. Dapper as usual.
Another dark blue suit, this one with pinstripes, gold collar pin, seawater-blue necktie, gray hair perfectly combed.
A sweet time for walking, so sunny, so filled with the pretty women of Black River Falls doing their shopping or pushing their strollers in the small stores that make up the downtown.
I fell into step next to him. “Hello, counselor.”
“I’ve been waiting to hear from you.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Oh? I hope that means you’ve come up with something.”
“I sure have.”
“Good. Let’s hear it.”
Other than his first unhappy glance at me, he’d stared straight ahead. It would be a pleasure to snap his head around and see his startled eyes.
“The news is that you killed your wife and you’re trying to frame Mike Chalmers for it.”
His head not only snapped around, he stopped walking. “What the hell’re you talking about?”
He spoke in a loud whisper.
“I was a little skeptical when you showed up at my place that night. A man like you could afford any investigator in the state. Why me? You told me the truth about one thing: because I know the territory. So I’d hear plenty of gossip.
Hear if anything would get in the way of setting up Chalmers. Like a witness who saw you at the murder scene. I was like a mine-sweeper. And now you think you’re in the clear. Thanks to all the crap you’ve been feeding Cliffie, he’s more convinced than ever that Chalmers is his man. And he’s going to arrest him very soon.”
“Chalmers is his man.”
“You’re a jealous man, counselor.
You like to keep your women locked away from everybody else. And when they disobey you, you like to beat them. Or maybe you beat them just for the fun of it.”
“Do you realize I could sue you for slander for what you just said?”
“Care to try? And Mary Travers is missing. I think you may be behind that too.”
“I’m firing you. Right here and right now.”
“I’ll send you a bill.”
“After what you’ve just accused me of, do you honestly think I’d pay it?”
“No, I guess you wouldn’t. But let me tell you something. I won’t let you get away with it.”
Cold smile. “You won’t, huh?”
“No. I won’t.”
The smile stayed but now it turned nasty. “You think the Judge has the power to go up against Cliff when he makes up his mind?” I noticed he no longer called him Cliffie.
“It’s happened before.”
“Well, it won’t happen this time. Chalmers is the man. No doubt about it. He had the motive, the method, and the means, as they taught us in law school. He’s obsessed with me and has been ever since I put him behind bars, where he belongs.”
“You framed him then too. Because of your sister.”
His features froze. “I take it he’s your client now?”
“He is.”
“So he’ll have ample opportunity to tell you a lot of lies about my poor sister. Did he also tell you that he raped her and that’s how she became pregnant?”
“If he raped her, why didn’t you charge him with it?”
“And put my own sister through a rape trial?
I happen to love her very much.”
“You think your sister would tell me that if I called her?”
“If you do call her, McCain, you’ll be a very, very sorry man, believe me.” He paused and then said, “My uncle owns the plant where your father works. And I’m my uncle’s favorite nephew.”
“I’ll mention our conversation to the union rep at the plant.”
“Not even a union man can save his job if I put the word in Don’s ear.”
I sighed. “Just when I think you couldn’t get any more despicable, Squires, you manage to come up with something worse. You lie awake nights planning this stuff?”
“Yes.” The cold smile again. “When I’m not busy planning world domination.” He had a nice expensive watch and shot his cuff to peek at it. “My stomach tells me it’s lunchtime.”
“That’s funny. My stomach tells me you make me sick.”
I sat in a caf@e and had a cup of coffee and a wedge of apple pie with a piece of cheddar on it. I smoked three Luckies. I plotted what I was going to do to our friend Squires. You know how you start thinking of all these neat ways of getting rid of somebody. Mussolini would have been proud of some of the things I thought up.
I was at a stoplight on my way to my office when the black Ford appeared. The mystery blonde in the black sunglasses looked more fetching than ever: white turtleneck, black silk head scarf, blood-red nail polish. That wry sexy smile. And that throbbing Chuck Berry music.
The light changed.
I floored it.
I shouldn’t say I floored it, the entity in control of me floored it.
Here I was, this hardworking young attorney trying to be mature and respectable when this being took possession of my body and made it do all sorts of crazy and degrading things-l, drag racing.
I laid down twenty feet of black rubber.
I beat her to the next stoplight and waited for her to catch up.
This time, she discarded the smile. In its place was a pout. Pure Brigitte Bardot. She started jabbing the accelerator. Her glas-paks thundered. She was going to put me in my place.
My glas-paks roared back at her.
People on the corners stared at us: the red Ford; the black Ford. The erstwhile counselor-at-law; and the gorgeous girl.
About to put the pedal to the metal.
Red light…
Yellow light…
Green li-Which was when Cliffie pulled into view on his big Indian motorcycle catercorner from us.
Wouldn’t he just love to give me a ticket so stiff it would let him yank my license for a year or two?
The black Ford sped away faster than was strictly wise, given Cliffie’s hunger for ticketing people. He gave her the bad eye but didn’t move.
She beat me to the next light and then disappeared again, turning an illegal right on red.
School was getting out. I sat there waiting for the grade-schoolers in the crosswalk. Their clothes were new. The school year was only a couple of weeks old. I remembered what it was like, buying school clothes in August, your folks taking you to the department store all worried about the money they’d barely been able to scrape together. Buy good clothes had been my folks’ reasoning, they last longer. I always went for Buster Brown shoes as a tyke because of his dog Tige and Smilin’ Ed McConnell on the radio. I also liked clothes that either looked Western-because of Roy and Gene-or futuristic-because of the Flash Gordon serials they ran over and over at the Rialto.
The new-shoe smell was almost as good as the new-car smell. And the first few times I wore them, I treated my clothes with the deference shown toward something Christ had personally blessed, careful of everything I ate and drank.
Then the crosswalk was empty.
This time, I didn’t lay rubber. I drove away like the nice respectable attorney I am.
I smelled him before I saw him.
I don’t suppose that’s a nice thing to say, even about Cliffie, but it’s true. There was just this odor, a kind of generalized Cliffie odor, wafting its way out the open window and my office door.