Sam McCain - 02 - Wake Up Little Susie

Wake Up Little Susie

A Mystery

by Ed Gorman

Volume I of Two Volumes

Pages i-Xi and 1-188

Published by:

Carroll and Graf Publishers, Inc.

A division of

Avalon Publishing Group

19 West 21st Street

New York, Ny 10010-6805.

Further reproduction or distribution in other than a specialized

format is prohibited.

Produced in braille for the Library of Congress, National Library

Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, by National Braille

Press Inc., 2003.

This braille edition contains the

entire text of the print edition.

Copyright 1998 by Ed Gorman

Book Jacket Information iii

A Sam McCain Mystery

Ed Gorman

Author of The Day the Music Died

Praise For Ed Gorman’s

The Day The Music Died

“What sets this novel apart (and should make it a candidate for next year’s Edgar award) is Gorman’s successful capturing of time and place … [as] he sharply evokes the twilight of the ‘ej’s.”

—.Los Angeles Times

“Wonderfully evokes the sorrows and pleasures of a certain Midwestern past; [this]

engagingly low-key novel … proves much more genuinely affecting than many a more high-profile thriller.”

—.Wall Street Journal

“Gorman knowingly invests his whodunit with all the right retro cultural touches … but, by not ignoring the racism and sexual taboos of the time, he elevates it to a story with bite and substance.”

—.Chicago Tribune

“No writer captures the mood of 50’s America … better than Gorman.”

—..Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

“What a pleasant treat this book is!”

—..Washington Post Book World

In his ‘ea red Ford ragtop and a charming new mystery set in the rock and rolling Eisenhower years, Sam McCain is back.

On September 4, 1958, with hoopla and picnics and fireworks the Ford Motor Company introduced the Edsel to America. In Black River Falls, though, the baton-twirling, hog-calling, drum-rolling celebrations to introduce the small Iowa town to the car of the future go sour when the local Ford dealer discovers a dead body in the trunk of one of his brand-new, equally illfated Edsels. Very A young lawyer with a private

investigator’s license, Sam McCain

prefers rock and roll to murder, but he soon finds himself embroiled in the case of Susan Squires, which doesn’t want for clues—a broken taillight, tire tracks, an

Illinois license plate—or for suspects.

Prime among them stands David Squires, the victim’s abusive husband and the county’s politically ambitious attorney, until he himself turns up dead. Neither his jealous ex-wife, Amy, a sexy lady with an

immoderate palate for Chablis, nor

Susan’s one-time lover, the hostile and evasive Dr. Todd Jensen, clear the air of McCain’s suspicions, which also take him to the trailer park where an indigent ex-con prosecuted by Squires lives with his disa4

fifteen-year-old daughter.

Then McCain’s former high school

sweetheart, Mary Travers—the one friend with whom Susan Squires might have shared the secret that could crack the case—mysteriously disappears. And Sam’s stakes in the action get quickly more personal.

Ed Gorman, winner of the Shamus, the Spur, and the International Fiction Writer’s Award among others, is the author of many novels, including Cold Blue Midnight and The Day the Music Died. He lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Jacket design and collage illustration: Saksa Art and Design

Author photograph: Amy Kinney

Books by Ed Gorman

The Sam McCain Series

The Day the Music Died

The Jack Dwyer Series

New, Improved Murder; Murder

Straight Up; Murder in the Wings; The Autumn Dead; A Cry of Shadows

The Tobin Series Vii

Murder on the Aisle; Several Deaths Later

The Robert Payne Series

Blood Moon; Hawk Moon; Harlot’s

Moon

Suspense Novels

The Night Remembers; Night Kills;

Black River Falls

Thrillers

The Marilyn Tapes; The First Lady;

Runner in the Dark; Senatorial Privilege Short-Story Collections

Prisoners; Cages; Dark Whispers;

Moonchasers; Famous Blue Raincoat

The author would like to thank Larry Segriff for his indispensable help with this book.

ix

In memory of

Dr. William R. Finn

Readers of The Day the Music Died will note that this novel is set a year previous.

Xi

“There’s not much to see in a small town, but what you hear makes up for it.”

—August Derleth

“There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon.

Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.”

—Sherwood Anderson,

Winesburg, Ohio

Wake Up Little Susie

So Elvis leaned over to me and said, “You know what it looks like?”

“What what looks like?”

“That grille.”

“No,” I said. “What’s it look like?”

He grinned. “It looks just like a

woman’s—” He whispered a word naming the most private part of a woman’s anatomy.

He wasn’t really Elvis, of course.

On this Saturday, September 14,

1957, in Black River Falls, Iowa, on the lot of Keys Ford-Lincoln, there were at least a dozen Elvises, maybe eight James

Deans, six Marlon Brandos, and maybe as many as twenty Kim Novaks. Everybody had to be somebody, so why not be somebody famous?

I suppose it’s kind of sad, feeling that you need to be somebody else. For a long time I wanted to be Robert Ryan. I really like that crazed Irish intensity of his. But he didn’t wear anything distinctive—l Elvis’s hair or James Dean’s red jacket or Marlon’s rolled-up T-shirt—s even when I walked down the street pretending to be him, nobody knew. It was real frustrating. Maybe Ryan will start wearing an eye patch.

Being something of a car aficionado, I had been waiting for this day for months. This was the day that the Ford family of Detroit, Michigan, would bestow upon us the most futuristic, the most exciting of all family automobiles, the Edsel.

I guess it’s kind of funny how we look at cars. I remember this Russian diplomat saying that Americans were the only people he knew who wrote pop songs about their cars. Heck, I did even better than that. I dreamed about cars.

Oh, sure, I dreamed about girls, especially the beautiful Pamela Forrest, but I also dreamed about cars. About owning, in addition to my red Ford ragtop, a black chopped and channeled ‘di Merc. Or one of those little red street rods.

I even had a couple of dreams about the Edsel, and what it would look like would be downright fantastic. …

According to Time magazine, Ford had spent

$10 million advertising this launch. Even poet Marianne Moore had been asked to help name the vehicle. Her choice had been the “Moongoose.” Declining her suggestion was about the only smart thing Ford had done in bringing this car to market.

Keys Ford-Lincoln was so crowded, they’d had to hire extra cops to direct traffic. An hour before the unveiling, right on the same concrete slab where the cloth-covered Edsel would be brought, there had been a talent show. All the expected acts appeared—baton twirlers, tap-dancing twins, pig-call masters, Elvis

impersonators, Lawrence Welk imitators, baggy-pants drunk acts, and two (god love ‘em) little girls wearing spangly top hats who sang “God Bless America” with tears in their eyes—but the one I liked best was the saw player who kept cutting himself on the teeth of his instrument. By the time he’d finished “Ebb Tide” he was badly in need of medical attention.

There was the high school marching band. There was a speech by the mayor. There were pennants and three dozen Brownies with hula hoops and two dozen Cub Scouts in Davy Crockett coonskin caps and twenty-three college boys trying to stuff themselves into a single phone booth.

And then there were all the Elvises.

Not only wasn’t the guy next to me really Elvis, his opinion wasn’t even original.

A number of other men had expressed the same thing earlier in the day. About what the Edsel grille looked like, I mean.

And that was about the only good feature on the whole car. The rest of it looked like something out of a cartoon. Piss elegant was the proper term.

It had gadgets previously unseen in automobiles; it had pastel colors heretofore unknown to automotive metal.

This wasn’t just my reaction.

You could see it on virtually every face. It was like opening a birthday box to find a rat crawling around inside.

Being small-town folk the way we are, we didn’t say any of this to Dick Keys, of course. The usually cool Dick Keys looked nervous. His story was that as the handsomest kid, not only in his class but in the entire valley, he would go on to marry his own kind: a beauty.

Instead, he married a plain stout girl who just happened to be the wealthiest girl in the valley.

There was no smoother salesman than Dick Keys, and he ran the Ford-Mercury dealership well day-to-day. But it was rumored, and I believe true, that his wife, who’d put up the money for the dealership, made most of the important decisions. Today, Dick wore a white button-down shirt, red-and-blue

regimental-striped tie, and a pair of blue slacks. He was good-looking in the sort of way that the second lead in romantic comedies is good-looking. He never gets the girl. Dick’s graying hair lent him an air of earnestness, and his slightly loose midsection reminded the rest of us mortals that when we reached Dick’s age-he was in his early fifties—we too would be faded by time. If it could happen to Dick Keys, it could happen to any of us.

Dick was one of hundreds of Ford dealers who were just now realizing that Edsel Ford and Robert Mcationamara had stuck him with one hilariously ugly sonofabitch of a car.

Elvis snapped his collar up a little higher, gave me a lurid wink, cracked his gum, and said, “I gotta find me some chicks, man.”

I got a hot dog and went over to where Keys had set up a little carnival: a small Ferris wheel, a few battered bumper cars, a pony ride, and some clowns who vaguely scared me the way clowns had always vaguely frightened me.

Keys had also rented some green park benches that pigeons had been decorating. I sat down on one and ate my dog.

I was just finishing up my lunch when I saw her, and it was a good thing I was almost done because my stomach did its usual flip-flop. The same kind of flip-flop it had been doing since that first day of fourth grade when I’d instantly fallen in love with her: the beautiful Pamela Forrest.