The Day the Music Died (2 page)

She got out and, for the moment, the door was open. The night air felt good, clear and purifying somehow.

I watched Pamela’s good legs flash going up the steps and then she was gone, and I just sat there inhaling her perfume and remembering what it was like to walk her home from high school on Indian summer afternoons. My life had been so complete at those moments. She was all I’d ever wanted, dreamed of. I wanted that sense of completeness again. I wanted to be fifteen again and have it all ahead of us, for both of us, only this time there’d be no Stu. There’d just be us. Just us.

T
HE CALL CAME AFTER
I’d been asleep for about two hours. I woke dazed and confused, the way you get when you’re sleeping off whiskey. Not that I get that way very often. Two drinks, I go to sleep. Three drinks, I generally throw up. My dad’s the same way. Heredity, I guess. For the sake of everybody concerned, I mostly stick to Pepsi.

A sunny dawn sky was at the windows of my apartment, bare black branches like antlers on the panes. I cleared my throat and said hello.

“I’m sorry to bother you, McCain, but I need you to throw your clothes on and get out to Kenny’s place.”

She didn’t need to identify herself. There was only one voice like hers in the entire state. Not only was it imperious, it was somehow Eastern too—Smith College, I think—though she’d lived here all her life, Judge Esme Anne Whitney.

Tasha and Crystal, my cats, were lost among the muss of winter covers, yawning and stretching and deeply resenting being awakened at this time. I’m not a cat guy, actually. Samantha, a local community college drama star, left them with me when she went to Hollywood to become a movie star. She writes me every six months or so to tell she’ll be sending for them as soon as director Billy Wilder gives her a part. She’s fixated on Billy Wilder. Meanwhile, I have the cats, and, worst of all, I’ve started to consider them family. I know guys aren’t supposed to like cats (out here, you still occasionally find the stout masculine type who goes out and
shoots
cats), but I can’t help it. They’ve won me over.

“Does it have to be right now, Judge?” I almost asked, “I just got to sleep.” Then I stopped myself. If I admitted to being out that late, I’d not only have to get dressed, I’d have to listen to a sermon while I was fumbling around with my clothes and shoes.

“Eight hours’ sleep should be plenty for an active young man like yourself, McCain.”

“Yes, I guess it should.”

“Kenny seems to be having some kind of difficulty.”

“Your nephew, Kenny?”

“Yes, my nephew, Kenny. I know you two don’t like each other much but he seems to be—hysterical.”

Her nephew, Kenny, had given me my one and only shiner. Eleventh grade. Mr. Stearns’ civics class. Kenny and I had started arguing about civil rights. Kenny had a vast ship upon which he wanted to put all Negroes, non-English speakers, atheists, union members, communists, Jews, Catholics and people who’d ever refused to cooperate with the House on Un-American Activities. He inherited his beliefs from his father, Judge Whitney’s brother, who was head of the local bar association. I made a few points that got Kenny snickered at. One thing a Whitney can’t abide is being ridiculed. Kenny waited for me in the parking lot, in full view of Pamela Forrest. Kenny was starting fullback for our Wilson Warriors. I stood five-seven and weighed 130 pounds. Hence, my black eye, and my humiliation in front of Pamela.

“I’m not sure I’m the right man for this, Judge.”

“He won’t hurt you.”

“I know he won’t hurt me. I’m bringing my forty-five if I go.”

“Are you serious?”

“Damned right, I’m serious. But I still don’t think I’m the right man.”

“You may not be the right man but you’re the
only
man I can reach. Now get out there.”

I reached over the 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 WWII 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.

S
IX 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 rag-top 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.

T
HE 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—every 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. I’d wanted to defend the dead people they were making fun of. Maybe it’s the lawyer in me.

My first impulse was to kneel down, check her out. But what was the point? By the looks of things, she was long dead. Her face was starting to discolor badly.

Silence from upstairs. Maybe he’d pulled it off. He’d been lucky at everything else. Why not lucky at his suicide attempt?

I went upstairs, moving carefully. If he wasn’t dead, he might want to start shooting at me again. The stairway was enclosed. I took the steps slowly, carefully, and then I reached the top. I smelled floor polish. And then the fresh smell of rifle fire. The floor creaked as I stepped on to the hallway. Two doors on one side, three on the other. I gripped my .45 harder, feeling self-conscious. You see so much gunplay on private eye TV shows that you think it feels natural to have a gun in your hand. But it doesn’t. You’re carrying such quick-and-easy death in your hand. There’s so much responsibility, and fear. At least for me.

A bathroom. Watery blood smeared all over the white porcelain sink. A bedroom that I sensed—given its neatness and slightly impersonal accouterments—was a guest room. Another bathroom, this one huge compared to the other one. And then another bedroom. Or a monument to bedrooms. This had everything, including a large TV, stereo speakers on the wall and yet another bathroom. Everything in this bedroom was sumptuous, from the carpeting to the silver-handled hairbrushes on the dressing table. This was how rich people lived, at least around here. Except for the two fresh bullet holes in the ceiling and the raw smell of cordite. He hadn’t done so well by his suicide attempt.

I was just turning around to leave the bedroom when I saw him in the doorway. I hadn’t seen him in some time and at first I hardly recognized him. The chiseled face was fleshy now, as was his waistline. The eyes were alarming, tinted red from sleeplessness and whiskey and grief, and underscored with deep dark half-moons of loose and wrinkled flesh. His hair had started to thin. He was my age. This kind of aging didn’t just happen; you had to go out and earn it. The white oxford button-down shirt he wore had traces of blood on the sleeves and the cuffs. His chinos showed even more blood. His feet were bare.

He held a Remington hunting rifle on me. He said, “I’ve got some whiskey downstairs.”

Then he quietly laid the rifle against the door frame and led the way back down the hallway to the stairs.