The Day the Music Died (23 page)

Greene just glared at him. It was over for him and Greene knew it. He seemed smaller now, less menacing, than at any time I’d ever known him. There was defeat mixed with anger now and I think even Frazier sensed this. When he spoke again, his voice was much softer. “I can’t stop you from telling people about the time you spent with my daughter. It won’t do her reputation any good, though, and if you love her as much as you say you do, then you’ll think that over. For her sake.” Then, “And for your sons’ sake, too, don’t forget. You really want him to know you were in love with some other woman?”

“For
your
sake, you mean,” Greene sneered. “Big fancy man like yourself with a daughter sleepin’ with a nigger.”

“All right then. For my sake.
And
hers. For all our sakes.”

Greene glared at him some more. Then he swung his giant head away.

Frazier looked down at his gun. “McCain, you go to the front door and tell Sykes I’m bringing Greene out and if anybody tries anything funny, he’s going to answer to me.”

“I’ll tell him,” I said.

I looked at Greene. He was staring at the floor, his shoulders slumped.

I walked down the hallway toward the lights in the front yard. I was thinking about the talk of abortion. Where had Susan gotten hers? And where was my sister, Ruthie, tonight?

The lights in front were stronger now. There were more of them. There were also more people. It was starting to look like a football crowd. Only they didn’t want to settle for games. They wanted the real thing.

I crunched pieces of glass as I walked to the front door and opened it. “Sykes!” I yelled before turning the corner where the crowd could see me. I didn’t want some yokel thinking I was Greene. “It’s me, McCain.” I had my hands up.

“Hold your fire!” Sykes shouted over his bullhorn.

I felt stupid, my hands up in the air and all, like one of the guys Robert Stack catches every week on
The Untouchables,
but I kept them there in case one of the more enthusiastic members of the mob got any ideas.

Sykes walked over to me.

“No deals,” he said.

“No deals? What deals?”

“No deals with your colored friend.”

“Nobody’s asking for any deals.”

“What was all the gunfire?”

“Nothing much,” I said. “The important thing is Frazier’s bringing Greene out. Frazier’s got a gun and he’s in good shape. He just wants to make sure nobody—the crowd or you—tries anything on Greene.”

“Me?” he snapped. “I’m the law here. I’ll do what I damned well please.”

“That part of the oath you take when you’re chief? ‘I’ll do what I damned well please’?”

But he was already moving away from me, putting the bullhorn to his mouth, instructing everyone to move back, saying that Frazier and Greene were coming out. He also told them not to do anything stupid and to keep their mouths shut when Frazier and Greene appeared. I had to admit, for once he was doing a competent job as a cop.

I headed on to my car up the hill. I wanted to get back to town. I needed to find Ruthie. I also needed to call Judge Whitney and bring her up to date.

A couple of out-of-town reporters rushed me and tried to get me to talk but I just kept on moving. One of them put his hand on my shoulder. I spun around and faced him and he shrunk away. Maybe all those teenage days of trying to look like Robert Ryan were paying off.

I was about twenty yards from my car when I saw a somewhat familiar form emerging out of thick fog. Rita Havers, Doc Novotony’s secretary at the morgue. She wore a leather car coat with the collar up and jeans. She also wore a jaunty little golf cap. She was proof that a woman well into her forties could easily still be damned good-looking. Fog encased her like iridescent coils illumined by moonlight, lending her an almost extraterrestrial radiance. The dampness was even worse now. A lot of people with arthritis would be having a bad bone-chilled night.

“Hi, McCain,” she said.

“Hi.”

“Doc’s busy at the hospital so he sent me here to see what was going on. He always counts on me to help him out.”

“It’s all over.”

“Nobody dead?”

“Nobody dead.”

She smiled. “Good. Now I can go back home. Jack Paar’s got Eddie Fisher on tonight. I’m a big Eddie Fisher fan.”

Her earlier words came back. “You said ‘he can always count on me.’”

“Uh-huh. Doc Novotony.”

“When I was in the morgue, you said that about somebody else.”

“I did?”

“Yeah, don’t you remember? You said that there was somebody your cousin could always count on. That he never let her down.”

“Oh,” she said, “yes.” Obviously remembering now. “I never should have said that.”

“Why?”

“Well, you know. It’s family business. Private family business.”

“You said she was pregnant and he helped her out.”

She shook her head and then looked with sudden longing at the crowd. She wanted to be down there with them. She wanted to be anywhere except here with me, answering questions about private family matters. “I’ve got to go”

I touched her arm. “This could be very important, Rita. Where did she get her abortion?”

“McCain, look, you’re really putting me on the spot here.”

“I mean to put you on the spot, Rita. It’s very important that I know that name.”

She looked longingly downhill to the lights and the crowd. You could tell by a sudden hush that Frazier and Greene had appeared. They hadn’t gotten the bloodshed they’d wanted but at least they’d gotten something. A colored man arrested. Maybe Sykes would work him over later.

“Please, Rita. Please help me.”

She sighed. “It was Jim.”

“Jim?”

“You know. Jim the handyman.”

“He did the abortion?” The name, the personal style, the way he was perceived by the community—none of it fit. Jim the handyman was Jim the abortionist?

“Yes. She said he laughed about it. How he was a handyman in every sense of the word.”

“Jim,” I said. “Jim the handyman.” I thought of all the medical supplies he’d bought at the Rexall earlier. Maybe they weren’t for his animal menagerie. Maybe they were for the girls he aborted.

I kissed her on the cheek and ran back up to my car.

T
HERE’S AN AREA ON
the edge of town that reminds me of my one and only trip to beautiful New England. Narrow, spiraling roads with trees set very near the gravel. Hollows that reap fog so thick you can’t even see the lights of farmhouses. A lot of dense hardwood forests that glow with the moonlight trapped in the fog that drips from the trees like moss.

I kept the ragtop in second gear all the way. A couple of times, the fog-mazed roads curving abruptly, I nearly ended up in the ditch. I kept the radio off. I needed to concentrate on my driving.

The owl song didn’t make the foggy night any cheerier. Nor did the coyote cries. The car continued to grope its way to Jim’s.

I slowed down every time I saw a country mailbox, looking for Jim’s place.

I used my spotlight on six metal mailboxes before I found the right one. There were no lights buried in the fog. But the box identified Jim the Handyman along with his address.

I pulled the car over to the edge of a gully; I didn’t want to turn in the drive, let him know I was coming. I also didn’t want anybody to run into it and kill themselves—or damage the ragtop.

I grabbed the flashlight out of the glove compartment. Clicked it on. Nothing. I tried the same trick as the kid at the DX station: I whomped it against my hand. Light flickered on and off. I whomped it harder. The bulb lit up full glow and stayed steady. This whomping business couldn’t be underestimated.

The fog was a damp hand, pressed clammy across my face. I couldn’t see three feet ahead. The owl again, and the coyote, and the tramp and crack of my footsteps on gravel.

I started up the drive. I had to sneak in. If he heard me, he might panic and accidentally kill Ruthie. I kept thinking of the poor girl in the canoe.

I’d only been to Jim’s once. He had a large frame house with a long, shallow front porch. He had refrigerators and parts of furnaces and lawn mowers and TV sets and all other kinds of junk on the porch. He’d mentioned that these were “dead” items, the ones on the porch, and that he’d be hauling them to the dump soon. He then expressed his displeasure about how the dump was run.

I doubted that any of the dead items had been hauled away as yet. He’d said this four or five years ago. I tramped on. I kept waiting for the outline of the house to impress itself on the shifting fog. But nothing. I was in the netherworld.

It took me a while to reach the house. I knew I was near because of the smells. These were smells of a meal cooked, a tobacco pipe smoked, of oil and metal rust and sweet sawn lumber.

I stumbled on the first porch step. I didn’t make much noise, fortunately. I went up the rest of the steps on my hands first, groping, exploring. Far within the house, I heard voices. But they were so muffled, I couldn’t tell who they belonged to, or what was being said.

When I was on the porch, I stuck my right hand out and began slowly walking ahead, one careful step at a time. No lights shone from inside. The fog was blinding even on the porch.

I touched the screen door, my fingers running down its coarse surface. The screening was loose enough so that I could push it against the inside door and feel if there was a window. I couldn’t remember what the wooden door looked like. It felt like a slab of pine.

If the screen door made noise, Jim would likely hear it. But I didn’t have much choice. I stepped back and eased the door open a half inch at a time. Except for a faint thrumming sound made by the spring connecting door to frame, there was no sound at all. I put my hand on the knob of the inside door. It was locked. Great.

I had to go back down the stairs. Though I moved slowly, I still managed to slip on the edge of the mist-covered last step. Somehow, I stayed upright.

I went around the side of the house. The ground was muddy. The exterior of the house smelled of wet wood. My soles made the acquaintance of several plump, juicy pieces of what stank like dog shit. There’s nothing like the feeling of your foot telling your brain what you just stepped in.

I had to feel my way around the corner of the house. The fog seemed even more impenetrable back here. For safety’s sake, I continued to keep my hands on the house as I made my way across the back. After a few minutes, I bumped into the fruit cellar door. A lot of houses in the Midwest have them. The prairie wives would put up preserves, fruits and vegetables, and pickle certain kinds of meat and then stash them in the fruit cellar, where it was much colder than on the upper floors. A prairie form of refrigeration.

There would likely be steps from the cellar leading up into the house. Sneaking in through the cellar would be easier than getting in any other way. I decided to try it.

I groped my way along the slant of the exterior cellar door. I found a latch. No padlock. I undid the latch and raised the door.

I’ve never opened a grave so I can’t say for sure what they smell like. But the cold and sour rushing odor of the cellar reminded me of dead animals I’d seen rotting in scorching sunlight.

I crept downstairs, following the stuttering beam of my flashlight. There was no flooring, just hard-packed earth. The walls were covered with rotted wooden shelves that held ancient Mason jars containing the sort of indefinable but creepy stuff you see floating in large bottles in carnivals. The ceiling was a Crosshatch of electrical wiring. For a handyman, Jim didn’t seem to worry much about fires.

A red-eyed rat watched me with malignant curiosity. He probably didn’t get many visitors.

I hurried across the wide basement to the sharply pitched wooden steps leading to a door on the first floor. My flashlight chose this moment to go dark.

I set a cautious foot on the bottom step and proceeded to work my way carefully up to the door. I was almost afraid to try the knob. What if it too was locked?

But it wasn’t.

I turned the knob all the way to the right and opened the door. A refrigerator motor shuddered on and off; a faucet drip went
pock-pock-pock.
The kitchen.

The voices were louder and clearer now. One of the voices was Jim’s. The other’s was Ruthie’s.

I went left. There was a dining room, or what was supposed to be a dining room. It held four large tables. In the gloom, I could see that appliances of every kind, dozens of them, filled the table. The dust in this room started to make me sneeze. I slapped my hand over my nose and held my breath. I didn’t sneeze.

The room where the voices were coming from was on the west side of the house. No wonder I hadn’t been able to see the light. I tiptoed to the end of the dining room. A door was outlined in yellow light. Behind the door were Ruthie and Jim.

I moved up to it one slow step at a time. I kept waiting to step on a bad stretch of board—a loud squeak would fill the entire house.

All the time, they were talking.

“You sure you know what you’re doing, Jim?”

“If you don’t think I can do it, you shouldn’ta come out here.”

“Don’t get mad, Jim. I’m just scared, that’s all.”

“I done this when I lived up in Wisconsin and I done this when I lived over to Missouri. I had me a lot of practice, if that’s what you’re askin’.”

He was saying all the right things to convict himself later on. I was glad I’d snuck in rather than barged in.

“All right, Jim. All right.” She sounded ready to cry.

“Now you just lie back and we’ll get down to work.”

Now was the time.

I got myself ready. Took a deep breath. Reached down and grabbed the knob. Prepared myself to charge into the room. And found that the door was locked.

“I’m out here, Jim!” I shouted and started rattling the knob.

He shouted something that I couldn’t hear. The lights went out in the room.

“It’s my brother!” Ruthie said.

A pistol exploded. He shot through the door. Twice. The sound was vast. I’d been to the side of the door, stripping off my jacket so I could grab him easier when I smashed inside. I hadn’t counted on him having a gun.