The Day the Music Died (25 page)

This was along the gravel road, where cars were backed up for miles. We’d seen the Lincoln on the highway and ended up parking two cars behind.

“You two get in the car and shut up,” Conners snapped. “I’m sick of your damned arguing. You’re like a couple of little kids.”

He opened up the back door of the Lincoln and practically stuffed Chris inside. Dana went around and got in the front passenger seat.

He had started to get inside the car himself when he saw us approaching. He climbed back out, slammed the door behind him, and said, in a voice comfortable with command, “Tell your girlfriend to go for a walk. I need to talk to you.”

“About what?” I resented his tone.

He had one of those profiles made to be chiseled in stone. Better than handsome, he was mythic, especially with his graying locks and his angry blue eyes and his high-rhetoric voice.

“About what?” he said. “About somebody trying to kill me, that’s about what. Now can we talk in private or not?”

“I’ll go say hi to Dana,” Pamela said nervously, and flitted away.

Richard Conners left Black River Falls in 1931. He went to Harvard, where he completed a master’s in political science. Right before the war broke out, he went to work for the State Department. He was soon one of FDR’s favorite advisers. He was also brilliant, driven, and contemptuous of just about everything and everybody he encountered. He was, as far as I could gather after slogging through two of his five best-selling books, more of a utopianist than a communist or even socialist. In the meantime, though, his wide circle of friends included many prominent communists and socialists. He even had a very public affair with a Soviet consul’s beautiful wife, who killed herself in Anna Karenina fashion after Conners refused to marry her. By that time, he was on his third wife and the divorces were getting expensive.

After the war, Conners worked for Truman, though old Harry never did like or trust him. Conners did a lot of the radio talk shows of the day. His version of things was that he pretty much ran foreign policy and Truman had to get permission before he made any serious foreign policy announcement. All the while he was publishing best-selling books that extolled the virtues of the masses—the kind of thing you’d have if John Steinbeck had written copy to accompany Walker Evans’s famous photographs of the Depression—the trouble being that Steinbeck was not only
of
the masses (like Conners), he genuinely
loved
the masses (unlike Conners). Conners spent his public life banging on tables on behalf of the masses, but he spent his private hours in limousines, attending ballet, opera, and movie premieres, and sleeping with the wives of the powerful and famous. His motive seemed to be revenge. By God, I didn’t have a silver spoon shoved up my ass the way you did, but I’ll get even by turning your spoiled wives into instruments of betrayal.

He was able to sustain his power until another man of the masses came along. For Senator Joseph McCarthy, Richard Conners was an obvious and easy target. All he had to do was remind his ever-growing TV and radio audience that not only did Richard Conners’s personal life demonstrate his contempt for American virtues, so did his professional life. He quoted many passages from Conners’s books back to him, while Conners sat there looking like a slightly bored duke as played by Charles Boyer. Two or three times on that first afternoon (you can bet everybody in Black River Falls was watching, McCarthy having convinced the networks to televise his hearings live), Conners corrected McCarthy’s grammar and attire (“That suit of yours could stand a cleaning, Senator”). Conners was a strapping, physically powerful man so he never came across as effete, but he did seem arrogant and icy. The last quote McCarthy read was the most devastating. Conners contended that the American press had consciously vilified Stalin, who was, according to Conners, a decent man who only dealt harshly with his political enemies when necessary. “The American press is afraid to portray Joseph Stalin for what he really is—a true man of the people.” It was after this that McCarthy hinted he’d given secrets to the Russians.

I still remember that quote and how stupid and infuriating it was. But a good deal of the left was caught up in maintaining Joe Stalin’s image as that of a beloved and temperate uncle. Stalin was a butcher on par with Hitler. While I hated the Cold War, I wasn’t naïve about Russia or the merciless Soviet regime that ran it, or the proliferation of Russian spies in the United States following the war. The conservatives were paranoid and hysterical about spies; the liberals refused to do anything about them or to even acknowledge their presence.

That was the end for Richard Conners. His State Department tenure ceased with Ike’s election, it being unlikely that Conners and John Foster Dulles would become fast friends; Harvard, where he’d been lecturing part-time, declined to invite him back; and his publisher suddenly felt that there was no longer an audience for his books. Such was life during the time of Joe McCarthy. Spying on your fellow American citizens got so bad that the Hearst newspapers started supplying “facts” about local “subversives” in their respective communities.

Conners took to writing mysteries (some good ones) under a pen name and he returned to Black River Falls, where he bought the old Grotte mansion. It was a huge place of native stone, an aerie really, perched above the Iowa River on a red clay mountaintop. He’d been here a year when Trawler College asked him to lecture on political science. He was such a seductive speaker that the college decided to risk the ire of the local political right and make him writer-in-residence.

“C’mon,” he said now. “Let’s walk.”

Despite their political differences—which were vast—my boss, Judge Esme Anne Whitney, who carries a photo of Ayn Rand in her wallet (just kidding), is a friend of Richard Conners. He’s a frequent guest at her parties. She considers him something of a social equal, given all his connections. He’d been in her chambers many times when I came in but had never deigned to acknowledge me. I mentioned this to the Judge one day, and she said, “He’s a perfect liberal, McCain. He loves the masses but hates people. He figures his love for the downtrodden gives him the right to be a snob and a shit. I, on the other hand, hate the masses but love people.” Which was a crock, but I hadn’t said anything.

We walked.

All these people, all these cars, you’d think there was a county fair going on. Nice warm September afternoon and all. That tender smoky autumn scent in the piney hills. Hawks swooping down their glide paths. Corn so ripe it’s like spilled gold in the fields. Auburn-colored colts running in the high meadows.

Not the afternoon to be talking about murder.

“I started getting letters a few weeks ago,” Conners said. “Well, not letters exactly; hammers and sickles drawn in blood. Human blood. I had a chemist friend at the college analyze them. Then flat tires and a mysterious fire in my office at the school. And then late-night phone calls. You know the kind. They just hang up. Don’t say a word. Last week my dog was poisoned. And last night somebody took a shot at me when I was bringing my horse back from my early evening ride.

“My suspicion is that it’s Jeff and that crowd.”

Jeff Cronin had been a likable guy when I was growing up. He was several years older but, despite his heroics on the football field, was always decent to us younger kids. The Korean War changed him. (I know we’re supposed to call it a police action and all, but around here we call it a war.) Six of our own died over there in the first year. Anyway, Jeff’s brother got captured and brainwashed, and Jeff couldn’t seem to get past it. The communists had destroyed his brother and they destroyed Jeff, too. Hating communists had become the most important thing in his life.

Conners went on. “They graduated from Trawler and are very prominent alumni and they keep trying to get me fired. That hasn’t worked—thanks to Dean Wyman’s courage—so maybe now they’re trying the more direct approach. I think this has to do with that magazine article, ‘The Red Who Got Away.’ Walter Winchell gave it a lot of play. They imply I turned state secrets over to the Russians but the State Department covered it up to save embarrassment with that sonofabitch McCarthy coming after them. That article sure didn’t do me any good. I mean, back east they know I’m not a communist. But out here—well, you know how people are.”

“Hell, yes, I do. We’re a bunch of bumpkins and we wouldn’t recognize a smear job if you put it up our most delicate orifice.”

He looked hard at me. “What the hell are you, a member of the Chamber of Commerce?”

“No, just somebody who likes most of the people in Black River Falls and thinks they’re a lot smarter and nicer than you do. Very few people hassled you when you came back here. They took you back as a lost son. The library gave your daughter a job and the women went out of their way to try and make your wife feel comfortable. So don’t tell me what a bunch of bigots we are, because it’s not true. For every asshole like Jeff Cronin, there are ten very nice people.”

“Boy, McCain, are you a hothead.”

I shook my head. “I’m not a hothead. I just don’t like snobs. And Conners, you’re a snob.”

He laughed. “You little guys sure have tempers.”

“You big guys sure have egos.”

He stopped walking. “Now that we’ve decided not to like each other, how about going to work for me? Esme is quite taken with you.”

I’d cooled some. I smiled. “She hides it well.”

“Oh, Esme’s all right. A bit of a lush, a bit of a poseur—I mean, God, her extended family is riddled with white-collar crooks if you look back far enough; that’s where their fortune comes from—but she has a decent heart and a very good mind.”

“Which she wastes on Ayn Rand and William F. Buckley.”

His laugh was mythic too. He was one of those giant men—like Orson Welles—who should be given to opera capes and top hats. “Now there’s something we can finally agree on.”

“I’m not sure what I could do for you.”

“Try and find out who’s after me. This thing is escalating. I’m not a physical coward. But I sure as hell don’t like people setting fire to my office and taking shots at me. And then there’s something else that happened. It requires more of an explanation than we’ve got time for now, but—”

I was thinking about telling him I’d make the time when Bill Tomlin approached. Bill and Chris Tomlin lived in a house next to the faux-mansion Conners had bought. Tomlin was, and would always be, the class brain. There was a sad earnestness about the crude haircut, the expensive but wrinkled suit. You never saw him without his briefcase. He had it now, in fact. He also had an occasional tic that jerked his entire head a quarter inch to the right, made more obvious than it had to be by a blue walleye.

“We’d better get going, Richard. You’ve got that radio interview at nine.”

“Oh, thanks for reminding me.” He reached out a massive arm and gave Bill a brotherly hug. “I wish the girls got along as well as we did.” Then, to me: “What I told you is between us. Not even Esme should know. I don’t want that dunce Cliffie Sykes Junior hearing about this.”

“Like it or not, he’s the law in Black River Falls.”

“Yes, and he’s also an idiot.”

“No argument here.”

“And he supports Jeff wholeheartedly. I doubt he’d put much effort into an investigation. Hell, he may be involved himself. Wouldn’t surprise me.” He turned toward his car. “Gotta go. There’s a dinner thing at the school tonight.” He looked at me. “I want to give you something tomorrow. Want you to keep it for me.”

Then he and Bill Tomlin, big striding brother and shambling little one, headed back toward their fancy car.

“Y
OU KNOW WHAT I
am, McCain?”

“Yes, I do know what you are: fetching.”

“No, I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

The beautiful Pamela and I were going back home in my red ’51 Ford convertible with the white sidewalls and the extra-powerful radio that can pull in clear-channel KOMA, the world’s best rock-and-roll station, with no problem at all. Though the top was still down, and the sky was filled with those impossible colors only near-dusk can create, a chill was in the air and I knew that soon enough she’d be asking me to stop and put the top up. Such are the duties of ragtop owners.

Pamela had put a sweater over her elegant shoulders. “I was watching this movie the other night.”

“Uh-huh.”

“With Alexis Smith and Zachary Scott. Did you happen to see it, by any chance?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Zachary Scott is married and he’s got two little daughters, but he’s having this affair with Alexis Smith.”

“I see.” Not sure where this was going.

“
The Other Woman.
That was the name of it.”

“Makes sense.”

“Well, think about it, McCain.”

“Huh?”

“The similarities? Stu and me? He has a wife and two sweet little daughters. So what does that make me?”

“Oh, I see.”

“I’m the other woman.”

I reached over and took her hand. Sometimes that’s OK with her; sometimes it’s not. This time it was. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. I’m sorry, Pamela.”

“So the first thing next morning I called him at the office and said that either he did the right thing and ask his wife for a divorce or it was over for us. I couldn’t hurt his wife and daughters anymore.”

“And he said what?”

“He said he’d get back to me.”

“He’d get back to you? What did he think he was doing, closing on a mortgage?”

“He always talks like that. I never said he was real romantic.”

“Apparently not.”

“Anyway, I told him if people ever found out, just think what my reputation would be like. Everybody’d think I was a whore.” She looked off at the cornfields and pastures and then back at me. “Maybe I
am
a whore.”

“You know better than that.” Then: “So, did he get back to you?”

“Yes,” she said. “He called me last night. When I told him I was going to see Khrushchev with you, he got mad.”

“Because of me or Khrushchev?”

“Both. He’s jealous of you, though he always says that’s ridiculous because you’re so short; and his dad is a member of the John Birch Society, so he wouldn’t cross the street to see a communist.”