Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (17 page)

    "Yeah, very busy," I said. "You know, keeping the world safe for democracy."

    She grinned. She's got one of those surprised-and-delighted young-girl grins. And I love to make it happen. I play her face the way I do a pinball machine. But instead of racking up points I try to rack up smiles.

    "Oh, yes, I feel much safer, now that I know you're watching out for us."

    "How're the malts today?"

    "Good as always."

    She didn't have to ask. Pineapple malt was my regular. Maybe I can't hold liquor because of my size, but you should see me pour down the malted milks.

    She set my malt down and said, "Wes and I are going to take a little break."

    "What?"

    She nodded. "Same old thing."

    Think things through about us. "Gee, I never see you except in here."

    "He just can't get us out of his head. No matter what I say."

    "Oh, hell, he'll come back, Mary."

    She started wiping the counter with long, lovely hands. "You remember when you were little and you just knew that someday everything would make sense to you and everything would be fine?"

    I smiled. "Sure."

    "When's that day going to come, Sam?"

    "I don't happen to know personally, but I'm sure Kookie does."

    The kid grin. "You still hate him, huh?"

    "Yeah; yeah, I really do."

    Are there TV and movie stars who really bug you? I mean, on a personal level? They just irritate you so much you want to back over them with a dump truck? Edd "Kookie" Byrnes, the boy sexpot of the otherwise enjoyable detective show 77 Sunset Strip, had that effect on me. Every time he came on, I wanted to take my gun out and start blasting away.

    Bob Steinem stood up, left a tip for Mary, and said, "Don't worry, McCain. I hate him too. Every time I see his face I want to punch it."

    "Do I detect some jealousy here?" Mary said innocently. "Or maybe even some intimidation?"

    "That jerk doesn't intimidate me any," Steinem said, as he walked to the cash register, "and I'm sure he doesn't intimidate McCain here, either."

    After she'd cleaned up Steinem's dishes, she said, "Any idea yet who killed Conners and what's-his-name? Rivers?"

    "Not yet."

    "And no word on Cronin?"

    "Nobody's seen him." Then I started talking about it. From the beginning, I mean. Everything. From the day we went to see Khrushchev to this morning, when it turned out that Natalie wasn't Rivers's sister at all but one of his fellow operatives. I told her about Margo, too.

    "She had lunch in here yesterday. Really beautiful woman. Nice and friendly."

    "She would be," I said. "To her you're one of the exploited masses."

    "I feel like that sometimes." Then: "You ever consider that either Margo or Natalie might have killed them?"

    "Why would Margo kill Conners? He was on her side."

    "Maybe he was dangerous to her side all of a sudden."

    "Dangerous how?"

    "Maybe he was going to talk to the FBI or HUAC. People have been doing that a lot lately."

    And they had: professors and scientists and actors worried that their time as thirties leftists might get them in trouble someday. Better to go to Washington and tell your tale - and name names - than have the House Un-American Activities Committee come after you.

    "And Natalie would kill him - why?"

    "The opposite reason. He wouldn't come through for her. He had something she wanted - information - but he wouldn't let her have it. You sleep with her, Sam?" she asked suddenly. "No, no, don't tell me. I know you did, but if you say so it'll just make me feel worse." She went back to speculating. "Maybe Rivers got his hands on it, whatever it was, and that's why he was killed."

    "I can see why Margo would kill him. But not Natalie."

    "Maybe Natalie and Rivers had a falling out of some kind. Or maybe she wanted the credit all to herself."

    "You're fishing now."

    "I can only be brilliant so long."

    "But I like your idea about one of them being the killer. They have the only real vested interest."

    She shook her head. "I feel sorry for poor Dana. She was so proud of Richard."

    "I suppose she had reason to be. I didn't always agree with his politics, but he had a pretty amazing career."

    She made a face. "He wasn't much of a husband."

    "Why do you say that?"

    She took a box of straws and started refilling the plastic cylinder on the counter. "He was in here late one night and asked me if I wanted to have a drink with him. I thought he'd be interesting, and I was flattered. We had a few drinks over at Tilly's and then he gave me a ride home. He nearly raped me."

    The story seemed illogical at first. You marry a lovely woman thirty years your junior and you run around? Didn't make any sense. But with his grand ego and ambition, conquest was probably his forte. He'd had the young and lovely woman at home. Now it was on to other conquests.

    "Did you tell anybody?"

    "When Mom died last year, Dana sent me a little essay she'd read on mourning. It really helped. And I'd never even met her formally. It was just so thoughtful. I'd misjudged her. She gives the impression of being a very cold, arrogant woman, but she isn't at all. She even called me a few days later to see how I was doing."

    "He ever bother you again?"

    "No. The few times I saw him afterward, he had the good grace to look embarrassed."

    Three young women came in from the shops down the block. They lit cigarettes and giggled and parked their nice trim bottoms on the upholstered counter stools.

    At the register, as I was paying my bill, Mary said, "There's a Robert Ryan picture at the drive-in tonight."

    She knew the way to my heart, sweet Mary did.

    

    

    I went into Leopold Bloom's only when it was absolutely necessary. Stephen and Eileen Renauld had gone to the university in Iowa City, where they learned how to speak French well enough to impress yokels, and to write and compose and paint and sculpt so well that they were beyond sharing their work with the public. The public, coarse philistines, could never properly appreciate such beauty. So instead they ran one of those little bookstores where you suffocate in all the good taste: Persian rugs, Debussy on the record player, and every picture of James Joyce ever taken except maybe for the rectal X-ray he had in later years. Oh, and you also got their opinions on what was All Right to read and what Was Not. Those who can't, teach, is true enough - and they also own bookstores.

    Fortunately, the Renaulds must have been off saying their daily prayers to D. H. Lawrence. They weren't in the shop. One of the local beatniks was, a skinny girl in pigtails with a beret. "I'm afraid we don't sell your kind of books in here," she said with practiced disdain. Apparently, the Renaulds kept a list of people who didn't belong there.

    "Don't worry," I said. "I won't touch anything and contaminate it."

    "I just meant I know what kind of books you read. Those - paperback things."

    Having once made the mistake of special ordering The Collected Stories of Erskine Caldwell in here, I'd been a marked man ever since. But I figured if Caldwell was good enough for old Bill Faulkner, he was probably good enough for old Sam McCain. I didn't bother to point this out. This was their store and they were the unchallenged king and queen of all they surveyed.

    I'd come in today because I saw Bill and Chris Tomlin through the window. I went back to them now. They were in the nonfiction section.

    Chris wore sunglasses that looked especially dark and imposing against her pale medieval-virgin skin and short red hair. I wondered what the shades were all about. True, it was sunny outdoors, but inside here it was rather dark and a mite chilly. She wore a white sweater beneath a blue jumper. The supple body wasn't lost in the shapelessness of the garment, nor was the erotic face in the odd cant of her head. The angle looked uncomfortable. I wondered if she'd hurt her neck.

    I said, "I wanted to see how things were going out at the Conners house."

    Tomlin shrugged. He wore his usual European-cut suit. This one was double-breasted and blue and had traces of cigarette ash on one of the pockets. He was always mussed up somehow. A good thing he was so clearheaded when it came to organizing and chronicling the life of Richard Conners. The aging altar-boy face, the graying dishwater-blond hair, and the one blue walleye made me feel sorry for him as usual.

    "Still in shock, pretty much," he said, in his quiet, southern-tinged voice. "Dorothy stares out the window. And Dana goes on her rampages" - he nodded to his wife - "that's why she's wearing the sunglasses."

    "I didn't want you to think I'd gone Hollywood," she said.

    "Dana gave Chris a black eye the other night. Made some stupid accusation and just started hitting her."

    I was going to ask her about the accusation but just then the girl came by. "Could you please be a little quieter? This is a bookstore. There's a very nice cafe right down the street."

    "We need to be going anyway," Chris said.

    "There's a lot of work to be done now," Tomlin said. "Finish the biography. Harvard wants his papers. I have to start organizing them."

    The girl came around to scowl at us again. We couldn't be disturbing the customers because there weren't any customers. Probably my mere presence in the store disturbed her.

    We went outside and stood in the grace of the beautiful day.

    He said, "Any word on Jeff Cronin yet?"

    "No."

    "That's the damnedest thing. Him not showing up at the school board meeting last night and then going missing."

    "You think he's dead, McCain?" Chris said.

    "I don't know."

    "Neither does Cliffie," Tomlin said. "God, he's such a clown." He looked at his watch. "Well, we'd better go."

    When they were half a block away, I realized I'd forgotten to ask them exactly why Dana would attack Chris. Then I thought again of the day when we'd gone to see Khrushchev, and the argument I'd seen between them.

    I was standing on the corner, wondering what to do next, when a gentle voice said, "You look lost."

    She'd changed into a crisp red blouse and black skirt and hose and black flats. The skirt was cinched by an outsize patent leather belt. Quite high-fashion for our little burg. She carried a small paper shopping bag. Men of every age paused to gawk at her. She was eminently gawkable, let me tell you, this dark-haired girl-woman with her big-city elegance out here on the prairie. She held up the shopping bag. "I like to pick up souvenirs whenever I can."

    "I didn't know spies did stuff like that. Sounds pretty mundane."

    "First of all, I'm not a spy. I just work for the foundation."

    "Ah."

    "And second, of course spies do stuff like this. They're human too."

    "You couldn't prove it by me."

    "Spies are necessary."

    "I suppose."

    "You don't even like the spies on your own side?"

    "All the lies you have to tell. All the innocent people you have to hurt." Then I said, "Say, all that Russian junk you told me. I know Rivers wasn't your brother, but were you really born in Russia?"

    "New Haven, Connecticut." She touched my arm again. "Poor McCain. It's just not a very nice world, is it?"

    This is when you go to a downtown theater. You know, indoors. The list changes considerably when you go to the drive-in.

    I know I should use more sophisticated language here - I mean, first base and second base sound kind of dopey for a twenty-five-year-old - but it gets the point across.

    The best time for the drive-in is the summer: Buck Night, the whole carload for $1, when you hide people in the trunk; Rock Night, when all the local bands take turns playing on the concession roof and you vote by honking; and Fright Night, when people dress up. But summer was past now.

    We both dressed warm and got a car heater, too. We rolled the window up on the driver's side so that the only opening was where the cord from the speaker went. The drive-in was only about half full. The shows started early these days because dusk came right at dinnertime. The Robert Ryan flick was called Inferno. I'd seen it several times before, but I found new things in it every time. Ryan's wife and her lover leave Ryan to die in the desert and he has to make it back to civilization. I like Ryan because he's the only one of the tough-guy leading men who shows you his suffering. I think that's why he's never been the big star he deserves to be. He lets you see the sorrow and the confusion and the panic. Most people would rather see some boring sonofabitch like Clark Gable, who looks good even in a suit and talks like he knows all the answers.

    Fortunately, Inferno was the only A flick on the triple bill tonight. You go to the drive-in because you can have sex, smoke cigarettes, drink beer, pee outdoors if you're in the back rows, and sit on the car hood and watch if you've had enough sex-cigarettes-and-beer for a while. And the movies should fit right in, too. The last two features were High School Hellcats and Teenage Caveman. Next week's triple "wham" feature was Riot in Juvenile Prison, Girls on the Loose, and Dragstrip Girls.