He wheeled the bike off the sidewalk and accelerated down the street, mufflers roaring.
Rita said, “She was a beautiful girl.”
When I was younger, I never appreciated older women. Rita Fahey is forty-something and what the paperback writers always call “lushly built.” She also has a lovely face, and eyes you just can’t keep from watching. Kind of green but then again kind of blue. She’s Doc Novotny’s secretary in the morgue. She keeps the rock-and-roll loud, as if its festive qualities push back the cold stench of the place.
“She sure was.”
“You know her, McCain?”
“No. But Mary Travers did.”
She yawned. I tried not to notice what her sweater did. She never wore them tight, but it didn’t really matter. “Cliffie’s moving in for the kill. Between us, I mean.”
As Doc Novotny’s cousin and tacit
boss, Cliffie gets first dibs on all murder information. I have to give him one thing.
Cliffie’s great at finding the person who looks like the killer.
“Oh? Who?”
“Mike Chalmers.”
“God.”
“Cliffie laid it out for the doc this morning. You ask me, it was Amy Squires. I saw her slap Susan Squires one night in the face at the dance pavilion. Out in the parking lot.
My husband and I were walking to our car. She was screaming she wanted Susan to let go of her husband.”
“When was this?”
“Three-four years ago.”
“Well, look who’s here,” Doc Novotny said. He has the air of a politician who resembles Humpty-Dumpty. He smokes
cheap cigars, paints himself with aftershave, and wears a rug that looks like a badly injured forest creature. “Cliffie’s favorite guy.”
“Rita said you gave him all the information already,” I said, in a joking tone. “We get the crumbs as usual.”
“Are you kidding? How long was Cliffie here, Rita?” He dragged a stray hand down his paunch, as if he were stroking a pet.
“Oh, five-six minutes.”
“My cousin’s got the attention span of a kindergartner. I started explaining things to him and he immediately started looking at his watch. He thinks he’s got his murderer already; why bother him with facts?”
“Mike Chalmers?”
“Rita tol’ ya, huh? But if he would’ve listened to what I said, he might’ve changed his mind.”
“You got something interesting?”
“Very interesting.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
The shadows. The cold. The stench. None of it had changed. We walked into a tiled room with body drawers on one wall and two operating tables in the center.
He showed me the body. The head wound was vicious. Susan had one of those quietly pretty faces that holds an erotic power for men who take the time to look closely, that kind of First Communion chastity crossed with a whispered suggestion of desire.
“She die instantly?”
“Maybe. Can’t say for sure.”
“Blunt trauma the cause of
death?”
“Without question.”
“Time of death?”
“Nine to eleven P.M. Friday night.
Can’t do any better than that. She had a nice little body on her. Never showed it off much.”
I’d thought the same thing and felt guilty about it.
“Pretty open and closed?”
He nodded. “Except for the bruises.”
“Bruises?”
He took out a Penlite and worked it up and down her body. The bruises were old but still violent, even as they were fading. Upper thighs.
Ribs. Lower back.
“They’re old bruises.”
“Yeah,” he said. “They are.”
“They have any significance to her death?”
“Not directly. But they suggest that somebody beat her up pretty often. Somebody who knew what he was doing. These aren’t the kind of bruises that show when you have clothes on. The amateur wife beater, he’ll give the old lady a black eye or a busted nose or a split lip and everybody knows what’s going on. But your more devious wife beater, he puts the hurt on her where it don’t show. Her thighs?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s an iron burn.”
“Iron?”
“Yeah. Like the old lady does her ironing with?”
“She was burned with an iron?”
“Yeah. And pretty bad too.”
“You ever heard of that before?”
“Oh, sure. Job like mine, I’ve heard of everything before, McCain.”
“So what you’re saying is that her husband, David Squires, put all those bruises on her?”
“You said it,” Doc Novotny said. “I didn’t.”
My kid sister, Ruthie, said to her friend Debbie, who was sitting on the living room floor in front of that great postatomic
social icon, the Tv console, “She shouldn’t dance with that blond guy. She looks better when she dances with dark-haired guys.”
“Yeah, like that cute Eye-talian,” Debbie said.
“Which cute Italian?” Ruthie said.
“There’re a lot of them.”
“The one who sort of looks like Paul Anka except his nose isn’t as big.”
“Paul’s gonna get his nose fixed.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Mom showed it to me. It was in the newspaper.”
“I wonder if his singing’ll be different. You know, when they whack off his nose that way and all.”
“Personally, I wish he wouldn’t get it fixed.”
“It’s pretty big, Ruthie.”
“Yeah, but it’s sort of cute.” Then: “I’ll ask my brother. Sam, do you think Paul Anka’s nose is too big?”
I said, “His nose isn’t. But his mouth is.”
“I think he’s a good singer,” Ruthie said.
“I’ll take Tony Bennett,” I said.
“He’s old,” Ruthie said.
“Your brother’s sure a wise ass clown,”
Debbie said.
“He sure is,” Ruthie said, glaring at me. She was pretty, like Mom, slender and fair. A lot of awkward guys trooped to our door to ensnare her. But at sixteen she wasn’t quite ready to get ensnared.
It was Monday at 3ccdg P.M. on the
prairies of America, and for teenagers that meant just one thing: American Bandstand with Dick Clark. And conversations just like this, teenage girls (and boys, if they’d admit it) pondering the fates of the various stars Clark was featuring on his show to lip-synch their latest records. The Platters and Frankie Lymon and Gene Vincent and people like that. Some of them lip-synched pretty well; standing in front of a gray curtain they almost looked as if they really .were singing live. But most of them were pitiful, lagging behind the record or given to sudden vast melodramatic showbiz gestures. More important than lip-synching, however, were the questions burning in the minds of the girls watching at home.
Who were they dating? were they as lonely as
the songs they sang? Would they ever consider dating a girl from a place like, say, Black River Falls, Iowa? What was their favorite color? What was their favorite dessert? Did they want to have kids of their own someday? Had they ever met James Dean? were they ever going to be on The Ed Sullivan Show?
Bandstand hadn’t been on the air long but it had gripped the teenage imagination like a scandal.
Small-town kids got to see how big-city Philadelphia kids dressed and danced. They became celebrities in their own right, the kids who danced on the show every afternoon. Justine and Benny and Arlene and Carmen and Pat and Bob were just some of the more prominent names. And the girls at home liked to match them up. Decide who should go out with whom. It was a kind of soap opera, because one day Bob and Michelle would be a couple and the next day here was Michelle, that slattern, in the slow spotlight dance practically dry-humping Biff right on camera.
Every once in a while it was all right to miss mass on Sunday (as long as your folks didn’t find out), but you could never (repeat) never miss American Bandstand.
The Great White Fisherman was just coming in from the back porch as I reached the kitchen. Dad had taken a week’s vacation to spend every afternoon up on a leg of the Iowa River with his rod and reel. This afternoon, still in his waders, his fishing hat jangling with a variety of hooks and lures, he stood in the back porch doorway and held out two pretty pathetic walleyes to my mom. “Here you go, hon, we freeze these for dinner Saturday night.”
Mom winked at me and said, “Your dad must be going on a diet if this is all he’s going to eat.”
“I’m surrounded by wiseasses,” Dad said, in his best Job-like voice. Then he grinned and said, “And I love it.”
Different types of men came back from the big war. There were the sad ones, often mentally disturbed, who spent their time in mental hospitals or seeing psychologists. There were the thrill seekers, who kept trying to duplicate, usually in illegal ways, the excitement that danger had given them. There were the petulant ones, who felt that Uncle Sam should forever be in their
debt for what they’d done for the Stars and Stripes.
And then there were the men like Dad—the majority—who were just happy to be alive and exultant about being back in the arms of their loved ones. Sure, Dad had almost been killed, and sure, he’d seen a lot of terrible things happen, but most of the time he just thanked the Lord he’d gotten home safely.
He got us a couple of Falstaffs from the refrigerator and plunked them down on the kitchen table, a little quick-moving guy like me. He sat down and said, “Those Ford boys should be shot.”
“The Edsel?” I said.
“Damned right the Edsel.”
“It’s all he can talk about,” Mom said.
“He hates it almost as much as he hates Nixon.”
“Don’t get me started on Nixon.”
“And here I was gonna buy you a pink-and-puce one,” I said.
He laughed at me. “Give it to Liberace.
He’d probably go for it.”
“Now there’s nothing wrong with Liberace,”
Mom said from the sink, where she was putting the dishes in the dishwasher.
Dad had eventually gotten a good job after a spate of low-paying ones, so Mom now not only had the status symbol of the new tract house, she also had the status symbol of the new dishwasher. She was cute about it. She’d have a guest in and instead of seating them in the living room she’d lead them directly to the kitchen and say, “This is our new dishwasher.” I told her she should dress up like a tour guide and sell tickets.
“Liberace’s a cultured man,” Mom said now.
“That’s what you call him, huh? Cultured?”
Dad sighed. “Aw, hell, I don’t mean to make fun of him. I feel sorry for him. You know, how people pick on him and all. He just makes me nervous. I can’t help it.”
That’s a trait I inherited from Dad: feeling sorry for so many people. I guess because Dad was always so little and poor and awkward around people, he identifies with outsiders. I felt the same way about Liberace. I couldn’t sit down and watch him—he drove me nuts—but I didn’t like people making fun of him either.
“Don’t forget it’s a Tv night,
sweetheart,” Dad said to Mom.
Mom laughed. “You and Tv night.”
And it .was kind of funny. Bishop Sheen was always warning about how the family Tv set was actually pulling the family apart. Instead of eating dinner at the table the way they used to, families now sat in front of their Tv sets and ate. So Dad had made a deal with Mom.
Two nights a week he got to eat in the living room and watch Douglas Edwards with the News on Cbs. He got to use the Tv tray
he’d bought for himself and he got to eat a Swanson Tv Dinner. Personally, I thought Tv dinners tasted like cardboard a dog had left damp. But Dad was never so happy as when he was in his Tv mode.
“Oh, Lord, I forgot,” Mom said. She smiled at me. “I was going to make him a pot roast stewed in vegetables and potatoes. But he’d rather have a Tv dinner. If you can believe that.”
“Why don’t we have the pot roast tomorrow night?”
Dad said.
“All right,” Mom said, “if you’ll take me to that new Debbie Reynolds picture this weekend.”
“You got yourself a deal,” Dad said. Then, to me: “The one I’d be lookin’ into is that young doctor she worked for.”
“Todd Jensen?”
“Yeah. I was fishing out at the park one day and I saw the two of them arguing. I couldn’t hear them but I saw him push her.”
“When was this?”
“Three weeks ago or so.”
Dad never kibitzes on legal stuff but he has no hesitation about kibitzing on matters of investigation. It was from him that I got my habit of reading Gold Medal original paperbacks.
The way he figures it, he’s read enough whodunits to qualify as a detective himself.
He shook his head. “Life is like that sometimes, though.”
“Come again?”
“You know. Couples. She’s going with this doc and everything seems to be fine and then all of a sudden she starts running around on the side with Squires. I don’t know any of them
personally, but she sure looked to be better off with that doc. The way Squires treats
the little people, he’s a hard one to stomach.”
The little people. That’s what he always called the working class. And that was how he always saw himself. Because I’m an attorney, I get invited to some of the more high-toned events around town. I invite my family whenever possible. Most of the time they don’t go—they always have a graceful excuse—but when they do I see how deep their sense of inferiority runs. Mom with her J. C.
Penney dress and sweet goofy flowered hat and Dad with his blue suit from Sears looking ill-at-ease with all the local gods, the mayor and his cronies and the country club crowd.
I guess that’s why I like John O’Hara.
He’s one of the few American writers to understand our caste system in Iowa. It’s heartbreaking to see how uncomfortable Mom and Dad are around people they consider their betters.
I took out my Captain Video notebook and wrote in a line about Todd Jensen shoving Susan Squires.
“That’s some notebook,” Mom said, laughing.
“Aren’t you a little old for it?”
“Got a deal on a bunch of them.”
“Long as it’s not Mickey Mouse, you’ll be Ok,” Dad said.
Ruthie came in and took two bottles of Pepsi from the refrigerator. “Gee, I wish Bandstand was on for three hours,” she said dreamily, and floated out.
“Hurry up!” Debbie called from the living room. “The spotlight dance is on!”