“You see how polite he is since he moved out of the house?” Mom said.
Dad winked at her, making sure I saw it. “Maybe he should have moved out sooner. He’d be even more polite by now.”
“Maybe I didn’t raise him right,” Mom said.
“Oh, Lord,” Dad said, “I wish those magazines had never been published.”
Mom was a reader of parental magazines. How to train Little Bobby not to poop in his soup; hit the kitties with his hammer; say dirty words to company before he reached the age of three. You know the magazines I’m talking about. Like most women of her generation, Mom spent a number of hours per week perusing these rags and then torturing herself with the certain knowledge that she had failed me as a loving mom, tutor and inspirer of lofty goals.
“So what’s this about her temper?”
“Scotty McBain down to the plant?”
“Uh-huh,” I said. I was working on the three strips of delicately wrought bacon.
“He said she had some temper.”
“Who did?” I said.
“That gal they were keeping.”
“Karen Hastings?”
He nodded. He was working on his bacon, too.
“How did Scotty McBain know she had a temper?”
“In the summer he’s got this canoe rental deal he runs on the side. His wife works there during the day and then he takes over when he’s done at the plant.”
“Oh. Right. I forgot.”
“Anyway, this Hastings gal, she used to go around with this gal got a trailer right up the road from where Scotty’s got his canoe renting deal. Very nice looking gal.”
“What’re you doing, honey?” Mom asked me.
“Writing.”
“Writing what?”
“I’m putting what Dad says in my notebook so I’ll remember to follow up on this.”
“Are you working on this thing?” Dad said.
“Uh-huh. Go ahead.”
Dad shrugged. “Well, it isn’t any big deal. This gal—I don’t remember her name—and the Hastings gal, they’d rent canoes together, see. And so one day they were climbing into their canoe and a couple guys—smart-asses, you know—started makin’ remarks. You know how guys get. And Scotty said they were pretty drunk, besides. He wouldn’t rent ’em a canoe. So anyway you got these two really good lookin’ gals and these two smartasses and the gals kinda play along while they’re getting their canoe ready and then one of the guys kinda pats the Hastings gal on the rump. And man. Scotty says he never saw a woman hit a man as hard as she did that guy. Really rocked him. And she wasn’t much bigger than your mom. Scotty said the guys were really mad but they backed off and left.”
“Scotty still working at the plant?”
“Nope. He retired about the time I did.”
“I still say I feel sorry for their families.” Mom said. “And their poor kids.”
“Well, most of their kids are grown up by now,” I said.
“I hear Murdoch hired a Chicago lawyer, huh?”
“Yep. Very big-time guy. Seems all right.”
“He’s going to need Perry Mason,” Mom said. “That poor woman dead in his bomb shelter.”
“‘Poor woman’?,” Dad said. “I thought you said she was just a prostitute.”
“Well, that doesn’t mean anybody had the right to kill her. She could’ve made a good confession and started her life over again.”
My mom is of the belief that everybody is Catholic. Or secretly wants to be. Or should be. Or will be. Someday. If we just wait patiently long enough.
This time, it was me my dad winked at. “What if she was Methodist?”
“Well, she still could’ve started over. Nobody had the right to kill her.”
“Murdoch must have really panicked,” Dad said. “Leaving her there in that bomb shelter. Say, is that as fancy as everybody says?”
“The bomb shelter?” I said. “It sure is.”
“We’re having another prayer vigil tonight,” Mom said softly. “I’m just asking God that Khrushchev comes to his senses.” She took Dad’s hand. He smiled at her. “We’ve had our lives. It’s the children I’m worried about. They should have their chance to live.” She looked at me. “You could always come to the vigil tonight, Sam.”
“It’d be nice,” I said, “if I get the time.”
“That means,” Dad said, “there’s not a chance in hell he’s going to be there.”
Mom actually smiled. “You think I don’t know that?”
I decided to start the meeting with Spellman and his investigator Del Merrick with a shocker. I’d awakened in the middle of the night with an idea we should have considered all along.
“We’re assuming that Ross Murdoch didn’t murder Karen Hastings,” I said.
They both nodded. They looked as if they’d slept in. Spellman even had sleep lines on one side of his face. Merrick was a middle-aged man with rusty-colored hair and a good blue suit.
“That’s right,” Spellman said. “You’re not going to tell me that he killed her, are you? Nobody’d leave a body in his own house like that.”
“True—or probably true. Maybe he got into a situation where he killed her and couldn’t figure out a way to get rid of the body.”
Spellman’s face was knitted with irritation. “So you are saying he killed her.”
“No, I’m just saying let’s re-think the assumptions we’ve made so far. I’ve made them, too. But I’ve been thinking about a different way this could have happened.”
Spellman said, “Well, let’s hear it. No offense, McCain, but we’re sitting with the best criminal investigator I’ve ever worked with. If he thinks it’ll fly, then it’ll fly.”
Merrick actually blushed from the praise. I liked him right away. A modest man. He said, “My old man was a lot better than I was. He went head-to-head with old J. Edgar twice and won both times. Found the killers before Hoover’s men did. Hoover kept trying to nail him after that. You didn’t embarrass Hoover and get away with it.”
I drank some coffee and said, “I don’t think Ross Murdoch killed her. I don’t think he knew anything about the body until, as he said, he opened the bomb shelter.”
“So how did the body get carried inside?” Spellman said.
“That’s the assumption I want to knock down. First of all, the entire family was gone the day before the body was discovered. Ross was at a meeting in Des Moines, Mrs. Murdoch was visiting her other sister in Iowa City, and Deirdre was at the hospital here working as a candy-striper.”
“A what?” Merrick asked.
“A volunteer. They call them candy-stripers. She was at the hospital from nine in the morning until around six-thirty. Her parents got home just before she did. Their part-time maid had fixed dinner for them. Mrs. Murdoch heated the dinner and they ate together.”
“So you’re saying somebody brought Karen Hastings’s body in while the family was gone?” Spellman said. “They still had to sneak her in past the workmen.”
“Nobody snuck her in,” I said.
“You’re losing me here, McCain. If Ross didn’t kill her and nobody snuck the body in, then how did she end up in the bomb shelter?”
“This is the part I should’ve thought of before. The workers all left at five. That left roughly an hour and a half that the house was empty. This is where we have to start looking at the other three partners in the deal. It wouldn’t be difficult for one of them to call Karen and tell her to meet them at Murdoch’s place. She’d been wanting to leave town and take a lot of money with her. That would be the lure to get her there. All the caller had to say was that they’d come up with the money and that they’d hand it over.”
“Wouldn’t she think that meeting at Murdoch’s was strange?” Merrick said.