“I don’t think so.”
“That’s what you told me.”
“No, it wasn’t. That’s what you told yourself.
You haven’t even asked me what killed him.”
“Well, if he was doin’ all that heebie-jeebies stuff, then what killed him?”
Kylie said, “Poison.”
“Yeah, snake poison.”
She shook her fetching head. “I don’t think so. We studied snakes in biology in college.”
“College,” Cliffie scoffed. “A training ground for commies.”
Kylie sighed. She was used to him. “Snake venom rarely produces symptoms like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like what you call the heebie-jeebies.”
“So if it wasn’t snake poison, what was it?”
“We’ll have to let the autopsy tell us,” I said.
The ambulance siren cut through our conversation as the boxy white truck swept up in front of the open doorway. You could hear the attendants hitting the ground and yanking the gurney from the back.
Cliffie, thumbs in his gunbelt, swaggered up to meet them.
“Why aren’t I surprised Cliffie liked those pamphlets? And I’m not saying that just because I’m Jewish. I’d be mad even if I wasn’t.” Then she smiled. “And by the way, McCain, the rabbi put some more guns in the basement of your church last night.”
“I’ll alert the monsignor.”
They made swift work of Muldaur, the ambulance boys.
When they were lifting him onto the gurney, Cliffie, ever helpful, said, “Sorry about the smell, boys. He crapped his pants.”
“You calling Bci?” I said, referring to the state Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Without their help, small towns just can’t do adequate scientific crime investigations.
“For what?”
“For what? To find out who poisoned him.”
“Did it ever occur to you, McCain, that maybe one of his snakes bit him earlier and he was just having a delayed reaction. Snakebites can do that, you know.”
“Clifford Sykes, Jr.,
Herpetologist,” Kylie said.
“What’s that herpe-thing mean?”
“It means snake expert.”
“Oh.”
He’d obviously thought she’d insulted him.
Then he said, “So I call them in and it turns out to be an accidental snakebite and then I look like a fool.”
“Gee, I can’t imagine you ever looking like a fool, Chief,” Kylie said in her sweetest voice.
“Well, God knows you and that left-wing rag you work for have tried to make me sound like one every chance you get.”
Maybe it was the innumerable times he’d arrested people for crimes they hadn’t committed. Maybe it was the year he pocketed half the ticket sales to the policeman’s dance. Maybe it was the time The Clarion pointed out that it was Cliffie’s first cousin Luther who was not only selling our town its police vehicles but also charging twenty percent over the sticker price. It wasn’t real hard to make a case against Cliffie.
“We couldn’t do it without your help,” Kylie said, all sweetness again.
Cliffie was about to respond when one of the children raced into the church. Cliffie did not like this. When Cliffie tells you to stay out, he gets most unpleasant if he sees you defying him.
He lunged for the kid and shouted, “Hey, you, twerp!”
“Maybe he’ll shoot him,” Kylie said.
“Nah. Nothing worse than a pistol-whipping, probably.”
The kid wanted to see the snakes, was the thing.
He rushed up to the cage and stood gazing in fear and amazement at the serpents that hissed and rattled at a world as alien to them as theirs was to us.
“You get away from there now,” Cliffie said.
“They wouldn’t bite me, Chief,” the boy said. He was probably eight, with a bowl-job haircut like Larry’s of the Three Stooges, something Mom probably gave him at home. “I don’t have sin in my heart. I really don’t.”
“You heard what I said.”
Cliffie yanked him down from the platform and dragged him outside.
Something had been troubling Kylie all evening.
Something that was becoming clearer and clearer on her girlish, elegant face. Somehow, I sensed that it didn’t have anything to do with the church here, frightening as that had been.
“You give me a ride home, McCain? I guess I’ve about had it. Watching him die like that took it out of me.” She slid her arm through mine.
“Let’s go outside.”
Heat, mosquitoes, fireflies, and the smell of gasoline, cigarettes, and sweaty people awaited us. The place was already becoming a carnival. On a summer night in a small town there’s nothing front-porch folks would rather do than follow ambulances. Put up some iced tea there, honey, and we’ll see where that ambulance is goin’. Hurry, now. More dramatic than Tv, cheaper than the movies. And they were just now pulling up, forming a semi-circle around the cars of the churchgoers. They were practiced enough at all this to leave plenty of room for the official vehicles to get in and out. And they were bold enough to go right up to Muldaur’s flock and ask them questions. They were sure this just had to involve snakes, and what could be more exciting than something that involved snakes and was cheaper than going to the movies?
But it wasn’t all front-porch types, and that surprised me. Reverend Thomas C.
Courtney was there, for one, the first minister to look as if Esquire had dressed him. I wondered if the apostles had worn starched blue dress shirts, white ducks, and deck shoes. And driven green Mg’s. I always enjoyed driving past his church to see the titles of his forthcoming sermons. “You, John Paul Sartre, and The Crucifixion” was still my favorite. We used to parody that title. I came up with “You, Gabby Hayes, and The Heartbreak of
Hemorrhoids.” (i was reading Mad magazine a lot in those days.) Courtney appealed to what we call, out here anyway, the gentry. He’d angered a lot of Catholics lately by preaching a piece written by Dr.
Norman Vincent Peale, the most successful Protestant minister of our day, who claimed that Jack Kennedy was, as a Catholic, beholden to Rome and that a vote for Kennedy was thus a vote for papal rule.
Finding Sara Hall here was even more surprising. A fading country-club beauty who’d been to the Mayo Clinic several times for what was locally called “a little drinking problem,”
Sara was a friend of my employer, Judge Whitney, and a woman I liked. Her hands twitched sometimes, and she was known to have had a couple minor breakdowns in very public places a few years back. One day, seeing me on the street and having met me only once, she asked if I’d have a cup of coffee with her. I was surprised but I went. And when our coffee came and she’d had a couple of swallows, she said, “I was just afraid I might pop in somewhere and have a drink. But instead I can sit here and talk to you.
I really appreciate this.”
Muldaur’s people had gathered in front of two battered Chevrolet trucks, from one of which issued the plaintive cry of hill music in its purest form, not steel guitars but slide guitars, the kind of music first heard on these shores a couple hundred years ago when Irishers landed on the shores of the Atlantic.
The voices of the girl singers were my favorite parts, high-pitched wails relating tales of doomed lovers and the men who enslaved them. The lyrics were changing now, influencing country music and being influenced by it at the same time. This was the music of a subculture that would never become mainstream. To find life as it was lived a hundred years ago, maybe a hundred and fifty years ago, you didn’t have to travel far.
I saw it peripherally, not sure at first that I did see it, the big man who’d guarded the church door leaning over to slap a small woman, hard, across the mouth. This was in the far shadows, beyond the wall of crunched and crushed vehicles they drove. They stood between two such vehicles.
They were easy to see.
It was just at that moment that Cliffie started baying orders for all the people who’d been inside the church to start giving statements to his men-first cousins, second cousins, shirttail cousins-who were now moving among the flock with ball-point pens and nickel back-pocket notebooks. Cliffie had once seen Bci agents do this and had forever after imitated it. Hey, this idea of interviewing witnesses seemed like a pretty neat-o keen idea. Boy, where was this scientific detection stuff going to end, anyway?