“You seem to forget your husband hired me.”
“Yeah. To find out who wanted to kill him.”
She smiled with dirty teeth. “And you done a whale of a good job at finding out who, didn’t you?”
Ned’s whole body did a delighted kind of puppet-dance. “Hee-hee, she sure got you on that one, city boy.”
That was probably the first time a man from Black River Falls, Iowa, had ever been called a city boy. In a way, it was flattering.
I glanced back at his junky motorcycle, big-ass old Indian, and the sidecar with all the artillery in it. “You expecting a war any time soon?”
“I sure am, city boy. And when it comes, I’ll be ready for it.”
I’d suddenly run out of things to say to these people.
I felt sorry about leaving Ella behind- she was young enough there might still be hope for her-but there wasn’t anything I could do short of kidnapping her. And if I did that, Ned here would probably get out his bow and arrow.
I went around and got in my ragtop.
What exactly, you may ask, is the
Cincinnati Citadel of Medinomics? Many before you have asked and many after you will do likewise.
As near as I can figure, it’s a diploma mill. The “Medi” part I get (medicine), but the “nomics” thing I think they stuck in there just because it sounds sort of vaguely official.
Its most prestigious, and only, local graduate is Doc Novotony, who is yet another relative of Cliffie’s. Doc had to battle the state medical board to get his ticket but they finally had to give in after the state supreme court ordered them to. Cliffie, Sr. made Doc the county medical examiner, which was all right with everybody because he did so with the tacit understanding that Doc, who is actually a great guy, would never actually touch a living human being. He would work only on corpses, people figuring how much harm can you do to a stiff? And if he didn’t have a stiff to work on, he generally sat in his office in the morgue in the basement of the courthouse, chain-smoked his Chesterfields, gnawed on his Klondike candy bars, read his scandal magazines (“Kim Novak’s Naughty Nite Out With The Football Team!”), and avoided damaging his five-six, 220-pound figure by doing any exercise at all.
“Hey,” he said when I walked in, his feet up on his desk as usual. It being Saturday morning, his voluptuous middle-aged receptionist Rita, with whom he was or wasn’t having an affair, depending on which town gossip you talked to, wasn’t here. He wore floppy loafers, red Bermuda shorts, a polo shirt with a Hawkeye insignia on it (he was quoted as saying once that he was neither Jew nor Christian but Hawkeye, meaning a fan of the various University of Iowa Hawkeye teams), and a smile on his face. He almost always looked happy, as if he were spiting the corpses tucked in the drawers all around him.
“Cliffie said you’d be here, McCain, and that I wasn’t supposed to tell you anything.”
“Good ole Cliffie.”
“How come you’re interested, anyway?”
I shrugged. “I was out there when he died.
Plus I got a phone call.”
His blue eyes became downright merry. “Herr Himmler?”
Which is what he called Judge Whitney, my three-quarter-time employer.
“Uh-huh.”
“Why would she give a damn about Muldaur?”
“She doesn’t. But Richard Nixon’s going to swing through here after he stops in Cedar Rapids and she’s afraid we’ll all look like a bunch of rubes to him if we’ve got a murder going involving a minister who used snakes in his church.
She’s going to have dinner with Nixon. Said she doesn’t want our little town to sound like a bunch of mountain crackers.”
He beamed. “Richard Nixon? Really?
I’m gonna vote for him. I guess I’ve got to give the old broad one thing-she sure is connected.”
As she was. In the past few years, she’s golfed three or four times with Ike and dined with celebrities as various as Leonard Bernstein, Dinah Shore, and Jackie Gleason; next month she was scheduled to be on the same Chicago dais as Claire Booth Luce and Dr.
Joyce Brothers.
“So what’s the word on Muldaur?” I said.
He took his feet down. “You want all the mumbo jumbo or English?”
“English will do fine.”
“He was poisoned.”
One thing about those Cincinnati Citadel of Medinomics graduates-y can’t put anything over on them.
“Anything a little more specific?”
“Ah, you do want the mumbo jumbo. I appreciate the opportunity to sound like I know what I’m talking about.” He cleared his throat.
Pulled up his baggy trousers. The spotlight was his. “Technically, he died from exhaustion.”
“Exhaustion? You’re kidding. I thought you said he was poisoned.”
“He was. Strychnine has that effect. You know all those convulsions he had?”
“God, they were terrible.”
“They literally wore him out. Yes, he was poisoned, and that asphyxiated him. But the convulsions were so severe he also had a heart attack brought on by sheer exhaustion.”
“God, what a terrible way to go.”
“Been better poetic justice if one of his vipers got him. But the vipers wouldn’t have done half the damage the poison did.”
“But doesn’t poison like that taste terrible?”
“Yeah, but the way he worked himself up during those ceremonies… He might have swallowed it and not realized it. He wouldn’t have had to drink a whole hell of a lot of it. Cliffie talked to one of the churchgoers who said Muldaur was always guzzling Pepsi. Somebody coulda put it in that.”
“I need to talk to his wife.”
“Cliffie said she wasn’t any help.”
“Yeah, she probably didn’t respond well to when Cliffie clubbed her.”
Doc grinned. “I shouldn’t put up with you making fun of my beloved cousin that way. Without him I wouldn’t be medical examiner of this here county. And I wouldn’t be permitted to wear my stethoscope in public, either.”
“Now, that would be a shame. You look very good strutting down the street in your stethoscope.”
He giggled. “That’s what the ladies tell me, counselor.”
“Exhaustion, huh,” I said, thinking about everything he’d told me. Then an image of Muldaur convulsing came to me. Seeing something like that diminished our entire species. I’d always known we were vulnerable. I just didn’t like to be reminded of it in such a grotesque fashion.
Five
I guess I should explain about our dunking.
It’s one of our darkest family secrets.
Everybody in my family dunks. We dunk doughnuts, we dunk coffee cake, we dunk sandwiches, my kid sister, at least before she moved to Chicago, dunked her French fries in her Pepsi. In moments of great excitement I’ve been known to dunk a slice of pizza in my glass of beer. Maybe it’s genetic. You don’t want to know about family reunions, believe me. The inclination to dunk affects multiple generations. Eighty, ninety McCains planted at various picnic tables in a public park. Dunking. All at the same time.
Anyway, after visiting Doc, I stopped over to ask my dad about a guy who used to work at the plant and then all of a sudden there were three of us at the kitchen table, dunking long johns in our coffee.
My dad’s three biggest dreams had come true. He produced a kid who became a professional man, he bought a house, and he paid saved-up cash for a 1958 Plymouth that has the fin-length of a shark.
My mom’s three biggest dreams have come true, too. My dad returned safely from the war, her sister survived breast cancer, and she finally got the Westinghouse washer-dryer combination she’s always wanted, thanks to the way Betty Furness hawks them on Tv.
My dad was mid-dunk when I said, “So did Walter ever tell you why he dropped out of Muldaur’s church?”
“He sure did.”
“How come?”
He held up his finger, meaning please let him finish swallowing. He’s a little guy, which is where I get it, and when Mom’s in high heels they look sort of funny together, not mother-son but more like big sister-ll brother, but when they get out on the dance floor to Benny Goodman, their musical tastes having ossified around 1946, they are dazzling, gray hair, girdle, shoe lifts, bald head, and all.