“I’m sure I wouldn’t know,” she said imperiously. Then, “Where are you now, McCain?”
That’s when I heard the sirens. Two, maybe three squad cars. That was a lot, even for a Friday night. Once in a while you got that many headed to a single scene if it was a bad accident out on some lonely road. But generally, given the fact that only four cars worked on weekend nights, one car covered most incidents.
“McCain?”
“I’m here.”
“Are those sirens?”
“Yeah.”
“Any idea what’s going on?”
“No. But there’s a Dx service station that has a police band radio. I’ll head over there.”
“If it’s anything important, you be sure to call me.”
“I will.”
“I still can’t believe you didn’t know that was Chopin.”
The Dx station had glossy promo pictures of Buddy Holly all over the front window. There was going to be a Buddy-a-thon on a local radio station Sunday afternoon.
The place was lit up but I didn’t see anybody working. I bought a nickel Coke and some peanuts. I vaguely remembered from health class that peanuts were good energy food. The toilet flushed and the kid came out. He’d apparently been in there dipping his head in an oil c. His long, dark hair glistened with grease.
He wore greasy coveralls with the collar turned up. Way up. He looked like Batman.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
“You want some gas, daddy?”
Since I needed a favor from him, I decided not to call him “sonny.”
“I need your police radio.”
“You’re that lawyer that works for the judge, right?”
“Right.”
“She yanked my license last year for six months. The bitch.”
“You were innocent, of course.”
“I accidentally bumped this old lady when she was crossing the street. I guess it sort of knocked her down.”
“Well, the judge can be unreasonable sometimes, no doubt about it.”
“You know the funny thing?”
“What?”
“She’s actually a good-lookin’ gal.”
“The judge?”
“Sure. For an old broad, I mean.”
He winked. “Maybe if I woulda asked her out, she wouldn’ta yanked my license.”
He should have pleaded diminished capacity. “How about the police radio?”
“It don’t work too good. In fact, it’s shut off right now.”
“I’d really appreciate it if you’d give it a try.”
He grinned. “You was wonderin’ about them sirens, too, huh?”
“Yeah. I love chasin’ sirens.”
“Me, too, except my chickie, she gets scared when we get over ninety. Her brother was on this motorcycle and he rear-ended this lumber truck and man they had to scrape him off the back end and that’s no shit. So ever since, anyway, she gets scared when you hit around a hundred. You know how chicks are.”
The front area of the station was a small box with a counter, a twirl rack of state road maps, a red Coke machine, Hawkeye calendars for every sport except marbles, cans of oil stacked neatly along the bottoms of the plate-glass windows and a glass cabinet up on the wall with new fan belts and the like.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, hoping that my hands didn’t automatically go after this little twerp all on their own.
The kid went behind the counter and produced a long, narrow radio. He plugged it into an outlet that was conveniently set into the countertop. A tiny amber light clicked on in the tuning bar of the radio. “Well, the sumbitch came on, anyway. Sometimes, it won’t even do that.”
“It won’t, huh?”
“Nope. I wanted to take it apart and work on it, but Wally won’t let me because of the refrigerator.”
“What refrigerator?”
“Oh, you know, the one out in back where the mechanics used to keep their sandwiches and stuff like that.”
“What happened to it?”
“Well, me and Merle, he’s this friend of mine that Wally don’t like much, we spent two nights takin’ it apart, you know, tryin’ to figure out why it was makin’ all that noise, and the damned thing caught on fire.” He shook his head.
“Sumbitch was just char and ashes.”
“That’s why Wally won’t let you work on the radio?”
“Yeah, you know how Wally is. He took some night classes out to the community college and now he thinks his shit don’t stink. You know how college guys are.”
He started wrenching the tuning knob back and forth and swearing at it and shaking his head.
“Hey,” he said as he continued to twist the knob back and forth, “how about that Buddy Holly, huh?”
“Yeah. God, it was awful.”
“You know I bet them guys, them singers, I bet they get more ass than a toilet seat.”
“Yeah, I s’pose they do.”
He reached in a drawer and pulled out the longest screwdriver I’d ever seen. God only knew what he was going to do with it. He started taking off the back of the radio. “You know what I wonder?” he said.
“What’s that?”
“You think any of them singers ever get to screw any of them chicks on Bandstand?”
“That I wouldn’t know.”
“You think Dick Clark ever screws ‘em?”
“Most of them are underage.”
“Hey, man, that kinda shit goes on all the time in Hollywood. Underage girls, queers, dope addicts, everything, man.”
“Yeah, except it’s in Philadelphia.”
“I thought Bandstand was in Hollywood.”
“Nope. Philadelphia.”
“No shit,” he said, amazed at the mysteries of existence. And that’s when the radio blasted him back into the big red Coke machine. His screwdriver had discovered electricity.
“Whoa!” he said. “You see them sparks! That was really cool! Wait ‘til I tell Merle!”
He came back to his radio and said, “Man, this little booger sure got a kick, don’t it?”
“Sure seems that way. Well…” I said, starting to back up to the door.
“Just a minute, man. Lemme try one more thing. Sometimes, if ya just whomp it a little.”
Which was when he started pounding the radio against the edge of the counter. Not a timid let’s-try-th-and-see-if-it-works pounding, either.
He was really whaling away. I expected to see the radio break into three or four pieces.
Instead, it did something phenomenal. It started working.
Myrna Potts, the nighttime police dispatcher, came through loud and clear. “Backup highway patrol car to Kenny Whitney’s house on two-two-four-five Pine Valley
Road. One more on its way. Repeat. One more backup car on its way.”
Kenny Whitney’s house? I wondered. Who would be out there now? And why?
“I gotta remember and tell Wally that,” the kid said. “Hell, he’s got himself a good radio again. Just took a little whompin’ is all.”
But there was no more time to listen to the sage of the Dx. I was out the door and into my ragtop.
Twenty-five
I didn’t know what was going on, but it knotted up my stomach pretty fast.
There sat Kenny Whitney’s house and in a semicircle around it were three local squad cars, a highway patrol car and an ambulance.
Every vehicle had a spotlight trained on the house. Two of Cliffie’s deputies had shotguns pointed directly at the place.
Cliffie had a bullhorn.
I parked on the hill and walked down the gravel road. There had to be fifty gawkers.
They were bundled up and ready for a siege. This was the something you couldn’t get on Tv. You could smell the jungle thrill on them. This was a doozy, all right.
But why would anything be going on at Kenny’s house? He was dead. The house was empty.
Paddy Hanratty, Jr., cleared it up for me.
He’d been standing with his proud father, two dumpy fat guys in hunting jackets, cowboy hats and tumescent bulges of chewing tobacco pressing against their cheeks.
Paddy, Jr., came over, spat right at my foot, barely missing and said, “Looks like we’re gonna have us some coon huntin’ tonight.”