He had the left leg of his Osh-Kosh overalls pulled up. White bone poked through.
He kept rocking back and forth and grimacing and tentatively touching his fingers to the exposed bones.
I knelt down next to him and took the ankle of his broken leg and turned it violently to the right. With any luck, his scream could be heard all the way into town. He was sobbing, pleading, almost delirious. “Oh, God, what’re you doing, McCain? What’re you doing?”
Technically, it probably wasn’t good police procedure, what I was doing. But it was fast anyway.
It took three leg twists to get it all out of him. How he’d aborted Susan Whitney and then started to blackmail her and killed her with Darin Greene’s gun believing Greene would take the rap, but then Kenny had to come along and spoil everything by killing himself with a . 45 and making Sykes assume that only a. 45 had been used. How he’d been operating on the girl I’d found in the canoe, but he’d done something wrong. And how he’d killed another girl up in Wisconsin.
“Why’d you kill Susan?” I said.
He was kind of late answering so I gave his leg another twist for good measure. I wondered if you had to join a union to be a sadist. A guy could get to like this stuff.
“I took out the baby. It was a coon.
Greene thought she was in love with him.” He snorted bitterly. “Think of that, a jig like Greene and a upperclass gal like Susan. Them jigs, I tell ya.”
“Why’d you kill her?”
He knew enough to answer right away. “I was blackmailing her. Threatened to tell her father about Darin Greene. She made three payments was all. Then I went over there one night to get some more money and she was pretty drunk. She picked the phone up and said she was gonna call Judge Whitney and tell her everything, including how I was doin’ all these abortions. I guess I just got mad. She’d threatened me one other time before with this. I seen where she kept it. I went and got it-and I shot her. I couldn’t believe it. It was like watchin’ somebody else do it. Like it wasn’t me at all.”
Then, “But I was gonna be real careful with your sister,” he said. “Honest to God, I was, McCain. Honest to God, I was.”
Just for the hell of it, I gave his ankle another good twist.
Twenty-seven
The next day was Saturday and I guess I should tell you about it in sequence. I’ll make it as brief as possible.
I woke Ruthie up and we had a long talk and then we went out to the kitchen where Mom and Dad were eating breakfast and told them about her condition.
Dad was pretty mad at first but then Ruthie sat in his lap and cried and Dad had a few tears in his eyes as well. Ruthie promised to get the boy over here in the afternoon for a talk with Mom and Dad. And to bring his folks along.
Mom and Dad weren’t sure how they felt about anything yet. There hadn’t been time. Ruthie walked me out to my car and we stood there hugging each other until our noses got cold.
In the afternoon, I stopped by the judge’s office and rehashed everything that had happened the night before.
She was calling the Eastern branch of her family before I got out the door.
The family name would not be burdened with a murderer after all. Just land swindlers and associated other reprobates disguised as leading businessmen.
In the evening, I went to the Buddy
Holly dance. I worked up a good sweat dancing.
I danced with anybody who’d have me. Believe it or not, I’m not universally beloved. Around eight, Pamela came in with her date, Stu.
I assumed his fianc@ee was out of town. He was a whole lot taller than I was and a whole lot smoother with the women and a whole lot better dressed and a whole lot better looking. Other than that, I had no reason to resent him at all.
Mary and Wes came later. Mary looked really pretty in a buff blue sweater and a tight blue skirt and bobby sox and saddle shoes and this really fetching blue bow in her hair.
Wes made sure not to look at me. But every once in a while, I’d look over at Mary when they were slow-dancing and I’d feel sad, and I’d just want to hold her, but I didn’t know why. I mean it was Pamela I was in love with, but it was Mary I wanted to hold.
Around nine, when they started playing slow songs all the time, I left. I didn’t have anybody to pair up with. I started feeling like an outsider, the way I do a lot of times, and so I just went outside and got in my ragtop and drove home and fired up the boob tube and sat on the couch having a Pepsi and letting the cats use me as a bed. There was an Audie Murphy movie on. Being short and Irish, he was a sort of hero of mine.
Audie was just about to shoot all the bad guys when the phone rang. “Yes.”
“What’re you doing, McCain?”
“Judge Whitney?”
“Of course. Who did you think it was?”
“Is something wrong?”
“Not exactly.” I could tell she’d been drinking. “But I need you to come out here.”
“To your house?”
She sighed impatiently. “Yes, McCain.
To my house. Where the hell else would I be?”
“For what?”
“Just get out here.”
The manse is of red brick. Three stories.
White shutters. And white fencing that gives the hundred acres the look and feel of a Kentucky bluegrass horse ranch. Except in the dead of winter.
Her maid, Sophie, a
Norweigan woman who is even crankier than the judge, let me in and led me to the den.
Mambo music blared out of a stereo.
The judge wore a festive red blouse and a pair of black slacks and one-inch black heels. Her mambo-lesson footsteps were sprawled all over the floor between the built-in bookcases and in front of the fireplace, black footsteps on a long stretch of white plastic, a brandy in one hand and a Gauloise in the other. And she was following her mambo-lesson footsteps with great fervor.
Sophie gave me her usual frown and left.
“Be with you in a minute, McCain. Help yourself to the dry bar.”
I had a beer. From the can. It was my petty protest about being inside the fortress of the master class, as Karl Marx used to call them.
“You could always use a glass,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “I always could.”
She shook her head with elegant disdain and then went back to her dancing. She was getting good, and she looked good too, in the blouse and slacks.
The music ended.
“Well, get ready,” she said.
“Ready?”
“To be my mambo partner. I tried a bunch of other people, but they were all busy. The instructions say that on the tenth night, I should have a live human partner.”
“You’re kidding. That’s why you called me out here?”
“Of course,” she said. “Now get over here.”
There wasn’t any use arguing. I put my beer down, stubbed my Pall Mall out and went over and became her dancing partner.
“God, McCain,” she said, when I was in her arms, “I never realized before just how short you are.”
As my dad says, life is like that sometimes.