Bad Moon Rising

PART THREE
17

So there we had it. Open marriage was something I read about in Playboy and the kind of paperbacks Kenny writes. Sometimes you see brief stories about it on TV news but it’s always reported as if the newsman is handling feces. Even the swankiest of people-despite the protestations that they love their spouse devoutly and are positive that sleeping around has no effect on the children-come off as selfish and decadent. What’s wrong with these people? Haven’t they ever heard of plain old all-American adultery?

The sexual revolution, which we heard about as often as we heard the Pentagon lies about the war, had come to Black River Falls, Iowa.

“Well there, you’ve said it, Eve. Happy now?”

“Oh, sure, Paul. I’m delirious. Can’t you tell?”

“Did your girls know about this?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Mainwaring was ready for an argument.

“You said Vanessa changed after Eve came. I wonder if she ever found out about your arrangement.”

“Not that I know of.”

“We were very discreet.”

“Look at his face,” Mainwaring said. “He just can’t wait to tell everybody he knows.”

“You’re right, Paul. I’m thinking of calling Walter Cronkite.”

“I’m so damned sick of you. I wish I’d never hired you.”

“Believe it or not, Paul, I’m not going to tell anybody. If your arrangement doesn’t have any bearing on Vanessa’s murder it doesn’t matter. But I have to remind you that being discreet in a town this size is difficult. Your friends at the Sleepy Time got guilty and called you, but if they told me, how many other people did they tell?”

“I’ll talk to them and they’ll be damned sorry. Damned sorry. They needed money a few years ago and were overextended at the bank. I loaned them several thousand dollars at three percent. I can call that in any time I choose.”

Again, Eve put her hand over his. “They’re friends of ours, Paul. Keep that in mind.”

“Some friends.”

“I just want to ask one more time-”

Eve spoke before Mainwaring could. “The girls didn’t know anything about it. We were very careful. They disliked me simply because I was trying to replace their mother. That happens all the time with widowers.”

Not that it could have had anything to do with Eve’s personality or the way she treated Marsha or her need to be number one babe in residence.

“Are we about done here?” Mainwaring had taken to drumming his fingers on the table. As chairman of the board he believed that when he was through talking the meeting was over. Who wanted to hear the prattle of lesser beings?

“We haven’t eaten yet, Paul.”

“Are you really hungry, Eve?”

She bowed her head slightly as if in prayer. I’d just demoted her from a fine actress to a ham. A very clumsy move. “No, I guess you’re right. Van’s dead and that’s all that matters.”

Suddenly, soap opera actors looked pretty good to me.

“I told you what I’d pay you to write that letter, McCain. Twenty thousand. Now I want you to add a line about our marital arrangement. That you’ll stay silent about that, too.”

“I won’t write it.”

“Then you’re a fool.”

“No, I’m not. You’ll just have to take my word for it. I won’t tell anybody as long as it doesn’t have any bearing on your daughter’s death.”

“Which means that you’re going to keep on asking questions and putting your nose into things that aren’t any of your business.”

“That isn’t my way of looking at it but yes, I still don’t think the Cameron boy killed your daughter. And I don’t think he committed suicide, either.”

“I was hoping we were going to be friends, Sam. You’re making that impossible.” I wasn’t sure what the word “friends” meant to her, but I was probably flattering myself if I thought there was a hint of lust in her definition.

“Let’s get out of here.” Mainwaring had taken her arm and popped her out of her seat so that they were both glaring down at me accusingly. “If I see you anywhere around my property, McCain, I’m going to have you arrested.”

“You’re a very big disappointment to me, Sam,” Eve said.

As soon as they started to leave, the waiter returned. “Aren’t they going to eat?”

“No, but I am.” I gave him my order. “Is there a pay phone nearby?”

“Just off the lobby.”

“Thanks.”

When Marsha answered, she said, “The Mainwaring residence.”

“Marsha, it’s Sam.”

“You sound as if something’s wrong.”

“You didn’t get this call, Marsha. I just had lunch with Paul and Eve-well, we planned to have lunch, let’s say-and they both made it clear that they don’t want anything to do with me. So please don’t tell them I called.”

“All right. I won’t.”

“I appreciate it, Marsha. Is Nicole there?”

“She’s up in her room. She’s got a small TV up there and rarely comes down. This morning I brought her breakfast up to her.”

“Does she have a phone in her room?”

“The girls each had their own line. I can’t imagine what Mr. Mainwaring had to pay the phone company every month.”

“Would you mind going up there and asking her if I could talk to her?”

“That’s no problem, Sam. But you’ll have to call her back.”

“That’s fine. I just don’t want to be on the phone with her when Paul and Eve get back. They wouldn’t be very happy to know she’s talking to me.”

“I’ll hurry.”

“Thanks again, Marsha.”

“I imagine she’ll talk to you. She told me she likes you. I’ll be right back.”

The wait was only a few minutes. “Here’s her private number. She said she’d be happy to talk to you.”

“Marsha, I’m sending you a Cadillac.”

I could feel her smile through the phone. “I’d settle for a new Plymouth. My old one is wearing out. It’s ten years old and needs a lot of help. It’s sort of like me.”

“You sure didn’t look like it when I was out there.”

“You sure can sling it, Sam. Good luck with Nicole.”

While I dialed I thought about Paul and Eve Mainwaring. They had a secret worth keeping. Paul worked in a military environment, and while generals likely had frequent orgies with various animals, the Pentagon made sure that these were considered as top secret as nuclear warhead locations. People with military secrets were blackmailed all the time. Mainwaring had opened himself up to that and to being tainted with the stigma of perversion if his behavior was made public.

When Nicole came on the phone, she said, “My father is going to be mad I talked to you.”

“I know that. And he may well be on his way home right now. I had lunch with him just a few minutes ago.”

“I don’t give a shit what he thinks, Mr. McCain. I just said that to warn you.”

“Is there a place we could meet around four o’clock?”

“I ride my bike up to Whittier Point a lot. There’s a pavilion up there. I like to sit in the corner of it and read.”

“That’d be great. Four o’clock, all right?”

“I’ll be there.”

I spent the next hour and a half in the office working on a probate case. Somewhere at midpoint the phone rang and Jamie said, “It’s Commander Potter, Mr. C.”

Potter said, “You won’t like me after this call.”

“What makes you think I like you now?”

“Very funny, asshole. Paul Mainwaring just left here and he’s convinced the chief that you’re to be arrested if you keep bothering people about his daughter’s death.”

“What would he arrest me for?”

“He’ll figure out something. He’ll haul you in and then you’ll bail out and then he’ll haul you in again when you start bothering people again. And so on. Why don’t you save yourself and me a lot of trouble and just give it up?”

“Maybe because I’m onto something.”

“Uh-huh. If you were on to something you’d have called me about it already.”

“You make a lot of assumptions.”

“Just give it up, Sam, because I’m the one who’ll have to bring you in and that won’t be fun for either of us.”

“I can’t do that, Mike.”

“Well, then I can’t keep from arresting you.” And with that he hung up.

I went back to work on the probate case, more distracted than ever. Mainwaring was moving in on me now. As Potter had hinted, this was nothing more than harassment. But Mainwaring knew many powerful people in this state, including the governor himself. If Mainwaring wanted to call in some favors, he could. For relief I kept glancing at my wristwatch. I had an hour and a half before I drove out to Whit-tier Point. At least the scenery would change.

The probate case I was working on was ridiculous but modestly profitable so I’d taken it. When their old man died, leaving two thousand dollars and a shotgun to his daughter, his son came to me and said he wanted to contest it. This seemed curious to me because the son was a prominent psychiatrist in Iowa City. He’d grown up here with his old man and his sister. It was the latter he was after. According to him, the old man had always favored her. She got all the new clothes, all the money to go east for college and, more than anything, all the love and support because she reminded his father of his late wife. He was close to tears while he was telling me, biting his lip and twisting his hands. I felt like the shrink listening to a patient. I wouldn’t be recommending his services to anybody I knew.

When I heard Jamie say, “Oh, hi, may I help you?” I raised my head and stared straight into the eyes of Sarah Powers. She and another girl stood in the doorway of my office, both looking nervous.

“Hi, Sarah.”

“Hi.” Sarah wore a blue work shirt and jeans. She held a cigarette aloft with great delicacy, the ash at least half an inch long.

“Let me help you with that,” Jamie said. Seconds later she slid an ashtray under the cigarette. Sarah flicked the ash and thanked her.

“This is Glenna, Sam. I wondered if you’d talk to us. Glenna knows something about what happened the night Vanessa died.” Glenna was a thin, tall girl with blond hair in a ponytail and quick, suspicious brown eyes. Her T-shirt read S TOP THE WAR NOW!

“Sure. Come on in.”

Jamie dragged an extra chair in front of my desk so both girls could sit. Glenna’s fringed buckskin shirt had to be damned hot on a day like this. When she sat down she leaned back and dragged a package of Winstons from the front pocket of her jeans. The pack was pinched by now so that when she got a cigarette out she had to straighten it up.

“Glenna just came to the commune a couple of weeks ago. She’s a real good cook. She made a pumpkin pie last week that knocked everybody out. Plus she’s got her college degree. But she dropped out of society just like the rest of us because it’s all such bullshit.”

That remark caused Jamie to show some interest in the conversation. She stopped her typing to listen. The remark caused me to force a somber look on lips that wanted to smile. The casual way so many of them said “we dropped out of society” had always struck me as funny. They shopped at grocery stores, they had cars that needed repairs, some of them had to pay light and gas and phone bills, and they weren’t averse to going to doctors or free clinics. They’d dropped out of the parts of society they didn’t like but they were very much still citizens.

“And she saw Vanessa go into that barn.”

I straightened up. This required full attention. “What time was this, Glenna?”

“She says it was right after supper. She was going to the barn to see if this kitten had come back. She found this little black-and-white one-”

“Sarah, why don’t you let Glenna talk?”

Sarah blushed bright as an autumn apple. “I’m sorry. But she’s shy. She asked me to do the talking.”

“I’m sorry. I need to hear it from her.”

She took a deep breath. “She, uh, thinks you’re like, you know, one of the pigs.”

“Why, that’s not true, Sarah. Mr. C isn’t a pig. You shouldn’t say things like that,” Jamie interjected.

“If that’s true, she should tell me I’m a pig herself.”

“You’re a pig,” Glenna said.

“All right, now that we’ve got that established, how about telling me what you saw that night.”

“I’m only doing this because I know Neil never murdered anybody. That’s something only pigs do. Neil was transcendental and so am I.”

“Good enough. So what about Vanessa that night?”

“I saw her behind the barn. She was arguing with Richard.”

“You could hear them arguing?”

“No, but it was obvious. She sort of shoved him once and started to walk away but he grabbed her by the arm.”

“They didn’t see you?”

“I was over by that old silo. They couldn’t see me in the shadows. Plus it was starting to get real dark.”

“How long did you watch them?”

“Probably ten, eleven minutes, something like that. Until she ran inside the barn and he went in after her. That time I did hear them-at least, I heard him shout her name. I didn’t want to get involved because Richard thinks we spy on him anyway. He can get real paranoid.”

“Why didn’t you come forward before?”

This time she took a deep breath. When she exhaled the sound was ragged, anxious. “I got in a little trouble in Iowa City. I’m on probation. I don’t want to get hassled by the pigs again.”

“What happened in Iowa City?”

“They can’t take a joke is what happened in Iowa City.”

“That doesn’t exactly tell me anything.”

“Go ahead, Glenna. Tell him.”

“It doesn’t matter, Sarah.”

“Sure it matters. So please tell me.”

“I puked into this bucket and then threw the bucket at a cop. I got vomit all over him. All we were doing was trying to take over this dean’s office. This dean was a real pig.”

The hell of it was she seemed to be serious. I wasn’t sure how to deal with someone who didn’t understand that throwing a bucket of puke at somebody just might be considered an aggressive and unlawful act. “Can’t imagine why the cop’d be pissed off about that.”

“I’m glad you never try to be sarcastic. I told you he’d be a pig, Sarah.”

As I’d said so many times, most of the hippies I’d met over the past few years I’d liked. I agreed with them about the war, about the materialism of our society, about the alienation so many of us felt. Just as there were a few hippie haters in town, there were also a few hippie lunatics and right now I was sitting across from one of them.

“All I care about right now is that you’d be willing to testify to what you just said. Under oath.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Hey, Glenna, you promised me you would.”

“I said I ‘might.’ But I don’t like this jerk. At all.”

“Forget about him. He doesn’t matter-no offense, Sam. What matters is that you’re willing to admit the truth to the cops. And save my brother’s reputation.”

“Well, if I do it, that’s the only reason I’ll do it.”

“That’s all I care about,” I said. “Sarah, I’ll leave it up to you to hold her to this. The first thing I need to do is talk to Richard. This doesn’t mean he killed her.”

“See what I mean, Sarah? That’s why I didn’t want to come here. He’s already making excuses for Richard. They’re big buddies.”

“She hates Richard, Sam. She thinks she should be running the commune.”

Somehow that’s not a surprise, I thought. But I didn’t say it, of course, not with Rasputin sitting directly in front of me.

“He thinks he’s so cool,” Glenna said.

“She used to live with Richard.”

“He doesn’t believe any of the things he says about the revolution,” Glenna said, managing to light a cigarette while saying this. “He has two credit cards.”

“Maybe he needs them,” Sarah suggested quietly.

“You think Lenin had credit cards?”

“I need to get out of here. I have some appointments. One of them will be to go see Richard. In the meantime, Sarah, I’d appreciate it if you’d make sure that Glenna is willing to tell her story to the authorities if need be.”

“That’s cool. Now he’s not talking to me. He’s only talking to you.”

But Sarah was already dragging herself and Glenna to their feet and didn’t respond. I think that she was as tired of Stalin’s daughter as Jamie and I were.

“I’ll talk to you soon, Sam.”

“Thanks, Sarah. And thank you, too, Glenna. I appreciate you helping us like this.” You crazy bitch. But of course that was a thought meant only for me, myself, and I. Like Sarah, I had to abide Glenna’s nastiness in order to ensure her testimony.

At the door, Sarah turned back and gave me a frown, a shrug and a nod toward Glenna, who was preceding her into the hall. I wished she had drawn an invisible circle around her head, the way people do to indicate that somebody is nuts. But then Glenna just might have been packing a flame thrower and melted Sarah down on the spot.

After we heard the outside door open and close, Jamie said, “That woman scares me. And she shouldn’t have talked to you the way she did.”

“Well, she’ll be helpful to us if Richard was involved as she claims.”

“Turk thinks hippies should be put in prison. He says they don’t contribute anything to society. And he says boys with long hair are nothing but girls anyway and make him sick.”

Let’s see. Turk the wife-abuser, Turk the willfully unemployed, Turk who lives off his wife’s work, Turk the leader of Iowa’s only surfer band, thinks hippies should be sent to prison. It seemed that the ones who hassled hippies the most were the bikers, the local thugs, and the hillbillies from the Hills-you know, the cream of local society. No surprise that Turk was among them.

“I just say live and let live, like most people around here do.”

As I was passing her desk, I bent over and kissed the top of her head.

“Gee, thanks, Mr. C.” The blush just made her all the cuter.

I was about out the door. In fact, I was one step over the office threshold when the phone rang. When I was four steps over the threshold and making my way to the outside door, Jamie said, “It’s Mr. Federman. Do you want to talk to him?”

“Hey,” he said. “I call at a bad time?” The people at the Wilhoyt agency were always polite.

“No. It’s fine. Just real busy.”

“Well I found out two things that might interest you. Eve, original name Sharon Carmichael, has been named in two different divorce cases by very unhappy wives. She has also been married to two wealthy older gentlemen. She got a small sum from one when he kicked her out for cheating on him and nothing from the other one because he threatened to send around the photos his private investigator snapped of her. Her name was variously Sharon Downes and Sylvia Tralins. I got this from two newspapermen. Just thought you’d like to know. Should I keep digging?”

“Definitely. I just wonder if Mainwaring knew about any of this.”

He laughed. “The way you described how hooked he is-you think it would’ve made any difference?”