Short Stories, Volume 1

1

“She in a good mood?” I asked.

The lovely and elegant Pamela Forrest looked up at me as if I’d suggested that there really was a Santa Claus.

“Now why would she go and do a foolish thing like that, McCain?” She smiled.

“Oh, I guess because—”

“Because it’s the Christmas season, and most people are in good moods?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“Well, not our Judge Whitney.”

“At least she’s consistent,” I said.

I had been summoned, as usual, from my law practice, where I’d been working the phones, trying to get my few clients to pay their bills. I had a 1951 Ford ragtop to support. And dreams of taking the beautiful Pamela Forrest to see the Platters concert when they were in Des Moines next month.

“You thought any more about the Platters concert?” I said.

“Oh, McCain, now why’d you have to go and bring that up?”

“I just thought—”

“You know how much I love the Platters. But I really don’t think it’s a good idea for the two of us to go out again.” She gave me a melancholy little smile. “Now I probably went and ruined your holidays and I’m sorry. You know I like you, Cody, it’s just — Stew.”

This was Christmas 1959, and I’d been trying since at least Christmas 1957 to get Pamela to go out with me. But we had a problem — while I loved Pamela, Pamela loved Stewart, and Stewart happened to be not only a former football star at the university but also the heir to the town’s third biggest fortune.

Her intercom buzzed. “Is he out there pestering you again, Pamela?”

“No, Your Honor.”

“Tell him to get his butt in here.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“And call my cousin John and tell him I’ll be there around three this afternoon.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“And remind me to pick up my dry cleaning.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“And tell McCain to get his butt in here. Or did I already say that?”

“You already said that, Your Honor.”

I bade goodbye to the lovely and elegant Pamela Forrest and went in to meet my master.

“You know what he did this time?” Judge Eleanor Whitney said three seconds after I crossed her threshold.

The “he” could only refer to one person in the town of Black River Falls, Iowa. And that would be our esteemed chief of police, Cliff Sykes, Jr., who has this terrible habit of arresting people for murders they didn’t commit and giving Judge Whitney the pleasure of pointing out the error of his ways.

A little over a hundred years ago, Judge Whitney’s family dragged a lot of money out here from the East and founded this town. They pretty much ran it until World War II, a catastrophic event that helped make Cliff Sykes, Sr., a rich and powerful man in the local wartime construction business.

Sykes, Sr., used his money to put his own members on the town council, just the way the Whitneys had always done. He also started to bribe and coerce the rest of the town into doing things his way. Judge Whitney saw him as a crude outlander, of course. Where her family was conversant with Verdi, Vermeer, and Tolstoy, the Sykes family took as cultural icons Ma and Pa Kettle and Francis the Talking Mule, the same characters I go to see at the drive-in whenever possible.

Anyway, the one bit of town management the Sykes family couldn’t get to was Judge Whitney’s court. Every time Cliff Sykes, Jr., arrested somebody for murder, the judge called me up and put me to work. In addition to being an attorney, I’m taking extension courses in criminology. The judge thinks this qualifies me as her very own staff private investigator, so whenever she wants something looked into, she calls me. And I’m glad she does. She’s my only source of steady income.

“He arrested my cousin John’s son, Rick. Charged him with murdering his girlfriend. That stupid ass.”

Now in a world of seventh-ton crime-solving geniuses, and lady owners of investigative firms who go two hundred pounds and are as bristly as barbed wire, Judge Eleanor Whitney is actually a small, trim, and very handsome woman.

And she knows how to dress herself. Today she wore a brown suede blazer, a crisp button-down, white-collar shirt, and dark fitted slacks. Inside the open collar of the shirt was a green silk scarf that complemented the green of her eyes perfectly.

She was hiked on the edge of the desk, right next to an ample supply of rubber bands.

“Sit down, McCain.”

“He didn’t do it.”

“I said sit down. You know I hate it when you stand.”

I sat down.

“He didn’t do it,” I said.

“Exactly. He didn’t do it.”

“You know, one of these times you’re bound to be wrong. I mean, just by the odds, Sykes is bound to be right.” Which is what I say every time she gives me an assignment.

“Well, he isn’t right this time.” Which is what she says every time I say the thing about the odds.

“His girlfriend was Linda Palmer, I take it.”

“Right.”

“The one found in her apartment?”

She nodded.

“What’s Sykes’s evidence?”

“Three neighbors saw Rick running away from the apartment house the night before last.”

She launched one of her rubber hands at me, thumb and forefinger style, like a pistol. She likes to see if I’ll flinch when the rubber band comes within an eighth of an inch of my ear. I try never to give her that satisfaction.

“He examine Rick’s car and clothes?”

“You mean fibers and blood, things like that?”

“Yeah.”

She smirked. “You think Sykes would be smart enough to do something like that?”

“I guess you’ve got a point.”

She stood up and started to pace.

You’ll note that I am not permitted this luxury, standing and pacing, but for her it is fine. She is, after all, mistress of the universe.

“I just keep thinking of John. The poor guy. He’s a very good man.”

“I know.”

“And it’s going to be a pretty bleak Christmas without Rick there. I’ll have to invite him out to the house.”

Which was not an invitation I usually wanted. The judge kept a considerable number of rattlesnakes in glass cages on the first floor of her house. I was always waiting for one of them to get loose.

I stood up. “I’ll get right on it.” I couldn’t recall ever seeing the judge in such a pensive mood. Usually, when she’s going to war with Cliff Sykes, Jr., she’s positively ecstatic.

But when her cousin was involved, and first cousin at that, I supposed even Judge Whitney — a woman who had buried three husbands, and who frequently golfed with President Eisenhower when he was in the Midwest, and who had been ogled by Khrushchev when he visited a nearby Iowa farm — I supposed even Judge Whitney had her melancholy moments.

She went back to her desk, perched on the edge of it, loaded up another rubber band, and shot it at me.

“Your nerves are getting better, McCain,” she said. “You don’t twitch as much as you used to.”

“I’ll take that as an example of your Christmas cheer,” I said. “You noting that I don’t twitch as much as I used to, I mean.”

Then she glowered at me. “Nail his butt to the wall, McCain. My family’s honor is at stake here. Rick’s a hothead but he’s not a killer. He cares too much about the family name to soil it that way.”

Thus basking in the glow of Christmas spirit, not to mention a wee bit of patrician hubris, I took my leave of the handsome Judge Whitney.

2

Red Ford ragtops can get a little cold around Christmas time. I had everything buttoned down but winter winds still whacked the car every few yards or so.

The city park was filled with snowmen and Christmas angels as Bing Crosby and Perry Como and Johnny Mathis sang holiday songs over the loudspeakers lining the merchant blocks. I could remember being a kid, in the holiday concerts in the park. People stood there in the glow of Christmas-tree lights listening to us sing for a good hour. I always kept warm by staring at the girl I had a crush on that particular year. Even back then, I gravitated toward the ones who didn’t want me. I guess that’s why my favorite holiday song is “Blue Christmas” by Elvis. It’s really depressing, which gives it a certain honesty for romantics like myself.

I pulled in the drive of Linda Palmer’s apartment house. It was a box with two apartments up, two down. There was a gravel parking lot in the rear. The front door was hung with holly and a plastic bust of Santa Claus.

Inside, in the vestibule area with the mailboxes, I heard Patti Page singing a Christmas song, and I got sentimental about Pamela Forrest again. During one of the times that she’d given up on good old Stewart, she’d gone out with me a few times. The dates hadn’t meant much to her, but I looked back on them as the halcyon period of my entire life, when giants walked the earth and you could cut off slices of sunbeams and sell them as gold.

“Hi,” I said as soon as the music was turned down and the door opened up.

The young woman who answered the bell to the apartment opposite Linda Palmer’s was cute in a dungaree-doll sort of way — ponytail and Pat Boone sweatshirt and jeans rolled up to mid calf.

“Hi.”

“My name’s McCain.”

“I’m Bobbi Thomas. Aren’t you Judge Whitney’s assistant?”

“Well, sort of.”

“So you’re here about—”

“Linda Palmer.”

“Poor Linda,” she said, and made a sad face. “It’s scary living here now. I mean, if it can happen to Linda—”

She was about to finish her sentence when two things happened at once. A tiny calico kitten came charging out of her apartment between her legs, and a tall man in a gray uniform with DERBY CLEANERS sewn on his cap walked in and handed her a package wrapped in clear plastic. Inside was a shaggy gray throw rug and a shaggy white one and a shaggy fawn-colored one.

“Appreciate your business, miss,” the DERBY man said, and left.

I mostly watched the kitten. She was a sweetie. She walked straight over to the door facing Bobbi’s. The card in the slot still read LINDA PALMER.

“You mind picking her up and bringing her in? I just need to put this dry cleaning away.”

Ten minutes later, the three of us sat in her living room. I say three because the kitten, who’d been introduced to me as Sophia, sat in my lap and sniffed my coffee cup whenever I raised it to drink. The apartment was small but nicely kept. The floors were oak and not spoiled by wall-to-wall carpeting. She took the throw rugs from the plastic dry-cleaning wrap and spread them in front of the fireplace.

“They get so dirty,” she explained as she straightened the rugs, then walked over and sat down.

Then she nodded to the kitten. “We just found her downstairs in the laundry room one day. There’s a small TV down there and Linda and I liked to sit down there and smoke cigarettes and drink Cokes and watch Bandstand. Do you think Dick Clark’s a crook? My boyfriend does.” She shrugged. “Ex-boyfriend. We broke up.” She tried again: “So do you think Dick Clark’s a crook?”

A disc jockey named Alan Freed was in trouble with federal authorities for allegedly taking bribes to play certain songs on his radio show. Freed didn’t have enough power to make a hit record and people felt he was being used as a scapegoat. On the other hand, Dick Clark did have the power to make or break a hit record (Lord, did he, with American Bandstand on ninety minutes several afternoons a week), but the feds had rather curiously avoided investigating him in any serious way.

“Could be,” I said. “But I guess I’d rather talk about Linda.”

She looked sad again. “I guess that’s why I was talking about Dick Clark. So we wouldn’t have to talk about Linda.”

“I’m sorry.”

She sighed. “I just have to get used to it, I guess.” Then she looked at Sophia. “Isn’t she sweet? We called her our Christmas kitten.”

“She sure is.”

“That’s what I started to tell you. One day Linda and I were downstairs, and there Sophia was. Just this little lost kitten. So we both sort of adopted her. We’d leave our doors open so Sophia could just wander back and forth between apartments. Sometimes she slept here, sometimes she slept over there.” She raised her eyes from the kitten and looked at me. “He killed her.”

“Rick?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Why do I say that? Are you kidding? You should’ve seen the arguments they had.”

“He ever hit her?”

“Not that I know of.”

“He ever threaten her?”

“All the time.”

“You know why?” I asked.

“Because he was so jealous of her. He used to sit across the street at night and just watch her front window. He’d sit there for hours.”

“Would she be in there at the time?”

“Oh, sure. He always claimed she had this big dating life on the side but she never did.”

“Anything special happen lately between them?”

“You mean you don’t know?”

“I guess not.”

“She gave him back his engagement ring.”

“And that—”

“He smashed out her bedroom window with his fist. This was in the middle of the night and he was really drunk. I called the police on him. Just because he’s a Whitney doesn’t mean he can break the rules any time he feels like it.”

I’d been going to ask her if she was from around here but the resentment in her voice about the Whitneys answered my question. The Whitneys had been the valley’s most imperious family for a little more than a century now.

“Did the police come?”

“Sykes himself.”

“And he did what?”

“Arrested him. Took him in.” She gave me a significant look with her deep blue eyes. “He was relishing every minute, too. A Sykes arresting a Whitney, I mean. He was having a blast.”

So then I asked her about the night of the murder. We spent twenty minutes on the subject but I didn’t learn much. She’d been in her apartment all night watching TV and hadn’t heard anything untoward. But when she got up to go to work in the morning and didn’t hear Linda moving around in her apartment, she knocked, and, when there wasn’t any answer, went in. Linda lay dead, the left side of her head smashed in, sprawled in a white bra and half-slip in front of the fireplace that was just like Bobbi’s.

“Maybe I had my TV up too loud,” Bobbi said. “I love westerns and it was Gunsmoke night. It was a good one, too. But I keep thinking that maybe if I hadn’t played the TV so loud, I could’ve heard her—”

I shook my head. “Don’t start doing that to yourself, Bobbi, or it’ll never end. If only I’d done this, if only I’d done that. You did everything you could.”

She sighed. “I guess you’re right.”

“Mind one more question?”

She shrugged and smiled. “You can see I’ve got a pretty busy social calendar.”

“I want to try and take Rick out of the picture for a minute. Will you try?”

“You mean as a suspect?”

“Right.”

“I’ll try.”

“All right. Now, who are three people who had something against Linda — or Rick?”

“Why Rick?”

“Because maybe the killer wanted to make it look as if Rick did it.”

“Oh, I see.” Then: “I’d have to say Gwen. Gwen Dawes. She was Rick’s former girlfriend. She always blamed Linda for taking him away. You know, they hadn’t been going together all that long, Rick and Linda, I mean. Gwen would still kind of pick arguments with her when she’d see them in public places.”

“Gwen ever come over here and pick an argument?”

“Once, I guess.”

“Remember when?”

“Couple months ago, maybe.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing much. She and a couple of girlfriends were pretty drunk, and they came up on the front porch and started writing things on the wall. It was juvenile stuff. Most of us graduated from high school two years ago but we’re still all kids, if you see what I mean.”

I wrote Gwen’s name down and said, “Anybody else who bothered Linda?”

“Paul Walters, for sure.”

“Paul Walters?”

“Her old boyfriend. He used to wait until Rick left at night and then he’d come over and pick a fight with her.”

“Would she let him in?”

“Sometimes. Then there was Millie Styles. The wife of the man Linda worked for.”

“Why didn’t she like Linda?”

“She accused Linda of trying to steal her husband.”

“Was she?”

“You had to know Linda.”

“I see.”

“She wasn’t a rip or anything.”

“Rip?”

“You know, whore.”

“But she—”

“—could be very flirtatious.”

“More than flirtatious?”

She shrugged. “Sometimes.”

“Maybe with Mr. Styles?”

“Maybe. He’s an awfully handsome guy. He looks like Fabian.”

She wasn’t kidding. They weren’t very far out of high school.

That was when I felt a scratching on my chin and I looked straight down into the eager, earnest, and heartbreakingly sweet face of Sophia.

“She likes to kiss noses the way Eskimos do,” Bobbi said.

We kissed noses.

Then I set Sophia down and she promptly put a paw in my coffee cup.

“Sophia!” Bobbi said. “She’s always putting her paw in wet things. She’s obsessed, the little devil.”

Sophia paid us no attention. Tail switching, she walked across the coffee table, her left front paw leaving coffee imprints on the surface.

I stood up. “I appreciate this, Bobbi.”

“You can save yourself some work.”

“How would I do that?”

“There’s a skating party tonight. Everybody we’ve talked about is going to be there.” She gave me another one of her significant looks. “Including me.”

“Then I guess that’s a pretty good reason to go, isn’t it?” I said.

“Starts at six-thirty. It’ll be very dark by then. You know how to skate?”

I smiled. “I wouldn’t exactly call it skating.”

“Then what would you call it?”

“Falling down is the term that comes to mind,” I said.

3

Rick Whitney was even harder to love than his aunt.

“When I get out of this place, I’m going to take that hillbilly and push him off Indian Cliff.”

In the past five minutes, Rick Whitney, of the long blond locks and relentlessly arrogant blue-eyed good looks, had also threatened to shoot, stab, and set fire to our beloved chief of police, Cliff Sykes, Jr. As an attorney, I wouldn’t advise any of my clients to express such thoughts, especially when they were in custody, being held for premeditated murder (or as my doctor friend Stan Greenbaum likes to say, “premedicated murder”).

“Rick, we’re not getting anywhere.”

He turned on me again. He’d turned on me three or four times already, pushing his face at me, jabbing his finger at me.

“Do you know what it’s like for a Whitney to be in jail? Why, if my grandfather were still alive, he’d come down here and shoot Sykes right on the spot.”

“Rick? Sit down and shut up.”

“You’re telling me to shut up?”

“Uh-huh. And to sit down.”

“I don’t take orders from people like you.”

I stood up. “Fine. Then I’ll leave.”

He started to say something nasty, but just then a cloud passed over the sun and the six cells on the second floor of the police station got darker.

He said, “I’ll sit down.”

“And shut up?”

It was a difficult moment for a Whitney. Humility is even tougher for them than having a tooth pulled. “And shut up.”

So we sat down, him on the wobbly cot across from my wobbly cot, and we talked as two drunks three cells away pretended they weren’t listening to us.

“A Mrs. Mawbry who lives across the street saw you running out to your car about eleven p.m. the night of the murder. Dr. Mattingly puts the time of death at right around that time.”

“She’s lying.”

“You know better than that.”

“They just hate me because I’m a Whitney.”

It’s not easy going through life being of a superior species, especially when all the little people hate you for it.

“You’ve got fifteen seconds,” I said.

“For what?”

“To stop stalling and tell me the truth. You went to the apartment and found her dead, didn’t you? And then you ran away.”

I watched the faces of the two eavesdropping winos. It was either stay up here in the cells, or use the room downstairs that I was sure Cliff Sykes, Jr., had bugged.

“Ten seconds.”

He sighed and said, “Yeah, I found her. But I didn’t kill her.”

“You sure of that?”

He looked startled. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means were you drinking that evening, and did you have any sort of alcoholic blackout? You’ve been known to tip a few.”

“I had a couple beers earlier. That was it. No alcoholic blackout.”

“All right,” I said. “Now tell me the rest of it.”

“Wonder if the state’ll pass that new law,” Chief Cliff Sykes, Jr., said to me as I was leaving the police station by the back door.

“I didn’t know that you kept up on the law, Cliff, Jr.”

He hated it when I added the Jr. to his name, but since he was about to do a little picking on me, I decided to do a little picking on him. With too much Brylcreem — Cliff, Jr., apparently never heard the part of the jingle that goes “A little dab’ll do ya” — and his wiry mustache, he looks like a bar rat all duded up for Saturday night. He wears a khaki uniform that Warner Brothers must have rejected for an Errol Flynn western. The epaulets alone must weigh twenty-five pounds each.

“Yep, next year they’re goin’ to start fryin’ convicts instead of hanging them.”

The past few years in Iowa, we’d been debating which was the more humane way to shuffle off this mortal coil. At least when the state decides to be the shuffler and make you the shufflee.

“And I’ll bet you think that Rick Whitney is going to be one of the first to sit in the electric chair, right?”

He smiled his rat smile, sucked his toothpick a little deeper into his mouth. “You said it, I didn’t.”

There’s a saying around town that money didn’t change the Sykes family any — they’re still the same mean, stupid, dishonest, and uncouth people they’ve always been.

“Well, I hate to spoil your fun, Cliff, Jr., but he’s going to be out of here by tomorrow night.”

He sucked on his toothpick some more. “You and what army is gonna take him out of here?”

“Won’t take an army, Cliff, Jr., I’ll just find the guilty party and Rick’ll walk right out of here.”

He shook his head. “He thinks his piss don’t stink because he’s a Whitney. This time he’s wrong.”

4

The way I figure it, any idiot can learn to skate standing up. It takes a lot more creativity and perseverance to skate on your knees and your butt and your back.

I was putting on quite a show. Even five-year-olds were pointing at me and giggling. One of them had an adult face pasted on his tiny body. I wanted to give him the finger but I figured that probably wouldn’t look quite right, me being twenty-six and an attorney and all.

Everything looked pretty tonight, gray smoke curling from the big log cabin where people hung out putting on skates and drinking hot cider and warming themselves in front of the fireplace. Christmas music played over the loudspeakers, and every few minutes you’d see a dog come skidding across the ice to meet up with its owners. Tots in snowsuits looking like Martians toddled across the ice in the wake of their parents.

The skaters seemed to come in four types: the competitive skaters who were just out tonight to hone their skills; the show-offs who kept holding their girlfriends over their heads; the lovers who were melting the ice with their scorching looks; and the junior-high kids who kept trying to knock everybody down accidentally. I guess I should add the seniors; they were the most fun to watch, all gray hair and dignity as they made their way across the ice arm in arm. They probably came here thirty or forty years ago when Model-Ts had lined the parking area, and when the music had been supplied by Rudy Vallee. They were elegant and touching to watch here on the skating rink tonight.

I stayed to the outside of the rink. I kept moving because it was, at most, ten above zero. Falling down kept me pretty warm, too.

I was just getting up from a spill when I saw a Levi’d leg — two Levi’d legs — standing behind me. My eyes followed the line of legs upwards and there she was. It was sort of like a dream, actually, a slightly painful one because I’d dreamt it so often and so uselessly.

There stood the beautiful and elegant Pamela Forrest. In her white woolen beret, red cable-knit sweater, and jeans, she was the embodiment of every silly and precious holiday feeling. She was even smiling.

“Well, I’m sure glad you’re here,” she said.

“You mean because you want to go out?”

“No, I mean because I’m glad there’s somebody who’s even a worse skater than I am.”

“Oh,” I said.

She put out a hand and helped me up. I brushed the flesh of her arm — and let my nostrils be filled with the scent of her perfume — and I got so weak momentarily I was afraid I was going to fall right back down.

“You have a date?”

I shook my head. “Still doing some work for Judge Whitney.”

She gave my arm a squeeze. “Just between you and me, McCain, I hope you solve one of these cases yourself someday.”

She was referring to the fact that in every case I’d worked on, Judge Whitney always seemed to solve it just as I was starting to figure out who the actual culprit was. I had a feeling, though, that this case I’d figure out all by my lonesome.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Judge Whitney as upset as she was today,” I said.

“I’m worried about her. This thing with Rick, I mean; it isn’t just going up against the Sykes family this time. The family honor’s at stake.”

I looked at her. “You have a date?”

And then she looked sad, and I knew what her answer was going to be.

“Not exactly.”

“Ah. But Stewart’s going to be here.”

“I think so. I’m told he comes here sometimes.”

“Boy, you’re just as pathetic as I am.”

“Well, that’s a nice thing to say.”

“You can’t have him any more than I can have you. But neither one of us can give it up, can we?”

I took her arm and we skated. We actually did a lot better as a team than we did individually. I was going to mention that to her but I figured she would think I was just being corny and coming on to her in my usual clumsy way. If only I were as slick as Elvis in those movies of his where he sings a couple of songs and beats the crap out of every bad guy in town, working in a few lip locks with nubile females in the interim.

I didn’t recognize them at first. Their skating costumes, so dark and tight and severe, gave them the aspect of Russian ballet artists. People whispered at them as they soared past, and it was whispers they wanted.

David and Millie Styles were the town’s “artistic fugitives,” as one of the purpler of the paper’s writers wrote once. Twice a year they ventured to New York to bring radical new items back to their interior decorating “salon, “ as they called it, and they usually brought back a lot of even more radical attitudes and poses. Millie had once been quoted in the paper as saying that we should have an “All Nude Day” twice a year in town; and David was always standing on the library steps waving copies of banned books in the air and demanding that they be returned to library shelves. The thing was, I agreed with the message; it was the messengers I didn’t care for. They were wealthy, attractive dabblers who loved to outrage and shock. In a big city, nobody would’ve paid them any attention. Out here, they were celebrities.

“God, they look great, don’t they?” Pamela said.

“If you like the style.”

“Skin-tight, all-black skating outfits. Who else would’ve thought of something like that?”

“You look a lot better.”

She favored me with a forehead kiss. “Oh God, McCain, I sure wish I could fall in love with you.”

“I wish you could, too.”

“But the heart has its own logic.”

“That sounds familiar.”

“Peyton Place.”

“That’s right.”

Peyton Place had swept through town two years ago like an army bent on destroying everything in its path. The fundamentalists not only tried to get it out of the library; they tried to ban its sale in paperback. The town literary lions, such as the Styleses, were strangely moot. They did not want to be seen defending something as plebeian as Grace Metalious’s book. I was in a minority. I not only liked it; I thought it was a good book. A true one, as Hemingway often said.

On the far side of the rink, I saw David Styles skate away from his wife and head for the warming cabin.

She skated on alone.

“Excuse me. I’ll be back,” I said.

It took me two spills and three near-spills to reach Millie Styles.

“Evening,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, staring at me. “You.” Apparently I looked like something her dog had just dragged in from the backyard, something not quite dead yet.

“I wondered if we could talk.”

“What in God’s name would you and I have to talk about, McCain?”

“Why you killed Linda Palmer the other night.”

She tried to slap me but fortunately I was going into one of my periodic dives so her slap missed me by half a foot.

I did reach out and grab her arm to steady myself, however.

“Leave me alone,” she said.

“Did you find out that Linda and David were sleeping together?”

From the look in her eyes, I could see that she had. I kept thinking about what Bobbi Thomas had said, how Linda was flirtatious.

And for the first time, I felt something human for the striking, if not quite pretty, woman wearing too much makeup and way too many New York poses. Pain showed in her eyes. I actually felt a smidgen of pity for her.

Her husband appeared magically. “Is something wrong?” Seeing the hurt in his wife’s eyes, he had only scorn for me. He put a tender arm around her. “You get the hell out of here, McCain.” He sounded almost paternal, he was so protective of her.

“And leave me alone,” she said again, and skated away so quickly that there was no way I could possibly catch her.

Then Pamela was there again, sliding her arm through mine.

“You have to help me, McCain,” she said.

“Help you what?”

“Help me look like I’m having a wonderful time.”

Then I saw Stew McGinley, former college football star and idle rich boy, skating around the rink with his girlfriend, the relentlessly cheery and relentlessly gorgeous Cindy Parkhurst, who had been a cheerleader at State the same year Stew was All Big-Eight.

This was the eternal triangle: I was in love with Pamela; Pamela was in love with Stew; and Stew was in love with Cindy, who not only came from the same class — right below the Whitneys — but had even more money than Stew did, and not only that but had twice done the unthinkable. She’d broken up with Stew and started dating somebody else. This was something Stew wasn’t used to. He was supposed to do the breaking up. Stew was hooked, he was.

They were both dressed in white costumes tonight, and looked as if they would soon be on The Ed Sullivan Show for no other reason than simply existing.

“I guess I don’t know how to do that,” I said.

“How to do what?”

“How to help you look like you’re having a wonderful time.”

“I’m going to say something and then you throw your head back and break out laughing.” She looked at me. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

She said something I couldn’t hear and then I threw my head back and pantomimed laughing. I had the sense that I actually did it pretty well — after watching all those Tony Curtis movies at the drive-in, I was bound to pick up at least a few pointers about acting — but the whole thing was moot because Stew and Cindy were gazing into each other’s eyes and paying no attention to us whatsoever.

“There goes my Academy Award,” I said.

We tried skating again, both of us wobbling and waffling along, when I saw Paul Walters standing by the warming house smoking a cigarette. He was apparently one of those guys who didn’t skate but liked to come to the rink and look at all the participants so he could feel superior to them. A sissy sport, I could hear him thinking.

“I’ll be back,” I said.

By the time I got to the warming house, Paul Walters had been joined by Gwen Dawes. Just as Paul was the dead girl’s old boyfriend, Gwen was the suspect’s old girlfriend. Those little towns in Kentucky where sisters marry brothers had nothing on our own cozy little community.

Just as I reached them, Gwen, an appealing if slightly overweight redhead, pulled Paul’s face down to hers and kissed him. He kissed her right back.

“Hi,” I said, as they started to separate.

They both looked at me as if I had just dropped down from a UFO.

“Oh, you’re Cody McCain,” Walters said. He was tall, sinewy, and wore the official uniform of juvenile delinquents everywhere — leather jacket, jeans, engineering boots. He put his Elvis sneer on right after he brushed his teeth in the morning.

“Right. I wondered if we could maybe talk a little.”

“We?” he said.

“Yeah. The three of us.”

“About what?”

I looked around. I didn’t want eavesdroppers.

“About Linda Palmer.”

“My one night off a week and I have to put up with this crap,” he said.

“She was a bitch,” Gwen Dawes said.

“Hey, c’mon, she’s dead,” Walters said.

“Yeah, and that’s just what she deserved, too.”

“You wouldn’t happened to have killed her, would you, Gwen?” I asked.

“That’s why he’s here, Paul. He thinks we did it.”

“Right now,” I said, “I’d be more inclined to say you did it.”

“He works for Whitney,” Walters said. “I forgot that. He’s some kind of investigator.”

She said, “He’s trying to prove that Rick didn’t kill her. That’s why he’s here.”

“You two can account for yourselves between the hours of ten and midnight the night of the murder?”

Gwen eased her arm around his waist. “I sure can. He was at my place.”

I looked right at her. “He just said this was his only night off. Where do you work, Paul?”

Now that I’d caught them in a lie, he’d lost some of his poise.

“Over at the tire factory.”

“You were there the night of the murder?”

“I was — sick.”

I watched his face.

“Were you with Gwen?”

“No — I was just riding around.”

“And maybe stopped over at Linda’s, the way you sometimes did?”

He looked at Gwen then back at me.

“No, I... I was just riding around.”

He was as bad a liar as Gwen was.

“And I was home,” Gwen said, “in case you’re interested.”

“Nobody with you?”

She gave Walters another squeeze.

“The only person I want with me is Paul.”

She took his hand, held it tight. She was protecting him the way Mr. Styles had just protected Mrs. Styles. And as I watched her now, it gave me an idea about how I could smoke out the real killer. I wouldn’t go directly for the killer — I’d go for the protector.

“Excuse us,” Gwen said, and pushed past me, tugging Paul along in her wake.

I spent the next few minutes looking for Pamela. I finally found her sitting over in the empty bleachers that are used for speed-skating fans every Sunday when the ice is hard enough for competition.

“You okay?”

She looked up at me with those eyes and I nearly went over backwards. She has that effect on me, much as I sometimes wished she didn’t.

“You know something, McCain?” she said.

“What?”

“There’s a good chance that Stew is never going to change his mind and fall in love with me.”

“And there’s a good chance that you’re never going to change your mind and fall in love with me.”

“Oh, McCain,” she said, and stood up, the whole lithe, elegant length of her. She slipped her arm in mine again and said, “Let’s not talk anymore, all right? Let’s just skate.”

And skate we did.

5

When I got home that night, I called Judge Whitney and told her everything I’d learned, from my meeting with Bobbi Thomas to meeting the two couples at the ice rink tonight.

As usual, she made me go over everything to the point that it got irritating. I pictured her on the other end of the phone, sitting there in her dressing gown and shooting rubber bands at an imaginary me across from her.

“Get some rest, McCain,” she said. “You sound like you need it.”

It was true. I was tired and I probably sounded tired. I tried watching TV. Mike Hammer was on at 10:30. I buy all the Mickey Spillane books as soon as they come out. I think Darren McGavin does a great job with Hammer. But tonight the show couldn’t quite hold my interest.

I kept thinking about my plan—

What if I actually went through with it?

If the judge found out, she’d probably say it was corny, like something out of Perry Mason. (The only mysteries the judge likes are by Rex Stout and Margery Allingham.)

But so what if it was corny — if it turned up the actual culprit?

I spent the next two hours sitting at my desk in my underwear typing up notes.

Some of them were too cute, some of them were too long, some of them didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.

Finally, I settled on:

Then I addressed two envelopes, one to David Styles and one to Gwen Dawes, for delivery tomorrow.

I figured that they each suspected their mates of committing the murder, and therefore whoever showed up tomorrow night had to answer some hard questions.

It was going to feel good, to actually beat Judge Whitney to the solution of a murder. I mean, I don’t have that big an ego, I really don’t, but I’d worked on ten cases for her now, and she’d solved each one.

6

I dropped off the notes in the proper mailboxes before going to work, then I spent the remainder of the day calling clients to remind them that they, ahem, owed me money. They had a lot of wonderful excuses for not paying me. Several of my clients could have great careers as science fiction novelists if they’d only give it half a chance.

I called Pamela three times, pretending I wanted to speak to Judge Whitney.

“She wrapped up court early this morning,” Pamela told me on the second call. “Since then, she’s been barricaded in her chambers. She sent me out the first time for lunch — a ham-and-cheese on rye with very hot mustard — and the second time for rubber bands. She ran out.”

“Why doesn’t she just pick them up off the floor?”

“She doesn’t like to reuse them.”

“Ah.”

“Says it’s not the game.”

After work, I stopped by the A&W for a burger, fries, and root beer float. Another well-balanced Cody McCain meal.

Dusk was purple and lingering and chill, clear pure Midwestern stars suddenly filling the sky.

Before breaking the seal and the lock on Linda Palmer’s door, I went over and said hello to Bobbi Thomas.

She came to the door with the kitten in her arms. She wore a white sweater that I found difficult to keep my eyes off of, and a pair of dark slacks.

“Oh, hi, Cody.”

“Hi.”

She raised one of the kitten’s paws and waggled it at me. “She says ‘hi’ too.”

“Hi, honey.” I nodded to the door behind me. “Can I trust you?”

“Sure, Cody. What’s up?”

“I’m going to break into Linda’s apartment.”

“You’re kidding.”

“You’ll probably hear some noises — people in the hallway and stuff — but please don’t call the police. All right?”

For the first time, she looked uncertain. “Couldn’t we get in trouble?”

“I suppose.”

“And aren’t you an officer of the court or whatever you call it?”

“Yeah,” I said guiltily.

“Then maybe you shouldn’t—”

“I want to catch the killer, Bobbi, and this is the only way I’ll do it.”

“Well—” she started to say. Her phone rang behind her. “I guess I’d better get that, Cody.”

“Just don’t call the police.”

She looked at me a long moment. “Okay, Cody. I just hope we don’t get into any trouble.”

She took herself, her kitten, and her wonderful sweater back inside her apartment.

7

I kind of felt like Alan Ladd.

I saw a great crime movie once where he was sitting in the shadowy apartment of the woman who’d betrayed him. You know how a scene like that works. There’s this lonely wailing sax music and Alan is smoking one butt after another (no wonder he was so short, probably stunted his growth smoking back when he was in junior high or something), and you could just feel how terrible and empty and sad he felt.

Here I was sitting in an armchair, smoking one Pall Mall after another, and if I wasn’t feeling quite terrible and empty, I was at least feeling sort of sorry for myself. It was way past time that I show the judge that I could figure out one of these cases for myself.

When the knock came, it startled me, and for the first time I felt self-conscious about what I was doing.

I’d tricked four people into coming here without having any proof that any of them had had anything to do with Linda Palmer’s murder at all. What would happen when I opened the door and actually faced them?

I was about to find out.

Leaving the lights off, I walked over to the door, eased it open, and stared into the faces of David and Millie Styles. They both wore black — black turtlenecks; a black peacoat for him; a black suede car coat for her; and black slacks for both of them — and they both looked extremely unhappy.

“Come in and sit down,” I said.

They exchanged disgusted looks and followed me into the apartment.

“Take a seat,” I said.

“I just want to find out why you sent us that ridiculous note,” David Styles said.

“If it’s so ridiculous, why did you come here?” I said.

As he looked at his wife again, I heard a knock on the back door. I walked through the shadowy apartment — somehow, I felt that lights-out would be more conducive to the killer blubbering a confession — and peeked out through the curtains near the stove: Gwen and Paul, neither of them looking happy.

I unlocked the door and let them in.

Before I could say anything, Gwen glared at me. “I’ll swear under oath that Paul was with me the whole time the night she was murdered.”

Suspects in Order of Likelihood

That was before Gwen had offered herself as an alibi. Now Paul went to number one, with her right behind.

I followed them into the living room, where the Styleses were still standing.

I went over to the fireplace and leaned on the mantel and said, “One of us in this room is a murderer.”

Millie Styles snorted. “This is just like a Charlie Chan movie.”

“I’m serious,” I said.

“So am I,” she said.

“Each of you had a good reason to kill Linda Palmer,” I said.

“I didn’t,” David Styles said.

“Neither did I,” said Paul.

I moved away from the mantel, starting to walk around the room, but never taking my eyes off them.

“You could save all of us a lot of time and trouble by just confessing,” I said.

“Which one of us are you talking to?” Gwen said. “I can’t see your eyes in the dark.”

“I’m talking to the real killer,” I said.

“Maybe you killed her,” David Styles said, “and you’re trying to frame one of us.”

This was pretty much how it went for the next fifteen minutes, me getting closer and closer to the real killer, making him or her really sweat it out, while I continued to pace and throw out accusations.

I guess the thing that spoiled it was the blood-red splash of light in the front window, Cliff Sykes, Jr.’s, personal patrol car pulling up to the curb, and then Cliff Sykes, Jr., racing out of his car, gun drawn.

I heard him on the porch, I heard him in the hall, I heard him at the door across the hall.

Moments after the door opened, Bobbi Thomas wailed, “All right! I killed her! I killed her! I caught her sleeping with my boyfriend!”

I opened the door and looked out into the hall.

Judge Whitney stood next to Cliff Sykes, Jr., and said, “There’s your killer, Sykes. Now you get down to that jail and let my nephew go!”

And with that, she turned and stalked out of the apartment house.

Then I noticed the Christmas kitten in Bobbi Thomas’s arms.

“What’s gonna happen to the kitty if I go to prison?” she sobbed.

“Probably put her to sleep,” the ever-sensitive Cliff Sykes, Jr., said.

At which point, Bobbi Thomas became semi-hysterical.

“I’ll take her, Bobbi,” I said, and reached over and picked up the kitten.

“Thanks,” Bobbi said over her shoulder as Sykes led her out to his car.

The people in Linda Palmer’s apartment each took a turn at glowering at me as they walked into the hall and out the front door.

“See you, Miss Marple,” said David Styles.

“So long, Sherlock,” smirked Gwen Dawes.

Her boyfriend said something that I can’t repeat here.

And Millie Styles said, “Charlie Chan does it a lot better, McCain.”

When Sophie (I’m an informal kind of guy, and Sophia is a very formal kind of name) and I got back to my little apartment over a store that Jesse James had actually shot up one time, we both got a surprise.

A Christmas tree stood in the corner — resplendent with green and yellow and red lights, and long shining strands of silver icing, and a sweet little angel right at the very tip-top of the tree.

And next to the tree stood the beautiful and elegant Pamela Forrest, gorgeous in a red sweater and jeans. Now, in the Shell Scott novels I read, Pamela would be completely naked and beckoning to me with a curling, seductive finger.

But I was happy to see her just as she was.

“Judge Whitney was afraid you’d be kind of down about not solving the case, so she asked me to buy you a tree and set it up for you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t even have Bobbi on my list of suspects. How’d she figure it out anyway?”

Pamela immediately lifted Sophia from my arms and started doing Eskimo noses with her. “Well, first of all, she called the cleaners and asked if any of the rugs that Bobbi had had cleaned had had red stains on it — blood, in other words, meaning that she’d probably killed Linda in her apartment and then dragged her back across to Linda’s apartment. The blood came from Sophia’s paws, most likely when she walked on the white throw rug.” She paused long enough to do some more Eskimo nosing.

“Then second, Bobbi told you that she’d stayed home and watched Gunsmoke. But Gunsmoke had been preempted for a Christmas special and wasn’t on that night. And third—” By now she was rocking Sophia in the cradle of her arm. “Third, she found out that the boyfriend that Bobbi had only mentioned briefly to you had fallen under Linda’s spell. Bobbi came home and actually found them in bed together — he hadn’t even been gentleman enough to take it across the hall to Linda’s apartment.” Then: “Gosh, McCain, this is one of the cutest little kittens I’ve ever seen.”

“Makes me wish I was a kitten,” I said. “Or Sherlock Holmes. She sure figured it out, didn’t she?”

Pamela carried Sophia over to me and said, “I think your daddy needs a kiss, young lady.”

And I have to admit, it was pretty nice at that moment, Pamela Forrest in my apartment for the very first time, and Sophia’s sweet little sandpaper tongue giving me a lot of sweet little kitty kisses.