She looked pretty cute.
Until I realized that what she found were three rubber bands. She gets some kind of deep dark Freudian sexual pleasure out of shooting rubber bands at me and seeing if I can duck away in time.
But she was only teasing. She dangled the rubber bands so that I could see them and put them back.
She was a proper lady after all. Shooting rubber bands should only be done in the privacy of one’s office.
“Damn.”
“What?”
“I’m out of cigarettes.”
“Have one of mine.”
“You smoke those American things.”
“You smoke those French things.”
“Oh, hell, McCain, give me one, I suppose.”
I gave her one. I even struck the match for her.
She inhaled deeply. Exhaled. “These are even worse than I remembered.” Then: “I clocked you yesterday.”
“Clocked me?”
“Loitering at Pamela’s desk.”
“Oh.”
“She’s mine, not yours, McCain. At least during business hours.”
“I’ll try to watch it.”
“You always say that. Now I’m afraid I’ll have to take action.”
“Action?”
“For every minute you stand out there mooning over her, I’m going to dock you a dollar.
Given what I pay you, and given how long you moon, you could easily end up owing me money.”
She dropped her Lucky on the ground and twisted it into shreds with the tip of her gray suede high-heeled shoe. “These are terrible. Just terrible.” She sat back and said, “Why don’t you marry that Mary Travers? It seems to be a much better fit. Pamela has… aspirations.”
“Ah.”
“What in God’s name does ah mean?”
“It means that even though her family no longer has money, it once did. So you relate to her.”
“Sometimes families lose their fortune and then regain it again.”
“So I should stick with my kind and Pamela should stick with hers, is that it?”
“No offense, McCain, but you’re a man of simple needs. And from what I can see, Mary Travers-who is very very pretty, by the way-is also a person of simple needs.”
I was about to tell her how insulting her theory was-ffboth Mary and me-when I saw Dick Keys pushing through the crowd and shouting my name. He looked crazed. As a young man, he’d distinguished himself by flying more than sixty bombing missions as a tail gunner in World War Two. He was known for his charm, his self- possession.
People were watching him now.
Something was obviously wrong.
He stumbled over somebody’s foot and practically landed on his face in front of me.
“Sam, you have to help me,” he said, his breath coming in short gasps.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’ll explain when we get there.”
“Hello, Richard,” the Judge said loftily. “Or aren’t we speaking anymore?”
He seemed to see her for the first time.
“Oh, hi, Judge. God, I’m sorry,
I’m just so-ccfused, I guess. I really need to borrow young McCain here, if you don’t mind.”
“Consider him borrowed, Richard. But next time you could at least have the courtesy to say hello to me.” She was the only person who called him Richard. He apparently brought out the schoolmarm in her.
“I will, Judge, I promise,” he said. And then: “C’mon, Sam. Hurry!”
And we were off.
It took us a good seven-eight minutes of broken-field running to get inside the service garage, where we were finally alone.
“What’s going on, Dick?”
He looked at me lost in grief. “It’s bad enough that everybody hates the Edsel grille because it looks like a woman’s vagina. That isn’t enough? Now I got a body on my hands.”
I really thought he might start crying.
Two
The garage had six bays and smelled wonderfully of oil and grease and cleaning compound.
There was no activity today, no wrenches clanging to the floor, no Hank Williams song on the radio, no Pepsi bottles yanked out of the nickel machine in the corner. It was Edsel Day, after all. Only heathens would work on a day like this.
I looked around the silent garage wistfully.
I’ve always wanted to be one of those manly men who can walk into a service garage and know exactly what to do. I’m terrible with hammers, saws, and screwdrivers. My dad learned my terrible secret when I was nine years old and he asked me to help him hang a pair of shutters my mom had bought at Woolworth’s. They were supposed to go on either side of the kitchen window.
My dad held the shutter in place-which was the hard part of the job-while I was supposed to bang in the first couple of nails. I banged, all right -right through storm window and window alike. My mom jumped back from the sink, screaming, as glass icicles flew everywhere. From then dad always got my kid sister to help him with his carpentry projects.
And that’s why I take my ragtop to Denny’s garage whenever anything goes wrong. I sure couldn’t fix it myself.
“I need you to look at something, Sam.”
“What is it?”
“I’ll just let you see for yourself.”
I looked at all the Rotary good service plaques he had mounted above the desk.
If you’ve read any Sinclair Lewis-my undergraduate major was American Literature -y know the word booster. And boy, that was
Dick. He belonged to everything-Rotary, Kiwanis, Eagles, Elks, Vfw,
Masons, Chamber of Commerce, you name it-and he boosted everything too: high school sports, the new swimming pool, the new softball diamond, and stricter regulation of teenage drinking at both drive-in theaters. His people had come out here from New England in the early 1850’s.
They brought a lot of good recipes and clean, admirable habits with them, including the principles of education with which the Iowa Territory established its first schools. And they brought along the dulcimer, an instrument till then unknown in these parts. The odd thing was, whenever you saw Dick with his fellow Rotarians or
Kiwanians, he seemed apart from them. The smile touched the lips but never the eyes, and the eyes strayed constantly, looking out some window that was his alone.
“C’mon.” Then, as we started walking, he said, “You’ve got a private investigator’s license, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And you do work for Judge Whitney?”
“Yes I do.”
