“Well, I did actually do some work.” I told her what I’d done.
“And I’m supposed to be impressed?”
“It’s better than nothing.”
“Oh, there’s a slashing self-justification.
Better than nothing. Inspiring, McCain.
Downright inspiring.”
I wanted to slide this one right across the plate.
Startle her with it. Make her wonder if she’d heard me right. I wanted to rattle her like she’d never been rattled before.
I said, fast, “David Squires wants to hire me.”
She said, “I know. He called me last night.”
She slid it right back. Startled me with it.
Made me wonder if I’d heard her right.
“What?”
“He said he decided it’d probably be better to speak to me directly.”
“Great. Just great.”
“You were hoping to surprise me with it, weren’t you?”
“I guess.”
“And here I was the one who surprised you.
That’s funny.”
“Real funny.”
“I told him you’d do it, McCain.”
“What?”
“He and Cliffie are up to something, and I want to find out what.”
“You think Cliffie’s involved in this?”
“Of course. Don’t you?”
That’s when she got me with the first rubber band. She keeps a stash of them in her drawer. She makes a pistol of her hand, thumb and finger, and then lets me have it. She’s good. Annoyingly good. The rubber band hit my nose and fell into my lap.
“Nice to know I haven’t lost my touch.”
“Yeah. I’m thrilled.”
“Try and be a little faster next time. It’s no fun if I always win.”
She exhaled a great deal of French blue smoke. “Find out what they’re up to, McCain, and fast.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
This time, even though I ducked, her rubber band got me on the forehead.
A sip of brandy. A glance at the two-hundred-year-old Swiss clock. “I need to get ready for court, McCain. And you need to get ready to do what you should’ve done yesterday.” She shook her head. “And I certainly wouldn’t go around admitting that you still read the funny papers. My Lord, McCain.
Presumably, you’d like to be a grown-up someday.”
I made it all the way to the door. Then she did some showing off. Just as I started to open her door, one of her rubber bands landed on my shoulder.
“It’s a good thing you’re short, McCain. I don’t think I could’ve pulled that off if you were normal-sized.”
All the time I was reading Nancy and Slu)o yesterday morning, I should have figured that Judge Whitney would pay me back for it, comments about my size being her specialty.
The beautiful Pamela was on the phone when I went out. She didn’t get to ask me to pray for her and Stu again.
Seven
Try to keep the covers folded back so you can’t see the illustration of Captain Video, the boldest man in outer space and the most popular science-fiction show on Tv. Friend of mine at Woolworth’s was closing out merchandise that didn’t sell. Among those items was a box of forty-eight small spiral notebooks that fit nicely in my back pocket. Great for keeping notes during an investigation-z long as nobody saw the illustration with the Captain and his zap gun.
Before I left the courthouse parking lot, I wrote three names on the first page of my fresh notebook:
Mike Chalmers
Todd Jensen
Amy Squires
I’d stopped by the parole office in the courthouse and gotten Chalmers’s address. He was living on an acreage where he worked part of a farm for a salary. Kepler, the parole officer, didn’t seem to have much faith in the man. “You know what the first thing he did was when he got out a few years ago?”
“What?”
“Cruised David Squires’s place.”
“Squires tell you that?”
“Squires didn’t have to. A cop did.
He saw Chalmers out there several times and thought I should know about it. So I call Squires and warn him and I call Chalmers and try and scare him.”
“He scare, did he?”
“You know Chalmers pretty well?”
“Pretty well.”
“Well, then, whaddaya you think? You ever know anybody who could scare Chalmers?”
I put the top down. Figured if I had to work, I might as well enjoy it. I was sixteen again. It’s funny how quickly you can get nostalgic. Here it was 1957 and I was looking back at 1952 as the Golden Age already. Senior year in high school. Somehow, it seemed a slower, gentler time. Beer parties at the sandpits. Dancing with Pamela on the boat that goes up and down the river all summer. Seeing my dad finally shake off the war. No more nightmares. No more depressions. The year 1952 was just about as perfect as a year could get.
I was sitting at a stoplight when the black Ford convertible mysteriously appeared next to me.
A beautiful blonde. Kim Novak. Head scarf. Shades. Radio blasting Buddy Holly. Revving the engine. Daring me to drag her. A smile that said we knew each other, disturbing without me understanding why. And then she was fishtailing and her tires were screaming and she was laying down a quarter block of rubber. And then she was gone.
The acreage was scruffy, overgrown with weeds.
Wire fences falling. Bottles and cans and papers littering the front yard. Windows crisscrossed with tape. A chimney that was little more than a pile of bricks atop a shingle-bare roof.
From what I could see, Chalmers had himself what was essentially a tenant-farmer agreement. There were a lot of acres in the adjacent land given over to soybeans and even more given over to corn. In the distance along the horizon line you could see a new big blue silo, a new red barn, and a new white farmhouse. Whoever lived there was doing all right for himself. But he still had some back acres he wanted worked so he offered a subsistence wage and a faded frame two-story farmhouse and disintegrating outbuildings and told the tenant farmer, in this case Chalmers, to go to it. Miserable as the conditions were-I had the sense that there was electricity but no indoor plumbing, thus the outhouse in the backyard-it still had to beat being in prison.
There was a rusty Ford pickup sitting at the end of the dirt drive. The house and the outbuildings looked even rougher close up, badly in need of washing and painting. A John Deere even older than the truck sat near the left-leaning barn.
A sweet-faced border collie ran in sad useless circles before slowing down to take a look at me. All that frantic pointless energy.
I got out. The border collie came over and growled. I put out my hand. She licked my fingers. I smiled at
