chrome handle grips and chrome saddlebags and streamers half as long the bike itself, came right up over the curb and sent me flying and my briefcase skidding down the sidewalk.
Cliffie. Clifford Wilbur Skyes, Jr.
“Aw, gee, counselor, I’m sorry.
Guess I didn’t see you there.”
I’d like to say he only hurt my pride.
But he’d also given my left hip a hell of a jolt. “I can see how that’d happen, Cliffie.
Clear sunny day like this one.”
“I thought we had an agreement about that Cliffie stuff.” He had his Glenn Ford duds on, and he was looking fierce the way only an overweight bully with little pig eyes and jagged teeth can look fierce.
“Long as you keep pushing me around the way you do, the Cliffie stays.”
“Don’t forget, counselor, I could throw your ass in jail.”
“Yeah, and I want to hear your lawyer in front of the Iowa Supreme Court when he tells them that you threw me in jail because I called you Cliffie. They’ll get a good laugh out of that one.”
“Yeah, well, they won’t be laughing when my lawyer says you obstructed justice.”
“Cliffie learned a new term. I’m proud of you.”
“You’re messin’ again, McCain. And that’s one thing I won’t abide this time, and that’s messin’ by McCain. And there ain’t even a reason to mess in this one, McCain. Me and my deputies already figured out who the killer is.”
“This should be good.”
“That peckerhead Chalmers. He’s got it in for Squires-Squires sent him up-s he killed Squires’s wife.” He grimaced suddenly and leaned forward on his Indian, his butt off the seat.
“What’s wrong?”
“You ever get hemorrhoids?”
“Not so far.”
“Usually use Vaseline. But I tried this stuff on Tv. Like to set me on fire. Doc Baines says it’s ‘cause I’m worried all the time. You know, about little Kim.”
He wouldn’t even give you the satisfaction of letting you hate him 100 percent clean and pure. He had to mitigate your hatred by having a two-year-old daughter with water on the brain.
He was corrupt, violent, stupid, and yet he suffered. I’d seen him in the park holding her one day on his knee. I saw a tenderness and love I wish I hadn’t seen. Even bad guys have good sides. Sometimes that can get downright exasperating.
He set his ass back down on his seat and said, “You’ve been warned, counselor. This is our case and we’re just about ready to wrap it up and we don’t want no interference from you or the Judge. Understand?”
He got the motor gunning so loudly, he couldn’t have heard me if I’d answered him.
He wheeled the bike off the sidewalk and accelerated down the street, mufflers roaring.
Rita said, “She was a beautiful girl.”
When I was younger, I never appreciated older women. Rita Fahey is forty-something and what the paperback writers always call “lushly built.” She also has a lovely face, and eyes you just can’t keep from watching. Kind of green but then again kind of blue. She’s Doc Novotny’s secretary in the morgue. She keeps the rock-and-roll loud, as if its festive qualities push back the cold stench of the place.
“She sure was.”
“You know her, McCain?”
“No. But Mary Travers did.”
She yawned. I tried not to notice what her sweater did. She never wore them tight, but it didn’t really matter. “Cliffie’s moving in for the kill. Between us, I mean.”
As Doc Novotny’s cousin and tacit boss, Cliffie gets first dibs on all murder information. I have to give him one thing.
Cliffie’s great at finding the person who looks like the killer.
“Oh? Who?”
“Mike Chalmers.”
“God.”
“Cliffie laid it out for the doc this morning. You ask me, it was Amy Squires. I saw her slap Susan Squires one night in the face at the dance pavilion. Out in the parking lot.
My husband and I were walking to our car. She was screaming she wanted Susan to let go of her husband.”
“When was this?”
“Three-four years ago.”
“Well, look who’s here,” Doc Novotny said. He has the air of a politician who resembles Humpty-Dumpty. He smokes cheap cigars, paints himself with aftershave, and wears a rug that looks like a badly injured forest creature. “Cliffie’s favorite guy.”
“Rita said you gave him all the information already,” I said, in a joking tone. “We get the crumbs as usual.”
“Are you kidding? How long was Cliffie here, Rita?” He dragged a stray hand down his paunch, as if he were stroking a pet.
“Oh, five-six minutes.”
“My cousin’s got the attention span of a kindergartner. I started explaining things to him and he immediately started looking at his watch. He thinks he’s got his murderer already; why bother him with facts?”
“Mike Chalmers?”
“Rita tol’ ya, huh? But if he would’ve listened to what I said, he might’ve changed his mind.”
“You got something interesting?”
“Very interesting.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
The shadows. The cold. The stench. None of it had changed. We walked into a tiled room with body drawers on one wall and two operating tables in the center.
He showed me the body. The head wound was vicious. Susan had one of those quietly pretty faces that holds an erotic power for men who take the time to look closely, that kind of First Communion chastity crossed with a whispered suggestion of desire.
“She die instantly?”
“Maybe. Can’t say for sure.”
“Blunt trauma the cause of death?”
“Without question.”
“Time of death?”
“Nine to eleven P.M. Friday night.
Can’t do any better than that. She had a nice little body on her. Never showed it off much.”
I’d thought the same thing and felt guilty about it.
“Pretty open and closed?”
He nodded. “Except for the bruises.”
“Bruises?”
He took out a Penlite and worked it up and down her body. The bruises were old but still violent, even as they were fading. Upper thighs.
Ribs. Lower back.
“They’re old bruises.”
“Yeah,” he said. “They are.”
“They have any significance to her death?”
“Not directly. But they suggest that somebody beat her up pretty often. Somebody who knew what he was doing. These aren’t the kind of bruises that show when you have clothes on. The amateur wife beater, he’ll give the old lady a black eye or a busted nose or a split lip and everybody knows what’s going on. But your more devious wife beater, he puts the hurt on her where it don’t show. Her thighs?”
