“I wish I knew,” I said.
The half-hour drive to Cedar Rapids was pleasant. Fall is my season. The melancholy scent and the delicate beauty of the land, made all the more delicate by its brevity.
The office was on the west side of the river, above a corner grocery store that stank of rotting meat. The owner pointed me to the side of the stucco building and a flight of stairs that led to a door beyond which you could hear babies crying and adults coughing.
The nurse was pretty, much like Susan had been. Young Dr. Jensen’s taste in women seemed to run to type. She said she was sorry but that since I hadn’t phoned ahead for an appointment, I’d just have to wait my turn.
Babies always cry when they see me. I set three or four of them exploding just by sitting down.
Mothers scowled at me for existing. What sort of telepathy or voodoo had I performed on their sweet little dears?
The people in the waiting room looked poor, that class below the working class that not even the war was able to help economically. I suspected that Jensen dealt with them because they were the only clientele he could get. But I had to give him his due for bringing help and comfort to people that most of society despises. In America, being poor is a sin if not a perversion.
Coughers coughed and sneezers sneezed, and a couple of old men hawked up enough phlegm to make me swear off eating for months. It was a swell way to spend seventy-three minutes.
I killed time by taking out my notebook and reading over what I’d written about the case so far. A couple of the mothers made faces when they saw Captain Video staring at them. One infant kept pointing at me and sobbing. I gave his mother my best “I’m sorry” look but she wasn’t mollified.
I started looking my way through the magazines.
The room was long and narrow, much like a boxcar, the cracked walls painted a mustard yellow. There were a lot of framed bromides about staying healthy, but they looked so old and decrepit they mocked their own wisdom. The chairs were mismatched, and so were the three tables upon which magazines were heaped. There were so many magazines, I got the impression that people were using this office as a dumping spot for periodicals they wanted to dispose of. Magazines of every kind: family, how-to, adventure, knitting, horseback riding, grain importing. And not a single one displaying cleavage. I found a Collier’s with a John D. MacDonald novelette in it and read that.
He wore physician whites and a black serpentine stethoscope. His wild curly red hair was a lot longer than it should have been, and too many midnights had painted gray swaths beneath his green eyes. The equipment was sorely out of date, an examining room and two slender glass-fronted cabinets holding medicine.
He was busy with a clipboard when I walked in. He glanced up and said, “Just sit on the table. I’ll be with you in a sec.”
It was a couple hundred secs actually. Then he looked up at me and did a double-take Red Skelton would have considered hammy.
“You,” he said, pure accusation.
“The one and only.”
“You were at the dance the other night.”
“Right.”
“What the hell’re you doing here?”
I took my notebook out from inside my sport jacket and held it up.
He gawked and looked as if he wanted to giggle. I’d forgotten to flap the cover back.
“Never mind the cover,” I said. “This is where I keep my list of suspects.”
“Oh, great,” he said. “A cop with a Captain Video notebook-”
“I’m not a cop. I work for Judge
Whitney of the District Court.”
“That snooty bitch. What the hell’s she got to do with any of this?”
“She wants to see justice done.” I sounded like Broderick Crawford on Highway Patrol. “I’ll bet.”
He walked over to the door and put a giant hand on the knob. “Get out.”
“I have a witness who saw you arguing with Susan a few weeks ago. The witness says you gave her a very hard shove.”
He didn’t sound quite so sure of himself suddenly. “A shove is a long way from murder.”
“It could be the first step toward murder.”
His hand came away from the knob. He leaned against the east wall. “We had an argument was all.”
“About what?”
He sighed. “I used to go out with her when she worked for Squires. Then she fell in love with him. And he ditched his wife and took up with her.
But we never quite let it die, me ‘n’ her.”
“She didn’t let it die or you didn’t?”
He hesitated. “Me, I guess.”
“Everybody I know says she was still in love with Squires.”
“She was. That’s what we were arguing about.”
“I’m not following you.”
“She was still in love with him but he wasn’t still in love with her.”
“Oh? How do you know that?”
“I followed him several times.”
“For what?”
“I thought maybe Susan would see him for what he was. You know, if I could prove he was running around on her.”
“And was he?”
He snorted. “Hell, yes, he was.”
“Anybody special?”
“Not that I could see. Just general nooky.”
I took out a Lucky. He nodded to the pack and I gave him one too. When I got us fired up, I said, “You told Susan this.”
“Yes.”
“And she believed you?”
“Not at first. But she believed me after I showed her some pictures of him at a motel.”
“You’re a busy boy.”
“I love her.” He hesitated. “Loved her, I mean. And she loved me too. At one time. I look at that prick and I can’t figure out what women see in him. He’s the kind of guy who steals your woman just to prove he can do it. And then laughs in your face.”
“He ever laugh in your face?”
“Once.”
“When was that?”
“He saw me at an outdoor concert in Iowa City. He was with Susan. When she introduced us, he said, “Oh, yes, the young man who’s always calling you when I’m not home.” Then this big smirk.”
“You know there’s a possibility he beat her?”
“Possibility? Are you kidding? Of course I knew. I had to treat her a couple of times.”
“She didn’t want to leave him?”
“Leave him? Hell, she wanted to help him. It just brought out her maternal side. She talked about how his mother had been so cold to him.
He didn’t trust women. Deep down he was scared of them. She figured it was a small price to pay-taking a beating every once in a while-ffhelp straighten him out.”
“Been reading too much Freud.”
“No shit,” he said. “I hate all that crap. It was force-fed us in med school.
And that’s what I kept trying to tell her. That it didn’t matter why he beat her-even if her Freudian psychology was right-what mattered was that he did beat her and that’s all that counted. I told her he was going
