I sat next to her in the old high-ceiling farm living room. There’d probably been a horsehair couch in here at one time, and a Windsor chair, and a soft Victorian kerosene lamp and a Victrola. There was an overhead light on now. Bare. Merciless. The charm of the place had long ago fled.
She stopped crying and just looked scared. “He wants to kill him.”
“No, he doesn’t. He just likes to talk.
Don’t you, Chief?” I was careful not to call him Cliffie. This wasn’t the time.
He glared at me. “She’s old enough to understand what he done.”
“He didn’t do anything,” I said.
“Yeah? And you can prove that?”
“Yeah, I can. I just need a few more hours.”
I had no idea what I was talking about. The point was to make Ellie feel better. She sat prim and proper, sort of gangly, and more than sort of sweet.
He looked at Ellie. “Well, I hope for his sake she’s more cooperative with you than she was with me. It’d be a damn sight better if Chalmers turned hisself in instead of me findin’ him.”
He looked around the room again, rubbed his jaw, and then left. The emergency lights died. No red-soaked bursts of illumination in the front window anymore.
I lit a Lucky.
“Can I have one?”
“Technically, I shouldn’t do this, you know.”
“Aw, shit, Mr. McCain, just give me one, all right? I’ve been smoking for years.”
I gave her one. Lit it for her.
“He’s probably out at the old line shack.” She told me where it was.
“I thought he was going to run away.”
“He said he wanted time to think.”
“You know, Cliffie’s going to put a tail on me. Everywhere I go, his tail will go. I go to the line shack, I’ll lead him right to your dad.”
She coughed on the cigarette.
“I thought you said you’d been smoking for years.”
“Well, not steady, I didn’t say. I have to smoke a couple each time before I quit coughing.”
“Ah.”
“He wants to kill him. Cliffie, I mean.”
“He wants to kill anybody he even suspects is a criminal. And that means just about everybody.”
“Is his old man as stupid as he is?”
“Just about.”
“How’d he make all that money, then?”
I could tell she was enjoying this little respite from worrying about her father.
“Right time, right place. He had a local construction company. When the Sykeses took over, Cliffie applied for the Chief’s job.”
“So Old Man Sykes stepped in?”
“So Old Man Sykes appointed him.”
Then: “How long do you think your dad’ll be at the line shack?”
“Probably all night.”
“You plan on going there?”
“He told me not to.”
“Then don’t.”
“You think Cliffie’ll kill him?”
“No. I’ll see to that.”
“Really?” She coughed.
“Really. And meanwhile, why don’t you give up the cigarettes?”
“I will if you will.”
I smiled and kissed her on the forehead.
“Whatever happened to respect for your elders?”
Cliffie’s tail was even more amateurish than I’d expected. He followed me about half a car length back. The car was unmarked, true, but the man was in his police uniform. One sort of canceled out the other.
I was thinking about Dr. Todd Jensen. I’d been wanting to talk to him anyway. Now I wanted to talk to him as soon as possible, which meant early morning. His past with Susan Squires had always been murky. I needed to know about it in detail now, especially since he’d been identified as one of the people at Dick Keys’s garage the other night.
Bed.
All three cats piled near my feet.
No trouble sleeping. Except that every time I moved, one or two of them meowed in protest. It was Ok for them to move, you understand, but not for me.
They have that written in their contract.
I was standing outside the good doctor’s door at eight o’clock, exactly fifteen minutes before his nurse arrived. She still didn’t look as if she found me much of an improvement over a leper.
“He isn’t in.”
“I’ll wait.”
I sat in the reception room and went through all the boring magazines. She made coffee. She didn’t offer me any. We both kept looking at the clock on the wall to her left.
I said, “If I give you a dime, can I have a cup of coffee?”
“A quarter.”
“Hell, I can go down to the corner and get a cup of coffee for a dime. Good coffee. And a free refill.”
“Then I’d suggest you go down there.”
“You really don’t like me, do you?”
“What was your first clue?”
“What the hell did I ever do to you?”
“I don’t like your face. I hate baby faces. That’s number one. And second, I hate people who get Dr. Jensen riled up.
He’s hard enough to deal with when he isn’t riled up. But you put him in a pissy mood for two days.”
“I just asked him some questions.”
“That’s all it took.”
“How about fifteen cents?”
“How about,” she said, “twenty?”
“Deal.”
He came in just as I was finishing up my coffee. He wore a jaunty brown leather jacket, white shirt, necktie, chinos, and desert boots. And sunglasses. Dr. Heartthrob.
“What the hell’re you doing here?” he said to me, as he picked up his phone messages.
“Looking for a few fashion tips.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means we need to talk.”
“Someday I’m going to punch your face in.”
“I guess I don’t remember that part of the Hippocratic oath.”
“He’s such a nuisance,” his nurse said.
“He got here before I did. Tried to mooch a cup of coffee.”
“She charged me twenty cents. Ten cents of that belongs to you.”
“Why don’t you shut the hell up, McCain?
I’m sick of you. What the hell’re you doing here anyway?”
“Somebody saw you at the murder scene Friday night.”
“Bullshit.”
