“You’re prejudiced, McCain. You like me.”
“He’s your husband. I’m assuming he likes you, too.”
She bit her lower lip, half-whispered, “You should see what I’m up against, McCain. She looks like a movie starlet.”
I wanted to hold her, protect her. Any man who could throw away a young woman this bright, this decent, this caring-but she had to go through with this, I knew. Same as I’d had to go through it with Pamela Forrest all those years. Being desperately in love is grand, isn’t it?
She nodded to my ham and cheese. “You should eat better.”
“I know. Usually, Mrs. Goldman fixes me meals three or four times a week. But her sister took sick all of a sudden.”
“Where’s her sister?”
“Des Moines.”
I saw how her right hand was twitching.
It made her even more vulnerable.
“I wish I was in Des Moines,
McCain.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“I try to be objective about it, you know.”
“One thing you can’t be objective about is being in love with somebody.”
“I mean, I really can’t blame him.”
“I can.”
“I’m what you’d call pretty, I guess.”
“Very pretty.”
“But you should see her, McCain. She makes me want to hide in the basement.”
“Is she as smart as you are? As much fun as you are? As deep as you are?”
“Oh, McCain, I’m not deep.”
“Are you kidding? You know things, Kylie. You understand things. You have insight into people.”
“I don’t fill out a bikini very well.”
“I happen to’ve seen you in a bikini one time. And you filled it out just right.”
“And my nose- You know, back east a lot of Jewish girls get bobs.”
“You don’t need a Bob. Or a Dave.
Or a Rick.”
She smiled.
“You’ve got a very fine nose. It fits your face perfectly.”
We went through this every once in a while. Her insecurities ran pretty wide. But then again, so did mine. I figured that’s why we liked each other.
“You’ll be fine tonight. You just have to relax.”
“It’s like a first date. And look how long we’ve been married.”
I held her hand. “You’ll do fine.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
She asked about the case and I told her what I’d learned. She tried to seem interested but her anxiety made that impossible. She said good-bye and fled.
I hate to admit this but that night I drank more than my usual two beers. I drank three beers. Which meant, given my size and my inability to hold alcohol at all well, I was pretty stinko.
I banged my knee going to the bathroom, I banged my head getting a slice of cold pizza from the refrigerator, and I banged my butt when I miscalculated how far the end of the coffee table extended.
My dad and I are about the world’s worst drinkers. It takes most accomplished drinkers a long time to get stupid when they drink. We can do it in about the length of time it takes to guzzle a beer-and-a-half.
Things get all out of proportion for us. Something mildly amusing becomes unbearably hilarious.
Something modestly sad becomes a cause for great theatrical tears.
Tonight, for instance, Art Carney did a routine on “The Honeymooners” that made me laugh so hard I had to dash (well, stumble forward quickly) to the bathroom before I yellowed my Sears underwear; and then on “Gunsmoke” they had this story about a young crippled girl who becomes a gunfighter in order to avenge her brother, and man, tears were dripping off my chin when she got killed in the end.
I had the great good sense to go to bed shortly after that.
Sometime in the sticky murk of sleep-not even the fan cooled things off in any substantial way-the phone rang. Rang several times.
Rang loud enough to stir me but not loud enough to make me pick it up.
I fell back to sleep.
The phone started ringing again and this time, I picked it up.
“Hullo.”
“McCain?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“Never.”
“This is Judge Whitney.”
“Yes, I recognized you. You’re sort of hard to confuse with anybody else.”
“Get some coffee in you and then head for the jail.
I’ll meet you there.”
“The jail? What for?”
“Cliffie, Jr., in his infinite wisdom, has just arrested Sara Hall for murdering Muldaur and Courtney.”
Part III
Sixteen
You have to wonder how word could spread at three o’clock in the morning. No air-raid sirens had sounded, no words were bellowed from the loudspeakers the city had planted in various places, no Paul Revere had hopped in his car and driven up and down the dark streets announcing that Sara Hall had been arrested for murder.
And yet there they were, maybe as many as fifteen of them, looking like the kind of crowd you always saw in westerns, the low-murmuring crowd that could turn into a lynch mob when the guy in the black hat appeared and stirred them up.
Except people in those westerns didn’t wear pink hair curlers that made them look like Martians, or Cubs baseball caps and Monkey Ward sleeveless undershirts that emphasized hairy, beachball-like stomachs. And in westerns Annette Funicello wasn’t playing on car radios.
Main Street was empty otherwise, and shadowy, and like the people in the crowd, it suggested a movie, too, small-town Americana. I glimpsed a shooting star and then heard the steady sound of a plane lost in the clouds. Any kind of plane sound suggested only one thing to Americans these days. That’s why we taught civil defense in our schools-? Duck and cover”-and that’s why forty percent of us, according to the Eastern newspapers, were busy building some form of bomb shelter. There were a lot of jokes going around about what Hugh Hefner would put in his bomb shelter.
One of Cliffie’s cousins-a dense deputy named Jebby Sykes-stood in front of the front door of the jail with a shotgun in his arms.
He didn’t look scared. He looked sleepy and he looked rumpled.
“Hey, where you goin’, McCain?”
“Little pecker, he thinks he’s hot stuff, don’t he?”
