Oh, yeah, well he punched me first, Sister Mary Francis. I’d used that line all the way through grade school and it was nice to know that a variation of it still applied.
“I just want you to go. I just want all this over with.”
“Somebody killed two men, Mrs. Oates.
I’m wondering if it was you.”
“Don’t say nothin’ to him,” Oates said.
“Maybe Courtney was killed because he’d run out of money to pay the blackmailer,” I said, “and the blackmailer was afraid Courtney might go to see Cliffie.”
“You heard what I said,” Oates snapped.
“Don’t say nothin’ to him.”
So he was inclined to see things the way I did.
He thought his wife killed the men and he had planted the strychnine to make it appear that Sara Hall was the guilty one.
“You need to leave now, Mr. McCain,” she said.
I didn’t have much choice.
He took the rifle from her and sent her to the house and then, after dropping my gun in the pocket of his overalls, he walked me back to the car.
“She let the Devil take her a few times,” he said, as if I’d just accused the missus of something. “But she has cleansed herself since. She ain’t even afraid of the snakes, which shames me. The man of the house shouldn’t show fear.
But I just can’t stand those things.”
“She killed those men, Oates.”
“You don’t know that for a fact.”
“Maybe not. Though I think you do.”
The sun was so hot not even the dust wanted to rise when an old truck passed by in front of the yard. I was betting the chickens wished they had electric fans.
“You don’t trouble us no more,” he said when we reached the ragtop.
“You really think things’re this easy, Oates?”
“You don’t dwell on things, sometimes the good Lord just takes them away.”
“The good Lord may but then Cliffie brings them right back.”
“You can’t prove anything. And anyway, you know how them Sykeses don’t like to be showed up. You tell him about that strychnine and he’ll say “so what?” Strychnine is sold all the time.
He’s got Sara Hall all zeroed in on and nothin’s gonna change his mind.”
Oates was probably right. I didn’t know for a fact that Pam had killed anybody. I just had a suspicion that he had a suspicion that his wife had killed the two men. But that was surmise, not fact.
I got in the Ford and did a little backside-dancing. The seats, back and bottom, were blast-furnace hot. The steering wheel was probably going to brand my palms for life.
“You get away from here now,” he said. “And you don’t come back.”
The seats were still scorching when I got back to town.
Nineteen
The drive-in was showing a Vincent Price “Triple Terror” feature that night. His lisp didn’t do much for me but he was effective in a hammy sort of way. They advertised this in “spooky” lettering on their big sign out front.
That sounded good. Lots of buttery popcorn from the concession stand, a nice breeze off the surrounding cornfields, and my arm around any girl I could find who’d go out with me. A bachelor my age in a small Iowa town has slim pickings.
Girls are either married off or knocked up by the time they reach twenty; by twenty-five they’re having baby number three or four. I would have daydreamed about taking the beautiful Pamela Forrest tonight but she’d never have gone to the drive-in.
She would have called it “uncouth,” a word she picked up from an old Bette Davis movie we saw together on Tv one night.
I didn’t recognize the car in my drive.
The garage door was open, Mrs.
Goldman’s car was gone. Meaning this gink didn’t have sense or courtesy enough not to block her when she came back home.
The car was a forest-green Mg. It looked dashing in the way of many things British. That’s one thing the Brits have got all over us, the dashing stuff. We have better cooking, prettier girls, and a higher class of rock stars. But they’ve got a corner on the dashing stuff.
I parked at the curb and walked around back.
He was sitting on my steps, smoking a cigarette with one hand, patting his hair with another. Maybe there was an invisible photographer somewhere about to take his picture.
America’s favorite unknown literary genius.
Just ask him.
When he looked at me, he frowned. “This wasn’t easy for me to come here. I want you to know that.”
He sounded as if he wanted me to pin a medal for valor on him.
“You could always leave,” I said. “Like right now, for instance.”
“Let’s get one thing straight. I think you’re a two-bit hayseed lawyer who works for a fascist judge in an intolerable little burg.”
“Ok, now I’ll tell you what I think of you.”
“You didn’t let me finish. You see me as an untalented, spoiled, rich boy who is cheating on a very sweet young woman who was stupid to fall in love with me in the first place and is even dumber to stay with me now that she knows the truth. At least part of the truth.”
“Part of the truth?”
He looked suitably miserable for what he was about to say, a stage figure in his inevitable white button- down shirt and chinos.
“The truth is I’ve never been faithful. The day after our wedding night-in Paris, thanks to the largesse of my parents-I screwed the maid.”
“The maid?”
“She was eighteen. You wouldn’t have believed her tits.”
“And Kylie was-” his-out shopping.”
“The old screw-the-maid-with-the-big-titswhile-the-ll-woman-is-out-shopping routine. And you are ashamed of yourself, of course.”
“Of course. You think I’m proud of it?”
“Yeah, I do. Because there was a little smirk in your voice when you told me about it. You like being the conqueror, and you know what? The big lug just can’t help himself. He’s just a charming rogue, isn’t he? There’s just enough of me like you to recognize it, Chad. But where I’m not like you is that I’d never do it while I was married. I’d at least get a divorce before I went back to chasing.”
He was wringing his hands now. He didn’t know how to wring his hands worth a damn. His hand-wringing made him look prissy.
“That’s why I’m here.”
“I’m not following.”
“I’m here to ask you a favor.”
You know how things come clear all of a sudden and you just know, almost word for word, what you’re about to hear, but you reject it because you don’t think that anybody would have the arrogance to ask?
“Don’t ask me,” I said.
