He’d meant for his words to hurt. He’d succeeded. “I’ll send a check to your office. I appreciate this, Sam.” He spoke through a kind of pain I’d never had to deal with. “Maybe I’ll call you tomorrow.”
He turned and walked back to his people and his Jag. His daughter came to him and slid her arm around his waist. She tilted her head against his chest as he guided her to their car.
Tommy walked a few feet toward me and said, “Hope no girls beat you up on the way home, McCain.”
“Get back here,” Mainwaring shouted without turning around.
Of course Tommy gave me the famous soul-freezing evil eye before he did what Mainwaring said. I wondered what he’d look like if I was fortunate enough to back over him six or seven times.
A few years ago, before Jamie married her wastrel boyfriend Turk and bore him a baby girl as sweet as Jamie herself, I always checked out the clothes she wore. She had one of those stunning bodies you see on the covers of paperbacks, usually under the title Teenage Tease or some such thing. The wholesome pretty face only made her more appealing. These days I checked her for signs of bruises and cuts. In the first year of their marriage Turk had given her a black eye. I returned the favor by giving Turk a black eye. I’m not tough, but I’m tougher than Turk. I also drew up divorce papers that Jamie refused to sign. She loved him and he would change, she said.
These days I had her solemn word that if he ever got physically violent with her again she was to tell me immediately. I made her promise on her mother’s life. A good Catholic girl, she took such oaths seriously.
Turk still had his surfing band, probably the only one in landlocked Iowa-despite the fact that surfing bands were now seen as wimpy and irrelevant. And he was still going to be on American Bandstand, though American Bandstand was fading fast. And he was still going to have several gold records. And he was still, when the time was right, planning to become a movie star. And he still didn’t want to get a job because working conflicted with his songwriting and practicing. He couldn’t even babysit his little daughter. That was left to Jamie’s mother. These artistes, they need their time to create.
Today Jamie wore a sleeveless yellow blouse and a richer yellow miniskirt. She was easy to scan for bruises. I didn’t see any. She also wore a pair of brown-rimmed eyeglasses. She’d started having headaches so I’d paid for her visit to an optometrist and then for the glasses. I still wondered about the headaches. I didn’t trust Turk. Somehow in the course of our years together she’d become my little sister and I’d be goddamned if anybody was going to hurt her or baby Laurie.
Jamie’s typing skills had improved marginally and she’d learned how to answer the phone professionally and take down information without mistakes. She gave me my messages and a cup of coffee. That was another thing she handled capably. Our new automatic coffee brewer. Me being me, I still couldn’t make a decent cup of coffee, even with that new machine I’d bought on sale at Sears. But Jamie had triumphed.
As I went through my phone messages, I glanced up once and saw the way Jamie straightened all four of the framed photographs of one-year-old Laurie she had on her desk. Not that they needed straightening. But touching them brought her peace you could see in her face. At these times I always wanted to kill Turk. He should honor her for her sweetness and loyalty. Maybe I could get him convicted as a Russki spy and get him deported. After I beat the shit out of him.
7
In grade school we always swapped comic books. Kenny Thibodeau tended to like Superman and The Flash. I went more for Batman and Captain Marvel. In junior high we swapped paperbacks. Mickey Spillane and Richard S. Prather were early favorites though soon enough I discovered Peter Rabe and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others. Kenny discovered John Steinbeck and Henry Miller. In high school I’d picked up on all the Gold Medal crime writers such as Charles Williams, while Kenny had discovered Jack Kerouac and the Beats. At none of these junctures was it possible to predict what Kenny would bring to the table-literally the table in the booth at Andy’s Donuts where I’d gone straight from jail-on this already hot and humid morning.
Baby pictures.
His daughter Melissa was two and a half years old. She wasn’t just the center of Kenny’s life, she was all of Kenny’s life. Yes, he still wrote his soft-core sex novels and he still wrote his men’s magazine “Die Nazi Die!” articles, but those he did almost unconsciously these days. Automatic pilot. His conscious attention was devoted to Melissa. All this was reflected in his attire. Not a vestige of the former Beat. Short, thinning brown hair. Pressed yellow short-sleeved cotton shirt and pressed brown trousers. I mention pressed by way of introducing his wife, Sue. As Kenny always joked, by marrying him Sue had inherited both a husband and a son. Kenny needed help and Sue, loving and amused, was there to provide it.
“This one’s of Melissa and the cocker spaniel we got her last week.”
Even though we had gone past picture number twenty I had to admit this one of Melissa in her frilly sundress leaning down to kiss the puppy on the head was pretty damned cute.
“And here’s one-”
I held up my hand. “I don’t mean to be rude, Kenny, but I’ve got a lot to do today.”
For only a moment he looked hurt, then he grinned. “Yeah, Sue says I drive people nuts with my pictures. Just be glad I haven’t invited you out to see the slide show I made of all the pictures we have of her.”
“You have a slide show? Seriously?”
“With music.” He sipped his coffee. “Don’t worry, you’ll get to see it one of these days.”
“That sounds like a threat.”
The timbre of his laugh hadn’t changed since we were in fourth grade. “It is. But I’m sure you want to talk about the girl who got killed last night.”
Kenny was the unofficial historian of Black River Falls for our generation. Every once in a while he’d talk about this huge novel he was going to write someday, a kind of Peyton Place about our own small city. Despite his reputation for writing smutty books, people liked Kenny and confided in him. He knew secrets nobody else did. He’d been helping me with cases since the day I’d hung out my shingle.
“Do you know anything about her?”
“I know one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“She’s been seen with Bobby Randall on occasion.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Wild child. Lot of trouble for her old man.”
“Bobby Randall deals drugs.”
“That’s my point. A lot of trouble for her old man.”
“I’m representing Sarah Powers. She’s the sister of Neil Cameron, the guy everybody’s looking for. They’re both part of the commune. You ever hear of Bobby Randall hanging out at the commune?”
“Oh, sure. They had some real head-trippers out there for a while. Right after Donovan and the rest of them came here. Randall was the only source they had so they dealt with him. But finally the head-trippers moved on. Randall still goes out there. I think he had something going with one of the girls at the commune for a while, but she broke it off with him for some reason. He’s a heartbreaker.”
I took a moment to finish my glazed donut. This coffee shop was one of the few small businesses that hadn’t shriveled up since the new mall opened. The larger downtown stores had all moved to the mall, taking with them a good deal of traffic and thus business. The mayor had been frothy with reassurances that the mall would increase business for everybody because shoppers who’d trekked to Iowa City or Cedar Rapids would now be happy to shop here again. The younger people thought it was pretty cool of course. But the older ones-and the ones like Wendy and me, touched by a spiritual old age on occasion-saw it as one of those generational betrayals that are a part of growing up. The young betray the old until they are old enough to be betrayed by the next generation. I’m sure the good Reverend Cartwright has an explanation for such things.
“You hear much about the Mainwaring family?”
“Just that it’s sort of gone to hell since Mrs. Mainwaring died and Mainwaring married again. I know the Mainwaring kids really don’t like her.”
“She’s pretty exotic.”
“Yeah, and from what I hear not a real warm person. But she went to Smith and worked on the Bobby
