for rubbers. At that moment her period was late and she was terrified. The period came a few days later. I put Turk on the same insurance plan only because she pleaded with me. I had dreams of running him down with my car just to see how reliable the insurance coverage was.
“Aw, what the hey, Jamie, I’ll take half your sandwich.”
“I always like it when we eat together here. It’s real homey.”
Turk, you son of a bitch, if you ever hurt her again I’ll tear your throat out.
The pastrami on rye she’d gotten from Goldblatt’s deli down the street was excellent as always. We mostly talked about her baby. Jamie was starting a college fund that she was keeping secret from good old Turk because he “sometimes” tended to spend every cent in the house. She said that she wanted her baby to be a doctor or a lawyer-” just like you, Mr. C.”
Then the two phone lines started buzzing and it was back to work.
Without quite knowing why, I called the Wilhoyt Investigative Agency in Chicago. This was a prominent firm that had recently helped bring down a powerful and corrupt politician who fought every civil rights bill that came up, despite the fact that he had a Negro mistress. He didn’t seem to understand the incongruity. He must have thought he was back running the plantation.
My contact at Wilhoyt was an older man named Pete Federman. He’d hired me four times to work on cases he was overseeing in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. The checks were about double what I charged here. Federman had a cigarette hack and a lot of jokes about what it was like living under the burden of being a Cubs fan.
“You see the game yesterday, McCain?”
“Couple innings on TV.”
“I’m taking a cyanide capsule with me next time I go. They screw up like they did yesterday, I’ll just slide it under my tongue and that’ll be that. The way my oldest boy’s been carryin’ on, that doesn’t sound all that bad anyway.” Hack. “So what can I do for you?”
I told him about Eve. Gave him all the details about her background I’d managed to put together.
“If this isn’t all bullshit she must be quite the doll.”
I told him about Vanessa’s death. “The girls couldn’t stand her. After talking to her this morning it was easy to see why.”
“Solid gold bitch, huh?”
“Yeah, and one who seems to enjoy the role.”
“I’ll probably need twenty-four hours on this. I take it you’re on an expense account.”
“Yeah.”
“Then no discounts. For you personally I’d go twenty-five percent off.”
“Hey, I appreciate that.”
“You do good work, kid.”
“Well, you do good work, too, Pete.”
The big agencies had access to people and documentation all over the country. The starting point would probably be Dartmouth, where she’d been a professor. They’d likely work backward from there.
I’d been talking on line one. As soon as I began lowering the receiver, line two rang. Jamie answered, “Sam McCain’s law office.” She sounded official as hell. She listened and then said: “He’s right here, Commander Potter.” She nodded to me. I picked up; she hung up.
“Hi, Mike, what’s going on?”
“You know that old Skelly station near the roundhouse? Been closed down for a couple years?”
“Sure. Why?”
“Well, somebody spotted Cameron there and I jumped in the car and found him.”
“You bringing him in?”
“Yeah, Sam. But there isn’t any hurry. He put a. 45 to his head and killed himself.”
P ART T WO
10
T he station had been abandoned in the late ’40s, the reason being that the ones in town were new and bright and easy to get to. This was a holdover from the early ’30s, a two-pump station that sold only gas and oil, no car repairs. Kids had smashed out the windows and animals had used the drive as a bathroom. The front door had been chained shut. If you looked through one of the dust-coated front windows you could see a large movie poster advertising a Betty Grable film circa 1945 when Betty was already slipping in popularity.
Three squad cars and an ambulance were parked on the east side of the station. I pulled up behind them and walked to the back of the place where a green wooden storage shed was tucked into a stand of hardwoods. Potter was explaining to two uniforms how he wanted them to gather evidence, who would start where, and so on. The ambulance boys leaned against the open rear doors of their big white box, looking slightly bored and taking it out on their cigarettes. As usual, the joyous birdsong reminded me that the so-called lower orders could give a shit about the travails of the plodding creatures that lumbered across their land. Nature presented them with their own travails.
Potter set his men to work and then walked over to me. “I’d let you have a look at him but we’re still gathering evidence. I wanted you out here so I could tell you firsthand what I saw when I got out here. He’s in the back of the shed. He had a blanket and some sandwiches in a brown paper bag. Obviously somebody helped him. From what I could see, he didn’t have any marks on his arms or hands or face. No signs of a struggle, in other words, in case you’re thinking somebody killed him and then planted the gun in his hand. He fired a. 45 above his right ear. The exit wound is a big bastard, bigger than usual. The doc is on his way. He’ll be able to guesstimate when Cameron did the deed. Now, I’m sure you have a lot of questions, so if you want to wait around for a couple of hours-there’s a pretty good burger joint about a mile from here-we’ll probably have a lot more information for you.”
“I’m sure your boss will take this as an admission of guilt.”
“Right now I do, Sam. And if you can step back and be a little objective, you should, too. You’ll say everything’s circumstantial and it probably is, but he was obsessed with the girl, she broke it off with him, and he killed her. That’s not exactly a new story. He hides out, he’s afraid and probably sorry for what he’d done, and he kills himself.”
“Where did he get the gun?”
“Where did he get the sandwiches and the blanket? Probably the same place.”
“I’ll get to see the blanket and gun?”
“As long as the chief isn’t here. He’s still pissed off about your John Wayne crack. Being a draft dodger and all.”
“Good thing I didn’t tell him that Superman can’t actually fly.”
He shook his head and smiled. “You two really hate each other, don’t you?”
“I don’t hate him as much as he hates me.”
“Yeah, I kind of figured that was the case.” He waved to a squad car that had just pulled up. “Now I gotta get back to work.”
I drove back to town. When I saw a phone booth outside a Howard Johnson’s I pulled over. I had Paul Mainwaring’s phone number scribbled in the small notepad I carry in my left back pocket. Marsha the maid answered.
“I’m afraid he’s at the funeral home, Mr. McCain. The burial will be tomorrow. Mr. Mainwaring just wants to get it over with.”
“Well, will you please give him this message, Marsha? The police have found Neil Cameron’s body in a shed in back of that old Skelly station on the edge of town.”
Her gasp-and it was indeed a gasp-surprised me. “Oh, my Lord.”
“Are you all right, Marsha?”
“He was such a nice boy. I liked him so much.”
