Ed Gorman - Short Stories, Volume 1

“Did you find out that Linda and David were sleeping together?”

From the look in her eyes, I could see that she had. I kept thinking about what Bobbi Thomas had said, how Linda was flirtatious.

And for the first time, I felt something human for the striking, if not quite pretty, woman wearing too much makeup and way too many New York poses. Pain showed in her eyes. I actually felt a smidgen of pity for her.

Her husband appeared magically. “Is something wrong?” Seeing the hurt in his wife’s eyes, he had only scorn for me. He put a tender arm around her. “You get the hell out of here, McCain.” He sounded almost paternal, he was so protective of her.

“And leave me alone,” she said again, and skated away so quickly that there was no way I could possibly catch her.

Then Pamela was there again, sliding her arm through mine.

“You have to help me, McCain,” she said.

“Help you what?”

“Help me look like I’m having a wonderful time.”

Then I saw Stew McGinley, former college football star and idle rich boy, skating around the rink with his girlfriend, the relentlessly cheery and relentlessly gorgeous Cindy Parkhurst, who had been a cheerleader at State the same year Stew was All Big-Eight.

This was the eternal triangle: I was in love with Pamela; Pamela was in love with Stew; and Stew was in love with Cindy, who not only came from the same class — right below the Whitneys — but had even more money than Stew did, and not only that but had twice done the unthinkable. She’d broken up with Stew and started dating somebody else. This was something Stew wasn’t used to. He was supposed to do the breaking up. Stew was hooked, he was.

They were both dressed in white costumes tonight, and looked as if they would soon be on The Ed Sullivan Show for no other reason than simply existing.

“I guess I don’t know how to do that,” I said.

“How to do what?”

“How to help you look like you’re having a wonderful time.”

“I’m going to say something and then you throw your head back and break out laughing.” She looked at me. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

She said something I couldn’t hear and then I threw my head back and pantomimed laughing. I had the sense that I actually did it pretty well — after watching all those Tony Curtis movies at the drive-in, I was bound to pick up at least a few pointers about acting — but the whole thing was moot because Stew and Cindy were gazing into each other’s eyes and paying no attention to us whatsoever.

“There goes my Academy Award,” I said.

We tried skating again, both of us wobbling and waffling along, when I saw Paul Walters standing by the warming house smoking a cigarette. He was apparently one of those guys who didn’t skate but liked to come to the rink and look at all the participants so he could feel superior to them. A sissy sport, I could hear him thinking.

“I’ll be back,” I said.

By the time I got to the warming house, Paul Walters had been joined by Gwen Dawes. Just as Paul was the dead girl’s old boyfriend, Gwen was the suspect’s old girlfriend. Those little towns in Kentucky where sisters marry brothers had nothing on our own cozy little community.

Just as I reached them, Gwen, an appealing if slightly overweight redhead, pulled Paul’s face down to hers and kissed him. He kissed her right back.

“Hi,” I said, as they started to separate.

They both looked at me as if I had just dropped down from a UFO.

“Oh, you’re Cody McCain,” Walters said. He was tall, sinewy, and wore the official uniform of juvenile delinquents everywhere — leather jacket, jeans, engineering boots. He put his Elvis sneer on right after he brushed his teeth in the morning.

“Right. I wondered if we could maybe talk a little.”

“We?” he said.

“Yeah. The three of us.”

“About what?”

I looked around. I didn’t want eavesdroppers.

“About Linda Palmer.”

“My one night off a week and I have to put up with this crap,” he said.

“She was a bitch,” Gwen Dawes said.

“Hey, c’mon, she’s dead,” Walters said.

“Yeah, and that’s just what she deserved, too.”

“You wouldn’t happened to have killed her, would you, Gwen?” I asked.

“That’s why he’s here, Paul. He thinks we did it.”

“Right now,” I said, “I’d be more inclined to say you did it.”

“He works for Whitney,” Walters said. “I forgot that. He’s some kind of investigator.”

She said, “He’s trying to prove that Rick didn’t kill her. That’s why he’s here.”

“You two can account for yourselves between the hours of ten and midnight the night of the murder?”

Gwen eased her arm around his waist. “I sure can. He was at my place.”

I looked right at her. “He just said this was his only night off. Where do you work, Paul?”

Now that I’d caught them in a lie, he’d lost some of his poise.

“Over at the tire factory.”

“You were there the night of the murder?”

“I was — sick.”

I watched his face.

“Were you with Gwen?”

“No — I was just riding around.”

“And maybe stopped over at Linda’s, the way you sometimes did?”

He looked at Gwen then back at me.

“No, I... I was just riding around.”

He was as bad a liar as Gwen was.

“And I was home,” Gwen said, “in case you’re interested.”

“Nobody with you?”

She gave Walters another squeeze.

“The only person I want with me is Paul.”

She took his hand, held it tight. She was protecting him the way Mr. Styles had just protected Mrs. Styles. And as I watched her now, it gave me an idea about how I could smoke out the real killer. I wouldn’t go directly for the killer — I’d go for the protector.

“Excuse us,” Gwen said, and pushed past me, tugging Paul along in her wake.

I spent the next few minutes looking for Pamela. I finally found her sitting over in the empty bleachers that are used for speed-skating fans every Sunday when the ice is hard enough for competition.

“You okay?”

She looked up at me with those eyes and I nearly went over backwards. She has that effect on me, much as I sometimes wished she didn’t.

“You know something, McCain?” she said.

“What?”

“There’s a good chance that Stew is never going to change his mind and fall in love with me.”

“And there’s a good chance that you’re never going to change your mind and fall in love with me .”

“Oh, McCain,” she said, and stood up, the whole lithe, elegant length of her. She slipped her arm in mine again and said, “Let’s not talk anymore, all right? Let’s just skate.”

And skate we did.

When I got home that night, I called Judge Whitney and told her everything I’d learned, from my meeting with Bobbi Thomas to meeting the two couples at the ice rink tonight.

As usual, she made me go over everything to the point that it got irritating. I pictured her on the other end of the phone, sitting there in her dressing gown and shooting rubber bands at an imaginary me across from her.

“Get some rest, McCain,” she said. “You sound like you need it.”

It was true. I was tired and I probably sounded tired. I tried watching TV. Mike Hammer was on at 10:30. I buy all the Mickey Spillane books as soon as they come out. I think Darren McGavin does a great job with Hammer. But tonight the show couldn’t quite hold my interest.

I kept thinking about my plan—

What if I actually went through with it?

If the judge found out, she’d probably say it was corny, like something out of Perry Mason. (The only mysteries the judge likes are by Rex Stout and Margery Allingham.)