Ed Gorman: Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool

My class resentment aside, I didn’t like him for a specific reason. A few years ago, when I set up my own practice, I asked him if I might drop by and ask him some questions.

He was nice enough-his wife and I were longtime school friends-until a secretary walked by his open door. He stopped talking to me and snapped at her to get in there.

She came in, all right, and he laid into her with the fury of a drunken brawler. This was

A.M. and he was quite sober. She’d forgotten to give him a message-or she’d garbled a message she’d given him-I could never figure out which it was.

Right in front of me, he ripped into her not only professionally but personally. How stupid she was. How slow she was. How irresponsible she was. And how fat she’d gotten. How her clothes always looked sloppy on her. And how irritating it was that she was always running off to the john.

And I had to sit there pretending to be invisible and deaf.

His rage seemed endless. And her inevitable tears-e once in a while she’d glance at me in her shame and humiliation-only seemed to make him angrier.

No matter how she’d let him down, she didn’t deserve to be treated like this. And especially with me sitting there.

When it was over, he said, “What a stupid cow of a bitch. Five years ago she was a good-looking woman. Then she had two kids and let herself go. That’s what I should do with her-let her go. I’m just too damned softhearted.”

I almost laughed out loud. I mean, given what he’d just done to that poor woman-and he could still see himself as “softhearted.” He was about as softhearted as Himmler.

But here I was drinking his liquor. I leaned against the patio wall, watching the dancers and remembering them as they’d been when we were all in school together, remarking to myself on all the usual ironies of why the A student was still a bag boy and how fate or the gods had conspired to turn the portly drab girl into a knockout babe and what kind of small but significant social courage it must take for the guy with the clubfoot to get out there and dance, fast or slow, without ever seeming self-conscious, and to hell with what anybody might think.

A fragile hand touched my arm. Jean Coyle. Somewhat prim but very pretty. She’d been our class valedictorian. She wore a dark cocktail dress and had short dark hair.

She was one of those women who could look dressed up in a work shirt and worn jeans. She was the good catch of her generation in our valley-gd family, good education, a socially skilled wife for a prominent man. Jack Coyle was fifteen years her senior. But his powerful presence-he had a kind of tanned country club virility, and the graying traces of black Irish hair only added to it somehow-narrowed the age difference.

“Hi, Sam.”

“Hi, Jean. I was going to look you up before I left, to thank you for tonight. I had a good time.”

“Thank you, Sam. I hope everybody did.”

I nodded to the dance floor. Everybody was in passionate embrace. “Sure looks like it.”

“I wonder if you’d come with me for a little bit.”

Some women might have made a naughty joke of the request. Jean wasn’t the type. If she wanted you to go somewhere with her, it was for a perfectly legitimate reason.

Just then, Linda came back.

She thanked Jean, who looked uncomfortable with Linda suddenly. “Would you mind if Sam helped me with something for a few minutes?”

“No. Not at all.”

“Be right back,” I said.

Linda touched my arm. “I’m looking forward to that ride.” The way she touched my arm, portending all sorts of things, was far sexier than if she’d kissed my neck. It was sweet and sexy at the same time. It’s never fun to realize what a pitiful grasping creature I am. She touched my arm and my Midwestern mind was rhapsodic with romance.

As Jean led me through the elegant house that just missed being a bit too showy, she said, “I hate to drag you into this, Sam. I was going to call Cliffie but he’s such an idiot.”

I laughed. “Our Cliffie? The chief of police? I guess I never noticed that he was an idiot.”

Her smile was forced.

We went out the front door and around the side of the house. There was a white gazebo on the west edge of the lawn. It glowed in the moonlight.

“This is getting pretty mysterious,” I laughed.

“It shouldn’t be. It’s in your line of work, Sam. You have a private investigator’s license and everything, I mean.”

“What kind of work is it, Jean?”

She said, “There’s a dead girl in the gazebo.”

The gazebo conformed to the classic pattern, octagonal in shape, fretted with Victorian touches, and just wide enough to hold a glider and two sitting chairs comfortably.

Jean had brought a small flashlight along and handed it to me just before we reached the gazebo.

The girl, who was familiar to me in some way, was tucked into a corner of the glider. She was dressed sorority girl-style, black flats, a dark wrap-around skirt closed with a large golden safety pin, a summery white blouse.

Death was obvious but not disfiguring. Though her dark-haired head was pitched at an uncomfortable angle on her shoulder, her posture was perfect, even prim.

The eyes were closed. She’d possessed the kind of austere, important beauty that only the rich boys and the top jocks had a chance with. She had the looks of all the ethereal troubled girls in F. Scott Fitzgerald novels. I imagined she was twenty.

The wound was on the side of her head, the blood lost in the texture of the hair. I didn’t want to touch her to see how wide and deep the wound went. Blunt instrument trauma, presumably.

I said, “We need to call Cliffie.”

“He’s such a boob.”

“Yeah, he is. But he’s also the chief of police and this is a crime scene.”

“The Griffins are such nice people.”

“The Griffins? He’s got the Cadillac dealership?”

“Yes. You mean you don’t know who the girl is? It’s their daughter, Sara.”

“That’s who she is. Was she invited to the party tonight?”

“Lord, no, Sam. She’s a sophomore in college. Way too young for our crowd.” She bit her lip. “I just wonder what she was doing here.”

“Did you tell Jack?”

“I haven’t had a chance yet.”

“How did you find her?”

She made a perfectly childish and perfectly fetching face. “We had a tiff.

Jack and I. The usual marriage thing. I just went for a little walk. Needed air.”

“Did you see anything else?”

“Anything else?”

I nodded to the two-lane asphalt road about a long city block from the gazebo. “You didn’t see a car or anybody on the road over there?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

For some reason-professional nosiness, probably-I wanted to ask her what she and her husband, Jack, had been arguing about.

“I need to call Cliffie. And you need to make sure that nobody leaves. Tell them what happened and tell them that they have to stay here at least until Cliffie gets a chance to take down their names.”

“My God,” she said, “I can’t believe it.”

“What?”

“I’m actually going to let Cliffie Sykes set foot in my home.”

After she left, I spent five minutes looking over the grass that stretched to the road. And found nothing. Then I went to the road itself. The other side of the asphalt was farmland, soybeans.

I didn’t find any notable tire tracks on either the roadside or the two-laner. I assumed that the girl had been killed elsewhere and then carried from a car parked on this road. Somebody had gone to a lot of trouble.

Everybody drifted into the front yard. About half brought their drinks. A woman cried; a man said that it was about time somebody dealt with the crime wave we were having in town. I wasn’t sure what crime wave he was talking about. A Shell station had been broken into last night.