Ed Gorman: Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool

Maybe that’s what he had in mind.

There are three things you should know right away about Clifford Sykes Jr., the first being that when his family of rednecks came up here from the Ozarks a few generations ago, they lived not in the Knolls, which was sort of the official slums where I grew up, but on a sandy end of the river where they bred babies, filth, and stupidity.

Cliffie’s grandfather tried to bring the Klan up here and even managed to burn a cross in a field until several of the men in town, including my dad, went out there with shotguns and ball bats and persuaded all the fat drunks hiding in sheets that the Klan was not wanted in these parts.

The second thing you need to know about Cliffie is that he hates me because I work for Judge Esme Anne Whitney, whose folks came out here with a lot of Eastern money in the previous century and pretty much built the town. It was almost never mentioned that this branch of the Whitney family had to leave New England rather suddenly when several major papers mentioned a major bank fraud case being brought against the Whitneys’ most infamous black sheep, Esme’s father.

The Whitneys ran the town until

World War Ii came along. Esme was sent back east to school when she was seven, graduated from Smith, lived for a time in Europe, finally returned to town here with a law degree and a yen for the judicial bench, which she got with more than a little help from a Dixiecrat holdout in Harry Truman’s Justice Department.

Cliffie Senior, through a series of coincidences and outright miracles, had been able to parlay his shabby little construction company into a firm that helped the army build training camps and airstrips throughout the Midwest. With his new fortune in hand, Cliffie Senior ran for mayor, won by making all sorts of foolish promises that he actually made good on, and proceeded to buy off every important person loyal to the judge’s camp. All that was left to this branch of the Whitney family, in the person of Esme Anne herself, was her judgeship, several million dollars, and a dire need to fly to New York whenever she could put together a three-day vacation. Don’t ever let her start telling you stories about her “brunches” with the likes of “Lenny Bernstein” and “Dick Nixon” and the various fashion designers who make her stylish clothes. Her stories of the famous are as long-winded and pretentious as a novel by Thomas Wolfe.

The town now belonged to the Cliffies, Senior and Junior, respectively.

The third thing about Cliffie is that he secretly thinks he’s Glenn Ford. Back when we were in grade school together, everything was Glenn Ford Glenn Ford Glenn Ford. In the early fifties, when Ford started making a lot of Westerns, he sometimes wore a khaki outfit and carried his gun slung low. Hence, you will notice that Cliffie, as he makes his appearance here, is also dressed in khaki with his gun slung low.

I admit to a bit of hypocrisy, complaining about Cliffie walking around pretending he’s Glenn; I walk around pretending I’m Robert Ryan.

I was in the driveway when Cliffie swept up in his cruiser, a hopped-up Mercury with a whip antenna that could amputate low-hanging branches if given half a chance. The ambulance was already here, along with Doc Novotony’s shiny black Corvette. Doc is the medical examiner and a distant relative of Cliffie’s. He’s one of the few Sykes menfolk who doesn’t blow his nose on his shirt sleeve.

Usually, Cliffie swaggers. And sneers. The thing is, though he had his gun and his white Stetson and his cowboy boots, he had one more thing tonight, too. His feelings of inferiority.

Most people don’t ever forget being poor. As much as poverty deprives the belly, it also deprives the spirit. A big house like this, a dozen locally prominent people standing on the Jay Gatsby lawn, a hint of art and culture glimpsed through the wide front windows… this wasn’t Cliffie territory and never would be. No matter how mean, rich, or powerful Cliffie got, he would never be accepted by people like these and he knew it.

I would have felt sorry for the dumb bastard but he would’ve scowled if I’d mentioned that I knew how he was feeling.

He came up and said, “Looks like these fancy friends of yours got some trouble on their hands.”

“Looks like.”

“One of ‘em needs a lawyer, Counselor, I’ll bet it won’t be you. It’ll be some blue-suit prick from Cedar Rapids.”

“Probably.”

He looked at me as if my face had broken out. “You not feeling well tonight, Counselor?”

“Why?”

He checked his wristwatch.

“Been here nearly two minutes and you haven’t insulted me yet.”

“That’s because you and I have one thing in common tonight.

We don’t belong here. And we both know it.

It’s sort of intimidating for a couple of hayseeds from the Knolls.”

He spat a stream of chewing tobacco. He usually spat in the direction of one of my shoes.

The way the bad guy in the bad Westerns always shoots at the ground and makes the pitiful old drunk dance.

“Shit, Counselor, I’ll bet my old man has three times as much money as Coyle here.”

“I’ll bet he does, too,” I said. He knew damned well what I was talking about. And I knew damned well he wouldn’t admit it.

Two of his men took care of business. They’d been taking police training at the state academy. They had a pretty decent knowledge of inspecting crime scenes and interviewing witnesses and identifying suspects. He looked at them now and snorted. “Those two men, they get a little bit of police school and they think they’re hot shit.”

“Maybe you should get a little of that training yourself.

Couldn’t hurt.”

He gaped at me again. “What the hell’s with you tonight, Counselor? You sound like one of those psychologist guys on the tube.” Then, “And you tell that judge of yours not to get you involved in this one, McCain, you get me? I’d hate to have to make a fool of her again.”

I almost said something but stopped myself in time. The standing battle between Judge Whitney and Cliffie took the form of her always disproving the guilt of the person Cliffie had charged with a capital crime. By this time the score was something like 37 to 0, due in no small part to the fact that Cliffie didn’t know anything about investigative techniques. He always claimed he went on “hunches.” Ah, those good old hunches.

Cliffie said, “Now I gotta go call the Griffins and tell them what happened. I’ll just patch in through my two-way.”

“Sort of the personal touch, huh, Chief?”

“You want to call them for me, Counselor?

You think you’d like to make a call like that?”

He went away and came back within a few minutes. I spent the time talking to one of his deputies, who actually sounded intelligent.

For a minute or so I was alone. I took in the summer moon-drift sky and the scent of grass and flowers from the nearby garden. It was a night to be twelve again, catch fireflies, and read comic books under the covers with a flashlight and dream of the girl you hope to walk home from school with some lucky day.

Cliffie said, “Well, well, Counselor, looks like you and me may be buttin’ heads on this dead girl after all.”

“How would that be?”

“One of my least favorite people sounds like he’s in a lot of trouble.”

“How does that affect me?”

“He’s one of your clients. One of those punks we’re always haulin’ in and you’re always bailin’ out. Mrs. Griffin told me that her daughter and him had a terrible argument just this afternoon and that he slapped her.”

I knew the name he was going to say. And I dreaded hearing it. A lot of people had predicted that he would kill somebody someday. Maybe that day had come around at last.