Ed Gorman - Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool

“I could shoot you and get away with it, you know that, don’t you?”

I turned and looked at Rita Scully.

“Three murders aren’t enough, Rita?”

“Oh, shit, McCain. Give it a rest.”

She came in, walked over to her desk, sat down, and said, “How the hell’d you get in here?”

“Where are the boots?”

“What boots?”

“The boots that were lined up against the wall over there.”

“I took them up to the house.”

“Why?”

“Why? What difference does it make to you?”

“A lot of difference. Now tell me why you took those boots up to the house.”

“You are one goofy sonofabitch, you know that?”

“The desert boots Donny Hughes bought you.

Those are the ones I want to see.”

“The desert-” She stopped herself and a cold, superior smile made her particular kind of loveliness hard and mean. “You mean these?”

She pushed back from the desk in her chair and then set both of her desert boots on her desk. “Pretty exciting boots, huh?”

“I thought they were too small for you.”

“My dad let me use these stretchers he had. That helped a lot.” She waggled one of the boots at me. “Pretty exciting, huh, McCain?”

I peered down at it. “Oil stain.”

“Exactly right. If this were a game show, you’d win a refrigerator.”

“You snuck over there, didn’t you?”

“Snuck over where?”

“Snuck over to Egan’s late at night and cut his brake line and got your boots all oily doing it.”

“God, McCain, you’re such a moron, I can’t believe it. You actually think I murdered David and those two others?”

“You’ve got oil on your shoes.”

“And you’ve got rocks in your head.”

I wasn’t sure at first what she slipped from the pocket of her red Western shirt. It was a cigarette and somehow not a cigarette.

When I realized what it was, and what she was going to do with it, I thought that it looked wrong. She shouldn’t be wearing Western gear. She should be in black, a beatnik girl in a shabby, crowded apartment where cool jazz fought pretentious conversations for domination in the room.

But it didn’t seem to bother her. She was Annie Toke-ly of the West. She put the reefer in her lips and lit up. Then she closed her eyes and let the magic do its work. The smell was, as always, sweet and stark, and more than a little scary. An attorney caught in a place where marijuana was being smoked would lose his ticket, even if he could prove that he hadn’t actually smoked any himself.

She took two long hits. “I get pretty frisky when I smoke this reefer, McCain.” She giggled. It was a marijuana giggle, friendly as a puppy and just a wee bit daft. “If I don’t keep smoking this stuff, all I do is lie on my bed and cry about David. Excuse me.”

She took two more long hits.

“Your folks know you smoke this?”

She was holding it in her lungs and didn’t want to exhale. She shook her head. When she exhaled, she said, “Are you kidding? My dad’d take a riding crop to me.” Then, “I didn’t kill him. Or any of them.”

“Then who did?”

“Isn’t that supposed to be your job?”

“I’m always up for a little help.”

“Just a sec.”

Another deep inhalation.

The exhalation came in a ragged burst.

“Guess who I called today, McCain?”

“Who?”

“Molly.”

“For what?”

“I figured now was the time to be friends again.

We’re both mourning David. We should comfort each other.”

“What’d she say?”

Sly smile. “She hung up on me. But that’s Molly. Always takes awhile to bring her around.”

“She’s a nice kid.”

“And I’m not, I suppose?”

She didn’t wait for my answer. She took another deep hit. The reefer was burning to ash quickly.

“You really want me to answer that?”

She looked as if she were inhaling helium, the way her head seemed to rise and swell as she held the smoke deep in her lungs. Then the explosion.

“I don’t sleep around, McCain.

David’s the only guy I ever slept with, in fact. I don’t drink much. I go to church. I try to help people whenever I can. You seem to think I’m some kind of slut.”

“Molly’s under the impression that you were bad for Egan.”

“Molly’s under the impression that everybody was bad for David-except her, of course.”

“Did you get Egan started on marijuana or the other way around?”

But she was taking the last drag on the reefer.

All the Iowa City and Chicago hipster parties I’d touristed my way through came back. I swear I could hear a couple of sexy Northwestern coeds discussing Sartre.

Boom. She exhaled.

“You didn’t know your client very well, McCain.”

“Meaning what?”

“His asthma. And all his allergies. He tried smoking reefers a couple of times and his glands swelled up on him and he had this miserable asthma attack. He didn’t like it when I smoked grass. He said it made me too crazy. He took a whole bunch of my joints and kept them in his room. He’d only let me smoke one a week. He told me he got his aunts to try it once. Thought it’d be funny. They loved it.” The sly smile again. “Be sure and tell Molly that, will you? That I’m not some slut? That I didn’t seduce him into drugs or anything? I really think now is a good time to be friends again. She was my best friend for ten years. We used to trade dolls and clothes and do overnights all the time. Even when I hated her for David, I missed her. I couldn’t talk to anybody-not even David-the way I used to talk to her.”

She snubbed out the reefer between thumb and forefinger and popped it into her mouth the way she would a vitamin pill.

“Thrifty girl,” she said, after swallowing it.

“I always eat the roach. Why waste it?” Then, “I can see you now.” She stumbled over her words.

The reefer was taking effect. “Racing out here in your deerstalker cap. Thinking you had me because of the oil stain on my desert boots.” The marijuana giggle again. “Poor McCain.”

Her eyes gleamed merrily. “A wasted trip.”

“Not at all,” I said, standing up. “You told me something important that I needed to know.” Then, “I’ve got a lot of horseshit on my shoe.”

“Occupational hazard around here.”

“There a hose anywhere I could wash it off?

I’ve got one more stop to make tonight.”

“East side of the barn there’s a hose we use for the water trough. So where’s this next stop of yours, anyway?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

Another giggle. “God, I haven’t heard that since fourth grade.” She shrugged. “I don’t really give a shit where you’re going, anyway.” She pulled out the center drawer of the desk and came up with a Snickers, ripping the wrapper off with spectacular ferocity. “Boy, when I get like this, McCain, high and all like this, I’ll bet I could eat twenty of these things in a row and not miss a beat. I might puke somewhere along the line but I’d go right back to eating if I did.”

Gone gone gone, she was.

Gone gone gone.

“Tell Molly I love her, McCain.”

“I’ll tell her,” I said, starting for the door.

Giggle giggle. “And tell her that I’d like to trade dolls again.”

A couple of minutes later, I used the hose to wash away the horse feces and then made my way carefully to my car.

This time I used the driveway instead of the ravine and the grassy hill.

It was the world of my grandfather and grandmother. The world of all those long-ago folks who’d fled their beloved land because it no longer fed or tolerated them. And so they came to the new country and mixed old with new-supermarkets and cars with fins and Joe McCarthy with crucifix and holy Mary and holy water to be sure; and brogues and lilts and song in their voices, and joy and fear and resentment and great vast hope in their eyes. The tiny old women at daily mass, their heads covered in cheap faded scarves; the whiskey-faced, knuckle-swollen union leaders shouting at the scabs who’d crossed the picket line; and the sweet, young, skinny-legged girls in their school uniforms up in the choir loft intoxicated by the scent of incense and the sound of the bells ringing out in the belfry as they had in Belfast and Donegal and Kerry. And now they had Bing Crosby and his songs from the old country on their phonographs, and Jackie Gleason and Bishop Sheen on their televisions, and so many sports figures they were uncountable. And one of them, the son of a bootlegger, might soon become president-imagine that, president-ofthe entire country. Old and new.