Ed Gorman - Save The Last Dance For Me

“You ever hear of sending somebody a bill?”

“That’s how we settled things in the hills.”

“He’s right, mister,” Viola said. “We wouldn’t actually hurt nobody. Just make a lot of noise. And what’re you doin’ out here, anyway?”

“Just wondered if you’d had any ideas about who might’ve poisoned your husband.”

“I sure do,” the girl said.

“You hush, Ella.”

I studied their eyes. Ella had been crying.

Viola was wiping tears from her eyes. Ella seemed unsteady, ready to erupt. Viola looked calm. Different people react differently to the death of a loved one. Still, Viola’s reaction made me curious. Ella kept touching a rashed spot just below her knee. She’d rubbed something on it.

“You tellin’ me you don’t have no money?”

“That’s what I’m tellin’ you, Ned.”

“I suppose they give you credit down at the Tv store.”

“John hisself bought that set. I don’t know nothin’ about it.”

“I bet.”

I said, “You were going to say something, Ella.

About who might have killed your father.”

“Ella wasn’t gonna say nothin’ and

Ella ain’t gonna say nothin’,” Viola said. “You understand that, girl?”

Ella, a whipped dog, nodded slowly. She suddenly seemed winded, washed out. She looked older today, maybe sixteen or seventeen.

“And as for you, mister, I want you off my property.”

“You seem to forget your husband hired me.”

“Yeah. To find out who wanted to kill him.”

She smiled with dirty teeth. “And you done a whale of a good job at finding out who, didn’t you?”

Ned’s whole body did a delighted kind of puppet-dance. “Hee-hee, she sure got you on that one, city boy.”

That was probably the first time a man from Black River Falls, Iowa, had ever been called a city boy. In a way, it was flattering.

I glanced back at his junky motorcycle, big-ass old Indian, and the sidecar with all the artillery in it. “You expecting a war any time soon?”

“I sure am, city boy. And when it comes, I’ll be ready for it.”

I’d suddenly run out of things to say to these people.

I felt sorry about leaving Ella behind- she was young enough there might still be hope for her-but there wasn’t anything I could do short of kidnapping her. And if I did that, Ned here would probably get out his bow and arrow.

I went around and got in my ragtop.

What exactly, you may ask, is the

Cincinnati Citadel of Medinomics? Many before you have asked and many after you will do likewise.

As near as I can figure, it’s a diploma mill. The “Medi” part I get (medicine), but the “nomics” thing I think they stuck in there just because it sounds sort of vaguely official.

Its most prestigious, and only, local graduate is Doc Novotony, who is yet another relative of Cliffie’s. Doc had to battle the state medical board to get his ticket but they finally had to give in after the state supreme court ordered them to. Cliffie, Sr. made Doc the county medical examiner, which was all right with everybody because he did so with the tacit understanding that Doc, who is actually a great guy, would never actually touch a living human being. He would work only on corpses, people figuring how much harm can you do to a stiff? And if he didn’t have a stiff to work on, he generally sat in his office in the morgue in the basement of the courthouse, chain-smoked his Chesterfields, gnawed on his Klondike candy bars, read his scandal magazines (“Kim Novak’s Naughty Nite Out With The Football Team!”), and avoided damaging his five-six, 220-pound figure by doing any exercise at all.

“Hey,” he said when I walked in, his feet up on his desk as usual. It being Saturday morning, his voluptuous middle-aged receptionist Rita, with whom he was or wasn’t having an affair, depending on which town gossip you talked to, wasn’t here. He wore floppy loafers, red Bermuda shorts, a polo shirt with a Hawkeye insignia on it (he was quoted as saying once that he was neither Jew nor Christian but Hawkeye, meaning a fan of the various University of Iowa Hawkeye teams), and a smile on his face. He almost always looked happy, as if he were spiting the corpses tucked in the drawers all around him.

“Cliffie said you’d be here, McCain, and that I wasn’t supposed to tell you anything.”

“Good ole Cliffie.”

“How come you’re interested, anyway?”

I shrugged. “I was out there when he died.

Plus I got a phone call.”

His blue eyes became downright merry. “Herr Himmler?”

Which is what he called Judge Whitney, my three-quarter-time employer.

“Uh-huh.”

“Why would she give a damn about Muldaur?”

“She doesn’t. But Richard Nixon’s going to swing through here after he stops in Cedar Rapids and she’s afraid we’ll all look like a bunch of rubes to him if we’ve got a murder going involving a minister who used snakes in his church.

She’s going to have dinner with Nixon. Said she doesn’t want our little town to sound like a bunch of mountain crackers.”

He beamed. “Richard Nixon? Really?

I’m gonna vote for him. I guess I’ve got to give the old broad one thing-she sure is connected.”

As she was. In the past few years, she’s golfed three or four times with Ike and dined with celebrities as various as Leonard Bernstein, Dinah Shore, and Jackie Gleason; next month she was scheduled to be on the same Chicago dais as Claire Booth Luce and Dr.

Joyce Brothers.

“So what’s the word on Muldaur?” I said.

He took his feet down. “You want all the mumbo jumbo or English?”

“English will do fine.”

“He was poisoned.”

One thing about those Cincinnati Citadel of Medinomics graduates-y can’t put anything over on them.

“Anything a little more specific?”

“Ah, you do want the mumbo jumbo. I appreciate the opportunity to sound like I know what I’m talking about.” He cleared his throat.

Pulled up his baggy trousers. The spotlight was his. “Technically, he died from exhaustion.”

“Exhaustion? You’re kidding. I thought you said he was poisoned.”

“He was. Strychnine has that effect. You know all those convulsions he had?”

“God, they were terrible.”

“They literally wore him out. Yes, he was poisoned, and that asphyxiated him. But the convulsions were so severe he also had a heart attack brought on by sheer exhaustion.”

“God, what a terrible way to go.”

“Been better poetic justice if one of his vipers got him. But the vipers wouldn’t have done half the damage the poison did.”

“But doesn’t poison like that taste terrible?”

“Yeah, but the way he worked himself up during those ceremonies… He might have swallowed it and not realized it. He wouldn’t have had to drink a whole hell of a lot of it. Cliffie talked to one of the churchgoers who said Muldaur was always guzzling Pepsi. Somebody coulda put it in that.”

“I need to talk to his wife.”

“Cliffie said she wasn’t any help.”

“Yeah, she probably didn’t respond well to when Cliffie clubbed her.”

Doc grinned. “I shouldn’t put up with you making fun of my beloved cousin that way. Without him I wouldn’t be medical examiner of this here county. And I wouldn’t be permitted to wear my stethoscope in public, either.”

“Now, that would be a shame. You look very good strutting down the street in your stethoscope.”

He giggled. “That’s what the ladies tell me, counselor.”

“Exhaustion, huh,” I said, thinking about everything he’d told me. Then an image of Muldaur convulsing came to me. Seeing something like that diminished our entire species. I’d always known we were vulnerable. I just didn’t like to be reminded of it in such a grotesque fashion.