Ed Gorman - Wake Up Little Susie

He wouldn’t even give you the satisfaction of letting you hate him 100 percent clean and pure. He had to mitigate your hatred by having a two-year-old daughter with water on the brain.

He was corrupt, violent, stupid, and yet he suffered. I’d seen him in the park holding her one day on his knee. I saw a tenderness and love I wish I hadn’t seen. Even bad guys have good sides. Sometimes that can get downright exasperating.

He set his ass back down on his seat and said, “You’ve been warned, counselor. This is our case and we’re just about ready to wrap it up and we don’t want no interference from you or the Judge. Understand?”

He got the motor gunning so loudly, he couldn’t have heard me if I’d answered him.

He wheeled the bike off the sidewalk and accelerated down the street, mufflers roaring.

Rita said, “She was a beautiful girl.”

When I was younger, I never appreciated older women. Rita Fahey is forty-something and what the paperback writers always call “lushly built.” She also has a lovely face, and eyes you just can’t keep from watching. Kind of green but then again kind of blue. She’s Doc Novotny’s secretary in the morgue. She keeps the rock-and-roll loud, as if its festive qualities push back the cold stench of the place.

“She sure was.”

“You know her, McCain?”

“No. But Mary Travers did.”

She yawned. I tried not to notice what her sweater did. She never wore them tight, but it didn’t really matter. “Cliffie’s moving in for the kill. Between us, I mean.”

As Doc Novotny’s cousin and tacit boss, Cliffie gets first dibs on all murder information. I have to give him one thing.

Cliffie’s great at finding the person who looks like the killer.

“Oh? Who?”

“Mike Chalmers.”

“God.”

“Cliffie laid it out for the doc this morning. You ask me, it was Amy Squires. I saw her slap Susan Squires one night in the face at the dance pavilion. Out in the parking lot.

My husband and I were walking to our car. She was screaming she wanted Susan to let go of her husband.”

“When was this?”

“Three-four years ago.”

“Well, look who’s here,” Doc Novotny said. He has the air of a politician who resembles Humpty-Dumpty. He smokes cheap cigars, paints himself with aftershave, and wears a rug that looks like a badly injured forest creature. “Cliffie’s favorite guy.”

“Rita said you gave him all the information already,” I said, in a joking tone. “We get the crumbs as usual.”

“Are you kidding? How long was Cliffie here, Rita?” He dragged a stray hand down his paunch, as if he were stroking a pet.

“Oh, five-six minutes.”

“My cousin’s got the attention span of a kindergartner. I started explaining things to him and he immediately started looking at his watch. He thinks he’s got his murderer already; why bother him with facts?”

“Mike Chalmers?”

“Rita tol’ ya, huh? But if he would’ve listened to what I said, he might’ve changed his mind.”

“You got something interesting?”

“Very interesting.”

“Good. Let’s go.”

The shadows. The cold. The stench. None of it had changed. We walked into a tiled room with body drawers on one wall and two operating tables in the center.

He showed me the body. The head wound was vicious. Susan had one of those quietly pretty faces that holds an erotic power for men who take the time to look closely, that kind of First Communion chastity crossed with a whispered suggestion of desire.

“She die instantly?”

“Maybe. Can’t say for sure.”

“Blunt trauma the cause of death?”

“Without question.”

“Time of death?”

“Nine to eleven P.M. Friday night.

Can’t do any better than that. She had a nice little body on her. Never showed it off much.”

I’d thought the same thing and felt guilty about it.

“Pretty open and closed?”

He nodded. “Except for the bruises.”

“Bruises?”

He took out a Penlite and worked it up and down her body. The bruises were old but still violent, even as they were fading. Upper thighs.

Ribs. Lower back.

“They’re old bruises.”

“Yeah,” he said. “They are.”

“They have any significance to her death?”

“Not directly. But they suggest that somebody beat her up pretty often. Somebody who knew what he was doing. These aren’t the kind of bruises that show when you have clothes on. The amateur wife beater, he’ll give the old lady a black eye or a busted nose or a split lip and everybody knows what’s going on. But your more devious wife beater, he puts the hurt on her where it don’t show. Her thighs?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s an iron burn.”

“Iron?”

“Yeah. Like the old lady does her ironing with?”

“She was burned with an iron?”

“Yeah. And pretty bad too.”

“You ever heard of that before?”

“Oh, sure. Job like mine, I’ve heard of everything before, McCain.”

“So what you’re saying is that her husband, David Squires, put all those bruises on her?”

“You said it,” Doc Novotny said. “I didn’t.”

My kid sister, Ruthie, said to her friend Debbie, who was sitting on the living room floor in front of that great postatomic social icon, the Tv console, “She shouldn’t dance with that blond guy. She looks better when she dances with dark-haired guys.”

“Yeah, like that cute Eye-talian,” Debbie said.

“Which cute Italian?” Ruthie said.

“There’re a lot of them.”

“The one who sort of looks like Paul Anka except his nose isn’t as big.”

“Paul’s gonna get his nose fixed.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Mom showed it to me. It was in the newspaper.”

“I wonder if his singing’ll be different. You know, when they whack off his nose that way and all.”

“Personally, I wish he wouldn’t get it fixed.”

“It’s pretty big, Ruthie.”

“Yeah, but it’s sort of cute.” Then: “I’ll ask my brother. Sam, do you think Paul Anka’s nose is too big?”

I said, “His nose isn’t. But his mouth is.”

“I think he’s a good singer,” Ruthie said.

“I’ll take Tony Bennett,” I said.

“He’s old,” Ruthie said.

“Your brother’s sure a wise ass clown,”

Debbie said.

“He sure is,” Ruthie said, glaring at me. She was pretty, like Mom, slender and fair. A lot of awkward guys trooped to our door to ensnare her. But at sixteen she wasn’t quite ready to get ensnared.

It was Monday at 3ccdg P.M. on the prairies of America, and for teenagers that meant just one thing: American Bandstand with Dick Clark. And conversations just like this, teenage girls (and boys, if they’d admit it) pondering the fates of the various stars Clark was featuring on his show to lip-synch their latest records. The Platters and Frankie Lymon and Gene Vincent and people like that. Some of them lip-synched pretty well; standing in front of a gray curtain they almost looked as if they really. were singing live. But most of them were pitiful, lagging behind the record or given to sudden vast melodramatic showbiz gestures. More important than lip-synching, however, were the questions burning in the minds of the girls watching at home.

Who were they dating? were they as lonely as the songs they sang? Would they ever consider dating a girl from a place like, say, Black River Falls, Iowa? What was their favorite color? What was their favorite dessert? Did they want to have kids of their own someday? Had they ever met James Dean? were they ever going to be on The Ed Sullivan Show?

Bandstand hadn’t been on the air long but it had gripped the teenage imagination like a scandal.