Ed Gorman - Wake Up Little Susie

“Well, it won’t happen this time. Chalmers is the man. No doubt about it. He had the motive, the method, and the means, as they taught us in law school. He’s obsessed with me and has been ever since I put him behind bars, where he belongs.”

“You framed him then too. Because of your sister.”

His features froze. “I take it he’s your client now?”

“He is.”

“So he’ll have ample opportunity to tell you a lot of lies about my poor sister. Did he also tell you that he raped her and that’s how she became pregnant?”

“If he raped her, why didn’t you charge him with it?”

“And put my own sister through a rape trial?

I happen to love her very much.”

“You think your sister would tell me that if I called her?”

“If you do call her, McCain, you’ll be a very, very sorry man, believe me.” He paused and then said, “My uncle owns the plant where your father works. And I’m my uncle’s favorite nephew.”

“I’ll mention our conversation to the union rep at the plant.”

“Not even a union man can save his job if I put the word in Don’s ear.”

I sighed. “Just when I think you couldn’t get any more despicable, Squires, you manage to come up with something worse. You lie awake nights planning this stuff?”

“Yes.” The cold smile again. “When I’m not busy planning world domination.” He had a nice expensive watch and shot his cuff to peek at it. “My stomach tells me it’s lunchtime.”

“That’s funny. My stomach tells me you make me sick.”

I sat in a caf@e and had a cup of coffee and a wedge of apple pie with a piece of cheddar on it. I smoked three Luckies. I plotted what I was going to do to our friend Squires. You know how you start thinking of all these neat ways of getting rid of somebody. Mussolini would have been proud of some of the things I thought up.

I was at a stoplight on my way to my office when the black Ford appeared. The mystery blonde in the black sunglasses looked more fetching than ever: white turtleneck, black silk head scarf, blood-red nail polish. That wry sexy smile. And that throbbing Chuck Berry music.

The light changed.

I floored it.

I shouldn’t say I floored it, the entity in control of me floored it.

Here I was, this hardworking young attorney trying to be mature and respectable when this being took possession of my body and made it do all sorts of crazy and degrading things-l, drag racing.

I laid down twenty feet of black rubber.

I beat her to the next stoplight and waited for her to catch up.

This time, she discarded the smile. In its place was a pout. Pure Brigitte Bardot. She started jabbing the accelerator. Her glas-paks thundered. She was going to put me in my place.

My glas-paks roared back at her.

People on the corners stared at us: the red Ford; the black Ford. The erstwhile counselor-at-law; and the gorgeous girl.

About to put the pedal to the metal.

Red light…

Yellow light…

Green li-Which was when Cliffie pulled into view on his big Indian motorcycle catercorner from us.

Wouldn’t he just love to give me a ticket so stiff it would let him yank my license for a year or two?

The black Ford sped away faster than was strictly wise, given Cliffie’s hunger for ticketing people. He gave her the bad eye but didn’t move.

She beat me to the next light and then disappeared again, turning an illegal right on red.

School was getting out. I sat there waiting for the grade-schoolers in the crosswalk. Their clothes were new. The school year was only a couple of weeks old. I remembered what it was like, buying school clothes in August, your folks taking you to the department store all worried about the money they’d barely been able to scrape together. Buy good clothes had been my folks’ reasoning, they last longer. I always went for Buster Brown shoes as a tyke because of his dog Tige and Smilin’ Ed McConnell on the radio. I also liked clothes that either looked Western-because of Roy and Gene-or futuristic-because of the Flash Gordon serials they ran over and over at the Rialto.

The new-shoe smell was almost as good as the new-car smell. And the first few times I wore them, I treated my clothes with the deference shown toward something Christ had personally blessed, careful of everything I ate and drank.

Then the crosswalk was empty.

This time, I didn’t lay rubber. I drove away like the nice respectable attorney I am.

I smelled him before I saw him.

I don’t suppose that’s a nice thing to say, even about Cliffie, but it’s true. There was just this odor, a kind of generalized Cliffie odor, wafting its way out the open window and my office door.

I wondered how many other times he’d broken into my office.

He had his cowboy-booted feet up on my desk, his campaign hat pushed back on his fat head, and a cigar butt stuffed into the corner of his mouth. He wore his holster rig complete with billy club.

“What the hell’s that thing?” he said, pointing to the sprawl of gear on the coffee table.

“A lie detector. Something I’d like to get you hooked up to sometime.”

“I don’t need no lie detector. I just look a man straight in the eye. That’s all I need.”

“My hero,” I said.

He said, “You got troubles, counselor.”

“I do, huh?”

“You certainly do.”

“Well, why don’t you make yourself comfortable, Chief, and tell me about them.”

“You thinkin’ of suin’ me or some other lawyer bullshit like that, you just forget about it. I’m the law and I got a perfect right to be here.”

I nodded to the Pepsi bottle and piece of waxed paper on my desk. “You got a perfect right to drink my Pepsi and eat my sandwich?”

“That beef was a little tough.”

“Gee, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“You got to buy grade-A meat, counselor. Tastes a whole lot better than the gristle you been buyin’.”

I sat down in one of the client chairs.

“What the hell do you want, Cliffie?”

That sat him up straight as I knew it would.

I was sick of his ugly self parked in my chair. He was all things slothful. “I thought we agreed you wasn’t to call me that.”

“When you break into my office, all bets’re off.”

He had his elbows planted hard onto the surface of my desk. “You just like to rile me, don’t you, counselor?”

I sighed. “Get to it. What the hell’re you doing here?”

“Ok then,” he said, and extracted from his lips the wet cigar butt. “You been botherin’ a friend of mine.”

“That being David Squires.”

“Then you admit it?”

“I don’t admit anything.” Then: “He tell you he hired me?”

“What’re you talkin’ about? Why would Squires hire you?”

“Because he killed his wife. And he thought maybe he might have left a couple of loose ends. Maybe a witness, or something dropped at the scene of the crime. He knew you’d be too stupid to figure it out so he hired me.”

“Bullshit. He arranged for me to get that Lawman of the Year award last year from the Skeet Shooters Association over to Fort Madison.”

“He was kissing your ass, Cliffie. You can help him. If you couldn’t, he wouldn’t even speak to you.”

Cliffie was angry and hurt and confused.

“Well, you can bet your ass I’m gonna ask him about that. About him hirin’ you.”

He looked pretty bad just then, Cliffie did. Knowing you’ve been betrayed will do that to a person. Just saps all your strength and focus.

He said, like a kid, “He really hired you?”

Somehow I couldn’t take any more pleasure from hurting him. “It wasn’t anything really big.”

“I mean, you don’t get Lawman of the Year award unless them fellas really think you’re doin’ your job.”