Ed Gorman - The Day The Music Died

“Sykes is lookin’ for you.”

“Sykes?” I said.

“Yeah. He called the warehouse and asked if I knew where you were. And then he called your mom out to the house.”

“He say what he wanted?”

“Said you shouldn’t have left Kenny Whitney’s house before he told you to. He said he could arrest you for leaving. What a dipshit that guy is.

I had a captain like him in the army. Always struttin’ around and actin’ like he was on top of things. Drove a truck straight off a mountainside when were in Italy. Luckily, he was the only one who died.”

“Well, I’m going to see Judge Whitney first. That’s been my plan all day but I can’t get in, she’s so damned busy.”

He looked at me, this old man who had yet to see his fiftieth birthday. “She been any nicer to you lately?”

I smiled. “Not so’s you’d notice.”

“Well, I don’t have to tell you how the Whitneys are.”

“Eastern money,” I said. “Big Eastern money. The only thing I could never figure out is why her branch moved clear the hell out here to Iowa.”

We were passing a supermarket on the edge of town. Dad read some of the prices in the windows out loud. “Gosh, look. Pork steak is thirty-three cents a pound. And bacon is three for a buck. Guy’d have to be a millionaire if he wanted to eat a good steak these days.” As a child of the Depression, Dad watched food prices the way other men watched stock prices. Overseas and dreaming of home, the men of his generation had imagined heaven on earth when they returned home. They hadn’t known that heaven had inflation and bad spells of recession, too.

“You know Ross, the guy I work with? You know what he paid for his new Mercury? Three thousand dollars. Hell, we paid that for the house when we bought it.”

“You were going to tell me why the Whitneys came out here.”

“Oh. I forgot. The Whitneys. Well, the judge’s grandfather got caught in a land swindle, one of those deals that’s so complicated it gives you a headache to think about. Anyway, what it came down to was that her grandfather cheated the government and they were going to bring him to trial and everything, but the family chipped in and gave the cash back and got the government to drop the charges. And then they gave him a lot of money and told him to get lost somewhere on the frontier. Iowa was as far as he got.”

I laughed. “So that story she hands out about her grandfather coming out here because he wanted to be a gentleman farmer-”

“A total crock.”

We were in town and headed toward the one-story corner brick building where I have my office around back. Dad pulled into the parking lot and said, “Mom wants to know when you’re coming over for dinner.”

“How about next Tuesday?”

“Spaghetti night. She makes the best.”

Mom did housework with military-style orderliness. For years, Tuesday night had been spaghetti night just as Tuesday day had been housecleaning day, just as Wednesday was Swiss steak night and grocery shopping day. She did all these things on a budget so minuscule I felt like a spendthrift every time I bought a candy bar.

Dad said, “You didn’t mention Kenny.”

I looked over at him. “I don’t think he killed her.”

“That isn’t what I was thinkin’ of.”

“Oh?”

“I was thinkin’ of how he was always beating you up.

Ever since you were in kindergarten together. And I could never protect you and I felt like hell about it.

I remember the time he broke your glasses and I drove out to their mansion and I was ready to be all pissed and everything but when I got inside there I was really intimidated. The way they looked at me and talked to me. It should’ve made me even madder. But it just kind of beat me down. I shoulda stuck up for you a lot better, but I didn’t. All he did, Kenny’s old man, was scratch out this check and hand it to me and tell me to never come out there again. I felt ashamed of myself, I really did, kiddo. I really did.”

I put my hand on his shoulder. “You did the best you could, Dad. I wouldn’t have done any better.”

Then he circled back. “So how come you don’t think he killed her?”

“I’m not sure. Just a feeling, I guess.”

He thought a moment and said, “You know what I shoulda done the day I was out at their mansion?”

“What?”

“I had real muddy shoes on. I took them off at the door. I shoulda tracked mud all the way into his den.”

I laughed at the picture of my small father leaving big mud prints on the mansion floor.

It was like watching a really funny Daffy Duck cartoon.

“Well, kiddo,” he said, glancing at his Timex. “I better head back.”

I watched him pull away, and then I walked over to the imperious Judge Whitney’s chambers, the same Judge Whitney whose grandfather had been a federal land swindler.

The stone courthouse had been built before there were any Whitneys or Sykeses to fight over who would get the building contract. It was three stories high, with a small golden dome that flew the American flag, and had the feel of an Italian Renaissance castle in an Mgm musical with Mario Lanza and Kathryn Grayson. For my taste, it was too fancy by half. Cliff Sykes, Sr., was always hinting he’d like to tear it down and build a new one.

He’d go to the opposite extreme. The one he’d build would look like the prefab home developments he was putting up on both ends of town.

Judge Whitney’s chambers were on the second floor. I’d missed the rush. The outer office, which was nicely carpeted wall-to-wall and filled with mahogany furnishings and several large portraits of Whitney menfolk down the decades, was empty. There was an American flag standing in the corner and a portrait of George Washington on the wall next to it.

Empty like this, and with paintings of all these dead people, there was a hushed, churchlike air about the place.

The air was soon changed by a beautiful face and a beautiful body, namely one Pamela Forrest. She walked through the door with an aluminum coffeepot in her hand. “Want some?”

“Please.”

“The judge has extra cups in there.”

She wore a white turtleneck sweater and a blue jumper. She looked very smart in what should have been a fairly humdrum outfit. She also smelled great. I always wondered if I wasn’t in love with her perfumes and not her at all.

“Is Frazier still in there?”

She made a face. She was speaking sotto voce. “He’s very upset.”

“His daughter’s dead. I don’t blame him.”

“He seems to be holding the poor judge responsible for everything Kenny ever did.”

Over the years, the Eastern Whitneys shipped most of their ne’er-d-wells out here to Iowa.

Kenny’s father had been a womanizer. He went through three wives and numerous affairs before he finally cracked his car up on Hopkins Road one night. Needless to say, he’d also been a drinker. The Eastern branch of the family had sent him out here originally because he’d plundered a trust fund that was to be used for philanthropy.

He ended up routing a lot of the money to some of his European cronies, who sported such dubious titles as prince, duke and viceroy. When the trust fund was nearly depleted, the family put Kenny’s father and Kenny on a plane and dispatched them out here, where the father was to oversee the family’s rather large cattle holdings. He was smart enough to hire a good manager, a former rodeo star whose baptismal name was Tex (presumably after the well-known Saint Tex), and spend the rest of his time chasing ladies. Without a mother-Mom having run off with one of those titled fellows of dubious cachet-Kenny had only his father to raise him, which went a long way to explaining why Kenny had turned out as he had. Kenny’s father had been the drunken twit who’d tossed my dad out of the family manse.