Ed Gorman - The Day The Music Died

Both his legs and an arm were gone, lost in Korea. A few hours later, the man’s photo was up on the wall, as well as the newspaper clipping about his purple heart and silver star, and Also had himself a new cook trainee.

Al’s was crowded as always. I sat down at the counter and ordered my four pancakes, hash browns, orange juice, coffee and

Pepsi. I’m pretty much a Pepsiholic.

Mom always says she’s surprised I don’t take it intravenously while I sleep.

Juanita, the voluptuous farm-girl waitress, took my order and sashayed to the back to call it in, her hips swinging in time to the rhythms of Jo Stafford’s cheery “Mockingbird Hill” played low on the jukebox. You would find no rock and roll on Also’s jukebox.

Al’s favorite song was “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” He never tired of the dog barking in the bridge of the song. As a culture maven, he’s a great short-order cook.

When the voluptuous Juanita brought my coffee, she asked me about falling into the pond last night, and then everybody along the counter joined in, too. The consensus was that I was lucky. A farmer said that there were places in that pond that were twenty-feet deep. Then we started talking about the dead girl in the canoe. Her identity seemed to be a mystery and it was getting on to 7cccj A.M. But they were working very hard-“they” being Cliffie, on the assumption that she was the missing girl.

He was late arriving. Most mornings, he was already here when I took my place at the counter.

Not today. He would have been busy with funeral arrangements for his daughter, Susan. But folks out here are creatures of strong habit. I knew a guy who went for a mile walk every morning and he went no matter what, even during a tornado one day. He wasn’t hurt, but he’d seen a couple of trees uprooted.

He came in late and took his special place. He wouldn’t dare have let anybody else have it.

The smells were good here. Bacon and coffee and pancake batter on the scorching griddle. Al had ventilated the place well. You didn’t get much scent of sour grease. The odors were lulling me into grogginess-two nights without much sleep had dulled me considerably; I’m always amazed at how Mike Hammer and those guys do it, go sleepless for days on end, and are keen on lots of sex and violence to boot-and then I looked over at him.

Being the Brahmin of Brahmins, Robert Frazier had his own reserved booth in the back.

Every day, the lesser Brahmins trooped back there to pay homage. Occasionally, they’d be asked to sit down and talk. This happened about as often as the Pope said, “Hey, how about a game of craps?”

This morning he was dressed in a homburg and an expensive dark topcoat. I didn’t get a chance to look at his shoes until he was about halfway back to his private booth. The shoes were the big cleated mothers he’d worn yesterday at the judge’s office, the same shoes he’d worn while paying me a visit yesterday.

I let the lesser Brahmins have at him. They were brief today. They’d walk back there, making sure their sorrow masks were in place, and then let the lies filling their mouths spill forth. How much they’d liked Susan and what a great father he’d been to her and how sorry they were for him.

Frazier was reviled but he was also feared. He wasn’t actually ruthless, I suppose; he was simply without empathy. If you made a mistake to his advantage-in a business or personal matter-he’d simply act as business textbooks said he should act. He’d destroyed any number of so-called friends and had done so without any apparent regret. I’d always had the sense that it was all one big poker game to him and there were no personal hard feelings. Not on his part anyway.

They spent twenty minutes with their various genuflections and mea culpas. His grief and rage were there to see and they fed on them: it must have been tasty stuff to many of the lesser Brahmins, Frazier’s grief and rage. Maybe he’d know now how they felt when he decided to up the ante and cause a few players to drop out, devastating family bank accounts in the process. Tasty stuff, indeed.

Juanita served him; she was his favorite.

He usually looked at her with the great avaricious eyes of the richest man in the valley. You could see him hope he would someday add her pelt to his belt. She’d only started here a couple of months ago. He’d probably dry-runned various approaches already. There would be outright bribery, but that would probably offend her; there would be offering her a job in one of his businesses, but that could mean trouble after he’d sucked her youth dry and she was still there; and there would be the emotional approach, the I’m-lonely approach, though the indignity of such a posture would be impossible for such a proud man to endure. He was, I assumed, still contemplating his line of attack.

But not today.

Today, he paid hardly any attention to her. She took his order and walked away. He didn’t even watch her voodoo hips sway magically.

I let him eat his breakfast. For a big man, and especially one so surly, he ate with surprising delicacy. It was like watching a heavyweight fighter with a broken nose and a flattened ear knit doilies.

When I walked over and he raised his head to see who dared to interrupt his after-breakfast cigar, he said, “I don’t have any time to talk, McCain.”

“You made me do a lot of extra work, Mr.

Frazier.”

“Work? What the hell’re you talking about?”

He looked like a cartoon war profiteer, the big Roman senator head with the deep scowl on the wide mean lips, the fat cigar stuck with great disdain in the corner of the mouth.

“My floor. Those shoes of yours left tracks all over the floor. I had to scrub them up.”

“I still don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do, Mr. Frazier. Sure you d.”

We stared at each other a long moment and then he said, “Sit down.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m going to tell the judge about this, of course. You harassing me like this.”

“She’ll probably ground me and won’t let me have any caramel corn for a week.”

“Did I ever tell you how much I dislike you, McCain?”

“No. But I kind of got that message a long time ago.”

I sat down. I lit up a Pall Mall.

I sat back in the booth and looked at him. And said nothing. It was good cop technique, which I learned at the police academy. Silence frequently makes people more nervous than pointed questions.

“I loved her.”

“I’m sure you did, Mr. Frazier.”

“And I could see this coming, the way he got when he drank and everything.”

“He got pretty bad, no doubt about it.”

“So why the hell are you bothering me, McCain?”

I said, calmly, “I wasn’t kidding about wiping up those footprints. Do you know how much I hate doing housework?”

Juanita started over toward us, raising her pad for action. Frazier waved her angrily away.

“What is it you want from me?”

“I want to know what you were looking for in my apartment.”

“I wasn’t in your apartment.”

“Sure you were.”

He put his cigar in the ashtray and then put his head back against the booth and closed his eyes.

He stayed that way for at least a minute. I became aware of all the sounds around me.

Caf@es are noisy places when you actually sit down and listen to them. Waitresses should wear earplugs, like flight crews.

He raised his head and opened his eyes. He looked at me and said, “I wanted to see if you were the one blackmailing him.”

“Blackmailing Kenny?”

“The son of a bitch, whoever it is, has already cost me a lot of money.”

“Anybody else know about this?”

“If you mean the judge or that clown Sykes, no. As for anybody else, Susan knew about it. And the blackmailer.”