Ed Gorman - The Day The Music Died

I crunched pieces of glass as I walked to the front door and opened it.

“Sykes!” I yelled before turning the corner where the crowd could see me. I didn’t want some yokel thinking I was Greene. “It’s me, McCain.” I had my hands up.

“Hold your fire!” Sykes shouted over his bullhorn.

I felt stupid, my hands up in the air and all, like one of the guys Robert Stack catches every week on The Untouchables, but I kept them there in case one of the more enthusiastic members of the mob got any ideas.

Sykes walked over to me.

“No deals,” he said.

“No deals? What deals?”

“No deals with your colored friend.”

“Nobody’s asking for any deals.”

“What was all the gunfire?”

“Nothing much,” I said. “The important thing is Frazier’s bringing Greene out. Frazier’s got a gun and he’s in good shape. He just wants to make sure nobody-the crowd or you-tries anything on Greene.”

“Me?” he snapped. “I’m the law here.

I’ll do what I damned well please.”

“That part of the oath you take when you’re chief?

“I’ll do what I damned well please”?”

But he was already moving away from me, putting the bullhorn to his mouth, instructing everyone to move back, saying that Frazier and Greene were coming out.

He also told them not to do anything stupid and to keep their mouths shut when Frazier and Greene appeared. I had to admit, for once he was doing a competent job as a cop.

I headed on to my car up the hill. I wanted to get back to town. I needed to find Ruthie. I also needed to call Judge Whitney and bring her up to date.

A couple of out-of-town reporters rushed me and tried to get me to talk but I just kept on moving. One of them put his hand on my shoulder.

I spun around and faced him and he shrunk away.

Maybe all those teenage days of trying to look like Robert Ryan were paying off.

I was about twenty yards from my car when I saw a somewhat familiar form emerging out of thick fog.

Rita Havers, Doc Novotony’s secretary at the morgue. She wore a leather car coat with the collar up and jeans. She also wore a jaunty little golf cap. She was proof that a woman well into her forties could easily still be damned good-looking. Fog encased her like iridescent coils illumined by moonlight, lending her an almost extraterrestrial radiance. The dampness was even worse now. A lot of people with arthritis would be having a bad bone-chilled night.

“Hi, McCain,” she said.

“Hi.”

“Doc’s busy at the hospital so he sent me here to see what was going on. He always counts on me to help him out.”

“It’s all over.”

“Nobody dead?”

“Nobody dead.”

She smiled. “Good. Now I can go back home. Jack Paar’s got Eddie Fisher on tonight. I’m a big Eddie Fisher fan.”

Her earlier words came back. “You said “he can always count on me.””

“Uh-huh. Doc Novotony.”

“When I was in the morgue, you said that about somebody else.”

“I did?”

“Yeah, don’t you remember? You said that there was somebody your cousin could always count on. That he never let her down.”

“Oh,” she said, “yes.” Obviously remembering now. “I never should have said that.”

“Why?”

“Well, you know. It’s family business.

Private family business.”

“You said she was pregnant and he helped her out.”

She shook her head and then looked with sudden longing at the crowd. She wanted to be down there with them. She wanted to be anywhere except here with me, answering questions about private family matters. “I’ve got to go.”

I touched her arm. “This could be very important, Rita. Where did she get her abortion?”

“McCain, look, you’re really putting me on the spot here.”

“I mean to put you on the spot, Rita.

It’s very important that I know that name.”

She looked longingly downhill to the lights and the crowd. You could tell by a sudden hush that Frazier and Greene had appeared. They hadn’t gotten the bloodshed they’d wanted but at least they’d gotten something. A colored man arrested.

Maybe Sykes would work him over later.

“Please, Rita. Please help me.”

She sighed. “It was Jim.”

“Jim?”

“You know. Jim the handyman.”

“He did the abortion?” The name, the personal style, the way he was perceived by the community-none of it fit. Jim the handyman was Jim the abortionist?

“Yes. She said he laughed about it. How he was a handyman in every sense of the word.”

“Jim,” I said. “Jim the handyman.” I thought of all the medical supplies he’d bought at the Rexall earlier. Maybe they weren’t for his animal menagerie. Maybe they were for the girls he aborted.

I kissed her on the cheek and ran back up to my car.

There’s an area on the edge of town that reminds me of my one and only trip to beautiful New England. Narrow, spiraling roads with trees set very near the gravel. Hollows that reap fog so thick you can’t even see the lights of farmhouses. A lot of dense hardwood forests that glow with the moonlight trapped in the fog that drips from the trees like moss.

I kept the ragtop in second gear all the way. A couple of times, the fog-mazed roads curving abruptly, I nearly ended up in the ditch. I kept the radio off. I needed to concentrate on my driving.

The owl song didn’t make the foggy night any cheerier. Nor did the coyote cries. The car continued to grope its way to Jim’s.

I slowed down every time I saw a country mailbox, looking for Jim’s place.

I used my spotlight on six metal mailboxes before I found the right one. There were no lights buried in the fog. But the box identified Jim the Handyman along with his address.

I pulled the car over to the edge of a gully; I didn’t want to turn in the drive, let him know I was coming. I also didn’t want anybody to run into it and kill themselves-or damage the ragtop.

I grabbed the flashlight out of the glove compartment. Clicked it on. Nothing. I tried the same trick as the kid at the Dx station: I whomped it against my hand. Light flickered on and off. I whomped it harder. The bulb lit up full glow and stayed steady. This whomping business couldn’t be underestimated.

The fog was a damp hand, pressed clammy across my face. I couldn’t see three feet ahead. The owl again, and the coyote, and the tramp and crack of my footsteps on gravel.

I started up the drive. I had to sneak in.

If he heard me, he might panic and accidentally kill Ruthie. I kept thinking of the poor girl in the canoe.

I’d only been to Jim’s once. He had a large frame house with a long, shallow front porch. He had refrigerators and parts of furnaces and lawn mowers and Tv sets and all other kinds of junk on the porch. He’d mentioned that these were “dead” items, the ones on the porch, and that he’d be hauling them to the dump soon. He then expressed his displeasure about how the dump was run.

I doubted that any of the dead items had been hauled away as yet. He’d said this four or five years ago. I tramped on. I kept waiting for the outline of the house to impress itself on the shifting fog. But nothing. I was in the netherworld.

It took me a while to reach the house. I knew I was near because of the smells. These were smells of a meal cooked, a tobacco pipe smoked, of oil and metal rust and sweet sawn lumber.

I stumbled on the first porch step. I didn’t make much noise, fortunately. I went up the rest of the steps on my hands first, groping, exploring. Far within the house, I heard voices. But they were so muffled, I couldn’t tell who they belonged to, or what was being said.