Ed Gorman - Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

“I don’t say it to chicks.”

“Yeah, but I mean what if the Pope or somebody called you?”

“Why would the Pope call me?”

“I’m just saying for instance the Pope.”

“I’d say, Hey, Padre, how they hangin’?”

I laughed. “I don’t think you’ve changed much since we were in fifth grade.”

“Well, I didn’t know how to write dirty paperbacks back then.”

“I guess that’s a good point. So what did you dredge up for me from all these mysterious sources of yours?”

“Hardin’s broke.”

“Hardin? He’s one of the wealthiest lawyers in the state.”

“California cleaned him out.”

“What happened in California?”

As I leaned against the inside of the booth, I saw a group of people coming through the doors of the Presbyterian church across the street. They held long white candles that burned in golden nimbuses. There were maybe forty of them in a long line of pairs. A cross-section of folks, white collar and blue collar alike. Rich and poor. They walked down the street saying the Lord’s Prayer. Not hard to figure out the occasion. They were praying to whatever gods there be that this planet and its people would not be subjected to what Hiroshima and Nagasaki had had to endure. And were still enduring. Today’s bombs were many times more powerful than those had been.

“Hey, McCain, you still there?”

“Hey, Kenny, how they hangin’?”

“Very funny.”

“I got distracted. So tell me about California.”

The long line reached the end of the block and turned toward the business section. There would be a rally tonight where people from all four churches would meet in the town square to pray and sing hymns. According to Walter Cronkite, this was going on all over the country. Khrushchev had yet to respond in any fashion to the naval blockade.

“Condos. Sank about everything he had in condos with his brother-in-law out there. I guess they both got dazzled when this old movie star—Rex Thomas, you remember him, right after the war?—anyway this Thomas guy was building these condominiums on the ocean front. First thing Hardin did was ask for safety of the land to be evaluated. You sink all this money into building condos and they tumble into the ocean some night, you got some real problems.

“Anyway, the guy Hardin hires—some guy this LA lawyer recommended—he says you’d have to be crazy to build where Rex Thomas wants to. So Hardin and his brother-in-law are all ready to pull out but Thomas convinces them to get a second opinion.”

“I think I can see this one coming.”

“So they get this guy they meet who’s checking out the land for some other investors and Hardin gets along with him—naturally the guy is impressive—and so Hardin says let’s let this guy check out the land. If he says it’s all right—”

“Rex Thomas knows the guy. Told him to pretend to be checking out the land for these other mysterious investors.”

“Then you can write the rest of this yourself, man. Hardin and his brother-in-law give Rex Thomas practically everything they’ve got. The condos get built.”

“And tumble into the ocean?”

“Not yet. It’s going to happen. But it hasn’t happened yet.”

“So how did Hardin lose his money?”

“What Thomas—who is now in Europe somewhere marrying this countess and making the same kind’ve of swashbucklers he used to make in Hollywood—what Thomas did was cheapjack the shit out of the construction. They’re like a thousand times shoddier than regular housing developments. I mean, the toilets don’t flush, the doors fall off, the air conditioning sounds like a B-52 when you start it up. Like that.”

“So Thomas cheapjacked the work and pocketed the difference.”

“And that difference may be as much as two hundred thousand dollars.”

“They can’t sue?”

“Chapter Thirteen. Thomas set up his own corporation and ran everything through there. Soon as the first residents moved in, he declares Chapter Thirteen and skies over to Europe to marry this countess chick.”

“‘Skies’?”

“Yeah. I read that in Variety the other day.”

“So he’s broke.”

“Just about. But I’m not sure what any of this would have to do with whatever’s going on that you won’t tell me about.”

“I don’t either. I’ll have to run it through my giant brain several times before I can figure it out.”

“Well, that’s all I’ve got.”

“Thanks, Kenny.”

“You owe me a meal.”

“You like drive-up windows?”

“A real meal, McCain. A real meal.”

After I’d hung up, I stood outside the phone booth in the chill night, smoking my Lucky and listening to the singing of the group that had just left the church. It was hopeful and despairing at the same time, that trapeze flight of our existence.

I was on the right side of town to check out Hastings’s motel so I decided to break a few laws tonight, pick his lock and peek inside. On the way over, I thought of the four grim men sitting in Ross Murdoch’s den. Murdoch would pick up the phone and call Cliffie, and Murdoch’s life in a very real sense would end. As would the lives of the other three men. All the people who’d envied them, all the people they’d pushed around to get their way, all the home-grown moralists would become an angry Greek chorus. From the pulpit, though their names would not be used, they would be denounced as libertines and used as examples of our corrupt age; and in the taverns they would be denounced as laughing-stocks and used as examples of how rich guys had all the advantages when it came to women.

I passed a shiny new motel with late model shark-finned cars in all the parking lots and a general air of prosperity in the landscaping, the signage and the clean, inviting, brightly lit front office.

I parked half a block from Hastings’s motel. No air of prosperity here. A kind of prairie grimness: low-echelon traveling salesmen; beer tavern romeos and romeoettes trying to blot out the burden of spouses and kids waiting so hungrily for them at home; and sad itinerant families with too many kids and never enough money, traveling to where some magazine told them were good-paying jobs that always seemed to be have just been filled when they arrived. Then back into their rusty beaten old trucks and on to the highway again, satisfied to settle for minimum wage and three squares a day—if they can only find it.

Country music twang; sitcom robot laughter; slap and tickle, thrust and groan—all the familiar sounds of motel life behind those heavy dusty faded curtains and loose doors a ten-year-old could open if you gave him a few minutes.

I used my old Cub Scout pocket knife. Best eighty-nine cents I’d ever spent. I was inside in less than thirty seconds.

I used a penlight to look around. There was a briefcase that didn’t reveal a lor besides his taste in reading. Three western paperbacks by Luke Short. At least he had good taste in frontier stories.

I found what I wanted in a manila envelope. I sat down in a chair and lighted a cigarette and started looking through all the clippings. In case he decided to burst through the door, I put my .38 in my lap.

There was, it seemed, a magic act known as “The Majestic Magic-ans.” Judging by the clippings, they played every kind of venue there was, from the seamier lounges in Vegas to VFW halls in Beloit, Wisconsin. Most of the clippings weren’t reviews, just notices that “The Majestic Magic-ans” were about to or had appeared there.

There were two reviews and both of them were moderately favorable as to the magic part of the show but almost lascivious when it came to the male reviewer discussing the “beautiful assistant Shandra.” She sure as hell was beautiful, especially half-naked in her Magic-ans costume. The only time I’d seen her she was dead back there in the bomb shelter.