Ed Gorman - Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

I sat in the park and alternately read through my notebook and watched the squirrels stock away food for the winter. I wished I could be a part of nature the way all the little animals were, a true part of the cycle. Even living in a small town in the Midwest, you are cut off from nature. You get more of a chance to see it but you rarely have the time—or, face it, the inclination—to get into the woods or the prairies or the farm fields and learn about it firsthand. The irony was that the people who spent the most time with nature—excepting farmers, of course—were the hunters, whose pleasure it was to kill a part of it. Life, as my dad always says, is like that sometimes.

I stopped off at a store that sold used items and bought a copy of Budd Schulberg’s Winds Across the Everglades. Nobody had paid much attention to the book or the movie. But both were lyrical and bloody looks at the destruction of the Florida Everglades as far back as the turn of the century. Just the same way nobody paid much attention now to how Midwestern rivers were being used as toilets by manufacturing plants.

I figured I’d get in fifteen minutes of reading before Janice Wilson showed up.

But she was waiting for me. As soon as I pushed through the glass outer door, I saw that my office door was open about an inch. I’d left it that way in case she beat me here. Through the crack between door and frame, I saw the back of a blonde head with the collar of a blue suede jacket turned up.

I had to get all the way into my office before I realized that she wasn’t doing anything. Even when you’re sitting silently, you tend to move a bit, scratch your chin, run a hand against your hair, shift your position, unconscious, nervous mannerisms that everybody has.

She wasn’t moving.

I walked around her chair and looked down at her.

She was a very dignified-looking working-class girl. The white ruffled blouse and blue skirt and blue hose and blue one-inch heels were tasteful but cheap. The thigh-length suede coat was a notch up. The matching suede purse was stitched badly and the pieces hadn’t quite fitted together. But there was nothing cheap about the face. It was one of those long, earnest, solemn faces that bespeak hard work, honesty and intelligence. Well-scrubbed. Perfectly made up. Not quite beautiful but quietly sexual.

There was blood on the right side of her head. Fresh blood. Her breath came in little bursts, almost asthmatic-sounding.

I rushed to the john and soaked up half a dozen paper towels. I took a pint of bourbon from my desk drawer and poured three fingers into a glass. The booze is for clients. It’s in the private eye’s list of Things To Have In The Office. I have yet to get a fedora or a trench coat but I have no doubt they’ll be coming along soon.

“Somebody hit me.”

“They sure did.”

She’d come awake like Sleeping Beauty. Wide blue eyes trying to remember who and where she was. Dry, full lips parting to speak sleepily. Confusion, fear, and finally recognition all playing silently across her appealing womanly prairie face.

“You’re McCain.”

“I’m McCain.”

“It was dark in your doorway there. I think I caught somebody trying to get into your office. They really let me have it.”

“Apparently.”

She spidered long fingers across the area of the wound. “I don’t think I’ll need stitches.”

I handed her the glass with the bourbon and then tapped two aspirin out of a bottle. She took both gratefully. She shuddered once after ingesting the aspirin. Then she began sipping the bourbon.

“Should I call the police?”

“No. That’s why I came here. So I wouldn’t have to talk to the police. I just want to tell my little story and leave town.”

I went behind my desk, sat down, took out my notebook and grabbed a pencil.

“She hated him, you know.”

“I guess we need to back up a bit, Janice. Who hated who?”

“Who hated whom, actually. I got A’s in English in high school.”

“Good for you, Janice.”

She smiled for the first time and it was worth the wait. She was like right out of the box at Christmas time—shiny, fine, immaculate. “I always correct people’s grammar.”

“Endearing habit.”

This time the laugh was throatier. “You don’t hide your irritation very well.”

I smiled. “I’m sorry. You’re sitting here with a lump on your head and I’m being less than gentlemanly. My apologies. Now how about your story.”

“Well, let me try to organize it. I guess the simplest way to say it is that Karen Hastings used to come into the Embers in Cedar Rapids. I grew up on a farm near Cedar Rapids and started taking night classes to get a college degree. The tips were good at the Embers and I liked the people so I’ve been there for three years. I’ve got two years of college behind me now. Anyway, Karen always came in and ate. She was so beautiful I could see why she’d attract all her men. Then I started to see that she kind of rotated through four different men over and over. There was a pattern there. And they ran to a type. Twenty years older, obviously well-to-do, and very taken with her. Sort of courtly, in fact. She was like the pretty little girl that all the uncles wanted to shower with gifts. The funny thing is, she always looked lonely. I guess I picked up on that because I’m the same way myself. I have a lot of opportunity for dates but most of them just make me feel worse than better. The guy I was seeing is in the Marines. Last winter they sent him to Viet Nam. Have you ever heard of it?”

“I know we’re sending more and more troops over there is about all.”

“Anyway, so I’m lonely and she’s lonely and one of the nights she came in alone, she asked me if I wanted to have a drink after I got off. That’s how we got to be friends. The place she lived in—I’m a farm girl, I’d never seen any place like it. I’d never seen a sports car like hers, either. She didn’t ever say it—she wasn’t much for talking about herself at first—but I caught on that these men were keeping her somehow. I wasn’t sure of the arrangement right away but it got to be clear. And then they started getting jealous of each other.”

“Anyone in particular?”

“Carlson?”

“Peter Carlson?”

“Yes. I was in her apartment one night when he started banging on the door. She was terrified of him. We had all the lights off. But he was so drunk, he just kept pounding. I asked her why didn’t she call the police? Later that night she explained her arrangement with the men. I could see why she couldn’t call the police. Then she started hearing from her brother. The first time I met him I couldn’t believe they were even related. Quiet little guys like that I usually feel sorry for. But not him. He scared me. He was four years older than she was. She told me he used to force her to have sex with him all the time they were growing up. He wasn’t as meek and mild as he liked to seem. Anyway, what he wanted her to do was start shaking down these men. He knew that with Carlson acting the way he was, the whole thing was going to come apart very soon. But he saw the opportunity with Ross Murdoch running for governor to really collect one big blackmail payment. He said that since he’d set this whole thing up he was entitled to half of it.”

“Did he ever threaten her?”

“Oh, sure. A lot. She was afraid of him. She told me that she’d tried to hide from him several times—she lived in New York and Miami twice each—but that he’d found her both times.”

“Was she planning to run away this time?”

“I think so. But I’m not sure.” She paused. “She didn’t want me around any more. When I called, she’d get me off the phone as quickly as possible. And the same when I saw her on the street one day. She said she was busy. But I could tell that something else was going on.”