Ed Gorman - Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

She was silent for a time.

“Then what happened, Deirdre?” I said softly.

“Then there was just—nothing. She didn’t exist because the terrible man couldn’t have his terrible dreams any more.”

“That’s pretty sad.”

“Maybe not, Sam. Maybe it was better that she didn’t exist. That nobody existed. Then they couldn’t hurt each other or betray each other.”

She began to cry, then, in little spasms of delicate grief. “Why don’t you just call the police, Sam, and we’ll get it all over with.”

“I can give you a little more time.”

“No, Sam.” She sat up in the chair and looked at me. “Please. Now. We’ll just get it over with.”

I called all the people I needed to call, including Cliffie, and then went over to the bar in the den and had a drink. I went to the bottom of the stairs twice and shouted up to Deirdre. I doubted she’d try to escape. She answered both times.

There were two cop cars. Cliffie came on his motorcycle. All three had sirens blaring. The first contingent of press wasn’t far behind. Cliffie had obviously called them.

He came up to me where I stood on the steps, in the glare of patrol car headlights. He’d had time to put on his white Stetson and his swagger.

“I figured it was her all along,” he said.

“Sure you did. That’s why you arrested her father.”

“Ever think I was trying to set a trap for her?”

“The mind boggles,” I said.

“Where the hell is she?”

“I’ll go get her.”

He turned and waved at a cop with a shotgun. “Earle, get over here.” To me he said, “Earle’n me’ll go inside with you.”

I couldn’t fault the police procedure but I knew why he was doing it. So he could bring her out on the porch personally. In handcuffs. His hand on her arm. Cliffie Sykes, Jr. Bad-ass.

“All right,” I said.

“Nice of you to give me permission and all,” Cliffie said.

I couldn’t tell you today which came first, the scream or the gunshot. I don’t believe I’d ever heard a scream or a gunshot that sounded quite as loud as these did. They seemed to paralyze everybody for long seconds.

And then Cliffie, Earle and his shotgun, and I were running inside to the staircase. Cliffie and I reached the first step at the same time. I pushed him out of the way and took the stairs two at a time.

The weeping guided me to the master bedroom. The door was closed. I flung it open. What I saw didn’t make sense at first. Deirdre’s mother hadn’t gone to the hospital after all.

Irene sitting on the chair of her enormous makeup table, her face in all four mirrors. She wore a simple blue dress. Her right hand was on the table and in her right hand was a large handgun. Above her there was a large oval crack in the ceiling plaster. A snowfall of the stuff was all over her hair and shoulders.

Cliffie damned near knocked me down getting into the room. He had his gun drawn.

The weeping came from Deirdre, who was in a chair by the fireplace. Curled up in a fetal position.

The other cops were crammed in the doorway, watching.

Cliffie said, “You take your hand off that gun, Missus. You’re just gonna make everything worse for everybody. I came here to arrest your daughter for murder. And I’d advise you not to get in the way.”

She didn’t do it right away. Instead, she just looked up at him. I had a sense that she was lost to reality for all time. There was a sadness about her that you see in the faces of the hopeless on the wards of mental hospitals. They’re so sedated they walk zombie-style down the halls, slippers slapping, heads down.

She lifted her hand from the gun and said quietly to me, “I killed all three of them, Sam. Deirdre realized this tonight when I took her car and went out to the summer house.” She raised her regal head to Deirdre, still in the chair. “She’s protected me all her life. While I was the one who should have been protecting her. I was selfish. I should’ve divorced Ross a long time ago. Deirdre would have been so much better.”

She glanced down at her large, muscular hands. “They were terrible people, Sam. Terrible people.” Then she went on to explain that Kevin Hastings had tried to blackmail her directly and showed her the Embers receipt and told her he knew what was going on. And then she saw a way to destroy them all—expose the men for what they were, rid everybody of the Hastingses.

Then she looked back at me. “I killed them, Sam. Not Deirdre.”

And I knew she was telling the truth.

TWENTY

HALF A DAY AFTER Washington announced that a deal had been struck with Russia, that Khrushchev would be dismantling the missile sites, there was a party in the park. A sure sign that it’s a real true community party is when very old people dance. And dance they did. There was a polka band and that was their muse. Other sure signs of a true community party was free burgers, free potato salad, free pop, free beer. The youngest teenagers raced around the park performing antic pranks, while the older teenagers flirted, or yearned to flirt, or hung out with kids who weren’t afraid to flirt. It seemed like every woman there had an armload of babies, bouquets of babies. The men from wars past played horseshoes and smoked corncob pipes or Luckies or Camels and talked about how Jack Kennedy had redeemed himself from his invasion of Cuba.

Late in the afternoon a bunch of kids, all of whom tried to look like either Elvis or Buddy Holly or eerie amalgams of both, replaced the polka band and swung into rock. This brought out little ones as wee as three and kids of eight and up. I did all my dutiful dancing with cousins somewhere around my age. In small towns, you were expected to. They’d been fine for dunking in pools, beating in races, locking in closets, scaring the hell out of in dark rooms, laughing at the first time you ever saw them in makeup or high heels, even have useless idle verboten crushes on from time to time. Now it was time to act like a grown-up and dance with them. One of them was pregnant, one of them was drunk, one of them was gorgeous and one of them listed eight things I’d done to her over our mutual childhood that she still planned to pay me back for, including dropping an Ex-Lax tablet into a Pepsi.

For these hours, euphoria—which had to be going on all over the world—euphoria triumphed in Black River Falls, Iowa. Sundown came with a clear and melancholy beauty, with even some of the very oldest dancing to Buddy Holly songs … and people who didn’t usually speak to each other there were talking with Pepsi and Pabst cans in their hands.

The world had been spared the worst war of all. And for these exquisite hours we were bound up, each of us, in our common humanity.

I was finishing off a Pepsi when I felt fingers on my arm. I turned and saw Mary who said, “How much would you charge to dance with me?”

I looked at that shy sweet face, that face I’d been looking at since we’d had our kindergarten photo taken together, and said, “This is your lucky day, ma’am. Sam McCain is having a sale. For you he’s absolutely free.”

“Well, that sounds reasonable enough.”

“It sure is good to see you, Mary.”

She laughed, taking my hand. “Shut up and dance, Sam.”

A ballad would’ve been nice. But even bopping to “Great Balls of Fire,” it was romantic as hell anyway. Because everything was romantic at this moment in the history of old planet Earth. Everything.