Ed Gorman: Bad Moon Rising

Sarah Powers seemed lost. She glanced around the room. A man told me once that the only time he’d been in jail the whole experience was like a nightmare. This was county, not even hard time, and he only did thirty days for a drunk driving charge. He said all those prison movies were fake. They never dealt with how oppressive it was to be forced to live with men who had spent their lives cheating, stealing, beating people. And enjoying it. That was what scared him the most. The way they bragged about it. Then, he said, there were the smells. He said there were even men who laughed about the smells. I wondered if Sarah was having a similar experience here. Yes, the jail was new, and yes, she obviously considered herself worldly and tough. But she was really just a middle-class woman terrified for her brother. And now, I suspected, terrified for herself.

Sarah Powers said, “I’m sorry about knocking you out.”

I just nodded.

Harry Renwick had good radar. “I’ll keep an eye on her for you, Sam.”

I think she would have hugged him if she hadn’t had the cuffs on. Now she had at least one friend here. My first cigarette was long gone. I lighted a second and let her take a deep drag. Then I handed Harry my nearly new pack. “These are hers.”

“They sure are,” he said, taking the Luckies from me.

Sunlight blasted me into temporary blindness as I walked from the station to my car. Only when I was halfway there did I see the three people standing two cars from mine: Paul Mainwaring, his daughter Nicole, and Tommy Delaney. Delaney was a local high school football hero and former boyfriend of Vanessa.

He had a little kid’s face-all red hair and freckles and pug nose-set atop an NFL body. In his black Hawkeye T-shirt you could see why he was so feared on the field. He started toward me, but Paul Mainwaring himself put a halting hand on his shoulder.

The car I referred to happened to be a new white four-door Jaguar.

I usually found myself defending Paul Mainwaring. For all his work with the military and inventing things vital to war-he was a prominent military engineer-he had a true interest in helping the poor and had given thousands of dollars to the local soup kitchen and church relief funds. The irony wasn’t lost on me; I’d always wondered if it was lost on him.

The face he showed now, as he broke from the group and walked toward me, stunned me. The white button-down shirt, the chinos, and the white tennis shoes spoke of the preppy he would always be. The silver hair was disheveled for once. The sunken, bruised eye sockets and the unshaven cheeks and jaws revealed a man lost in not only despair but confusion. Even his walk was uncertain.

Tommy Delaney broke in front of him, aiming himself directly at me.

“Tommy, get back there where you belong.”

Tommy gave me the practiced look that probably made even the toughest kids in high school run when he turned it on them. I just watched him as he fell into sulking. Behind him, Mainwaring’s daughter Nicole started sobbing and put her hands to her face. I was embarrassed to be in Mainwaring’s presence. I’d had the young man thought to be the killer of his daughter and I’d lost him because I wasn’t clever enough to outthink a twenty-two-year-old girl. I wanted to say something but I wasn’t sure what that would be.

“Paul, I owe you an apology.”

He brushed it away. “It wasn’t your fault, Sam. Don’t listen to all this. I was in the army for four years. Things just go wrong sometimes. The girl admitted that she struck you on the back of the head with a steel rod and knocked you out. I don’t know anybody who could stand up to that.”

I wanted him to repeat what he’d just said. I couldn’t quite believe it after just one hearing. I was already known as the man who’d been outsmarted by a young girl. It was absurd-as Paul said, anybody can be felled by a steel rod smashing into your skull-but when you have enemies they work with what they’re given. And yet the one who should despise me the most for my stupidity was telling me that getting smacked in the head was the reason I wasn’t able to arrest Neil Cameron. Not because I was incompetent.

“I let myself down, Paul.”

He extended his hand and we shook. I wasn’t sure why we shook.

Then he offered his second surprise. “I want to hire you, Sam.”

I allowed myself the luxury of a smile. “Right. I can see that. I come highly recommended.”

“As I said, things happen. You’ve done some good work as a private investigator. And you know all the kids out at that commune. If anybody knows where Cameron might have gone, they do.”

“I’m not sure they trust me.”

“They trust you more than they do Cliffie. I’ve asked him a number of times to stop harassing them but all I get are those speeches Reverend Cartwright gives. All the marijuana and sex. By now Cliffie must’ve run every one of them in at least once. They certainly won’t cooperate with him.”

“I’m representing Sarah Powers, Paul. You should know that up front.”

He blinked only once. “I didn’t know that.”

“That’s why I think you should look for somebody else.”

“She of course says Neil didn’t kill Van.”

“That’s what she says.”

“And you believe her?”

“In a case like this I only represent people I think are innocent. I want to find Neil and have him turn himself in.”

“What if he’s guilty?”

“Then he’s guilty. If he’s not, then I want to find the person who really killed Van.”

“Then there’s no conflict. I still want to hire you.”

“I wish you’d think it over. I can recommend a few people in Cedar Rapids or even Des Moines. It might be better to let them handle it instead of me.”

For the first time I saw resentment-anger-in the long, angular face. “You have a stake in this now, too, Sam. You need to prove to people you’re not the fool they say you are.”

He’d meant for his words to hurt. He’d succeeded. “I’ll send a check to your office. I appreciate this, Sam.” He spoke through a kind of pain I’d never had to deal with. “Maybe I’ll call you tomorrow.”

He turned and walked back to his people and his Jag. His daughter came to him and slid her arm around his waist. She tilted her head against his chest as he guided her to their car.

Tommy walked a few feet toward me and said, “Hope no girls beat you up on the way home, McCain.”

“Get back here,” Mainwaring shouted without turning around.

Of course Tommy gave me the famous soul-freezing evil eye before he did what Mainwaring said. I wondered what he’d look like if I was fortunate enough to back over him six or seven times.

A few years ago, before Jamie married her wastrel boyfriend Turk and bore him a baby girl as sweet as Jamie herself, I always checked out the clothes she wore. She had one of those stunning bodies you see on the covers of paperbacks, usually under the title Teenage Tease or some such thing. The wholesome pretty face only made her more appealing. These days I checked her for signs of bruises and cuts. In the first year of their marriage Turk had given her a black eye. I returned the favor by giving Turk a black eye. I’m not tough, but I’m tougher than Turk. I also drew up divorce papers that Jamie refused to sign. She loved him and he would change, she said.

These days I had her solemn word that if he ever got physically violent with her again she was to tell me immediately. I made her promise on her mother’s life. A good Catholic girl, she took such oaths seriously.

Turk still had his surfing band, probably the only one in landlocked Iowa-despite the fact that surfing bands were now seen as wimpy and irrelevant. And he was still going to be on American Bandstand, though American Bandstand was fading fast. And he was still going to have several gold records. And he was still, when the time was right, planning to become a movie star. And he still didn’t want to get a job because working conflicted with his songwriting and practicing. He couldn’t even babysit his little daughter. That was left to Jamie’s mother. These artistes, they need their time to create.