The Day the Music Died (3 page)

H
E LED ME THROUGH
the dining room so we didn’t have to see the body of his wife in the living room.

In the kitchen, he pointed to the breakfast nook and then he opened a cupboard door and pulled down a fresh bottle of Canadian Club. He slit the seal with his thumbnail. He grabbed two glasses, opened the refrigerator and the freezer compartment and got out a small bowl of ice, and then carried everything over to the breakfast nook where I was sitting. I’d put my .45 away. It had started to feel awfully melodramatic.

As he poured and noisily dumped in some ice cubes, I looked out the window at a squirrel wrestling with an acorn it had found on the sunny snow. The border collie was back, too, sniffing my tires.

“Sweetest dog I’ve ever owned,” Kenny Whitney said. He smiled sadly. “Wish I had her personality.” His voice startled me. I associated Kenny with the quick, derisive jab, making you feel bad for being unpopular or ugly or fat or sissy, at least in his eyes. And for short, barked threats. He was a master at short, barked threats. But this was a slow and considered voice, and it was an adult voice. That’s what startled me most. He looked a lot older than he should have, but he’d turned into an adult in the process.

“Why the hell’d you shoot at me?”

He shook his head, “Sorry. I was just crazy is all I can say. I wasn’t really trying to hit you, though.”

“You came close enough.”

“I should never have called her. Gotten her involved.”

He leaned his head against the back of the nook. The kitchen sparkled. The appliances were brand-new and sat there basking in their own suburban glory. Then he sat up straight and wrapped a massive fullback’s hand around his glass. He drained the whole drink in a single swallow and then filled up again with the bottle he’d just opened. “You see her in there?”

“Yeah.”

“You call Sykes yet?”

“I wanted to make sure you were still alive.”

“Oh. I’m alive. Unfortunately.”

“You kill her, Kenny?”

He looked up at me. “Yeah.”

I let out a long sigh. “When?”

“Early last night. We were both pretty drunk.”

“What happened?”

“She wanted a divorce. I didn’t.”

“So you shot her?”

He stared at me for a long time. “Yeah.”

“Don’t tell me anything more.”

“Why not?”

“Because you need a lawyer.”

“I don’t suppose you’d want that honor?”

I smiled at him. “Kenny, I don’t like you. I’ve never liked you. Believe me, you don’t want me for a lawyer.”

“I guess I was kind of a jerk back in school, wasn’t I?”

“You remember my black eye?”

He shrugged. “Not really. I mean, I gave a lot of guys black eyes.”

“Well, you gave me mine right in front of Pamela Forrest.”

He looked at me and grinned. “Oh, yeah, now I remember. Not your black eye. But Pamela. Man, you really made a fool of yourself over her.”

“I guess I did.”

His face became dour and old again. “Well, join the club, my friend. That’s the problem Susan and I were having. And that’s one of the reasons I killed her. She was running around on me.”

“Running around on you? God, look how you ran around on her.”

He was pouring himself his third drink. His third drink since we’d sat down, anyway. He’d had many more during the night. “You need to keep up on the town gossip, McCain. I quit running around on her over two years ago. I even went on the wagon. She’d threatened to leave me and then I realized how much I loved her. Then she fell in love with somebody else.”

“Don’t tell me anything more. Save it for your lawyer.”

“All I was going to say was that when she asked me for a divorce last night, I couldn’t handle it. I took down a bottle of whiskey—I’d gotten used to having it around, you know, for when we had company and stuff—and then I really started knocking down the drinks. After two years of being dry, they really hit me hard.”

“So then you killed her?”

He shrugged again. “Then I killed her.”

The funny thing was, I didn’t believe him. “Why’re you telling me this?”

“That I killed her? Because it’s the truth. We may as well get it over with. With Sykes and all. Man, will that hillbilly be gloating. He’ll actually have a member of Judge Whitney’s family in his jail. He’ll probably play Webb Pierce records all day long.” Webb Pierce was the country-western favorite of the moment. A small Iowa town like this, people liked to show their sophistication by shunning country music. Badge of honor.

“I still want to know why you’re telling me this.”

“I told you. Because I just want to get it over with. It’s pretty obvious that I killed her, isn’t it?” Then he drained off his drink.

I stood up. “I’m going to walk over to the phone and call Sykes.”

“Fine. That’s what I want you to do.”

“I’m also going to call Bob Tompkins for you. He’s the best criminal attorney in this part of the state. Your aunt has a lot of respect for him.”

He looked at me abruptly. “I don’t want to have to see her again.”

I wasn’t sure who he meant. “Who?”

“You know. Susan.”

“Okay.” Then, “It’s freezing in here.”

“Yeah, after I shot her, I guess I went a little nuts. I smashed out some windows and stuff.”

I still didn’t believe he’d killed her and I still didn’t know why. I went to the phone and called Cliff Sykes, Jr., and listened to him try to hide his glee. Then I called Judge Whitney and repeated what I’d told Sykes. I also told her I’d like to invite Bob Tompkins in. She said she thought that was a good idea.

I had just hung up when the shot sounded. I glanced at the empty breakfast nook behind me. I had a feeling he’d been better at it this time. A kind of sorrow came over me, one I hadn’t counted on driving out here. I’d always hated him and with good reason. But he’d been sad this morning, human-animal sad, a creature frenzied and forlorn and crazed, and he wouldn’t let me hate him anymore, the son of a bitch, no matter how much I might have wanted to.

I went upstairs and found him on the bed. He looked even older now, a lot older.

T
WO HOURS LATER, I
got to play celebrity. I’d needed a haircut for two weeks so I walked from my tiny law office to Bill and Phil’s. The walk helped; the cold air woke me up, the golden sunlight lent me an air of hope. Sometimes, I’d think about Pamela, sometimes I’d think about Kenny, and sometimes I’d think about Buddy Holly and Richie Valens.

Bill Malley gave me my first haircut when I was two or three. My folks have a photo of me sitting on a board stretched across the arms of his barber chair with his barber sheet drawn up to my neck. He always gave little kids suckers, the way dentists do. Adults, he just gives speeches. Bill’s favorite topics are communism (he’s against it), fluoride (he’s against it), civil rights marches (he’s against them), Senator McCarthy (he was for him) and Sammy Davis, Jr. (he’s against him).

By rights, I should go to Phil, who’s a Democrat like myself. But Phil has a halitosis problem that could melt a metal wall.

Both chairs were filled, one of them by Jim Truman. He was a handyman who worked out of his house on the edge of town, along a scenic leg of the Cedar River. The joke was that he wanted to be buried in an Osh-Kosh coffin because everything else he wore—cap, shirt, bib overalls—carried the Osh-Kosh label. He’d come here a few years ago after the Korean War, in which he’d lost his leg below the knee. Now he wore an artificial one. The Fix-It Man was what he had painted on the front of his trailer. He was a marvel of arcane knowledge and physical dexterity. He could fix everything from a blender to a car engine. He always said he couldn’t fix TVs but folks knew that was because he didn’t want to hurt Benny Welsh’s business, Benny being the guy who first started selling and repairing TVs here in the late forties.

My celebrity was a result of my being at the Whitney place when Kenny took his life. I’d waited around for Sykes and his incompetents to show up, told them what I knew, then headed back for town.

When I got done repeating my account for the boys in the barbershop, Bill said, “Probably fluoride.”

“Huh?” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “It rots your brain just the way the commies want it to.”

“Ah,” I said.

“Well, figure it out for yourself, Counselor,” he said. A lot of people called me “counselor” as a joke, mostly because I’ve still got a baby face and freckles. “Guy brushes his teeth as much as Kenny did, and the water’s got fluoride in it, how long before the guy goes psycho and kills somebody?”

Phil rolled his eyes. “There go those commies workin’ overtime again.”

“Well, you laugh now, my friend, but someday when you see the mayor turned into a zombie and walkin’ down the street with an ax in his hand—”

“Hell, the mayor’s
already
a zombie,” Phil said. “He don’t need no fluoride to help him.”

The men in the chair laughed. Bill and Phil had their mutual excoriation polished smooth as a vaudeville routine.

“Thanks for taking care of that contract for me,” Jim Truman said. “I really appreciate it, Mr. McCain.”

“My pleasure.”

Truman had a long, angular face and brown eyes that had an almost cowlike docility, leading to the rumor that he might be slightly retarded in his deliberate, Osh-Kosh way. But he wasn’t retarded. He just took his time, which was what made him such a good craftsman. He’d done a lot of home repairs for my folks and charged them about the fairest prices you could ask for.

Phil said, “They hear anything more about that girl?” to no one in particular. It was his way of starting us on a new topic of conversation.

“What girl?” I said dutifully.

“Next county over. Been missing four days now. Reason I asked, she’s a shirttail cousin of one of my customers. He said she’s a real nice little gal.”

“Real nice little gal” translated to virginal. I like to sit in the barbershop and smell the hair oil and the talcum powder and the butch wax and the smoke from the various cigarettes, cigars and pipes. I like the friendship of the men and the sense you get when you have three or four generations of them sitting in the same room arguing about the Cubs or the Republicans or the latest scandal in Hollywood. An old-timer’ll tell you about his Model-T, a WWII vet’ll tell you what it was like in a Japanese concentration camp, somebody just back from Chicago’ll tell you about the latest skyscraper going up. What I don’t like is the local gossip, the cruelty of it. In a small town, you get punished for being different in any way, and sometimes when you sit in a small-town barbershop you get a sense of what Salem must have been like during the witch trials. Reputations get smeared, sometimes ruined permanently. Women get ripped up especially hard. A divorcée is inevitably a whore, and a widow is invariably a pent-up, frustrated sex machine. The modern version of the lynch mob: They hang you with innuendo and lies.

Jim Truman said, “Maybe she ran away.”

Bill shook his head. “This cousin of hers says she wasn’t the runnin’-away type.”

Win Sullivan, the banker in Phil’s chair, laughed and said, “Maybe she ran into Sammy Davis, Jr., the way he’s been stealin’ white gals lately.”

Everybody laughed. Davis had been in the news for all his affairs with white women. I always felt sorry for him. He was a very talented guy but you could see how nervous and probably scared he was. Three southerners had recently run up on the stage where Nat King Cole was playing to a white audience and had beaten him up. America was a dangerous place for certain kinds of people.

And so it went until it was finally my turn in the chair. I dozed off and dreamed of the beautiful Pamela Forrest. We were out canoeing on a gentle blue lake and she was telling me how much she loved me.

“All done, Counselor,” Bill said, waking me up.

No lake. No canoe. No Pamela.

I was out on the street again and the aftershave Bill had slapped on stung pretty good in the February winds.

Over the noon hour, at the Woolworth lunch counter and the Rexall soda fountain and the courthouse cafeteria, the town had a dilemma. They couldn’t decide which they should talk about first, the murder-suicide out at the Kenny Whitney place, or the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly.

I was at Rexall having a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee, and reading a new Peter Rabe paperback. I always sat at the far end of the counter because that’s where the metal paperback rack was. It creaked rustily and threatened to fall over every time you turned it. I usually read while I was eating. I was a big fan of Gold Medal books. For twenty-five cents (plus a penny for the governor, as folks in Iowa like to say), you could get the likes of a brand-new novel by Rabe or Charles William or, my favorite, John D. MacDonald. They were well-written, intelligent books, too, despite the lurid covers. Of course, when you told people that, they’d just wink at you and say, “Sure they are.” Then they’d nod to the cover with the seminaked girl and wink at-you again.

“How about some more coffee?” a female voice asked. And I looked up into the pretty and almost impossibly sweet face of Mary Travers. Mary works days behind the counter at Rexall. She was the brightest girl in our class but her dad got throat cancer just before Mary started at the U of Iowa. She never did make it to college. Mary is the girl my mom and dad want me to marry and God, I wish I could make myself love her. A lot of times I get so mad at Pamela that I try to make myself love Mary.

We went out several times, even went to the county fair three nights running, and we ended up making out pretty passionately at the drive-in. Mary had loved me just about as long as I’d loved Pamela. She’d lived down the block from me up in the Knolls. I’d finally gone to the senior prom with her after it was clear that Pamela wasn’t going at all because Stu Grant was going with someone else. I’d bought Mary a corsage and even managed to prevail upon an older cousin to buy me a pint of Jim Beam. He also gave me a rubber, a Trojan, and I hadn’t even asked him for it. “Maybe you’ll need it,” he said. “It’s Mary,” I said. “I won’t need it. I don’t think of her that way.”