Sam McCain - 04 - Save the Last Dance for Me
Save The Last Dance For Me
by Ed Gorman
Volume I of Two Volumes
Pages i-Xii and 1-168
Published by:
Carroll and Graf Publishers
An Imprint of
Avalon Publishing Group Inc.
161 William St., 16th Floor
New York, Ny 10038.
Further reproduction or distribution in other than a specialized
format is prohibited.
Produced in braille for the Library of Congress, National Library
Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, by National Braille
Press Inc., 2003.
This braille edition contains the
entire text of the print edition.
Copyright 2002 by Ed Gorman
Book Jacket Information iii
A Sam McCain Mystery
Praise For Ed Gorman’s
Sam McCain Mystery Series
“Sweetly nostalgic mystery. …
[McCain’s] zeal to cleanse Black River Falls of evil makes him the kind of hero any small town could take to its heart.”
—Marilyn Stasio, New York
Times Book Review
“Gorman’s delightful series …
provoke[s] a bracing nostalgia for a time that was neither as innocent nor as dull as is sometimes said.”—.Wall Street Journal
“Gorman’s successful capturing of time and place … sharply evokes the twilight of the ‘ej’s.”—.Los Angeles Times
“No writer captures the mood of 1950’s middle America … better than Gorman.”
—..Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
“Gorman seems to have hit a mother lode with this series.”—.Publishers Weekly
“In Black River Falls … good and
evil clash with the same heartbreaking results as they have in the more urban crime drama of Block or Leonard.”—.Booklist
Murder strikes a poisonous note in
1950’s Iowa as the acclaimed Sam McCain mystery series continues.
It is August 1960, and Vice
President Richard Milhous Nixon is
riding the campaign trail. Among his next stops is Black River Falls, Iowa—a prospect that has the whole town talking and Judge Esme Anne Whitney, the
presidential candidate’s old friend, bustling with Republican fervor. Out on the north edge of town, meanwhile, in the abandoned garage where the country preacher John Muldaur has set up his ministry, the snakes are rattling. Very Muldaur has not endeared himself to the people of Black River Falls either with his snake-handling ceremonies or with the anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic pamphlets—The Jews
Behind John F. Kennedy screams their headline—t he’s been circulating. Still, the town’s youngest lawyer and sometime private investigator, Sam McCain, finds
Muldaur’s claim that he may be the target of a papist assassination plot largely improbable.
McCain can’t deny, though, that somebody has got it in bad for Muldaur when, apparently by snakebite but actually from strychnine-laced Pepsi, the preacher drops dead at his own altar.
With Nixon’s visit only a week away Judge Whitney wants this inconvenient matter of murder cleared up fast, to keep the entire population of Black River Falls from looking like “a bunch of hill people” to the Gop and the national press. Between McCain and the solution stand a heap of local prejudices, some unpleasant family secrets, the dim-witted police chief Cliffie Sykes, Jr., another
corpse, and a cageful of rattlesnakes.
Ed Gorman, winner of the Shamus, the Spur, and the International Fiction Writer’s Award among others, is the author of many novels, including Cold Blue Midnight and Senatorial Privilege. He has
written three other mysteries in the Sam McCain series—..The Day the Music
Died, Wake Up Little Susie, and Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?—and is the editor of Mystery Scene magazine. He lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Jacket design by Susan Shapiro,
adapted from original series
design by Saksa Art and Design
Jacket photographs:
The Drifters; Frank Driggs
Collection/getty Images all other
photos Hulton/archivest Getty Images
Author photograph: Vii
Amy Kinney
Also by Ed Gorman
The Sam McCain Series
The Day the Music Died; Wake Up Little Susie; Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?
The Jack Dwyer Series
New, Improved Murder; Murder
Straight Up; Murder in the Wings; The Autumn Dead; A Cry of Shadows
The Tobin Series
Murder on the Aisle; Several Deaths Later
The Robert Payne Series
Blood Moon; Hawk Moon; Harlot’s
Moon
Suspense Novels
The Night Remembers; The First Lady; Runner in the Dark; Senatorial Privilege Short Story Collections
Prisoners; Dark Whispers; Moonchasers
All of the characters in this book are ix fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely
coincidental.
For Joe and Mitsue Gorman
and the grandkids
Shannon, P.J., and Regan
and For Sadao, Norika, and
Hisami Sugiyama
with great love, affection, and joy
I have drawn extensively from Richard Xi Hofstadter’s fine book
Anti-Intellectualism in American
Life.
—E.G.
“It was not until I was 8 years old that I discovered that not all the world was Roman Catholic.
When John F. Kennedy ran for president, it became clear that many Americans outside our homogeneous enclave considered our faith strange and suspicious and threatening. It turned out we were a they.”
—Anna Quindlen
Save The Last Dance
For Me
Part I
One
“You hear them, McCain?”
“Oh, I hear them all right.”
And I did. How could you not hear them?
“So you know what they are?” she said.
“You bet I do,” I said.
“And you’re not scared?”
“Who said I wasn’t scared?”
“You did. On the way over.”
“Oh.”
“So you are scared?” she said.
“A little, I guess.”
“I’m scared. But then I’m a girl. I’m not a big brave five-foot-four he-man like you.”
“Five-five.”
“Yeah, in motorcycle boots maybe.”
“In motorcycle boots I’d be
five-six. If I owned a pair.”
“Have I ever told you I’m
five-foot-seven?”
“Not more than 4eagcb times,” I said.
“Almost five-eight, actually.”
“All right, I’m scared. Does that make you feel better?”
She gave me her best kid-sister grin and squeezed my hand. It was a kid-sister squeeze, too. Nothing romantic.
“Actually, that does make me feel better, McCain. So let’s go in, all right?”
Just as we walked away from my ‘ea red Ford ragtop, she stopped me and said. “Actually, maybe we’re imagining it.”
“Imagining what?”
“You know. Hearing the rattlesnakes. I don’t think you can hear rattlesnakes this far away.”
“You want to get out a tape measure?”
The grin again. It always made me want to kiss her. But she was married and we were both reasonably hon
orable people. So I knew better than to try and she knew better than to let me should I be foolish enough to try.
I guess I should do a little scene-setting here.
The date is August 19, 1960.
The town is Black River Falls, Iowa, pop. 20eacjj. The pretty, red-haired young woman I’m with is Kylie Burke, ace reporter for The Black River Falls
Clarion. Only reporter, actually. She isn’t writing the story—her boss is doing that—but she thought it’d look good on her resume (in case the New York Times calls
someday) to say she did background on a group of Ozark folks who moved here after getting kicked out of every state contiguous to ours. Seems these folk incorporate rattlesnakes in their services and that is a violation of the law. And after all the rain we had this past spring, there are plenty of timber rattlers to be had in the woods.
Kylie’s a bit uneasy about visiting these folks, as am I, so we’re here together.
My name is Sam McCain. I’m the youngest and poorest attorney in town. I’m also an investigator for Judge Esme Anne
Whitney, the handsome, middle-aged woman who presides over district court. At the age of twenty-four, I earn more from Judge Whitney than I do from my law practice. I’m here tonight because I was summoned by Reverend John Muldaur, the hill-country man who procures the rattlers and oversees the services.
The place we’re about to enter is a deserted four-bay service garage that was once part of a Chevrolet dealership on the north edge of town.
It’s closed up tight except two of the front windows have been smashed and are now filled only with cardboard, so you can hear everything going on. A tornado came through here in ‘ed and killed eight of us, including a two-month-old, and wiped out everything in this area, including the gleaming new Chevrolet showroom, except the garage. The dealer decided to rebuild on the opposite end of town, apparently figuring his luck might be better come the next tornado.
The cars and panel trucks and pickup trucks parked in the melancholy twilight looked as if they’d been driven across a time warp from the Dust Bowl. Hadn’t been washed in years.
Had smashed windshields. Cracked headlights.
Missing taillights. Tires that held varying amounts of air, some of them nearly flat. were rusted out so badly the rust had turned into holes in places. And were covered with stickers of
all sizes and all lurid colors exhorting pagans to hand themselves over to God and be damned quick about it before it was too late.
The service was just now starting. An Old Testament voice said into a screeching microphone, “Let us now praise the Lord in song.”
And that’s when we knew that we really had been hearing rattlesnakes. Because as a lone, lame electric guitar began to play “I Know The Bible’s Right—Somebody’s Wrong” the faint rattling sound disappeared.
The man appeared from inside the small door in the face of the whitewashed concrete-block building. He was big and wide in his greasy gray work clothes. The dour line of his mouth exploded into a smile as he said, “The Lord welcomes you.” But the close, hard way he looked at us made me wonder about his words.
Kylie and I glanced at each other and nodded, and he widened the doorway by standing aside for us.
Right inside the door we saw the snakes.
A small, wood-framed cage of them sat on a table with a large crude painting of Christ that was as spooky as the snakes. He had the demonic visage normally associated with Satan. On the left side of the table was a stack of pamphlets with a headline reading: The Jews Behind John F. Kennedy. You could pretty much guess what that one was all about. The pamphlets were well printed on a
semi-glossy stock. I wondered where Muldaur had gotten the money for them.
There were no pews, just wobbly folding chairs; no decorations but an elevated platform holding a lectern, and four more folding chairs, pushed back against the wall. You could still smell gasoline and car oil all these years later, though all the hydraulic lifts had been taken out and the work pits filled in with concrete.
“Say hello to some new friends!” John Muldaur shouted into the microphone. He’d been singing in a sturdy baritone. He kept grabbing a bottle of Pepsi, gripping it hard as if it was slipping, and guzzling it down between lyrics.
When they turned around and looked at us, the twenty or so people filling the folding chairs, I saw faces that were almost cartoons of joy and grief and fear and hope as they sang out, immigrant faces scrubbed clean for
churchgoing, unlovely faces for the most part, mountain people of the deep South who’d trekked up to the Midwest several generations ago but had never fundamentally changed, a problem for cops, social workers, doctors, clerics, and neighbors. Some of these people still clung to the precepts of “granny medicine,” where you cure lockjaw by crushing a cockroach in a cup of boiling water and drinking it down, and staunch the bleeding of a wound by rubbing chewing tobacco on it.
You can’t estimate the effects of poverty on generation after generation of people, that sadness and despair and madness that so quietly but irrevocably shapes their thoughts and taints their souls.
The Muldaurs lived off by themselves, a good half-mile from the others, who lived in trailers and shacks in an area called The Corners and mostly worked for large tenant farms. Ten, twelve families that crossbred with alarming regularity. The women mostly wore faded housedresses, their hair beribboned for church.
The men mostly wore threadbare white shirts with the sleeves rolled up. A couple of them bore dark neckties. There were six or seven very young children who wore shorts and shirts because of the eighty-degree heat. There was a certain apprehension in the eyes of the young ones. They had not yet been fortified with the certainty of their elders-that those who did not practice the ways of their faith would perish in hell, and that all strangers meant you harm. Especially, according to the pamphlets Muldaur had been circulating in town, the Jews and Catholics all huddled behind Jack Kennedy in this fall’s election. And of course it was the diabolical Jews stirring up all the trouble down South with the “coloreds.”
Naturally, I had mixed feelings about these people.
About the only good thing I could say for their religion was that they didn’t wear hats of any kind. I’ve often wondered if God wears a fedora. I mean, have you ever noticed that about religions, their thing for hats? But the rattlesnakes kind of balanced things back in the other direction. The priests and monsignors I grew up with all wore various liturgical hats, caps, and beanies, but one thing you could say in their favor was that they never brought any rattlesnakes to mass, God love ‘em. If they had any rattlesnakes, they kept them in the privacy of the rectory and didn’t tell
us about it.
But then there was the sadness of these people. Not even Steinbeck had gotten to it. The Okies were just displaced farmers who wanted to work and prosper. I never read anything about Okies and rattlers.
Dreiser kinda got to these people, I guess. That opening scene of An American Tragedy where the family is there on that twilight street corner. I could see these people on that same corner, snakes and all. They were the lost ones and didn’t even know it. Few of them would have indoor plumbing; some of them wouldn’t even have electricity. A good number of them would die young because they didn’t see doctors. And they would spend too much of their time fearing a Jesus who was a parody of the man or god who lived not quite 2eajjj years ago. In their version, He despised them and they were appreciative of that fact. It gave some explanation, I suppose, for their smashed and shabby lives.
The singing continued even though John Muldaur set down his microphone and suddenly walked down the aisle between the folding chairs. By this time, his entire upper body glistened with sweat and he was muttering some kind of prayer to himself in the sort of hypnotic fashion people speaking in tongues get into.
No doubt about where he was going, what he was doing.
He swooped up the two cages of snakes and transported them back to the makeshift a
ltar.
The air changed. Not just because of the hissing and the rattling. Because of the excitement. I’d never been to an orgy before but I was sure at one now.
Kylie nudged me. Whispered, “This is scary.”
I knew what she meant. There was a sense of violence in the orgiastic response to the snakes. Women moaned in sexual ways; men stared as if transfixed. The children looked confused but excited and afraid, their tiny faces darting up to survey the faces of their parents, wanting some sort of verbal explanation.
Muldaur reached out his hands. His wife, Viola, took his left one; his teenage daughter, Ella, his right. Both were buxom, frizzy-haired, and aggrieved-looking. They looked as troubled and angry as the rattlesnakes. All three Muldaurs
raised their locked hands and said a brief
prayer. “That I am pure of soul, I have no doubt, my Lord. Bless me in my purity, Father.
Bless me.”
Muldaur dropped the women’s hands and turned to the snakes once again. A collective emotional upheaval rumbled through the church. The big moment was approaching. The electric guitar played quick, exotic, crazed, off-key rifts.
Moans; shouts; cries. The snakes were coming.
Orgasm.
My body spasmed when he reached into the cage and brought forth snake number one. Now slow down and think about this: You have a small cage containing four or five poisonous snakes, all right?
So what do you do? You just plunge your hand in the open lid up top and grab one of the buggers?
Aren’t you risking being attacked by one if not more of the snakes in the cage?
But if he was afraid—or even hesitant-he sure didn’t show it.
“God has sent us the serpent to reveal our true nature,” Muldaur said. Or intoned, I guess. The rattler had brought out his intoning side. “Who wants his soul judged by the serpent?”