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  Everybody’s Somebody’s

  Fool

  by Ed Gorman

  Book Jacket Information iii

  Death revs up on the drag strip in a new mystery featuring Sam McCain

  Things go as wrong as love in a

  rock-‘n’-roll song for dangerous, young David Egan when he finds himself charged with the murder of the pampered but seriously disturbed daughter in the wealthy Griffin family of Black River Falls. They go fatally wrong the night that Egan crashes his black Mercury into a bridge at ninety miles an hour in a drag race outside of town—”no accident, it would appear, as the Merc’s brake line had been cut.

  Struggling lawyer and sometime private eye Sam McCain finds himself, not unusually, hauled into the investigation by the incorrigible Judge Esme Ann Whitney, who continues to make no attempt to conceal her disdain for the local police and their khaki-clad chief Cliffie Sykes, Jr. While Sam manages to establish a critical connection between the two victims easily enough, the solution to the case more than eludes him the mellow autumnal afternoon that he stumbles on a third: Brenda Carlyle, wife of a former all-American, her once robust body lying lifeless in the last suds of her bath.

  Jealous husbands, philandering spouses, jilted girlfriends, outraged parents, a long-suffering wife—Sam does not want for suspects. Or for clues. It’s the conclusive evidence that surprises him and that frostily ends the Indian summer in Iowa 1961.

  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 four other mysteries in the Sam McCain series—..The Day the Music

  Died, Wake Up Little Susie, Will

  You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, and Save the Last Dance for Me—and founded Mystery Scene magazine. He lives in Cedar

  Rapids, Iowa.

  All of the characters in this book are Very fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely

  coincidental.

  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, The 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 Vii 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

  Also by Ed Gorman

  The Sam McCain Series

  The Day the Music Died

  Wake Up Little Susie

  Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?

  Save the Last Dance for Me

  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 ix

  Harlot’s Moon

  Suspense Novels

  The Night Remembers

  The First Lady

  Runner in the Dark

  Senatorial Privilege

  Short Story Collections

  Prisoners

  Dark Whispers

  Moonchasers

  For the good doctors Tammy O’Brien, M.D.; Dean H. Gesme Jr., M.D.,

  F.A.C.P.; Kevin Carpenter, M.D.,

  F.A.C.S.; Leann Schneider, Lpn;

  that very special oncology nurse Amy Hass; and the lovely ladies of the lab—Carolyn, Denise, Marcia, Sherry, and Wendy.

  Xi

  And hearts that we broke long ago

  Have long been breaking others.

  —W. H. Auden

  Everybody’s Somebody’s

  Fool

  Part

  One

  Around eleven that night, the hostess broke out the Johnny Mathis and the Frank Sinatra, and everybody quit talking about their kids and their jobs and their mortgages and their politics, and got down to some serious slow dancing out on the darkened patio in the warm prairie night of summer 1961.

  It was like all those groping, grasping ninth-grade parties we’d always had in some kid’s basement, where the mom was gracious and the old man cast an evil eye on anybody who danced too close with his sweet blooming daughter.

  The difference now was that we were adults, or rumored to be, or hoped devoutly to be. Andre Malraux once asked an old priest if he’d learned anything from sixty years of hearing confessions and the padre said, “Yes, there’s no such thing as an adult.” He was probably on to something there.

  There were only three single women there that night, and only one single guy. Me.

  I took turns dancing with all three of them and all three of them said pretty much the same thing when I slid into their embrace, “Gosh, McCain, you always make me feel so tall.”

  And then a giggle.

  There’s nothing worse than being insulted by people who don’t mean to insult you. At five-five a guy can be awfully sensitive about short jokes.

  We danced.

  Back in high school the only girl I wanted to dance with was the beautiful Pamela Forrest, the girl I’d loved since grade school. But since she went out with older boys, I didn’t get to dance with her very often.

  As I saw it, my prospective dancing partners were divided into three groups. Girls who were shorter than I was and therefore good for my public image; girls who were fun to dance with no matter how short or tall they were; and girls who didn’t mind a little dry-humping in the darkness.

  There weren’t many in the last category, at least not many available to me, anyway, but when you came upon one you immediately fell to your knees sobbing

  in gratitude.

  Tonight, I was hoping I’d find a girl who, at twenty-five, had moved beyond the dry-humping stage. The best bet was Linda Dennehy, who was divorced and worked as a nurse in Iowa City, well known to be the capital of all great-looking girls in our state. I mean, you had girls there who’d been to Paris and London walking around in heartbreaking Levi cut-offs openly reading Kerouac and Ginsberg. I spent as much time there as I could.

  Linda was a little bit drunk and a little bit sentimental. She smelled good, too. Very good.

  “You ever wish you could go back, Sam, you know, to when we were in high school?”

  “All the time.”

  “I thought it was going to be so neat. You know, growing up and going out on my own.”

  I paid all the attention I could. The feel of her flesh beneath her silk blouse and silk slip made certain parts of my body more alert than others. There was a bonus to her slender but very female form. I liked her. Always had. She was one of those quiet, decent girls who, oddly enough, looked better with eyeglasses than without them. Nobody paid a lot o
f attention to her back then is what I’m trying to say. But on hayrack rides and at skating parties and on Fourth of July starburst keggers, we’d drifted together sometimes, friends and maybe a little more, but never enough little more that it ever went anywhere.

  “You still have your ragtop?”

  “I sure do.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d feel like going for a ride?”

  “I sure would.”

  “I have to tell you something, though.”

  She didn’t finish the sentence, leaving me to wonder what she wanted to say but didn’t quite have the courage to. (a) I have to tell you, though, that I’m three months preggers. (but) I have to tell you, though, that I somehow picked up a venereal disease. (can) I have to tell you, though, that if I meet somebody who’s taller than you, I’m going to dump you in a minute.

  “Tell me what?”

  She put her arm around my neck and kissed me. She had a very soft mouth and a very deft tongue and I have to say that I went a wee bit cuckoo standing there on that patio. Not only hadn’t

  I had sex in some time, I hadn’t had any companionship. And right now in that shadowy darkness, I felt as if Linda was the best friend I’d ever had.

  “God, I can’t believe I did that,

  Sam.”

  “You don’t hear me complaining, do you?”

  “It’s—embarrassing.” She glanced about. A few of the other couples had taken note of our kiss.

  The song ended.

  “I need to go to the bathroom first,” she said.

  “Will you wait here?”

  “I’m nailed to the floor.”

  I watched her walk away, a pleasing sight indeed. Slender but not without some elemental curves. We’d grown up in the Knolls together.

  That’s the section that the proper citizens of Black River Falls try to forget about. A lot of tiny, rusty shacks and hundreds of scrubby little kids doomed to live out the same kind of grim, gray lives of their parents and enough violence to inspire the daydreams of a dozen generals.

  Even by Knolls standards, Linda’s father was a bastard. My dad and a lot of other dads took turns hauling his drunken ass off his fragile little wife, whom he seemed to enjoy beating up on the front lawn of their shacklike house. When he was very drunk, it’d take a couple of dads —maybe even three of them—ffput the monster down because he was not only big, he’d once been a good amateur fighter.

  Linda would hurl herself upon him, screaming, literally tearing hair out of his head, scratching his eyes, biting his shoulder—anything to stop him from smashing punches again and again into her tiny mother. On summer nights, long after her old man had been laid low by one of the dads and lay passed out on the front stoop, I could hear Linda crying into the night. She couldn’t seem to stop herself. If she had friends, I never saw them or heard about them.

  She liked to fish, God did she like to fish, and growing up, before my dad started making enough money to move us into town proper, I always saw her down on that old deserted railroad bridge, so solitary in her T-shirt and jeans it’d break your heart that way your little sister could break your heart. And if you approached her, she’d jump up and run away.

  Her father was dead now and her two younger brothers were driving for a trucking company. She’d gotten a scholarship to nursing school and had done well for herself. Her drinking tonight surprised me. The few times I’d seen her at social affairs she’d always made a point of drinking nonalcoholic things.

  I went over and poured myself a little bit of nonalcoholic punch myself. My dad and I share the same ability to get absolutely stoned on three cans of 3.2 beer, so I generally stay away from alcohol.

  A hot August breeze came and ruffled all the pines that surrounded this expensive fashion plate of a house. Two vast stories done in a mock-Plantation style. The Coyles’ house.

  Jack Coyle was a lawyer who’d inherited a good deal of money when his father, also a lawyer, died recently. He’d also inherited the family manse. In a town of 27eajjj like Black River Falls, the Coyles passed for

  royalty. They were nice, unassuming folk with a pair of twin girls everybody said should be in Tv commercials, they were so damned cute.

  I didn’t like Jack Coyle. In the old days I would’ve felt class anger. He’d gone back east to school—allyale—and clerked for a Supreme Court Justice and had come back here to become the dominant lawyer of his generation. He was in his early forties. He’d had all the breaks.

  My class resentment aside, I didn’t like him for a specific reason. A few years ago, when I set up my own practice, I asked him if I might drop by and ask him some questions.

  He was nice enough—his wife and I were longtime school friends—until a secretary walked by his open door. He stopped talking to me and snapped at her to get in there.

  She came in, all right, and he laid into her with the fury of a drunken brawler. This was

  A.M. and he was quite sober. She’d forgotten to give him a message—or she’d garbled a message she’d given him—I could never figure out which it was.

  Right in front of me, he ripped into her not only professionally but personally. How stupid she was. How slow she was. How

  irresponsible she was. And how fat she’d gotten. How her clothes always looked

  sloppy on her. And how irritating it was that she was always running off to the john.

  And I had to sit there pretending to be invisible and deaf.

  His rage seemed endless. And her inevitable tears—e once in a while she’d glance at me in her shame and humiliation—only seemed to make him angrier.

  No matter how she’d let him down, she didn’t deserve to be treated like this. And especially with me sitting there.

  When it was over, he said, “What a stupid cow of a bitch. Five years ago she was a good-looking woman. Then she had two kids and let herself go. That’s what I should do with her—let her go. I’m just too damned softhearted.”

  I almost laughed out loud. I mean, given what he’d just done to that poor woman—and he could still see himself as “softhearted.” He was about as softhearted as Himmler.

  But here I was drinking his liquor. I leaned against the patio wall, watching the dancers and remembering them as they’d been when we were all in school together, remarking to myself on all the usual ironies of why the A student was still a bag boy and how fate or the gods had conspired to turn the portly drab girl into a knockout babe and what kind of small but significant social courage it must take for the guy with the clubfoot to get out there and dance, fast or slow, without ever seeming self-conscious, and to hell with what anybody might think.

  A fragile hand touched my arm. Jean Coyle. Somewhat prim but very pretty. She’d been our class valedictorian. She wore a dark cocktail dress and had short dark hair.

  She was one of those women who could look dressed up in a work shirt and worn jeans. She was the good catch of her generation in our valley—gd family, good education, a socially skilled wife for a prominent man. Jack Coyle was fifteen years her senior. But his powerful presence—he had a kind of tanned country club virility, and the graying traces of black Irish hair only added to it somehow—narrowed the age difference.

  “Hi, Sam.”

  “Hi, Jean. I was going to look you up before I left, to thank you for tonight. I had a good time.”

  “Thank you, Sam. I hope everybody

  did.”

  I nodded to the dance floor. Everybody was in passionate embrace. “Sure looks like it.”

  “I wonder if you’d come with me for a little bit.”

  Some women might have made a naughty joke of the request. Jean wasn’t the type. If she wanted you to go somewhere with her, it was for a perfectly legitimate reason.

  Just then, Linda came back.

  She thanked Jean, who looked uncomfortable with Linda suddenly. “Would you mind if Sam helped me with something for a few minutes?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “Be right back,�
�� I said.

  Linda touched my arm. “I’m looking forward to that ride.” The way she touched my arm, portending all sorts of things, was far sexier than if she’d kissed my neck. It was sweet and sexy at the same time. It’s never fun to realize what a pitiful grasping creature I am. She touched my arm and my Midwestern mind was rhapsodic with romance.

  As Jean led me through the elegant house that just missed being a bit too showy, she said, “I hate to drag you into this, Sam. I was going to call Cliffie but he’s such an idiot.”

  I laughed. “Our Cliffie? The chief of police? I guess I never noticed that he was an idiot.”

  Her smile was forced.

  We went out the front door and around the side of the house. There was a white gazebo on the west edge of the lawn. It glowed in the moonlight.

  “This is getting pretty mysterious,” I laughed.

  “It shouldn’t be. It’s in your line of work, Sam. You have a private investigator’s license and everything, I mean.”

  “What kind of work is it, Jean?”

  She said, “There’s a dead girl in the gazebo.”

  Two

  The gazebo conformed to the classic pattern, octagonal in shape, fretted with Victorian touches, and just wide enough to hold a glider and two sitting chairs comfortably.

  Jean had brought a small flashlight along and handed it to me just before we reached the gazebo.

  The girl, who was familiar to me in some

  way, was tucked into a corner of the glider. She was dressed sorority girl-style, black flats, a dark wrap-around skirt closed with a large golden safety pin, a summery white blouse.

  Death was obvious but not disfiguring. Though her dark-haired head was pitched at an uncomfortable angle on her shoulder, her posture was perfect, even prim.

  The eyes were closed. She’d possessed the kind of austere, important beauty that only the rich boys and the top jocks had a chance with. She had the looks of all the ethereal troubled girls in F. Scott Fitzgerald novels. I