Wake Up Little Susie Read online

  Wake Up Little Susie

  A Mystery

  by Ed Gorman

  Volume I of Two Volumes

  Pages i-Xi and 1-188

  Published by:

  Carroll and Graf Publishers, Inc.

  A division of

  Avalon Publishing Group

  19 West 21st Street

  New York, Ny 10010-6805.

  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 1998 by Ed Gorman

  Book Jacket Information iii

  A Sam McCain Mystery

  Ed Gorman

  Author of The Day the Music Died

  Praise For Ed Gorman’s

  The Day The Music Died

  “What sets this novel apart (and should make it a candidate for next year’s Edgar award) is Gorman’s successful capturing of time and place … [as] he sharply evokes the twilight of the ‘ej’s.”

  —.Los Angeles Times

  “Wonderfully evokes the sorrows and pleasures of a certain Midwestern past; [this]

  engagingly low-key novel … proves much more genuinely affecting than many a more high-profile thriller.”

  —.Wall Street Journal

  “Gorman knowingly invests his whodunit with all the right retro cultural touches … but, by not ignoring the racism and sexual taboos of the time, he elevates it to a story with bite and substance.”

  —.Chicago Tribune

  “No writer captures the mood of 50’s America … better than Gorman.”

  —..Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

  “What a pleasant treat this book is!”

  —..Washington Post Book World

  In his ‘ea red Ford ragtop and a charming new mystery set in the rock and rolling Eisenhower years, Sam McCain is back.

  On September 4, 1958, with hoopla and picnics and fireworks the Ford Motor Company introduced the Edsel to America. In Black River Falls, though, the baton-twirling, hog-calling, drum-rolling celebrations to introduce the small Iowa town to the car of the future go sour when the local Ford dealer discovers a dead body in the trunk of one of his brand-new, equally illfated Edsels. Very A young lawyer with a private

  investigator’s license, Sam McCain

  prefers rock and roll to murder, but he soon finds himself embroiled in the case of Susan Squires, which doesn’t want for clues—a broken taillight, tire tracks, an

  Illinois license plate—or for suspects.

  Prime among them stands David Squires, the victim’s abusive husband and the county’s politically ambitious attorney, until he himself turns up dead. Neither his jealous ex-wife, Amy, a sexy lady with an

  immoderate palate for Chablis, nor

  Susan’s one-time lover, the hostile and evasive Dr. Todd Jensen, clear the air of McCain’s suspicions, which also take him to the trailer park where an indigent ex-con prosecuted by Squires lives with his disa4

  fifteen-year-old daughter.

  Then McCain’s former high school

  sweetheart, Mary Travers—the one friend with whom Susan Squires might have shared the secret that could crack the case—mysteriously disappears. And Sam’s stakes in the action get quickly more personal.

  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 The Day the Music Died. He lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

  Jacket design and collage illustration: Saksa Art and Design

  Author photograph: Amy Kinney

  Books by Ed Gorman

  The Sam McCain Series

  The Day the Music Died

  The Jack Dwyer Series

  New, Improved Murder; Murder

  Straight Up; Murder in the Wings; The Autumn Dead; A Cry of Shadows

  The Tobin Series Vii

  Murder on the Aisle; Several Deaths Later

  The Robert Payne Series

  Blood Moon; Hawk Moon; Harlot’s

  Moon

  Suspense Novels

  The Night Remembers; Night Kills;

  Black River Falls

  Thrillers

  The Marilyn Tapes; The First Lady;

  Runner in the Dark; Senatorial Privilege Short-Story Collections

  Prisoners; Cages; Dark Whispers;

  Moonchasers; Famous Blue Raincoat

  The author would like to thank Larry Segriff for his indispensable help with this book.

  ix

  In memory of

  Dr. William R. Finn

  Readers of The Day the Music Died will note that this novel is set a year previous.

  Xi

  “There’s not much to see in a small town, but what you hear makes up for it.”

  —August Derleth

  “There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon.

  Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.”

  —Sherwood Anderson,

  Winesburg, Ohio

  Wake Up Little Susie

  Part I

  One

  So Elvis leaned over to me and said, “You know what it looks like?”

  “What what looks like?”

  “That grille.”

  “No,” I said. “What’s it look like?”

  He grinned. “It looks just like a

  woman’s—” He whispered a word naming the most private part of a woman’s anatomy.

  He wasn’t really Elvis, of course.

  On this Saturday, September 14,

  1957, in Black River Falls, Iowa, on the lot of Keys Ford-Lincoln, there were at least a dozen Elvises, maybe eight James

  Deans, six Marlon Brandos, and maybe as many as twenty Kim Novaks. Everybody had to be somebody, so why not be somebody famous?

  I suppose it’s kind of sad, feeling that you need to be somebody else. For a long time I wanted to be Robert Ryan. I really like that crazed Irish intensity of his. But he didn’t wear anything distinctive—l Elvis’s hair or James Dean’s red jacket or Marlon’s rolled-up T-shirt—s even when I walked down the street pretending to be him, nobody knew. It was real frustrating. Maybe Ryan will start wearing an eye patch.

  Being something of a car aficionado, I had been waiting for this day for months. This was the day that the Ford family of Detroit, Michigan, would bestow upon us the most futuristic, the most exciting of all family automobiles, the Edsel.

  I guess it’s kind of funny how we look at cars. I remember this Russian diplomat saying that Americans were the only people he knew who wrote pop songs about their cars. Heck, I did even better than that. I dreamed about cars.

  Oh, sure, I dreamed about girls, especially the beautiful Pamela Forrest, but I also dreamed about cars. About owning, in addition to my red Ford ragtop, a black chopped and channeled ‘di Merc. Or one of those little red street rods.

  I even had a couple of dreams about the Edsel, and what it would look like would be downright fantastic. …

  According to Time magazine, Ford had spent

  $10 million advertising this launch. Even poet Marianne Moore had been asked to help name the vehicle. Her choice had been the “Moongoose.” Declining her suggestion was about the only smart thing Ford had done in bringing this car to market.

  Keys Ford-Lincoln was so crowded, they’d had to hire extra cops to direct traffic. An hour befo
re the unveiling, right on the same concrete slab where the cloth-covered Edsel would be brought, there had been a talent show. All the expected acts appeared—baton twirlers, tap-dancing twins, pig-call masters, Elvis

  impersonators, Lawrence Welk imitators, baggy-pants drunk acts, and two (god love ‘em) little girls wearing spangly top hats who sang “God Bless America” with tears in their eyes—but the one I liked best was the saw player who kept cutting himself on the teeth of his instrument. By the time he’d finished “Ebb Tide” he was badly in need of medical attention.

  There was the high school marching band. There was a speech by the mayor. There were pennants and three dozen Brownies with hula hoops and two dozen Cub Scouts in Davy Crockett coonskin caps and twenty-three college boys trying to stuff themselves into a single phone booth.

  And then there were all the Elvises.

  Not only wasn’t the guy next to me really Elvis, his opinion wasn’t even original.

  A number of other men had expressed the same thing earlier in the day. About what the Edsel grille looked like, I mean.

  And that was about the only good feature on the whole car. The rest of it looked like something out of a cartoon. Piss elegant was the proper term.

  It had gadgets previously unseen in automobiles; it had pastel colors heretofore unknown to automotive metal.

  This wasn’t just my reaction.

  You could see it on virtually every face. It was like opening a birthday box to find a rat crawling around inside.

  Being small-town folk the way we are, we didn’t say any of this to Dick Keys, of course. The usually cool Dick Keys looked nervous. His story was that as the handsomest kid, not only in his class but in the entire valley, he would go on to marry his own kind: a beauty.

  Instead, he married a plain stout girl who just happened to be the wealthiest girl in the valley.

  There was no smoother salesman than Dick Keys, and he ran the Ford-Mercury dealership well day-to-day. But it was rumored, and I believe true, that his wife, who’d put up the money for the dealership, made most of the important decisions. Today, Dick wore a white button-down shirt, red-and-blue

  regimental-striped tie, and a pair of blue slacks. He was good-looking in the sort of way that the second lead in romantic comedies is good-looking. He never gets the girl. Dick’s graying hair lent him an air of earnestness, and his slightly loose midsection reminded the rest of us mortals that when we reached Dick’s age-he was in his early fifties—we too would be faded by time. If it could happen to Dick Keys, it could happen to any of us.

  Dick was one of hundreds of Ford dealers who were just now realizing that Edsel Ford and Robert Mcationamara had stuck him with one hilariously ugly sonofabitch of a car.

  Elvis snapped his collar up a little higher, gave me a lurid wink, cracked his gum, and said, “I gotta find me some chicks, man.”

  I got a hot dog and went over to where Keys had set up a little carnival: a small Ferris wheel, a few battered bumper cars, a pony ride, and some clowns who vaguely scared me the way clowns had always vaguely frightened me.

  Keys had also rented some green park benches that pigeons had been decorating. I sat down on one and ate my dog.

  I was just finishing up my lunch when I saw her, and it was a good thing I was almost done because my stomach did its usual flip-flop. The same kind of flip-flop it had been doing since that first day of fourth grade when I’d instantly fallen in love with her: the beautiful Pamela Forrest.

  I once asked my mom if our family had ever been hexed. You know, if somebody had a grudge against Mom and Dad and put a curse on their firstborn, which would be me. Condemn him to love a girl forever beyond his reach. I am twenty-three, a lawyer, and have what they call “prospects.” And I have a ‘ea red Ford convertible with the custom skirts, the louvered hood, and the special weave top that most of the guys around here, even the cool ones, envy.

  That’s my story. Hers is, she’s been in love with Stu Grant since ninth grade, just the way I’ve been in love with her. He’s big, good-looking, rich, and powerful. He’s also married. Pamela’s convinced he’ll someday leave his wife and take his rightful place at her side.

  Right, just like Liz Taylor and Eddie Fisher’ll break up someday too.

  She was licking an ice-cream cone. She wore a crisp pink blouse and pink pedal pushers and pink flats. The blouse and pedal pushers had cute little black and white poodles on them. Her golden hair touched her shoulders, and her blue eyes looked fresh and bright.

  Everybody says she looks like Grace Kelly, and that’s the neat thing: she does but she doesn’t try to. It comes naturally for her.

  Just the way it does for Grace Kelly. If you see my point.

  “Hi, McCain.”

  “Hi.”

  “May I sit down?”

  “Nah.”

  She looked startled. She’s used to me making a fool of myself around her, so when I do otherwise it shakes her faith in how the universe works.

  “No?”

  I grinned. “Sure.”

  “Oh, gosh, you scared me there, McCain.”

  We come from the area of town known as the Knolls, Pamela and I. Worst section in all of Black River Falls. Her grandfather had money till the Depression, which was when they’d been banished from mansion to Knolls. Pamela was raised to believe she was an exiled princess.

  Someday she’d have money again and would therefore be restored to the throne.

  “What do’ you think of the Edsel?” she asked between licks.

  “What do’ you think?”

  “I asked you first.”

  “I think it’s terrible.”

  “Me too. But I saw the Judge a few

  minutes ago and she loves it.”

  The judge she referred to is one Esme Anne Whitney. Before the big war (as distinct from the little one in Korea), the Whitneys owned this town. The city council, the police and fire departments, the newspaper, the school board, the Presbyterian church, and both banks were

  run by them. Then a yahoo family one generation up from the South—Sykes by name—got lucky working for the army during the big war building airstrips and took over much of what the Whitneys had controlled. Now there was a pitched battle between the two camps. Because my law practice couldn’t support me, I used the private

  investigator’s license I picked up after graduating from the University of Iowa law school to work for Judge Whitney. If Pamela labored under the delusion that she would someday be a princess, Judge Whitney labored under the delusion that she would someday reclaim the town from the barbaric hordes that had stolen it from her family. She saw virtually all citizens of Black River Falls as unclean, uncouth, uneducated,

  unappreciative, ungodly, and just about every other un you care to name. It was her often stated wish that the Whitneys would once again reign supreme so the “little people” would have the Whitneys to imitate and aspire to. The beautiful, elegant Pamela Forrest was her secretary.

  “She loves it,” I said, “because she used to date one of the Ford boys when she was at Smith and he was at Dartmouth. You know how she thinks.

  The upper classes have to stick together. Otherwise all of us Woolworth vulgarians’ll overrun them.”

  “She’s a lot nicer than you think.”

  “Yeah? When?”

  “You should see her on Christmas Eve. Handing out those dimes to little poor kids.”

  “Yeah, that probably puts a real strain on her five-million-dollar bank account.”

  “She makes sure they’re shiny and new, McCain. She’s a stickler for that.”

  “She makes sure what’s shiny and new?”

  “The dimes.”

  “Ah.”

  “She goes to the bank and personally picks out every one.”

  “I’d call her a saint,” I said, “if she didn’t hate Catholics so much.”

  And that’s when Pamela’s stomach did a flip-flop. Or at least I imagined it did.

  A silent
Dreamboat Alert had sounded.

  That’s what some of the teenage girls at the Rexall soda fountain counter call it when a cool guy comes into the drugstore.

  This particular dreamboat was none other than Pamela’s lifelong love, Stu Grant. And he was sans wife today, a fact that Pamela had no doubt noted instantly.

  “Oh, gosh,” she said, as if Tab Hunter had just appeared. She handed me her cone. “Here.

  Finish this for me, will you?”

  She pushed the cone at me before I could say no. Being her slave, I took it. She went to work on herself, using the tools inside the small pink purse slung over her small pink shoulder. She touched up every inch of her lovely face and then jumped up and said, “See you, McCain.”

  Yes, I had been cursed. My dad or

  mom had to have done something to somebody with supernatural powers. Because I just kept right on loving her. No matter what she did to me. No matter how hopeless it was.

  After I finished off her ice-cream cone, faintly tasting lipstick on its rim, I just sat and watched and felt good about living here. Most of the people I graduated law school with rushed off to big cities, mostly Chicago, which is only four and a half hours away. I’d spent four recent days there at a law conference Judge Whitney had sent me to, and now I was happily back home. For all its flaws, I love the place.

  As if to confirm my regard for the town, Henry chose now to jump up on the bench. With his jaunty sailor’s cap and his bow tie, Henry was looking his best. Henry is a duck, and as far as I know he’s been a duck most of his life, though sometimes you have to wonder, the very human things he does. Maybe he started out as a kid and evolved into a duck. Henry belongs to a farmer who plants corn west of town. He brings Henry in for special occasions, like Edsel Day.

  Henry sat next to me and we watched the human parade roll past, the way it’s been rolling past since those French trappers of three hundred years ago came down the