The Day the Music Died Read online

  “So what’s going on in the august Judge Whitney’s office?” I said, smiling at Mary as I spoke.

  “A lot, actually. She wants you over here right away. Robert Frazier is in her chambers.”

  Frazier was the father of Susan, the woman Kenny Whitney had married. And perhaps murdered.

  “I tried to call Her Honor several times this morning,” I said. “The line was always busy.”

  “It was crazy here. The press and all. I mean, both of them, the newspaper guy and the radio guy. And it was questions, questions, questions all morning. Finally, Judge Whitney threatened to get an injunction.”

  I could see the judge up against this shambling, dandruff-laden Earle Peterson of The Bugle and the crew-cutted nitwit (“Hey, hang loose, Jack, elsewise I’ll be blastin’ off, you dig?”) Charlie O’Brian of TOPS radio. Not many people knew this—it was sort of like the secret identity of the Shadow—but ace reporter and resident hipster Charlie O’Brian was also the voice of Trader Tom.

  “Well, I’m glad things’ve calmed down.”

  “So should I tell her you’ll be here right away?”

  “Sure. See you.”

  I hung up and when I turned back to Mary, I felt something I would’ve thought impossible. I felt jealous. Wes Lindstrom had his arm around Mary’s shoulder and was talking to her in the intimate whispers only lovers can understand. And she was smiling up at him, nodding.

  When he saw me hang up, he said, loud enough not only for Mary but for the customers along the counter to hear: “I thought I had a shoplifter on my hands this morning. Our esteemed counselor here was walking out with a trashy magazine and he acted surprised when I asked him to pay for it. But I went along with it and just let him pretend that he’d just forgotten about paying for it.”

  There was an angry undertone in his voice and the customers picked up on it. They weren’t sure if they should laugh or not. I saw Mary watching me, unhappy that he was doing this. I had a good comeback, even, asking him what he was selling trashy magazines for in the first place. But I decided against it. The customers were looking me over now and I could sense that the tide was against me.

  “I’ll see you, Mary,” I said. I knew I was blushing. I felt alone, hunted, on the run. Growing up in the Knolls can do that to you.

  Life is like that sometimes, as my father always says.

  As I was walking out of the store, I slowed down in the aisle Ruthie had been in. There was a one-box hole in a span of six small boxes on the shelf. The product was called Potassium Permangatel. I wondered why she’d want something like that.

  7

  THE DAY WAS A postcard, the warm sunlight on the snowy streets making the downtown area look not old but fashionably antique, from the stone gargoyles that guard the entrance to the First National Bank to the octagonal bandstand in the city square where Iowa boy Meredith Wilson of Music Man fame had guest-conducted the local symphony three years ago to the three blocks of retail stores, all showing the blue and tan awnings the chamber of commerce had talked them into buying a few years back. The temperature was up around thirty now and the air smelled clean. The people looked clean, too—young, old, rich, poor, clean and bright and friendly, even the young ones in the black leather jackets and the duck’s ass haircuts. They liked to play at being bad, some of the older boys, but mostly what they did was cruise the loop area with their radios up too loud and call out to the pretty girls on the streets, and snarl at any male who wasn’t dressed the way they were.

  There was a shortcut to the courthouse and I took it, down two alleys and one block over. Halfway there, I came out on a narrow side street with a lumberyard, a Western Auto and a small tavern at the very end of the street. It was from the tavern I heard the shout, “You try’n come in here one more time you black bastard, and I’ll call the law on you! You see if I don’t!”

  There was no mistaking the subject of this tirade: Darin Greene. He stood out in front of Paddy’s Tap with his hands on his hips, facing down Paddy, who owned the place, and Paddy, Jr., who spent most of his time guzzling up the profits and sounding off on politics. In his cups, he’d tell you that he had some kind of connection to the KKK, but with Paddy, Jr., truth and lies sounded just the same.

  Whenever he got drunk and wanted to pick a fight with somebody white, Darin Greene headed for Paddy’s, the only tavern in town that wouldn’t serve Negroes. Darin had been Kenny Whitney’s best friend all the way through school and until a year or so ago when they’d had a mysterious falling-out. In another time, Darin could have been a movie star. He had Harry Belafonte good looks and when he was sober, he could be a charmer. He’d probably had a dozen jobs since high school, losing all of them because of his drinking. He and Kenny had been the football stars. Darin played two years at the University of Iowa but got in trouble busting up a white dean’s son in a barroom one hot July night. He served six months in county and then headed straight to Chicago. Nobody saw him for nearly a year and then one day he drove back into town in a shiny new Olds convertible, a fine high-gloss yellow one. He’d lost twenty pounds and looked meaner than ever. The small knife scar he’d picked up on his left cheek didn’t hurt, either. Nobody was ever sure how he’d gotten the Olds or the scar but there was a lot of speculation. He immediately started hanging around Kenny again, spending a lot of time out at Kenny’s house, and less and less time with his wife and young son, who had not accompanied him to Chicago. Lurlene stayed here and worked as a nurse’s aide at the hospital. Cliff Sykes, Jr., our esteemed police chief, tried for a year to run Darin out of town, but thanks to Judge Whitney, he failed. Judge Whitney wasn’t all that crazy about colored people. She just enjoyed thwarting the will of any Sykes anytime she got the chance.

  Now, on a beautiful day like this one, two low-life white men were in Darin’s face and he was probably too drunk and confused to understand what was going on. He seemed to come to Paddy’s on autopilot. He got some kind of terrible pleasure out of it, as if this was the way he secretly believed he should be treated.

  I walked on over.

  Darin was drunker than I thought, weaving back and forth, leaning on the fender of his yellow Olds to keep himself from falling down into the slushy street.

  “Why don’t you get in your car, Darin?” I said. “I’ll call Lurlene and she can come and get you.”

  “You get your ass out of here, McCain,” Paddy, Sr., said. “This buck wouldn’t be here if that judge of yours hadn’t got all them court orders against Cliff Sykes.”

  “’Bout time we started handling things our way,” Paddy, Jr., said. “The way they handle ’em down in Mississippi and Alabama.”

  “’Til the Jews went down there and started stirring up the coons, anyway,” Paddy, Sr., said. Darin was six-three and probably weighed 180 or 190, so it was quite a swing. He’d have shattered Paddy, Sr.’s jaw if the punch had connected. But Darin was off-balance when he threw it and he also slipped on the ice. He followed his punch, ending up on one knee.

  Paddy, Jr., moved quickly, raising his foot, ready to catch Darin a good one in the face or chest. Paddy, like his father, was round, sloppy and had a face made for sneering. My rage was right there waiting for me. I supposed Paddy, Jr., could take me in a prolonged fight, but my small size worked for me here. I was faster than he was.

  I took the leg he was just about to use on Darin and yanked it out from under him. He sat down on the ice, shocked, enraged and humiliated. He was wearing a new pair of cowboy boots, a new western shirt with fancy piping and a new white Stetson, pretty much the same thing he and his father always wore.

  Paddy, Jr., called me a lot of names in a very short time. His father came over and started helping him up. By this time, a number of customers had started wandering out of the small dirty-brick tavern. This was like an extra session of the professional wrestling they watched every Friday night down at the armory. And this was free.

  Darin couldn’t even get to his feet. I walked over and got one of my arms und
er one of his and proceeded to inflict a hernia on myself. Somehow I got him to his feet and inside the car. He kept muttering things that I didn’t understand at all. I told him, “Get over on the passenger side.”

  “I can drive, man.”

  “Sure, you can, Darin. Now get your ass over there.”

  “I’d watch that white mouth of yours, man.”

  “Just slide the hell over.”

  Paddy Hanratty, Sr., was smiling. “He’s all yours, McCain. How you like bein’ a chauffeur for a coon? Isn’t it usually the other way around?”

  All the customers standing around found this wonderfully hilarious. They were nudging each other in ludicrous exaggerated ways.

  The only one not smiling was Paddy Hanratty, Jr. I’d messed up his cowboy outfit and he was mad. “This isn’t over by a long shot, McCain.”

  I got the key in the ignition. The car barely started. The fine yellow Olds Darin had driven into town a few years ago had now deteriorated just as much as its owner. It hadn’t been tuned up for a long time. The windshield was cracked. The floorboards were muddy. Empty beer cans littered the backseat. A Chicago Bears brochure was angrily mashed up in a corner. It was four years old, dating from about the time Darin had tried out for the pros. He was great high school material, solid college material, but no material at all for the pros. Those guys brunch on iron bars.

  I got the motor running, albeit raggedly, and then pulled away from the curb. A forest of middle fingers poked the February air at us.

  Darin sat up. “I coulda handled that cracker with a gun if I needed to.”

  “Yeah, you were doing a great job, the way you slipped and fell down.”

  He glared at me. “You better watch that white mouth of yours.” Then, “And anyway, you be drivin’ my car, asshole, so I’d keep that tongue of yours real civil.”

  There wasn’t any point in arguing with him. He was speaking gibberish the way most drunks eventually do. Being near clinical death—his usual alcoholic intake was enormous—he should have passed out. But he just kept right on going. That was the kind of drunk both he and his pal Kenny had been. If they’d gone through everything alcoholic in the house, they’d go into the bathroom and start on the hair tonic that was 14.2 percent alcohol.

  We went two blocks and then he muttered something.

  “What?” I said.

  “Pull the car over!” he screamed at me.

  I whipped to the curb. Even before I had the car stopped, he had the door open and was vomiting into the gutter. A couple of lawyers were walking by. They looked pretty disgusted. Then they saw who was driving the Olds and they smirked. There’d be all kinds of jokes about the kind of clientele I had.

  He puked for quite a while. He was pretty good at it. He’d puke and then raise his head a little and then puke some more. Then he’d spit. He was almost as good at spitting as puking. I was glad that my next meal was still several hours away.

  When he was done, he leaned back inside and said, “Gimme a smoke.”

  “Yes sir, commander.”

  I gave him a Pall Mall.

  “Light,” he said.

  I took out the nice silver Ronson my folks had given me for Christmas. I’d already lost it twice but luckily it had kept turning up.

  “How much your lighter cost, man?” he said.

  “It was a gift.”

  “Lady friend?”

  “My folks. Look, Darin, I have to get going. But there’s something I need to do first.”

  “I coulda handled those two crackers, man.”

  “When you were sober, yes. Not as drunk as you are now.”

  “I sound drunk, McCain?”

  Actually, he didn’t. He sounded, in fact, almost cold sober.

  “It’s the puking,” he said. “It never fails. I just puke my guts up and I’m fine.”

  “Well, you can never underestimate the medical benefits of puking.”

  “Straighten me right up. That’s how I can last thirty, forty hours drinkin’. I just puke every once in a while.”

  I started driving again. I pulled into a DX station.

  “What you doin’?”

  “I need to make a phone call.”

  I jerked the keys out of the ignition.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  “Where you goin’ with my keys?”

  “I told you. To make a phone call.”

  “How do I know you ain’t gonna try and sell this car or some shit like that?”

  “Oh, yeah. I could probably get twenty, thirty grand for this baby. I think the stale beer smell in the backseat is what folks are looking for in a car these days. Not to mention the puke.”

  “There’s that white mouth of yours again.”

  “Just shut up and sit there, Darin. You’re almost as big a pain in the ass as Paddy, Jr.”

  That quieted him down for some reason.

  The pay phone was next to the john. I looked up the hospital number and called. I asked for Lurlene and the operator said just a minute. Out in the car repair section, the greasy silver hoist was raising up a very cherry 1953 DeSoto. A kid in a clean DX uniform was using his wrench to point out various things on the undercarriage of a car. I was getting sentimental. Nothing I’d rather do than spend a warm afternoon on my driveway working on my ragtop.

  Lurlene came on and I told her who I was and what had happened.

  “Did he throw up?” she asked.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, he did.”

  “Then he should be all right to drive.”

  “He may be all right technically. But I’ll bet that Sykes still comes after him.” I was sure that Paddy, Sr., had called Chief of Police Sykes, and I was sure that Sykes would be waiting for Darin Greene to get behind the wheel. They’d hit him with several charges, including drunken driving and, for sure, resisting arrest, which would justify the beating they would certainly put on him.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. McCain, it’s just that they don’t like me takin’ time off at the hospital here. They’re real nice and I hate to take advantage. And you know, with Darin not workin’, I’m the only support our family’s got.”

  “All right. I’ll run him home.”

  “That’s very nice of you, Mr. McCain.”

  I hesitated, knowing what I was about to say would disturb her. “Does Darin have a gun?”

  “A gun? He has a hunting rifle. I bought him one at Sears a couple years ago. For his birthday. Jeff, he’s the oldest boy, he’s eight, he’s startin’ to take target practice with it in the Cub Scouts.”

  “How about a handgun?”

  “He’s got that Army .45 his daddy had in the war.”

  That must be the gun he was referring to when I’d gotten into his car.

  “Is he in some kind of trouble?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “He just mentioned it in passing.”

  Another pause. “Is he in trouble, Mr. McCain?”

  “No. He really isn’t, Lurlene.”

  “Would you swear to it on the Lord’s name?”

  “I swear to it on the Lord’s name.”

  “Oh, thank God. I just got so scared there.” She sounded about to cry. “The boys, they’re just always afraid somethin’ bad’s gonna happen to that daddy of theirs.” Now she was crying, not hard, but with the soft, earnest sounds of a good and weary woman. “He ain’t like people say he is, Mr. McCain, not when he’s sober. When he’s sober, he can be the nicest man in the world.”

  When I hung up, I dropped in another nickel and called my dad and asked him if he could meet me out at Darin Greene’s place in about twenty minutes. And that I’d explain later.

  When I went back out to the Olds, Darin was leaning against the front of the car, one heel hooked on the bumper. He had to be cold in his short-sleeved red shirt and tan slacks. He did not look happy.

  When I got close, he held his hand out. “Keys.”

  “I’m driving you home.”

>   “Keys, man. Or I’m gonna make you very sorry.”

  I looked at him. He wasn’t a bully, as Kenny had been. But he had a much deeper and meaner anger. He could make me very sorry indeed.

  “Sykes is going to be laying for you.”

  “I don’t give a damn about Sykes right now, man. I just want my keys back.”

  “You want your kids to have to come and visit you in county again?”

  That got to him. Say what you would about him, what he was or wasn’t, he was a man who loved his kids.

  “You son of a bitch.”

  But he got in the car. The passenger’s side.

  When we were going again, he reached under the seat and brought up a pint of rotgut whiskey.

  “You really need that?”

  “You’re pushin’ your luck, man. And that’s no shit.”

  “I take it you heard about Kenny.”

  “’Course I heard about Kenny. Everybody’s heard about Kenny.”

  “I don’t think he killed her.”

  “What’re you talkin’ about, man, of course he killed her.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “If he didn’t kill her, why’d he kill himself, then?”

  “I was hoping maybe you could help me out a little with that one.”

  He glowered at me again. He looked angry, as he often did, but now there was a sense of fear about him, too. I wondered what he was afraid of.

  We were out on the river road now, heading toward the trailer court where virtually every Negro in the county lived. The rent is cheap, I guess. It’s our form of segregation.

  “You were his friend, is what I mean. I thought maybe you could help me.”

  “You haven’t kept up. Me ’n’ Kenny haven’t spoken in over a year.”

  “Why?”

  “None of your business why.”

  “Friendship like that, all those years, and it just ends. That doesn’t make much sense.”

  “I don’t know anything about what happened out there. Far as I can tell, he killed Susan and then he killed himself. He got crazy when he drank and from what I hear, he’d been hittin’ it pretty hot ’n’ heavy.”

  We came up on a little hill. On a wide grassy field below were the trailers. They were the small jobs, the kind they’d built before the war. There were maybe three dozen of them. It was a ghetto. Saturday nights, the good colored folks stayed inside all locked up while the predators prowled. I sometimes felt sorry for myself, coming from the Knolls. But what I’d had to put up with was easy compared to the doom that awaited the black kids from Shady Acres Trailer Park.