Sam McCain - 04 - Save the Last Dance for Me Page 5

  Its most prestigious, and only, local graduate is Doc Novotony, who is yet another relative of Cliffie’s. Doc had to battle the state medical board to get his ticket but they finally had to give in after the state supreme court ordered them to. Cliffie, Sr. made Doc the county medical examiner, which was all right with everybody because he did so with the tacit understanding that Doc, who is actually a great guy, would never actually touch a living human being. He would work only on corpses, people figuring how much harm can you do to a stiff? And if he didn’t have a stiff to work on, he generally sat in his office in the morgue in the basement of the courthouse, chain-smoked his Chesterfields, gnawed on his Klondike candy bars, read his scandal magazines (“Kim Novak’s Naughty Nite Out With The Football Team!”), and avoided damaging his five-six, 220-pound figure by doing any exercise at all.

  “Hey,” he said when I walked in, his feet up on his desk as usual. It being Saturday morning, his voluptuous middle-aged receptionist Rita, with whom he was or wasn’t having an affair, depending on which town gossip you talked to, wasn’t here. He wore floppy loafers, red Bermuda shorts, a polo shirt with a Hawkeye insignia on it (he was quoted as saying once that he was neither Jew nor Christian but Hawkeye, meaning a fan of the various University of Iowa Hawkeye teams), and a smile on his face. He almost always looked happy, as if he were spiting the corpses tucked in the drawers all around him.

  “Cliffie said you’d be here, McCain, and that I wasn’t supposed to tell you anything.”

  “Good ole Cliffie.”

  “How come you’re interested, anyway?”

  I shrugged. “I was out there when he died.

  Plus I got a phone call.”

  His blue eyes became downright merry. “Herr Himmler?”

  Which is what he called Judge Whitney, my three-quarter-time employer.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why would she give a damn about Muldaur?”

  “She doesn’t. But Richard Nixon’s going to swing through here after he stops in Cedar Rapids and she’s afraid we’ll all look like a bunch of rubes to him if we’ve got a murder going involving a minister who used snakes in his church.

  She’s going to have dinner with Nixon. Said she doesn’t want our little town to sound like a bunch of mountain crackers.”

  He beamed. “Richard Nixon? Really?

  I’m gonna vote for him. I guess I’ve got to give the old broad one thing—she sure is connected.”

  As she was. In the past few years, she’s golfed three or four times with Ike and dined with celebrities as various as Leonard Bernstein, Dinah Shore, and Jackie Gleason; next month she was scheduled to be on the same Chicago dais as Claire Booth Luce and Dr.

  Joyce Brothers.

  “So what’s the word on Muldaur?” I said.

  He took his feet down. “You want all the mumbo jumbo or English?”

  “English will do fine.”

  “He was poisoned.”

  One thing about those Cincinnati Citadel of Medinomics graduates—y can’t put anything over on them.

  “Anything a little more specific?”

  “Ah, you do want the mumbo jumbo. I appreciate the opportunity to sound like I know what I’m talking about.” He cleared his throat.

  Pulled up his baggy trousers. The spotlight was his. “Technically, he died from exhaustion.”

  “Exhaustion? You’re kidding. I thought you said he was poisoned.”

  “He was. Strychnine has that effect. You know all those convulsions he had?”

  “God, they were terrible.”

  “They literally wore him out. Yes, he was poisoned, and that asphyxiated him. But the convulsions were so severe he also had a

  heart attack brought on by sheer exhaustion.”

  “God, what a terrible way to go.”

  “Been better poetic justice if one of his vipers got him. But the vipers wouldn’t have done half the damage the poison did.”

  “But doesn’t poison like that taste terrible?”

  “Yeah, but the way he worked himself up during those ceremonies … He might have swallowed it and not realized it. He wouldn’t have had to drink a whole hell of a lot of it. Cliffie talked to one of the churchgoers who said Muldaur was always guzzling Pepsi. Somebody coulda put it in that.”

  “I need to talk to his wife.”

  “Cliffie said she wasn’t any help.”

  “Yeah, she probably didn’t respond

  well to when Cliffie clubbed her.”

  Doc grinned. “I shouldn’t put up with you making fun of my beloved cousin that way. Without him I wouldn’t be medical examiner of this here county. And I wouldn’t be permitted to wear my stethoscope in public, either.”

  “Now, that would be a shame. You look very good strutting down the street in your stethoscope.”

  He giggled. “That’s what the ladies tell me, counselor.”

  “Exhaustion, huh,” I said, thinking about everything he’d told me. Then an image of Muldaur convulsing came to me. Seeing something like that diminished our entire species. I’d always known we were vulnerable. I just didn’t like to be reminded of it in such a grotesque fashion.

  Five

  I guess I should explain about our dunking.

  It’s one of our darkest family secrets.

  Everybody in my family dunks. We dunk doughnuts, we dunk coffee cake, we dunk sandwiches, my kid sister, at least before she moved to Chicago, dunked her French fries in her Pepsi. In moments of great excitement I’ve been known to dunk a slice of pizza in my glass of beer. Maybe it’s genetic. You don’t want to know about family reunions, believe me. The inclination to dunk affects multiple generations. Eighty, ninety McCains planted at various picnic tables in a public park. Dunking. All at the same time.

  Anyway, after visiting Doc, I

  stopped over to ask my dad about a guy who used to work at the plant and then all of a sudden there were three of us at the kitchen table, dunking long johns in our coffee.

  My dad’s three biggest dreams had come true. He produced a kid who became a professional man, he bought a house, and he paid saved-up cash for a 1958 Plymouth that has the fin-length of a shark.

  My mom’s three biggest dreams have come true, too. My dad returned safely from the war, her sister survived breast cancer, and she finally got the Westinghouse washer-dryer combination she’s always wanted, thanks to the way Betty Furness hawks them on Tv.

  My dad was mid-dunk when I said, “So did Walter ever tell you why he dropped out of Muldaur’s church?”

  “He sure did.”

  “How come?”

  He held up his finger, meaning please let him finish swallowing. He’s a little guy, which is where I get it, and when Mom’s in high heels they look sort of funny together, not mother-son but more like big sister-ll brother, but when they get out on the dance floor to Benny Goodman, their musical tastes having ossified around 1946, they are dazzling, gray hair, girdle, shoe lifts, bald head, and all.

  “Muldaur tried to get frisky with his wife.”

  “What? You’re kidding.”

  “Oh, no,” Mom said. “One of the women at the beauty parlor said that the same thing happened to her daughter-in-law. Apparently, he was a frisky man.”

  I don’t have to tell you what frisky means.

  Dad rarely uses vulgarities and Mom never does. That particular genetic streak ended with me, I’m afraid.

  I wondered if Cliffie knew anything about this. Muldaur was not only a religious bigot but a ladies’ man as well. Two motives had already surfaced for his being killed. There would likely be more. There usually are in homicide investigations. You take a guy like Muldaur, you might find six, seven people who’d considered killing him, each with very specific and unique reasons of their own.

  Part of my mom’s long john got

  soaked and fell in her coffee. She used her spoon to rescue it, then ate it like a piece of cereal. I’m more careful with my dunking. More timid, I guess. I’m well aware
of how pieces get too wet and fall off. I don’t want that to happen to me.

  “Where’d Walter move to, anyway?”

  “Cedar Rapids. Penick and Ford plant.

  He’s got a brother-in-law there who’s a big shot in the union.”

  “He didn’t happen to move because of Muldaur, did he?”

  “Heck, no. Walter? He knew what he

  was getting into when he married Jinny.”

  “What he was getting into? What’s that mean?”

  “You know,” my dad said, as if we were telepaths. “Her, uh, bosoms.”

  “She had big knockers, as the men like to say,”

  Mom said, “your father included.”

  “Yeah, now that I think about it,” I said, “I guess she did.”

  “Guys were always gettin’ frisky with her,”

  Dad said. “Muldaur was just one more. His wife was the one who thought the snake stuff was so neat, anyway. So when she told Walter about Muldaur askin’ her to meet him out to the old Tyler farm, he just told her that he didn’t ever want her to go back there to church.”

  “You know who you should talk to,” Mom said.

  “Who?”

  “Kenny Thibodeau.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. He wrote a long article on

  Muldaur and his church, back when he worked for The Clarion.”

  Kenny Thibodeau was a local kid who graduated from the University of Iowa journalism school in 1955 or so. He came back to town here, became the assistant editor of the local paper, got himself married, had a son, took up golf, and could even be seen ushering at the Pentecostal church on Sunday morning.

  Then he read On The Road by Jack

  Kerouac and claimed to have the same kind of vision St. Paul had on the road to Damascus, or wherever he was going. Well, not exactly the same, of course. Paul claimed to have seen God and renounced all sin. Kenny Thibodeau, on the other hand, claimed to have seen Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassidy. And instead

  of renouncing sin, he embraced it. All kinds of sin. He left his wife and child and moved to the West Coast. He reappeared a year later, his wife and child long gone, no longer the buttoned-down, crew-cutted Kenny we’d known and ignored. He was a beatnik. I hate that word, it’s a press word, but that’s what he was.

  He had the goatee, he had the black horn-rimmed glasses, the black

  turtleneck, the black chinos, the black socks, and, worst of all, the Jesus sandals.

  I’m no fashion plate but there’s something about socks and sandals that rankles. At least he’d spared us the beret.

  Kenny had been coming and going ever since. He went to London, Paris, San Francisco, New York. And always returned. He

  supported himself by writing pornography, or what the moralists called pornography, anyway. Paperbacks with sexy covers and suggestive titles but virtually nothing explicit inside. Lesbo Lodge was one of his, as was Life of a Lesbo. Kenny

  lived in a trailer near the west end of town.

  We had coffee whenever we ran into each other. I enjoyed him without quite approving of him. And I disapproved of him because I was probably jealous.

  He traveled, he supported himself writing, albeit somewhat scandalously, and he was always going to Iowa City on the weekends and coming back with wild tales of undergraduate English majors who “know how to swing, man, and I do mean swing.”

  I’d never thought of asking Kenny for actual hard information. I’d never suspected Kenny of having any hard information. But maybe Mom was right. Maybe before he’d taken up marijuana, cheap wine, and Zen there had been an actual fact or two rolling around inside his mind.

  “He looks so silly in that goatee,” Mom said. “But he’s still a nice boy.”

  Dad laughed. “Don’t tell that to Emily at the rectory. She thinks he should be put in jail for writing those dirty books.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “She also was going to start a petition to put D. H. Lawrence in jail until she found out he was dead.”

  Summer Saturday mornings in Black

  River Falls are a good time to be on the streets. The merchants are happy because

  business is good; the farm wives are happy because they’re getting their hair done or buying something new for themselves—it could be a dress or an electric mixer, it doesn’t matter, it’s just the idea of getting something new; the little ones are happy because there’s a triple feature plus a chapter of a serial at the Rialto; the teenage girls are happy because they’ll be modeling their swimsuits at the public pool; and the teenage boys are happy because they’ll get to watch the teenage girls model those swimsuits.

  The street rods are out already. They’ll go out to the park where the boys will polish them the way pagans used to polish false idols. Chopped and channeled hymns of metal and fiberglass and rubber that wouldn’t think of playing Fabian or Frankie Avalon or anybody like that, sticking strictly to Mr. Chuck Berry and Mr. Little Richard and Mr. Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps. There are also “jes’ folks” kinds of cars, bicycles, a horse-drawn Amish buggy or two (there’s an Amish community twenty miles due east of here), and a whole bunch of motorcycles, most of the riders being Marlon Brando in their minds (but then who do the grandmas riding the big Indians imagine themselves to be?).

  Kenny Thibodeau made it easy for me. He was sitting in the town square reading a John Steinbeck paperback, In Dubious

  Battle.

  His black uniform was intact. Even his shades were black. The only way I knew he saw me was the way he tilted his head up at me.

  “Hey, man.”

  “Hey, man, yourself, Kenny.”

  I sat down next to him on the bench.

  “How they hangin’, man?”

  “Oh, you know,” I said. I’ve never known how to answer that particular clich@e. They’re hangin’

  low, hangin’ high? Which way is best? “How’s the writing going?”

  “Pretty good. They jumped me up in advances.”

  Two paperbacks rested on the pigeon-blessed bench between us.

  “Take ‘em, I was gonna give ‘em to you anyway when I ran into you.”

  I picked them up. The covers were nicely illustrated. One showed a virginal young

  blonde woman in a matching skirt and sweater and bobby sox and penny loafers staring over her shoulder at a severe but coldly beautiful older woman standing in a shadowed doorway. “Student Advisor … Lesbos ruled this campus until a stud professor was hired.” The other one featured a well-built shirtless young girl in bed with a nearly naked older woman. “Sex Machine … His “tools of the trade” could turn lesbos into man-lovers.”

  “The Nobel Committee wants every copy of those they can find,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” he laughed, “so they can burn ‘em.”

  “You ever actually meet a lesbian?”

  “I heard one on the radio once.”

  “How do you know she was a lesbian?”

  “She said she was.”

  “I guess that’s one way of telling.” Then I said, “My cousin’s a lesbian and she’s actually very nice. I mean, nobody in the family wants to acknowledge it but she never even pretends to be interested in guys romantically.”

  “Maybe you could introduce me to her sometime.

  You know, maybe she could teach me how they talk, code words, stuff like that.”

  “I think they talk pretty much like everybody else. At least Alison does.”

  “You mean Dr. Edmond DeMille wasn’t right? They don’t have a secret handshake?”

  “Who’s Dr. Edmond DeMille?”

  “I am. That’s one of my pen names. I wrote a book called When Your Daughter Is a Lesbo. DeMille is even more full of shit than I am.”

  That was Kenny’s greatest virtue. The self-deprecation. He didn’t harangue you the way some of his compatriots did. I’d never even heard him describe anybody as “square.” That was why I liked his books, too. I

&
nbsp; appreciated the errant erections they sometimes inspired but even more I appreciated the humor he was able to sneak in.

  “My mom tells me you did an article on Muldaur.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Hey, wasn’t that wild?

  Him dying and all.”

  “The Judge wants me to find out what happened before Richard Nixon gets here.”

  He whipped his shades off. “Richard

  Nixon is coming here?”

  “That’s right. In six days. Having dinner with her at her club.”

  “That Nazi.”

  “I agree, Kenny. But right now I need to know about Muldaur. You find out anything interesting about him?”

  “Interesting meaning sleazy?”

  “Yeah. Something like that.”

  “He was porking a lot of the ladies in his flocks.”

  “That I’ve heard.”

  “And then about six months ago, he came into some money.”

  “Inherited, you mean?”

  Kenny shook his head. He had beagle brown eyes. Plaintive. He made you want to put a dog biscuit in his paw. “I guess not.

  He just suddenly had some money. Paid off the loan on that garage he uses for his church. Paid off a lot of bills, too.”

  “But nobody knows where the money came from?”

  “Nobody I talked to.”

  “Wonder where he’d get money? The place he came from—^th hill people don’t have any money.” He hesitated. “You want me to see what I can find out.”

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  “In fact, maybe I can get some ideas from it. You know, sort of playing private eye. You ever watch “Peter Gunn?””

  “Never miss it.” And I didn’t.

  “How about that Mancini music?”

  Henry Mancini had revolutionized

  television theme music. His music was as much a part of the noir feel of the show as the scripts and the actors.

  Kenny put his glasses back on. Raised his Steinbeck. “Writing sleaze is starting to take its toll on me, man.”

  I stood up. “How so?”

  “Even readin’ somebody like Steinbeck. You know, like this really serious, really fine writer. I keep waiting for the sex scenes now.”