No Cure for Death m-1 Page 4

  “I was up, sir,” John said.

  “Well, okay.”

  I said, “What’d you find out?”

  Brennan gave me his slow look, tension tightening his jaw muscles; he was getting ready to have another go at me, but John stopped him.

  “Why are you coming down so hard on Mal, when he’s just trying to help you out?” John asked him, dropping the “sir” as though it had just occurred to him that Brennan wasn’t his commanding officer.

  But Brennan ignored John and held his gaze on me. He was trying to keep an expression of control, of confidence on his face, but it wasn’t working out for him.

  Finally he said, “Before you ask me any more questions, Mallory, I got something to lay on you: just keep your damn butt out of my business. And this whole deal is my business. You had some information, you delivered it, now go on home, damn it. Shoo.”

  And I said, “I’m not a bystander, Brennan. Whether you like it or not, I’m an active participant. If you find any evidence of foul play, I’ll be a top prosecution witness, you know. So be nice to me, Brennan. Satisfy the curiosity of this concerned citizen.”

  He came over and sat down at the table with us, changed his expression to one that was about as friendly as he could muster for me. Sort of a warm grimace.

  He said, “I appreciate you letting me know about the circumstances surrounding that accident last night. I really do. I’m obliged to you for that much, don’t get me wrong.”

  “Then tell me about the autopsy.”

  He started to get mad all over again, then sighed in momentary defeat. “We’re trying to contact next of kin. After a reasonable attempt’s been made, we can go on ahead with it.”

  John said, “What about the girl’s mother?”

  Brennan shook his head. “Called the University Hospital just before I came up here. Old lady Ferris is out of the picture.”

  “Who?” I said.

  “The mother,” Brennan said. “Renata Ferris, age fifty-nine. She died around four this morning.”

  SEVEN

  John’s sister Lori and her husband and newborn child lived in a duplex on East Hill, just a few blocks from my trailer-the lower floor of a paint-peeling gothic two-story.

  When John knocked, we heard “Come on in,” and did, finding Lori sitting on the couch, with her blouse unbuttoned, holding her baby to one beautiful, mostly exposed breast. She apologized for not rising. Lori is a pretty, shapely little thing, with long brown hair highlighted with red, and milky white skin freckled here and there. Her breasts, judging from the one that was showing, were pale ivory, and let me state now that watching a beautiful woman breast-feed a child is something I’ll never get used to, and not just because I was a bottle baby myself.

  Lori and John had a lot to talk about, so I kept fairly quiet for the first half hour. They hadn’t seen each other since his emergency leave when their mother died, which had been just before he left for his second tour in Vietnam. John didn’t say much about his overseas duty, but he did have a few words to say, mostly bitter, about California and the wife he’d briefly had out there. Lori told John that her husband Frank wasn’t in a rock group anymore, but was playing four evenings a week in a local bar with a country-western band, which was helping to supplement the salary from his job at the alcohol plant. She was going to try to stay at home with the child, Jeff, and hoped she wouldn’t have to go back to secretarial work.

  Finally I said, “Lori, I wonder if you’d mind if I butt in for a moment.”

  Her brown eyes flashed sexily, an unsettling thing for a mother breast-feeding her child to do (unsettling for me, that is), and she said, “Not at all, Mal.”

  “John told me this morning that you used to know a girl named Janet Ferris.”

  Lori nodded. “I still do. I mean, we’re not real close, but I know her.”

  John and I exchanged glances.

  “And,” she said, “her name isn’t Ferris anymore. She got married to a guy named Phil Taber. They’re split up, but she’s still using the name.”

  “Have you seen her lately?”

  “Sure. Last week. She moved back to Port City several months ago.”

  John said, “You better tell her, Mal.”

  Lori shifted the child from one breast to the other. “Tell me what?”

  I said, “Janet Taber was killed last night.”

  “God, no! But… how? What happened?”

  John said, “A car crash.”

  “An accident?”

  “That’s what it looks like,” I said. “But I think there’s a chance it was something else.”

  “God,” Lori said. “And after all she’s been through.” She shook her head. “I wonder what’ll happen to her boy. That freaky husband of hers won’t take care of him. The kid’s in bad shape, you know. Very bad shape.”

  “How bad?”

  “Bad shape like in open heart surgery.”

  John said, “The appearance of the accident was that Janet was drunk at the wheel and went over the side out at Colorado Hill.”

  “That’s a load of bull,” Lori said. “Booze made Janet nauseous-she couldn’t stand the stuff! I’ve seen her smoke a joint now and then, but hard liquor? No way.”

  “Well,” I said.

  Lori eased her child away from her breast and rose up from the couch, saying, “Excuse me.” Several minutes later, having tucked the baby away in his crib, she came back, buttoning her white blouse.

  “What’s your interest in Janet, Mal?” Lori said, sadly, sitting back down on the couch. “I didn’t realize Janet and I shared a mutual friend in you. She never mentioned you.”

  I told her the story. I’d been through the bus station incident so many times I was beginning to feel prerecorded. Lori leaned forward, intent on my words, the intelligence sharp in her brown eyes. When I finished up, she said, “Wow,” and shook her head. “Some story.”

  “And,” I said, “since I’m on Thanksgiving vacation…”

  “Don’t mention the word Thanksgiving,” she said. “I’ve been wrestling with a turkey all morning. I’ll be glad when tomorrow’s out of the way. I’m having Brennan and John over and…”

  John interrupted, “Mal’s not changing the subject to his holiday plans, sis. He’s really caught up in this Janet Taber thing. He wants to do something about it.”

  “The only thing to do,” Lori said, “is fill Brennan in on it. He’s a little right-wing, I’ll grant you, but then Port County is the most Republican county in this Republican state. Brennan’s a good sheriff-don’t let his redneck attitude fool you.”

  “I just came from talking to Brennan,” I said. “And I came away with the feeling he doesn’t really take this too seriously.”

  “Why not?”

  “Maybe because I’m involved. I don’t know.”

  “So what are you gonna do? Play cop?”

  “I was one once, you know.”

  Lori smirked. “Yeah, you rode around in a squad car out in some California equivalent of Port City for what, a month and a half before you quit? Big deal.”

  “Lori,” John said.

  “Look, Mal,” she said, “I like you and all that, but I’m not in favor of helping out anybody who’s got in mind taking the law in his own hands. I’m an ex-radical these days, all settled down and married and a mother, and I’m for working through the system, not running over it.”

  “Don’t pay any attention to her,” John told me. “She’s been a schizophrenic for years, trying to be a left-wing antiwar liberal on the one hand, and supporting that super-conservative stepfather sheriff of ours on the other.”

  “Lori,” I said, “I just want to poke around a little bit and see if I can uncover some truth. Is there anything wrong with that?”

  Her expression froze in an undecided half-smile, and she sat back and thought it over for a while. John started to coax her, but I waved at him to shut up.

  Finally she sighed and started pouring out everything she knew
about Janet Ferris Taber.

  “Five years ago,” she said, “when I was a student at the community college, I had this summer job, a job I felt would be rewarding in more ways than just financial. The job was being a full-time secretary on the campaign team for U.S. Senate hopeful Richard Norman.”

  “Norman, huh?”

  “Yeah. Norman, our local wonder boy.”

  Son of Port City’s resident eccentric millionaire, Sy Norman, young Norman had been a top honors man in college and a letter-winner in track to boot, and had gone on to be first in his class in the University law school. His next achievement was being the youngest man in the state’s history to be elected to the Iowa legislature. He served his district well (which included his home town, Port City, of course) for ten years, then began to mount his campaign to reach Washington.

  “I was eager to help him,” she said. “I’d been vice-president of the Young Demos at the college and Norman was a Republican. But, he was a liberal Republican, and that was about as far to the left as this state could ever be expected to move, so I jumped in with both idealistic feet.

  “The other full-time secretary on the campaign team was Janet Ferris, a young student the same age as me who went to Drake in Des Moines, and in her spare time during the school year’d worked as a part-time secretary in Norman’s office, in the Capitol Building. Norman had brought Janet from Des Moines to Port City, which was to be the launching pad for his campaign. She and I became close friends, worked intimately together, shared the same dedication to Norman-Janet always spoke of the senator in glowing terms-and the summer months went quickly by.

  “Janet and I had our tearful good-byes at the bus station, Janet heading back for Des Moines and Norman, to help him continue with phase two of his campaign, and me back to the community college and part-time work on the local level as a Norman volunteer.

  “On the whole,” she said, “even though we were college students, Janet and I had a very high school-ish relationship. Giggling girls caught up in the importance of what we were doing-you know, helping to change the world and all. When we got together last month, after I found out she was back in town, it was an awkward situation. I mean, we were ‘friends’ with a relationship based on something past, and everything that happened to her since I saw her last was such a downer. We never did say much about that summer we worked for Norman. Sometimes I wonder how Janet must’ve taken it when Norman lost.”

  “Norman,” I said.

  “Whatever happened to him?” John asked.

  “Norman’s dead,” I said. “He and his family were killed in some freak accident, as I recall.”

  Lori nodded. “A sad thing. He was getting ready to make another bid, this time for the House, and the polls had him out front, too.”

  “He’s dead?” John said.

  “Yes,” Lori said. “A car crash, two or three years ago or so. He and his wife and little girl. Say, you know something funny… now isn’t that strange.”

  “What?” John said.

  “The crash he was in,” she said. She paused. “Seems to me that happened out on…”

  “Out on Colorado Hill,” I said.

  EIGHT

  I opened the Rambler door with my free hand and struggled with the other to balance a wobbly cardboard tray, the tray trying desperately to contain its cargo of one fat white paper bag and two lidded paper cups. I handed the tray in to John and let him juggle with it for a while, amazed at the ease with which he set it safely down on the seat between us, and watched as he drew out two hamburgers and a little sack of french fries from the bag, leaving in it the same configuration of food for me. My Rambler was one of many cars squeezed into the lot at Sandy’s for noontime conversion into dining rooms.

  “Mal,” John said, unwrapping one of his hamburgers, “about both those accidents being out at Colorado Hill…”

  “Yeah?”

  “That could be a legitimate coincidence, you know. Don’t rule it out, anyway. Hardly a year goes by without one or two accidents out there.”

  I nodded.

  A minute or so went by, the sound in the car one of mouths chewing, not talking. In between hamburgers, John said, “Mal?”

  “What?”

  “You going to keep snooping around today?”

  “Planned to.”

  “Well, uh…”

  “Well, uh, what?”

  “You suppose you could drop me off some place after we eat?”

  “Sure. Any place in particular?”

  “Suzie Blanchard’s. It’s over on Spring.”

  “Suzie Blanchard? Well, some things never change, I guess. But isn’t she married?”

  “Divorced.”

  “She expecting you?”

  “No. I’d kind of like to surprise her.”

  “I’ll bet. I didn’t know you two had kept in touch.”

  “Just the last few months or so-we’ve been writing letters.”

  “I see. Will she be home? Doesn’t she have a job?”

  “No, she’s got a kid. Byproduct of the marriage.”

  “Oh. Well. You won’t want me around.”

  “Right.”

  I started in on my french fries.

  John said, “What are you going to do this afternoon?”

  “Thought I’d run over to the college and see Jack Masters. I figure if anybody in town can give me a line on that black guy at the bus station, it’ll be Jack.”

  “Not a bad idea, Mal. Mal?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You won’t mind it, me dropping out of the picture for a while?”

  “No, no.”

  “I’ll stop by your trailer around eight, okay? And see how it’s going.”

  “Sure. And if you get stranded anywhere, just call me and I’ll play taxi.”

  “You sure you don’t mind?”

  “Not at all. This is my hang-up, not yours.”

  “I can probably help you out later on.”

  “Sure. When I uncover a vast Communist conspiracy behind all this, I’ll just about have to send for the Marines, won’t I?”

  He grinned. “That’s Army, kid. Keep it straight.”

  I grinned back and started peeling away the wrapper from the second hamburger. “Suzie Blanchard, huh?”

  “Man does not live by french fry alone,” John said, biting into one.

  Down the right half of the hall, on the left side, was the college office, and beyond the glass wall of the outer office all the typewriters were covered and desks cleared and employees gone, except for Jack Masters, of course, who was in one of the inner offices with the door open, talking on his phone. It was Thanksgiving vacation and the community college was otherwise empty.

  I took the seat across the desk from Jack and sat watching him bark at the superintendent over his phone.

  It reminded me of the day a couple months back when our conservative, near-elderly dean was showing a bunch of guys from the North Central accrediting board around the school, and when they went into Jack’s office, he was wearing a Hamm’s Beer sweat shirt and smoking a cigar, his feet on his desk. The dean blew what of his lid was left after many such confrontations with Jack, but the North Central boys said nothing, sensing the rapport Jack had built with the two young men he was in the process of counseling.

  Jack is five-eight, and near as wide as he is tall, though he isn’t fat. He’s chunky, and he’s got a paunch, but he isn’t fat. His age is indeterminate: he could be forty, he could be fifty. He looks more like a truck driver than a Dean of Admissions of a college, and he’s black.

  Jack was a token black who backfired profoundly on his employers. Besides championing liberal causes and pushing his own and other minorities’ down the throats of an unwilling school board, Jack didn’t play by the unspoken rules. For instance, there was the case of the woman he was living with-a white woman. She had an apartment downtown over one of Port City’s many taverns, and unofficial word came from the school board that the Dean of Admissions
shouldn’t be seen coming in and out of the apartment of such a woman (“such” being a euphemism for “white,” one supposes). Jack said, well, fine, then he’d be glad to marry the gal and make it legal. No further criticism of the Dean of Admissions’s love life was heard.

  I watched as he hung up the phone. He spotted me waiting and grinned and waved me in.

  “You got a minute, Jack?”

  “Sure, Mallory, sure.” He gestured to the chair opposite his desk. He didn’t have his Hamm’s shirt on this time, just an off-white sport shirt.

  I sat down. “Been going a few rounds with the superintendent?”

  “Naturally.” He offered me a cigarette and I declined while he lit one up. “From major issues to minor. Like, he thinks the Ag boys should be excused from the Humanities, but I think they need a history course, not just history of the plow, and a literature course, not just ‘How to Read a Harvester Manual.’ And then there’s that black kid from Moline he wants expelled, just because the kid called his gym instructor a mother.”

  I laughed. “Sounds like a term of endearment to me.”

  He shook his head, smiled. Slapped his desk. “Well, what can I do for you, Mallory? You don’t need counseling, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I need some information. And it’s nothing to do with school.”

  “What is it, then?”

  It was something like the hundredth time I’d gone through the story, but if it seemed stale to me, it didn’t to Jack: he leaned forward, intense interest on his walnut-stained face.

  When I finished, Jack leaned back and said, “So what now? What’re you going to do? Investigate? You’re no detective.”

  “I know that. But all I’m going to do is ask some questions, do a little research. If I can come up with anything really concrete, I’ll turn it over to Brennan.”

  “Why not leave it to him now?”

  “I didn’t think you thought much of Brennan, Jack.”

  “I don’t. But in the context of this town, he’s a pretty good man. Port City’s sheriff has to be a little lazy and a little corrupt if he’s going to be an accurate reflection of his town. But when the need arises, Brennan pulls himself up to it.”