Sam McCain - 05 - Everybody's Somebody's Fool by Ed Gorman Read Free Book Online Page B

back.
    “Right.”
    “Was Mike with her?”
    “No. That’s what was so funny about it.
    David Egan brought her in. I walked in on them once and he was kissing her.”
     
Eight
     
    The Griffins lived in one of those venerable old brick mansions that had probably looked venerable and old the day the builders finished it. It belonged in one of those sappy Mgm British romances with Greer Garson, all noble and cold, and Ronald Coleman, all noble and hesitant.
    They’d each do three or four noble things in the tedious course of the flick and then one of them would die doing something so noble it was difficult to even speak about it. Personally, I prefer Hot Rods from Hell.
    There were vines up the ass (and on all sides of the house, too) and mullioned windows that bespoke even greater antiquity than the vines.
    A blue Caddy convertible and a dark green Caddy sedan were in their proper garage slots. The doors were open for some reason. The drive and a half block in either direction were jammed with new and expensive cars of various kinds.
    Inside, amid all their friends consoling the Griffins, there would be canap@es and sandwiches and hard liquor served by a maid who made less in a lifetime than most of the men present made in a year and who probably worked twice as hard. It was my class anger and sometimes it was fine, resenting the upper class, and sometimes it wasn’t fine, not when one of their daughters had been killed and I was petty enough to deprive them of my pity.
    I would have made a good Marxist if
    only I could have believed in all the economic and sociological horseshit the Commies hand out.
    I said a kind of prayer for the soul of poor Sara Griffin and also a kind of prayer for her parents. My older brother had died. None of us in the family, even all these years later, was ever again quite the same. The Griffins, despite the two fine and shiny cars in their open garage, would never again be quite the same, either.
    No way I was going to go inside and try to talk to them with all the company they had.
    Late afternoon now, autumn sky ripening into the color of grape and blood as a quarter-moon traced itself against the blue of the sky between gold-outlined clouds. There’s a special quality to the loneliness of dusk, a melancholy more brooding even than the night’s. I had always felt it as a child and felt it still.
     
    I decided to get ready. A shower and fresh clothes would knock the mood out of me. I felt ridiculously eager to see Linda again, to be bound up in that quiet, sensible, good-girl prettiness of hers, the gray gaze so eternal and wise behind her glasses. How fitting she should be a nurse, I thought. And then smiled. It didn’t take much to tumble me down the rabbit hole of infatuation. And with Linda I sensed the tumble would be worth the risk.
    One hour later, shaved, showered, smelling of Old Spice and Lucky Strikes, I stood at the door of her mother’s two-story white frame house on a narrow working-class street that showed—with its shiny new cars and all the new home repairs—how well most people were doing in the United States at the moment. There had been some violent economic ups and downs after the war, but for the most part, this was the golden age of America.
    There were jobs aplenty, several years of peace following the Korean War, college money for anybody who needed it, Playboy clubs, American Bandstand, the Twist, and the Flintstones, and who the hell could ask for more than that?
    She was surprised to see me. She wore a quilted robe. I could smell supper. It smelled very good. She said, “Didn’t you get my—”
    I handed her the note she’d thumbtacked to my back door. “I believe you left this at my place.”
    She looked flustered for only a moment and then said, over her shoulder, “Mom, I’ll be on the porch a few minutes.”
    “Supper’s almost ready, honey.”
    “I know, Mom. I’ll be right in.”
    When the door was closed, she said, “My mom’s so sweet.