Free Sam McCain - 02 - Wake Up Little Susie by Ed Gorman Page A

you.”
    “He said he wasn’t sure you’d be getting married.”
    “That’s all he said?”
    “Yes.”
    “Nothing about me?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Honest?”
    “Honest.”
    “He may try and contact you, McCain.
    Please call me right away if you hear from him.”
    She said something else but it was lost in her tears.
    She broke the connection.
     
    It rained all day Sunday.
    I ate two bowls of Cheerios for breakfast and then read the funnies—I still like just about all of them, including Nancy and Slu)o, having, when I was a tot, a crazed crush on Aunt Fritzie—and then I listened to the local Top Ten while I did the exercises I’d learned in the National Guard.
    The Top Ten is a little different out here.
    Whenever I’m in Chicago on a Sunday morning, I listen to their Top Ten and the sponsors are products like gum and cigarettes and pop. Out here, the sponsors are cattle feed, farm implement stores, and—my favorite —an ointment for cattle warts.
    In the afternoon, I did some work. I tried to get Chalmers’s number from information. None was listed.
    I also called Mary a couple of times. I wanted to see if she could steer me to a few close friends of Susan Squires. But she sounded so distraught over the state of her father’s health—the family doc was there each time I called—t I didn’t feel good about asking her for information.
    I also kept trying the morgue. While the county coroner, Doc Novotny, has a
    somewhat suspicious diploma—?ally are a proud graduat of Thayer Medinomics College”
    declares his degree, and no, that’s not a typo; they really did leave off the Every in graduate-he’s a pretty helpful guy. (and just what the hell does “Medinomics” mean anyway?) He’s Cliffie’s first cousin. I think he secretly resents the power his kin have. Somehow his own family was not dealt a fair hand at the table.
    So he helps me on the sly.
    Except today. There was no answer until 4ccjj P.M., when the rain was slashing down and I was getting ready for my Sunday evening dose of Maverick, two hours away. And then he said, “I’m sort of busy right now.”
    “With the Squires autopsy?”
    “That seems like a hell of lot for car insurance.”
    I know code when I hear it. I don’t read Shell Scott for nothing.
    “Somebody’s there, right?”
    “Seems to be the case.”
    “Cliffie?”
    “Looks like it to me.”
    “I’ll try you later.”
    “See if you can do better on those rates, will you?”
    And he hung up.
    I managed to stay in my robe all day.
    Didn’t even shave. Watched Maverick.
    Laid down to read a detective paperback and woke up at 6cccj A.M. I turned on the radio to a commercial advertising a popular polka band, Six Fat Dutchmen. They’d be in our fair city next week. One night only.
     
Six
     
    One of the largest group of Negro settlers came to Iowa in the late 1890’s.
    Representatives of a coal company that was having troubles with its white workers went south and made job-hungry blacks a lot of promises, a surprising number of which they actually kept.
    Come to Iowa and prosper was their message.
    By 1910, a couple of different areas of Iowa became Negro mining towns.
    I remembered this from my history lessons when, on Monday morning, I went over to Keys Ford-Lincoln to see if anybody had been working late on Friday night before the Edsel premiere. A still-nervous Dick sent me back to the noise and energy of the service garage, where a man named Frank Kelton was working on a 1955 Ford station wagon. Like most other men, he had a lot of family pictures thumbtacked to the wall of his personal bay. He also had a yellowing photo of a group of black miners just stepping out of a mine. One of the men, most prominent because of his height, looked a lot like Kelton.
    “Frank?”
    “Yeah?”
    I could see his coveralls but not his head or hands. They were lost somewhere up under the car he had on the hoist.
    “Wondered if I could talk to you. Dick said it’d be all