Free Sam McCain - 05 - Everybody's Somebody's Fool by Ed Gorman Page A

o’clock. The stuff on Tv looked bad so I picked up the Steinbeck I was rereading, In Dubious Battle, and lost myself in the bleak rage of the early labor movement. For me it was his best book.
    I was asleep by eleven-thirty. The
    phone rang at just before midnight according to the glowing hands of my alarm clock.
    One of these nights it’s going to be Natalie Wood telling me how lonely she is and that she’s always wanted to see Black River Falls, Iowa, and couldn’t she please come out and stay with me a few months.
    It was Molly Blessing, who barely took time to introduce herself.
    “I’m really scared, Mr. McCain.”
    “What about, Molly?”
    “David got real drunk tonight.”
    “Where is he?”
    “That’s the thing. I’m not sure. And that’s not the worst part, he’s going to drag tonight.”
    “Where?”
    “He wouldn’t tell me. He said the cops always check out the spots everybody uses, so they were going to find a different place.”
    “Why didn’t you go with him?”
    “He said he was going to pick up that bitch Rita. I’m a lot better for him than Rita is. I try to get him to stop drinking and drag racing. She just encourages him to keeping doing them.
    I know I sound like a goody-two-shoes but if you really love somebody, Mr. McCain, shouldn’t you want them to do the right thing?”
    “I agree, Molly. But right now the
    important thing is to find David.”
    “He said you two had had an argument tonight. That you threatened to dump him.”
    “I got pretty mad, I guess.”
    “You’re the only one he can rely on, Mr.
    McCain—if you didn’t represent him, I don’t know what would happen to him, I mean a lot of people think he killed Sara.” Then, “I’m at the AandW. At the phone booth. Could you pick me up and we’ll go looking for David?”
    “Yeah, maybe between us we can figure out where he went.”
    “He’s so drunk, he’s—”
    “All we can do is hope for the best. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
    “I really appreciate this.”
    “I appreciate your calling, Molly. We need to stop him.”
    She waited on the corner for me. Even given the sudden autumnlike turn in the temperature, the AandWill was crowded with cars, kids, and brave short-skirted carhops on roller
    skates.
    Molly got in quickly. “I’m glad you put the top up. I’m kinda cold.”
    She wore a white sweater, jeans, and a rust-colored suede car coat that only enhanced the copper tones of her hair. “Do you mind if I smoke?”
    “May I see some Id?”
    She laughed. “Believe it or not, I still have to sneak around. At home, I mean. My father found a cigarette that had dropped out of my jacket one night. He grounded me for four nights and I was seventeen.” She used the dash lighter, inhaled deeply, exhaled a long blue stream of smoke. “I don’t even know where to start.”
    “I’ve been thinking. If he wants to avoid Cliffie, the two best places would be Graves Hollow or that road that runs by where the old closed mines are.”
    “Graves Hollow I’d thought of, too. But I forgot about the road by the old mines.”
    “I don’t know where else to go so we may as well start there.” Then, “If I were with him, I wouldn’t let him race. Not as drunk as he is.”
    “How would you stop him? He’s pretty hotheaded when he’s drunk.”
    “I don’t know—take his keys and throw them in the bushes if I had to.”
    “He’d just hot-wire his car.”
    “Then I’d take off his distributor cap and throw it in the bushes.”
    “Do you know what a distributor cap looks like?”
    “Not exactly.”
    “Then how would you find it?”
    “I’d ask somebody.”
    Neither of us could keep from smiling about that one.
    “Or maybe I’d stop by a gas station and pick up one of those car guides,” she said.
    “They’d have something in there about a distributor cap, wouldn’t they?”
    “Maybe it’d be easier to just take his tire iron and knock him out with it.”
    “Believe me, I’ve