Free Breaking Up Is Hard to Do (The Sam McCain Mysteries Book 6) by Ed Gorman

headlights speared through gathering ground fog.
    “Looks like Hardin, Wheeler, and Carlson. Their cars, I mean. Somethin’ must be up. That tip was a good one.”
    “Probably just having a business meeting of some kind.”
    “Guess I’ll drive up there and see if they’ll talk to me.”
    “Well, good luck, Don.”
    “Bet them boys are gonna be surprised to see me.”
    I sure couldn’t argue with him about that one.

EIGHT
    I FOUND A PHONE booth downtown and called the motel where Hastings was staying. A woman was on the desk now. She told me he hadn’t come back yet, that she’d just checked the rooms—they’d had trouble with teenagers trying to sneak into vacant rooms—and there was no sign of him. She said that her father, the guy I’d bribed with money enough for a burger and a pack of smokes with some change left over, had given her instructions to call me right away when she saw him.
    I called Kenny Thibodeau, Pornographer and unofficial Private Eye.
    “Hey McCain, how they hangin’?”
    “Y’know, Kenny, you really should quit saying that to everybody who calls.”
    “I don’t say it to chicks.”
    “Yeah, but I mean what if the Pope or somebody called you?”
    “Why would the Pope call me?”
    “I’m just saying for instance the Pope.”
    “I’d say, Hey, Padre, how they hangin’?”
    I laughed. “I don’t think you’ve changed much since we were in fifth grade.”
    “Well, I didn’t know how to write dirty paperbacks back then.”
    “I guess that’s a good point. So what did you dredge up for me from all these mysterious sources of yours?”
    “Hardin’s broke.”
    “Hardin? He’s one of the wealthiest lawyers in the state.”
    “California cleaned him out.”
    “What happened in California?”
    As I leaned against the inside of the booth, I saw a group of people coming through the doors of the Presbyterian church across the street. They held long white candles that burned in golden nimbuses. There were maybe forty of them in a long line of pairs. A cross-section of folks, white collar and blue collar alike. Rich and poor. They walked down the street saying the Lord’s Prayer. Not hard to figure out the occasion. They were praying to whatever gods there be that this planet and its people would not be subjected to what Hiroshima and Nagasaki had had to endure. And were still enduring. Today’s bombs were many times more powerful than those had been.
    “Hey, McCain, you still there?”
    “Hey, Kenny, how they hangin’?”
    “Very funny.”
    “I got distracted. So tell me about California.”
    The long line reached the end of the block and turned toward the business section. There would be a rally tonight where people from all four churches would meet in the town square to pray and sing hymns. According to Walter Cronkite, this was going on all over the country. Khrushchev had yet to respond in any fashion to the naval blockade.
    “Condos. Sank about everything he had in condos with his brother-in-law out there. I guess they both got dazzled when this old movie star—Rex Thomas, you remember him, right after the war?—anyway this Thomas guy was building these condominiums on the ocean front. First thing Hardin did was ask for safety of the land to be evaluated. You sink all this money into building condos and they tumble into the ocean some night, you got some real problems.
    “Anyway, the guy Hardin hires—some guy this LA lawyer recommended—he says you’d have to be crazy to build where Rex Thomas wants to. So Hardin and his brother-in-law are all ready to pull out but Thomas convinces them to get a second opinion.”
    “I think I can see this one coming.”
    “So they get this guy they meet who’s checking out the land for some other investors and Hardin gets along with him—naturally the guy is impressive—and so Hardin says let’s let this guy check out the land. If he says it’s all right—”
    “Rex Thomas knows the guy. Told him to pretend to be