Free Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? by Ed Gorman Page B

things. Things that don't have anything to do with this."
        "I'll be the judge of that."
        I sighed. "She and a friend were having some troubles. She needed to talk about it."
        "What friend?"
        "What difference does it make what friend? Just a friend is all."
        "Male or female?"
        "God, Sykes, what's the difference?"
        Two things interrupted our little verbal dance. Deputy Henry Regennitter came pounding up the back steps shouting - this is now around 1 a.m. and people are trying to sleep: all those, anyway, not encircling the emergency vehicles downstairs - and the phone rang.
        I leapt for the phone, suspecting who it might be. Cliffie probably wouldn't let me talk to her if he got it.
        "No such agent," Esme Anne Whitney said to me, in a sleepy, brandied voice. "I was going to call Edgar in the morning and ask him to check it out for me. But Clyde - and this is between us - is a much nicer guy when you wake him up in the middle of the night." I suppose I could've asked her how she would have come to know that particular fact, but all I said, ever the gentleman, was, "Anything else?"
        Deputy Regennitter had found something, and Cliffie and Deputy Roger Weed were examining it carefully - i.e., handing it back and forth and getting their fingerprints all over it. I'm smarter than that. After I got my law degree and realized I couldn't support myself in Black River Falls as an attorney - at least not right out of the chute - I took Judge Whitney's advice and went back to the U of Iowa and took several criminology courses and got my private investigator's license. And one of the first things they teach you in private eye school - right after you learn about which kind of trench coat to buy and all the variations on the private eye's secret handshake - is to be very careful how you handle evidence. It's all right to soak it, jump up and down on it, or even lick it if you're so inclined, but they do urge one never to muck it up with one's own fingerprints if at all possible. Cliffie must not have been in class that day.
        "Oh, yes," the Judge said, very enthused now. "One other bit of tantalizing information. Rivers - his real name was Andrew Wylie - was let go from the Agency because of his activities with some far-right organizations. The Agency was so concerned about him they kept track of him after he left Washington. He went to work for an outfit called America First. They've been active in stirring up trouble with small-town school boards: getting teachers fired, taking certain books out of school libraries, starting whispering campaigns about certain prominent citizens. And guess who the outfit's representative in Black River Falls is? And the man Rivers contacted when he got here three days ago? Jeff Cronin."
        "McCain, who the hell you talking to?" Cliffie said.
        "I'd better go," I said to the Judge. "And you know, sometimes you almost sound like a liberal."
        "Good Lord, that's the vilest thing anybody's ever said to me." She hung up.
        Cliffie came over, bearing gifts.
        "Regennitter found this in the garage," Cliffie said, proudly pushing it toward me. "The killer must've tossed it there when he was making his getaway." He made it sound as if we were in a Hopalong Cassidy movie.
        There wasn't much doubt it had been used as a weapon. There was relatively fresh blood, small tufts of hair, and the mucus-like gray matter of the human brain.
        "It's mine," I said.
        Cliffie grinned. "You like Pat Boone? I thought you only liked coon music - Chuck Berry and that crowd."
        "Always the poet, aren't you, Cliffie?"
        "Don't call me Cliffie."
        "Then don't call people coons. You ever heard of the civil rights movement?"
        Cliffie smirked at Deputy Roger Weed. "Oh, I heard of it, all right. I figure Martin Luther King's got about six months before somebody starts usin'