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

street from my office. I had the waitress pour the coffee directly into my eyes. You wake up faster that way.
    No need to wonder what the various conversations were about. There is nothing quite so pleasing as watching the mighty fall. And if they fall because of a sex scandal it’s really a lot of fun. Like hearing that John Wayne was really a transvestite. You know—that shadow between the public image and the private person. A few years ago Confidential magazine had made a lot of money with just such tales.
    From what I could hear, the murder wasn’t nearly as interesting to the downtown folks as the idea that they’d hired the woman to share sex. The double homicides would play in later. But for now the whole idea of having your own kept woman—this was the stuff of legend. It was good for at least three generations and maybe more. Who cared about dead people when you had a beautiful lady putting out for the four men who kept her in relative luxury?
    I was at the counter, paying my bill, when Deirdre came in. The morning was chilly enough to rouge her cheeks with wholesome red spots and to draw silver dragon-breath from her perfect little nostrils. “I went to your office. Decided I’d just start walking up and down the street. I really need to talk to you.” She wore movie star sunglasses, very dark and provocative.
    A lot of the patrons knew who she was. It became a bad cowboy movie suddenly. The gunfighter everybody’s afraid of walks in and conversation goes silent. Everybody watching. Staring.
    She kept her eyes averted. If she looked at them, it would just reconfirm the hell her life had become. There was a fifteen-year-old boy whose father had shotgunned and raped a waitress. The mother was too ashamed—and angry—to attend the trial. I was hired as the public defender. The father was the kind of bully who probably should have been drowned when he was a couple months old. Definitely mentally deformed. But the boy was there. Every day. Sat right up in the first pew, too. Just wanted his old man—abominable as he was—to know that there was still blood between them and that he was there to offer the man his support. All the smirks and name-calling and even threats the kid had to endure—but by God he was there every day the court was in session. When the Amish drive someone from their community, they do so by “shunning” them. The kid had been shunned but he stood up to it.
    I wondered how Deirdre was going to fare. She was definitely going to be shunned. And for a long, long time.
    “Let’s go back to my office,” I said.
    As we walked she said, “I look like hell.”
    “You’re right about that. You’re one of the ugliest women I’ve ever known.”
    She laughed. “My father’s life is crumbling down around him and I’m worried about my looks. God, am I vain.”
    “You have reason to be vain.”
    “Keep talking like that.”
    “How’re your folks holding up?”
    “Dad’s angry. Last night he was depressed. Now he’s angry. I’ll take angry any day. My mom’s always depressed. She’s been seeing a shrink in Iowa City for years. That I’m used to. But Dad’s almost never depressed. He takes action. I think men do that—busy themselves, even if what they’re doing doesn’t amount to much.”
    We were at my office. Went inside. It was cold. I turned on the heat. I sat in my Philip Marlowe chair and she sat across from me.
    “So what’s going on?”
    She bowed her head for a time. Said nothing. I thought maybe she was praying silently. “Dad has an alibi for the night before last. The night the coroner says the Hastings woman was murdered. He also has an alibi for last night, when her brother was murdered.”
    “Then he’s in the clear. With criminal charges, I mean. His political career—”
    “He doesn’t even mention that any more. He’s calling a press conference for this afternoon. He’ll pull out of the race.”
    “But you sound like there’s a