All That I Have Read online

  Deputy Keen’s patrol car was parked in the circle. He came out of the house as I was leaving the truck. Keen was by himself.

  “Caretaker not here yet?” I asked him.

  “Not yet,” said the deputy.

  We started for the house, walking side by side.

  “Gate was open,” Keen said. He had his head turned and was looking at me.

  “Yes, it was,” I said.

  “What’s that tell you?”

  “Where’s the break-in?” I asked him.

  “Around back,” said Keen. “It’s an easy one.”

  “An easy one?”

  “Easy as pie, Sheriff,” said Deputy Keen.

  He led the way around the house and onto a deep porch that went along the rear of the building and overlooked a lawn that must have covered five acres, sloping down from the house to woods in the distance. I saw a tennis court to the left, a swimming pool to the right. There was even a driving range: four tees side by side on a little rise and yellow flags set up down the lawn in front to show you how far you’d hit the ball.

  In the corner of the porch lay several rolls of tar paper, bundles of shingles, and a couple of toolboxes. Somebody had set up one of those long racks roofers use to cut and bend sheet metal.

  Deputy Keen stopped at the glass door that let into the house from the porch.

  “Here you go,” he said.

  The door had been broken in. It had been destroyed: glass all over the porch, all over the room inside, busted woodwork. Beside the door was a row of four concrete garden planters with some kind of ferns growing in them. The planters were maybe three feet high. Made of cement and full of dirt, the way they were, each one would have had to weigh well over a hundred pounds. Somebody had picked one of the planters up and thrown it through the porch door. He’d more than shattered the glass and the woodwork. He’d ripped the door and its upper hinge right out of the frame.

  “Cat burglar, here, it looks like,” I said.

  Deputy Keen was looking at me. “That must have set off every house alarm in the state,” he said.

  “Man in a hurry,” I said.

  “Who do we know’s in a hurry like that?”

  “Here’s your caretaker,” I said.

  A stout middle-aged man wearing a Red Sox cap came up onto the porch and joined us. I didn’t know him.

  “Buster Mayhew,” said the man. He shook hands with me, nodded to the deputy. He looked at the ruined door and shook his head.

  “Boy,” he said.

  “You want to go on in, see what’s missing?” I asked him.

  “What?”

  “You want to take a look inside, see if anything’s been stolen?”

  “Oh,” said Buster Mayhew. “Oh, sure. I guess so.”

  He stepped through the doorway into the house. The deputy and I followed.

  The room we entered was a kind of living room. There was a fireplace in one wall, nice hardwood floor, big television, leather couches, low tables. Apart from the broken glass scattered over the floor, the planter lying in the glass, and the dirt and ferns that had spilled out of it, the room was clean and neat. Magazines and newspapers were arranged tidily on the tables. Deputy Keen had picked up a picture magazine and was looking at it. He put it down and picked up another. He showed it to me. On the cover was a photo of three plump young ladies standing in the snow in front of a grove of birch trees. They were wearing big square fur hats and nothing else — I mean nothing else. They were smiling and waving, the three of them there in the snow. They didn’t look like they were a little cold, even. The titles above and below them were printed in Russian. In fact, all the papers and magazines were in Russian, with that strange alphabet they have that’s so you have to look at it for a minute before you realize you can’t even begin to read it.

  “What are they, Russians?” Deputy Keen asked me.

  “Looks like it,” I said.

  Deputy Keen turned to the caretaker. “Whose place is this?” he asked.

  “Don’t really know,” said the caretaker. “They ain’t here much.”

  “Who’s here, when they are here?” I asked him.

  “Foreigners,” said the caretaker. “Some kind of foreigners. They don’t speak no English. Germans? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t think they’re Germans, but I don’t know. They might be. I don’t know nothing about them. I just look after the place, you know.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “Real estate company in Manchester.”

  “Which one?”

  “O’Connor’s.”

  “How long have you worked at this place?”

  “God, I don’t know. A year? Less? Less.”

  “Take a look around,” I said. “Go ahead.”

  Buster Mayhew left us in the living room to go over the rest of the house. When we were alone, Deputy Keen turned to me again.

  “You saw the roofers were here?” he asked.

  “I saw their stuff.”

  “It didn’t say which roofers, though, did it?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  “I bet I know which ones, though, don’t I?” said Deputy Keen.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Do you?”

  “Timmy Russell, I bet. Who do you bet?”

  “I’m not much of a betting man,” I said.

  Mayhew stood in the doorway. “They were in here,” he said.

  We left the living room and followed him to a smaller room set up as an office or study: a big desk, a chair behind it, other chairs, windows covered with heavy drapes. One wall was bookshelves, with books in Russian and a few in English. The desk drawers didn’t lock. All of them had been pulled out and dumped onto the desk and onto the floor around it.

  “Anything missing you can see?” Deputy Keen asked Mayhew.

  “Oh, God, I don’t know. I don’t even know if I’ve been in this room before,” said the caretaker. “I mostly look after the outside, you know.”

  “Roofers have been here, I guess,” said Deputy Keen.

  “That’s right,” said Mayhew. “They’re reflashing the chimney. Been here since last week.”

  “Not here today, though,” I said.

  “No,” said the caretaker. “They kind of come when they’re ready, you know. It gets done.”

  “You gave them the gate code, then?” Keen asked him.

  “Gate code?”

  “For the security gate, down on the road. The electric gate?”

  “Oh,” said Mayhew. “Oh, sure. Sure, I did. Had to. I can’t be here all the time waiting on them.”

  “You hire them?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Who’d you get?”

  “Russell’s crew,” said the caretaker. “Out of Bellows Falls. You know them?”

  “We know one of them,” Deputy Keen said. Turning again to me, “Don’t we?” he asked.

  It looked like we’d done about all the damage we could do at the scene for the present, so the caretaker left to call his bosses at the management company and to get a sheet of plywood and whatever else he needed to secure the door. I gave him one of my sheriff cards to give to his company, so they could reach me.

  I was on my way back to the office, but Deputy Keen stopped me as I was climbing into the truck.

  “Sheriff?” he said.

  I looked at him.

  “Superboy works for Russell,” said Keen. Superboy was what Keen and some others called Sean — young Sean Duke. It ain’t what I called him. I called him Sean.

  “He does,” I said.

  “He’d have the code for that gate,” said Keen.

  “He might,” I said. “Might not.”

  “Superboy would break down that door, too. He’d do it just that way. That’s pure Superboy. And plus, way out here, he’d know he could.”

  “Maybe.”

  “No maybe about it,” said Keen. “An easy one, like I said.”

  “Like you said.”

  “
I think I should go have a talk with Superboy,” said Deputy Keen.

  “I’ll do that,” I said.

  “You will?”

  “I’ll talk to him,” I said.

  “No, you won’t,” said Deputy Keen.

  “You don’t think?”

  “You mean like you talked to him about Van Horn’s thing?”

  “Van Horn’s thing was nothing.”

  “Van Horn didn’t think so, maybe.”

  “Sure, he did,” I said. “Okay, Deputy. Thanks for your input. You go bust a speeder, now, why don’t you?”

  “Is that your order, here, Sheriff?”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “I can see him on my own time,” said the deputy.

  “You can do whatever you like on your own time, Deputy.”

  The deputy gave me a dark look, nodded, and went to his patrol car. He drove off, leaving me alone at the house. I thought about going back inside and poking around some more, but why? All I’d find would be more of Sean’s footprints. Everything Keen said was true. I knew that, he knew it, and he knew I knew it. That was the thing, right there. Because Deputy Keen and I don’t exactly see eye to eye where Sean is concerned. No, we don’t. And Deputy Keen is hard; Deputy Keen is stubborn. But Deputy Keen is not a fool. And Deputy Keen is ambitious.

  So, no: I don’t know Russian. But I know how to add. You see a little green fellow a foot and a half high with a couple of dozen eyes and antennas coming out of his head buying beer at the corner store on Wednesday. Ask him where he’s in from, he says Mars. Then Saturday, here come a couple more of the same type fellows at the post office. How much more do you have to know to about decide the Martians are in town?

  3

  SHERIFFING

  Now, I have said Deputy Keen and I don’t think alike on the subject of young Sean Duke. That ain’t the only place where we differ. For example, the deputy says this business in Grenada is an easy one. He says that because he knew right off who it was broke into the Russians’ house, and he thinks if he knows who did the deed, and he takes them in, his job is done. But his job is sheriffing, and that ain’t sheriffing. That’s car repair. A car won’t start, you say, Well, maybe the alternator’s shot. You test it out. It don’t work. You pull the old alternator, throw it away, put in a new one from the parts store, and you’re done. Sheriffing’s different. You can’t do it with spare parts. It’s a whole thing you’re working on. It’s a whole thing you have to keep going.

  Truth is, Deputy Keen, Lyle, don’t have much use for sheriffing. He reckons a sheriff is a kind of amateur cop. A soft cop. And that’s so, in a way. The sheriff brings law to people who don’t need law. He enforces the law for people who don’t break it, or not much. Sheriffing is like being the bouncer at the Ladies’ Aid lunch: when things are going normally, they don’t work you too hard. Lyle’s bored; he wants more. He’s in a hurry.

  Therefore he don’t always see everything he needs to see. He don’t always look both ways. That can lead to poor sheriffing. It can also lead to risk, because, again, sheriffing is enforcing the rules for people who nine times out of ten obey the rules on their own. But sheriffing don’t necessarily go well on the tenth fellow. And it don’t necessarily go well with people who don’t know the rules, people from away.

  Russians are from away, if anybody ever was.

  But Lyle don’t want to hear all that. He reckons he’s a cut above sheriffing. Or, put it another way, he reckons he’s a cut above sheriffing the way his boss does it, the way I do it. And Lyle’s got an answer for that, too. Don’t he just?

  I learned sheriffing from old Ripley Wingate, who had the office here for about a hundred years. Wingate went in for a kind of horse-and-buggy sheriffing, and I was his deputy for ten or eleven years before he got done at seventy and I took over. Wingate could have had the job after seventy. He could have had the job after he’d died, at least for a while. Nobody was going to run against him, were they, any more than they’re going to run against Diamond Mountain, or the moon, or anything else that’s always been there.

  That’s another thing that sets sheriffing apart. Maybe that’s the main thing: you’re elected. You get voted in, and you get voted out. No other lawman is like that, that I ever heard of. The sheriff has to run for his job, every other year. Therefore you can’t ever assume that you know even half as much as Deputy Keen thinks he knows about what that job is. And Lyle’s only a deputy, don’t forget. All he thinks he knows on sheriffing, and he ain’t even the sheriff. Or he ain’t, yet.

  Not that Deputy Keen is a foreigner. He was born here in the county, in Humber, graduated from Cumberland Union. Basketball player. Lyle went to the Police Academy and took a job out of the county, with the police department in St. Johnsbury, looking to get into the state police. But the state police wouldn’t have him. I don’t know why. Lyle’s a smart fellow, but, of course, with the state police smart won’t do it for you. You have to have a genius IQ, or pretty close. Look at Trooper Timberlake.

  Anyway, Lyle didn’t take to it up in St. Johnsbury, so he applied to join our department, and I hired him. That’s four or five years ago.

  Again, Lyle’s bright, and he’s honest. He works hard. The occupational disease of sheriffing, you could say, is laziness, and Lyle don’t have a lazy bone in him. Fact is, he might get too far over on the other side. Because Ripley Wingate used to tell us (me and his other deputies): Don’t be lazy, but it’s okay to look lazy. Lyle don’t even look lazy. Far from it: his uniform’s always pressed, his radio’s always on his belt. He carries a gun.

  I don’t wear a uniform; no need of one. People around here know me. They know who I am. They know what I do. They don’t have to see me in a fancy suit. I don’t have a uniform, and I don’t carry a weapon. Wingate never went armed. No guns, he said. Leave it in your car. And leave your car at home. I learned from Wingate. Of course, I have a gun. I have Wingate’s old army .45 that he brought back from World War Two. It’s in my sock drawer, where a gun ought to be. I also have the county’s expensive Remington police shotgun in the trunk of the sheriff’s car. At least I think it’s in there. It was last time I looked. I don’t much use the sheriff ’s car, though. I like my truck. Plus, it saves the county money.

  Saving money is big. The sheriff is a county officer, but in this state the county don’t have taxing authority; the towns do. Towns that don’t have their own police forces — and that’s practically all the little country towns — make a contract with the sheriff ’s department to take care of policing within their limits. Those town fees are what make the sheriff ’s budget. Therefore, the towns reckon that budget is their business — and that’s fair enough. But, I mean, look at that Ambrose selectman the other day: those town boards and treasurers want to bite every dime you spend. They want to count your paper clips. They want to look over the tires on your patrol cars, and if they can see any tread at all on those tires, they want to know why you’re asking for money to buy new ones. You’re a bookkeeper, is what it is. It don’t ever end, and for time, it seems like it’s two thirds of the job.

  Wingate’s right: you don’t need a gun to be the sheriff. You don’t need a badge or a uniform. You do need an adding machine.

  I guess I could tell Lyle and my other deputies they’re not to carry guns, the way Wingate told us years ago. I haven’t done that. There are different kinds of people passing through here from what there used to be. Not long since, there was a sheriff ’s deputy up near White River who was shot and killed in a traffic stop. As near as anybody could tell, he’d pulled over a car for speeding or some other violation, went up to the car, and the driver shot him through the window and took off. Nobody ever found him. So I won’t tell my deputies they can’t arm themselves. Some of them do and some of them don’t. I tell them to figure it out for themselves, do what they want. (Within reason: no nuclear weapons.) Again, Wingate didn’t give them the choice, not in that, but Clemmie says I’m more Wingate than Wingate.


  Clemmie’s fond of Wingate. Wingate never married, he’s all alone, and she feels sorry for him. After he’d retired we’d have him over for dinner now and then, or we’d take him out someplace, but not so much lately. He don’t want it. He’s by himself in his place over here in South Cardiff; it’s just Wingate and his bees. He keeps bees.

  He hasn’t been well. Fact is, Wingate’s barely making it. After all, he’s eighty-three or -four. I go visit him every so often, but Clemmie don’t come. Wingate don’t want her. He don’t want Clemmie to see him broken down the way he is, it looks like. If you’re Wingate, you don’t show weakness, or anyway you don’t show it to women, or anyway you don’t show it to women of an age to be your daughter. Wingate’s old school.

  4

  THE SWEETHEART OF SIGMA CHI

  Coming down the long drive from the Russians’ house, I followed Deputy Keen. At the road, he went right and I went left. I wasn’t going back to the department. I was going to look for Sean Duke. His parents lived in Afton. He wouldn’t be at their place, but they might know where he was.

  I had hoped Melrose wouldn’t be home. I had hoped I’d be able to talk to Sean’s mother. But Melrose was in front of their house when I drove up. He was washing his car, playing a garden hose over it to rinse off the soapsuds. He turned off the hose.

  “Hello, Lucian,” said Melrose. “You looking for Superboy?”

  Melrose Tidd couldn’t stand Sean. He wasn’t Sean’s real father. Sean’s father had been dead for, at that time, I’d guess thirteen, fourteen years. Melrose was his stepfather.

  “You know where I can find him?” I asked Melrose.

  “Going to arrest him this time?” asked Melrose. “Going to take him in?”

  “Nothing like that,” I said.

  “No,” said Melrose, “I didn’t think so. Not you, right? More likely you’d pat him on the head, ain’t it? Get him to sit in your lap?”