All That I Have Read online

  Clemmie’s an only child. There’s a certain weight to that, she’ll tell you, and it looks like she’s got it double, since her mother don’t live here. She and Addison split up when Clemmie was little. In those days, in a place like this, being divorced pretty much made Clemmie’s mom a fallen woman. She would have found it hard to stay around here if she’d wanted to. As it was, though, she had other plans. Clemmie’s mom was a New Yorker, and she moved back down there. She remarried, had a couple more kids. Clemmie don’t see much of her.

  Addison stayed single. He and Clemmie lived in their house here on the Devon road, though Clemmie spent a good deal of time in Brattleboro, being partly raised by her aunt and uncle, Addison’s sister and her husband down there.

  So Addison has been a bachelor for years. He’s had lady friends from time to time, and that’s had to have been a little tough on Clemmie, a little confusing, when she was a girl, anyway, especially because some of Addison’s lady friends have been married to other people. Nobody makes a fuss, though. People are going to do what they’re going to do. Addison’s what you could call a pillar of the community, though he’s the kind of pillar where the side facing out gets a little more paint than the side facing in. He likes his toddy, too. And he’s getting older. Like Clemmie says, a certain weight.

  Give him credit, though, Addison. He’s honest. He don’t lie, he don’t sneak. The time I stopped him for driving under the influence, I had him pulled over, and he started to get out of his car and about fell on his face.

  “Have you had anything to drink, sir?” I asked him

  “Don’t insult both our integillences, Trooper,” said Addison. “What did I say? Did I say ‘integillences’? I believe I did. I must be intoxicated. Intelligences. Don’t insult our intelligences, Trooper. Do your duty.” And he handed over his keys. That was pure Addison.

  Addison didn’t think much of the idea of his only daughter marrying a policeman. He for sure didn’t think much of it when Clemmie and I were getting engaged and I quit the state police to be a sheriff ’s deputy. If you have to have a cop for a son-in-law, at least let him be a high-class cop and not some shitkicker. Poor Addison.

  No, going from the state police to the sheriff ’s department didn’t make sense. When I told my barracks commander what I was doing, “God damn it,” he said, “you’re playing in Fenway, here, and you want to quit and go to Pawtucket?” He was a good man, though. “Well,” he went on, “you could do worse. You’ll be with Ripley Wingate, up there. You could do a lot worse. Give him my regards. Tell him he’s getting my best boy, god damn him. It ain’t true, but tell him anyway.”

  A good man. But what about Wingate? Where did he come from? I knew I wasn’t cut out for the state police, but I didn’t know I wanted to go to the sheriff ’s. I didn’t know, but Wingate did.

  There are no strangers in law enforcement: everybody knows everybody else, at least some. And, of course, Wingate had been sheriff it seemed like all my life. So sure, I knew him, at least by sight. But Wingate and I hadn’t spoken ten words before this time. Then one day when I’d been in the troopers for a year and a bit, I was patrolling in North Cameron on the Ulster road. It was a spring day. I had the windows open. I came around a bend, and here’s Wingate’s sheriff ’s car pulled over in a turnout, and Wingate himself standing beside it and looking my way.

  I thought maybe he was having engine trouble, so I drove in beside him and stopped.

  “Good morning, Sheriff,” I said.

  “Trooper Wing,” said Wingate.

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Pretty day like this? ’Course it is.”

  “What are you doing up here?” I asked him.

  “Waiting for you,” said Wingate. “Get on out and stand with me a minute, why don’t you? Take in the air.”

  I left my patrol car, and Wingate and I leaned on his car and looked out in front of us across the road and over a big mowing beyond it going up to the top of a hill. There was an old house up there, an old farmhouse and a barn, and the clouds moving behind them in the blue sky.

  “You’re Lucian, right?” Wingate asked me.

  “That’s right, Sheriff,” I said.

  “What do they call you, then?”

  “Lucian.”

  Wingate nodded. “ ’Course they do,” he said. “Well, here’s the thing, Lucian. You’ve been at the barracks now for, what, a couple of years?”

  “Not that long. Year and a half.”

  “A year and a half. And yet, you know, I’ve been noticing something about you.”

  “What’s that, Sheriff?”

  “How’m I to put it?” said Wingate. “Let’s see: you were in the service, weren’t you?”

  “Three years in the navy.”

  “The navy,” said Wingate. “I was army, but it’s the same: your officers, when they dress up, they wear swords, don’t they? For ceremonial occasions? Naval officers?”

  “I guess so. Some of them. Sometimes.”

  “And you’ve seen them,” Wingate went on, “wearing their swords?”

  “I guess I have.”

  “Then you’ve seen how a man walks, you’ve seen how he carries himself when he’s wearing a sword,” Wingate went on. “Kind of stiff and ramrod, and favoring one side so the sword don’t trip him up?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, it always struck me that when young fellows like yourself go into the barracks, there, the state police, that when they’ve been there a little while, they always, all of them, start walking like they’re wearing a sword. Have you seen that?”

  “I can’t say I have, Sheriff.”

  “I have,” said Wingate. “I bet they do, too. I bet they do so give them swords. Don’t they? At the barracks? They do so wear swords. At night, maybe, when nobody’s around?”

  “I wouldn’t know, Sheriff,” I said. “I never did.”

  “You never did,” said Wingate. “That’s it. That’s what I noticed. You’re different. You’ve been there near two years, and you haven’t started, you haven’t developed that walk. That sword walk. Which makes me wonder: are you happy in your work, Trooper Wing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do,” said Wingate. “If that’s your answer, you do know. You know you ain’t. Now, here’s the thing. I’m hiring a deputy this spring. Deputy Rackstraw’s getting done. He’s got a security job at the power plant. I need to hire another deputy. I wondered if that’s anything that might interest you.”

  “That would be a pay cut, I guess,” I said.

  “You guess right,” said Wingate. “It would be a pay cut. It would be a hell of a pay cut. I ain’t got the governor behind me, you know.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m getting married in the summer, though.”

  “That don’t matter,” said Wingate. “You’re supposed to be poor when you’re just married, ain’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Who are you marrying?” Wingate asked me.

  “Clemmie Jessup.”

  “Addison’s girl?”

  “That’s right, Sheriff.”

  “What are you worried about, then?” asked Wingate. “You’ll get by. Have Addison set you up.”

  “No chance, Sheriff,” I said.

  “No chance because Addison won’t do it, or no chance because you won’t let him?”

  “Both, it looks like.”

  “Well, but still, think it over,” said Wingate. “You ain’t got to make up your mind now.”

  “I will. I will think it over.”

  “Sure,” said Wingate. “You think it over. Think it over good. The sheriff ain’t the barracks, you know. It’s like, it’s like the difference between going fishing with a cane pole and taking off all your clothes and jumping into the pond and swimming around with the fish all day and maybe grabbing one from time to time.”

  “Which is which, Sheriff?”

  “Sheriff ’s swimming around with the fish
,” said Wingate.

  “I’ll get back to you,” I said.

  “It’s like the difference between being the fellow who puts the doors and windows in a big house and being the fellow who builds a little house, but he builds the whole thing,” said Wingate.

  “I’ll think it over.”

  “Sheriff ’s the one builds the whole house,” said Wingate.

  “I thought so,” I said.

  “There ain’t a sword in the shop,” said Wingate.

  I was on patrol that morning, supposed to be, so I left Wingate, promising to think about his deputy job. I thought about it for two minutes. No, I didn’t. I didn’t think about it that long. I didn’t think about it at all; I didn’t have to.

  The next day I turned in my flat hat.

  6

  DARK LADY

  Wednesday we had the day off. Not a Russian to be seen, not a Russian heard from. No Russians on the market anywhere. I’d about decided I’d have to get busy and scare one up. Then, Thursday, bright and early, the Russians began to come to me.

  The sheriff ’s department has its headquarters in Fayetteville, across the common from the county courthouse. Wingate, in his time, had a little broom closet of an office in the courthouse basement, but since then we’ve moved on, though not real far. I could walk to work if I wanted to, but then where would I be if I had to saddle up in a hurry and ride out after evildoers? I take the truck, as a rule, and I like to get in to the department first thing, before the night dispatch goes home, so I can talk to a human being about what I don’t know happened the night before instead of reading a log or listening to a recording. That works when the night dispatch is sharp, like Beverly is during the day, or even halfway sharp, but at night the sharp kind is hard to find. I always wondered why. Night dispatch at our department is a quiet job: good job for a reader, good job for a crossword puzzle man, good job for a knitter. You don’t have to be a deputy. You’d think plenty of people would want a job like that. But no, the night dispatch turns over pretty quick.

  The one we had now was new, Errol Toobin. Errol was middleaged, didn’t have much to say. Kind of a low-gear fellow who had worked in a hardware store for years until his bad back made him quit because he couldn’t stand up all day anymore. He had some disability pension, and he’d been looking for a job where he could sit down. I’d just let go the fellow we’d had for dispatching under the influence of alcohol. (Night dispatch is also a good job for a drinker.) So Errol had started at the department. He’d figured out how to turn the radio on and off, and we were working on the rest.

  Wednesday-Thursday night hadn’t stretched Errol too far, it didn’t look like. Somebody had rolled his car on Route 10, and there was a noise complaint from Mount Pleasant. That was the sum of it. Errol was getting ready to go home. I started for my office in the rear.

  “Oh,” said Errol. “Forgot: somebody in there to see you.”

  “In here?”

  “She’s been waiting for a couple of hours,” said Errol.

  “She?”

  “Didn’t say her name. She wanted to see you. I told her to wait in there.”

  “Next time,” I said, “somebody comes in, you’re by yourself, put them out front, here, where you can see them.”

  “Why?” Errol asked.

  “So we don’t have people wandering all over the office,” I said.

  “Roger that,” said Errol.

  “Just ask them to have a seat out here,” I said. “Maybe get them a cup of coffee.”

  “Roger that,” said Errol

  “It’s a matter of security, you might say,” I told him.

  “Roger that,” said Errol. He was coming along, no question.

  I opened the door to my office and looked in. A woman stood up from the chair I kept in front of the desk and turned to face me.

  “Sheriff Wing?” she asked.

  She was nobody I knew from the county, nobody I had ever seen before. Tall, tall as I am, slim, somewhere in her middle thirties, dark brown hair worn long. She didn’t look like she spent a lot of time in police stations, but she also didn’t look like she couldn’t handle herself in one. She didn’t look like there were many places where she couldn’t handle herself.

  “I’m Wing,” I said. I went around to my desk, and we both sat, the desk between us.

  The woman bent and picked a paper shopping bag off the floor beside her chair. She set it on the desk. “From Sean,” she said.

  “Sean?”

  “Sean Duke,” said the woman. “He said you knew him.”

  “I know him,” I said. “I don’t know you.”

  “I’m Morgan Endor,” the woman said.

  “Morgan?”

  “Morgan Endor.”

  “Morgan’s your first name?”

  “That’s right, Sheriff. It’s a family name. Sean asked me to bring you these.”

  She didn’t empty the bag out onto the desk. Instead, she stood up and, reaching into the bag, began pulling things out of it and laying them neatly in a pile in front of me. I watched her.

  A sport jacket, a pair of jeans, a white shirt, a man’s undershirt, underpants, two socks, a wristwatch, a billfold. I took the billfold. In it was a card from a Super 8 Motel in Montreal and a California driver’s license issued to Oswaldo de Gomez, Los Angeles. No money. I set the billfold to one side.

  I looked up at Morgan Endor. Morgan. What kind of a name is that for a woman? She had stopped taking things from the bag. She was watching me.

  “Where did Sean get this?” I asked her.

  “Wait,” she said.

  She reached back into the bag and carefully, holding it by the butt, she took out a small pistol and laid it on top of the pile of clothes. It was one of those imported semiautomatics, clever little things that look like you’re meant to take them with you to the opera.

  “Is it loaded?” she asked me.

  I picked up the pistol, dropped the magazine out of the butt, and drew back the slide. The round in the chamber popped out and landed on the desk, where it rolled toward the woman. She put out her finger and stopped it. I laid the gun back down on top of the pile of clothes.

  “Not now,” I said.

  Morgan Endor pushed the cartridge across the desk to me. I took it and put it in a drawer.

  “Is that all?” I asked.

  She went into the bag for the last time and came up with a piece of paper, folded, which she handed to me. Then she sat down again in the chair.

  “That’s for you from Sean,” she said.

  I didn’t open the paper or handle the other things. I picked up the billfold again and took out the driver’s license. It was a photo license. I had another look at the picture.

  “Where did you say Sean came by these?” I asked.

  “He took them away from the person who had them. Read the note.”

  I unfolded the paper. It read like this:

  SHERF LUCAN

  I BUSTED UP THAT FUKING SPIC + LEFT HIM WERE EVEN YOU CUD FIND. HA. ALSO TOOK HIS CLOSE + WALET HER THEY ARE. ALSO HIS PECE YOU CAN AD IT TO YOUR COLECTON. HA. DON’T SEND NO MORE FUKING SPICS FORINERS

  RESPETFULY

  S. DUKE

  P.S. HIS WALLETT HAD $500. YOU CAN PUT IT ON MY TAB.

  HA.

  I put the note down on the desk and leaned back in my chair. “You’re a friend of Sean’s?” I asked.

  “An acquaintance.”

  “How?”

  “How what, Sheriff?”

  “How do you know him?”

  “He’s been working at my house.”

  “Where’s your house?”

  “Mount Zion. It’s my parents’ house, actually. I’ve been staying there this spring and summer.”

  “What was Sean doing there?”

  “He was fixing the roof,” said Morgan Endor. “The roof started to leak. I told my father. He called somebody. They sent Sean.”

  “You live there with your parents?”

  “No. T
hey live in Provence.”

  “Provence?”

  “It’s part of France, Sheriff.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes. I’m living at their house here temporarily so I can get some work done.”

  “You got to know Sean when he was working on your roof?”

  “Yes. I watched him. We talked. I saw I could use Sean.”

  “Use him?”

  “In my work.”

  “What kind of work is that?”

  “Photography.”

  “You’re a photographer?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Sean helped you take pictures?”

  “Not exactly. I wanted to photograph him.”

  “Photograph Sean?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  “Sean is beautiful.”

  That brought me up some, I have to say. I probably could have thought of a better way of asking the next few questions.

  “What do you take pictures of, Ms. Endor?”

  “Men.”

  “Men?” I asked her. “You mean, like me?”

  “Not like you. Young men.”

  “Young men. What kind of pictures are we talking about, here?”

  She lifted her chin an inch and gave me a look.

  “How extraordinary,” she said. “You think I’m a pornographer, don’t you, Sheriff?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I don’t know any pornographers.”

  “I do,” said Morgan Endor. “But I’m not one of them. I’m an artist. I’m preparing for a show in the fall, actually. That’s why I’m here.”

  “A photography show?”

  “Yes. They’re not uncommon, believe it or not.”

  “Where’s the show?”

  “Paris.”

  “I’ll bet that’s Paris, France, ain’t it?”

  “That’s right, Sheriff.”

  “That anywhere near Provence?”

  “Not near, not far.”

  “What kind of show?”

  “The show is about style,” said Morgan Endor. “Or say it’s about personality. Personal style.”

  “You’re saying Sean has style?”