All That I Have Page 6

  “We are?”

  Tracy stood up from the desk where he had been sitting. “Alright, Sheriff,” he said, “This isn’t useful. We’ll leave it. The owners do want their property restored, obviously. That’s your job. I’m sure we can count on you, can’t we? Let me say, the owners are in a position to offer a reward for the return of their property. A substantial reward. Maybe that will help you in your investigation.”

  “I work for the county,” I said.

  “Of course you do, Sheriff,” said Tracy. “We appreciate that. I’m only saying the owners are prepared to be helpful to those who are helpful to them. You understand, I’m sure.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I do understand.”

  Tracy pulled a card out of his pocket and handed it to me. “You’ll keep me informed,” he said.

  “Are there going to be more fellows like that Eugene coming around?” I asked.

  “I told you, Sheriff,” said Logan Tracy, “I don’t know anything about anybody by that name.”

  I took a look at Tracy’s card. It had his name on it, and in the corner the name Atlantic Casualty, and a telephone number. There was no street address.

  “Where is your office?” I asked Tracy.

  “How do you mean?”

  “How do I mean?” I said. “How do you mean? There’s no address here. On your card. No address. Where’s your office?”

  “New York.”

  “New York’s a big place,” I said.

  “We’re downtown,” Tracy said.

  He started toward the door of the study. The man who had been standing there had gone. Emory O’Connor had left too, it looked like. He wasn’t in the hall where he’d been waiting, and when I left the house, his car wasn’t there.

  Did I enjoy being talked to like the dumbest boy in the third grade by that fellow with his fancy leather jacket and his little business card that not even the dumbest boy in the third grade would believe? Not really. But I don’t mind. In sheriffing, you ain’t there to show everybody you’re the smartest fellow in the room. You’re there to do your job, and sometimes you do it better if you look ten degrees cooler in the top story than you really are. That way, instead of talking, you shut up and listen, and watch. That way, you ask dumb questions, and sometimes it’s the answers to the dumb questions that are interesting — and the no-answers.

  So no, I didn’t mind Mr. Tracy. Wingate used to say: Everybody thinks you’ve got to come out on top. You don’t. All you’ve got to do is do your job.

  That was pure Wingate. On sheriffing he ran a kind of — what is it where everybody sits around and asks questions and nobody ever answers them? A seminar. Wingate ran a kind of a seminar on sheriffing. The end was always the same: do your job. All you have to do is do your job. But Wingate never said what the job was. You were supposed to figure that out on your own. On your own, but Wingate’s way.

  Deputy Keen was at the office when I got back from the Russians’ house. He had talked to the Sweetheart of Sigma Chi about Sean. It sounded like he’d had better luck with her than I did.

  “She ain’t a bad kid, Sheriff,” the deputy said. “Fucking Superboy’s got her brainwashed.”

  “Does she say where he is?”

  “No,” said Lyle. “She don’t know where he is. She don’t even see that much of him. He don’t really live there, with her. He checks in every few days with a case of beer and a bunch of dope, and they, you know, they get it on all day and all night. Then he takes off. She thinks he’s going to marry her.”

  “Is that what she says?”

  “She don’t have to say it. She’s only just eighteen, you know. She’s had a tough time. Her dad hit on her; when he wasn’t hitting on her he was beating her up. She didn’t finish school. Working at Wendy’s, there. One shithead guy after another. She’s going nowhere, and she knows it. Here comes Superboy. He’s got a job, he’s got a little money in his pocket. Sometimes he’ll change his socks, take a shower, even. He looks good to Crystal.”

  “I guess he does.”

  “She’s a good kid,” Lyle went on. “She loves that big dog. Jackson. What a monster. Did you see him? I don’t know why she calls him Jackson. I’ll have to ask her. I’m going back out there later, see she’s okay. She could use a break, you know? And instead she gets Superboy. That little toad. I’d like to — ”

  “Okay, Deputy, that’ll do,” I said.

  “Well, Sheriff?” Lyle said. “Well? What? You know as well as I do it was Superboy broke into that place. We ought to just go ahead and bust him.”

  “We can’t bust him for what I know as well as you do but maybe ain’t true,” I said. “We can’t bust him for what neither one of us can prove. Maybe them Russians could, if they were at home, but we can’t.”

  “You can’t,” said Deputy Keen.

  “You, neither,” I said, “as long as I’m sheriff.”

  “As long as you’re sheriff.”

  “As long as I’m sheriff,” I said again.

  “As long.”

  “And, plus,” I said, “we can’t bust him if we can’t find him.”

  “Well, I’ll give you that,” said Deputy Keen. “But we’ll find him. I’ll find him.”

  The deputy left, and I sat there and thought things over — didn’t get far with it, though. I decided I didn’t yet have quite enough to think about to make thinking worthwhile. So I got on my legs and went across the street to Addison’s office, there in back of the courthouse. Let’s get some more players on the field, here.

  I found Addison standing at the window, looking out. He was wearing his wide red suspenders and a blue bow tie. The country lawyer. All Addison needed was the corncob pipe, and he has a couple of them, too.

  “There is a kid down there cutting the grass who I believe must be asleep,” said Addison when I came in. “Asleep or drunk. Look at him.” He pointed out the window. Leo Crocker, on his little tractor, was mowing the lawn beside the courthouse.

  “That’s Leo,” I said. “What’s the matter with him?”

  “He’s missing half the lawn,” said Addison. “He’s leaving big strips between his cuts. Place is going to look like a god damned corn maze. Leo Who? Is he one of your guys?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “My guys don’t cut the grass.”

  “I know they don’t, Lucian,” said Addison. “Sit down. How’s our favorite little girl?” He sat behind his desk. I stood.

  “Who do you mean?” I asked him.

  “Hah,” said Addison. “Hah, hah. A hit, Lucian. A very palpable hit. We’ll make a comic out of you yet. What can I do for you?”

  “You can search a title for me,” I said. I told him about the Russians’ house, about the break-in.

  “What town?” asked Addison. I told him the town the house was in. Addison was making notes.

  “New house?” he asked.

  “Pretty. Last five years, I’d guess.”

  “What else?”

  “Emory O’Connor manages it,” I said. “Probably sold it, too.”

  “And you want to know who’s owned it?”

  “I want to know who owns it now.”

  “Ask Emory,” said Addison.

  “I will,” I said. “I’m asking you, too. I like asking people things.”

  Addison smiled faintly and nodded. “Going to cost you,” he said. Now we’re getting to the fun part.

  “Come on,” I said. “You’re assisting a county officer in the performance of his duty. That’s pro bono.”

  “The hell it is,” Addison grinned. “You know what pro bono means in Latin, don’t you, Lucian?”

  I shook my head.

  “It means, ‘For suckers,’ ” said Addison.

  8

  SHERIFFING II

  “We’ll find him,” says the deputy. Then he says, “I’ll find him.” He might do it, too. Lyle’s sharp, he works hard, and he’s got incentive. He’s got incentive because if people see Lyle putting in the hours, the days, to
apprehend an evildoer, if they get the idea that he’s a worker (if, along the way, they maybe get the idea he’s a good deal harder a worker than his boss) — well, that suits Lyle, too.

  It suits him because of the election. Hear how he said, “As long?” There’s an election coming up. There’s always an election coming up. Now, I was saying earlier, that means everybody reckons they’ve got a handle on the sheriff in a way they don’t on other cops; it means they want to see you doing your job, every day. That’s so, they do. But it can also mean that if they see you, they’re happy. Whether you’re really doing the job or not don’t matter as much as being seen doing it does.

  That don’t make sense, does it? No, it don’t. Come to that, electing the sheriff don’t make sense. It ain’t that kind of job. A couple of hundred people climb onto an airliner and are waiting to take off. Do they get to have an election to decide who’s going to be pilot? Do they get to pick the one who looks best in a pilot uniform, the one who sounds best on the radio? No. Somebody else decides who’s the pilot, and the passengers like it — or they get off the plane.

  It looks to me like electing the sheriff is like electing the pilot. Don’t misunderstand: I ain’t against elections. Majority rules. Democracy’s a wonderful thing. But from time to time we take it right out the window.

  Clemmie says thinking that way makes me some kind of a Nazi, some kind of a storm trooper. We’ve gone a few rounds on that one, too.

  “Do I look like a storm trooper to you?” I ask her.

  “No,” says Clemmie, “you don’t look like one, but you think like one. That’s worse.”

  “It is?”

  “Mister Law. You think you are the law. You think you and the law are the same.”

  “I do?”

  “Shut up,” says Clemmie.

  “I didn’t say nothing.”

  “I know you didn’t,” says Clemmie. “Shut up.”

  “Wait, now,” I say. “Wait, now. Let’s see. You reckon I think I’m the law, but, let’s see. What is the law? Who does the law come from? It comes from the people, don’t it?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “You suppose so. I suppose so, too. How?”

  “How, what?”

  “How do the people decide what laws to have? Elections, ain’t it?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “You suppose right. Elections. You’re going great, here. Okay, we’ll take the next one real slow. How did I get my job? I was elected, wasn’t I? I seem to recall being elected. Sure, I was. The people elected me.”

  I reckon I’ve tagged her there. But I get to sleep on the couch, just the same, and then next morning I get to look at her back again. Clemmie may take life too seriously, sometimes.

  All I’m saying is about sheriffing. Democracy makes sheriffing harder, and easier. It makes doing the job harder and holding the job easier — or maybe it’s the other way around.

  ’Course, a lot depends on what you think the job is.

  One day when I’d been sheriff ’s deputy for six months or so and was getting to feel like I could handle the work, Wingate gave me a court writ of some kind for a fellow named Chalmers Babcock, who everybody called Chum.

  Chalmers Babcock sounds like the name of a high flier. Chum was anything but. He must have been eighty at the time. He and his wife lived way to hell out in the woods in West Gilead: no plumbing, no electric. Chum got by picking ferns and trapping muskrats and working at the sawmill in the winter. I don’t recall what kind of trouble he was in that had led to him being served, but it was nothing unusual. Chum was in and out of court quite a lot. If it hadn’t been for having to go to court, he’d never have got to town at all, it looked like.

  So it was that I took the writ and set out for West Gilead on a fine warm day in May with dandelions in the meadows and the little shadbushes coming out pink and white along the roads. Yes, the dandelions were out and the shadblow, too — and right along with them, sure enough, the blackflies were as thick as you ever see them. When I got out of the patrol car at Chum’s, far back in the middle of the woods as he was, the flies were worse. I mean, they were right there, swarming around my head and face like a cloud of poison gas.

  Chum’s wife was waiting for me in the dooryard. She wore one of those headdresses made of black mosquito netting to keep the bugs off, so you couldn’t see her face. She looked like an Arab woman.

  “Mrs. Babcock?” I said. “Is Mr. Babcock here?”

  I was taking it slow, you see. In process serving, of course, you have to have the customer in person, in front of you. You have to serve his face, as they say. We all knew that. Chum wasn’t going to make it easy.

  “He’s upstairs,” said Mrs. Babcock.

  Behind her, over the door of their house, was an open window.

  “Mr. Babcock?” I called out. The blackflies were crawling around in my hair, they were crawling down my collar, up my nose, they were buzzing in my eyes, in my ears.

  Something came flying out of the upstairs window and landed at my feet. It was a glass Mason jar, a canning jar, held about a pint. It didn’t break, but it lay there in a pool of what had been in it — a yellow liquid that might have been flat beer. It wasn’t flat beer.

  “Mr. Babcock?” I called. “It’s e sheriff ’s. I need to talk to you.” I flapped and flailed and batted around my head at the cloud of bugs.

  “I know who you are,” said Chum from inside, but he stayed back from the window so I couldn’t see him. Another Mason jar came out the window. It hit the ground and broke, and what was in it splashed over Mrs. Babcock’s and my shoes. I took a step back from the house.

  “Mr. Babcock?” I called. “Chum?”

  “I ain’t saying so. You didn’t hear me say it’s me,” said Chum. “I know who you are and I know why you’re here. You’ve got another god damned summons, don’t you?”

  Then I thought I had an idea.

  “Yes, sir, I do,” I said. “I do have a summons. Mr. Babcock, the bugs are awful out here. Can I come inside?”

  “Heh, heh,” said Chum. “Hell, no, you can’t come inside.” A third jar flew out the window and broke against my patrol car.

  “How many jars has he got up there?” I asked Mrs. Babcock.

  ”Quite a few, it looks like,” she said. “He knew you’d be along. He’s been saving up.”

  “Bugs are pretty savage today, ain’t they?” called Chum from inside. “You don’t want to be standing around out there. Here’s what you do. Put your summons away, get back in your rig, go home, and tell Ripley Wingate he can take his summons, stick it up his ass, and bust it off.”

  Nobody had anything to say to that. Mrs. Babcock turned to me. “Let me see your paper,” she said.

  I handed the writ to her. She took it out of its envelope, raised her bug veil, read the summons. She stuck it back into its envelope.

  “This ain’t going to work,” she said. “He ain’t going to take it. You’d better go.”

  “What about the writ?”

  “Leave your paper with me,” said Mrs. Babcock. “I’ll see he gets it.”

  “You know I can’t do that, Mrs. Babcock,” I said.

  “Well,” she said, “you’d better go, then.” She handed me the summons.

  I went back to the department and told Wingate I couldn’t serve Chum.

  “ ‘Course you couldn’t,” said Wingate.

  I told him the circumstances: the blackflies, Mrs. Babcock, the Mason jars, what was in the Mason jars, the upper window. Wingate nodded.

  “We’ll give him another whirl in a day or two,” said Wingate.

  “A day or two? Why not now?”

  Wingate seemed to think about this, and then, “No,” he said. “We’ll let him work, we’ll let him develop for a little.”

  So it was a couple of days later that Wingate and I went out to Babcocks’ together. We had our writ, and this time each of us had his own anti-bug headgear — county issue. We found Mrs. Babcock out fron
t, and the three of us were standing there in our black veils like a club of beekeepers getting ready to go to a funeral, when here comes Chum out of the house in his own bug net, a specially heavy, dark, long one, and he starts right in on Wingate.

  “Sent the big boy today, I see,” said Chum. He was having a fine time. “You’ve got your paper with you, I guess.”

  “We’ve got it,” said Wingate.

  “This is a dogshit business, here, Sheriff,” said Chum. “I never moved that son of a bitch’s stakes. Why would I?”

  “I didn’t say you did,” said Wingate. “I ain’t here to say one way or another what anybody did. I’m here to serve you.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “You don’t know who you’re serving,” said Chum, very pleased with himself. “A man wouldn’t know his own mother if she was wearing one of these.” He tugged at the black bug veil, which hung down to his chest. “You can’t prove who I am. You can’t serve me.”

  At that I felt my blood pressure starting to climb. Here’s Chum, living out in the woods like a rabid coon, more than half crazy, pissing into fruit jars to throw at public servants, by now well into his second day of wasting the sheriff ’s time and the taxpayers’ money over a two-dollar lawsuit with the rabid coon down the road, who’s as crazy as he is — and he thinks he can come over like some crafty lawyer in a pin-striped suit. I wanted to cuff him and take him in to the lockup.

  Wingate knew it, too. He knew how I felt. He put his hand on my shoulder for a second and leaned toward Chum a little, like he was trying to see through Chum’s blackfly veil. He shook his head.

  “You’re right,” said Wingate. “I couldn’t swear it was you. It looks like you got us, Chum.”

  “Hah. Very clever,” said Chum. “But I ain’t saying nothing to that, am I? I ain’t answering like it’s me. You can’t prove it’s me.”

  “It looks like we’ll have to go back to the clerk and advise him, we’ll have to tell him it ain’t been served,” said Wingate. He handed the summons in its envelope to me.