All That I Have Read online

  “Is he?” she asked. “I wonder. Can you prove any of the things you’ve told me?”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t. That’s the thing. Sean ain’t in trouble from me, not really, because I can’t go after him without proof. But there are other people in this thing, too, and they can do whatever they want.”

  “What other people?”

  “People who own the house Sean busted into.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I don’t know for sure. I’ve been trying to find out. But they are very bad news, I know that. They know Sean went into their place. If they catch up with him, they won’t need proof to do what they have to do. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  “Yes, Sheriff, I see. But even if you’re right about Sean, it’s for the police to act. It’s for you. Why would these people think they had to do anything?”

  “Because Sean took something from their house. A kind of a little safe or strongbox, I guess. They’re not in a hurry for the police to get their hands on it, but they’re ready to go some way to get it back, it looks like, or what’s in it. They’re ready to go a long way. You don’t know about anything like that?”

  “Certainly not,” said Morgan Endor. “What was in it that’s so valuable to your people?”

  “They ain’t my people,” I said. “I don’t know what was in it. They don’t say.”

  “You think the man Sean fought was from these people?”

  “That’s what I think.”

  She smiled then. “Sean didn’t seem to have much trouble with that one, though, did he? I gathered you found him tied to a tree naked. Sean handled him, didn’t he?”

  “Sean was lucky,” I said.

  “Sean’s a lucky young man.”

  “You think so?”

  “I think you worry too much about him.”

  “About Sean? I don’t worry about Sean. I’m doing my job.”

  “Is that what you’re doing, Sheriff?”’

  “That’s what I’m doing.”

  “Well,” she said. “Maybe you worry too much about those other people, then.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I saw the fellow. I saw the gun he had on him, too. So did you. I worry about fellows who carry guns. Don’t you?”

  She shrugged.

  “I worry about them because there’s apt to be more than one to a litter,” I said.

  Morgan Endor smiled again. “Sean can take care of himself,” she said.

  Sean can take care of himself ? Wrong. Not for a day, he can’t, not for an hour. Sean can do a lot of things. He can fix your roof. He can pick up a two-hundred-pound flowerpot and toss it through your patio door. He can steal your strongbox. He can mop the floor with your imported evildoer. He can go all night putting the old inner life to his lady photographer in her chalet, get up, cup of coffee, slide right down to the trailer park and roll the doughnut with the Sweetheart of Sigma Chi. Sean can do all those things. But take care of himself, he cannot.

  Morgan Endor thought he could, or she said she did. She was wrong if she thought so. But she didn’t look like she was often wrong about things. I didn’t get Morgan Endor. I didn’t get her name, I didn’t get her age. I didn’t get her when she came to the office with the Russian’s pants, and I still didn’t get her. I couldn’t figure her out. In sheriffing, that happens, too. You don’t always figure everybody out. There are some people you never do get.

  Driving home that evening, I thought about Addison and his Russian novels. Good old Addison, always holding a ticket you don’t have. Well, whoever these Grenada Russians were, they weren’t in no novel, and they had Addison’s attention, it looked like. He was more than a little spooked.

  Or maybe it was the White Horse. I wondered whether or not I should tell Clemmie that her dad might be working the stuff a little harder than usual. Would telling her about it make anything better? I about decided no, I’d shut up. But then it didn’t matter, because when I got home, Clemmie wasn’t there.

  10

  THE COSSACKS

  Late that Sunday night, Monday morning, the balloon went up. It went up about halfway. Errol called me at home after three to say he’d had a trouble call from Monterey for a disturbance at one of the trailers there, the Finn trailer: a fight or a party, it looked like to Errol, or, more likely, both at once. He’d gotten Deputy Keen, who was patrolling, on the radio, and Lyle had started over there. Then a couple of minutes later Errol had gotten a second call, same place, saying shots had been fired. That’s when he called me.

  I got there about quarter to four. Errol must have hit every switch on his desk, because we lacked nobody at the scene except the Salvation Army. I saw state troopers, deputies of mine, medics, volunteer firemen, and two animal control officers from Brattleboro.

  They had lights from the vehicles playing over the side of the trailer and over the little yard in front. You could see the door had been forced in, and you could see glass all over the ground in the yard. There was some blood on the cement-block steps at the door. I went on into the trailer.

  The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi was in there surrounded by police and medics. She was a little shaky, but mainly alright. She was wearing a bathrobe and drinking a beer, sitting on the divan telling her story for the tenth time.

  Deputy Keen was with her. He came over to where I waited in the trailer door and nodded toward the yard. We went out there together, and the deputy filled me in.

  I have to say it was quite a story. It seems Crystal Finn was innocently asleep in her trailer around three o’clock when she heard banging and crashing and woke to find two men beating down her door. Crystal wasn’t the only one who woke up, though, and that was bad luck for the intruders, because the minute they got inside the trailer here comes Jackson, Crystal’s two-hundred-pound bull mastiff-wolf-alligator hybrid, storming full tilt out of the bedroom and right at them. They turned and ran for their car, which was parked in front, with the dog all over them and behind the dog, Crystal wearing a little black nightie and carrying an old side-by-side Ithaca. The dog grabs the hindmost fellow by the arm and commences to eat, but the fellow breaks free and makes their car, just as the quicker one fires it up and starts to roll, which is when Crystal lets go on them with the Ithaca, first one barrel, then the other. She said she thinks she got the driver, but maybe not, because they took off and kept going. She’s sure she blew out their rear window, though. A neighbor called the police, but it’s all over. Crystal’s fine. The dog’s fine.

  “She’s something else, ain’t she?” said Deputy Keen.

  “She is,” I said.

  “They won’t get far,” said Lyle, “not wounded and with their back end all shot up.”

  “Do we know who they were?”

  “More Russians, Sheriff. Look here.”

  The deputy and I went to one of the state police cruisers, and he opened the door. Lying on the passenger’s seat was a large, clearplastic evidence envelope with some kind of cloth or fabric inside.

  “That’s part of the one fellow’s coat,” said Lyle. “Jackson ripped it away when he grabbed hold of the guy’s arm. There’s an inside pocket with a passport, French passport, in the name of Vaseline something.”

  “Vaseline?”

  “Vaseline, Sheriff. Russian name. Plus, there are stamps in Russian all over the inside of it, the passport. I found the coat in the yard when I got here. Gave it to the troopers. I was first on scene.”

  “You find anything else with the coat?” I asked him.

  “Couple of fingers.”

  “Fingers?”

  “Jackson had a pretty good grip on him, it looks like,” said Lyle.

  “Was Sean here with the young lady, when these fellows showed up?” I asked.

  “Crystal says no,” said Deputy Keen. “And that brings me back to where I’ve been right along, Sheriff: Sean Duke. Superboy. When in hell are you going to get serious about him?”

  “What’s he got to do with this, here? It wasn’t
Sean did this tonight.”

  “It was because of him it happened,” said Lyle. “They came here to find him. He’s the reason they’re here. You know that as well as I do.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I do know that as well as you do. I also know if these fellows that were here find Sean before we do, we never will find him. There won’t be nothing left to find.”

  “Suits me,” said the deputy.

  “Well, it don’t suit me,” I said.

  “What are you more interested in, here, Sheriff?” the deputy asked me. “Solving a crime, a crime you know was committed by Superboy, or keeping the Russians off him? Which one?”

  “Both.”

  “I don’t figure that, Sheriff.”

  “You don’t have to figure it, Deputy,” I said. “All you have to do is follow your orders.”

  “What orders?” said Lyle. “I got no orders. All I want is orders. All I want is for you to do your job or at least let me do mine. That means running down Superboy. Don’t it? Don’t it?”

  Two of the other deputies and some of the medics who had been in the trailer had come out into the yard and were listening to Deputy Keen, who had raised his voice. I didn’t want to get into something with him in front of an audience.

  “It seems to me,” I told the deputy, “that the job right now, today, is finding the two fellows who were here before they get clean back to Russia while we stand here pissing on each other’s shoes. Wouldn’t you think?”

  “Whatever you say, Sheriff,” said Deputy Keen.

  “Why don’t you go ahead and do that, then? You want an order? You got one. You want to do your job? Go do it.”

  Deputy Keen turned and, taking all the time he needed and maybe a little more, he walked to his vehicle. He drove off. Another satisfied customer. All the others standing around in front of the Sweetheart’s trailer were looking at me. It was beginning to get light.

  Believe it or not, we never found them. You’d think a pair of Russians, one of them with half his hand chewed off, the other maybe with gunshot wounds, driving a car with a blown-out rear window and its bodywork full of those big double-o buckshot holes, would tend to attract attention to themselves, wouldn’t you? I would. But nobody ever caught up with either of them — or hasn’t yet.

  The one who lost his passport was traceable, of course. Lieutenant Farabaugh, my window on the world of international evildoers, ran him down the same day. The passport holder was Vassily Karataev, born Riga, Latvia, 1969. Citizenship, French. He had the same kind of sheet as the nude male except that, plus having been arrested in every city in Europe, Vassily had also done time in New Delhi, India.

  The passport meant Dwight also had a line on the car the two Cossacks drove. Vassily had rented it at Kennedy Airport in New York the day before they turned up on our field. But that was as far as anybody could get with the car. It had disappeared, too. It turned up most of two years later, abandoned in a parking lot on the river in Detroit. Nobody had thought much about it out there, I guess, maybe because half the cars in Detroit are full of blood and buckshot holes, just like the Cossacks’.

  11

  THE SEANS OF THIS WORLD

  Addison said a smart thing one time. Well, he said smart things more than once: he’s a smart fellow, as I hope I have made plain. But one time in particular I’m thinking of, when Clemmie and I found out we weren’t going to be having any kids.

  That was not an easy thing. We’d been married five, six years, working it in the usual way, not exactly trying to fetch at any special time, but expecting a kid would come along. It didn’t happen. Finally Clemmie thought she’d go to the doctor, get herself checked out for fertility. She went. She aced: Clemmie’s sitting on more eggs than your granny’s Rhode Island Red.

  That passed the ball to me. And sure enough, I was the problem. It turned out my sperms were a lot like the old-time hardscrabble Vermont hill farmers of my childhood: few in number, barely hanging on, and never learned to swim.

  So, no kids. It took some getting used to. Looking back, it took more getting used to than either of us would have thought. There’s no better way to learn what you want than to find out you can’t have it. Things with us weren’t going to be quite the way we’d thought they’d be. Did we talk that over a lot between us, at the time? Did we get straight with each other on what it meant, on how we felt about it? I don’t remember that we did. For me, I guess I said to myself, well, that’s the deal you’ve got: it is what it is. Clemmie? It might have been tougher for Clemmie — probably was. We’re different people, ain’t we, different kinds of people? That’s what makes it interesting. That’s what makes it fun when it’s fun, but that’s also what makes it hard when it’s hard. The way I said, Clemmie can take life too seriously.

  But I was saying about Addison. Maybe Clemmie and I didn’t talk much about having kids or not, but everybody else did, including Clemmie’s cousins. It was one day we were all sitting around after lunch at Addison’s, talking about sperms and eggs and hormones and all that fascinating kind of thing, and one cousin speaks up and says, Well, have you considered adoption?

  And Addison, who’s probably got a leg pretty well up over the back of the White Horse by now, gives a big guffaw and says, “Why would they do that?” Then, looking at me, “He’s already adopted the whole god damned county, don’t you know?” Good old Addison.

  So: Deputy Keen says I’m not doing my job, that I’m giving Sean a get-out-of-jail-free card. Am I? I guess I am. Is that because of what Addison said back then? Am I making Sean a special case? Am I going easy on him because I think he’s one of my own? Never. Sean ain’t mine. I don’t want him; he don’t want me. If I’m giving him some extra rope — and I am — it’s because that’s my method. That’s sheriffing. In sheriffing you don’t stop things from happening. You know you can’t do that, mostly, so you don’t try. People are going to do what they’re going to do. You let things happen. “Let them come to you,” said Wingate.

  Your bad boys, he was talking about. Let your bad boys come to you. The idea is that you give them a little cover, so they have a little room to screw up, a little time to figure things out and come around. What you’re aiming for is a taxpayer with a few good stories, a few memories that today make him shake his head, and not a convict sitting in a jail cell somewhere.

  In working with your bad boys, you’re also in the conservation business, in a manner of speaking, you’re in the endangered species business; because bad boys are getting scarce, at least the old-fashioned kind like Sean are. It’s like I said before: without the Seans of this world, it looks like the only young fellows we’d have in these parts would be bank clerks and sales representatives and fellows who work on computers — kids who want to grow up to be big lookers, kids who want grow up to be Logan Tracy and Emory O’Connor.

  Sure, there are bad boys who test Wingate’s method, who won’t come to you, who will not shape up, not ever. Sean may be one of them. But you don’t assume that. You try to use the method with Sean, too. At least you try until you get done trying. Then you come down onto the hard bottom of the law, the bedrock, the place where Deputy Keen wants to do business. Then you say that your job is to make the law work, to make it real, and in the end what makes the law real can only be one thing. If you’re a trooper, you carry it on your hip; if you’re a sheriff like Wingate, like me, you keep it locked up in your sock drawer. But you’ve got it, you know where it is, you know how to use it, you know you’re allowed to use it, and so does everybody else.

  Would Sean make us all come down onto that hard place? I didn’t think he would. And this time, anyhow, I was right. Because as it happened, I didn’t catch up with Sean. Sean caught up with me.

  He did it fairly neat, too: got me out of the office and as off duty as I ever am. Dinnertime. Clemmie was making something in the kitchen and came up with not enough sugar. Would I make a sugar run? So I got in her little car and drove down to the store at the Four Corners. It was
beginning to get dark. I parked in front of the store, went in, got the sugar, paid for it, came back out front, and climbed into the car to start home. Sean was sitting in the back. He was down kind of low, so I didn’t know he was there till he spoke up.

  “Evening, Sheriff,” said Sean.

  “Jesus.”

  “Take it easy, Sheriff.”

  “I might have shot you,” I said.

  “You ain’t got no gun, though,” said Sean.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Everybody knows that. Drive around for a few minutes, okay, Sheriff?”

  “Where to?”

  “I don’t give a fuck. Just drive. Go ahead.”

  I started the car, and we left the store and went right, away from the Four Corners and up the hill.

  “Sheriff, I told you to keep them fucking spics off me,” said Sean. “I wrote you a note about that. Didn’t I? Didn’t I say that?”

  “You know I’ve got nothing to do to keep them off or put them on,” I said. “If you want to get done with them, you’ll help me.”

  “Bullshit,” said Sean. “They came after my girl. They didn’t have the balls to come after me, not after what I did to the one fucker. So they came after her. Well, fuck them. They can kiss my ass.”

  “You ain’t listening to me,” I said. “Do you know why they’re looking for you?”

  “I don’t give a fuck,” said Sean. “Let them find me. Bring them the fuck on.”

  Talking to Sean was like talking to a barking dog, except that any dog that’s smart enough to bark is smarter than Sean.

  “Okay,” I said. “Were you there at her trailer when they came?”

  “Fuck, no,” said Sean. “I had been, you would have had a couple of dead spics.”

  “You keep on saying spics. Who do you think these people are, here?”

  “What?”

  “Who do you think’s after you? Who broke into Crystal’s, there?”