Fourth Person No More

by John Gastineau

  Also by John Gastineau

  The Judge’s Brief

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity and are used fictionally. All other characters and all incidents and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not be construed as real.

  Fourth Person No More. Copyright © 2018 by John Gastineau

  ISBN 978-1-54394-266-8 eBook 978-1-54394-266-8

  Front and back cover design by Rebekah Frey. Copyright © 2018 by John Gastineau

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  For Jane

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Acknowledgments

  Here’s how you keep secrets. Don’t talk. Don’t write anything down. Live a life so open nobody notices when you don’t talk and you stop writing everything down.

  I know it works. I tried it. Trouble is, a guy like me can’t stop talking or writing. Not that long. Some of this, you didn’t read the first time.

  The Program says I must be honest. With myself and with others. This time I will be. I didn’t tell everything I knew last time.

  You never do. There’s always that nugget, that bit you hang onto, maybe to trade to a source in the future, maybe to jump start the next story, maybe just to hold onto, to know that you have, to turn and admire. But there were things about the Aunt Lotty business I should’ve said, if not to the people who read my material then to somebody.

  Like Moze. The kid deputy? He was not quite the hero I might’ve made him out to be.

  True, he did go into Aunt Lotty’s double-wide that night with his service weapon drawn, but that was just to buck himself up. He already had a pretty good idea what was in there, and it represented no danger to him. It was just that the dispatcher had told him some and his imagination did the rest.

  Yes, Moze did have his gun out when he went in, but he was so shook he barked his knuckles on the doorframe trying to use that stiff-arm technique he’d seen cops use on TV. It’s a wonder he didn’t drop the damned gun. Or shoot himself. Or me.

  And when he came out? Maybe ten minutes later? He did not reappear at the door, set his jaw, and march manfully to his squad to call for the investigative forces of five contiguous counties and the state police. No.

  Moze clutched the doorframe for a long minute, his face tipped up glistening and gray in the moonlight, sucking air. He towed himself hand over hand down the stair rail and stumbled to an oak in the yard. He put his hands on either side of the trunk, bent at the waist, and blew a double order of French toast and bacon across a new, two-hundred-dollar pair of Tony Lamas. His head still bowed, he moaned, “Sweet Jesus.”

  Call it a prayer for dead children.

  Pretty good detail, you might say. Impossible to obtain unless you were there, you could say. As I was, at the beginning, even before the beginning, at the ingestion of the French toast and bacon.

  That’s another thing I didn’t say before. I mean, I wasn’t looking for a Pulitzer out of this, and I did have to think about covering for Moze, who technically should not have had a civilian, particularly a civilian reporter, riding around in his squad. But a little recognition from a certain editor wouldn’t have hurt.

  Chance said Bob Marley. That is his name: reggae king, Scrooge’s foil, exec ed, as if a paper with a circulation of 4,500 needs a news boss with a title that rich.

  Luck, said Marley, dumb luck I had gotten bored reading Anne Tyler late of a Friday, the night before Halloween. And where else would I go for a little bite of something, said Marley, who’s sired two tykes and sometimes talks in the style of the last story he’s read them. Assuming, said Marley, father to us all, assuming, of course, I was still off sauce. Hack’s was the only place outside of a couple of taverns that was open after midnight in Failey, said Marley. Anyone in my position should have gotten the story under those circumstances, said he.

  But not everyone would have known to use that foray as a chance to buy breakfast for Amos T. “Moze” Beard, 21, kid deputy. It was not, at that time at any rate, a well-recorded fact that young Moze took his first break about an hour after coming on or that he usually used it to stoke himself for the rest of his shift. Nor would just anyone know that when they’re young, before old-timers nip them or they get burned by the likes of me, cops actually like to talk about their work with people other than cops. And certainly not everyone would have known what it meant when the radio Moze had propped next to the condiments squawked.

  Moze was not, at that moment, conversant. He had his head down, shoveling. But at the radio’s bark, he froze. And in the silence that followed, he quivered, like a dog on point, resonating with what he had just heard.

  I couldn’t think what he was waiting on, so I said, “Ten-zero. Moze? Did that say ten-zero?”

  Moze brought his head up, looking at the radio, expecting more. He was still a boy then, nearly fresh out of the service, with a blond buzz haircut, a mild case of acne that I suspect drove him nuts, and a pair of dorky black plastic glasses that I knew kept him out of the state police, his less-than-secret ambition.

  He looked at me but said nothing. So I said, “A ten-zero. That would be a body. A dead human body, would it not, Moze?”

  His eyes went shifty, like he was trying to figure a way to get out of our booth without me noticing.

  “And ‘times three’?” I said. “The dispatch said ‘ten-zero times three.’ That would mean three dead human bodies?”

  Moze shrugged and glanced over his shoulder, still trying to be casual. There were three other people in the place: Doreen, the slack-jawed waitress, and two truckers, judging by the wallet chains running from their belts to their back pockets and maybe the smelly rigs parked outside.

  Perhaps I had been too loud. All of them stared at us. Maybe Moze thought that if he waited we’d all go away, but I’ve been put off by pros.

  “And ‘Austin 8,’” I said. “That would be Austin County unit 8 and that would be you, would it not, Moze? Isn’t that you? They said something about registering your twenty on the land line. I believe they want you to call in on the telephone, the landline, as we call it these days.”

  I paused, raised my bushy eyebrows and pursed out my full lips. Moze turned to eye the ancient pay phone at the other end of room. Probably it seemed a million miles away because he couldn’t bring himself to get up and go to it in front of the audience. That by itself was enough to make me continue.

  “Why would they want that, Moze, do you suppose? Why wouldn’t they want you to use the radio. Or more likely, why wouldn’t they want to use the radio?”

  I tried to reach for my wallet, but the booth was what you could call co
nfining.

  “I’m thinking this is something important, Moze. I’m thinking you’re about to get your feet wet. Figuratively speaking, of course. I’m thinking maybe you ought to call in and find out just what the hell is going on.”

  I wasn’t the only one who’d been thinking. Hack’s is a long room of buzzing fluorescent lights, knotty-pine paneling, Formica, and chrome. Its ambience is not tempered by what Hack calls “the sculpture,” stuffed deer butts to which green glass eyes, the size of limes, have been affixed on either side of the tail so they appear to be the faces of hairy aliens. The sculpture hang on the walls at either end of the room. Under the one opposite of where we sat is a counter and behind that a long, narrow, pass-through window into the kitchen.

  From where I sat, I watched a thick fist emerge from the kitchen side of the window, rap a black telephone handset twice on the sill, and thrust it straight-arm out into the dining area. I had not heard the phone ring, so I assumed the thick fist dialed.

  Moze knew whom it was for. “Geez, Clay,” he hissed, as though I’d gotten him in trouble, and jumped up to take it.

  I was more nonchalant. It does not pay for a man of my build to try to twist too quickly out of a narrow booth. Such a person could get stuck and lose his story, maybe his dignity.

  Nor does it serve any useful purpose to display too much emotion around Hack. He thinks it reveals something about your manhood.

  Hack is, by day, a town cop, a year short of a pension but still a patrolman. Consequently, I run into him day and night, and almost from the moment I hit town, we have not gotten along.

  I thought at first it was because Hack was jealous that my girth rides so much higher and more youthfully over my belt than does his. It could also be that he didn’t appreciate it when I suggested in print early in my tenure that his name derived from his preferred interrogation technique. Considering the bright capillaries crocheted across his cheeks and nose and the foul mint you find on his breath from about noon on, I now think it more likely that it is a matter of one drunk recognizing himself in another.

  Hack came from the kitchen to meet me at the cash register with the reptile eyes cops turn on people they think they can bully. I chose to meet his opening gambit with my best smile.

  “Hack,” I said, because I am always cordial. He continued with the dead stare.

  I ticked off the courses of my meal and Moze’s meal and asked him how much I owed him.

  “It’s on the house,” he said, still without noticeable change of expression.

  “Hack, you and I have been through this before,” I said, still with that winning smile. “Thank you. I appreciate your generosity, but I insist.”

  He let me stand there for a minute or more, smiling like I’d just jumped out of the clown car.

  “You must not think much of yourself if you’re afraid you’re going to be bought for a couple of meals,” Hack said.

  “Well, Hack, appearances count. Besides, I like to stay in practice for when the big bribes come my way.”

  Not everyone appreciates wry jest at moments of confrontation. The net mask draped over Hack’s face went maroon, and I suspect that if we’d been on the street his hand would’ve moved toward the spring-loaded sap that bulges like a huge butt boil from his right rear pocket.

  I was eager to get out of there anyway because it sounded like Moze was trying to wrap up his call. I put a ten on the counter.

  “Cops don’t pay here,” he said and jerked his head back toward Moze.

  People in this town take the raising of their young very seriously, and that’s what this was about, of course, winning the hearts and minds of kid deputies.

  “Sure they do, Hack. It’s a well-known fact among the law-enforcement community that only the coffee here is free. That’s why you don’t see a lot of your brother officers around.”

  “Doreen,” I called to the waitress at the other end of the room and pointed to the ten. “Part of this is yours.”

  As a rule, more so than most men, cops are not touchers, probably because in their work they must touch to threaten or coerce. I knew Hack was serious when he put a hand on my forearm as I turned. The index finger he aimed at my nose, short and thick as a tuber, was entirely unnecessary.

  “The kid’s got work,” he said. “Leave him alone.”

  I slowly pirouetted out of his grip, raised both hands against the threat of his finger, and backed away.

  “Hack, the boy’s on the phone and I’m out the door.”

  Which is where I wanted to be anyway. Moze had parked his squad around the corner, nose out in the best ready-for-anything position, just as he had been trained. But Moze being Moze, young and gung-ho, had gone a step further.

  He figured that if he left the door unlocked he could pull out just that much faster, and who was going to steal anything out of a squad parked out front of a known cop diner? I liked the way the boy thought. It made him vulnerable to finding rotund reporters sitting shotgun, but it saved me from having to roost on the hood.

  Naturally, Moze told me to get out as soon as he found me. I said I thought we ought not waste time arguing. He said the county had a policy against civilians riding in squads; something to do with insurance. I said he could just drop me at my office; I’d pick up a car and follow him. Someone, presumably Hack, flicked the restaurant’s exterior lights on and off twice.

  “Son of a bitch,” said Moze, and we were off.

  Moze smoldered until we hit the edge of town. He said, “You’re going to get me in trouble.”

  “Nope,” I said. “I’m going to stay out of the way and not be obtrusive, not interfere, and if it comes down to it, I’ll lie and say I hid in your trunk.”

  “Yeah, as if that’d help. Or you’d fit.”

  He was starting to sound whiney.

  “Hey, Moze.” I waited until he turned to look at me. “You may not’ve covered this kind of thing before, but I have. I know how it’s done.”

  I was calm. I had said it evenly, matter of fact. No need for rancor. The Program says that to be honest you must recognize that you are who you are, and, anyway, in a small town, your history is known. Even a kid deputy would’ve heard that I’d covered cops in Chicago, that I’d once been top-of-the-line. He was too polite to say much after that.

  It was what an autumn night in the Midwest should be: clear, hard, and cool as crystal. Frost would not begin to suture up the soil for another week or so, but a deep breath outside would still ice your lungs and sharpen your senses.

  A harvest moon a night or two past full defined landmarks beyond the headlights in silver. Ten, fifteen miles into the country, we turned off the pavement onto a gravel road. That took us up onto another gravel road that seemed to be cut into the side of a wooded ridge. I had to check the address later against the map or I don’t know that I could’ve found it again.

  Near the top, Moze found the mailbox he was looking for and turned up a gravel drive. He hit the squad’s spotlight as we rolled forward.

  The white double-wide had been placed in the center of a clearing in a woods. Flower boxes had been added to the windows and ceramic gnomes and animals had been placed in the yard to make it look permanent.

  No lights in the windows. The door stood wide open.

  Moze said the dispatcher had told him to go to this home, secure it, and report what he found. The homeowner, a Lotty Nusbaumer, had appeared at the door of a neighbor, who had called the sheriff’s department. The neighbor said Miss Nusbaumer was bloody from head to foot and hysterical, talking nonsense about babies and robbers.

  There were no babies, not even baby cops. When he was done being sick, Moze straightened up, spat, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He considered the trailer for a moment, then me. A notable transformation had occurred. Moze had grown reptile eyes.

  He told me in a voice that he
had wired down tight that he knew he couldn’t watch me and do what he had to do. He said he was going to call it in, the phone did not work, and he’d have to use the radio. That would mean every cop in range and anyone with a scanner would be here in a little bit, so I had maybe five minutes to see whatever it was I thought I just had to see.

  I was not to touch, I sure as hell was not to take, and I’d better watch where I stepped. Then he wanted me the fuck out. And no, he did not give a good goddamn if I had to walk.

  I took it as a compliment to my experience and his trust that he did not feel it necessary to tell me that anything he had said was off the record.

  The button on the door knob was not set in the locked position, and there was no sign that the door had been pried. The door opened into the kitchen and an adjoining dining area, not really a room. To the right of that, separated by a counter, was the living room. The only light there was pewter and dim, seeping through a streaked picture window from the security light and the moon outside.

  Even so, bodies capture the eye. Three.

  My face felt hot, tight; I must’ve been holding my breath. I looked away and exhaled. To cope during the crisis moments, the Program says the drunk must pause and size up. Disappointment more than anger, annoyance more than revulsion. I had entertained some previously unrealized hope of leaving this kind of thing behind in Chicago.

  Dill was my editor there, the one who cut me loose. She did that, she said, not so much because I was a drunk as because I was no longer useful to her as a reporter.

  I had become a High Beam, she said. I shined my moments against the wall of history or space, rather than the brick of my existence. Nothing could be new to me if always I examined it in terms of whether it had happened to somebody else in some other time or some other place. High Beams robbed themselves of the capacity for wonder, Dill said, and curiosity without wonder was cynicism and waste.

  Like most editors, Dill was a head case. But putting that and her fondness for metaphor aside, maybe so. I am not unfeeling, but this was work. People get murdered. When they do, I can do nothing for them, so I do what I do. I breath through my mouth and look at details.