Oh.
“We were in Las Vegas when we broke up. I didn’t have the price of a bus ticket home—wouldn’t have come back to Farewell anyway—so I stayed in town and went to work on the late shift at the Sands with a cocktail tray, net stockings, and a three-inch skirt. That was one of Harry’s favorite losing-places, and I had a ringside seat while he lost every cent he made at a job he got dealing blackjack down in Glitter Gulch, and then every dime he could borrow from friends and passing acquaintances, and then every dollar he could hustle out of the two-for-three boys who finally put him to work hustling tourists for a string of call girls when he couldn’t pay up. And I was the one the cops called to identify the body and tell the coroner what to do with it when he finally got tired of seeing a pimp in the mirror and took a flying leap to hell off the fifth floor of a fleabag hotel downtown.
“Meanwhile, I was getting pretty well acquainted with all the nice friendly pushers, punks, pansies, powder-horners, and assorted sons of bitches who make up the general population of that little garden spot…”
She paused for breath, but I didn’t interrupt.
She still had things to say.
“So I know you,” she said. “You’re the one they call Preacher. The poker hustler in the black suit, who plays it so cool and smiling and patient and never wants anything but mineral water when he’s sitting around a table trimming the chumps. You live in California, and they say you travel all over the world to find games that are big enough to suit you, but you get to Vegas two or three times a year—and no one ever saw you go home empty.”
My face doesn’t usually tell people much. Call it a professional necessity. But Dana Lansing seemed to read my next thought before it was fully formed.
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Oh, no! It’s not what you’re thinking. This isn’t a second-rate television movie, and you’re not one of the people who broke poor dumb Harry. He did that himself. Strictly solo.
“But you’re part of the scenery. Part of the life. So I’ll go along with the gag and be as much help as I can, because it’s something to do to pass the time and the Spences seem to trust you, and besides, it keeps you away from Marilyn, who doesn’t need anything else to worry about right now. Only, just don’t waste the charm and the hustle on me. Save it for the marks. I’m immune.”
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
Why, then, this seeming contradiction of the concern with living space?
The answer seems plain.
Space is freedom, room for that action which is basic to our search for those other necessities…
EIGHT
There didn’t seem to be much to say after that.
We finished the coffee in silence and I counted its price, plus an outrageous tip, onto the check that the single on-duty waitress had dropped at our table before she disappeared from the face of the earth.
It was easy enough to tell myself that the surprisingly strong reaction I was feeling had to do with Sara, and not with the flesh-and-blood woman now gathering up purse, cigarettes, and sweater across from me. But I didn’t believe it for a moment, and I had a definite impression that intellectual persuasion wasn’t going to make a bit of difference. Apologia has its limits.
Our good-byes, at the door of my room, were punctiliously correct and professionally cordial. You could have cut glass with them. So all right. Enough.
Sufficient unto the day.
Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.
All the same, the air-conditioned chill of the room and its drape-dim anonymity left me empty and restless.
I wondered if there were any other poker games in town.
Which was ridiculous. Fumbling the dead bolt and spiking the key on the play-for-pay television set, I told myself I was merely too tired to sleep—that seemed to have been happening oftener than necessary of late—and stripped off for a long, hot shower. It turned out to be brief and lukewarm. But effective.
I switched off the lamp, flipped back the lightweight blanket, and let myself dissolve into the commercial ease of some mattress-maker’s wholesale special. He had nothing to apologize for. Sleep came within seconds and I fell into shape-negative darkness without even token resistance.
Like a corpse.
But sleep was restless. Scientists who study such things assure us that everyone dreams. No exceptions. The ones who think they don’t, they say, are simply unable to remember the dreams because their content is too revealing—too rich for the dreamer to handle on a conscious level.
They talk like that all the time. I bet it's a barrel of fun. If they are right, though, I suppose I must have quite a bit to repress, because my dreams have always been few and far between, and even the ones I do remember are nothing for the Krafft-Ebing crowd.
The one I was having now, for instance, was certainly a second-rate effort. A real programmer, banal plot and lousy camera work, with me in slow motion while everyone else was able to move at regular speed and a Rolls Corniche quietly drowning in quicksand while its owner squatted, serene in lotus, on the roof.
Somewhere in the distance, mortar rounds began pounding the far-too-familiar floor of the rain forest where all this was happening…and kept right on pounding when the scene dissolved.
I let it go without regret.
The blank wall of the motel room greeted me, and I only needed two or three tries to remember that I was in Farewell, New Mexico, and to realize that the ratio of waking to sleeping hours was still a long way out of balance. I sat on the edge of the bed and invited saika.
But the mortars were still pounding—from the vicinity of the door—and I finally gave up.
Too early in the morning.
Or too late.
I’d fallen asleep in the same costume I had worn for the shower, and for a moment I was tempted to deal with the noise without pausing for nonessentials. But in the end, wiser counsel prevailed and I took the time to pull on short trousers and a shirt before dragging myself to the door and putting my eye to the peephole.
The portal pounder with the mortar-fire cadence was a man.
In uniform.
Twisting the dead bolt back into the open position and working the knob, I put three inches of New Mexico climate between door and jamb and waited for him to talk.
“Uh…I’m really sorry if I woke you up, there,” he began.
The voice was incongruous. High-pitched and thin, all wrong for its owner. He was a big man—taller, broader, and far more formidable than he had seemed in the lens-distorted view afforded by the peephole. A bright-buffed deputy’s badge, I noted, was pinned to the precise peak of a military crease painstakingly ironed into the uniform blouse, and the leatherwork of the regulation pistol harness showed the effect of patient stropping with a dog bone.
“Perfectly all right,” I said, lying with a straight face and stepping back to leave him a clear path into the room. “I had to get up to answer the door anyway.”
If he got the joke he didn’t say so, and maybe it wasn’t such a knee-slapper at that. I’m never at my best when I first wake up. But he managed to get into the room, and I closed the door behind him and stood leaning against it, waiting for him to tell me why he was there.
It took him a while to do that. First he had to dig a soiled little spiral notebook out of his pants pocket and leaf through it to find the page he wanted.
“You…uh…drive a black Ford Camaro automobile, Texas license plate…uh…1X4328D?” he asked finally, reading from the scrawled page with evident effort.
Maybe he needed glasses.
“I’m driving a car I rented yesterday at the airport in Amarillo,” I said. “It’s a black Camaro, but I don’t think I even glanced at the license number.”
He nodded earnestly. “You got the rental contract here with you?”
If this was J. J. Barlow’s notion of getting the missing car back to me, I decided he was either a lot less intelligent than I had supposed, or was trusting the wrong p
eople to do the work for him.
“No,” I said. “I put the contract in the glove compartment of the car for safekeeping. Too easy to lose papers you carry around with you.”
The deputy’s eyes were immediately troubled. “Oh, you should never do that,” he said. “See, if you do that and then the car gets stolen or something, you can’t tell the police what license number to look for or even prove you got a right to turn in an auto theft report, or anything.”
His distress seemed genuine, and I had a strong impulse to pat his head and scratch his ears. The town of Farewell was getting odder and odder.
“Well,” I said, “I guess I just wasn’t thinking. Sorry. I’ll try to remember in the future.”
He nodded and shuffled his feet. “Uh…yeah,” he said, still unhappy. “Yeah, well…” He reached behind his back and brought out a gleaming set of handcuffs. “I don’t guess I need to search you, do I?” he inquired hopefully.
I looked at the manacles and decided I must have missed a paragraph or two somewhere. They weren’t in any script I had read. None of this was. The whole dream was getting entirely out of hand.
“I don’t, do I?” he prompted when I didn’t reply at once.
“Guess not,” I said.
He seemed relieved. “Good,” he said, reaching out to snap one cuff on my left wrist and then moving clumsily to turn me around. “Ain’t no sense having trouble on these things, is they?”
“No, indeed,” I agreed as he confined the other wrist, testing to see that they were comfortable in the small of my back. “But there is one thing…”
“Oh? What’s that?” he said, turning me back to face him.
“I always like to cooperate with the authorities,” I said. “And I wouldn’t for the world want you to think I was planning to make trouble. But don’t you think it would be nice to tell me why I’m wearing the nifty new jewelry?” I clicked the cuffs together to make sure he knew what I was talking about.
“Oh, darn!” The oversize deputy’s features registered new apology. “Now, ain’t that just like me?” he said. “Forgot to say you were under arrest or read you your rights or anything!”
He fished in his pocket once again and finally came up with a greasy little card, which he held at myopic distance, squinting a bit to read the small print.
“You have the right to remain silent,” he said, launching into the standard Miranda admonition. “If you give up the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak with an attorney…”
The dreamlike quality of the scene refused to go away. I let the words wash over me and decided it was very poor theater. Not really credible. A bomb. Should have fixed it in New Haven or let it close out of town.
The deputy paused, looking at me and waiting for something. “Do you?” he said.
I was fresh out of information and ideas.
“Do you understand each of these rights I have explained to you?” he repeated.
“Well,” I said, stirring my hands to make a rhetorical gesture and thinking better of it. “Well, there was just one little thing there, Mr. Deputy.”
“Manion,” he said with an open-faced smile. “Name’s Vollie Manion. Call me Vollie, everyone does.”
“Okay, then…Vollie,” I said. “Before I go giving up any rights, isn’t there one other thing you ought to tell me?”
That seemed to shake him.
He looked back at the Miranda card and read it through again in silence. Nope. He was sure he’d said it all. “Well…” he began uncertainly.
“The charge,” I said. “Before we do anything more, shouldn’t you tell me I’m under arrest. And for what?”
“Aw, shoot!”
You absolutely cannot fake the kind of blush that started at his neckline and rose to his forehead in less than a second.
“The thing is,” he said, “I guess you can tell I don’t arrest people very often. Mostly, they just keep me in at the jail. But I was out on patrol tonight when all this happened…”
He had lost me again, and it must have shown in my face.
“Sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “What do you say, let’s start this all over: You are under arrest for the crime of murder. Uh…you want me to read you your rights again?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “But there’s still one little thing you haven’t told me.”
“What’s that?”
“The name of the victim. Who am I supposed to have killed?”
I’d have sworn his look of astonishment was genuine.
“Why, my Lordy,” he said, “ain’t you heard? It’s all over town by now. Even on the radio. Ol’ Bobby Don Thieroux was found dead out on the county road—in the sheriff’s territory, you know—three, four hours ago. In your rental car…”
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
Examples of the contrary condition—and its terrible price—are all around us.
Muslim terrorists clash and kill and make war to drive one another from the face of the earth in the Middle East.
Christian terrorists clash and kill and make war to drive each other off the face of the earth in Northern Ireland.
Thousands disappear without a trace in Argentina…
NINE
Deputy Manion was proud of himself.
His first night on regular patrol—three other deputies were sick, they’d had no choice but to let him off jail duty—he had discovered what seemed to be a murder and was handling it all by himself without even having to bother the sheriff.
“They sure going to be surprised,” he said as we pulled up in the sheriff’s parking space behind Farewell’s four-story courthouse. “Though I got to say it didn’t take any great shakes of detecting to see who done what.”
He helped me out of the car’s enclosed backseat and kept a hand lightly on my arm as we entered through the basement door and waited for the elevator.
“The victim—ol’ Bobby Don, you know—he was in that car,” he said. “ ’Course, I didn’t know who it belonged to then. But I teletyped the license number to the Texas Highway Patrol, and they told me the name of the company owned it, and I phoned them up, and they give me your name.”
We got out of the elevator on the fourth floor, which seemed to be the county’s central lockup.
Farewell’s courthouse had been built at the tag end of the 1930s, a federal make-work project that had survived the test of time.
Someone had gone to a good deal of trouble to keep it as clean and habitable as possible, considering its basic mission in the world. The booking room—where I posed for two photographs, let Deputy Manion roll and stamp my fingerprints onto a stiff FBI card, and deposited most of my personal effects in an envelope—disclosed little trace of the dinginess and detritus usually associated with such places.
Perhaps it was just lack of use. Moving down the hallway and along a double row of cells, I saw only two customers: a trusty in denim busy with mop and bucket, and a disheveled drunk still apparently sleeping it off in the holding tank.
Deputy Manion paid them no mind, marching me to the end of the cell block, then through a barred but unlocked gate and into a cell with a solid steel door, which he locked behind him.
I had been a bit surprised when he slipped the cuffs on my wrists again before we moved into the cell block, but decided he was probably just being extra cautious. Not every day a rising young lawman captures a desperate murderer single-handed.
Still, I saw no cause for concern.
A telephone call to Jake Spence would solve all problems. No matter whose car the late Bobby Don Thieroux had been driving, at least four of Farewell’s most prominent citizens could vouch for my whereabouts at the time he came to his sad end.
I had just opened my mouth to remind Vollie Manion about my right to make a telephone call when his fist slammed into the inverted V of my ribs, removing all the oxygen from the world and turning it misty gray at the edges.<
br />
“Now, then,” he said, never losing that friendly smile as he settled me gently into a metal chair and secured my manacled hands behind its back, “I did hear you say you wanted to make a statement without bothering any lawyers so early in the morning. I did hear you say that, didn’t I?”
Leaning back in an effort to get just a little oxygen back into my lungs, I found myself wondering about a detail that seemed almost irrelevant for the moment, but seemed to take up a lot of space nonetheless: The smiling deputy’s punch had come without warning. A total surprise.
And that was next to impossible.
I had walked into an ambush at the country club by acting like a civilian: slovenly, thought-resistant, and half conscious. But it had been an effective lesson. My senses had been tuned in to the world around me ever since then—give or take an hour or two for sleep—and there was absolutely no way I could have failed to sense the emotional heat, the sudden change in the wa, that had to have preceded such a blow.
Yet I hadn’t felt a thing. And that left two possible—very unattractive—explanations: Either I was beginning to lose the ability to read and respond to other human beings, which would put me in the market for a brand-new line of work, or Vollie Manion had delivered the punch without heat.
If he could do that, I was in trouble.
“You ever study anatomy?” he inquired, talking over his shoulder while he busied himself with something in the corner of the cell. “I did. Most folks wouldn’t believe it, looking at me or listening to how I talk, but I done real good over at the state university. Was third in my class before I quit. Could’ve been first, but I don’t like to make a spectacle of myself.”
He turned, bright as a button and friendly as a pup, and I had a chance to see what he’d been doing.
Modern college-educated policemen have a kind of mania for renaming. I think it has something to do with shedding the old-time image of the apple-grafting Keystone Kop. Prowl cars, for instance, have become patrol vehicles. Badges are magically transmuted into shields. Cops have become police officers.
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