Violence Is My Business
Page 18
The surprise came a few minutes after her expected eulogy of her husband. She went on talking compulsively, as if the sheer volume of her words would give her the absolution she sought. She had had an affair with Sheriff Lonegran, she said. They had been very careful about it, very smooth, all but once. It had nothing to do with how she felt about her husband. She was how she was. Then one time they had been very clumsy. Dygert had walked in on them. He never said a word—not right away. Lonegran had wanted to tear him apart, but Mrs. Bonner calmed him down. Then later, when I visited Bonner with my pocket recorder, Dygert told Lonegran I wasn’t to reach the Prince Charles County jail alive. Or else.
They gave me back my license. Mrs. Bonner went to live alone in her big house. Maybe she’s still there.
A week after the hearing, Captain Masters of the Virginia State Poliee came into my office. He made a gun of his thumb and forefinger and shot at me with it. Then he grinned ruefully.
“We sure gave you a hard time, Drum,” he said.
I said something about being used to it, in my line of work.
“I heard about Canada. It must have been rough.”
I waved at a chair, and he sat down. It had been Jerry’s chair. I brought out the office bottle. We had a drink, toasting each other silently with our glasses.
“I got to thinking you’d like to know what happened to Lonegran.”
“What could have happened to him? Mrs. Bonner’s evidence was only hearsay. It wouldn’t stand up in court. You know that, I know it, and so does Lonegran.”
“He didn’t act like he knew it,” Lonegran said.
I filled his glass and said nothing.
“The day after the hearing, he didn’t show up at his office.”
“So?”
“So this came in on the teletype yesterday.” He handed a yellow sheet of paper across the desk. It was a teletype from the office of the Policía Federal of Mexico in Guadalajara, Jalisco Province. A man identified as Roger P. Lonegran, sheriff of Prince Charles County, Virginia, had crashed his car into the abutment of a bridge spanning a river on the highway from Guadalajara to Ajijic. They had to get his body out of the wreck with blow torches.
We talked for a little while, then Masters shook my hand and left. I never saw him again.
I told Bobby about it that night at her new apartment. She’s been talking lately of leaving Washington. It has too many of the wrong kind of memories for her. She may decide to leave in a week, or a month, or not at all. Except for that, we don’t talk about the future. It might spoil what we have. What we have, now, for as long as it wants to last without us pushing it, is each other.
We drank to that.
THE END
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copyright © 1958 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.
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