Hugger Mugger

by Robert B. Parker

  "Well, if they were, why would they shoot those horses? The stable pony's worth maybe five hundred dollars. Neither of the other two horses showed much promise. Heroic Hope can't run again, but insurance covers it. If you wish to damage me, you shoot Hugger Mugger-no amount of insurance could replace him."

  "Me either," I said. "Maybe they were chosen because their loss would not be damaging."

  "That doesn't make any sense."

  "True," I said. "If someone didn't want to damage you they could just not shoot the horses."

  A good-looking woman with close-cropped hair and high cheekbones and blue-black skin came in pushing a tea wagon. There was coffee in a silver decanter and white china cups and a cream and sugar set that matched the decanter. She served us each coffee and departed. I added cream and two lumps of sugar. Clive took his black.

  "So what kind of security did Jon Delroy do for you?" I said.

  "Why do you ask?" Clive said.

  "Because I don't know."

  "And you find that sufficient reason?" Clive said.

  "Admittedly, I'm a nosy guy," I said. "It's probably one of the reasons I do what I do. But that aside, doing what I do is simply a matter of looking for the truth under a rock. It's under some rock, but I don't usually know which one. So whenever I come to a rock, I try to turn it over."

  "Doesn't that sometimes mean you discover things you didn't need to know? Or want to know?"

  "Yes."

  "But you do it anyway?"

  "I don't know how else to go about it," I said.

  Clive looked at me heavily. He drank some coffee. Outside the window some birds fluttered about. They seemed to be sparrows, but they were moving too quickly to reveal themselves to me.

  "I have three daughters," he said. "Two of whom have inherited their mother's depravity."

  "Penny being the exception?" I said.

  "Yes. They have not only indulged their depravity as girls, they have married badly, and marriage has appeared to exacerbate the depravity."

  Clive wasn't looking at me. He wasn't, as far as I could tell, looking at anything. His eyes seemed blankly focused on the middle distance.

  "Depravity loves company," I said.

  I wasn't sure that Clive heard me. He continued to sit silently, looking at nothing.

  "Among Delroy's duties was keeping tabs on the girls," I said.

  He was silent still, and then slowly his eyes refocused on me.

  "And dealing with the trouble they got into, and their husbands got into," he said.

  "Such as?"

  Clive shook his head. Outside, the birds had gone away and at the window there was only the flutter of the curtains in the warm Georgia air. I put my empty coffee cup on the tray and stood up.

  "Thanks for the coffee," I said.

  "You understand," he said.

  "I do," I said.

  TWELVE

  SINCE IT WAS evening, and I wasn't being feted at the Clive estate, I had the chance to lie on the bed in my motel and talk on the phone with Susan Silverman, whom I missed. "So far," I said, "only one sister has made an active attempt to seduce me."

  "How disappointing," Susan said. "Are there many sisters?"

  "Three."

  "Maybe the other two are just waiting until they know you better."

  "Probably," I said.

  "I have never found seducing you to be much of a challenge," Susan said.

  "I try not to be aloof," I said.

  We were silent for a moment. The air-conditioning hummed in the dim room. Outside, in the dark night, thick with insects, the full weight of the Georgia summer sat heavily.

  "Are you making any progress professionally?" Susan said after a time.

  "I'm getting to know my employer and his family."

  "And?"

  "And I may be in a Tennessee Williams play… The old man seems sort of above the fray. He's separated, got a girlfriend, looks better than George Hamilton, and appears to leave the day-to-day management of the business to his youngest daughter."

  "What's she like?"

  "I like her. She's smart and centered. She finds me amusing."

  "So even if she weren't smart and centered…" Susan said.

  "Actually, that's how I know she's smart and centered," I said.

  Susan's laugh across the thousand miles was immediate and intimate and as much of home as I was ever likely to have. It made my throat hurt.

  "What about the other sisters?" Susan said.

  I told her what I knew.

  "You have any comment on a woman married to a man who prefers little boys?" I said.

  "It would probably be preferable if she were married to a man who preferred her."

  "Wow," I said. "You shrinks know stuff."

  "In my practice, I know what my patients tell me. I know nothing about Stonie and whatsisname."

  "Cord."

  "Cord," she said. "And there is no one-fits-all template for a woman married to a man who prefers boys-if what SueSue told you is true."

  "SueSue says that Stonie is so sexually frustrated that she is a threat to every doorknob," I said.

  "Maybe she is," Susan said. "Or maybe that's just SueSue's projection of how she herself would be."

  "And Cord? You figure he married her to get cover?" I said.

  "Maybe," Susan said. "Or maybe he married her because he loves her."

  "I could not love thee half so much, loved I not small boys more?"

  "Sexuality is a little complicated."

  "I've heard that," I said. "What bothers me in all of this is that I've got a series of so-far inexplicable crimes, committed in the midst of this family full of, I don't even know the right word for it-dippy?-people. I mean, there ought to be a connection but there isn't, or at least I can't find it."

  "You'll find it if it's there," Susan said. "But most families are full of dippiness. Perhaps you don't always find yourself so fully in the bosom of a client's family, and thus don't have it shoved in your face from such close range."

  "Maybe. Do you think there's a connection?"

  "I have no way to know," Susan said.

  "Do you think a man who prefers boys, or a woman who is married to a man who prefers boys, would have a reason to kill some horses?"

  "As I've said, mine is a retrospective profession, as is yours. We're much better at explaining why people did things than we are at predicting what they might do."

  "Our business is generally after the fact," I said.

  "Yes."

  "You're not going to solve this for me, then."

  "No. I'm not."

  "And what about my sexual needs?"

  "I could talk dirty on the phone."

  "I think I'm too old for that to work anymore," I said.

  "Then unless you're coming home soon, I guess you'll have to mend your fences with SueSue."

  "And if I do?"

  "I'll shoot her, and swear I was aiming at a horse."

  "I thought you shrinks had too much self-control for jealousy," I said.

  "Only during office hours."

  THIRTEEN

  I WAS JUST finished shaving when I got a call from Becker, the Lamarr sheriff's deputy. "Got a horse shot over in Alton, in South Carolina. Thought I'd drive over and have a look. You want to ride along?"

  "Yes."

  "Pick you up in 'bout fifteen minutes."

  I was standing in front of the motel by the lobby door when Becker pulled up in a black Ford Crown Victoria. There was a blue light sitting on the dashboard, and a long buggy whip antenna, but no police markings. When I got in, the car smelled of food. Becker was drinking coffee. On the seat beside him was a large brown paper bag.

  "Got us some sausage biscuits," Becker said, "and coffee. Help yourself."

  He pulled the car away from the motel and out onto the county road.

  "What about granola?" I said.

  "Have to go over to Atlanta for that," Becker said. "People in Columbia County don't eat granola
and don't tolerate those who do."

  I poured a little container of cream into a paper cup full of coffee and stirred in several sugars. I drank some, and fished out a large biscuit with a sausage patty in the middle.

  "Okay," I said. "I'll make do."

  "Figured you'd eat most things," Becker said.

  "What about the horse shooting?"

  "Stable over in Alton, Canterbury Farms, somebody snuck around their stable last night, shot a filly named Carolina Moon."

  "Dead?"

  "Don't know," Becker said. "Just picked it up off the wire. Got no jurisdiction, you know, over in South Carolina."

  "Me either," I said.

  "Hell, you got no jurisdiction anywhere," Becker said.

  "It's very freeing," I said.

  I drank some more coffee as the Georgia landscape gave way with no discernible change to the South Carolina landscape. I checked my arteries. Blood still seemed to be getting through, so I had another sausage biscuit.

  I was experiencing a little of the separateness I always felt when I was away from Susan. It wasn't unreality exactly, it was more a sense that there was a large empty space around me. Even now, sitting in a squad car, maybe eighteen inches from another guy, there was a sense of crystalline isolation. It was not loneliness, nor did the feeling make me unhappy. It was simply a feeling different from any other, a feeling available only when I was away from Susan. I was alone.

  "What do you know about the Clive family?" I said.

  "Somebody been shooting their horses," Becker said.

  "Besides that," I said. "Any of them had any problems with the law?"

  "Clives are the most important family in the whole Columbia County," Becker said. "They don't have trouble with the law."

  "Have they come to the attention of the law?" I said.

  We were driving along a two-lane highway now. There were fields with farm equipment standing idle, and occasionally a Safeway market or a Burger King. Traffic was light. Becker kept his eyes on the road.

  "You got a reason for asking?" he said.

  "I'm practicing to be a detective," I said. "Plus the family seems to be full of people who would get in trouble."

  " 'Cept for Penny."

  "Except for her," I said.

  "Old man's calmed down some, since Dolly came aboard."

  "But before that?"

  "Well. For a while he was married to the girls' mother. Don't remember her name right this minute. But she was a hippie."

  "Lot of hippies around thirty years ago," I said.

  "Yep, and that's when they got married. But times changed and she didn't. 'Bout ten years ago she ran off with a guy played in a rock band."

  "So Penny would have been about fifteen."

  "Yep. The other girls were a little older."

  "They're two years apart," I said. "So they'd have been seventeen and nineteen."

  "See that," Becker said. "You been detecting more than you pretend."

  "I'm a modest guy," I said. "How was the divorce?"

  "Don't know nothing about the divorce."

  "Was there a divorce?"

  "Don't know. Not my department."

  "So what was Clive doing between the hippie and Dolly?"

  "Everything he could," Becker said.

  There was a two-wheeled horse-drawn piece of farm machinery inching along in our lane. I didn't know anything about farm machinery, but this looked as if it had something to do with hay. A black man in overalls and a felt hat was sitting up on the rig, though he didn't seem to be paying much attention. The horse appeared to be the one on duty. Becker slowed as we approached it and swerved carefully out to pass.

  "Booze, women, that sort of thing?"

  "A lot of both," Becker said.

  "Ah, sweet bird of youth," I said.

  Becker grinned without looking at me.

  "You hang around those Clive girls, you might get younger yourself," he said.

  "While Clive's living the male fantasy life," I said, "who's looking after the girls?"

  "Don't know," Becker said.

  "Is there anything in this for me?" I said. "Clive screw somebody's wife, and somebody wants to get even? He sleep with some woman and ditch her and she wants to get even?"

  "I don't pay attention to shit like that," Becker said. "Do I look like Ann Landers?"

  "You look sort of like Archie Moore," I said. "And you sound like a guy who knows things he's not saying."

  "It's a special talent," Becker said.

  "The real talent is sounding like you don't know anything you're not telling," I said.

  "I can do that," Becker said.

  "If you want to," I said.

  Becker watched the road.

  "So why don't you want to?"

  We passed a sign that read, "Welcome to Alton."

  "Because you want me to wonder."

  Becker slowed and turned into a narrow dirt road that went under high pines, limbless the first thirty feet or so up. I remembered it from my last visit, eight years ago.

  "You want me to look into them, but you don't want it to have come from you, because it could come back and bite you in the ass."

  "Clives the most powerful family in Columbia County," Becker said, and turned off the dirt road into a wide clearing and parked near a white rail fence near the Canterbury Farms training track.

  FOURTEEN

  WE DIDN'T LEARN much in Alton. An Alton County Sheriff's detective named Felicia Boudreau was on the case. I knew her from eight years earlier, and Becker and I talked with her sitting in her car at the stable site. Carolina Moon, she told us, had been a filly of modest promise. Her groom had found her dead in her stall when he went to feed her in the morning. She'd been shot once in the neck with a.22 long bullet, which had punctured her aorta, and the horse had bled to death.

  "We have the bullet," Felicia said. "Vet took it out of the horse."

  "We'd like to see if we can match it against ours," Becker said.

  Felicia said, "Sure."

  "Nothing else?" I said.

  "Well, it's nice to see you again," she said.

  "You too," I said. "Got any clues?"

  "None."

  "Lot of that going around," I said.

  "What's it been, eight years?"

  "Yep. Still getting your hair done in Batesburg?" I said.

  "Yes, I am."

  "Still looks great," I said.

  "Yes, it does."

  We talked with Frank Ferguson, who owned the horse. He didn't have any idea why someone would shoot his horse. I remembered him from the last time I was in Alton, but he didn't remember me. He had been smoking a meerschaum pipe when I talked with him eight years before. I thought of saying something about it, but decided it would be showing off, especially after my hair-done-in-Batesburg triumph.

  We headed back toward Lamarr in the late afternoon with neither information nor lunch. I didn't mind about the lunch. The sausage biscuits from breakfast were still sticking to my ribs. In fact, I was considering the possibility that I might never have to eat again.

  "That didn't help much," Becker said.

  "No," I said, "just widened the focus a little."

  We were heading west now and the afternoon sun was coming straight in at us. Becker put down his sun visor.

  "Maybe it was supposed to," Becker said.

  "So we wouldn't concentrate entirely on the Clives?" I said.

  Becker shrugged.

  "What is this, you give me an answer and I try to think up the question?"

  Becker grinned, squinting into the sun.

  "Like that game show," he said. "On TV."

  "Swell," I said.

  We kept driving straight into the sun. The landscape along the highway was red clay and pines and fields in which nothing much seemed to be growing.

  "Okay, let me just expostulate for a while," I said. "You can nod or not as you wish."

  "Expostulate?" Becker said.

  "I'm sleeping wit
h a Harvard grad," I said.

  "The Emory of the North," Becker said.

  "I have a series of crimes which, excepting only Carolina Moon," I said, "centers on a family made up of Pud, who's an alcoholic bully, and SueSue, who's an alcoholic sexpot, and Cord, who likes young boys, and Stonie, who, according to SueSue, is sexually frustrated. They are mothered by Hippie, who ran off with a guitar player while her daughters were in their teens, and Walter, who after Hippie ran off, consoled himself by bopping everything that would hold still long enough."

  "And Penny," Becker said.

  "Who seems to run the business."

  "Pretty well too," Becker said.

  "You know anything about any of these things?" I said.

  "Heard Cord might be a chicken wrangler," Becker said.

  "How about Stonie?"

  Becker shrugged.

  "SueSue?"

  Shrug.

  "How about good old Pud?" I said.

  "Pud's pretty much drunk from noon on, every day," Becker said.

  "Probably doesn't make for a good marriage."

  "I ain't a social worker," Becker said. "I don't keep track of everybody's dick."

  "Still, you knew about Cord."

  "I am a police officer," he said.

  "Okay, so Cord got in trouble."

  Becker didn't comment. We pulled into the parking lot of my motel. Becker stopped by the front door. We sat for a moment in silence.

  "These are important people, probably the most important people in Columbia County," Becker said. "Walter Clive is a personal friend of the sheriff of Columbia County, who I work for."

  "You mentioned that," I said.

  "So I don't want you going down to the Bath House Bar and Grill and nosing around there, asking questions about Cord Wyatt."

  "I can see why you wouldn't," I said. "That the gay scene in Lamarr?"

  "Such as it is," Becker said. "Tedy Sapp, bouncer down there, used to be a deputy of mine, spells it with one d in Tedy, and two p 's in Sapp. When you don't go down there like I told you not to, I don't want you talking to him or mentioning my name."

  "Sure," I said. "Stay away from the Bath House Bar and Grill, and don't talk to Sapp the bouncer. Where is it located so I can be sure not to go near it?"

  "Mechanic Street."

  "I'll be careful," I said.