A Blind Eye

by G. M. Ford

  “I watched a little of it earlier.”

  “He’s digging my grave, Mr. Corso.”

  “He’s sure as hell setting you up to fail. All that stuff about having a dramatic announcement for the press in the next few days is just an invitation for a retraction, if you ask me.”

  Corso watched as her eyes turned inward. She was silent for a moment. When she spoke it seemed as if her words had been rehearsed. “I’m too damn old to start over,” she said. “Richardson beats me in November…I mean…what in hell am I gonna do? Apply down at the Burger King? See if maybe I can’t get on with the Parks Department? Being sheriff is all I know. I just can’t see myself—”

  She caught herself. Stopped. Brought a hand to her mouth and walked around in a tight circle. “I’ve also got a pair of Wisconsin state troopers who want to ask you a few questions about finding the bodies.”

  Corso lifted his hands from the sheet and then let them fall.

  “I’ve got nothing to hide,” he said.

  She nodded. “And then there’s your friend Ms. Dougherty.”

  “What about her?”

  “Seems she’s got some pretty graphic images tattooed all over her.”

  Corso’s eyes narrowed. His tone was brittle. “How’s that a problem for you?”

  “Nobody in these parts has ever seen anything like that before. The only way I could keep medical staff from making up reasons to go in her room for a peek was to post a guard on the door. That puts me an extra officer down.” She cast a glance Corso’s way, started to say something, and then stopped. He read her thoughts.

  “Somebody did it to her,” he said.

  “You mean…she didn’t—”

  “An asshole ex-boyfriend drugged her up and put that shit all over her.”

  “No kidding.”

  “She almost died from it.”

  She shook her head in amazement. “And I thought we had problems.”

  “Trust me, Sheriff, Hopalong Cassidy and Gabby Hayes there are gonna be a big problem for me.”

  She looked surprised. “All you gotta do is testify,” she said.

  “There’s a minor problem with that plan.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as I don’t have the information they think I do.”

  She was momentarily taken aback. “I was given to understand that you did.”

  “Me too,” Corso said. “But it didn’t work out that way.”

  She eyed him closely. “Well now…as a guy who once got canned from the New York Times for making stuff up…that leaves you between a rock and a hard place, now doesn’t it?”

  “It means they can hold me indefinitely without charging me with anything. Lawyers or no lawyers. No bail. No nothing. Anywhere from six to nine months in the hoosgow,” he said.

  “Grand juries have a lot of power,” she said.

  “Don’t suppose there’s any way I could talk you into telling those Dallas cops to take a hike,” Corso said. “As I understand extradition law, you don’t necessarily have to turn me over.”

  She nodded. “Ordinarily I’d have quite a bit of latitude in the matter. I’d be able to weight the value of cooperating with another department against the gravity of the crime and then make my own decision. Under regular circumstances I could make them fight for you in court. I could even let you walk, if I wanted.”

  “But…”

  “But…with the whole damn world watching on the six o’clock news, and my own deputy sheriff telling everybody this is just another example of me being out of touch with the community…I just don’t see as I’ve got any choice but to hand you over.”

  “A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do,” Corso said.

  She cast him an annoyed look. “Hold the guilt, Mr. Corso. I don’t need any help beating myself up.” She paced across the room to the window and stood staring out into the parking lot. “Maybe my detractors are right,” she said after a moment. “Maybe I have lost touch with the community.”

  Something in her tone caught Corso’s ear. He frowned and levered himself higher in the bed. “What makes you say that?” he asked.

  Her face said it was a stupid question. Her voice began to rise. “I’ve had a local family rotting away under a shed floor. They been right under my nose for the past fifteen years.” She waved an arm. “As the crow flies, it’s no more than five miles from here and I’ve…” She went silent. Knotted muscles trembled along the edges of her jaw.

  “Something personal here?” Corso asked.

  Her mouth sprang open in denial, but nothing came out. “You’ve got a good ear,” she said finally.

  “It’s what I do.”

  She continued to stare silently out the window.

  “So?” Corso pressed.

  “Miss Sissy Warwick,” she said.

  7

  Nineteen seventy-three. I was twenty-two and fresh out of college.” She rolled her eyes and made a face. “I’d just figured out I was never going to be Shirley Temple. That dainty was never going to be the first thing anybody thought of when I came to mind. Horsy maybe…but not dainty.” She stifled a sigh. “Anyway…I came back home to lick my wounds for the summer. A little R and R before figuring out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.” She looked over at Corso. “You ever live in a small town like this?” she asked.

  Corso shook his head. “Not since I was a little kid,” he said.

  “Well then, you’ve got to understand…towns like this are pretty much closed societies. People come and go, but nothing really changes. Most of the kids we send up to the university at Madison stay gone for a while. They meet mates, have children, move someplace else. They come back to Avalon on the holidays to show off the grandkids. And then later on they start coming back to see how their parents are getting along. And then later on for good…get away from the hustle of the city…you know, the urban lifestyle and all.” Corso nodded that he understood. “What I’m trying to say is that…up until a couple of years ago, we didn’t even have a motel. All we had was a hundred-year-old rooming house.” She folded her arms. “Which had the same people living in it for as long as anybody could remember. Because just about everybody who comes to town is related to somebody who already lives here and is staying out with them at the family farm. We really didn’t need anyplace to house strangers, because we didn’t have any strangers.” She sighed and scratched the back of her neck. “We’re not exactly a destination getaway…if you know what I mean.”

  Corso chuckled.

  “So when a young woman who isn’t related to anybody here in town shows up and takes up residence, it’s something people are going to notice. It’s something that’s going to get talked about over coffee and down at the barbershop.”

  “And that’s what happened?”

  “Right after I got home from college, so it must have been the middle of June sometime. Hottest damn summer anybody could remember.” Her eyes moved inward. “Sissy Warwick. Jet-black hair and those big blue eyes. Real exotic looking. Like nobody you ever saw before. Like she could have been from the Middle East or Turkey or someplace like that. Claimed to be twenty years old, but I always thought she was more like eighteen.” She caught herself rambling. “Anyway, Sissy Warwick shows up in town one day. Gets herself a room at Harrison’s. Next thing you know, she’s got a job as a receptionist at the medical center, and it seems like you can’t hardly walk down the street without running into her.”

  Corso smiled. “Town just wasn’t big enough for the both of you, eh?”

  The sheriff lifted her eyebrows in resignation. “Maybe that was it. Maybe it was just a case of having two hens in the same barnyard,” she said. “You could be right. Lord knows…everything she did that summer sure seemed sinister to me.” She listened to an inner voice for a moment and then said, “Wasn’t just me, though. Lotta people in town felt the same way. For a while there, all anybody could talk about was who was this girl and what was she doing here.”

 
“So?”

  “So, right there in the middle of that sweltering summer”—she made an expansive gesture with her arms—“it was like this girl was everywhere. No matter what sidewalk you walked down, she was there. No matter what tree you stopped under, she was there. If you went to the library, she was sitting over in the corner reading a book. If you—” She read Corso’s expression. “Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating a little…”

  “You make it sound like it was yesterday.”

  She got serious. “It’s like it was. I didn’t realize how much she’d affected me until I looked into that barn Friday morning. How I’d practically forgotten about Eldred and Tommie and James. But how Sissy”—she waved a finger—“how Sissy Warwick had never been far from my thoughts. How something about that woman was still grinding away at me, all these years later.”

  “The damnedest things stick in our hearts, don’t they?”

  She thought it over. Decided she agreed. “Something about her just didn’t ring right for me,” she said finally. “That was a really vulnerable time for me. I was trying to figure out who I was and didn’t like some of the answers I was getting from the universe. I didn’t believe in myself, and something about her made it impossible for me to believe in her either. It was like neither of us was for real.”

  “Interesting.”

  “It was like a voice inside of me said we couldn’t both exist and have things be right with the world. Like I couldn’t be the person I was and have her alive on the planet at the same time. It was that visceral. I felt like we were mutually exclusive or something.”

  “What else?”

  “She was just way too friendly. Remembered everybody’s name. Had that smarmy, car salesman quality about her. Always asking questions. By the time she’d been here three months, she knew as much about the town and everybody’s business as people who’d lived here all their lives.”

  “And then?”

  She swallowed hard. “So, you know…she’s been around for about six months when I start hearing the rumors, and—” She stopped herself again. “—I was probably the last to know. I was so busy driving back and forth to Madison, pretending to look for a job, I nearly missed the whole thing.”

  “What rumors were those?”

  Corso watched as her professionalism failed to defeat her obvious discomfort. Her hands made quotation marks in the air.

  “She had a number of ‘things’ going on with local men.”

  “Affairs?”

  She nodded. “Prominent local men.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as my predecessor, Sam Tate. Which is how I ended up being sheriff.” When Corso didn’t speak, she pointed a finger at his chest and ambled his way as if to impale him on its blunt tip. “You’re like a snake on a rock,” she said. “You just sit there sunning yourself until people blurt out what it is you want to know.”

  Corso smiled. “Way I see it, most everybody has an intense desire to tell their story. All you got to do is shut up and give them a chance to spit it out.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “As I recall, that was pretty much Sissy’s MO too.”

  Corso’s face was stiff. “You figure that means I’m fated to develop an unquenchable yen for local law enforcement personnel?”

  “I don’t think Richardson would like that at all,” she deadpanned.

  “You’re probably right,” he said with a smile. “So…it was this Sam Tate’s sexual proclivities that got you elected.”

  “Actually, it was his death proclivity.”

  “Ah.”

  “Two weeks before the election.”

  “Good timing.”

  “Better for me than Sam.”

  “That’s the way things generally work out.”

  “Sam was gonna outpoll me twenty to one. I was only running for sheriff because I couldn’t figure out what else to do with my life.” Her eyes clouded over. “Just got back in town. Came home to look after my dad.” She met Corso’s eyes. “Alzheimer’s,” she said. “I had a degree in criminal justice and five years’ experience as a Saint Paul County deputy.” She shrugged. “So I ran for sheriff.”

  “And then…that fateful night.”

  “Sam took Sissy up to his family cabin on Hunter Lake. Came out later they’d been up there a bunch of times.” Her lips were pressed tight. “He died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Dropped stone dead on top of her while flying united. She had to call search and rescue. Fire department don’t service that far out in the boonies.”

  “So they find Sam Tate dead.”

  “They also find a Polaroid camera and a bunch of snapshots of what she and Sam had been doing with each other. That’s when the rumors started about the others. How she had a bunch of other lovers. How she’d taken pictures with all of them. I’m telling you, this town was humming.”

  “Rumors from where?”

  The sheriff shrugged. “Who knows. It’s a small town.”

  “Full of prominent men,” Corso said with a sneer.

  “And the shit hit the fan. Just about this time of year—a month or so before Christmas—the town is buzzing. Everybody’s looking at everybody else and wondering. We’ve got our own version of Peyton Place going on. I’m figuring either one of her lovers is gonna kill her or the wives are gonna get together and ride her out of town on a rail, and either way, with Sam dead and only two weeks to go till the election, sooner or later I’m going to end up having to deal with it.”

  “So you won the election.”

  “Hell, no!” She laughed. “He beat me from the grave!”

  “Musta been the sympathy vote,” Corso said.

  “Town charter says if a candidate dies, the other candidate gets the job.” She spread her hands in mock resignation. “The rest is history.”

  “What was the big attraction?” Corso asked.

  “Whadda you mean?”

  “What was the big sexual attraction to Sissy Warwick?”

  “I wasn’t aware men needed one,” she said.

  Corso’s lip curled. “Work with me here, Sheriff. Prominent men don’t risk their tranquillity and let people take pictures of them doing it unless there’s something pretty special going on.” He watched as her neck began to redden, as the color began to work its way into her cheeks and finally all the way to the tops of her ears.

  “Supposedly…she was just hell in bed.”

  “That’s it? She was a good roll? These guys risked life, limb, and community property just to…”

  She winced at the gesture he made. “The pictures of her and Sam made it plain that she was…you know…”

  Corso kept silent.

  “Kinky,” she finally blurted. “She was quite…” Again she stopped. Regrouped. “Of an alternative persuasion.”

  “What alternative was that?”

  She looked as if she’d just smelled something vile. “Dressing up…spanking…that sort of thing.” She waved a hand in front of her face as if to brush the odor away. “And whatever else it is those people do to each other.”

  “Did the names of these prominent men ever come to light?”

  “Not officially. But believe you me, Mr. Corso, everybody in this town’s got their own list of who they think it was.”

  She took a deep breath and turned away. The set of her shoulders told Corso all he needed to know. “What else?” he pushed.

  She spun his way, embarrassment turned to anger. “Else? What do you mean else? Isn’t that enough? Jesus.”

  She met his stony gaze with her own. Silence settled into the room like cigarette smoke. After an uncomfortable moment, she said, “The talk in the barbershop was that she liked it up the ass.”

  “So this Sissy Warwick is now the town ‘ho,’ ” Corso prodded. “Givin’ the good old boys a little something they can’t get at home. Takin’ pictures of it all. Causin’ all kinds of chaos among the local gentry.”

  “I can see you’re an incurable romantic,” she said.

  For t
he second time Corso laughed. “Yeah…ask anybody.”

  She went on. “Everybody in town figures she’ll do the right thing and either kill herself or disappear back to wherever it was she came from.”

  “But no.”

  She shook her head. “Next thing you know, I’m hearing she’s hot and heavy with Eldred Holmes.” She shook her head in remembered astonishment. “First time I heard it, I laughed out loud.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “It was crazy. They were just such an unlikely pair,” she said.

  “Ah” was all Corso said.

  “And Eldred…I mean there wasn’t a less likely candidate for romance in the whole county. Eldred might have been our least prominent citizen. You want to talk backward and shy, I’m telling you, Mr. Corso, Eldred was the poster boy for awkward. Poor kid spent his whole life out on that eighty acres where you found him. His parents were deaf. They died the year before Sissy came to town. By the time I saw them together, he’d already had his teeth fixed. Bought himself some new clothes. Stopped cutting his own hair.”

  “You think this Eldred knew about the prominent men?”

  She frowned. “Wouldn’t have mattered. She had old Eldred firmly in hand.”

  “And then?”

  “And then, the next thing you know they’re getting married, and everybody’s picking up their jaws and waiting for the pictures to appear in the newspaper. They’re all wondering what she wants from poor Eldred. Figuring she’s gonna move in for a while and then screw him out of the farm, since that was pretty much all he owned.” She cast a glance at Corso.