George Floyd actually shouted arrgh like they do in comic books and came out of his chair at Karp, knocking the table aside. They grappled. His clawing hands came within millimeters of Karp’s throat before Trooper Vogel-sang whipped a mighty arm around Floyd’s neck and strangled him back into his chair. Karp cocked a fist and went for Floyd, but Hawes got in his way and pushed him back. “What are you, crazy?” Hawes shouted. “Don’t ever talk to a prisoner that way in my courthouse again! Who the hell do you think you are?”
“I’m in charge of this investigation,” said Karp in as authoritative a tone as he could manage.
“The hell you are! This is my courthouse, goddamnit, and right now you’re not welcome in it. Get out!”
Karp did a glare and then spun on his heel and walked out, slamming the door behind him. Outside in the narrow corridor he straightened his clothes and took a drink from the water fountain. The guard on duty looked at him curiously as he signed out of the jail.
“Having some trouble?” the deputy asked.
Karp replied, “Just torturing the prisoners, Deputy Wyatt,” and walked up the stairs.
He thought it had gone fairly well. Because he had a genuine sympathy for evildoers—he could not have stayed married to his wife had he not—Karp was extremely, famously effective as the good cop and hardly ever got the chance to be the bad one, as he had just now. He did not think he would ever get to like it, although he knew some perfectly decent people who doted on the role.
It was dark when he left the courthouse and walked the few streets to the Burroughs Building. As he had expected, the lights were burning still. Hendricks and his team had taken over the largest room in the place. At desks and at makeshift trestle tables, several detectives were methodically ploughing through George Floyd’s papers.
“Did you find the diary, yet?” Karp asked Hendricks.
“What diary is that?”
“The one with the entry ‘June 26, pick up frozen yogurt, kill Heeney family.’ ”
“Oh, that diary. No, not just yet. Floyd seems to be a cagey fellow. Most of what we looked at so far is copies of routine union business and personal stuff. How did you make out with the man?”
“I did my crude New York monster impression. Stan is soothing him as we speak. Somehow, I doubt we’ll get much. We don’t have much except the confessions.”
“And the pistol.”
“Could’ve been planted. Was planted, more likely, and, boy, would I have loved to have found it all oiled and fingerprinted under his Simmons. But anyway, whether or not Floyd was at the scene, he’s definitely the guy who set the whole thing up. He paid for the whole thing. You serve that subpoena for the bank stuff yet?”
“Right after we got it, Floyd’s personal account. Mel Harkness is going over them now. It might take a while.”
“As long as it takes. We’re looking for seventy-five hundred dollars, if the Cade boys aren’t just blowing smoke. Seven point five K cash.”
“Follow the money?”
“That’s what they say. The weak point of every criminal enterprise. It’ll probably be in the union accounts, though. We need those, too.”
Karp went to the room he was using as an office and called Marlene at Four Oaks. Not in. He sat back in his chair, a cheap old-fashioned job, not nearly as comfortable as the big judge’s swivel he used in New York. He swiveled. It squeaked. He tried to make it play a tune while he tapped out “The Yellow Rose of Texas” on his teeth with a pencil. The phone rang.
“Butch? Stan.”
“A full confession. Remorse. Tears. You stroked his head and said, ‘There, there.’ ”
Hawes laughed. “Not quite. I had to take some abuse, but I calmed him down. He thinks I’m still one of the boys.”
“Yeah, that’s why you were the good guy. What’s his story?”
“Outraged citizen. He allows as how it might have been suggested around the Cades that Heeney was trouble and that no one would cry their eyes out if he got hit by a truck. But planning his murder? Heaven forbid! It was like that old movie with what’s his name, Richard Burton?”
“Becket,” said Karp. “ ‘Who will rid me of this troublous priest?’ He mentioned that?”
“No, I was thinking of it while he was lying. His story is the Cade boys got the idea that Floyd and the union bosses wanted Heeney dead and they thought they were doing a favor. He wasn’t there, didn’t know nothing about it until it happened. A pretty good defense, I thought. At trial, it’d come down to the gun and the testimony of a couple of convicted felons, or three. And they tried to implicate him because they knew he had the county wrapped up and they wanted to get off.”
“Uh-huh. Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works. Their play was to hold out for a deal before they ratted out George. But you’re right, our case versus. Floyd could be a lot better. Did Weames come up at all?”
“I broached the subject. Funny expression on his face, like wheels were spinning. But what he said was Weames didn’t have anything more to do with it than he did.”
“Truer words were never spoken,” said Karp. “How about that two grand in the brown envelope?”
“Never mentioned. But he contrasted me as quote ‘one of us’ with you, ‘the Jew bastard.’ I blamed you for everything.”
“Right move. Okay, we’ve gone about as far with him as we can right now. Let’s wait for the physical evidence to firm up and we’ll see where we go from there. But my sense is that this is going to be settled when we find the payoff. That’s the key.”
After he got off the phone, Karp called the inn again and again found no answer. He walked out of the Burroughs Building and looked down the street. McCullensburg shut down early. The courthouse was dark, as were the Market Street businesses. Traffic was light. It had been a while since the catfish supper and he was hungry. In the middle distance golden arches gleamed. He walked a couple of blocks and went in. There he found three-quarters of his missing family.
He slid into the booth and snatched up the plastic movie-marketing toy in front of Giancarlo. “My monster!” he said, clutching it dramatically to his breast.
“Garçon!” Marlene called. “Encore de Happy Meal! They were whining for Micky D and they wore me down. I called you but you weren’t in the office.”
“I was fighting crime. And all of a sudden I realized that what I really wanted was not justice but a cheap plastic Disney figurine and a thin, tasteless burger.”
“Dad, I have news for you,” said Giancarlo. “You’re a grown-up.”
“No toy?”
“No. As a matter of fact, I think I’m outgrowing Happy Meals myself,” said Giancarlo. “You can give it to Zak. He’ll be ordering Happy Meals when he’s forty-two.”
The response to this from Zak was a quick knuckle to the ribs. Giancarlo flinched and yelped. “Dad! Zak punched me!”
“Yes,” said Karp. “You abuse him verbally and he responds physically. A few minutes pass. Then you abuse him verbally and he responds physically. A few minutes pass. You abuse him verbally and he responds physically. Do you see a pattern here?”
“He’s not supposed to hit me.”
“No, and you’re not supposed to insult him either.” Karp handed back the toy. To his wife he said, “Have they been like this for long?”
“Only all day. I tried to drown them but they were too slippery. I heard about your big-boy day from Emmett. He came by after they sprung him. How’s Lucy?”
“She seemed perfectly cool. Apparently the dog intervened before anything really nasty went down.”
“Yes, that’s what they’re for,” said Marlene. “In any case, dingdong the witch is dead. The bad guys are in custody. My work here is done.”
“Planning on leaving?”
“I guess. It’s not really fair to stick Billy with the whole burden.”
“Oh, hell, Marlene, take a break! Have him hire some more people. You’ve got the money and the whole thing’s just a tax dodge anyway
.”
“We can’t leave now, Mom,” Zak interjected. “Emmett promised to take me hunting. We’re going to go hunting at night, Dad, with real shotguns and dogs.”
“When I’m dead, you can go hunting at night, darling,” said Marlene sweetly. “It’s not just a tax dodge. It’s a tax dodge I have a substantial emotional investment in. It’s my profession. I’m good at it and I like it.”
Karp sighed and slid out of the booth. “Whatever. Do what you like, you always do. I’m going to get a couple of Big Macs.”
He had been hungry, he decided, after the first Mac had vanished, and it had made him unnecessarily cross. The boys had left for the McPlayground just outside. Giancarlo had done a drawing on the back of the place mat, made with the crayons supplied by the franchise. It was a typical Giancarlo product, monsters in extraterrestrial landscapes. Karp was no connoisseur, nor could he draw a straight line himself, but even to his eye his son’s artwork was more sophisticated than he imagined was typical of ten-year-old boys. The crayoning was layered, smudged, and mixed to yield colors not in the Crayola box, and the line was vigorous and confident. Where did it come from? he wondered. Another disturbing miracle, like the languages. Zak seemed to be the one normal kid, if saying four words a day and wanting to shoot everything moving was normal. Karp felt Marlene’s eyes. Around a wad of the second burger he said, “Sorry for snapping. Besides the brats, how was your day?”
“I worked on my tan. I hated three teenagers who showed up at the pool for their sleek limbs. I swore I would never wear a bikini again. I flirted with Trooper Blake and reneged on my swear about the bikinis on his unspoken advice. I arranged for the truck to be deposited at Buddy’s Body and spent a good deal of time waiting for Buddy to get to where he could look at the damage and let me know how long it would take him to fix it. Buddy is a deliberate fellow, which I guess comes naturally when you weigh three-fifty. Have you noticed how many remarkably fat people there are in this town?”
Karp looked around the restaurant to confirm this. “Yes. Are you afraid it’s catching?”
“Frankly? I am; it may be something in the air. Buddy was telling me about Alma Knox, whose Chevy he had right there in the shop. Alma got into a little fender bender out on Route 11 that squished the latch on the driver’s-side door. Well, Alma could not actually slide across to the passenger door to exit the vehicle. They had to call fire and rescue to cut her out with the Jaws of Life. In any event, I got to sit in the shade of Buddy’s Body for a good long time, drinking diet RC and occasionally easing my bladder, while the rich life of McCullensburg flowed around me. Buddy’s junkyard is one of the places to see and be seen, it turns out. A parade of codgers, mainly guys with few teeth and tobacco stains on their stubble. Very polite gents, all retired miners looking for junk parts to keep their 1978 Pontiacs humming. Apparently they occasionally get a little bonus of some kind from the union pension fund, and they all just got one and were blowing it on Delco alternators. They weren’t fat, though. Would you still love me if I weighed three hundred pounds?”
“Of course, dear.”
“How incredibly sincerely you lie. You must be a lawyer. On the strength of that guarantee, however, I will risk another french fry.” She chomped. “In any case, Buddy says it will take the better part of a week to fix the truck, and there’s no point in leaving before then.”
“Good. When you’re tired of McCullensburg, you’re tired of life. I assume that our daughter has not reappeared?”
“Oh, her! Speaking of my work being done, that’s the one good thing about this whole adventure. I don’t have to resign myself to having raised a sociosexual failure. I will have grandchildren before I get Alzheimer’s. I will!”
“She’s still with that Heeney kid, huh?” Karp grumbled. “What, you think that’s serious?”
“I saw a couple of looks pass that would’ve melted plastic.”
“From him you mean?”
“Mutual. They were sliding their limbs over one another in the pool like spawning grunion.”
“And you approve of this?”
“Darling, he goes to MIT, plus I’m almost a hundred percent certain he’s not a junkie and not HIV-positive. He doesn’t belong to a cult, he doesn’t pick his nose, he doesn’t weigh three-fifty, and he has excellent table manners. What more could a mom ask?”
Karp had stopped listening at HIV-positive. Mental pictures he did not wish to entertain entered his mind. “Wait a minute, you think they’re . . .”
“Fucking their brains out? I deeply and profoundly hope so. And about time, too.”
* * *
Lucy and Dan had made their police statements, and Dan had been examined by paramedics, after which Lucy had volunteered to drive Dan back to his house. Lucy drove south on 130, Dan slumped in his seat, not speaking.
“What’s wrong? Are you in pain?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“I hate it when people say ‘I’m fine’ when they don’t mean it, especially to people who are supposed to mean something to them. If you have cancer and the mailman asks how’re you doing, then ‘fine’ is an appropriate answer, if false. But I really want to know.”
“Well, what do you expect, cheerful? Happy? I just got the shit kicked out of me by a bunch of guys who probably killed my family. And they probably were going to do something really bad to you, and I didn’t do shit.”
“Yes, you did. You hit an armed man with a chair and while you were hurt, too. He might have shot Magog if you hadn’t done it. I thought it was incredibly heroic.”
Here he gave her a quick look to see if she was serious. He determined that she was, which was fine; but still the association of his sense of what he knew himself to be and the concept of heroism had a profoundly jarring effect on him, as if he had just been informed that he was adopted. He was not a hero; he was a shy bookworm; his father and brother were the heroes.
“The dog was the hero,” he mumbled.
“Of course,” said Lucy matter-of-factly. “That’s what she’s trained and bred to be. She’d give her life for me without a thought, assuming she thinks at all. There are people like that, too, I guess, people who just, like, jump into danger without thinking. Like a dog. You can call that heroic, and people do, but that’s not really all that impressive, when you think about it. It’s like being strong because you happen to be six-seven with a big frame. Well, yeah? It’s really much more impressive when someone who’s careful and thoughtful and imaginative does something courageous, because you know it was moral strength that got them over all their fears. Like my mother—she does brave things all the time, but you know it’s really all in the nerves. She just acts without thinking. My dad’s brave, too, but he suffers, before and after: ‘What should I do, did I do the right thing?’ ”
“And which one are you like?”
“Both, I guess. I act without thinking a lot, but I still suffer.” She laughed. “The worst of both worlds.”
“You’re just trying to make me feel better.”
“True. Am I succeeding?”
“Mm. Try harder.” This time they both laughed.
“But really,” she said, “I meant it. If you hadn’t behaved well, I would have told you that, too.”
“Yeah, all the time I was thinking, take the girl, do whatever you want, just don’t hit me again.”
“No, you weren’t.”
“No, I wasn’t thinking at all, except getting hold of a gun or weapon and killing all three of them.”
“Yes, and if you’d done that, we wouldn’t be sitting here.”
“Oh, you don’t approve of revenge?”
“It’s not me that’s in charge of approving or disapproving,” said Lucy. “I’m obliged to love my enemies, being a Christian; you’re not. But it would’ve changed you. You don’t think it would’ve, and the movies and everything tell you it doesn’t. The good guy kills the villain and hugs the girl, music up and fade to black. But that’s not the way it is in real
life, and believe me, I know. When you strike your enemy with a sword, the blade goes through your own body first. St. Augustine.” She slowed the truck. “Is this the turnoff?”
“Yeah, but don’t turn. Keep going on 130. I want to show you something.”
“Ooh, yet another wonder of Robbens County! I have goose bumps already.”
“Yet another,” he agreed, and sat back in his seat. Somehow, the darkness that had lately borne him down was gone. He placed his left hand on her thigh below the hem of her shorts and felt a tide of gladness when she removed a hand from the wheel and placed it on top of his.
“Dan handwich,” she said, “on thigh.”
Dan had heard the phrase she made him happy many times, but until just then he had thought it to be a mere figure of speech or hyperbole. Before he could think about it or reduce it to the level of strategy, his usual way with girls, he heard his voice saying it: “You make me happy.” And blushed.
She nodded. “Uh-huh. I know. You make me happy, too. You won’t believe this, but I was actually thinking just that, and how funny that phrase is. I was also thinking, I don’t know where we’re going, but I hope it’s hours and hours.”
It was only twenty minutes, though, before he directed her to a left turnoff. The asphalt lasted only a hundred yards or so, as usual, and then they were on oiled dirt and gravel, rat-a-tat-tat, steeply back and forth up the mountainside. Then off that road up a rutted track to a clearing dotted with little twisted pines and gray boulders on a field of whispering, pink-tinged ocher grasses.
“This’s Mount Knox, the highest point in the county,” he said. “You can see almost the whole thing from here.” Hand in hand they picked their way among the boulders, the dog casting before them, nose asniff.
He helped her clamber up a whaleback boulder resting against a much higher mass of naked rock. “You’re looking north. You can make out the town there.”
“Yes, the storied towers of McCullensburg, and their promises of romance and adventure. What’s that smear?” She pointed to where a dirty tent of yellow-brown haze hung under the dome of the sky.
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