Jeep asked, “You need a lift home?”
“No,” I said. “My head’s clear now, and the doc says my eyes are working okay. Besides, I don’t want to leave the bike anywhere up here overnight.”
Jeep shook his head disgustedly and said, “You know, didn’t used to be folks had to worry about stuff like that. You could leave your car up here with the keys in the switch and the doors unlocked, and when you came back the next day the most that would have happened is someone had washed it and filled your tires.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “I remember correctly, there was a lot of crime back then, too. Maybe even more than now. Plus a lot of other awful stuff that maybe wasn’t illegal at the time, but sure as hell was uncivilized. I’m not sure any generation has a monopoly on lawlessness or general assholism.”
“Maybe not, but look, man, back then there was at least some kind of wall between folks and the assholes. Look at that building across the street there. It used to be a restaurant. Nothing fancy, but a local family owned it. Italians. It was there for thirty years. Say you’re there one night, having a nice meal inside, and some shithead thinks to try to make off with your wheels. You caught him, you could shoot his ass, and that was that. Nobody would turn you in, and you couldn’t even pay the local cops to look at you cross-eyed. Guys like Luster and Galligan, we had the unions to push back against them, keep them in line, and maybe even stop them killing a few of their employees. Nowadays, though, that place across the street is a pawnshop. Does better business than the restaurant ever did. You shoot the guy stealing your car, you’ll not only go to jail, the car thief will probably sue you and win. He’ll get emotional damages, too, all the harm you did him. He can’t sleep at night. Has nightmares, like that. And Luster and Galligan? We kowtow to them because they’re all we have left, and when they go there’s not one of us knows what’ll keep these towns from drying up and blowing away for good, pawnshops and all.”
“You paint a pretty picture.”
“But you know I’m right.”
“I don’t know,” I said again, but the truth was I wasn’t so sure he wasn’t.
Jeep tipped his hand and climbed in his truck and roared away. I stood watching him a moment, then climbed on the bike and rode home toward a royal chewing-out.
I’ll ask you again.”
“Okay.”
“Are you out of your goddamned mind?”
“Hey, there’s a child present.”
“No,” Anci said. Surprisingly, she ignored my remark about the child and forked some potatoes into her mouth. They were the way she liked them, extra creamy with chopped scallions sprinkled on top. She was the only one eating. “She’s right. Are you out of your goddamned mind?”
My food was getting cold. And warm. Besides the potatoes, I’d made pork chops and fried okra and green salad. There was ice cream in the fridge, too, and some of Anci’s favorite orange soda. Also, a box of those fancy lemon cookies Peggy liked so much. I was overcompensating.
“Why on earth would you ever do anything so . . .” Peggy paused, searching for the exact word. “. . . asinine?”
Anci said, “What’s that?”
This was a teaching moment. Peggy hit pause on her lecture and put her hand on Anci’s shoulder. “It’s a bad word that means stupid.”
Anci nodded. She liked bad words fine. She said, “Ass-nine. That works.”
“That’s good, darling, but it’s not ass-nine. It’s ass-i-nine. There’s an extra little stop in the middle.”
“Ass-i-nine,” she said, trying it out. She looked at me. “You are asinine.”
Peggy said, “That’s it.”
I said, “You two are something else.”
“Don’t change the subject,” Peggy said. She turned back to me. Her eyebrows bunched, and she had that little knot between her eyes she got when confronted with unacceptable levels of idiocy. “You could have been hurt. Seriously hurt.”
“I know.”
“And for what?” she said, waving her hands. “Because you wanted to ride your bike in the rain?”
“I like the rain,” I said. “It reminds me of your beautiful . . .”
“Darlin’, don’t press your luck.”
“Sorry. Anyway, it wasn’t really raining when I left. I thought I could beat it in.”
“Well, you didn’t,” Peggy said. “It beat you. You lost control of your bike on a slick road and went into a ditch. And without your helmet, too.”
“Yup,” I said. “Pretty stupid, huh?”
“Stupid doesn’t cover it. It’s . . .”
She paused. Anci said, “Asinine.”
I turned to Anci. “Guilty as charged. Never do anything like that, squirt.”
“I won’t.”
“I’m serious now. Ever.”
“Okay.”
Peggy wasn’t satisfied, not by a good distance, but after a while she gave it up and turned her attention to her food. The rest of the meal was fairly calm, if not exactly gladsome.
Peggy didn’t sleep over that night. She was still upset with me, so there was that, but something else seemed to be bothering her. There was no reason she’d know I’d lied to her, but her mood darkened throughout the rest of the evening until it turned itchy and nervous, and pretty soon it was even getting to Anci. When she announced she was leaving, I think we were all a little relieved.
I spent the rest of that evening reading To Kill a Mockingbird with Anci for school and making phone calls to what must have been every hospital in the tristate. No one had logged anyone claiming to be Guy Beckett, and I wasn’t able to locate any anonymous victims of violence or John Does matching Beckett’s description. I called an ex-miner buddy with the Williamson County sheriffs to ask whether anyone had used Guy Beckett’s cell phone or one of his credit cards, but that came up empty too, and cost me a valuable favor for nothing. Really, I don’t know why I was doing it. I’d already decided to let the whole thing go. On the other hand, it was like poking a dead snake with a stick. Something about you just didn’t want to stop.
After a while, I gave up idly playing private detective. I went to bed and lay there worrying over everything, aching in my head and neck and missing Peggy. By the time I was drifting off to sleep an hour or so later, I’d resolved to talk to Luster in the morning and quit. After that, things could shake out however fate or the disappointment of a rich old man wanted them to shake out. I could always get another job. Maybe. I fell asleep with Betsy on the pillow beside me and visions of the phony round-faced cop sliding through the wet grass in my brain. Let me tell you, sleeping next to a loaded gun will do wonders for your restfulness.
In the morning, my thoughts were clearer. I’d come to peace with my decision and wherever it might lead. I got out of bed, went into the kitchen, scooped some coffee into the pot, and got out some breakfast stuff for Anci. The weather was rumbling again, the gray winds switching the branches and spitting noisily against the windowpanes. The spine of stiltgrass along the sandstone monument overlooking the Vale brandished and billowed. It was a day full of threat.
After a while, Anci came down and ate. She had an appetite but not much to say, so instead of talking we listened to a radio program she liked. When she went back up to shower, I thought about giving Peggy a ring, but I changed my mind suddenly and instead screwed up my resolve and dialed Luster. The phone rang and rang, but no one answered, so I called the mine and spoke to the lady with the dog on her head.
“He’s home today, Slam,” she said.
“Slim.”
“No, honey, Slim’s dead. We talked about this.”
“I guess I forgot,” I said. “May his beautiful soul rest in peace. Anyway, I just called up there to the house and nobody answered.”
“Well, that place is roughly the size of Soldier Field. Sometimes they miss the phone. I know for a fact he’s there today, though. He’s got a meeting with the police this morning and he insisted on having it at the residence.”
I told her again how sorry I was about Slim and hung up. I knew what I had to do: go up to his house and resign in person. That was the adult thing to do. I rounded up Anci and, much against her will, set her off to wait for the bus. This was one of her least favorite things. Even for rural parts, we live in an out-of-the-way spot, and the way these county buses run you could basically go to the Oort Cloud and back in the time it takes them to drop you off at home. I drove her to school myself when I could, or Peggy did. I promised to pick Anci up later, save her the agony of the bus ride home. She seemed to think I’d forget, so I put in a call to Peggy. I was almost relieved when it went through to voicemail and I was able to leave a message. If I wasn’t there, Peggy would run Anci back to the Vale. Whether Peggy would stick around long enough to see me was a question I couldn’t yet answer. I didn’t have time to answer it anyway.
I had a job to quit, and maybe two.
FIVE
Luster’s place was east of the Vale on a pleasant cut of land between the Little Grassy and Devil’s Kitchen lakes called Baker’s Crossroads. The house sat atop a low hummock surrounded by crown vetch and big bur oaks at the edge of a narrow track of road called Knight Hawk. I guess a county commissioner owed a favor. At the bottom of the hummock was a lagoon, now nearly black with algae, and some knots of paling knotweed and loosestrife. A family of hackberries surrendered their mottled leaves and the autumn gusts caught them and tossed them around like ticker tape.
I left the bike at the bottom of the hill and got off and walked up. Some underemployed birds lifted off the road and fluttered southward on spotted wings, but otherwise nothing stirred. The lady at the mine was right: the house was as big as Soldier, with a little left over. You could have stuffed our place at Indian Vale into the little left over and still had room for a head or two of cattle. There was a car in the drive, a white Lincoln shining under coats of wax. There was a fountain with a statue of a naked lady and some neatly coiffed box hedges. There were some of those solar lights you stake in the ground to form a path to the front door, but a couple of the lights had been kicked over, and one of them had been stepped on and busted. Neither Jonathan nor the old man struck me as especially clumsy, and the sight of this small disorder made my throat tighten in an unhappy way.
I went up to the door and tried the bell and heard it chime prettily behind the thickness of the wooden frame. I waited a moment, then checked my watch, rocking on my heels a little in an attempt to be casual. Then I knocked and tried the handle and the unlocked door swung open, the expensive weather stripping releasing its hold with a swoosh. I stopped being casual. I could smell what was inside immediately: a hint of smoke and the sharp tang of cordite. A house that big, maybe there was a shooting range inside. With the One Percenters, you never knew.
I went in to find it. I called out Luster’s name and Jonathan’s but nobody answered. I took a day or so to search the downstairs part of the house before I found the kitchen, where I slid a knife out from a wooden block on the counter. I was coming down with an anxious feeling, and a knife made me feel a little better about things. I went back to the front and climbed some thickly carpeted stairs into the upper reaches of the house and walked down a wide hallway and finally into a bedroom, last door on the left. It was a big, bright space with an odd kind of industrial Bandraster ceiling of exposed metal beams. There was a chifforobe and dresser and a closet that might have doubled as a hangar. There was a long gun mounted on the wall, an A. H. Fox double-barrel with scrolled engraving and an inspector’s cartouche stamped 1906. A beautiful weapon. On the south wall was a wooden frame, and in the frame a chunk of coal the size of a derby hat. A bay window overlooked the oaky woodland spreading west and the rocky spine of the hills nearer the horizon. All that was interesting, but Luster was more interesting.
He was on the bed, on top of the sheets. On one of the acorn newels was a beaver-pelt Stetson. On the other was a six-shooter in a patent leather holster. None of it had done him any good. He was in his boxers and shirtless, on his back, facing the ceiling with his feet and arms spread, and there were holes in the top of his chest and holes and blood spatters on the beams and ceiling directly above. Part of the ceiling had broken away, and the bedspread and Luster were covered in a thin white dust. Here and there, his blood and the powder had mingled to form a kind of plaster on his naked chest.
I checked his vitals but there wasn’t any doubt about it. The skies had fallen. Matthew Luster was dead.
I called the cops, and the cops came. Not just cops—all the cops. They surrounded the property: radio cars and county sheriffs’ prowlers and evidence vans and Illinois State Police unmarkeds. They overran the cobbled driveway until the later cops were forced to park all the way down the steeply sloped lawn, so far out that technically they weren’t even in Baker’s Crossroads. An ambulance was grudgingly permitted to park in the grass near the front door.
Then they questioned me, up one side and down another. They wanted to know about me and what I was doing snooping around at the residence. They wanted to know about the knife I was holding. I told them knives didn’t fire bullets. When they were finally satisfied I hadn’t done anything bloody they started to ignore me, distracted by the crime scene and trying to contain the chaos they themselves had created. I put the knife back in its block and wandered around a little, listening in on some of their talk. Then I slipped outside and wandered around the back of the house to see what I could see. No one stopped me or even seemed to notice my presence. There were too many cops for anyone to think of policing anything. Every cop in the tricounties must have been there. There were cops in the grass. There were cops on the roof. The garage door lifted on its arm and a crowd of cops came burping out, as though the house had swallowed too many to keep down.
After a while, Jonathan arrived. His arms were full of groceries. The big cop with soft eyes from that first day at the Knight Hawk appeared out of nowhere to explain what had happened, and the groceries dropped from the boy’s arms and some of the items rolled out of their bags and down the hill and into a ditch. A can of creamed corn floated away. Jonathan wept into his hands. Some things they don’t prepare you for at business school. As I approached, both men looked up at me.
Jonathan said, “Thank God you’re here.”
“I’m here,” I said. “I’m afraid I’m the one who found him. But I don’t know what good I can do.”
The big cop stuck out his hand.
“You must be Slim,” he said. “I’m Sheriff Wince. Now that they’ve taken your statement, son, I’m eager we speak.”
On account of his name kept coming up, I’d asked my buddy in the Williamson County sheriff’s about this Ben Wince. The story of how he’d attained office was a pretty good one, and here it is:
Wince was a local boy with a reputation for honesty, but it’d taken a botched suicide to win him his star. For twenty years, he’d languished away as deputy, and then one day Sheriff Edelson, who’d held the office so long almost no one could remember the last guy, began slipping into dementia. And when I say “dementia,” I don’t mean he left the house without shoes or forgot his Social Security number. This was the real deal. Edelson launched drug sweeps of churches, social groups, and preschools. He developed insane conspiracies and let them mushroom into office-wide investigations. When the federal government started spreading around some of that post-9/11 money, he used Randolph County’s share to buy an armored antiriot vehicle. Got his office written up in the Chicago papers for that one, and not in a good way. Before long, even the major crimes unit of the Illinois State Police stopped returning his calls. Innocent citizens were harassed, and one night a high school boy was pulled from his car on a lonely county road and beaten nearly to death in front of his date. But even crazy behavior behind the county shield wasn’t enough to stop the law-and-order crowd from voting him back into office.
Then, one morning not long before election day, Edelson was refilling his coffee at the station hous
e when suddenly he paused to stare squint-eyed out the window. There was a squirrel on the sill, staring back. Edelson scowled at the squirrel. The squirrel scratched his nut. Edelson couldn’t abide that. It was too much to endure, these derisive squirrels freely roaming the countryside. All his efforts at law enforcement had come to naught. He did the honorable thing: he unholstered his service weapon and shot himself in the head.
In one of those freak things, the bullet didn’t kill him, but it did complete the job of scrambling his brains, turning him into a vegetable. The public took in the sad news, reflected soberly on what it all meant, and again returned Edelson to office. In a landslide. Only when a civil case was launched by the parents of the assaulted boy, and a settlement quietly reached, was Felix Edelson shuffled quietly out of office for reason of mental incapacity, pension intact. Wince had been sheriff ever since, though a statistically significant portion of county voters apparently viewed his rise as opportunistic and he was reelected only by the slimmest margins.
We went into the house. Wince asked Jonathan to join us, but he refused and instead stayed outside, collecting his fallen groceries and shivering against the cold and an unfolding nightmare. A plainclothesman came huffing down the grand staircase, followed by a nervous-looking guy with no hair and a patent leather bag like in the movies.
Wince said, “Well?”
“He’s dead.”
“Is there anything science can’t do?”
The little guy ignored him. “With prejudice, too. I don’t think I’ve seen one like this before.”
Wince said, “And here I thought you’d seen everything.”
The little guy didn’t like that. He was one of those folks who wore his exasperation like a sign on his head. He rubbed his mustache with his thumb in a funny way and sneered and said, “Go on up. See for yourself.”
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