The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter

  Ward said, “Yessir,” and Mr. Ellison unlocked the door and walked into the office. We followed him in, uninvited. He opened the shades, lighting the room, and the dome of his head shone under his thin hair.

  “You’re World War’s boy? …”

  “Yessir,” my brother said, still standing.

  He went to his desk and sat down. “Gone to work for the competition,” he said, and shook his head. He opened his desk drawer and stared inside.

  “How is your daddy?”

  “He’s fine,” Ward said.

  Mr. Ellison closed the drawer and leaned back in his chair, smiling. “The most contrary man in Moat County,” he said in an admiring way. Ward did not reply to that, and Mr. Ellison sat up, ready to do business.

  “What may I do for you gentlemen today?” he said.

  And my brother told him we were in town looking into the murder of Thurmond Call and the conviction of Hillary Van Wetter for the crime. He said, “There was some physical evidence that was lost.…”

  Mr. Ellison nodded, as if he knew everything Ward was going to say. As if we were all in agreement. “Yes, there was,” he said.

  “Significant evidence …”

  “Yessir,” Mr. Ellison said. The room went quiet.

  “We were wondering,” my brother said, “what sort of explanation …”

  Mr. Ellison was shaking his head. “There is no explanation,” he said, “unless you ever been in a situation where your life was endangered. Unless you ever felt an attachment to someone who was murdered. That’s the only explanation, that our officers are human.”

  My brother sat still and waited. Mr. Ellison looked at him, then turned for a moment and stared at me. “I don’t believe I caught your name,” he said.

  “Jack James,” I said, and he smiled again.

  “The swimmer,” he said, and I didn’t know if he was talking about the University of Florida or what happened on the beach up in St. Augustine. He looked at us both, a wax smile fastened to his face.

  “You going into the family business too?” he said. “World War must be a very proud man.”

  He smiled, Ward kept himself still. “Mr. Ellison,” my brother said, when enough time had passed, “what happened to that evidence?”

  He shook his head. “I wisht I knew,” he said.

  “Mr. Van Wetter has told us the blood on his clothing was his own,” Ward said. “That he’d cut himself on some equipment he was using that night.”

  Mr. Ellison nodded thoughtfully. “Mr. Van Wetter has been known to use his equipment at night before,” he said, and then paused while that sank in. “Cut a deputy’s thumb off, as I remember.” There was another pause, a long one. “Over a traffic ticket,” he said.

  And then he looked at his own hand and dropped his thumb until it was pressed against the palm. “A man can’t do much without his thumb,” he said. “It’s what separates us from the primates.”

  “Is there a deputy we could talk to?” Ward asked.

  “Somebody who was out there when they arrested him?”

  Mr. Ellison was still looking at his hand, working the fingers. “A little thing like holding your wife’s titty …” He stopped moving his fingers and looked up suddenly, directly at my brother. “You married yet, Mr. James?”

  Ward shook his head no.

  Mr. Ellison looked back at his hand. “A little thing like that, you can’t do it.” He put his hand on his own chest and tried to cup the breast through the shirt. “You can poke a titty,” he said, looking up, “but they don’t like that, you know. They like to have them held. You go poking around all the time, before long they won’t allow you to touch them at all.”

  He looked up again and smiled.

  “Can I talk to somebody who was there?” Ward said.

  “You can talk to whoever you want as long as they’ll talk to you,” he said. “But when you talk about Mr. Van Wetter, keep in mind what it’d be like, not to be able to hold your own wife’s titty in your hand.”

  A moment passed and he said, “Oh, that’s right. You aren’t married.” He seemed to be teasing him.

  We went from Mr. Ellison’s office back to the dispatch room, passing two deputies in the hallway, and arrived finally in front of a belligerent, overweight woman sitting at a desk reading a copy of Motor Trend magazine and wearing a name tag on her blouse that said, “Patty.” There was a swinging door next to the desk, no more than waist high, and a sign attached to it prohibiting entrance to anyone not employed by the sheriff’s department.

  My brother and I stood in front of her a long time, waiting to be acknowledged. When she did that finally, looking up, she did not speak or smile. She only waited. “My name is Ward James,” my brother said. “I was talking with Mr. Ellison, and he suggested that I come down here.”

  She took us in a moment longer, then went back to her magazine. I saw a deputy then, thirty feet behind her, leaning across his desk to watch her work us over. The deputy was smiling.

  “Excuse me,” Ward said, and she looked up again. “I would like to speak with any of these deputies …. ” He took a pen from his pocket and wrote down the names of five deputies who were at Hillary Van Wetter’s house the night he was arrested. He slid the paper across the desk. She looked at it a moment, then looked at us, and then picked up the paper and dropped it into the wastebasket.

  Someone behind her laughed. She went back to the magazine, aware that her performance was being watched and appreciated.

  I turned away, wanting to get out of the room, but Ward stayed where he was. She looked at Motor Trend, he waited. Minutes passed, and she reached into her purse for a pack of cigarettes, looking up once at Ward, then lighting a match and going back to the magazine. She had been on the same page a long time. Half a dozen deputies were watching now, waiting to see how it would come out.

  She shifted in her chair and stole another look, and then suddenly slammed the magazine down on the desk in front of her, stood up, and walked off into the back. There was some laughing back there, and then it was quiet. No one came to the front to take her place, and the deputies seemed to have gone back to wherever they had been before.

  “Are we just going to stand here?” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  “They aren’t going to talk to us,” I said. And he nodded at that, but he didn’t move.

  The woman returned perhaps fifteen minutes later. She did not seem surprised to see us still standing in front of her desk. “Is there something else?” she said.

  My brother reached across her desk to a pile of paper, took one of the sheets, and wrote down the names again. He pushed the paper toward her without saying a word. She looked at it and then at him.

  “You’re slow, aren’t you?” she said, sounding concerned, and dropped that paper into the wastebasket too. She looked at me then, as if I might be a faster study. “I can do this all day,” she said.

  But she couldn’t. In another minute or two she stood up again and walked into the back. There were no chairs, so we stood in front of the desk. Half an hour passed, and a deputy took her place. He nodded at my brother and sat down at the woman’s desk.

  “May I help you?” he said.

  My brother leaned over the rail and reached into the woman’s wastebasket for one of the pieces of paper. He put it on the desk in front of the deputy. “I would like to speak to these men,” he said.

  The deputy looked at the list a moment, then slowly shook his head. “These officers don’t have time to speak to you, sir,” he said. “They’re busy with their duties.”

  “When would they have time?” Ward said.

  The deputy shook his head. “You might come back tomorrow.…”

  He waited.

  “Are you one of these officers?” Ward said. The deputy looked at the list as if he couldn’t remember. There was a place above his pocket where the color was brighter blue than the rest of the shirt, and there was a hole in the material there. He’d taken o
ff his name tag.

  “I don’t see where that’s got anything to do with it,” he said. “I told you we don’t have time for you now.”

  “Are you one of these officers?” my brother said, sounding patient, as if it were the first time he’d asked.

  “What I am,” he said, “is the one telling you to cease and desist and allow us to get back to work.”

  My brother looked at the list of deputies. “Which one are you?” he said. And a murderous looked passed over the deputy’s face.

  “You know, there’s some people,” he said finally, “they won’t let you treat them well.”

  Ward nodded at that, as if it were a compliment.

  The deputy left and we stood in the room until four-thirty, when the cleaning lady came in and said that the place was closed.

  “Thank you,” my brother said, and we walked past her out the door, and then, in the hallway, I could hear people cheering. I went back to the door and saw that the deputies had come out from the back to applaud the cleaning woman. She was still in the middle of the floor, holding a mop that was set into a bucket on wheels, looking embarrassed but not entirely surprised at the sudden attention. As if it was about time.

  We drove through Lately at quitting time. Citizens were coming out of their stores and offices, locking the doors behind them. Schoolchildren were on the street too, some of them smoking cigarettes and eating candy bars at the same time. The older ones, from high school, hung out of the windows of their fathers’ four-door sedans, the drivers tearing up the engines, revving them until the noise was like a scream.

  Ward and I had watched the same ceremony in Thorn, but had never had any part in it.

  “Imagine what it would be like,” my father would say from time to time, “if your name appeared in a police story in your father’s own newspaper.”

  He was telling us, in his way, that there would be no favoritism; but we already knew that. Ward and I grew up in a house where my father’s principles were a regular topic of conversation, and we were often asked to imagine the embarrassment which would be visited on the family in the event either of our names had to be put in the newspaper.

  Ward seemed better at imagining the embarrassment than I was; it threatened him in ways I didn’t understand.

  At some point, of course, my father realized that there was no need to warn my brother to stay out of trouble. And perhaps by then, he was already beginning to worry that Ward had never been in any trouble; that he hadn’t any friends to get into trouble with.

  I looked at him now, wondering if he thought of Yardley Acheman as a friend. “Another fine day in the newspaper business,” I said.

  He shrugged. “It wasn’t bad.”

  I stopped the car and let a woman pushing a baby carriage cross in front of us. Behind me, a load of kids in a Plymouth honked, and the woman jumped at the noise, looked up into the front seat of the car I was driving, frightened, thinking that I’d honked, and then hurried across to the other side. I had never seen her before and never expected to see her again, but I thought of getting out of the car and telling her that it was the driver behind me who had blown the horn.

  I was triggering a hundred misunderstandings a day, and I couldn’t seem to straighten out the important ones without straightening out them all.

  “I don’t see what it accomplished,” I said, speaking again of the afternoon at the sheriff’s department.

  “We were there,” he said.

  “That’s all?”

  “It’s enough,” he said.

  And I saw it then, clearly, that he found something in the waiting—or the shunning—pleasurable.

  “We ‘re going back?” I said.

  He was looking out the window when he answered. “Of course,” he said.

  WE STOOD IN THE sheriff’s department all the next day, and the day after. The woman behind the desk did not speak to us except to tell us to move out of the way when other visitors came through the door.

  “Please move to the side of the room and do not interfere with the orderly business of this office,” she would say. Words a county lawyer had given her, probably, the groundwork for our arrest if we failed to get out of the way.

  But my brother and I moved politely to the side of the little room and listened as stories of stray dogs and dead chickens or children who did not belong in neighbors’ yards were laid out across her desk.

  “Do you wish to fill out a complaint?” she would say, cutting off their stories. And those words seemed to make them afraid.

  “We don’t want to get nobody in trouble.…”

  “There is nothing this office can do until a complaint has been filed.…”

  And then, more often than not, the visitors would leave, nodding to my brother and me politely on their way out. Thinking that we were a different kind of people, that we were not afraid of the law.

  Still, none of the deputies on my brother’s list had come out of the office behind the desk to speak to us, not even to say they wouldn’t speak to us. My brother was not discouraged. If we were constant enough, things would fall into their natural place.

  WE ARRIVED AT OUR OFFICE late in the afternoon and found Yardley Acheman sitting in the stuffed chair against the wall and Charlotte sitting in front of him on his desk. From there, he could see up her skirt.

  They were both drinking beer, and when Yardley saw us, he lifted his in a toast.

  She smiled at us, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Something had been going on in the room before they heard us on the stairs, and I felt a familiar, quick heat in my face. “The guy who bought the lawn,” he said, “I found him.”

  He walked past her then without a glance, as if she were a panhandler on the street asking for his change, and she saw that she’d been discarded.

  He picked up a reporter’s notebook, opened it to the front page, and found his notes.

  “He remembered them,” he said. “They showed up at six in the morning in a truck. He said he looked at the two of them and what they had and thought they’d stolen it from a cemetery.”

  My brother nodded slowly. “You showed him pictures?”

  “Of Hillary. That’s when he remembered thinking they’d robbed a graveyard.”

  “And he bought it anyway.…”

  Charlotte got off the desk and walked to the window. She crossed her arms under her breasts, as if she were cold, and stared outside.

  “He doesn’t want to be connected to this in any way,” Yardley Acheman said. “He doesn’t want to talk to anyone else about it.” He glanced quickly at Charlotte, who was still facing the window, and then at my brother. “You can’t blame him for that,” he said.

  “Who is he?” Ward said.

  Yardley scratched his chest. “This is the hard part,” he said. “The only way the guy would talk to me, I had to promise to keep him completely anonymous.”

  Ward nodded. “What’s his name?” he said.

  “It’s completely anonymous,” Yardley said. “I had to give him my word. He’s in a position to get some work with the state.…”

  “But who is he?”

  Yardley Acheman shook his head. “You’re not listening,” he said. “I had to make a promise to get him to talk to me, and I can’t break it. There’s a principle here.…”

  Ward looked at him a long time. I do not know if he believed him or not.

  “It was the only way it could be done,” Yardley said. “I can only tell you he exists, and he recognized the picture.”

  “How did you find him?” Ward said.

  “The hard way,” he said. “We went through the county records.”

  Ward thought it over.

  Yardley Acheman shrugged. “It’s a matter of trust,” he said. “I can’t violate that.”

  Charlotte turned suddenly away from the window and walked, without a word, out of the office and down the stairs, as if she had just realized she didn’t belong in the room.

  IT WAS NECESSARY to see
Hillary Van Wetter again before a story could be written. Charlotte and Yardley Acheman, for reasons that were not clearly drawn, were no longer speaking to each other, and she sat next to me in the car on the drive to the prison, with Yardley and my brother in back. She wore a blue dress and did not seem as concerned with her appearance as she had on the earlier visits. She looked in the mirror only once, after we had stopped in the parking lot.

  What had happened in Daytona Beach had taken the excitement out of things for her, I think, and she was left with a situation which, while of her own making, bore no resemblance to the one she had envisioned.

  HILLARY VAN WETTER WAS led into the interview room in leg irons and handcuffs and pushed down into his chair. The bruises under his eyes had faded since the last visit.

  The instructions were familiar now, mindless and repetitive. The smell of the place, the way words sounded in this room—it was all the same. Charlotte crossed her legs, showing some thigh, and lit a cigarette. And in some way that was the same now too. Hillary studied her a moment and then looked directly at Yardley Acheman.

  He knew.

  She smiled at him, unsure of herself.

  “Don’t you look nice,” he said, sounding too polite, as if he were talking to tourists.

  “Thank you,” she said, and crossed her legs the other way. She felt his eyes and tried to hide from them. Every move she made to hide herself seemed to please him more.

  “We found the man in Ormond Beach,” Yardley Acheman said, and Hillary turned to him, nodding as if he were interested.

  “The one who bought the sod,” he said.

  “That’s good news,” Hillary said, smiles all around.

  “He made a note of the day and the amount he paid,” Yardley said. “He remembered you from your picture.”

  Hillary looked back at Charlotte, and from her to Yardley Acheman.

  “That’s good,” he said again, without looking at Ward, and then he moved his gaze to Charlotte. “These newspaper boys done me a big favor, wouldn’t you say?” She nodded back, trying to diagnose the nature of the change that had come over him.