The Blinds

by Adam Sternbergh

  “I just thought I’d see what the view looked like from here, while we waited for you,” says Dawes, looking up from Cooper’s swivel chair, at Cooper, who’s standing in the doorway of the trailer, having just arrived back from his entirely unsatisfactory visit to Fran Adams.

  The three of them have gathered in what passes for the town’s police station: a single room housed in a trailer at one end of the main thoroughfare. The office is crammed with filing cabinets and discarded furniture of various fake wood grains, in various stages of disrepair. A sadly failing and mostly ornamental A/C unit sits wedged in the lone window. Only Cooper gets a desk. Cooper gets the desk because Cooper’s the boss, he was here first, and when he started, it was only him. When they hired Robinson five years back, Cooper ordered a second desk. They’re still waiting for it to arrive. Cooper never bothered to order a desk for Dawes.

  Situated behind Cooper’s desk is Cooper’s swivel chair, another perk of his position, and behind that, in a place of honor on top of a low-slung filing cabinet, sits the idle fax machine. Only Cooper gets to touch the fax machine. Since there’s no Internet and no cell service in Caesura, the fax machine and its dedicated phone line are the town’s only link to the outside world. Next to the fax machine sits an impressively sturdy paper shredder. If you get a fax, you read the fax, and then you feed the fax into the shredder’s hungry teeth. Once upon a time, not long after he arrived, Robinson nicknamed the fax machine Cain and the shredder Abel. Now Cain and Abel sit attentively behind Cooper’s desk, waiting, under his watch, like two heeled dogs.

  Dawes rises from Cooper’s desk and returns to her own spot, a hardback chair by the wall. “I meant, what do we know about Gable since he got here?” she continues. “Any feuds? Debts? Disputes?” As she says this, she flips back through her notebook intently, as though the answers are already written there by some previous, wiser version of herself.

  “Gable mostly kept to himself, best as I know,” says Cooper, unbuckling his gun belt and coiling it heavily on his desktop. Thus unburdened, he settles back into his swivel chair, where he twists idly, the king returned to his throne.

  “I’ve always meant to ask—why is it that Deputy Robinson and I aren’t issued gun belts, sir?” says Dawes.

  “Because you don’t carry guns,” says Cooper. “One sheriff, one gun—that’s the theory, anyway. We used to keep an emergency firearm in a locked safe but look how that turned out. Speaking of —” He unlocks his top desk drawer and slides it open and pulls out a box of .38 ammo. He shakes six bullets into the palm of his hand. Then he flips open the cylinder of his pistol and feeds the bullets, one by one, into the revolver. “Eight years, and I never had to load this thing.” He flips the cylinder shut, then slips the pistol back into the holster in his gun belt, and locks the box of ammo away again. “This belt isn’t even Institute issue. It’s my personal property, a souvenir from my last job, before I signed my life away to work for the Blinds.”

  “And what was that?” says Dawes.

  “Wish I could tell you, Dawes, but you know the rules.” Cooper raises a finger to his pursed lips like an old librarian shushing a rowdy room. “But this here? This was my lucky gun belt. Good thing I brought it with me, too. It’s hell trying to convince the Institute to supply us with anything.” He gestures to the ramshackle office. “As you might intuit.”

  “So what’s your plan on informing people?” asks Robinson, continuing to torture those pants with the hissing iron. Cooper suspects that it’s taking everything in Dawes’s power, as the clear subordinate, not to leap up and offer Robinson remedial instruction in crease-making, given that her own uniform is always pressed to a military crispness.

  “I’ll ring the bell and call a town meeting this afternoon,” says Cooper. “That gives us a little time to put our heads together and figure out what we’re going to tell them.”

  “We might want to hold off until the agent from Amarillo has weighed in,” says Dawes.

  Cooper stops swiveling. “Wait—someone’s coming out here?”

  “Agent Rigo, from Amarillo. He’s on his way right now. He’s scheduled to arrive in a half an hour or so.”

  There is nothing about Dawes’s statement that is welcome news to Cooper. “Who’s Rigo? What happened to Agent Brightwell?”

  Dawes shrugs. “I called it in first thing this morning from the fax phone just like you asked me to. This Agent Rigo answered. Said he’s our liaison now. Said he wanted to come out personally to have a look at the crime scene.” She delivers all this with the slightly defensive, slightly befuddled tone of someone relaying news she had no idea would be controversial. “He also said he had some questions about Colfax.”

  “Errol Colfax?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What about him? Colfax was months ago. Colfax was a suicide,” says Cooper.

  “Agent Rigo was very insistent,” Dawes says, then looks to Robinson for reinforcement, but he keeps his head down, studiously trained on the ironing. She looks back to Cooper. “I just assumed—”

  “Please, do not do that,” says Cooper. “This is just great. Dr. Holliday is going to be delighted.”

  “We’d have to tell her what happened eventually,” says Robinson.

  “Of course, we’ll tell her,” Cooper says. “I’d just—I’d like to have a little more to tell her when we do. Like a fucking suspect, for starters.”

  “Sheriff, I don’t mean any disrespect—” says Dawes.

  Cooper turns to Robinson. “Why do I suspect I’m about to be disrespected?”

  “—but it would seem,” Dawes continues, “to be in everyone’s interest to follow procedure on this, yes? It is a homicide, after all.”

  Cooper stands and leans forward on the desk. “While I’m certainly delighted to be reminded by you about the necessity of procedure, I am also interested in sparing the fragile residents of this town from a parade of nosy outsiders. Residents who, I’ll remind you, are made jittery by law enforcement agents who come bearing intrusive questions.”

  Dawes has the quizzical look of someone being chastised for something she’s still confident was entirely right. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t—”

  “No, you didn’t. That much is for certain.” Cooper picks up his gun belt and straps it back around his waist. The belt and its holster—and the pistol inside it—are almost entirely for show, but then Cooper’s learned that showmanship—the appearance of authority; the illusion of order—is a crucial part of his job. “Dealing with our citizenry’s sensitivity to these issues”—he pulls the belt tight and buckles it—“is something I have learned a lot about over my eight years of doing what you’ve been doing”—and here Cooper comically checks his watch—“for all of six fucking weeks. So, before you don your goddamned deerstalker hat and start the Sherlock Holmes act, will you please consider the nature of our situation. Which is delicate.”

  Cooper also considers the nature of their situation. Now, instead of gathering the residents to give a calming, don’t-worry-folks-we’ve-got-this-all-under-control speech, he’s going to have to lead an officious stranger right down the middle of the main street while the entire jittery town looks on and speculates. He turns to Robinson. “Any thoughts you care to share on this subject, Walt?”

  Robinson props the iron on its haunches, where it looses a long exhausted sigh of steam. “I never knew that’s what they called it.”

  “Called what?”

  “That Sherlock Holmes hat. A deerstalker. I never knew it had a name.”

  “Any other thoughts?”

  “It’s not good,” he says.

  “No, it’s not good,” says Cooper. “It’s not fucking good at all.”

  5.

  THE AGENT FROM AMARILLO arrives at noon exactly. His bright black car appears down the dirt road in a shimmer of undulating heat. The tires spray a continuous plume of yellow dust as the long sedan approaches the town’s fence, then stops, and Cooper and Robinson roll back the entrance
gate and the sedan enters slowly. The driver pulls the car over and parks. The three of them, Cooper, Robinson, and Dawes, stand attentively aside.

  The driver’s door opens. A very tall man with very blond hair unfolds himself from the front seat, then reassembles himself to stand straight again, like some new brand of expensive and complicated umbrella. He wears a black suit, white shirt, and black tie, the whole outfit entirely inappropriate to the heat. On his face, he wears wraparound sunglasses that look as though they’ve been stolen from a surfer. His white-blond hair is gelled straight up in the air in an almost aquatic crown of spiny spikes. He’s very pale, Cooper thinks, like he crawled up from the bottom of the sea to emerge blinking in the Texan sun.

  He steps forward and extends a white hand.

  “I’m Agent Paul Rigo,” he says.

  Cooper shakes his hand. “Sheriff Calvin Cooper.”

  “I know,” says Rigo. “Now where’s the bar?”

  As the quartet walks through the center of town, faces appear at windows. Curtains are parted. This is exactly what Cooper had hoped to avoid. He’s relieved when the four of them finally reach the trailer that houses the bar, Blinders, where Greta Fillmore is already waiting outside to receive them. Robinson offers a mumbled pleasantry, then excuses himself to dubious-sounding duties. Cooper’s hoping Dawes might similarly recuse herself, but no such luck—she sticks around to observe. The four of them step into the darkened bar together. When Greta flicks on the lights, a defeated ceiling fan begins its exhausted rotation. Rigo steps forward and inspects the plywood bar, which still bears a large kidney-shaped stain. Then he inspects the stool where Gable sat. Then he walks around the bar and inspects the shelves behind the bar. He finds a hole basically at a plumb line from where Gable’s head would have been while he was seated. Rigo pats his pockets, pulls out a Leatherman tool, then wrenches free a bent slug from the wall. He puts it in his palm and peers at it like a prospector appraising a nugget. Then he sets the slug on the bar, and requests a beer.

  “Thoughts?” says Cooper, now nursing his own beer and seated next to Rigo on a barstool. Dawes hovers, beerless, behind them, scribbling notes.

  “It’s a nine-millimeter round,” says Rigo. “You know anyone in town with a nine millimeter?”

  “I don’t know anyone in town with a gun,” Cooper says, smiling, “save for me. Which is our dilemma in a nutshell.” He unholsters his gun and presents it to Rigo. “It’s a thirty-eight, in case you’re wondering. Never even carried it loaded, until today.”

  Rigo inspects it disinterestedly, then hands it back. “You had another shooting a while ago, yes?”

  “That’s right. A suicide.”

  “Suspected suicide,” Dawes interjects from behind them. Cooper shoots her a glance that, if there were any justice in this world, would send her scurrying to the other side of town.

  “You folks seem to be suffering from an epidemic of unexplained shootings,” says Rigo.

  “In the case of the suicide, we did keep an extra handgun in a locked case in the police station,” says Cooper. “Couple months back, someone broke in, smashed the case open, stole the pistol.”

  “You weren’t concerned?”

  “We were plenty fucking concerned at the time. Then we found out what had happened to it two days later. Fellow by the name of Colfax, Errol Colfax, one of our original eight, he’d stolen it to end his own life. I found him myself, with the gun in his hand, in his living room La-Z-Boy, having ushered himself from this world.”

  “That seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to just to off yourself,” says Rigo. “Breaking into a gun safe like that.”

  “Well, some people don’t like ropes,” says Cooper. “And we’re a long way from the nearest bottle of pills.”

  “What happened to that gun?”

  “We bagged it and sent it to the Fell Institute in Amarillo to let them handle it,” says Cooper. “That’s the institute that runs this place.”

  “I know,” says Rigo. “I work for the Fell Institute. They sent me out to assess this situation.”

  “You’re not Justice Department?”

  “Ex-Justice.”

  “So you work for Dr. Holliday now?”

  “Indirectly,” Rigo says.

  “What happened to Brightwell?”

  “Reassigned.”

  “Shame,” says Cooper. “He was a good man.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” says Rigo. “The point is, the Institute is”—here he considers his words, in a very ostentatious manner—“concerned. About this killing. As you would imagine.”

  “As are we, I can assure you,” Cooper says.

  “Who sent that gun in to the Institute? You?”

  “It was my ex-deputy, Ellis Gonzalez. That was his real name. His name out here was Marlon Garner.”

  Rigo laughs. “That’s right, you’ve all got these funny names here. What’s your real name, Cooper?”

  “I can’t tell you that. Not while I’m still employed.”

  “What about her?” Rigo nods to Dawes.

  “Deputy Sidney Dawes, sir.”

  Rigo says to Cooper, “So what happened to Marlon Garner?”

  “He quit, not long after Colfax killed himself.”

  “And where is he now?”

  “I have no idea. We haven’t kept in touch. Why?”

  Rigo picks up the slug from the bar and studies it, pincering it between two long fingers. “Because my guess is that the pistol you gave him never made it back to the Institute. And that if this slug here matches the one from that gun, we might have two murder mysteries on our hands. You pulled the slug from Colfax, right?”

  “Sure did—I sent it back to Amarillo with the gun.” Cooper did no such thing.

  “And the body?”

  “Colfax? Cremated. Our local nurse has an arrangement with a town nearby. Same fate awaits Gable, is my understanding. You want me to hold them off?”

  “No need. You go ahead and deal with your dead.” Rigo finishes his beer, pulls a few bills from his pocket, and slaps them on the bar.

  Cooper slides the cash back toward him. “You know your money’s no good here, Agent Rigo.”

  “The Institute’s got it covered.”

  “No, I mean it’s literally no good here. We don’t exchange cash.”

  Rigo glances at Cooper. “That’s right. No names, no cash—quite an operation you’ve got going here.” He pockets the bills and retrieves the slug from the bar and pockets that, too. “You got any kids living in this town?”

  “Just one.”

  “They let you raise a kid out here?”

  “It wasn’t exactly planned.”

  “Does he have a funny name, too?”

  “He’s a good kid.”

  “No doubt. This town seems like a regular Mayberry.”

  Cooper stands, in hopes of ushering Rigo out of the bar. “I know you’re new, Agent Rigo, but traditionally the Institute more or less leaves us alone to handle our own affairs.”

  “That might be changing. After all, you’ve never had a murder before.” Rigo stands. “Nice to meet you both. I’m sure I’ll be seeing you again soon.”

  “Would you mind doing me one favor when you leave?” asks Cooper.

  “What’s that?”

  “Outsiders tend to make our residents a wee bit nervous. So drive a little faster out of town.”

  With Rigo gone, Dawes occupies the barstool next to Cooper. He uncaps a beer and hands it to her without asking, knowing it’s the only way she’ll accept it, given she’s still on duty and it’s still the middle of the day. And she does accept the beer, showing only the slight hesitation of someone faced with the conundrum of having to either disobey a written regulation or disobey a direct request from a superior. But Cooper’s always considered this a useful rule of thumb: Always obey the request in front of you over the one written in a book somewhere. If he can teach Dawes that, he thinks, then maybe one day they can move on to the more valuabl
e lesson of when to disobey both.

  He holds up his own bottle, his second, and offers the longneck for a toast. “Here’s to following proper procedure.”

  She hesitates. “I’m not a cop, you know. I was an EMT before this.”

  “And I was a corrections officer. So maybe neither of us should be expected to play Sherlock Holmes on this one.”

  They toast. Cooper swigs. He tips his beer back slowly, careful not to race too far ahead. It’s not like he’s an alcoholic. It’s just that he can’t usually think of a good reason, when the opportunity presents itself, not to fuzz the edges of the world just a little bit. “You like that work? An EMT?”

  “I trained for it because I thought I’d be saving people’s lives. Turns out you spend most of your days helping really fat people get out of bed.” She pretends to take a sip of beer. She hates beer.

  “I’m sorry I was hard on you earlier.”

  “You weren’t hard. You were right.”

  “It’s possible to be both.” Cooper looks her over. “Why the hell did you choose the name Sidney Dawes, anyway?”

  “Do I look like a Barbara Quayle to you?” She picks at the label of her beer, unscrolling it from the sweating bottle. “To be honest, I thought you could choose any name you liked when you got here, and I wanted to be called Darwin.”

  “Why Darwin?”

  “Because Darwin means change.” She fakes another sip. “I don’t know shit about Charles Dawes, but ‘Dawes’ seemed close enough.”

  “And why Sidney?”

  “For Sidney Poitier. He’s the only black person on either of those lists.”

  Cooper finishes off his bottle, slightly ahead of schedule. He starts to think about number three. He gets up and walks around the bar, rummaging in the fridge, then surfaces with another cold one and pops the beer open.

  “What about you, sir?” she asks. “Why Calvin Cooper?”

  “Cooper for Gary Cooper, the greatest movie sheriff of all time. I guess I figured if someone had to take that name, it might as well be me.”