by Kluge, P. F.
“What are the chances, now you’re going?”
“They might get lucky,” Graves said. “But I wouldn’t bet on it. They’ll do what the college wants and the college wants it to be over. Even if it isn’t, they’ll act like it is. Get rid of me and the problem goes away, they hope...”
I kept driving and waited for the next installment. It came at Sunbury, at one of those interstate plazas—motels, gas, fast food—that makes you feel like the whole purpose is to keep ‘em moving. We were sitting at the last traffic light, watching huge rigs head out for Columbus, Indianapolis, Wheeling.
“It’s not as if I didn’t learn something,” Graves reflected, more like he was talking to himself than having a conversation with me. “I came in to settle a score. And you know what? I actually liked the place, never mind all the dirt I was digging. Every day I walked around, I liked it, I liked it in spite of myself, this little college, full of shit and charm. I saw why my dad came here, why he stayed, stayed in the neighborhood even after his career was destroyed. Walking where he walked, those lawns and paths, those lines of old trees, those classrooms he taught in...”
He fell silent once again. He was telling me what he wanted to say, which was all about himself and nothing about me. I was always the last thing on his mind, the bottom of the list. He was saying goodbye to a place he’d fallen in love with, which was nice, but I was going back up this road and there was no love waiting for me at the end of it.
“The G-Man,” he finally said. We were in the parking lot of a state office building. “The magic word. At last you hear it. You’ve been patient.”
“Thanks...”
“I could tell that your interest in him was exceptional. From the minute you heard his name, out of your ex-wife’s mouth, you were hooked. You’d come across a life you wanted to know about, a lot like yours in its background, and a lot different in its accomplishments. As for its outcome...horribly worse, it could be. You’ll notice I said could be.”
“I know you never thought it was him,” I said. “You were doing me a favor. Indulging me.”
“I was, Billy. And it was unprofessional. But I liked you and felt sorry for you...and wanted you to have something that you wanted.”
“You make me sound like a chump.”
“You’re not. Bear with me. It seemed impossible that an honors student would come back after many years to kill a professor, more impossible that he would kill two students and a high school kid. It was inconsistent with my sense of...human likelihood. And inconsistent with what I’ve told you about these crimes, which I continue to believe are the result of an alliance that is deep, complicated and...local. So I gave him to you, Billy, the same way I let you sit in on Hiram Wright. For your benefit...”
“I see,” I said. Looked at in a certain way, I’d done alright out of these murders. I got a new girlfriend, a college course for nothing, and a free dog. But it didn’t feel like I’d come out ahead.
“Well,” he said, figuring out how to say goodbye, I guessed. Wrong. “I don’t suppose you’ve learned much from me. I wanted Averill Hayes, more than anything. That’s unprofessional. So is this. This last thing. This is between us.” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a plastic envelope, zip-locked.
“It was on the body of the fourth victim, the prospective, tucked into his pocket. That’s why there’s blood.”
I opened the envelope and found a piece of paper inside, cheap paper that had sponged up the kid’s blood, turning from red to rust. Careful block letters that were between the lines. Stay between the lines. The lines are your friend. ALWAYS DO A LITTLE BIT EXTRA. The G-Man’s slogan.
“With that, you can get the sheriff to put out an all points this afternoon,” he said. “I thought you might want to try something else.”
“Does this mean he did it?”
“He did it,” Graves said. “Or someone wants it to look like he did. Anyway, you weren’t wrong. G-Man’s involved.”
“‘Always do a little bit extra,’” I quoted. “If it’s not him, it’s someone who knows him.”
“And knows you, Billy. I guarantee it.”
“It’s not over?”
“Of course not,” Graves said. He reached out and put his hand on my shoulder, left it there a second. “Good luck, Billy.”
I get back from Columbus in time to pull the night shift and around midnight I’m parked out by the tennis courts, smoking a cigarette and listening to oldies but goodies on the radio, “You Don’t Send Me Flowers Anymore,” wondering what to do about that bloody note Graves gave me, when all of a sudden there are sirens screaming up the highway, like coon hounds on a hunt. They pass the entrance to the college—we’re spared—but I call in to Dottie, who tells me there’d been a report of shots fired at a house in the country. My house.
When I drive up, the place is a crime scene, two police cars, a fire truck, an ambulance parked out front and Tom’s truck too. He’s standing on the lawn next to Sheriff Lingenfelter. The house is all lit up.
“What happened?” I asked.
“You don’t know?” Tom says.
“I did, I wouldn’t ask.”
“Okay. About an hour ago someone came down the driveway—on foot, seems like—and stood about over there...” He nods toward where my Dad’s truck’s been parked for twenty years. “...and shot out every damn window in the front of your house.”
“Linda?”
“She’s okay. Hit the floor, crawled over to the phone.”
“Where is she?”
“Coming.”
I see Linda step out onto the porch, accompanied—steadied—by a deputy who’s carrying an overnight bag. They walk towards us. She looks shaky, red-eyed and trembling. When she sees I’m there she gives me a look that says it’s my fault, what happened.
“Well, Billy,” she says, “I guess you got your farm back.”
After a long hard stare, she walks away from me.
“What’s that about?” the sheriff asks.
“It’s nothing,” Tom says. “She just needs a man around the house, is all.” Tom asks can he help me clean up the mess and I say no, it’s my mess, but I appreciate the offer. “Okay, son,” he says and he drives off in that pinging truck of his. I head towards the house, spend the next hour sweeping up glass. When I go out to the barn looking for plywood, everyone is gone. I nail the wood over the windows. That would keep the weather out. Not people. Whatever keys we had were lost years ago. Anybody could walk right in.
I sit on the porch, just tasting what it would be like to live here again. Sappho a country dog? That’s the first thing I think about. Going up against groundhogs? Hard to picture. Still, she’s got a nasty streak. My father’s truck sits out across the lawn. You can hardly tell it was a truck anymore, thistles and weeds. Nature as destroyer and consoler. That’s something Wright talks about. He loves stuff like that. Paradoxes. I sit there thinking and then I stop thinking and just sit. That’s okay, too. It’s nasty—temperature in the thirties, damp and mean—but I don’t want to leave yet. I wonder who came down the driveway that night. G-Man after Sangy Girl? Maybe not. What was the phrase Graves had used? “Human likelihood.” Besides, Robert Rickey had been out of the house a while and it could be Linda picked up some guy, jumped his bones and told him to go. Some guys wouldn’t put up with that.
Back on shift, I do a few more circuits and drive home at dawn. The farm is mine again, things are looking up for me, even though the killings haven’t been solved. Could it be possible, I wonder, for life to be good, with things rattling around in the past, four people dead and a killer unpunished, no justice done? Could the world work that way? Or had it been working that way all along? A big question, the kind of headscratcher that might come up in Wright’s class or afterwards, when we stayed around to talk with the old man, the way we always did, because among the students at that makeshift one-man college, there’s a sense that he won’t be around much longer. Since I’ve known him, especially
since they made him provost, he’s been going down steady. “One long retreat from the gates of Moscow,” he says. “The weather gets colder, the snow is deeper.” Then he pulls himself together. “But not tonight,” he says. “Not tonight.” Another thing that doesn’t help, he isn’t sleeping much. He says he’s terrified of dying in his sleep, he wants to see his death coming.
Next morning, someone was hammering on my door. No doorbells in trailers, no sound of knuckles on wood, just a kind of metal rapping that would worry you, if you heard it from your car. While I stumbled out of bed and put my legs in my pants, I glanced out and saw the sheriff’s car. I opened the door, Lingenfelter was standing there.
“Hi, Billy,” he said. “Did I wake you up?”
“I work nights,” I said. “Sleep days.”
“Sorry. Guess I knew that. Can I come in?”
“You really want to?”
He looked behind me and didn’t see much. “Not really. But we got to talk.”
“Can I have a minute? Brush my teeth? Throw some water in my face?”
“Sure thing. No rush.”
While I was in the bathroom, I asked myself what brought him. Old Donny Lingenfelter had been sheriff forever. Unopposed. Look at him and you’d think of Jackie Gleason in all those movies where he was running after Burt Reynolds. That was his trick, getting you to think he’s some dumb, fat goober.
“Well then,” I said when I sat down next to him. He was trying to play with Sappho and having no luck.
“Billy, you want to chat a while or should I just cut to the chase?”
“The chase,” I said.
“We’re just talking here. I knew your dad real well and I watched you grow up...”
“This the chase, sheriff?”
“Getting there. I know you married that college woman. I know you had trouble. When I heard you let her stay in the house after you split—hell, after she moved another man in—I said that’s Earl’s boy alright, that’s Earl all over again...” He stopped and shook his head, like he couldn’t resist lingering among memories of my dad. When he spoke again, he made it sound like a reluctant return to business.
“So there I am last night, standing outside your shot-up house. Out comes your wife, ex-wife...”
“Ex-wife, to be...”
“And she snarls at you and says, ‘Well, Billy, guess you got your farm back.’ Son, look at it from my side. Can you blame me for wondering if you maybe gave her a little nudge? Hold it...”
I’d been ready to answer but he didn’t want to hear it yet.
“This is chickenshit, Billy. Four broken windows on your own property. Hell, I wouldn’t know what to call it, not sure it’s even a crime. What I’m saying is we can handle this, we can end it right here, just the two of us.”
“We sure can,” I said. “I didn’t do it.”
“Uh-huh. That’s your answer?”
“I didn’t do it.”
He sat there waiting for more. When it didn’t come, he sighed deep, like he was blaming me for wasting his time.
“Okay then, that’s the way you want it.”
“That’s not the way I want it. It’s the way it is.”
“Okay. No need to get touchy.”
“I’m not touchy. I’m innocent. And the flip side of that is—someone else is guilty.”
“That’ll do son,” he said. Now he was being patient with me. “That’ll do for now.” He hoisted himself off the bench and Sappho started barking.
“Is that a dog?” he asked. “Or something you knitted?”
After Lingenfelter left I went straight back to sleep, no trouble, no guilty conscience here. The trouble was staying asleep. I closed my eyes and the phone rang.
“Billy? It’s Linda.”
“How you doing?”
“I’m leaving,” she said. “I wanted you to know. I’m going to stay in Columbus with my aunt. Take it from there. From here I mean...”
“Huh?”
“I mean Columbus is where I’m calling from. I’m not just going. I’m gone.”
“Oh...”
“This return to Ohio thing didn’t work out. I guess we both know that. I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”
“That goes for me.”
“Well...I said it first.”
“Okay.”
“There’s something else, Billy, that I’m sorry for. It’s what I said to you last night, with Tom and the sheriff standing right here. I was scared and angry. I wasn’t accusing you of anything. But I think that’s what they thought.”
“It’s alright,” I said. “Sheriff came sniffing around this morning. Woke me up. I told him I didn’t shoot those windows out. No big thing.”
“Oh, Billy, but it is...”
“What?”
“That’s what I wanted to tell you. I went to the office this morning, first thing, cleaning up. Sheriff was there and Tom and they’ve got a match...”
“A what?”
“The bullets from your house? They match the other bullets from those kids. Same gun.”
I couldn’t speak. Broken windows? Chickenshit? Watched you grow up, knew your daddy, just us talking? Bullshit. The bullets matched. Matched each other. Matched the Smith and Wesson .38 the killer used, that we’d been keeping quiet about. No doubt about it. Lingenfelter had come to my house to collect a murderer. He wanted me.
Things hadn’t been right between Tom and me since Graves came to town. But Graves was history now and Tom still kept his distance, communicating through notes, acting pissed off. I wasn’t sure why. Was it because I hadn’t shared every step of Graves’ fouled-up investigation? Or because I’d slept with Lisa Garner while conducting a screwed up investigation of my own? Did he prefer me alone and mopey? Was it that I was hanging out with Hiram Wright? Did my uncle prefer me stupid? It was something I’d done, no doubt about it, but I wished he’d narrow things down a little, pick one off of a long list of things he wanted me to apologize for, so we could get back to how we used to be. Meanwhile, tonight’s work order: “Stay sharp. There’s a basketball game in Danville. They might come down here drunk, joyriding, tearing up the grass.” So I parked outside the upperclass dorm, walked out onto the grass, found an Adirondack chair and sat, just near enough to hear the basketball game on the radio, Danville versus Mount Vernon, farm kids see-sawing back and forth on a court I could picture, parents and girlfriends screaming in bleachers, the whole place damn near levitating. Some of those kids, tonight might be the best night of their lives. Count on it. There’s a peak that you don’t even know you’re on, until you’re back down.
“Billy Hoover. You there?”
Dottie was calling me from the Security Office, her voice rising above the background of the basketball game. Somebody had a flat tire in the parking lot above the football field. I told her I’d be right there. Football was over, so was college, but sometimes folks with campers and RVs parked down there, where the ground was flat.
It wasn’t a camper, though, it was a van with Franklin County plates. That’s Columbus. I got out, grabbed a flashlight and walked over. No one was sitting inside, waiting for me. And the tires looked just fine.
“Hey, Billy Hoover.” It was Lisa, leaning against the stadium fence.
“Hey, yourself,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about you.” Now I was facing her, wondering about a hug. It didn’t feel right. Something was up. I didn’t believe in happy coincidences any more, lucky meetings, star crossed lovers, casual drop ins. Neither did she.
“Got a question for you,” she said. “Are you armed?”
“No.”
“And the radio that connects you to the office? You left it in the car? You’re not carrying a beeper?”
“Nope. In the car. What is this, anyway?”
“You wanted to meet my brother, right?”
“He’s here?” I looked around. No one else in view, no traffic. A shrewdly chosen place and time, I realized.
“I’m asking. You stil
l want to meet him?”
“Yes,” I said. And—I don’t know why—I did what I’d done when we met, down on the river, came right up to her, an inch away. To see if it was still there, the feeling.
“Okay, Billy,” she said, moving in towards me, like we were just about to slow dance. There was feeling, alright. Most of it was fear. “He’s down on the field. Fifty yard line.”
“He knows I’m coming?”
“Sure does. He’s looking forward to it.”
The light from the parking lot died at the top row of seats. After that, I stepped into a dark bowl, down the aisle towards the field. I saw Lisa standing at the top, watching me go. I went slowly, asking myself if she was testing my faith in her—which was possible—or waiting to hear a shot—which would be the end of me and my amateur detective career, my late education, all my half-assed wondering. I could picture Lingenfelter standing over my body tomorrow morning. “I knew his daddy...” And Tom recalling a lifetime of lessons he’d wasted on me. “In a restaurant, never order anything stuffed.” “Any beer that’s worth drinking is worth drinking out of a glass.” All his winks and jokes and his warnings, wasted. Linda wondering if I hadn’t taken a bullet that was meant for her. Wondering what to do and doing nothing. Hiram Wright, ripe in years, remembering all the students whose lives he’d changed and a few—just a few—who hadn’t worked out.
At the bottom of the stands, I stepped out onto a macadam running track that goes around the football field. I couldn’t see anything out there in the middle. If I couldn’t see him, did that mean he couldn’t see me? Maybe not.
“Yo,” I called out. And then, after hesitating. “G-Man!”
A moment of silence and winter wind came next and me just standing there, wondering what was being prepared for me.
“Over here,” someone said. A voice that came from mid-field. I stepped out onto the grass, not seeing where I was headed. So I sensed him before I saw him and all I saw was a dark, bulky something ahead of me.