Fourth Person No More

by John Gastineau

  As instructed, I covered the school play. The day after, in a fit of pique, I wrote a story that began “Where in the world is Aunt Lotty Nusbaumer?” The lede was a play on the title of children’s TV show that was popular then, “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?”, another of his kids’ passions that Marley indulged.

  I know that because Marley can talk fairly endlessly about his children. It is in the nature of those of us drunks who have actually spent nights sleeping in gutters and nearly lost family as a result. He knew the first line was a shot at him.

  The story said essentially that the last we saw her Lotty was being transferred from the local hospital to an intentionally secret site, then it identified by name those in the law enforcement community who should’ve known her whereabouts but denied they did. The story also raised questions about the need for secrecy and reported rumors circulated as theories about how and why Aunt Lotty had disappeared. One or two could have come from Naomi, but I assure you, based on my own personal research, by the time they went into my story they were in wide circulation in the area’s bars and diners.

  Besides, the cops were given ample opportunity to deny the theories or provide information to dispute them. Crandall, however, was still trying to control the story, and he would only say: “No comment.” Which was the same as throwing gasoline on the sparks generated by the rumor mill.

  I knew all that when I wrote the story. Marley knew all that when he edited it. We ran it anyway.

  Bobby Russell appeared at the counter early the day after. He wasn’t dressed as a clown or a mourner; he was dressed like any other farmer who comes to the paper in December: jeans, a brown, grease-smeared canvas jacket over a plaid flannel shirt and a red billed cap advertising fertilizer. I did not remember him, and I was busy and frankly I didn’t pay much attention to him at first.

  Russell leaned across the counter, grabbed the passing Anorexia by her dowel-sized arm and hissed: “Who’s the son of a bitch wrote this?” With his other hand, he was choking and shaking the previous day’s edition.

  Marley and I looked at each other. Marley shook his head. Neither one of us knew who the guy was.

  In matters of this sort, Marley takes the point. He rose from his desk. He took with him his pica stick, a metal ruler about 18 inches long, less than an inch wide, and no thicker than a knife blade. Before computers, editors used them to measure the length and width of type and art for layout. Marley wielded his now like the samurai editor that he is.

  “May I help you?” he said, removing the man’s hand from Anorexia’s arm and shooing her on her way. All eyes had turned to the counter; we all knew from experience this could be entertaining.

  “You write this?”

  The man shoved the paper at Marley’s face.

  “No,” said Marley, blocking the paper with his free hand and gently brushing it aside. He introduced himself by name and title. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m going to talk to who wrote this.”

  The man again put the paper up in Marley’s face.

  Marley smiled and again put his hand up to move the paper aside, this time using the hand holding the pica stick.

  “What is your name?” Marley asked.

  “Russell.”

  “Bobby Russell?” I said, starting to rise.

  Marley turned.

  “Clay, sit down.”

  “You’re Ambrose?” the man said, raising his voice and talking straight past Marley. “You cocksucker. You’re the son of bitch I’m talking to.”

  Marley raised the pica stick over his head with one hand. The air sang as he sliced the stick down into the edge of the counter. He left it there, as he usually did, embedded and quivering at both ends, another notch in a row of thirty or so.

  “Don’t cuss,” he barked. “You will talk to me.”

  “Well,” Russell said, his eyes round. “Okay.”

  Marley took Russell into the library and calmed him down. After several minutes, he invited me in. Mr. Russell, Marley said, wanted to dispute the rumors about Aunt Lotty. Marley raised his eyebrows and blinked once, his see-that’s-how-it’s-done look, and left.

  Whatever head of steam Russell worked up coming to the paper, Marley had released. The man sat in one corner of the library. He looked smaller than he had when he appeared at the counter. He sat with his shoulders rounded and his head down so that I could not see his face, only the top of a buzz-cut, red head. In his lap, fingers thick as brats worked and worried the bill of his cap.

  “Somebody told me you could heave a hay bale one-handed,” I said. “Pick it up by the strings, rear back, and pitch it like a baseball. That true?”

  That was the kind of opening schmooze would’ve made Naomi melt. He didn’t.

  “I don’t see that’s got a goddamned thing to do with it.”

  He crushed the hat in his big hands.

  “You son of a bitch, you shouldn’t have snuck into the funeral like that.”

  But he just couldn’t quite work himself up again. He looked up at me with red, dry eyes and said in a much milder voice: “Wish you’d stopped asking about us.”

  He would not talk to me about his children and what they had been like. He would not talk to me about his wife or how she or he felt or how she and he were coping. He would not offer any opinions about the Crawfords, other than how sorry he was for their loss. He said he was sure the police were giving the matter all their attention. He only wanted to say that whatever was being said about Lotty could not possibly be true, that she’d taken care of him and his wife when they were kids, and that if there’d been a way, he knew she would’ve done whatever she could to protect his children. No, he didn’t know where she was either, but if she read what he had to say, he hoped she would know that he didn’t blame her.

  And that’s pretty much how I wrote it. I reported what he had to say and pointed out the things he wouldn’t say, and I described his manner. He looked me in the eye, he talked in a quiet, willfully even voice, and when he was done, he thanked me for my time, told me not to call him ever, and left.

  Naomi called me the next day after the story ran to say she didn’t know how a newspaper could employ someone as biased as me.

  None of my reportage helped Wood much. When I reported that the cops had leads and later that the leads went nowhere, the commissioners called Wood in to find out what was taking so long. Didn’t Sheriff Modine understand, asked the one who was up for re-election that year, watching me all the while to make sure I wrote it down. Didn’t he know that the people of Austin County required swift and sure justice to be safe in their homes? Yes, he understood, Wood said, looking at me as well before he scorched each of the three commissioners with a glare and told them he did not intend to discuss a pending investigation in public, particularly in front of me.

  Late one afternoon, I happened to see Moze come out of the jail in uniform and pull away in a squad. Since every other cop seemed to be angry with me and since I had not seen Moze for days, maybe weeks, I thought I’d follow him, say hello, and maybe pump him for a little information.

  He gave no indication that he knew I was behind him until we were well out of town, maybe a mile from Wood’s farm. He goosed the squad, then yanked it into a power slide so that it came to rest across both lanes of the narrow, gravel road. I nearly T-boned him.

  He flipped on the flashers and came charging out of the car at me like a linebacker, crouched and low. Just as I got out of my car, he spun me around and pushed my head onto the roof of my car and held it there, while he patted me down.

  I was confused, probably a little angry, but it seemed like a situation best approached calmly.

  “Moze,” I said, muffled somewhat by the pressure of my mouth against the foul-tasting, torn vinyl roof. “Moze, you know me. I don’t carry.”

  “Maybe you got a recorder,” he sa
id and gave me a rather rough pat in the crotch, the kind that grazed the scrotum and made me a little nauseous.

  “You know, as a rule, I don’t carry that either.”

  I’d had about enough and tried to straighten up. Moze’s center of gravity is lower than mine and he had a foot hooked around my ankle and probably he was a little pissed about things himself. He kicked my foot out from under me and rode me down to the gravel. He used a very firm grip on my neck to plow a furrow through stones and lime with my face. In the only piece of paper filed after the incident, Moze wrote that I resisted him and he directed me to the ground.

  “Wouldn’t fight him, I were you,” I heard Wood say.

  I was able to turn my head to see that Wood had pulled his squad up close behind my car.

  “He radio you before he battered me?” I asked Wood.

  “Word I had, one of my deputies was being followed closely by a person or persons unknown, thereby endangering his safety. The deputy reported he intended to stop the vehicle and needed backup. Ask anybody with a scanner.”

  “This isn’t your style, Wood. Crandall put you up to this?”

  Wood let that question linger in the chilly early evening air for a moment before he told Moze to let me up. I rolled over and held up a hand to Moze for assistance, but he looked away. I pulled myself up with the door handle and started to brush the lime off my face and clothes.

  “Before I go hog fucking wild, maybe you can give me a reason not to,” I said to Wood.

  “Don’t follow us around. Don’t come to my place,” Wood said.

  “What’s going on at your place?”

  “Nothing. We’re feeding the stock.”

  “Exactly how many people does it take to feed a few cows?”

  I was trying to keep my voice from rising, but it sounded kind of loud.

  “And why is one of them”—I jerked my head at Moze, who was tucking in the tail of uniform shirt—“apparently feeding your cows on county time?”

  “Clay, here’s how it is.” Wood stepped in close and spoke in the quiet, even manner he uses when he’s really pissed. “Follow one of us again, come to my place, you’ll be cuffed and stuffed. Clear?”

  He waited until I nodded before he turned toward his car.

  Moze put it even more succinctly and directly. He poked a sharp index finger deep into the thick flesh above my heart.

  “Stay the fuck away.”

  Dill, the oracle poet, once said that in moments like these a reporter’s curiosity should ring in beauty like a bell choir. At that moment, mine sounded like drunk sailors and drug addicts in withdrawal.

  I knew something I’d done other than reporting had provoked the response, but over the noise in my head I could not then pull it together to figure out what and I certainly did not feel like confronting Wood or Moze again soon to find out. So there I stood, like any other mugging victim, alone and confounded in the middle of nowhere, sucking air and massaging my chest.

  Janelle S. called every few days at random times and random numbers—work, the apartment, my cell—to remind me I’m an asshole. That’s all she’d say. She’d identify herself, call me an asshole, and hang up before I could engage her in small talk. In terms of keeping me clean and sober, it worked nearly as well as a Meeting. But in terms of making me vocationally humble, the calls had no such effect. I knew from reading her stuff she didn’t know any more than I did. I liked to think that was why she called.

  Sure, I’d like to tell you I solved the case, that something I did or wrote broke it wide open, as the old-timers called it. But there’s the Program, and its pesky vow of honesty.

  Instead, think of it as a tort lawyer would. Those guys talk about proximate cause. One act or event leads to another and another and so forth. The proximate cause is the act or event that makes you liable, the one from which you start counting.

  In Lotty’s case, start with a condition, an old man’s plump prostate. The old man sees a car. The car connects to a kid. The kid connects to him. Not that we knew that immediately, of course. Not that we—those of us who were not cops—knew much of anything for what seemed then like much too long.

  The cops caught the boy when he tried to peddle his ass to a church deacon in Orlando. For the deacon, the experience fulfilled every sin-laden fantasy that every preacher had planted in his head since he was dipped. For Jake, it was strictly amateur hour.

  The deacon had slipped away late at night to a Waffle House when he could not sleep. He had a raging sunburn, and he did not want to disturb his wife and four kids, all of whom were snoring off a day’s worth of hanging with the Mouse in the one motel room they could afford after admission and snacks.

  Jake shuffled up to the guy and asked him what he’d pay to have one cranked off. Fearing for his life and perhaps his soul, the deacon fled to his car and called the cops. Call it cynical of me to ask the Orlando cop I talked to if the Waffle House was in a part of town known for red-light work and to wonder aloud if the deacon would have screamed as loud if Jake had been a girl.

  The cops picked the kid up, ran his name through a computer, and called Wood. Wood and McConegal headed south the next day. They spent five days talking to the kid and getting the legal work straight so that they could bring him back.

  Moze disappeared from sight the whole time they were gone. I heard from grumbling colleagues that he was staying at Wood’s place and feeding his livestock, but that didn’t explain why he was not taking his shifts. Still, deputies taking time off usually is not news, so I did not inquire further. I should have, I suppose now.

  Turned out, Jake was trying to scrape together enough money to get into Disney World. I reminded myself that authorities believed the kid had been involved in shooting children not much younger than himself, but when Wood told me that later, after they brought him back, it made me sad. I could not remember the last time I felt sad.

  There is no doubt that we are a sentimental bunch. The clans run too many pictures of orphaned dogs and sick, bald children for it to be otherwise. I like to think that it is merely to cheer thought patterns darkened by inherent and extreme cynicism. I recognize that it may be that we just print what sells, although I try to resist that notion since it is cynical of itself.

  Nevertheless, sometimes a fact gets to me more than it should. Rent or food apparently were low on the list of things Jake was willing to prostitute himself for, but I imagine that when you’re young, stupid, and run low on self-esteem your priorities skew. Or maybe priorities don’t even enter your mind. Maybe you just want to be a kid.

  All those facts but none of those opinions went into the stories I wrote about Jake’s arrest. In the way these things often go, however, much of our readership, the publisher in particular, concluded from the facts that might make Jake seem sympathetic that I might be biased. As a result, the paper, I in particular, caught a fair amount of hell for the coverage, regardless of how objective it may have been.

  Maybe because I felt a little sorry for Jake and maybe because I felt a little singed by the reactions to my work, I was not what you would call receptive when he called, again at home.

  “Do you know who this is?” he said.

  If I had not been angry, I would’ve been surprised. Instead, I said, fairly quickly I might add, with an extra dollop of pride in the evenness of my response: “Nope, you wouldn’t give me a name last time. Remember?”

  The pause. The think-through.

  “I mean,” he said in his soft, even, offhand way, “do you recognize the voice?”

  “You seem agitated,” he said.

  “You seem happy about that.”

  “Do I?” He sounded genuinely surprised before he gave me the pause. “You also seem less, what should I call it, deferential?”

  “Is this, like, group or you call for a reason?”

  “You aren’t going to as
k for my name?”

  “Nope. You want to give it to me, you will.”

  “Ah,” he said, as though he faced yet another choice.

  Since I’d stripped down to my underwear for the evening, during the inevitable pause, I had to scramble around the apartment for a notepad and a pen. The recorder I’d promised the authorities the next time he called didn’t even cross my mind.

  “I hear they arrested a boy,” he said.

  The way he phrased it irked me to the extent that I almost dropped the notepad and pen I’d found and propped on the wide plane of my knee.

  “You don’t know his name?” I said.

  “Well, yes.”

  “What is it?”

  “I usually called him son.”

  “I bet you did.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It gets to what I should have asked you the last time. Why?”

  “Ah,” he said and paused. “I don’t know that I can say.”

  “I bet you can. You’re a thinker. You thought it through a long time ago.”

  “Well,” he said, and I waited for him to hang up, but he didn’t. He just let the cosmos bristle around my head for a while.

  “I cannot feel,” he said at last.

  “What’s that mean? You paralyzed?”

  “Oh, no. Not physically.”

  “You don’t have emotions?”

  I cursed myself in my head for not letting him talk, but he said, “Yes. Yes, exactly.”

  “So?”

  “So, I try things.”

  “You try things.”

  “To see if I can feel.”

  “What kind of things do you try?”

  “I don’t know. The usual.”

  “The usual,” I said, repeating what he said to buy time.

  I’d read a book or two about serial types. If you’re a serious crime reporter, you got to keep up.

  “Hurting things?” I asked.

  “I tried doing good things first.”