by Lee Semsen
Inch turned to Gregory Luke, who was still wearing the same smile. After a moment, Luke said, “Thank you, Sheriff Inch. I am sure we will not disappoint you. Now, for those of you who are new to ceremonies of this nature, you do not need to raise your hand or ask for permission to speak. Simply begin speaking, and the rest of us will listen.”
There was a brief silence and then a voice – vaguely accented; Inch thought he recognized it as Serge Tamiroff’s – said, “I would like to offer a few words about Charlie Evans. But first, may I ask Sheriff Inch if he has found, or is close to finding, the person who was responsible for Charlie’s death?”
Inch looked at Luke, who said, “Ordinarily that would not be part of this conversation, but there may be others here who would like to know the answer to that question if Mr. Inch would care to respond to it.”
Inch’s throat was dry again. “I wish I could say otherwise,” he began, “but no. I have not discovered who killed Mr. Evans, nor do I expect that I will find out soon. To answer the question that Mr. Tamiroff did not ask, nothing I have learned so far leads me to believe that the person responsible is an employee of this casino.” Inch stopped. “I hope I didn’t put that too bluntly,” he added.
“No one should ever apologize for speaking plainly, Mr. Inch,” said Luke. “I encourage everyone here to do the same. Mr. Tamiroff, do you wish to say anything else?”
“Yes, sir. When my mother and my sister and I first came to this country, we lived next door to Mr. Evans. I was ten years old. My father was in prison in Chechnya and it was a difficult time for my family. I did some things I shouldn’t have done. When I was 14, I tried to steal a pair of shoes from the Bi-Mart, and I was caught and went to juvenile court. The judge was going to send me to a detention center in Yakima, but Sheriff Evans talked to him and asked him to put me on probation for a year and said he would be responsible for me and make sure I did nothing wrong. He did this even though he hardly knew me. I never stole anything again, and I wouldn’t have this job if Mr. Evans hadn’t talked to Mr. Little Crow and told him I would make a good security officer. So I owe him a lot.” Tamiroff stopped for a few seconds. “And I hope Mr. Inch catches the man who killed him.” He stopped again, and this time he seemed to be finished. After half a minute or so, Inch began to feel that he ought to fill the silence. “So do I, Mr. Tamiroff,” he said.
There were sounds of agreement, and then a man sitting across from Inch spoke up in a loud voice. “Some of you know that in the past I’ve had a problem with addiction.” The speaker was a man about 40 with short, dark hair. “Charlie Evans knew it, and he made me a bargain: if I ever missed work because of my problem, he would take my shift for me. If you think that makes Charlie sound like an enabler, you’re wrong, because he wasn’t just covering for me. It was more complicated than that. If I missed work because I needed to go to rehab or to an AA meeting, he’d give me the money he earned from my shift. If I missed work because I was sick from drinking, he’d keep the money unless I went to detox, and then he’d keep half. I’ve been sober now for three years and 10 months and 16 days. Last night my wife told me that Charlie never kept any of the money he earned when he worked my shift. He gave it to her instead. We always had enough for what we needed – nothing extra; we don’t get paid enough for that – and I thought it was because my wife was good with money. She is, but Charlie Evans was good with it, too.”
Another voice, a woman’s, picked up the thread immediately. “When my son had meningitis, Charlie took up a collection to send him to Seattle so he could get the best treatment. He raised thousands of dollars; I don’t know how much because he arranged to have the bills sent to him. I don’t know how much of his own money he contributed, either, because he wouldn’t tell me. But my son was in the hospital for three weeks, and we’d still be paying for it if it hadn’t been for Charlie.”
Then another voice, younger: “He did the same thing when my baby wouldn’t eat and his pediatrician couldn’t figure out what was wrong. We went to five other doctors and to hospitals in Pendleton and Yakima and Spokane. We never would have been able to pay those bills on our own.”
A few more stories similar to those, and then the emphasis changed: Charlie was kind, Charlie was always a gentleman, Charlie always walked them to their cars if it was dark when their shifts ended. The cashiers, the dealers, the floor managers, the money counters, even the other security personnel felt safer when Charlie was on duty. He was always calm; he always knew what to do. Nothing bad ever happened when Charlie was around.
By the end of the morning, Inch was feeling distinctly inferior, as if he not only failed to measure up to the standard of the office he held, but that he barely deserved to live. He wished that someone would commit a breach of etiquette and speak ill of the dead, a wish that made him feel even worse. Further dispiriting was the gradual realization that nobody would say anything that would bring him closer to finding Charles Evans’s murderer so he could redeem himself to the meager extent that might be possible.
At about quarter to twelve, there was a longer-than-usual silence; apparently everybody had spoken who wished to speak, and people began to look at one another and shift in their seats as if they sensed it was time to leave. Inch expected Luke to announce that the ceremony was over, but he let the silence continue as if he knew there was something else that needed to be said. Finally an old man, someone Inch hadn’t noticed until then, began to speak, hesitantly at first and then with increasing confidence.
“We’ve heard a lot of good things about Charlie Evans this morning. In fact, we’ve heard nothing but good things. Maybe that’s because there are no bad things to hear. I don’t doubt it, because I worked with Charlie for ten years and I never saw him do anything that was unkind or disrespectful or selfish or dishonest, the way most of us do at one time or another whether we intend to or not. We’re all human. Charlie was human, too, although to listen to us talk this morning you’d think he was a saint. I wonder if Charlie would want to be remembered as a saint. I know I wouldn’t, not that there’s much chance of it.” The speaker paused for a moment. “I’m wandering. What I mean to say is that Charlie would want to be remembered for the man he was, not just the man we’ve made him out to be. Charlie was a complicated man just like the rest of us. Some men say they’re simple men. I don’t believe it. There’s no such thing as a simple man. And there sure as hell ain’t no such thing as a simple woman…. I’m wandering again. Mr. Luke, you said at the beginning of this that you hoped to know Charlie Evans better when we were done. Do you?”
Luke waited several seconds before answering, perhaps unsure whether the question was rhetorical. “No, I don’t, Denny.”
“Neither do I,” said Denny. “I’ll bet the sheriff doesn’t know him any better, either. None of us do. Now I’m not saying we ought to spend another four hours chipping away at the flaws in Charlie’s character, telling stories about how he drank that soda we left in the break room or picked up that five-dollar bill off the floor and put it in his pocket instead of giving it to the cashier. I don’t know any stories like that, and I’ll bet nobody else does, either. But I do know a story about Charlie Evans that makes him more of a man, a man like the rest of us. It doesn’t make him less of a good man. In fact, it makes him more of a good man because it shows that he had it in him to do the wrong thing, the bad thing, and he chose not to do it. You can’t be a good man if you never have to make any choices. So unless someone objects, I’ll tell my story, because I think Charlie would like to be remembered for it.
“Maybe I shouldn’t call it a story. It doesn’t have a beginning because I didn’t see it – I got there after it started – and it doesn’t have an ending, either, unless something happened later and I missed it. But I don’t think anything did, or if it did, we’re all wrong about Charlie. Anyway, all I saw was the middle. So it’s not a real story, but I’ll try to tell it like one, the way Mr. Luke would.
“This happened five, maybe six month
s ago. I was just coming on shift, and Charlie was just coming off. It was a Tuesday or maybe a Wednesday morning, and it was kind of quiet because two of the buses had broken down. We had one busload of pissed-off old men and women sitting on the shoulder of I-84 near Emigrant Springs, and another blocking the passing lane on Highway 11 just the other side of Athena. Anyone else remember that day? I’ll bet the mechanics do.
“So there wasn’t hardly anyone around, at the tables or the slots, and I was just doing a first walk-through when I saw Charlie standing over by the wall by the penny slots. I was going to go say hello when I noticed there was a man with him, a customer. I started to walk away, and then the man said something, I don’t know what, and Charlie said in this voice I’d never heard him use before, ‘So you saw me and all of a sudden your conscience was bothering you.’ The man nodded and swallowed; I could actually see his Adam’s apple bob up and down. Charlie was already red, but he got redder, and the veins stood out on his neck. He said, ‘Your conscience never bothered you before now?’ The man shook his head, but that wasn’t the right answer because Charlie reached up and put a hand on the man’s neck and pushed his head against the wall. He looked like he wanted to say something but he couldn’t; all he could do was make choking sounds, and Charlie finally took his hand away. But his expression didn’t change; he looked like he was only an inch away from doing this guy some serious bodily harm. He said, ‘You made a fool out of me and liars out of everyone else, and if you think you’re doing me a favor by coming to me now, you’re not only a coward and a snake; you’re a fool, too. The only favor you can do for me is to get out of my sight.’ So this guy slid away and stretched his neck and straightened his collar, and then turned around and left.
“Charlie just stood there watching him go. For a second it seemed like he might go after him, but he didn’t. He had a look on his face that I’d never seen before on him – or on anyone else, either. He was angry, so angry he could barely hold it in, but he was also sad. More sad than angry, because he didn’t try to hold the sadness in; I saw him wipe his cheek with the back of his hand.
“Then he turned and saw me. You know how people say that someone looks like they’ve seen a ghost? At that moment, Charlie looked like he was a ghost. But he pulled himself together and nodded at me. He’d made a choice. He was going to be the Charlie we all knew.
“Not the Charlie who nearly killed a man.”
After the meeting, Inch spent 15 minutes questioning Dennis Mack, but with little to show for it. The man whom Charles Evans had grabbed by the neck hadn’t spoken loud enough for Mack to hear him, and Mack had no idea what the confrontation had been about. He’d asked Charlie about it later, but all Charlie had said was that it was about something that happened a long time ago, and that he shouldn’t have gotten so upset, and that he was disappointed in himself and would have to guard his actions more carefully in the future. When Mack had asked him who the man was, Charlie had told him that he was a complete stranger; that he’d never seen him before and didn’t know his name. Mack hadn’t believed that, but he could see that Charlie didn’t want to talk about it, and he figured he ought to respect his wishes. He’d never mentioned the incident to anyone until today.
Had Mack ever seen the man after that? No, he said, and he would have remembered if he had. Of course he could have seen him any number of times before he and Charlie had argued; there was nothing about the man that made him particularly noticeable: light brown hair, clean-shaven, average height and weight. About 35 years old, give or take. Dressed in Levi’s and a brown sports jacket.
Inch asked Mack to call him immediately if he ever saw the man again, and Mack said he would, and he’d detain the man until Inch got there.
What had been a strong suspicion that the key to Evans’s murder would be found in the past now seemed a near certainty. Gregory Luke had said that Inch had three mysteries: who killed Charles Evans, who killed Emily Reed, and why did Evans resign? – but now it seemed there were only two, and the solution to Evans’s murder would be obvious once he solved the others – although which of them would provide the key, he didn’t know. It was still possible that Jody Graham was wrong and all three were wrapped together; that Evans had been forced to resign because he’d interfered in the investigation of the hit-and-run that had killed Emily Reed, and ten years later he’d been killed because he’d finally learned something about the case that his killer wanted to remain secret. But Jody Graham had known Evans too well and worked with him too closely to be wrong about something as important as that. If Evans had been killed to keep a secret, the secret was connected with the county commission.
Chapter 5
It would be an exaggeration to say that Inch had any friends among the current county commissioners. The chair, a man named Richard Stecklin, typically voted against Inch’s budget requests, although he justified it by saying that it wasn’t a vote against the sheriff’s office, but a vote for the many other interests and departments that the commission had to serve. Apportioning the budget – unless the commission could raise revenue, which usually meant raising taxes, which would get them voted out of office – was a zero-sum game, and if, in Mr. Stecklin’s estimation, the courthouse needed an espresso machine more than Driscoll needed a new camera, then the sheriff’s department was out of luck. The other male member of the commission, Christopher Warren, pretended to be more sympathetic, but Inch’s private opinion was that Warren resented Stecklin’s imperious and condescending manner, and that he voted against Stecklin if he could find a reason for doing so and construe that reason in such a way that made Stecklin look petty and him look generous.
Perhaps because she was a woman, the third commissioner, Elizabeth Mason, felt no need to compete with Stecklin, and that, combined with an objectivity and fair-mindedness that the others lacked, made her the most competent of the three. She was also the least predictable; she never seemed to have any personal stake in the positions she took and the votes she cast. Although she frequently favored Inch’s department, it was only, she’d told him more than once, when she could see the obvious benefit to the county if his requests were honored. But, she added, if he asked for too much or if he spent what the commission awarded him unwisely or unnecessarily, she would have no hesitation – indeed, no recourse – but to allocate the money elsewhere. She told him this with no animus; just the simple conviction that to decide on any other basis would be a violation of her principles and a breach of the public trust.
She was the only one of the three whom Inch had voted for in the last election.
And although she and Inch weren’t exactly friends, they were on good terms, terms that were based not on affection but on mutual respect. And when Inch had a question about the workings of the commission or about a decision it had made, she was the one he called.
Which was what he did as soon as he returned from Pendleton.
The county commission rarely met, or did any sort of business at all if Richard Stecklin could help it, on Fridays. Even so, Elizabeth Mason was in her office, and she answered the telephone as she always did by saying “Mrs. Mason.” Her husband, Inch knew, had been dead for 15 years.
Inch identified himself and asked her how she was; she replied that she was fine and hoped he was the same, and without waiting for a confirmation, she asked, “What can I do for you, sheriff?”
“I expect you’ve heard that Charles Evans was killed,” Inch said.
“That he was murdered. Yes, of course. You’re investigating, I assume?”
“I am,” said Inch. “One of the lines of investigation leads back to his dismissal by the commission ten years ago.”
“I remember that,” she said. “I wasn’t a member of the commission at the time, however.”
“I know,” said Inch. “I’m not saying that you or Mr. Stecklin or Mr. Warren had anything to do with it.”
“What are you saying, then?”
“That his murder is connected with the reason he was
forced to resign.”
“May I ask what makes you think so?” said Mrs. Mason.
“There’s nothing about his life since then that suggests why he might have been killed.”
“There’s nothing about most peoples’ lives that would justify death by violence, Mr. Inch.”
“Maybe so,” said Inch, “but I’m looking for an explanation, not a justification.”
“And you think that the explanation might be found in the acts of the former commissioners. That your predecessor was murdered by one of my predecessors.”
“Not literally,” said Inch. “You know that the commission made the decision to dismiss Mr. Evans and forced his dismissal while meeting in executive session.”
“There’s nothing unusual about that, Mr. Inch. Decisions regarding personnel issues are usually made in camera.”
“Yes,” said Inch, “but at the time, the commission was making all of its decisions in secret. And Mr. Evans told a friend of his that he was forced out over a jurisdictional dispute, which was an outright lie.”
“Who was this friend, Mr. Inch?”
“John Bennings.”
“Humph. If you’re depending on Dr. Bennings for your information, you should get a second opinion.”
“I did,” said Inch. “Evans’s former deputy is certain that Bennings was wrong.”
“Then what, according to the ex-deputy, is the correct answer?”
“She said she didn’t know.”
“The former deputy is a woman?”
“Yes,” said Inch. “Her name is Jody Graham.”
