by Lee Semsen
“Well. Forgetting for the moment what I said about Dr. Bennings, what makes you inclined to accept Ms. Graham’s word rather than his?”
“I believe she was in a better position to know the truth.”
“Better than Mr. Evans himself? You said he was the source of Dr. Bennings’s explanation.”
“I –” Inch began. “Mrs. Mason, I’d hate to be cross-examined by you in a court of law.”
“I’m merely trying to hold you accountable for your beliefs, Mr. Inch.”
Inch took a deep breath. “All I can say in my defense is that my beliefs are based on years of experience asking questions and listening to answers and trying to separate the true from the false.”
“In other words,” she said, “you’re the expert.”
“That’s what it comes down to,” said Inch.
“All right. I’ll accept that.”
The abrupt reversal flustered Inch for a moment. “I suppose – no. I strongly suspect that Mr. Evans knew what the commission was hiding and that he was forced to resign because of it. If I can find out what that was, it should lead me to his murderer.”
“And you think I might know what that was?”
“I think you might know more about the workings of the commission than I do,” said Inch.
“That would be true of the present commission,” she said.
“But when you first took office,” Inch said, “there must have been unfinished business that you had to take care of, something that the previous incumbents had been working on and were unable to complete.”
She thought about that for ten seconds or so. “If there was, it wasn’t anything that caught my attention, or Mr. Stecklin’s or Mr. Warren’s. The transition was smooth; the former commissioners had completed the budget and most of the commission’s other business before they stepped down. None of them had lost a run for re-election, so there were no hard feelings. We met with them for an afternoon, and to my knowledge, none of us ever consulted them after that. Or saw them, for that matter.”
“Did anything come up later that indicated wrongdoing on their part?” said Inch.
“No,” she said firmly. “That I definitely would remember. Let me step back for a moment, Mr. Inch. I took office – all three of us took office – more than a year and a half after Sheriff Evans resigned. We were all new to the commission, and Mr. Warren and I had never held public office before. Mr. Stecklin had served two years as a state representative, but that’s hardly the same. Even if we’d known what to look for, would we have seen it?”
Inch had to admit that it would have been difficult.
“You interviewed with them, didn’t you?” she went on. “You probably spent more time with them during your interview than we did during our transition meeting. After that, you worked with them for a year and a half. Did you notice anything?”
“No,” said Inch. “You’re right; the question was unfair.”
“It wasn’t unfair, Mr. Inch. Just unanswerable. Perhaps you’re running out of questions.”
“Perhaps I am, Mrs. Mason.”
“Then I have a question for you. Suppose we assume that Mr. Evans knew something that the commissioners didn’t want to be made public. Why would forcing him to resign ensure that he would keep that secret? To my mind, it would do precisely the opposite. It would make him resentful even if he wasn’t a man of a grudging nature.”
“I don’t know the answer to that,” Inch said after a moment, “but I do know another way of asking the same question. If they wanted Mr. Evans to keep quiet, they needed some sort of hold over him. The mere threat of dismissal might have been enough, but they threw that away.”
“So your question is, what else could they have threatened to take from him?”
“Yes. And I have no idea what that was, unless it was his reputation.”
“But could they have accused him without implicating themselves?”
“I don’t see how,” said Inch, “but they must have persuaded him that they could do it.”
“Then in your expert opinion, it was a combination of coercion and persuasion? Pardon me if that sounded sarcastic; it wasn’t meant to.”
“I know it seems farfetched, Mrs. Mason.”
“It also means that the former county commissioners were engaged in a conspiracy of silence. I find that hard to credit. Perhaps that’s why I’m not of much help.”
“I think you’ve helped in spite of yourself, Mrs. Mason.”
“Thank you for being polite. Do you intend to question Mr. Warren and Mr. Stecklin?”
“Do you think I ought to?” said Inch.
“I think you ought to talk to Ann Lamott.”
Inch didn’t recognize the name, and he was trying to think of a way of finding out who she was without betraying his ignorance when Mrs. Mason said, “I’m surprised that you don’t remember her. She was the secretary to the former commissioners. She retired when Mr. Stecklin and Mr. Warren and I took office.”
One of the requirements for graduation when Inch was a high school student was a semester-long class called Civics. Unlike most students, Inch took the class as a sophomore, not a senior, and he had no idea what the class would be about until the semester started. It turned out to be a mix of history and government and politics with – at least the way Mr. Erhard taught it – the greatest emphasis on the latter.
Every day Mr. Erhard brought copies of the two Seattle dailies, the Times and the Post-Intelligencer, to the class, and one of his favorite lessons was to read an excerpt from an editorial column and ask a student to tell him whether the piece was liberal or conservative in its political perspective. Although several of the students – those who had strong opinions about everything, not just politics – enjoyed this exercise, Inch wasn’t one of them. But Mr. Erhard called on every student in the room, not just those who raised their hands at every opportunity, and Inch had to be ready to answer when his turn came. Fortunately, after a few weeks he discovered a shortcut: if Mr. Erhard was reading from the Seattle Times, the point-of-view probably was conservative; if he’d chosen an essay from the Post-Intelligencer, more likely than not it was liberal. Because Mr. Erhard never asked anyone why they thought the quote-of-the-day deserved the label they pinned on it – he took particular delight in explaining that himself – Inch was able to survive most of the semester by noting which of the two papers Mr. Erhard was reading from and making his judgments accordingly. For all of March and April, every answer Inch gave was correct, and Mr. Erhard began to look on him as one of his best students.
Toward the end of May, however, Mr. Erhard began to enlarge the scope of his selections to include articles from newspapers and magazines that Inch had never heard of, and Inch’s final turn came on a day when Mr. Erhard brought in not an entire magazine, but only a clipping somewhat wrinkled with age. The clipping was small, and Mr. Erhard read the entire text. It was about legalizing drugs, and the writer was in favor of it – not merely as an advocate of what later came to be called decriminalization, but of making drugs such as marijuana and cocaine available in supermarkets and convenience stores just like beer and cigarettes. As Mr. Erhard read through the essay, Inch looked around the classroom. Some students were grinning; others looked shocked. Inch, whose father was a policeman, didn’t know what to think.
After he finished reading, Mr. Erhard called on one of the students, a girl whose expression verged on the horrified. She shook her head and refused to answer. Several of the grinning students raised their hands, but Mr. Erhard ignored them. “Miss Lawford prefers not to comment.” He always called students by their last names, the only teacher at the school who did so. “What about you, Mr. Inch?”
Although Mr. Erhard’s Civics class was far from his favorite, Inch attended every day and dutifully read the textbook assignments. He hadn’t paid close attention to Mr. Erhard’s lectures – that was impossible with Pamela Harris and her perfumed hair sitting in front of him – but he’d absorbed enough to
know that there was more to the distinction between liberal and conservative than the morning and afternoon newspapers. And his father sometimes talked about the addicts who slept on the park benches down in Pioneer Square. So he figured the answer was obvious enough. “I’d say that’s a liberal position, sir,” he said in the respectful tone that Mr. Erhard demanded.
But Mr. Erhard’s response was not what Inch had expected. He raised an eyebrow and peered at him and said, “Mr. Inch says this –” he held up the clipping – “was written by a liberal. How many of you agree with him?”
A few students raised their hands, but lowered them almost immediately; something about Mr. Erhard’s eyebrow suggested that Mr. Inch was wrong. Inch saw it, too, but it was too late to take back his answer.
“I’m curious, Mr. Inch,” Mr. Erhard said. “Do you think that drugs are bad for you?”
“I suppose so, sir.”
“Why do you suppose so, Mr. Inch?”
Inch was reluctant to commit himself. “That’s what I’ve heard, sir. And they must be illegal for a reason.”
“‘They must be illegal for a reason’,” Mr. Erhard repeated. “Mr. Inch, suppose Miss Lawford decided to take up smoking marijuana. How would that affect you?”
“I guess I’d worry, sir, that she’d become sick or addicted.”
“Very compassionate of you, Mr. Inch. What if you didn’t know Miss Lawford – had never met her or heard of her? How would her using marijuana affect you then?”
“I guess I wouldn’t worry so much, sir.”
“Remember that you don’t know Miss Lawford. Maybe it wouldn’t affect you at all.”
“Maybe not, sir,” said Inch. “Not personally. But she would be breaking the law.”
“So she would, Mr. Inch. What’s the purpose of the law?”
“To keep people from getting sick or addicted?” Inch couldn’t keep the question out of his voice.
“And therefore, Mr. Inch, that makes it a good law?”
“I think so, sir.”
“I see. Suppose Miss Lawford knows that she may become sick or addicted but chooses to smoke marijuana, anyway. Do you think that the law – let’s call it the government – has the right to tell her she cannot?”
By this time Inch was fervently wishing that he’d paid more attention to Mr. Erhard’s lectures. Then he would have given the correct answer in the first place, and Mr. Erhard would have gone on to explain why the clipping he’d quoted was liberal or conservative or whatever it was, and Inch could have half-listened in anonymity instead of being subjected to endless questions that he couldn’t answer to Mr. Erhard’s satisfaction. This last question…. It seemed that Mr. Erhard wanted him to say that the government doesn’t have the right to tell Susie Lawford that she can’t smoke marijuana, but how could that be the right answer when every other adult, teachers and parents alike, continually said the opposite? “I don’t know, sir,” Inch said finally.
“You don’t know,” Mr. Erhard said. “Mr. Inch, you’re a sophomore, isn’t that so?”
Inch said that it was so.
“Maybe you should have waited until you were a senior to take this class.”
“Maybe I should have, sir.”
“Shall I give you one more chance? If I were to argue that it ought to be illegal to ride a motorcycle without a helmet because we need laws that keep people from making bad choices even if those choices don’t affect anyone but themselves, would I be taking a liberal or a conservative position?” When Inch hesitated, Mr. Erhard added, “Come on, Mr. Inch. A law that prohibits drug use, and a law that mandates motorcycle helmets. What’s the difference?”
Inch could have named several differences, which made the question seem like another trap. Maybe it was – but what could he say that would get him in worse trouble? “You’d be taking a liberal position, sir.”
“Would I?” said Mr. Erhard. “How many of you agree with Mr. Inch?”
Inch didn’t realize he’d been holding his breath until Sarah Landers’s hand went up. Sarah answered every question correctly; the whole class knew it; and soon everyone had raised their hands.
“Perhaps there’s hope for Mr. Inch after all,” Mr. Erhard said, and he used the rest of the hour to explain that true conservatives believe that the rights of the individual are paramount, and that in a truly free society, which the United States was not, although no other nation had ever come as close, but in a truly free society, people ought to be able to do anything they want as long as they don’t interfere with the rights of others.
That hour was burned into Inch’s memory, and it had affected him profoundly: it had made him a lifelong liberal, and it had made him feel stupid.
Elizabeth Mason had been a teacher, too, before she was elected to the county commission. Maybe that was why, after Inch hung up the phone, Mr. Erhard’s lecture had sprung into his mind and for the next half-hour, sat there playing itself over and over. Or maybe it was the question she had asked him: how could the commissioners have been certain that Charles Evans would keep their secret after they’d forced him to resign? It was a question that should have occurred to him, but hadn’t; it was also a question that he should have been able to answer, but couldn’t. He’d quickly seen what her question implied – another question – and he’d been able to articulate that question, so to Mrs. Mason, he probably hadn’t sounded stupid. But he’d felt stupid, and the fact that she’d accepted his “expert opinion” on the matter had only made him feel stupider, because his expert opinion hadn’t deserved that much respect.
Once he’d succeeded in banishing his high-school trauma to the back of his mind, he tried Mrs. Mason’s question on Driscoll, who, after a moment’s reflection, proposed that the commissioners could have been holding someone – Evans’s sister, maybe – as a hostage, and threatening to harm her if Evans revealed their secret. Inch replied that if Charles Evans had had any living relatives ten years ago, he certainly didn’t now, and that he, Inch, had never heard of a hostage situation lasting ten years unless it was a child-custody kidnapping, in which case they would have found some evidence for it, wouldn’t they? Driscoll wasn’t entirely sure about that, but he shrugged and suggested – more plausibly this time – that maybe Charles Evans had had a secret, too, and the commissioners had threatened to reveal his secret if he revealed theirs. Inch countered by pointing out that it still didn’t explain why they’d fired him, and if he’d stumbled onto their secret while he was working on a case, or simply during a routine investigation, why would they force him to resign and take the chance that the next sheriff would discover their secret, too? To that, Driscoll answered, But you didn’t, did you, sir?
Which left Inch wondering not whether he was stupid, but whether it was his stupidity that got him hired.
Chapter 6
On Friday evenings Inch and his friend Esther usually ate dinner together. He thought about calling and cancelling, but it was her turn to cook, and earlier in the week she had promised to make him one of his favorite meals. He left work a little early, thinking that he’d go home and spend an hour on the Friday crossword, and if he could solve it in that time he might not feel like so much of a fool. But after an hour and fifteen minutes he was still facing more than a dozen unsolved clues, as well as the probability that he would be late for dinner if he didn’t leave the house within the next two minutes, and he gave up.
It didn’t take long for Esther to notice that Inch wasn’t “his usual ebullient self” as she put it, although they both knew that even on his best days his mood could hardly be described as ebullient. Inch explained what was troubling him – omitting the problem with the crossword – and after a longer than usual silence, Esther said, “Driscoll may be right, you know.”
“That’s not what I needed to hear, Esther.”
“I mean about the mutual secrets. But you’re so down on yourself that you haven’t thought it through. How long had Charles Evans been gone when you took over as sheriff?”
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br /> “A month and a half,” said Inch.
“Think about it, then. Evans discovers that the commissioners have done something illegal. He tells them that he knows their secret. Would he tell them how he discovered it, too?”
“Probably,” Inch said. “I would have.”
“So what do they do? They dig around and find something about Evans that’s either deeply embarrassing or incriminating or both, and they call him in and tell him that they know something about him that he wouldn’t want anyone else to know. They tell him what it is, of course, and then they fire him, adding that he’d better keep quiet or they’ll make sure that everyone in the county hears his secret, too.”
“That’s just what Driscoll said, Esther. I don’t need to think that through.”
“Then what happens next?” said Esther.
Inch shrugged. “They hire a new sheriff.”
“After how long?”
“Six or seven weeks. I told you that.”
“So you did. And during those six or seven weeks, what are the commissioners doing?”
“Advertising for an interim sheriff. Reading résumés. Interviewing candidates. Looking for one who isn’t as smart as Charles Evans.”
She looked at him with exasperation. “I seriously doubt that Charles Evans was any smarter than you, Abraham, although you’re definitely not at your best tonight. What else would the commissioners have been doing during that time?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “They knew how Evans had discovered what they’d done. They had 40 days and 40 nights to cover it up so the next sheriff wouldn’t discover it, too. Don’t you think they would have made the effort to do that?”
“I suppose they would have,” Inch said.
“And you were not only new to the job, but new to the county. You never met with Evans or his deputy, you never heard why he resigned, and you had no reason to suspect that the commissioners had done anything illegal. In fact, we still don’t have any proof that they did.”
“I should have asked more questions,” Inch said.
