The Sixth Mystery

by Lee Semsen

  “What do you think, sir?” said Driscoll after he’d relayed these findings to his boss.

  “I’m thinking that it might be a waste of time to think about it,” said Inch. “And then again, it might not. It would help if we had copies of Sheriff Evans’s responses.”

  “We do, sir,” said Driscoll. “They’re in storage.”

  “Then the question is whether it would be a waste of time to go through them to find the one we want.”

  “I don’t think so, sir.”

  “Meaning that you’d like to spend a few hours with the dust and the spiders.”

  “With your permission, sir,” said Driscoll. “Unless you have a better plan.”

  “Maybe I do. Or maybe just a different way of wasting time,” said Inch. “A visit to Arthur Simpson.”

  Inch had formed two pictures in his mind, one of how Arthur Simpson’s property would look, and the other of how Simpson himself would look. They were stereotypes, of course, and Inch was well aware of it; nevertheless he was surprised at how far off the mark they were. The house was a typical suburban ranch-style structure with lapped siding and aluminum-frame windows, probably built in the 1960s. The yard, too, was generic for the area, a scant acre that was mostly grass with an assortment of low shrubs by the house and a single locust tree front and center in the lawn. Although there was a fence, it wouldn’t have stopped even a small child; it was just a series of split rails strung on eight-foot centers, hardly more than two feet high.

  The one thing that Inch got right was that Simpson lived alone. He didn’t exactly welcome Inch, but he didn’t try to keep him out, either. After Inch had identified himself and explained why he was there – a process that took several minutes – Simpson took the chain off the door and invited him in. The living room again failed to match Inch’s preconceptions, although if he’d switched stereotypes to “Danish modern circa 1962,” it would have fit perfectly. Simpson noticed him inspecting the furniture and said, “This was my mother’s room. I don’t spend much time here.”

  “It’s like a museum,” said Inch.

  “More of a shrine,” said Simpson. “My mother’s way of preserving her youth.” He started down a hall to their left. “I’m pleased that you’re interested in my thesis.”

  “Your thesis?”

  “My project,” said Simpson. “I’ve begun to think of it as my life’s work, since I’m old enough that it may finish me before I finish it.”

  Simpson, who was bald but smooth-skinned, could have been anywhere from 30 to 60, and Inch wasn’t sure how to respond. “It must be quite an undertaking.”

  “It is,” said Simpson. “At first I thought it would be simple – it should have been; the best theories are the most elegant – but I’ve been working on it for 14 years and it still seems quite complex. So I haven’t found the key yet. Maybe I won’t. But if I lay the groundwork well enough, others can build on what I’ve done, and they will discover the key. And if I’ve played a part, that will be sufficient.”

  Inch had a feeling that he would regret asking the question, but he couldn’t help himself. “What key are you talking about, Mr. Simpson?”

  “The key to human action, Mr. Inch. There are many theories about why people do what they do, but not so many about how they do it. How they make decisions. I don’t mean petty yes-or-no decisions or inconsequential choices such as which brand of cereal to eat for breakfast, but major policy decisions in government bodies and other large organizations. Do you know why juries have 12 members? You’re an officer of the law; you ought to know.”

  “We borrowed that from the English,” Inch said.

  “It’s an ancient magical number. Twelve apostles, 12 months, 12 signs of the zodiac. That’s all it is. Twelve-man juries are too large; seven would be far better. But where it isn’t 12, it’s still an even number, except in Scotland, where it’s 15, which is worse than 12. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “A jury decision has to be unanimous –” Inch began.

  “Which is even more ridiculous. A Supreme Court ruling requires only a simple majority.”

  “But in a criminal case,” said Inch, “someone’s future, maybe even his life may be at stake. If all 12 members aren’t convinced that he’s guilty –”

  “Yes, yes. But there’s little or nothing at stake for the public at large; for the country as a whole. Why do we set the bar so high for juries? A Supreme Court decision, on the other hand, affects the entire nation, and it may be enshrined for generations, perhaps forever. Yet it requires agreement by only five out of nine justices. Why do we allow that?”

  “I’m not sure that we should be comparing criminal proceedings with Supreme Court deliberations,” said Inch.

  “Why not? They both hinge on points of law. Now, why are there nine justices on the Supreme Court?”

  “You need an odd number,” said Inch.

  “Not if we required all nine to reach consensus. Even so, we started with six, and in Lincoln’s time, there were ten. So why nine? Five is generally recognized as the ideal size for a deliberative body.”

  Time to give up, Inch thought. “You know more about it than I do, Mr. Simpson. Regarding the county commission –”

  “Ah, right. That’s what you were inquiring about.” They had been standing in front of a locked door. Simpson took out a key and said, “I have a woman who comes in to clean every week. She does a fine job, but she won’t leave this room alone unless I lock her out of it.” He inserted the key into the lock and opened the door. Evidently there were shutters and curtains over the windows; the room was completely dark, and Inch couldn’t see a thing. Then Simpson flicked on a light, and Inch saw … paper.

  There were stacks of it lining the walls, some over six feet high. In the middle of the room was a desk the size of a ping-pong table that was also covered with papers, although most of the piles were only a few inches high. A desk chair and a standard lamp completed the décor.

  Simpson went over to a stack in the middle of the opposite wall and began removing papers and placing them on the desk. “This is the city-county wall,” he said. “State is on the left and federal on the right.”

  “And here?” said Inch. He had ventured a few feet into the room, and he was looking at a table to the right of the door. The table was just large enough to hold a stack of 8x11 bond, which was about 18 inches high.

  “That’s my manuscript,” said Simpson.

  Inch picked up the top sheet and turned it over. It was filled with single-spaced, typewritten copy that ended in the middle of a sentence.

  “I print it out one page at a time,” said Simpson. “It’s probably two-thirds completed. I envision eight or ten volumes when it’s published.”

  “And the books?” said Inch. There were several dozen heaped against the wall next to the table.

  “My reference library,” said Simpson. “Everything I’ve been able to find on the subject.”

  Inch bent down to read the titles. Most were long and drily descriptive in an academic sort of way, but one caught his eye: Giving an Inch: a Theory of Group Decision-Making. He began to worry it out of its place in the middle of the stack.

  “Please keep them in order,” Simpson said.

  Inch ran his eyes up and down the books. “What order are they in?”

  “Size.”

  Inch scanned the stack again; as far as he could see, all of the books were the same size. Then he realized that they were graded according to thickness; the fattest books were on the bottom – which made sense, he supposed, if you preferred to sort your books into six-foot pillars.

  He was still trying to extract Giving an Inch when Simpson announced that he had located the papers from the Walla Walla County Commission. “An intriguing case,” Simpson said. “Did you know that committees of three are generally the least functional?”

  Inch pushed the book back into place and stood up and said No; he hadn’t known that.

  “What usually happens,” S
impson went on, “is that two of the members team up against the third. The odd man out resents this, of course, and begins to take positions that are increasingly extreme, in which his primary purpose is to oppose the other two instead of seeking balance or compromise. It’s possible for a committee to function in such circumstances, but it rarely makes good decisions. The county commission – the previous one, that is – seems to have been an exception. According to the evidence –” he held up a sheaf of papers – “the commission functioned smoothly without any sign of conflict at all.”

  “Are those the minutes from their meetings?” said Inch.

  “Two years’ worth,” said Simpson. “You’d get more dissension in 15 minutes of C-SPAN.”

  “I can tell you why if you’re interested.”

  “You’re saying that you can tell me now, in a few sentences, what it took me two months and two chapters to explain? I seriously doubt that.”

  “Yesterday I talked with the former secretary to the commission. The meetings were a sham.”

  Simpson eyed him suspiciously. “What do you mean?”

  “Prior to the meetings that were recorded by the secretary, the commissioners met on their own. Any differences of opinion were settled then. Later, when they convened with the secretary present, they were simply going through the motions.” Inch belatedly realized that there was a pun buried in that last phrase, but Simpson didn’t seem to notice.

  “You mean I wasted two months on a fraud?” Simpson was indignant.

  “Not quite,” said Inch. “Don’t you find it interesting that they held the meetings in executive session?”

  That stopped Simpson for a moment. “If what you’ve just told me is true, I can’t see any reason for it,” he said finally.

  “The secretary gave me a reason,” said Inch, “but I’m not sure I believe it.”

  Simpson glared at him. “Are you going to tell me what it was? And why you think she was lying?”

  “I don’t think she was lying,” said Inch. “I just don’t think she was aware of the truth. What she said was that the meetings were made to seem as if they were several hours long, but that the commissioners spent only a fraction of that time on business. I don’t doubt that’s what they did, but I do doubt their purported reason for it, which was to appear to be working for longer hours so as not to raise objections from the public.”

  “That sounds plausible to me,” said Simpson.

  “But why didn’t they simply do their work in the open? It would have been less trouble. They wouldn’t have needed to meet secretly and then meet a second time to make their business official. They could have declaimed and debated in full view of the public, and then no one could have said that they weren’t doing their jobs, or criticized them for conducting too much of their business in executive session. I think they were hiding something, something other than a truncated work schedule.”

  “Then what was it?” said Simpson.

  “I don’t know,” said Inch. “I was hoping that you might have run across it while you were doing your research.”

  Simpson shook his head. “As I told you, I’m concerned with the how, not the why. Or in this instance, the what.”

  “So you didn’t notice anything?” said Inch.

  “No,” said Simpson. “Once in a while they reversed one of their previous decisions, but that was always unanimous, too.” He considered that for several seconds. “I’ll admit I can’t imagine why they’d do that, or why the reversal would be unanimous. But I was juggling several other lines of research while I was studying the county commission. I didn’t have time to think about content, only about process.”

  “What was the issue they changed their minds on?” said Inch. “If you remember.”

  “My memory is excellent,” said Simpson. “I can tell you how many prelates signed each of the 62 decrees passed by the Council of Trent. I can tell you the breakdown of every vote taken by the Imperial Dumas under Nicholas II. But I can’t be bothered to remember what doesn’t concern me, so I can’t tell you what the Council of Trent decreed or the Imperial Dumas voted on.” Simpson drew himself up. “And there’s no reason why I should remember on what grounds, or on what subject, the Walla Walla County Commissioners had second thoughts ten years ago.”

  “It may be important,” Inch said.

  “Not to me,” said Simpson. “But if it’s important to you, I’ll make you a present of it.” He threw the sheaf of papers down on the desk. “Evidently these are useless, and I’d appreciate it if you’d get them out of my sight.”

  The gift was presented with such a lack of grace that Inch felt like refusing it, but he contented himself with omitting the customary “thank you” and moving toward the door. But he couldn’t leave without asking one more question. “A few years ago, Mr. Simpson, you submitted a public records request to my office.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Simpson.

  “I’d like to know why,” said Inch.

  “What did I ask for?”

  “Documents relating to the shooting of a murder suspect.”

  “Accidental?” said Simpson.

  “Deliberate.”

  “You shot the suspect yourself?” said Simpson.

  “No,” said Inch, “but I was present when it happened.”

  “You allowed it to happen?”

  “No. I made an error in judgment.”

  “That would explain it,” said Simpson.

  “Maybe you could explain it to me,” said Inch.

  Simpson gave an elaborate shrug. “I collect bad decisions.”

  “But this was a decision by an individual, not a group,” said Inch.

  “I didn’t know that when I read about it. If I had, I wouldn’t have made the request.”

  “You read about it in the paper?” said Inch.

  “Or I may have seen it on television. What does it matter?”

  A good question; Inch knew it didn’t matter. But something – perhaps Simpson’s cavalier attitude toward what had been one of the worst moments in Inch’s career as sheriff – made him want to press on. “So in this case you were more interested in the outcome than the process.”

  “Not so,” said Simpson. “If I hadn’t known the outcome, I wouldn’t have known it was a bad decision. What was important to me was how that decision was arrived at. Once I found out that the decision had been yours alone, I was no longer interested, and I forgot about it.”

  Inch thought about answering that he wished he could forget about it, too, but he said nothing.

  “You might keep in mind,” Simpson went on, “that the majority of bad decisions are made by people acting alone without the advice of others.”

  “I’ll remember that,” Inch said. “I suppose it applies to all of us, doesn’t it, Mr. Simpson.”

  Chapter 9

  Inch could not recall ever encountering anything as tedious and banal as the minutes of the decade-old executive sessions of the county commissioners. Arthur Simpson had given him two years’ worth, including the final 16 months of Charles Evans’s tenure as sheriff and the first six months of Inch’s. Inch and Driscoll had split the chore down the middle, Inch taking year one and Driscoll year two. After two hours they’d traded and spent another two hours checking each other’s findings. Then they’d pooled the results, which included what seemed at first an odd coincidence: a man who was party to one of the commissioners’ reversals, William Cooper, was also the subject of one of the public records requests directed at Charles Evans.

  “I wonder if Arthur Simpson noticed the connection,” said Driscoll.

  “I doubt it,” said Inch. “Although he claims to have an excellent memory for what interests him, he has none at all for what doesn’t.”

  “Nobody would ever remember this drivel if that’s how it worked,” said Driscoll.

  “And if you wanted to hide something, that would be an advantage,” said Inch. “Assuming you were clever enough to do it.”


  “The commissioners didn’t strike me as particularly clever, sir.”

  “Oh?” Inch said absently. He was reviewing the notes he’d made about the three occasions on which the commissioners had upended their previous votes. In the first instance, they had denied Charles Evans’s request for $10,000 to install electronic locks in the county jail, only to reverse themselves a week later after two prisoners walked away unnoticed in the middle of the night. A few months after that, an epidemic of whooping cough had hit the county, and the commission had been forced to restore a $5,000 line item for vaccines they’d eliminated from the Health Department budget. The third reversal had been the decision to purchase a tract of land west of town that William Cooper had offered to sell to the county, and the commission had refused to buy, a year earlier.

  “In fact,” Driscoll went on, “they struck me as just the opposite.”

  “You mean losing those prisoners because they wouldn’t upgrade the locks on the jail cells?” said Inch. “That was definitely a mistake.”

  “I was thinking of the land they bought from William Cooper. The county could have gotten it for half the amount a year earlier.”

  “The commissioners couldn’t have known that the price would go up that much,” said Inch.

  “You don’t think so, sir? They bought the land for a visitors’ center. Who decided to put it there?”

  “I suppose they had to approve it at some point.”

  “They did,” said Driscoll. “Six months earlier. Then, by the time they got around to confirming the purchase, they had to pay an extra $50,000.”

  “You’re right,” said Inch, more to placate Driscoll than for any other reason. “That wasn’t very smart.”

  “And,” Driscoll went on, “if they’d bought the rest of the land that Cooper was offering, think what they could have sold it for. Since then a hotel, a restaurant, and a theme park have been built on that property. The county could have made millions, but the profit went to Cooper instead.”

  Inch didn’t respond; he was thinking that he’d wandered into another cul-de-sac, and wondering if he could find a way out by moving forward, or if he’d have to go back and retrace his steps instead. “Driscoll,” he said after a while, “you said that the commission didn’t buy the entire property that Cooper was selling?”