The Watcher (The Lt. Hastings Mysteries)

by Collin Wilcox

  I thanked the clerk, and Darrell and I walked to the small storefront building that had been converted into a sheriff’s substation. Using paste-on gold letters, someone had done a poor job of printing L.C.S.D. on the big plate-glass window. Inside, behind a formica counter, I saw an overweight deputy lolling belly-up in a metal swivel chair. With his right hand, he held a phone to his ear. With the little finger of his left hand he was delicately probing his left ear. As we pushed open the door, the deputy carefully examined the tip of his little finger, then reinserted it in his ear. He nodded once to me, then swiveled his chair until he’d turned his back on me.

  “I’ll tell you, Ced,” he drawled into the phone, “it’s the shits. I mean, I can guarantee you, for sure, that the minute I hang up this phone, it’ll start ringing. I mean the very second. And I can tell you, for sure, what they’ll be saying. ‘A hunter shot my cow,’ they’ll be saying. And ‘There’s some Hell’s Angels dragging the road in front of my place,’ and ‘My snot-nosed kid’s got a fishhook stuck through his finger,’ and on and on and on.” Each imitation was done in an identical nasal twang. Except for its higher pitch, the twang was indistinguishable from the deputy’s normal speaking voice.

  “If you don’t count the Fourth,” the deputy continued, “or Labor Day, or opening day for those goddam hunters, then this is about the worst weekend of the year, because it’s only a week from opening day. And so Hagger goes to a funeral. I mean, Jesus, the funeral isn’t until Tuesday. I know that for a fact. And it’s only two hundred miles from here, where the funeral’s at. So I wish you’d tell me, Ced, why the hell Hagger had to leave today. I mean, I wish you’d tell me.”

  Again examining the tip of his little finger, the deputy listened for a moment, shaking his head and sighing. Now he stroked his large, balding head. His complexion was ginger: a fringe of light reddish hair, a freckled face, a large, wet-lipped mouth. His eyes were a mild, moist blue; his eyebrows were sandy tufted. Even though his tie was loosened, his jowls almost concealed his collar. When I looked at him closely, I realized that he was only in his early thirties. But his heavy, dispirited manner suggested a man in his fifties. He probably weighed three hundred pounds.

  “All right, Ced. Be good, now. See you, boy.” He hung up the phone and took a moment to paw aimlessly through the papers that littered his steel-topped desk. It was, I knew, a ploy. He wanted me to realize that he was a busy man. Finally, sighing deeply, he swiveled to face me.

  “Yessir,” he drawled. “What can we do for you?”

  I’d already decided that I wasn’t going to turn over the cocaine to him—not without a third officer present. So, instead, I simply identified myself and told my story, leaving out the cocaine. I also omitted the intruders’ second visit, and Billy Marsh’s wound. As I talked, the deputy repeatedly shook his head, clicking his teeth, still sighing deeply. He didn’t get up from his chair.

  When I finished, he reached for a pad of paper on the desk, at the same time searching in a drawer for a pencil.

  “These goddam hippies,” he said plaintively. “I tell you, they’re a bigger problem than the goddam hunters and the goddam cycle riders all put together. I imagine it’s the same in San Francisco, eh?”

  “Not really,” I answered shortly.

  “That’s right,” he said, finally finding a pencil. “You got the niggers. Which, thank God, we don’t have. I mean, not really. Fact is, the ones we get here—the niggers—they’re a whole lot better than the goddam white tourists, if you want the truth. There’s others don’t say so, but I do. I’m not predjudiced, see. I go by what people do, not the color of their skins. And I can tell you, the niggers we get here, they’re—”

  His phone rang. Again turning his back to me, he took almost five minutes to copy down the details of a minor traffic accident, and another five minutes to relay the information to the state police, with embellishments. Finally he swiveled to face me.

  “Sorry,” he said. “It’s like I said, this goddam—” His phone rang.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he groaned. “Listen, give me the license number. I’ll give it to the state police. That’s all I can do, anyhow.”

  With the phone ringing incessantly, I explained that I didn’t have a license number, only a description. While he was taking a complaint that apparently involved a fight between a fry cook and a waitress, I left the storefront sheriff’s office, quietly closing the door. The deputy didn’t turn around.

  “He’s sure not much of a policeman,” Darrell said as we got into our car. “And he’s fat as a hog, too.”

  “You’re right.” Staring at the plate-glass window with its badly aligned paste-on letters, I spoke absently. Did I want to drive another forty-five miles to the county seat—ninety miles round trip, possibly to encounter more frustration?

  Should I turn the cocaine over to the State Police? Their nearest barracks, I knew, was in Napa, sixty miles south, toward San Francisco.

  I stared at the glove compartment, where the cocaine was hidden, folded in a roadmap. I could turn the cocaine in when I returned to San Francisco. I’d be breaking the law—but only a little. And aside from that slight risk, I’d lose nothing. It was obvious that I could expect no protection from the Lake County Sheriff’s Department.

  “What’re we going to do?” Darrell asked.

  I pointed to a nearby phone booth. “I’m going to go over there and give the State Police a description of the van and its occupants, and make an official complaint. Then I’m going to phone San Francisco, and tell Lieutenant Friedman to put the pressure on the State Police from his end. I’m also going to request that someone from San Francisco check the emergency hospitals in the area, on the chance that Billy Marsh got treatment. And then”—I pointed to a bait shop, across the street—“we’re going to get some worms, and we’re going to catch enough fish for dinner.”

  Fourteen

  I WATCHED THE BOBBER quiver—dip—suddenly disappear. I jerked the rod, felt a live, thumping underwater weight drag at the line—then nothing. The hook, I knew, was bare.

  “Goddammit,” I muttered.

  “You jerked it too soon,” Darrell whispered. “You got to let him take it first.”

  In an hour, Darrell had caught three fish. I’d caught nothing.

  “Where’d you learn to fish?” I asked.

  “I learned two summers ago, when we went up to Walton Lake. Don taught me.”

  Don—for almost ten years Carolyn’s husband, Darrell’s stepfather.

  She’d divorced me to marry Don. She’d never admitted it. We’d never spoken about it. But I knew. A month before Carolyn told me that she wanted a divorce, I’d watched Carolyn and Don dancing together. We’d been at the country club that Carolyn’s father had helped to found. I’d seen Carolyn’s long, graceful fingers caress the back of his neck. Her fingernails had been painted an iridescent silver. Her eyes had been closed. The band had been playing a slow, sensuous version of “Night Train.”

  “Is Don a good fisherman?” I asked the question quietly, tentatively. I didn’t want to know the answer. But I couldn’t keep myself from asking.

  “Pretty good.” It was a diffident answer. Darrell and I never talked about Don. But my daughter, two years older than Darrell, had once told me that Darrell and Don couldn’t get along.

  Yet Don had taught him to fish. It was a traditional father-and-son exchange, a ritual part of the American pioneer mystique. The father taught the son to hunt and fish and shoot and plow a straight furrow.

  I turned my attention to the bobber, motionless in the water. We were fishing in Cache Creek, the stream that Ann had recommended. Darrell was sitting on the grassy bank. I was sitting on a fallen log, with the shotgun propped beside me. We’d been fishing for more than two hours, mostly in silence. But when we did talk, the conversation had been easy, unforced. We’d spoken very little about the events of last night. After I’d called both Friedman and the State Police, I’d felt reassured—in contact, onc
e more, with the men and machines of law enforcement. Friedman had been amused, hearing that I’d encountered city-style hoodlums the first day of my vacation. The State Police had promised to put a special patrol on Long Valley Road. They’d also given me the location of the nearest phone to Ann’s cabin—it was Virgil Cassiday’s ranch.

  I yawned—and felt an overwhelming need for sleep. Altogether, last night, I hadn’t slept more than a few hours. When we returned to the cabin, I decided, I’d sleep for an hour before dinner. Maybe two hours.

  As I watched the bobber, half hypnotized by the movement of the water, fatigue overtook me with the suddenness of an anesthetic. My right shoulder ached where I’d torn a muscle ripping open the duffle bag. My whole body felt abused. I slid to the ground and used the log as a backrest, letting my eyes close. It was another tableau from American folklore: the father sleeping while the son fished, wide-eyed and alert.

  How many father-and-son rituals had I missed during the last twelve years? I’d never know. On every Sunday of those twelve years, at five o’clock my time, eight o’clock Detroit time, I’d called Claudia and Darrell. Carolyn had always been good about stage-managing the phone calls when the children were very small and had nothing to say. Later, whenever one of the children wasn’t there at eight o’clock, she’d been good at making explanations. And dutifully she’d sent me copies of report cards, and class pictures and programs and, later, prom invitations.

  She’d always been good about the amenities—the “social mucilage,” as she called it. Before we were married, she’d ordered two sizes of personalized stationery for us: notepaper, and full-size sheets, with matching envelopes. The thick, creamy paper had been deeply embossed with our names and the address of the four-bedroom house Carolyn’s father had given us for a wedding present. It had been an imitation Tudor: used brick and stucco trimmed in rough-cut timber and studded with fake spikes. I’d never felt at home in the house. And I’d always resented how much Carolyn’s father had felt at home there. The first time he’d dropped in, unannounced, he’d poured himself a drink and, uninvited, sank down in front of our oversize fireplace with a deep, proprietary sigh. The fireplace, he’d announced, had cost him four thousand dollars over the contractor’s bid. But, he’d continued, it was worth every penny. He’d always wanted an oversize fireplace.

  It was while I was listening to him that I first realized our marriage had probably been a mistake.

  Yet her father had always liked me. Characteristically, he knew exactly why. It was, he said, because I excelled at the same games he’d never been able to play: the hard-contact sports. Uncharacteristically, he volunteered the reason for his failure: he couldn’t bear the thought of getting hurt. He invariably introduced me as his “All-American son-in-law, the Lions’ best-running back.” He’d never accepted the fact that, as long as I’d played for the Lions, I’d never been better than second-string. In the pros, I just couldn’t hit hard enough—and they hit too hard. I flinched. My problem, I’d realized, was essentially the same as my father-in-law’s. We’d both flinched. The difference was that he’d flinched too soon. I’d flinched too late.

  When an operation on my knee finally ended my career, I’d half expected Carolyn’s father to turn his back on me. Instead, he’d immediately given me a job with his company. He still slapped me on the shoulder, still called me his All-American son-in-law. The job was in “P.R.” Translation: I met important clients at the airport, and saw to their comforts and pleasures during their stay in Detroit. Almost invariably, the client’s first request was for a drink. The second was for a girl. So I drank with them, and arranged for their girls. I began to hate the job—and hate myself. And hate Carolyn, and hate her father. I began to hate Detroit, too. The city became a vast, dirty symbol of defeat.

  To ease the ache, I began to drink more than my job required. Within a year, I couldn’t get through the day without liquor. When Carolyn told me she wanted a divorce, I was grateful that she didn’t mention my drinking.

  Privately, I was also grateful that she’d asked for the divorce. It was, I knew, my only chance to escape certain ruin. If I could get out of Detroit—get back to San Francisco, where I was born—I might be able to save myself.

  It had worked—barely worked.

  I spent the first part of the next year fruitlessly looking for a job in San Francisco—and drinking. I spent the last half of the year in the police academy. I graduated to become the oldest rookie in my division. I was secretly ashamed of myself. So I drank. Then, one evening in April, my commanding officer knocked on the door of my apartment. He was there, he said, because we’d known each other since childhood. He’d gotten me into the academy, and finally on the force. Standing in the center of my living room, he gave me a choice: either quit drinking or resign. The speech had taken less than a minute. But it was enough. I quit.

  I’d often wondered whether Carolyn knew she’d done me the favor of my life—that she’d done for me what I’d never have done for myself when she decided divorce was the only way out for us.

  And I wondered whether we’d ever talk about it.

  I opened my eyes. My bobber still floated on the water. Darrell was stretched out on the riverbank, propped on one elbow. His eyes were heavy.

  “Want to call it a day?” I asked.

  He raised one shoulder, shrugging. “In a little while, I guess.”

  “You’ve got more patience than I have.”

  “I caught more fish than you did.”

  “So you’re having more fun. Is that it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Listen”—I sat up straighter, rubbing my eyes—“do you want to stay in Lake County? Considering everything that’s happened?”

  Again, he gave an abbreviated shrug. “I’d just as soon.” He thought about it a moment, staring at his bobber. Then, turning to me, he said, “You don’t think they’ll be back, do you?”

  “No, I don’t. But that’s just a guess.”

  “I don’t think they’ll be back either.”

  “Then you want to stay. Is that it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Maybe tomorrow we can make arrangements to rent a couple of horses for the week. Ann told me about a farmer who lives ten miles up Long Valley from the cabin. He has four riding horses, she said.”

  “For the whole week, you mean? Just for us?” Asking the question, his eyes brightened.

  “We can try.”

  “Hey, that’d be neat.”

  “Have you ever done any horseback riding?”

  “I went with Don once, on a vacation.”

  Don again—canceling out yet another first father-and-son experience.

  On a sudden irresistible impulse, I asked, “How do you and Don get along?”

  Immediately, his eyes were veiled, his expression closed. As he returned his attention to his bobber, he mumbled, “All right, I guess.”

  For a moment, I let silence lengthen between us while I absently massaged my aching shoulder. But then, driven by the memories that had intruded as I lay back against the log with my eyes closed, I found myself saying, “For a long time, whenever I’ve seen you, I’ve thought that—” I hesitated, uncertain how to go on. Then I took a deep breath and began blindly talking, hoping the words would come: “I’ve thought that I should tell you—should try to tell you—why I left Detroit. I—I don’t think I’ve ever told you, have I? Or even tried to.”

  He didn’t answer—didn’t look at me. He swallowed, then the muscles of his face suddenly twitched, as if he’d experienced a brief spasm of pain.

  “When your mother and I—any two people—when they decide to get a divorce,” I said haltingly, “it’s always a fifty-fifty proposition. I mean, it might seem, sometimes, that one person is more to blame than the other. It’s usually one person, for instance, who wants the divorce, even though both people are really at fault. And that’s what happened with your mother and me. She was the one who wanted the divorce. She wanted it for�
�” I broke off. I realized that I was shaking my head in a slow, helpless arc. As I talked, I’d dropped my eyes to the water. Darrell was also staring at the water. One from the other, sitting side by side, we were apart. But now I was committed. I must keep on with it.

  “Your mother wanted the divorce for … her own reasons. I’ve never known—really known—what her reasons were. Maybe she didn’t know, either. I’ve discovered that people usually don’t know why they do things. They always think they know, but they usually don’t. Which doesn’t make what they do wrong …” My throat closed, choking off the rest. I waited until I could safely go on. Then, speaking more slowly: “And your mother wasn’t wrong about the divorce. Because I’d—” Again I broke off, this time searching for the words. “I’d lost my way, and your mother knew it. All my life, I’d played football. Your mother and I got married while I was playing for the Lions. I don’t think, when we got married, that either of us knew who we really were. That might not make much sense to you now—but someday it will, maybe.” I paused, drawing a deep breath. “Anyhow, the only way I could judge myself was by how well I played ball. So, when I couldn’t play any more and your grandfather gave me a job in his factory, I—I came unglued. I didn’t know who I was or where I wanted to go. And I started … to make a fool of myself. At least, it felt like I was making a fool of myself. For one thing, I started drinking too much so that I wouldn’t have to face what was happening to me. And I got angry with your mother. I was really mad at myself. But it was easier to get mad at her …” Again the words stopped. This time, I didn’t bother to clear my throat. Instead, I just stared at the water. I’d said everything I’d wanted to say. It was finished.

  I felt Darrell stirring—heard him clear his own throat. Finally: “Mom always says you were a real good football player. And Grandpa does, too. He’s got pictures of you.”

  “That’s nice of them. I mean it.”