The World's Finest Mystery...

by Ed Gorman

  "Won't talk?"

  "Larry was never the sharpest knife in the drawer, even before. Now, anyone in a uniform talks to him, even hello-how's-the-weather, he just stares through you, like he doesn't see you. Calls up here every now and then, though."

  "Calls up? Why?"

  "To remind us his boy is dead and it's our fault."

  "Christ."

  Ben shrugged. "It's hardest on Richie. Larry knows when it's him on the phone."

  "What does he say? Richie?"

  "Nothing. Rule is, don't talk, put Larry through to me. I just tell him I'm sorry. What else can I do?"

  "God, Ben."

  Ben looked into his coffee.

  I asked, "You think he could have seen something?"

  "He lives up there. Spends a lot of time on the beach, just sitting. Watching, I guess."

  "And he might talk to me?"

  "The state offered to send someone, but to Larry, a cop's a cop."

  I looked beyond Main Street to the cliffs and the sea. "Who found him?" I asked.

  "Frankie? We got a call. Man, wouldn't give his name, said there was a kid in the water at Gray's Cove. Richie and me were there in three minutes, pulled him out. Like I said, seemed he might live. Richie broke down and cried when he died."

  Ben got up, looked at something out the window. He drank his coffee. I didn't ask him what he'd done when Frankie died.

  "You get anything off the nine-one-one tape?"

  "No. Could be just some tourist, doesn't want to screw up his vacation by getting involved." He turned, sat heavily again in the sheriff's chair. "I got nothing, Smith. But I'll tell you what I got: I got a guy who did this before, and if I can't stop him, he'll do it again, some other kid, some other time." He looked out the window again, to the street, the shore, the sea. "And I got a town, they find out who this guy is, someone's going to go out there and take care of the problem himself."

  "They don't know?"

  "I been hearing whispers around town lately, but I think no one knows for sure. I told my guys, keep it quiet."

  "Why?"

  "We got some hotheads out here. I guess I was more afraid of what they might do than what he might do. I thought…" He looked at me. I recognized the look in his eyes; I'd seen it in the mirror more than once. "It's a quiet town, Smith. It's been quiet, all these years."

  To that I didn't say anything. What came to mind was, It's not your fault, but Ben didn't need that from me.

  "What can I do?" I asked.

  "I can't get a search warrant. I can't get anything. I need something, Smith."

  "You want me to get you something that connects Hurst to the kid?"

  He nodded. "And soon."

  "How?"

  "Drink with him. Break into his place. Hold a gun to his head. I don't care."

  "You're kidding."

  "You know me better. Shit, if I could do it myself, I would. If I could send Richie, one of the other guys, I would. But anything like that, we do it, it fucks up any case we make." He sighed. "And shit, Smith, I'm the law around here. Some of these kids" —he gestured to the door, to the rest of the building beyond the sheriff's private office— "they have enough trouble finding the line. It can't be me pushes them over it."

  I shifted my eyes to the window, looked over Ben's town myself. "Talking to your guy Crandall's one thing. Hurst, if I break into his place or beat the crap out of him, what I get may not be admissible."

  "You bring me something, I'll find a way to make it admissible. Don't doubt it."

  I didn't.

  "If I get caught?"

  Ben grinned, for the first time. "By who? Me? Richie? One of my other guys? 'Gave us the slip, Your Honor. Don't know who he was, but he was slick. Must have been some big-city dude.' "

  "But he left behind this silver bullet."

  Ben's face grew quiet, calm like the surface of a night sea. "Bring me that bullet, Smith. Bring me that."

  Ben gave me his incident report to look over, and Richie's. He handed me a photo of Frankie Rogers, a yellow-haired, shy-faced kid. He showed me a picture of Larry Crandall, and Bob Hurst's mug shot, gave me directions to Hurst's place at the far side of the county and to the place he worked. I gave Ben my cell phone number, and what reassurance I could. On the way back through the outer office I stopped to talk to Richie.

  "I understand you were the first on the scene when Frankie Rogers died," I said to him.

  "Yes, sir," Richie answered. His eager smile faded. His eyes looked at something I couldn't see. "Me and the sheriff."

  "Can you tell me what happened?"

  "I gave him CPR." Still looking away, swallowing. "I did everything you're supposed to do. I thought he'd be okay."

  "I'm sure you did. What I want to know, did you see anyone else, anything odd, anything that sticks in your mind?"

  "No, sir. Just Frankie… in the water… it's all in my report."

  "Nothing you thought was maybe too dumb, too meaningless to put in the report, to tell the sheriff about?"

  "No, sir." He looked up at me, suddenly. "Was there— did I miss something? Should I have done something else?"

  "No," I said.

  Richie nodded, unconvinced. There was nothing else I could say to him; I turned to go.

  "The other time," I heard, and turned back to see him looking away again, speaking softly and not to me, "I was just a kid the other time. I'm a cop now, I've been trained, I should've been able…"

  "No," I said again.

  He raised his head, as though surprised to find himself not alone. Our eyes met, Richie waiting to hear what I had to say. But there was nothing. Christ, Smith, I thought. You really have something to tell this kid about being a hero?

  I couldn't help him. I turned and left.

  * * *

  I drove out first to the repair shop on Route 3, Hurst's job. His shift ran until six; I just wanted a look at him, make sure he hadn't left early. A picture's one thing, but when you're going to break into a guy's house you want to size him up, if you can.

  I stopped the car at the park where kids played softball. I sat and looked across the street, at the repair yard. Half a dozen guys were hard at work there, erasing the scars of things that had happened. The yard rang with the pounding of metal on metal. A circular saw screamed its way through a steel sheet. I spotted Hurst, a big guy, brown hair, a little thick in the waist. His jaw set, he gripped a wrench in both hands, fought with a bolt that wouldn't budge. The wrench slipped. Hurst's knuckles scraped, drawing blood. He shook the pain out, set the wrench on the bolt again. Sweat ran down his face; his T-shirt was black-streaked and damp.

  I watched, then drove away. Hurst, nothing in his world right then but the solid refusal of the rusted bolt, never saw me.

  It took me forty-five minutes to get out to the place Hurst lived, a squat wood cabin on the landlocked side of the county. The neighbors on each side were far enough and the scrubby trees between big enough that I figured I was okay. I parked off the road about fifty yards beyond Hurst's driveway; he wouldn't see the car, coming home after work, if I was still there. I made my way back to the house and around it: the back door's always a better bet than the front, hidden, usually a weaker lock. I went to work, for ten minutes moving nothing but my fingers, concentrating as hard on the thin steel picks as he had on the five-pound wrench clenched in his fists. The lock finally gave. I wondered if the rusted bolt had.

  The cabin wasn't much, and there wasn't much there. Old shabby furniture, battered pots and pans. The back door opened into the kitchen, and the kitchen, with a change of flooring, became the living room; a bedroom, shades still pulled, was off beyond the living room to the left, bathroom beyond that, and no more.

  I moved through the place, opening closets and drawers. It was clean enough but with a stale, closed-up air: people up here left their windows wide in heat like this, home or not, but Hurst's were closed and locked. In prison nothing you have is your own. Some guys, when they get out, build
a fortress.

  The magazines and books weren't hard to find, just hard to look through: kids, doing things they would never get over. Like anyone else, people who went in for this had preferences and favorites. Hurst's was young boys, not infants, not teens: around eight years old, and blond. I wondered, briefly, what Hurst had looked like when he was eight.

  I went through the stack and left them in the bottom of the bedroom closet where I'd found them. I dumped the trash can looking for mailing wrappers. Possession of this stuff was legal, but getting it through the mail wasn't. If I could show Hurst had done that it would be a parole violation, and Ben could pick him up.

  But the trash held nothing. I did the rest of the place, hope fading with the lowering sun. No photos, no kid's clothing, no letters, no diary. If Ben had been able to get a search warrant it would have gotten him nowhere.

  All right. I put a cigarette in my mouth but didn't light it, stood in the middle of the floor, looking around. This had been an unlikely route to a payoff, but it had to be tried. There were a couple of other things I could do. One was talk to Hurst, but for that I needed to sound convincing. I let myself out the back door. A breeze rustled branches. I stood for a moment, letting it brush across my face, breathing air that was moving, that had come from somewhere clean.

  I drove to the shore. Near Gray's Cove I parked on the shoulder of the road. Small stones rolled down the path under my feet as I worked my way to the water. The sun was almost gone from the land by now and the sea was in darkness.

  A small sand beach curved like a new moon, backing onto the cliff I'd come down. Where it narrowed to nothing, waves crashed on piles of boulders, jetties stretching away into the water. I walked along the beach just beyond the reach of the lapping waves, smelling the salt, feeling the spray, listening to the roar, the murmur, the roar again, of the endless sea.

  The towering cliff was black now, and I stopped to look, to learn its contours. I took the measure of the beach, estimated the jetties. I listened to the waves and counted their rhythm. I was going to lie to Hurst, and I was going to be good.

  I reached the boulders that marked the end of the beach. For a while I stood and looked out over the sea. The lights of boats on the surface of the water gleamed through a thin mist that, above me, hid the stars. I turned and started to walk back, heading along the beach to the rocks at the other end.

  I got near and realized I wasn't alone. A figure sat on the rocks, arms wrapped around knees, unmoving in the blowing spray.

  My feet slipped along the wet stones as I climbed to where he was. I came to stand next to him and he turned, then turned his face back to the sea.

  "Larry Crandall?" I asked. I raised my voice above the crashing of the surf.

  He didn't look at me this time. He took a while to answer, and when he did it was only to say, "Be careful how you step."

  "I'm Bill Smith," I told him. I squatted beside him on the rocks. He didn't move; it was as if I wasn't there. I looked where he was looking, watched the waves rear back, break over the rocks.

  "Someone should do something," I said. "When it's a kid, someone should do something."

  Waves rolled in and broke, slipped out again. White foam flew, briefly airborne, but could not keep the height. It fell and was taken back by the sea.

  Crandall finally spoke. "No one will."

  "I will, if I can."

  "They say they want to." He wasn't speaking to me now, but to the sea, or to the past. "Sorry, Larry, we tried. They say."

  "I'm not them."

  "Another chance. It was the same." He turned his head to me, his eyes and voice suddenly full of the ferocity of the waves. "He should have saved my boy. Ah, but he's only a kid himself, Ben says. He did what he could. And Frankie? He's a man now. What about Frankie?"

  At first I didn't understand. A man now? A shift of the wind covered us in salt spray. Then I thought: Richie, Ben's deputy. He didn't save Crandall's son, and he and Ben didn't save Frankie. Crandall's eyes blazed; then all the fury faded, like a wild surf subsiding. He turned back to the water.

  Carefully, I asked, "Did you see Frankie here, that day?"

  In a voice as dull as fog, he said, "Frankie rode his bike on the cliff."

  "That day?"

  Crandall shrugged. "Frankie rode his bike on the cliff."

  "Did you see anyone with him?"

  "No one will help."

  "Was anyone with Frankie?" Calm, Smith, I told myself, stay with the rhythm of the sea.

  Crandall answered, "I don't know him."

  I kept my voice even. "Who?"

  "They had ice cream cones. But I don't know him."

  "Would you recognize him?"

  Crandall turned his head from the crashing surf to stare at the black cliff rising like a stone wave above us. "There," he said. Then, "No."

  I scanned the cliff top. It was far, and in late afternoon the sun would have been behind anyone up there. And Larry Crandall's word might not be good for much, in court. But someone had been with Frankie Rogers at Gray's Cove that day.

  "I'm going to do something," I said. "About Frankie."

  Crandall looked at me as though what I'd said meant nothing, was in a language he didn't speak and didn't care about. His face was flat and dull, but tear tracks glistened on it like the water left behind by a pulling tide.

  I straightened, standing over him now. "Thank you."

  He didn't answer. I turned and left, picking my way along the boulders to the beach, careful how I stepped.

  * * *

  I drove back to Hurst's place, working out what I would say, the lies most likely to work. By the time I got there the darkness was complete, lying heavily on the cabin and the spindly trees. The cabin's windows were dark and no car was parked nearby. I hadn't locked the back door when I left and I let myself in it now. In the closet with the magazines, earlier, I'd spotted Hurst's Winchester; it was empty when I found it, but a half dozen shell boxes were piled on the closet floor. I broke it open, loaded it, and, setting it across my lap, sat down in the dark to wait.

  I don't know how long the wait was; it was however long it takes to smoke three cigarettes, and to let the need between them build up hard. I don't know what I thought about, either, in the heat, in the dark, in that closed-up house, but I was ready when headlights swung into the driveway and a moment later a car door slammed.

  When Hurst switched on the light inside the front door I was still in the chair, facing him squarely, the rifle raised. The bag he held dropped to the floor in a thud.

  "Close it, Bob," I said.

  "What—"

  "Close the door."

  I moved the rifle. He closed the door.

  "Who the hell are you?" His voice was ragged. Fear widened his eyes.

  "I want to talk to you."

  "Get out," he tried, because he had to, though the game was obviously mine.

  "Frankie Rogers," I said. "The little boy you raped and killed up at Gray's Cove."

  Hurst flinched. "I never saw that kid. Who the hell are you?"

  "State police," I said. "Out of uniform, but that doesn't mean I won't shoot you. I was out of uniform the night you killed Frankie Rogers, too."

  "I never saw that kid."

  "Bullshit."

  "What kind of—?"

  "I saw you."

  Hurst stood, mouth half open. He took a step toward me.

  "No," I said, moving the rifle again.

  He stopped. I could smell the cup of coffee that had smashed on the floor in the bag he'd dropped. Other things had been in there, too, eggs, milk. A pool grew slowly at Hurst's feet, reaching toward me.

  "You saw me what?" Hurst said. "What the hell does that mean?"

  "With the kid. Up on the cliff, late afternoon. You bought him ice cream. That where you raped him, Bob?"

  His faced reddened. Good; it was that word. I used it again. "After you raped him you killed him, right? So he wouldn't tell. So he wouldn't tell anyone you're a m
onster."

  "It wasn't like that!" he shouted. Eyes wide, he stopped, clamping his mouth shut.

  I waited. Then, "It wasn't like what?" I asked softly. Hurst said nothing, jaw clenched, eyes blazing.

  "I know it wasn't, Bob." I kept my voice low, gentle. "That's why I'm here."