Pellam grinned back.
"Name's Tom Sherman." They shook hands.
"Guess you know me," Pellam said.
"Yessir, I do."
"You're back in town now," Pellam pointed out. "I heard you were away."
"Some personal business. How you feeling, sir, after your little accident?"
"Stiff is all."
"Wanted to let you know, we probably wouldn't be inclined to cite Mrs Torrens for anything. Unless you were thinking of filing a complaint…"
Pellam was shaking his head. "No. She's taken care of the medical bills. I'm not looking to make a profit."
"Well, I think that's fair, sir. You don't see much of that. I was reading in TIME about people suing people over all sorts of things. This woman-I saw this on TV-Sixty Minutes maybe, I don't recall. This woman, what she did was she opened this package of cereal and there was a dead mouse inside and she sued the company and got, I don't know, a half million dollars. She didn't eat it or anything. She just looked at it. She said she had dreams about mice for a year. That a crock, or what?"
"Uh-huh. Say, Sheriff, there's something I wanted to talk to you about."
"What's that?"
"I saw the car my friend was in."
"Your friend? Oh, right-the car got itself blowed up."
"There were two bullet holes in it."
"Bullet holes?" Not one strand of lean muscle in his cheek changed position. "I doubt that, sir."
"I've hunted since I was twelve," Pellam said.
"We went over it real careful and we didn't find any sign of nothing a'tall."
"Two," Pellam said, "by the gas tank."
His face still didn't budge. "Oh, you mean, in the back. Those the holes in the back about three, four feet apart?"
Pellam said, "Believe they were."
The sheriff nodded. "Firemen."
"What?"
"When they got there, the car was still on fire and the trunk was closed. They used this pike, I don't exactly know what it is, a big rod kind of thing with a hook on it to pop the trunk. They do that with a burning car. Open it up as much as they can. They got a lot of good equipment. Always using the Jaws of Life to cut people out of wrecks."
"Oh."
"Where'd you happen to run across this car, sir?"
"Saw it out by the highway. At the junkyard a mile outside of town."
The sheriff looked down at his feet, shoes expertly polished with more Vaseline. "Uh, one of the things I was looking for you for-I wanted to mention: it might not be such a good idea, you doing what you're doing here."
Pellam said, "What would that be?"
"You know, I get the feeling that you don't like the fact your friend got himself killed doing drugs and you're trying to show something else happened."
"Investigation was pretty fast."
"Pardon?"
"The coroner's inquest, your investigation. All happened pretty fast."
The impassive, sunglass-less face nodding slowly. "Maybe you'd be used to city police work. We don't have a thousand homicides a year in Cleary, sir. We get a crime, or an accident, and we take care of it quick."
"I appreciate that. But I doubt my friend was doing drugs…"
"Mr Pellam, we don't have an evidence room, like you see on TV, you know. But we have this file cabinet and sitting inside it right now is a foil package with what must be a couple ounces of hashish. Now, I-"
"But-"
"Let me finish, sir. I was in Nam. I've done some smoking in my day. And I should add I've got no axe to grind with movie people or with you or your friend. We found the dope, we found a lighter, we found a brush fire. You yourself can see where the evidence points."
"I've never heard of a car getting blown up because somebody was smoking nearby."
"Well, you think about that Negro comedian a few years ago, set himself on fire."
"Marty wouldn't be freebasing coke in a state park at noon." A faint smile.
"Oh? Then when would he be?"
Pellam leaned forward. He spotted a cautious flicker in the sheriff's eyes. "Listen, Sheriff, let me line it up for you. And you tell me what you think, okay? My camper's vandalized with threatening messages. Then my friend dies in a pretty curious way. And in forty-eight hours the place where it happened is dug over, the car gets sold to a junkyard and the man who rented the car to him goes off to Miami."
"Clearwater. Fred Sillman goes to Clearwater every year."
"I don't honestly give a shit what his leisure schedule is. My friend didn't die the way everybody keeps saying he did. And if you aren't going to find out what happened I am. Simple as that."
"We did our job, sir. We found some facts about your friend that weren't so nice. I'm sorry about him and I'm sorry about your job but there's nothing to be gained by you staying in Cleary."
"You telling me to leave town?"
"Of course not. You're free to visit, to sight-see, hell, you can even buy yourself a house here-I understand you know a local real estate broker pretty good-all I'm saying is, you're not free to be a policeman. And if you start troubling people I'm going to have to get involved."
"Your concerns've been noted." Pellam tried to imitate the smile. It didn't work too well. He had better luck with: "Have a good day, sir."
Wexell Ambler was going to visit his lover.
He walked out of his house-supposedly on his way to a meeting-and strode toward his big Cadillac, parked in the U-shaped driveway. He was looking forward to sitting with her in the Jacuzzi in the glass-enclosed deck of his house in nearby Claverack, New York, from which they could watch the Catskill Mountains in the distance-now a stunning wash of color. He could look forward to enjoying fresh coffee and tasting some of her cooking.
Thinking about making slow love in the hot tub or in the large Shaker bed he'd bought for her because she'd mentioned that she liked the simple lines. She was a strange woman. He often compared the two of them, his ex-wife and his mistress.
And tried to decide what were the differences and what were the similarities. They both were attractive, dressed well, knew how to carry on a conversation at the country club. His wife was more intelligent but she was also less imaginative; she had no spark, no humor. She let him get away with anything. His lover challenged him (perhaps, he now reflected, this made him feel younger. Uncertainty was a quality brought out by one of the first girls he'd been in love with).
He'd just gotten into the Caddie when his housekeeper ran to the door and signaled to him with a wave.
"It's Mark," she called. "Says it's urgent."
Ambler said, "Have him call on the car phone."
He backed the car out of the driveway and waved to her affectionately once more.
Waiting for the call. He was thinking less about what the beefy young man would have to say and more about the woman he was on his way to see.
Ambler was a religious man (on the executive committee of the First Presbyterian Church), and although he understood that Calvinistic predestination did not absolve him from choosing the right path, the moral path, nonetheless the religion instilled in him a tendency toward helplessness on those moral questions the answers to which he did not like. He tended to throw his hands up and follow his instinct.
So although he knew what he was doing was immoral, he felt an addiction to his mistress, and could more or less successfully conclude that he had no control over the matter.
He packaged the infidelity carefully, though. For instance, he never thought of the word "cheating," which gave the whole matter a blue-collar taint. And he always thought of his paramour as a mistress or lover, rather than girlfriend or "the woman he was seeing on the side." (Dignity was important to Wex Ambler.) He never risked embarrassing his lover just to satisfy his own passion and went to crazy lengths to keep the affair secret.
The one problem, though-one he hadn't counted on-was that he'd fallen completely in love with the woman.
Ambler, who was fifty-two, was not so old that
he had forgotten love makes people stupid-and in his philosophy, as well as his profession, stupidity was the number-one sin. He had guarded against love but unlike religion and unlike money and unlike power, love had a mind of its own.
It had nabbed him, but good.
At his insistence, their get-togethers had become more and more frequent. And he now felt his center giving, falling further toward her. He was growing hungrier, even desperate-while she seemed increasingly aloof.
Was there anything more foolish than a middle-aged man in love? And was there anyone who could care less about that foolishness?
Ambler smelled leaf dust and warm air from the Caddie's heater and wished he were already at the cabin.
The phone buzzed. The noise always disturbed him; it reminded him of the alarm a hospital monitor would make when a patient went into cardiac arrest. He snatched up the light receiver.
"Yes."
"I talked to Tom," Mark said.
"Yes. And?"
"The guy's turning into some kind of private eye."
Ambler concentrated on driving. The roads were narrow and wound in tricky meanderings past horse and dairy farms. He had a tendency to wander onto the shoulder if he didn't think about his driving. He asked Mark, "What do you mean?"
There was a pause and he heard Mark spit. A young man chewing tobacco-it was stupid. Maybe he did it to darken his moustache. Mark continued. "He's been asking a lot of questions about his friend and the car. He was down to R &W."
"The junkyard."
"Right. Looking at the wreck of the car."
Ambler felt the car bobble as the right front tire dipped noisily off the asphalt. "Damn." He forced the car back onto the road, overcompensating. It slipped over the broken yellow line before he got it steady again.
Mark asked, "What should we do? I was thinking maybe we could offer him some money. You know, bribe him to leave."
"Then he'd think I had something to do with the accident."
"Not necessarily." When Ambler didn't answer, Mark said, "But maybe."
Ambler said, "I've got an idea. I don't want to talk about it on the phone. Come see me."
"Now?"
"I'll be busy for a while. I'll call you."
They hung up, and it took Ambler the rest of the drive to the cabin to shake off his concern at Mark's news. In fact, it wasn't until he turned into the leaf-packed driveway and saw his lover's car sitting obliquely in the turnaround of the cabin that his spirits lifted. He climbed out of the Caddie, eager and buoyant as a seventeen-year-old en route to a homecoming date.
10
The Cleary Volunteer Fire Department had a long history of proud firefighting and a photo gallery to prove it.
Dozens of faded pictures of hand-pump, horsedrawn wagons, even a few of bucket brigades, were scattered on the walls of the tiny office-as if the company had had a Matthew Brady protégé on staff to record every major fire before, after and including the big one of 1912. The firemen seemed to have been arranged by the photographer and Pellam wondered if they'd actually stopped working momentarily, smoothed their pushbroom or handlebar mustaches and posed for the leisurely exposures.
"Afternoon," said the man sitting at the desk, rocking back in a metal chair. He was in his early thirties, wearing a black T-shirt over good muscles, blue jeans, a New York Mets cap.
"How you doing?"
"Not bad."
Silence.
Pellam looked through a glass window at a big, yellow Seagrave fire truck. "Got some nice equipment there."
"Town don't scrimp, I'll say that."
"You all volunteer, huh?"
"Yep. There's pay for one man on duty to take calls twenty-four hours."
"He must get pretty tired."
The man snagged the joke right away and fired back with, "But makes a hell of a lot of overtime."
Pellam said, "I'm the one with the movie company."
"I know."
"You mind if I ask you a few questions?"
"Nosir."
"You on duty when that car blew up? The one in the park?"
"That your friend's car?"
Pellam said, "That's right."
"I answered that call, yessir. All of us did."
"You tell me what happened?"
"You mean what caused it?"
"Whatever you can tell me."
The man said, "There was most of it in the coroner's report."
"This isn't official or anything like that. I'm just curious. He was a good friend."
"Yessir, I understand." The fireman squinted up at the spotless, red-enameled tin ceiling. "I recall the back end of the car was burning pretty good when we got there. Somebody'd driven past and called it in."
"You know who?"
"Nope. I think it was a call from a pay phone. Anonymous."
"You showed up and then what happened?"
"No hydrants, course, so we had to use the tank on the truck to get things cooled off enough to get close to your friend. Then half the crew started on the brush fire with extinguishers and shovels. That was about it. We got the body away from the wreck and finally got the fire out. He died right away. It was pretty quick."
"The gas tank had blown up?"
"Yessir."
"You opened the trunk?"
"We popped it open, that's right."
"How do you do that?"
"Usually, we just pop out the cylinder, then reach in and flip the release bar. But the steel'd been pushed outward, so what we did was whack it a couple times with a pike. That jarred the bar and popped it open."
"Why'd you open the trunk?"
"The sheriff wanted us to. To see what was inside. Anyway, it's standard procedure. In case there's cans of gas or oil. Also, your spare'll burn for hours you don't douse it good."
"You find anything interesting?"
"Sir?"
"You said the sheriff wanted to look inside."
"I don't know. I was at the hood."
"You have one of those pikes handy?"
He wasn't yet uncomfortable under this questioning but he was growing warier. "They're mounted on the truck, sir. We're not really supposed to let civilians into the house, you know."
Pellam nodded. He looked at the truck through a greasy window. The pikes looked blunt and heavy. It didn't seem they'd leave holes as small as the ones he'd seen in the car.
"What're they made out of?"
"Steel of course."
"One last question. Why was the area dozed over?"
"Sheriff ordered it. Somebody called him up and told him to, I heard. I don't know why."
"You don't know who called, do you?"
"Sure don't."
Pellam thanked him then said, "Aren't you going to ask me?"
"Ask you what, sir?"
"Whether we're going to be making a movie here?"
The man shrugged. "Don't make a lick of difference to me, sir. I work in feed and grain, not movies."
At noon, Meg Torrens walked out the door of the Dutchess County Realty office, set the hands of the Be Back At clock at 1:15. She looked around the square. Pellam's Winnebago camper was parked opposite. She looked up and down the street, then crossed over and circled the camper. Taking in the tan and brown paint, the battered fenders, the mud stains, the chips in the windshield.
What the hell was she doing here?
Going shopping on my lunch hour, that's all.
And when was the last time, my dear, you bought anything in one of these rip-off antique stores? Three, four years ago, wasn't it?
She imagined herself in one of the campers, on location. She imagined what it was like to be in a movie. The modeling she'd done had been pure effort-exhausting. And she'd been treated like a dim-witted cocker spaniel. Making a movie would have to be different, she believed.
She caressed the metal skin of the camper. Noticed the faint remains of some graffiti on the side. It looked like two crosses.
Meg slung her leather bag over her shou
lder and strolled up and down the street, looking at sights she'd walked past for years and never noticed. A cornerstone dated in late September, 1929-could that have been Black Thursday? A painted wooden barrel on the side-walk emblazoned with the number 58 in red paint. One building was topped with a weathervane in the shape of a whale-why here, a hundred fifty miles from the ocean? Another was decorated with a beautiful round stained-glass window.
Meg was gazing into the window of Steptoe Antiques when she heard slow footsteps. A voice asked her, "Could use seconds on the brownies."
Meg turned, looking blank at first, the way she'd rehearsed in case this happened. She said, "Should've eaten them while you had the chance, cowboy."
Pellam stepped next to her to look at what she was examining. "How're the driving lessons coming?"
"'Bout the same as your photo classes."
Meg pointed to a tattered rug hanging on the wall in the window. "See that? Price tag looks like it says sixty. Wrong, that's six hundred. They'll sell it for that too."
"What's that supposed to be on there, a dog?"
Meg looked at it closely. "Could be. Maybe a cat. I don't know."
"Dinner was nice," he said. "I enjoyed it."
She lifted an eyebrow. "I did too." She'd chosen the pronoun carefully.
"Your house is beautiful. That was the first dinner I'd had in a house, I mean a real house, in over a year."
"No kidding," she said, though she wasn't surprised. "Sam's done nothing but talk about you. You better make good on that promise."
Pellam said, "The practice bombs. I haven't forgotten."
They walked past another real estate office. Pellam looked at some of the listings.
Meg's voice dropped a half octave. "I've got some wonderful properties, Mr Pellam. Owner financing is available…"
They laughed.
Eyes were on them. Cars slowed as they passed. Meg thought, Go to hell. But the defiance was shaky. She felt vulnerable, like the time she found herself at a Florida resort wearing a new bikini that turned out to be more see-through than she was comfortable with. As she did then she now crossed her arms over her chest.
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