by Crider, Bill
"So I guess you do want to talk to me," Napier went on. "I guess you want to explain just what the hell anybody would want with those books and why they had red stains all over 'em in the first place. And maybe you want to tell me how in the hell you got your nose broken."
"I think that about covers it," Burns said.
"It damn well better. I was gonna have you brought in, anyway, so I guess you can tell me and save the trouble."
Napier sounded a little disappointed to Burns, as if he had been looking forward to having Burns brought to the station. In cuffs, no doubt.
"So you want me to meet you at the police station?" Burns said.
"Hell no. If I go down there, I'll never get away. I'll have to read reports and sign 'em and listen to people bitch about one thing after another and God knows what all. This is supposed to be my day off."
"I'd think Saturday would be a big day for the police," Burns said.
"Look, Burns, I don't tell you how to teach Alfred, Lord Neuman—"
"Lord Tennyson."
"Whoever the hell. And you don't tell me how to run the police department."
"I wasn't trying to tell you—"
"I know what you wasn't trying to do. Anyhow, I'm not going down there till tonight. Saturday night is the busy time. Not during the day."
"I see. So do you want to come here?"
"Hell, no, I don't want to come there. Didn't I tell you this is my day off? I got things to do around the house. You come here."
"Come there?"
"For an English teacher you have a pretty tough time with the King's English," Napier said. "Or maybe you just have a hearing problem."
"No, I heard you all right. You said for me to come there."
"You got it."
"Where is 'there'?" Burns asked.
Napier gave him the address. "You had lunch yet?"
As a matter of fact, Burns had not. It was the middle of the afternoon, but the events of the day had somehow pushed the thought of food from his consciousness.
"Me neither," Napier said. "Bring something when you come."
Burns was so surprised that for a second he couldn't think of anything to say. "What would you like?" he finally managed.
"Whatever. Just make it snappy." Napier hung up.
Burns stood and looked at the phone for a while. Then he got a move on. When Napier said make it snappy, he probably meant it.
Burns stopped by the Taco Bell drive-in window and picked up a bag of soft tacos, three for him and three for Napier. Then he located the address Napier had given him, which was right on the eastern edge of Pecan City, near the end of its main east/west street. The houses in that area were not new, and they were spread out, some of them sitting on two or three lots, with more acreage in the rear. More than one of them had a small barn in back, and Burns could see a horse in one of the barns.
Napier's house was set back from the road and surrounded by live oak trees that shaded the lawn of St. Augustine grass. The lawn was neatly clipped and still quite green, a neat trick in Pecan City, where the annual rainfall did not contribute much to the upkeep of a lawn. It was obvious that Napier's lawn had been carefully watered and fertilized, not to mention tenderly cared for.
Why that should have been a surprise, Burns wasn't quite sure, but it was. Not as big a surprise as being told to come to the house was, however. Burns wondered if maybe Napier had developed a liking for him.
He parked his car in the semicircular drive and got out. The house was small, probably two bedrooms, but like the yard it had been well taken care of.
On the door there was a brass knocker shaped like a cowboy boot. Burns banged the toe of the boot into the brass plate and waited.
Napier opened the door. He was wearing jeans and boots, and a white shirt that had small paint stains all over it—red, green, yellow, blue, black, gray. He was holding an artist's paint brush in his right hand. There was an odor of something in the air.
Turpentine? Burns wondered, standing in the doorway with the Taco Bell bag in his hand.
"Come on in, Burns," Napier said. "You look like hell with that bandage around your nose. What you got in the sack?"
"Soft tacos," Burns said, still trying to take in the sight of Napier with an artist's brush in his hand.
"Well don't just stand there till they get cold. Let's go back in the kitchen."
Burns followed the police chief through a short hall into a small den. They turned right into the kitchen/dining area, which was actually a part of the den.
That was when Burns got an even bigger surprise.
The table was set off in a small nook and partially covered with newspapers. On top of the newspapers were hundreds of tiny figures and numerous little bottles of paint. There were more brushes, too, like the one Napier had in his hand.
"Sit down, sit down," Napier said, taking the bag from Burns. "There's room. Just move the papers out of the way."
Burns sat in a wooden chair and looked at the figures on the table.
"Battle of Little Big Horn," Napier said. "Or it will be when I get 'em all painted."
Burns marveled at the detail of the tiny figures of cavalrymen and Indians, at the details of their dress, at the weapons they were carrying, at the poses they were striking. He marveled even more at the fine job Napier was doing with the painting. He was taking lifeless lumps of lead and making them into miniature works of art.
Napier sat in the chair opposite Burns, opened the bag, and looked inside. "You didn't bring any drinks," he said accusingly.
"I, uh, I forgot," Burns said, still looking at the figures. For some reason he found himself thinking of a student who had been in one of his classes many years before. The boy had seemed utterly hopeless. He could not spell his own name the same way twice, had no idea of the structure of an English sentence, and could no more organize a paper than he could circumnavigate the globe in an inner tube.
Burns had tried to get through to the boy, but it had been impossible. The boy just didn't seem to care, and Burns had finally given up, letting him drift along to take his failing grades with what appeared to be a complete lack of concern or desire to learn.
If anyone had asked him, Burns would have said the boy was hopeless, someone who should never have come to college in the first place and someone who certainly would never amount to anything, ever.
Then Burns had gone to a student art show. Walking around the room, he was struck by a group of paintings on one wall, paintings that at first looked like conventional portraits but which upon closer inspection showed a clarity of vision that even their subjects probably would never have suspected the artist possessed. Though he could never have said how it was done, Burns saw that the paintings revealed their subjects' personalities as clearly as anything Burns had ever seen. Looking at them, he felt as if he were looking right into the subjects' secret hearts. The effect was devastating.
And naturally they had been painted by the hopeless boy, whose barely legible signature Burns could make out in their lower right-hand corners.
Napier set a Pepsi in a twelve-ounce non-returnable bottle in front of Burns and sat back down. Burns had not even noticed that Napier had gotten up.
"You've done a really nice job on those soldiers," Burns said.
"I like to do it," Napier said around a mouthful of taco. "Relaxes me. I got a lot of stuff like that. Now tell me about those books."
Burns told him, but Napier wasn't satisfied.
"I know all that already. There must be more to it than that, or you wouldn't have wanted to talk to me." Napier took another taco from the bag and started in on it.
"Well, I was thinking that whoever defaced the books might be the same one who killed Street," Burns said.
"Defaced. You English teachers sure do talk good. But I'd already thought about that. What's more to the point is, why deface the books in the first place?"
Burns had an answer for that. He'd thought about it while he was waiting in the E
mergency Room. "To show contempt for Street. If someone really wrote letters saying that Street wasn't the author of his own books, it must be someone who really hates the man."
"That reporter from Big D told me all about that letter, but he didn't show it to me." Napier rattled the bag as he brought out another taco. "You got any ideas about who wrote it?"
"None at all," Burns admitted, sipping the Pepsi.
"You just might be wasting my time, Burns," Napier said. "Why did whoever it was come back after the books, then?"
"Fingerprints," Burns said. He'd thought about that one.
"Jesus," Napier said. "You guys who read books are all alike. Do you know how likely it really is that we'd get a usable print off a book?"
"No," Burns said.
"Damn small, especially after you and Miss Scanner—"
"Tanner."
"—had put your own fingers all over it. And who knows who else besides. It'd been sitting on a library shelf, for God sake."
"If I didn't think about that, maybe the thief didn't think about it," Burns said.
Napier chewed thoughtfully. "You could be right. If he didn't think about fingerprints in the first place and wear gloves."
"We wouldn't be dealing with a professional," Burns said.
"I wish you hadn't said that," Napier told him.
"Said what?" Burns asked.
"'We," Napier said, going for another taco.
Chapter 9
On Monday, Burns got to his office early, as usual. He climbed the three flights of stairs with his usual alacrity, but he did not do anything about preparing the lecture for his first class. Instead, he sat in the chair at his desk and thought about his visit to Napier.
One thing that really aggravated Burns was that the police chief had eaten every single one of the tacos. All Burns got was the Pepsi.
And what had surprised Burns most was not the lead soldiers that Napier had been painting but what the chief had shown him just before Burns left: a whole room, intended by the builder as a small living room, devoted to miniature figures that filled the shelves on all four walls. There were Indians, farmers, cowboys, sports figures, Vikings, knights, bullfighters, spacemen, police, sailors, soldiers, and even a few dragons, all of them handpainted by Napier. And on the floor were models of the Alamo, Fort Apache, and the Roy Rogers Ranch.
"I got a set of Lincoln Logs, too," Napier said. "Still in the original box."
It wasn't that Burns didn't like Napier, it was simply that he liked thinking of him as Boss Napier, the man who relaxed by going into the forest with a bullwhip to subdue grizzly bears single-handedly. Thinking of him as someone who liked to paint tiny figures of spacemen and collect model toy sets three or four decades old made the man seem too human somehow.
And Napier was certainly human. As Burns was leaving, he said, "That Miss Tanager, she's single, right?"
"I believe she is," Burns said. "Why?"
"She's a good-looking woman, is all," Napier said, and Burns left him there in his paint-stained shirt. Hadn't Miss Tanner even said that Napier was a "nice man"? It didn't bear thinking about.
On the positive side, Burns had learned a good deal about the questioning of the people in attendance at the seminar.
"Most of 'em are in the clear," Napier said. "They've all got alibis, except for the president, and the president of the school wouldn't kill anybody, would he?"
They had a good laugh over that one, and Burns never did get around to mentioning who had been the last person to check Street's books out of the library.
"I told 'em they could all go back where they came from," Napier said. "But that Dunkum, he's stayin' in town. This'll be big in all the papers, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a few of those TV folks in town."
Burns hadn't thought of that, but it just might turn out so that Miller got his national publicity. Somehow, Burns didn't think President Miller would be happy about it, however.
"Could Street have been killed by someone who just came to town, did the job, and left?" Burns asked.
"You talkin' about a professional hit?" Napier said. "No way."
"Well, he did write a book about the Bay of Pigs."
"I read it," Napier said, surprising Burns again. "I don't think he gave away any national secrets. I don't think the CIA sent out a hit man after him, not this many years after the book was published."
"Who do you think did it, then?"
"I don't know," Napier said. "You tell me."
Burns had no more idea than the chief did, but it seemed that Napier was almost asking him to get involved now, after having spent a lot of time and words warning him off. He said as much.
"You can take it any way you want to, Burns. But if you get in any trouble, it's your own look-out."
Burns had known that all along.
Burns got through his early class and went immediately to the History lounge to see how Tomlin and Fox had fared in the questioning. To his surprise, there was no one there.
He went to Fox's office, threading his way among the students who were changing classes. They were laughing and talking, exchanging friendly jibes and telling jokes, altogether a good bit more lively and cheerful than they had been only minutes before in the classroom.
Burns's two friends were standing in the doorway of the office, talking. Today Fox had on a pair of pants with green and white windowpane checks, a striped shirt, and a paisley tie that was about five inches wide.
Fox saw Burns headed toward them. "It's an outrage!" he said loudly, ignoring the curious glances of the students. "It's an absolute outrage. We're professional people. We don't have to put up with this kind of thing."
"What kind of thing?" Burns said when he reached them. "Did Boss Napier pistol-whip you?"
"Huh?" Fox said, a puzzled look on his face. "What are you talking about?"
"The same thing you are. About getting questioned by the police on Saturday."
"Oh," Fox said. "That. I'm not talking about that."
"It's worse than that," Tomlin said. "A lot worse."
"What, then?" Burns said. Most of the students had gone on by, finding their way to their next classrooms.
"We'll show you," Tomlin said, marching off in the direction of the History lounge. Fox fell in behind him, and Burns trailed along after them.
When they got there, Fox stepped in front of Tomlin and opened the door with a dramatic flourish. Burns looked inside.
"See?" Tomlin said.
The room looked the same as it had the last time Burns had been inside it, the same old table and chairs, the same cheesy shade on the light, the same ashtray on the table.
"I don't see anything," Burns said.
"On the wall," Fox told him. "Look on the wall."
The walls of the History lounge were nothing to brag about, being nothing but bare boards. There was no wallpaper, not even any sheetrock, to cover them.
There was, however, a small sign attached to the back wall, a sign that had not been there the previous Friday. It was made of black plastic and had white letters pressed into it. It said:
NO SMOKING
PUBLIC AREA
Fox was really fuming now. "Can you believe that? 'Public area,' my fat rump! When's the last time you ever saw any of the public in this place?"
"The public would probably be embarrassed to be caught dead in there, to tell the truth," Tomlin said.
"Who put the sign up?" Burns said.
Neither of the other men had thought about that, so Burns suggested that they ask Rose.
They found her in a storeroom located underneath the first floor stairs. The storeroom was small, and Rose took up most of it, since she was built something along the lines of a pro wrestler—a male pro wrestler—with powerful sloping shoulders and thick, muscular arms. She was smoking a cigarette.
"Rose," Burns said, "do you know anything about the sign in the History lounge?"
"Sho do," Rose said, blowing a thin stream of smoke out her nostrils,
a skill Burns had often admired. When he had been a smoker, he had tried it once or twice. It burned his nose so much that he gave it up.
"Who put it there, then?" Fox demanded.
"I did," Rose said. "Mr. Fairly, he tole me to do it."
"Who told him to do it?" Fox asked.
"I didn' ax him that," Rose said. "He the boss, I jus' do what he say." She took another puff of her cigarette.
"He didn't tell you to put a sign in this room?" Tomlin asked.
Rose laughed. "He know better than that."
"I bet he does," Fox said. "All right, Rose. Thanks for telling us."
"Sho," Rose said.
The three men trooped glumly back upstairs to the lounge and sat around the table. Fox took out a pack of Cost Cutters and put it on the table. Then he began twirling it around.
"I thought you were never going to smoke those things," Burns said. "Didn't you tell me once that you thought the package was tacky?"
"Maybe," Fox said. "They're cheap though, and since the tax went up again, cheap is what I'm looking for, not style."
Burns tried to avoid looking at Fox's garage-sale clothes, but he couldn't help it. Tomlin was looking, too, and when he caught Burns's eye it was all they could do not to laugh.
"I bet it was Dorinda Edgely," Fox said. "She's the one who got them to put up that sign."
"Why would she do that?" Burns asked. He had been doing very well without smoking, but he found that the sign made him want to light up and to keep on lighting up. He hadn't wanted a cigarette in days, hadn't even really thought about one, but the damned sign was working on him. In reverse.
"She's poked her head in here once or twice," Fox said. "And she saw you two smoking. She's just the kind who'd try to get it stopped."
Fox was right, Burns thought, not that it really mattered who got the sign put there. The sign was there, and there was actually a state law banning smoking in public areas. So there was nothing they could do about it, short of complaining to the president, and they were not about to do that.
