"I know why all these cars are stopped," Barbie said. "You heard about that man who got blown up over there by the river? It's all over the radio."
"Oh my!" Hooter returned a quarter to her and dropped seventy-five cents in the toll bin. "I don't got a radio in my booth 'cause they ain't no time for me to listen to it. What happened, baby?"
Cars began to honk, turning the interstate into an endless flock of migrating Canada geese.
"The police wouldn't say. But it will be in the paper in the morning," Barbie replied. "Problem is, I don't get the paper, so I'll never know what happened."
"You just drive through my booth tomorrow," Hooter said with importance. "I always read the paper before I go to work. I tell you all about it. What your name, baby?"
They exchanged names and Hooter handed her a rainbow bumper sticker.
"You put that on your minivan and it will bring smiles and hope to all you pass," Hooter promised.
"Why thank you!" Barbie was touched and delighted. "I'll do it the minute I get home."
Nineteen
Governor Crimm chalked the tip of his lucky pool cue, cigar smoke hanging in a hazy halo around his head as he tried to make out striped balls on the red felt-covered table that Thomas Jefferson had brought back from France, or so Maude had claimed when she'd discovered it on eBay. Every few minutes, one of the troopers came into the billiards room to give the governor updates. The news was not promising.
Checks of vehicles passing through tollbooths had produced only one car with New York plates, and the driver, clearly Hispanic, had fled. So far, he had not been caught, and the consensus was that he-the heinous serial killer-had left the city, heading north. Other disturbing developments included Trooper Truth's latest essay, which accused Major Trader of being a dishonest, self-serving pirate who was trying to poison the governor. As if things weren't grim enough, Regina had planted herself on a Chippendale commode chair, slurping ice cream she had mixed with homemade Toll House cookies she had helped herself to in the kitchen. She was chewing with her mouth open and talking nonstop, distracting the governor as he peered through his magnifying glass at the pool balls he went after.
"Good shot," Andy said when a red-striped ball bounced off the table. He quickly caught it and discreetly tucked it into a corner pocket.
"You aren't letting me win, are you?" the governor said, chalking his stick again.
"Everybody always lets you win," Regina told her father. "Except me. I refuse to let you win."
Regina was a gifted pool player and between her father's terms as governor, when she was at liberty to come and go as she pleased, she was known in area bars for her trick shots and ruthlessness. The only person who had ever beaten her without cheating was that dumbshit, disrespectful Trooper Macovich.
"Here." Andy offered Regina his pool cue. "I'm not with it tonight. You take over. If you don't mind my asking," he said to the governor as Regina racked up balls, "how did Trader come to work for you?"
"A good question," the governor replied. "It was during my first term as governor, and as I remember it, he was a low man on the totem pole, but I got to know him because he used to stop by the mansion to help out with things, such as supervising the inmates, which is not the most desirable job."
Regina broke, and four solid balls whizzed into four different pockets. "Shit," she complained. "I'm having an off night, too."
Pony had just stepped inside to see if anyone needed a touch more brandy, and he caught what the governor said about inmates. He was hurt. It always wounded him when the First Family implied that just because a person was a convicted felon, he could never be trusted with anything ever again.
"Might I get you another cigar?" Pony asked Governor Crimm in a sullen tone as Regina held the cue behind her back and knocked a ball into two more balls, all three of which spun off at impossible angles and smacked into pockets.
"I must admit, I'm very disappointed to learn that he might have been trying to poison me," the governor added. "I think we should go back to having tasters. Huh, make that scoundrel one, as a matter of fact."
"If you can find him," Andy replied. "My guess is, he's going to disappear and probably already has. It's too bad we don't have any hard evidence on him yet or we could have arrested him before he left the mansion."
"Sounds to me like Trooper Truth has plenty of hard evidence," Crimm commented with an insinuation in his tone. "And that indicates to me this renegade columnist may be Trader's accomplice. How else would Trooper Truth know about my being poisoned, now tell me that, unless he had something to do with it?"
Andy hadn't anticipated this turn in the governor's thoughts, and he got a little worried. If Hammer were subpoenaed and asked under oath if she knew Trooper Truth's identity, she would have to reply truthfully and Andy could find himself in a world of trouble.
As if Crimm were privy to Andy's thoughts, he said, "I need to talk to Superintendent Hammer and find out what she knows."
"I'm sure she'd be happy to talk to you, Governor," Andy said. "But she's had a terrible time getting hold of you and never hears from you."
"Never hears from me?" The governor gave Andy a magnified eye. "I've written her a number of notes, not only about her poor little dog, but inviting her to official functions!"
"She's never gotten them, sir."
"So that damn Trader was interfering with everything!." He was getting very put out.
"Seems to me he's been lying to you from the start," Andy agreed.
"A fresh cigar would be a good idea," the governor said to Pony, who was still waiting patiently in the doorway.
Crimm stubbed out his half-smoked cigar in Regina's ice cream dish, which he mistook for an ashtray. He was getting impatient as his unsportsmanlike daughter tapped one ball after another into the pockets.
"That's why I don't like to play with you," he said to her. "I never get to shoot. I may as well not even be in the room. Tell you what I'm going to do, son." Crimm directed this to Andy. "I'm going to assign you to a special undercover investigation. I want you to find out who Trooper Truth is as quickly as possible and see just what his involvement with Trader might be. And while you're at it, let's get the dentist back and make sure those Tangier people aren't up to any other mischief."
"Why don't you put both Andy and me on a special mission, and I'll help him solve crimes and get bad people off the streets?" Regina suggested as the last solid ball spun across felt, banked several times, and sank out of sight. "Maybe he can teach me to fly, too."
"Maybe Miss Regina and Mister Andy should help out with that fisherman who just burned up," Pony said from the doorway. "I hear things aren't going too well. Some old woman ran over the body, a bicycle, and a tackle box. The troopers are talking about it. They say a mean Hispanic's on the loose and will probably kill some other poor black person the same way."
"And what way might that be?" the governor inquired.
"Spontenuous consumption."
"Well, I 'spect Doctor Sawamatsu will be the judge of that," was Crimm's response.
He had appointed the most recently hired medical examiner himself, and he had the utmost confidence in the infallibility of Dr. Sawamatsu, who had originally come to Virginia for the sole purpose of studying gunshot wounds. His intention had been to take his training back to Japan, but the traffic was so bad there and he was so tired of living in a crowded house with people he didn't know that he lingered in the Commonwealth well beyond the completion of his internship. Then the governor, who was always trying to attract Japanese businesses and tourists to Virginia, called Dr. Sawamatsu one day.
"Doctor Sawamatsu," the governor said, and the doctor would never forget what followed, "let me get your honest opinion about something. As you know, the chief medical-examiner is a woman I'm not especially fond of. All of her staff are Americans, and I'm wondering if I had a Japanese medical examiner in Virginia, would that make a difference?"
"To whom?"
"To these Japan
ese Fortune 500 companies who keep relocating or never relocate here to begin with-and to
Japanese citizens in general who have yet to discover Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown, our many amusement parks and plantations and resorts and so on. As long as they speak English, and all of them do."
Dr. Sawamatsu had to think quickly. He wanted to be a medical examiner in America more than anything else, but he was keenly aware that his patients were not important players in tourism or the business community and rarely had any influence whatsoever, either before they were carried into the morgue or after they left.
"When you have especially sensational cases, it most certainly would make a difference," was Dr. Sawamatsu's reply. "Because of the publicity and the message it would send if the medical examiner were Asian. In such a case, I believe my people would reciprocate and locate their companies and tourists here, providing you give them a tax incentive."
"A tax incentive?"
"A big one."
"What an unusual idea," the governor said, and the minute he got off the phone, he told his cabinet that he planned to make all Japanese businesses and individuals exempt from state taxes. The result was stunning. Within a year, tourism flourished. Railways and Greyhound had to double their staffs and buses, and camera stores began popping up on every corner. Dr. Sawamatsu became an assistant chief medical examiner and received a personal thank-you note from Governor Crimm, which the young doctor framed and hung in his living room, next to the display case of souvenirs he had collected from dead patients who no longer had any need of artificial body parts, suicide or threatening notes, or the wreckage of whatever they had died in or the weapons that had killed them.
We need to get this body out of here," Dr. Sawamatsu was telling the police as he crouched in the dark, pulling on surgical gloves. "Please do not let anyone else run over it."
"Where's the chief?" asked Detective Slipper, who did not share the governor's high opinion of Dr. Sawamatsu. "Why isn't Doctor Scarpetta here? She almost always responds personally to complicated, sensational crime scenes."
"She went to court in Halifax and will not be back until very late," Dr. Sawamatsu replied rather testily. "Now, we must get this body to the morgue right now."
"I'm not sure we can retrieve the stretcher out of the river," Detective Slipper hated to tell him. "We'd have to bring in divers."
"No time. We wrap him in sheets and carry him to the ambulance," Dr. Sawamatsu ordered. "I look at him in the morning. I can't see anything out here."
"Glad I'm not the only one," Lamonia grumpily agreed.
She was in handcuffs and standing by her dented Dodge Dart, not sure what she had done to irritate everybody so much. Trader, of course, was not put out with Lamonia in the least. He was watching the activity through his shattered windshield after a fruitless hour of standing on a bridge, shining a powerful flashlight down into the water, trying to find the crabs and the trout. Trader was deeply grateful that Lamonia had virtually destroyed the crime scene. He watched the medical examiner and paramedics cover the dead fisherman with sheets and carry him away, tucking him into the back of the ambulance, which had a crunched-in tailgate. How could Trader's luck have changed so dramatically, all in one day?
Major Trader's career and entire life were in shambles and always had been, if he were honest with himself. He looked at himself in the rearview mirror and was faced with a reflection that might as well have been his maternal grandfather, also named Major. All of the men in his mother's lineage had been called Major since Anne Bonny had had sex with a pirate and given birth to a son she named Major because it was a higher rank than captain, and she'd never met a pirate ranked higher than captain.
All the Major men bore a resemblance to one another. They were a sturdy lot with ruddy faces, big girths, pale, shifty eyes, and thinning hair. As a child, Trader had enjoyed a spree of pyromania and had never been caught. To this day, no one on Tangier Island knew that little Major was the one who torched a shed on stilts that turned out to be a soft-crab plantation. Thousands of crabs in the midst of molting had been killed, the year's harvest lost, the economy ruined. To make matters worse, the fire could not be contained and spread up several creeks, incinerating scores of bateaus before the blaze was finally extinguished alarmingly close to Hilda Crockett's Chesapeake House, known for its long family-style tables, crab cakes, clam fritters., home-baked bread, ham, and more.
Young Major Trader also became adept at sneaking the family flare gun out of the wading boot where his father hid his liquor. By experimenting with lighter fluid, gasoline, and bourbon, Major realized he could torch places from a distance by filling a milk jug with a flammable liquid and, when nobody was looking, fire a flare at the jug and cause a small explosion, much like what he had done to the fisherman.
Pony also had led a lawless life as a young one, but unlike Trader, Pony lived with remorse and an overwhelming sense of shame and regret. Having grown weary of watching Regina play pool while her father stood idly by, tapping cigar ashes wherever he thought he saw an ashtray, Pony and Andy had wandered out into the garden. They sat on a granite bench in the cold and began to talk.
"May I get you anything, Mister Andy?"
"No. You're really nice to keep asking, but why don't you just take it easy for a while and tell me about yourself. Why do you call yourself Pony?"
"I don't," Pony replied, his breath smoking out and reminding him he longed for a cigarette. "You mind?" He pulled a pack out of his white jacket. "My daddy called me Pony because when my sister was born-she's older than me-she used to tell my daddy she wanted a pony. We couldn't afford a pony, so when I was born a few years later, my daddy named me Pony and says to my sister, 'Now you got a pony.' "
Andy didn't comment as he tried to discern whether the story was heartwarming or simply depressing.
"It's not a name that's helped me out much, you want to know the truth," Pony continued. "The other inmates make comments about it 'til they figure I'll fight 'em if they think for one minute they gonna ride me in the showers, you know what I mean?" He shook his head and grinned, several gold caps gleaming in the dark. "I had my share of scuffles, but I'm stronger than I look. Did some prizefighting when I was younger, know karate pretty good, too."
"How long you in for?" Andy asked.
"Another two years, unless the governor lets me out. And he could, but he won't. Thing is, I do a good job and none of the Crimms want someone else. They're used to me. And if I do a bad job, they'll just send me back to lockup. So I'm kinda stuck." He flicked an ash. "I should never have stole that pack of cigarettes." He shook his head again and sighed.
"You're in jail for stealing a pack of cigarettes?" Andy couldn't believe it.
Pony nodded. "It violated my parole. Before that, it was two pints of apricot brandy at the ABC store. So I pretty much ruined my life over things that ain't good for me anyway. It runs in my family."
"Stealing?" Andy asked.
"Self-destruction. How 'bout you?"
It was rare anyone asked about Andy's life and he had always been cautious about what he revealed.
"Tell me about yourself, Mister Andy," Pony encouraged him to talk. "What about a girl? You got someone special?"
Andy dug his hands into the pockets of his uniform winter jacket and hunched his shoulders against the unseasonable chill as helicopters churned up the night.
Clouds had moved on, and the moon was a sliver that reminded Pony of a gold smile.
"Not at the moment," Andy said. "I was on and off with an older woman I met in Charlotte. But we're finished."
"I guess she still in Charlotte?"
"I don't know where she is. I wanted to be friends, but she's not that way. I don't understand women," Andy confessed. "They're always saying men don't know how to be friends, but when I try to be a friend, they act weird about it."
"That is the truth." Pony slowly nodded his head. "You tell it, brother. Women never say what they want or mean what they say or
admit to even wanting-unless it's something they don't want or they want you to think they do or don't want. So they can play you, know what I mean? My wife's a sweet woman when she's not too wore out from doing the First Family's laundry or mad at me for going back to lockup during my vacations and holidays. But to look at it from her side, I know I don't always shoot straight with her, either.
"Sometimes I ought to just come out with it and say, 'I sure do love you, baby.' Or 'You sure do look good to me right now, baby.' Or 'I carry this sickness in my heart, baby, 'cause I know I've spent most of our good years behind bars, and that's not fair to you and you got no idea how much I just ache for you when I'm away like that.' And I guess, Mister Andy, I don't want to admit to her or myself that I probably fucked up my life forever, you know what I'm saying?" He sucked on the cigarette. "You know, it's probably too late and I'll probably never get out of lockup 'cause the governor will forget or the next one will or the one after that.
"And I guess I don't got sense enough to cause trouble in the mansion and maybe get fired and then sue the Comm'wealth for discrim'ation, which would entitle me to lawyers who would take me on for a cause and look into my prison record and discover there's some mess-up in the Department of Corrections computer and I would be a free man. As is, I don't got no money for no lawyer and right now I ain't no cause. My point being, if I did the wrong thing, everything would turn out all right for me."
"I know exactly how you feel," Andy agreed. "But you've still got to do the right thing, Pony. Look at Trooper Truth. He did the right thing by telling the truth about Major Trader, and now the governor suspects Trooper Truth of doing something wrong."
"I hear you. I wish I knew Trooper Truth," Pony said with a sigh. "He sounds like one fine person, and it's 'bout time someone blew the whistle on Trader. I've known all along he's a rotten apple up to no good. Yes sir, I wish I knew Trooper Truth. Maybe he could fix my mess with the Department of Corrections."
"Why don't you call DOC yourself and see if you can get someone to look into the matter?" Andy asked.
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