He hesitated for a second or two, then killed the engine and got out, coming over to stand where I stood near the railing.
“It’s like I figured,” I told him.
He frowned at me.
“He might have been lost, but he could have gotten help at one of those cabins. You can see the lights easily enough.”
I pointed out the obvious, and Mac looked at the house lights, then back at me.
“The only real danger he was in was the danger he was to himself.” I nodded toward the bench. “He killed himself, Mac. He just sat down here and gave life up.”
“Oh,” he said, as if just getting what I was driving at.
“Vietnamese,” I said. “We made life hell for them in their own country, then we made it hell for them here.” I took a deep breath and looked out over the railing at the darkening sky. “You married, Mac?”
“No.”
“Ever been?”
“No.”
“He was,” I said.
Mac started to say something but changed his mind.
“The way I see it,” I told him, “you got him up here in his own cab, made him get out, and you left him. You drove his cab down the mountain and ditched it.”
Mac was quiet.
“I don’t think you intended to kill him. I figure you thought you were just teaching him a lesson in turf protection.”
I turned back to him and saw him staring at me wide-eyed.
“The thing is, Mac, he’d been taught that lesson before. More than once. Texas. San Diego. San Francisco. Everybody protected their turf, and there was no place for him.” I waved my hand at the world immediately around us. “He’d just run out of places to go.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mac whispered.
I smiled and said, “I’m not the police, Mac. You don’t have to say anything to me. This is just — soldier to soldier.”
He snorted, then frowned a brave look of disparaging disbelief.
I smiled again. “But if I did have a talk with the sheriff — who is a close personal friend of mine, by the way — and I told her that you knew that the body I found was of a Vietnamese before that bit of information got in the newspaper, she might want to ask you a few questions.
“And,” I went on easily, “if I told her that the manager of Fear Mountain Lodges had seen you threaten Long Van Doan about driving his cab on your mountain, I imagine she’d have a few questions to ask him.”
He swallowed and began breathing a little roughly.
“And the sheriff,” I continued, “being a good cop and a very smart woman, would probably ask around, fixing your whereabouts Tuesday night, and before too long she’d put two and two together — and you’d find yourself in kind of a tight spot.”
His mouth sagged open.
“Trying to explain to a jury how you only meant to scare the man.”
He looked away from me, down at his shoes.
I scooped some snow from the ground and said, “Now, I don’t know if they could make a murder case out of this, Mac, but I’m damn sure they’ll get you on something.”
He said nothing.
“And you’ll do some time,” I told him.
He heaved a big raggedy sigh but kept his head down.
“And you’ll never be the same after that,” I added.
He looked up at me with a what-now look on his face.
I worked the snow I held into a tight white ball. “On top of which you will never get a liquor license with a felony conviction in this state, which ends the idea of Mac’s Tavern.”
His swallowed and looked a little sick.
“You following me, Mac?”
He said nothing, but he was.
I turned and threw the snowball I was holding, watched it strike the top of a tall pine tree down in the valley below, and saw the tree explode with snow. “The thing is, I’ve got no big desire to see you behind bars, Mac.”
He cocked his head slightly.
“I mean, what’s the point?”
He frowned, suddenly very interested.
“Doan is dead, Mac, and only the living matter.” I shrugged. “Prison seems a waste in this case, don’t you think?”
He half nodded, half started to say something, but I stopped him by putting a finger on his chest and telling him, “But you’ve got to make it right.”
He swallowed and stared.
“I mean — justice has to come into this business at some point,” I told him reasonably. “You can’t get away with this.
“You know that,” I said.
He didn’t say so, but he knew.
“He left a wife and five kids, Mac. He was their sole support.” I waited a moment until his eyes met mine. “Now you’re their sole support.”
He blinked.
“That’s simple enough, isn’t it?” I asked. “You just step into his shoes. Assume his responsibilities.” I smiled. “Like a blood stripe.”
He said nothing, his eyes drifting away from me.
“So?” I said.
He looked back at me.
“Are we connecting here, or what?”
We were.
So, we talked a bit more — negotiated, I suppose — and came to terms and conditions we could both live with — at least I could, and I hoped he would — and when we were done, I had him drive me into town for groceries, then back up to the lodge.
Back in my cabin an hour later, with Loretta still sound asleep, I started the breakfast I’d promised her. By then it was nearly eight and I decided to make the call then. It was Friday and he might be away for the weekend, and I wanted the ball rolling as soon as possible. After the phone rang twice a boy — eight or nine, using the voice-deepened tones of a boy ten or eleven — answered, saying, “Springer residence.”
I asked to speak with his father, who came on the line directly, and I told him who I was, adding, “How’re you doing, David?”
“Couldn’t be better,” he told me. “How about yourself?”
“Same as always,” I told him. “Marie and the kids?”
“Fine,” he replied in a mildly curious way, and we chatted a bit more about nothing in particular until I got to the point, saying, “Um, David — are you still with First Western?”
“Senior VP,” he told me.
“And how’s the commercial savings and loan business?” I asked.
“Middling,” he replied. “Why?”
“Well,” I told him, “the fact is, David, your name came up today in connection with this little money problem I have.”
“How much do you need?” he asked in a say-no-more way.
I laughed. “No. I don’t need a loan...”
“However much it is,” he said quickly, “I’ll work it out. You know I owe you...”
“This isn’t about me, David,” I told him. “It’s about this woman and her children. She’s recently widowed, and she’ll be coming into some money in a few days. A lump sum payment of seventy-five thousand dollars and a monthly amount as well. The donor wishes to remain anonymous.”
“I see,” he said, in an I-don’t-see-at-all-but-whatever-you-say-is-fine-with-me way.
“The woman will need help,” I went on, “managing things. She has some relatives down there in San Diego, but she’s Vietnamese and speaks no English. She’s expressed interest in opening a restaurant.”
He laughed. “Just what San Diego needs — another Vietnamese restaurant.”
I laughed back at him, then said, “Can you help?”
He sighed. “No problem,” he told me.
“I can have the donor contact you, then?”
“Certainly.”
“Great. I really appreciate this, David.”
“My pleasure.”
“And,” I added lightly, “you can call us even.”
“No,” he told me flatly, after a slight hesitation. “No, I can’t.”
The Day That Crenshaw Burned
by Bobby Lee
Forever after the day he burned the town of Crenshaw to the ground, the sheriff would maintain that what he had done had been motivated solely by the sense of moral outrage he’d felt at the scandalous use he had believed was being made of Miss Petula’s vacant house while she was away on her annual summer travels in Europe. But lest you too hastily anoint as a hero the conquering moral crusader, there are perhaps a few things of which you should be made aware.
To begin with, and to give credit where credit is due, it should be acknowledged that the sheriff’s initial involvement in this episode was motivated by a legitimate, albeit a totally misdirected, desire to obtain incriminating evidence against a suspect in the wave of counterfeiting activities that at the time was threatening to rock the financial foundation of the entire county. As true as that may be, however, it is equally true that in most circumstances nothing the sheriff says or does can be properly interpreted without giving due consideration to the extremely tempestuous, not to mention extraordinarily longstanding, relationship that for so many years now has existed between the sheriff and Miss Petula.
To put it bluntly, as inglorious and even pedestrian as it may seem, when all the facts and circumstances are considered, it seems far more likely that the sheriff’s motivation in this peculiar affair was nothing more than a petty desire to embarrass the love of his life. To uncover within the very home of Miss Petula incontrovertible evidence of some nefarious, maybe even illegal, activity. Evidence he could use against her in their endless struggle for domination of one another.
The plain and simple fact of the matter is that the sheriff and Miss Petula, both of whom have for one reason or another long been sentimental favorites among the general population here, are without doubt two of the orneriest and most cantankerous people you would ever want to meet up with. Over the course of the past six decades they have remained entangled, on an on-again, off-again basis, in what can only be described as a passionate love-hate relationship that almost defies human comprehension. Which is not all that surprising, actually, in view of their remarkably disparate backgrounds.
In the one corner, you see, you have the seventy-four-year-old Miss Petula Clairborne, a blueblooded patrician through and through who has an East Coast pedigree that’s about as long as your arm. She also happens to be one of the wealthiest, and one of the most powerful, people in the entire valley. In the whole of Miller County, really. And in the other corner, spoiling for an upset, you have the seventy-three-year-old Sheriff Clyde Duncan, the quintessential blue collar type who hails from proud but long impoverished Puritan stock. Representing the violent clash of blue blood with blue collar as they do, and having little in common other than their advancing years, the sheriff and Miss Petula are, at best, an unlikely pair.
Still, in spite of their loud and often downright nasty differences on almost any issue you care to raise, the two of them have somehow stayed together. The relationship has somehow lasted, weathered the storm. In a manner of speaking, at least. It’s just that over the years it’s sort of gotten to the point that aggravation has become their strongest and purest expression of the affection that neither one of them will admit to but everybody knows both of them feel for one another. So you see that breaking into Miss Petula’s home to get the goods on her, so to speak, would for the sheriff simply be a natural expression of his love for her. Or his hatred of her. With them it’s always kind of hard to tell.
Either way, and regardless of his motives, there’s little question that the ultimate outcome of the sheriff’s seemingly heroic actions, intended or not, resulted in yet another feather in the already crowded cap of Miller County’s oldest and certainly most illustrious crimefighter. A truly remarkable outcome, you have to admit, since the entire affair began with nothing more dramatic than a simple misunderstanding over the price of a refill on a cup of coffee.
That pivotal cup of coffee had been poured pretty much without incident by one Donna Sue Walker, the eldest, and in my opinion the prettiest, of the three daughters of old Joe Walker, Sr., Crenshaw’s most ardent seller of insurance. The problem didn’t arise until several minutes later, when the check was delivered and the recipient of the refill, one Martin John Withers of Kansas City, discovered to his embarrassment that the mention of free refills at the bottom of the faded plastic menu at Vernon’s Diner referred not to the coffee, which as a result of a drought in Brazil was in short supply, but rather to the soda pop, which was always in plentiful supply.
If one were overly charitable, perhaps one might be tempted to attribute the otherwise inexplicable behavior that followed next to the fluster that had resulted from the mistake Withers had made in interpreting the menu. At any rate, after counting out his change on the counter and discovering he had arrived at the diner with only enough coin for a single cup of coffee, in what could only be characterized as a monumental error in judgment Mr. Withers apparently threw caution to the winds and tried to pay his check with a crisp new one hundred dollar bill. It was, you would have to admit, an extraordinarily incautious move for a stranger in town who had just kidnapped a woman and stashed her in someone’s basement.
The hundred dollar bill, as it turned out, was one of many that Mr. Withers had recently obtained in a similar, very successful caper in Kansas City. A caper that, after its conclusion, had been so highly publicized in the local newspapers as to persuade him that it would be far wiser to move this new caper, in mid-operation as it were, to a more isolated, less well-informed region of the country. The choice of the town of Crenshaw, other than being strangely appropriate, was as far as anyone can determine purely fortuitous.
Unfortunately for Mr. Withers, the current owner of the historic diner, Donnie Vernon, having been burned on more than one occasion by customers of dubious character’s palming off on the diner large denomination bills that turned out to be either counterfeit or stolen, had instructed his employees that without his explicit approval they were never to accept anything larger than a twenty. And being her daddy’s daughter, Donna Sue was not the sort to be reticent, or terse, in staking out and defending her position in the ensuing debate.
More important, the increasingly heated, not to mention increasingly loud, disagreement over the payment of the check that followed from Donna Sue’s refusal to accept the suspect hundred dollar bill, an argument that was resolved only when the exasperated waitress finally announced that she would pay for the refill out of her own pocket, eventually caught the attention of another of the diner’s handful of early morning customers. For sitting at the far end of the counter, quietly eating his breakfast and reading the morning newspaper, was none other than our own Sheriff Clyde Duncan.
Worse still for Mr. Withers, who ironically had never even considered the possibility of venturing into the counterfeiting business, this was not the first time that his rather distinctive profile, with its beaklike hooked proboscis and offsetting bushy, jaw-length sideburns, had caught the eye of the wily old sheriff. It had, in fact, been only the day before that, off duty and dressed in civilian clothing, the sheriff had stood behind this very unusual looking man, tall and gangly to the point of being spidery, in the checkout line at Schulte’s IGA. And on that occasion, as on this one, the sheriff, already on his sharpest lookout as a result of a recent bulletin from the state police detailing the activities of a counterfeiter working the southern reaches of the state, had watched with keen interest as the man had paid his bill with a crisp new one hundred dollar bill.