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.
