"What did you try to charge him for the lift, Sammy?"
"Jesus… I think you ruptured… somethin'!"
"Sammy, answer my question! How much?"
"Twenny bucks. I saw… he had plenty… when he paid… one of the tolls."
"He paid up, did he?"
"Yeah, yeah."
I lifted his chin up gently. "Sammy, I don't believe you. And I don't think the cops will either."
"Awright, awright. He didn't pay. But I didn't make him… He just hopped out and… ran."
"With a pack he outdistanced you? Do you figure your kidney needs a little more massage, Sammy?"
"No, no. He… ah, listen, man-you gotta keep this quiet. Around here, I'd be laughed at. I'd be-"
"Come on, Sammy."
"Okay, okay. He had a piece."
"A piece?"
"A gun, man. A long thing like outta Star Wars. He fuckin' went into his pack for the twenny and come out with the piece. I thought the fuckin' little screwy was gonna shoot me. I backed off, and he took off across a field."
I straightened up. "Thanks, Sammy. You've been a swell guy and a great panelist."
As I walked away I heard the telltale click. I wheeled around as Sammy was coming off the crate with a big clasp knife open for business. His face was still contorted in pain, but a vengeful determination shone through.
The booming voice behind me interrupted our little melodrama. "Sammy, you drop the knife or it's the last piece of anything your fingers'll ever go 'round."
I glanced over my shoulder at Al with his cleaver hanging at his side and a somewhat calmer George next to him.
Sammy didn't close the knife, but he visibly stood down. I walked toward Al and thanked him.
"I told ya he was a weaselly bastard," replied Al as I passed on my way out.
NINETEENTH
– ¦ "I'm not sure how far it is to Granville, but I expect it's going to be an overnighter. You know how I hated to travel without you. And I can't very well call you, you know."
The carnations weren't there anymore. The kid in the jeans had probably scoffed them as soon as I'd left the last time. I squatted down and arranged Mrs. Feeney's red roses on the spot where the carnations had been.
"The grandmother hasn't played straight with me, Beth. I think I know where the kid is, or at least where he was headed, because one of the ranger stations is only four miles from Granville. But I have to check out a few things first."
A puff of wind came off the harbor and ruffled the roses. I foraged a rock to hold them down.
Off to the left, at another grave, I noticed an elderly man. He wore an old gray suit and held a Homburg in his hand. He was motionless, standing to the side of a headstone and staring at it.
I looked down at Beth. Funny, I almost never looked at the stone. Probably because the stone wasn't her, wasn't where she was for me.
"This boy I'm looking for, Stephen, must be some piece of work. His teachers think he's at least exceptional and a doll in his class thinks he's a genius and is crazy about him. His father seems not to care about him, his grandmother seems not to care about much anything else. He's apparently shy around most kids, but he has perseverance enough to search his father's house for a gun for four years, and then balls enough to take off and use the gun to stand off a shake-down artist twice his size."
Something was wrong there. Like always, Beth sensed it before I did. But I couldn't quite put it into a thought, and she couldn't put it into words.
I needed to get something else off me and squared away, anyway. I took a breath and hunched down again.
"I did a necessary thing this afternoon, Beth. I roughed up a cheating, lying trucker. He was the shake-down artist. But I did a stupid thing before that. I spidered a big, bullying college kid into a short fight and humiliation. It wasn't just my overeager sense of righteousness, Beth. I was showing off. Showing off for somebody I was with. Valerie. Sort of the way I showed off for you. But not quite. For you I showed off for you. For Valerie, I showed off just to see that I could still show off for somebody. Pretty dumb, not to mention a pretty boring description of being dumb. But then, you always put up with dumb, boring me much better than most."
I laughed for her, then got serious again. "Valerie took offense, but I apologized and it's okay now. Except that she's invited me to dinner, and I'm afraid she's getting the wrong impression, that she thinks that I'm-"
I stopped because Beth and I had come to a decision. It certainly seemed the only fair thing.
I stood up. The mini-yachts of the well-to-do who lived on the renovated waterfront were tacking and running in the harbor below. I looked down at the grave. Mrs. Feeney had done a nice job with the roses. As I walked out of the cemetery, the elderly man with the Homburg was still standing over the other grave. Still motionless.
TWENTIETH
– ¦ I stopped at the apartment. My tape had two hangups. I reset the machine and changed my clothes. I figured it would be colder in the Berkshires and I wasn't sure when I would be able to change again. I put on a flannel shirt and a pair of khaki pants. I strapped my Chief's Special to my inside left calf and bloused the pant bottoms into the tops of a pair of L. L. Bean Maine hunting boots. I slung an old army pack (with a jacket, canteen, and candy bars) over my shoulder.
There was some plain white bond paper on my desk. I took a piece and wrote a short note, marked the envelope "Personal," and put a return address under the name "Pembroke." I mailed it on my way back to the car. Then I headed southwest.
The sun was still high, and children were out sunning and playing ball in seemingly every yard and field I passed. There was a constant gentle breeze of the kind that I remembered kept you from getting thirsty. The flannel shirt was making me thirsty. I took the exit that would bring me to Bonham Center first. Since Cal was a six-days-a-week cop, I stopped in at police headquarters and was told Chief Maslyk would be back in an hour. I had a late lunch at an uncrowded pub with a jukebox that played country-and-western. I returned to the station, and still had to cool my heels for twenty minutes until Cal Maslyk could see me.
I told him about my planned trip to the Berkshires. He asked me why I was telling him, and I said because I might need someone to come looking for me. He said he had some vacation time coming in September and that if I weren't back by then, he'd swing by Granville to check on me. I thanked him and left. It was only 4:00 and I couldn't see dropping in on Val that early. I decided to drive over to the Swan Street bridge. Thomas Doucette had already poked a lot of holes for me in Blakey's version of Diane Kinnington's accident, but a law professor of mine always had stressed that we actually should visit the scene of any incident.
I crisscrossed Bonham roads for thirty minutes without hitting Swan Street. I ended back in Bonham Center. Too proud to stop and ask directions, I took a road with a sign that said "Meade Center 3." Just past the center I came upon Swan Street. As I prepared to turn north onto it, a Meade police car drove through the intersection heading south. Officer Dexter was in the passenger's seat. He seemed to recognize me. I waved to him, but he didn't wave back.
I tumed onto Swan Street back toward Bonham and drove a little over a mile before seeing the bridge ahead. I was surprised. I had expected the bridge to be around a corner or curve, but it was clearly visible along the straight road for nearly four-tenths of a mile. Diane Kinnington, or anyone else, would have had no corner or curve to negotiate that night.
When I reached the bridge, I slowed and checked my rear-view mirror. There was no traffic behind me. I slowed to a crawl and went across the bridge as Blakey told Doucette he had done that rainy night. As Doucette had described it, there was a rock maybe twenty feet out whose crest was eight inches clear of the water line. There were replacement railings where Diane's car must have gone through, but the car couldn't have been going very fast to land so close to the bridge. I studied the spot where the Mercedes must have rested. When I reached the other end of the bridge, I stopped and got out. Again I looked to where the Mercedes must have been. Then I checked for traffic, backed across the bridge, and angled my car in the way Doucette had placed Blakey's cruiser. I tried to keep my eyes focused on the rock and the placement of the Mercedes as I sidestepped down the embankment. I stood at the river's edge and stared across to the other bank. If Doucette was accurate regarding the Mercedes's reclining angle against the rock in the water and the compass angle to the far shore, there was no way that Blakey could have seen a license plate or even a hood ornament to know it was the Kinnington car out there.