In small towns in this state, police chiefs were frequently the highest-ranking officials and de facto kings of the area. Although they were supposed to be apolitical, among other things they were usually the heads of their party and generally held the power and patronage that made them kings of their feudal realms.
Beau held his scepter lightly. He wielded his power always with the good of his community in view, even if he skirted the law to accomplish it. In return, his town gave him its affection with unabashed enthusiasm. There was no diner, bar, or Legion hall in the town or even the entire county, however remote and down at the heel, where he could go unnoticed or pay for a drink. “Evening, Chief,” some grease-smeared gas jockey or fertilizer-redolent farmer would murmur as soon as he walked in the door. “Buy you a drink?”
Beau walked through the door often. A gregarious man by nature, with big appetites for food, beer, and praise, he made it a policy to keep in touch with all the outlying areas of his domain, using invitations to a constant stream of parties, anniversaries, birthdays, christenings, funerals, and weddings to shape his social life. Helen, a full and willing partner in this lifestyle, never walked into a room she didn’t own within five minutes. Her nature gave her what his position gave him, an unassailable sense of entitlement and a conviction of her own worth.
On Friday night, having groused through a half-hour of getting dressed and made-up, having bitched from the house to the car, having griped through most of the twenty-minute drive, Helen finally settled down. Impatient in many of life’s situations, Beau always found Helen worth the wait.
Helen was quiet all the way up the gravel walk to the surprisingly modern multilevel house on a wooded hill in the south of the county. At the door, Helen straightened her back, took a calming breath, and knocked.
The door swung open and Helen strode through with her dazzling smile, her gaze sweeping the room for dignitaries and interesting gossip.
“Congressman,” she smiled, wiggling out of the smelly embrace of the crusty old lecher who had been elected more times than she could count, despite an official censure for misuse of federal money. “Where you been, you old rattlesnake? We never see you anymore.”
The people’s representative simpered and smirked, keeping one liver-spotted hand on Helen’s waist. “I can’t see enough of you, Helen, my angel,” he leered with meaning. Helen instinctively covered her considerable cleavage. The congressman had a full complement of hands and no part of a woman’s anatomy was safe while one of them was unoccupied. She leaned in to give him a buss on the cheek. As she moved on, his eager old claw descended smoothly to cup her butt.
In the meantime, their hostess swooped on Helen, simultaneously removing the congressman’s hand from her friend’s derriere with a practiced gesture and putting a protective arm around her, kissing her and steering her toward the bar set up at the end of the long room.
“Thanks, Samantha,” Helen said. “I’d have fingerprints on my ass if I talked to that old goat another minute.”
“Thank God you’re here,” Sam whispered. “Veda Macavoy brought her New York cousin and he’s flirting with everyone — female and male.”
“I’ve got to meet this guy,” Helen purred enthusiastically. “I’m a complete fag hag. I love them. I do.”
She didn’t look back at Beau. She didn’t need to. She knew he was sweet-talking the congressman about local issues that could profit from attention at the national level. She also knew without looking that some helpful soul had already put a cold beer bottle into Beau’s pudgy hand. She and Beau had a rule about parties. They ignored each other, worked the room in their own way and at their own pace, then reconnoitered at the end and told each other everything. They had developed this technique early in Beau’s tenure as chief and it stuck. They were able to cover twice the ground, shake twice the hands, and get twice the gossip as they would if they stuck together like an ordinary couple. Say what you want, Beau and Helen were never ordinary.
Helen had worked her way through a dozen people, two daiquiris, three dirty stories and one interesting-if-true secret when her radar issued a quiet warning. She smiled at the woman who was boring her to sobs with a real-time description of her husband’s prostate surgery and turned slightly to put her drink down on a table, catching a glimpse of Beau giving Emily Watson a big hug and a wet, smacking kiss right on her mean little mouth, the bitch.
Beau was surrounded by his usual troop of fans, all of them soaking up Beau’s wisdom, fetching him beers, and laughing at his jokes, even when they didn’t understand them. One of the throng was the state highway commissioner and Helen knew Beau was using the opportunity to advance his plan to get new signage on the three exits that led to town. Although he was forbidden to play politics, Beau took every opportunity to upgrade the town’s image. He had been instrumental in several recent efforts, most notably in bringing in a new light-manufacturing plant that would employ several hundred. Most of the town didn’t even know that Beau labored tirelessly and successfully on their behalf.
To Helen’s practiced eye, Beau was just giving Emily the usual warm greeting, always reciprocated by slavish adoration. She didn’t detect anything in Beau’s big wet kiss or Emily’s bearing that would signal any guilty complicity.
Still nodding at the prostate horror story, Helen let herself watch Beau for just a second longer. He glanced up across the room and caught her and winked. Helen reddened slightly under her pancake foundation. Beau bent his head back to Emily Watson, who was on tiptoe whispering something to him. It could be anything, and Helen turned her attention back to the medical nightmare.
“And the doctor said he never saw anything like it. Hard as a walnut. Don’t that beat all, Helen? Hard as a walnut.”
Helen was expressing her amazement when she saw Beau, just for a second, put his hand on Emily Watson’s bony butt. Or did he?
Helen was at home Monday evening, waiting for Beau, when one of Beau’s officers came to the door.
“Is the chief here, Miz Goode?” he asked, hat in hand.
“Nope, I’m waiting on him now,” she said, standing aside so that he could come in. He shuffled back and forth in the doorway, wrinkled his forehead in thought, shrugged, and turned to go.
Helen reached out and took hold of his arm. “Come on in, now,” she said with a smile. She knew Beau’s boys were scared of her, particularly without Beau around. “Now what’s this all about?”
Ten minutes later she was driving on South Main heading toward Wheeling. She didn’t even remember getting into the car or starting the motor. Emily Watson was dead. Found beaten to death in her own house, although Beau’s boy said it looked like she was killed elsewhere and hauled home after.
And where was Beau anyway? Helen shook angry tears out of her eyes, trying not to think what she was thinking. Beau did it. She knew it in her heart but she pushed the thought back down. Helen’s heart was pounding like a rabbit. She stepped on the gas.
She was two blocks up Wheeling when she hit the brakes hard enough to snap her head forward, her pillowy bosom air-bagging into the steering wheel. She sat perfectly still as her body from head to toe turned dead cold then fiery hot. Up ahead, near the Greek deli, was Beau’s unmistakable big yellow Buick. Just where Louie said it would be.
Short of breath, Helen barely registered the timid honk from the car behind her. She drove forward and pulled over next to a fireplug. She turned off the key and shut her eyes. The evidence was irrefutable. There was no earthly reason for Beau to be in this neighborhood at this time of day. She remembered that he had mentioned that morning that he might be late. Another trip to the state capital, he’d said.