I said, “I’ll behave myself. I’m not saying it’ll be easy, but I’ll do my best. I’ll treat the uniform with respect, even if I have some reservations about the guy inside it.”
Dad looked at me for another second, decided, I guess, that that was the most he could expect for now, and turned his eyes front. We came down the hill into Braynor, traveled through the three blocks of downtown and came out the other side, and parked along the street outside a beautiful, old, three-story, if you counted the dormers, Victorian home that had been turned into a law office.
I got out, went around to help Dad step down, and noticed staple-gunned to the wooden light standard by the truck more Braynor fall fair flyers, listing, in print too small to see unless you went right up to it, some of the big events, including a parade, the lawn tractor races Dad had already warned me about, a massive roast beef dinner, various rides and games.
“This is what you want to involve me in?” I said, nodding my head at the flyer.
“I don’t want you doing any damn thing you don’t want to do,” Dad said.
We mounted the steps of the old house and walked right in, since it was an office and not a residence. Inside, the charm and architectural significance I imagine must have once been there had been eradicated. The place looked more like, well, a lawyer’s office, with a receptionist’s station, some chairs and magazines.
I approached the middle-aged, slightly frumpy woman at the desk and told her we had an appointment to see Bert Trench, and she said he would be right with us. Dad plopped awkwardly into one of the chairs and I took one next to him.
“Look how old these magazines are,” Dad complained. “Hey, look, they’re going to impeach Nixon.”
A heavy wood door opened and a short, mostly bald man in glasses strode out, hand extended toward Dad. Bert Trench looked to be in his mid-forties, and judging by the lopsided roll of flesh that hung over his belt, spent more time behind his desk than at the fitness club, if Braynor even had a fitness club.
“Hey, Arlen, how nice to see you,” he said. His voice squeaked. “I don’t think you’ve been in here since we did the paperwork on your place. Good heavens, what’s happened to you?”
Dad struggled to his feet to shake hands. “Just something stupid,” he said. “Slipped.”
“Let’s help you into the office here.”
“This here’s my son Zachary,” Dad said.
“Nice to meet you,” I said as the three of us went into the office. Bert made sure Dad was comfortably settled in one of the two leather padded chairs opposite his desk before he went round and took his spot. I sat down, glanced at a framed photo on Bert Trench’s desk of a stunningly beautiful, dark-haired woman I guessed was in her late thirties.
Trench saw how the picture had caught my attention, then looked back at Dad. “Arlen, I read the piece in the paper today, by that Tracy girl, about the trouble at your place. A bear?”
Dad glanced at me, looking for a signal as to whether we were going to get into this. I did a small shake of the head. That wasn’t why we were here, exactly.
“Awful thing,” Dad said. “Just terrible.”
“I can’t imagine,” Bert Trench said. He turned to me, reached for the framed picture. “This is my wife, Adriana. Arlen, her picture wouldn’t have been here when you were last in.”
Dad smiled, sort of shrugged. “I don’t exactly remember, Bert.”
“Adriana and I got married a year ago. This is number four! One of these days I’m going to get it right, and I think she’s the one. Although I said that with numbers one, two, and three! Had you seen my other wives, Arlen?”
Dad shook his head, so Bert got pictures out of his desk, displayed them for us. They all looked like beauty queens. Bert must have had something that appealed to the ladies, besides his lumpy tummy, bald head, and squeaky voice, that was not immediately evident.
“Anyway,” Bert said, gathering up the photos of his exes and tucking them away, “it’s good to see you. Exciting times all around, huh? You see the paper today? Looks like they’re going to let the gay boys into the parade. Council couldn’t find a way to say no. Either let ’em in, or cancel the parade altogether, and if you ask me, it would have been better to take a stand and cancel the parade.”
“What’s the story here?” I asked, recalling Timmy’s remarks about this, and the manager of the grocery store with the petition he wanted me to sign.
“Oh, sorry,” said Bert Trench. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
“The city,” I said. Dad and Trench shared a glance, as though this would help explain a lot of things that might come up later in the conversation.
“There’s always a fall fair parade,” Dad said. “Beecham’s Hardware, the high school band, the local cattlemen’s association, the racing lawnmowers, 4-Hers, Henry’s Grocery, Braynor Co-op, that kind of thing, they’re all in it. There’s these homo activists want to put a float in the parade, or march, or do synchronized wrist flicking, I don’t know. The town council said no, so the gay boys were going to make a civil rights case out of it, so the town backed down, decided to let ’em in.”
“They were going to go to court to be allowed into a parade like that?” I asked. “You’d think you’d do everything in your power to get out of a parade like that.”
Bert Trench cocked his head, offended. “Pardon?” He eyed me curiously. “The fall fair parade is a tradition around here.”
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Dad said to Bert. “He makes fun of everything. The whole world’s a joke to him.”
“Listen,” I said, turning to Dad, not Bert Trench. “I have a very good friend, a private detective, who just happens to be-”
“So, Bert,” said Dad. “I wonder if you could help me with a little problem I got.”
“What would that be, Arlen?” He wasn’t even looking at me now. I’d mocked the fall fair parade. Even now, he was probably pressing a silent alarm button under the desk, summoning Orville.
“Uh, it’s about my neighbors, Bert. My tenants, actually.”
Bert squinted. “Refresh my memory.”
“You wouldn’t probably even know. It’s just been in the past couple of years, I’ve been renting out the farmhouse, fixed up the best of the cabins for myself. Rented it to some folks named Wickens. They moved down from Red Lake way.”
“Wickens,” Bert Trench said quietly. “Wickens. That’d be Timmy Wickens, and his boys.”
“Stepsons. There’s his wife, and he’s got a grown daughter, and her boy. It was the daughter, her boyfriend that got killed.”
“I see,” Bert Trench said, picking up a pen and making circles on a yellow legal pad.
“Bert, they scare the shit out of me. They’re shooting guns up there, they’ve got No Trespassing signs all over the place, and these pit bulls, they’re eating my guests’ fish right off the stringers, and they’re running the place down, it’s going to cost me a fortune to get it back in shape when they leave.”
“They’re leaving, are they? Packing up?’ Trench swallowed. “That’d be a load off, wouldn’t it?”
“Well, that’s what I’m here to see you about. I want them out. And I wanted your advice on how to go about that. How would I go about evicting them? How much notice do I have to give? And can I tell them, I don’t know, that it’s because I want to fix the house up and move into it, so they don’t think it’s personal? Because, I don’t want them getting angry with me. I don’t have a good feeling about them.”