“Ten-four, Eagle.”
“Yeah, yeah. Ten-four.” He looked for his hat, the white Stetson he’d bought last spring at the police chiefs’ convention in Dallas. It was on the floor in front of him, getting dirty. He retrieved it and started brushing it clean with his hand. That goddamned Ham Stark, he fumed, as he brushed his hat with his thick fingertips. Getting me into this. Why does he always have to … whatever it is he does. I ought to just get the hell out of here, drive off and forget the whole thing. Not even mention it to anyone. Not even Jody. Except that Calvin’s already on his way over here. He knows. Shit. Never should have called him. Jesus Christ, why don’t things go right for me? Shit, shit, shit. Who the hell made that phone call last night, anyhow? That’s who probably did it, got me into this in the first place. He studied his hat. It was white again, sparkling white, without even a bruise of dirt from the floor.
Taking a long-handled plastic windshield scraper from under the seat and sticking the wide end into his hat, the chief slowly raised his hat above him, hoping that, if they shot at it, they would miss. But no one shot. Silence. He held the hat in what he assumed was plain view for a minute, joggled it temptingly, and then slowly sat up beneath it, took the hat off the scraper, and squared it on his head, checking himself out in the rear-view mirror. He tried a little smile, the one that started with a sneer and ended there too, the smile he used to answer backtalking out-of-state speeders. He’d started practicing it when state troopers caught Ethel Kennedy, the murdered senator’s wife, speeding on Route 93 on her way home from a ski weekend at Waterville Valley. The smile looked good. Tough, smart, mean. A smile that said he’d seen it all, seen it all twice last week.
How the hell had Hamilton got himself mixed up with Mafia hit men? the chief wondered as he settled back into his seat to wait for Calvin. Ham was a plumber, for Christ’s sake, a pipefitter. Not a bookie or something. Maybe he was mixed up with a woman of some kind. Maybe this time the bastard went too far, got himself involved with a woman who belonged to someone who’d kill him for it. Serve the bastard right. Serve him right if some tough little wop in a three-piece suit kicked him in the nuts three or four times and then shot him in the face. Some women a man has to steer clear of. The chief thought of his own wife, Jody, her long, angular body, her grim mouth and flat voice. He studied the house in front of him, and as he hoped, forgot his wife. It was a nice place, he observed, a handsome white house, square, well kept, large but not too large, situated well off the road, with the mountain behind it and the valley in front. No wonder Ham was so attached to the place, he thought.
The house was a two-hundred-year-old, traditionally proportioned Cape, with an ell at one end that was connected to a small barn Hamilton had converted into a garage. Behind the house was another, larger barn, several outbuildings, and then the woods. Behind the woods was the mountain. The main house and the small barn had been built by Josiah Stark, and the place had remained in the hands of the Starks until now, which of course was a mightily significant fact about the place. But not to the chief. He could see only that it was a solid-looking, attractive and well-kept place, and that alone made it desirable. Oh, he knew that Hamilton had been born and raised in the house, and he imagined that that, too, probably made it desirable, at least to Hamilton. I can see why the bastard wanted the place so bad, he conceded. But I’ll never know why he couldn’t wait for his mother to die first. Never.
Though the chief had been a visitor to the house for decades, though he had courted and eventually married a woman who had been born and raised there, and though afterward for years he had visited his in-laws there, nevertheless, whenever he saw or thought of the house, he remembered only one event, a single night, the night Hamilton had taken possession of the house. Here is how it happened.
Or rather, here is the version of what happened that was generally accepted as the truth, accepted by all but one of the participants in the events of that monstrous evening, accepted as well by the townspeople of Barnstead, and accepted by hundreds of others who were told the story only because it could be said to have a certain universal “human interest,” or because it was an example of horrid behavior, say, or of long suffering, or of a bizarre turnabout.
At any rate, almost any native of Barnstead, New Hampshire, the librarian, perhaps, or the town clerk, visiting a cousin named Mattie in Daytona Beach, Florida, might look up from her knitting and say, “Well, if you want to talk about your bizarre turnabouts, here’s one for the books.” Or, “If you think that’s one of your long-suffering parents, let me tell you about Alma Stark…” Or, “Now, that’s horrid, all right, but I can tell you something so horrid, Mattie, that it’ll make you never want to have a son.” And this is what she’d say:
“UP TO BLUE Job Road, oh, maybe a mile, mile and a half from town, you’ve got the Stark place, which has been in the family since it was built, probably some two hundred years, though of course it’s lots different now, different from the way it was when it got built, because the Starks have always been hardworking and mostly in the building trades, the men, so they’ve fixed the place up quite a bit over the years — not so much the land, I mean, which is over five hundred acres, at least that’s what they always got taxed for, ‘in excess of five hundred acres’—no, they didn’t so much fix up the land as the house and barns, putting on a dormer here, a new porch there, sort of constantly renovating was how the Starks have always taken care of their place, so by the time poor Alma and Horace Stark were up in their seventies and their children were all grown and married — there were three, the son Ham and the daughters Jody and Sarah — well, by that time the place was all modernized, you know, with electricity and aluminum storm windows and a new oil furnace, and the plumbing was just about the best you could imagine, because Horace was a pipefitter, like his father, who died pretty young in a sad way, but that’s another story — anyhow, if there was one thing the Stark house was going to have, it was good plumbing. Oh, I guess Horace’d got to be about seventy or maybe seventy-one, and Alma was about the same age, when he got his first heart attack and had to retire from the pipefitting and stay in the house all the time, though of course he wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t stay in the house all the time, he was outside working on that place as soon’s he could walk again, no matter he couldn’t move half his face and couldn’t even talk right anymore, though he never talked much anyhow. But now he couldn’t even remember what you’d told him five minutes ago. Anyhow, all that man knew about life was work, work, work, and if he couldn’t keep on working, he was dead, so he kept on working, putting in the garden, shingling the barn roof, building fences, cutting firewood — just about anything needed doing around the place, and lots that didn’t need doing too. Poor Alma. She couldn’t keep that man in and down the way the doctor had told her to, ‘You keep that man in and down,’ he told her, and Horace’d never been the easiest man in town to live with anyhow, kind of cross all the time, not very talkative and then grouchy when he did talk, but after he got the heart attack he got even crosser, scowled all the time, even when he didn’t know you were looking at him. And because he couldn’t talk right anymore, he stopped talking completely, left it up to Alma to do the talking for both of them, wouldn’t even answer the telephone, would stand right there beside it and let it ring and ring and ring. He’d look at it like it was a design on the wallpaper or something. And the cost. Well, I know that heart attack of his cost them a pile of money, because Alma let me know with a few well-chosen words, she said, ‘It’s twice as expensive to be sick when you’re old,’ she told me one day, and I could have just cried for her, the poor thing. So proud, you know. But at least they owned the house clear and free, I told her, trying to comfort her, and at that time they did own the house clear and free, no mortgage, no debts of any kind, the way I heard it, so all they had to do was make do from month to month on Social Security, and I guess for a while that’s what they did. Then Horace went and got his second heart attack, this time one of your real strokes, and he had to have surgery this time, so when he come out of it he couldn’t even leave his chair without help from Alma, and all he could do now was sit in the living room in his rocker or his armchair, he liked to switch around, and watch the wrestling on television, a nice twenty-one-inch color set his son Ham, who was living over in Concord with his new wife, had bought him for Christmas. Ham was nice about that, the color TV, because he really didn’t have to, they already had a black and white, but when it come to the question of how they were going to pay all the doctor and hospital bills, Ham told his mother, who was now the only one capable of making a decision, he told her to borrow the five thousand dollars from the bank and take out a mortgage on the house to guarantee it. Now naturally there was no way that poor old couple was going to be able to make the payments on a loan that size, so the son, a pipefitter like his father, but young, of course, and making good money working heavy construction over to Concord, he offered to make the payments for them, but so’s he’d feel covered — that’s how he put it, so’s