"And Jack was the husband's brother's son's third son. Did you get that?"
"Good thing we're not into exponentials," I said. "We'd be at the sixth power by now."
Bernie raised an admonitory hand. "We've gotten to Jack Sprunk, in case you hadn't noticed."
"I'm all ears, except for a few remaining shreds of intellect."
"Save what you've got left," Bernie said. "You'll need it. And do you know why? Of course you don't. Jack Sprunk was deeply defective in the intellect department."
"Hell, Bernie," I said. "I already know Toby. Speaking mentally, he could stand on the shoulders of giants, to paraphrase Newton, and he'd still be shorter than Billy Barty."
"You're not listening. Jack Sprunk was seriously shortchanged. This was a Centigrade IQ. If you asked him how many fingers he had on his right hand, you would have had to give him an error factor of plus or minus two. We're talking about a permanent fourth-grader here."
I sat up. "Oh," I said.
"He got to high school by an act of collective charity," Bernie said. He looked pleased with himself, an expression that allowed his gold right front tooth to glint rakishly. "No one had the heart to flunk him. Small town and all that, you can't make the kid study harder unless you're a heartless sonofabitch, which there aren't any of in small towns, because he wasn't capable of studying harder. The best he could do with his books was carry them home and bring them back again. Which was good practice, because whether he ever graduated or not, he was going to wind up moving heavy objects aimlessly from room to room in his father's hardware store, so why not pass him?"
He paused dramatically.
"So he passed," I said a little impatiently.
"In a manner of speaking. He passed out of sight." He looked smug enough to choke.
"Bernie, if you don't stop being cryptic, I'm going to steal your notes and leave."
"He only had one friend in school," Bernie said. "The bad boy, naturally, the kid who could tell old Jack what to do for his own evil ends." He raised his eyebrows Groucho style. "This was the absolutely worst kid in the whole school. One morning the town woke up-rurally early, no doubt-and poor, dumb Jack Sprunk and the other kid were gone."
"And the other kid's name?"
"Pepper."
That made two Peppers and one Peeper. "That was his first name?"
"Last."
"Bobby Pepper," I said.
"Well, shit," Bernie said. "If you already knew that, why'd you let me keep talking?"
"I didn't know it. I guessed. You've done great. You've earned every nickel."
"Hey, allow me a point once in a while. Do you want me to go on?" He squinted elaborately through his new contacts at a black plastic runner's watch. The watch he usually wore was made of four pounds of steel. I had a feeling Joyce was into fitness.
"You mean there's more?" I asked submissively.
"Sure there is, the best part as far as the Widow Sprunk is concerned."
"Do we have to keep calling her the Widow Sprunk? Isn't that sexist or something?"
"Clara," he said sulkily. "Clara Sprunk."
"So what was the best part for Ms. Sprunk?"
"If I'd called her Ms., she would have hung up on me."
"So you called her Clara. You devil, you."
"I called her Mrs. Sprunk. Simeon, even money goes just so far."
"Sorry, Bern. You mean that Bobby Pepper showed up on TV one night, but his name was Toby Vane."
"That's one-third of it. And since you're being so insufferable, I'll tell you the other two-thirds out of order. First, or actually second, chronologically speaking, some little twit from Hollywood who said he was Toby Vane's personal press agent-"
"Dixie Cohen?" I said, wondering whether Dixie had known that Toby wasn't really Jack Sprunk.
"No, some guy named Chubb. Bertram Chubb," he added, consulting his notes. "Mrs. Sprunk said he sounded like he was wearing a bow tie. You'd like Mrs. Sprunk."
"And what did Bertram Chubb do?"
"He called the town's mayor. Did I mention that the town is called Crooked Elbow?"
"Crooked Elbow?"
"Crooked Elbow, Montana. There's a story behind it."
"I'm sure there is. Maybe later."
"The mayor is also the barber. Barbers talk, as I'm sure you know."
"I didn't even know there were still barbers. I thought they were all stylists now."
"In Montana, they're still barbers. Anybody calling himself a stylist would be quarantined."
"Probably a good idea."
"Well, Bertram Chubb asked Mr. Ingstad-that's the barber's name, lot of Norwegians up in Montana, apparently — whether the town wouldn't like to host a big homecoming parade for Toby Vane."
"And what did the barber say to Bertram Chubb?"
"He said thanks, but no, thanks. He said, to paraphrase, that Crooked Elbow would receive the return of Toby Vane with mixed emotions, and that the mixture would be one part fear and two parts loathing. He said that he couldn't guarantee Toby's personal bodily safety, much less a ticker-tape parade."
"And Mrs. Sprunk knows all this."
"As I believe I've already said, barbers talk."
"I'm surprised it didn't make the papers."
"It'll never make the papers. As far as the good people of Crooked Elbow, Montana, are concerned, Bobby Pepper, AKA Toby Vane, doesn't exist. They'd like to keep it that way."
"But he must have had some family. Even bad boys have family."
Bernie put a defensive hand, palm down, over the four-by-five cards containing his notes. "Can you read upside down?" he asked in a suspicious tone of voice.
"Bernie, I couldn't read your handwriting right-side up."
"Well, Bobby's family is the first part of the story, chronologically speaking. There are no longer any Peppers in Crooked Elbow."
"Is that so?" I was beginning to feel uncomfortable.
"There were five little Peppers to begin with. Bobby, two sisters, Mommy, and Daddy. Daddy Pepper was apparently someone who, in a larger town, would have been confined to a small white room relatively early in his career, minus his belt and shoelaces. He just loved to knock the shit out of women."
"I know some of this already," I said. "In L.A. or New York, he would have been classified as a psychotic, probably irreversible. In Crooked Elbow, people just thought he was mean."
Bernie looked across the desk at me. "This is pretty sordid stuff."
"I'll survive," I said. "Just tell me about the Peppers."
"Daddy clubbed the two girls until they ran away," Bernie said distastefully. "Nobody in town knows where they went, apparently they were pretty careful about that. They covered their tracks and went, about a year apart. That left Bobby and Mommy to take whatever Daddy wanted to dish out."
"Poor Mommy," I said. "So what happened?"
"Bobby finally ran away. Nobody would have looked very hard for him, Mrs. Sprunk said. But Jack was gone, too, and him they were worried about. It was winter, and there'd just been a blizzard. They were afraid he might have lost his way and frozen to death. They went around checking snowdrifts and looking down wells. About three days later, they found out that the Pepper farmhouse had burned down."
"No," I said.
"Because they lived so far from anything or anyone, and because of the storm, no one went out there until someone suggested that's where Jack might be. Even then it took them a day to get there. Roads were bad, cars wouldn't start, the wind chill factor was around absolute zero. Real frontier days, you know?"
I nodded. I was even more tired than I had realized, but I'd forgotten about my headache. Now that I thought about it, it came back.
"Well, the house was gone. Just two walls standing and part of one room. The room that was left was the whole original house. It had been built out of sod about a hundred years before. The rest of the place was wood, and it caught like cellophane."