I looked at him levelly. "He's not a killer, Mac."
MacGregor didn't answer, only shrugged.
"Can I leave?" I asked. "I'm starving."
MacGregor sighed and his tone changed. "In a minute. Tell me something else. Brinkman has this bug up his ass about Grice. So why hasn't he ever picked him up?"
"What do you mean?"
"I never heard Brinkman was crooked but I never heard he was Kojak, either. All the rackets Grice runs—protection, prostitution, even drugs—some jerk or other has run in Schoharie since the Creation. Never bothered Brinkman as long as the boys were local and kept their heads down. Then along comes some minor-league bozo out of Albany to do a little muscle work and all of a sudden fighting crime is more important to Brinkman than sitting on his duff watching his pension grow."
"Jesus, Mac, I thought you and Brinkman were on the same side." He glared. I asked, "What kind of muscle work?"
MacGregor snorted. "Union-busting. For Appleseed."
"Scabbing at the baby food plant? God, that's disillusioning."
"Yeah. So Brinkman develops the same boil on his butt about Grice that he has about you—asshole from the city messing in his county, all that shit." I raised an eyebrow at "asshole" but that didn't stop him. "But in the four years Grice's been around, Brinkman hasn't managed to take him up even once. Why is that?"
"I don't know."
He shook his head. "You don't know. Well, maybe you know this After your slimy lawyer sprang Jimmy Antonelli, Brinkman still had nine cars that his boys spent a week— and a hell of a lot of county money—pulling out of the quarry. If Grice was running dope up from Florida in them there must have been some other way to prove it. Why didn't he or the DA even try?"
I stood up. "What the hell do I look like, the Answer Man? Ask Brinkman. I'm going to get some lunch."
"Not even a theory?"
"Yeah, I have a theory. But you won't like it."
"Try me"
"Grice has protection, someone watching his back."
"Oh, screw that. In New York maybe. It doesn't work that way up here."
"Come off it, Mac. A jerk who'd be nobody anywhere else drifts into the county, puts all the local talent out of business, and for four years even a jack-booted sheriff with a grudge can't get near him. Did you know Grice left for Florida the night before Brinkman busted Jimmy? Left in a hurry, came back three days after Jimmy got out. It glows in the dark, Mac. Only a cop could miss it."
MacGregor turned his face to the window, stared out over the brown grass to the trees that started abruptly beyond it. After a minute he reached over, punched a button on his phone.
"Craig? You got Smith's statement yet? Well, bring it in. And bring in Tony Antonelli, too; I'm ready." He dropped the receiver in the cradle. "Sign your statement and beat it. Don't leave the county. You got a phone yet?"
"Not a chance." I didn't tell him about the cell phone.
Up here in the hills, it's close to useless anyway, which I can't say I really minded. "You need me, you can leave a message at Antonelli's." I looked at his gray, tired face. "Cheer up, Mac. Fishing season starts in four weeks."
Life came into his blue eyes. "Three weeks, three days. I've been tying flies all winter."
"I don't doubt it." The door opened and Tony came in, with the uniformed trooper who'd taken my tape. The trooper handed me three typed pages; I glanced through them, signed the bottom of each.
"All right," said MacGregor. "Go on. Just don't disappear."
"When do I get my gun back?"
"When we're finished with it. Call tomorrow."
I turned to Tony. I could read tension in the set of his shoulders. His face was opaque. "See you later," I said to him. He stared at me for a moment, then nodded. I left MacGregor's office, navigated past a pair of troopers in gray uniforms sitting at gray desks. I took long, deep breaths as I headed toward my car across the gray asphalt parking lot.
The damn car was gray, too. I couldn't remember why that had seemed like a good idea at the time.
Off the highway just west of the trooper station there was a shabby Amoco station with a working pay phone. I called Obermeyer's garage, letting the phone ring long enough for a mechanic to curse, crawl out from under a car, and pick up the receiver in a grease-blackened hand; but it didn't happen. There was no answer.
I leaned against the chipped enamelled steel panels of the station and watched a chunky kid in a green football jersey fill my car. I thought. Not that I had a hell of a lot to work on, but I thought.
I paid for the gas and a pack of Kents and turned back east, toward the village of Schoharie. I cut off the highway onto 1A, a county road. For a few miles 1A ran through pines and maples and birches, past some old frame houses that had needed a coat of paint for as long as I could remember, past a couple of trailers parked broadside to the road, until suddenly it opened out just before it started down into Schoharie.
Even in this season, when everything lay still and cold, not quite ready yet to take another chance, the sudden view over these hills could take your breath away. There was a promise of generosity and refuge in the soft contours, in the bowl of the hills, in the wide valley quilted with farms and fields. The river that flowed through here was choked with ice now and the hills were gray-brown where they weren't pine; and in a dark, unhealed gash in the hills you could see the old stone quarry, three played-out pits, empty now of what had made them worth ripping the hillside apart for; and farther down the hill, the smaller, working pit. Still, coming down into this valley, even in winter, could make you believe home could be more than just a word.
Schoharie's not the largest town in the county—that's Cobleskill, where the state ag-and-tech college is—but it's the county seat. Main Street runs half a mile, flat, straight, and tree-shaded. In each direction, like a caterpillar's legs, short narrow residential streets branch off it. None is more than three blocks long, the houses thinning by the start of the second block.
On the east side of Main in the center of town stand the village hall and the county buildings: the executive offices, the courthouse, the sheriff's office with the new jail annex behind it. They're mostly brown brick, but the courthouse, the oldest of them, is a square-shouldered building of gray local stone, pulled from the quarry in the busy, prosperous days.
I parked on the nearly empty street a block up from the courthouse. I fed the parking meter—six minutes for a penny, half an hour for a nickel—because the sheriff's office was half a block away and Brinkman knew my car.
I crossed in the middle of the block, creating a two-car traffic jam, and stepped onto the cracked and uneven concrete sidewalk. There was no grass verge here. Beyond Main Street's half mile there wasn't even a sidewalk.
The Park View luncheonette was at the end of a block of two-and three-story brick buildings with their dates set in stone at their cornices. The luncheonette's storefront windows were clouded, the way they always were on a cold day. Beads of water streaked them from inside; dish towels lined the low Formica sills, catching the condensation before puddles formed and dripped onto the checkerboard linoleum.
The chrome-legged tables at the front were empty except for two old men with plaid wool jackets and rheumy eyes. I walked past them, sat at the counter on a stool whose green vinyl cover was bandaged with silver tape.
At one of the rear tables a giggling group of adolescent girls who should have been in school were drinking Cokes and puffing on cigarettes without inhaling. At another a young woman ate a sandwich while a baby in a high chair rubbed his hands in his apple sauce. A man and a woman with a city look about them were spread out at the back table drinking coffee and reading the Mountain Eagle. There were people who said that people like them—yuppies with money to spend—would be the salvation of the county. A class above weekenders like me, they would buy the shabby farms, hire locals to repair the buildings and tend their gardens and look after their horses while they were back in the city making money. A few of the local cafes had put in cappuccino machines, and the A 8c P in Cobleskill was starting to stock arugula and endive, for the ones who’d come already. But the drive from New York is long, and summers are short up here in the hills. There's no cachet to a place in this county, nowhere to wine and dine your weekend guests, no one to see or be seen by. People with an eye for beauty and a need for quiet would come here, but they always had. And the moneyed crowds would continue to go elsewhere, as they always had.