So in Lionel’s absence, a foulmouthed and filthy-minded creep nobody much liked named Selby Cluxton rose up and took everything over. Selby had always been a fat and greedy low-level dealer held down by my father, most likely because Lionel knew the threat he could become. But once Lionel was gone, there was nobody stopping him. Toola worked for Selby. Most everybody that sold pills, weed, or powder around here did.
Creep though he was, it said something about Selby that people would think he could keep Lionel from coming back. But it said more about how quick people are to forget. Because I knew Lionel wasn’t scared of Selby or scared of coming back. Lionel wasn’t afraid of anything, because nothing in his life had shown him he ever had reason to be. I knew Lionel wasn’t avoiding Selby, he was only out of state for a little bit, repairing the relationships he needed to keep him with a steady supply of drugs to sell. He’d be back sooner or later to take over again.
And if people had a little more information, if they knew what I knew, then they’d start to believe that time was now. After all, it was Selby Cluxton that was laying dead in that Cadillac.
The sheriff’s station might have been impressive when they built it fifty years ago, but I doubt it. All I knew for sure was that now it was a squat, faded red-brick building that was too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, and looked like something God had squished with his thumb. I stayed away as much as I could, but I didn’t have that option now.
Inside the station Billy Price was reading the newspaper, his long legs kicked up on his desk, looking as thin and limp as a string hanging from a balloon. Billy had a deputy’s star and the title that came with it, but he was seldom allowed to carry a gun or go out in the field. Only the sheriff knew why that was, but everyone acquainted with Billy agreed that it was probably a good idea anyway.
Now Billy looked me over lazily and yawned. “Where you been at all day?”
“Keeping the world safe from outlaws and Methodists,” I said.
Billy laughed, a little too hard. He always did, as if he wanted to prove he could recognize a joke. You’d be surprised who gets hired for jobs that nobody particularly wants.
“The sheriff in?” I asked. I was feeling anxious. If I was going to do anything on Selby Cluxton’s murder, I had to hustle. There was only so much time before the Cadillac would get discovered. Somebody skipping work to go fishing or poach deer would find it sooner or later. And then they’d box me out and there’d be nothing I could do. Before that happened, I wanted to grease the skids that pointed to Lionel. Give them a head start, so to speak. And I needed to do all this without telling anybody about that dead body.
“Sheriff’s in his office,” Billy said, nodding toward the back. “Same as always.”
Sheriff Gutherie was in fact in his office, hidden behind three tall stacks of paperwork on his desk. The sheriff was a good man, as far as that went, but he seemed constantly vexed, like a man who had to spend each day trying to shovel another hundred pounds of garbage into a ten-pound bag. There was a rumor every year that he was going to retire, and those rumors were getting stronger now.
“Okay,” he said, after hearing what C.T. told me, “your father’s back.” He shrugged. “Probably was going to happen sooner or later.”
I glanced at the door like I didn’t want to be overheard. “What worries me is, he’s not exactly the type to take to rehabilitation.”
“You’re probably right on that. But we can’t arrest a man for what he might do.”
It was a weird feeling, not reporting the murder. But there was no other way.
“We can follow him,” I said. “That’d help keep him on the straight and narrow.”
“How am I going to do that? And who am I supposed to do it with?”
“What about Billy?”
“Deputy Price is good right where he is, sitting at his desk reading the paper cover to cover every day. We shouldn’t strain that brain of his with anything more difficult.”
The way the sheriff folded his hands across his gut and leaned back in his chair, I knew he had made his decision and I had lost. But I had to play my role anyway.
“I’m just worried it’s only a matter of time,” I said. “Before he’s back to doing his dirt.”
“And then we’ll investigate it when he does. Look, I appreciate you telling me this, I know it’s hard for you and you only want to keep him out of trouble. But we can hardly deal with the crimes that have happened, let alone the ones that haven’t yet.”
The sheriff set a chaw in his lip and scooted the tallest pile of paperwork closer to him. His way of saying goodbye. There wouldn’t be any tail on Lionel, and that would make my job that much tougher. For a second my nerves got to me and I wondered if the sheriff could be in Lionel’s pocket. But the sheriff was cautious and responsible to a fault, the kind of man who gets more pleasure from reserving his cemetery plot than buying a new pickup. The sheriff wouldn’t take a dirty dollar, I didn’t think.
He looked up from his work, as if surprised to still find me there. I stepped out, like a scolded child, and shut his door. I stood for a moment in the empty hallway, thinking.
That Lionel killed Selby Cluxton would make sense to everybody; they wouldn’t need a calculator to add it all up. The problem was, guesswork would be all they had, and that wasn’t near enough to convict anybody, let alone someone as slick as Lionel. Five decades of committing every crime you could imagine and the only time the jury got to say guilty was when he beat that college boy, and that was only because an off-duty highway patrolman drinking in the corner of the bar happened to see it all. Unless you got that kind of luck, you need confessions, physical evidence, eyewitnesses.
For now I had none of that. And with no tail on him, Lionel would be free to go and do as he pleased. But that didn’t mean I was quitting.
On my way out of the station, I rapped my knuckles on Billy’s desk to wake him up.
“Come with me, deputy,” I said. “You just got a new assignment.”
Billy was nervous, and that’s without me even mentioning the murder. I explained it to him again.
“All I’m asking is, back my play,” I told him. We were sitting in Billy’s borrowed cruiser in the empty parking lot of a bankrupt lumberyard, while my patrol car idled a few feet away. “There’s no risk in it for you. It works, you get all the credit. If it doesn’t, nobody will ever hear about it.”
“Yeah, but—”
“You want to get out in the field more than once a month? You want to carry a gun without asking permission? Then you got to give the sheriff a reason to believe in you.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Besides, Joe might not be sheriff much longer. Who knows who the next sheriff might be. Doing this would go a long way in impressing whoever that is. And look, this won’t sweat you any. You see something, you call for backup. You don’t, you go on home. It’s gonna be easy as shelling peas. You used to do that for your mama, right?”
Billy laughed, too hard again. It didn’t give me a good feeling, but there was nothing that could be done now. All I could do was hope that the next time I saw Billy he’d be accepting handshakes and backslaps from the rest of the department, not tightening the noose around my neck.
I got out and tapped the hood and Billy drove off. It was time for me to go find Lionel.