And that was another reason for making sure that the boy Louis was punished for what he had done to Deber. If he got away with murder this time, then what would follow? Maybe he might take it into his head to move on to the men who had killed Errol Rich, the ones who had driven the car out from underneath his feet so that he kicked at dead summer air; the ones who had doused him in gasoline; the ones who had lit the torch and applied it to his clothes, turning him into a beacon in the night. Because there were whispers about Errol Rich and the boy’s mother, too, and you could be certain that the boy had heard them. A man’s father dies like that, and it could be that he would take it upon himself to avenge him. Damn, Wooster knew that he would, in the same situation.
Now here was Kavanagh, another of Wooster’s little experiments in social change, bothering him with shit that he was certain he could do without. Wooster wiped his face with his handkerchief, then wrung it dry into his trash basket.
“What is it?”
He didn’t look up. Once again, his gaze was fixed upon the wall before him, as though boring through it and the observation room beyond to reach the boy who had defied him for so long.
“Company.”
Wooster turned in his chair. Through the window behind him, he watched the men emerge from their cars. One was a standard-issue Ford. He smelt government, a suspicion confirmed when Ray Vallance rolled down the passenger-side window and tossed a cigarette butt on the chief’s yard. Vallance was the ASAC of the local FBI field office. He was an okay guy, as far as the feds went. He wasn’t trying to move folks faster than they could walk on this civil rights thing, but he wouldn’t let them dawdle either. Still, Wooster would have words with him about that butt. It showed disrespect.
The second car was too good to have come from any government pool. It was tan, with matching leather upholstery, and the man who got out on the driver’s side looked more like a chauffeur than an agent, although Wooster thought that he also seemed like one mean sonofabitch, and he was pretty certain that the bulge underneath his left arm didn’t come from a tumor. He opened the right rear passenger door, and a third man joined them. He looked old, but Wooster guessed that he wasn’t much older than he himself was. He was just the kind of man who had always looked old. He reminded the chief of that old English actor, Wilfrid-Something-Something, guy was in the movie of My Fair Lady that had come out a few years back. Wooster had seen it with his wife. It had been better than he was expecting, he seemed to recall. Well, that guy, the Wilfrid guy, he had always looked old, too, even when he was young. Now here was one of his near relatives, up close and in the flesh.
Vallance seemed to sigh in his seat, then got out of the car and led two of his fellow agents to the door of the chief’s office, bypassing the cop at the desk to enter the main area.
“Chief Wooster,” he said, nodding with a pretence of amiability.
“Special Agent Vallance,” said Wooster. He didn’t stand. Vallance had never addressed him by anything but his first name before, and Wooster had returned the familiarity, even when there was business at hand. Vallance was giving him the nod, letting him know that this was serious, that both he and Wooster were being watched. Still, Wooster wasn’t about to stand down on his own turf without a fight, and there was the matter of that butt to consider.
Wooster looked past Vallance to where the other four men stood, the old-looking guy in the middle of the pack, smaller than the others but with his own, quiet authority.
“What you got here, a wedding party?” asked Wooster.
“Can we talk inside?”
“Sure.” Wooster rose and spread his hands expansively. “Everybody’s welcome here.”
Only Vallance and the older man entered, the latter closing the door behind them. Wooster could feel the eyes of his men and his secretary on him, boring through the glass. Knowing that he was on show before his own people made him step up to the plate. He straightened his shoulders and stood taller, his back to the window, not bothering to adjust the blinds, so that they had the sun in their eyes.
“What’s the deal, Agent Vallance?”
“The deal is that boy you’re sweating back there.”
“Everybody sweats here.”
“Not like him.”
“Boy is a suspect in a murder investigation.”
“So I hear. What have you got on him?”
“Got probable cause. Man he killed may have murdered his mother.”
“May have?”
“He ain’t around to ask no more.”
“From what I hear, he was asked before he left this world. He didn’t fess up to anything.”
“He did it, though. Anyone believes he didn’t is ready to meet Santa Claus.”
“So, probable cause. That all you got?”
“So far.”
“The boy bending?”
“The boy’s not the kind to bend. But he’ll break, in the end.”
“You seem real sure of that.”
“He’s a boy, not a man, and I’ve broken better men than he’ll ever be. You want to tell me what this is about? I don’t think you have jurisdiction here, Ray.” Wooster had given up being polite. “This isn’t a federal beef.”
“We think it is.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Dead man was a crew chief on the new road by the Orismachee Swamp. That’s a federal reserve.”
“Will be a federal reserve,” Wooster corrected him. “It’s still just swamp now.”
“Nope, that swamp, and the road that’s being built, have just come under federal jurisdiction. Declaration was made yesterday. Rushed through. I got the paperwork here.”
He reached into his inside jacket pocket, produced a sheaf of typed documents, and handed them to Wooster. The chief found his glasses, perched them on his nose, and read the small print.
“So”, he said, when he was done, “that don’t change a thing. Crime was committed before this declaration was made. It’s still my jurisdiction.”
“We can agree to differ on that one, Chief, but it doesn’t matter anyhow. Read closer. It’s a retrospective declaration, back to the first of the month, just before road construction began. It’s a budgetary thing, they tell me. You know how the government works.”
Wooster examined the paper again. He found the dates in question. His brow furrowed, and then blood soared to his cheeks and forehead as his anger grew.
“This is bullshit. The hell should this bother you anyway? It’s colored on colored. It’s not a rights issue.”
“This is now a federal matter, Chief. We’re not pressing charges. You’ve got to cut the boy loose.”
Wooster knew that the case was slipping away from him, and with it some of his authority and his standing with his own staff. He would never be able to recover it. Vallance had made him his bitch, and the boy in that cell was going to skate, and laugh at Wooster while he was doing it.
And Wilfrid back there, with his prematurely graying hair and his neat, if slightly threadbare, clothes, had something to do with it, of that Wooster was sure.
“And where do you fit into all this?” he asked, now directing the full force of his ire at his second visitor.
“I apologize,” said the little man. He stepped forward and stretched out a perfectly manicured hand. “My name is Gabriel.”
Wooster didn’t move to shake the hand that had been offered to him. He simply left it to hang in the air until Gabriel allowed it to fall. Screw you, he thought. Screw you, and Vallance, and good manners. Screw you all.