'He chartered a private plane to fly to Minnesota, did I tell you that? Because he can't bear to have people look at him. Did I tell you that, Billy?'
Billy shook his head again.
'What's going to become of him?'
'I don't know,' Halleck said, thinking: And just by the way, what's going to become of me, Leda?
'At the end, before he finally gave up and went, both of his hands were claws. His eyes were two . . . two bright little sparks of blue inside these pitted, scaly hollows. His nose . . .' She stood up and wobbled toward him, hitting the corner of the coffee table hard enough with her leg to make it shift – She doesn't feel it now, Halleck thought, but she's going to have one hell of a painful bruise on her calf tomorrow, and if she's lucky she'll wonder where she got it, or how.
She grasped at his hand. Her eyes were great glittering pools of uncomprehending horror. She spoke with a gruesome, breathy confidentiality that prickled the skin of Billy's neck. Her breath was rank with undigested gin.
'He looks like an alligator now,' she said in what was almost an intimate whisper. 'Yes, that's what he looks like, Billy. Like something that just crawled out of a swamp and put on human clothes. It's like he's turning into an alligator, and I was glad he went. Glad. I think if he hadn't gone, I would have gone. Yes. Just packed a bag and … and . . .'
She was leaning closer and closer, and Billy stood up suddenly, unable to stand any more of this. Leda Rossington rocked back on her heels and Halleck just barely managed to catch her by the shoulders … he had also drunk too much, it seemed. If he had missed her, she might very well have brained herself on the same glass-topped, brass-bound coffee table (Trifles, $587 plus mailing) on which she had struck her leg … only instead of waking up with a bruise, she could have waked up dead. Looking into her half-mad eyes, Billy wondered if she might not welcome death.
'Leda, I have to go.'
'Of course,' she said. 'Just came for the straight dope, didn't you, Billy dear?'
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I'm sorry about everything that's happened. Please believe me.' And, insanely, he heard himself adding: 'When you talk to Cary, give him my best.'
'He's hard to talk to now,' she said remotely. 'It's happening inside his mouth, you see. It's thickening his gums, plating his tongue. I can talk to him, but everything he says to me – all of his replies – come out in grunts.'
He was backing into the hall, backing away from her, wanting to be free of her soft, relentlessly cultured tones, needing to be free of her gruesome, glittering eyes.
'He really is,' she said. 'Turning into an alligator, I mean. I expect that before long they may have to put him in a tank … they may have to keep his skin wet.' Tears leaked from her raw eyes, and Billy saw she was dribbling gin from her canted martini glass onto her shoes.
'Good night, Leda,' he whispered.
'Why, Billy? Why did you have to hit the old woman? Why did you have to bring this on Cary and me? Why?'
'Leda -'
'Come back in a couple of weeks,' she said, still advancing as Billy groped madly behind him for the knob of the front door, holding on to his polite smile by a huge act of will. 'Come back and let me have a look at you when you've lost another forty or fifty pounds. I'll laugh … and laugh … and laugh.'
He found the knob. He turned it. The cool air struck his flushed and overheated skin like a benison.
'Good night, Leda. I'm sorry . . .'
'Save your sorry!' she screamed, and threw her martini glass at him. It struck the doorjamb to Billy's right and shattered. 'Why did you have to hit her, you bastard? Why did you have to bring it on all of us? Why? Why? Why?'
Halleck made it to the corner of Park Lane and Lantern Drive and then collapsed onto the bench inside the bus shelter, shivering as if with ague, his throat and stomach sour with acid indigestion, his head buzzing with gin.
He thought: I hit her and killed her and now I'm losing weight and I can't stop. Cary Rossington conducted the hearing, he let me off without so much as a tap on the wrist, and Cary's in the Mayo Clinic. He's in the Mayo Clinic, and if you believe his wife, he looks like a fugitive from Maurice Sendak's Alligators All Around. Who else was in on it? Who else was involved in a way that the old Gypsy Might have decided called for revenge?
He thought of the two cops, rousting the Gypsies when they came into town … when they had presumed to start doing their Gypsy tricks on the town common. One of them had just been a spear-carrier, of course. Just a patrol-car jockey following …
Following orders.
Whose orders? Why, the police chiefs orders, of course. Duncan Hopley's orders.
The Gypsies had been rousted because they had no permit to perform on the common. But of course they would have understood that the message was somewhat broader than that. If you wanted Gypsy folk out, there were plenty of ordinances. Vagrancy. Public nuisance.
Spitting on the sidewalk. You name it.
The Gypsies had made a deal with a fanner out on the west side of town, a sour old man named Arncaster. There was always a farm, always a sour old farmer, and the Gypsies always found him. Their noses have been trained to smell out guys like Arncaster, Billy thought now as he sat on the bench listening to the first droplets of spring rain strike the bus shelter's roof. Simple evolution. All it takes is two thousand years of being moved along. You talk to a few people; maybe Madame Azonka does a free reading or two. You sniff for the name of the fellow in town who owns land but owes money, the fellow who has no great love for the town or for town ordinances, the guy who posts his apple orchards during hunting season out of pure orneriness – because he'd rather let the deer have his apples than let the hunters have the deer. You sniff for the name and you always find it, because there's always at least one Arncaster in the richest towns, and sometimes there are two or three to choose among.
They parked their cars and campers in a circle, just as their ancestors had drawn their wagons and handcarts into a circle two hundred, four hundred, eight hundred years before them. They obtained a fire permit, and at night there was talk and laughter and undoubtedly a bottle or two passed from hand to hand.
All of this, Halleck thought, would have been acceptable to Hopley. It was the way things were-done. Those who wanted to buy some of whatever the gypsies were selling could drive out the West Fairview Road to the Arncaster place; at least it was out of sight, and the Arncaster place was something of an eyesore to begin with – the farms the Gypsies found always were. And soon they would move on to Raintree or Westport, and from thence out of view and thought.
Except that, after the accident, after the old Gypsy man had made a nuisance of himself by turning up on the courthouse steps and touching Billy Halleck, 'the way things were done' was no longer good enough.
Hopley had given the Gypsies two days, Halleck remembered, and when they showed no signs of moving along, he had moved them along. First Jim Roberts had revoked their Are permit. Although there had been heavy showers every day for the previous week, Roberts told them that the fire danger had suddenly gone way, way up. Sorry. And by the way, they wanted to remember that the same regulations which controlled campfires and cook-fires also applied to propane stoves, charcoal fires, and brazier fires.
Next, of course, Hopley would have gone around to visit a number of local businesses where Lars Arncaster had a credit line – a line of credit that was usually overextended. These would have included the hardware store, the feed-and-grain store on Raintree Road, the Farmers' Co-Op in Fairview Village, and Normie's Sunoco. Hopley might also have gone to visit Zachary Marchant at the Connecticut Union Bank … the bank that held Amcaster's mortgage.