“Charice?” he said, returning to the matter at hand. “I thought you were mad at me about the lamb chops.”
“Say again?”
“I ate all your lamb chops. I was a pig.”
“Of course you ate my lamb chops. You were invited for dinner. Jerome would’ve ate ’em all. I’d’ve been lucky to get one.”
“I guzzled your expensive wine and fell asleep.”
“Shows what you know, if you think that swill was expensive.”
“So you’re not really mad at me?”
“Of course I’m not.”
“Then why’d you lock me out on the porch?”
“Lock you out?”
“The door was locked.”
“No, it just sticks when it’s humid. You have to lift up at the same time you push or pull.”
Now that she mentioned it, he remembered that when she first let them out onto the porch, she’d not only lifted the handle but kicked the bottom of the door.
“I left you a note,” she said.
“You did?”
“Put on the table right in front of you. Said I didn’t know how long I’d be, but to wait if you wanted to.”
“It must’ve blown away,” he said, recalling how still it had been when he dozed off, how the breeze had come up by the time he awoke. “The kitchen was all dark.”
“The bugs were swarming. Like a hundred of them on the screen.”
“God, I’m such an idiot. Go ahead and write that down, too, if you want.”
“Already did.”
He knew she hadn’t, though. Was she writing any of it down? Or was this list of hers just a running gag, like the Heinz one he shared with Mr. Hynes?
“Charice?” he said. “Do you believe in ghosts?”
“What? I’m black, so I have to be superstitious?”
“Charice.”
“No.”
“No to which?”
“No, I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Because Becka visited me last night. Twice.”
“Your dead wife visited you.”
“Out on your porch, the first time. She came to me in a dream.”
“How does you dreaming about Becka make her a ghost?”
“Later, in the cemetery, she tried to kill me.” He’d been wondering what a statement like this would sound like out in the open air. Now he knew. Batshit.
“What do you mean, ‘later, in the cemetery’? What were you doing out there?”
“I went to apologize.”
“To a dead woman. In the middle of the night.”
“You make it sound kind of crazy.”
“Where you were struck by lightning. Even if you were, how’s that Becka?”
He sighed. “I really have lost my mind, haven’t I.”
A quick negative response would’ve been welcome, but none was forthcoming. Finally she said, “You had a bad day.”
“Today’s going to be another. Should I go visit Jerome?”
“No,” she said quickly. “Absolutely not.”
“He still thinks I keyed his car?”
“Probably. When he gets like this…” In the silence that followed, he could hear her concern.
Nor did he blame her. He’d never seen anyone come quite so unglued as Jerome had. He remembered the relief he felt turning away from him and heading back to the Morrison Arms, even if it meant coming face-to-face with a cobra. Raymer replayed the short journey again, stepped off the curb and heard screeching brakes, the animal-control vehicle rocking mere inches from his left knee, again saw the people milling around in the parking lot. Roy Purdy had been among them, he recalled. It wasn’t just the neck brace that had made him stand out, or even that he’d been working so hard to blend in. It was that, for a brief moment, everyone else in the crowd was facing the Arms. Roy was looking at Gert’s, then spun away when he saw Raymer.
All at once the buzzing in his ears was gone. Got him, said Dougie.
“Got who?” Charice said.
Raymer ignored her. “Is there something you’re not telling me, Charice?”
She hesitated before answering. “Like what?”
“Does the mayor want Jerome to run against me for chief of police, because—”
“No, it’s nothing like that.”
“What’s it like?”
“Thing is, I’m not supposed to know. Nobody’s supposed to.”
“But you do.”
“No secrets between me and Jerome. I wish there were.”
“How about you and me, Charice? Are there secrets between us?”
“Okay, but you didn’t hear this from me. The muckety-mucks in Schuyler and Bath are talking about consolidating services. Police. Fire. Garbage collection.”
“Bath doesn’t have garbage collection.”
“It will. The idea is to get rid of redundancies. One administration. A single chain of command.”
“Firing people.”
“Trimming expenses.”
“Firing people.”
“Becoming more lean and efficient.”
“Firing people. So how does Jerome fit in?”
“He’d oversee the transition. That was his master’s thesis.”
Raymer, who didn’t usually leap to cynical conclusions, did so now. “Perfect fall guy, when it doesn’t pan out. No wonder he’s having panic attacks. When people find out who’s behind all this efficiency, somebody’s going to—”
“Shoot him,” Charice finished the sentence for him. “Right. That possibility has also occurred to him. He’s actually thinking about moving back to North Carolina.”
“Would you go, too?” he said, suppressing the urge to beg her not to.
“Come out from behind this desk, you mean? Go someplace else where I could maybe do some real police work?”
It made Raymer’s head swim, all of it. “Will Bath even have a chief of police?”
“Unclear.”
“And Gus supports this?”
“His idea, is my impression. Remember his campaign slogan? Let’s be Schuyler Springs?”
“Fuck him,” Raymer barked, surprised at how strong his feelings were about this.
The long moment of silence this occasioned made him wonder if maybe Gus was actually standing there next to Charice’s desk. Had he been listening to the whole conversation? Maybe he and Charice had made some sort of pact to keep tabs on him.
“Chief?” she said.
“Yeah?” he said, clearing his throat.
“Was that you? Who just said ‘Fuck him’?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
—
“YOU AGAIN,” the man said, when Raymer reappeared. “I thought you was gone.”
“You know Roy Purdy, Mr. Hynes? Moved into the Arms a couple weeks ago?”
“What he look like?”
“Skinny. Tattoos,” Raymer said. “His neck’s in a brace.”
“Live with that nice Cora woman?”
“I wondered, did you see him over at Gert’s yesterday?”
“People here all hangin’ out at Gert’s. I don’t pay ’em no mind.”
“I meant out back. In the parking lot. You’ve got a good view of that from here.”
“So?”
“Remember the tall black man I was with yesterday?”
“One with that shiny red car? Somebody ruint his paint job, I heard.”
“Did you see who did that, Mr. Hynes?”
“My eyes don’t do too good from a distance.”
“How about closer up, though. You were sitting right about where you are now. You didn’t by any chance see Roy Purdy come walking out of that alley, did you?”
“Would I be getting the boy in trouble if I said so?”
Raymer thought about lying but decided not to. “It’s possible,” he said.
“Good,” said Mr. Hynes. “ ’Cause I ’spect he the one peein’ in the stairwell.”