That sounded about right to Raymer as well.
“I got it narrowed down,” the old man said. “It either him or you.”
—
A LUNATIC. That’s what he looked like in the grainy newspaper photo. Taken from the kitchen window below Charice’s, it caught Raymer at the moment the column detached from the porch above, his surprise at this unexpected turn of events having registered at just that instant. He’d been shinnying down, of course, but judging from the photo, he might as easily have been climbing up, a home-invading burglar. His bruised, swollen face looked like some sort of visual prediction of the damage done by a fall that hadn’t yet occurred. The caption read: What’s up, Chief?
Studying himself, a middle-aged man clinging for dear life to a load-bearing post, he again recalled the question Miss Beryl had pestered him with on his essays all those years ago: Who is this Douglas Raymer? Who, indeed? Three-plus decades later he still had no answer for her. Worse, he had just forty-eight hours to come up with one. At the moment all three sides of the old woman’s beloved rhetorical triangle remained blank. He couldn’t think of a single thing to say about his former teacher, couldn’t bring his audience into sharp focus. How many of these people would even remember her? Would those few who did think of her fondly? If so, would they hold his many personal and professional failures against her? After all, if she was such a great teacher, how had she managed to turn out a man who campaigned for chief of police on the slogan We’re not happy until you’re not happy?
Tossing the newspaper into the wastebasket, he looked up and saw the cobra, hooded and erect, atop a nearby filing cabinet. He stared at it transfixed, then hit the intercom. “Charice?” he said.
She came on the speaker immediately. “Chief? I didn’t see you come in.”
“I snuck in the back. Could you come in here a minute?”
When the door opened two seconds later, he pointed at the cobra. “How’d that get in here?”
“Huh,” she said, going over to it.
“Try harder,” he suggested.
“It looks very real.”
“That was my thought. My heart’s still pounding.”
She took the statue down and examined it. “Ceramic?”
“If you say so. This office was locked yesterday when I left.”
“Hold on,” she said, narrowing her eyes at him. “Are you saying I put it there?”
“I’m asking who else has a key.”
“Chief. Cops work here. And know how to unlock doors without keys.”
“I don’t,” he pointed out, for the record.
“I’m not talking about you,” she said, leading Raymer to question was this a compliment or an insult. “Also, lots of criminals are in and out of this station. Might’ve been one of them.”
“I was wondering about Jerome. If maybe this was his idea of a joke.”
“Jerome has an alibi. He was at the hospital all night. Sedated. Besides, like I told you. Jerome’s scared to death of snakes. Even ceramic ones.”
“Maybe he had an accomplice.”
“So I am a suspect?”
“I’d like to rule you out.”
“I got an alibi, too. Last night? I was with the chief of police himself.”
“Not all night.”
“Damn straight,” she agreed.
“And you got here before me this morning.”
“Chief?”
“Yes, Charice.”
“I don’t know where the fucking snake came from.”
“Would you write my Beryl Peoples tribute for me? For the middle-school rededication? Because if you’d do that, in return I’d be willing to believe you had nothing to do with this.”
“Not a chance. Never even met the lady.”
They regarded each other with what seemed to Raymer like a bottomless well of mutual disappointment, until she finally said, “Put who back where he was?”
“Sorry?”
“When I told you that you were on the front page of the Dumbocrat, you said you’d put him back where he was.”
“I did?”
“Somebody called the station early this morning. And the mayor, too. Reporting that Judge Flatt was being disinterred.”
“Really?”
“Means ‘dug up.’ ”
“I know what it means, Charice.”
“And you did admit to being out there at Hilldale getting zapped by lightning.”
“Charice?”
“Yeah?”
“You’d make a good cop.”
“What I been saying.”
“What else was in the log?”
She went out and came back in with it. “You want everything?”
“Just the meaty parts.”
“All in all, a wild night. The mayor’s wife went AWOL again. We found her, though.”
“Where this time?”
“Longmeadow Estates.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, why?”
“That’s where Becka and I used to live.” He remembered coming out of the condo in the morning and seeing her loitering across the street, anxious for him to leave for work so she and Becka could have coffee. He’d told her many times that she didn’t have to wait outside, to just ring the bell whenever, but the next morning she’d be there again, patiently awaiting access to her best friend. Possibly her only friend. For some reason Becka had refused to accept the conventional wisdom that Alice Moynihan was increasingly untethered from reality, preferring to believe that she was just odd, overly sensitive, like a psychic, to things other people never even noticed. Was it possible that Becka had paid her a visit last night as well? Why else would she return to Longmeadow Estates after so long? “What was she doing out there?”
“Talking on her phone.”
“Bless her heart. Okay, what else?”
“Mrs. Gaghan called again. Said her son went out drinking at the White Horse last night and never came home.”
“That would be Spinmatics Joe?”
“One and the same.”
“What’d you tell her?”
“Not what I wanted to. Also, there was an A and B over at Hattie’s an hour ago. Guess who?”
Dougie knew immediately, and a second later so did Raymer. “Roy Purdy.”
“Except this time it wasn’t the ex-wife he beat up. It was her mother.”
“Ruth, right?”
“Messed her up pretty bad.”
“Is he in custody?”
She shook her head. “Slipped out in the confusion when the ambulance got there. Apparently he got injured in the scuffle himself.”
“With an officer?”
“No, your old friend Sully showed up in the nick of time. Brained him with a skillet.”
“Good,” Raymer said, surprised for perhaps the first time in his life to think of his old nemesis with straightforward affection. Something was nagging at him, though, having to do with their adventure out at Hilldale that hadn’t seemed right. Not important right now, of course. “I’m pretty sure it was Purdy who keyed Jerome’s car, by the way. I saw him in the vicinity. When we pick him up, have the arresting officer check his keys for red paint in the grooves.”
“He can’t have got far. He doesn’t have a vehicle after yesterday.”
“Yeah, but there’s a woman at the Arms he’s tight with. Cora something. Make sure she didn’t loan him her car. Put out an APB on it if she did. Where are we with animal control?”
“Justin just called. He’s going through the place again this morning with four or five other AC guys. They figure the snake’s long gone, though.”
“Have they removed the other reptiles? And the rodents?”