“So in the morning the kids headed on away in the camper truck and the first thing I did was tell Roger the whole thing. That was Friday, and Hazzard came out in the afternoon and sent Roger out of the place and talked to me. He said he’d put the evidence away in a safe place, and in the pictures he had proof on both Roger and me on the teeny-bopper on corrupting a minor, and lewd and lascivious conduct. Then he questioned me over and over on what I saw that Sunday. Then he brought up if I knew a friend of Bannon’s named McGee. I told him about just that one day, and he made me remember every little part of it. So he walked back and forth and then he told me I was going to come in and make a statement and what I was going to say. I asked him why I should do anything he said, because if he left us alone, I wouldn’t say anything about him. He said if I didn’t do it, he would bust us both good, and he had enough proof and enough charges to get us both five to ten anyway. And I said if he tried to bust us that way, when he took us in, I’d tell what I saw him do. And he said then it would be pretty clear to everybody that I was making it up just to try to get him in trouble for doing his job and nobody would believe it because nobody ever believes an acid head about anything, and those pictures would make a hog sick. He said if I did my part, then after McGee was convicted, he’d give back everything he took. Then he gave me a chance to talk it over alone with Roger and for a while we thought maybe we ought to just take off and go merge into a colony someplace, but we went that road for a while and we relate better like plastics.”
“What? What?” asked the sheriff.
“Take the group thing now and then, and have a square thing we do for bread. We take off and we lose the trade we’ve built up that comes to maybe a hundred and fifty a week on average, and then maybe that Hazzard could get us brought back anyhow.” She combed the fingers of both hands back through the dark blonde stiffness of her long hair, shook it back and said, “So we decided okay, only what we didn’t know is how I could get busted a lot bigger for the statement than for what he’s got on us, and I didn’t know McGee would be in the clear, because he said maybe McGee might not even get to answer any questions at all. So where are we?”
“Where are you?” the sheriff asked. “Honest to God, I don’t even know what you are, girl.”
I looked at my watch. It was just eleven o’clock. The sheriff told Arlie he’d like to hold her and her husband in protective custody on a voluntary basis, and she agreed. I knew that part of the case against Freddy Hazzard would be Press LaFrance’s testimony about whatever conversation he’d had with his nephew, triggered by my comment to LaFrance about the possible reason why Tush had been killed. But had I reminded Burgoon of that point, he was going to mess up my timing, which was already two hours off. So I wondered out loud if Tush could have come in by bus early Sunday morning and if Hazzard, cruising around, had picked him up near the bus station and driven him out there.
Arlie had been taken off to the female detention tank. Tom, the chief deputy, said that if anybody could place Hazzard and Bannon together in town at dawn on Sunday, it would lock it up tighter.
“Tighter than the way he run?” Burgoon asked. “He was a good boy. He worked harder than any two others I got. Just a little bit too handy with that mailorder pacifier sometimes. But you take a county where you got some hard cases back in the piney woods, a little head-knocking keeps things leveled off. He lived clean and straight. It must have shook that boy when he checked out that complaint, walking in on that. Like looking into a bucket of mealy grubs. What’s going wrong with folks lately McGee?”
I had neared the ultimate promotion to Mr. McGee.
“It’s a mass movement against head-knocking, Sheriff.”
“What kind of a joke is that?”
“All kinds of head-knocking. Commercial, artistic and religious. They’re trying to say people should love people. It’s never been a very popular product. Get too persistent, and they nail you up on the timbers on a hill.”
He stared at me with indignation. “Are you one of them?”
“I recognize the problem. That’s all. But the hippies solve it by stopping the world and getting off. No solution, Sheriff. I don’t seek solutions. That takes group effort. And every group effort in the world requiring more than two people is a foul-up, inevitably. So I just stand back of the foul line and when something happens that doesn’t get called by the referees, I sometimes get into the game for a couple of minutes.”
“Around here today,” he said sadly, “it’s beginning to seem to me like in my sleep last night I must have forgot half the English language.”
“Can I go take care of my business matter?”
He looked at Tom, got some signal in reply; and said, “Stay in the area, Mr. McGee.”
Thirteen
I SAW PRESTON LaFrance sitting at his desk inside his little real estate office in a converted store on Central Street. He had his head in his hands, and he was alone.
When he heard the door open, he looked up with the beginnings of the affable show you-a-fine-parcel smile, and it froze there partially developed. He jumped and boggled and said, “McGee! You… you’re alone? But I saw you with… you were…”
“Sorry I couldn’t keep the coffee date, Press. I had to go answer some fool questions the sheriff wanted to ask me.”
“Bunny… let you go?”
“What’s the matter with you? Are you disappointed?”
“No! Hell, no! Sit down! Sit down, Trav! Cigar? Take that chair. It’s more comfortable.”
I sat down. “Did you have the same weird idea Burgoon had? Did you think I killed Bannon?”
“But Freddy said an eyewitness had turned up, and they were going to grab you down there in Lauderdale and he was going to go down and bring you back.”
“It would have been an exciting trip.”
“What happened? What about the eyewitness?”
“Burgoon satisfied himself that she was lying and I wasn’t.”
“Freddy said everything fitted together.”
“It did.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“It worried you a little, Press, when I told you that maybe somebody was trying to give you and Monk Hazzard a lot of cooperation in rousting Bannon out of his property, and maybe they busted him up too much. And you said that there wasn’t anybody involved who’d do a thing like that, but you hesitated a little. So you were thinking of Nephew Freddy, the head-knocker. So you came back and laid some very indirect questions on him and he convinced you he was absolutely innocent, and then you told him who had been feeding you such crazy ideas. So, lo and behold, the eyewitness was brought in and she changed her story and the sheriff let me go.”
“I guess then we can… talk business?”
“Sure, Press. That’s what I’m here for. By the way, the eyewitness identified Freddy as the killer. He heard about it by accident and took off. They’re running a manhunt right now. So it was a pretty good guess.”
“I got the money together, but first I have to… What did you say? Freddy? Come on!”
“He ran, Press. He took off. Check it out. Call Burgoon.”