“Earle clocked Stander at eighty miles an hour and said he was so drunk he couldn’t get out of the car by himself.” Earle was the best of the three cops who worked the night shift. Sam swore by Earle’s word. Earle had been damned upset by what he’d seen last night. Thus Sam was damned upset.
As he spoke, Cummings took his pipe from his pocket, tamped some tobacco down into it, and then lit up.
“He’s not a bad kid, Sam,” Cummings said.
“As I said, Senator. He’s not a kid. He’s eighteen.”
Cummings glanced at the Chief again. This time he didn’t wink. He could obviously sense that Sam was in no mood for humor. He looked at Sam and said, “All right, then. He’s not a bad young man. Just a little rambunctious.”
Cummings stared at him a moment and then said, “His mother isn’t doing all that well since her operation, Sam.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Sam said. “She’s a nice woman. She really is. But that doesn’t have any bearing on this. He should stay in jail until he can raise bail.”
“What good’ll that do, Sam?” the Chief said. He was a freckled, ruddy-faced man with a fleshy face and huge hands and a body not meant for suits and neckties. He’d grown up a farm boy, and he would die a farm boy. Sam liked him but he didn’t respect him. Like most people in this town, the Chief always did what Senator Cummings wanted him to. As the Chief had said to Sam once, “This town was damned near bankrupt when David Cummings went to Washington. By the end of his first term, it was one of the most prosperous towns in the Midwest. Why shouldn’t we go along with him?”
Cummings said, “You don’t think you’re being a little harsh?”
“No.”
“Sam, damn it,” the Chief said in his familiar whine. He’d found this an effective method of dealing with his officers. They hated his whine, and would stay in line just so they wouldn’t have to hear it again. “Ron’s mother is a friend of mine.”
“I like to think she’s a friend of mine, too, Chief,” Sam said.
Cummings sighed. Stared at his well-manicured hands for a long time. Then he looked up and said, “Doc Klever gives her three, four months at the outside.”
“Goddamn it, Senator, don’t do this to me,” Sam said.
The Chief looked at Cummings to see if he was offended by Sam’s words. He didn’t appear to be.
“Do what to you, Sam?” Cummings said quietly.
“Make me feel like an incredible shit because I want to obey the law.”
The Senator stared at him a thoughtful moment longer and then said to the Chief, without taking his eyes from Sam, “He’s teaching us a lesson here, Chief. And we should take it to heart. He’s telling us that none of us is above the law. Not one of us.”
Cummings turned away from Sam and then reached inside his tan leather jacket and took out a checkbook.
He showed it first to Sam and then to the Chief. He looked like a magician showing a prop to the audience.
“You know what our good friend Sam here has done, Chief?”
The Chief just watched Sam.
“Forced me to be creative.”
He set the blue checkbook down on the Chief’s desk, picked up a pen, and started writing.
Finished with the check, he tore it off and handed it over to the Chief.
“I believe you said two thousand dollars.”
“Two thousand dollars?” the Chief said.
“His bail.”
“Hell, Senator, you’re not going to put up his bail, are you?”
“What else can I do, Chief? The Stander family doesn’t have a pot to piss in. Where’re they going to get that kind of money?”
Cummings stood up and then offered Sam his hand.
“Thanks for keeping me on the right side of honest, Sam. I’m sorry I got carried away there, wanting to get Ron out of jail without doing it legally.”
He took his hand back and glanced over at the Chief.
“The fact is, I’m going upstairs right now and have a talk with the boy. Oops, sorry, Sam. Have a talk with the ‘young man.’ ” The Senator offered him a nice Hollywood smile. “I’m going to rag on his ass for a while. Remind him about his mother and remind him about the wreck he almost caused last night.”
He leaned down and picked up his stylish western fedora. It was white and went well with his ivory-colored turtleneck. Cummings had a number of these fedoras in various colors. He looked just as good in every single one of them.
He walked to the door, opened it slightly.
“I’m supposed to check in with my office in a little bit. Guess I’d better head on over there.” He nodded to Sam. “I knew we could work it out, Sam. When you come right down to it, we’re both reasonable men and we both love this town of ours very much.”
Then he put his western fedora on and walked out the door.
“Now there’s a classy guy,” the Chief said.
“Yeah, or a sociopath.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“People that charming always scare the hell out of me.”
“You know the kind of people who scare the hell out of me?” the Chief said.
“No. What kind?”
“People who barge in on meetings they weren’t invited to.”
“I guess I should apologize, Chief.”
The Chief shook his head. “I don’t give a damn about apologies, Sam. But what I do give a damn about is helping that man who just left here. The things he’s done for people in this town are just amazing. Rich, poor, black, white — hell, he was the one who got all those illegals in the hospital when they came down with influenza a few years back.”
“We owe him a lot,” Sam said. “I was never disputing that, Chief.”
“You could have been a little more respectful.”
“I was just trying to make my point.”
“Oh, you made it all right, Sam. You made it real good.”
Sam walked to the door, put his hand on the knob.
“Sam?”
He turned around, faced the Chief.
“Yeah?”
“One thing.”
“All right.”
“Never make the people in this town choose between you and the Senator. Because you know what?”
“What?”
“They’ll choose the Senator every time. And that goes for me, too.”
“I guess maybe I should remember that,” Sam said.
The Chief watched him coolly. “Yeah, I think that’d be a real good thing for you to remember.”
Sam walked out into the hall.
Five
1
Darcy Fuller watched as the gas station attendant kept peering through the windshield of the Triumph sports car for a better look at Darcy’s breasts.
She wore a red tank top under a sheer white blouse, the tank top only emphasizing the size of her breasts. The miniskirt she wore rode halfway up her thighs. The only way the attendant could get a look at those would be to lean into her convertible, and he was way too timid for that.
A real stud would have looked at her frankly, almost daring her to say something.
But this kid, all pimples and horn-rimmed glasses, looked like the dweeb of all dweebs.
He wanted to look but was scared to look.
The DX station was crowded in the late afternoon. A couple of suburban women with big vans were pumping their own gas, trying to prove how liberated and self-reliant they were. A couple of grade-school boys using the air hose to fill up their bicycle tires. And one of the town’s old Mexican men was looking over a new radial tire. The air smelled of oil and gas. The three bays were filled with cars, two up on hoists. Every few minutes a metal tool would clang to the floor. Beautiful fall day like this. Black and Gold posters everywhere. The Iowa Hawkeyes incited great loyalty and excitement. This senior boy who thought he was really hot shit had got his father’s box seats and wanted to take Darcy with him. But he was a dweeb, too, nice looking and slick in his way, but real prim and proper. No fun at all.