I looked at him for a time and then smiled. “I want his body shipped back to his family. I think they’re in Cleveland. I want it escorted back by one of your cops. A lieutenant, at least.”
Loambaugh jumped up from his chair and headed around the corner of the table. I assumed that I was the goal line. He got all of two feet before Lynch cracked out his order: “Sit down, Cal, and shut up!”
Loambaugh hesitated, stopped completely, turned and went back to his chair. “Don’t ride me,” he whispered, not looking at anyone. “Don’t do it again.”
Lynch’s fat round face was wreathed in smoke and smiles now. “I reckon we can take care of that fella’s remains okay, Lucifer. No big problem that I can figure. What really concerns me is this little old film we’ve just seen. Film can lie just like words can. I mean pictures don’t always tell the full story. Now if you was taking a picture of a barrel of apples and you had a thousand apples in that barrel and you just picked out six or seven rotten ones and took pictures of those and then showed ‘em to somebody and said, ‘Hey, here’s what apples look like,’ why, they wouldn’t really know what a good apple looked like, would they?”
“Jesus, that’s vivid,” I said. “I never thought of it in just that way.”
The wreath of smiles on Lynch’s face disappeared and was replaced by a sour, puckered look. “Okay, pal, you came here with a proposition. A deal. Let’s have it.”
“That was just a rough cut you saw. Wait’ll they edit it, throw in some background music, write the narration, and then get somebody like Cronkite or Brinkley to narrate it. Of course, they’d have to interview the chief here. Or if he didn’t want to go on, then they’d have to talk about that for a while and about his reasons for being unavailable. Then, too, what you’ve seen is only what they have on film. They must have a couple of file cabinets of other evidence lying around. Still pictures, sworn statements, witnesses, even victims. They’d all make nice little vignettes that would round out the film — give it breadth and scope and depth, if you follow me.”
“How much?” Lynch said.
“I’m getting to that.”
“You’re sure as hell in no hurry,” Loambaugh said.
“Well, after they have the film all put together, with additional facts, a big name voice — what do you think of Gregory Peck?”
“Not much,” Lynch said.
“Just an idea. So after they put it all together in a slick, professional, competent manner and give it a catchy title, something like, ‘Swankerton’s Cops: the Best that Money Can Buy,’ well, they’ll have no problem giving it — or even selling it — to one of the networks and then you’ll have about twenty or thirty million viewers instead of a mere hundred thousand or so here in Swankerton. Think of what the publicity will do for the place. You’ll have a special team down here from Life the next day plus a couple of dozen other hard-nosed reporters, all specialists in crime and corruption. The state cops will move in. They’ll have to, and they’ll be falling over the feet of the Justice Department types from Washington. That film, I’d say, can really put Swankerton on the map.”
Lynch sat through it all, puffing calmly away on his cigar. Loambaugh listened, at first with a certain amount of affected boredom that changed into interest and then deepened into fascination. By the time I was through he was chewing on his fingernails again.
Lynch sighed and ground his cigar out into an ashtray. It was only half-smoked. “I don’t know about Cal over there, Lucifer, but you don’t have to paint me any more word pictures. For an old country boy, I got a pretty good imagination. So I’m going to ask you again, how much do they want?”
“They?”
“That’s right. They. Them.”
“There is no they or them, Lynch. There are no expensive middlemen. I’m what’s called the sole source.”
“You are, huh?”
“He’s a lying sonofabitch,” Loambaugh said.
“Well, shit, Cal, we already know that.” He turned to me again. “I thought you was kind of working for us.” He tried to sound a little disappointed, even hurt, but it didn’t come out that way. Just petulant.
“Is there anyone else in town who’d have shown you the film?”
“So you’re the man?” Lynch said.
I nodded. “That’s right; I am.”
“Well, Mr. Man, what’s your price?”
I coughed once to clear my throat so that I could be sure that my voice wouldn’t crack when I named it. I kept my hands flat on the table so that they could be plainly seen, but not their fibrillary tremor. I ignored the sweat that formed in my armpits despite the air-conditioning. I looked at Lynch, but nodded my head toward Loambaugh.
“I want his resignation as chief of police. Today.”
Loambaugh hurtled across the table at me, his knees working on the polished surface in a scrambling effort to gain purchase. His hands were around my neck in less than a second and I could smell his SenSen breath and count the veins in his rolling eyes. I brought the heel of my right palm hard against his chin and I heard his teeth click shut. I shot both locked hands up and out through his arms and broke his hold on my neck. Then I hit him again as hard as I could, once with the heel of my left palm just at the base of his nose, and when that straightened him up, I hit him just below the breast bone with my right fist. He was softer than he looked and my fist seemed to sink in several inches and he whoofed and grabbed his middle with both hands, pressing hard. His nose was bleeding now and so was his tongue where he had bitten it when I had knocked his jaws shut. He knelt there on the long table, his head bent as he clutched his stomach and bled all over the polished surface. I leaned back in my chair, pressed my hands flat on the table again, and watched him without much interest. I noticed that the tremor was gone from my hands.
Lynch yelled, “Boo!” and the young man poked his head through the door. He looked at the kneeling figure of Loambaugh on the table, but it wasn’t unusual enough to make him change his expression.
“Get Chief Loambaugh a cold, wet towel,” Lynch said, “he’s had a little accident.”
After the blood was mopped from the table and Loambaugh was back in his chair with a towel pressed to his nose, Lynch gave me a genial smile and said, “Well, I reckon that’s enough excitement for one afternoon, don’t you, Lucifer?”
“Plenty,” I said.
“You were serious?”
“Completely.”
“It’s a mighty awesome thing,” he said, “asking a man to resign at the peak of his career for the good of the community. It takes a big man to do that. A real big man. You think you’re a big enough man to do that, Chief Loambaugh?”
“No resigning, Lynch. You can go fuck yourself.”
“Hear that, Lucifer? The chief doesn’t much care for your proposition.”
“I heard,” I said.
“You think this bastard’s got something on you?” Loambaugh said to Lynch, his voice muffled by the wet towel. “I got enough on you to send you down for twenty years.”
Lynch turned his head slightly and yelled for Boo again. When the young man popped his scarred head through the sliding doors, Lynch said: “Bring us some writing paper and some carbons and a ball-point pen, will you, Boo? Chief Loambaugh here wants to write up something.”
When Boo came back he offered the writing materials to Loambaugh, who ignored him. Boo glanced at Lynch, who said, “Just put them down here in front of him. He’s busy with his nose right now. He’ll get to them directly.”