They got me in the bushes now, really giving me hell-for, when I hear this real smooth voice saying, “Table open?” It's Dick, you see, a fresh Lucky stuck between his lips and palming the prettiest nickle-plated .38 I think I’ve ever seen. Duke and Reese drop me like a wormy apple, with Reese going on about what right the other had sticking his nose in.
“I got six rights, pizza face,” Dick tells him, then raises the revolver up to make his point. “You and your friend should really go play someplace else — like Kentucky.”
I think that’s a good one, even in my condition, and I enjoy watching the both of them back out of there. They hit the street at a brisk shuffle and disappear.
“You coming?” he asks, putting his gun away. “Or maybe you want to go play hopscotch on Canal Street?”
“All right, Dick,” I finally say, letting him help me up. I’m sore as hell all over but can’t help getting in the mood. “Let’s make like a tree and leave.”
“Ditto, canman.”
We vamoose.
Robert Sampson
Rain in Pinton County
Robert Sampson may be best known to students of popular culture for Yesterday’s Faces, a five-volume study of pulp magazines that is being published by Popular Press. Volumes one and two — Glory Figures (1983) and Strange Days (1984) — have appeared, and the next two volumes are with the printer. In addition to his scholarly work, Mr. Sampson, who is a management analyst at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, has published about two dozen mystery stories.
Fat raindrops rapped circles across puddles the color of rusty iron. Ed Ralston, Special Assistant to the Sheriff, said, “ 'Scuse me,” and pushed through the rain-soaked farmers staring toward the house. Ducking under the yellow plastic strip — CRIME SCENE, KEEP OUT — that bordered the road, he followed the driveway up past a brown sedan, mud-splashed and marked “Sheriff’s Patrol.”
Behind him, a voice drawled, “He’s her brother.”
The house, painted dark green and white, sat fifty feet back from the county road. That road arced behind him across farmland to hills fringed darkly with pine. Black cattle peppered a distant field. The air was cold.
In the rear parking lot, a second patrol car sat beside a square white van with “Pinton County Emergency Squad” painted across the state outline of Alabama. On the shallow porch, a deputy in a black slicker watched rain beat into the yard.
Ralston said, “Punk day, Johnny. Fleming get here yet?”
The deputy shook his head. “They’re still calling for him. Broucel’s handling things inside.” And, as the door opened, “I’m sure as hell sorry, Ed.”
“Thanks.”
He entered a narrow kitchen, went through it to a dark hallway that smelled faintly of dog, turned left into the front room. There a handful of men watched the photographers put away their gear.
When he entered the room, their voices hesitated and softened, as if a volume control had been touched. Men stepped forward, hands out, voices low: “Sorry. Sorry. Ed, I’m real sorry.”
He crossed the familiar room, keeping to a wide plastic strip laid across the beige carpet. He shook hands with a little, narrow-faced man who looked as if he had missed a lot of meals. “Morning, Nick.”
“Sorry as hell about this, Ed,” Nick Broucel said.
Ralston nodded. His glasses had fogged, and he began rubbing them with a piece of tissue that left white particles on the glass. Without the glasses, his eyes seemed too narrow, too widely separated for his long face. His dark hair was already receding. Scowling at the flecks on his glasses, he said, “Well, I guess I better look at her.”
A gray blanket covered a figure stretched out by the fireplace. Ralston twitched back a corner, exposing a woman's calm face. Her hair was pale blond, her face long, her lipstick bright pink and smudged. On the bloodless skin, patches of eye and cheek makeup glared like plastic decals.
He looked down into the face without feeling anything. There was no connection between the painted thing under the blanket and his sister, Sue Ralston, who lived in his mind, undisciplined, sharp-tongued, merry.
He stripped back the blanket. She was elaborately dressed in an expensive blue outfit, earrings and necklace, heels; nails glittered on hands crossed under her breasts. “Well, now,” he said at last. “It’s Sue. What happened?”
Nick said, “She went over backward. Hit her head on the corner of the fireplace. Pure bad luck. Somebody moved her away. Smoothed her clothes. Folded her hands. Somebody surprised, I’d say.”
“Somebody shoved her and she fell?”
“Could be.”
“Or she just slipped.”
“Could be.”
Rain nibbled at the windows. The investigative work had started now, and the room squirmed with men standing, bending, looking, methodically searching for any scrap of fact to account for that stillness under the gray blanket.
Ralston asked, “Why the full crew? How’d we hear about this?”
“Anonymous call. Male. Logged at 5:32 this morning. Gave route and box number. Said the bodies were here.”
“Bodies? More than one?”
“Not so far.” Broucel looked sour and ill at ease. “This is Fleming’s job, not mine. I’m just marking time here. I don’t know where the hell he’s got to. Where’s the sheriff?”
Ralston said carefully, “He’s taking a couple of days vacation.” He slowly scanned the room. Money had been freshly spent here, money not much controlled by taste. New blue brocade chairs bulked too large for the room. The couch seethed with flowered cushions. The lamps were fat glass creations with distorted shades. Tissues smeared with lipstick scattered a leather-topped coffee table.
“And there’s something else,” Broucel said.
He gestured toward the shelves flanking the fireplace. Cassettes of country music littered the bottom shelves. On upper shelves clustered carved wooden animals, ceramic pots, weed vases. Centered on the top shelf was the photograph of a grinning young man. It was inscribed “To Sue, With Ever More Love, Tommy.”
“You recognize that kid?” Broucel asked.
“Isn’t that Tommy Richardson? His daddy owns the south half of the county.”
“That’s the one.”
“Daddy’s going to enforce the dry laws, jail the bootleggers, clean up the Sheriff’s Department — come elections. That’s a mike, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir, that’s a mike.”
A fat wooden horse had tumbled from the second shelf. Its fall had exposed the black button of a microphone, the line vanishing back behind the shelves.
In a slow, reflective voice, Ralston said, “Sue never had a damn bit of sense.”
“Let’s go down in the basement,” Broucel told him.
Steep wooden stairs took them to a cool room running the length of the house. Windows along the east foundation emitted pallid light. Behind the gas furnace, a small chair and table crowded against the wall and black cables snaked out of the ceiling to connect a silver-gray amplifier and cassette tape recorder. On the table, three cassette cases lay open and empty, like the transparent egg cases of insects.
Broucel said, “We found three mikes. About any place you cough upstairs, down it goes on tape.”
Ralston gestured irritably at the equipment. “I don’t understand this. She didn’t think this way. She couldn’t turn on the TV. Why this?”
Broucel fingered his mouth, said in a hesitant voice, “I sort of hoped you could help me out on that.”
“I can’t. I don’t know. We didn’t speak but once a year.”