Mickelsson's Ghosts (84 page)

Mickelsson studied the old man's face carefully, with admiration. It might have been carved out of gray mountain stone. “You don't think somebody should check on 'em now and then?”

“Not me. He'd blow my head off. You go check on him, you want to.”

Mickelsson smiled. “Strangest country I ever lived in,” he said.

“Still wild, that's the thing of it,” the old man said. “Still half Indian. Over to Mont-rose now, that's civilized. All them big white houses, big old Bible school, picture show downtown, three different restaurants to feed the rich people. Ain't even gaht rattlesnakes, over there in Mont-rose. All stayed this side of the river, away from the hymn-singing. Myself now, I'd sooner take the snakes.”

“Yes, that's it, that's the feeling,” Mickelsson said thoughtfully. “Sort of pagan. I don't mean bad.”

“All those Catholics—worst pagans the world ever saw—that's Seskehenna. All their patron saints and their spirits for every gorge and crick.” Though he did not smile, he was enjoying himself. “You can bet there's no ghosts over there in Mont-rose. They sail right up to the Throne like chickens in a whirlwind.”

Now both of them smiled.

Pearson raised his long left arm and pointed down at the band of river and dark, gleaming patches of pond in the valley. “People of a well-watered land,” he said, “that's what the name means. The Seskehenna. Captain John Smith come and called them that, and the Indians didn't want to offend him, so they took it as their name.” He lowered his arm.

They both sat looking for a minute or two, the sun through the falling snow blindingly bright where it hit an open slope, everything dark and shifting where the shadows were.

“Wal, good luck to you,” Pearson said at last, and glanced at Mickelsson's boots as if they might not be adequate.

“Same to you,” Mickelsson said.

The old man touched the brim of his cap, then stood up and turned without a word and set off through the woods with gradually lengthening strides. The shadows, as he moved toward them, seemed to deepen. Mickelsson shaded his eyes and looked up in the direction of Spragues' place, but he could see no sign of it. He would remember distinctly, the following morning, that he'd wondered that instant if it were possible that the house had burned down. It had not, at the time the thought occurred to him; but it had by the following morning.

As soon as he stepped out the back door to get wood for his stove, he saw the smoke. By the time he reached the telephone, or anyway before he'd mentally committed himself to dialing, the trucks of the Volunteer Fire Department were already screaming by. He stood with his hands on his head, agonizing over whether or not he dared show his face. He had no idea why, abruptly, he decided he would. Quickly he put on a heavy sweater, coat, boots, and gloves and ran out to the car; but when he finally got it started and made his way up to where the fire was, it was obvious that there was nothing to be done. Everything was gone, even the shed where the dogs had been. The air was rank with the stench of wet, burned wood. The firetrucks were mud-spattered and serious, like old farm tractors. Mickelsson stayed back by the road, his hands in his coatpockets. He couldn't tell whether the knot in his stomach was hunger or something else. Pearson stood nearby, talking with the man from the place between, John Dudak. Dudak was young, good-looking, cleanshaven. He had two boys with him, maybe eight and ten; he'd made them wait in the pickup.

“You think they were in there?” Mickelsson heard Dudak ask.

“Musta been,” Pearson said. His face was gray.

Smoke and steam rolled up through the bare-branched trees. All the ground was black.

With a start, Mickelsson realized that one of the men in the fireman's outfits was Owen Thomas, from the store. Owen was coming toward him; it was too late to flee.

“Any sign of them?” Mickelsson asked.

Owen looked at him, reserved, then shook his head.

Perhaps it was Owen Thomas's look, or the stark reality of the fire, or perhaps it was his painfully sharp memory of going there with Jessie: it came to him that he could tolerate his uncertainty no longer.

So far as he could learn from the telephone book, Susquehanna had no police station, though he knew it had police. Carefully and slowly, like an old man, he drove down to town and parked across from the Acme Market, four spaces ahead of where Tacky Tinklepaugh sat watching for violators of the town's one red light. Mickelsson, wearing his most formal clothes—dark suit, dark overcoat—stepped carefully out onto the glare-ice street, locked his car-door, for no reason, then walked carefully on the glare-ice sidewalk back to the patrol car. He towered above it. He bent down and knocked on the passenger-side door and, when Tinklepaugh reached over and cracked it an inch or two, called in, “Can I talk to you a minute?”

By a gesture, Tinklepaugh invited him in, and, after glancing up and down the street, Mickelsson opened the patrol-car door and took a seat beside Tinklepaugh. Mickelsson sat hunched forward, staring up-from-under through the windshield. He pretended not to notice the whiskey bottle on the seat between them, though Tinklepaugh obviously had no interest in whether he noticed it or not. Tinklepaugh, it was said, had more than once pushed a car he owned over a cliff for the insurance, had once shot a man for no good reason at the Peaceful Valley Inn, and had again and again been given warnings about his drinking while on duty. None of that bothered him in the least, apparently. Without back-up he would knock on the door of well-known mountain murderers; at fires and cave-ins and drowning scenes he performed acts of heroism no sober man would dare, especially at the salary the town afforded him, ten thousand a year.

“Cold out,” Tinklepaugh said, and reached to the dashboard to fiddle with the lever that ran the heater.

Mickelsson studied him a moment, chilled by his miscalculation in coming here. He cast about in vain for a way to get out of what he'd gotten himself into. Tinklepaugh's nose was enlarged, his face a drunken ruin, puffy, dark with broken blood vessels. His eyes were like partly closed suitcases.

“I want to ask you something,” Mickelsson said. “I've been worried sick, and I live out there all alone, you know—I'm a nervous person anyway …” Quickly, lest he change his mind, or chatter crazily and give himself away, he said, “You know that fat man that was murdered?”

Tinklepaugh nodded, a slow downward then upward movement of the fleshy mask and cowboy hat.

“What have you found out?” Mickelsson asked.

Tinklepaugh seemed to study him, possibly too drunk to think clearly. At last he said, “Could be just about anybody, Professor Mickelsson.”

“That's not very reassuring, is it,” Mickelsson said. “Are you saying you've got no idea at all? It could be me, or Owen Thomas, or the man that runs the Acme … or Charley Snyder?”

“Not them last three,” Tinklepaugh said.

A wave of fear went through Mickelsson. He'd set that one up himself! “You're saying it could've been me?” His mind raced; then, cunningly, he said. “You're right, of course. It could've been me. That would be convenient, pinning it on a newcomer—a stranger.”

“Yes, it would.” He was silent a moment, his bleary eyes on Mickelsson. “I'd have my problems, though. Say it's you, you're the killer.” He pointed at Mickelsson's jaw. “You must be pretty well-off, if you killed that fat man. I'm surprised you don't try to spend it. I understand you've been bouncing checks all over town.”

Mickelsson's heart missed a beat. “Rich?”

Tinklepaugh's face was as expressionless as ever, sagging with sorrow or neurotic gloom, drunken ruin. “I understand you're into the I.R.S. for quite a handy sum. Funny you don't pay 'em.”

Mickelsson said, “I don't follow you.”

It came to him that Tinklepaugh had been holding his breath, or perhaps had forgotten to breathe, because now the man sighed, a sigh irrelevant to Mickelsson's guilt or innocence. Tinklepaugh turned his face away—pulled it away reluctantly, it seemed—and stared out through the windshield, his hands on the steeringwheel. “You know those Susan B. Anthony dahllars?” he asked. “You know why they made 'em? Because paper dahllars wear out in a year or two, and they're expensive to make. You see? Nothing's what it looks. You're like the rest of the citizens. You thought they made the Susan B. Anthonys as a sign of their new respect for women, or maybe because some faggot at the mint had been to England and got taken by the idea of coins with flat sides. Well, no. Maybe some of that—politics is always tricky. But mainly, dahllar bills wear out, they're money down the drain.” He turned to Mickelsson again to study him, or rather, dully stare at him, as one might stare at a wall. “Every year's dahllar bills are a little bit different—you aware of that? It's like motorcycles or cars, small changes every year. Anyone deals with money all the time, such as a banker, he can tell at a glance if a bill is a seventy-nine or an eighty. Imagine how surprised he'd be if he suddenly got a handful of bills from, say, nineteen sixty-five. That's when the fat man you murdered robbed the Cass Bank in St. Louis.”

Mickelsson said nothing, the words
you murdered
crackling through his brain.

“I ain't saying you
didn't
kill him,” Tinklepaugh said, and sighed again, tightening his hands on the steeringwheel. “But I had a talk with your psychiatrist.” For an instant he glanced at Mickelsson, evilly grinning. “We cover all the bases, any bases we can find. Routine, you know, all of it.” He raised two fingers up to his forehead to tip his hat up, then returned the hand to the steeringwheel. “If your psychiatrist thought you did it, he wouldn't say so, I expect, but after I talked to him I had a kind of a hunch that sooner or later you and me would have dealings.”

Numbly, Mickelsson said, “You think I killed them … him, and …” The mistake baffled him, made him forget what he was saying.

Tinklepaugh didn't notice. “Let's say I'm just puzzled over how come you never spent the money.”

Mickelsson looked down at his knotted hands. Somewhere Donnie Matthews was spending those old dollars. It seemed unlikely that Tinklepaugh didn't know about his nights with Donnie. No doubt they were looking for her, would eventually find her. They'd call Donnie an accessory.

Softly, staring forward, his eyebrows lifted in what he would have recognized another time as his crazed look, Mickelsson asked, “Who
do
you think did it?”

“I guess we
know
who did it,” Tinklepaugh said. “It's a question of finding proof.”

“Who, though?” he asked.

“Who broke into your house? Who set the fire up on the mounting?”

Mickelsson twisted his head around. “What do you mean?” The nape of his neck tingled. Then he said, “I never told you my house was broken into!”

Tacky Tinklepaugh leaned back, hung his arms over the steeringwheel, and let his eyes fall shut. “If you don't want things known, don't talk. Don't even breathe. Now go home, Professor. If I find out you killed him, you'll be one of the first to know.” He let his eyes fall shut and at once seemed fast asleep.

Mickelsson looked down at the bottle in the seat beside the man, then back up at the face. At length, quietly, hurriedly, he got out and closed the door. Returning to his car, he moved recklessly on the icy sidewalk, almost running.

3

Two days later Finney called again. The divorce hearing would be the following morning at nine, in Providence. He'd better be there.

“What'll happen?” Mickelsson asked. He could imagine Finney swinging around in his big leather deskchair, pushing off from the glass-topped desk with three fingers, great pink fatrolls bulging above his collar. On the desk, just within reach, Mickelsson imagined or conceivably saw a box of After Eight mints.

“She won't want to get into a pissing match,” Finney said. “She'll huff and blow a lot, rattle a few cages, see if you throw your tire, but she knows right well the court'll never give her what you've offered her—nowhere near it.”

“I doubt that
she
believes that,” Mickelsson said. Finney's line, he remembered.

Finney apparently did not remember. “Well, you're more familiar with the lady than I am,” he said. “But I can tell you this, whatever she may think, her lawyers know a damn sight better. The bottom line is, she's lucky to get one red goddamn cent, and when the I.R.S. drops the other shoe, maybe she
won't
get a red goddamn cent. As you know, ole pal, if you'd left it up to me—”

“All right,” Mickelsson said, “I'll be there.”

And so by one that afternoon he was on the road east, pushing the repaired Jeep at seventy in spite of snow flurries and ice. He arrived in Providence in a blinding snowstorm, put in at a cheap motel, watched television and drank, put in a wake-up call, and went to bed. He reached the courthouse at eight-thirty. Finney arrived about twenty minutes later, dressed in dark green, his face brick-red and scowling, even the flesh around his eyes unhealthily swollen. When he spotted Mickelsson he forced a sudden grin and held out both arms as if to hug a long-lost brother. For an instant Mickelsson got a nightmare flash of the fat man he'd killed, reaching up to him from the lawn. Finney's suitcoat was open—Mickelsson suspected it would no longer button—and the buttons of his pale yellow shirt were tight, ready to pop. “Hey, Professor,” he yelled, “how ya doing? How's it go?”

“I'm fine,” Mickelsson said.

“Good boy!
Good
boy!” Finney put his arm around him, talking a blue streak—“Jesus, you look like you lost fifty, sixty pounds! You sure you're all right?”—urging him up the broad, waxed steps to a small room upstairs, just off the courtroom. “Hope ya brought something to read,” he said, “You know how it is with these things.”