He’d just gotten into the Caddie when his housekeeper ran to the door and signaled to him with a wave.
“It’s Mark,” she called. “Says it’s urgent.”
Ambler said, “Have him call on the car phone.”
He backed the car out of the driveway and waved to her affectionately once more.
Waiting for the call. He was thinking less about what the beefy young man would have to say and more about the woman he was on his way to see.
Ambler was a religious man (on the executive committee of the First Presbyterian Church), and although he understood that Calvinistic predestination did not absolve him from choosing the right path, the moral path, nonetheless the religion instilled in him a tendency toward helplessness on those moral questions the answers to which he did not like. He tended to throw his hands up and follow his instinct.
So although he knew what he was doing was immoral, he felt an addiction to his mistress, and could more or less successfully conclude that he had no control over the matter.
He packaged the infidelity carefully, though. For
instance, he never thought of the word “cheating,” which gave the whole matter a blue-collar taint. And he always thought of his paramour as a mistress or lover, rather than girlfriend or “the woman he was seeing on the side.” (Dignity was important to Wex Ambler.) He never risked embarrassing his lover just to satisfy his own passion and went to crazy lengths to keep the affair secret.
The one problem, though—one he hadn’t counted on—was that he’d fallen completely in love with the woman.
Ambler, who was fifty-two, was not so old that he had forgotten love makes people stupid—and in his philosophy, as well as his profession, stupidity was the number-one sin. He had guarded against love but unlike religion and unlike money and unlike power, love had a mind of its own.
It had nabbed him, but good.
At his insistence, their get-togethers had become more and more frequent. And he now felt his center giving, falling further toward her. He was growing hungrier, even desperate—while
she
seemed increasingly aloof.
Was there anything more foolish than a middle-aged man in love? And was there anyone who could care less about that foolishness?
Ambler smelled leaf dust and warm air from the Caddie’s heater and wished he were already at the cabin.
The phone buzzed. The noise always disturbed him; it reminded him of the alarm a hospital monitor would make when a patient went into cardiac arrest. He snatched up the light receiver.
“Yes.”
“I talked to Tom,” Mark said.
“Yes. And?”
“The guy’s turning into some kind of private eye.”
Ambler concentrated on driving. The roads were narrow and wound in tricky meanderings past horse and dairy farms. He had a tendency to wander onto the shoulder if he didn’t think about his driving. He asked Mark, “What do you mean?”
There was a pause and he heard Mark spit. A young man chewing tobacco—it was stupid. Maybe he did it to darken his moustache. Mark continued. “He’s been asking a lot of questions about his friend and the car. He was down to R&W. Looking at the wreck of the car.”
Ambler felt the car bobble as the right front tire dipped noisily off the asphalt. “Damn.” He forced the car back onto the road, overcompensating. It slipped over the broken yellow line before he got it steady again.
Mark asked, “What should we do? I was thinking maybe we could offer him some money. You know, bribe him to leave.”
“Then he’d think we had something to do with the . . . drugs, the car.”
“Not necessarily.” When Ambler didn’t answer, Mark said, “But maybe.”
Ambler said, “I’ve got an idea. I don’t want to talk about it on the phone. Come see me.”
“Now?”
“I’ll be busy for a while. I’ll call you.”
They hung up, and it took Ambler the rest of the drive to the cabin to shake off his concern at Mark’s news. In fact, it wasn’t until he turned into the leaf-packed
driveway and saw his lover’s car sitting obliquely in the turnaround of the cabin that his spirits lifted. He climbed out of the Caddie, eager and buoyant as a seventeen-year-old en route to a homecoming date.
THE CLEARY VOLUNTEER
Fire Department had a long history of proud firefighting and a photo gallery to prove it.
Dozens of faded pictures of hand-pump, horse-drawn wagons, even a few of bucket brigades, were scattered on the walls of the tiny office—as if the company had had a Mathew Brady protégé on staff to record every major fire before, after and including the big one of 1912. The firemen seemed to have been arranged by the photographer and Pellam wondered if they’d actually stopped working momentarily, smoothed their pushbroom or handlebar mustaches and posed for the leisurely exposures.
“Afternoon,” said the man sitting at the desk, rocking back in a metal chair. He was in his early thirties, wearing a black T-shirt over good muscles, blue jeans, a New York Mets cap.
“How you doing?”
“Not bad.”
Silence.
Pellam looked through a glass window at a big, yellow Seagrave fire truck. “Got some nice equipment there.”
“Town don’t scrimp, I’ll say that.”
“You all volunteer, huh?”
“Yep. There’s pay for one man on duty to take calls twenty-four hours.”
“He must get pretty tired.”
The man snagged the joke right away and fired back with, “But makes a hell of a lot of overtime.”
Pellam said, “I’m the one with the movie company.”
“I know.”
“You mind if I ask you a few questions?”
“Nosir.”
“You on duty when that car blew up? The one in the park?”
“That your friend’s car?”
Pellam said, “That’s right.”
“I answered that call, yessir. All of us did.”
“You tell me what happened?”
“You mean what caused it?”
“Whatever you can tell me.”
The man said, “There was most of it in the coroner’s report.”
“This isn’t official or anything like that. I’m just curious. He was a good friend.”
“Yessir, I understand.” The fireman squinted up at the spotless, red-enameled tin ceiling. “I recall the back end of the car was burning pretty good when we got there. Somebody’d driven past and called it in.”
“You know who?”
“Nope. I think it was a call from a pay phone. Anonymous.”
“You showed up and then what happened?”
“No hydrants, course, so we had to use the tank on the truck to get things cooled off enough to get
close to your friend. Then half the crew started on the brush fire with extinguishers and shovels. That was about it. We got the body away from the wreck and finally got the fire out. He died right away. It was pretty quick.”
“The gas tank had blown up?”
“Yessir.”
“You opened the trunk?”
“We popped it open, that’s right.”
“How do you do that?”
“Usually, we just pop out the cylinder, then reach in and flip the release bar. But the steel’d been pushed outward, so what we did was whack it a couple times with a pike. That jarred the bar and popped it open.”
“Why’d you open the trunk?”
“The sheriff wanted us to. To see what was inside. Anyway, it’s standard procedure. In case there’s cans of gas or oil. Also, your spare’ll burn for hours you don’t douse it good.”
“You find anything interesting?”
“Sir?”
“You said the sheriff wanted to look inside.”
“I don’t know. I was at the hood.”
“You have one of those pikes handy?”
He wasn’t yet uncomfortable under this questioning but he was growing warier. “They’re mounted on the truck, sir. We’re not really supposed to let civilians into the house, you know.”
Pellam nodded. He looked at the truck through a greasy window. The pikes looked blunt and heavy. It didn’t seem they’d leave holes as small as the ones he’d seen in the car. “What’re they made out of?”
“Steel of course.”
“One last question. Why was the area dozed over?”
“Sheriff ordered it. Somebody called him up and told him to, I heard. I don’t know why.”
“You don’t know who called, do you?”
“Sure don’t.”
Pellam thanked him then said, “Aren’t you going to ask me?”
“Ask you what, sir?”
“Whether we’re going to be making a movie here?”
The man shrugged. “Don’t make a lick of difference to me, sir. I work in feed and grain, not movies.”
AT NOON, MEG
Torrens walked out the door of the Dutchess County Realty office, set the hands of the
Be Back At
clock at 1:15. She looked around the square. Pellam’s Winnebago camper was parked opposite. She looked up and down the street, then crossed over and circled the camper. Taking in the tan and brown paint, the battered fenders, the mud stains, the chips in the windshield.
What the hell was she doing here?
Going shopping on my lunch hour, that’s all.
And when was the last time, my dear, you bought anything in one of these rip-off antique stores? Three, four years ago, wasn’t it?
She imagined herself in one of the campers, on location. She imagined what it was like to be in a movie. The modeling she’d done had been pure effort—exhausting. And she’d been treated like a dim-witted cocker spaniel. Making a movie would have to be different, she believed.
She caressed the metal skin of the camper. Noticed the faint remains of some graffiti on the side. It looked like two crosses.
Meg slung her leather bag over her shoulder and strolled up and down the street, looking at sights she’d walked past for years and never noticed. A cornerstone dated in late September, 1929—could that have been Black Thursday? A painted wooden barrel on the sidewalk emblazoned with the number 58 in red paint. One building was topped with a weather vane in the shape of a whale—why here, a hundred fifty miles from the ocean? Another was decorated with a beautiful round stained-glass window.
Meg was gazing into the window of Steptoe Antiques when she heard slow footsteps. A voice asked her, “Could use seconds on the brownies.”
Meg turned, looking blank at first, the way she’d rehearsed in case this happened. She said, “Should’ve eaten them while you had the chance, cowboy.”
Pellam stepped next to her to look at what she was examining. “How’re the driving lessons coming?”
“’Bout the same as your photo classes.”
Meg pointed to a tattered rug hanging on the wall in the window. “See that? Price tag looks like it says sixty. Wrong, that’s six hundred. They’ll sell it for that too.”
“What’s that supposed to be on there, a dog?”
Meg looked at it closely. “Could be. Maybe a cat. I don’t know.”
“Dinner was nice,” he said. “I enjoyed it.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “I did too.” She’d chosen the pronoun carefully.
“Your house is beautiful. That was the first dinner I’d had in a house, I mean a real house, in over a year.”
“No kidding,” she said, though she wasn’t surprised. “Sam’s done nothing but talk about you. You better make good on that promise.”
Pellam said, “The practice bombs. I haven’t forgotten.”
They walked past another real estate office. Pellam looked at some of the listings.
Meg’s voice dropped a half octave. “I’ve got some wonderful properties, Mr. Pellam. Owner financing is available . . .”
They laughed.
Eyes were on them. Cars slowed as they passed. Meg thought,
Go to hell.
But the defiance was shaky. She felt vulnerable, like the time she found herself at a Florida resort wearing a new bikini that turned out to be more see-through than she was comfortable with. As she did then she now crossed her arms over her chest.
“I guess I better get going,” she said.
Pellam touched her arm. She froze, then stepped back casually. He said, “I’d like to ask you a question. In confidence.”
Her thoughts raced but she just nodded slowly.
He asked, “There any reason why somebody might not want a movie made in Cleary?”
“We say no to drugs.”
“Beg pardon?”
“There’s some talk that there might be bad influences if your company came to town.”
“Okay, granted. I’ve heard that before. . . . But let me be a little blunter. There any reason why somebody
might kill my friend to keep a movie from being made here?”
Meg turned to him, her mouth open in shock. “You’re serious, aren’t you?” She turned back to the window. “That was a stupid thing to say. Sure, you’re serious.”
“This is off the record?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Okay, Marty did have some pot. Except, it was in the
camper
. Along with the rolling papers—”
“What’s that?”
“Rolling papers? Cigarette papers.”
“Oh. Right.”
“So it
wasn’t
in the car with him when it blew up. Somebody planted those drugs on him.”
She shook her head, but noncommittally, as if he were a lawyer taking down her reactions.
“Then I looked over the car a little while ago.”
“You did?”
“And I found two bullet holes in it.”
“Bullet holes?”
“I think so. Near the gas tank. I think that’s what happened. Somebody shot the tank, it exploded and then they planted the drugs and left before the fire truck got there.”
At first she thought this was impossible—in Cleary. But then she remembered the darker side of the town. The murders of those businessmen, the occasional rapes, two high school boys had driven into a tree at eighty miles an hour—they were both stoned on heroin, of all things.
He continued. “I was hoping I could talk to Keith. Maybe there’s a test he could do. On the metal. See if they were bullet holes.”
Meg said, “Why don’t you talk to Tom? Didn’t he investigate . . .” Then she understood. “I see. You think he’s involved in some way, do you? The sheriff?”
“I just want to keep it low-key.”
Nodding. She opened her purse and handed him one of Keith’s business cards. “Well, sure. Give him a call. He liked you.”
Across the square she saw a couple staring at them. The woman leaned toward the man; there was an extended whisper going on. Meg felt the burst of discomfort again.