The Blackstone Commentaries (34 page)

“I figured him out, sheriff,” Puma had declared afterward, grinning. “He had four arms, not two.”
All for a hundred dollars
.

Then Dugan found himself thinking of the chicken factory again, of Lester, the taxi driver, who lived just up the street, if you wanted to call that dirt track with puddles wide enough to swallow a car a street. And he recalled wading through the grass to Lester's front porch the day he drove to Pinetown, then Natty Moon and Mary Stacy, then the courtroom and Pemberton not looking at him. He still couldn't think about that sonuvabitch with equanimity.

When he came to, he found Trainor still there, staring expectantly, waiting for approbation, he supposed. “Thank you for the update, Junior. Good work.”

“I thought you might want to know, sheriff! Welcome back.”

No, nothing's ever over. It's all still happening. I've got a trial to deal with, and Ronnie Patton to locate, and the Carvers, and an election coming at me, and God knows what new nonsense around the bend. The world went right on without me. And I got one other thing to do
.

“Hello, Eddie.”

“So it's true, you're back.”

“I went down to Alabama for a while.”

Eddie looked him over, then Dugan saw his body suddenly ease, the tension flow out. Eddie pushed the screen door open. “I was just pouring a cup of coffee.”

At the table, neither of them said anything for a spell, then, “I talked to Willis. He said I ought to keep working.”

Now, that surprised Eddie, he could see. “You
gave
him the choice?”

Dugan nodded.

“He understood that?”

“Well, let's say he saw it a lot more clearly than I did, at first anyhow.”

“A chip off the old block, huh?”

“I should have seen it, I suppose. Other stuff got in the way. Not that I expect he'll ever vote for me or anything rash like that. And I don't think you'll see him drunk again either.” Dugan smiled, which seemed to please Eddie, too. “Trainor's panting to be my driver,” he added. “You couldn't do some more driving, could you?”

“Charlie, he's going to get someone killed. Get rid of him.”

“I don't have cause, Eddie. And I'm in enough trouble as it is.”

“That's a fact,” Eddie said, “though if it makes you feel better, I don't think it's terminal. Wait a moment, I'll change into my uniform.”

“Remember Ronnie Patton, the one supposedly shot up the Carvers' car?” Dugan called from the kitchen. “We found out he left the state, may be out west.”

“Even if you find him, you think he'd testify?” Eddie said as he wandered out of the bedroom buttoning his shirt. “I'm going to need a pistol.”

“It's in the glove compartment, along with your bullets and badge.”

“Even if Patton was willing, do you think Pemberton's lawyers would let him within a thousand miles of here?”

Charlie shrugged. “Well, I don't suppose I'd want to make a deal with a man like that, even if it did give me Pemberton.”

Eddie was halfway out the front door when he stopped. “Where's my last paycheck?”

“Whole bunch of them in my drawer. You took some vacation time.”

“I understand ordinarily this would be none of my business, but Dru?”

“She's sticking for the time being.” He handed Eddie the keys.

Part Six

XXXV

Dugan

Turner Mull and Bobby Lee Beauford, clothes torn, filthy and bleeding, were ushered into the jail by a small herd of deputies and city cops, the two looking like they might have been dragged all the way from Beauford's Four Corner Market just west of Little Zion. Mull bawled like a calf as he was shoved through the iron door into the lockup, bawled about his rights, police harassment and conduct unbecoming an officer.

Dugan inhaled Mull's sour sweat and bad liquor from across the room.
They only
look
like they've been dragged
, he thought.
Thank God we're not quite that barbaric, I suppose
. But he only supposed, because there it was again, the underlying question, the irony that had come to permeate his thinking more and more since Rance's Bottom, a skepticism about the value of many things, but primarily law enforcement,
his
enforcement. Objectively, he told himself, he still did know the value of his work, but now it seemed he had always to remind himself.
This job demands absolutes,
and I'm no longer sure there are any
. Since Rance's Bottom, he'd thought a lot about Pemberton, too, though it distressed him. But he could no longer deny the impact that long-ago shame under the tent had on events, and didn't want to. As he watched the scene across the room, he reflected,
This is all about Pemberton and me. It's happening the way it is because he and I happened to meet, which in itself had nothing to do with fairness and justice
. And irony—well, he'd always had a dose of it, had always understood he would have to act like more than he was in order to achieve what he had to do. That wasn't true for just politics or law enforcement either.

He felt edgy.

Eddie wandered in from the courthouse in time to watch the prisoners disappear. “Trainor did that?” Dugan nodded just as Deputy J. B. Fisher emerged from the lockup, grinning. “Where is he?”

“Trainor?” Dugan said. “At the hospital getting a few stitches. He'll be here soon. I offered him the night off, but he insists he's fine, wants to book his prisoner.”

“What's so special about booking Mull and Beauford?”

“Not them.” Dugan cocked his head toward the open door of his office.

Eddie looked in. “Who's
that?
”

Dugan turned and gazed at the woman sitting primly in one of the chairs, her hands folded on her lap, or rather her thighs, since the skirt she was wearing reached maybe a third of the distance to her knees if she pulled hard, which she showed no inclination to do. She was wearing a pink-and-white-striped man's shirt open three buttons. She was tanned, and her feet were lovely and petite in white sandals. Except for that skirt, or lack of it, and maybe that shirt unbuttoned as much as it was—even Dugan couldn't keep his eyes off the deep, curving shadow beneath the swath of pure and full satin breast—and maybe that tan, and even the sandals somehow, not to mention a face that would provoke idiocy in any red-blooded male, she looked as proper and imperturbable, and maybe even as legal, as any granny at teatime. The idea of what she was charged with doing was utterly inconceivable, even to someone who might have actually seen her doing it. Like Trainor.

“Jesus,” Eddie said. Eddie wasn't easily impressed.

“Yeah,” Dugan agreed as both men reluctantly dragged their eyes out
of the office. “That's Miss Peanut, or so the boys call her. It's really Helen Marchesko. She's from somewhere in New Jersey, been living in a trailer up near the reservoir. No way I could put her in the cage with Mull and Beauford.”

“What did she do?”

Dugan gave his driver a look of unalloyed disdain.

“You
don't
say!” Eddie promptly checked his watch. “My, and only five-thirty.”

It was Friday, October 6, 1972, just a few weeks short of the election, and Dugan had already called Dru, telling her he wouldn't be home for dinner. “This evening has a smell about it,” he'd told her, and she'd laughed, a most lovely and reassuring sound. There'd been little enough of that between them for much too long.

The fact was, nothing had gone really wrong the entire month of September, not since his return from Alabama and rehiring of Eddie. Tranquility had broken out. No one had said a thing about his unexplained absence, something he'd felt sure Pemberton would make hay out of. But he hadn't heard a peep from Pemberton.

Dugan was back in stride, caught up on his paperwork, rested. He'd even been taking a little time to politick. True, some of the party officials had become hesitant about their commitment to him since Pemberton had been bound over, but they'd come around, for with his deepening skepticism had come a new quietness in his political style, which people seemed to like. It reassured them. He even felt the quietness in himself, and knew it came right out of Rance's Bottom, all that had happened that night and after, particularly with Elmore. Dugan wished he could hold onto even more of that quietness.

But still, maybe it had just been too tranquil too long. Anyway, he was edgy.

“So what happened?” Eddie demanded in the midst of another surreptitious peek, reminding Dugan of someone stealing a look at a nudie photo with his wife beside him.

“Trainor was out on I-40, heard a call over the CB radio, and I quote, ‘Breaker, breaker, boys! It's cocktail hour, and Peanut Butter's easy spreading!' ”

“This Peanut said
that
?” Eddie looked crushed.

“You know how Junior gets into chasing CB outlaws. Well, he hung
his mike out the window and tromped on the gas, sounding like maybe he was driving something big, like a semi. We all heard him: ‘Hey there, Peanut Butter! This here's Mustang Mike, and I sure like the taste of goobers. Where you at?' ”

“Mustang Mike?”

Dugan was smiling. “He and J. B. found themselves up at that old CCC camp in Sentry, a trailer tucked down in the woods, a bunch of cars, maybe a dozen fellas lined up waiting their turn. J. B. told me he had a lot of trouble believing what Junior thought was going on, said there was too many cars down there. Looked like church. But Junior insisted, and sure enough, those old boys scattered like firecrackers when they saw uniforms walk into the clearing. Junior went right to the door, knocked real polite and heard one word in reply: ‘Yessss?' J. B. said that word positively wriggled out of that trailer. Neither one thought a Yankee or anyone else could talk that way.”

Eddie took in Dugan with almost as much astonishment as he had the woman. “I believe you're actually enjoying this.”

Dugan glared at his deputy. “Absolutely not.”

Eddie turned away, grinning.

“Everything came out perfectly normal—it all went to hell. Junior charged her with running an establishment for the procurement of sex for money, then told her she'd have to accompany him down here. To which she said, ‘You'll have to speak with Grady, Grady Snipes. It's his trailer. Winthrop Reedy sold it to him.' ”

“So Winn's become some kind of character reference? My,” Eddie said.

“Sheriff?”

Hiding his annoyance at having his story interrupted, Dugan turned to greet a short, flaccid man in a light blue summer suit weaving across the room toward him, smiling with all his teeth. At a distance, the man looked dapper, but closer in Dugan knew he would see wrinkles and sweat stains on the clothes and white hair hanging too long over the collar. The hair of the white mustache was yellowish brown where his mouth held a cigarette. The lawyer extended a soft hand. “Grayson,” Dugan said.

“Charlie, I believe you have my client in the lockup.”

Dugan, knowing the client had to be Beauford, since Mull wouldn't have a lawyer until the court appointed one, didn't reply. Grayson had a way of pushing his patience.

“I'm talking about Bobby Lee,” the lawyer said when the silence grew awkward.

“Oh,” Dugan replied.

Grayson was brother to the banker and scion of one of the original settlers of Damascus. Big family, kids at the university, a regular down in Raleigh, where the Democrats still ruled, he'd been known to take payment from female clients on top of his desk. “Evening, Eddie,” the lawyer said.

“Mr. Grayson.”

“What are the charges, Charlie?”

“Assault on an officer and assault with a deadly weapon—namely, a twenty-eight-ounce can of Happy Duck Apple Juice.”

Grayson chuckled. “That's rich! Of course, we're talking his own recognizance.”

“No way, Arthur.”

“Now, sheriff, you
know
he's not going anywhere.”

“Those are felonies, and I got a man having his head sewn up.”

“Well, my client's going to want restitution for damage to his store!”

With a
bullshit
smile, Dugan looked down at the lawyer. “Arthur, when was the last time this county paid restitution for anything?”

“I'd like to confer with my client, if you don't mind.”

“Of course.” He called across the room, “J. B.! Take Mr. Grayson to Mr. Beauford.”

As Grayson was being guided toward the lockup, his gaze popped into Dugan's office. “Who's
that
?” he asked.

“You watch, they'll claim bipartisan cooperation and run her for sheriff,” Dugan said.

“What have Mull and Beauford got to do with all this?” Eddie asked.

“Mull was standing outside Beauford's market six sheets to the wind when Junior happened by on his way here with Miss Peanut. He
allegedly
gave Junior the finger.”