I encountered Gus Deemys coming out of police headquarters as I was limping up the steps. The surgeon had promised the limp would be temporary, the result of arthroscopy to remove torn cartilage from my knee. The DA looked like he'd had a lot more taken out of him. His linen suit was wrinkled, his tie loose, and he had none of the cocky attitude that he liked to project. I had a brief temptation to needle him, the way he always did others, but you didn't prevail over your opponents by becoming them. Deemys couldn't let it be, though. He moved to block my path, keeping the upper step, so that in theory he'd be glaring down at me, but the extra inches it gained him only brought our eyes even. His were red with fury and fatigue. “Hear me, Rasmussenâif there's any way I can do it, I'm going to carve you in strips. I'm going to subpoena your records on this case. As of ten minutes ago I've requested a gag order be put on you. You can forget about grabbing headlines. You can't even talk on the record about this or you'll face charges. That's just for starters. I'm going to clamp you down hard.”
“Okay if I scratch my ass once in a while?”
He scowled. “You really bitched things up. I hope you know that.”
“An innocent man cleared? How do you figure?”
“The Pepper thing I can live with. But Loftis falling down? That's going to make one holy mess. The county is going to have to reexamine every collar she was part of, and reopen cases where Travani presided. You can bet your ass they'll all be appealed, and some of the guilty will walk.”
“And you're here to add insight to injury.”
His jaw lumped. “I'm holding you personally responsible.”
I didn't point out that that was the system he had sworn to uphold. That Jill Loftis had, too. I clapped his shoulder. “Maybe it'll all turn out like tropical storm Gus in the endâjust a lot of wind.”
Ed St. Onge was in his office, copying words out of a book. An English-to-Khmer dictionary. I could see the curlicue scratches on the yellow pad. “That's ambitious,” I said, “though I read that in California they've got these little handheld units that can read people Miranda in about forty languages.”
“Yeah, they also elect old movie stars to public office.” He set his pen aside. “I figure it can't hurt to try to meet some of these gang kids halfway Though you didn't have that option with Vanthan Sok. Nobody would have.”
I sat down.
“The weapon fired through your kitchen window was the same one used on Travani and the Ouellette woman. It was one of the SIGs recovered at the mill yard.”
I gave it a sober nod. He did, too. One sure sign that summer was over was when he put away the heavy woolens for something breezy and light. I'd seen him wear seersucker in January. Today he had on a blazer in pale blue polyesterâ“powder blue” they would've called it in the decade it had been madeâwith brass coin buttons and darker blue piping on the lapels. Give him a glockenspiel and he'd have fit in at halftime over at Alumni Field. I didn't say boo. He seemed somber. “I'm surprised you'd want to see the inside of this place again,” he said.
“It's not the place, it's the people.” I told him about my encounter with the DA.
“He'll get over it. Even Deemys wouldn't find much joy in sending up an innocent man. Say what you want about the guy, once he cools down he'll work it hard and fair. He's here looking into whether any other officers were involved. So far it checks out as just the one.” He
grunted. “Sounds strange to say, but in a lot of ways, she was a damn good cop. Hardworking, smart. Tough.”
“Just ask my knee.”
“She had a way with the kids out running with the wolves, knew how to talk to them. They respected her. Which is most likely how she crossed paths with Sok. I figure he served her because she asked him to, and he'd have been glad to, wanting to stay on her good side. She kept him out of prison. Maybe he had the hots for her, too. My hunch about Travani is he once tried to proposition her, and she'd have told him not in this life, put him in his place. Which could've made her job hell anytime she appeared in his session, but they came to see advantages in being allies. When she went before his court, her collars stuck.”
“And the judge got women for his private chamber, eager to atone for sins.”
“Between Loftis and Carly Ouellette pimping, he was well supplied. We may never know the full story.” He scratched at his mustache, which seemed to have grown grayer than I remembered. “There's still a matter of ballistics on some of the gunshots in the mill yard, but I imagine that'll get sorted out in due course. Your piece, at least, wasn't one of them.” He opened his desk drawer and took out my .38. “Here.”
I snapped the holster onto my belt.
“More perplexing, though,” he went on, “is that nine-one-one call. It came from the judge's house, on his phone, but we haven't been able to identify the caller.” Looking at me. “Maybe some civic-minded individual who was just passing by.” I kept quiet. “Well. Not that big a deal, I guess.” He gave it a wave of dismissal, wincing slightly as he moved his arm. “Damned arthritis.” He took a pill, swallowing it with water. “I'll be off them soon. They don't want to keep you on those for too long or you end up with a face the size of a medicine ball.” He capped the plastic vial and put it back in his desk drawer. I was ready to leave when he said, “You know how you sometimes wonder if things might've gone differently?” He'd been chewing on something since I came in, working it with his mind. I waited. “Like if maybe no one had talked O.J. out of shooting himself when he sat holed up in the Bronco after the chase. Saved everyone all that hassle.”
“You're globalizing. Give the focus knob a twist.”
“That kid died. The one who tried to quit the gang.”
I hadn't heard it. “I'm sorry.”
“Last night.” He spread his hands. “What if he'd been able to come in here and tell us what he had in mind and maybe we'd been able to get him out of town till things cooled? Or if there was some way to meet with the rival gangs ⦠a big conference room, coffee ⦠talk things over before they ⦠Ah, I'm just thinking. About Travani, too. What are we to make of him, spanking the bad girls who came before his bench? A judge, for God's sake.”
He'd had a reputation as a man of probity, a sound and fair-minded jurist, yet he had elected to throw it down the toilet. He had abused my good will. Worse, he had abused his power. Worst, he had been willing to send two women to their graves and an innocent man to prison because, apparently, he never managed to bring to trial the adversary inside his own mind. Yet I could not get all the way past the thought that he'd been the boy in the old photographs I'd seen in his house, or that I had been there as he drew his final breaths this side of the void. Of course, I couldn't say that. Besides, what St. Onge was really asking was, what if the judge had realized he was messed up and had turned himself in before it went so far? I chose to put the question into the realm of metaphysics, and I left it there. No good could come of my wondering how things might've played out differently. I was happy to be right here, right now, because I almost hadn't been. “Dogs whose lives are lived on a short leash sometimes slip the collar and kick their heels up extra high,” I said.
“I guess.”
“How's Duross?”
“Still at All Saints, but not for much longer. He'll be out soon. He was wearing his vest, which probably saved him. Anyway,” he said after a pause, “the city is safe for carnivals again. Maybe they'll give you free rides all day.”
I glanced at my watch. “They're pulling out this afternoon.” I rose.
“While I think of it ⦔ From the floor underneath his desk he pulled out a cylindrical box, gift-wrapped in gold paper and topped with a shiny red ribbon. “Housewarming gift,” he said. “Belated.”
I judged it to be a fifth of something tasty. “Good for a cold night, when the frost is on the pumpkin?”
“Something to cheer you through the long winter.”
“Much obliged. There're probably enough drinks in it for two.”
“Don't be hasty.”
“You won't be taking those steroids forever.”
He grinned and shook his head.
I drove out the parkway under a cloudless afternoon sky. The trees lining the riverbanks and distant hills blazed with furnace light. I had the window open, and the air carried a faint scent of burning leaves. It was illegal to burn them anymore, but somewhere leaves were burning anyway, and it was a magical smell that wanted to bring me back to childhood and happy times. On the calm water above the Pawtucket Falls dam, one of the National Park Service's tour boats was bumping slowly upriver, a fan of wake unfolding behind it. A ranger stood in the stern, declaiming through a bullhorn to a thinned crew of visitors, probably talking about how for centuries the spot had been a meeting place for the Indians, and how later the falls were the force behind the city's mills. It wouldn't be too long before the season would end and the boats would be hauled out and stored, the itchy woolen uniforms packed in mothballs, and a couple months from now, ice would begin to turn the river to clabber and there would be no smells at all in the air, only snow. But for now, golden autumn held sway.
Most of the carnival had pulled out already, the trailers and vans gone, leaving the big mowed meadow to a line of Portojohns awaiting pumping, and the duffers who'd be back soon, driving golf balls. Pop Sonders's motor home was still parked off to one side, though it was facing the boulevard now. Several bare-chested jacks were lashing the last of the amusement rides on a flatbed. Moses Maxwell was standing by a dusty blue Econoline van, his porkpie hat tilted back, his face tipped toward the sun.
“Howdy, Mr. Maxwell,” I said.
He turned. “Hello, Mr. Rasmussen. I'm just waitin' on Nicole. Here she comes yonder.” She was leading a troupe of dogs, the greyhound trotting along a little apart from the rest but looking healthy. Seeing me, Nicole waved. “Kind of like traveling with the band,” Moses said, and laughed: a deep, throaty chuckle. It was a good sound to hear. I asked about Sonders, and he pointed. “Captain of the ship. He'll be the last man out.”
We chatted a moment more, then shook hands, and I went over to where Pop Sonders was coiling a rope. Inside a red-and-black-checked hunting shirt, the collar turned up, he looked smaller than he once had. “Hoping I'd see you,” he said. “Wanted to say good-bye before we pulled out.” I appreciated that he didn't ask if I'd received payment (which I had). Farewells and money mix poorly.
“Where to?” I asked.
“We'll catch the last three days of what would've been a week in Providence, then on to a harvest fair in Bridgeport.”
“Robert Mitchum's hometown.”
“I didn't know that. I know the citizens there once elected P. T. Barnum mayor, and that's where John Ringling hooked up with him for their circus. From there we'll swing west through New York stateâUtica, Rome ⦔ He went on, mentioning destinations, like an old sailor naming ports of call. While he talked, I kept looking to see if Troy Pepper was around. I hadn't seen him since his release. Of course, there was no reason I had to; I'd done my job, collected a week's pay. Soon the remaining workers conferred with Pop, confirming that the caravan planned to gather at a food plaza on I-95 in a couple of hours and make the rest of the trip together from there.
I walked with Pop to his motor home, both of us moving at slower than our usual speed. Beyond, at the edge of the unmowed field, gold finches were darting among clumps of Canadian thistle, loosing little bursts of thistle down that drifted past like early snow. Sonders opened the driver's door and turned to me. “What I told you before about having a hometownâI meant it. Maybe if I'd had some place to go back to, a place to hang my hat, lick my wounds ⦠I'd have gone. But I don't.
We
don't.” He gestured at what remained of the caravan, waiting on him. He stuck out his hand. “I appreciate what you did, son.”
I wanted to say to hell with that, wanted to tell him,
Stick awhile. In all the confusion of the past few days, we didn't get much chance to talk
. I'd like to have sat with him, and Moses Maxwell, in the mellowing autumn sun and hear their stories, learn from them. I'd been hung up on seeking facts and had gotten far too many of them. Now I wanted wisdom. But there's never a discount on that commodity, no closeouts or clearance sales; we
all had to get it the same way, in installments, paying over time with the hard coin of experience. I shook his hand, then watched him and the others draw into the light afternoon traffic on the boulevard.
As I walked back toward my car, a black 4Runner with tinted windows climbed the curb and moved across the field to pull up five feet from me. Louis Hackett climbed out of the passenger side and looked around the vacant field. He cleared his throat and spat. “Sooner or later Pop'll get his ass in a sling again, and there won't be a bozo like you around to save it.”