Mrs. Richardson had pivoted me onto the couch and tucked me into a blue quilt. I woke up all cozy and rested, but I felt like a busted spring.

The light was pink against the curtains, and I didn’t know where her bathroom was. I scouted quickly and found it, and when I came out there was light and cheer in the kitchen. Mrs. Richardson was cooking bacon and eggs. She told me it was a long time since she had kept a man overnight, and she laughed at me and fed me, and when I tried to thank her, she treated me like some kid who was trying to sell his truck to pay her for the breakfast.

When I stood by her door, the sun was almost up. She stood in front of me, a little old lady with a big wrinkly nose and big wrinkly hands. Her hair was all white, and it was neat, though I don’t know when she’d had time to fool with it that morning. I stood by the door, and I looked down at her. I felt the way Tammy Manchester would have felt if she had been lucky enough to have a father who wasn’t a jerk.

“Thank you,” I said, “I—”

Mrs. Richardson’s old hands came up and touched my cheeks. They were warm and smooth, the way wrinkled, plump, old hands are. Her fingers made little circles on my face, and then she pulled down, gentle as a leaf. She kissed me on the mouth, softly, quietly. Tenderly.

“Thank you,” I said. I went along the green rubber runner in the hall and out the door. The shadows in the street were long, and the light between them was darkest gold. I arced out backward and whined down the street, past the grocery, past the post office corner, past the deceased diner. It was all morning and empty. At the stop sign I looked to the left. A battered black Pontiac was lonesome on the apron, and I wondered if Randy Scheidt were going to hammer on its brakes today. The sign still said Mar ak.

I drove past where Ron Miller had shot my car and shot my car and missed me and missed me and ticked me. I drove past the phone booth and thought about when Perkins was a man and a friend. Once I had walked south with him and wanted to keep walking through the night. Now I was driving northwest, and I wanted to go and go and go and leave him so far behind that I would never have to think of him again.

I drove on blacktop through the wheat. It wanted to be gold. The gold was creeping up from the feet, like the way hemlock works on you. After a while, the wheat turned to wheat-amid-scabrock. The ponds in the scab lands were low this year, but the ducks seemed to be doing OK. I stopped in a town called Sprague and mailed a postcard to Dr. Johannasvater. I told him I was sorry I had not come back to let him finish fixing my hand. I thanked him for fixing me up as much as he had.

The scablands slid into the low hills, and then there were hills and then it was the mountains. The road was new and broad, and my car did not complain going up the wall and over the hump. Sometimes there was a funny whistling sound from the bullet hole in the hood. But only when the wind was right—or wrong.

I tried to stay blank, but a couple of times I had to pull off and wait. Once it was in the pothole country, and once it was way up in the pines. It was dry and dusty up there, and even the pines just smelled like dust. I stopped once more just over the top of the mountains. I was leaning on the wheel, and I went to sleep. I woke up and it was raining, lightly. I could smell the smell of the new rain on the dusty, warm concrete.

I got to Seattle from the wrong direction, but I drove all the way through so I could go to Tomasino’s. Traffic wasn’t too bad till I got near the north side. I fought my way through it and past Northgate and started to think I could taste the anchovies.

It hadn’t been three weeks since I had been there. But Tomasino’s was closed, swirls of soapy white paint over the window. It looked like fingerpainting in pus.

After a little, I went back to my place. My Hudson was still in mothballs over by Roselawn. It was too late to go over there, and I had no reason to go over there. But I sort of felt like going over there. I couldn’t find any Buckhorn, so I drank Rainier. I tried not to think of Perkins. Outside it was dark, but the city made a glow in the sky. I tried not to think about Perkins.

•

Almost two years later, a little man with a bow tie hired me to find out a number of things that are not germane here. I did so. In the process, I visited a house on Pike Street, a couple dozen blocks up from the market.

At first, Miss Nancy, the madam, was inclined to be snotty. I showed her how wrong her attitude was, and we got along fine. I found out what I needed to find out and headed home to collect my fee.

At the bottom of the stairs, I turned and spoke to Miss Nancy. Fifteen feet down the hall to our left, a phantom shape in a green satin wrapper came out of a door, then ducked quickly out of sight. Her long red hair flickered behind her like a fox tail. It was Tammy Manchester.

Miss Nancy was pleased that things had turned out as pleasantly and placidly as they had. She said, “What was that, Chapman?”

I looked down the empty hall.

“Never mind,” I said. “Nothing.”

THE END

Wednesday was an inquisition of gravity and anticlimax. They found the judge and the lawyers and sprang Mike. A courier arrived from the medical examiner’s office in Spokane. The file on Ina Simmons had gotten shuffled onto the wrong end of somebody’s desk, and they had just found it, and they were awful sorry, and they sure hoped the delay hadn’t caused any trouble.

I joined Tuzzwack and the sheriff and Ron’s lawyer in the interrogation of Ron Miller. Perkins wasn’t there. I had asked Tuzzwack not to call him. Tuzzwack gave me a long look and a professional shrug.

I still hadn’t cleaned up beyond what a doctor’s cotton ball and a washbowl could do. I felt like an old sweat sock. Miller’s lawyer was a very young woman with a nose and mouth like a Pekingese. She was wearing a grey-brown tweed suit over a yellow silk blouse. There was a strip of gold around her neck. She looked like a magazine ad, except for the mouth.

She kept telling Ron not to say anything. Ron said OK to her a couple of times, but he kept answering questions. Something had gone out of him. I wished I could think I had beaten it out of him, but I knew that wasn’t so. It was just that there was a place in him that punctured as soon as things poked him too hard. He was plenty tough till you got that one last poke in. Now there was nothing in the place, and it showed. The lawyer kept being patient and trying not to show how much he was exasperating her. She acted like she needed the job. I suspect she was pretty good.

One of Miller’s eyes was blackened, and the other was red and puffy. There was a big bruise on his right cheek, and there were swollen places on his lips. Under his chin was a bruise, and Tuzzwack told me I had knocked out one of his eyeteeth. I was bigger than Miller, and I had been trained and had twenty-three fights. I should have been ashamed of myself. I wasn’t.

I learned what I had already figured and some new things that I hadn’t guessed. I asked a couple of questions of my own, and his lawyer didn’t object and neither did the cops.

It went on for a long time. Then there was some time getting my own deposition made and typed and read and signed. I did it all gladly. It kept Perkins at arm’s length. The night before, I had thought that the encounters in my mind in my cell had taken care of him. They hadn’t.

I sluiced off in a washbowl again. I read the medical report and discussed details with Tuzzwack. Mike Miller caught me and tried to talk about paying me. He was pathetic, inarticulate in his gratitude. I tried to make him feel all right about its being all right. He wasn’t convinced but he finally ran out of steam. We couldn’t shake hands, but I slapped him on the side of his arm and told him it was OK. He pursed up his mouth and didn’t look very happy about it. There are a million Rons, but there are ten Mikes for every Ron, and if there is any hope for the world, it lies in that fact.

After some more time, I went down one of the grey concrete tunnels and into the glare of the parking lot. It was a hot day. I had been in the fortress of the jail all day and hadn’t realized that it was hot outside. The parking lot was remarkable because it did not smell like urine and disinfectant. I supposed that my system would be able to adjust.

I opened my door lefthanded. Tuzzwack came out of the building and stood scratching the asphalt with his toe.

“Uh, Mr. Chapman, you gotta excuse me for this.”

The case had begun with an embarrassed cop, and now it was ending with another one. I said “OK” because I was too tired not to excuse him.

“It’s about Perkins. You know, I know him pretty good.”

I didn’t say anything. He gave me my chance, then went on. “He’s a good guy.” I shrugged. I didn’t want to talk about Perkins.

“You know,” he said, “he likes you. He really respected you. It meant a lot to him to get to know you, get to work with you.”

I grunted some kind of yeah. Tuzzwack kept trying to bore a hole in the parking lot.

“I, uh, I know it’s none of my business. But. . .well, I mean, if you wanna talk about it or anything. If there’s anything I can do. . . .”

He was a nice little guy with pale skin and limp brown hair. I said, “Naw, I don’t want to talk about it.” I tried to sound nice. He looked up and made a funny mouth and stuck out his hand. Then he looked embarrassed and dropped the hand.

“Thanks,” I said. “Really.”

He watched me out of the parking lot. I hadn’t eaten for twenty four hours. I passed the ex-A&W and the high school. Then I thought better of it and looped back to get a couple of hamburgers and a chocolate malt. I passed the high school and went up the hill above the golf course and did all the rest of the drill. My hand thrummed with a stabbing pain, and I wondered whether I had made a mistake in skipping the x-ray man. Probably not. It’s no easier to eat a burger with a cast than it is to eat a burger with a broken hand. Either way you wind up with a lap full of sauce.

The butte that wasn’t a steptoe reminded me of Perkins, and the name reminded me of the Wagon Wheel Café, which reminded me of Perkins and his coffee and his Bunn-O-Matic. On the gravel before the last pull into Garfield I got the shakes and had to stop. I leaned against the wheel and kept my teeth together and my eyelids clamped down. After a while it was OK and I drove on over the hill. Just over the lip was a rusty old windmill with all its machinery gone. It looked like a gallows.

The afternoon was old by the time I ran the stop sign by Randy Scheidt’s Mar ak station. I felt like used oil. When I staggered against my doorframe, I realized all at once how deep my weariness was. The bed was an almost irresistable lure.

I was dull and stupid, and Perkins tasted bad. I imagined myself driving into the evening, losing the sun ahead of me as the darkness outraced me from behind. I could feel the tiredness, see the road through the mountains blurring in front of me.

But I didn’t want to stay here any longer.

Gravity was dragging, pulling, sucking me down. My clothes were filthy, my hair was full of grit, the wound on my arm had made a big stain of blood on my shirt. My head hurt, my eyes burned, and I felt like crying. I wished I was dead, only they might put me in with the Halls. Another tough case brought to a triumphantly successful conclusion.

Maybe LaSalle would pay me to do endorsements for the glamorous profession of private investigation.

I took a long, hot shower. The water assaulted my bandage and started my arm bleeding again. The shower washed away all the dirt and a lot of the gravity. My body, at least, felt a lot better.

I did what I could to repair the bandages on my arm and hip. The cut on my cheek wasn’t bandaged. It didn’t take long to pack. Driving was going to be bad, but however bad it was, it would be better than staying. I bumped down the stairs and knocked on Mrs. Richardson’s door. Into Garfield exhausted, out of Garfield exhausted, and a mausoleum full of lousy in between. This week was going to be some bright beacon in my memory.

Mrs. Richardson wasn’t in. I didn’t know how much I owed her, so I wrote a bad check for more than it could be and folded it into a note asking her not to cash it for a couple of days. The ideal tenant: skip without seeing the landlady, leave her worthless paper, and don’t say thanks for bandaging my bullet wound.

My car started. That was a good sign. I had just started to back out when Big Jack Manchester’s blue Caddy swept in and bounced against the curb. Manchester made frantic gargoyle faces and waved his arms. He looked like a moron trapped in an aquarium. I thought about backing on out and taking off, but I knew he would chase me, that big silver-toothed monster on my tail, probably honking and flashing, maybe pulling alongside on a narrow road, elaborate pantomime gestures urging my window down or my car over. Insistent. Persistent. Nemesis. I shoved the clutch and let my car roll back into the gutter. The transmission was still in reverse, and it whimpered. It wanted to go to Seattle too.

Manchester came out of his wheeled ballroom like an earnest bear. He was reaching for my hand before I was half out of my car. He hadn’t figured on having his enthusiasm balked by a bandage. He grabbed my left hand in both of his and pumped it.

“Jesus Christ,  Chapman. Don’t tell me you were leaving. Jesus Christ, I haven’t even thanked you.” He was wearing pale blue slacks and a bright yellow knit polo shirt. Susanna used to call them polio shirts. The color reminded me of Ron Miller’s VW. I wondered how old Hamilton Flagler was doing. Manchester’s chunky face was red with his gratitude. I didn’t feel noticeably less tired for it.

“Thanks,” I said, trying to sound like I cared. “I’m glad it came out OK for Tammy.” I tried to get my hand back, but he wasn’t having any.

“Chapman, you’ve got to come up to the house. My wife’ll want to see you. We haven’t thanked you properly.”

I said, “Thanks a lot, Mr. Manchester, but I got to get back to Seattle. I’m a week overdue already.” I got my hand back without quite having to put my foot against his stomach and tug. I was glad that he wasn’t going to ask what I was overdue for.

He waved his newly freed hand. “Hey, no sweat, Chapman.” Studied geniality and casual wealth. “I can make it up to you. Make it worth your while. Jesus Christ, you saved my daughter’s life, man!”

I wondered how much his daughter’s life would be worth to him. More than thirty-four eighty five, presumably.

“Thanks a lot, Mr. Manchester, but I really have to—”

Mrs Richardson came around the corner of the hotel and joined us with a big smile.

Jack Manchester could sit on his gratitude and rotate, or wrap it up in a polyester shroud, for all I cared. Mrs. Richardson was different. Fifteen minutes later, we were all sitting in Manchester’s den.  I was getting another shot at that brandy after all.

•

I sat on my favorite bar stool and we killed time till Mike Miller could get there. Having him and Mrs. Richardson be part of this almost made it worthwhile.

We didn’t hear the truck coming, but I knew how to change that. Mike didn’t look a lot the worse for a week in the can, but I didn’t like it that that was inside him now. He greeted us shyly.

Tammy was sitting on one of the bar stools, working on another Tab. She was wearing a bra this time, but the jeans and t-shirt part of the uniform were immutable. This t-shirt proclaimed her a devotee of the god MTV.

Tammy was a mess. Both eyes were black, and the left side of her face was bruised and swollen.  Her cheekbone had not been broken, apparently, but she had lost a tooth. Her lips were puffed and split.

And on the side of her neck was a dark bruise, neat and round. Tammy Manchester had come very close to becoming an Ina Simmons clone.

Manchester had done his Genial Host, and now he elected himself Chairman. “Mr. Chapman, we know that Ron killed Ina, but that’s almost all we know for sure. Please. Give us some details.”

I looked at Mike. He had gone through most of these details back in Colfax, when I had. He was sitting stiffly in a leather-grain plastic wing chair, a virgin Coke in his hand.

I shrugged. It was like living through the last scene of a goddam detective novel. “It all turned out to be pretty simple and straightforward, after all,” I said. “The only reason things got so fouled up and stayed so fouled up for Mike for so long was that the lab reports from Spokane got misplaced.” I explained about the delay, and how the results of the lab work would hang Ron.

“But why did Miller—I mean, Ron Miller—” Manchester shot a worried, half-apologetic look at Mike, who just sat looking shy and pleasant—“why did he kill his girl? Was it some kind of, um, lovers’ quarrel?”

I wetted my tongue with the brandy and glanced at Tammy. She was sipping her pop with a studied calm that was about a half beat shy of exploding.

I remembered how vicious Ron Miller had been during part of his talk at the jail. “Not exactly,” I said, finally. “Ina sold drugs. She was just about the sole source for drugs in Garfield and Oakesdale.” Mrs. Manchester drew in her breath. She was being unobtrusive in a corner, pretending to be an elephant-foot umbrella stand or something. I wondered whether she might not start to make connections more quickly than Manchester would.

I explained how the distributor came in from Oregon. “Ron and Ina were both involved in the dope, but Ron was getting ambitious.” Ron had sat in his yellow library chair in the jail and explained it all as calmly and coolly viciously as though he were outlining the athletic conference set-up leading to the state eight-man football championship. “Ron knew a lot of the customers, and they knew him. He figured there was no point in sharing the profits. So last week, when the distributor came through, Ron talked to him about supplying him, too. Separately from Ina. The distributor didn’t care; as long as he got paid and didn’t get arrested, he didn’t care who paid him.” He had not, it turned out, been personally involved with Ina; he was a connection, a friend of a friend from her days in Eugene. He was also extremely likely to find his drug-distributing ass in a sling very quickly, now.

Mrs. Richardson spoke wonderingly. “I can hardly believe this. It’s like something from a TV show.”

That’s why she read Dickens instead of watching TV.

“A bad TV show,” I said. “The whole damned thing is one bad cliche after another. Thursday night Ron told Ina he was cutting himself in. He was going to start by taking over Oakesdale for himself.” I shrugged. I was pretty good at that by now. “Play the scene yourself. They argued about it. The argument got hot. Ina took a swing at Ron. It got hotter, and Ron lost his temper. He grabbed her throat and shook her. She scratched and kicked. One of the kicks got him in the groin—hard enough to hurt, not hard enough to cripple him.” I didn’t mention that I’d pulled off a more successful assault. “He went blind mad. Next thing you know, Ina was dead.” It was appalling, perhaps, and especially appalling to these people, these brothers and friends and grandmothers. But it was still essentially and fundamentally a stupid and a shabby scene.

I grinned suddenly at Manchester. It rattled him a little. “Ina was fighting for her life,” I said, “and she scratched. There was blood and flesh under her fingernails. Show them your arm, Mike, will you?”

Embarrassed, Mike Miller unbuttoned the cuff of his blue work shirt and rolled up the sleeve. On the back of his right wrist were three scratches, half healed, about two inches long. They looked exactly like the result of being scratched by somebody who was being strangled. Mrs. Richardson caught her breath sharply, and Manchester frowned. He looked ready to get overbearing. I said, quickly, “Those scratches nearly hanged you, Mike. Literally. Tell us about them, would you, please?”

Mike Miller’s voice was low, and there was a soft edge to his speech, as though there were some South in his past. I still hadn’t really figured that one out. His shy hesitation rounded the soft edges of his sentences with question marks.

“Out to Warner on the old side, the lentil side? Well, the motor that runs the auger from the pit over to the leg? It was stopped. It turned out there was this skunk got caught in the belt—the drive belt.” He made a face that twiched his beard. Only Tammy smiled. “Uncle Bob, he had me get that skunk out of there. It was in pieces, and it smelled from being a skunk, and it smelled from being dead.” Mrs. Richardson smiled, thinly.

“So the motor, it’s under the floor and you have to lie on your stomach, and pull pieces of this rotting skunk out from the belt and the pulley and even the axle.” He rolled his eyes at us, almost comically. “Man, that was one rotten job.” He looked down at his wrist and flexed it meditatively, then added his shrug to the total and finished in a rush. “I was yanking once, and this piece came free, and my hand hit the bottom of the floor, and there was these three bolts sticking down. That’s all.” He splayed his hands and reddened.

I said, “So when the cops saw the scratches on Mike’s wrist and saw the blood under Ina’s fingernails, that was jut one more nail in Mike’s coffin. One more knot in the noose.”

Of course it was Mrs. Richardson who caught it. If she had been running that investigation, Mike would probably have been able to finish his breakfast that morning. “Only one wrist,” she said.

I gave her a single nod. “That’s right. That’s dead right, but the sheriff’s men didn’t catch that. You see?”

Mrs. Manchester certainly didn’t. Even when she was being unobtrusive, her puzzlement glowed. Maybe she wasn’t going to be quicker than Manchester after all. I said, “When Ina was struggling, trying to save her life, she tore at Ron’s wrists. Both of them. She had flesh and blood under the nails of both hands. But Mike had scratches on only one wrist. That alone should have shown that he couldn’t have been the one who strangled Ina.” Mrs. Manchester blinked and worked on absorbing it. Her hands were clasped in front of her, and she was busily turning the rings on her hard little fingers.

Manchester blustered. “Damned incompetence,” he said. “What the hell kind of police we got here, anyway?” His neck puffed out until he looked like a cartoon turkey.

I’m not an expert on old laws. I’m not sure why they hadn’t drowned him when he was a little kid. I pretended I hadn’t felt like kicking him, and I said, “That’s something else that cost Mike when the lab reports got slowed down. See, Mike has type O blood, and Ron has type B blood. All the matter under Ina’s fingernails was type B. So the lab report made it even more clear that Mike couldn’t have killed Ina. But by the time the screw-up in Spokane got straightened out, Mike had become a long-term resident of the jail.”

“Why didn’t anybody notice that Ron’s wrists were all torn up?” It was Mrs. Richardson again.

“Ron’s a farm hand,” I said. Mrs. Richardson nodded. China doggies with birthstone eyes, indeed. This lady was a class act. Mrs. Manchester still looked at sea. “Gloves,” I said. “Every time anybody talked to Ron, he was working, and he was always wearing white cotton work gloves. The gloves and his shirt cuffs hid his wrists.”

Manchester snorted. It looked like he was going to launch himself from the heights of his perfection and bitch about incompetence and incompetents again, so I said, “The cops thought they knew who did it. They thought that Mike’s scratched wrist was all they had to worry about. But I knew better. Or at least, I thought I knew better. I was convinced that Mike wasn’t guilty. So I should have realized what Mrs. Richardson just realized—that Mike’s injuries weren’t what they should have been if he had strangled his old girlfriend.”

Manchester abandoned righteous indignation at the second-rate cops and expanded with geniality and praise. “Don’t sweat it, Chapman. In the end you did great. Didn’t he?” He beamed around the room. I suppose I’ve saved a few lives in the course of being a romantic hard-boiled LaSalle dick, but I hadn’t ever been condescended to because of it before. The crowd nodded. They thought I’d done great.

I wanted to leave. Suddenly not even Mike and Mrs. Richardson made it OK any more.

“What was the point of, you know, all the rigamarole? Moving the body, and like that?” Tammy’s voice was a shock.

“Very simple and very stupid,” I said. “Ron was Ina’s boyfriend, and everybody knew it. And everybody knew he had been over at her place that night.

“Ron hated and scorned Mike. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know why; Mike had never done a thing to his brother. Ron had never made any secret of how he despised Mike as a goody-goody, a numb. . .uh, a numby. But it went deeper than that, apparently.” I didn’t mention Dr Johannasvater’s speculation that Ron’s hatred had extended to his grandmother. Not that I supposed Mrs. Richardson couldn’t take it. “So he had a body he needed to get rid of, and he had a brother he didn’t mind screwing over. Opportunity knocks.”

“And that’s how the truck got into it?” Manchester was working hard now on being the cool and observant one. My partner.

“Yeah,” I said. “Ron killed Ina a little after midnight. He knew that Mike went to bed early, and he knew that Mike was a heavy sleeper. Hell, of course he knew: he was his brother.”

“Cain,” Mrs. Richardson murmured.

“So Ron waited till past two, when he could pretty well figure on everybody in town being asleep. He drove out and parked in a grove near Mike’s place, walked over, hotwired the truck, and brought it back to town. He loaded Ina’s body into the pickup and went over to the hotel. He knew that the front door wouldn’t be locked and that nobody would be likely to be around.”

“Jesus,” Manchester muttered. He was almost human in his horror.

“Once he had the body in the bathroom, it was easy,” I said. “Nobody is going to bother you when you have the bathroom door locked. He strung Ina up and took off. Now that he had the body disposed of, he could try to draw attention to the truck. He used the muffler cut-out to make the engine loud. He roared all over town, squealing his tires and roaring the engine, hoping that somebody would see the truck and remember whose it was that was hammering all over at three in the morning.” I rubbed my cheek, remembering the guywire slicing down between me and the truck. “It worked, too,” I said. “I saw the truck and identified it. So did three other people in town. One of them even swore that the driver had a beard.”

“That’s horrifying,” said Mrs. Richardson.

“Yeah,” I said, “but it wasn’t all that smart, really.”

“The big frame,” Manchester said. Cooler and more observant than ever. Maybe he was a LaSalle field representative.

“Why wasn’t it smart?” That was Tammy. She wanted a whole lot of talk about murders—and no talk about drugs.

“Right from the beginning, Ron was incredibly lucky,” I said. “It took nearly a week to nail him, as it turned out, but it could just as easily have been ten minutes.”

“What do you mean?” Even when he was trying to be agreeable, Manchester grated on me. I wished I were nursing my car and my hand over the mountains.

“Pure dumb luck,” I said. “The things Ron did were almost suicidally foolish and risky. He drove half a mile through town in a stolen truck with a murdered body in the bed. He carried Ina upstairs over his shoulder. It wouldn’t have taken any more than one person with insomnia, one person coming home late, to have hung him right on the spot.”

“Or Ruby getting up to pee,” said Mrs. Richardson.

I gave her a big grin. I wanted to buy her a bottle of thirty-four eighty-five brandy. “Right,” I said. “Some of the things Ron did were really dumb. He was saved—temporarily—by luck. If Ina’s body had been discovered earlier, for instance, he would almost certainly have been nailed. He took Mike’s truck back, got his own car, and went over to Ina’s to pick up the drugs that she had stashed there. If Ina had been found by then, Ron might well have found a couple of county cops there to help him carry that suitcase full of dope.” I thought about Perkins and grabbed a quick look at Tammy. Since she was working hard at playing casual, I didn’t know what kind of worry she was doing a bad job of hiding. She sucked on her pop and tried to pretend she was only mildly interested in what was going on.

“I guess he was counting on the middle of the night,” Manchester said. Move over, Sherlock. Sleep easy, Whitman County: no villain would dare lock horns with Big Jerk Manchester.

“He got lucky in other ways, too,” I said. “It was lucky for him that Mike had scratched the back of his hand and wrist under the elevator—that meant the cops didn’t have to bother about looking around for somebody with scratched-up hands and wrists. It was lucky for him that Mike was home and asleep that night, though of course he knew enough about Mike to be able to all but count on that.

“And then he was just plain dumb lucky, for about twenty four hours, that some bozo in Spokane fouled up with the lab reports. Without all that delay, things would have been broken open by Monday morning, at the latest.”

(Then it was like a comedy routine:)

I hoped that Manchester wouldn’t ask how Tammy got involved in all this.

“How did Tammy get involved in all this?” Manchester asked.

•

I knew I would have to, some day. I looked at Tammy. The swollen side of her face was trying to be impassive. She looked like she was hurting. Lots of ways. I couldn’t do much. “Mr. Manchester, Tammy was kind of caught in the middle, a sort of innocent bystander,” I tried. Sort of. Is innocent like pregnant and dead? —one of those words that doesn’t have any ‘sort of’s?

Manchester was almost ignoring me. “What were you doing at that son of a bitch’s house, Tammy?” He came up out of his chair slowly. He looked like a dog who has the scent but hasn’t quite pinned down the bird yet.

“Mr. Manchester, I think—”

“Shut up, Chapman.” He took a step toward Tammy. I’ve taken offense at less offensive remarks than that, but this didn’t seem like the time. Besides, I had a busted hand. I talked fast, pulling him off Tammy with the fast words. “She went to see him because she knew Ina and she knew about the dope Ina and Ron sold,” I said. “She’s lucky Ron Miller didn’t kill her, Manchester.” So was I. I wondered what Tammy had said that had kept Manchester off her for twenty-four hours. Maybe it just took him this long to think of asking the question.

Manchester’s face was dark. His neck swelled the collar of his bright shirt. “Bitch!” he spat. His hand came back to slap his daughter. I came off the stool and caught his arm with my good hand—which was on my bad arm.

“Hey,” I said.

The breath came off him like slime. The arm and his body surged against me. There was polyester over the flesh now, but it was a farmer’s body with a farmer’s muscles. A wire dragged through the slashed nerves of my arm. I bit my lip and leaned nonviolently against him. His eyes were zombie eyes.

“For God’s sake, Manchester.” His lungs snorted, and his jaws flexed. I had two inches on him but not much else, and he hadn’t been shot recently.

We stood there like a statue. A very stupid statue in a park in a very stupid town.

He shoved me, then, a little. “You’re using that dope shit, aren’t you, Tammy. Baby.”

The endearment wasn’t very endearing. Mrs. Manchester caught her breath with a sucking wheeze. Tammy’s face came around. She looked like a raccoon with a purple and yellow mask. The tough role she acted outside this house struggled with the bullied daughter she was used to being.

The tough girl said, “Yeah, I—” and broke off. The daughter trembled and started to cry.

“Jack?” Mrs. Manchester’s voice was little and hesitant. Manchester didn’t even look at her. “Shut up, Beth.” The words flickered hotly past my cheek. Now Mrs. Manchester and I had something in common. I doubted it would grow into a great passion.

“Sit down, Manchester,” I said. I pushed toward his chair. The whole room was a stupid statue. Tammy’s crying caught and sputtered, caught and sputtered, like a dirty lawnmower engine. I didn’t want to hit Manchester. Assuming that he would notice if I did. . . .

He gave me a push, spun, and went to his chair. He sat on the edge of it, his big farmer fists dangling between his legs, flexing and curling. A cluster of litle warts studded the side of his right thumb. I thought about the old guy with the fine white hair in the waiting room of the county hospital.

“By God, you little slut. We’ll see about this.”

Mike Miller sat stiffly in his chair, staring at the beads on his can of pop. Mrs. Richardson was looking at Tammy.

Tammy slid off her stool and stood fighting in herself. The tough girl struggled into her throat. The daughter sputtered. Then both of them suffocated. Crying hard, she ran out of the room.

The shadows were long in the room, and I was tired of the whole thing. I wanted a pizza and my own bed. “Yell all you want, Manchester,” I said, “but if you touch her, you’re chickenshit.”

He came to his feet again. His face swelled, and his fists worked. Gravity and exhaustion clawed me down, down. Mrs. Manchester slid along the wall and left the room.

“Get out of here. Get out of here.” He dragged the words from his throat and slapped me with them.

I wondered whether I was ever going to get to finish a glass of thirty-four eighty-five brandy. Not in Big Jack Manchester’s house, probably. I didn’t worry about turning my back on him this time.

Mrs. Richardson caught up to me halfway across the whorehouse room. Her hand folded gently around my healthy elbow.

“I’ll drive you back, Mr. Chapman,” she said. Her fingers were warm and firm, and she opened the door of the Valiant for me. Mike appeared. I’d have bet money that he didn’t leave without trying to make some polite goodbye. He hurried across the gravel. There still wasn’t a Filipino chauffeur to watch us.

“Ah, Mr Chapman?”

I gave him my best smile. He was a good kid: he deserved better.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said. I was afraid his earnestness would give him a stroke. “I should have thought before.”

“I think we settled it already, Mike. Please don’t worry about it.”

“No; listen. I ought to of thought of this before. Listen, I can sell the truck. It’s worth two thou, easy.”

I heard Jack Manchester’s voice raised deep in the cave of his house. I looked at Mike Miller, and something turned over in my chest. I said, “Please, Mike. Please forget it. It’s like I told you in Colfax.”

He didn’t like it much. Neither did I, from a different angle. Mrs. Richardson started the Val, and I wished Mike Miller good luck and told him goodbye. He took it like a man. I saw him then for the last time, standing on the gravel, his lovely shiny chocolate and cream truck behind him. Between him and Big Jack Manchester’s house.

We snaked down the hill and past the young pines. Tammy didn’t come bouncing out this time. My arm still burned, though. So did my hip, for that matter.

“Mr. Chapman, you are a deeply decent man.”

I might have cracked wise, but there was nothing left inside to do it with.

It wasn’t a long enough ride to get a lot of things told. She pulled in next to my lonesome Toyota, and we went into her parlor, and I sat on the couch. She had finished Bleak House, and there was a copy of Jude the Obscure open on the arm of the couch. I told her everything that she didn’t already know about what had happened at Ron’s and at the elevator. She gave me scotch, and it got dark outside.

After a while she excused herself and asked me to wait a minute. She left the room, and I leaned against the back and the arm of the davenport and let the week swirl in me. A table lamp with flowers painted on white china was the only light in the room. Grandchildren and ancestors relaxed in color and sepia in the dim corners. A car went by, and another. I sank into my darkness.

A vivid yellow slash of pain lanced through my eyeballs. I saw it, like lightning. I went down hard, and he kicked me in the hip. I rolled, and he jumped for me and kicked again. He was wearing heavy black workboots. The toe clubbed my thigh. I rolled again. I had to get my feet back. A long splinter from the coarse floor burned into my left palm. I tried to cover up and not lose my gun.

His next kick was perfect. The big black toe blasted the back of my right hand. My pistol skittered across the floor. A jolt of numbness shot up my arm. It dissolved and left pain.

I rolled again and came up to my feet. He threw his pistol at my head. I took it on my forearm. He came in hard, charging under my arm while I was off balance. He hit me in the stomach with a short right hand, and I went backward. My heel caught the edge of the scale, and I went down again. He kept coming, the heavy farmer’s boots clubbing and pounding. He was like a pilled-up linebacker in the last thirty seconds of the Rose Bowl, frantic, maniacal, everywhere.

Despair blossomed in me, and anger. He was going to kick me to death. I was going to curl up and let him kick me to death.

I was NOT going to curl up and let him kick me to death. I rolled and came up. He came in again and I hit him with a straight left. His head rocked back, and blood bloomed on his nose and lip.

When I started the punch, I was grinning. I had my feet, now, and this was my game. When the punch landed, I quit grinning. The splinter in my palm jabbed like a hot ice pick.

I clenched my teeth and gave him a feint with a low left. His guard came down, and I hit him in the face with a right cross.

I thought I was going to die. My right hand screamed. The pain made it so weak I could hardly keep a fist. I thought he must have broken something when he kicked the gun.

The old one-two punch. Two-fisted Chapman.

Zero-fisted Chapman. The boxer with no hands.

I had been startled and forced to cover up when he charged me. Then I had been delighted when I found my feet and knew I was going to get a chance to beat on the little son of a bitch. Now I was sick, an old cripple with hands that throbbed.

He gave me a right lead, which I took on my forearm. His tawny face was rigid with hatred and fire. He wanted to kill me. I hit him on the mouth with a left. At the last second I pulled it a bit, but I felt his teeth under his lips. And I felt the sting in my palm. It felt like a pocket knife being turned in my flesh. He leaned in and kicked my left shin. I grunted and staggered. The old reflexes had cut in quickly enough—but they hadn’t budgeted for boots. Even boxing in the Marines, I hadn’t had to worry about workboots.

He tried to follow in the kick. He caught my cheek a glancing shot, but I hit him twice in the face. He rocked back. I moved in and hooked a left into his belly. He was tough and hard, but blood bubbled off his mouth as the breath jerked out of him.

I hit him in the body again. The bullet wound in my arm ripped open. I felt the flesh tear apart, and my eyes squinched shut. Ron Miller hit me in the neck. His foot lashed out, and my ankle wobbled.

We fell apart as though we were in a choreographed dance. I missed him with a jab, and we stood panting two feet apart. I wanted to tell him that I would see him hang, and cheer. But I didn’t have the breath or the voice.

We stood and breathed at each other. An old cripple and a young killer. My head throbbed. Both my hands were balls of agony. Somebody had poured acid into the open wound on my arm. My eyeballs ached. My hip was leaking blood and thrumming with pain. My shin and my ankle made me weak with their throbbing.

And none of the pain hurt as bad as the frustration. That was twisting in me till I could have cried.

I had spent nine hours coolly half-hoping I would get a chance to beat Ron Miller up. I had spent the last half hour hotly yearning to beat Ron Miller up. And now I had him, had him where I should have been able to spend fifteen minutes turning his leering, cool, snotty face into hamburger. And I could hardly hit him.

He jumped me. I took his knee in my thigh. There was a place on my left earlobe that didn’t hurt yet. He wrapped his arms around my torso and tried to tackle me backward onto the scale. The breath was rasping from him, and his eyes were bright. His shoulder banged my ribs, but I was bigger and I was set, and I didn’t go down. My right arm was free, and I hit him twice in the ear. He grunted, rocked by the pain. So did I. His embrace loosened, and I hit him in the face. I felt one of the bones in the back of my right hand break. Well, once you bust one, the rest go a lot more easily. My breath wheezed out, and I grunted and said shit.

I wanted to beat him up. But I couldn’t. And if I kept playing around like this, he was going to get lucky and put me away.

I suppressed the old reflexes and flicked on the new ones. I hit him in the chest with a left and closed with him as he stepped backward. I wrapped my arms around him and smashed his balls with my right knee.

His breath puked into my face. I let him go. He dropped to the floor and wrenched himself into a tight ball. A thin scream threaded from him, and then he vomited.

He was on the floor between the scale and the manlift. A row of wooden bins on spindly legs was against the wall. He rolled over, clutching himself and moaning. I stood and breathed too hard and tried to make the pain go away.

He uncurled. His hand shot under the bins and came back with my pistol in it. I jumped on him. My hands were reaching for the gun. They wouldn’t have made it, but my knees dropped onto his right thigh. My weight drove his flesh against the floor, against his bones. He screamed again. My gun jerked and exploded in our faces. The bullet whacked one of the bins. We were both deaf and grunting. I had both hands on his right wrist, my body lying half across his. I tried to knee him again, but the angle was wrong.

I let go of his wrist with my right hand. He was writhing under me like a bag full of weasels. I whipped my elbow up and hit him right under the chin. I heard his teeth crack together and his head bang the floor.

He went limp and lay gurgling harshly. He sounded like a big dog being sick. I pulled my gun away from limp fingers and lurched backward. In a minute I could stand up. I stood up and panted and said ung ung ung.

Blackness and redness whirled in my head. A stab of fear said I was going to pass out. Miller was gurgling and moaning. My elbow must have mashed his throat some. Little grunts came out of his throat like a man being brave while they cut out a bullet with a hunting knife. I gathered a deep breath and fought for consciousness.

I knew he would kill me if I passed out.

I got ready to kill him if it looked like I couldn’t stop from passing out. I didn’t like that. It probably helped. It made me mad, and I suddenly wasn’t so weak and dizzy.

A big green fleet Plymouth rocked to a stop by the Dodge at the Y. I stuck my gun in my hip pocket and rocked over to the door. The last bit was across a grating of big steel pipe, like a cattle guard. It was the pit, where the grain is dumped from the trucks. I wasn’t sure I wasn’t going to fall down between the pipes and be carried away to Oz by a giant wheat auger.

“Hey,” I yelled. There was a cop kneeling by the man in the road and another one standing by the car. I could see the cord of the radio looping out the window. I waved both my arms to show them what a good guy I was.

The cop with the radio leaned in his window and hung it up. He got into the car and accelerated all the way to my ramp. It was at least sixty yards. When he got there he braked and crimped his wheel. The car came around like a figure skater with arthritis. He’d been watching too much TV. When he came out of the car he came with his pistol drawn.

“I’m Chapman,” I said.

“I knew you weren’t Miller,” he said. He was a medium-sized guy with eye-colored eyes and hair-colored hair. And a pistol-colored pistol. “Perkins called us in.” He wasn’t pointing the gun at me, but he hadn’t holstered it.

“Miller’s up here. He killed Ina Simmons and tried to kill Tammy Manchester and me.” The cop came carefully up the ramp. His tag said he was Tuzzwack. I thought it was a funny name, but I didn’t laugh.

“Looks like he shot somebody else, too,” he said. He jerked his head and shoulder toward the Dodge and the VW and his partner. “Unless you did that.”

“The way I’ve been shooting, I probably ought to try to grab any credit I can get,” I said. Tuzzwack snorted, and we turned into the bay. Miller wasn’t on the floor by the wooden bins. He made a scuffling sound in the corridor, and I pointed. I let Tuzzwack go first. I’d had my chance. Besides, I didn’t figure my hands had healed in three minutes. Tuzzwack dropped into shooting range stance and told Miller to freeze. Miller was crawling, dragging himself along the dusty wooden floor. He moved like a rat that the trap hasn’t killed. He moved like a man who has taken a knee where he didn’t want it. He had gotten to the end of the corridor, and he folded out the door like a sack of lentils. It was a waist-high drop, and I heard him grunt when he hit the ground. I had to admit that in a lot of ways he was a scrappy little bastard. Tuzzwack charged after him. I was looking at a hole in the wall.

It was the door into one of the grain bins. The heavy wooden door had been lifted out and placed against the corridor wall. After Tuzzwack loaded Ron into the back seat of the county car, he gave me his flashlight. I leaned in the hole in the wall and looked into a grain bin for the first time in twenty years. It was a huge place, forty or more feet high and twelve or fifteen feet square. The walls were dark cribbing. High on the walls where chutes pour the wheat in were swirled patterns and waves where the wood was as worn as sea cliffs.

The immense walls were braced in the corners with steel rods. The floor of the bin was funnel shaped. In the bottom was Ron Miller’s rifle, its butt sheared off and jagged. He had slid into the top of the bin and clambered down the corner braces. In doing so, he had lost hold of the rifle, and it had smashed. That was the big noise that had scared me. He was a tough and a cunning little son of a bitch, and I was lucky he hadn’t gotten down armed and shot a very large hole in me. Just now I was too tired and sore to know whether I was really all that grateful for my luck.

•

It was a day to wait. We leaned against our cars in the gathering dusk and waited for the ambulance. Miller sat in the back of the cop car, holding himself and clenching his teeth. He looked like the Cholera Society’s poster child. I worked the splinter out of my hand—it was about two inches long—and told Tuzzwack what I knew. I left out the part about Perkins and Tammy. I knew it and he didn’t. I wished that he knew it and I didn’t.

The man lying in the Y was covered with an old wool blanket. His feet were elevated, and he hurt bad. His named was Hamilton Flagler, and he was seventy-two years old. He was conscious, and he told Tuzzwack and his partner—Hamilton, said the plastic—what had happened. He’d been heading west into the Y. Miller’s VW had screamed into the corner and slid sideways into Flagler’s car. Flagler got out, and Miller shot Flagler in the stomach with his pistol.

Larry got there before the ambulance did. He pulled the old truck past the cars in the Y and lumbered to the bottom of the ramp. He swung down, chewing gum like a college girl. “What the fuck’s going on here?” he said incuriously.

After the ambulance arrived, I followed Tuzzwack and Hamilton west to the blacktop. Perkins got to the Y as we left. I didn’t look at him or wave.

It was a long ride, and I was afraid my hands were going to petrify around the wheel. After a while, I drove left-handed and rested the other one in my lap. I figured my lap didn’t hurt as much as Ron’s did. It was dark when we came down the hill into Colfax. The lights around the baseball diamond were out. We drove the length of the gut and up a hill on the south end of town. We passed the radio station, and I honked. The guy on the air was introducing a song and he said “beep beep” in a little voice. It made me feel bad for standing in my room in Garfield and thinking what a dope he was.

The cops made Miller and me go to the hospital. My doctor was a big Norwegian on the far edge of middle age with dark hair and kind eyes. My right hand was black and swollen. They x-rayed it, and he wrapped it in elastic cloth. He told me that my hands probably hurt. I told him he must be a good doctor to know that without even having my medical records there. He looked modest and washed the blood off my face and disinfected my hip and arm.

“Mr. Chapman,” he said, “didn’t your mother ever teach you to be careful with guns?”

“I am careful with guns,” I said. “I didn’t hurt anybody with my gun. You tell Ron Miller to be careful with guns.”

He dabbed a cut on my cheekbone. I don’t spend every day having other people fix me up. Every other day, maybe.

“It was Ron that killed the Simmons girl, is that right?” he said. He smelled good, like aftershave and wintergreen.

“Yeah.”

“Tell me something, will you?” He leaned back in his swivel chair and tossed the cotton ball over his shoulder without looking. It hit the rim of the wastebasket and dropped in. “Do you know yet?—why take her to Mabel’s place? Why the hotel?”

I tried to lean back without being sorry for it. I almost made it. “I haven’t talked to Ron yet,” I said. “You know Mike and Ina used to go together?”

“Matter of fact, she gave him warts,” he said drily.

“Jesus,” I said. “What a county. What kind of shape is Mrs. Richardson’s cat’s liver in?”

He didn’t blink. “Mabel doesn’t keep a cat. She’s allergic to them.”

It was nice to laugh.

“Mike and Ina used to meet in the hotel,” I said. “Up on the top floor, where Mrs. Richardson had things closed off. Ron apparently knew that—probably from Ina, once they hooked up together. He was setting out to frame Mike.” I explained what I figured about the truck.

The doctor nodded. He looked like someone getting ready to say ‘I could have guessed that.’ He leaned forward and pressed his knees and looked serious. “I delivered those boys,” he said. “Both of em. And about ten years ago, I began to wonder whether I shouldn’t have accidentally dropped Ron into a storm drain.” He stood up and rubbed a big paw up his cheek. “I think you’re going to be finding that Ron wouldn’t have minded if Mabel had caught some flak for the body being in her hotel. I believe you’ll find him a very self-centered and a very vicious young man. I believe I shouldn’t be talking.

“I won’t shake your hand because I’m not a sadist, even if I am a doctor. You come in here in the morning and we’ll read those x-rays and decide how to plaster up that hand.”

I said, “For the love of God, Montresor,” and he raised his eyebrows. He slapped me on the shoulder and went out. The shoulder didn’t hurt too much. He was a nice doctor, and he made me feel pretty good, but now he was gone, and I was back to normal.

I argued for a while with the skinny lady at the front desk about whether I was allowed to be healed without prior application to the hospital. She didn’t want to think that my check might be good. She was right; it wouldn’t be. But I was being even-handed: it wasn’t a bad check because it was an out of town check. It was a bad check because it was my check. It would have been a bad check even on a Colfax bank.

I even offered to soothe her worries by writing her a check on a Colfax bank. She wasn’t much amused. She looked sort of like a raisin, as though all the moisture had been dried out of her. She was pleasant enough for somebody who looked like a raisin and thought that I was trying to dump bad paper on her hospital.  After a while we agreed on a truce. I was kind of sorry because now I wasn’t doing anything to keep amused.

Hospital landscapes get pretty old pretty quickly. I sat in the waiting room and listened to the blood hammer through my hand. There wasn’t anyone else in the room.

After a while an old fellow with fine, fine white hair creaked in and sat across from me. He had big, seamed hands. The hands were big because they were full of muscles, and the seams were very deep because he was old. He sat straight upright with his hands on his knees, and he never moved. He was looking at the floor between his feet. He was like a statue or an Indian or an animal. I wanted to say something nice to him, but I didn’t know what would be nice for him. Then Tuzzwack came down the hall with Ron Miller.

Miller was cuffed, and they had changed him into a sky blue jumper. His lips were swollen, and his right eye was black. He looked pretty bad, but I wished he looked worse. I got up and went along the concrete and linoleum tunnel with them. The old guy never looked at us.

Ron didn’t seem to have anything to say to me. Maybe it was because he didn’t have his chew. He couldn’t talk to me without spitting.

I didn’t have anything much to say to him, either. The cuffs didn’t hide the scratches on the backs of his hands and wrists. Ina hadn’t been unconscious when he had strangled her.

We went back down the hill and into the long spill of light that was Colfax at night. My hand throbbed dully, and my head throbbed sharply. Ina Simmons’s killer was in custody. I had done what I hadn’t come here to do.

Finishing up wasn’t an unmixed blessing. I didn’t have Ron to be hating or fearing or fighting. That left only Perkins. There were two big empty places in me, and I didn’t want to fall into them. I went into the jail and concentrated on Ron Miller and Mike Miller and how my body hurt.

They couldn’t find the judge and they couldn’t find the lawyer who would be Ron’s public defender. Maybe Tuesday nights were Legal Profession Bowling nights or something. At least they weren’t going to assign Mike’s lawyer to Ron. . . .

The cops didn’t know just what to do, and I didn’t know what to do, and I was too tired to care. They finally threw Ron into a cell and told Mike, apologetically, that they would be letting him go in the morning. He was agreeable. My hand hurt like a son of a bitch, but I shook Mike’s hand and he thanked me.

Tuzzwack was still on duty. I talked him into showing me an empty cell. I promised not to sue the county, and after a while he let it go. Dr Johannasvater had given me pills for pain. I took two of them and lay on the bunk. The cell had a sliding door. It was open, but that didn’t really make much difference. I lay looking into the near-dark and tried not to think of Perkins.

Then I went ahead and thought of him. I lived a dozen fantasy encounters with him.

“I was just trying to cop a quick feel,” he said.

I said bitterly, “Cop is a good word.”

He pleaded. “It didn’t hurt anything. It didn’t do her any harm.”

I said, “You were in uniform, Perkins. You betrayed your trust.”

“You don’t understand how it is,” he said. He wanted me to understand. He wanted me to be his friend. He knew what I had felt like walking through the night with him, walking along the tracks wishing we didn’t have a destination. He knew it because he had felt it too. “You don’t know how it builds in you.” He had been long without a woman, and she had been unconscious, and no harm would be done.

You can’t explain how abstractions are important. If ideals don’t matter to a man, you cannot make him understand. If they matter to him, you do not have to explain.

“You violated her helplessness,” I said.

We were in his house. We were in jail. We were in my car. We were in my hotel room in Garfield. We stopped on the railroad tracks and put our half cases of beer down carefully on opposite ends of the same tie, and I hit him, and we fought, and I beat him up in the soft night, and all the times I was hitting him I was crying.

We were in the IGA by the coffee. We were in my hotel room, and he brought me coffee in a styrofoam cup as an offering.

“Chapman. Bill. You got to understand. You got to give me a break. No harm was done.”

“Not to Tammy,” I said. “That’s right.”

And we were here and we were there, and even in the bad times I was not angry, but the hurt would not go away. He wanted me to understand, and I wanted to understand, and I wanted him to understand. And I did understand, but that was not enough. Even if it is true that to understand is to forgive, to forgive is not necessarily to make it OK.

Finally I was played out. I was old and old and tired and tired, and I could not stand another encounter. The cell door was still open, but it still did not make any difference. I took two more of the pills, and after a while I slept. The night got deep, and in the county people lived and died and loved and betrayed and smiled and hurt. And slept.

Even through the pills and in my sleep, my body hurt. And even through the sleep, I hurt. I had lousy dreams.

I hit sixty on a couple of the straight stretches. It was a silly thing to do. I came through one corner sideways, and if Larry had been shepherding that Jimmy right there right then, they would have had a hard time even finding pieces to put together. After that I slowed down and thought about what to do.

It wasn’t as though I were seriously chasing Ron Miller. These were his roads, and they were definitely not my roads. He had a big start. Anyway, this was no longer my game. I had thrown away my ticket when I let him jump across his own living room and shoot me and run away from me.

I would stop at the first house and call the cops and they could do their thing and I could go back home across the mountains and wait around till I healed.

I came down the last hill and into the long S curve. What I felt about Ron I didn’t like. There are limits to the ways you ought to hate, and there are damned important rules about how not to let irrelevant stuff intrude on how you hate. Besides, when you spend a week being the great white hope from Seattle to half a county, you feel like a real asshole when you screw things up. What I felt about Perkins I couldn’t even look at yet.

Warner came into sight. Here beneath the hills the light was fading, but the top half of the middle elevator was bright. Up in the headhouse at the top it was probably cool and breezy. A man up there could relax in the quiet solitude and look out the little screened windows at the miles and hills of lentils and wheat.

If a man could shake free of the shit. If a man could shake free—

A magpie swooped across the road in front of me. I wondered whether it were the same one I had seen when I was standing so near here waiting for Ron’s tractor to chuffle back over the hill. Probably not: that had been earlier in the day. We were well into swing shift now, and I think the magpie union is pretty strong.

Ron Miller had smashed his yellow Volkswagen into a tan Dodge.

Both cars were in the crotch of the Warner Y. Miller had backed away from the bigger car and was yanking and hammering at the caved metal of his front fender. Next to the Dodge, a man was lying in the gravel. He had on blue jeans and a red and blue plaid shirt. He was lying neatly on his back with his legs straight and his arms at his sides. Blood was welling out of a bullet hole in his belly, but I didn’t know that till later.

I goosed my Toyota along the bottom, and Ron Miller gave up trying to free his front wheel. He jumped into his car, and the rear tires threw gravel. The Volkswagen’s tail jerked sideways, and the nose of the yellow car dragged forward and to the right and mashed into the rear fender of the Dodge. I was doing fifty in third, my transmission screaming and my hands aching on the wheel. I had caught up to Miller. I wouldn’t have to let the cops do my work.

The VW’s door flapped open, and Ron charged out. He crouched and shot at me. I don’t know where it went. I was fighting the car and the gravel and the washboard and the adrenalin. Miller grabbed back into his car and came out with a rifle. He ran, angling off to my left toward the mouth of the truck bay of the middle elevator.

Then I was into the corner, and that was almost it. My tail broke loose, and for an instant I thought I was going to slide sideways into the wrecked cars. I yanked the wheel and floored it. The gravel wanted to kill me, and third didn’t have enough oomph to prevent it. Then the gravel gave up, and my wheels gripped and threw me forward. My rear fender banged the Volkswagen’s rear bumper, and then the Toy leapt forward.

I didn’t even run over the old man on the ground.

Miller was running up the gravel ramp into the truck bay. For a crazy instant I thought of roaring up the ramp and through the scale. But I was getting tired of being all the Keystone Kops at once. My Toyota jumped across the dirt and gravel. Miller stopped at the top of the ramp and shot at me again, but I didn’t bother to pay attention. I got by the bottom of the ramp and whipped the wheel around, and my tail slewed sideways, and I killed the engine. Just like TV. I rolled out of the Toy on the side away from Miller. The gravel lanced my knees and my left hand. I was making a habit of ducking out of cars when Ron Miller shot at me, and I was getting pretty good at it. Well, so far. I had my keys, too. I was tired of doing things wrong. Well, entirely wrong.

I rolled twice, and there I was. Right where I wanted to be: in the cover of the curve of the big steel grain tank. Miller hadn’t shot me again. He hadn’t even shot at me.

I leaned against the cold, rough metal and gasped and tried to steady my heart. I tried to listen. If Miller was doing anything, I couldn’t hear it over my breathing. TV heroes never breathe so hard they can’t hear the bad guys getting ready to kill them. I wondered if LaSalle offered courses in becoming TV heroes.

The bay went all the way through the elevator, and I knew that Miller could run through and come down the ramp on the other side and come around the grain tank and be right behind me and blow my guts halfway to Seattle. Unless he was still using military ammo in that rifle. Then he would just punch a messy hole through my guts. That was a comforting possibility.

I leaned around the curve. The tank was made of great convex squares, with thick ridges between the squares. There were rivets in mysterious and regular patterns. Maybe they placated the harvest gods.

I threw a look behind me, but all I could see was the ridged curve of the tank and a backdrop of empty Whitman County. He could be right around the curve, right behind me. He could blow my spine in half.

I was very tired of thinking like that. I inched forward and could see at an angle into the dimness of the bay. I could not see Miller. My heart started to jerk. I couldn’t find the calm button. It was like being in the dark when you know somebody is going to jump and yell.

I looked behind me again. Tank and countryside.

I looked into the bay. I had to hold my breath to make sure I didn’t hyperventilate.

Then he moved in the half dark of the bay. His blue work shirt was a flicker of lightness, and I let a long breath go. Getting shot is not half as bad as waiting to maybe get shot when you don’t know just where or when you’re going to get shot. . . .

It was not bright outside, but I couldn’t see inside the elevator very well. I stood pressed against the tank, watching for motion and making my body calm down. The tank smelled like warm metal and a little bit like rust and paint.

Ron moved again. He stepped out of the darkness and looked south, away from this door. He knew I might be sneaking around the tank and trying to jump him through the other door of the bay. It was nice to have him be the one who was nervous. It was nice to have him be the one on the jump, not knowing where an explosion might suddenly make him jump and a bullet make him jump even more.

My arm burned. Sometimes my hip burned and sometimes it itched. I wasn’t especially fond of either sensation. But I knew where he was, and he didn’t know where I was. I was in favor of that. It even helped some of the burn and some of the itch. There are a lot of things to be said for not having an invisible rifleman after your ass.

Up in the bay, he stepped back, and I could barely seen the lightness of his face and his shirt. I wondered how his breathing was. I was standing at ground level and his feet were about five feet higher than mine. If I shot him in the body, the angle of the bullet would tear up his insides. A lot.

Motion flickered to my right. I jumped and banged my head against the tank. Three swallows wheeled and skimmed over the gravel. Another one swept in from the tracks. It made a tight turn and darted into the truck bay. Ron Miller stepped out and looked nervously through his tunnel. I wasn’t down there. I knew he wished he could be more sure about that.

He was holding the rifle. That probably wan’t the best possible strategy. Wherever I showed up, it was going to be close quarters and fast action. Maybe the five shots he had thrown at me were all he had for the pistol. I liked that idea, too.

I decided to shoot him high in the right chest. I didn’t really want to kill him, but I sure as hell wanted to put him out of action. If I could bust up his shoulder, he’d be out of it. I started to draw down on him, and he spooked. He whirled and jumped into the darkness. There was a muffled metallic clang. I could see his shirt and face, and all of a suden he flew upward and out of sight.

Manlift.

Most grain elevators have little one-man elevators reaching the forty or sixty or more feet up to where the machinery is. They’re counterweighted metal cages with a heavy rope running through the ceiling and the floor. You step on a lever to disengage the brake, pull down on the rope, and float up to heaven.

I ran onto the ramp and into the elevator.

I did a dumber thing once. 1965, I think it was.

But Ron had not stopped the manlift six feet up so he could shoot me through the head. No matter how much he should have. The rope wobbled, and the manlift made a muted grumble as it swept upward. I leaned into its open shaft and looked up. Gritty dust drifted into my face. The bottom of the cage was grey waffled steel, and it was receding fast.

The cage banged against the top of the shaft, and a flurry of dust poured down. I ducked back and swore for a while. It itched. Then I grinned for a while. Ron Miller was forty feet up in the air. Up into the darkness next to the manlift, a heavy homemade wooden ladder was nailed against the wall. There was no other way up or down. And coming down by either way made you a clay target.

Of course, I could get ambitious and go up that crude vertical ladder. Not wait for Ron. That was a bad idea because the rungs were all covered with barley dust. Climbing would fill my hair and eyes and nose with dust. It would be much easier to stay on this level and shoot myself in the top of the head. Same outcome, less discomfort on the way.

That was all right. I could stand staying here. I’d been up in grain elevators before. I figured I could make it for a little longer without going up again.

It was a waiting game again. But this was the good kind. Ron’s ass was in a sling, and mine wasn’t. He had panicked and backed himself into a box canyon, a dead end alley, a cul de sac. Or any six other dead-end places. I could take my time. I had plenty of choices.

I looked up the ladder to make sure he wasn’t climbing down. The darkness up the central shaft was thick, but there was enough glow from the little windows in the headhouse that I could have seen a man’s form. Nothing. I backed out into the truck bay and stood on the scale and looked around.

The bay was a tunnel ten feet wide and eighteen or twenty feet high. It ran north and south, through the east side of the bulk of the elevator. The manlift was in a little alcove on the west side of the bay.

Running into the darkness behind the manlift was a corridor. It was like a mineshaft. A one-point-three watt bulb fought with dust and lost. At the blunt end of the corridor was a heavy wooden door held shut by a railroad spike. I pulled the door open, and there were the railroad tracks.

I trotted down the hall and looked up the shaft. My patient wasn’t moving. I went back to the door to the west.

The tracks were bright twin spills on a bed of colorful round rocks. Beyond them was a patch of weeds and then a bottom of wheat. The wheat rose to the horizon. The air was cool here, and moist. There was no direct sunlight, but it wasn’t anything you would call dark. I could smell the wood in the elevator, and the creosote in the ties, and the dust in the wheat, and the green in the little ditch. Farther away, the thread of the creek showed green through the bottom. Swallows were looping and wheeling over it.

I relaxed. There was a killer upstairs. Out on the gravel was a man who might be dead, for all I knew. A nice kid had spent a week in jail learning to fear for his life. But the moist and the swallows and the smooth June air were like a soothing hand. I wanted to sit in the door and slide down to the ground and pick up the dense round stones from the railroad bed and pitch them at the white railroad sign: WARNER. Tossing round river rocks is better therapy than a visit to the seashore. I wanted to watch the swallows and smell the evening as it flowed down from the hilltop and filled the little valley.

I stood in the doorway relaxed, and suddenly my stomach turned over and I saw Perkins squatting on the floor of Ron Miller’s living room. The big cherrywood grip of his pistol stuck out like a growth. His uniform was still crisp, his. . . his. . . .

I went back into the darkness of the corridor. Its walls were the cribbed walls of the grain bins. They were immensely strong: two-by-tens laid flat, laminated. They were walls ten inches thick that would never bulge even when tons of wheat were poured into the bins from above. Waist-high in the walls were square portholes, maybe three feet square, little doors letting into the bins.

I looked up the shaft. Nothing showed, nothing moved. Now my biggest fight was with the two Perkinses in me. I looked out the big truck door at the yellow VW nosed into the tan Dodge. I looked up the shaft and thought about trotting over to check out the guy on the ground in the road. It would be suicide. Ron had a rifle. The little peak-roofed cupola he was in had an unglazed window. He could shoot me six times before I could get close enough to the cars to read their license plates.

I stood—

BOOM!

There was a rattling crash. I jerked, and my hand squeezed the grip of my pistol. I looked up. Nothing. It sounded as though the noise had come right out of the walls. The shaft was getting darker. Evening was taking hold of the valley. I went into the corridor and to the door. There was nothing to see, nothing to hear. Nothing.

I stood by the manlift shaft and tried to cool off from the adrenalin. It had been a big noise, and it had come from nowhere. The tightness and the fright were back. Now I wasn’t sure any more that I knew where Ron was. I didn’t know which direction the bullet would come from.

I went down the corridor and leaned out the door into the evening. It wasn’t relaxing anymore. Around and above me, the impassive grey sheathing of the elevator was a blank front. High up, it was touched with sunlight. A long jointed pipe snaked out from the wall and dangled over the tracks like an elephant’s trunk. There was no way out from where Ron was.

I went out the north bay door and looked up. A mountain of grey, the little cap of the cupola. Only a fly could get down the walls of this place. The tightness gripped my chest. The elevator was a maze of shadows and darkness now. I looked up into the black manlift shaft. There wasn’t enough light to see. I was scared.

I reached for the calm button again and tried to think of the best strategic place to be. There was plenty of light outside, but the elevator was becoming a horror house.

I went to the truck doors and looked north. I looked back through the tunnel of the bay. A swallow came through from the south. I went back by the manlift. Ron Miller ran out of the dark mouth of the corridor and clubbed the side of my head with his pistol.

It wasn’t quite six when I went through Belmont. The big doors on the elevator were open, and Bob Miller was sweeping out the scale area with a push broom. He gave me his big wave, and I gave him my Bob Miller wave. I was going to help pinch his rotten nephew, and the fact didn’t bother either of us a bit.

I followed my shadow along the gravel toward Ron’s place. I hadn’t meant to jump the gun on Perkins. I figured he was nearby: I had phoned him before I left, and he wasn’t at his place. I just couldn’t stand another ten minutes of that ceiling. Or another ten seconds, for that matter.

Just before making the drop along the last hillside before the T at Ron’s place, I nearly ran head-on into Larry in his antique Jimmy. Three peaks of brown and yellow lentils heaped in the ancient bed. Larry was busy nursing the truck over the top and barely had time for a tightlipped nod. The truck sounded like a bucket full of rocks. I eased my Toy down and looked toward Ron’s place. He might well be staying in the field till six. Or later, for that matter. Once harvest started, he’d be working till eight, or later. I remembered harvesting till long after full dark, the combines like ghostly dinosaurs in the night. I didn’t see any light at Ron’s, but that didn’t mean anything.

It occurred to me that Ron Miller might well shoot out John Kilgore’s windshield, or maybe my eyeballs this time. Especially if he had noticed his messed up garbage. Quite apart from my personal prejudice about the eyeballs, I figured I wouldn’t get lucky a second time finding another windshield.

There was no place to pull off. The road was going down a hill full of wheat. There was a steep dirt bank above me to my left and a steep slope of wheat dropping from my right. I zipped through Ron’s T without slowing. Instead of going left, toward Warner, I went straight. I didn’t see any movement at his place. The road jigged behind a line of Lombardy poplars that were alive on the outside but brown and dead up their cores. I did some clumsy maneuvering and got the Toyota pointed back the way I had come. I was out of sight of Ron’s place, about a hundred yards east of the T, and getting a little tight across the shoulders. I checked the loads in my .38 and stuck it down the back of my pants. That way you can blow your ass off but not your balls. I walked along the gravel in the silence.

I was walking toward hills with the sun on top of them. My shadow was long behind me, stretched and grotesque. It felt good not to be stretched and grotesque. It felt good to be straightening things out and getting Mike out of jail. It felt good not to be waiting anymore. I wished Perkins were there: Perkins felt good, too, and it would be nice to lean on Ron Miller together. Maybe I could find a good place to keep an eye on the house and wait till Perkins got there.

I knew Ron had a rifle and was pretty good with it. He was a country kid: the odds were good that he had a pistol and had plinked with it. And even if he had ditched his rifle after plugging my car and carburetor, he might well have another rifle or two, and some shotguns around. It would not be wise to count entirely on my winning smile. Or on a service title nearly twenty years and clearly twenty pounds out of date.

I hugged the north ditch and had cover till I was nearly to the junction. When I came in sight of the house. I paused to have a look. There was almost no covered way to approach. Perhaps this would be a good place to wait till Perkins showed up.

But then I saw the white Buick with the blue upholstery, and I knew I wasn’t going to waste time waiting for Perkins, or bellying through the wheat and dashing across the gravel to crouch behind the poplar stumps. It was Big Jack Manchester’s car, but I didn’t figure that Mr. Baltimore Colts was out here hobnobbing with Ina Simmons’s old boyfriend.

I remembered asking Tammy whether she thought Ron might know about the Oregon connection. I’m just full of good ideas. I thought about Ron Miller, placidly and coldly spitting tobacco juice onto the dun earth of a worn-out lentil field, placidly and hotly working up his face of outrage as I talked to him. It didn’t feel good to think of Tammy in there with him. I trotted along the gravel and cut through the T and ran across the lumpy hardpacked dirt of Ron Miller’s yard. The garbage bag didn’t seem to have been fooled with since I had left it in the bed of the truck nine hours earlier. The yellow Volkswagen was nosed in along the side of the little house.

Tammy screamed as I pounded across the yard. It was a short cry, and it sounded cut off. I jumped onto the wooden step and shoved the door. It was locked. There was nothing to brace against, and the step was too small to get any leverage. I swore and leaned back and drove my heel against the door next to the knob. It was a shoddy house, but at least it wasn’t a trailer with a door that opened out. The door slapped open and banged the wall, and I came through fast. My pistol was in my hand, but I didn’t know when I had pulled it.

Tammy Manchester was on the floor, and Ron Miller was kneeling on her chest and strangling her. The left side of her face was purple, and there was a blurt of bright blood on her chin.

Miller was incredibly quick. They were slightly to my right, and as I pivoted, he rolled off her like a gymnast. He straightened against the far wall, and there was a pistol in his fist. He fired one-handed, and I rolled to my left and tried to find him as the room tumbled with me. I heard the flat whack of his slug in the plaster, and I fired just to make him jump.

He had no business being so quick, being so cool. His gun roared again, and a slug furrowed my hip. I grunted and rolled and thought I was dead. My hip burned. I was ashamed of being killed in such a stupid way.

And then Miller pounded across the angle of the room and fired again and ran out the door. The slug slapped the wall, and his feet hit the hard ground, and I wasn’t dead.

I felt very stupid.

I sat on the floor for half a minute with my pistol covering the door. There was a big window behind me, but it takes a lot of noise to bust a big window. I was ready to roll into the hallway. Then I came to my feet and edged toward Tammy.

Tammy was breathing. The side of her face was swollen, and her neck was fat and bruised, but she was just breathing. No rasp, no trouble. The Volkswagen coughed into life and rattled across the yard. I jumped to the front door and leaned against the frame. The VW was rocketing backward toward the dead poplars. I leaned and steadied and fired twice. His windshield starred, and we were even for that. His hood plonked, but that wasn’t his engine, so he still owed me a carburetor. He slewed backward onto the gravel and shrieked into gear, and he threw gravel shooting down the road toward Warner.

I was already out into the yard, hammering across the hard dirt and saying shit shit shit because I had parked two hundred yards away. Two hundred and fifty. Sorry, Mrs. Jones. A rut shoved sideways at my ankle, and I went down. Fire shot up from my elbow as I hit the dirt, and the sound of the VW racketed down the road. Away.

My hip burned and my elbow hurt and my ankle hurt, and I was dusted from ankle to hip and along my forearm, and the shame of being stupid burned with the frustration, and I lurched across the T and along the gravel toward my car.

Twice my ankle staggered me, and once I went to my knee and tore my pants and added a scrape to the rest of the petty and trivial marks of my physical incompetence. I fumbled my keys and dropped them into the gravel and scrabbled for them, and Ron Miller raced away to the north, immune, inviolate. And as the key slid home and clicked and turned, the old breath scratched in my ragged throat and what I felt was the shame, the shame. It was like a fist of nausea in my chest. All the triumph and excitement of pursuing the bad guy was gone. There was nothing in me but the whimpering desire to hide. To cower.

The car started right away. There are different ways to lose. Some of them aren’t so bad except for the losing, and some of them are worse than the losing itself could ever be. The car started: no problem. I had been slow and late and stupid and inefficient and ineffectual and the drag of my loathing was heavier than the gravity. I put the car into gear and then took it out. I led it idle while I reloaded the three empty chambers. My hands were shaking, and I spilled the box on the passenger seat. I arched up under the wheel and stuffed a handful of ammo into my pocket. Then I squirted gravel and shot down my arm of the T. I could still do what I could still do. I fishtailed through the junction in second and floored it. It would not exactly be a hot TV chase: two cars with booming four cylinder engines sliding around gravel roads in the middle of a sea of lentils. . . .

Then I realized that there was a green county Plymouth with a buggy whip antenna in Ron Miller’s yard. Perkins was here. He could radio; maybe we could put the squeeze on Miller before he got out of the county or went to ground.

Maybe we would even be able to get him. I jammed the Toy’s nose into the gravel and scratched back. I banged into first and jounced into the yard. The door was closed now. I pushed it open.

The room hadn’t changed, except that the feeling of tight and danger and maybe death had gone out of it when Ron went out of it.

I started to say something. I think I was starting to say “Hey, Perkins,” or something like that. I don’t think I got even as far as the “Hey.”

He tried to cover up. It wasn’t that he was crass or brash or anything. He tried to cover up. But he didn’t try to cover up till after he had heard me, and he didn’t hear me till after I had come in and seen him.

“Jesus Christ, Perkins,” is what I said. It was not a prayer. It was an exorcism.

Tammy Manchester was still bleeding from the corner of her mouth. The side of her face was swollen, and her eyes had both begun to blacken. Ron Miller had done a quick and brutal job on her face.

She was out cold. Miller had hit her on the side of the face. The blow had blacked her eyes and maybe broken her cheekbone and knocked her out.

That was all part of Miller. Part of the violence and the black eyes and the bloody mouth and the bruised neck. That was rough and violent and bad. I didn’t like seeing a seventeen-year-old high school girl hit in the face. I didn’t like seeing a slim girl choked and smashed in the face, even by a slim guy. I didn’t like that, but I could take it.

That wasn’t “Jesus Christ, Perkins.”

Perkins had Tammy Manchester over his lap. Her long. slender girl’s body was shaken and hurt, and she had almost been strangled by a son of a bitch who had killed his girl and tried to frame his own brother for the murder. Perkins had that slim body acros his lap, and that is not a bad thing. Not in itself, not by itself.

“Jesus Christ, Perkins,” I said. Perkins jumped like a galvanized frog, and his hand jerked out, but it was too late for him, too late for me. I already had seen. One hand, two hands. One hand under the loose weave of the white cotton of Tammy’s t-shirt. That thick hand with its blunt fingers, snaking under the soft cotton, palping the naked flesh of Tammy Manchester’s unconsciousness, of Tammy Manchester’s foolish, childish, warm, springy breast.

I had been shot and hit and shot and ashamed. This hurt hit hardest. I actually lurched against the doorframe and I said Jesus Christ, Perkins, and his hand came away from the warm soft flesh of Tammy Manchester’s breast and his other hand jerked up out away from the top of her jeans. I saw the gap where the button was undone and the burn moved from my arm and hip. I leaned against the door frame, and the burn spread. Tammy Manchester was out cold, and I said, “Perkins,” and I said, “Perkins, you son of a bitch,” and he jerked backward with his whole body, his whole self.

Tammy’s limp body rolled onto the floor with a loose noise, and she stirred and moaned a little bit, and Perkins kept moving backward as though a jerk could go on forever, and the shock was in his eyes as though he had been knocked cold by Ron Miller. He said “Chapman,” and the room filled me, and I said, “Perkins, you son of a bitch” and in his eyes was the fear. I said, “You get out of here, you son of a bitch,” and I bumped away from the door. I could hear him stir, and I knew the fear was still in him, and I knew that he was afraid that I would kill him.

I leaned against the wall, and I heard him move, and I knew that he was moving away. He went away, and after a long time I rolled along the wall to the door. In the room, Tammy was rolling a bit, and she moaned and she flopped a hand against the floor. She was coming to. I knelt by her and I touched the top of her arm.

I said, “Tammy, try to lie still.”

And she said, “Oh, it hurts.” Only the words were muffled because her jaw had been hit and maybe something was broken.

She was muttering through the haze of her pain and I said, “Tammy, you lie still for a minute. There will be a doctor here. He can do something for the pain. Things will be OK now.”  That was partly a lie. But it was partly true. Even now I knew that Perkins would be on his radio. I knew he was still a good cop who would do the good cop things that he should do.

But all the time I could see Perkins there with his big hand up the front of her t-shirt, and I could see Perkins there with his big blunt ugly hand down the front of her jeans, and Tammy Manchester unconscious because Miller had tried to kill her. And Perkins there because he was a cop, because Miller had killed people and tried to kill people and because people needed to be protected from Miller and people like Miller.

And I could not help it: I remembered walking along the railroad tracks with Perkins and wishing that we could walk on forever like this because we were feeling warm and close. Because we were friends and it was night and soft and we were walking through the soft night together. And Tammy moaned because her jaw hurt or because her neck hurt where Ron had tried to kill her. I knew that never in her life would she know that Perkins had put his paw on the naked flesh of her breast or that Deputy Perkins had slid the thick meat of his hand down the gap between her jeans and the taut whiteness of her belly, and she would never suffer from it, not an instant, and I would never stop suffering from it. Perkins and I had walked along the tracks together and now we would never be able to walk a yard together. I felt the way I had when I learned about Susanna.

I would have been happy to wave at Bob Miller or Larry or the office lady, but everybody in Belmont was lying low as I swept through. I bounced along the rocky part and pased the windmill and nemesised down to the T by Ron Miller’s place. I didn’t expect him to be home, and he wasn’t. One for one.

I didn’t bother to hide the car. I didn’t figure Ron Miller was going to break the routine of his job and come wheeling along with a Mauser in his scabbard. Sometimes you make decisions, and afterward you realize that it’s pure dumb luck that you didn’t wind up getting dead from them. It was really not very bright of me to poke around with my car out there for everybody and his tractor to see. Even with John Kilgore’s windshield for a disguise.

There wasn’t a great deal of poking around to do, logically. I had either to do a thorough toss, or not bother. Logically, that is. I poked around a little.

I didn’t break and enter, though not because of scruples. I looked around the dirt yard surrounding the pustule that Ron Miller lived in. There was an orange cat who thought that the fields looked more interesting than I did. That was fine with me. I scuffed around in the little falling-down old shed. Miller seemed to have been hiding mice in there. I looked under the two unpainted wooden steps. He seemed to have been hiding nothing there. I looked in the cab of the pickup. He seemed to have been hiding dried mud in there. I looked in the bed of the pickup. He was still hiding sticks and trash and garbage bags in there. I spat reflectively in honor of Ron Miller and started back to John Kilgore’s carburetor.

I suppose the cops would have found it. If you were looking it wasn’t all that well hidden. But it was damned clever. I backed up and leaned over the dirty lip of the pickup bed and grinned at the new garbage sack. The suitcase was just a shade too big for the bag. It bulged against the plastic and stretched the plastic tightly enough that the plastic was translucent and voila, the wheatfield dupin realizes the possible significance of a suitcase in a garbage sack in the pickup of a possible drug pusher.

I kept grinning as I untwisted the bag cinch. It was getting to be a pretty nice Tuesday. Some of the fill in the bag was real garbage and some was just newspaper. It was almost a very good job of hiding a cardboard suitcase full of dope: Who was going to poke around in a farmhand’s garbage? That truck probably always had some number of green plastic garbage bags waiting to be hauled off to some dump, official or unofficial. There wouldn’t be any trash pickup here: Only the owner would have occasion to have anything to do with those trash bags. So when some halfwitted snoop from the coast lets you know that he’s been messing around your crypt stash, what better place?

I popped the catch without leaving prints. In the suitcase was another garbage bag, a bulging wad of marijuana that I was willing to bet I had seen on the drying screens. There were also mayonnaise jars full of pills. A lot of them. Tammy had been right: I’d be surprised. The coke was in a little tin candy box with pictures of black currants on the lid. No crack, man; I was in the innocent boondocks. I didn’t suppose that I should be particularly comforted by the lack.

Ina Simmons had not been running a nickel-and-dime kind of business. It looked like a few dozen farm kids around Garfield used approximately sixty times the dope admitted to by the whole NFL. . . .

I didn’t bother to repack the garbage very carefully. Whatever worries I might ever have had about offending Ron Miller seemed to have contracted Worry Polio and shriveled.

It had been a long time since I had arrested anyone. I was looking forward to it. I even kind of hoped Ron Miller would get belligerent. It would be fun to punch him around a bit.

I forget. Is that what Belgium said about Hitler?

I went up the little hill and down the longer hill and through the long curve and along the bottom with the ditch in the field to my left. The big doors to the truck bay of the middle elevator at Warner gaped, but Larry and his ancient Jimmy weren’t around. The other two elevators showed no break in their impassive grey faces.

Miller’s yellow Volkswagen was not where I had always seen it. The field was all plowed. I was going to have to revise the setting of the arresting-Ron-Miller fantasy.

I guessed if he could stand it, I could stand it. I took the other road from Warner and read mailboxes. There was a Simpson and some Kruegers and a Guernsey and a Miller and a Baranowski, for goodness’ sake. Logan, last of his race. No Busbees. I could live with that, too. It was a west-running road and after a while I hit blacktop and figured I was north of Belmont. I was. Five minutes later I pulled in next to the tin side of the office annex and went into the office. The office lady was wearing a dress this time, and she was very friendly and helpful.

I still couldn’t raise Perkins. When Bob Miller followed his orange cap up from the belly of the elevator, he shook my hand earnestly and took me into our conference room.

“Bottle a sody?” he asked. It was the first time I had ever heard a westerner call pop soda. I said no thanks, but he hesitated, and I realized that he wanted a bottle of pop but wouldn’t take one unless I had one. So I changed my mind, and he looked relieved. It was Pepsi in the old style bottles with the red white and blue labels, and it was very cold. I wondered how many cases of the stuff he had stuck in some storeroom, and what the collectors in the city would pay for a case of unopened pop maybe a quarter century old.

I told him how things stood with Ron. He tchked his tongue when I showed him a piece of my bandage, and when I was through he said,     “You hang on a second, Mr Chapman. I maybe can help you run Ron down.” He made four phone calls, only one of which was answered. He asked somebody named Alex how he was coming along and whether he knew where Charlie Busbee or his nephew Ron might be working. He told him no, they’d finished at Warner and said yep and sure and thanks, and that was that. He told me to let him know if there was anything he could do and he shook my hand and clapped my shoulder, and I drove back to Garfield.

I waited.

You’ve waited. Maybe you’ve been bored, maybe you’ve been apprehensive, maybe you’ve read all of Moby-Dick in some waiting room or department store.

Staking a place out is waiting, and it’s boring. Tailing somebody is usually mostly waiting, and it’s boring.

Sometimes you’re lucky and you get to sit in your car and listen to the radio if it’s working and drink coffee and eat sandwiches if you were bright enough to bring coffee and sandwiches. Lots of times you’re not lucky and you get to stand in doorways or sit in hotel lobbies which smell of mildew and cigarettes and unwashed bodies. Or stand in the rain.

It rains a lot in Seattle.

I waited. I should have been the luckiest of all: I was waiting in my own room. All the comforts of home. Buckhorn and salami and mayonnaise. My own saggy bed and muttering alarm clock. My own thumbed, secondhand, unread couple of science fiction novels. I didn’t feel especially lucky. I ignored the Buckhorn and listened to the clock and couldn’t read the books.

I waited and waited. It got to be eleven o’clock. Noon. I felt like I had run a marathon in chest waders in the sand. Every now and then I’d walk over to the post office booth and call Busbee’s number. Then I’d bring variety into my existence by letting Perkins’s number ring. Bob Miller had told me that Busbee was a widower, who was likely to eat his dinner in the field. By dinner he’d meant lunch, I figured. He’d been right, I figured.

I finally got Perkins. His voice was thick, groggy. He sounded like a hangover speaking from beyond the veil.

“Fachrissakes, Chapman. I can’t wait to call you at two in the morning some time.”

“You’ll never call me,” I said. “Not till they invent a way to drop beer cans through the phone.”

He snorted, then said, “Just a sec. I gotta do something to wake up.” He disappeared for a while. When he came back he still sounded stupid and asleep.

“Look,” I said, “Ron Miller killed Ina. He’s got a suitcase full of Ina’s dope in that pickup at his place. He’s the only one who could have known to be waiting there to shoot me Sunday night. And nobody knows where he is. He and Busbee are both working somewhere out in the boonies.”

“Well, son of a bitch,” Perkins said. He came awake enough to be interested. “The weasel. The rotten little son of a bitch.”

“I wanted to brace the little bastard when he knocks off,” I said. “You interested?”

“Hell yes,” Perkins said. He was full awake now. “I arrested Mike, remember?” He paused for a moment and the operator said she wanted more money or she was going to take her phone and go home. I fumbled and came up short.

“Hey,” I said. “I’m out of change. Perkins, you call me back. It’s two eight—”

“I’m sorry,” she broke in. “I must have an additional thirty-five cents before I may permit you to continue your conversation.”

“Look,” I said, “I just w—”

“Operator,” Perkins said, “would you reverse the charges on this call, please?”

“I’m sorry, sir, I cannot alter the nature of the call once it is comenced. For this to be a collect call I would have to disconnect you and then reconnect the call using a code OC.”

Perkins was cool. He sounded like Jack Nicholson telling the waitress how to make his toast. “Fine,” he said. “Would you please disconnect us and reconnect us using a code OC?”

“Certainly,” she said. “But I need thirty-five cents from the pay station.”

“I haven’t got thirty-five cents,” I said. I was beginning to feel like a part of the Three Stooges. I wondered when Perkins would reach through the phone to hit me over the head with a rubber hammer. “I can go get it if you want. I have some money in my room.”

“That would be acceptable,” she said. “Ask for operator seven. I must warn you,” she added sternly, “that should we fail to receive the amount from the pay station, the charge must be assessed against the recipient caller. That’s you, sir, in Colfax,” she said, making everything clear.

One thing about phone calls. They make waiting look sort of attractive.

“You mean this would sort of turn into a collect call, right, operator?” Perkins’ voice was slow and heavily patient.

“That would be the effect, yes, sir. You would be responsible for the accrued charges associated with this connection.”

I could almost forget about Ron Miller.

•

When I got Perkins again, collect, I told him the number of the booth, talked for three minutes, hung up, and he called me back. You can fool a couple of sharp cookies like us for only so long.

You can still fool me about why a cookie should want to be sharp, though.

“Look,” I said, “short of just stumbling over Ron’s VW out by some field, there’s no way anybody is going to find Miller before he knocks off this evening.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We’d both like to handle the little bastard, right?”

“Sure.”

“Well, then. I know you don’t go on duty till midnight or whenever. But you’re still a cop. You got access to a car?”

“Sure,” he said. “All the deputies have their own patrol cars. It helps make up for so few cops in so many square miles.”

“You be rested up enough to meet me out at Ron Miller’s place at six?”

“Rested up? You got to be kidding. I got this asshole keeps calling me when I’m trying to sleep.” He made a disgusted noise. “But I’ll tell you what. I’ll be there. Maybe if we arrest Miller you’ll move back to Seattle and I can get some sleep. I’ll see you at six.”

“It’s Ron,” I said, quietly. “He killed his girl and framed his brother.”

“Yeah,” Perkins said. “Welcome to our charming town. You want me to pick you up there?” He had skipped his chance to say that Ron had mitigated some of his rotten behavior by shooting me. Maybe Perkins was unfairly prejudiced against Ron and wasn’t giving him a fair shake.

“No, that’s OK,” I said. “More mobile, more flexible. You know us SWAT teams.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I heard they special-ordered a whole fleet of Toyotas for the Delta Force.”

After Perkins had hung up, I hung on for a minute. But Operator Seven didn’t have anything more to say. I thought about calling her, asking her out. Maybe we could go have a pizza at Tomasino’s on the far north side. But then I figured she probably didn’t like anchovies and we’d have to fight about it all the way across the state and we’d be too tired from fighting to have a good time eating whatever kind of mild-mannered pizza we finally decided to get. So I said “You can keep your damned mule” at the phone and tottered back across the street. There seemed to be no mad dogs or Englishmen in Garfield, so I had the place to myself.

I wondered whether somebody were watching me from a rented window. I wondered what it looked like I needed. Not industrial strength brains: I had them. Solid, grade-A janitor brains with crisscrossed re-bar.

I went upstairs and lay on my bed and watched the ceiling. And waited.

•

I suppose there are some sadists who become private eyes. They’d be the ones to give you a blow by blow of that afternoon. A blink by blink. I was too tight to read, too loose to go cruising the gravel roads of the county on the off chance of running across one Volkswagen that might or might not have been parked in sight of a road. I was tired of going over and over the stupid case. It was Ron, Ron, Ron. It hadn’t really been all that complicated. Not one of your classic locked-combine mysteries with sultry county fair queens and villainous herbicide-snorting masterminds. Just a tawdry little killing in a nearly comatose town on the outskirts of nowhere. There was a nice kid who got put in line to be screwed over, a sonofabitch who did the putting, and a Keystone private kop who needed to be hit in the head for things to shake loose and fall on the table.

Mike was real again, but calling Colfax wasn’t going to spring him—not till Ron could be found.

Mike’s lawyer, if he could be found, wouldn’t be any help.

It was Ron, Ron, Ron.

It was wait, wait, wait.

It was almost two o’clock.

It was Tuesday, but gravity was ahead on points. Something clonked, and I started to crawl up out of sleep. Clonk. What the hell?

It clonked again. And rattled. And it was in my room.

Jesus. I rolled out and hit the floor, scrabbling for my gun. Damfool! I thought. Make yourself a target and then sleep behind a cardboard door with a tinfoil lock. . . .

My fingers found the grip. I didn’t know which way he would lead me, but I really had only one way to go. My bare feet shoved against the linoleum and I flew sideways, twisting in the air, bringing the pistol up, hoping for one shot, just one, at least one.

My ribs hit the edge of the old chair, and together we hit the wall. Another empty beer can dropped through the transom and clonked on the floor.

“Chapman?” Perkins’ voice grinned through the door. My ribs hurt.

“Perkins?”

“Rise ’n’ shine, boy. You left a wake-up call?”

“Perkins,” I said, pretty steadily, “there’s an eighty year old man in the next room. He’s a nice guy. He used to run a paint store. I’d hate to wake him up. Otherwise I’d go ahead and shoot you.”

He laughed and tossed another empty through the transom. Clonk. They were Rainier cans.

I put up my bright sword and opened the door. Perkins came in and perched a jaunty thigh against the table. “I thought you said you had butterflies on your undies,” he said. He was in uniform. The big cherrywood grip of his revolver was dark and oiled-looking. His uniform was neat but not crisp: he was a man who had spent the night in a patrol car.

Management’s alarm clock whirred softly and said it wasn’t quite seven. “You’re still on duty, officer?”

“Yeah,” he said, “but I heard you couldn’t resist a guy in uniform.”

“You goddam sailors are all alike.” I pulled on a t-shirt and thought about Tammy in her cougar.

“You got coffee?” he said.

“Sure,” I said, “but the waitress is down in the can. You got to get your own.”

He showed me his teeth politely and went to the door. He bent out into the hall and straightened back with a tall white styrofoam cup in each hand. When he thumbed the plastic lid off one, the coffee filled the room. I began to think I might live. I also began to think it might not be too bad an idea.

It wasn’t too hot to drink. “Compliments of the Wagon Wheel in Steptoe,” he said, “but not of the honest citizens of Whitman County. You owe me fifty-two cents.”

“Take it out in trade,” I said. “If you ever get in a jam and need some professional investigative work, give me a call.”

“Shit,” he said, and looked disgusted. “What the hell kind of problem could I have that would take you fifty-two cents’ worth to investigate? No way I could ever need more than two, three days’ work from you.”

The coffee was wonderful. “It’s a special half-weekly rate,” I said. “For half-weak clients. You got ham and eggs out there too?” I looked hopefully toward the door, but he shook a grave head.

“Got hijacked outside of Oakesdale. Malaysians. They got everything except the coffee.”

I took another sip. “Where’s your partner?”

He looked to all corners of the room. “You pay taxes in this county?”

“Christ no,” I said. “I don’t even piss here. I’m saving it till I get west of the mountains.”

“Well, all right. Deputy Barnes is engaged at this moment, some two city blocks to the north of this location, in slamming the pork to a young lady of Swedish extraction. The young lady in question shall, of course, remain nameless. A gentleman and an officer does not bandy the name of Sandy Christiaansen.”

“He’d better not,” I said. “Nor you neither.”

I finished the coffee with real regret. Perkins ran a blunt hand through his short hair and said, “Actually, this is damn near business. I got some dope from Spokane.”

I had been leaning against the bed’s chipped metal headboard. I sat forward and looked interested. I was interested.

Perkins shook his head heavily. “Don’t get excited. It’s nothing good.”

I pursed my face. Every time I talked to Perkins, he had some kind of damn-Mike information. “They found Mike Miller’s fingerprints on her throat,” I said, “and he carved his name in her belly with his scout knife and we didn’t notice when we found the body.”

“Could be,” he said. “Can’t anybody say you’re wrong, at least. They can’t find any records of Ina Simmons.”

“What?” I groped for the styrofoam and tipped it up, but it was still empty.

“Yeah. Some kind of screwup in the Medical Examiner’s office up there. The body is there, but nobody can find her file, the pathology reports, nothing.”

“Oh, for—”

“Yeah,” he said again. “I knew you’d like that. Maybe we should have left it to our own homegrown carpenter, huh?”

I thought about Mike Miller sitting in his little grey-painted urinal in Colfax. This case was an odd one. It had a life of its own, a dreary vitality which made Mike sometimes almost irrelevant, almost an abstraction. But at times he would come back alive. He would be real, a quiet boy, an inoffensive boy. He would be the quiet and respectful young man who had spoken quietly and respectfully to me. He would be the placid young man who blinked in wonder as the sudden wrench tore him from his shabby but neat little house and twisted him into a shabby but foul little cell. And set Larry to doing his work for him.

“Aw hell,” I said. Gravity had gone over the ropes when I hit it with the coffee. I hadn’t realized that this was a tag team match. Grey had slipped into the ring. It was fresher than I was.

“I got the scoop when I came on last night,” Perkins said. “I stopped and gave Spokaloo a call a couple of times, but they’re all shut down.” He shook his big ugly head. “You don’t get that fancy big city twenty-four hour stuff around here. Hell, maybe that’s all just TV anyway.”

I told him everything I had done and learned since I had seen him last. He squiggled his face through all the appropriate moves: amazement at the mausoleum, interest at the dope, dislike at Manchester and his posing, appalledness at the ambush, suspicion at Ron Miller.

“Look,” he said, “what do you figure the chances are that Ina’s supplier from Oregon knew about that tomb. No chance, right?”

It was a helpful and attractive proposition. But it wasn’t certain. “Well, that depends on how intimate they were, doesn’t it? If he was just a vending machine to her, sure. But if they were personal as well as professional associates—” I shrugged. There was plenty of possibility that Ina’s involvement with drugs had come through a boyfriend in the first place; this supplier could have been an old lover from college, or even a current now-and-then lover.

“But we don’t have any reason to suspect personal involvement,” he persisted.

“No,” I admitted. “But we’d be damn fools to assume anything and then operate as though the assumption were fact.”

We sat in the clean, shabby room in the morning, and we were friends the way we had been on Saturday night. It made the room and the morning nicer. But it wasn’t helping Mike in any way that I could see. Perkins was real, but Mike was real too. Sometimes they were pushing against each other.

After a while, Perkins leaned over and looked at the alarm clock. “That’s about it, fans,” he said. He grinned at me. “Believe it or not, Barnes is a hell of a conscientious young officer of the law and public servant. He never does his humping on the public’s time.”

I took my own look at the clock. “You guys are still on duty, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, but get this. Barnes skips his coffee break time, skips his lunch time. Lunch comes along at two ayem and there is Deputy Perkins sitting in the Wagon Wheel or wherever, but by golly Deputy Barnes is off patrolling the roads of Whitman County, keeping the populace safe. Then when he’s got all his time in a lump we swing by Garfield and he bounces on old nameless Sandy Christiaansen.”

We laughed. I said, “I hope old nameless SC isn’t too slow. I’d hate to have stern duty rip her man out of her loving arms at the wrong moment.”

Perkins was almost serious. “I’ll give Barnes full credit,” he said. “If she needed thirty more seconds and his break time was up, he’d be off and buttoning his trousers.

“But he’s a gentleman. He’d be apologizing graciously while he did it.”

He straightened from the table and tossed his coffee cup toward the wastebasket. “I dunno how late I’ll be staying up after I get off,” he said. “I’m beat to hell. But I’ll let you know if anything comes in from Spokane.” He squashed his thick lips together and looked grim. “It’s a lousy screw-up. It figures.” He flickered his stubby fingers in a sketchy wave and turned. Then he turned back and grinned. “You wanna keep the beer cans? Cash em in at the recycling center under the scenic Space Needle?”

“Naw,” I said. “They’re Whitman County property. I’d probably get extradited. I’d wind up sharing a cell with Mike Miller and Officer Barnes.”

“No problem,” he said. “Some citizen left them in a neat assortment not far from Christiaan Sandysen’s place.”

“We’ll send them back to that distinguished citizen on the occasion of his seventeenth birthday,” I said. Perkins kicked a Rainier can across the floor, laughed, and clomped away. He and his coffee had made the morning nearly bearable.

I listened to his car whirr into life and swoosh away. I filled the wastebasket with the beer cans and the styrofoam cups. The coffee was leaking out of the room and the morning. I scouted an old Buckhorn cap and added it to the collection.

Perkins and the coffee were fading fast. I fished another bottle cap out from under the bed and tossed it into the wastebasket. It went clink. It wasn’t eight o’clock, and I had done everything I could think of to fill the time.

It looked like being a long day. After Monday I wasn’t sure I could take it. Especially without some more coffee.

The woman was an angel. She knocked lightly, and I said Yeah? She said Good morning, Mr. Chapman, and I hopped for my pants. The coffee smell raced her lavender smell across the room, won by a nose, and then Mrs. Richardson turned around from backing the door open and I didn’t even finish buttoning my fly. Even all-seeing big city dicks who take it in stride when there’s no dope in the pusher’s house can’t always be plussed.

Or ept, I suppose, but that’s another matter. And the coffee was making me feel damned gruntled.

“I have some errands to run and some people to see,” Mrs. Richardson said, “or I’d ask you to eat with me. But I figured you must be tired of whatever you’ve been eating for breakfast.” She bore a tray before her like a salver. On it were eggs and bacon and toast and jam and coffee and salvation, redemption, and resurrection.

It looked like being a wonderful day.

She went her way, and I got outside of the life on her magic platter. I didn’t hurry. There was still going to be plenty of day left when I finished.

I was at a stall, a dead end, and I knew it. I wished I still had Perkins there to bounce things off. I bounced them off the wall instead. Old off-the-wall Chapman.

Ina Simmons could have been killed by some complete outsider, someone we had never seen or heard of or thought of. The proverbial tramp or traveling salesman.

But if the killer were an outsider, it didn’t make sense for him to have used the truck, to have framed Mike elaborately and deliberately. Motive and likelihood didn’t even enter into this one.

Ina Simmons could have been killed by Mike Miller, who did an incompetent job with the murder but a consummate job of looking surprised when the cops grabbed him.

I wasn’t even bothering to consider that one. Besides, if Mike had killed her, everything would be taken care of in good order.

Ina Simmons could have been killed by Ron Miller. I liked that one. It explained Mike’s truck (brotherly love) and the apparent disappearance of Ina’s stash (since Ron had been involved with both Ina and Ina’s drug dealing). It accounted for the disappearance of the dope from the mausoleum (since I had mentioned the cemetery over the phone, myself, in one of those exhibitions of strategy that might well be filed under a special heading in the LaSalle Instruction Manual index). It could even account for the ambush and—hell yes—the timing of the ambush.

Motive? Who could tell, yet. Lovers’ quarrel. Disagreement over some aspect of peddling dope in Garfield. Conflict over what TV show to watch, how much salt to put on the popcorn. Sudden passion, calculated scheme—whatever? It didn’t matter—plenty of room for motive.

Likelihood? It was hard to say. If Ron had killed her, then it wasn’t a particularly intelligent murder. But then, nobody had ever said that Ron Miller was a particularly intelligent young man. If he had done it, the Nobel Prize in Homicide was going to have to go to someone else. Maybe some Libyan up-and-comer, or an Old Favorite from Stalin’s crew, passed over out of political jealousy until now, the twilight of his long and illustrious career. You never could tell.

Ina Simmons could have been killed by her mysterious supplier from Oregon. That one wasn’t too bad. It could account for the truck (an intimacy with Ina going back quite a while) and the non-presence of the stash (the killer’s business in the first place). The cemetery, too, could be accounted for by that killer. A lot of the plausibility of this villain depended on how personal his relations with Ina had been. And there was no way we could know about that without finding him: If she had been banging the guy, she was not likely to have told any of her in-town boyfriends, past or present. Besides, Tammy and others had made it clear that Ina was a model of cautious discretion when it came to mentioning her drug contacts. Not that it had saved her life.

Motive? Dope, in whatever permutations and combinations. Always a good reason to kill. Sudden or planned, it didn’t matter: Same circumstances as with Ron Miller.

Likelihood? Depended on the motive. By Tammy’s account, the guy had been through early in the week, presumably for the only time that month. But if he had had reason to kill Ina, coming back wouldn’t have been particularly unlikely. Especially if his visits to this part of the country were part of a route, a loop that could bring him easily back past Garfield.

Ina Simmons could have been killed by Randy Scheidt. I didn’t like that one: I bought the kid’s Christianity all the way down the line. As the straight dope, too—as something lived, not thrown up as mask either hypocritical or self-deceived. That’s one you can sometimes get a pretty good feel for, and it’s the feeling I had. But Randy could explain the truck (a mechanic’s knowledge, an old timer who would know, and perhaps have reason to hate or resent Mike). Depending on his intimacy with Ina—before or after his conversion—it could explain a lot of things.

Motive and likelihood? They were hard to dredge up, at least from a mind that accepted Scheidt’s innocence as a kind of precondition. Desire to root out evil?— to extirpate the wickedness from his own past? I supposed it could be. True Believers can be odd sorts of people. But I was going to put a lot of folks on the list ahead of Randy Scheidt. Including Perkins and Mrs. Richardson. Well, Perkins.

Ina Simmons could have been killed by Skip Kirby. I didn’t like that one much. It could help account for the clumsiness apparent at every turn. Skip was dumb enough to kill like this.

Motive? Jealousy and secret passion for Ina. Not much trouble there. A mind—such as it was—like Skip Kirby’s didn’t need a lot of motive.

Likelihood? Not large, but there. Skip was big and strong; strangling would be his style. If only because he would forget that he had a weapon at hand. Not much else fit: it didn’t seem likely that he would know about her business, about the cemetery, unless Skip had been Ina’s lover. I didn’t like much of what I knew about Ina, but I hesitated to damn a dead woman with that kind of speculation. . . .

Somehow Skip Kirby in the role of rifle-wielding ambusher was unlikely. He knew my car and could have seen me leaving town, yes. He could even have waited around till I came back. In fact, his was just the kind of stolid stupid who would do that with great patience. For that matter, who could tell how many times Skip might have hung around the wrong road, waiting in vain for me to drive past his rifle? Maybe he had spent the last three days waiting in Farmington for me.

I liked that idea for fun, but I still didn’t like Skip much for the job. When I bounced him off the wall, the wall bounced him back, and he hit the floor and bounced about as well as a sweaty t-shirt.

The wall and I blinked at each other. That ambush. . . .

I poured myself coffee. Mrs. Richardson, of course, had not been content with one cup; she had left me a thermos of the stuff. When that was gone, I expected that I would find that she had arranged for my sink’s hot-water tap to run hot coffee. . . .

A mouthful of coffee and a pair of squinty eyes. I didn’t really need Perkins or a wall for bouncing, now. It all made sense. It really did wrap up neatly.

Ron Miller was with Ina the night she was killed.

One way or another—dope, personal, or both—Ron was likely to have had motive.

Ron—and almost Ron alone—had reason to try to frame Mike for the murder. (In all fairness, though, the supplier could, if he had the knowledge, have wanted to toss Mike into the pit to give the cops an easy answer to the murder.)

Ron would know about the truck, about Mike’s sleeping habits, perhaps even about Mike’s having used the hotel for a rendezvous with Ina.

Ron would know all about Ina’s arrangements for selling dope. He might well even know the supplier, the details of supply.

Ron would have known that I had discovered the cache in the mausoleum. “Would have known” indeed—he knew. I had told him.

Ron knew that I would be going north out of town Sunday afternoon—I was going to keep an appointment with him. An appointment he didn’t keep. An appointment which I was certain to return from by the main road.

Ron drove a VW, as did the ambusher.

Ron was the same build as the gunman. He wore an orange cap, but that meant less than the fact that the gunman was male. Half the population of Whitman County was male, but well over half the population of Whitman County seemed to wear orange caps.

Ron was a lousy sonofabitch.

I liked that one almost as much as all the rest.

I rooted my notebook out from under my last shirt. Between crawling around tombs and having people trying to put me into them, I was making a lot of spare space in my bag. I tore a page from the middle and made a list so I wouldn’t forget anything when I talked to Perkins. The list looked like this:

Does (did) RM own 8mm rifle? any good?                            what information connection RM & drug sales?:
aide? partner? asst? what?
Physical links RM & mrdr?—rope? flesh Ina nails?
(what abt scratches &c? need Spok lab rept)
RM prints mausoleum?
Note: where RM new stash?
RM’s place searched?—maybe Tammy warrant?                          (plowing
a lot of poss. places)
witnesses VW sun pm?

After I ran out of things to put on the list, and after I got tired of looking the list over and feeling pleased, I went over to the booth by the post office. Perkins didn’t answer his home phone. I figured he wasn’t in from his big night out yet. I didn’t want to talk to the official-type cops yet.

That’s OK. Once in a while I do something right.

I wanted to talk to Ron Miller. In fact, I wanted to lean on Ron Miller. I wanted to run away from home, but I wasn’t allowed to cross the street: Mrs Richardson was off running errands and seeing people, and my car was having both cosmetic and coronary surgery. I had about as much chance of leaning on Ron Miller as I had of leaning over the big desk in the Oval Office. I made the classy exit from the booth: the door didn’t stick, bump my foot, or hit my head. Also, though, the phone didn’t ring; the President figured he could get through another day without my help. Oh, well.

The kid with the purple bicycle was practicing spinning out in a patch of gravel by the post office. I wondered how much he would charge me to let me use his bike to ride out into the country to brace a brother-framing murderer. I stood and watched him for a while. He was pretty good. He’d crouch and peer through the harp of his handlebars, pumping like crazy. He’d hit the gravel, lean, turn the bike, and jam on the brakes. The result was loud and dusty and sidewinding and satisfactory. He did it over and over: speed, out of control, fight it.

And win it. He never wiped out. Nice work, if you etc.

I was hoping the old guy would come out of the post office so I could cross the street and pace myself by him. But he never showed up. Maybe he was in the lobby trying to find the penny-postcard slot on the vending machine. I tried Perkins again. If he had had a canary or a dog I might have disturbed the neighbors by setting his pet to chittering or barking. But he didn’t have a canary or a dog, and the nearest neighbor was too far away to hear the phone anyway. Or the canary, I supposed.

I walked over to Castle Mar ak. I wondered if they had even started on my car. I wondered if they even had the parts yet. A short kid with no chin was cinching up the screws along the underside of the dashboard. The windshield glittered. It didn’t have a mar, a ding, or a scratch.

“Jeez,” I said. “That was quick work.”

He snaked out and gave me a grin. “You’re lucky,” he said. “Old Mrs. Taplinger, she bashed hell out of John Kilgore’s Toyota. Hit him right upside the passenger door. Never touched the engine, never even broke the windshield. But the insurance guy, he said it was totaled.” He patted the top of my car. “So, bingo, you got replacement parts. No hassles with the Toy folks in Moscow or Spokane, no jacking around with faraway junkyards. Nossir, Mr. Chapman, you picked yourself a good car to get shot up in.” He patted the car again. He was soaring. He had glasses with thick black plastic rims, but they didn’t make you forget to notice that he didn’t have any chin.

“Carburetor too?” I asked. I couldn’t believe it. It was better than a marked trail through the wheat.

“Yeah. Here—look at this.” He popped my trunk, reached in, and handed me the top of my old carburetor and the bullet. It was copper jacketed—military ammo. That might or might not be odd. Probably not. The main part of the carburetor hadn’t been damaged. I told the kid they were Mar ak miracle workers and paid up. They didn’t charge me extra for taking the busted carburetor and the slug. I didn’t ask for the shot windshield. Maybe they figured that made us even. Randy Scheidt didn’t seem to be around. I wondered whether he spent his free time hammering brakes.

I drove the three blocks to the hotel and pulled into my old spot. Comforting continuity. Mrs. Richardson’s old Valiant was still gone. Maybe she was delivering trays full of hot breakfasts to young people all over the county. Meals on valiant wheels. Valiant meals on Richardson wheels.

I had a car again. So I walked over to the booth by the post office and called Perkins. If his nonexistent canary were getting better and better at phone imitations he was pretty good by now.

Maybe Perkins couldn’t answer the phone because Mrs. Richardson had him pinned in bed with a tray full of nourishing breakfast.

Maybe he had had his wisdom teeth out today and had shot himself when his painkillers didn’t do the trick.

Maybe he wasn’t off duty yet.

I went back to my room.

•

For a while I thought about calling Bowles, or whoever was on duty now, and having the county send any old car along. I could probably talk them into putting the nab on Ron Miller, and I could lay it out for Perkins later. But Perkins was a friend, now, and he would want to be in on it. He felt the way I did about Mike, and about framing people for murder. About framing your brother for murder.

Like I said, now and again I do something right. There’s no need to insist that I ought to do it all the time. Heck, I was east of the mountains; I hadn’t functioned on that side of the state for years.

I lay on my bed for a while and turned it over. It still looked good. That ambush would have been a hell of a thing for anyone except Ron Miller to pull off. For him, it would have been like money from home: me setting up an appointment at his place, him skipping it, me coming almost without option in along the road from his direction.

I could be charitable and say that it wasn’t his fault that he didn’t have the good sense or the patience or whatever to wait till I was inside eighty yards, but it was his fault. If he had had the sense to wait till I got inside sure range, he wouldn’t be doing whatever he was doing now with me nemesising his cat tracks.

I thought it over for a long time. But it was no good.

There really wasn’t any excuse for pretending that you could make a verb out of “nemesis.”

It was the longest Monday since Joshua. I had talked to Bowles and to somebody else. Nothing from Spokane. Ina Simmons had been dead for nearly ninety hours, and we couldn’t even know for sure if they had looked at her up there yet. Maybe she had turned into a vampire and was haunting the corridors of wherever Spokane County’s crime lab was. Maybe I had turned into a vampire and that’s why I felt so lousy. After all, it was daylight.

It seemed plausible.

I was lying on the bed wondering whether a cold Buckhorn was worth the jouncing my arm would have to take to get it. I didn’t hear anyone on the stairs, but all of a sudden there was a sharp rapping on my door. I yelled Yeah and Come In. The knob rattled, and a male voice told me it was locked. I rolled off the bed and winced and said something unpleasant. At least now I had decided to get a beer.

It was a skinny kid with dry blond hair sticking out in tufts from under a green John Deere cap. He had pale eyes. Vacuous pale eyes.

“You’re Mister Chapman.” There was no getting around it. “The boss wants to see you.” He looked to be about twenty, and even talking didn’t put any life into his eyes.

“Who’s the boss?” I asked. The boss?

He handed me a plain white envelope. “Mr. Manchester. I work for him. You’re supposed to see him.”

I felt like an intruder in an absurdist movie. Inside the envelope was a single sheet with five lines of typing. The pressure on the keys had been erratic and afternoon had been misstruck and came out aftetnoon.

Mr. Chapman. I would like to
talk to you this aftetnoon.Russ
will give you direction’s. Come
at your convenience.
Jack Manchester

The signature was typed.

“Is this Tammy Manchester’s father?” I asked.

The kid thought it over. “Yeah, sure.”

I wondered whether I ought to tip the kid a buck. Maybe he hadn’t finished paying off his lobotomy yet.

I tried to give him an easy one. “You’re Russ?”

He worked on it a while. “Sure.”

I thought about acting like a tough guy in a book, and sending Big Jack Manchester some kind of snotty kiss-off reply. But then I thought that might be too much of a strain on poor old Russ. So I decided to see whether he really would give me directions. Whether he really could give me directions.

After he had figured out how to get back down the stairs I decided that I had earned two separate and distinct beers. Even if they were just Buckhorns.

•

The kid had said I couldn’t miss Jack Manchester’s place, and he was right. The house was right on the dome of a big hill just northeast of town, a regular squire’s mansion overlooking the. . . well, sort of teeming. . . hive of the town. It looked like a daylight shot of the cover of a paperback gothic novel, alone on the hilltop, framed by big old trees and the bright June sky.

The pavement ended at the edge of town. I crunched up the hill on gravel, Mrs. Richardson’s old Valiant laboring with appropriate valor. To my left, behind three strands of barbed wire, wheat ripened from the feet upward. To my right, also fenced, the hillside was a thick tangle of multiflora rose, hawthorne, and bunchgrass. It looked like it might be virgin Whitman County.

The road jogged twice near the top of the hill and debouched into Manchester’s side yard. Somebody had spent a hell of a lot of money having the place landscaped. It looked almost surrealistic, an expanse of close-cropped grass and raked gravel on top of a hill in the middle of miles and miles of wheat, peas, and lentils. The house didn’t really go with the southern California ritzy, either; it was actually pretty much a typical big old farmhouse with some recent and expensive additons.

I pulled up next to a powder blue Caddy and a big white Buick with blue velvet upholstery. I patted Mrs. Richardson’s valiant dashboard and told it not to worry. I walked across the gravel feeling like an interloper in a corny hardboiled novel. The boss wants to see you.  Great. Maybe a butler with a secret would show me in to some suety mountain of a rich woman who smoked cigars and had murdered her husband with poison during the Depression. Maybe a blonde lush with come-on eyes would give me an enigmatic wink before her pompous stockbroker husband poured the brandy. Maybe the Filipino chauffeur would sneer at me.

A medium-sized plump woman with grizzled hair opened the door. “Mr Chapman? Good, good.” Well, I was pleased enough about it, I guess; she was entitled to her share of delight. “Come in, please. Mr. Manchester is waiting.” She stood back and waved me through. She was wearing an engagement and wedding rings set with enough diamonds to buy a good deal of Garfield real estate. Of course, property values being what they were, Mrs. Richardson’s Valiant would probably buy a good deal of Garfield real estate. . . . The hand behind the jewels was short-fingered and strong. It looked more fit to mine diamonds than to wear them.

“Through here, please.” We walked past the foot of a stairway that bent twice before disappearing into upper darkness. She led me through a high-ceilinged living room with thick red carpeting and a lot of mirrors on paneled walls. Sets of books, elaborately bound and in mint condition, lined one wall, and in one corner a small aquarium burbled quietly. The furniture was stylish and unworn. I felt like part of a department store catalogue layout. The woman kept turning the rings on those blunt and coarsened fingers.

Off the dining room—a Mediterranean suite with every chair rigidly in place—was His Master’s den. The woman stopped and sort of bowed me through. She disappeared, and Jack Manchester took over.

He rose from a slick leather-grain plastic recliner, a smoked glass tumbler in his hand.

“Chapman? Good of you to come.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. If I was supposed to be bowled over by the elegance of it all, I was going to have to retire for a while and practice.

The room was an addition to the original house, a cosy retreat that looked like a self-parody. The walls were paneled in mahogany, the expanse of dark wood broken here and there by clusters of framed pictures. The seed idea was of Crew groups, yacht clubs, polo teams. The effect was spoiled by the fact that the photos were aerial shots of farmhouses and windmills, toothy studies of a prepubescent Tammy, and various family groups blown up in pitiless and grainy detail.

The carpet was blue, thick, and soft. The furniture was massive and masculine, calculated to help set the mood. I started to look for a mounted ibex head or a pair of matched Purdy twelve-bores, but Manchester distracted me, waving the glass.

“Howsabout a drink, Chapman?”

“I got your message at the hotel,” I said. “Did you order me up here to offer me a drink?”

He flushed a little. Jack Manchester was about fifty, a beefy guy with curly brown hair. He was dressed in an expensive-looking blue blazer and grey flannel slacks. But he still looked like a farmer. The face was weathered, with wrinkles around the eyes. The coarsened skin on the back of his shaved neck said he had spent a life outside of this add-on retreat—before the days of comfort cabs. Wherever the Manchester money came from, it hadn’t come early enough to keep Big Jack from twenty or thirty years on a tractor seat.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it to sound like that.” Score one in Big Jack’s favor. “Go ahead—have a drink. It’s brandy. Class stuff—thirty-four eighty-five a bottle.” He didn’t wait for an answer but went right over to a built-in bar and sloshed amber out of a square bottle. He handed me the glass. It said “Cleveland Browns” on the side, and it showed the profile of a football helmet. I thought about Marion Motley and Otto Graham and Pete Brewster.
“Have a sit, Mr. Chapman. I need to talk to you.” Things were thawing out: he’d added a “mister.” His glass had a Colts helmet on it. I sat down and thought about Art Spinney and Gino Marchetti and Art Donovan.

He said, “You remember Alan Ameche? The Horse?”

I raised an eyebrow or two. “Who’s the detective, Mr Manchester? I was just thinking about Marchetti. Remember the appendectomy?”

He chuckled. “I thought you looked old enough to maybe remember those days.” He added a grin to the chuckle and slapped back a jolt of his drink. I sat on a tall bar stool with a walnut back and watched him. He settled back into his recliner and ran the tip of his tongue around his lips. He didn’t hitch up his pantlegs before sitting down.

“Mr. Chapman, I’m worried.” It was still ‘mister’. “It’s about Tammy. My daughter, you know. You went to school and talked to her there.” He pulled the weathered face into a frown. “You know, that’s going to cause talk. This is a small town.” He waved the glass around to show how small it was. “You know how it is in places like this.” I wondered if he knew anything about how it was in places not like this.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry. I know how it is.”

“Do you think it was entirely necessary to subject my daughter to that kind of, of trouble?” Wow; he must have stayed up all night practicing that one. Under the blazer he was wearing a white shirt with a very fine gold stripe. He leaned toward me, looking concerned, and the front of his shirt made crisp crinkling sounds.

I said, “Mr. Manchester, you probably know that a young woman was murdered here in town Thursday night or Friday morning. I’m investigating that murder. I’m convinced that the man who has been charged with it—Mike Miller—is innocent.”

“I know. I know.” The Colts waved in dismissal. “But, dammit, do you have to bring trouble to my daughter?”

Behind his chair the room’s wall was sliding glass doors giving onto a brick patio. There was a round redwood picnic table with a green beach umbrella sprouting from it. Tammy Manchester was sitting on an arc-shaped bench, her fingertips stroking idly up and down the beaded sides of a can of Tab.

I said, “Tammy knew the murdered woman, Ina Simmons. She had known her for nearly a year, had been introduced to her by your daughter Deb. For me to find out who really killed Ina Simmons, I have to talk to all the people who knew her, who had anything to do with her. I’ve talked to Tammy. I’ve talked to a dozen other people.”

His face darkened, and his jaw swelled. “Goddammit, Chapman, are you saying Tammy had something to do with this murder?” His tone was angrier than his words. Fair enough: we were talking about his daughter.

“No, I’m not. I’m saying Tammy knew the Simmons woman.”

His jaw worked, and I could hear him having trouble with his breathing. He was working on being the worried-but-reasonable parent. He got hold of breath between his teeth and won his pose back.

“I’m trying to be reasonable, Chapman.” Oops: it was goodbye to ‘mister’. “But I’m really upset. I come home and I find out that my daughter is being made a spectacle at her school. That this adult from out of town is giving her a hard time right out on the front steps of the high school. You know, you can see how I’d be concerned. This is my daughter we’re talking about.”

I sipped from the Cleveland Browns. Jim Brown, Lou Groza, Walt Michaels. Out on the patio, Tammy was looking sideways towards the big glass doors, her blazered father, the worn-out stranger with the chewed up bicep and too much gravity in his brain. The stuff tasted like thirty-four eighty-five brandy.

I shrugged at him. “Like I said, I’m sorry. I’m not trying to make any trouble for Tammy. I need to ask questions. Tammy might have had some answers. I’m sure that you understand that I can’t let an innocent man hang in order to spare Tammy a little embarrassment on the front steps of GHS.”

He fought it again. This time he lost. For a minute I thought he was going to go Hollywood and throw the Colts at me. Raymond Berry and Lenny Moore and Jim Mutscheller tumbling through the air, trailing clouds of brandy.

“Goddamn it, Chapman. Do you have any idea how much weight I pull in this county? I could have your two-bit ass slung out of here before supper time. Don’t you try to shove me around.” He had popped out of his chair and he stood sputtering in front of it. His dialogue came out of cheap paperbacks. The leatherbound books were part of the decor, but apparently he had another library somewhere.

I did a manly job of controlling my fear. “Mr Manchester, I’m not trying to throw trouble Tammy’s way. In fact, I’m trying—”

“Chapman, I’m warning you. You quit harassing my daughter.” He said it hur-ass-ing. “You just lay off her, or I’ll lean on you till you’re flat.” His face was red, and his hand shook till the brandy slopped out of the glass.

It was too bad. I didn’t mind the worried but reasonable father. I didn’t even mind when he acted like a jerky farmer whose mother had been frightened by a copy of some snob men’s magazine. But the tough guy I could do without, nifty flannel trousers or no.

“Manchester, I’m trying to be civil and discreet. I’m trying to keep from involving Tammy any more than is absolutely necessary. But you’re making it damned hard.” I stayed sitting. I figured he wouldn’t miss the insult. “I don’t like being pushed. I push back. I’m not interested in telling you how hard I can push. I don’t want to sound like a big-mouthed jerk.”

His eyes and jaw bulged. He swayed forward, and I didn’t know if he was going to slug me or have apoplexy. I put the glass on the bar. It was too bad things had deteriorated so fast; it would have been nice to sip through some more of that thirty-four eighty-five juice. I noticed that Tammy wasn’t out on the patio anymore. I slid off the stool. Manchester was still standing there working his fists and breathing hard.

I said, “Just back off, Manchester. I haven’t got the time and I haven’t got the energy for jacking around with troublemakers. If Tammy didn’t have anything to do with the murder, then you and she have got nothing to worry about. If she did, then the hell with you and her both.” I turned my back on him and headed for the door. He was making strangling noises like a bulldog with a rubber bone. I didn’t figure I’d be able to hear him coming across the carpet, but I didn’t get palpitations worrying about it.

Mrs. Manchester, if that’s who it was, wasn’t around. I went through the living room and realized that maybe it was a pretty tasteful place after all. Anybody who could get away with that many mirrors and that much red without looking like a whorehouse must have had a delicate touch of some sort.

I let myself out and crunched across the smooth gravel to Mrs Richardson’s car. Its interior was warm and smelled faintly of lavender, or something—the smell my grandmother had, years and years ago.

There was no noise or motion from the house as I backed out and swung onto the road heading down the hill. The sky was pale blue, but more blue than pale. Two of the big trees on the edge of the Manchester place were dead. There wasn’t a Filipino chauffeur to sneer at me. I wondered if maybe a furtive Mexican gardener would fill in for him.

But I rolled through the road’s first jiggle without seeing anyone. The gravel dropped beneath the lip of the hill, and a row of adolescent pine trees hid the house from me. Tammy Manchester hopped out from the trees. She landed in the shallow ditch with a bounce, then surged up the little bank and onto the road. Her long red hair was disordered, and her pale face was flushed. She waved her arms, and I pulled up. She got into the car without ever taking her eyes off my face.

“What happened?” she said breathlessly. “What did you say to him?”

She was wearing jeans and a white t-shirt with a red cougar growling on it. Her small breasts made the cotton writhe like something alive.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “We had our little disagreement, but it didn’t turn into a fight or anything.” I wondered whether Big Jack was taking out his frustrations on the den furniture, or his wife, or the brandy, or what.

“No, no.” She thrust her hand outward, dismissing my remark. “I mean—you know, about what we talked about at school. Did you tell him anything, I mean, anything about. . .about that?” The hand waved back and forth, then stopped, its long white fingers flexed.

“What?—the drugs? No, I didn’t say anything about that.” Over her muttered and fervent “thank God” I said, “I’m not out to make trouble for you, Tammy. I came up because your father sent for me. If you didn’t kill Ina, then I’m no threat to you.”

Her eyes came up, blue and pleading. Innocent. “Please. Please don’t talk like that, mister. It makes me so scared, here.” Her pale hand covered the cougar’s fangs. “Sick, like. I can’t even—I mean, she’s really dead. Really murdered. “  The eyes filled. The tip of her index finger pressed a hollow in the soft flesh of her left breast. Her fingernails were short and she didn’t wear polish.

“Tammy, did your father know Ina?”

“What? Dad? Hell, no.” Some of the overlay of tough she thought she was kicked in automatically. “I mean, of course he knew who she was. Everybody knows everybody in this dump. But, you know. . . .”

“Did Ina ever mention your father to you? Complain about him, make fun of him, say what a swell guy he was—anything?”

“Are you kidding? I mean, about the swell guy.” She was cultivating the hard-edged scorn with fair skill—for an amateur. “Ina, well, she said you couldn’t trust anybody old anyway, you know, over thirty and all. All parents, she said you couldn’t trust them at all. You know?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Did Ina ever say anything to you about your father? Ever mention him at all?”

Tammy moved her shoulders behind the cougar. “I guess she used to, sort of, I dunno. You know, she’d say like ‘How’s big chief Leisure Suit today?’ Stuff like that, you know?”

“People knew Ina was wild,” I said. “Did your parents give you a hard time about being a friend of hers? She was a lot older than you are, too.”

Her eyes went a little flat. Maybe I should have arranged not to be over thirty. “Are you trying to say that my father killed Ina?” The words came with a breathy soap-opera delivery. I found the strength not to roll my eyes.

“Your father just got through asking me if I thought you killed her.”

Her breath scratched across her teeth. “Does he think that?”

I decided not to pursue the stupid pronouns. “Tammy, you’re not answering my questions. Did your parents try to keep you from being friends with Ina?”

Comforted and secure that I hadn’t mentioned dope to her father, she snapped a couple more rivets in her tough girl outfit. “I’m friends with who I please.”

“Whom. And quit playing tough with me, Tammy. I’m on your side.”

“Sure. Chase me all over the goddam county and ask questions till I gag.”

You can’t grab seventeen-year-old redheads without bras and shake them as though they were preschoolers. Very slowly and deliberately I said, “You jumped out and stopped my car. Remember?”

Her eyes wandered, and she tried to look bored. “You sure drive a creepy old heap.”

“Yeah. It’s because I’m over thirty.”

She looked at me and tossed her head, the long red hair swirling. It gave off a perfume more subtle than the lavender in the car. “You don’t have to be nasty.”

“Why not? You got a monopoly on it?”

She started to sneer, started to shift to a smile, then went with the sneer.

“Nice guy.” She pulled the handle and the door swung out.

“Tammy, right now I’m probably the nicest guy you know. Will you quit trying to alienate me?”

She was half turned, one foot on the gravel. The blue eyes were bright over the white shoulder of the t-shirt. “Well listen to Mr. La-de-da. Alienate, yet.” Her voice was laden with adolescent scorn.

I said, “Will you quit trying to piss me off? You’re making me wonder if it’s worth my time to try to save your goddam neck. That better?”

She paused, one foot on the road. The car was idling quietly, with a little tappet noise that sounded like crickets. The blue eyes were big, and a vagrant wisp of hair floated across her face. A memory stabbed at me and withdrew. It was probably just as well.

Suddenly she pulled the foot back into the car. “Jesus, mister, I just about forgot. How could I of?” Her face was intent and serious. It was almost the first time I had seen her without a mask.

“What’s that? You learn something about the supplier?”

The hand waved me off again. “Naw, naw. No, look, I—” She broke off and pinched her mouth inward. It was something real. Something big, maybe. I got the tight feeling that comes when you get a big break in the middle of things.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Say it any way you need to.”

She took a long breath. She wasn’t moron-magazine material up top, but it was distracting to watch the cougar squirm. “Look,” she said. “I dunno—I mean, I’m awful sorry. But. . .well, you know. You can see how I felt. But I guess, I mean, I guess you ought to know.”

A big break in the middle of things. All I needed was my Sherlock Holmes decoder ring. “Tammy, what the hell are you talking about?”

“It’s awful hard to tell you,” she said. Her pale skin was flushed and her eyes were lowered. “Aw, hell. Look, you know how you were saying about how was I going to, you know, get the dope and all? And I told you about Ina and the cemetery and like that?

“Well, I—” In came the breath again. “Aw hell,” she said in a rush. “I hit you on the head with that flowerpot.”

It took a while to get things straight, but it turned out that that was precisely what she had meant to say. Scouting, hoping to find where Ina had stashed her supplies, Tammy had come through the wheat and over the hill, had heard me arrive and rustle around, had crouched behind the tomb too terrified even to look.

“Man,” she said at one point. “I remembered what you said about people getting killed for stuff like this. And I thought about Ina being dead.” Her head flopped from side to side in her wide-eyed reliving of fear. “All of a sudden you didn’t seem so full of shit, you know?”

“Thanks.”

Her eyes flickered, but she wasn’t really worried about my tender feelings. “So anyhow I just stood there and, and, oh, Christ, I was so scared, and I heard you coming by the wall only I didn’t know it was you of course. So I got that pot thing and I waited by the wall, and. . .well, you know.” Living it again frightened her. Her voice was fast, and the tremble of fear and determination shook it.

I stirred it around and tried to figure what it did to Ron Miller as bad guy, what it did to Tammy. What it did to me.

“And, I mean, like I know I probably should of stayed and all, but geez, you don’t know how scared I was.” We both sat and stirred it around, and Mrs. Richardson’s car ticked like a cricket. I told her I guessed it was OK, and she was glad, and we found out she didn’t know anything more about the cemetery or anything about the mausoleum or anything more about Ina and the dope than she had known or said Friday.

“Your dad didn’t like that I talked to you at school,” I said. “He’s afraid I’ll ruin your reputation.” She rolled her eyes, and for a moment we were leagued, allies against Big Jack. It didn’t hurt anything, but it didn’t get me any sudden confidences, either. Then I said, “How come you’re not in school today?”

She remembered that I was part of the enemy. A little scornfully she said, “Don’t you know? Graduation was Saturday night. It’s June, remember? Vacation.”

The double entente dissolved and it was question-answer time again. “Tammy, how do you make your contacts during vacation? Ina supplied you—how did you supply the kids during summer?”

“Come on.” The distant look was sliding back onto her face as she confronted the problem that had drawn her back away from me before. Her foot went back to the gravel and the car ticked in the afternoon.

“It won’t be long till some of your customers are trying to buy from you. Are you going to be able to get in touch with Ina’s supplier, the guy from Oregon? What are you going to do to keep the customers satisfied, Tammy?”

She surprised me, suddenly smiling as she slid out of the car and bent to speak. “Thanks for not saying nothing to my dad. I guess I got enough trouble without having him lay a lot of big chief daddy shit on me.”

“Tammy, isn’t there anything you can say that might help me find out who the Oregon guy is? It might be vital.”

“I told you, man, I don’t know.” She blinked and grabbed her lower lip between even white teeth. They were the first good teeth I’d run into in this place. “I wisht I did know. I’m kind of stuck, you know?”

“Yeah. You think Ron Miller might know? Did Ina ever say anything that might have suggested to you that Ron would know who the supplier was?”

“I dunno. Maybe.” She was already gone, though. The words were automatic. “I gotta get back up to the house. I don’t need any hassles from him, you know?”

“Be careful, Tammy.” The door chunked shut. She stuttered down into the ditch, then flowed up the hill. Her lean, young flanks flexed and surged under the tight jeans, and the long fan of her hair waved like a fox tail. I let in the clutch and ticked back down toward Garfield. A trickle of sweat eased its way under the bandage and set fire to my arm. I felt old and ugly and mean. I wished things could be straightforward: the Filipino could be the pusher and I could beat him up under a eucalyptus tree, next to a big black Packard.

Just after I got to the pavement, the Val’s left rear tire went flat. By the time I was through wrestling the spare on, my bandage was soaked with sweat, and my whole arm was aflame. It felt like the Filipino had surprised me with a knife.

•

I went back to the hotel and checked in with Mrs. Richardson. Nobody had sent her any confessions or revelations. There wasn’t any word from Perkins about autopsy reports. Maybe Perkins had died of a hangover and was waiting in line for his own personal autopsy.

Be the first on your block. He was going to have to hustle if he wanted to beat me. I dragged up the stairs and sneaked a peek into the refrigerator. Ina Simmons wasn’t in there, but that was about the only attractive thing that could be said about the view. I fought my way through some salami and onions and listened to KCLX drone through its dynamic programming. But then there was too much gravity inside me, and I tried to fight that, but it was useless. Gravity won, and that was Monday.

Even a highly successful and much admired private eye can’t spend forever lying on a swaybacked bed in a $30-a-month hotel room. I went downstairs and used Mrs Richardson’s phone to talk to Bowles. He said there was no word from the crime lab in Spokane. No medical report on Ina Simmons.

We would have to wait a while before discovering that she had swallowed the murderer’s inscribed wedding ring.

I drove north out of town and didn’t make the false starts this time. The Ogdens were probably disappointed, but that’s the way it goes. My breath was a little tight as I came across the plank bridge. The sight of the Hall mausoleum was a little too apt to nudge my mind toward thoughts of Susanna. The wrong kinds of thoughts.

I parked where I had parked the day before. There were new tracks there, tracks that had pulled farther off the road than mine. I knelt in the dust. The wheels had swept in an arc as the car had backed out, and you could distinguish front from rear. The rear wheels were big, unusually wide. The tracks were close together, like on a Jeep or a VW.

I slogged up the hill, the sun hot on my back. The Bains hadn’t moved, and neither of the mausoleums had been sided in aluminum or repainted in this season’s pastels. I stopped by the Halls’ and touched the granite absently. There was no breeze, and the silence was stifling. Ron Miller’s Volkswagen had extra-wide rear tires. I was going to have to be careful about putting Ron Miller at the top of all my lists. That’s a good way to go blind. You get all fixed on one possibility, and you can’t see it when somebody takes out a billboard confessing. The granite was warm and gritty under my fingers.

I made a smooth and confident leap for the top of the wall. It was a good jump. My hands caught the top of the wall, and I felt smug. For about half a second. Then the grenade exploded in my left arm. The wound tore open, and I gasped and bit my tongue and fell into the weeds on my ass and lay there gasping and sweating and waiting for it to quit, to quit, to quit. Being foresighted and alert, I hadn’t thought to realize that boosting yourself onto mausoleum walls is something best done by the young at heart and by those who have not within the previous twenty-four hours been shot. I wasn’t even all that sure about being young at heart any more.

My sleeve was soaked with blood. I wondered if maybe I didn’t need stitches. I already knew I needed to have my head examined. I got back up and tried to make the jump one-armed. A one-armed jump doesn’t come very close to getting you into a mausoleum (except professionally, maybe), but it’s remarkably efficient in making a bullet wound feel fresh and new.

I knelt and waited again. My face was beginning to hurt from being squinched up against the pain. It was time to add vandalism and desecration to my other virtues. I upended an urn—not the one that had been my favorite headgear the day before—on the uphill side and scrabbled up and sat on the top panting and sweating and pinching my face to make it stop. My flashlight (foresight) stabbed my hip. I looked down into the Halls’ last stand.

The tire tracks in the dust could have been kids parking or drinking, but I hadn’t really thought so. I wasn’t utterly surprised, then. The screens were stacked untidily against the northeast wall. The dope was all gone.

I slid down inside. I missed the jagged place, but the wall tugged at my scrape anyway. I flashed light into the corners and along what was left of the ceiling. I don’t know what I might have found. But I had acted like a seven-year-old after a night of ghost stories, and I had left my calling card splattered on the marble, and so that was that.

There were, of course, scraps and pieces of marijuana here and there on the screens and on the floor, but they were about as relevant now as the serial number of Busbee’s old Cat. I said shit, mildly; apologized to the Halls for having puked amid their eternal rest; and scrambled up and out. No images of Susanna had visited me. Nobody bounced any urns off my head. Nobody shot at me, though you couldn’t tell that from the way my arm felt. Driving on around the hill was anticlimactic.

I went past the little blue house without a wave. At the Y and the three elevators I bore left for a hundred yards and pulled in next to Ron Miller’s yellow VW. Miller and his Cat were nowhere to be seen. I inspected the treads on his oversized rear tires. They looked a lot like tire treads.

Mrs. Richardson’s valiance pinged discreetly in the stillness. I leaned against her grill, wondering how hard to lean on Ron Miller. I was beginning to like him as a bad guy. Even the timing made sense. Presuming his guilt: He would have the necessary knowledge and strength—and motive, for that matter—to frame Mike; he could on his day off have discovered me at the cemetery and bonked me; he could later that day have removed the dope from the mausoleum; he could have accepted my appointment Sunday night, skipped it, and ambushed me as I returned to town by the only road I could use. It made some sense. Not complete sense, though.

It presumed some pretty dumb moves by Ron Miller.

I chewed air and listened to the metal get cool enough to stop pinging and kicked around the possibilities that Ron Miller offered. The prospect was intriguing but flawed.

Flawed but intriguing.

A coughing and rattling from the south wasn’t Ron. It was the ancient and listing GMC from the Belmont truck bay. It choked and wheezed down the hill and around the corner. The gears clashed, ground, growled, then clanked into place. The truck grunted up the ramp into the bay of the middle elevator.

Ron Miller didn’t seem to be racing his tractor back this way. I wandered over to the elevator. I didn’t figure it would be any trouble to make the hundred yards or so back to the field when Miller finally got back from Montana.

The stocky blond kid—Larry—was standing watching a flood of lentils pouring from a spout into the back of the old truck. I introduced myself, and we talked about nothing. He didn’t know Ron Miller. He had worked with Mike and liked him “all right.”

“You think he killed that girl?” I asked. The pouring lentils threw up a fallout of fine dust. It had a tang like nothing I had ever known before. Acrid, sort of, but not unpleasant. Spicy, almost.

“Naw. You kidding?” Larry had a dead eye, a disconcerting paleness on the left side that didn’t look at you but that wasn’t looking anywhere else.

“Why not?” I was leaning against the corner of the truck bed. He nudged me away.

“’Scuse me,” he said. He reached up and pulled a frayed rope. The jointed length of pipe spewing its dusty freight into the truck creaked and moved. The stream of lentils spattered against the back part of the truck bed and started to form a new mountain. “You gotta make an even load,” he said. “Especially in a old piece of shit like this.” He watched the lentils pouring from the pipe.

“Why don’t you think Mike killed the girl?” I prompted.

He blinked rapidly. “Oh, yeah. Well, I just don’t think so. Besides, I seen him before he knocked off that night. You know, this ain’t suppose to be my work, here. This is Mike’s job.” He shrugged and looked wise. “But hell, he’s in the can, right? So I got to do his work for him.” Another shrug. “I guess it beats sacking, at that.” The truck was over forty. I figured it was in a close race with Larry’s IQ.

The cascade out of the mouth of the pipe was hypnotic. Big machinery was growling steadily off to our left. It added to the waterfall feeling.

If I was hypnotized, Larry was in a trance. The pile of lentils in the truck peaked and slid, peaked and slid. The food crept up the wooden sidewalls of the old truck. The lentils were brown, red, and green. Lots of shades of brown and red and green. The dust was fine and acrid and unique. It was everywhere. The truck sagged and groaned on its old springs.

“Shit,” Larry said suddenly. He ran behind me and into a cavelike passage. I could barely see him through the dust and in the dimness. He bent and pulled sideways on a lever that angled up from the floor. The machinery kept growling. For a moment nothing changed; then the flood of lentils from the pipe slowed. With startling abruptness, it halted completely. The machine was still roaring, but nothing was coming down the chute.

Larry passed me again and reached an arm through a doorway. The machine slowed to a groan, to a whine, to a quiet moan. Silence came down the chute.

“Hope it ain’t too big a load,” Larry said. He sounded worried. “This dumb old son of a bitch truck boils over like a fish. She’ll stall out, and Bob don’t like that much.” The truck bed bore the weight of three peaks of lentils, each flowing into the next, each flowing to the wooden racks.

“I’m sorry, Mr., Uh, I mean, excuse me, but you got to get off the scales. I got to weigh this load.”

I came back to myself. With an arm half on fire, that wasn’t as good an idea as it might have been. I left Larry juking counterweights up and down a scale arm. The air outside the bay was hot, but after the lentil dust, it was like fresh, cool water. I came out of the shadow of the steel tank in time to see Ron Miller’s Cat chuffling away over the hill. The dark earth still pursued him. The area he had still to plow was shockingly small.

I walked back across the gravel and the weeds toward my car. Mrs. Richardson’s car. The old Jimmy coughed into life in the bay, revved a couple times, and choked down the ramp and onto the road. It beat me to my crossing, and I waited till it went by. Larry gave a mechanical wave. Without a beer and a cigar, he was wavy enough. . . .

The day and I were too worn out to wait for Ron Miller to ramble by again. I leaned my forehead against the steering wheel for a while and waited for Susanna to go away. It was Monday. Less than twenty-four hours before I had been glad not to be lying dead with my face in tree roots and my heart chewed up and spit out. Now the gratitude wasn’t so intense.

Ron didn’t come back, so I fired up the Val, backed out, and bounced toward home. The washboard and the dip and the T and the trees and the windmill and the rocky part and the new tin storage tanks. They were as familiar as an old habit, now. They were as familiar as the disease that is in you and is wasting you and that you don’t want to think about but that you can’t avoid.

The stop sign. It wasn’t funny to be a green Connie anymore. It never had been all that funny. I pulled onto the blacktop for the thousandth time and let gravity drag me and the Val toward Garfield. An irritated two-tone brown Buick whooshed up behind and swept past.

Larry had beaten me back to Belmont, and then he had hidden so he wouldn’t have to wave. Bob Miller was out, though, a big hand earnestly flying. I waved and smiled. It was the bravest and toughest thing I had done all week.

   
It wasn’t seven when I went through Belmont, but Bob Miller had already finished humping open the big tin doors. He gave me a big wave from the truck ramp. Seeing me in an aged white Valiant didn’t seem to shake his faith in a stable universe. The man was more cheerful than my grandmother. I did my best to match him wave for wave. I turned off the blacktop and slipped east through the hills.

The wheat didn’t look any different this morning. It never did. Except that one morning it would be up, green through the brown. Another morning it would be half colored. And then another morning it would be ripe, and the combines would chuffle off the roads and into the whispering world of the grain. Food. Life.
   
I was getting good and not finding Farmington. Ron Miller’s place was still small and white. There was still a red Ford pickup in the yard. I had forgotten to bring the guys from the lab along, so I couldn’t be sure if they were the same bulging green garbage bags in the back of the truck. I stood on the wooden step and banged the door. Ron Miller—or RonMiLLeR—still wasn’t home, or he still wasn’t answering the door. I was starting to get bored with Ron Miller. And annoyed. The kid annoyed me all over the place, and I hadn’t even met him yet. Maybe.
   
A new silver and crimson pickup with enormous tires came slowly up the north-south road and stopped. And old guy with a big nose and a lot of wrinkles leaned across and yelled through the passenger window.
   
“You looking for Ronny Miller?” His voice had a lot of nose and wrinkles in it too.
   
I told him yeah, I was looking for Ronny Miller. I didn’t add that I was beginning to hope that I’d find the dumb son of a bitch hanging from a light fixture.
   
“He’s working,” the old guy yelled. “Plowing Busbee’s field down to Warner. I seen him just a minute ago.” He told me how to find the elevators at Warner. Then he said, “You that fella from Seattle.” I didn’t know whether he was asking or telling. I confessed. He looked at me from behind ramparts of grey eyebrows, then nodded, wheeled on around the corner, and disappeared over the hill to the west. His tires looked like he’d stolen then off a combine. I walked back across the hard, rutted dirt of Ron Miller’s yard. A lot of people gripe about Monday mornings. I didn’t see no p’ints about this morning that was any worse than any other morning.
   
Early as it was, the interior of the car was already warm. I went up a hill and down a hill and through a long curve between the hunched shoulders of two hills. A thread of green through the plow on my left showed where a crick ditch ran through the bottom. Warner was where I had gone left at the Y the day before. I was a lot nattier now. Well, some nattier. My toes were still scuffed but I had a clean shirt and there wasn’t any blood in my sideburn any more.

The middle elevator had a cylindrical steel tank attached to it by an iron-railed umbilical, forty feet in the air. All three buildings were shut up, lifeless, waiting. They didn’t look a bit like mausoleums, though.
   
Across the gravel from the elevators, a bright yellow Volkswagen bug was parked with its nose in the field. A Cat-yellow tractor was clanking away from the road, dragging a seven-bottom plow over the hill. I pulled in beside the VW and watched. It looked almost as though the tractor were fleeing the creeping darkness of the fresh earth, keeping barely ahead as the fuse burned. Ron Miller, if it was Ron Miller, was plowing along the edge of ground that he had turned the day before. Or Saturday, probably. To his right was brown dirt, dried plow. Behind him, he dragged the black ribbon of fresh plow. To his left was the drab dun of a lentil field that had not been worked since harvest a year ago. For a guy who had gone more than eighteen hours without getting hit over the head, I felt surprisingly like a drab dun lentil field.
   
I got out and checked the folder clipped to the visor. It was Ron Miller’s car. The chug and clank of the tractor faded over the hill. He had gone straight up and over: this hill was a mile long and had a fence running straight up it a hundred yards south of me. There was no way to contour plow and avoid that strain on the machinery. I stood leaning against the front of my car and waited for the Cat to come back around. The early morning silence was complete except for the pinging my engine made as it cooled. Presently that stopped, and I was alone in an immensity of silence. I didn’t see any birds and I didn’t see any animals. I didn’t see any cars. Then I saw a hawk, hovering high in the blue off to my right, south. I watched him riding the air. Then he dropped, slowly and gracefully. Then I couldn’t see him any more. A while later a magpie looped over the hill in front of me and flew across the valley. I watched him disappear behind the middle elevator—the one with the steel cylinder.

There was a railroad over there, a roadbed and tracks that ran right next to the elevators. I thought about Susanna and how I was glad I hadn’t puked at the funeral. It was a beautiful morning, still and clear and getting hot. I remembered a friend of mind I had double-dated with once. We had just let the girls off, and I had leaned over to throw up in the bushes around the parking lot. My friend laughed, and then he said, “No wonder you felt lousy; your stomach was full of puke.”
   
After about two weeks, Ron Miller’s Cat came around where the hill curved two hundred yards north of me. Black smoke came out of the smokestack, and the tank treads looked like solid silver. I stepped away from my car and waved at him. The tractor clanked along the edge of the old plow, dragging its ribbon of black behind. I started to walk across the old plow to cut him off. The tractor was an old open D-6 with a faded canvas sunshade, and Ron Miller was sitting on the black cushion and looking straight ahead, sometimes turning to watch the plow. I waved again and tried to hurry. The dirt was dry and crumbly, and a lot of it got into my shoes.
   
Ron Miller didn’t look at me. “Hey,” I yelled, knowing it was silly to yell at somebody sitting on top of a big damn diesel tractor with clanking steel treads. “Hey, stop.”
   
The tractor reached the point at which it had begun this morning and clattered inexorably along the edge of the dark earth. On the side toward me, the earth slid off the plow smoothly, like a glistening black wave breaking endlessly along a seacoast. I had misjudged the speed of the tractor, and it was already past me, clanking and chuffing and twice as loud as you’d think it had any right to be.
   
“Hey,” I yelled. I got to the new plow, and the dirt pouring into my shoes was darker. I didn’t know whether I was more proud of my dialogue or my trajectory-figuring physics.
   
I swore unimaginatively and ran after Ron Miller a bit, lurching in the uneven ruts of the plowed earth. The tractor entered the long, sweeping curve that would take it up and over the hill. I gauged the distance and the angles and thought about trying to cut across and cut him off. Then I swore again, only without any real conviction.
   
I went back to my car more slowly. Well, Mrs. Richardson’s car. It didn’t help: the dirt still poured into my shoes. I leaned against the front of my car and watched Ron Miller and his magic carpet disappear over the hill. Miller was dark haired and thin faced and was wearing an orange bill cap, blue shirt, and jeans. The silence returned, and I sat on the ground and emptied all the dirt out of my shoes. So much for natty. Street shoes in a plowed lentil field. Chapman the supersleuth.
   
This time there weren’t any hawks or magpies. This time Ron Miller kept heading east till he got to Montana. He settled in Bozeman and raised a family while I watched the dirt in the field he had once plowed. While I watched the sky over the dirt in the field that tradition said he had once plowed.
   
When the tractor appeared around the end of the hill, I trotted across the wide strip of plow. Practice didn’t make perfect. It didn’t help a bit. There is no way to run in plowed ground without turning your ankles and knees and filling your shoes with dirt. I beat him this time, staggering sideways out of the loose dirt and onto the hard earth with its moth-eaten, antique lentil plants. I stood and waved and made sure I knew where I’d go if he decided to keep chunking that machine along the edge of his last round of plow. “Supersleuth Squashed by Caterpillar.” How sweet fame in the P-I would be.
   
For the second or two-hundredth time today I tried to wave Ron Miller and his tractor to a stop. It looked for a moment as though he wanted to see whether I were tough enough to stop him. Then he bent, looking reluctant, and pulled the machine out of gear. The clanking stopped, but the roar of the diesel didn’t change. Then he yanked a lever, and the engine quieted. A little.
   
“Whaddya want?” he yelled. His face wasn’t as thin as I had thought. It was tanned and lean, and the bones showed in the cheeks.
   
“Can I talk to you?” I yelled back. The rhythmic thrumming of the tractor engine and the black smell of the diesel filled the little valley. “It’s about Ina,” I shouted. He leaned sideways and spat off the Cat.
   
“I gotta get this plowing done,” he yelled, and moved his hand to fire the engine up again.
   
“It’s important. Come down, please.” It doesn’t take long to get damned tired of yelling over a tractor engine. He shrugged and spat again. Then he swung out onto the big silver tread and jumped down to the unplowed side of the tractor. The engine kept chunking along, and the Cat kept quivering. We moved off a little way up the hill. I told him who I was and what I was doing. He kept his excitement and admiration under control. He blinked at me out of deepset eyes and spat neatly onto the hard ground. He didn’t offer to shake hands. His lower lip was pushed out by a tumor of tobacco.
   
“Can’t leave a guy alone, can you?” The very corners of his lips were touched with a stain of brown.
   
I asked him about his Thursday night with Ina Simmons. He looked at me coldly. “I don’t see that it’s just a hell of a lot your business,” he said. He spat on the hard ground.
   
“It’s my business,” I said. “Me and the cops, both. Not to mention your brother, Mike’s. You got something about that evening you’re afraid to talk about?”
   
He stared at me for a long moment. His eyes were dark and deepset, and they were cold and expressionless. Suddenly the bottom part of his face twitched. “Jesus,” he said. “Jesus Christ. My girlfriend—my fiancee, she gets fucking murdered by my fucking brother, for Christ’s sake, and you come around and push a guy around. Jesus Christ.”
   
He sounded like a badguy echo of Tammy Manchester.
   
“I’m sorry,” I said. I sounded like a boring echo of me. “I know it’s painful to you, but it’s important. I’m working with the police on this.” I gave him my pitch. His face kept twitching. Perkins had been right; he looked like he was going to cry.
   
“I already told them,” he said. “That prick Jerrold. Me and Ina watched TV. We shot the bull. I left her place not too late, about eleven. Went home, slept, got out on this goddam Cat. And then that prick Jerrold, he comes along and starts giving me shit and all of a sudden he’s leaning on me and he tells me Ina is dead. Dead.”  His jaws swelled. The Cat kept chumping and shaking. Once I heard about a farmer who got his Cat stuck in the mud, and he left it running, and when he came back, only the top of the smokestack was visible. It had shaken itself right into the mud. Ron Miller spat. Maybe he was trying to make enough mud to sink his Cat in. Or me.
   
“Did it surprise you when the police arrested Mike and said he had killed Ina?” I said. Family affair.
   
“Hey,” he said, “you’re a hell of a sweet guy, aren’t you? You want to know what it felt like when they told me my dad died?”
   
“Were you surprised that the cops grabbed Mike?”
   
“Jesus H. Christ. You’re a real fucking prize, aren’t you, mister.” The jaw twitched. “You really want to know? Well, I’ll tell you, mister. No, it didn’t surprise me. That Mike, everybody thinks he’s such a sweet little fucking angel. Well, I’ll tell you. I’m not surprised the little shit went around the bend. That quiet stuff, that’s bullshit. That’s for the grandma.
   
“You wanna know am I surprised, mister? Hey, I’ll tell you. Not me. I’m not surprised. I know better. I seen through that little shit a long time ago.” He worked his face again. He was good, but I wasn’t buying. “But I never figured he’d kill, he’d kill my. . . .” He screwed up his face and mouth. “My girl, man.”
   
I managed to control my melting-heart sympathy. “Were you part of the deal of Ina selling drugs here in town?”
   
He managed to control his grief. His jaws swelled again. The eyes stayed flat and black, but his fists worked. He was wearing white cotton work gloves with blue cuffs. He wasn’t going to flip like Tammy Manchester.
   
“I ought to take you apart, you son of a bitch,” he said. “That’s my girl you’re talking about.” He rocked toward me.
   
I wished he would; I really wished he would. Unless he had something I didn’t know about—like a hand grenade—I could have turned him into a sniveling mask of blood with a nose the size of an orange. It’s one of the real dangers of having fought; there are times when the temptation is almost frightening.
   
“Knock off the bullshit, Ron,” I said. “I know about Ina and the dope. I know all about you and Ina. Just give me some kind of straight answer, all right?”
   
He retreated into sullenness. A lot more competent sullenness than Skip Kirby had managed. It helped a little; all I wanted now was to slap him as though he were a snotty four year old.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
   
I thought, cheap punk. “I’m talking about the night that you and Ina got so giggly listening to the Stones that Skip Kirby yelled at you to shut up and you called him Oliver Hardy,” I said. “I’m talking about Ina getting dope from her supplier from Oregon and you going up to Oakesdale with her to put some muscle in Jim Kingman’s face so he wouldn’t give her any trouble up there. That’s what I’m talking about,” I said. Good old Randy Scheidt with his brakes and his solid anchor. “That’s what I’m talking about. For Christ’s sake, Miller, get smart. I know all about you and Ina and the drugs. I’m not interested in the dope.” Well, not in dope as dope. “I’m interested in finding out who killed Ina, and why.”
   
The Cat fuffled and snorted, and Ron Miller sneered and spat brown jets into the pathetic tangle of outdated lentil plants, and I acted tough and pushed questions at him. We went around in enough circles that we could have been on the tractor, plowing rings around the hill. It was more boring than leaning on the front of Mrs Richardson’s car and waiting for magpies to swoop over the hill and across the valley. And noisier. At least that goddam diesel hadn’t been chunking away while I was making like Mariana at the moated grange.
   
Whatever that means.
   
Ron Miller was tougher than Tammy Manchester and smarter than Skip Kirby and a hell of a lot less innocent than Randy Scheidt. It wasn’t long before I was feeling a great warm kinship with officer Jerrold, whoever he was. I wished I could find some excuse to slap Ron Miller down.
   
He didn’t know anything about dope. He didn’t know nothing about no guy from Oregon. He didn’t know where the hell I got off saying things like that about a guy’s girl that got murdered , fachrissakes.
   
Shit, didn’t I have no heart or human sympathy at all?
   
What the fuck was I, some kind of an animal?
   
Why didn’t I. . .well, why didn’t I leave him alone in his grief, leave him decently alone to plow his endless circle of mourning for the lamented Ina. I don’t quote directly. Poor innocent Ina who wouldn’t know a yellowjacket or a nickel bag if she tripped over them on her way to Wednesday night prayer meeting. Poor innocent Ron who wouldn’t know if Ina was taking vitamin C or high grade Ecuadorian coke—even when he helped sell vitamin C to the kids up the road. . . .
   
We went round and round, and he called me a liar and he called everyone a liar who ever connected him or Ina with the dope in Garfield, and the Cat chuffed and trembled and was damn near as irritating as Ron Miller.
   
Then after a while he said yeah, what the hell, he and Ina got high together, and what was it to me. He said he didn’t have to talk to a bunch of narc assholes and anyhow it was none of my business because all us narc assholes were doing was persecuting him as an excuse for having our heads so far up our asses that we couldn’t find out who killed his fiancee , fachrissake. He leaned over and spit between us and said he’d never heard such a pile of bullshit in his life as that crock about Ina selling dope. I didn’t ask him what had happened to his joyous certainty that Mike had committed the murder. It would have been impolite to intrude on such a fine dramatic presentation.
   
Oh, he was a helpful one.
   
After a day or so I said, “You got a deer rifle, Ron?”
   
He didn’t flinch. One blink and, “I got six of them, bigshot. Sixteen. And a whole set of Porky Pig drinking glasses. And a subscription to Dogshit Magazine.”
   
He was hard to read. Impossible. I took a brass cartridge case out of my pocket and held it out. “You figure a ballistics lab would find anything interesting about this empty? Maybe match it to one of your firing pins? You shoot an eight millimeter, Ron? A Mauser, maybe?”
   
The brass was warm in my hand. Miller hardly looked at it. “You know,” he said, “I thought plowing was pretty near the most boring goddam thing in the world. But you got it beat nine ways, Jack. You bore the piss out of me.”
   
“You didn’t shoot at me last night, is that right?”
   
“I wish to God I had, mister, I really do. Because if I’d of shot at you, by God, I wouldn’t of missed, and I wouldn’t have to stand here listening to all this bullshit.”
   
We went round and round. He was tough and stubborn, and if he was lying he was good at it. Part of it, of course, I knew was lying. But I couldn’t see the seams. I didn’t know whether there was an end to the lying. A couple times I thought about spitting on the ground to hurry up burying that damned chuffling Cat. Then after a while, Ron Miller said that was about enough and he had to get to work because Busbee wasn’t paying him to stand around yakking with some asshole who had his head up his ass. I didn’t mention that I didn’t even know who wasn’t paying me for that. He didn’t offer to shake hands. I watched him use one of the tread grousers as a step. He swung smoothly onto the cat-track and settled onto the cushion in the same motion. He didn’t look at me. The engine pitch changed to a roar that sounded dangerous, certain to throw a rod. Then Miller yanked a lever, and the Cat lurched forward, clanking like a freight train. The plow ran perfectly along the edge of the track of turned earth. Ron Miller leaned out and spat neatly over the tread.
   
I put the brass back into my pocket and staggered back across the plow. The tractor was already gone over the hill before I was through emptying the dirt out of my shoes. I had the dirtiest socks in Whitman County.
   
I went through the long curve between the hills and up and hill and down a hill and around the turn at the T. Miller’s desolate little white house hadn’t moved. I didn’t know whether I had or not. At the stop sign, I turned south as though I were a big green Continental, and I hummed through Belmont without seeing Bob Miller, Larry, or the lady in the checkered pants suit. Maybe they were having bad Monday mornings. I came down the little hill into Garfield and crossed the little bridge. Nobody shot at me. The phone booth was empty. It probably wasn’t too hot at this time of day, but I didn’t have anyone to call. I didn’t even know what the Time and Temperature number was in this town.
   
I went up to my room at the head of the stairs and lay on my bed memorizing the ceiling. There wasn’t any place I could wish I was. There wasn’t any place I wanted to be.