Текст книги "Salem's Lot"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

Deals with the devil, all right, Larry thought, shuffling his papers. When you deal with him, notes come due in brimstone.

The people who bought trailers were lower-middle-class blue– or white-collar workers, people who could not raise a down payment on a more conventional house, or older people looking for ways to stretch their social security. The idea of a brand-new six-room house was something to conjure with for these people. For the elderly, there was another advantage, something that others missed but Larry, always astute, had noticed: Trailers were all on one level and there were no stairs to climb.

Financing was easy, too. A $500 down payment was usually enough to do business on. And in the bad old barracuda-financing days of the sixties, the fact that the other $9,500 was financed at 24 percent rarely struck these house-hungry people as a pitfall.

And my God! how the money rolled in.

Crockett himself had changed very little, even after playing “Let’s Make a Deal” with the unsettling Mr Straker. No fag decorator came to redo his office. He still got by with the cheap electric fan instead of air conditioning. He wore the same shiny-seat suits or glaring sports jacket combinations. He smoked the same cheap cigars and still dropped by Dell’s on Saturday night to have a few beers and shoot some bumper pool with the boys. He had kept his hand in hometown real estate, which had borne two fruits: First, it had gotten him elected selectman, and second, it wrote off nicely on his income tax return, because each year’s visible operation was one rung below the breakeven point. Besides the Marsten House, he was and had been the selling agent for perhaps three dozen other decrepit manses in the area. There were some good deals of course. But Larry didn’t push them. The money was, after all, rolling in.

Too much money, maybe. It was possible, he supposed, to outsmart yourself. To go into the tunnel of love with girl A, screw girl B, come out holding hands with girl A, only to have both of them beat the living shit out of you. Straker had said he would be in touch and that had been fourteen months ago. Now what if—

That was when the telephone rang.

FOUR

“Mr Crockett,” the familiar, accentless voice said.

“Straker, isn’t it?”

“Indeed.”

“I was just thinkin’ about you. Maybe I’m psychic.”

“How very amusing, Mr Crockett. I need a service, please.”

“I thought you might.”

“You will procure a truck, please. A big one. A rental truck, perhaps. Have it at the Portland docks tonight at seven sharp. Custom House Wharf. Two movers will be sufficient, I think.”

“Okay.” Larry drew a pad over by his right hand and scrawled: H. Peters, R. Snow. Henry’s U-Haul. 6 at latest. He did not stop to consider how imperative it seemed to follow Straker’s orders to the letter.

“There are a dozen boxes to be picked up. All save one go to the shop. The other is an extremely valuable sideboard—a Hepplewhite. Your movers will know it by its size. It is to be taken to the house. You understand?”

“Yeah.”

“Have them put it down cellar. Your men can enter through the outside bulkhead below the kitchen windows. You understand?”

“Yeah. Now, this sideboard—”

“One other service, please. You will procure five stout Yale padlocks. You are familiar with the brand Yale?”

“Everybody is. What—”

“Your movers will lock the shop’s back door when they leave. At the house, they will leave the keys to all five locks on the basement table. When they leave the house, they will padlock the bulkhead door, the front and back doors, and the shed-garage. You understand?”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you, Mr Crockett. Follow all directions explicitly. Good-by.”

“Now, wait just a minute—”

Dead line.

FIVE

It was two minutes of seven when the big orange-and-white truck with “Henry’s U-Haul” printed on the sides and back pulled up to the corrugated-steel shack at the end of Custom House Wharf at the Portland docks. The tide was on the turn and the gulls were restless with it, wheeling and crying overhead against the sunset-crimson sky.

“Christ, there’s nobody here,” Royal Snow said, swigging the last of his Pepsi and dropping the empty to the floor of the cab. “We’ll get arrested for burglars.”

“There’s somebody,” Hank Peters said. “Cop.”

It wasn’t precisely a cop; it was a night watchman. He shone his light in at them. “Either of you guys Lawrence Crewcut?”

“Crockett,” Royal said. “We’re from him. Come to pick up some boxes.”

“Good,” the night watchman said. “Come on in the office. I got an invoice for you to sign.” He gestured to Peters, who was behind the wheel. “Back up right over there. Those double doors with the light burning. See?”

“Yeah.” He put the truck in reverse.

Royal Snow followed the night watchman into the office where a coffeemaker was burbling. The clock over the pin-up calendar said 7:04. The night watchman scrabbled through some papers on the desk and came up with a clipboard. “Sign there.”

Royal signed his name.

“You want to watch out when you go in there. Turn on the lights. There’s rats.”

“I’ve never seen a rat that wouldn’t run from one of these,” Royal said, and swung his work-booted foot in an arc.

“These are wharf rats, sonny,” the watchman said dryly. “They’ve run off with bigger men than you.”

Royal went back out and walked over to the warehouse door. The night watchman stood in the doorway of the shack, watching him. “Look out,” Royal said to Peters. “The old guy said there was rats.”

“Okay.” He sniggered. “Good ole Larry Crewcut.”

Royal found the light switch inside the door and turned it on. There was something about the atmosphere, heavy with the mixed aromas of salt and wood rot and wetness, that stifled hilarity. That, and the thought of rats.

The boxes were stacked in the middle of the wide warehouse floor. The place was otherwise empty, and the collection looked a little portentous as a result. The sideboard was in the center, taller than the others, and the only one not stamped “Barlow and Straker, 27 Jointner Avenue, Jer. Lot, Maine.”

“Well, this don’t look too bad,” Royal said. He consulted his copy of the invoice and then counted boxes. “Yeah, they’re all here.”

“There are rats,” Hank said. “Hear ’em?”

“Yeah, miserable things. I hate ’em.”

They both fell silent for a moment, listening to the squeak and patter coming from the shadows.

“Well, let’s get with it,” Royal said. “Let’s put that big baby on first so it won’t be in the way when we get to the store.”

“Okay.”

They walked over to the box, and Royal took out his pocketknife. With one quick gesture he had slit the brown invoice envelope taped to the side.

“Hey,” Hank said. “Do you think we ought to—”

“We gotta make sure we got the right thing, don’t we? If we screw up, Larry’ll tack our asses to his bulletin board.” He pulled the invoice out and looked at it.

“What’s it say?” Hank asked.

“Heroin,” Royal said judiciously. “Two hundred pounds of the shit. Also two thousand girlie books from Sweden, three hundred gross of French ticklers—”

“Gimme that.” Hank snatched it away. “Sideboard,” he said. “Just like Larry told us. From London, England. Portland, Maine, P.O.E. French ticklers, my ass. Put this back.”

Royal did. “Something funny about this,” he said.

“Yeah, you. Funny like the Italian Army.”

“No, no shit. There’s no customs stamp on this fucker. Not on the box, not on the invoice envelope, not on the invoice. No stamp.”

“They probably do ’em in that ink that only shows up under a special black light.”

“They never did when I was on the docks. Christ, they stamped cargo ninety ways for Sunday. You couldn’t grab a box without getting blue ink up to your elbows.”

“Good. I’m very glad. But my wife happens to go to bed very early and I had hopes of getting some tonight.”

“Maybe if we took a look inside—”

“No way. Come on. Grab it.”

Royal shrugged. They tipped the box, and something shifted heavily inside. The box was a bitch to lift. It could be one of those fancy dressers, all right. It was heavy enough.

Grunting, they staggered out to the truck and heaved it onto the hydraulic lifter with identical cries of relief. Royal stood back while Hank operated the lift. When it was even with the truck body, they climbed up and walked it inside.

There was something about the box he didn’t like. It was more than the lack of customs stamp. An indefinable something. He looked at it until Hank ran down the back gate.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get the rest of them.”

The other boxes had regulation customs stamps, except for three that had been shipped here from inside the United States. As they loaded each box onto the truck, Royal checked it off on the invoice form and initialed it. They stacked all of the boxes bound for the new store near the back gate of the truck, away from the sideboard.

“Now, who in the name of God is going to buy all this stuff?” Royal asked when they had finished. “A Polish rocking chair, a German clock, a spinning wheel from Ireland…Christ Almighty, I bet they charge a frigging fortune.”

“Tourists,” Hank said wisely. “Tourists’ll buy anything. Some of those people from Boston and New York…they’d buy a bag of cow-shit if it was an oldbag.”

“I don’t like that big box, neither,” Royal said. “No customs stamp, that’s a hell of a funny thing.”

“Well, let’s get it where it’s going.”

They drove back to ’salem’s Lot without speaking, Hank driving heavy on the gas. This was one errand he wanted done. He didn’t like it. As Royal had said, it was damn peculiar.

He drove around to the back of the new store, and the back door was unlocked, as Larry had said it would be. Royal tried the light switch just inside with no result.

“That’s nice,” he grumbled. “We get to unload this stuff in the goddamn dark…say, does it smell a little funny in here to you?”

Hank sniffed. Yes, there was an odor, an unpleasant one, but he could not have said exactly what it reminded him of. It was dry and acrid in the nostrils, like a whiff of old corruption.

“It’s just been shut up too long,” he said, shining his flashlight around the long, empty room. “Needs a good airing out.”

“Or a good burning down,” Royal said. He didn’t like it. Something about the place put his back up. “Come on. And let’s try not to break our legs.”

They unloaded the boxes as quickly as they could, putting each one down carefully. Half an hour later, Royal closed the back door with a sigh of relief and snapped one of the new padlocks on it.

“That’s half of it,” he said.

“The easy half,” Hank answered. He looked up toward the Marsten House, which was dark and shuttered tonight. “I don’t like goin’ up there, and I ain’t afraid to say so. If there was ever a haunted house, that’s it. Those guys must be crazy, tryin’ to live there. Probably queer for each other anyway.”

“Like those fag interior decorators,” Royal agreed. “Probably trying to turn it into a showplace. Good for business.”

“Well, if we got to do it, let’s get with it.”

They spared a last look for the crated sideboard leaning against the side of the U-Haul and then Hank pulled the back door down with a bang. He got in behind the wheel and they drove up Jointner Avenue onto the Brooks Road. A minute later the Marsten House loomed ahead of them, dark and crepitating, and Royal felt the first thread of real fear worm its way into his belly.

“Lordy, that’s a creepy place,” Hank murmured. “Who’d want to live there?”

“I don’t know. You see any lights on behind those shutters?”

“No.”

The house seemed to lean toward them, as if awaiting their arrival. Hank wheeled the truck up the driveway and around to the back. Neither of them looked too closely at what the bouncing headlights might reveal in the rank grass of the backyard. Hank felt a strain of fear enter his heart that he had not even felt in Nam, although he had been scared most of his time there. That was a rational fear. Fear that you might step on a pongee stick and see your foot swell up like some noxious green balloon, fear that some kid in black p.j.’s whose name you couldn’t even fit in your mouth might blow your head off with a Russian rifle, fear that you might draw a Crazy Jake on patrol that might want you to blow up everyone in a village where the Cong had been a week before. But this fear was childlike, dreamy. There was no reference point to it. A house was a house—boards and hinges and nails and sills. There was no reason, really no reason, to feel that each splintered crack was exhaling its own chalky aroma of evil. That was just plain stupid thinking. Ghosts? He didn’t believe in ghosts. Not after Nam.

He had to fumble twice for reverse, and then backed the truck jerkily up to the bulkhead leading to the cellar. The rusted doors stood open, and in the red glow of the truck’s taillights, the shallow stone steps seemed to lead down into hell.

“Man, I don’t dig this at all,” Hank said. He tried to smile and it became a grimace.

“Me either.”

They looked at each other in the wan dash lights, the fear heavy on both of them. But childhood was beyond them, and they were incapable of going back with the job undone because of irrational fear—how would they explain it in bright daylight? The job had to be done.

Hank killed the engine and they got out and walked around to the back of the truck. Royal climbed up, released the door catch, and thrust the door up on its tracks.

The box sat there, sawdust still clinging to it, squat and mute.

“God, I don’t want to take that down there!” Hank Peters choked out, and his voice was almost a sob.

“Come on up,” Royal said. “Let’s get rid of it.”

They dragged the box onto the lift and let it down with a hiss of escaping air. When it was at waist level, Hank let go of the lever and they gripped it.

“Easy,” Royal grunted, backing toward the steps. “Easy does it…easy…” In the red glow of the taillights his face was constricted and corded like the face of a man having a heart attack.

He backed down the stairs one at a time, and as the box tilted up against his chest, he felt its dreadful weight settle against him like a slab of stone. It was heavy, he would think later, but not that heavy. He and Hank had muscled bigger loads for Larry Crockett, both upstairs and down, but there was something about the atmosphere of this place that took the heart out of you and made you no good.

The steps were slimy-slick and twice he tottered on the precarious edge of balance, crying out miserably, “Hey! For Christ’s sake! Watch it!”

And then they were down. The ceiling was low above them and they carried the sideboard bent over like hags.

“Set it here!” Hank gasped. “I can’t carry it no further!”

They set it down with a thump and stepped away. They looked into each other’s eyes and saw that fear had been changed to near terror by some secret alchemy. The cellar seemed suddenly filled with secret rustling noises. Rats, perhaps, or perhaps something that didn’t even bear thinking of.

They bolted, Hank first and Royal Snow right behind him. They ran up the cellar steps and Royal slammed the bulkhead doors with backward sweeps of his arm.

They clambered into the cab of the U-Haul and Hank started it up and put it in gear. Royal grabbed his arm, and in the darkness his face seemed to be all eyes, huge and staring.

“Hank, we never put on those locks.”

They both stared at the bundle of new padlocks on the truck’s dashboard, held together by a twist of baling wire. Hank grabbed at his jacket pocket and brought out a key ring with five new Yale keys on it, one which would fit the lock on the back door of the shop in town, four for out here. Each was neatly labeled.

“Oh, Christ,” he said. “Look, if we come back early tomorrow morning—”

Royal unclamped the flashlight under the dashboard. “That won’t work,” he said, “and you know it.”

They got out of the cab, feeling the cool evening breeze strike the sweat on their foreheads. “Go do the back door,” Royal said. “I’ll get the front door and the shed.”

They separated. Hank went to the back door, his heart thudding heavily in his chest. He had to fumble twice to thread the locking arm through the hasp. This close to the house, the smell of age and wood rot was palpable. All those stories about Hubie Marsten that they had laughed about as kids began to recur, and the chant they had chased the girls with: Watch out, watch out, watch out! Hubie’ll get you if you don’t…watch…OUT—

“Hank?”

He drew in breath sharply, and the other lock dropped out of his hands. He picked it up. “You oughtta know better than to creep up on a person like that. Did you…?”

“Yeah. Hank, who’s gonna go down in that cellar again and put the key ring on the table?”

“I dunno,” Hank Peters said. “I dunno.”

“Think we better flip for it?”

“Yeah, I guess that’s best.”

Royal took out a quarter. “Call it in the air.” He flicked it.

“Heads.”

Royal caught it, slapped it on his forearm, and exposed it. The eagle gleamed at them dully.

“Jesus,” Hank said miserably. But he took the key ring and the flashlight and opened the bulkhead doors again.

He forced his legs to carry him down the steps, and when he had cleared the roof overhang he shone his light across the visible cellar, which took an L-turn thirty feet further up and went off God knew where. The flashlight beam picked out the table, with a dusty checked tablecloth on it. A rat sat on the table, a huge one, and it did not move when the beam of light struck it. It sat up on its plump haunches and almost seemed to grin.

He walked past the box toward the table. “Hsst! Rat!”

The rat jumped down and trotted off toward the elbow-bend further up. Hank’s hand was trembling now, and the flashlight beam slipped jerkily from place to place, now picking out a dusty barrel, now a decades-old bureau that had been loaded down here, now a stack of old newspapers, now—

He jerked the flashlight beam back toward the newspapers and sucked in breath as the light fell on something to the left side of them.

A shirt…was that a shirt? Bundled up like an old rag. Something behind it that might have been blue jeans. And something that looked like…

Something snapped behind him.

He panicked, threw the keys wildly on the table, and turned away, shambling into a run. As he passed the box, he saw what had made the noise. One of the aluminum bands had let go, and now pointed jaggedly toward the low roof, like a finger.

He stumbled up the stairs, slammed the bulkhead behind him (his whole body had crawled into goose flesh; he would not be aware of it until later), snapped the lock on the catch, and ran to the cab of the truck. He was breathing in small, whistling gasps like a hurt dog. He dimly heard Royal asking him what had happened, what was going on down there, and then he threw the truck into drive and screamed out, roaring around the corner of the house on two wheels, digging at the soft earth. He did not slow down until the truck was back on the Brooks Road, speeding toward Lawrence Crockett’s office in town. And then he began to shake so badly he was afraid he would have to pull over.

“What was down there?” Royal asked. “What did you see?”

“Nothin’,” Hank Peters said, and the word came out in sections divided by his clicking teeth. “I didn’t see nothin’ and I never want to see it again.”

SIX

Larry Crockett was getting ready to shut up shop and go home when there was a perfunctory tap on the door and Hank Peters stepped back in. He still looked scared.

“Forget somethin’, Hank?” Larry asked. When they had come back from the Marsten House, both looking like somebody had given their nuts a healthy tweak, he had given them each an extra ten dollars and two six-packs of Black Label and had allowed as how maybe it would be best if none of them said too much about the evening’s outing.

“I got to tell you,” Hank said now. “I can’t help it, Larry. I got to.”

“Sure you do,” Larry said. He opened the bottom desk drawer, took out a bottle of Johnnie Walker, and poured them each a knock in a couple of Dixie cups. “What’s on your mind?”

Hank took a mouthful, grimaced, and swallowed it.

“When I took those keys down to put ’em on the table, I seen something. Clothes, it looked like. A shirt and maybe some dungarees. And a sneaker. I think it was a sneaker, Larry.”

Larry shrugged and smiled. “So?” It seemed to him that a large lump of ice was resting in his chest.

“That little Glick boy was wearin’ jeans. That’s what it said in the Ledger. Jeans and a red pullover shirt and sneaks. Larry, what if—”

Larry kept smiling. The smile felt frozen on.

Hank gulped convulsively. “What if those guys that bought the Marsten House and that store blew up the Glick kid?” There. It was out. He swallowed the rest of the liquid fire in his cup.

Smiling, Larry said, “Maybe you saw a body, too.”

“No—no. But—”

“That’d be a matter for the police,” Larry Crockett said. He refilled Hank’s cup and his hand didn’t tremble at all. It was as cold and steady as a rock in a frozen brook. “And I’d drive you right down to see Parkins. But something like this…” He shook his head. “A lot of nastiness can come up. Things like you and that waitress out to Dell’s…her name’s Jackie, ain’t it?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” His face had gone deadly pale.

“And they’d sure as shit find out about that dishonorable discharge of yours. But you do your duty, Hank. Do it as you see it.”

“I didn’t see no body,” Hank whispered.

“That’s good,” Larry said, smiling. “And maybe you didn’t see any clothes, either. Maybe they were just…rags.”

“Rags,” Hank Peters said hollowly.

“Sure, you know those old places. All kinds of junk in ’em. Maybe you saw some old shirt or something that was torn up for a cleaning rag.”

“Sure,” Hank said. He drained his glass a second time. “You got a good way of looking at things, Larry.”

Crockett took his wallet out of his back pocket, opened it, and counted five ten-dollar bills out on the desk.

“What’s that for?”

“Forgot all about paying you for that Brennan job last month. You should prod me about those things, Hank. You know how I forget things.”

“But you did—”

“Why,” Larry interrupted, smiling, “you could be sitting right here and telling me something, and I wouldn’t remember a thing about it tomorrow morning. Ain’t that a pitiful way to be?”

“Yeah,” Hank whispered. His hand reached out trembling and took the bills; stuffed them into the breast pocket of his denim jacket as if anxious to be rid of the touch of them. He got up with such jerky hurriedness that he almost knocked his chair over. “Listen, I got to go, Larry. I…I didn’t…I got to go.”

“Take the bottle,” Larry invited, but Hank was already going out the door. He didn’t pause.

Larry sat back down. He poured himself another drink. His hand still did not tremble. He did not go on shutting up shop. He had another drink, and then another. He thought about deals with the devil. And at last his phone rang. He picked it up. Listened.

“It’s taken care of,” Larry Crockett said.

He listened. He hung up. He poured himself another drink.

SEVEN

Hank Peters woke up in the early hours of the next morning from a dream of huge rats crawling out of an open grave, a grave which held the green and rotting body of Hubie Marsten, with a frayed length of manila hemp around his neck. Peters lay propped on his elbows, breathing heavily, naked torso slicked with sweat, and when his wife touched his arm he screamed aloud.

EIGHT

Milt Crossen’s Agricultural Store was located in the angle formed by the intersection of Jointner Avenue and Railroad Street, and most of the town’s old codgers went there when it rained and the park was uninhabitable. During the long winters, they were a day-by-day fixture.

When Straker drove up in that ’39 Packard—or was it a ’40?—it was just misting gently, and Milt and Pat Middler were having a desultory conversation about whether Freddy Overlock’s girl Judy run off in 1957 or ’58. They both agreed that she had run off with that Salad-master salesman from Yarmouth, and they both agreed that he hadn’t been worth a pisshole in the snow, nor was she, but beyond that they couldn’t get together.

All conversation ceased when Straker walked in.

He looked around at them—Milt and Pat Middler and Joe Crane and Vinnie Upshaw and Clyde Corliss—and smiled humorlessly. “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” he said.

Milt Crossen stood up, pulling his apron around him almost primly. “Help you?”

“Very good,” Straker said. “Attend over at this meat case, please.”

He bought a roast of beef, a dozen prime ribs, some hamburger, and a pound of calves’ liver. To this he added some dry goods—flour, sugar, beans—and several loaves of ready-made bread.

His shopping took place in utter silence. The store’s habitués sat around the large Pearl Kineo stove that Milt’s father had converted to range oil, smoked, looked wisely out at the sky, and observed the stranger from the corners of their eyes.

When Milt had finished packing the goods into a large cardboard carton, Straker paid with hard cash—a twenty and a ten. He picked up the carton, tucked it under one arm, and flashed that hard, humorless smile at them again.

“Good day, gentlemen,” he said, and left.

Joe Crane tamped a load of Planter’s into his corncob. Clyde Corliss hawked back and spat a mass of phlegm and chewing tobacco into the dented pail beside the stove. Vinnie Upshaw produced his old Top cigarette roller from inside his vest, spilled a line of tobacco into it, and inserted a cigarette paper with arthritis-swelled fingers.

They watched the stranger lift the carton into the trunk. All of them knew that the carton must have weighed thirty pounds with the dry goods, and they had all seen him tuck it under his arm like a feather pillow going out. He went around to the driver’s side, got in, and drove off up Jointner Avenue. The car went up the hill, turned left onto the Brooks Road, disappeared, and reappeared from behind the screen of trees a few moments later, now toy-sized with distance. It turned into the Marsten driveway and was lost from sight.

“Peculiar fella,” Vinnie said. He stuck his cigarette in his mouth, plucked a few bits of tobacco from the end of it, and took a kitchen match from his vest pocket.

“Must be one of the ones got that store,” Joe Crane said.

“Marsten House, too,” Vinnie agreed.

Clyde Corliss broke wind.

Pat Middler picked at a callus on his left palm with great interest.

Five minutes passed.

“Do you suppose they’ll make a go of it?” Clyde asked no one in particular.

“Might,” Vinnie said. “They might show up right pert in the summertime. Hard to tell the way things are these days.”

A general murmur, sigh almost, of agreement.

“Strong fella,” Joe said.

“Ayuh,” Vinnie said. “That was a thirty-nine Packard, and not a spot of rust on her.”

“’Twas a forty,” Clyde said.

“The forty didn’t have runnin’ boards,” Vinnie said. “’Twas a thirty-nine.”

“You’re wrong on that one,” Clyde said.

Five minutes passed. They saw Milt was examining the twenty Straker had paid with.

“That funny money, Milt?” Pat asked. “That fella give you some funny money?”

“No; but look.” Milt passed it across the counter and they all stared at it. It was much bigger than an ordinary bill.

Pat held it up to the light, examined it, then turned it over. “That’s a series E twenty, ain’t it, Milt?”

“Yep,” Milt said. “They stopped makin’ those forty-five or fifty years back. My guess is that’d be worth some money down to Arcade Coin in Portland.”

Pat handed the bill around and each examined it, holding it up close or far off depending on the flaws in their eyesight. Joe Crane handed it back, and Milt put it under the cash drawer with the personal checks and the coupons.

“Sure is a funny fella,” Clyde mused.

“Ayuh,” Vinnie said, and paused. “That was a thirty-nine, though. My half brother Vic had one. Was the first car he ever owned. Bought it used, he did, in 1944. Left the oil out of her one mornin’ and burned the goddamn pistons right out of her.”

“I believe it was a forty,” Clyde said, “because I remember a fella that used to cane chairs down by Alfred, come right to your house he would, and—”

And so the argument was begun, progressing more in the silences than in the speeches, like a chess game played by mail. And the day seemed to stand still and stretch into eternity for them, and Vinnie Upshaw began to make another cigarette with sweet, arthritic slowness.

NINE

Ben was writing when the tap came at the door, and he marked his place before getting up to open it. It was just after three o’clock on Wednesday, September 24. The rain had ended any plans to search further for Ralphie Glick, and the consensus was that the search was over. The Glick boy was gone…solid gone.

He opened the door and Parkins Gillespie was standing there, smoking a cigarette. He was holding a paperback in one hand, and Ben saw with some amusement that it was the Bantam edition of Conway’s Daughter.

“Come on in, Constable,” he said. “Wet out there.”

“It is, a trifle,” Parkins said, stepping in. “September’s grippe weather. I always wear m’ galoshes. There’s some that laughs, but I ain’t had the grippe since St-Lô, France, in 1944.”

“Lay your coat on the bed. Sorry I can’t offer you coffee.”

“Wouldn’t think of wettin’ it,” Parkins said, and tapped ash in Ben’s wastebasket. “And I just had a cup of Pauline’s down to the Excellent.”

“Can I do something for you?”

“Well, my wife read this…” He held up the book. “She heard you was in town, but she’s shy. She kind of thought maybe you might write your name in it, or somethin’.”

Ben took the book. “The way Weasel Craig tells it, your wife’s been dead fourteen or fifteen years.”

“That so?” Parkins looked totally unsurprised. “That Weasel, he does love to talk. He’ll open his mouth too wide one day and fall right in.”

Ben said nothing.

“Do you s’pose you could sign it for me, then?”

“Delighted to.” He took a pen from the desk, opened the book to the flyleaf (“A raw slice of life!”—Cleveland Plain Dealer), and wrote: Best wishes to Constable Gillespie, from Ben Mears, 9/24/75. He handed it back.

“I appreciate that,” Parkins said, without looking at what Ben had written. He bent over and crushed out his smoke on the side of the wastebasket. “That’s the only signed book I got.”