Richard Stevenson - Chain of Fools

Dan and Arlene were off on their car-related errands, and Janet went back to work at the Herald. With Timmy and Dale to watch over Ruth Osborne, and a cop car patrolling the neighborhood, I had the rest of the afternoon to roam Edensburg.

The town was, if not an idyllic Rockwellian piece of small-city Americana, still reasonably healthy for the unstable age it had survived into. The (so far) locally owned canoe manufacturing company that had been Edensburg's economic mainstay for over one hundred years had not moved its factory to low-wage, long-hour Ciudad Juarez or Kuala Lumpur; in fact, Janet had told me, the company was doing reasonably well, having diversified into the production of fiberglass bodies for Jet Skis, ORVs, and light-truck bumpers. Tourism brought seasonal work into the area too in summer and during the ski season. Even the Herald would have been making a go of it, had it not been for Stu Torkildson's Spruce Haven debacle.

Edensburg's Main Street had only a few vacant storefronts. The four-story department store had been carved up into smaller businesses a comic book store, Betty Lou's Hairport, a New Agey place called Crystals n' Constellations, among them-and J. J. Newberry's looked as if it was still going strong despite the competition from the Kmart at the edge of town. A battle to keep Wal-Mart out of the county was hard-fought and ongoing, Janet said. The Gem Theater on Main Street had been triplexed, but at least it was still open. It was showing one film that had the word "fatal" in the title, one with "deadly," and one with "mortal."

I had a town map and an Edensburg phone book with me and had no trouble locating Dick Puderbaugh's fuel-oil distributership. I thought he might be willing to talk with me in a general way about the Os-bornes' intrafamily feuding over the future of the Herald and I'd pick up an odd, useful nugget on the family dynamics, particularly the propensity among some Osbornes for violence. But as soon as I introduced myself, Puderbaugh, a whey-faced little man with what looked like a rodent insignia on the left breast of his golf shirt, turned hostile.

Puderbaugh fumed that he and June had both been insulted by Janet's "accusation" that a connection existed between Eric's murder and the pro-InfoCom Osbornes. He said it was "a goddamn shame" that people like himself and his wife could have their "private rights" interfered with by people like me. Puderbaugh was barely coherent and bordering on the hysterical as I backed out the door and said, "Have a good one, Dick."

Following Janet's directions, I drove the four miles out of town to Parson Bates's spats museum and pear orchard. I thought I might chat him up too on the split among the Osbornes. Bates was up in a tree when I pulled in, sitting on a branch about eight feet off the ground. I walked up a knoll toward him, and when he recognized me he glowered. Perched up there, Bates looked like a man who might be going to tell me that he had just been taken for a ride by space aliens.

Instead, he yelled down at me, "I do believe I detect a detectiveor would I be venturing too far afield in my verbal perambulations if I began again and put it thusly: I do believe I detect a defective." Bates said this with the type of loony-eyed jovial sneer rarely encountered outside state mental institutions prior to the deinstitutionalization consent decrees of the 1960s and '70s. Here was a man you might have expected to be arrested in a midtown Manhattan subway station for sticking his face down the bosoms of young matrons while he whistled "Heartaches," and up here in Edensburg he was considered by many to be a solid citizen. So much for rusticity as an inducement to clear thought.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Bates," I yelled up at him. "I just thought I'd drop by and see if you might give me a few moments of your time. I'm interested in hearing as many points of view as possible on the conflict over the disposition of the Herald, and I know you've had a long association with the paper and the Osborne family."

That seemed like an innocuous enough opener, but Bates made no move to climb down and stand on the same ground I stood on. "The disposition of the Edensburg Herald is none of your concern," he said, giving me his fish eye. "It is solely the concern of the Osborne family. Not that family life is a subject you would know anything about, I believe I have been reliably informed."

"Oh, I come from a family too, Mr. Bates. And I have observed others. They're all over the place. Anyway, the Osbornes', like all families, is made up of individuals. One of those individuals has been murdered, and attempts have been made on the lives of other Osbornes. Did you know that this morning someone tried to run Dan Osborne's car off a rural road?" A quick glance at Bates's parked Hillman Minx helped eliminate him as a suspect.

"Yes," Bates said testily, "I am aware that Dan drove his car into a ditch earlier today. As for the precise circumstances of the mishaplet's just say that his sister June relayed to me Dan's version of the incident. But it is June's belief, and mine, that dubiety is in order. Item: Dan Osborne is a marijuana addict. Most of the time, he and Arlene Thurber are stuporous. Surely, safe driving is a stranger to the both of them. Item: Dan Osborne can be ruthless and conscienceless on behalf of his causes. In his youth-and I mean his actual youth, not his latter-day infantilism-Dan Osborne was found to have planted an explosive device in the offices of an antiwar organization in an attempt to create the appearance that the FBI was persecuting war protestors. Conclusion: both Dan Osborne's mind and morals are impaired. I would be strongly inclined to await the outcome of a thorough police investigation before I drew any conclusion that this morning's event constituted an actual attempt on Dan's life. A more likely verdict will be trickery."

"I heard the story from both Dan and Arlene," I said, "and whatever their moral and other habits, their version of this morning's incident rings true."

Bates sniffed and said, "I remain unconvinced. You don't know those two. All this talk of murder afoot is nonsense. Eric, poor lost lad, was slain by a homicidal maniac on the loose, according to the State Police. And as for Janet's contention that she was menaced by a Jet Skier, my estimation of the event is that she misperceived the motorized behavior of some doltish and unmannerly youth-suchlike are everywhere these days, heaven knows-and she became unstrung over it. You know how women can be."

One phone call to an old friend of mine active in the Albany chapter of Lesbian Avengers might have further interfered with Bates's lazy afternoon among his pear crop, but I had more pressing concerns. I said, "I was present for one of the Jet Ski attacks, Mr. Bates. In fact, my partner, Timothy Callahan, was injured. His foot was broken when he was hit by the skier. Everyone who witnessed this incident-and there were four of us-agreed that what it was was attempted murder."

"I doubt that very much. In my estimation, you and your cohorts simply saw what suited your agenda."

It was probably his use of "agenda" that did it-the term had come to be used by the loony right more or less interchangeably with "flamethrower"-and the words flew out of my mouth before I could snatch them back. I said, "You're a blithering idiot, Bates."

He shot back, "As of this moment, you are trespassing on my property!"

I reached down, ripped a dandelion leaf out of Bates's meadow, and stuffed it in my mouth. I looked up at him, munching.

Red-faced, Bates stammered, "Begone! Begone!"

I went.

Timmy's Aunt Moira had a favorite piece of advice she gave herself and others when faced with one of life's passing irritants: Get mad; then get over it. It drove Timmy crazy when Aunt Moira came out with this- not because it wasn't often sensible advice, but because he knew she would have said the same thing to Mahatma Gandhi. Parson Bates did not represent one of the major evils of the century, however, as far as I knew, so the scale of my situation with him brought to mind Aunt Moira's generally wise counsel, and I had little trouble abiding by it.