Robert Tanenbaum - Absolute rage

"It's pretty good ice cream, Sheriff," said Mose happily. "It's chocolate."

"Well, I can see that, Mose. You got it up to your eyes. I would say you look half like a nigger, but Ms. Ciampi here would report me for racial insensitivity."

"I would not, Sheriff," said Marlene. "I would give you a pass on that. I would report you for incompetence and corruption, maybe."

The sheriff laughed. "Well, then it's a good thing for me you'll be leaving soon."

"Yes, it is. Did you check out that pistol I took off Bo Cade?"

"Yes, I did. But I'm so incompetent, you probably don't even want to know what the state lab found out. I probably can't even read the report with my tiny little brain."

She moved a marble and gave him a considering look. "I take it back, then. You're not incompetent. You're competently corrupt. What did it say?"

"Wasn't the.38 that killed Lizzie Heeney, is what."

Marlene was somewhat let down by this news, but took care to disguise it. "Well, then, I'm sure you'll redouble your search for the actual murder weapon."

"Oh, hell, you know he could've pitched it anywhere in the county, down some mine probably. This is an easy part of the country to lose things in. Is that what you done, Mose? Pitched it down a mine?"

"Uh-huh," said Mose cheerfully, nodding his head and studying the board like Boris Spassky contemplating a tricky endgame.

"See?" said the sheriff.

"What can I say, Sheriff? It's just like Perry Mason. You've totally outsmarted my client." She moved another marble, hardly looking at the board. "Just between us, now, who do you think really killed the Heeneys? I kind of like Earl and Bo Cade for it, although it's hard to believe that they're organized enough to actually pull it off. There must have been someone else involved."

"I wouldn't know about that." Sheriff Swett grinned around his big teeth and rubbed his right eye with the heel of his hand. "And it ain't my job to speculate. I will tell you one thing, though."

"What's that?"

"I think your client just outsmarted you." He gestured to the board, where Mose was just placing a blue marble. He looked up, his mouth an O, and bounced on his bunk like a four-year-old. "I win! I win!" he crowed.

The sheriff and the cops and the other inmates roared. After a while, Marlene did, too.

"It must be something in your water," she said, and thought, grinning up at Swett, you just gave me an idea, Sheriff.

"Why don't we, " Marlene said, " Find that gun?"

"What gun is that?" asked Poole without much interest. They were dining at Rosie's in the courthouse square, McCullensburg. Rosie's served what Marlene always thought of as mom food, although Marlene's actual mom had not served the sort of food Rosie served, or rather Gus served, Gus being the current Rosie. Gus's meat loaf on Thursday was famous throughout the county, as was the fried chicken on Wednesday and the batter-dipped catfish on Friday. Sugar was the major condiment in Gus's cuisine, and grease the prevailing flavor. The food was, however, always served very hot, and in large quantities, which seemed to meet the needs of the locale, and Marlene's needs, too, as it was a welcome relief from the food fascismo prevalent at the time in lower-Manhattan upper-bourgeois circles. The place was friendly, the service was swift, the atmosphere was full of the good-natured joshing that passes for wit in the provinces, where everyone knows all the jokes and everyone else's foibles. Tonight, Marlene was going with the chicken-fried steak and mashed pot., w/peas; her partner had the open roast-beef sandwich, w/fries.

"The murder weapon," she said. "I think I know where it is."

A fork of Rosie's grayish roast beef was poised halfway to his mouth and stopped there when she said this. "Excuse me, but I thought we had agreed to leave all that to the pros from now on." He ate the morsel. He was eating better since Marlene had arrived. He wondered whether he would go back to being a nonfunctional drunk when she left.

"Yes," she said, "but this is practically a gimme."

"A gimme?"

"Yeah. It was the boots, and something Swett said this afternoon. He said the killers would've tossed the incriminating stuff down an old mine shaft, the gun, I mean. He suggested that Mose did just that. But they didn't, the actual killers didn't do that at all. They threw the bloody sneakers into the laurel and the bloody boots off the 130 bridge. Why? Because besides not being criminal geniuses in the first place, they were drunk. One of them tosses his sneakers in the laurel when he gets back to the car. The other one doesn't notice his boots are blood-covered until later, and he throws them off the bridge as they pass by, and at that point he remembers, oh, the gun, the pistol, they can trace that, so the pistol goes in there, too."

Poole looked at her narrowly, still chewing slowly. "If you're serious, I think our pollution is starting to affect your brain. That's not only a stupid idea, it's a McCullensburg-stupid idea."

"Oh? And why is it stupid?"

"It's pure speculation based on associating facts that have no logical association, like our fella who thought the weather had something to do with the moon shot. Shoes in the laurel, shoes in the river, hence gun in the river. Why not gun in the laurel? Or shoes in the river but gun down the mine. Or keep the gun. They don't like getting rid of weapons in Robbens County anyway. The people are poor, and they typically have so little to fear from the law. Plus, everyone in the county knows that Dummy Welch goes frogging under that bridge and sleeps there from time to time. Maybe the boots were a crude attempt to frame our client. Which worked, as it turned out."

"You never mentioned that before," said Marlene accusingly.

"The greatest legal mind in Robbens County is more functional than it was a short while ago."

"I think it's worth a look, anyway," said Marlene, deflated somewhat. "There's hardly any water in there this time of year, I'm told. Two, three feet at the most."

"And opaque. What were you planning to do, feel for the gun with your toes? And what if you find it? How is that going to help our client? You expect to find prints on it after weeks in the sort of corrosive water that flows through the lovely Guyandotte? You'd be lucky to find more than a rusted frame."

Marlene shrugged. "Maybe. It's always nice to have the murder weapon." She turned her attention to her steak, although her appetite had faded in the face of the resentment she now felt welling up in her. Now she was getting legal lectures from a man she was recently hosing down in a bathtub to get him sober enough to walk. It was unbearable, especially as the idea she had germinated was revealed as a stupid one, a typical bit of girl-detective nonsense. On the other hand, she had experienced odd ideas in the past that had paid off. She had figured out cases, including ones far more complex than this one, against far smarter criminals than these appeared to be. It was all very well for Poole to dismiss her smugly like that, like a man…

Marlene was by no means a doctrinaire feminist. She had never had many problems competing with men, and the one area where she admitted some inferiority was nicely evened up by a two-hundred-pound guard dog and, where necessary, a pistol. But just now, with Karp coming to take the whole thing away from her, and Poole acting as if he just had, some darker mud had been stirred up, thick and toxic like the sludge below the Guyandotte, and she started to obsess.

"Can I get you folks some dessert?" asked Mamie, the waitress. Unlike waitpersons in more civilized places, she did not describe what was on the menu, since nearly everything was displayed in cake stands on the lunch counter, and what Rosie's had on offer had not changed in twenty years.