Steven Havill: Dead Weight

The Carla Champlin in the photo was decades, perhaps even centuries, younger than the one currently clanking glasses in the kitchen.

“When did you do show dogs?” I asked.

“A long, long time ago,” she said, and appeared in the kitchen door holding a dish towel. “That’s Blake.”

“Blake?”

“It’s short for what’s on his papers, which is even more asinine,” Carla said without offering further explanation. “He was the first national champion I ever had.”

“But not the last.”

“Not the last.”

“I didn’t know you even owned a dog, Carla.”

“I don’t. Not anymore. As I said, that was all a long, long time ago. Come have some tea.”

I moved into the kitchen and she handed me a tall, elegant glass already sweating from the ice and topped with three slices of lemon. “As I remember, you don’t use sugar,” she said.

“No, thanks.” I had no idea why she would know anything about my tea habits, but thirty years in a small town supplied lots of ancillary and most often useless information if you chose to take notice and remember. Maybe she’d just noticed my ample girth and made a lucky guess that I was trying to do something about it.

“Why did you give the dogs up?”

“Allergies,” she snapped with considerable venom. “And a reversal of fortune. All about the time I turned forty.” She smiled without much humor. “Such a delight life can be, sometimes.”

“I suppose.” I knew that she had been married at one point in her life, but I didn’t suppose that discussing her early life with the dogs was why she had summoned me to her home on a broiling summer’s day. “This is the first time I’ve ever noticed your camper out back.”

“Oh, that thing,” she said. “Now listen,” she added, as if I hadn’t been. “You know my sister.” The blank look on my face stopped her. “Elaine Doyle?” she prompted.

I frowned and shook my head. “I didn’t know you had a sister, Carla.”

“Well, she’s my sister-in-law, really, but that’s just a technicality. You know Bobby Doyle.”

“He ran the drive-in theater,” I said, remembering a small, quick-moving man who smelled of buttered popcorn. “He died some time ago. I didn’t know he was your brother.”

“He wasn’t,” Carla said. “Elaine’s first husband, Scott Champlin, was my brother.”

I chuckled. “I didn’t know Scott, either.”

Carla waved a hand. “He lived in Terre Haute, of all places. Never visited here. But that’s neither here nor there. Listen. Elaine’s not wired just right, if you know what I mean. I love her like a real sister, but sometimes she just goes off the deep end. When she’s into the bottle…well, you know how that goes. Anyway, about five years ago, when they moved away, I purchased that little house of theirs over on Third Street. Two Twenty-one Third Street, just behind the Salazar funeral home. And by the way, that was their RV, too. I bought it as a favor, thinking maybe I’d do a little traveling, like I used to do on the show circuit.”

“That might be fun.”

“Well, not traveling alone, it isn’t. If you hear of anyone who wants to buy the thing, let me know. It’s in perfect condition. It just sits there.”

All of that was delivered with the rapidity of a machine gun. Carla Champlin’s voice had lost none of its metallic bark.

“So, what’s the problem?”

“The problem, Sheriff, is that I purchased the house on Third Street as something of an investment. I know it’s not all that much, just five rooms, but it was just such a dollhouse. I rented it to the McClaines for almost four years, and they were just perfect tenants. Just perfect. You remember them, of course.” She paused for a moment to let that sink in. I knew that the McClaines no longer lived at 221 Third Street, but I knew better than to interrupt Carla just when she was spooling up.

“A beautiful yard, everything. The two of them had one small child, but then Mr. McClaine took work out of town, and they had to move.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, and sipped the tea.

“And now, I’m just worried sick.”

I pulled out a chair from the white kitchen table and sat down carefully. “Start from the beginning,” I suggested, knowing exactly what was coming. “You’re unhappy with a tenant?”

“Unhappy is an understatement,” Carla Champlin said, sounding pleased that I had cut to the chase in such fine fashion. “I wish I had thought to take a photograph of the place when the McClaines left. What a picture.”

“And now it’s a mess,” I said.

“You’ve seen it?”

“At a distance. I know the renter.”

“Of course you do. It’s one of your deputies.” Her expression said and that’s why I called you . When I didn’t respond instantly, she added, “I know it’s none of your affair, except something has to be done. I’m not going to stand by and watch my investment just go frittering out the window.”

“Have you talked to Deputy Pasquale?”

“I’ve driven by there endless times. He’s either not there or makes these grand, endless promises that he never keeps. He can be a charmer, that’s for sure. Have you seen the front lawn?”

“Not recently, ma’am.”

“Well, you should go look. It’s just such a shame. And everything else. If it’s green, he kills it.”

I tried my best not to smile. “Let me talk to Tom,” I said. “I’m not sure what I can do, but let me talk to him first.”

“I wish you’d do that. Perhaps he’ll be reasonable. You know, I even tried calling Judge Hobart’s office. I’ve left messages, but he hasn’t seen fit to respond. I don’t have the time or inclination or the money to go to a lawyer, Mr. Gastner. But if you can convince that young man to be reasonable, that would be such a help.”

Reasonable wasn’t the first adjective that came to my mind when someone mentioned Deputy Thomas Pasquale, but I nodded agreement, certain that the whole problem was just one of those petty things that festered in hot weather until it blistered out of all proportion.

I drained the last of the tea and stood up. “I’ll see about it,” I said, as if that were the first thing on my afternoon’s agenda.

That was the first time that Deputy Thomas Pasquale’s name was mentioned to me that day. I could put up with once. It was the nature of law enforcement that complaints were a hundred times more common than compliments. Few people enjoyed being drawn up short, whether for a routine traffic ticket or something worse. Reprimands, tickets, and jail were all ego bruisers, and lots of folks who crossed our paths in an official capacity didn’t much enjoy the experience.

It was human nature to blame the cop. If we wrote a speeding ticket to a local, we were called hard-nosed, unreasonable, and then accused of making it impossible for honest law-abiding citizens to earn their livings. If we wrote tickets to out-of-towners, we were making Posadas a speed trap, harassing the tourists and truckers, ruining the local economy.

And domestic disputes were the worst, no matter whether it was a spouse pounding on his better half or a mindless dispute over a flower bed that encroached six inches over a property line. Tempers flared, especially if they were alcohol-fueled. That’s what made me uneasy when I heard complaints like Carla Champlin’s.

Deputy Thomas Pasquale, one of our department’s youngest officers and certainly our foremost hot-rod, had garnered his share of scathing mention by citizens, despite a couple of well-publicized occasions when he’d been nothing short of a goddamn hero. It all went with the turf.

More than once I had given him a dressing-down reminiscent of the recruit ass-chewings I had delivered countless times during twenty years in the marines. To his credit, young Pasquale took the corrections in stride and learned from them, after a fashion.