James Sallis: Cypress Grove

“Sure thing.” I chewed my way through half a cup of it. Busy day in town. Every four or five minutes a car passed outside. The phone rang and went on ringing in the real estate office next door.

“The mayor’s mail?”

“Beg pardon?” Don Lee said.

“What you found on the body. Outgoing mail or incoming? Circulars? Bills? Bank statements? Personal letters?”

“Bills, mostly. That’s what he put out for pickup. Clipped them to the front of his mailbox with a clothespin. Same clothespin’s been out there eight or ten years.”

“His mailbox at home.”

“Right.”

“On the porch or streetside?”

“These parts, they’re all by the street.”

As Bates was pouring more coffee, a fortyish woman pulled the door open and stepped in. She stopped just inside, blinking. Ankle-length pants that had started off black and with repeated washings gone purplish gray, red-and-blue flannel shirt over maroonish T-shirt. She was tall. The shirt’s sleeves, left unbuttoned, came halfway up her forearms.

“Billie,” Don Lee said. “How you doing?”

“C. R.’s left again.”

“Honey, he’ll be back. He always comes back. You know that.”

“Not this time.”

“Course he will.”

“You think so?”

Bates walked over to her. For a moment before she looked off, their eyes met.

“Thought he liked the new job.”

“Job was okay, Sheriff. What he didn’t like was me.”

Steering her to the desk, Bates said, “You had any breakfast? I could call across, have something sent over.”

“Kids ate good this morning.”

“They always do.”

“Pancakes.”

“Billie does great pancakes,” Don Lee told me.

“Put pecans in, the way they like them.” Her eyes swept the ceiling. “Woodie has to turn in his geography project today. I made sure he packed it up safe.”

“You get any sleep, sweetheart?” Bates asked.

“I don’t think so. I made brownies, for the kids. C. R. likes them too. It was dark outside. I think maybe I burned them.”

“Don Lee, why don’t you take Billie on home, see she gets settled in. That be okay with you, Billie?”

She looked wildly about for a moment at the door, window and floor, then nodded.

“He’ll take her out by the ballpark,” Bates said once they’d left. “They’ll sit in the bleachers a while. Don’t know why, but that always seems to calm her down.”

“Is she okay?”

“Basically. You couldn’t ask for a better person. Just sometimes, every six or eight weeks, things get too much for her. Get too much for all of us sometimes, don’t they?”

I nodded.

“Been going on for three or four months, we figure-the missing mail. That’s how far in arrears the mayor’s bills had fallen. Gas, water, electric. Near as we can tell, he didn’t know.”

“Which tells us he doesn’t bother balancing his checkbook.”

“Mm-hm.”

“And service was still being provided?”

“Things don’t get shut off much ’round here. Just not the way we do it. And he’s the mayor, after all.”

“What about credit cards?”

“Looks like he paid those from the office. Those and the phone bill.”

“He works at home?”

“Town this size, there’s not a lot of mayoring needs doing. Not much call for regular office hours.”

“So why would he pay the phone bill at the office? Some reason he doesn’t want his wife seeing the bill, maybe? I assume there’s a wife.”

“Oh,” Bates said, “there’s a wife sure enough.”

“Can we get a warrant for his phone bills? Home and at the office? See who he called, who called him?”

“No need for all that.” Fie grabbed the phone and dialed, spoke a minute or two and hung up. “Faxing it over. Give her half an hour, Miss Jean says.”

“That simple.”

“Seems simple to you, does it?”

I understood. As a cop on city streets you learn to dodge, duck, go along, feint. You find out what works and you use it. Same here, just that different things worked.

“Where’s the mayor live?”

“Out on Sycamore. Far end of town.”

“Anyone else on that route have mail missing?”

“There’s only the one route. And if so, they didn’t notice.”

“Or didn’t report it.”

Mug cradled in both hands, Bates swung his chair several degrees right, right knee rising to a point northeast, then a few degrees left, right knee dipping as the left V’ed northwest. “Hard as this may be for you to believe, Detective, we did get around to asking after that. Took us a few days to think of it, most likely. Probably have it written down somewhere.”

“I don’t mean any disrespect, Sheriff. I’m only here because you asked me, doing the job you asked me to do the only way I know how.”

Our eyes met.

“All right,” he said at length.

“So you found the mayor’s mail in this guy’s pocket.”

“Right.”

“But no wallet, no identification.”

He shook his head.

“Don Lee mentioned a notebook.”

“Nothing much there, far as we could tell.”

“And he’d been holding some of this mail for what? Three, four months?”

“Right.”

“Thought he was some kind of postman,” I said.

“Undelivering mail.”

I’d known Sally Gene for two or three years. She’d done a couple of ride-alongs back when she started with Child and Family. I remember giving her a hard time, claiming she couldn’t be much older than the children she was investigating, and her saying, “You’re kidding me, right,” my partner not getting it at all. Sally Gene and I had crossed paths professionally five, six times since. What she did was to her the most important thing in the world. I think deep down it may have been the only thing she really cared about. A lot of people who are outstanding at what they do seem to be like that. The rest of us look on, at once admiring and critical; vaguely ashamed of ourselves and our wayward lives.

That Sunday, she was waiting for me outside the station house.

“Think I might get a ride, Detective?”

“Sure thing, little girl.”

She’d already cleared it with brass. Bill took one look at us coming out together, chucked me the keys, and got in back. “What the hell. So we give up an hour or two of knock-on-doors-and-ask-questions excitement.”

Recently the department had bolstered the auto pool with half a dozen new blue Plymouths. We pretended we were being sly, but two guys that looked like Joe Friday driving around in a plain car with no chrome trim, black tires and no radio were pretty obvious.

“And what lovely suburb of the city might the three of us be touring today?” Bill said.

Round about the airport, as it turned out, in those years an undeveloped region of cheap motels and eateries. We nosed down the highway that led into Mississippi and turned off into a subdivison of tiny, plain houses once part of the army base. Trucks sold pecans, watermelons and peaches at the side of the road. The smell of figs and honeysuckle was everywhere.

I stood a few paces back as Sally Gene knocked. We weren’t supposed to have much of a presence on these calls. Bill stayed by the car. I’d already had a look around. A vegetable patch ran alongside the west side beneath a double clothesline, okra, tomatoes and green peppers, all of it pretty much gone from lack of care. No car in the driveway, and what oil spills there were, were old ones. Four or five Press-Scimitars lay unrolled and unread at the back of the driveway, one near the front door, another halfway into the front yard.

The door opened. Flat, uninflected sound of TV from within. Cartoons, maybe, or a sitcom. But then I heard “Willa Cather tried in her own inimitable way… ” I watched Sally Gene’s head tilt forward and down as the door came open. A child’s face stared up at us. Twelve, maybe. Wearing a yellow nylon shirt he’d grow into in another four or five years and a serious expression.