William Landay - Mission Flats

‘Look, the guy died in my town,’ I told him. ‘And like I said, I met him once. I’m just saying, I’d like to be in the loop, that’s all. I’m supposed to be the chief here.’

The Game-Show Host nodded to signal he understood. ‘Okay, sure, we’ll keep you in the loop.’ But his expression said, I understand. You’re supposed to be the chief and it wouldn’t look good if all these flatlanders swooped in and chased you off your own case. So I’ll humor you, I’ll let you hang around awhile.

Kurth straightened up from examining the corpse. ‘Officer, does the press have the story?’

‘The press?’

‘Yes, the press — newspapers, TV.’

‘No, I know what the press is. It’s just, we don’t really have a press here. There’s a newspaper, but it’s more of a community thing. David Cornwell puts it out by himself. It’s the schools and the weather mostly. The rest he just makes up.’

‘Don’t give him any information,’ Kurth ordered.

‘Well, I have to tell him something. In a town like this-’

‘Then withhold the details. Or get him to. Will he do that?’

‘I guess so. I’ve never asked.’

‘Ask.’

And that was as much conversation as Edmund Kurth cared to lavish on me. He snapped off the gloves, dropped them on the gurney, and stalked off without a word.

‘Mr Kurth,’ I called to him.

Kurth paused.

I stood there blinking at him. A sentence made its way to the back of my throat but no farther: It’s Chief Truman, not Officer. ‘Never mind,’ I said.

Kurth hesitated. I imagine he was weighing whether to ignore me completely or tear out my heart and show it to me still beating. In the end, he just gave a little nod and moved on.

‘Have a nice day,’ I murmured, once he was out of earshot.

In a few minutes the caravan of official vehicles — cruisers, late-model Tauruses, a modified camper marked CRIME SCENE SERVICES, a black van from the Medical Examiner’s office — started their engines and pulled away. The clearing around the cabin was quiet again. The loons were rhonking over the lake.

Dick Ginoux appeared out of the gloomy woods. It occurred to me he’d been hiding there until the strangers left. He came over and stood beside me as the parade rumbled away down the access road. He shuffled the pine needles with his feet. ‘What do we do now, Chief?’

‘I don’t know, Dick.’

Kurth was wrong about one thing: You could not keep the case quiet, not in a place like this. There are no secrets in Versailles, Maine. Information shoots around the town like tremors over a spider’s web. Details of the murder began to emerge the same day, and within twenty-four hours most Versellians had a pretty good idea what we’d found in that cabin. Thankfully, people around here don’t scare easily, and the case excited more curiosity than fear. It was the hot topic at the Owl and McCarron’s. The morning after the body was discovered, Jimmy Lownes sidled up to me at the Owl and confided that he ‘knew a little about guns,’ if I was interested. Bobby Burke pleaded for a look-see inside the cabin. No one was immune.

‘Tell me what it looked like,’ Diane prodded.

This was at our poker game, a quarter-ante affair that met at the station to help me pass the Sunday-night shift. Diane was usually the most serious player at the table. She chain-smoked Merits, played conservatively, and rarely lost when she did go after a big pot. But tonight even Diane was distracted, even she had the bug.

‘Tell you what what looked like?’

‘The body.’

‘It musta been the gormiest thing,’ Jimmy Lownes snorted. He took off his ball cap to scratch his head in wonder.

‘I can’t talk about it.’

‘What do you mean, you can’t talk about it?’ Diane was offended. ‘The whole town is talking about it! You’re the only one who isn’t.’

‘I can’t. They told me to keep my mouth shut.’

‘Oh, Ben, you are such a wuss.’

‘Hey, are we playing poker or not?’ I scolded.

Of course, they did not give a rat’s ass about poker, but it would have been unseemly to abandon the game altogether, so they acquiesced, albeit with murmurs of reluctance.

‘Alright, that’s better. Seven-card stud, roll your own-’

‘I bet it was stiff as a board.’

‘Jesus, Jimmy, I just got through saying. We’re not talking about this.’

‘I’m not asking you anything, Ben. I’m just saying: I bet it was stiff as a board.’

‘Ai-yi-yi, how should I know if it was stiff? I didn’t feel the thing!’ I dealt the cards, sensing their eyes on me. ‘Jimmy, it’s your bet.’

‘Did it smell?’

‘Your bet.’

Jimmy checked, and the rest of the table promptly did the same. They barely glanced at their cards.

‘Alright, dealer bets two bucks.’ I tossed in two blue chips.

‘What, you can’t even tell us if it smelled?’

‘Alright, yes, Diane, it smelled.’

‘No, but what did it smell like?’

‘You really want to know what it smelled like?’

She put her cards down, exasperated. ‘Yes. I really do.’

‘I tell you what,’ Dick said, apropos of nothing, ‘The Chief never had a murder case.’

My father had retired, reluctantly, in 1995, but even two years later when people referred to The Chief, they meant him, not me.

‘Dick,’ I explained, ‘The Chief never worked a murder because nobody ever got murdered. It doesn’t make me anything special.’

‘Well now, I didn’t say you were anything special, Ben. I just said The Chief never had a case like this one.’

‘Jimmy, it’s two bucks to stay in.’

‘What are you gonna do now?’ Diane pressed.

‘We’re waiting for the AG to sort out what they found in the cabin.’

‘You’re just gonna wait? That’s crazy.’

‘Most murders are solved in the first twenty-four hours, you know, Ben.’ This was Bobby Burke with one of his signature factoids.

‘Look, this isn’t the Hardy Boys. You can’t just run out and investigate a murder on your own, just because you want to. There’s laws. The AG has jurisdiction. It’s not my case.’

‘Well it happened here,’ Bobby retorted.

‘And you found the body, Ben.’

‘Doesn’t matter. Not my case.’

‘The Chief would have grabbed it,’ Dick tossed in. ‘You could ask him to help you out, like a — whaddaya call it? — a consultant.’

I rolled my eyes. ‘I don’t need help that bad. Besides, he wouldn’t work for me.’

‘Did you ever ask him?’

I answered with a non sequitur. ‘Hey, do any of you guys know where he might have got a beer?’

‘Claude had a beer?’

‘One of those big bottles. Where did he get it?’

‘Could have got it anywhere. It’s just beer.’

‘It’s not just beer. If you hear who sold it to him, you let me know.’

‘What are you going to do? Arrest somebody for selling your old man a beer?’

‘I’m going to have a talk with him is all.’

‘Well,’ Dick sighed, steering us back to an older, hardier image of my father, ‘The Chief wouldn’t have listened to some smartass yuppie lawyer. No, sir. I’d like to see that kid tell your old man, “It’s not your case.” The Chief would have given him what-for.’

‘Dick, he’d have listened because he had to listen, same as I am.’

‘Well,’ Diane retorted, ‘your mother wouldn’t have listened.’ She exhaled cigarette smoke. ‘Why would she listen to some lawyer? She never listened to anyone else.’

There was a pregnant moment while the four of them waited to see how I would react to that. There was some risk in mentioning my mother. In the ten weeks since she’d died, I had wrapped myself up in righteous Yankee stoicism. Never mind that my grief carried something extra, a tinge of guilt and shame — more than the usual dose. But to my own surprise, Diane’s comment did not trigger any of the old sadness. We were thinking the same thing: If the Game-Show Host had ever tried to put off Annie Truman with the high-handedness he’d shown me…