Sue Grafton - L is for Lawless

As a child I was raised with the same kind of white bread, which had the following amazing properties: If you mashed it, it instantly reverted to its unbaked state. A loaf of this bread, inadvertently squished at the bottom of a grocery bag, was permanently injured and made very strange-shaped sandwiches. On the plus side, you could roll it into little pellets and flick them across the table at your aunt when she wasn't looking. If one of these bread boogers landed in her hair, she would slap at it, irritated, thinking it was a fly. I can still remember the first time I ate a piece of the neighbor's homemade white bread, which seemed as coarse and dry as a cellulose sponge. It smelled like empty beer bottles, and if you gripped it, you couldn't even see the dents your fingers made in the crust.

The air in the kitchen was now scented with browning bologna, which was curling up around the edges to form a little bowl with butter puddled in the center. I could feel myself getting dizzy from the sensory overload. I said, "I'll pay you four hundred dollars if you fix me one of those."

Chester glanced at me sharply, and for the first time, he smiled. "You want toasted?"

"You're the chef. It's your choice," I said.

While we chowed down, I decided to satisfy my curiosity as well. "What sort of work do you do back in Columbus?"

He snapped back the last of his sandwich like a starving dog, wiping his mouth on a paper napkin before he responded. "Own a little print shop in Bexley. Offset and letterpress. Cold and hot type. Brochures, flyers, business cards, custom stationery. I can collate, fold, bind, and staple. You name it. I just hired a guy looks after the place when I'm gone. He does good I'll let him buy me out. Time I did something else. I'm too young to retire, but I'm tired of working for a living."

"What would you do, come out here to live?" Chester fired up a cigarette, a Camel, unfiltered, that smelled like burning hay. "Don't know yet. I grew up in this town, but I left as soon as I turned eighteen. Pappy came out here in 1945, which is when he bought this place. He always said he'd be in this house until the sheriff or the undertaker hauled him out by his feet. Him and me never could get along. He's rough as a cob, and talk about child abuse. You never heard about that in the old days. I know a lot of guys got knocked around back then. That's just what dads did. They came home from the factory, sucked down a few beers, and grabbed the first kid came handy. I been punched and kicked, flung against the wall, and called every name in the book. If I got in trouble, he'd make me pace until I dropped, and if I uttered one word of protest, he'd douse my tongue with Tabasco sauce. I hated it, hated my old man for doing it, but I just thought that's the way life was. Now all you have to do is pop a kid across the face in public, you're up on charges, buddy, looking at jail time. Foster home for the kid and the whole community up in arms."

"I guess some things change for the better," I remarked.

"You got that right. I vowed I'd never treat my kids that way, and that's a promise I kept. I never once raised a hand to 'em." I looked at him, waiting for some rueful acknowledgment of his own abusiveness, but he didn't seem to make the connection. I moved the subject over slightly. "Your father died of a heart attack?"

Chester took a drag of his cigarette, removing a piece of tobacco from his tongue. "Keeled over in the yard. Doctor told him he better lay off the fat. He sat down one Saturday to a big plate of bacon and eggs, fried sausages, and hashed browns, four cups of coffee, and a cigarette. He pushed his chair back, said he wasn't feeling so hot, and headed out to his place. Never even reached the stairs. 'Coronary occlusion' is the term they used. Autopsy showed an opening in his artery no bigger than a thread."

"I take it you don't think his death is related to the break-in."

"I don't think he was murdered, if that's what you're getting at, but there might be some connection. Indirectly," he said. He studied the ember on the end of his cigarette. "You have to understand something about my old man. He was paranoid. He liked passwords and secret knocks, all this double-o-seven rigmarole. There were things he didn't like to talk about, the war being foremost. Once in a while, if he was tanked up on whiskey, he'd rattle off at the mouth, but you ask him a question and he'd clam right up."

"What do you think it was?"

"Well, I'm getting to that, but let me point this out first. You see, it strikes me as odd, this whole sequence of events. Old guy dies and that should have been the end of it. Except Bucky gets the bright idea of applying for these benefits, and that's what tips 'em off."

"Tips who?"

"The government."

"The government," I said.

He leaned forward, lowering his voice. "I think my old man was hiding from the feds."

I stared at him. "Why?"

"Well, I'll tell you. All the years since the war? He never once applied for benefits: no disability, no medical, no GI Bill. Now why is that?"

"I give up."

He smiled slightly, unperturbed by the fact that I wasn't buying in. "Clown around if you like, but take a look at the facts. We fill out a claim form… all the information's correct… but, first, they say they have no record of him, which is bullshit. Fabrication, pure and simple. What do you mean, they don't have a record of him? This is nonsense. Of course they do. Will they admit it? No ma'am. You following? So I get on the phone to Randolph – that's the Air Force base where all the files are kept – and I go through the whole routine again. And I get stonewalled, but good. So I call the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. No deal. Never heard of him. Then I call Washington, D.C… we're talking the Pentagon here. Nothing. No record. Well, I'm being dense. I'm not getting it myself. All I know to do is raise six kinds of hell. I make it clear we're serious about this. A lousy three hundred dollars, but I don't give a good goddamn. I'm not going to let it drop. The man served his country and he's entitled to a decent burial. What do I get? Same deal. They don't know nothin' from nothin'. Then we have this." He jerked a thumb toward the garage apartment. "See what I'm saying?"

"No."

"Well, think about it."

I waited. I didn't have the faintest idea what he was getting at.

He took a deep drag from his cigarette. "You want to know what I think?" He paused, creating drama, maximizing the effect. "I think it took 'em this long to get some boys out here to find out how much we knew."

This sentence was so loaded, I couldn't figure out which part to parse first. I tried not to sound exasperated. "About what?"

"About what he did during the war," he said, as though to a nitwit. "I think the old man was military intelligence."

"A lot of guys worked in military intelligence. So what?"

"That's right. But he never admitted it, never said a word. And you know why? I think he was a double agent."

"Oh, stop this. A spy?"

"In some capacity, yes. Information gathering. I think that's why his records are sealed."

"You think his records are sealed. And that's why you can't get verification from the VA," I said, restating his point.

"Bull's-eye." He pointed a finger at me and gave me a wink, as though I'd finally picked up the requisite IQ points.

I looked at him blankly. This was beginning to feel like one of those discussions with a UFO fanatic, where the absence of documentation is taken for proof of government suppression. "Are you saying he worked for the Germans, or spied on them for our side?"

"Not the Germans. The Japanese. I think he might have worked for 'em, but I can't be sure. He was over in Burma. He admitted that much."