Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

“But you do.”

“No secrets between me and Jerome. I wish there were.”

“How about you and me, Charice? Are there secrets between us?”

“Okay, but you didn’t hear this from me. The muckety-mucks in Schuyler and Bath are talking about consolidating services. Police. Fire. Garbage collection.”

“Bath doesn’t have garbage collection.”

“It will. The idea is to get rid of redundancies. One administration. A single chain of command.”

“Firing people.”

“Trimming expenses.”

“Firing people.”

“Becoming more lean and efficient.”

“Firing people. So how does Jerome fit in?”

“He’d oversee the transition. That was his master’s thesis.”

Raymer, who didn’t usually leap to cynical conclusions, did so now. “Perfect fall guy, when it doesn’t pan out. No wonder he’s having panic attacks. When people find out who’s behind all this efficiency, somebody’s going to—”

“Shoot him,” Charice finished the sentence for him. “Right. That possibility has also occurred to him. He’s actually thinking about moving back to North Carolina.”

“Would you go, too?” he said, suppressing the urge to beg her not to.

“Come out from behind this desk, you mean? Go someplace else where I could maybe do some real police work?”

It made Raymer’s head swim, all of it. “Will Bath even have a chief of police?”

“Unclear.”

“And Gus supports this?”

“His idea, is my impression. Remember his campaign slogan? Let’s be Schuyler Springs ?”

“Fuck him,” Raymer barked, surprised at how strong his feelings were about this.

The long moment of silence this occasioned made him wonder if maybe Gus was actually standing there next to Charice’s desk. Had he been listening to the whole conversation? Maybe he and Charice had made some sort of pact to keep tabs on him.

“Chief?” she said.

“Yeah?” he said, clearing his throat.

“Was that you? Who just said ‘Fuck him’?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

—

“YOU AGAIN,” the man said, when Raymer reappeared. “I thought you was gone.”

“You know Roy Purdy, Mr. Hynes? Moved into the Arms a couple weeks ago?”

“What he look like?”

“Skinny. Tattoos,” Raymer said. “His neck’s in a brace.”

“Live with that nice Cora woman?”

“I wondered, did you see him over at Gert’s yesterday?”

“People here all hangin’ out at Gert’s. I don’t pay ’em no mind.”

“I meant out back. In the parking lot. You’ve got a good view of that from here.”

“So?”

“Remember the tall black man I was with yesterday?”

“One with that shiny red car? Somebody ruint his paint job, I heard.”

“Did you see who did that, Mr. Hynes?”

“My eyes don’t do too good from a distance.”

“How about closer up, though. You were sitting right about where you are now. You didn’t by any chance see Roy Purdy come walking out of that alley, did you?”

“Would I be getting the boy in trouble if I said so?”

Raymer thought about lying but decided not to. “It’s possible,” he said.

“Good,” said Mr. Hynes. “ ’Cause I ’spect he the one peein’ in the stairwell.”

That sounded about right to Raymer as well.

“I got it narrowed down,” the old man said. “It either him or you.”

—

A LUNATIC. That’s what he looked like in the grainy newspaper photo. Taken from the kitchen window below Charice’s, it caught Raymer at the moment the column detached from the porch above, his surprise at this unexpected turn of events having registered at just that instant. He’d been shinnying down, of course, but judging from the photo, he might as easily have been climbing up, a home-invading burglar. His bruised, swollen face looked like some sort of visual prediction of the damage done by a fall that hadn’t yet occurred. The caption read: What’s up, Chief?

Studying himself, a middle-aged man clinging for dear life to a load-bearing post, he again recalled the question Miss Beryl had pestered him with on his essays all those years ago: Who is this Douglas Raymer? Who, indeed? Three-plus decades later he still had no answer for her. Worse, he had just forty-eight hours to come up with one. At the moment all three sides of the old woman’s beloved rhetorical triangle remained blank. He couldn’t think of a single thing to say about his former teacher, couldn’t bring his audience into sharp focus. How many of these people would even remember her? Would those few who did think of her fondly? If so, would they hold his many personal and professional failures against her? After all, if she was such a great teacher, how had she managed to turn out a man who campaigned for chief of police on the slogan We’re not happy until you’re not happy ?

Tossing the newspaper into the wastebasket, he looked up and saw the cobra, hooded and erect, atop a nearby filing cabinet. He stared at it transfixed, then hit the intercom. “Charice?” he said.

She came on the speaker immediately. “Chief? I didn’t see you come in.”

“I snuck in the back. Could you come in here a minute?”

When the door opened two seconds later, he pointed at the cobra. “How’d that get in here?”

“Huh,” she said, going over to it.

“Try harder,” he suggested.

“It looks very real.”

“That was my thought. My heart’s still pounding.”

She took the statue down and examined it. “Ceramic?”

“If you say so. This office was locked yesterday when I left.”

“Hold on,” she said, narrowing her eyes at him. “Are you saying I put it there?”

“I’m asking who else has a key.”

“Chief. Cops work here. And know how to unlock doors without keys.”

“I don’t,” he pointed out, for the record.

“I’m not talking about you, ” she said, leading Raymer to question was this a compliment or an insult. “Also, lots of criminals are in and out of this station. Might’ve been one of them.”

“I was wondering about Jerome. If maybe this was his idea of a joke.”

“Jerome has an alibi. He was at the hospital all night. Sedated. Besides, like I told you. Jerome’s scared to death of snakes. Even ceramic ones.”

“Maybe he had an accomplice.”

“So I am a suspect?”

“I’d like to rule you out.”

“I got an alibi, too. Last night? I was with the chief of police himself.”

“Not all night.”

“Damn straight,” she agreed.

“And you got here before me this morning.”

“Chief?”

“Yes, Charice.”

“I don’t know where the fucking snake came from.”

“Would you write my Beryl Peoples tribute for me? For the middle-school rededication? Because if you’d do that, in return I’d be willing to believe you had nothing to do with this.”

“Not a chance. Never even met the lady.”

They regarded each other with what seemed to Raymer like a bottomless well of mutual disappointment, until she finally said, “Put who back where he was?”

“Sorry?”

“When I told you that you were on the front page of the Dumbocrat, you said you’d put him back where he was.”

“I did?”

“Somebody called the station early this morning. And the mayor, too. Reporting that Judge Flatt was being disinterred.”

“Really?”

“Means ‘dug up.’ ”

“I know what it means, Charice.”

“And you did admit to being out there at Hilldale getting zapped by lightning.”

“Charice?”