Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

“I did. He said it’s important.”

“Tell him to go fuck himself,” Dougie barked.

The radio crackled but otherwise was silent.

“Sorry about that,” Raymer said. What troubled him most about Dougie’s unwelcome interruptions was that they were beginning to feel like a natural physical impulse — a hiccup or one of those irritating dry coughs that wouldn’t go away. “I’m sorry. Lack of sleep. Where is he?”

“Out at Hilldale. He said something about the dead being on the move again. Does that make any sense to you?”

Raymer actually heard only the first part. When she said “Hilldale,” it reminded him of something that had been nagging him ever since he’d left the cemetery. But what? Something to do with the garage remote? He tried to concentrate and tug whatever was hiding in the back of his brain forward into the front, but the signal was too weak and managed to make the buzzing in his ears grow louder.

“Chief? You there?”

“Sorry, I was thinking.”

“So you’re heading out there? To Hilldale?”

“Eventually.”

“Chief?”

“What, Charice?”

“You’re scaring me.”

There was a knock on the window, and Raymer jumped. Oh, it was just Karen, the clerk. “Sorry,” she said, “but I just remembered something else. When the van pulled out? It was making this funny scraping noise.”

“You could hear that inside with the door closed?”

“A customer happened to be leaving right then, so it was open. It was kind of a screech. Like—”

“Metal on a tire?”

“Yeah, like that.”

—

HAROLD PROXMIRE, sole proprietor of Harold’s Automotive World since his wife’s death, was busy prying a crumpled section of panel away from a cargo van’s front tire when Raymer pulled in.

“I had a feeling,” he said when Raymer came over and showed him his badge. They stood regarding the vehicle Harold had bought a couple hours earlier. “Stolen?”

“I have no idea,” Raymer confessed, “but there’s a pretty good chance it was involved in a hit-and-run on County Road last night.”

“Who got hit?”

“A man named Gaghan.”

Harold shook his head. “I don’t think I know him. Dead?”

“Amazingly, no. At least not yet.”

“I wondered when I saw that reflector was missing,” Harold said, pointing at the side panel. “The guy claimed his kid drove the thing into a ditch, but it’s got Georgia plates, and that’s a long ways off. There wasn’t any blood that I could see.”

“He visited the car wash before he came here.”

“There was something wrong about him,” Harold said.

“How so?”

“Just an idea that struck me as soon as he got out of the van,” Harold said. “It was like he hadn’t made up his mind about something. It’s just me and the kid — Andy — working this morning, and he was around back smoking…well, smoking. So it’s just me and this guy and his eyes keep wandering around the yard, like, I don’t know, maybe he wants to make sure it’s just him and me. Then Andy appears, and I see something change behind his eyes. Like he made up his mind right then to sell me the van.”

“Instead of?”

“Who knows?” Harold shrugged, ashamed of himself, Raymer could tell. “I don’t normally have such thoughts. It’s probably the…”

“The what?”

“I’m kind of ashamed to admit it.”

“I’m not here about you, Mr. Proxmire, if that helps.”

“It does, a little. I’ve got this thing growing in my head. A cyst. Fibrous, they say, not cancer. But they can’t operate. Anyway, I get these headaches.”

“And smoking dope helps.”

“It does. A little, anyways. I know the kid shouldn’t be smoking, but I can’t very well tell him he can’t when I do. Without him I wouldn’t even know how to get it.”

“I assume there’s paperwork on this vehicle?”

“There is. I’m on the up-and-up here, mostly.”

“Mostly?”

“Well, this is the car business.”

Harold’s office was the living room of a single-wide mobile home. He handed Raymer the van’s title, which he hadn’t even had time to file yet. Raymer wasn’t sure what a title issued by the state of Georgia was supposed to look like, but something felt off about the weight of the paper this particular document was printed on. The owner was identified as Mark Ringwald.

“How much did you give him?”

“Thirteen hundred. I told him the van was shot, even before this latest accident. Over two hundred thousand miles. I’d basically be using it for parts. I figured he’d want to dicker, but he didn’t. He seemed more interested in me paying in cash. That should’ve made me suspicious right there.”

“You keep that kind of cash around?”

Harold pointed to an ancient safe in the corner. “Have to, in this business.”

“So how’d he leave? In a taxi?”

“Andy gave him a lift in the tow truck.”

“To Bath?”

“Schuyler. The train station. Said he needed to be in Albany by early afternoon.”

“And this was when?”

“Couple hours ago?”

“Is this Andy still here?”

They went outside and Harold hollered for the boy, who appeared from in between rows of junkers. Raymer could smell the marijuana on him from thirty feet away.

“Yo,” he said, eyeing Raymer nervously.

Harold regarded the kid and sighed deeply. “Andy,” he said, “the person you’re addressing here is Mr. Raymer. He’s the chief of police in Bath.”

The boy stood up straighter. “Oh,” he said. “Yo, sir. ”

“He wants to ask you about the man who sold us the van.”

Now it was the kid’s turn to sigh. “All I bought was a couple ounces. For my own personal use, I swear.” His eyes flickered over to Harold for just a second, then returned to Raymer.

“Andy?” Raymer said, kind of liking the kid. He might be a stoner, but he’d just had the opportunity to throw his boss under the bus and he hadn’t.

“Yeah?”

“For future reference? It’s better not to answer questions until they’re asked.”

“Yeah, okay,” the boy said. “I can see how that would work.” But then he surprised him by taking a quick step backward and pointing at Raymer’s hand. “Dude,” he said. “Are you, like, a holy man?”

His palm, Raymer realized, was bleeding. Apparently he’d been scratching it again, and the fingernails of his left hand were rust colored. “Far from it,” Raymer assured him. “So, Mr. Proxmire says you took the owner of the van to the train station.”

The kid nodded but kept staring at Raymer’s hand, even when he turned the palm away. “Bill, yeah.”

“He told you his name was Bill?”

“Yeah.”

Raymer put the hand behind his back, which caused the kid to blink and then finally meet his eye. “What’d you talk about?”

“I told him the bus was way cheaper, but he said he had a thing for trains.”

“What else?”

He glanced at Harold again. “He offered me a job if I wanted to come with him.”

“Doing?”

“Steady work, was all he said. But I told him I’m not really, like, allowed to leave the county. And he said, ‘You gonna spend your whole life doing what other people say?’ and I said, ‘No, but like I’m really not allowed to leave the county,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, you mentioned that,’ and I said, ‘What’s in the box?’ because he’d set his backpack on the floor, but he was holding this box on his knees like it was real important and he wanted me to ask what it was, so I did, and he said if I came to work for him maybe he’d tell me, but I said, ‘I’m not kidding, if I leave the county I’m in, like, mega-trouble,’ and he said, ‘That’s three times now you’ve told me that,’ and I said, ‘Here we are, this is the train station.’ ”