John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“More important,” Mullen said. He stood staring.

“Maybe there was a wreck that afternoon, or a fight somewhere, or maybe it was the day we raided—” He checked himself. He couldn’t think of a place they’d raided in a month. He tried to think when it was they’d arrested the Sunlight Man.

Mayor Mullen walked over to the Barcalounger and leaned one hand on the back, pushing it down. After a long moment he said, “You retire next year, that right, Fred?”

“October.”

“Been a long career,” Mullen said. “A lot of people look up to you with a whole lot of respect.”

Clumly waited. The Mayor gazed at the wall where there were no pictures, absolutely blank, the wall to the left of the door as you came in. It was the wall you didn’t see as you entered the room: so that when you came in you saw photographs, a window, chairs, plants on the windowsill and cabinet (dead), but when you went out you saw nothing, a dirty yellow wall as empty as a grave.

The Mayor said, “Fred, you got to put your house in order. This is no time to snap. Talking frankly to you. I think of you as a personal friend, a man I’ve been proud to have on my team. I mean that. Every word.”

Clumly turned his head back to the desk. It gave him a crick in his neck to be constantly twisting around to follow the Mayor with his eyes wherever he roamed. The Mayor came up behind him and put his hand on his shoulder, firm.

“I’m pulling for you, Fred. Now you know I am. And every man on the Police Force is pulling for you. Yessir. But if all this keeps up, complaints keep coming, if I have to go before that City Council—” He pointed toward the Chamber—“and I have to tell them Fred Clumly’s not getting the paperwork done, well … I hope it won’t come to that. I believe it won’t come to that.” Suddenly, ferociously, he exclaimed, “More coffee, Fred?”

Clumly started, thinking for an instant of the girl Rosemary with the henna-red hair, and Kozlowski running the toe of his boot back and forth along the crack in the floor. “No no,” he said. “No coffee. I’m fine. Fine.”

“Suit yourself,” Mullen said. Then, solemnly: “I’m glad we had this little talk.”

Clumly nodded, getting up.

“Heard a funny story,” Mayor Mullen said as he showed him to the door. “You’ll die at this one. Lady told her three lovers whichever one brought her the most ping-pong balls could have her hand in marriage.”

“I heard it,” Clumly said.

“Seems the first lover went to the grocery store, and the second lover went to the sporting goods store, and the third lover went to Africa.”

Clumly shaped the end of the half-smoked cigar between his thumb and first finger, his eyes tacked to it.

“Well the first lover that went to the grocery store comes back with a hundred ping-pong balls, and the second lover that went to the sporting goods store comes back with a thousand ping-pong balls, but all the one that comes back from Africa has got is two big brown bloody balls. Are these ping-pong balls? the lady says. Ping-pong balls, he says, I thought you said King Kong’s balls!” The Mayor roared. Tears ran down his cheeks. “Well, Fred, I be seeing you,” he said. “Walk on the bright side. Grin and bear it.”

“Good night,” Clumly said. His heels clicked loudly on the wooden floor of the long empty hallway. Behind him Mayor Mullen went on laughing, filling the corridor with quick, dusky echoes like bats.

When Clumly got back to the station, at quarter-after-six, a paper bag of hamburgers tucked under his arm, a guilty sensation like suffocation inside him, Miller was still at his desk, chin-deep in papers, and Mickey Salvador was working on the police radio speaker with a screwdriver, whistling to himself. Clumly drew off his hat. “Any excitement?” he said.

“Like a tomb,” Miller said. He looked at the paper sack and, after thinking about it, grinned. “You, Chief? Any news?”

“Nothing,” he said.

Miller said, “Got a minute?”

“Come on in.” He opened the door to his office and went in. He sat down, motioned Miller to the chair across from him. “What’s on your mind, son?” The word son rang oddly in his ears. They’d worked just fine together all these years, he and Miller. If he had had a son, Miller was the kind of man he’d want him to be. But he felt slightly worried in Miller’s presence. He would be his replacement, if they forced him to resign. It was even possible that behind his back … But he checked himself. It came to him that there were things missing from the clutter on his desk. Miller had picked them up, then. Miller was helping out again, covering for him. It made him feel sick. Clumly had done the same for Miller, picked up some of his work when he was crowded. There was nothing unusual in that, no reason for Miller to sit there grinning too gently, pitying him. We all work together. You can’t run a Force without mutual respect. Watchdogs. (“Cowdogs, you mean,” Kozlowski had said.) He winced and opened the sack.

Miller stretched out his legs. “It’s nothing much,” he said. “A couple of things. One is this kid Salvador. I tried to talk to him.”

“Mmm?”

He opened his hands. “I don’t know. That is, nothing specific. Makes me nervous. He wants to be loved. Know what I mean?”

Clumly scowled.

“It’s this. He’s easygoing, gets into these long conversations with the bears. Long talk with the Indians this afternoon — kidding around with them, big friend of the family. I let him finish with ’em, and then I laid down the law — to them, not him: No more talk. One word back there in the cells and I said I’d brain the whole crowd of ’em. It’s your buddy the Sunlight Man mainly. Keeps getting at the Injuns, working ’em up. So I tell them to stow it. New policy. Pretty soon I hear them back there chattering again and I go back and guess who’s right up to his nose in it. Salvador.”

Clumly nodded and bit into the first of the hamburgers. He was feeling guilty now about not having offered Miller one. It wasn’t too late even now, but he didn’t. “He’ll get slugged for his trouble. After they’ve knocked him on his can once, he’ll see reason.”

“Yeah. Still—”

“You’re as jumpy as I am,” Clumly said. He smiled wryly.

Miller looked at the front of Clumly’s desk. “It’s true,” he said. “Tired. Maybe I should go home and knock up the old lady or beat the dog or something.” He smiled, and now he relaxed for a moment, but soon his eyes became thoughtful. “There’s something in the air, you know it? It’s like a smell.” He tipped his head back to look at the ceiling, thinking. “You want to know the truth? I keep hearing things. Somebody digging a tunnel right under us, or some kind of prehistoric monster waking up, down under the ground, scratching to get out.”

“You need a good stiff whiskey.”

“You telling me?”

Clumly hunted up his pencil and wrote himself a note about Salvador. “I’ll talk to him,” he said.

“Yeah, good.” He started to get up.

“There was something else too?”

“I guess so.” He mused, then stood up, pushed his fists down into his pockets, and leaned toward Clumly. “I know how to nail our thief — Walter Boyle.” He drew his right hand from his pocket and snapped his fingers.

“How?” He happened to break wind as he spoke, but not noticeably.

Miller pivoted away and went to the window. The sky was red now. “You ever hear of a paragnost, Chief?” When Clumly said nothing, he went on, “It’s a guy who knows things it’s impossible to know. The future, the past, what people around him are thinking.”

“A mind reader.”

He nodded. “Sort of. Anyhow, we got one right in our hands. Your Sunlight Man may be a lot of things, and some things he may not be, but one thing he is for sure is one of them. Listen.” He turned suddenly and crossed to the file to the right of Clumly’s desk and opened the drawer. He shuffled through the confusion of papers that lay flat in the drawer and pounced on one of the tapes. He cocked his eyebrow, reading the label on the tape, then drew the tape out and threaded it through the machine. “This is from day before yesterday,” he said. He played with the buttons, running the peeping, babbling tape through the spools until he found the place he wanted. “There,” he said. “Listen.” They bent over the machine.