Needful Things (15 page)

“All right, it never happened,” Keeton said. He spoke in a tone of overblown magnanimity, and Alan felt a familiar wave of dislike wash over him. A voice buried somewhere deep in his mind, the primitive crocodile-voice of the subconscious, spoke up briefly but clearly:
Why don't you have a heart attack, Buster? Why don't you do us all a favor and die?

“All right,” he said. “Good dea—”

“If,”
Keeton said, raising one finger.

Alan raised his eyebrows. “If?”

“If we can do something about this ticket.” He held it out toward Alan, tweezed between two fingers, as if it were a rag which had been used to clean up some dubious spill.

Alan sighed. “Come on in the office, Danforth. We'll talk about it.” He looked at Norris. “You've got the duty, right?”

“Right,” Norris said. His stomach was still in a ball. His good feelings were gone, probably for the rest of the day, it was that fat pig's fault, and Alan was going to forgive the ticket. He understood it—politics—but that didn't mean he had to like it.

“Do you want to hang around?” Alan asked. It was as close as he could come to asking,
Do you need to talk this out?
with Keeton standing right there and glowering at both of them.

“No,” Norris said. “Places to go and things to do. Talk to you later, Alan.” He left the men's room, brushing past Keeton without a glance. And although Norris did not know it, Keeton restrained, with a great—almost heroic—effort, an irrational but mighty urge to plant a foot in his ass to help him on his way.

Alan made a business of checking his own reflection in the mirror, giving Norris time to make a clean getaway, while Keeton stood by the door, watching him impatiently. Then Alan pushed out into the bullpen area again with Keeton at his heels.

A small, dapper man in a cream-colored suit was sitting in one of the two chairs outside the door to his office, ostentatiously reading a large leather-bound book which could only have been a Bible. Alan's heart sank. He had been fairly sure nothing else
too
unpleasant could happen this morning—it would be noon in only two or three minutes, so the idea seemed a reasonable one—but he had been wrong.

The Rev. William Rose closed his Bible (the binding of which almost matched his suit) and bounced to his feet. “Chief-uh Pangborn,” he said. The Rev. Rose was one of those deep-thicket Baptists who begin to twist the tails of their words when they are emotionally cranked up. “May I please speak to you?”

“Give me five minutes, please, Reverend Rose. I have a matter to attend to.”

“This is-uh extremely important.”

I bet, Alan thought. “So is this. Five minutes.”

He opened the door and ushered Keeton into his office before the Reverend Willie, as Father Brigham liked to call him, could say anything else.

“It'll be about Casino Nite,” Keeton said after Alan had closed the office door. “You mark my words. Father John Brigham is a bull-headed Irishman, but I'll take him over that fellow anytime. Rose is an incredibly arrogant prick.”

There goes the pot, calling the kettle black, Alan thought.

“Have a seat, Danforth.”

Keeton did. Alan went around his desk, held the parking ticket up, and tore it into small fragments. These he tossed into the wastebasket. “There. Okay?”

“Okay,” Keeton said, and moved to rise.

“No, sit down a moment longer.”

Keeton's bushy eyebrows drew together below his high, pink forehead in a thundercloud.

“Please,” Alan added. He dropped into his own swivel chair. His hands came together and tried to make a blackbird; Alan caught them at it and folded them firmly together on the blotter.

“We're having an appropriations committee meeting next week dealing with budgetary matters for Town Meeting in February—” Alan began.

“Damn right,” Keeton rumbled.

“—and that's a political thing,” Alan went on. “I recognize it and you recognize it. I just tore up a perfectly valid parking ticket because of a political consideration.”

Keeton smiled a little. “You've been in town long enough to know how things work, Alan. One hand washes the other.”

Alan shifted in his chair. It made its little creakings and squeakings—sounds he sometimes heard in his dreams
after long, hard days. The kind of day this one was turning out to be.

“Yes,” he said. “One hand washes the other. But only for so long.”

The eyebrows drew together again. “What does
that
mean?”

“It means that there's a place, even in small towns, where politics have to end. You need to remember that I'm not an appointed official. The selectmen may control the purse strings, but the voters elect me. And what they elect me to do is to protect them, and to preserve and uphold the law. I took the oath, and I try to hold to it.”

“Are you threatening me? Because if you are—”

Just then the mill-whistle went off. It was muted in here, but Danforth Keeton still jumped as if he had been stung by a wasp. His eyes widened momentarily, and his hands clamped down to white claws on the arms of his chair.

Alan felt that puzzlement again.
He's as skittish as a mare in heat. What the hell's wrong with him?

For the first time he found himself wondering if maybe Mr. Danforth Keeton, who had been Castle Rock's Head Selectman since long before Alan himself ever heard of the place, had been up to something that was not strictly kosher.

“I'm not threatening you,” he said. Keeton was beginning to relax again, but warily . . . as if he were afraid the mill-whistle might go off again, just to goose him.

“That's good. Because it isn't just a question of purse strings, Sheriff Pangborn. The Board of Selectmen, along with the three County Commissioners, holds right of approval over the hiring—and the firing—of Sheriff's Deputies. Among many other rights of approval I'm sure you know about.”

“That's just a rubber stamp.”

“So it has always been,” Keeton agreed. From his inside pocket he produced a Roi-Tan cigar. He pulled it between his fingers, making the cellophane crackle. “That doesn't mean it has to stay that way.”

Now
who is threatening whom? Alan thought, but did not say. Instead he leaned back in his chair and looked at Keeton. Keeton met his eyes for a few seconds, then
dropped his gaze to the cigar and began picking at the wrapper.

“The next time you park in the handicap space, I'm going to ticket you myself, and
that
citation will stand,” Alan said. “And if you ever lay your hands on one of my deputies again, I'll book you on a charge of third-degree assault. That will happen no matter how many so-called rights of approval the selectmen hold. Because politics only stretches so far with me. Do you understand?”

Keeton looked down at the cigar for a long moment, as if meditating. When he looked up at Alan again, his eyes had turned to small, hard flints. “If you want to find out just how hard my ass is, Sheriff Pangborn, just go on pushing me.” There was anger written on Keeton's face—yes, most assuredly—but Alan thought there was something else written there, as well. He thought it was fear. Did he see that? Smell it? He didn't know, and it didn't matter. But what Keeton was afraid of . . .
that
might matter. That might matter a lot.

“Do you understand?” he repeated.

“Yes,” Keeton said. He stripped the cellophane from his cigar with a sudden hard gesture and dropped it on the floor. He stuck the cigar in his mouth and spoke around it. “Do
you
understand
me?
”

The chair creaked and croaked as Alan rocked forward again. He looked at Keeton earnestly. “I understand what you're saying, but I sure as hell don't understand how you're
acting,
Danforth. We've never been best buddies, you and I—”

“That's
for sure,” Keeton said, and bit off the end of his cigar. For a moment Alan thought that was going to end up on the floor, too, and he was prepared to let it go if it did—politics—but Keeton spat it into the palm of his hand and then deposited it in the clean ashtray on the desk. It sat there like a small dog-turd.

“—but we've always had a pretty good working relationship. Now this. Is there something wrong? If there is, and I can help—”

“Nothing is wrong,” Keeton said, rising abruptly. He was angry again—more than just angry. Alan could almost see the steam coming out of his ears. “It's just that I'm so tired of this . . .
persecution.”

It was the second time he had used the word. Alan found it an odd word, an unsettling word. In fact, he found this whole conversation unsettling.

“Well, you know where I am,” Alan said.

“God,
yes!”
Keeton said, and went to the door.

“And, please, Danforth—remember about the handicap space.”

“Fuck
the handicap space!” Keeton said, and slammed out.

Alan sat behind his desk and looked at the closed door for a long time, a troubled expression on his face. Then he went around the desk, picked up the crumpled cellophane cylinder lying on the floor, dropped it into the wastebasket, and went to the door to invite Steamboat Willie in.

“Mr. Keeton looked rather upset,” Rose said. He seated himself carefully in the chair the Head Selectman had just vacated, looked with distaste at the cigar-end sitting in the ashtray, and then placed his white Bible carefully in the center of his ungenerous lap.

“Lots of appropriations meetings in the next month or so,” Alan said vaguely. “I'm sure it's a strain for all the selectmen.”

“Yes,” Rev. Rose agreed. “For Jesus-uh told us: ‘Render unto Caesar those things which are Caesar's, and render unto God those things which are God's.' ”

“Uh-huh,” Alan said. He suddenly wished he had a cigarette, something like a Lucky or a Pall Mall that was absolutely stuffed with tar and nicotine. “What can I render unto you this afternoon, R . . . Reverend Rose?” He was horrified to realize he had just come extremely close to calling the man Reverend Willie.

Rose took off his round rimless spectacles, polished them, and then settled them back in place, hiding the two small red spots high up on his nose. His black hair, plastered in place with some sort of hair potion Alan could
smell but not identify, gleamed in the light of the fluorescent grid set into the ceiling.

“It's about the abomination Father John Brigham chooses to call Casino Nite,” the Rev. Rose announced at last. “If you recall, Chief Pangborn, I came to you not long after I first heard of this dreadful idea to demand that you refuse to sanction such an event in the name-uh of decency.”

“Reverend Rose, if
you'll
recall—”

Rose held up one hand imperiously and dipped the other into his jacket pocket. He came out with a pamphlet which was almost the size of a paperback book. It was, Alan saw with a sinking heart (but no real surprise), the abridged version of the State of Maine's Code of Laws.

“I now come again,” Rev. Rose said in ringing tones, “to demand that you forbid this event not only in the name of decency
but in the name of the law!
”

“Reverend Rose—”

“This is Section 24, subsection 9, paragraph 2 of the Maine State Code of Laws,” Rev. Rose overrode him. His cheeks now flared with color, and Alan realized that the only thing he'd managed to do in the last few minutes was swap one crazy for another. “ ‘Except where noted-uh,' ” Rev. Rose read, his voice now taking on the pulpit chant with which his mostly adoring congregation was so familiar, “ ‘games of chance, as previously defined in Section 23 of the Code-uh, where wagers of money are induced as a condition of play, shall be deemed illegal.' ” He snapped the Code closed and looked at Alan. His eyes were blazing.
“Shall be deemed-uh illegal!”
he cried.

Alan felt a brief urge to throw his arms in the air and yell
Praise-uh Jeesus!
When it had passed he said: “I'm aware of those sections of the Code which pertain to gambling, Reverend Rose. I looked them up after your earlier visit to me, and I showed them to Albert Martin, who does a lot of the town's legal work. His opinion was that Section 24 does not apply to such functions as Casino Nite.” He paused, then added: “I have to tell you that was my opinion, as well.”

“Impossible!” Rose spat. “They propose to turn a house of the Lord into a gambler's lair, and you tell me
that
is
legal?”

“It's every bit as legal as the bingo games that have been going on at the Daughters of Isabella Hall since 1931.”

“This-uh is not bingo! This is roulette-uh! This is playing cards for money! This is”—Rev. Rose's voice trembled—
“dice-uh!
”

Alan caught his hands trying to make another bird, and this time he locked them together on the desk blotter. “I had Albert write a letter of inquiry to Jim Tierney, the State's Attorney General. The answer was the same. I'm sorry, Reverend Rose. I know it offends you. Me, I've got a thing about kids on skateboards. I'd outlaw them if I could, but I can't. In a democracy we sometimes have to put up with things we don't like or approve of.”

“But this is
gambling!”
Rev. Rose said, and there was real anguish in his voice. “This is
gambling for money!
How can such a thing be legal, when the Code specifically says—”

“The way they do it, it's really not gambling for money. Each . . . participant . . . pays a donation at the door. In return, the participant is given an equal amount of play money. At the end of the night, a number of prizes—not money but
prizes—
are auctioned off. A VCR, a toaster-oven, a Dirt Devil, a set of china, things like that.” And some dancing, interior imp made him add: “I believe the initial donation may even be tax deductible.”