Shallow Graves (14 page)

Billy called, “Hey, Ned, would you get a hard-on kissing Lisa Bonet?”

“I get a hard-on
looking
at Lisa Bonet.”

“Hot as hell in here,” Billy said. He took off his shirt and wiped sweat from his face with it. Underneath he wore a sleeveless T-shirt. “Hey, Ned, you’re one strong dude. See if you can turn the heat down.”

The boy pulled off his red and white jacket and dropped it on the bed. He wrestled with the radiator knob for five minutes until he was crimson-faced from the effort.

“Damn, it’s frozen.”

“Aw, forget it,” Bobby said. “We’ll just sweat.” He unbuttoned his shirt to his navel—no tee underneath—and flapped it to cool himself. The twins dropped into the room’s two chairs. Ned started to sit on the floor but Billy said, “Naw, take the place of honor.” He nodded at the bed and Ned flopped onto the spongy mattress. Bobby handed him another beer. They watched TV for a half hour.

Bobby said, “Hey, you want to try something?”

Ned said, “I guess. I don’t know.”

Bobby pulled an envelope out of his pocket, a small manilla envelope. He rattled it. “Surprise.”

“What’s that?” the boy asked.

He opened the envelope and showed the contents to the boy.

“The hell’s that?”

Inside were two dozen bits that looked like rock candy.

“It’s sweet,” Bobby said.

Billy gently shook the envelope until three or four spilled into the boy’s hand. He lifted them and smelled.

“Don’t smell like much.”

“Yep.”

“We’re gonna eat fucking candy?”

“Sure, why not?”

Billy and Bobby each took one. The boy lifted his palm to his lips but they touched his wrist. Billy on the right, Bobby on the left. “Uh-uh. Just one at a time.”

“Huh?”

“Just one.”

The boy dropped the others back into the envelope. Then lifted the single crystal to his mouth. He ate it slowly.

“It
is
sweet. It’s—” He stopped speaking. His eyes went wide then suddenly his lids drooped. “Man,” he whispered. “This is totally fresh. Man.” He brushed at his ears as if they were clogged, a dumb grin on his face. “What the fuck is this?” His words faded into a giggle. “Man. Excellent.”

They knew what was happening—how the soft cotton was expanding into the crevices of his mind, the warmth, the coming feeling starting at the fingertips and flowing along the skin like a woman lying slowly, slowly down on your body, dissolving into a warm liquid, flowing, melting . . .

“You happy?” Bobby asked.

The boy giggled. “Man.” He opened his mouth and inhaled as if he were tasting air.

Billy caught his brother’s eye and a slight nod passed between them. Bobby closed up the envelope and slipped it into the boy’s jeans pocket, where his hand lingered for a long moment.

THE THIRD ON
his list.

The R&W Trading Post on Route 9, which the poker-playing boys had been kind enough to suggest to him, was the one. The time was 9
A.M.
and a faded sign promised the place was open.

Pellam parked the camper in the small lot and walked back along the shoulder, which was gravelly and strewn with flattened Bud cans and cello wrappers from junk food. Occasional cars and pickups zipped past and he felt the snap of their slipstream.

The Trading Post stretched away behind a gray, broken stockade fence, which was decorated with some of the artifacts that were waiting to be traded: a rusted Mobil gas sign, a blackface jockey hitching post, a cracked wagon wheel, a whiskey aging barrel, an antique wheelbarrow, a dozen hubcaps, a bent plow, a greasy treadle sewing machine mechanism. If R&W had put the premier items here in the window Pellam wasn’t too eager to see what lay behind the fence.

But that didn’t interest him anyway. What had caught his attention was what rested at the far end of the lot, where the chain-link gate opened onto the
secrets of the Trading Post: the rental car responsible for Marty’s death.

There was a small shack in front of the fence. It leaned to the left at a serious angle, like a Dogpatch residence. When Pellam knocked no one answered. He strolled over to the jetsam of the car.

The wreck was scary, the way bad ones always are—seeing the best Detroit can do, no longer glossy and hard, but twisted, with stretch marks deep in the steel. The front half was pretty much intact but in the back the paint was all blistered or missing and it was filled with black, melted plastic. Pellam could see the gas tank had blown up. The metal had bent outward like foil. Inside of the car nothing remained of the seats except springs and one or two black tufts of upholstery, sour as burnt hair.

Then he found the holes.

At first, he wasn’t sure—there were so many perforations in the car. Parts where the metal had burned clean through, dents and triangular wounds where shrapnel from the tank had fired outward. But, crouching down, studying the metal, he found two holes that were rounder than the others, about a third of an inch in diameter. Just the size of a .30-06 or .303 bullet—which wasn’t to say that some hunters or kids hadn’t left the holes there after they found the wreck (Pellam himself had spent a number of lovely, clandestine afternoons playing Bonnie and Clyde with his father’s Colt .45 automatic and an abandoned 1954 Chevy pickup). But still—

“Help you?”

Pellam rose slowly and turned.

The man was in his thirties, rounding in the belly,
wearing overalls and a cowboy hat. He had a moonish face and weird bangs.

“Howdy,” Pellam offered.

“To yourself,” the man said, grinning. His hands were slick with grease and he wiped them ineffectually with a wad of paper towels.

“This your place?”

“Yep. I’m the R of R&W. Robert. Well, Bobby I go by.”

“Got a lot of interesting stuff here, Bobby.”

“Yep. Used to be all Army-Navy but surplus ain’t what it used to be.”

“That a fact?” Pellam said.

“You don’t get the deals you used to. My daddy, owned the place before us, he’d buy some all-right from Uncle Sam. Compasses, jeep parts, tires, clothes. World War Two, you know. Bayonets, Garands, M-1s. Originals, I’m talking. I’m talking creosote and oil paper.” The man’s eyes strayed to the wreck. “I got a better set of wheels, you’re interested.”

“Nope, just happened to notice it.”

“I bought it from a garage over in Cleary. A hundred bucks. There’ll be something under the hood I’m thinking I can salvage, then sell ’er to somebody for scrap. Could clear three hundred. . . . But if you’re not after a vehicle what would you be looking for?”

“Just sightseeing.”

“You’re not from around here,” Bobby said, “but your, you know, accent. Sounds familiar.”

“Born over in Simmons. Only about fifty miles away.”

“Got a cousin lives there.” The man walked back
toward the shack. “You need any help, just holler. I don’t mark prices on nothing, too much trouble, but you see something you take a liking to we’ll work something out. I’ll listen to any reasonable offer.”

“Keep that in mind.”

“You price stuff too high,” Bobby explained, “people just aren’t going to buy it. Never make money unless you make a sale.”

“Good philosophy.”

THIS TIME IT
was the sheriff himself.

Pellam hadn’t even set foot on the asphalt of Main Street before the man was next to him. He smelled of Old Spice or some kind of drugstore aftershave. Unlike the deputies he was tall and thin, like a hickory limb. He wasn’t wearing any
Cool Hand Luke
law enforcer sunglasses either.

“How you doing today, sir?”

Sir,
again.

He was wearing that smile, that indescribable smile the whole constabulary seemed to have. Like Moonies.

Pellam stepped out of the camper and answered, “Not bad. How ’bout yourself?”

“Getting by. Hectic this time of year. Crazy, all these people come looking at colored leaves. I don’t get it myself. I’m thinking maybe we should open a travel agency here, take tours of people into Manhattan to look at all the concrete and spotlights.”

Pellam grinned back.

“Name’s Tom Sherman.” They shook hands.

“Guess you know me,” Pellam said.

“Yessir, I do.”

“You’re back in town now,” Pellam pointed out. “I heard you were away.”

“Some personal business. How you feeling, sir, after your little accident?”

“Stiff is all.”

“Wanted to let you know, we probably wouldn’t be inclined to cite Mrs. Torrens for anything. Unless you were thinking of filing a complaint . . .”

Pellam was shaking his head. “No. She’s taken care of the medical bills. I’m not looking to make a profit.”

“Well, I think that’s fair, sir. You don’t see much of that. I was reading in
TIME
about people suing people over all sorts of things. This woman—I saw this on TV—
Sixty Minutes
maybe, I don’t recall. This woman, what she did was she opened this package of cereal and there was a dead mouse inside and she sued the company and got, I don’t know, a half million dollars. She didn’t eat it or anything. She just looked at it. She said she had dreams about mice for a year. That a crock, or what?”

“Uh-huh. Say, Sheriff, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”

“What’s that?”

“I saw the car my friend was in.”

“Your friend? Oh, right—the car got itself blowed up.”

“There were two bullet holes in it.”

“Bullet holes?” Not one strand of lean muscle in his cheek changed position. “I doubt that, sir.”

“I’ve hunted since I was twelve,” Pellam said.

“We went over it real careful and we didn’t find any sign of nothing a’tall.”

“Two,” Pellam said, “by the gas tank.”

His face still didn’t budge. “Oh, you mean, in the back. Those the holes in the back about three, four feet apart?”

Pellam said, “Believe they were.”

The sheriff nodded. “Firemen.”

“What?”

“When they got there, the car was still on fire and the trunk was closed. They used this pike, I don’t exactly know what it is, a big rod kind of thing with a hook on it to pop the trunk. They do that with a burning car. Open it up as much as they can. They got a lot of good equipment. Always using the Jaws of Life to cut people out of wrecks.”

“Oh.”

“Where’d you happen to run across this car, sir?”

“Saw it out by the highway. At the junkyard a mile outside of town.”

The sheriff looked down at his feet, shoes expertly polished with more Vaseline. “Uh, one of the things I was looking for you for—I wanted to mention: it might not be such a good idea, you doing what you’re doing here.”

Pellam said, “What would that be?”

“You know, I get the feeling that you don’t like the fact your friend got himself killed doing drugs and you’re trying to show something else happened.”

“Investigation was pretty fast.”

“Pardon?”

“The coroner’s inquest, your investigation. All happened pretty fast.”

The impassive, sunglass-less face nodding slowly. “Maybe you’d be used to city police work. We don’t
have a thousand homicides a year in Cleary, sir. We get a crime, or an accident, and we take care of it quick.”

“I appreciate that. But I doubt my friend was doing drugs. . . .”

“Mr. Pellam, we don’t have an evidence room, like you see on TV, you know. But we have this file cabinet and sitting inside it right now is a foil package with what must be a couple ounces of hashish. Now, I—”

“But—”

“Let me finish, sir. I was in Nam. I’ve done some smoking in my day. And I should add I’ve got no axe to grind with movie people or with you or your friend. We found the dope, we found a lighter, we found a brush fire. You yourself can see where the evidence points.”

“I’ve never heard of a car getting blown up because somebody was smoking nearby.”

“Well, you think about that Negro comedian a few years ago, set himself on fire.”

“Marty wouldn’t be freebasing in a state park at noon.”

A faint smile. “Oh? Then when would he be?”

Pellam leaned forward. He spotted a cautious flicker in the sheriff’s eyes. “Listen, Sheriff, let me line it up for you. And you tell me what you think, okay? My camper’s vandalized with threatening messages. Then my friend dies in a pretty curious way. And in forty-eight hours the place where it happened is dug over, the car gets sold to a junkyard and the man who rented the car to him goes off to Miami.”

“Clearwater. Fred Sillman goes to Clearwater every year.”

“I don’t honestly give a shit what his leisure schedule is. My friend didn’t die the way everybody keeps saying he did. And if you aren’t going to find out what happened I am. Simple as that.”

“We did our job, sir. We found some facts about your friend that weren’t so nice. I’m sorry about him and I’m sorry about your job but there’s nothing to be gained by you staying in Cleary.”

“You telling me to leave town?”

“Of course not. You’re free to visit, to sight-see, hell, you can even buy yourself a house here—I understand you know a local real estate broker pretty good—all I’m saying is, you’re not free to be a policeman. And if you start troubling people I’m going to have to get involved.”

“Your concerns’ve been noted.” Pellam tried to imitate the smile. It didn’t work too well. He had better luck with: “Have a good day, sir.”

WEXELL AMBLER WAS
going to visit his lover.

He walked out of his house—supposedly on his way to a meeting—and strode toward his big Cadillac, parked in the U-shaped driveway. He was looking forward to sitting with her in the Jacuzzi in the glass-enclosed deck of his house in nearby Claverack, New York, from which they could watch the Catskill Mountains in the distance—now a stunning wash of color. He could look forward to enjoying fresh coffee and tasting some of her cooking.

Thinking about making slow love in the hot tub or in the large Shaker bed he’d bought for her because she’d mentioned that she liked the simple lines. She was a strange woman. He often compared the two of
them, his ex-wife and his lover. And tried to decide what were the differences and what were the similarities. They both were attractive, dressed well, knew how to carry on a conversation at the country club. His wife was more intelligent but she was also less imaginative; she had no spark, no humor. She let him get away with anything. His lover challenged him (perhaps, he now reflected, this made him feel younger).