The Blackstone Commentaries (8 page)

The offices on the top floor of the Trotter Building surrounded a vast and airy hall painted a soft yellow and trimmed in varnished oak. It held five office doors, all with transoms, and the bench to the left of his own door, which he softly closed. There wasn't a sound in the building. The hardwood floor was cool to his bare feet. The stairway from the floor below protruded through an ornate iron cage in the middle of the hall. A huge oval skylight hung like a spaceship overhead. A clock said 7:14. He went into the lavatory.

He startled her when he emerged. Dressed except for her high-heel shoes, which she carried in one hand along with a small purse, she was gently pulling the office door shut. She looked around, her eyes wide, as though he were about to kill her. Her lips moved soundlessly. Then, with what seemed to him a supreme effort at defiance or contempt, she tossed her hair back.

“I …,” he began, but for a moment couldn't even remember her name. He thought he might have blushed.

“I was crazy, just downright stupid crazy, to stay here with you,” she announced, her words shattering the stillness as she ran for the stairs. Speechless, he saw the ring on her hand when she placed it on the banister. She stopped and gazed at him once more with a lopsided, brave smile. Then she was gone.

VII

Dugan

“Just who the hell do you think you are?” Martin Pemberton didn't speak loudly or with apparent rancor; the familiar soft drawl was educated and refined.

Dugan had been going over the duty schedule. He never did get any sleep Saturday night, all that stuff on the mountain and then his memories of Alabama, it becoming more apparent than ever he wasn't getting any younger. When he and Dru got momentarily talked out, he had done the chores, fed the Angus, then taken a shower and changed while she fixed breakfast. By the time they went to church, he was ready to play it moment by moment, and he and Dru were easy again.

Now it was Monday. At the sound of Pemberton's voice, Dugan checked his watch, then laid the pencil down and looked up at the man standing unannounced in his door. He hadn't knocked, but then he usually didn't; Pemberton was as proprietary about the office as he was about the man he felt he'd gotten elected.

“This fucking job going to your head, Charlie?” Pemberton leaned over the desk, his curled knuckles going white pressing the oak surface. It wasn't simple anger or aggressiveness—it was ownership.

“I've been expecting you. Close the door?” Dugan said quietly.

“Close it yourself.”

Dugan got up and closed the door. “This is only protocol, Martin. Your car came up as a possible.”

“Don't give me that crap. You bring a posse to my house in the middle of the night, wake my wife and scare her like I'd died, then suggest I was out philandering.”

Dugan reached over, grabbed that morning's copy of the
Gazette & Reformer
and slid it across the desk. It was folded open to page 5. Above a huge ad for Reedy's Mobile Home Sales was a picture of the Carvers' Monte Carlo, obviously taken out at Clyde Dean Forrest's auto yard. The back end of the tow truck was in view, as well as several cars parked against a high wooden fence. The Carvers had probably tipped the paper off, Dugan reflected. Or the city police. The family lived in the city, and cops got prickly about knowing what was going on in their bailiwick. But there was just the photo and a little blurb beneath it describing the incident in the barest terms, giving only the name of the Carver family, not the suspect car or the fact that there was one. Harlan knew better. The paper hadn't even called Dugan. It just made extra photos and sent them to him, knowing he'd tell them what he had when he got ready.

“I never suggested you were out philandering.”
I didn't have to.
He watched Pemberton go ashen over the picture.

“You think I had something to do with
that
? Listen close.” Pemberton's patrician face had turned a fine pink. He leaned over and pointed a finger at Dugan. “That's my name, my reputation, my family, my home you're playing with.
You have intruded where you don't belong
!”

“No one has accused anyone, Martin.” Still patient, but the world was suddenly too quiet. “Were you up there?”

Startled, Pemberton stood upright. “Hell no!” Face now red at the audacity.

“Then you've got nothing to worry about. Like I just said, it's routine, Martin.” Suddenly he didn't believe that a bit, hearing the lie beneath his own soft, unshaken voice, knowing the man across the desk was too quick
not to hear it, too.
Here we go
, he thought.
It's been there since I pried that damn hundred dollars out of you, just waiting.
He felt himself go out of focus, a fine pain shooting through his temples, a twinge of nausea. He flashed to the mountains and the cabin where he'd first lived when he came to Blackstone County, all that world below just grass and wind. Then he was back in his office, the man across the desk showing a look of amazed incredulity changing into rage, like someone had just grabbed his balls and windpipe at the same time and pulled in opposite directions.

“No you don't, Dugan. You don't play your fucking little games with me.” Pemberton's features twisted now, not at all refined or aristocratic or rich or educated or just plain born right.

Dugan was comforted. Just another unhappy human face. How close to the surface it always was.
This one likes to swear, only he's keeping his voice in check—he's not a yeller, all noise and lack of substance. And he's been waiting, too. So let's go ahead and get it over with.

Hell
, he thought moments later, alone again, feeling a touch of regret and sadness when he heard the outside door slam,
I haven't even got a case
.

Part Two

VIII

Eddie

Ordinarily, anywhere from midnight to dawn, if they were out and the night was pretty well gone anyhow, that was Charlie and Eddie's favorite time, gliding along empty roads, passing darkened houses and farms. They could drive anywhere they wanted and belong wherever they wanted to belong, whether it was down in the flats among the old cotton fields, or in the scrub of the Pinetown area where the black people lived, or way up in the mountains near the state line where Charlie began his career in Blackstone County, up above Rainer Cove where Doc Willis had his clinic. Sometimes a narrow road opened so they might suddenly see little lights far off and below them, and they knew it was Damascus or some other town, maybe in Virginia. Up in the mountains, they could almost smell time—the past, present and future, but the past particularly. They would cruise the top of the world, holding to the pure, unfettered feel of it. If they'd been smart, they would have done that instead of getting a search warrant for Martin Pemberton's car.

Eddie knew you didn't embarrass Pemberton twice, and judging by his
look when he steamed out of the jail the Monday after the Carver shooting, someone sure as hell had.

“Morning, Dr. Pemberton,” Eddie said as he climbed the steps to the office, being friendly, but the doctor just shoved by him without a word. That not being like Pemberton, it was then Eddie knew for sure it all was ready for the oven, as his father used to say, and it was going to be one hell of a taco. What he thought was that Charlie and Pemberton had hated each other from the outset but convinced themselves that somehow they could be friends, or ought to be friends, the way people sometimes do, so it had been just a matter of time before things unraveled. The fact it went almost thirteen years was nothing short of a miracle.

And Eddie knew Charlie could push buttons, drive men to real violence sometimes with just a look. He once thought that if Charlie believed in God, it would be Jehovah in the Old Testament, not a Jesus kind of God.

Eddie saw Charlie heave a man into a vat of hot mash once and knew it wasn't an act of wanton violence by a person in love with his authority. It was Maynard Pease who was heaved, one of the meanest bootlegging sonsuvbitches ever whelped in those mountains. Charlie got under his skin without a word, as Eddie had seen by the way Pease's face suddenly darkened like every blood vessel in it burst at once. As quick as a person could blink, Pease shoved a pistol in Charlie's face and pulled the trigger. The gun went off, only in the air because Pease was already flying backward. No one was ever prepared for Charlie's speed. But if speed and physical strength and political instincts were what kept Charlie alive, they weren't what made him special. No, it was that moral force—righteousness, some would call it—that could incense a man to outright foolishness. Eddie knew Martin Pemberton knew it, too.

Though not very religious, Eddie had grown up with the Bible out on the Panhandle of Oklahoma, where there wasn't much else except grass and wind. And dust. The wind was always blowing, and sometimes it bore the dust. And the dust would seep through the walls of a house like something coming to get a person. He'd always felt there was something timeless and sad and inevitable about it all.

Eddie had come to believe that if vengeance was the Lord's, justice wasn't, no matter what the preachers said. God pointed out to Job that He
created the shivering horse and the toothsome crocodile and everything else, right down to the ostrich that dropped its eggs on the ground and walked away, leaving them to fate. Now, was that just? Eddie had asked himself that question more than once. And no, it wasn't, but it was the way He'd made it, so who was going to argue? Who could stand up to that kind of power? God didn't have to think, didn't have to believe in any justice. What He did simply was. But Eddie had noticed that for some people with real power, justice wasn't an issue either. Unless someone like Charlie made it one.

Maybe that's all it was—the have-nots wanted the power so they could compete on equal ground. Short of that, they'd take justice, some kind of boundary on bad behavior. Maybe deep in their hearts, people carried around a remnant from Eden, a memory or yearning for a time when everything made sense and they could live without pain.

But it was Pemberton himself who took Charlie to the mountaintop—a steak dinner at Dorothy's Restaurant, back when Charlie was still with the preacher—and offered him Blackstone County, where a sorely lacking justice, with a little nudge from the right person, Charlie perhaps, might be made better, if not whole.

Eddie didn't know exactly what Pemberton had in mind back then, or what Charlie thought he'd heard over that steak dinner so long ago, but he knew the bait in that bargain, or almost-bargain, must have been justice. That was Charlie's weakness: he believed in justice. And as Charlie had once told him, “Like Pemberton or not, you gotta admit, the man makes up his mind to do something, he doesn't let go till the thing's done. That can be a good thing.”

Charlie was real good at sizing up people, but Pemberton was downright gifted, like the man who could spot a good horse, all fire and spirit, and to whom the challenge of taming such a beast and putting it to work for him was irresistible, a sublime gamble with living flesh and all its imponderables. For if Pemberton was a man accustomed to power, he was also a gambler—that was
his
weakness. So of course it became a challenge to both of them, the power to bring justice on the one hand, power over a powerful person for the sheer taste of it on the other. Just like two stallions, Eddie thought, they had taken each other's measure over that damn collection plate, each one deciding the other was strong and
therefore worthy. All they needed was that steak dinner to lay out the terms. And though they might not have known then, or at least admitted the full implications, from that moment on, both were bound to see where the challenge took them.

No specific bargain was made at Dorothy's, Eddie was sure, because it didn't have to be—the challenge had already been made and answered over that collection plate. And moreover, direct accountability bothered Pemberton to no end; he always hedged his bets. If an animal that took his fancy didn't work out, well, hell, Pemberton would break it, break that spirit. He'd find a way. That was power, too. And that seemed to sum up his relations with a lot of people, Eddie thought, women especially. Even his wife, Carlotta, he guessed. It was almost as though taming them meant making them see, even feel, the world like he knew it. On the surface, Pemberton was all smiles and success and charm. But this was deep down, like the man took pleasure in seeing others debase themselves, like he wanted everyone else to feel whatever ugliness inside him he couldn't escape.

With the Carver incident and that warrant, Charlie finally jumped the fence.

In the early days, none of this had seemed clear to anybody. When Charlie won the election to become the first Republican sheriff since Reconstruction, Eddie had expected to go out the door along with Mac and everyone else in the office. That was the way things were done. The day after, Eddie was in the kitchen having supper, the radio on top of the Frigidaire still talking about the election. He was wondering where he'd apply for a job—he was fifty then, physically small, not prime employment material, though the Damascus Police Department had approached him a year or so before—when a knock came from the front of the house.

Eddie went to the door in his slippers, still wearing his brown uniform pants with the stripe down the legs and a T-shirt, and was surprised and a bit embarrassed to find Charlie Dugan standing on the porch staring into the grapevine growing up a trellis, where a mockingbird was making all kinds of fuss.

“Mr. Lambert?” Charlie had said with a slight nod as Eddie pushed open—only partway, not quite welcoming—the screen door he hadn't gotten around to taking down.

“Sheriff?”

“Can we talk, Eddie?” The formality was dropped, Charlie's smile reflective and hardly triumphant.

Reluctantly Eddie opened the door. The two men had never had a lot to say to each other, mostly because Charlie was up on the mountain. But Eddie had always admired him—Charlie was a good, no-nonsense deputy and an obvious professional. He saw Charlie looking around as he led him through the house; he hadn't moved the furniture or changed anything since his wife died, and he knew it felt close and contained, somehow—like himself, Eddie guessed—and probably even smelled that way. The signs and smells of a woman, that openness to the world and the sounds and life outside that they somehow bring inside—as troublesome as that was sometimes, all that was gone, Eddie knew. He turned off the radio, and they talked over the supper table while Eddie finished his meal and started cleaning up. He never excused himself to anyone for his obsession with neatness. He was a bachelor again, but even when his wife was alive, he'd helped her keep things picked up.