第 29 页

They shook hands. Ribbon walked in, saying, 'I like that. The way you kept your hand in your jacket when you opened the door.'

Habit.'

'You looked pretty smooth. Cabrini projects, you were telling me the other night. War zone. Brung a present. You want a drink?'

'Sure.'

Ribbon poured John Begg scotch into squooshy plastic hotel cups. They tapped them together and sipped. Ribbon was in uniform and when Mahoney glanced at the top of the sheriffs head Ribbon took off his Smokey hat and dropped it down on the dresser.

"You're not getting tired of our little town, are you?'

Tired?' Mahoney grunted. 'It's heaven on earth.' He slipped off his jacket. He hung it up and poured more scotch.

Ribbon's eyes slipped to the large dark gray automatic pistol riding high on Mahoney's right hip.

'Steve, I happened to have a talk with Deputy Ebbans, Jim Slocum and some of the other boys on the case today. I sounded them out about how the investigation's going.' Mahoney's eyes tunneled into Ribbon's, which danced a little, looked briefly back then danced away again. This was fun. It was the way Mahoney used to look at perps and he missed doing it. There're a couple of things I've got to talk to you about.'

Ribbon responded exactly the same way the perps had - fiercely studying the scenery behind Mahoney as if memorizing the wall or window or front door.

'But first off. Good news. I just talked to Mr Gebben.'

'Did you now?'

'And you know that reward I was talking about?'

'Reward?' Ribbon frowned. Then he nodded. 'Right, yeah, I recall you mentioning that.'

'Well, he's authorized me to release some of it now.'

"We haven't caught anybody yet, Charlie.' Ribbon snorted a laugh.

'Well, I've told him you're doing a good job and he wants to show his support.'

That's real kind of him, Charlie.'

'He's a generous man. But I'm afraid we've got to talk about something. Kind of an unpleasant situation.'

"Unpleasant.'

Ribbon licked the rim of his cup and Mahoney let him fret for a delectable minute before he said, 'Again, I don't want to be imposing myself. You're the boss here, Steve.'

'I value your opinion. You're surely more of an expert than any of us.' Ribbon seemed at sea and took refuge in the scotch. He drank long and busied himself with pouring another glass.

'I hate to say anything.'

'Naw, go ahead, Charlie.'

'Well, it's about this Bill Corde.'

Corde pulled into the Town Hall driveway and saw three deputies standing in front of a new Nissan Pathfinder 4X4. It was a beauty. Corde admired it. He saw nothing wrong with buying foreign as long as the quality was better than American. He had a little problem paying foreign, having testdriven a Pathfinder himself; he knew he was looking at over twenty thousand dollars worth of transport.

Corde turned his attention away from the truck and back to the lardy figure of Dodd Humphries he was helping out of the squad car and through the parking lot. As he passed the truck Corde said to the men, "Who's the proud father?'

'Steve bought her.'

Corde laughed in genuine surprise. 'Steve Ribbon?'

'Surely did. Walked right into the dealership and drove out this morning.'

'Hell you say. He was gonna drive that Dodge till it dropped.' Corde looked at the shimmering chrome and metallic-flecked burgundy paint and he said to Lance Miller, 'He's gone and set a bad precedent. Now everybody's gonna want their trucks with all cylinders running.'

They entered the Sheriffs Department wing. Half the complement was out inspecting the sheriffs new wheels. Jim Slocum was looking at a handful of letters. Corde assumed they were more of the worthless confessions and tip letters that accompany any publicized investigation.

'Dodd, you can't keep doing this,' Corde said to his prisoner.

'Doing what?' the man asked drowsily.

The man's Toyota pickup had sheared a leg off the Purina feed billboard on 116 and dropped a painted sixty-foot Hereford on her black-and-white rump. Miller took him into the lockup in the back of the office. When he returned Corde looked up from the arrest report. 'Two point four. He's more than legally drunk. I do believe he's legally dead.'

Miller said, "Well, he's legally barfing and he's got bits of windshield falling out of his skivvies. It's all over the floor.'

Corde said, 'Give him some paper towels and make him clean it up. Nobody should be drinking like that on a weekday morning.'

'He'll lose his license this time,' Miller said.

'Hardly matters,' Corde answered. That was his last truck.'

Steve Ribbon appeared in the doorway and looked at Corde. 'Talk to you for a minute, Bill.'

Corde followed him into his office and the sheriff shut the door. Ribbon sat down and expanded his cheeks like a blowfish's body and started to bounce a Ticonderoga number two off the drum of his skin. Corde decided it might be a long conversation and sat down in the chair opposite the sheriffs desk.

'Bill. . .' The pencil stopped being a drumstick and became a Flash Gordon rocket crash-landing on the desk. 'Damn this bureaucracy, Bill.'

Corde waited.

'County and state and everybody.'

'Okay, what's up, Steve?'

'I got a call from Ellison.'

'Uh-huh.'

'Bill, this is a damn difficult thing to say to you.'

Corde laughed without humor. Then spit it out fast.'

Ribbon said, "The county's taking over the Gebben and Rossiter cases.'

It took several seconds for the fire to burn across Corde's cheek. The county.'

T.T.'s going to be heading her up.'

'Well, Steve, legally, I suppose, the county can take over any murder investigation it wants to. But the point is it's never-'

'Bill.'

The point is it's never happened before. All right. I'm a little angry. That's what you're hearing. I don't think we've done anything to make Ellison feel this way.'

'It was the situation at the dorm.'

'What situation?'

Ribbon surveyed the rocket pencil's crash site. They think you burned her letters and her diary, Bill.'

Corde said nothing.

They're thinking it was curious you flew to St Louis so fast after the killing. When you didn't find anything there you went to her dorm room and took them and burned it all up. Don't look that way, Bill. They think you were trying to cover up something between you and her. There'll be an inquest next month and you're off the case till it's over.'

4

Wynton Kresge's great-great-great-grandfather, whose name was Charles Monroe, had been a slave, one of two, on a small farm near Fort Henry, Tennessee. The story goes that when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on New Year's Day in 1863 Monroe went to his master and said, 'I am sorry to tell you this, Mr Walker, but there is a new law that says you can't own slaves anymore, including us.'

Walker said, They did that in Nashville?

Monroe answered, 'No, sir, they did that in the capital, that is to say, Washington, B.C.'

'Blazes,' Walker said, and added that he'd have to look into it. Because both he and his wife were illiterate they had to ask someone to tell them more about this law. Their charming innocence was demonstrated by their choice of Abigail, the Walkers' second slave, to confirm the news. She did so by reading from an outspoken abolitionist penny sheet, which printed the text of the Proclamation while avoiding an inconvenient discussion of Lincoln's jurisdiction to free slaves located in the Confederacy.

'Damnation, he's right,' Walker said. Then he wished Monroe luck and said by any chance you be interested in staying on for pay and Monroe said he'd be happy to and they negotiated a wage and room and board and Monroe kept on working on the Walker farm until he married Abigail. The Walkers gave them their wedding and Monroe named his first son Walker.

Family history.

And probably as embellished and half-true as any. But what Wynton Kresge thought was most interesting was how his children responded to the story. His eldest son, Darryl, eighteen, was horrified that he had been descended from slaves and never wanted the fact mentioned. Kresge felt bad the boy was so ashamed and grumbled that since he was black and had grown up in the United States and not on the Ivory Coast, how come that was such a shock?

Kresge's eldest daughter, Sephana, sixteen, on the other hand often talked about Monroe's plight. Which was how she referred to it. Plight. She hated Monroe for going back to work for Walker. She hated him for not putting a Mini6 ball in his master's head and torching the farm. Sephana had posters of Spike Lee and Wesley Snipesonherwall. She was beautiful. Kresge had put all serious talks with his daughter on hold for a few years.

Kresge's fifth child, named after the ancestor in question, was eight and he loved the story. Charles often wanted to act it out, insisting that Kresge take the role of Mr Walker, while Charles did an impersonation of someone probably not unlike his namesake. Kresge wondered what his youngest son, Nelson, aged two, would say about their ancestor when he learned the story.

These were the thoughts that kept intruding into Kresge's mind as he sat trying to read in the massive bun-buster swivel chair. He felt all stifled and bouncy with nervous energy so he stood up and walked to the window in the far corner of his office. He reached out and rested his hands on the windowsill and did half a dozen lazy-boy push-ups then twelve more and twelve more after that until he smelled sweat through his shirt.

The window overlooked not the quad but a strip of commercial New Lebanon, storefronts and flashing trailer signs and a chunk of the satellite dish on the Tavern. He was anxious and his muscles quivered from using them the wrong way, in a soft office, in a soft university, a soft white university, where you had to keep your temper and give reasons and all the suspects were good students and were trying hard and were just out for some fooling 'round.

He sat on the windowsill, his huge shoulders slumped.

Thinking of his ancestor (perhaps because Walker had ultimately gotten his freedom) had put Wynton Kresge in mind of his essential problem - he was not what he wanted to be.

Which was a cop.

He would be a cop in Des Moines. He would be a cop in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. In Sandwich, Illinois. He'd be a cop taking tolls on the interstate if they let him spend a good portion of the time cruising around in a souped-up four-barrel Dodge, tagging speeders and hunting down child molesters and stopping DUIs.

What was ironic - no, what was bitterly mean - was that every day Kresge got r?sum from cops all over the country. From real COPS! They wanted to work for him. Dear Sir: As a law enforcement officer of ten years standing, I am seeking a position in private security services and would like to be considered for any position you might have open ...

Knock me upside the head. I mean, this is too much!

Kresge would have dropped down on his massive, linebacker knees to kiss the police academy graduation ring of any one of those applicants and trade jobs in a minute. Gold shields, GLA supervisors, Ops-Coordinators, portable patrolmen, CS technicians. They all wanted to sit in Kresge's cracked leather chair and swivel back and forth and spend the three hours between start of business and lunch deciding how to allocate guards for the homecoming game.

And what did Wynton Kresge want to do but walk a beat?

He wanted to drive an RMP (remote mobile patrol, a squad car to everybody else; Kresge had learned this), he wanted to kick in doors of murder suspects, he wanted to pin drug dealers up against jagged brick walls and scream at them: WHERE'S THE STASH? (Was that what they called it? He'd learned a lot but there was much he had not learned.)

He had a very real problem however, Wynton Kresge's first goal in life was to be a cop. But his other goal was to make sure his salary exceeded his age. He now made fifty-three thousand dollars a year (being forty-two he was proud of this accomplishment). He was therefore in the Loop. Hooked. Hung up. Wynton Kresge received a salary not unattainable by senior detectives or police administrators in large cities but a complete rainbow for a rookie. It'd be back to school at no pay then a grunt pulling twenty, twenty-five even with overtime. Kresge alone would be able to cope with a career change of that magnitude. Kresge married might be able to.

But not Wynton Kresge father of seven. He loved cops but he also loved being a good father. He thought about reeducating them. He thought about having a family conference and telling them they were going to have to buckle down. Dad was about to take a fifty percent cut in salary and become a cop. (Man, he could taste the silence in the living room after dropping that news.)

So he watched Miami Vice reruns and led his men in drills for dealing with students who'd gone ED (the cop word for emotionally disturbed) and with demonstrators who might try to burn down the stadium (none so far) and he kept his thirteen-shot 9mm automatic loaded and ready on his hip waiting for the chance to draw down on a crazed assault-rifle-wielding sniper (none of them either), picking him off from fifty yards on the knoll of the quad.

This was all Wynton Kresge had for police work.

This, and thinking a lot about the murders of Jennie Gebben and Emily Rossiter, which is what he had been doing most of this hot afternoon. He now walked to his desk and balanced a book on his hand then flipped it lightly in the air as if he were tossing a coin to help him make a choice. That was in fact exactly what he was doing and when he caught the book, cover up, Kresge walked abruptly out of his office.

She died two weeks ago tonight. It took me all of fourteen days to lose the case.

Corde spent five minutes looking for change in front of the vending machines, waiting for the jolts of anger that never came. He dropped in thirty-five cents and pushed coffee milk and sugar. The steaming liquid poured in a loud stream into a fragile cardboard cup. It sounded exactly like a man taking a leak.