Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2006
- Автор: Бетанкур Джон Грегори, Jr. William J. Carroll,
- Год: 2006
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines/Crosstown Publications
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2006». Краткое содержание книги:
Not a lot, I thought.
“I think you’re all a bunch’a faggots.”
I looked down at his name placard that showed just inside his poncho.
“I think you’re a faggot,” he went on, trying hard to get a rise from me. “You got a problem with that?”
I said, “Which way is Bayette, Officer Mongon?”
He blinked, frowned, then made a sound of disgust and stepped back. “You ask me, you should just keep on goin’,” he told me.
I pointed down the road. “About five miles south, right?”
“Bayette ain’t for you, ya’ hear?”
I smiled. “Thanks for your help,” I said.
“You hear?!”
I waved, got back into the Explorer, and started it up.
Mongon got into his own vehicle, and fishtailed out from behind me, onto the highway — and was out of sight in seconds.
And I followed, but at a slower speed.
Bayette wasn’t much of a town — it took only an ounce of gas to run the length of Main Street — but what there was of it seemed pretty enough. There was a hardware/feed store, a tiny grocery, a diner, a drugstore, a place called Dixie’s Bar and Grille, and a touristy-looking little hotel, the Congaroo.
At either end of Main Street, on opposite sides, were The First Baptist Church of Bayette and The First United Baptist Church of Bayette. I imagined there was some interesting history there.
The police station was just off of Main Steet — a small, redbricked building with a huge flag flapping hard in front. The Bayette elementary and middle school, done in the same redbrick, stood opposite, next to a library. A new-looking Bayette Clinic stood on the broad, heavily treed levee that edged the Tar River.
I parked in front of the police station, right behind officer Mongon’s cruiser, and headed inside.
Where the air-conditioning hit me like a cold fist, and where in a large outer office cluttered with boxes, a huge, uniformed woman sat behind a counter, hand painting a road closed sign, one of about a dozen that were stacked by the counter.
She moved her eyes reluctantly toward me and said, “He’p you?”
“I’d like to see...”
“The hell you want?” Mongon shouted.
He’d just entered the outer office from somewhere in back.
To the woman, I said, “I’d like to see Chief Gettis...”
“I asked you a question,” Mongon demanded, coming up to the counter.
“The man wants to see the chief, Carl.”
“Ain’t talkin’ to you, Belle!” he snapped.
“You don’t take that tone to me, Carl Mongon...”
“You got a complaint to make,” Mongon told me, “you make it to my face, ya’ hear?”
I said, “My complaint, Officer Mongon, is about your face.” I looked at the woman, who smirked. “You know what I mean, don’t you, Belle?”
She snorted.
Mongon, a little purple in his cheeks, pointed a finger at me just as a door in back opened slightly and a voice boomed, “The hell is goin’ on out there?”
Mongon’s eyes flicked worriedly back to the door, then to me, as he started to say something, then changed his mind, making a sound of disgust and stalking out.
Belle gave me a wink, then got up and waddled to the opened door in back, poked her head inside, said something, then turned to me and waved me forward.
So I entered the office of Bayette Chief of Police Harold Gettis, who sat behind a broad oak desk, feet up on the corner, building a fish fly.
“Chief Gettis,” I said, as I entered.
“Uh-huh.”
“My name’s Virginiak.” I handed him my ID, which he took and squinted at briefly, then returned, and went back to the fly.
Gettis was sixtyish and grayhaired, with a lined, weathered face and bright blue eyes. He was a tall, heavy-shouldered man, with a big man’s calmness about him.
“I’m sorry about Carl,” he said wearily.
“You should be.”
His eyes looked up at me now, as if I were a walking lawsuit. “He give you a ticket?”
“No, but he did stop me for no reason.”
Gettis sighed, shook his head, put the fly down, put his feet on the floor, and waved me to a chair saying, “All I can do for you, Mr. Virginiak, is apologize.”
I took the chair.
“He’s had some... family problems,” he explained.
Above him on the wall was a bronze plate with the words TO SERVE AND PROTECT etched into it, surrounded by about a dozen plaques, attesting to the law-enforcement virtues and community-spiritedness of Harold Gettis, and about half as many framed photographs of him handshaking different people, including a past president.
“Think we can just forget it?” he asked.
“It’s forgotten,” I told him.
He nodded, then squinted at me. “So, what can I do for Army Counterintelligence?”
“Nothing,” I assured him. “I’m here on personal business.” I took out Steensen’s picture and put it in front of him. “I’m looking for a man. Name’s Steensen, Ralph Steensen, and I was told by...”
“Oh God,” Gettis said, picking up the photograph and looking rattled. “I knew him.”
“Knew?”
He blinked at the picture, then at me. “He a friend of yours?”
“A friend of a friend,” I said.
He looked back at the picture and shook his head sadly. “Well, I’m sorry to say, he’s dead.”
“I see.”
He frowned. “You say his name was Steensen?”
I nodded.
“Never did get his name,” he told me. “Had no ID on him. I should’ve run his prints, but...” He put the picture down. “Well, I didn’t.”
“How did he die?”
Gettis rubbed a shaky hand over his brow. “He come around here a while back — must’a been last fall — started pestering some folks. I had to put him in the lock-up for a night.” He shook his head slowly. “Hanged himself in his cell.”
“Ah.”
“Felt guilty as hell about it, I can tell ya.”
Right, I thought.
“Still do,” he added.
Steensen, Ralph, 1st Lt., USA. RIP.
“He have kin?” Gettis asked me.
“Just a friend,” I told him. “Just friends.”
“It was a helluva thing,” he said quietly. “Finding him like that.”
Right.
“I should’ve run his prints,” Gettis went on. “I thought Belle did it, and she thought I did it, and then, well, the body was cremated, and come to find out, we never got him printed to start with, so he went out a John Doe.” He sighed a tired-old-man sigh and added, “I’m gettin’ too old for this job, I reckon.”
Which, I decided, was not my problem.
I stood up, and so did Gettis, extending his hand to me, which I took and shook; then he walked with me out of his office to the station entrance, where we stopped.
The dark, late afternoon sky was in motion, and rain fell.
I put on my hat and said, “Think that hurricane will hit?”
Gettis shrugged.
“They usually do,” he replied, then put a hand on my shoulder. “I am truly sorry about your friend,” he told me. “I truly am.”
Walking to my truck, the world seemed suddenly more distant, but realer somehow. As if I were seeing, hearing, and smelling things more acutely but at a remove nevertheless.
It was, I think, the organism telling me to slow down and take stock, to know the world now because nothing lasts. I never knew Crash Steensen, but the loss of him hit me pretty hard.
The rain had picked up by the time I got back behind the wheel, and I didn’t want to drive through it, didn’t want to do much of anything, so I drove to the small hotel I’d seen and got a room with a balcony that overlooked the river.