Happy Policeman Page 3

  It wasn’t right not to pay for things, Schoen thought as he laid the small slip of paper next to the register. Handouts made life too easy, like the smooth, well-traveled road to damnation.

  God was testing Coomey for idle hands. The Lord probably had some divine nitrate test which He could paint on your fingers. You, God would thunder when the solution turned color, you have been idle.

  But Schoen had laboriously written his verses, an exchange of sweat for goods. Schoen knew the price of salvation was vigilance. He’d watched. He waited. He memorized sin, and counted the sinners, as any good watchman should.

  “Hey.” Purdy rounded a pyramid of Diet Coke. “There you are, pastor. You ain’t never gonna guess what happened. Loretta Harper’s been murdered.”

  Startled, Schoen whirled to stare into the beaming face of Purdy Phifer. Then his eyes fell to the Bible verse he had exchanged for the aspirin. The quote was the shortest. The most pithy.

  Jesus wept.

  Chapter Six

  DEWITT, depressed and frustrated, turned his mare away from town instead of toward it. On the road that had once led to Longview, by the sign that announced the speed limit dropped from fifty to thirty, DeWitt reined his mare. He stopped because he could go no farther—the Line straddled the highway, an insurmountable paisley wall.

  The white 30 MPH sign was a pale glimmer in the dusk. The bare spot in the ground where Bo used to lurk had grown to high weeds, a crumbling monument to the speed trap.

  Dismounting, DeWitt walked over and stood by the gathering of mementos washed in the Line’s glow. FOR JASON WALSH, a card wired to the laces of a football read. The plastic seal around the card had split; the ink was six years bleached. The football, waiting playless, had long ago deflated.

  A rain-warped book lay for the hands of TAMORA ADAMS, BELOVED SISTER to reach through the Line and pick up. For JENNIFER WASHINGTON, ADORED GRANDCHILD, there was a multicolored plastic necklace, its facets shiny, colors still bright.

  DeWitt’s eyes marched the graveyard of keepsakes: a fishing pole for BOBBY FLETCHER, FATHER; a vase of plastic flowers for NANA, BEST GRANDMOTHER. His eyes settled on a police chief’s badge: TO DAD.

  Quickly he lifted his gaze. The Line was almost transparent. Sometimes DeWitt, after standing for a while, was certain he saw the gray ribbon of the road as it curved up the hill on the other side. Sometimes, if he stood there long enough, he thought he heard sounds behind it: the rushing of the wind, the call of a bird—patterns built of hope and incomplete data.

  The eye, the brain, were cheats. DeWitt had read somewhere that the first astronomer to map Mars had fallen victim to delusion—the same delusion to which Hattie, in loving, had succumbed. She charted meaning in DeWitt’s every careless act and drew sentimental canals.

  Putting his palm forward, DeWitt watched his hand sink into the glow before resistance halted it. The light was as warm as blood. A tingle of energy thrilled up his arm and settled into the joint of his shoulder.

  DeWitt gave up trying to look through the light and stood back. As Hattie should. His eyes focused on the Line itself and not what might lie beyond it.

  Dusk settled slow and blue around him. A cold night wind breathed down his neck. He stood looking until his eyes watered.

  “You do not want the gas?”

  Seresen was standing a few yards away from the tethered horse as though he had materialized there.

  “You complain that we do not deliver, and then when it comes, you ignore it.”

  “I’m not ignoring it.” DeWitt wondered how long Seresen had stood watching him.

  “Perhaps it would be better now for you to go into town and get gas for your car. It is growing dark. Can the horse make its way in the dark?”

  “Sure.”

  The Torku seemed neither interested nor uninterested in the reply. But DeWitt had learned to read subtleties. The aliens hardly ever demanded; they dropped hints. Seresen wanted him out of there.

  DeWitt walked to his horse and paused in indecision. Under the safari shirt, the Kol’s legs were hinged wide over his pelvis. Seresen had the shape of a twin popsicle.

  DeWitt’s shoulder ached, as if the energy of the Line had jittered his socket bones together. “Can anyone get through there?”

  “Do you wish to try?”

  “No.” DeWitt thought of his father. It was best to picture him vaporizing in a superheated flash. Harder to think of his life draining in crimson, watery stools. But the idea that he might still be alive caused DeWitt the most pain—the sort of helpless, purblind agony left in the wake of the missing. “Yes, “ he said. “Sometimes.”

  DeWitt imagined the Line as he saw it in his dreams: the end of the world, the place on maps marked “Here Be Monsters.” In those nightmares he was always wasted on Curtis’s dope. Searching for his father, he would climb over the barrier only to fall down a starry well.

  Staring hard at the glow of the Line, he imagined he saw headlights. He looked away quickly, a sick feeling in his gut.

  “Where were you last night?” he asked Seresen. “What were you doing?”

  Seresen didn’t reply.

  “I need to know.”

  The alien looked up at the spangled sky. “The questions are contradictory, and I do not understand why they are important. To know where I am makes me less aware of what I am doing. And in knowing what I am doing, I lose awareness of location.”

  “Hazard a guess.”

  A pause. “It is probable I was in the center.”

  “Did anyone see you? Can anyone verify your whereabouts?”

  “I cannot be certain of either.”

  “Okay. So it’s probable you were in the center. What about the rest of your people? Were they with you?”

  “This is important?”

  “I told you this morning: someone’s dead. And we don’t know who or what caused it. Is it possible that a Torku went crazy or something?”

  A bat flittered out of the gloom, approached the empty space above the Line, then darted back toward the trees, not as though it had run into a barrier but as though it had sensed something evil.

  “You ask the wrong questions.” With that, Seresen turned away and disappeared into the darkening woods.

  Chapter Seven

  FULL NIGHT had fallen by the time DeWitt reached the poor neighborhood of the Hollows. Streetlights cast golden pools on the asphalt. Frame houses crowded near the road like cattle gathering to fences.

  In each brightly windowed living room was a VCR and a big-screen Sony. Every refrigerator was stocked, the result of the Torku’s largesse. DeWitt hadn’t admitted his contentment to Hattie, for fear of being misunderstood. It pleased him that the hardscrabble poor had come into their own, not for justice, but for the sleepy satiation it brought.

  No more burglaries. No more holdups. Glutted by consumerism, Coomey, Texas, napped.

  But in the wealthier neighborhood on the other side of Guadalupe Road, vandals had painted a stop sign yield-yellow. Someone, uncharmed by the Torku’s magnanimity, had sprayed EAT SHIT on the side of the volunteer fire station.

  By the time DeWitt reached Foster’s well-kept Victorian house, he had lost his smile. Propping his notebook against the saddle horn, he made a note of the vandals’ damage; then he dismounted and climbed the stairs to the wraparound porch. Windchimes, nudged by the breeze, plinked like three-year-olds on xylophones.

  As DeWitt knocked, his gaze snagged on Foster’s ‘68 Corvette gleaming on the concrete drive. The classic car might have been used to transport the children’s bodies, but Loretta was too large to fit in that trunk.

  Foster jerked open the door, his bearded face in a grin. The white-haired banker might have looked snappy in his suit had the tie-dyed shirt under the vest not been such a hideous orange.

  “Hey.” His hand lifted, the
index and middle fingers spread into a V. “Peace.”

  Without waiting for an invitation, DeWitt eased around the banker and into the warm living room. Arranged on the wall, fronted by scented candles, was the pictorial altar of Foster’s past: a young naked Foster, one of the many nude and beflowered disciples surrounding Timothy Leary; a clothed Foster smiling and shaking the hand of a thankfully-clothed Phil Gramm. Next to that was Foster’s framed college diploma and the photo taken the night of the Coomey High School Senior Prom: Foster’s possessive arm around a beaming, sixteen-year-old Janet. Janet’s blond hair was in a French twist, flowers tucked into its gleaming plaits. She looked different—younger, of course. She also looked happier than she had in years.

  DeWitt wrenched his eyes away. The dining-room door was shut, but behind it DeWitt could hear quiet activity. A rattle. The clack of something small and hard hitting a firm surface. What woman did Foster have in there this time?

  “Don’t mean to disturb you,” DeWitt told him, his eyes still on the door.

  The back of Foster’s hand collided with DeWitt’s chest. DeWitt staggered back a half-step in surprise and saw that the banker was holding a swatch of pale yellow fabric to his uniform.

  “Spring, I think.” Foster frowned at the piece of cloth and then at DeWitt’s face. The banker was so close that DeWitt could see the subtle brick color of his eyeshadow, the touch of blush on his cheeks.

  “You’re a Spring. Should wear more bright colors. Your hair’s highlights are toward the blond. Yellow would make that brighter. Eyes—what are they? More blue? More green? And the skin, warm peach. Yeah. Spring.” Foster stepped back and opened his vest to flash more of his shirt. The necklace of beads and bells he wore jingled. “I’m an Autumn, myself . . .

  “What about Loretta?”

  Foster stroked his beard. From the other room came a rattle. A series of sharp taps. Foster seemed to be fighting an urge to glance toward the closed door. “Loretta thought I was a Winter. She never could do colors well. She didn’t understand the vibratory resonance.”

  “Was? Have you heard she was murdered?” DeWitt hoped to catch him off guard, but the banker’s expression was as empty in its own way as Billy’s had been.

  “Do you meditate?”

  “I—”

  “You’re a Spring. Full of life. A hair-trigger temper that you regret later. Summers are impulsive, busy-work people who hurt without ever realizing it. Winters never forget a slight, but they possess psychic powers. Autumns are the most spiritual. I knew Loretta was headed for murder. Definitely a Summer. The quintessential victim. Summers never know revenge is about to fall until it hits them in the face.”

  “Who’d she hurt?” DeWitt tried to picture Loretta as one of Foster’s conquests and failed. Then he pictured Janet waiting in Foster’s dining room. The vision stuck in his mind like an annoying snatch of melody.

  “A Winter, obviously.” Foster tossed the swatch of fabric onto a turquoise-and-burnt-umber couch. “They’re brooders.”

  “You got anything to drink?” DeWitt parked himself on the sofa next to the square of fabric.

  Foster looked toward the dining room. “Lemon verbena tea? Peppermint? Maybe some Red Zinger?”

  “Mint sounds great.” DeWitt relaxed into the cushions.

  After a hesitation, Foster left. When DeWitt heard water running in the kitchen, he got up and crept over the hardwood planks to the closed door. The glass knob turned in his hand.

  DeWitt froze, the image of Janet returning. What would he do if he found her? he wondered. But he had no choice. If she left him for Foster, DeWitt would place his love at the Line of their estrangement: JANET, FOREVER AND ALWAYS, CHERISHED WIFE.

  He pulled the door open and peeked around the jamb. Jealousy assaulted him from an unexpected direction, impaling him so quickly, so painfully, that he found it difficult to breathe. On Foster’s dining room table a Monopoly board was set up. Sitting across from each other, wordlessly intent on their game, were a pair of Torku.

  DeWitt eased the door to. Confused, he made his way back to the sofa. Foster walked in, toting two mugs. A shell-and-bead necklace was entwined in the banker’s hand like a rosary.

  “Sorry I took so long.” The edges of Foster’s smile twitched.

  DeWitt met the man’s suspicion with a studied lack of guile. Taking the mug, he asked, “Loretta ever hurt you?”

  “Hurt me?” Foster put his mug down on the glass-topped table and offered the necklace to DeWitt. “Start wearing this. It helps the vibrations. Ties are out now. Phallic symbols, you know. We have to get in touch with our feminine sides after that game of nuclear hardball.”

  DeWitt put the necklace into his pocket.

  “Hurt me?” Foster asked again, plunking himself into a worn La-Z-Boy. “Nothing can hurt me anymore, DeWitt, now that I’ve set my priorities in order.” The chair reclined with a thump and a groan of springs. DeWitt found himself staring at the bottom of the banker’s sandals.

  “They did us a favor.” Foster spread his feet to peer at DeWitt. “The Russians. The Torku. You know, in college I thought the trick was revolution. Then later, when I followed my father and became a Republican, I imagined money was the answer. But there aren’t any answers. When you get right down to it, nothing’s meaningful. Nothing at all.”

  Foster was talking a notch too loudly, and DeWitt began to wonder if the speech was meant for the Torku in the next room. The rattle of dice, the clack of the pieces along the board, fell silent.

  DeWitt sipped at his tea. It was watery, and Foster had put no sugar in it. “Loretta thought you were a sinner.”

  “Loretta thought a great many things that weren’t true. She was the wrong season to be perceptive, remember?”

  DeWitt put his cup down.

  “Loretta was a Thou Shalt Not,” Foster told him. “Consider me a Thou Canst. When the bombs hit, I lost a lot of money in the stock market, but you don’t see me crying over it, do you?”

  No, DeWitt thought. But I see a pair of Torku in the next room learning all about acquisitions and mergers. He wondered what Kol Seresen, what Pastor Jimmy, might think of that.

  “So you hated Loretta.”

  The chair returned to sitting position with a startled bang. Foster leaned forward, his face too pink, too Summery, against the strident orange of his shirt. “Why would you think that?”

  “Pastor Jimmy’s people prayed God would take the sinners. Seems to me that when you have a congregation that wants something bad enough, one of them might help God along. The law would understand if you killed Loretta in self-defense.” In a kindly tone he added, “Secrets eat you up inside, Hubert. So tell me. Where were you last night?”

  Foster’s cheeks went a sickly shade of gray. A Winter-sky hue. “Here. At home.”

  “Any witnesses?”

  “Jesus, DeWitt. Loretta was the town’s only Mary Kay rep. And I’m completely out of skin toner. Why in the world would I kill her?”

  Slowly, pointedly, DeWitt looked at the living-room door. He had thought Foster could get no more sallow, but the banker’s cheeks went through a Torku transformation. He was as pale as Loretta, as white as his trimmed hair.

  “What’s going on between you and the Torku? Does Seresen know his people are here? And what did Loretta find out?”

  Irate, Foster shot to his feet, then appeared to be amazed to find himself standing. “The Torku and I have a lot in common. There’s no crime in that, is there?”

  Putting his hand into his pocket, DeWitt was surprised to feel the cold beads tucked away like a secret.

  “Well? Is there?”

  “Let me handle the Torku, Hubert. It’s better if they talk to one person. It keeps things from getting confused. I don’t want the Torku confused.”

  “Oh, I understand. You’re jealous. That’s what all this is about. W
ell, you don’t own the Torku. Envy is a pre-holocaust idea, DeWitt, and you’d better learn to get rid of it. The whole town had better learn to get rid of a lot of things. Outmoded ideas of demons. The Judgment Day holding tank that Pastor Jimmy thinks we’re in.”

  DeWitt looked at the piles of tie-dye, the beads, the canny little incense holders scattered about the room. An old paisley tie just the pattern of today’s Line. Foster was an ingenious man. He could have devised an ingenious murder weapon.

  “So you’re telling me life is meaningless.”

  Foster laughed. “I’m the one who should know. I campaigned for McGovern and then turned around and campaigned for Reagan. Find meaning in that.”

  “Funny thing.” DeWitt’s fingers slipped over the beads one by one. “There’s never any vandalism in the Hollow. It happens over here, right on the good side of town.”

  “So?”

  “So it makes me wonder about rich kids. Remember when you were in high school, Hubert? And my daddy arrested you for DWl? And how the circuit court judge just seemed to drop the case?”

  Foster’s jaw muscles tightened. “You drove drunk, too. You were just never caught.”

  “Well, your daddy can’t bribe you out of trouble this time.”

  The banker swallowed hard.

  “Isn’t it ironic?” DeWitt asked. “We get everything we want, and rich kids tear it up. They break street lights, they spraypaint graffiti on walls. All those people starving on the other side of the Line, and here you are, telling the Torku that life is meaningless.”

  “Of course I tell them!” Foster’s voice was strident, a voice to carry though closed doors. “I’m a teacher now. I’m not a wild teenager or a corporate pirate anymore. I’ve studied the arrogance of power dressing. The male Anglo-Saxon mind-set it creates. And if I could get through the Line, I’d teach those people the truth.”

  DeWitt pushed himself off the sofa and turned as though to leave. He whirled. Foster was planted, feet apart, pose defensive. “Did you borrow anyone’s car last night?”