Shallow Graves

9

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 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 sight-seeing."

"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 coke 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 mistress.

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. Uncertainty was a quality brought out by one of the first girls he'd been in love with).

He'd just gotten into the Caddie when his housekeeper ran to the door and signaled to him with a wave.

"It's Mark," she called. "Says it's urgent."

Ambler said, "Have him call on the car phone."

He backed the car out of the driveway and waved to her affectionately once more.

Waiting for the call. He was thinking less about what the beefy young man would have to say and more about the woman he was on his way to see.

Ambler was a religious man (on the executive committee of the First Presbyterian Church), and although he understood that Calvinistic predestination did not absolve him from choosing the right path, the moral path, nonetheless the religion instilled in him a tendency toward helplessness on those moral questions the answers to which he did not like. He tended to throw his hands up and follow his instinct.

So although he knew what he was doing was immoral, he felt an addiction to his mistress, and could more or less successfully conclude that he had no control over the matter.

He packaged the infidelity carefully, though. For instance, he never thought of the word "cheating," which gave the whole matter a blue-collar taint. And he always thought of his paramour as a mistress or lover, rather than girlfriend or "the woman he was seeing on the side." (Dignity was important to Wex Ambler.) He never risked embarrassing his lover just to satisfy his own passion and went to crazy lengths to keep the affair secret.

The one problem, though-one he hadn't counted on-was that he'd fallen completely in love with the woman.

Ambler, who was fifty-two, was not so old that he had forgotten love makes people stupid-and in his philosophy, as well as his profession, stupidity was the number-one sin. He had guarded against love but unlike religion and unlike money and unlike power, love had a mind of its own.

It had nabbed him, but good.

At his insistence, their get-togethers had become more and more frequent. And he now felt his center giving, falling further toward her. He was growing hungrier, even desperate-while she seemed increasingly aloof.

Was there anything more foolish than a middle-aged man in love? And was there anyone who could care less about that foolishness?

Ambler smelled leaf dust and warm air from the Caddie's heater and wished he were already at the cabin.

The phone buzzed. The noise always disturbed him; it reminded him of the alarm a hospital monitor would make when a patient went into cardiac arrest. He snatched up the light receiver.

"Yes."

"I talked to Tom," Mark said.

"Yes. And?"

"The guy's turning into some kind of private eye."

Ambler concentrated on driving. The roads were narrow and wound in tricky meanderings past horse and dairy farms. He had a tendency to wander onto the shoulder if he didn't think about his driving. He asked Mark, "What do you mean?"

There was a pause and he heard Mark spit. A young man chewing tobacco-it was stupid. Maybe he did it to darken his moustache. Mark continued. "He's been asking a lot of questions about his friend and the car. He was down to R &W."

"The junkyard."

"Right. Looking at the wreck of the car."

Ambler felt the car bobble as the right front tire dipped noisily off the asphalt. "Damn." He forced the car back onto the road, overcompensating. It slipped over the broken yellow line before he got it steady again.

Mark asked, "What should we do? I was thinking maybe we could offer him some money. You know, bribe him to leave."

"Then he'd think I had something to do with the accident."

"Not necessarily." When Ambler didn't answer, Mark said, "But maybe."

Ambler said, "I've got an idea. I don't want to talk about it on the phone. Come see me."

"Now?"

"I'll be busy for a while. I'll call you."

They hung up, and it took Ambler the rest of the drive to the cabin to shake off his concern at Mark's news. In fact, it wasn't until he turned into the leaf-packed driveway and saw his lover's car sitting obliquely in the turnaround of the cabin that his spirits lifted. He climbed out of the Caddie, eager and buoyant as a seventeen-year-old en route to a homecoming date.