Bullet Point

22

Wyatt entered the office of the Millerville Beacon. He’d never been in a newspaper office before, didn’t know what to expect. The Millerville Beacon had a counter in front, bearing a stack of fresh-looking newspapers, and four or five workstations in back, only one of which was occupied. The old man in the bowtie sat there, eating a sandwich, eyes on his computer screen.

“Looking for today’s paper, young man?” he said, somehow catching sight of Wyatt peripherally. He turned, pointed with his chin at the stack. “Just drop fifty cents in the dish,” he said.

Wyatt took the top paper off the stack, put two quarters in a dish that now held four.

“Don’t see many of your generation as customers these days,” the old man said, giving him a second look. “I’d be interested in any insights you might have about that.”

“Well, uh…”

“Simply put-why the hell don’t you read the goddamn paper?”

“There’s, um, online,” Wyatt said.

“Online.” The old man practically spat out the word. “You mean free.”

“What about advertising? Pop-ups and stuff.”

“One, it doesn’t pay diddly-shit. Two, no one even glances at the ads, and as soon as the accounts realize that, they’re over the blue horizon. So answer me this, young man-what’s your name, by the way?”

“Wyatt Lathem.”

“Nice name,” said the old man. “Mine’s Lou Rentner. Interested in palindromes?”

“What’s that?”

“Something that’s the same forward and backward-like Rentner. Lathem’s not a palindrome, of course, but it is an anagram.”

“Don’t know that one either,” Wyatt said.

“Not your fault-blame the education system in this country. An anagram’s where you can rearrange the letters and come up with something else. In your case, Lathem turns into Hamlet.” Wyatt thought, Whoa, and inside he reeled a little. “Ever heard of Hamlet?” said Mr. Rentner.

“A play by Shakespeare,” Wyatt said.

“Well, well. Can you tell me a thing or two about it?”

“It’s all about whether to believe the ghost or not.”

Lou Rentner tilted back in his chair, gave Wyatt a closer look. “Well, well,” he said again. “And where do you go to school, young Wyatt?”

Quick-decision time. Wyatt stuck with the story. “Foothills CC.”

“Really? You don’t look that old. But it’s true what they say about us geezers-the older you get, the harder it is to guess the age of the young people. What are you studying?”

What did people study at Community College? “Just taking a little of this and that for now,” Wyatt said.

“This and that will get you nowhere in life on planet Earth,” Mr. Rentner said. “If you don’t mind me sticking my oar in.”

“I’m interested in criminal justice.”

“Yeah?”

Wyatt nodded. He plunged ahead, the way he thought Greer might have in his place. “Right now I’m working on the story of this old case-it actually happened here in Millerville.”

“Did it, now?” said Mr. Rentner. His chair squeaked. “And what case would that be?”

“It was about these guys who tried to rob some drug dealers.”

“Thirty-two Cain Street?” said Mr. Rentner.

“Yes.”

Mr. Rentner pulled over a chair from the adjoining workstation and patted the seat. Wyatt walked around the counter and sat down.

“An interesting case,” Mr. Rentner said. “How did you happen to pick it?”

Was this the moment for starting over, for saying something like, It turns out that my real father, who I’d never met until very recently, committed this crime, or maybe not, and my girlfriend and I-another maybe not-are trying to find out what happened? Wyatt’s every instinct told him not to. “My partner found out about it,” he said.

“Partner?”

“We team up on these projects.”

Mr. Rentner shook his head. The skin of his face was shiny and must have been very thin: Wyatt could see purple networks of blood vessels underneath. “Never learn a goddamn thing that way. Real learning means all by your lonesome. But not your fault.” He drummed his bony fingers on the desk. “Tell you what let’s do,” he said. “I’ll take you on a quick tour.”

“Of what?”

“The crime scene, other places of interest. Nothing beats a firsthand look, and no amount of digital dipsy doodling will ever change that.”

“Thanks,” Wyatt said, “but I don’t want to take up your time.” But more important, how could he leave? What about Greer?

“Not an issue-I’ve actually been considering a follow-up piece, where-are-they-now, ten column inches. A handy space filler in this trade, should you ever choose to go into it, supposing it’s still around, which I highly doubt, as I hope I already made clear.”

“Won’t people always need news?” Wyatt said.

Mr. Rentner rose and took a cap off a wall peg, one of those flat caps with almost no brim. “Need, yes,” he said. “But all they want is entertainment. When you’re done with Shakespeare, check out the fall of the Roman Empire.”

They went outside. “This is my car,” Wyatt said. “Did you want me to, uh-”

“Nice ride,” said Mr. Rentner, patting the hood. “No-we’ll take mine.” He turned toward a bright yellow minivan. Wyatt quickly unlocked the Mustang so Greer could wait inside. Then he climbed into the minivan.

“Buckle up,” Mr. Rentner said. He pulled onto the road without looking, did a too-quick U-turn, and headed back in the direction of the North Side, over the speed limit by ten or fifteen miles an hour. A cop in a patrol car coming the other way made a pressing-down-air gesture with his hand, sign language for “slow down,” but Mr. Rentner didn’t seem to notice and sped up, if anything. Wyatt glanced back. The patrol car hadn’t turned to follow them; from behind, it looked like the cop was shaking his head in resignation.

“What do you know about Millerville?” Mr. Rentner said.

“Not much.”

“Where’re you from originally?”

“East Canton.”

“Did you know Mark Twain once ended up there by mistake?”

“Yeah.”

Mr. Rentner looked disappointed. “Bottom line-Millerville’s much the same, but in even worse shape. Unemployment rate topped twenty percent last month. Know what that means for people?” He jabbed his finger at storefronts passing by. Jab. “Going out of business.” Jab. “Closed down last week.” Jab. “Hanging on, but only by the good graces of the landlord.” Jab. “Bankrupt.” Jab. “In court.” Jab. “Skipped town in the middle of the night.” Jab. “Tried to commit suicide.” They drove in silence for a while. “Town was in much better shape back in the period you’re interested in. We just didn’t know it, is all.”

They came to Cain Street, turned left. Just past the point where the pavement ended, Mr. Rentner pulled over, onto the edge of one of the blackened lots.

“This was always the worst section, going back to frontier days. Know why? On account of the well water tastes skunky. But everyone’s been on town water for fifty years, and it’s still the bad part of town. Some folks, maybe most, take way too much time to realize things.” He pointed through the windshield. “Thirty-two Cain. Inside we had the Dominguez brothers, Luis and Esteban, illegal immigrants from Mexico. Make up your own mind whether the illegal part is germane to the story. The brothers worked construction for a local builder and developer name of Bud Pingree, now developing in the great beyond. Bud wasn’t a bad guy, rented out some properties he had on the North Side to some of his workers at a fair price. Thirty-two Cain was one of them. Not sure who owns it now.”

Wyatt came close to telling him; a strange situation, and uncomfortable. He realized with an inner start that there’d been too many of these lately.

“Bud’s nephew, Art-one of those guys who thinks he’s smarter than he is, in other words a born loser-did some of the rent collection. They say he came up with the robbery idea but I doubt it. Much more likely it was one of his lowlife pals-Doc Vitti or Sonny Racine.”

“What, uh-I mean how come you call them lowlifes?” Wyatt said.

“In addition to what they did right here?” Mr. Rentner said. “They were all pretty young, of course-mustn’t be too judgmental with the youth-but Doc already had a record and a rep as being something of a barroom brawler. The other one, Racine, was clean, as far as I recall, but there was something strange about him.”

“Like what?”

“He seemed-this was in court, I’m talking about-very smart, by far the smartest of the three. Not the kind of guy who shows it off, though-maybe he doesn’t realize how smart he is, pretty rare in my experience. The Art Pingrees of the world are much more common. Yet in a crime with incomplete forensic evidence and confused and sometimes contradictory testimony, plus no surviving witness other than a pair of drug dealers and an infant-you know about her?”

“Yes.”

“Here’s something you don’t know, the kind of sidebar that’s better than the main story-Bud Pingree and his wife ended up adopting her and she turned out to be quite a gal. Good rising out of the stink of evil. Don’t see that every day. But back to the main point-the smart thing in a case like this is to make the first deal. So why didn’t the smartest guy do the smart thing?”

“Why?” said Wyatt. “Tell me.”

Mr. Rentner laughed, an unpleasant sound in his case, like unlubricated steel parts rubbing together. “If I knew, I would.” He turned the key, did a U-turn, headed back the way they’d come. “It was chaos in there that night, and chaos leads to incoherence. Luis Dominguez got knocked out with a baseball bat right from the get-go, so his testimony was useless, and Esteban’s wasn’t much better-he was pretty much occupied grabbing his gun from under a seat cushion and trying to do some killing of his own. Do you have a handle on the forensics?”

“No.”

“Good. I mean by that it’s good to say you don’t know when you don’t know. Want to stay short of being an ignoramus, of course. First thing, there were two guns fired that night. One was a thirty-eight revolver belonging to Esteban Dominguez. Two shots were fired from that gun. One slug was dug out of the kitchen wall at thirty-two Cain Street, the other ended up in Art Pingree’s leg. Two more shots were fired from a twenty-two handgun that probably belonged to Art Pingree and was never recovered. The first one passed right through the girlfriend’s throat, severing her jugular vein, and then striking the baby in the eye. The second shot hit Esteban in the chest, missing his heart by an inch or so. He testified that he didn’t see who fired it, also testified that he remembered seeing only two invaders, Art Pingree and Doc Vitti. Pingree swore he wasn’t the shooter; Doc made his deal and fingered Racine; Racine took the stand and also denied he’d fired the shot. But then, in response to a question from the DA about what he thought had happened to the gun, Racine did the most amazing thing: he said he’d thrown it into the woods just as the police moved in. What do you make of that?”

Wyatt was totally confused. “The gun was never found?”

“Nope.”

“It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Not without an alteration or two, completely speculative.”

“Like what?”

“Naturally the DA had no interest in speculation. What he had was a strong case, just about open-and-shut, that speculation could only muddy up. No gun? They figured Racine had thrown it in some other direction, or a dog had found the thing and run off with it, or that it had fallen into a hole they’d missed.”

Mr. Rentner turned down a street that led to the edge of town. They passed a few shabby houses, then stopped outside a trailer park.

“But suppose,” said Mr. Rentner, “there’d been a fourth person on that little shindig. Further suppose that said fourth person, perhaps the actual shooter, ran away with the gun just as the police were closing in, maybe was never in the house at all, but outside a window, let’s say. Maybe Racine was there, too, at least part of the time. Then his testimony starts to make sense.”

“How?” Wyatt said.

“Saying he threw the gun away takes the police off the scent of number four. Therefore, in this scenario, Racine lied to protect whoever that was. Not even much woods back of Cain Street, then or now. Suggests a certain unfamiliarity with the area. I’m not convinced he was even there.”

“But why would he do that?”

“Cherchez la femme,” Mr. Rentner said.

“I don’t understand.”

“A basic French phrase like that?” Mr. Rentner said. Then he sighed and said, “Not your fault. Let’s put it this way-there were rumors at the time that Racine had a girlfriend.”

Wyatt felt the blood drain from his head, like he was about to faint. Yes, Racine had had a girlfriend all right: Wyatt’s mom. The girlfriend theory wouldn’t go away, threatening Wyatt’s whole history.

But there was no time to deal with that. An old black Dodge Ram pickup came driving out of the trailer park, a big-headed man with shoulder-length graying hair behind the wheel.

“That’s Doc,” said Mr. Rentner.