Mission Flats

4

Kurth was wrong about one thing: You could not keep the case quiet, not in a place like this. There are no secrets in Versailles, Maine. Information shoots around the town like tremors over a spider’s web. Details of the murder began to emerge the same day, and within twenty-four hours most Versellians had a pretty good idea what we’d found in that cabin. Thankfully, people around here don’t scare easily, and the case excited more curiosity than fear. It was the hot topic at the Owl and McCarron’s. The morning after the body was discovered, Jimmy Lownes sidled up to me at the Owl and confided that he ‘knew a little about guns,’ if I was interested. Bobby Burke pleaded for a look-see inside the cabin. No one was immune.

‘Tell me what it looked like,’ Diane prodded.

This was at our poker game, a quarter-ante affair that met at the station to help me pass the Sunday-night shift. Diane was usually the most serious player at the table. She chain-smoked Merits, played conservatively, and rarely lost when she did go after a big pot. But tonight even Diane was distracted, even she had the bug.

‘Tell you what what looked like?’

‘The body.’

‘It musta been the gormiest thing,’ Jimmy Lownes snorted. He took off his ball cap to scratch his head in wonder.

‘I can’t talk about it.’

‘What do you mean, you can’t talk about it?’ Diane was offended. ‘The whole town is talking about it! You’re the only one who isn’t.’

‘I can’t. They told me to keep my mouth shut.’

‘Oh, Ben, you are such a wuss.’

‘Hey, are we playing poker or not?’ I scolded.

Of course, they did not give a rat’s ass about poker, but it would have been unseemly to abandon the game altogether, so they acquiesced, albeit with murmurs of reluctance.

‘Alright, that’s better. Seven-card stud, roll your own-’

‘I bet it was stiff as a board.’

‘Jesus, Jimmy, I just got through saying. We’re not talking about this.’

‘I’m not asking you anything, Ben. I’m just saying: I bet it was stiff as a board.’

‘Ai-yi-yi, how should I know if it was stiff? I didn’t feel the thing!’ I dealt the cards, sensing their eyes on me. ‘Jimmy, it’s your bet.’

‘Did it smell?’

‘Your bet.’

Jimmy checked, and the rest of the table promptly did the same. They barely glanced at their cards.

‘Alright, dealer bets two bucks.’ I tossed in two blue chips.

‘What, you can’t even tell us if it smelled?’

‘Alright, yes, Diane, it smelled.’

‘No, but what did it smell like?’

‘You really want to know what it smelled like?’

She put her cards down, exasperated. ‘Yes. I really do.’

‘I tell you what,’ Dick said, apropos of nothing, ‘The Chief never had a murder case.’

My father had retired, reluctantly, in 1995, but even two years later when people referred to The Chief, they meant him, not me.

‘Dick,’ I explained, ‘The Chief never worked a murder because nobody ever got murdered. It doesn’t make me anything special.’

‘Well now, I didn’t say you were anything special, Ben. I just said The Chief never had a case like this one.’

‘Jimmy, it’s two bucks to stay in.’

‘What are you gonna do now?’ Diane pressed.

‘We’re waiting for the AG to sort out what they found in the cabin.’

‘You’re just gonna wait? That’s crazy.’

‘Most murders are solved in the first twenty-four hours, you know, Ben.’ This was Bobby Burke with one of his signature factoids.

‘Look, this isn’t the Hardy Boys. You can’t just run out and investigate a murder on your own, just because you want to. There’s laws. The AG has jurisdiction. It’s not my case.’

‘Well it happened here,’ Bobby retorted.

‘And you found the body, Ben.’

‘Doesn’t matter. Not my case.’

‘The Chief would have grabbed it,’ Dick tossed in. ‘You could ask him to help you out, like a — whaddaya call it? — a consultant.’

I rolled my eyes. ‘I don’t need help that bad. Besides, he wouldn’t work for me.’

‘Did you ever ask him?’

I answered with a non sequitur. ‘Hey, do any of you guys know where he might have got a beer?’

‘Claude had a beer?’

‘One of those big bottles. Where did he get it?’

‘Could have got it anywhere. It’s just beer.’

‘It’s not just beer. If you hear who sold it to him, you let me know.’

‘What are you going to do? Arrest somebody for selling your old man a beer?’

‘I’m going to have a talk with him is all.’

‘Well,’ Dick sighed, steering us back to an older, hardier image of my father, ‘The Chief wouldn’t have listened to some smartass yuppie lawyer. No, sir. I’d like to see that kid tell your old man, “It’s not your case.” The Chief would have given him what-for.’

‘Dick, he’d have listened because he had to listen, same as I am.’

‘Well,’ Diane retorted, ‘your mother wouldn’t have listened.’ She exhaled cigarette smoke. ‘Why would she listen to some lawyer? She never listened to anyone else.’

There was a pregnant moment while the four of them waited to see how I would react to that. There was some risk in mentioning my mother. In the ten weeks since she’d died, I had wrapped myself up in righteous Yankee stoicism. Never mind that my grief carried something extra, a tinge of guilt and shame — more than the usual dose. But to my own surprise, Diane’s comment did not trigger any of the old sadness. We were thinking the same thing: If the Game-Show Host had ever tried to put off Annie Truman with the high-handedness he’d shown me…

‘She’d have kicked his ass,’ I said.

Here is my mother: Around 1977 or so, on a raw morning in early spring. The weather was damp. In our kitchen that morning, you could sense the dankness outside, the smells of rain and mud. Mum was at the table, reading a hardcover book. She was already dressed, her hair gathered at the back of her neck exposing the empty dimple-holes in her pierced ears. I was at the table too. And before me, my preferred breakfast of the moment, Apple Jacks and a glass of milk. The glass was a concession from my mother, who’d recently given up trying to force me to drink the unpotable milk in the bowl, with its filmy emulsion of cereal scum. There was still a lingering self-consciousness between us over this tiff. I had the strongest urge to drink the soiled milk for her, but I couldn’t quite do it. (Those amoeboid globules of Apple Jacks oil…)

‘What are you reading?’

‘A book.’

‘What book?’

‘A grown-up book.’

‘What’s it called?’

She showed me the cover.

‘Do you like that book?’

‘Yes, Ben.’

‘Why do you like it?’

‘Because I’m learning.’

‘About what?’

‘It’s a history book. I’m learning about the past.’

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why would you want to learn that?’

‘To be better.’

‘Better than what?’

She looked at me. Blue-gray eyes, laugh lines. ‘Just a better person.’

Dad pulled up in his truck. The overnight shift was supposed to go from midnight to eight, but Dad always seemed to get home earlier. I heard him hawk his throat before coming inside. He sat down at the table with little mute greetings for Mum and me.

Look! I shot a glance at Mum: Does he know? There was a white patch in Dad’s bushy brown hair! Right at the top of his forehead! It was white powder, like baby powder, I guessed. Mum, do you see it?

‘Dad, there’s-’

‘Ben.’ My mother gave me a stern look to shut me up.

Dad said, ‘What is it, Ben?’

‘Um, nothing.’

Mum’s face had gone a little white too. Her lips compressed into a line.

Dad offered around a box of doughnuts from the Hunny Dip doughnut shop in town. On the box was a cartoon of a brown honey pot brimming with thick, golden ooze. A doughnut floated in midair above the jar, dripping with the stuff. Dad said, ‘Here. From Hunny Dip’s, like you like.’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Go on, Anne. It won’t kill you.’

‘No, Claude.’ You could tell from Mum’s voice she was angry about him bringing home those doughnuts.

I helped myself to a chocolate glazed, which pleased him. He cupped my jaw in his thick-fingered paw and shook it. His fingers had a weird, tangy chlorine smell. There was, I noticed, more white powder on his shirt cuff.

‘Attsaboy It’s just a doughnut, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Don’t touch him, Claude.’

‘Don’t touch him? Why not?’

Her blue eyes were squinched half-shut, as if she wanted to deny her husband the pleasure of looking into them. ‘Ben, take your doughnut and go in the other room.’

‘But I’m not done yet-’

‘Ben.’

‘What about my cereal?’

Dad said, meekly, ‘You better go, Ben.’

My mother was a small woman, maybe five-two and thin. But somehow she was able to dominate her husband. He seemed to enjoy submitting to her too. It was a game, a little joke of his: Of all the people to boss around big Claude Truman, this little spitfire…

When I was safely out of the room — and eavesdropping from the TV room next door — I heard her say, ‘- my house.’

‘What?’

‘I said, get out of my house now.’

‘Annie, what the hell’s wrong with you?’

‘Claude, there’s powdered sugar in your hair. This is a little town, Claude. Did you have to rub my face in it?’

‘Rub your face-’

‘Claude, don’t. Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid, like I’m the only one who doesn’t know. I am not stupid, Claude.’

I did not really understand what was going on that morning, but I knew — I think I always knew — their relationship was a precarious one. Dad’s temper, his rabbity sexual habits, his ego, and Mum’s own strong personality all made for a volatile marriage. Not a bad marriage, but an inconstant one. Sometimes they acted like lovers; they disappeared upstairs on Sunday afternoons for naps or kissed on the lips or laughed over obscure incidents in their secret history. Other times, the strain between them was obvious, like the creaking of a rope under a heavy load. As a kid I assumed this was what true love looked like — that love was inherently unstable above a certain temperature.

I pushed the door open a crack to spy and was immediately seen.

Dad spotted me — wide-eyed, the doughnut glutinizing in my fingers — and something, some small breath of shame, went out of him. To my astonishment, he surrendered to Mum immediately, asking only, ‘How long till I can come back?’

‘Until I’m ready’

‘Annie, come on. Just tell me how long.’

‘A week. Then we’ll see.’

‘Anne, where am I supposed to go? I’m exhausted.’

‘Go to the station. Go wherever you want, I don’t care. Except the doughnut shop.’

Later that morning, after Dad had gone, Mum took me into town to return the box of doughnuts. Dad’s friend Liz Lofgren was behind the counter that morning, and Mum waited until the store was empty to inform Liz that she’d better have nothing more to do with Chief Truman if she knew what was good for her. Liz pretended not to understand for a minute, but when Mum said, ‘You don’t want to be on my wrong side,’ Liz seemed to agree.

Anne Wilmot Truman was raised in Boston, and the imprint of that city stayed with her. It was in her voice, in the mangled r s and odd archaic colloquialisms (she always called soda tonic; the dry cleaner, the cleanser; milk shakes, frappes). But the deepest impression was left by her father, a striver named Joe Wilmot.

Joe had clawed his way up from a Dorchester tenement. In the 1930s and ’40s he built a small chain of grocery stores in Boston, a respectable success if not a spectacular one. It was enough to propel him out to the suburbs, anyway. But even after he’d made it, Joe could never quite shake the sense that his new neighbors — all those WASPy Juniors and The Thirds with their tennis games and rumpled clothes — possessed something he did not, something more than money. It was an attitude more than anything else, a sort of at-homeness among the big green lawns and tree-shaded streets. For lack of a better word Joe called it ‘class,’ and he knew it would always be out of his reach. Of course, this is the frustration of arrivistes everywhere. They cannot acquire ‘class’ because they cannot envision themselves having it. It is a failure of the imagination. They are anti-Gatsbys.

So Joe did what would-be Gatsbys have so often done: He tried to inculcate the elusive stuff in his only daughter. After all, this was Boston in the age of that real-life Gatsby, Joe Kennedy. And what had Old Man Kennedy learned if not that class is granted only to the second generation? So Joe Wilmot sent Annie to a private school, and when he deemed the education there inadequate, he made up the difference by paying her directly for educating herself: nickels and dimes for good posture, for reading Yeats or Joyce, for teaching herself a Mozart lied on the piano. The payola did not stop when she got older either. Right through the Winsor School and Radcliffe — between ballet recitals and voice lessons and a semester in Paris — Annie could always earn a buck or a fin by reciting a speech from Shakespeare or some other feat of cultivation. It was a game father and daughter played on the road to refinement.

Then the unthinkable happened. Its name was Claude Truman.

He was a thick-wristed policeman — a policeman! — from some godawful backwater in Maine. They were wildly mismatched. What Mum saw in him, nobody could understand. My guess is it was precisely his muscular rudeness that made Claude Truman appealing. He was cocksure and strong, a bull moose in springtime. He was different. Not dumb, far from it. But at the same time this was a man who thought John Cheever was a hockey player and Ionesco a corporation. It must have been a relief to Annie not to have to work so hard. Who knows? Maybe there was even an exotic appeal to Versailles, Maine. Of course, she’d never seen it, but the idea of Acadia County must have been romantic — the forest primeval and all that — especially to a young woman who had been literated to a fare-thee-well, educated beyond all reason. Her father forbade Annie to see Claude Truman, but she defied him, and the couple married three months after they met. He was thirty-seven, she was twenty-nine.

The price was high. Mum and her father had a ferocious argument, and the rift between them never healed. She called him every now and then; after she hung up the phone, she usually went to her bedroom to cry. When he died, Joe left his daughter enough to pay for my education and a little extra for herself, but not the lode she might have received if she’d stuck to the plan.

Mum did continue one Wilmot family tradition. When I was a kid, she’d pay me for various demonstrations of self-improvement. A dollar for learning the ‘we happy few’ speech from Henry V, and another buck for reciting it before dinner. Fifty cents for reading a novel (if it was not ‘crap’), a dollar for reading a biography. Five dollars for sitting with her through all of I, Claudius on PBS.

The day Mum kicked Dad out for getting doughnut powder in his hair, she cleared aside the kitchen furniture and asked me if I wanted to dance for a one-time payment of one dollar. She put on a Frank Sinatra record in the TV room and left the door open so we could hear it, then she instructed me on the proper placement of the man’s hands and the proper execution of the box step.

I laid my left hand on her hip and held my right hand up so she could rest hers in my palm.

‘Now what?’

‘Step with your outside foot.’

‘Which one?’

‘Any one, Ben. I’ll follow you.’

‘Why?’

‘That’s how it works. The man leads. Just keep stepping with your outside foot. Make the box.’

We danced for a while, to ‘Summer Wind,’ then ‘Luck Be a Lady’

She asked, ‘Do you want to talk about what happened this morning?’

‘No.’

‘Do you have anything you want to ask me?’

I was preoccupied with the complexities of the box step — look up at your partner, never down at your feet; stand straight, as if there were a string coming out the top of your head pulling you up, up — and all the while I was con-cen-tra-ting-on-the-beat. So I said no, it was okay.

She clinched my head a little too tight to her tummy and said, ‘My Ben,’ which meant she was sad but didn’t want me to know it.

‘You can’t bet that. It’s your badge.’

‘Of course I can. It’s worth something, isn’t it? It’s gold.’

‘It’s not gold. Besides, what am I gonna do with it? Melt it down?’

‘No, you could wear it, Diane. It’s jewelry’

‘Ben, I’m not going to walk around wearing your damn badge.’

‘Why not? You can be the new chief.’

She rolled her eyes, unamused. ‘Come on, bet money or fold. That’s how it works. U.S. currency’

Bobby Burke added, ‘Legal tender for all debts public and private.’

The pot was somewhere just south of fifty bucks, which is about as high as it gets in this game. I was sitting on three queens, with just Diane to beat. It was no time to drop out. I appealed to Dick: ‘Is this badge worth fifteen bucks or not? Tell her, Dick. These things cost twenty-five, thirty bucks. I can show you the catalog.’

‘That’s if you buy it new,’ he demurred.

‘Dick, it’s not a Buick. It doesn’t matter how many miles are on it.’

‘It’s up to Diane. If she wants to take it, she can take it.’

‘Jesus, Dick, you have no backbone. You’re like a… a squid. What, are you afraid of Diane?’

‘Yup.’

‘Diane-’

‘No.’

‘Diane, just listen.’

‘No.’

‘Look, if you take it, you can wear it around town and make me look like an idiot. Now, how’s that?’

She shook her head no. ‘Throw in your pants. I’ll take those.’

‘I’m not betting my pants.’

‘Must not be a very good hand.’

‘It’s got nothing to do with that.’

‘Then throw ’em in.’

‘Diane, I’m not betting my pants.’

‘What else do you have?’

‘That’s it. It’s all I got.’

She picked up the badge and turned it over in her palm, frowning. I expected her to bite it to see if it was counterfeit. ‘I’ll take it. Maybe I’ll make an earring out of it or something. I’ll wear it around town so everyone will know what a loser you are.’ She tossed it in the pot.

‘Ben,’ Dick asked, ‘does this make Diane the new chief?’

‘She hasn’t won yet, Dick.’

‘Well, after. Will she be the new chief?’

‘I guess so.’

His mouth squeezed into a frown of deep concern.

Diane laid her cards on the table. Two pairs, kings and sevens.

The thought crossed my mind that all I had to do here was fold. Just put my cards down, let Diane have the pot and the badge with it. An ignominious end to my career in law enforcement, but what the hell, an end is an end. Then again, I don’t get the chance to beat Diane very often. I put down my three queens and swept the pot toward me, forty-five dollars or so plus a gold-colored badge.

‘You wouldn’t have let me keep it anyway,’ she grumbled.

I shrugged. Hey, you never know.

Later, I watched Diane get out of bed to stand by the window. She was a big, haunchy girl with an athletic way of moving. I liked to watch her. The soles of her feet scuffed along the floor. At the window she lit a cigarette and puffed it distractedly, arms folded across her belly. She seemed lost in thought, her nudity forgotten, irrelevant. Outside, the hills were silhouettes against the moonlit sky.

‘What’s wrong, Diane?’ I propped myself on an elbow.

She moved her head vaguely but did not answer. The tip of the cigarette glowed orange in the dark room. ‘Did you ever think that maybe this is all we’re going to have?’

‘What? You mean’ — I wiggled my finger between us — ’this?’

‘No! Don’t worry, Ben, I know what this is.’

‘I only meant-’

‘I know what you meant.’ She shook her head. ‘I mean, what if this whole thing is all there is for me? Shitty little apartment, shitty little town. This whole shitty life. So-called life.’

My neck began to stiffen and I sat up. ‘Well, you can change it. If this place isn’t for you, you can go anywhere you want.’

‘No, you can go anywhere you want. It’s different for you, Ben. Always has been. You could always go anywhere you want. I can’t.’

‘Of course you can.’

‘Ben, don’t. Just don’t. I’m not asking to be cheered up.’

‘Oh.’

I sneaked a glance at the clock. 2:17 A.M.

‘We’re not all like you, Ben. You’ve got choices. You’re smart, you went to a fancy college, fancy graduate school. You’ll be okay wherever you go. You’re not even as butthole-ugly as I say you are. You’re actually-’ She looked back at me, then returned her attention to the window. ‘You’re not that bad.’

‘You’re not bad either.’

‘Right.’

‘I mean it, Diane.’

‘I used to be not bad. Now I’m not even not bad.’

‘That’s just not true.’

She dismissed this with a wave of her hand. ‘Ben, tell me what you’re going to do when you leave here.’

‘Go home, I guess. I have a meeting in Portland tomorrow.’

She shook her head again, the long-suffering Diane. ‘Not when you leave the room. When you leave this fucking town.’

‘Oh. I don’t know. Go back to school, I guess. Maybe just go have an adventure somewhere.’

‘Right. Prague.’

‘You could come, you know. There’s nothing holding you here.’

‘I don’t know from Prague.’ She slid a hand over her hip, smoothing the clothes that were not there. A gesture to fill the space. When she was ready, she said, ‘I thought you were going to be a professor. Isn’t that what you were in school for? English or something?’

‘History.’

‘You’ve got a good name for a history professor. Professor Benjamin Truman. Very intellectual.’

‘It’s probably not going to happen, Diane.’

‘Yeah, it will.’

‘I only got through one year of grad school. It takes a lot more than that.’

‘You say it like you flunked out. You got called back here. That’s different. You came back to help your mother and now she’s dead, so — You don’t have to stay, you don’t have to be here anymore. You should go back to school. It’s where you belong. Join the chess club or the prom committee or whatever.’ She took a drag on the cigarette and looked out at the hills, then, as if she’d reached a decision, turned to me. ‘You should go to Prague. I have some money, if that’s what’s stopping you.’

‘No, Diane. It’s not about money.’

‘Well, you just make sure you get there. Go to Prague, then get back to school. You know, those guys — Bobby and Jimmy, even Phil, all them guys — they look up to you. They want you to do all that shit you talk about.’

I had no response.

‘It’ll make them happy to see you out there somewhere. Just to think of you out there, like, flying. It’s important.’

‘How about you, Diane? Would it make you happy if I left?’

‘I’d get over it. There’ll be a new chief after you. Maybe I’ll just use him for sex, same as I did you. Maybe he won’t even be a prude like you.’

‘They might hire a woman. They do that now.’

‘That’d be just my luck.’

Neither of us spoke for a while.

‘Maybe we shouldn’t do this anymore, Ben. It’s starting to feel like a bad idea.’ The tip of her cigarette hovered at the window like a firefly. ‘We both got places to go.’