Scenarios - A Collection of Nameless Detective Stories (14 page)

I ran along the far edge of the road, back toward the fork. Most of my attention was on the fire behind me, so I did not become aware of the cluster of people until I was abreast of the last of the south-side buildings, where the road jogged in that direction.

They were standing in the meadow up there—more than a dozen of them, the whole damned town. Just standing there, watching me run toward them, watching the ghosts of Ragged-Ass Gulch burn as though in some final rite of exorcism.

No one moved even when I stopped within a few feet of them and stood swaying a little, panting. All they did was
stare at me. Paul Thatcher, holding a shovel in one hand. Jack
Coleclaw
, with his arms folded across his fat paunch. Ella Bloom, her mouth twisted into a witch's grimace. Hugh Penrose, shaking his ugly head and making odd little sounds as though he was trying to control a spasm of laughter. Their faces, and those of the others, had an unnatural look in the
fireglow
, like mummers' masks stained red-orange and sooty black.

"What's the matter with you people?" I yelled at them.

"What're you standing around here for? You can see the whole town's going to go up!"

Jack
Coleclaw
was the first of them to speak. "Let it burn," he said.

"Ashes to ashes," Penrose said.

"For Christ's sake, it's liable to spread to some of your homes—"

"That won't happen," Ella Bloom said. "There's no wind tonight."

Somebody else said, "Besides, we dug firebreaks."

"You dug firebreaks—that's terrific. Goddamn it, look at me! Can't you see I was in one of those burning buildings? Didn't any of you think of that possibility?"

"We didn't see your car anywhere," Thatcher said. "We thought you'd left town."

"Yeah, sure."

"What were you doing in one of the ghosts? You start the fire, maybe?"

"No, I didn't start it. But somebody sure as hell did."

"Is that so?"

"He was trying to kill me, the same way he killed Allan Randall in Redding. He damned near broke my head with a board and then he locked me in a room he used in the hotel and took my car and hid it somewhere. When he came back he torched the building."

Coleclaw
said in a flat, hard voice, "Who you talking about, mister?"

"The only person who isn't here right now, Mr.
Coleclaw
, that's who I'm talking about. Your son Gary."

The words seemed to have no impact on him. Or on any of the others. They all kept right on staring at me through their mummers' masks. And none of them made a sound until
Coleclaw
said, "Gary didn't do any of those things. He didn't."

"He did them, all right."

"Why? Why would he?"

"You know the answer to that. You all hate the Munroe Corporation, so he hates them too. And he decided to do something about it."

"Gary's slow, mister. You understand that?"

"I understand it. But being retarded doesn't excuse him setting fires and committing murder and attempted murder. Where is he? Why isn't he here with the rest of you?"

He didn't answer me.

"All right," I said, "have it your way. But I'm going to the county sheriff as soon as I find my car. You'll have to turn Gary over to him."

"No,"
Coleclaw
said.

"You don't have a choice—"

"The law won't take him away from me," a thin, harried-looking woman said shrilly.
Coleclaw's
wife. "I won't let them. None of us will, you hear?"

And that was when I understood the rest of it, the whole truth—the source of the bad vibes I had gotten earlier, the source of all the hostility. It was not any sudden insight, or even what Mrs.
Coleclaw
had just said; it was something in her face, and in her husband's, and in each of the other faces. Something I had been too distraught to see until now.

"You knew all along," I said to the pack of them. "All of you. You knew Gary set those fires; you knew he killed Randall. A cover-up, a conspiracy of silence—that's why none of you would talk to me."

"It was an accident," Mrs.
Coleclaw
said. "Gary didn't mean to hurt anybody—"

"Hush up, Clara," her husband told her in a sharp voice. Thatcher said, "No matter what happened to Randall, he had it coming. That's the way we look at it. The bastard had it coming."

"How about me?" I said. The rage was thick in my throat; I had to struggle to keep from shouting the words. "Did I have it coming too? You don't know me, you don't know anything about me. But you were going to let him kill me the way he killed Randall."

"That's not true,"
Coleclaw
said. "We didn't know you were still here. I told you, we thought you'd left town."

"Even if you didn't know, you could have guessed it. You could have come looking to make sure."

Silence.

"Why?" I asked them. "I can understand the
Coleclaws
doing it, but why the rest of you?"

"Outsiders like you don't care about us," Ella Bloom said. "But we care about each other; we watch out for our own."

"More than neighbors, more than friends," Penrose said. "Family. No one here lies to me. No one here thinks I'm ugly."

I looked at him, at the rest of them, and the skin along my back began to crawl. Thatcher had lifted his shovel, so that he was holding it in both hands in front of him; one of the men I didn't know had done the same thing.
Coleclaw's
big hands were knotted into fists. All of their faces were different now in the firelight, and what I felt coming off them was something primitive and deadly, a faint gathering aura of violence.

The same aura a lynch mob generates.

Some of the fear I had known at the hotel came back, diluting my anger. I felt suddenly that if I moved, if I tried to pass through them or around them, they would attack me in the same witless, savage fashion a lynch mob attacks its victims. With shovels, with fists—out of control. If that happened, I could not fight all of them; and by the time they came to their senses and realized what they'd done, I would be a dead man.

I had never run away from anything or anyone in my life, but I had an impulse now to turn and flee. I controlled it, telling myself to stay calm, use reason. Telling myself I was wrong about them, they were just average citizens with misplaced loyalties caught up in a foolish crusade—not criminals, not a mob; that they would not do anything to me as long as I did nothing to provoke them.

Time seemed to grind to a halt. Behind me, I could hear the heavy crackling rhythm of the fire. There was sweat on my body, cold and clammy. But I kept my expression blank, so they wouldn't see my fear, and I groped for words to say to them that would let me get out of this.

I was still groping when headlights appeared on the road to the south, coming down out of the pass between the cliffs.

The tension in me seemed to let go, like a rubber band snapping. I said, "Somebody's coming!" and threw my arm up and pointed.
Coleclaw
and two or three of the others swiveled their heads. And then the tension in them seemed to break, too; somebody said, "God!" and they all began to move at once. Shuffling their feet, turning their bodies—the mob starting to come apart like something fragile and clotted splitting into fragments.

The headlights probed straight down the road at a good clip. When they neared the bunch of us in the meadow Thatcher threw down his shovel and walked away, jerkily, through the grass. The others went after him, in ragged little groups of two and three. I was the only one standing still when the car slid to a stop twenty feet away on the road.

It was Kerry. And Raymond Treacle. They piled out and came hurrying my way. Her step faltered when she got a good look at me. "My God, are you all right?"

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, I'm all right."

"What happened here? That fire ...you look as though you..."

"I'm okay. It's over now."

"You didn't come back," she said. "I got worried, I asked Ray to drive me here to find out...For heaven's sake, what happened?"

I looked back at the raging fire; then I looked up at the line of people trudging slowly toward
Coleclaw's
mercantile. "
Cooperville
just died," I said.

8.

W
ithin five minutes, Treacle was driving us back to Weaverville. I did not want to stay there among the ghosts old and new even long enough to hunt for my car.

The burns on my back and legs, the lacerations on my hands, were not serious enough to require medical attention, so we went straight to the sheriff's department. I gave the cop in charge a full account of what had happened on my two visits to
Cooperville
, of how Gary
Coleclaw
had tried to kill me and how the whole town had been covering up his guilt in the death of Allan Randall. I also told him what it was that had put me onto Gary: The stone cup with the wax residue inside. The room in the hotel with the pieces of rock on the shelves. Penrose's comments to Kerry and me that Gary was a "poor young fool, poor lost lad" and that he had "rocks in his head." A pun, Penrose had said after the latter remark. He'd meant that Gary had rocks in his head not because he was retarded but because he was a collector of unusual stones—arrowheads and fossils and the like. And Treacle telling me the stone cup contained bryophytes, reminding me of those rocks in the hotel room, making me think that the room might have been outfitted by someone with the mind of a child who used it as a kind of clubhouse where he kept the treasures he'd collected.

Gary
Coleclaw
was not taken into custody that night. He was gone from what was left of
Cooperville
when the police got there; so were his father and mother. The cops put out a pick-up order on the family, but it wasn't until three days later that a police officer spotted the three of them at a diner in eastern Oregon, and arrested them without incident.

Kerry and I were long gone from Trinity County by then, comfortably holed up in a private cabin near Shasta Lake. The sheriff's men had found my car hidden in the woods near Paul Thatcher's home and returned it to me, and we were allowed to leave as soon as I signed a formal statement. Raymond Treacle's promise of a Munroe Corporation check in the amount of five thousand dollars had gone with us.

I hadn't told the police—or Kerry or anyone else—of my fear of mob violence. I could not be certain I'd been right about what I felt that night; it could have been my imagination, a product of the darkness and the fire and the brush I'd had with death. And no matter what the residents of
Cooperville
might have done to me in the heat of their passion, I felt no more anger toward them. When I thought of the
Coleclaws
and Ella Bloom and Hugh Penrose, I felt only sadness and pity.

Still. Still, I couldn't help wondering: Would they have attacked me, maybe even killed me, if Kerry and Treacle hadn't shown up when they did? It was a question that would trouble my sleep for a long time, because there was no way now that I would ever know the answer.

T
here are two places that are ordinary enough during the daylight hours but that become downright eerie after dark, particularly if you go wandering around in them by yourself. One is a graveyard; the other is a public zoo. And that goes double for San Francisco's
Fleishhacker
Zoological Gardens on a blustery winter night when the fog comes swirling in and makes everything look like capering phantoms or two-dimensional cutouts.

Fleishhacker
Zoo was where I was on this foggy winter night—alone, for the most part—and I wished I was somewhere else instead.
Anywhere
else, as long as it had a heater or a log fire and offered something hot to drink.

I was on my third tour of the grounds, headed past the sea lion tank to make another check of the aviary, when I paused to squint at the luminous dial of my watch. Eleven forty-five. Less than three hours down and better than six left to go. I was already half frozen, even though I was wearing long johns, two sweaters, two pairs of socks, heavy gloves, a woolen cap, and a long fur-lined overcoat. The ocean was only a thousand yards away, and the icy wind that blew in off of it sliced through you to the marrow. If I got through this job without contracting either frostbite or pneumonia, I would consider myself lucky.

Somewhere in the fog, one of the animals made a sudden roaring noise; I couldn't tell what kind of animal or where the noise came from. The first time that sort of thing had happened, two nights ago, I'd jumped a little. Now I was used to it, or as used to it as I would ever get. How guys like
Dettlinger
and Hammond could work here night after night, month after month, was beyond my simple comprehension.