Short Stories: Five Decades (22 page)

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” the sheriff said when he told him about Brisbane, “what the hell turns up in Los Angeles.” The sheriff was sleepy and annoyed, sitting on the edge of the sofa on which he’d been lying without shoes, his pants open for the first three buttons, after lunch. “We got a conviction out of that, already.”

“Brisbane is a known criminal,” Macomber said. “He committed entry.”

“So he committed entry,” the sheriff said. “Into a boxcar. He took two overcoats and a pair of socks and I have to send a man to Los Angeles for him! If you asked them for a murderer you’d never get him out of Los Angeles in twenty years! Why did you have to wake me up?” he asked Macomber testily.

“Los Angeles asked me to have you call back as soon as possible,” Macomber said smoothly. “They want to know what to do with him. They want to get rid of him. He cries all day, they told me, at the top of his voice. He’s got a whole cell-block yelling their heads off in Los Angeles, they told me.”

“I need a man like that here,” the sheriff said. “I need him very bad.”

But he put his shoes on and buttoned his pants and started back to the office with Macomber.

“Do you mind going to Los Angeles?” the sheriff asked Macomber.

Macomber shrugged. “Somebody’s got to do it.”

“Good old Macomber,” the sheriff said sarcastically. “The backbone of the force. Ever loyal.”

“I know the case,” Macomber said. “Inside out.”

The sheriff looked at him over his shoulder. “There are so many girls there, I read, that even a fat man ought to be able to do business. Taking your wife, Macomber?” He jabbed with his thumb into the fat over the ribs, and laughed.

“Somebody’s got to go. I admit,” Macomber said earnestly, “it would be nice to see Hollywood. I’ve read about it.”

When they got into the office the second deputy got up out of the swivel chair, and the sheriff dropped into it, unbuttoning the top three buttons of his pants. The sheriff opened a drawer and took out a ledger, panting from the heat. “Why is it,” the sheriff wanted to know, “that anybody lives in a place like this?” He looked with annoyance at the opened ledger. “We have not got a penny,” the sheriff said, “not a stinking penny. That trip to Needles after Bucher cleaned out the fund. We don’t get another appropriation for two months. This is a beautiful county. Catch one crook and you got to go out of business for the season. So what are you looking at me like that for, Macomber?”

“It wouldn’t cost more than ninety dollars to send a man to Los Angeles.” Macomber sat down gently on a small chair.

“You got ninety dollars?” the sheriff asked.

“This got nothing to do with me,” Macomber said. “Only it’s a known criminal.”

“Maybe,” the second deputy said, “you could get Los Angeles to hold onto him for two months.”

“I got brain workers in this office,” the sheriff said. “Regular brain workers.” But he turned to the phone and said, “Get me the police headquarters at Los Angeles.”

“Swanson is the name of the man who is handling the matter,” Macomber said. “He’s waiting for your call.”

“Ask them to catch a murderer in Los Angeles,” the sheriff said bitterly, “and see what you get … They’re wonderful on people who break into boxcars.”

While the sheriff was waiting for the call to be put through, Macomber turned ponderously, the seat of his pants sticking to the yellow varnish of the chair, and looked out at the deserted street, white with sunlight, the tar boiling up in little black bubbles out in the road from the heat. For a moment, deep under the fat, he couldn’t bear Gatlin, New Mexico. A suburb of the desert, a fine place for people with tuberculosis. For twelve years he’d been there, going to the movies twice a week, listening to his wife talk. The fat man. Before you died in Gatlin, New Mexico, you got fat. Twelve years, he thought, looking out on a street that was empty except on Saturday night. He could see himself stepping out of a barber shop in Hollywood, walking lightly to a bar with a blonde girl, thin in the waist, drinking a beer or two, talking and laughing in the middle of a million other people talking and laughing. Greta Garbo walked the streets there, and Carole Lombard, and Alice Faye. “Sarah,” he would say to his wife, “I have got to go to Los Angeles. On State business. I will not be back for a week.”

“Well …?” the sheriff was calling into the phone. “
Well?
Where is Los Angeles?”

Ninety dollars, ninety lousy dollars … He turned away from looking at the street. He put his hands on his knees and was surprised to see them shake as he heard the sheriff say, “Hello, is this Swanson?”

He couldn’t sit still and listen to the sheriff talk over the phone, so he got up and walked slowly through the back room to the lavatory. He went in, closed the door, and looked carefully at his face in the mirror. That’s what his face looked like, that’s what the twelve years, listening to his wife talk, had done. Without expression he went back to the office.

“All right,” the sheriff was saying, “you don’t have to keep him for two months. I know you’re crowded. I know it’s against the constitution. I know, I said, for Christ’s sake. It was just a suggestion. I’m sorry he’s crying. Is it my fault he’s crying? Maybe you’d cry, too, if you were going to jail for fifteen years. Stop yelling, for Christ’s sake, this call is costing the county of Gatlin a million dollars. I’ll call you back. All right, by six o’clock. All right, I said. All right.”

The sheriff put the telephone down. For a moment he sat wearily, looking at the open top of his pants. He sighed, buttoned his pants. “That is some city,” he said, “Los Angeles.” He shook his head. “I got a good mind to say the hell with it. Why should I run myself into an early grave for a man who broke into a boxcar? Who can tell me?”

“He’s a known criminal,” Macomber said. “We got a whole case.” His voice was smooth but he felt the eager tremor deep under it. “Justice is justice.”

The sheriff looked at him bitterly. “The voice of conscience. The sheriff’s white light, Macomber.”

Macomber shrugged. “What’s it to me? I just like to see a case closed.”

The sheriff turned back to the telephone. “Get me the county treasurer’s office,” he said. He sat there, waiting, looking at Macomber, with the receiver against his ear. Macomber walked over to the door and looked out across the street. He saw his wife sitting at the window of their house up the street, her fat elbows crossed, with the sweat dripping off them. He looked the other way.

He heard the sheriff’s voice, as though distant and indistinct, talking to the county treasurer. He heard the county treasurer’s voice rise in anger through the phone, mechanical and shrill. “Everybody spends money,” the county treasurer screamed. “Nobody brings in money, but everybody spends money. I’ll be lucky to have my own salary left over at the end of the month and you want ninety dollars to go joy-riding to Los Angeles to get a man who stole nine dollars’ worth of second-hand goods. The hell with you! I said the hell with you!”

Macomber put his hands in his pockets so that nobody could see how tense they were as he heard the receiver slam on the other end of the wire. Coldly he watched the sheriff put the phone gently down.

“Macomber,” the sheriff said, feeling his deputy’s eyes on him, hard and accusing, “I’m afraid Joan Crawford will have to get along without you, this year.”

“They will hang crepe on the studios when they hear about this,” the second deputy said.

“I don’t care for myself,” Macomber said evenly, “but it will sound awfully funny to people if they find out that the sheriff’s office let a known criminal go free after he was caught.”

The sheriff stood up abruptly. “What do you want me to do?” he asked with violence. “Tell me what the hell more you want me to do? Can I create the ninety dollars? Talk to the State of New Mexico!”

Macomber shrugged. “It’s not my business,” he said. “Only I think we can’t let criminals laugh at New Mexican justice.”

“All right,” the sheriff shouted. “Do something. Go do something! I don’t have to call back until six o’clock! You got three hours to see justice done. My hands are washed.” He sat down and opened the top three buttons of his pants and put his feet on the desk. “If it means so much to you,” he said, as Macomber started through the door, “arrange it yourself.”

Macomber passed his house on the way to the district attorney’s office. His wife was still sitting at the window with the sweat dripping off her. She looked at her husband out of her dry eyes, and he looked at her as he walked thoughtfully past. No smile lit her face or his, no word was passed. For a moment they looked at each other with the arid recognition of twelve years. Then Macomber walked deliberately on, feeling the heat rising through his shoes, tiring his legs right up to his hips.

In Hollywood he would walk firmly and briskly, not like a fat man, over the clean pavements, ringing to the sharp attractive clicks of high heels all around him. For ten steps he closed his eyes as he turned into the main street of Gatlin, New Mexico.

He went into the huge Greek building that the WPA had built for the County of Gatlin. As he passed down the quiet halls, rich with marble, cool, even in the mid-afternoon, he said, looking harshly around him, “Ninety dollars—ninety lousy dollars.”

In front of the door that said “Office of the District Attorney” he stopped. He stood there for a moment, feeling nervousness rise and fall in him like a wave. His hand sweated on the doorknob when he opened the door. He went in casually, carefully appearing like a man carrying out impersonal government business.

The door to the private office was open a little and he could see the district attorney’s wife standing there and could hear the district attorney yelling, “For God’s sake, Carol, have a heart! Do I look like a man who is made of money? Answer me, do I?”

“All I want,” the district attorney’s wife said stubbornly, “is a little vacation. Three weeks, that’s all. I can’t stand the heat here. I’ll lie down and die if I have to stay here another week. Do you want me to lie down and die? You make me live in this oasis, do I have to die here, too?” She started to cry, shaking her careful blonde hair.

“All right,” the district attorney said. “All right, Carol. Go ahead. Go home and pack. Stop crying. For the love of God, stop crying!”

She went over and kissed the district attorney and came out, past Macomber, drying the tip of her nose. The district attorney took her through the office and opened the door for her. She kissed him again and went down the hall. The district attorney closed the door and leaned against it wearily. “She’s got to go to Wisconsin,” he said to Macomber. “She knows people in Wisconsin. There are lakes there. What do you want?”

Macomber explained about Brisbane and Los Angeles and the sheriff’s fund and what the county treasurer had said. The district attorney sat down on the bench against the wall and listened with his head down.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked when Macomber finished.

“That Brisbane is a man who should be behind bars for fifteen years. There wouldn’t be any doubt about it, once we got him here. He’s a known criminal. After all, it would only cost ninety dollars … If you said something, if you made a protest …”

The district attorney sat on the bench with his head down, his hands loose between his knees. “Everybody wants to spend money to go some place that isn’t Gatlin, New Mexico. You know how much it’s going to cost to send my wife to Wisconsin for three weeks? Three hundred dollars. Oh, my God!”

“This is another matter,” Macomber said very softly and reasonably. “This is a matter of your record. A sure conviction.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my record.” The district attorney stood up. “My record’s fine. I got a conviction on that case already. What do you want me to do—spend my life getting convictions on a nine-dollar robbery?”

“If you only said one word to the county treasurer …” Macomber tagged after the district attorney as he started for his inner office.

“If the county treasurer wants to save money, I say, ‘That’s the sort of man we need.’ Somebody has to save money. Somebody has got to do something else besides supporting the railroads.”

“It’s a bad precedent, a guilty man …” Macomber said a little louder than he wanted.

“Leave me alone,” the district attorney said. “I’m tired.” He went into the inner office and closed the door firmly.

Macomber said, “Son of a bitch, you bastard!” softly to the imitation oak door, and went out into the marble hall. He bent over and drank from the shining porcelain fountain that the WPA had put there. His mouth felt dry and sandy, with an old taste in it.

Outside he walked down the burning sidewalk, his feet dragging. His belly stretched against the top of his trousers uncomfortably, and he belched, remembering his wife’s cooking. In Hollywood he would sit down in a restaurant where the stars ate, no matter what it cost, and have light French dishes, served with silver covers, and wine out of iced bottles. Ninety lousy dollars. He walked in the shade of store-awnings, sweating, wrenching his mind to thought. “Goddamn it, goddamn it!” he said to himself because he could think of nothing further to do. For the rest of his life, in Gatlin, New Mexico, with never another chance to get even a short breath of joy … The back of his eyes ached from thinking. Suddenly he strode out from under the awning, walked up the steps that led to the office of the Gatlin
Herald
.

The city editor was sitting at a big desk covered with dust and tangled copy. He was wearily blue-penciling a long white sheet. He listened abstractedly as Macomber talked, using his pencil from time to time.

“You could show the voters of Gatlin,” Macomber was leaning close over the desk, talking fast, “what sort of men they got serving them. You could show the property owners of this county what sort of protection they can expect to get from the sheriff, the district attorney, and the county treasurer they put into office. That would make interesting reading-matter, that would, letting men who committed crimes in this county go off thumbing their noses at law enforcement here. If I was you I would write one hell of an editorial, I would. For ninety lousy dollars. One expression of opinion like that in the paper and the sheriff’s office would have a man in Los Angeles tomorrow. Are you listening to me?”