The Sunlight Dialogues (44 page)

Clumly said, “What did you do then?”

“Then?” She seemed to study him crossly, though he couldn’t be certain. The veil obscured her expression.

“After you closed his eyes.”

“I’ve no idea,” she said. “I think you’ve missed my point.”

“No no,” Clumly said, “it’s very interesting, yes. But what did you do then?”

She made no effort. “I’ve no idea,” she said.

“Ah well, not surprising,” Clumly said. He considered the caning of the chairback behind her shoulder, the bloodless fingers of her son, the curling hairs on the backs of the fingers, the wide gold wedding band. “At times like these …” he began. He let it trail off.

Elizabeth Paxton leaned forward in her wheelchair. “Why are you questioning me?”

It caught him off guard, and he could think of no answer. He merely stared more intently than before at the eldest son’s fingers. It came to him that her eyes were not the only ones boring into him, there was someone else, staring at him from behind. He turned slowly, holding his cap in his two hands, and saw Will Hodge.

“Afternoon, Will,” he said.

“Hah!” Hodge said, and reached out to shake his hand.

“Why
were
you questioning her?” Kozlowski said, as they went toward the car.

“Later,” Clumly said.

Ben and Vanessa were beside the police car waiting for them, Vanessa with her pink nylon glove around Ben Hodge’s arm. “Yoo-hoo!” she was calling, and both of them were waving, getting him to hurry.

“They’re calling for you on the radio,” Ben said, when they were closer.

Kozlowski leaned into a trot and went around to the driver’s side and answered.

“Any developments?” Ben said. He stood with his weight on his heels, leaning back a little, giving the impression that he did not mean to butt in. But it did not occur to them to move away out of earshot of the radio.

“I don’t know,” Clumly said.

Kozlowski handed him the mike. There was news now. The pawnshop check had turned up nothing, as Clumly had expected. The Boyle trial would not be wound up until tomorrow, but it was not too early to predict that the whole thing was hopeless. The D.A. had been by. And one thing more. A car had been reported missing.

“Go ahead,” Clumly said. He glanced at Ben Hodge.

“It was taken from a garage two houses away from the jail,” Wilbur Haynes said dryly over the radio.

“Find it,” Clumly said.

“We did,” Haynes said. “It was right back where they took it from. In the man’s garage.”

Clumly chewed it awhile. “Ok,” he said. “How far’s it been?”

“Man’s not sure exactly. Forty miles, he thinks.”

“Blood?”

“Not a sign.”

“Christ. Ok, don’t let anybody touch it. Is Miller handy?”

“He went out. He got a phonecall.”

“You know who it was?”

“Not sure. It sounded like the Mayor.”

“Mmm,” Clumly said. The order he’d meant to give slipped his mind for a moment. “He head for City Hall, you happen to notice?”

“I didn’t watch, Chief. Sorry. I can phone and see.”

“Forget it. I’ll talk to him later.” At last he remembered. “Get vitas on the Paxton boys. Clive Paxton’s sons. Everything down to the color of their underwear. Find out where they were when he died.”

“Something up?”

“Hell no, I’m just curious about ’em. Gonna sell them a bridge.”

“Yessir.”

“That’s all. Ten-four.”

“Ten-four.”

“Correct. So long.”

He handed the mike to Kozlowski, though he himself was nearer to the hook. He turned to Ben Hodge. “Some business,” he said.

Hodge nodded sympathetically. “Well, you were right, your hunch about him.”

“Correct. Lot of good it did.”

Vanessa shook her head sadly. “Esther says it’s got you half sick. I can see it’s so.”

“I still manage,” Clumly said. He hunted for a cigar. He was out. “At least he was able to steal a car without murdering somebody. I had a feeling we were going to find some farmer …”

“Thank goodness for that,” Vanessa said.

Clumly nodded. “Well, so long, Ben, Vanessa.”

They nodded and wished him luck. Kozlowski started up. The sunlight had yellowed now, as it always did late on a summer afternoon. It made the trees seem taller, their colors richer, and gave a new sharpness to the lines of the Richmond mausoleum and the iron urns beside its gate. It was as though all the world were alive with spirit: in the woods beyond the graveyard there might have been satyrs and dancing nymphs, or at least parked cars.

“Where to?” Kozlowski said.

“Just drive,” Clumly said.

“You serious?”

Clumly turned to squint at him, scowling. “Does it seem to you I’m a playful man, Kozlowski?”

“You’re serious,” he said.

They drove.

At last Kozlowski said, “You got a theory, haven’t you.”

“No,” he said. “Stop at Deans’, I need a cigar.”

Kozlowski nodded and, when they came to the drugstore, pulled over.

Then afterward, smoking, sitting on the middle of his back in the seat, Chief Clumly said, “I got hundreds of theories, Kozlowski. I believe them all. Some of them I believe in the morning, some in the afternoon, and some of them I believe when it’s late at night. You follow me?”

He opened his hands on the steering wheel, a kind of shrug.

“It ever occur to you that a cop’s just like a philosopher, Kozlowski?” He leaned forward a little to look at him.

“No,” Kozlowski said.

Chief Clumly sighed. “It’s occurred to me sometimes,” he said, petulant. “A cop’s just like a philosopher, and a robber’s just like—” Imagination failed him.

They drove in silence. Then Kozlowski said, “Like a magician.”

Clumly shot a glance at him to see if he was mocking. “You serious?” he said. “Is that supposed to mean something?”

“Only in the late afternoon,” Kozlowski said.

Clumly frowned and thought about it. “You’re a good man to work with, Kozlowski. You make a man think.”

Kozlowski sighed.

Cops and Robbers, or Philosophers and Magicians.
That was good. A title for a speech.

“You’re kidding,” Chief Clumly said suddenly. “That’s pure nonsense, no meaning at all.” He squinted at him, watching for a sign. The young man’s face was a mask.

6

Miller stood in the high, dry grass of the bank watching. The car looked as if it had grown there. It was up to its doorhandles in silt, and it was seaweed green all over, even the windshield and windows. Willowtrees hung motionless and unreal behind and above it, their tops reddened by the setting sun. Beyond the willows stood the crumbling stone walls of what had been, long ago, a flourmill feedstore and carriage shop. Beyond that you could see a little of the black brick of the box factory. Borsian, of the State Police, stood with his foot up on a rock, his right arm leaning on his knee. “How long the fucking thing been here, you think?”

Miller shook his head.

Borsian said, “Current must’ve brought it down, that’s all I can figure.”

Miller nodded. If the current had brought it, it had done it a long time ago. Fifteen, twenty years. There were tin cans, tires, a snarl of old barb wire on the creekbed around it; mostly they weren’t as green. The creek was down to nothing—a trickle along one side, here and there a muddy, isolated pool. Inside the car there were two skeletons with bullet-holes in their heads. All the windows of the car were closed and there were no holes in them except the one in back that the three boys who had found the skeletons had made.

7

He was getting home earlier tonight, not for lack of work down at headquarters but for plain lack of strength. He had a couple of hours yet before sunset, to sit in the overgrown garden with the paper or to pace back and forth on the porch, making up his speech for the Dairyman’s League. But Esther’s minister was there again. Two nights almost in a row. Was the man after money? Clumly nodded his greeting, then took off his gunbelt and hat and put them away. Then he said, “I’ll be out in the garden,” and went out through the kitchen and back entryway. When he reached the bench in the garden he realized the minister had followed him out.

“Beautiful retreat you have here,” the minister said. “So restful and serene.”

“We like it,” Clumly said.

Weedpatch. The lilacs along the fence had taken over completely, so that the tulips and crocuses he’d planted five years ago—it was over a thousand bulbs he’d put in—were as shaded now as a worm down in under a rock. He hadn’t sprayed the roses once all year: there was hardly a leaf left on them. And the hollyhocks he’d had such a devil of a time getting started had taken over every corner of the garden now and were spreading out into the vacant lot behind it. In the shadow of the weeds there would be lizards and sleeping snakes.

“Nothing like Nature to take a man’s mind off his troubles,” the minister said. He came over to stand beside the bench. He said, “How
are
you, Fred?”

“Just fine, fine.” It came to him that the man had come out here to tell him something. Instantly he felt as he would feel in the office of the Mayor.

“Every man needs a place like this to retreat to,” the minister said. “It’s like Eden. Do you mind if I sit down?”

Clumly made room and the man in black sat down. He took off his glasses to polish them on his handkerchief, and he beamed toward the sunset as he did it. His dimple showed.
“Well,”
he said. “I’ve been thinking over our talk.”

He leaned his elbows on his knees and tipped his head, waiting.

“Our talk about, so to speak, the Sunlight Man. The magician, and wire-tapping.”

“I remember,” Clumly said. “Yes.”

He began to speak rapidly, smiling all the while with pleasure, like a satisfied crow. The faster he talked, the more his false teeth whistled. “It goes right to the heart of our modern predicament, doesn’t it. Especially with respect to the church in the modern world. Perhaps I don’t express myself clearly, but I’ll try to explain. You’re a good man, Chief Clumly, but you never go to church.”

Clumly straightened up a little.

“Now now,” the minister said quickly, patting Clumly’s knee, “don’t misunderstand me! I’m not canvassing for members. Nothing like it. God bless you! I’m here to talk to you, as one thinking man to another, because your remarks the other night interested me, and to tell you the truth, a man in my profession can sometimes find himself starved, truly
starved,
for good talk.”

Clumly leaned over his knees again tolerantly (the man was lying) and pursed his lips as a sign that he was listening.

“The church has always considered itself responsible for the welfare of the world, the
spiritual
welfare, that is. Yes good. Now in
what,
we might ask ourselves, does that responsibility consist? And to what extent are we
equipped
for our responsibility?”

“Mmm,” Clumly said. He nodded.

“It was once a fact of life in our society, that the decision-making forces in the community were in general people of the church—I don’t mean just legislators and judges and the like, I mean decision-making forces on every level. That situation has altered, if I’m not mistaken, particularly in the larger cities, and the presence of people like yourself in a town like Batavia—please understand I have no grudge in this, we’re talking as one thinking man to another, nothing more or less—the existence of people like yourself in small towns is an indication that the prevalent condition in the larger cities can spread. Now the question is, is this good or not good?”

Clumly tipped his head and considered. He got out a cigar.

“There’s one very serious difficulty in religion, you know. It can result in megalomania, as I call it. Are you familiar with my colleague Reverend Warshower, the Presbyterian? A good man, a
fine
man in many respects. But a touch of megalomania, all the same. A very righteous man. The Presbyterians usually are. Don’t you think that may have certain dangers in it—political and social, I mean?”

Clumly thought. “I may not be following you, exactly,” he said.

“Precisely. Let me try to explain. Don’t you think it’s just possible that we, as a nation, have perhaps been crippled for world affairs by a slightly excessive sense of righteousness? I mean Asia, for instance. A very difficult matter. It’s very possible, I think, that we really do involve ourselves in Asia’s problems for Asia’s sake. And yet sometimes … You see, a megalomaniac, as psychologists tell us, is a man who has done a good deal of repressing—pretending to himself that he does not actually feel what he actually feels, if you see what I mean. He feels very powerful through his rectitude, but in fact, hidden in his heart … evil.” He smiled as though evil were a great delight to him. “Or take social problems. The white and the Negro. Isn’t it just possible that the racist’s view of the Negro as a person may be nothing other than a megalomaniac projection—that is to say, a feeling of righteousness in one’s superiority to a person onto whom one has projected all one has had to repress to become what one has become. I mean: our civilization is built on work, and to do well in it we must repress our desire to loll about. We project, so to speak, this repression into the inherent nature (as we think) of the Negro. We say he’s lazy by very birth.” He paused for comment.

“Mmm,” Clumly said.

“But you see, if there’s an ounce of truth in all this I’m saying, our religion—our puritan ethic in one form or another, is at the heart of the American
problem.”

“I see,” Clumly said.

“It’s a discouraging thought for a man of the cloth, you can imagine.” He looked at the setting sun.

“It would be, yes.” Clumly remembered the cigar and lit it.

“And what it comes to, of course, is this: if the church is truly to be responsible for the spiritual welfare of the world, its business must be to hunt down and expose the evil in people’s hearts.
Or,
our business is to contend against the very megalomania we tend to induce, if you follow my reasoning. Our business is to point the finger, so to speak, at pious hypocrisy—not simple hypocrisy of the usual sort but a psychological kind, a sort of lie in the soul.”