What Dies in Summer (22 page)

Don met us as we got off the elevator, his sleeves rolled up and a gold badge clipped to his belt. He looked very different here, as if the surroundings had chemically transformed him from just
Diana’s father to the guy in charge. The change wasn’t in his actual appearance, being more a matter of things like people unobtrusively keeping track of what he was doing and saying,
and men older than he was addressing him as “sir.” When he asked Gram if she’d like coffee or anything, two detectives were moving toward the break room to get it before she even
finished saying, “Yes, thank you.”

A chunky, busy-looking red-haired cop named Sperry took Gram into a deskless office where there was an old tan leather couch and a coffee table. Coffee and fixings were brought for both of them
and Gram, being her usual self, had Detective Sperry filling her in on the policing business in no time: how many men worked here, how many secretaries were there, where did they keep their records
and what sort of filing system did they use, where were the criminals brought in and on and on.

L.A. wanted to see the interrogation rooms, and Don showed us one with a dinged-up little table, three folding chairs and nothing else in it. The room was smaller than I would have expected,
with no windows, dirty-looking light green walls and brown worn-out linoleum on the floor. I looked for the bright light hanging low over the suspect’s chair, but there were only the buzzing
fluorescents overhead. The air in the room seemed to hum with desperation, and it occurred to me that I might confess to pretty much anything to get out of a place like this. But then that raised
the question of where I’d go from here, which was not an encouraging thought either.

Don showed us how the two-way mirror worked. L.A. checked out both sides, then put her face to the glass and shaded her eyes with her hands. “You can see through it a little bit this
way,” she said. “Do something, Biscuit.”

I stuck my finger in my nose.

She laughed. A rare occurrence.

Don and another man brought us Cokes and sat us at a long metal table stacked with several big books full of pictures of different men’s faces. I couldn’t see the words “Mug
Book” on any of them, but there was no doubt that’s what they were. It was the first time I’d ever seen any in person, and unlike the interrogation room, these looked exactly the
same as the movie versions. The only difference I noticed was that in the movies and on TV they never brought out more than one.

“What I’m interested in,” said Don, “is if either of you might have seen any of these players anywhere, maybe looking out of place somehow, cruising the street or trying
to start a conversation with you or your friends. Or trying to follow somebody or just generally giving you a funny feeling.”

L.A. plunged right into this, and she was the perfect witness because she absolutely never forgot anybody’s face. She looked at each man for a second, photographed him mentally, then moved
on to the next one. Every so often she’d stop to take a sip of her drink, then go back to the photographs. I knew that if she ever met one of these men, even years later, she’d
recognize him instantly.

But I didn’t have an orderly bone in my body. I was a browser, and I caught myself getting interested in these people, wondering about their histories and making up stories in my mind
about them. Some of them looked so sad and broken down that it made my heart hurt. But there were others who seemed to have invisible fire spiking from their eyes, and their expressions told you
they could never possibly hurt you enough to be satisfied.

Don sat at the end of the table, occasionally taking sips of coffee from a tan mug that had his name painted on it in red fingernail polish. His left hand, with its wide gold wedding band, lay
on the table without moving. He’d watch L.A.’s eyes for a while, then glance off across the room, or sometimes just look at the clouds outside the window. It was hard to say exactly
how, but he gave a clear impression that it would be no problem for him if this took all night.

Once in a while somebody would come to ask him a question or get him to sign something, but the typewriters and all the other action around us seemed to pull back and go on without us so that it
felt like we were closed into our own private bubble of time and space. I had started concentrating on a picture of a young dark-haired shirtless guy who reminded me of Hubert a little, except for
the long whelp of scar tissue under his chin. I was wondering if somebody had cut his throat, and if so why that hadn’t worked, since I’d always understood throat-cutting to be lethal,
when I heard L.A.’s Coke can bang on the table.

“Here!” she said, jabbing her finger down on one of the faces.

Don snapped his own fingers once and pointed at one of the men across the room, who grabbed a tablet as he came over to stand behind L.A. and look down over her shoulder at the book. I moved
around the table to get a better look myself, Don and another man joining me, all of us focused on the tip of L.A.’s finger and the picture under it.

“We know this one,” she said.

I stared at the face and saw that she was right.

It was Hot Earl.

“Okay!” Don said, slapping one hand down onto the table. “This could be Break One. Tell us about him, hon.”

While L.A. gave Don the story about how we met Earl—leaving out the parts about the five-dollar bills and me smoking pot with him—the other detectives were getting organized to catch
him. “Earl Vester Wiggins, also known as Earl Williams or Vester Peoples,” someone said.

“Priors for theft, forgery, indecency with a minor—guest of the governor for two and a half at Huntsville,” said another voice.

“Jerry, what’ve we got for a last known address?”

Phones were dialed and notes were scribbled. It was terrific, like a huge engine cranking up. Gram came out with Detective Sperry, sniffing the excitement in the air.

“We identified Hot Earl,” L.A. reported with satisfaction.

“Who?” said Gram.

“Hot Earl. He’s a murderer, and we met him. He’s in the book.”

“Well, he’s somebody for us to talk to anyway,” said Don. “But we’re proud of our investigative consultants here.” He put his arm around L.A.’s
shoulders.

This is when I would have seen it if I had been half as smart as I wanted to believe I was. But I wasn’t and I didn’t.

Just then Dr. Ballard and Mrs. Bruhn walked into the squad room. Mrs. Bruhn was wearing a dress suit like the one I’d seen her in at the hospital, except this one was light brown. Dr.
Ballard wore a gray skirt and a peach-colored blouse with the sleeves pushed up. Her hair was light brown and kind of rolled at the back of her head, her little glasses hanging in front of her on a
thin gold chain. She took L.A.’s hands in hers and smiled at her. There was another female eyelock, this one softer and not quite as loaded as the one at Gram’s.

Dr. Ballard said, “Ready?”

L.A. nodded.

“Hi, Dr. Ballard, Miz Bruhn,” said Don, shaking hands with both women. “We’ve got a room ready, and the steno and policewoman are on their way up. Let me know if
there’s anything I can get you.”

A stiff-looking skinny woman about Mom’s age carrying an armful of notebooks, and a short friendly blond policewoman with dewberry engraved in white on her blue name tag, walked up to us.
Don introduced everybody, and then all the women trooped off down a hall.

Reading the wanted posters on a bulletin board in the waiting area, I learned that crooks were generally referred to by all three of their names, like a kid who’s in trouble with his
mother, that they tended to go by a lot of aliases that were usually kind of alike, and that they always had tattoos. Also a lot of scars, which gave the impression that being a criminal must be a
pretty rocky business. These characters were called Fugitives from Justice, the words making me think for a second of desperate men crouching in ditches as hounds bayed in the distance.

A lot of these guys were to be considered Armed and Dangerous, which I visualized as having large pistols on your hips, ammunition belts across your chest and a fierce expression on your face.
But in real life I had never seen an ammunition belt like the ones I was picturing, which got me thinking about where crooks got their equipment in the first place. They used specialized gear like
lockpicks and blunt instruments, and they bludgeoned people, which meant there must be places where you could get this kind of stuff. I wondered how much a bludgeon would cost and whether they came
in different weights and sizes, or maybe in light, regular and heavy-duty models. There was also the question of how you’d choose the right lockpick, or know a good-quality blunt instrument
from a shoddy one. But then the whole concept of blunt instruments sounded contradictory to me; I imagined bins full of them, shiny and looking something like surgical tools, but heavier and
without sharp edges or points.

Did all this come from a specialized hardware store, maybe with dirty old windows painted up past eye level like a pool hall and a hand-painted sign reading
CRIME
SUPPLIES
over the door, suspicious characters looking furtively back over their shoulders as they came and went? I assumed clerks who worked there would have to be experienced criminals
themselves to be able to answer the customers’ questions intelligently.

On the other hand, I wasn’t sure how the idea of intelligence applied to crooks, because the guys in these pictures didn’t look very sharp to me. Mostly they seemed dazed, with their
hair sprigged up like they had just that minute been jerked out of bed and stood in front of the camera. It made me tired just thinking of all the trouble and effort it must take to be a criminal,
and I wondered if it wouldn’t be easier to just go ahead and clean up and find a regular job.

Gram would never expect them to do that, though. “Never try to teach a pig to sing,” was how she put it.

Don looked at it pretty much the same way. “Takes three or four perps to make a halfwit,” was his philosophy.

I walked over to a corner where there was a green plastic-covered couch, a shaky-looking coffee table and four or five chairs that looked like they’d been chucked out in the alley behind
some school cafeteria in the poor end of town. In one of the police magazines I found on the table there was an article about the killing power of different bullets, something I’d never
thought about until that minute, assuming bullets killed you according to where they hit you rather than on account of differences in the bullets themselves.

My eyes were getting tired, and I thought about putting the magazine down and leaning my head back just for a minute—

—
Hot Earl stood in the middle of the street in Dodge City, not far from Marshal Dillon’s office, where there was a wanted poster on the bulletin board beside the door with a
drawing of L.A. on it. Where her mouth should have been, there was a big black X. Hot Earl was wearing heavy six-guns on his cartridge belt and had a snow-white bandanna with bright drops of blood
on it around his neck. On his chest hung a placard reading, “Making them wait is the best part.” Then his face lost focus so that I couldn’t make out his features.

An armed posse was riding up the street, but the faceless man couldn’t run because of the smelly old mattress he was chained to. He dragged it desperately through the dust, his pants
unzipped, his hair scragged up in every possible direction. As the riders closed in all around him, he drew his guns one after another to shoot at them, but each time the barrels fell off when he
pulled the trigger. The deputies all had nooses in their hands.

As they grabbed him, he turned to me and in a girl’s voice said—

“Hey, Biscuit.”

I opened my eyes and saw L.A. looking down at me. Gram and Dr. Ballard were at Don’s desk talking with him and another detective.

“We’re going home,” L.A. said. She looked white and tired.

“I want to wait and see Earl,” I said, imagining him being dragged across the squad room swearing and struggling and having to be subdued by force, losing a shoe, his shirt torn half
off, maybe a little blood running down from one ear.

“Don’s not gonna let us do that,” said L.A. “Anyway, Gram wants to go home. She says we’ve all had more than enough criminal justice for one day, and she wants to
be in her own kitchen again and know we’re safe at the pool, swimming.”

I could see there was no arguing with this. I rubbed my eyes with my knuckles. “Did you have to tell everything again?”

She just looked at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Tired as she was, there was something hard and dangerous in her eyes. I didn’t say anything else. I stood up and we all walked toward the exit, my thoughts a million miles from where they
should have been.

LATE IN THE
afternoon of the day before the Minnesota trip L.A., Diana and I leaned back in the kind of folding lawn chairs that people who didn’t
have to answer to Gram called “chase lounges,” lined up on the back patio at Diana’s house like old tourists on a cruise. Six sneakers in a row, four tidy and clean, two big and
shabby and at least a year past white. Nobody saying anything.

Diana and L.A. were doing that feline thing girls do where their eyes are closed but they’re nowhere close to being asleep, just listening to everything and thinking their own thoughts,
but I was trying to figure out how I was supposed to feel.

Don had said Cam’s trial would be set for sometime in the fall, and everybody expected him to eventually end up in Huntsville for what he did to L.A. Hot Earl wouldn’t go to death
row, because there was no death penalty now, but he was behind bars for good. The danger was past.

But apparently some things left part of their energy behind after they were gone, like an odor, because I didn’t feel one damn bit safe. Or maybe it was just that I understood the world
better now than I used to.

Diana had done her best to talk L.A. into coming to Minnesota with us, but L.A. was sticking to her guns. I banged it into my head that Gram and L.A. were going to be all right, that it was
practically impossible to fool or sneak up on either of them, that they were both probably tougher than me anyway.