“This has nothing to do with Judge Whitney.”
“Oh, no? She don’t care if this man is guilty or not. Just as long as she makes me look bad. Well, I’ll tell you somethin’.
It ain’t gonna happen this time. I got the right man, and there ain’t a damned thing she can do about it.”
“Then you won’t mind if I go talk him into surrendering?”
He said, “Billy.”
Billy Wymer instantly stepped forward, the forty-seven-year-old juvenile delinquent who does a good share of Cliffie’s bidding.
“Cuff him.”
“My pleasure, Chief.”
“What the hell’re you doing?” I said.
Wymer’s a big guy with green stuff always in the corners of his dull blue eyes and a kind of moss on his stubby little teeth. His mouth is usually leaking too. When he laughs, which is frequently, especially when something cruel is taking place, he does so without sound: his mouth wide open, his mossy teeth on display, and no sound whatsoever. Like a silent movie scene.
He snapped the cuffs on me. “Got ‘im, Chief.”
“Good goin’, Billy!” As if he’d just accomplished something major, like discovering a cancer cure or finding a new planet in the solar system. Then Cliffie smiled at me. “I tried psychology on this pecker, McCain. You heard me yerself.”
“I sure did. That new-car-smell stuff would certainly have made me surrender. They could’ve used you when Dillinger was around.”
He raised his bullhorn and aimed it at the shack. “Ninety seconds is what you got, Chalmers! You give yourself up or we open fire!”
“You can’t threaten him like that,” I said.
“I can’t, counselor?” His eyes scanned the men. “You men get ready.”
Rifles and shotguns glinted and gleamed in the fall sunlight. A lot of the men were grinning.
“This is McCain, Chalmers! Give yourself up right away!” Now that I understood Cliffie probably wasn’t bluffing, it was important to haul Chalmers out of there pronto.
“Scared the shit out of you, didn’t I, counselor?” Big grin on his stupid face.
“Sure wish I had a photo of you just now.
Sure wish I did.”
“C’mon out, Chalmers!” I shouted again.
He cried back, “They’ll shoot me!”
“They’ll shoot you if you don’t come out, Chalmers!”
“Forty-five seconds!” Cliffie said over the bullhorn.
“Chalmers, he’ll start shooting! He really will!”
“I didn’t kill those people!”
“I know you didn’t. But you have to come out before I can help you!”
“Twenty-five seconds!”
“Chalmers! For God’s sake! Get out of there!”
He came out. First he peeked around the door like a guilty kid. He had something in his hands.
It was sort of funny and sort of sad and sort of pathetic.
“What the hell is that?” Cliffie said.
From his fingers dangled a rosary.
“Don’t shoot me, all right?”
“Tell him you won’t shoot.”
He raised his bullhorn again. “You men put your weapons down!”
None of them looked happy about doing so.
Chalmers came slowly down from the cabin.
Arms stretched out for cuffs, black rosary beads hanging from his right hand.
When he reached me, he looked at my handcuffs and said, greatly disappointed, “How the hell you gonna help me, McCain? You’re handcuffed too.”
“Thanks for pointing that out,” I said.
Cliffie was magnanimous and let me drive myself back to town. Sans handcuffs.
Cliffie double-parked out front so everybody’d be sure to see him bringing in Chalmers. Just in case anybody was too dense to miss all his subtle machinations, he stood in the middle of the street with his bullhorn. He wanted an audience and got one immediately: decent folk in faded housedresses and work-worn factory pants and shirts and little kids squinting into the sun to see what dangerous specimen the chief had brought in this time.
He could have pulled up behind the building, of course, and nobody would have seen him.
“Stand back, everybody,” he said. “We’re bringing in a desperate criminal.”
Even the old ladies giggled about that one.
Desperate criminal. Cliffie loved melodrama almost as much as a keynote speaker on the Fourth of July.
He repeated himself: “Stand back, everybody.”
Then he handed the bullhorn to Billy, yanked his own sawed-off from the front seat, opened the back door, and said, “You take it nice and easy now.
You try anything, and your teeth are gonna be chewin’ lead.”
I hadn’t heard the “chewin’ lead” one before.
I hoped I didn’t have to hear it ever again.
Chalmers, pale, forlorn, about as dangerous as a ground squirrel, got out of the patrol car with his head hung low. Embarrassed.
Cliffie gave him a hard shove. Chalmers turned to glare at him. Cliffie shoved him again.
I grabbed his elbow. “What’s your problem?”
“He ain’t movin’ fast enough, counselor.
That’s my problem. Now take your hands off me.” And with that he gave me a shove too. I knew better than to push back. He had an audience. He’d love to put on a show with me as the foil.
Inside the police station, there was a lot of noise as shoes scuffled down the narrow, dusty hallway to the interrogation room. Keys jangled. Sam Brownes creaked. Men coughed.
Prisoners in the back shouted, wanting to know what was going on. The door to the cells was ajar. They wanted some kind of diversion. Cliffie wouldn’t let them have radios or magazines or books.
“How about opening a window?” I said.
“I’m sorry it don’t smell better for you, counselor,” Cliffie said.
It smelled of sweat, puke, and tobacco. It was a dingy little place not much bigger than a coffin.
There was a single overhead light and a card table with a wire Webcor tape recorder on it. There were also signed black-and-white publicity stills of Norman Vincent Peale and Richard Nixon.
Cliffie pushed the still-handcuffed Chalmers in a chair and sat next to the card table. He got the recorder turned on and rolling, and said, “I’m recording every word you’re going to say, Chalmers.
You understand?”
Chalmers looked at me. I nodded. Then he looked at Cliffie and nodded.
It was what you might expect. Cliffie came up with twenty different ways to ask the same question which was, basically, Why’d you kill them?
He was doing a terrible job. The County Attorney’s crew would have to interrogate Chalmers themselves.
He blubbered on.
It was forty-seven minutes exactly before Cliffie needed to go to the can. I needed to talk to Chalmers.
“I’ll be back,” Cliffie said. “Don’t you touch nothin’, counselor.”
We exchanged unfrly glances and he left.
I leaned over and whispered in Chalmers’s ear, “Who sends you the check every month?”
