And it didn’t take me long, worldly gadabout-philosopher and Hemingway sort of guy that I am, to realize what this meant.
Muldaur was dead.
“What’d he do? Crap his pants? God, that smell is awful. I knew those damn snakes would kill somebody eventually.” We were still inside the church. Sykes’d shooed a lot of the worshipers outside.
With his usual dignity and professionalism, Cliffie Sykes, Jr., hitched up his holstered Colt. 45, hitched up the Bowie knife he carries in a belt scabbard, touched a tip of his black Western boot to the corpse, and screwed up his fat face into a parody of Porky Pig, no personal offense meant to you, Porky.
Cliffie, Jr., is the chief of police.
At one time Black River Falls was owned and operated by the Whitney family, a branch of Eastern millionaires who came out here when one of the men got involved in some kind of legal trouble involving stock swindles. They tried to create a small version of a New England town out here on the prairie. They were imperious, of course, and snobs, of course, and contemptuous of the rest of the town, of course. But they brought sound town government, good and fair law, and an eagerness to keep the town clean and modern, all the virtues of New England Yankees.
World War Ii changed all this, as it changed so many things, good and bad. Cliff Sykes, Sr., owned a small construction company at the start of the war. Then he entered into various federal contracts with the government. He built airplane runways, roads, training camps. And his brothers and sisters practiced every kind of black- marketing there was. One of his sisters was even an Allotment Annie, a woman so-called because she married soldiers just about to ship overseas and collected their monthly allotment checks. One New York woman was indicted for having forty-six husbands. I doubt that Helga Sykes had had that many husbands, only because there weren’t that many blind soldiers.
Anyway, the long run of the Whitney family, begun in the previous century, came to an end. The Sykes clan were not only wealthier, they were more powerful. They took over this part of the state, including our town. And thus it was that Cliffie Sykes, Jr., who had failed to pass the police entrance tests given by six other towns, started his law enforcement career as our chief of police.
“You smell that, McCain?”
“Yeah, I smell it.”
“He crapped his pants.”
“Yeah, you said that, Sykes.” I only called him Cliffie when I was so mad I didn’t care anymore.
He pointed to the snake cage. “I should go get my shotgun and kill every one of those bastards.” He pawed his stubby hands on the front of his khaki uniform, the kind Glenn Ford always wears when he’s playing a lawman.
Secretly, Cliffie thinks he’s Glenn Ford. Secretly, I think I’m Robert
Ryan. Which I am, pretty much, except for the height, the good looks, the deep voice, the masculinity, and the charm.
“Or you could always just take them to the woods and set them free,” Kylie said.
He seemed to see her for the first time. She’d be pretty hard to miss. She was the only pretty one of the three of us. Everybody else he’d run outside.
“Say, what’re you doing here?”
“I’m with McCain.”
“And what’s McCain doing here, while I’m at it?” he said.
“McCain is doing here what Muldaur asked him to do,” I said.
“And that would be what exactly?”
“Exactly, that would be trying to ascertain if somebody was trying to kill him.”
“He told you that?”
“He told me that.”
“Why’d he think somebody was trying to kill him?”
“He thought it was because of all those pamphlets he was handing out.”
“What was wrong with those pamphlets? I read a couple of ‘em and they seemed all right to me.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” I said.
“And anyway, the snakes killed him.”
“I don’t think so.”
“That’s what you told me.”
“No, it wasn’t. That’s what you told yourself.
You haven’t even asked me what killed him.”
“Well, if he was doin’ all that heebie-jeebies stuff, then what killed him?”
Kylie said, “Poison.”
“Yeah, snake poison.”
She shook her fetching head. “I don’t think so. We studied snakes in biology in college.”
“College,” Cliffie scoffed. “A training ground for commies.”
Kylie sighed. She was used to him. “Snake venom rarely produces symptoms like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like what you call the heebie-jeebies.”
“So if it wasn’t snake poison, what was it?”
“We’ll have to let the autopsy tell us,” I said.
The ambulance siren cut through our conversation as the boxy white truck swept up in front of the open doorway. You could hear the attendants hitting the ground and yanking the gurney from the back.
Cliffie, thumbs in his gunbelt, swaggered up to meet them.
“Why aren’t I surprised Cliffie liked those pamphlets? And I’m not saying that just because I’m Jewish. I’d be mad even if I wasn’t.” Then she smiled. “And by the way, McCain, the rabbi put some more guns in the basement of your church last night.”
“I’ll alert the monsignor.”
They made swift work of Muldaur, the ambulance boys.
When they were lifting him onto the gurney, Cliffie, ever helpful, said, “Sorry about the smell, boys. He crapped his pants.”
“You calling Bci?” I said, referring to the state Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Without their help, small towns just can’t do adequate scientific crime investigations.
“For what?”
“For what? To find out who poisoned him.”
“Did it ever occur to you, McCain, that maybe one of his snakes bit him earlier and he was just having a delayed reaction. Snakebites can do that, you know.”
“Clifford Sykes, Jr.,
Herpetologist,” Kylie said.
“What’s that herpe-thing mean?”
“It means snake expert.”
“Oh.”
He’d obviously thought she’d insulted him.
Then he said, “So I call them in and it turns out to be an accidental snakebite and then I look like a fool.”
“Gee, I can’t imagine you ever looking like a fool, Chief,” Kylie said in her sweetest voice.
“Well, God knows you and that left-wing rag you work for have tried to make me sound like one every chance you get.”
Maybe it was the innumerable times he’d arrested people for crimes they hadn’t committed. Maybe it was the year he pocketed half the ticket sales to the policeman’s dance. Maybe it was the time The Clarion pointed out that it was Cliffie’s first cousin Luther who was not only selling our town its police vehicles but also charging twenty percent over the sticker price. It wasn’t real hard to make a case against Cliffie.
“We couldn’t do it without your help,” Kylie said, all sweetness again.
Cliffie was about to respond when one of the children raced into the church. Cliffie did not like this. When
