passenger side of his vehicle so close it almost took off her nose. Next comes George, and kapow. He had twelve blameless years on the State Police, two citations for bravery, community service awards without number. He was a good father to his children, a good husband to his wife, and all of that ended when a woman from Lassburg Gut tried to cross the street at the wrong moment and he killed her with PSP cruiser D-27. George was exonerated by the State Board of Review and came back to a desk job on the Troop, rated PLD -
permanent light duty - at his own request. He could have gone back full-time as far as the brass was concerned, but there was a problem: George Morgan could no longer drive. Not even the family car to the market. He got the shakes every time he slid behind the wheel. His eyes teared up until he was suffering from a kind of waterlogged hysterical blindness. That summer he worked nights, on dispatch. In the afternoons he coached the Troop D-sponsored Little League team all the way to the state tournament. When that was over, he gave the kids their trophy and their pins, told them how proud of them he was, then went home (a player's mother drove him), drank two beers, and blew his brains out in the garage. He didn't leave a note; cops rarely do. I wrote a press release in the wake of that. Reading it, you never would have guessed it was written with tears on my face. And it suddenly seemed very important that I communicate some of the reason why to Curtis Wilcox's son.
'We're a family,' I said. 'I know that sounds corny, but it's true. Even Mister Dillon knew that much, and you do, too. Don't you?'
The kid nodded his head. Of course he did. In the year after his father died, we were the family that mattered to him most, the one he sought out and the one that gave him what he needed to get on with his life. His mother and sisters loved him, and he loved them, but they were going on with their lives in a way that Ned could not . . . at least not yet. Some of it was being male instead of female. Some of it was being eighteen. Some of it was all those questions of why that wouldn't go away.
I said, 'What families say and how families act when they're in their houses with the doors shut and how they talk and behave when they're out on their lawns and the doors are open . . .
those can be very different things. Ennis knew the Buick was wrong, your dad did, Tony did, I did.
Mister D most certainly did. The way that dog howled . . .'
I fell silent for a moment. I've heard that howl in my dreams. Then I pushed on.
'But legally, it was just an object - a res, as the lawyers say - with no blame held against it. We couldn't very well hold the Buick for theft of services, could we? And the man who ordered the gas that went into its tank was long gone and hard to find. The best we could do was to think of it as an impoundment.'
Ned wore the frown of someone who doesn't understand what he's hearing. I could understand that. I hadn't been as clear as I wanted to be. Or maybe I was just playing that famous old game, the one called It Wasn't Our Fault.
'Listen,' Shirley said. 'Suppose a woman stopped to use the restroom at that station and left her diamond engagement ring on the washstand and Bradley Roach found it there. Okay?'
'Okay . . .' Ned said. Still frowning.
'And let's say Roach brought it to us instead of just putting it in his pocket and then taking it to a pawnshop in Butler. We'd make a report, maybe put out the make and model of the woman's car to the Troopers in the field, if Roach could give them to us . . . but we wouldn't take the ring. Would we, Sandy?'
'No,' I said. 'We'd advise Roach to put an ad in the paper - Found, a woman's ring, if you think it may be yours, call this number and describe. At which point Roach would get pissing and moaning about the cost of putting an ad in the paper - a whole three bucks.'
'And then we'd remind him that folks who find valuable property often get rewards,' Phil said,
'and he'd decide maybe he could find three bucks, after all.'
'But if the woman never called or came back,' I said, 'that ring would become Roach's property. It's the oldest law in history: finders-keepers.'
'So Ennis and my dad took the Buick.'
'No,' I said. 'The Troop took it.'
'What about theft of services? Did that ever get filed?'
'Oh, well,' I said with an uncomfortable little grin. 'Eleven bucks was hardly worth the paperwork. Was it, Phil?'
'Nah,' Phil said. 'Specially not in those days, when an IBM typewriter with CorrecTape was state-of-the-art. But we squared it up with Hugh Bossey.'
A light was dawning on Ned's face. 'You paid for the gas out of petty cash.'
Phil looked both shocked arid amused. 'Never in your life, boy! Petty cash is the taxpayers'
money, too.'
'We passed the hat,' I said. 'Everybody that was there gave a little. It was easy.'
'If Roach found a ring and nobody claimed it, it would be his,' Ned said. 'So wouldn't the Buick be his?'
'Maybe if he'd kept it,' I said. 'But he turned it over to us, didn't he? And as far as he
'was concerned, that was the end of it.'
Arky tapped his forehead and gave Ned a wise look. 'Nuttin upstairs, dat one,' he said.
For a moment I thought Ned would turn to brooding on the young man who had grown up to kill his father, but he shook that off. 1 could almost see him do it.
'Go on,' he said to me. 'What happened next?'
Oh boy. Who can resist that?
THEN
It took Bibi Roth and his children (that's what he called them) only forty-five minutes to go over the Buick from stem to stern, the young people dusting and brushing and snapping pictures, Bibi with a clipboard, walking around and sometimes pointing wordlessly at something with his ballpoint pen.
