'You're here.'
'Yeah, but why are you interested,' he said.
'Just a curious guy,' I said.
He shook his head as if I were ridiculous, moved down the counter to another customer. His interest in me had plummeted. I didn't mind. I was used to it. When I left the store the heat was tangible, like walking into a wall. I turned left and strolled the boardwalk. No one was about in the implacable sunshine, except me. Mad dogs and Englishmen, I thought.
In all directions but west, the hills rose up from the town in slow, curved slopes until, distantly, they became mountains. It produced the odd effect of simultaneous vastness and enclosure. I felt as far from home as I'd ever been, which was an illusion. California was farther, and Korea was much farther. But the land was so different, so un-Eastern, and, maybe more to the point, Susan wasn't here. She hadn't been in Korea either, but I hadn't known her then, and, while not knowing her made a hole in my existence, I didn't know it at the time.
At the end of the main drag, across the street from a western-wear shop and next to a place called Ringo's Retreat was a small building made of beige bricks with a hip roof and a blue light and a sign outside that said POLICE. I went in.
It was one air-conditioned room. Two cells across the back. A Winchester rifle and a Smith & Wesson pump gun were locked in a cabinet behind a big oak desk with an engraved brass sign on it that said CHIEF. At the desk, wearing a khaki police uniform, was a rangy guy with blond hair and soft blue eyes.
'Good afternoon, sir,' he said when I came in.
'Hot;' I said.
'Yes. But it's a dry heat,' he said.
'The same thing could be said of hell.' He laughed.
'What can I do for you?' he said.
'You the chief?'
'Dean Walker,' he said and smiled.
'Spenser,' I said. 'I'm an investigator from back east.'
'Boston,' the chief said.
'Betrayed by my accent,' I said.
'I can pick Boston out at a hundred yards,' he said. 'Anyone can.'
'I'm trying to find out what happened to a guy named Steve Buckman,' I said.
'Stevie,' Walker said. 'What a shame.'
'You knew him.'
'Oh, absolutely. Great guy.'
'Ever find the shooter?' I said.
'No. Had no evidence. Still don't.'
'Any suspects?'
'None.'
'I heard he'd been threatened by some people from the Dell.'
'I heard that, too,' Walker said.
'From?'
'Lou, his wife.'
'And?'
'She can't identify the people who made the threats. We even went up to the sheriff's substation in Gilcrest, looked at mug shots. She couldn't find anybody.'
'So,' I said. 'No witnesses. No names. No clues. Just a rumor.'
'Exactly,' Walker said.
'Case still open?'
'Well, theoretically, but you know the score. Nothing plus nothing equals nothing.'
'You have a theory?' I said.
'Stevie was a… Stevie thought he was a tough guy. He was pretty aggressive. Maybe he got aggressive with the wrong guy.'
'Anything special he might get aggressive about?'
'Nothing I know about,' Walker said.
'How about the wife?'
'What about the wife?' Walker said.
'When a married person gets killed, who's the first suspect?' I said.
