“Anyone else on that route have mail missing?”
“There’s only the one route. And if so, they didn’t notice.”
“Or didn’t report it.”
Mug cradled in both hands, Bates swung his chair several degrees right, right knee rising to a point northeast, then a few degrees left, right knee dipping as the left V’ed northwest. “Hard as this may be for you to believe, Detective, we did get around to asking after that. Took us a few days to think of it, most likely. Probably have it written down somewhere.”
“I don’t mean any disrespect, Sheriff. I’m only here because you asked me, doing the job you asked me to do the only way I know how.”
Our eyes met.
“All right,” he said at length.
“So you found the mayor’s mail in this guy’s pocket.”
“Right.”
“But no wallet, no identification.”
He shook his head.
“Don Lee mentioned a notebook.”
“Nothing much there, far as we could tell.”
“And he’d been holding some of this mail for what? Three, four months?”
“Right.”
“Thought he was some kind of postman,” I said.
“Undelivering mail.”
Chapter Ten
I’d known Sally Gene for two or three years. She’d done a couple of ride-alongs back when she started with Child and Family. I remember giving her a hard time, claiming she couldn’t be much older than the children she was investigating, and her saying, “You’re kidding me, right,” my partner not getting it at all. Sally Gene and I had crossed paths professionally five, six times since. What she did was to her the most important thing in the world. I think deep down it may have been the only thing she really cared about. A lot of people who are outstanding at what they do seem to be like that. The rest of us look on, at once admiring and critical; vaguely ashamed of ourselves and our wayward lives.
That Sunday, she was waiting for me outside the station house.
“Think I might get a ride, Detective?”
“Sure thing, little girl.”
She’d already cleared it with brass. Bill took one look at us coming out together, chucked me the keys, and got in back. “What the hell. So we give up an hour or two of knock-on-doors-and-ask-questions excitement.”
Recently the department had bolstered the auto pool with half a dozen new blue Plymouths. We pretended we were being sly, but two guys that looked like Joe Friday driving around in a plain car with no chrome trim, black tires and no radio were pretty obvious.
“And what lovely suburb of the city might the three of us be touring today?” Bill said.
Round about the airport, as it turned out, in those years an undeveloped region of cheap motels and eateries. We nosed down the highway that led into Mississippi and turned off into a subdivison of tiny, plain houses once part of the army base. Trucks sold pecans, watermelons and peaches at the side of the road. The smell of figs and honeysuckle was everywhere.
I stood a few paces back as Sally Gene knocked. We weren’t supposed to have much of a presence on these calls. Bill stayed by the car. I’d already had a look around. A vegetable patch ran alongside the west side beneath a double clothesline, okra, tomatoes and green peppers, all of it pretty much gone from lack of care. No car in the driveway, and what oil spills there were, were old ones. Four or five Press-Scimitars lay unrolled and unread at the back of the driveway, one near the front door, another halfway into the front yard.
The door opened. Flat, uninflected sound of TV from within. Cartoons, maybe, or a sitcom. But then I heard “Willa Cather tried in her own inimitable way… ” I watched Sally Gene’s head tilt forward and down as the door came open. A child’s face stared up at us. Twelve, maybe. Wearing a yellow nylon shirt he’d grow into in another four or five years and a serious expression.
“Daddy says not to let anyone in.”
Sally Gene introduced herself.
“Daddy says not to let anyone in.”
“I told you my name. What’s yours?”
“William.”
“William. I’m sorry, I know this is confusing, and I’m not saying your daddy was wrong, he wasn’t. But I have to come in. Hey: I’d rather be home watching TV, too. But the people I work for tell me I have to come in and look around. They’re kind of like your parents, you know? Always telling me what I have to do?”
The merest flicker as his eyes strayed to me, but I caught it. He was looking for a way out.
“How you doing, William?” I said. “Friends ever call you Bill?”
After a moment he shook his head.
“You hungry, William?”
Again the head went right, left, right. “I fixed breakfast. I know how to cook. I have a load of clothes in the dryer. Oughta get them out.”
“Are your parents home, William?”
“They’ll be back soon.”
“How long have they been gone, William?”
He just looked at me. More than he could handle, I guess. Like so many things in his life.
“Miss Sally Gene and I need to come inside. Look: here’s my badge. You hold on to it till I’m ready to leave. That should be okay, shouldn’t it?”
After a moment he nodded and undid the chain.
In one bedroom we found a four-year-old girl locked in a closet. She’d very carefully defecated only in the rear corner by boots and old shoes, but urine had gone its own way, she’d had no control over that. A plate near the front held frankfurters and slices of American cheese.
In the bathroom a younger child with severe diarrhea, maybe two or three, was lashed by brown twine to the bathtub faucets. A Boy Scout manual on the back of the toilet bore a folded square of toilet paper at a section on knots. Jars of applesauce and peanut butter and plastic spoons sat within reach.
In a rear bedroom with bunk beds stacked north, south and east, children of various ages, six of them, sat straight-backed as army recruits. Their eyes swiveled to us as we came in. Plates of cold cuts and Oreo cookies sat on windowsills.
“I had no idea,” Sally Gene told me.
“You must have.”
“Oh, I knew something was wrong. But this…”
“Foster home?”
“One of the few we’ve never had complaints about. No trouble at all.”
“I found a credit card in the desk drawer.” William stood in the doorway behind us. “We haven’t had real food for a long time.”
“A Visa,” Sally Gene told me, “and well past its limit. Two days ago someone tried to use its mate down in Vicksburg to settle a hotel bill that included an impressive bar tab. The card got confiscated.”
“Foster parents?”
“Their card, anyway.”
“I’m sorry,” William said. “I know it was wrong.”
“You did okay, son.”
“You did great,” Sally Gene said.
