I got up and hesitated. “You never got hassled after that trial, did you? I heard one of the jurors got some crank calls.”
“Crank calls?”
“Yes, like from people who were mad you convicted Davis.”
“Mad? Hell, nobody was mad. They were mad at him-a nigger flatlander up here, pretending it was New York or something. He got what he should of got. Everybody knows that.”
I shrugged and half-turned to leave. “Right… By the way, I have a feeling somebody from the press is likely to ask you about all this. We’ve been made to look pretty silly, and the news guys always love that. Come to think of it, whoever did this made you look pretty stupid too. Good headline stuff-give people a laugh.”
“Yeah. Well, the press can go fuck itself. I’m gonna give them squat.”
Music to my ears.
4
Martha Murphyopened the door and looked at me from top to bottom, shaking her head. “If you’d have come an hour earlier, I could have put a healthy dinner in you.”
I slid past her. “Good to see you too. I’ll have you know some twenty-two-year-old all but propositioned me today, stimulated entirely by my fabulous physique.”
“Twenty-two? Joe, she was looking for a father figure-probably wanted to feed you some proper food.”
I hung my coat up in the hallway, something I did in this house almost as frequently as I did in my own. “You still worked up over that dinner I served Frank a few weeks ago?”
“Mayonnaise, pickle and Velveeta sandwiches… I mean, really.”
I kissed her on the cheek. “Don’t you ever walk on the wild side?”
“Sure, but I try not to kill myself. You should have seen what that meal did to his system.”
“Hell, that was probably all the scotch he poured on top of it.” That hit a nerve, and I was sorry I’d said it. I patted her shoulder. “Okay, you win. Beans and sprouts from now on.”
She shook her head and sighed. I worked my way back to Frank’s den beyond the kitchen. He was lying on a brown vinyl couch in front of thgn=e television watching the news. There was a tall glass of scotch on the floor by his hand.
“Hi, Joe. You want a drink?”
I shook my head. I’d given up drinking several years ago. Frank knew that, but there’s something inside a hard-drinking man that can only see abstinence as a passing and regrettable phase. And Frank was a hard-drinking man; I’d seen him absorb five stiff scotch-and-sodas and not show a hair out of place. The only visible evidence of his daily drowning was an ever-expanding soft gut and a growing inability to move quickly-physically and mentally. I’d thought about going the same route after my wife Ellen had died many years back, but watching Frank even then had kept me straight. Unfortunately, either despite or because of Martha’s concern, Frank had kept right on going.
“You have any tonic water?”
He lugged himself out of the couch and ambled over to a freestanding bar set up near the wall. “Still on the wagon, huh? I don’t see how you can drink tonic water without something to kill the taste.”
He filled my order, handed me a glass and motioned to the couch. “Take a load off. I’m finding out who was asshole of the day-at least according to the TV. I’ve got my own opinion, of course.”
“John Woll?” Murphy grunted. “That’s not a bad place to start.”
“It was hardly his fault.”
“Oh, hell. I said ‘of the day,’ and the day’s almost up. I’ll find someone else tomorrow. Besides, what I think doesn’t matter much anyway.”
I cupped my ear. “What’s this? Violin music time?”
He glanced at me and shook his head. “Yeah. Sorry. I’m getting sick and tired of being the resident lame duck.”
“No one listening anymore?”
“Oh, they listen. They just don’t pay much attention. I know what’s going through their minds: if we just stall him long enough, he’ll be gone and we can forget about it. I can’t say I blame them. It’s just a lousy way to wrap things up. I’ve given those bastards a lot of good time.”
He leaned forward and turned up the volume a bit. The sports report was beginning-Frank’s idea of heaven.
As slow as he had become, his insight hadn’t suffered any. He was right about what people were thinking. He was retiring in four months, after thirty-five years on the force; it was the last chance a lot of folks had to subtly let him know they weren’t heartbroken.
I thought that stank. He was a good cop and a better friend. When I came out of Korea, I was twenty years old and scarred by something nobody wanted to hear about. Korea was the “action” between the Good War-World War II-and the Living Room War-Vietnam. We had racked up almost as many casualties in three years as they had during ten years in Vietnam. The Vietvets complained that people spat at them when they got back home; most of us didn’t stimulate even that much attention.
Also, warfare had revealed sides of humanity I’d never dreamed of, g Cdreem' rowing up in the hills of Thetford, Vermont. I’d witnessed extremes of boredom and action, of cowardice and foolhardy bravery, of viciousness and grace. I’d been touched by an experience so concentrated and searing that my former life, beckoning from my father’s farm, no longer seemed possible.
I floated for a while, utterly at sea. I was decommissioned in California, so I stayed there and spent a few years going to college in Berkeley. That was when the Beat movement was just beginning to stir, a phenomenon that filled my suitcase with some pretty strange books and all but finished the metamorphosis of one erstwhile farm boy, but it still hadn’t settled my mind one bit. So I quit and came back home, hoping something might switch me back on track.
But I’d become rootless, frustrated and alienated, and Vermont’s green hills did little to soothe. That’s when Murphy rounded me up. He was older by nine years, a veteran not only of Korea, but of World War II. I’d known him earlier; he’d been reared nearby in Ely, an older brother of sorts to a lot of kids my age-or if not a brother, then a cousin maybe-the only teenager in the area to have fought overseas and killed people and won medals. He listened to boys my age, and some girls too, I imagine, with a wisdom and sympathy we couldn’t find in the adult world. And he managed to track me down after California, although by that time he lived in Brattleboro, some seventy-five miles to the south. To this day, I’m not sure how or why he did that. I have the sneaky suspicion that my mother may have called him.
In any case, he got me interested in the police force he’d been on for several years already. It mimicked some of the more pleasant aspects of military life-that combination of specialness and fraternity-and it replaced the muddiness of my life with the welcomed rigidity of rank, paperwork and assigned tasks. It also meant carrying a gun-the ultimate symbol of the simple answer to a complex world-and it gave me a chance, every once in a while, to do something which by that time in my life was becoming an elusive quality. Korea and California had fouled the clear moral waters of my upbringing and had left me nostalgic for the innocent idealism of my younger years.
During my first weeks as a Brattleboro cop, I thought I’d finally found the solution. I was to walk the line between the good guys and the bad, keeping one from being done in by the other. Real Lone Ranger stuff, complete with silver bullets, or at least close enough. The fact that I started out directing traffic and ticketing cars didn’t matter. I was a Lawman-the armed instrument of Might and Right.
Not that Murphy instilled that simple-minded notion in my brain. That was my own doing, and I was quickly disabused. The younger, probably wiser Murphy showed me that most bad guys were usually regular joes with a screw loose-barring a few exceptions. But even while I was reluctantly conceding that the world was more gray than black and white, its complexities and contradictions stopped bothering me as much. The gun lost its appeal as I began to rely more on my instincts than on its authority. I came to see it finally as the unreal thing it is: the admission of your brain’s collapse under panic and impotent rage. For that personal growth-even rebirth-I had Frank Murphy to thank.
