found in the lining of his leather duty-jacket, a crayon self-portrait of Barbara signed bibby to my loving father in multicolor curlicue capitals, a copy of a five-year-old income tax return. He shut his drawer and took a Hershey bar from the department commissary drawer, depositing a dime in the cashbox. He stripped off the paper, dropped it into the waste basket, and chewed the chocolate slowly. Chief Secco was still talking to the widow.
Ellen will have my hide…
Malone took inventory. The E & J Emergikit on the counter-resuscitator, inhalator, aspirator. The two- watt, two-channel walkie-talkie. The case with the camera and flashbulbs. Nothing changes. Only for Sherrie-Ann Howland. I hope he left some insurance. It’s a dead cinch Pickney didn’t pay him enough to sock anything away. The whole town knew Pick-ney’s and Aztec’s way with a buck. And there was all that talk about Howland and Marie Briggs at Elwood’s. How do you kill in cold blood? A man had a right to live out his life, even a life as sorry as Tom Howland’s. A woman had a right to a husband, even a woman like Sherrie-Ann.
Secco rose. Mrs. Howland got up in a different way. As if her back ached. “You sure you don’t want me to have one of the boys run you home, Mrs. Howland?”
“I parked my car in the town hall lot.” There was nothing in the widow’s voice.
“I could have it delivered to you in the morning.”
“No.” She walked out, past Sam Buchard, past Malone, past the partition, through the vestibule. She walked stooped over like a soldier holding his guts in.
“Goddam,” Sam Buchard said.
“Oh, Wes,” Chief Secco said. “One thing. When you met Howland at the bank today and took him back to the plant with the payroll, how did he seem to you?”
Malone was puzzled. “I didn’t notice specially.”
“Did he act nervous?”
“Well, I don’t know. He talked his head off.”
“About what?”
“A lot of nothing. Now that I think of it, maybe he was nervous. Why?”
“All right, Wes,” Chief Secco said. “Out.”
“Chief,” Malone began.
“Didn’t you hear me?”
“John, you’ll need all the help you can get.”
“When you went off duty, Wes, what did I tell you?”
“You said take a couple days off-”
“Then do it. We’re under control here. I’m not about to have you come down with exhaustion. I’ve told you- more than once-this isn’t a one-man department. Believe it or not, I’ve got ten other men most as good as you.”
“Four of them trainees.”
“That’s my problem. You leaving under your own steam, Wes, or do I have to run you out?” Secco looked as if he could do it. He was almost sixty but he had a steer’s build and a tough face under the gray crewcut. He was home-grown New Bradford like most of the force. His father had been a dairy farmer and he had grown up tossing hay bales and stripping teats. He still had a knee-buckling grip.
“All right, John, but just one thing. How does it look to you?”
“An outside job, I make it. I didn’t tell Mrs. Howland, but I think Howland was in on it and got crossed. That’s why I asked you if he seemed nervous this afternoon. Now get out, will you?”
“You can’t leave me hanging, John! What’s the indication of that?”
“Ed Taylor says Howland all of a sudden sent him into town for coffee. Ed thought nothing of it at the time, but after he got slugged and came to it struck him funny. Howland never did that before. Looks to me like a setup: Howland got Ed out of the way so he could let the robbers into the plant. He’d probably dickered for a cut of the loot, and after making the deal they shot him down. Go home.”
“Any hard evidence?”
“Not yet.”
“Mrs. Howland have any ideas?”
“She can’t see two inches past her own miseries. Go home.”
“Who’s at the plant?”
“Trooper Miller. He’s waiting for the state lab men and the coroner. Go home, Wes!”
Malone left on dragging feet, not all from fatigue.
He walked east to the corner, turned right, did the one block past the Ford agency to Three Corners, and started up Lovers Hill.
How did a man get to the point of kicking his whole life away? Even a life as rotten as Howland’s? Or maybe that was the answer. Howland’s wife was a drag and a drain, his job was a lot of nothing, he was going nowhere, he was in his upper fifties, and he handled a lot of other people’s money. It made some sort of cockeyed sense if you were in Howland’s shoes. He had never seen a happy look on Howland’s face, even at the times when he dropped into Elwood’s for a coffee on a cold night and caught the guy playing up to Marie Briggs.
He wondered if the Briggs girl was involved. No, Marie was too smart. Besides, she had a thing going with Jimmy Wyckoff and it looked serious. Jimmy was a good-looking kid who pulled down a good salary as a machinist at Compo Copper and Brass. If there was anything between Marie and Rowland it had all been in Howland’s head.
Malone felt a rush of affection for his own girls.
Suppose I didn’t have them? Suppose Ellen had turned out i nag and a spender like Sherrie-Ann? And as lousy in bed as ihe must be? Suppose Ellen had miscarried with Bibby, as;he had done twice before and once since Bibby was born, vhen Dr. Levitt advised her not to get pregnant any more? There would be no little girl with copper curls and a valen-ine for a face and those big honey eyes full of love for the lero in her life. (And hadn’t Ellen been floored when, at the ige of six, Bibby had climbed into his lap and clutched him around the neck and looked deep into his eyes and asked, “Daddy, do you love mommy more than you love me?” He could still see the expression on Ellen’s face.)
Malone turned up into Old Bradford Road.
No, life would be as big a zero as Howland’s without his girls. Until he had met Ellen, with her snapping Irish eyes and tongue, he had never been serious about a girl. He had never had a girl. Only girls, and most of those had been the kind who drifted in and out of Rosie’s over on Lower Freight, and they didn’t count. He had never had any close friends of either sex before Ellen. It was Ellen, with her insight into people, who had quickly seen him for what he was and dubbed him The Malone Ranger, from which he became “Loney” to her and to her alone.
He found himself smiling as he trudged around the curves of the S. In bed sometimes he called her Tonto, just to get her mad. (“If you haven’t found out the difference between Tonto and me yet, Wesley Malone, you need a course in sex education!”)
He had always had to make out. His father, a cold and silent man, had worked on the roads for the state, and Malone’s memories of him were colored by the black oil he could never seem to clean off his hands and face. He had died when Malone was thirteen, a stranger, leaving a bed-fond widow who chainsmoked and never combed her hair, and four younger children. They were girls, and he became the man of the house before he had to shave. It still made him mad when he thought of the monthly check from the town welfare fund. It provided just enough to keep them from starving, and an inexhaustible supply of ammunition for the town kids. He had hunted up work for after school, swearing to himself that the first time he could make enough to turn down the town handout he would kick somebody’s teeth in. He did his studying at night-his mother insisted, with a stubbornness he now recognized as the source of his own, that he go through high school. During the summers he mowed lawns, bagged groceries at the supermarket, farmed out for the haying season, painted divider lines on the roads. Anything to earn a dollar. He turned it all over to his mother. Money meant little to him except as it kept her from complaining.
By the time she died of lung cancer in New Bradford Hospital, his sister Kathleen was old enough to cope with the household and the younger girls. He began bringing his earnings to Kathleen. He had supported his sisters through high school, he had seen them safely married, he had kissed them goodbye as one by one they left town with their husbands and kids, wondering whether he would ever see them again. Most of them he never had seen again, although he got a letter once in a blue moon, usually griping, they came by their complaining ways honestly. And his favorite, Kathleen, was living in San Diego on the base, her husband was career Navy, and he did not hear
