night when folks needed you?” But Grover Cleveland still tried; you’ll have to give him that, even if now even he never believed in it:
“Oh, you mean them two fellers in Uncle Willy’s store about half past ten last night. Sure, I seen them. I naturally thought, taken for granted it was Uncle Willy and Skeets. So I.… ”
“So you what?” Mr Hampton said.
“I … stepped back inside and … taken up the evening paper,” Grover Cleveland said. “Yes, that’s where I was: setting right there in the station reading the Memphis evening paper.… ”
“When Whit Rouncewell saw them two fellows in here, he went back to the station looking for you,” Mr Hampton said. “He waited an hour. By that time the lights were off in here but he never saw anybody come out the front door. And you never showed up. And Walter there says you never showed up at the Blue Goose either. Where were you last night, Grover?”
So now there wasn’t anywhere for him to go. He just stood there with his coattail hiked up over the handle of his pistol and blackjack like a little boy’s shirttail coming out. Maybe that’s what it was: Grover Cleveland was too old to look like a boy. And Uncle Willy and Mr Hampton and all the rest of us looking at him until all of a sudden we were all ashamed to look at him any more, ashamed to have to find out what we were going to find out. Except that Mr Hampton wasn’t ashamed to. Maybe it was being sheriff so long had made him that way, learned him it wasn’t Grover Cleveland you had to be ashamed of: it was all of us.
“One night Doc Peabody was coming back from a case about one oclock and he saw you coming out of that alley side door to what Montgomery Ward Snopes calls his studio. Another night I was going home late myself, about midnight, and I saw you going into it. What’s going on in there, Grover?”
Grover Cleveland didn’t move now either. It was almost a whisper: “It’s a club.”
Now Mr Hampton and Uncle Gavin were looking at each other. “Dont look at me,” Uncle Gavin said. “You’re the law.” That was the funny thing: neither one of them paid any attention to Mr Connors, who was the marshal and ought to have been attending to this already. Maybe that was why.
“You’re the County Attorney,” Mr Hampton said. “You’re the one to say what the law is before I can be it.”
“What are we waiting for then?” Uncle Gavin said.
“Maybe Grover wants to tell us what it is and save time,” Mr Hampton said.
“No, dammit,” Uncle Gavin said. “Take your foot off him for a minute anyway.” He said to Grover Cleveland: “You go on back to the station until we need you.”
“You can read the rest of that Memphis paper,” Mr Hampton said. “And we wont want you either,” he said to Mr Connors.
“Like hell, Sheriff,” Mr Connors said. “Your jurisdiction’s just the county. What goes on in Jefferson is my jurisdiction. I got as much right—” He stopped then but it was already too late. Mr Hampton looked at him with the little hard pale eyes that never seemed to need to blink at all.
“Go on,” Mr Hampton said. “Got as much right to see what Montgomery Ward Snopes has got hid as me and Gavin have. Why didn’t you persuade Grover to take you into that club then?” But Mr Connors could still blink. “Come on,” Mr Hampton said to Uncle Gavin, turning. Uncle Gavin moved too.
“That means you too,” he said to me.
“That means all of you,” Mr Hampton said. “All of you get out of Uncle Willy’s way now. He’s got to make a list of what’s missing for the narcotics folks and the insurance too.”
So we stood on the street and watched Mr Hampton and Uncle Gavin go on toward Montgomery Ward’s studio;What?” I said to Ratliff.
“I dont know,” he said. “That is, I reckon I know. We’ll have to wait for Hub and your uncle to prove it.”
“What do you reckon it is?” I said.
Now he looked at me. “Let’s see,” he said. “Even if you are nine going on ten, I reckon you still aint outgrowed ice cream, have you. Come on. We wont bother Uncle Willy and Skeets now neither. We’ll go to the Dixie Cafe.” So we went to the Dixie Cafe and got two cones and stood on the street again.
“What?” I said.
“My guess is, it’s a passel of French postcards Montgomery Ward brought back from the war in Paris. I reckon you dont know what that is, do you?”
“I dont know,” I said.
“It’s Kodak pictures of men and women together, experimenting with one another. Without no clothes on much.” I dont know whether he was looking at me or not. “Do you know now?”
“I dont know,” I said.
“But maybe you do?” he said.
That’s what it was. Uncle Gavin said he had a big album of them, and that he had learned enough about photography to have made slides from some of them so he could throw them magnified on a sheet on the wall with a magic lantern in that back room. And he said how Montgomery Ward stood there laughing at him and Mr Hampton both. But he was talking mostly to Uncle Gavin.
“Oh sure,” he said. “I dont expect Hub here—”
“Call me Mister Hampton,” Mr Hampton said.
“—to know any better—”
“Call me Mister Hampton, boy,” Mr Hampton said.
“Mister Hampton,” Montgomery Ward said. “—but you’re a lawyer; you dont think I got into this without reading a little law first myself, do you? You can confiscate these—all you’ll find here; I dont guess Mister Hampton will let a little thing like law stop him from that—”
