The Truth of the Matter (13 page)

Boadeen gave his precise chuckle. “Why, I didn’t say you were. But I do believe you’re hiding from something.”

The cruiser’s engine broke into a deeper roar as they took a hill.

“You’re right, Sheriff,” Ellie said in a defeated voice. “We’re hiding from my ex-husband. He doesn’t want me to leave him and he hates Lou. He even tried to kill him once, run over him with our car.”

“Why didn’t you have him arrested?”

“You should know, Sheriff; it takes proof. Trouble is, we probably won’t have proof until Lou or myself is dead. That’s why we decided to hide from him a while, to let him get used to the idea of me being gone, of Lou and me being together.”

The sheriff digested that story slowly while Ellie hoped he believed her.

“This ex-husband of yours following you?”

“We think he might be. That’s why we didn’t tell anyone where we were going.”

Boadeen patted her on the knee, then let his hand rest there. “Don’t be too upset, Ellie. That kind of thing happens all the time, but the husband seldom does anything about it. I’ve got the statistics to prove it.”

Ellie made no attempt to remove his hand. “I hope you’re right, Sheriff. But you can see why I was frightened.”

“Surely can.”

They were out of Danton now, surrounded by fields of ripe corn, tall green stalks that stretched away on either side of them. It was like a bug’s eye view of a gigantic carpet. Dragonflies flitted now and then across the highway, and one struck the windshield with a loud smack that made Ellie wince.

Boadeen lifted his hand from her knee, slowed for a clearing that he must have known about and veered off the highway for a quick U-turn to head them back toward Danton. The hand returned to her stockinged knee, resting higher up on her thigh this time. She sat quietly.

“Would you like to go by the office?” Boadeen asked.

“Sure,” Ellie said, “why not?”

“I thought you’d see it that way,” Boadeen said. “I thought so the first time I saw you there at the lake.”

“I know,” Ellie said.

“You knew it would happen, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

They reentered Danton on a side street that ran parallel to the main highway and drove for about five minutes before stopping at the rear of a two story brick building. There was one set of yellow lines leading to the building, and Boadeen ran the car between them, facing a metal sign with his name and a gold shield painted on it mounted on the brick wall. They got out of the car and Boadeen reached without looking for the correct key that hung on the huge key ring on his belt. He swiveled his hip and inserted the key in one motion and they entered through the rear door.

There was no one in the office and the Venetian blinds on the front window were closed. A massive desk sat catercorner facing the door. There were two telephones on the desk and that was all. Beneath a bulletin board decorated neatly with wanted posters was a table with shortwave radio transmitter and an electric coffeepot on it. The walls by the desk were lined with filing cabinets, metal bookshelves, and a cherry wood gun rack with a padlocked chain running through the trigger guards of the dozen or so rifles and shotguns it held.

“Looks efficient,” Ellie said. She knew what to say.

“It is efficient,” Boadeen said proudly. “It’s a firm step upward.”

“Will you remember me when you get to be governor?” Ellie asked with her quiet smile.

Boadeen smiled back. “Why, I reckon that sort of depends on you, Ellie.”

“I suppose you’ll remember me,” Ellie said. She walked to a bookcase and examined the leather-bound books. There were titles on law enforcement techniques, legal decisions, judges on the Supreme Court, firearms, civil liberties.

“Did you read all these?” Ellie asked, running her fingernail across the bindings of the books as a small boy might run a stick along a picket fence.

“They’re reference works,” Boadeen said. “All written by experts. I’m a self-educated man. I never wasted my time with the tripe they’re teaching in colleges.”

“You must know a lot,” Ellie said, taking in the book-lined walls with a toss of her head.

Boadeen’s professionally bland face broke into a smile. “I make what I know work. I campaigned myself to get a bond issue passed that’d buy all this equipment, so I could do the job right to the letter.”

“That’s wonderful,” Ellie said.

Boadeen cocked his head at her. “You want to see the holdover?”

“Holdover?”

“The cell block, where I keep dangerous criminals until the State Patrol transfers them to prison. It’s through that door there.”

Ellie hesitated. “Is there anyone…in there now?”

“No, no,” Boadeen said reassuringly, walking to the thick wooden door and opening it. “If there was I surely wouldn’t take you in there.”

A few feet beyond the wooden door was a door lined with sheet metal and held shut by a sliding bolt lock. Sheriff Boadeen slipped the bolt and switched on a light.

The cell block was windowless, odorless. Steel and concrete bounced back the sound of their footsteps. Boadeen turned another light switch to reveal harshly shadowed rows of gleaming steel bars forming an aisle that lead to a blank cinder block wall.

They took a few steps forward and Ellie saw that each cell contained a porcelain wash basin, a toilet and a small bunk covered with a gray woolen blanket.

“It looks escape proof,” she said admiringly. She’d decided to do a good job of alleviating the sheriff’s suspicions, of making him not want to be suspicious. It wouldn’t be all that hard for her to put her heart into her work.

“No one has ever got out,” Boadeen said, the echo taking the softness from his Midwestern drawl. He stepped forward and opened the section of bars that was the door of the cell nearest them. His free hand pressed on the small of Ellie’s back and he drew her to him. He began to kiss her warmly on the ear.

Ellie didn’t struggle. “I thought you lived upstairs.”

“Why, I do,” Boadeen whispered, “but this is better. This is the most private place in town. Bars are made to keep people out as well as in, you know.”

“If you say so, Sheriff.”

Practiced fingers ran down the buttons on the back of her white blouse and unfastened her brassiere strap. She gasped involuntarily as one of her breasts was suddenly cupped in Boadeen’s broad hand. He fondled her for a moment and then let go of her, nudging her gently into the cell. Ellie let her blouse and bra fall to the cement floor as she turned and sat down on the edge of the bunk.

Sheriff Boadeen stepped into the cell. On his face was a vague smile that came and went with his heavy breathing as he stood looking down at Ellie. That stiff, backward motion of his arm, and the cell door slammed shut loudly with an echoing, metallic clank.

“Makes a hell of a sound, doesn’t it?” Boadeen said, and he began to undo his belt buckle.

For Boadeen it was conquest; for Ellie it was mere expediency.

Roebuck stood and watched from the cabin as Ellie parked the station wagon, watched her sit for a long moment before getting out and looking toward the lake to draw the fresh breeze into her lungs. He let the screen door slam behind him as he sauntered off the plank porch and walked toward her.

“Get your shopping done?”

“Sure.” Ellie smiled and nodded.

Roebuck opened the tailgate of the station wagon. “Only one bag?”

“Our sheriff was exaggerating about the low prices at Blatkin’s,” Ellie said, “but I had to buy a few things just in case he did some more checking on us. Besides, there were some things we needed.”

They went into the cabin and Roebuck sat at the kitchen table while she put the groceries away.

“Did you happen to see Sheriff Boadeen?”

Ellie squeezed a head of lettuce experimentally. “I saw him, but he was on the other side of the street and he didn’t see me. I was glad to leave it that way.”

Roebuck felt a bead of sweat run down the inside of his arm, zigzag to a stop, then continue toward his elbow more slowly. He clenched the fist of that arm with his thumb inside his fingers. He wanted to believe her, but there was just no way to know for sure. He should believe her, he told himself; there was really no reason
not
to believe her. Roebuck turned the whole thing over and over in his mind like a mental diamond, choosing his facets. Again he was at that most agonizing of crossroads, the pause of the pendulum, the moment of noncommitment.

It would be dishonorable and unreasonable not to believe her, he told himself at last. To not believe Ellie would be betraying his faith in her, his faith in himself. She was sure as hell happy with him, and it would be stupid to throw unfounded suspicions at her. It was natural to feel a little jealous with a woman like Ellie. Not that Boadeen wouldn’t want to…

Ellie flipped the refrigerator door shut and turned to him. “What would you like for lunch?”

“How about hamburgers,” Roebuck said, “and a salad from that head of lettuce you bought.”

“Be ready in no time.” Ellie started to fold the empty grocery bag, then stopped. “Darn it, I forgot cigarettes! The one thing we needed bad.”

“I reckon you better stop at Blatkin’s on the way back to the lake and buy something, just to make it look good.” Boadeen had said when she was getting dressed. “But I want you to forget something important, like cigarettes.” He’d turned his eager smile on her. “You better forget your cigarettes and drive back into town tomorrow and buy some.”

“That’s okay,” Roebuck said, looking down at the table top. “We’ve got enough to last this afternoon and evening. You can drive back into town tomorrow and buy some.”

In the remaining week that she and Roebuck stayed at the cabin, Ellie had driven into Danton on some pretext to meet Boadeen three times. Saturday now. The day before Roebuck and Ellie were to leave the cabin.

Sheriff Boadeen awoke early that morning, did his sitting up exercises and then breakfasted on toast and coffee before going downstairs to his office. He pulled the Venetian blind cord on the front window, blinking at the burst of morning light. Still unable to see clearly, he stood before the wall mirror to adjust his tie and place his cap on his head at just the right angle. Then he unlocked the front door and sat behind his desk to thumb idly through the latest
Law Enforcement
Magazine.

But he found his mind wandering to Ellie, to her warmth and her tight softness. Damned if she wasn’t a hot one! And one who had been around, one who knew things….Boadeen turned a page of his magazine and chuckled. He bet there were some things that husband of hers didn’t know about her.

The sheriff finished glancing through the magazine and slipped it carefully into a drawer. He sat drumming his fingers on the desk top for a moment before picking up the receiver of one of his phones.

“This is the sheriff,” he said with authority. “Get me the post office.”

He listened to the clicking, buzzing mysteries of the switchboard.

“I want to talk to Jack Gardner,” he said, when someone at the post office had answered the phone.

“Jack? How about running over here with those wanted circulars from the East if they came in yet. They are? Good. I’ll be waiting for you in the office.”

The sheriff hung up the phone and smiled. There was no regular mail delivery until this afternoon, but he desired his weekly portfolio of wanted posters now. Old Jack Gardner would bring them to him as he did almost every week. He would do Sheriff Boadeen that favor because the sheriff had something on him, from long ago. The sheriff had something on almost everybody in Danton. Cutting into a town, he mused, was like cutting into a malignant cancer patient; the deeper you cut and explored, the more disease you found. And if they had made mistakes without covering them up, that was their tough luck. That was the game.

Boadeen leaned back in his desk chair and visualized the governor’s mansion. After all, life was politics and politics was life. He wondered if the governor had ever made the mistake of not covering a sin. For now, wondering was all he would do; that would be thin ice for a county sheriff to fish on.

Old Mr. Gardner delivered the plain brown envelope addressed to Sheriff Boadeen and made his exit with deference.

Boadeen opened the envelope and studied the first three circulars: An armed robber from Washington D.C., a counterfeiter, and a murderer who had abducted and killed a twelve-year-old schoolgirl in Cairo, Illinois. The sheriff looked at the murderer’s picture, at the insolent mouth and heavily lidded eyes. How he would love to get his hands around that one’s neck! How he would love to make him feel what that poor schoolgirl felt! How he would love to do that!

The telephone rang and Boadeen dropped the circulars to the desk and lifted the receiver.

It was Ben Slattery, from Slavery’s Diner. Boadeen knew about Slattery’s wife, and he was watching Slattery’s daughter.

It seemed that last night some kids had vandalized the back of the diner, tipping over trash cans, splashing paint, scrawling obscenities on the brick wall.

Wondering if the young schoolgirl in Cairo had been raped before she was murdered, Sheriff Boadeen got his fingerprint kit and went right over there.

It was past noon when he returned, because he had drawn out the investigation and accepted a free lunch from Slattery. The sheriff was walking to a filing cabinet to get paper to write a report on the Slattery vandalism when his eye fell on the wanted circulars still lying on his desk. The fourth circular, the one he would have looked at next, was half-exposed at an angle.

Boadeen stopped cold and cocked his head. Then he jumped to the desk to study the photograph on the fourth circular carefully. It sure as hell looked like Lou Watson, a younger Watson, with fewer lines and more hair, but the face had the same look about it. Boadeen read beneath his breath as his eyes skipped over the circular:
Wanted for murder and robbery…last seen in Collinsville with a woman companion described as blonde, average height and weight, in her thirties…believed to be heading West.

A murderer!
Sheriff Boadeen sat down behind his desk and tilted his cap back on his head. A murderer right here at the lake—in his jurisdiction!