Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

the smoke. By the time he reached the telephone, or anyway before he’d mentally committed himself to dialing, the trucks of the Volunteer Fire Department were already screaming by. He stood with his hands on his head, agonizing over whether or not he dared show his face. He had no idea why, abruptly, he decided he would. Quickly he put on a heavy sweater, coat, boots, and gloves and ran out to the car; but when he finally got it started and made his way up to where the fire was, it was obvious that there was nothing to be done. Everything was gone, even the shed where the dogs had been. The air was rank with the stench of wet, burned wood. The firetrucks were mud-spattered and serious, like old farm tractors. Mickelsson stayed back by the road, his hands in his coatpockets. He couldn’t tell whether the knot in his stomach was hunger or something else. Pearson stood nearby, talking with the man from the place between, John Dudak. Dudak was young, good-looking, cleanshaven. He had two boys with him, maybe eight and ten; he’d made them wait in the pickup.

“You think they were in there?” Mickelsson heard Dudak ask.

“Musta been,” Pearson said. His face was gray.

Smoke and steam rolled up through the bare-branched trees. All the ground was black.

With a start, Mickelsson realized that one of the men in the fireman’s outfits was Owen Thomas, from the store. Owen was coming toward him; it was too late to flee.

“Any sign of them?” Mickelsson asked.

Owen looked at him, reserved, then shook his head.

Perhaps it was Owen Thomas’s look, or the stark reality of the fire, or perhaps it was his painfully sharp memory of going there with Jessie: it came to him that he could tolerate his uncertainty no longer.

So far as he could learn from the telephone book, Susquehanna had no police station, though he knew it had police. Carefully and slowly, like an old man, he drove down to town and parked across from the Acme Market, four spaces ahead of where Tacky Tinklepaugh sat watching for violators of the town’s one red light. Mickelsson, wearing his most formal clothes—dark suit, dark overcoat—stepped carefully out onto the glare-ice street, locked his car-door, for no reason, then walked carefully on the glare-ice sidewalk back to the patrol car. He towered above it. He bent down and knocked on the passenger-side door and, when Tinklepaugh reached over and cracked it an inch or two, called in, “Can I talk to you a minute?”

By a gesture, Tinklepaugh invited him in, and, after glancing up and down the street, Mickelsson opened the patrol-car door and took a seat beside Tinklepaugh. Mickelsson sat hunched forward, staring up-from-under through the windshield. He pretended not to notice the whiskey bottle on the seat between them, though Tinklepaugh obviously had no interest in whether he noticed it or not. Tinklepaugh, it was said, had more than once pushed a car he owned over a cliff for the insurance, had once shot a man for no good reason at the Peaceful Valley Inn, and had again and again been given warnings about his drinking while on duty. None of that bothered him in the least, apparently. Without back-up he would knock on the door of well-known mountain murderers; at fires and cave-ins and drowning scenes he performed acts of heroism no sober man would dare, especially at the salary the town afforded him, ten thousand a year.

“Cold out,” Tinklepaugh said, and reached to the dashboard to fiddle with the lever that ran the heater.

Mickelsson studied him a moment, chilled by his miscalculation in coming here. He cast about in vain for a way to get out of what he’d gotten himself into. Tinklepaugh’s nose was enlarged, his face a drunken ruin, puffy, dark with broken blood vessels. His eyes were like partly closed suitcases.

“I want to ask you something,” Mickelsson said. “I’ve been worried sick, and I live out there all alone, you know—I’m a nervous person anyway …” Quickly, lest he change his mind, or chatter crazily and give himself away, he said, “You know that fat man that was murdered?”

Tinklepaugh nodded, a slow downward then upward movement of the fleshy mask and cowboy hat.

“What have you found out?” Mickelsson asked.

Tinklepaugh seemed to study him, possibly too drunk to think clearly. At last he said, “Could be just about anybody, Professor Mickelsson.”

“That’s not very reassuring, is it,” Mickelsson said. “Are you saying you’ve got no idea at all? It could be me, or Owen Thomas, or the man that runs the Acme … or Charley Snyder?”

“Not them last three,” Tinklepaugh said.

A wave of fear went through Mickelsson. He’d set that one up himself! “You’re saying it could’ve been me?” His mind raced; then, cunningly, he said. “You’re right, of course. It could’ve been me. That would be convenient, pinning it on a newcomer—a stranger.”

“Yes, it would.” He was silent a moment, his bleary eyes on Mickelsson. “I’d have my problems, though. Say it’s you, you’re the killer.” He pointed at Mickelsson’s jaw. “You must be pretty well-off, if you killed that fat man. I’m surprised you don’t try to spend it. I understand you’ve been bouncing checks all over town.”

Mickelsson’s heart missed a beat. “Rich?”

Tinklepaugh’s face was as expressionless as ever, sagging with sorrow or neurotic gloom, drunken ruin. “I understand you’re into the I.R.S. for quite a handy sum. Funny you don’t pay ’em.”

Mickelsson said, “I don’t follow you.”

It came to him that Tinklepaugh had been holding his breath, or perhaps had forgotten to breathe, because now the man sighed, a sigh irrelevant to Mickelsson’s guilt or innocence. Tinklepaugh turned his face away—pulled it away reluctantly, it seemed—and stared out through the windshield, his hands on the steeringwheel. “You know those Susan B. Anthony dahllars?” he asked. “You know why they made ’em? Because paper dahllars wear out in a year or two, and they’re expensive to make. You see? Nothing’s what it