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

and even if there had been, the Mormons would be horrified by everything you think. Your vision of the future—good God, man, they’d laugh at you! They’re burghers!”

He waited for Lawler to explain, defend himself. He waited on and on, bent forward, off balance, as motionless as Lawler himself. Lawler sat as if asleep, fallen in on himself, his button chin tipped upward as if bearing his throat to some knife, his eyes tight shut. He looked like peevish royalty, gentle Louis XVI, noble-heartedness misunderstood. It came to Mickelsson that the old man’s sooty face had shining channels running down from each eye. Mickelsson sat back in his chair. “Faggot,” Donnie Matthews would say with wonderful childish scorn. Another philosophical error, misleading row of trees. It was partly the coincidence of homosexuality—Professor Warren, Michael Nugent, Randy Wilson, probably not Tim, he thought now—that had thrown Mickelsson off; perhaps it had been, on Mickelsson’s part, a fascist wish that homosexuality be somehow at the nasty heart of it all—to Mickelsson an aesthetically unpalatable way of life. Pain—guilt—fanned through his chest, then subsided. His left eyelid hung like a half-drawn shade.

Falteringly, helping himself by gripping the bars in front of him, Mickelsson stood up. He stared at Lawler’s lumpy shoes suspended two inches above the floor. At last he said, “Well, sleep peacefully. I’m sure you will.” He looked down at his blistered, wounded hands, his swollen wrists.

Lawler said nothing.

Mickelsson turned slowly and nodded to the policeman working at his fingernails, then moved toward the door.

Behind him Lawler suddenly spoke, theatrical, like one of Ellen’s people. “I won’t survive this, you know! One never survives these things!”

They were out of the cellblock now. The door clicked shut. Outside on the street the world was still in the rigor-mortis grip of winter.

Tinklepaugh said, “Well, you know, we hear a lot of crank confessions.” He leaned on his fists, his elbows on the desktop, the bags under his eyes as heavy as a basset-hound’s. The ceiling above him in the one-room police station Mickelsson had finally located was full of jagged, filthy cracks, a few missing pieces of plaster. The floor was crooked, the windows patched with tape. The file-cabinets were dented and apparently half empty.

“Come off it, Sergeant,” Mickelsson said, raising his head from the leather chairback. He spoke crossly, though his voice was weak and there were tears in his eyes. “You know it’s the truth.”

“I don’t even know there was a murder. My theory is—”

“I’ve heard your theory. He broke into his own room, even though the chainlatch had been hooked from inside.”

“We don’t know for certain when that chainlatch was broken, now do we?”

“I know when it was broken.”

Tinklepaugh gazed at him, his blue eyes dead-looking, purple flecks in the pink of his sagging lower lip. “But you, Professor, have a history of mental illness.”

Mickelsson sank back in the chair. “OK,” he said. After a minute: “Just one thing. Tell me why. Say it’s a hypothetical case—some other murderer you refuse to arrest. What’s the point? Does it give you a feeling of significance, arresting some people, letting others go free? Makes you feel like a king? Do you do it as a service to the community—because I’m a homeowner and taxpayer, potentially available for jury duty? Or to save the state the expense of trying me and sending me to prison? Do you do it in the name of Higher Truth, because ‘vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord’? Or to get back at the people who don’t pay you enough?”

“You got a bad heart, Professor. Don’t get carried away.”

“Why, though?”

Tinklepaugh looked at him. At last he said, “All of that.”

“Is somebody paying you off?” Mickelsson asked suddenly.

Like a dead man, Tinklepaugh laughed. “That’ll be the day!”

Mickelsson closed his eyes and breathed lightly, to keep the pain down. The big, drab room was full of sounds. The clock above Tinklepaugh’s head, the furnace rumble coming up through the floor, some kind of rhythmical scritching sound he was unable to identify …

“What’ll happen to the world,” Mickelsson asked, “if the police let criminals walk away scot-free?”

“God knows,” Tinklepaugh said.

“All right,” Mickelsson said. “So you’re telling me to turn myself in to the state police.” He opened his right eye to check Tinklepaugh’s expression.

“No. I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.” Suddenly he brought his hands down flat on the desk, pushed back his chair, and stood up. He looked hard at Mickelsson, about to say something, then turned away, his thumbs in his gunbelt, and went over to stand looking out the window. “You want a drink?” he asked at last.

“No thanks.”

Tinklepaugh sucked at his teeth, considering, then went over to the file-cabinet, opened it, and got out a bottle, cheap bourbon, and a dime-store glass. He poured the glass half full, put the bottle away, then went to the window again, to stand with his back to Mickelsson. He sipped the drink. “Beautiful town once,” he said. “Some people say it will come back. I doubt it. You’d be surprised how delicate the balance is, place like this. Man runs up a pile of debts, then skips out, or something happens to him—somebody’s business could go under. That’s how fragile it can get. Everybody knows that, these dying small towns. Different places you live got different ways of being, of course. But that’s how it is here. People take care of each other, when they’re all living right on the edge—they better, anyway. The worse it gets, the more careful they all got to be. Somebody stops pulling his weight—somebody breaks the agreement, you might say—that’s trouble. Anything can happen.” He shook his head, as if imagining atrocities. “Well, people say the trains are coming back—coal to take care of the energy crisis. Maybe it’ll happen. That might change things. But I wouldn’t bet on it. I see it getting worse and worse—more houses falling down or catching fire some night, more people out of work, sitting out there