Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

beet, but smiling. He kept an eye on the people passing by on the side-walk, careful of his dignity. “You know how it is in a town this size. With a little quite simple technology—” Though his eyes remained dead, smoky blue, ice cold, he stretched his mouth into a still wider version of the trapezoid grin, chin thrown forward—the expression of a professor being patient and studiously unvindictive with an irritating student who no longer has a prayer. He drew his left hand from his sport coat pocket—brown coat, leather patches, a gift from his new, young wife, no doubt (Craine had heard about that; sooner or later he got all the filth)—raised his thin, freckled wrist for a glance at his watch, then looked back at Craine. Soberly, he said, “See here, Gerald, do you by any chance have time for a cup of coffee?”

“Dime?” Craine said.

“Time,” the inspector said, slowly and distinctly, as if speaking to a dull-witted foreigner.

“Oh, time!” Craine hesitated, pondering, thinking about the bottle in his pocket, imagining himself at the diner pouring Scotch into his coffee-with-cream, keeping the bottle steady by holding it with both hands. It was painfully tempting: McClaren would take the check. But suppose it was true that they were setting him up as the Lady Killer, planning to let him make them heroes? Head lowered, lips sucked inward, he slid his eyes toward McClaren, sizing him up. He was a man it might be useful to have a fix on, in point of fact, now that McClaren was working with the police. For a private eye, especially a tiresome old bum like himself (Craine had no illusions; that was the one decent card he had left), there was no such thing as good relations with the police, not in a place like Carbondale; but it was nice to know the enemy. McClaren felt the same, of course. It was the reason for his kind invitation. McClaren stood waiting, bald head tilted, mechanically smiling, as if someone had turned off his power switch.

“Don’t mind if I do,” Craine said at last. “Matter of fact, I haven’t had time to get lunch yet.”

“Fine! Jim Dandy!” the inspector said, looking at him oddly. With his right hand clamped on Craine’s crazybone, he turned Craine around like a peeping Tom taken into custody and marched him back into traffic. He raised his left arm to stop oncoming cars (Craine snatched his hat off, not to be outdone, and waved it furiously, leaning out past the inspector’s paunch), the inspector murmuring in his just-slightly-backcountry, reedy voice, “Glad I ran into you! Splendid piece of luck!” Craine racked his brains to place the accent. Northern South, he decided; east of Kentucky and West Virginia. Baltimore, maybe, where they murdered poor Edgar Allan Poe.

“I’ve been meaning to get over to see you, Gerald,” the inspector said, helping him up onto the curb as if Craine were a cripple. Two dogs drew back from them in alarm and a woman raised her hands. Craine waved his Stetson at her, then mashed it back onto his head.

The inspector was saying, “But you know how it is, mutatis mutandis and all that.” He smiled and gestured grandly with his free left hand to show Craine that, though a gentleman and scholar, he wore his learning lightly. They turned toward the Chinese restaurant, McClaren steering. (Craine hated Chinese restaurants.) Abruptly, as if just now remembering something, McClaren bent forward. His face showed concern. “I understand you’ve been ill,” he said. “You’re better now, I trust?” As if guiltily, he released Craine’s arm.

Craine smiled inwardly, registering that flicker of guilt in McClaren, and tightened his grip on the book. They were a wonder, these people: wanted to find a scapegoat with a terminal disease. No question about it, the world was in good hands! Craine clamped his lips. He would volunteer nothing. Let the bastard pull teeth. “I’m fine,” he snapped, and gave his head a little nodding jerk.

“You had”—McClaren tilted his dome, looking down at him at an angle—“you had some kind of operation, I understand?”

“That’s right,” Craine said. The inward smile widened, and a crackling like burning pine boughs began inside his head. The noise distracted him but also put him more determinedly on guard; it was something he’d experienced before, he couldn’t say when.

“Nothing fatal, I hope?” the inspector asked, then blushed.

“Everything’s fatal in the end,” Craine said, and gave a cackle. He turned to aim his nose at the inspector. “So you’ve joined the P.D.!”

“Yes,” McClaren said. “—Yes and no.” He hesitated. He seemed to cling for an instant to his hope of getting more on Craine’s illness, then relinquished it, looking down. He interlaced his fingers, thumbs upward, on his paunch. On two of the fingers he had heavy gold rings, one of them a wedding band, the other one the setting for a large red stone, perhaps a ruby. “Yes, I thought I’d get my hands ‘down into the dirt a bit,’ as Juvenal says. It’s no good being too theoretical.” By the lift of his eyebrows and the tilt of his head he gave Craine to understand that no one in the universe was his match when it came to pure theory. Craine had, as usual, his suspicions. He wondered, among other things, whether Juvenal had ever said anything of the kind. McClaren’s smile sharked out again. “Criminology,” he said, “is the science and practice of crime control.”

They’d arrived at the restaurant, and McClaren stopped, sweeping his bejewelled left arm out to open the door, pleased with the way he’d expressed himself and insisting, having won the advantage, that Craine enter first.

“Me before you?” Craine said. “You think there may be hit men inside?”

McClaren seemed not quite to hear him, and stared blankly at his grin. “Après vous,” he said, smiling, tipped forward and sideways so that his bald head slanted toward the door.

Craine hesitated for just a moment longer, leering, inspecting their two