Small Town

“Yeah, but after the auction.”

“Ah,” he said. “Not necessarily.”

“Oh?”

“Not if somebody leaked it.”

“Holy shit. Now why the hell didn’t I think of that myself? I know Liz Smith well enough to call her . . .”

“Or Page Six.”

“Page Six first, to tell them the police have talked to you in connection with the triple killing, di dah di dah di dah, and then Liz Smith so she can rush to your defense and tell the world yes, they talked to you, and they cleared you. I’ll call right now. Wait a minute. Will I be breaking any laws?”

“You’ll be pissing a few people off,” he said, “but I can’t see where you’ll be doing anything illegal. They didn’t even ask us not to talk to anybody.”

“I’m sure they never thought they had to. What about your lawyer? Is he one of the people I’ll be pissing off?”

“What do you care? Anyway, he’ll figure the cops leaked it.”

“And they might, so I’d better get cracking. Bye, sweetie.” He put down the phone and went over to the window. Below his window, a black man in camo fatigues went through the blue garbage can, selecting aluminum cans for redemption. Recycling didn’t seem to work in New York, all the trash wound up in the same landfill, but the law requiring you to separate it at least made things easier for the can collectors.

Across the street, a man with a clipboard was leading a dozen people on a walking tour of the Village. Willa Cather had lived on this block, and maybe he’d tell them as much and point out the house. They shuffled on by, leaving Creighton with a view of the old man leaning in the doorway.

He’d seen him before, in his plaid shirt and the pants from an old suit. Homeless, he guessed, or the next thing to it, but too proud or not desperate enough to root around in garbage cans.

Maybe he’d go downstairs, take the old fellow to the Corner Bistro and buy him a burger. One point one, Jesus, he could damn well afford it.

He went back to the computer first, to tinker with the last sentence he’d written, and when he looked up an hour had gone by and he’d written a page and a half. He stood up, rubbed his eyes, yawned.

One point one. He ought to call somebody, but who was there to call? And what kind of conversation could he have with someone he hadn’t talked to since before Marilyn Fairchild’s death had changed his life?

He could call Karin, tell her her money was safe, tell her the kids weren’t going to have to worry about money for college. But shouldn’t he wait until after the auction?

He was hungry, he was thirsty, he’d done a good day’s work, and damned if he wasn’t on the verge of genuine success. Blair Creighton had managed to get by, and that was no mean accomplishment in the field he’d chosen, but John Blair Creighton . . .

Look out, Grisham. Not so fast, Clancy. And you better watch your ass, Steve King.

He grabbed his cigarettes, checked to make sure he had his wallet, and got the hell out of there. When he hit the street he looked around for the old guy he’d seen earlier, but he’d drifted off, missing out on his chance for a Bistro Burger. And the Bistro could wait, because why not take the bull by the horns?

He started walking, and when people looked his way he looked right back at them.

E D D I E R A G A N L O O K E D U P when the door opened, and he figured his face showed about as much as it did when he played poker. All in all, he did pretty well at poker.

“John,” he said. “Been a while.”

“Well, I’ve been busy, Eddie. Better let me have a Pauli Girl.”

“You got it.”

And he sat where he always sat and got a cigarette going and looked at the TV, where Gene Fullmer and Carmen Basilio were duking it out on the classic sports channel. Basilio was bleeding so bad he must have needed a transfusion afterward, and even in black and white it was pretty gruesome. Nowadays they’d stop it, but this was from before the sport got so candy-ass.

Creighton drank some beer, looked around, saw Max the Poet.

“Max,” he said.

Max looked up from his book, looked over the tops of his glasses at Creighton, said, “John. Haven’t seen you in a while.”

“No, it’s been a while,” Creighton agreed.

“Well, you didn’t miss much,” Max said. “Everything jake with you, John?”

“Jake indeed. And with you, Max?”

“Oh, I can’t complain,” said Max the Poet.

I love this job, Eddie thought.

twelve

ON THE FLIGHT home from Dallas–Fort Worth, his seat companion in the front cabin was a ruddy-faced Texan with a GI haircut and intelligent brown eyes under a heavy ridge of brow.

Buckling up, the man said, “If there was no other reason to hate the goddamn Arabs, and there’s plenty, what they’ve done to air travel would do for me. The airport security measures just drive a man crazy. Anything under five hundred miles, I get in the car and drive.”

“It’s a difficult situation,” Buckram said.

“I know, but it’d be comforting to think there was a guiding intelligence behind it all. I saw them pull a woman out of line for one of their random searches and I swear she was eighty years old and used an aluminum walker. Meantime how hard is it to get a gun onto an airplane? All you have to do is tuck it in your turban.”

“They’re afraid to get criticized for racial profiling.”

“There’s a difference between stopping cars because the drivers are black and paying extra attention to people who flat out look like terrorists. I’ll tell you, my doctor wanted to schedule me for an MRI last week. Don’t bother, I told him. I’m flying to New York in a few days, I’ll ask airport security to send you the results.” He hadn’t heard that one, and laughed.

“Listen,” the man said, “I like to talk, but I hate to inflict myself on someone who’d rather read, so if you brought a book along . . .”

“It’s in my checked luggage, and I’d rather have human company anyway.”

“Well, I’m not sure I qualify,” the man said. “Some would argue otherwise. Name’s Bob Wilburn, from Plano.”

“Fran Buckram, from New York.”

“I already knew that.”

“Well, all I have to do is open my mouth and people know I’m from New York.”

“I expect they do, but I already knew your name, too. Recognized you from your photographs. You’re the fellow who made New York a nice place to go to.”

“I had a lot of help.”

“Can I ask what brought you to Texas? And you could make me real happy by telling me you’re coming down to run the police department in Dallas.”

“Hardly that. I was giving a talk last night to a roomful of busi-nessmen in Arlington.”

“Not the Pericles Club? Damn it all, I go to that more months than I miss, and I’d’ve been there last night if I paid attention to my mail and knew who the speaker was. I’m sorry I didn’t get to hear you.”

“You didn’t miss much,” Buckram told him.

I T H A D G O N E W E L L enough. They’d flown him first class on American, met him at DFW in a limousine, put him up at the Four Seasons. The club premises were Texas opulent, with a lot of dark wood and red leather, and western art on the walls that included several paintings by Charles M. Russell. Dinner was good, and his talk went well enough. They paid attention, they asked questions at the end, and the applause was more than just polite.

Now he was on his way home, $3,500 to the good, less a third to the lecture bureau that made his bookings. That meant he’d net $2,366.67 (and he wished they’d raise his price a hundred dollars, just so they’d be dealing in round numbers) which was not bad compensation for being well treated and fussed over while he gave a talk he’d given so many times he could do it in his sleep.

It changed, of course, according to circumstances and what was on his mind, and, he supposed, the phases of the moon. But it didn’t vary much, and the fact that it got an increasingly favorable reception bothered him. He was getting good at it, but what he was becoming good at was performance.

He felt like an actor in a long run of a Broadway show. He thought of Carol Channing, touring forever with Hello, Dolly, playing the same part in the same show a couple of hundred times a year. How could she stand it? Why would she want to?

And the conversations over cocktails, the chatting with his dinner partners, the smiles and handshakes and photos taken, they were all part of the performance, ad-libbed for the occasion but nevertheless the same. The hardest part used to be during the Q&A, when he had to answer a question without letting on that he’d been asked it a few hundred times. But he’d learned how to do that, too. It had felt phony at first, but now it just felt like part of what he did, and what did that make him?

“O N E T H I N G I H E A R D , ” Bob Wilburn said, “is you might be the next mayor.”

“You heard that all the way down in Plano, Texas?”

“Heard it in New York, matter of fact. I’m up there every couple of months. But I could as easily have heard it in Texas. There’s a whole lot more folks in Dallas can name the mayor of New York than there are New Yorkers who can tell you who’s mayor of Dallas. You fixing to run?”

“That’s a long ways off,” he said.

“And that’s a good way to answer the question, or to not answer it. Here’s another question—why in the hell would anybody want the job?”

He laughed. “Beats me, Bob.”

“What was it that fellow said? His name slips my mind, but you know who I mean. Talks like he swallowed the dictionary.”

“William F. Buckley.”

“That’s the fellow. Ran for mayor of New York, didn’t have a snowball’s chance, and some reporter asked him what he’d do if he won. Said he’d demand a recount.”

“It’s a good line.”

“It’s a damn good line. You want the job, Fran?”

“I don’t know.”

“That sounds honest.”

“It is.”

“It’s an important job. Somebody’s got to do it, and when you know you’d be good at it—”

“I’m not as sure of that as I used to be,” he said. “After 9/11, I looked at Rudy and watched him do everything right, and I don’t know if I could have done that well.”

“A time like that, a man finds out what he can and can’t do. I don’t know, Fran. Politics? I pay too much money to too many politicians to have a lot of illusions about the whole business. God knows I’ve never wanted to go into it myself.”

“Neither have I,” he said. “All I ever wanted to do was be a cop.” T H A T W A S N ’ T E N T I R E LY T R U E . His father was a cop, and when he was a little kid of course what he wanted was to wear a blue uniform and carry a gun and do what his daddy did. But that changed, and he grew up knowing a cop was the one thing he definitely did not want to be. “It’s steady,” his father told him, “and a man can take some pride in it, but it’s no life for a kid with a head on his shoulders. You’re cut out for something better, Fran. You don’t want to wind up like your old man.”