Fourth Person No More

Here’s how you keep secrets. Don’t talk. Don’t write anything down. Live a life so open nobody notices when you don’t talk and you stop writing everything down.

I know it works. I tried it. Trouble is, a guy like me can’t stop talking or writing. Not that long. Some of this, you didn’t read the first time.

The Program says I must be honest. With myself and with others. This time I will be. I didn’t tell everything I knew last time.

You never do. There’s always that nugget, that bit you hang onto, maybe to trade to a source in the future, maybe to jump start the next story, maybe just to hold onto, to know that you have, to turn and admire. But there were things about the Aunt Lotty business I should’ve said, if not to the people who read my material then to somebody.

Like Moze. The kid deputy? He was not quite the hero I might’ve made him out to be.

True, he did go into Aunt Lotty’s double-wide that night with his service weapon drawn, but that was just to buck himself up. He already had a pretty good idea what was in there, and it represented no danger to him. It was just that the dispatcher had told him some and his imagination did the rest.

Yes, Moze did have his gun out when he went in, but he was so shook he barked his knuckles on the doorframe trying to use that stiff-arm technique he’d seen cops use on TV. It’s a wonder he didn’t drop the damned gun. Or shoot himself. Or me.

And when he came out? Maybe ten minutes later? He did not reappear at the door, set his jaw, and march manfully to his squad to call for the investigative forces of five contiguous counties and the state police. No.

Moze clutched the doorframe for a long minute, his face tipped up glistening and gray in the moonlight, sucking air. He towed himself hand over hand down the stair rail and stumbled to an oak in the yard. He put his hands on either side of the trunk, bent at the waist, and blew a double order of French toast and bacon across a new, two-hundred-dollar pair of Tony Lamas. His head still bowed, he moaned, “Sweet Jesus.”

Call it a prayer for dead children.

Pretty good detail, you might say. Impossible to obtain unless you were there, you could say. As I was, at the beginning, even before the beginning, at the ingestion of the French toast and bacon.

That’s another thing I didn’t say before. I mean, I wasn’t looking for a Pulitzer out of this, and I did have to think about covering for Moze, who technically should not have had a civilian, particularly a civilian reporter, riding around in his squad. But a little recognition from a certain editor wouldn’t have hurt.

Chance said Bob Marley. That is his name: reggae king, Scrooge’s foil, exec ed, as if a paper with a circulation of 4,500 needs a news boss with a title that rich.

Luck, said Marley, dumb luck I had gotten bored reading Anne Tyler late of a Friday, the night before Halloween. And where else would I go for a little bite of something, said Marley, who’s sired two tykes and sometimes talks in the style of the last story he’s read them. Assuming, said Marley, father to us all, assuming, of course, I was still off sauce. Hack’s was the only place outside of a couple of taverns that was open after midnight in Failey, said Marley. Anyone in my position should have gotten the story under those circumstances, said he.

But not everyone would have known to use that foray as a chance to buy breakfast for Amos T. “Moze” Beard, 21, kid deputy. It was not, at that time at any rate, a well-recorded fact that young Moze took his first break about an hour after coming on or that he usually used it to stoke himself for the rest of his shift. Nor would just anyone know that when they’re young, before old-timers nip them or they get burned by the likes of me, cops actually like to talk about their work with people other than cops. And certainly not everyone would have known what it meant when the radio Moze had propped next to the condiments squawked.

Moze was not, at that moment, conversant. He had his head down, shoveling. But at the radio’s bark, he froze. And in the silence that followed, he quivered, like a dog on point, resonating with what he had just heard.

I couldn’t think what he was waiting on, so I said, “Ten-zero. Moze? Did that say ten-zero?”

Moze brought his head up, looking at the radio, expecting more. He was still a boy then, nearly fresh out of the service, with a blond buzz haircut, a mild case of acne that I suspect drove him nuts, and a pair of dorky black plastic glasses that I knew kept him out of the state police, his less-than-secret ambition.

He looked at me but said nothing. So I said, “A ten-zero. That would be a body. A dead human body, would it not, Moze?”

His eyes went shifty, like he was trying to figure a way to get out of our booth without me noticing.

“And ‘times three’?” I said. “The dispatch said ‘ten-zero times three.’ That would mean three dead human bodies?”

Moze shrugged and glanced over his shoulder, still trying to be casual. There were three other people in the place: Doreen, the slack-jawed waitress, and two truckers, judging by the wallet chains running from their belts to their back pockets and maybe the smelly rigs parked outside.

Perhaps I had been too loud. All of them stared at us. Maybe Moze thought that if he waited we’d all go away, but I’ve been put off by pros.

“And ‘Austin 8,’” I said. “That would be Austin County unit 8 and that would be you, would it not, Moze? Isn’t that you? They said something about registering your twenty on the land line. I believe they want you to call in on the telephone, the landline, as we call it these days.”

I paused, raised my bushy eyebrows and pursed out my full lips. Moze turned to eye the ancient pay phone at the other end of room. Probably it seemed a million miles away because he couldn’t bring himself to get up and go to it in front of the audience. That by itself was enough to make me continue.

“Why would they want that, Moze, do you suppose? Why wouldn’t they want you to use the radio. Or more likely, why wouldn’t they want to use the radio?”

I tried to reach for my wallet, but the booth was what you could call confining.

“I’m thinking this is something important, Moze. I’m thinking you’re about to get your feet wet. Figuratively speaking, of course. I’m thinking maybe you ought to call in and find out just what the hell is going on.”

I wasn’t the only one who’d been thinking. Hack’s is a long room of buzzing fluorescent lights, knotty-pine paneling, Formica, and chrome. Its ambience is not tempered by what Hack calls “the sculpture,” stuffed deer butts to which green glass eyes, the size of limes, have been affixed on either side of the tail so they appear to be the faces of hairy aliens. The sculpture hang on the walls at either end of the room. Under the one opposite of where we sat is a counter and behind that a long, narrow, pass-through window into the kitchen.

From where I sat, I watched a thick fist emerge from the kitchen side of the window, rap a black telephone handset twice on the sill, and thrust it straight-arm out into the dining area. I had not heard the phone ring, so I assumed the thick fist dialed.

Moze knew whom it was for. “Geez, Clay,” he hissed, as though I’d gotten him in trouble, and jumped up to take it.

I was more nonchalant. It does not pay for a man of my build to try to twist too quickly out of a narrow booth. Such a person could get stuck and lose his story, maybe his dignity.

Nor does it serve any useful purpose to display too much emotion around Hack. He thinks it reveals something about your manhood.

Hack is, by day, a town cop, a year short of a pension but still a patrolman. Consequently, I run into him day and night, and almost from the moment I hit town, we have not gotten along.

I thought at first it was because Hack was jealous that my girth rides so much higher and more youthfully over my belt than does his. It could also be that he didn’t appreciate it when I suggested in print early in my tenure that his name derived from his preferred interrogation technique. Considering the bright capillaries crocheted across his cheeks and nose and the foul mint you find on his breath from about noon on, I now think it more likely that it is a matter of one drunk recognizing himself in another.

Hack came from the kitchen to meet me at the cash register with the reptile eyes cops turn on people they think they can bully. I chose to meet his opening gambit with my best smile.

“Hack,” I said, because I am always cordial. He continued with the dead stare.

I ticked off the courses of my meal and Moze’s meal and asked him how much I owed him.

“It’s on the house,” he said, still without noticeable change of expression.

“Hack, you and I have been through this before,” I said, still with that winning smile. “Thank you. I appreciate your generosity, but I...