“You were at that damned Blue Goose café, where you are every night until Grover Winbush here comes in and runs all you niggers out and closes it up,” Uncle Willy said.
“Then what you asking me, if you know so much?” Walter said.
“All right,” Uncle Willy said. “What time last night did Mr Winbush close it?” Walter stood there, blinking. His eyes were always red. He made in an old fashioned hand freezer the ice cream which Uncle Willy sold over his soda fountain. He made it in the cellar: a dark cool place with a single door opening onto the alley behind the store, sitting in the gloom and grinding the freezer, so that when you passed about all you saw was his red eyes, looking not malevolent, not savage but just dangerous if you blundered out of your element and into his, like a dragon or a crocodile. He stood there, blinking. “What time did Grover Winbush close up the Blue Goose?” Uncle Willy said.
“I left before that,” Walter said. Now suddenly, and we hadn’t noticed him before, Mr Hampton was there, doing some of the looking too. He didn’t blink like Walter. He was a big man with a big belly and little hard pale eyes that didn’t seem to need to blink at all. They were looking at Grover Cleveland now.
“How do you know you did?” he said to Walter.
“Hell fire,” Uncle Willy said. “He aint never left that damned place before they turned the lights out since they first opened the door.”
“I know that,” Mr Hampton said. He was still looking at Grover Cleveland with his little hard pale unblinking eyes. “I’ve been marshal and sheriff both here a long time too.” He said to Grover Cleveland: “Where were you last night when folks needed you?” But Grover Cleveland still tried; you’ll have to give him that, even if now even he never believed in it:
“Oh, you mean them two fellers in Uncle Willy’s store about half past ten last night. Sure, I seen them. I naturally thought, taken for granted it was Uncle Willy and Skeets. So I.…”
“So you what?” Mr Hampton said.
“I … stepped back inside and … taken up the evening paper,” Grover Cleveland said. “Yes, that’s where I was: setting right there in the station reading the Memphis evening paper.…”
“When Whit Rouncewell saw them two fellows in here, he went back to the station looking for you,” Mr Hampton said. “He waited an hour. By that time the lights were off in here but he never saw anybody come out the front door. And you never showed up. And Walter there says you never showed up at the Blue Goose either. Where were you last night, Grover?”
So now there wasn’t anywhere for him to go. He just stood there with his coat-tail hiked up over the handle of his pistol and blackjack like a little boy’s shirt-tail coming out. Maybe that’s what it was: Grover Cleveland was too old to look like a boy. And Uncle Willy and Mr Hampton and all the rest of us looking at him until all of a sudden we were all ashamed to look at him anymore, ashamed to have to find out what we were going to find out. Except that Mr Hampton wasn’t ashamed to. Maybe it was being sheriff so long had made him that way, learned him it wasn’t Grover Cleveland you had to be ashamed of: it was all of us.
“One night Doc Peabody was coming back from a case about one oclock and he saw you coming out of that alley side door to what Montgomery Ward Snopes calls his studio. Another night I was going home late myself, about midnight, and I saw you going into it. What’s going on in there, Grover?”
Grover Cleveland didn’t move now either. It was almost a whisper: “It’s a club.”
Now Mr Hampton and Uncle Gavin were looking at each other. “Dont look at me,” Uncle Gavin said. “You’re the law.” That was the funny thing: neither one of them paid any attention to Mr Connors, who was the marshal and ought to have been attending to this already. Maybe that was why.
“You’re the County Attorney,” Mr Hampton said. “You’re the one to say what the law is before I can be it.”
“What are we waiting for then?” Uncle Gavin said.
“Maybe Grover wants to tell us what it is and save time,” Mr Hampton said.
“No, dammit,” Uncle Gavin said. “Take your foot off him for a minute anyway.” He said to Grover Cleveland: “You go on back to the station until we need you.”
“You can read the rest of that Memphis paper,” Mr Hampton said. “And we wont want you either,” he said to Mr Connors.
“Like hell, Sheriff,” Mr Connors said. “Your jurisdiction’s just the county. What goes on in Jefferson is my jurisdiction. I got as much right — —” he stopped then but it was already too late. Mr Hampton looked at him with the little hard pale eyes that never seemed to need to blink at all.
“Go on,” Mr Hampton said. “Got as much right to see what Montgomery Ward Snopes has got hid as me and Gavin have. Why didn’t you persuade Grover to take you into that club then?” But Mr Connors could still blink. “Come on,” Mr Hampton said to Uncle Gavin, turning. Uncle Gavin moved too.
“That means you too,” he said to me.
“That means all of you,” Mr Hampton said. “All of you get out of Uncle Willy’s way now. He’s got to make a list of what’s missing for the narcotics folks and the insurance too.”
So we stood on the street and watched Mr Hampton and Uncle Gavin go on toward Montgomery Ward’s studio. “What?” I said to Ratliff.
“I dont know,” he said. “That is, I reckon I know. We’ll have to wait for Hub and your uncle to prove it.”
“What do you reckon it is?” I said.
Now he looked at me. “Let’s see,” he said. “Even if you are nine going on ten, I reckon you still aint outgrowed ice cream, have you. Come on. We wont bother Uncle Willy and Skeets now neither. We’ll go to the Dixie Café.” So we went to the Dixie Café and got two cones and stood on the street again.
“What?” I said.
“My guess is, it’s a passel of French postcards Montgomery Ward brought back from the war in Paris. I reckon you dont know what that is, do you?”
“I dont know,” I said.
“It’s kodak pictures of men and women together, experimenting with one another. Without no clothes on much.” I dont know whether he was looking at me or not. “Do you know now?”
“I dont know,” I said.
“But maybe you do?” he said.
That’s what it was. Uncle Gavin said he had a big album of them, and that he had learned enough about photography to have made slides from some of them so he could throw them magnified on a sheet on the wall with a magic lantern in that back room. And he said how Montgomery Ward stood there laughing at him and Mr Hampton both. But he was talking mostly to Uncle Gavin.
“Oh sure,” he said. “I dont expect Hub here — —”
“Call me Mister Hampton,” Mr Hampton said.
“ — to know any better—”
“Call me Mister Hampton, boy,” Mr Hampton said.
“Mister Hampton,” Montgomery Ward said. “ — but you’re a lawyer; you dont think I got into this without reading a little law first myself, do you? You can confiscate these — all you’ll find here; I dont guess Mister Hampton will let a little thing like law stop him from that — —”
That was when Mr Hampton slapped him. “Stop it, Hub!” Uncle Gavin said. “You damned fool!”
“Let him go ahead,” Montgomery Ward said. “Suing his bondsmen is easier than running a magic lantern. Safer too. Where was I? Oh yes. Even if they had been sent through the mail, which they haven’t, that would just be a federal charge, and I dont see any federal dicks around here. And even if you tried to cook up a charge that I’ve been making money out of them, where are your witnesses?
All you got is Grover Winbush, and he dont dare testify, not because he will lose his job because he’ll probably do that anyway, but because the God-fearing christian holy citizens of Jefferson wont let him because they cant have it known that this is what their police do when they’re supposed to be at work.
Let alone the rest of my customers not to mention any names scattered around in banks and stores and gins and filling stations and farmers too two counties wide in either direction — Sure: I just thought of this too: come on, put a fine on me and see how quick it will be paid.…” and stopped and said with a kind of hushed amazement: “Sweet Christ.” He was talking fast now: “Come on, lock me up, give me a thousand stamped envelopes and I’ll make more money in three days than I made in the whole two years with that damned magic lantern.”
Now he was talking to Mr Hampton: “Maybe that’s what you wanted, to begin with: not the postcards but the list of customers; retire from sheriff and spend all your time on the collections. Or no: keep the star to bring pressure on the slow payers — —”
Only this time Uncle Gavin didn’t have to say anything because this time Mr Hampton wasn’t going to hit him. He just stood there
