The Paperboy (8 page)

“He was lying right under your tire,” she said, and I felt the accusation. She reached down and touched the animal’s head, a ring on every finger of her hand. The dog came up slowly then, encircled her leg with his legs, and she pushed him down just as slowly, prying him off just as he started to pump.

Yes, she knew how to handle dogs.

I wondered if she might hold the same charity for me. I doubted it, as none of the girls at Gainesville who made a show of compassion for what went on in an animal’s head had any sympathy at all for what went on in mine, and at that time in my life, when I was unsure of everything, sympathy was the only chance I had.

I looked back toward the place where the dog had been lying. He hadn’t been right under the tire, or even in front of it, but I wasn’t going to argue. In some way, her saying it made it so.

“I had an eye on him,” I said.

She nodded slowly, as if we both knew that wasn’t true, and then looked beyond me at the Moat Cafe, then up and down the street.

“I was looking for the office of Yardley Acheman of the
Miami Times,”
she said.

C
HARLOTTE BLESS AND
the retriever waited beside my window for Yardley Acheman and my brother to come down. I was dizzy with her perfume, and while I did not intentionally continue to compare myself sexually with this animal, it came to me then that somewhere in history, we, like dogs, were sexually aroused primarily by the sense of smell, and there are certain odors which all your life seem to call you to act on them. I was not thinking of roast turkey in the oven, which you sit down and eat, but something like gasoline, which stirred me from the first time I smelled it. But to do what? Drink? Bathe?

Is it possible the first thing I wanted to fuck was gasoline?

M
Y BROTHER AND
Yardley Acheman appeared in the open door which led upstairs to their offices. Yardley sat down on the bottom step, sucking alternately at a scraped knuckle and a long-necked bottle of beer he held in the same hand, while Ward walked back to the truck to shut the rear door. He did not see Charlotte Bless until she materialized next to him as he was reaching up for the handle.

She seemed to like appearing unannounced under your arm. He jumped at the sight of her, and then reddened as she stood still, her head slightly cocked, watching him recover. Suddenly he was doing everything too fast. Smiling, nodding, trying to close the truck.

“I’m Charlotte Bless,” she said.

“How do you do,” he said. She looked at him without saying another word. Whatever she had over men, she wanted to know it was there all the time.

Ward pulled the door of the truck shut and locked it, then dropped the keys on the street. She didn’t move as he bent to retrieve them, not even a step. His face almost touched her pants. He stood up, flushed and stumbling under her gaze. Then she looked away, over to the doorway where Yardley Acheman was still sitting, drinking his beer. Handsome and remote.

“Mr. Acheman?” she said.

From the beginning, she liked him best.

He stood up slowly and walked out of the shade to the truck. She extended her hand—chest high, as if she were someone just learning to shake hands—and he took it, looking her quickly up and down, taking in the appearance of her skin. He had seen her only in photographs.

“Is this it?” she said, looking at the front of the building. Yardley Acheman looked at it too, and then back at her, as if he might be asking the same question.

He finished what was in the bottle and set it down on the
curb. “You want a beer?” he said. “We’ve got a refrigerator upstairs.”

“I don’t drink before sundown,” she said, but she sounded like she might make an exception. She walked to the back of the van, opened the door, and came out with a stack of flat boxes that rose halfway from her hands to her chin.

She hesitated a moment, returning to my brother and Yardley Acheman, and then, deciding something, handed them to my brother, who accepted them without asking what they were and then stood still waiting for her to tell him.

“They’re my files,” she said, and headed back to the van. “Come on, there’s boxes of this stuff.…”

I waited behind Yardley Acheman for my own armful of boxes to carry up the stairs to the office and saw the look on her face as she handed him his load; a quick look, something passing between them, and then she dropped the boxes into his hands—he sagged under the sudden weight—and turned back into the van for mine.

I
T WAS CHARLOTTE BLESS’S
long-range ambition to become the wife of Hillary Van Wetter. That was what she pictured at the end. She acknowledged this matter-of-factly upstairs, sitting against a stack of gift boxes bearing the name of Maison Blanche Department Stores which went waist-high against the wall of my brother’s side of the office. Each of these boxes was taped shut and filled perhaps halfway to the top with several pounds of “files,” and the weight of those on top crushed the ones beneath, and the whole wall looked like a pile of forced smiles.

Yardley Acheman sat on the other side of the room, his
chair tilted back until it rested against the wall behind him, his feet crossed on the desk, drinking another beer. He was considering her in a way that suggested he hadn’t made up his mind. Or perhaps he was still getting used to her appearance. She had seemed much younger in the pictures she sent.

No one interested in how newspaper reporters find their stories should imagine that the compass needle is reset each time out. What they find attractive doesn’t change, only where they find it.

My brother and I leaned against the sills of the two windows in the office. The windows were open and I could smell onions, and, beneath it, her perfume.

She sat as comfortably as if she were in her own living room. Her knees were bent almost to her head, and she was hugging her legs. “My personal feelings for Hillary aside,” she said, looking at Yardley again, “what I have come here to do is correct an injustice and free an innocent man.”

Yardley Acheman bounced the bottle gently against his lip, not committing himself. My brother sat still and waited.

“That is our intention, is it not?” she said.

“You’re going to marry him,” Yardley Acheman said.

“We’re engaged,” she said. I looked quickly at her hands, trying to decide which of the rings might have come from Hillary Van Wetter. The one on her index finger had a baby’s tooth for a stone.

Yardley Acheman looked at my brother.

“It doesn’t change anything,” she said. The room was quiet. “What does it change?”

My brother stirred, and the movement drew her attention. He seemed ready to speak, but then something caught, and he stopped.

“Mr. Acheman?” she said. She leaned forward, showing
more of her chest. He tapped the bottle against his lip, thinking it over.

“Nothing,” he said.

C
HARLOTTE BLESS FIRST
laid eyes on Hillary Van Wetter in a UPI picture which appeared on the front page of a four-day-old copy of the
New Orleans Times-Picayune
which had been left on a lunch table at work.

He was handcuffed in the picture and being led up the Moat County Courthouse steps in Lately, accused of the murder of Sheriff Thurmond Call.

She was sitting in the employees’ cafeteria at the main branch of the New Orleans Post Office, on Loyola Street. The paper was lying on the table, gutted of its sports section and then discarded, stained with dried red beans and rice. She wiped off the food and studied the picture, which was out of register but still captured a certain intensity in the expression of the blond man standing between two moonfaced sheriff’s deputies, and found herself pulled to his side.

Judging from her other killers, whose files she brought along with Hillary Van Wetter’s in the Volkswagen, she had a tender spot for blonds.

She read the story beneath the picture—it was only a few paragraphs, mostly recounting the career of Sheriff Call—and then, as her lunch break was ending, she tore the picture and the story out of the paper and put it in her pocket. You could do that in the cafeteria; on the floor it was a felony, and there were dark windows in the ceiling where supervisors sat, watching the letter sorters for just that kind of criminal behavior.

Charlotte Bless’s previous ambition had been to end her career with the New Orleans Post Office as one of the supervisors
behind the dark windows. It fit her, and she had decided early to turn down any promotions that were offered beyond it.

That night she wrote him her first letter, an airy, five-page note telling him exactly how she stumbled across his picture, and about her position at the post office and the food on the table that nobody ever cleaned up, and her “quandary,” in the middle of other people’s mess, that an orderly, cleanshaven man like Hillary Van Wetter had gotten himself into a situation like this in the first place.

She made a carbon copy of the letter, and put it into a box that she marked H.V.W.

While he wasn’t the first murderer she had written to, he was the first one who had used a knife. “If it were myself,” she wrote at the very end, striking an odd tone of familiarity, “I am sure that, having sufficient provocation to kill, I would also opt for the intimacy of the blade.”

The letter brought no response.

In her next letter, she wrote that she understood he was early in his legal journey—those were the words she used—and still too distracted to observe normal social discourse. “Being the photogenic person you are,” she added, “I am sure you are receiving more letters than you have time to sort out.”