The Sunlight Dialogues (43 page)

Kozlowski said nothing.

“It was absolutely legal, you know. Thief had a drawn gun. All right. So the cop shot him in the head.”

“A little extreme, maybe,” Kozlowski said. But he was thinking his own thoughts, not planning to argue it.

Clumly poked him in the chest. “You would’ve shot him in the leg, right?” He laughed scornfully. “You ever see how fast a crook can turn around and shoot? It’s adrenaline, they tell me. He goes in there and he’s scared—you ever try pulling a gun on a druggist?—scared as hell he is, all the juices pumping up in him till he’s not in control any more, got a demon in him: damn near can’t miss. It’s the fear in him, see? It’s taken over his body. Quick as a magician he can turn around and put a bullet between your eyes. That’s no lie, son. You saw the blood in there.” He pointed toward the hallway where Salvador had died. “You want to end up like that?”

“Ok,” Kozlowski said. “Maybe so.”

“I don’t say the kid was bad, the thief. I don’t say he deserved to die. Jesus no! It was terrible! But what if the cop had yelled and the gun had gone off in that boy’s hand and killed the druggist?” He waited, bent toward Kozlowski, and he could feel his face twitching.

At last Kozlowski said, “Ok. I see your point.” He ran his finger and thumb along his shoulder strap and thought about it. He’d reddened a little. He said, “Yeah, I guess it was right.” He was not exactly convinced, but convinced enough.

Clumly turned away abruptly to keep his twitching face from Kozlowski’s eyes. “Right!” he hissed. “You crazy bastard, the kid was only sixteen years old.”

Kozlowski said nothing.

Clumly said, “I fired that son of a bitch, Kozlowski. I shut down that man’s
life.”
(It was a lie.)

Clumly put his hat on. “Ok,” he said, “come with me.”

All right. Good to have company nevertheless. Face of reddish stone, impassive as a priest’s: yessir, nosir. I was righteous as you when I was young, Kozlowski. Believe it! Oh yes, they’re always full of virtue, the fatassed littlechinned young. A conspiracy of Nature, a mystery: three- and four-year-olds with that incredible
in
nocence—over there on the sidewalk, looking blue-eyed up at the cop car, smiling, waving with pleasure at the old fat cop with the green cigar: Hi, Mr. Policeman! Hi hi hi! Beautiful. Zap. Full of mysterious trust that fills the best of their parents and teachers with alarm, with grief for them because the world will change them, and with baffled shame because parents and teachers can’t hope to prevent it, and even the best must contribute to it in ways they will not recognize themselves. (Bill Tenny at the corner with his whistle between his teeth, loose, holding up a hand to let the children cross: grinning at them, talking with them—kids who later will grow sullen in the presence of a cop, or defiant, or obsequious-friendly. Observes his boss with the green cigar and comes erect, all dutiful cop, stretching out a distance between them by his change. A salute.
’Lo Bill. Good morning Chief.
Transformed. What was the word? Changeling. So they too would come erect with years.
Good morning Miss Brown.
The squealing schoolyard transmogrified to the half-solemnity of the high-school lawn.) We watch the change and we mutter against it with pride. But the change will be incomplete, we think. They will be better than us. We look up at them out of our yellow-eyed, senile ignorance, reduced to wrinkled, toothless elders, smiling, waving at their brassy youth with pleasure like a kid’s: Hi hi. And join the conspiracy, from bafflement: yes: we’re the world, there’s no denying it: we’re old: and whatever it is that the world has done to them, it was us, we did it, whatever it was. So we fall to lies: Young people, harrump, you see what a mess the older generation has left you. Herkapf. Be stout of heart! Arise and do better! And they believe it, oh yes. They are
going
to do better! Who could
believe
what fools we were? They will tolerate us, as we tolerated our idiot fathers before us. Correct. And they will fix all this. Right. Well you’re mistaken, Kozlowski. All your reasons for righteousness will come down on your head like broken beams, and nevertheless you’ll go on, because that’s the law, son. That’s
THE LAW
.

“Pull over here at the corner,” Clumly said. “Here’s where we’ll start.” He handed one of the Sunlight Man pictures to Kozlowski.

“You really think somebody will recognize him?”

“No idea,” he said. He believed there was no hope, in fact. But you couldn’t just sit around and wait. Miller’s men would have the pawnshops covered by noon, and there would be answers by then from the State Police lab and the F.B.I.—worthless answers, Clumly had a hunch. At any rate, he wasn’t going to sit in his office writing letters and thinking about the trial. “Put it this way,” he said, “what makes a man write
love
in the middle of the street?”

“God knows.”

“Correct. Our job is to find out. Where’d he get his paint? What did he say to the man he got it from? Follow me? How did he look—Nervous? Happy? Batty as a bedbug? How’d he get where we found him? Walk? Hitchhike? Let’s go.”

But no one had seen him, the whole length of Main Street. They pulled the police car in at the Miss Batavia Diner for lunch.

“It’s like chasing a ghost,” Clumly said. Beads of sweat stood out around his forehead like jewels.

Kozlowski nodded. They radioed in. No news yet from anybody. They ate.

“What’s this?” Clumly said.

It was afternoon now—still no news, except that the F.B.I. had reported. No record on the man. It was just as he’d expected. The Sunlight Man had been too smart for them. He’d done things, all right, and had bigger things ready, but they no more had any record on him than they’d had on Alonzo J. Whiteside that day fifty years ago when he finally made the mistake of walking into a bank too close to home. Clumly and Kozlowski had covered both sides of Main Street now and all the stores on Liberty Street and Ellicott and Jackson. They were on Harvester, heading back toward Main, when the funeral procession turning in to the stone-walled cemetery blocked their path.

“Somebody’s funeral,” Kozlowski said.

“Oh yes. Yes,” Clumly said. “I know what it is.” He snatched his hat off and held it to his chest. “The funeral for Paxton. Pull over to the curb, we’ll pay our last respects.”

Kozlowski pulled over as though it were a perfectly reasonable command, and they got out. Still with his cap in his hand, Chief Clumly started up the sidewalk. Kozlowski hung back a moment, radioing in.

They stood with heads bowed in the large crowd, waiting for the men from Bohm’s to get the hearse backed up to the grave and the casket out. It was cool here in the perpetual shade of the maple trees. Beams of sunlight broke through the leaves in threads, dappling the grass, lighting up one part of a name on a glossy granite marker. The new-mown grass smelled sweet. The Harvester Avenue cemetery was older than the one to the east of town, where Hubbard had been buried, and it was larger, three blocks long and at least a block deep—it was hard to say exactly how deep: the hills and trees threw you off, and then there was the irregular back boundary of what looked from here (deceptively) like woods.

“He was a fine man,” Clumly said out of the corner of his mouth. “Did a lot for this town. Kept people working when everything else except the G.L.F. was shut dead. Those are his sons, those three over there by the lilac bush, other side of the grave. That’s his wife in the wheelchair. Wears that veil all the time, not just funerals. Got a birthmark down the side of her face. They had a daughter, too. Snuck her away to an asylum when her husband left her. It’s a story. I’ll tell you about it sometime. Over there mopping his forehead, that’s Professor Combs. Old friend of the family, used to take care of their money for’m, but they say there was something between him and the wife, and the Old Man found out—Clive Paxton, that is—and the Professor moved away to Utica or somewhere. Back now to pay his respects, must be. Funny world.”

The priests came over from their Cadillac, blessing the crowd.

“They were Catholics,” Clumly said. “Used to be Catholics were beaten from the start in a place like Batavia, but Clive Paxton broke that. Now half the richest men in town are Catholics. Bought up all the fine old houses from the families that used to have the money—and pretty well wrecked them. Tear big holes in them for picture windows, cut the trees off the lawns, paint ’em red, that kind of thing. Not that I’m saying all Catholics are like that.” (Kozlowski was a Catholic.) “Just the way these ones happened to be. You follow me?”

The casket was in place. The graveside prayer began, and some of the older people kneeled in the grass. Not Clumly. But he held his cap across his heart. Ben and Vanessa Hodge were back by the cemetery gates, with their heads bowed. Someone in the crowd behind Clumly was talking. He turned and glared, and the woman stopped, looking startled. Beyond her, Will Hodge stood watching him.

Clumly walked bent over beside the wheelchair, offering his sympathy. (Kozlowski came behind him.) “He’ll be missed,” he said.

“He’ll be hated more than ever,” Mrs. Paxton said. She raised the veil a little with one gloved hand and dabbed at her eyes with the other. “He left no will, you know.”

“I heard that,” Clumly said. He glanced at the tall young man pushing the wheelchair, the eldest of her sons. There were stories he’d been in and out of insane asylums himself. His brothers were beside him.

“The boys will be at one another’s throats over it. They’ll have it in the courts for years.” She’d always spoken bluntly in front of her sons. She had a cruel streak, like her husband.

“Well,” Clumly said. But he could think of no way to finish.

“I always thought he’d die by violence,” she said. “Sometimes I thought I’d be the murderer myself. It shows what fools we are. It’s disgusting to die sitting up at one’s desk in one’s bathrobe, writing one minute, dead the next. I wanted something better for him.”

Chief Clumly touched his chin with two fingers, reflecting, and glanced again at the sons. They still seemed oblivious to their mother’s talk. They wore expensive-looking clothes, almost identical glasses, as if to emphasize the resemblance among them—the chubby bloodless faces, sharply cleft chins, pale eyes that rarely blinked. But one was balding and had dark hair where hair remained, the other two were redheads.

“Sometimes I thought one of the boys would kill him, and then when Kathleen went mad I was sure it would be her. Then again sometimes I thought it would be those Union people, and then during the War I thought it might be one of your people, or someone from the Government. I’d be glad, I said to myself. He was a dreadful man, and he deserved it. He destroyed us all—turned his sons into robots and drove his poor daughter mad and chased the only friends he ever had out of town from pure jealousy, and then me. Oh God!” The fist in her lap clenched.

Professor Combs said, walking on the other side of her, “Now Elizabeth. Don’t strain.”

Clumly said, “I’m glad you could make it for the funeral, Professor.”

Combs nodded solemnly, as always when he didn’t hear. He was deaf as a post.

She caught Clumly’s hand. “All those years I was sure he’d be murdered, and I was glad of it. But I was lying to myself. He was a strong man, so brave and merciless—as merciless to himself as to anyone else—but with a streak of gentleness, too, or weakness at least. I must have loved him. But that morning—I’ll never forget it—when I walked into his study and saw him, the scales dropped from my eyes. Horrible! To think that a human being should come to this! He was all shrunken and horrid, with dirt in all his wrinkles, and the quilted red robe he had on was forty years old. He must have thought he was still imposing in it. He always wore it, anyway. But sunlight in the morning shows things as they are: it was faded and threadbare in that hard, steady light: as ruined as the dead thing inside it. I saw everything, that morning, as clear as something you see in your childhood: like a vision of death. I felt like Lazarus awakened from the dead, stretching his eyes open, looking around him in amazement and disgust. Yes! His old rolltop desk was gray with age, all pockmarked: it made me think of bone that’s been lying on a hillside for years and years; and the plush of his chair was stiff with age, like bristles—I don’t know what. The room was dirty, and my husband was dirty—not that we keep a messy house. It went farther than that. In that drab, dusty sunlight it was dirty with age and uselessness, like the paper walls of an empty trunk in the attic. I was sick at heart. I felt as if I’d suddenly seen the world with Kathleen’s eyes, not that I’d gone mad but that at last I’d seen things as they are, so that the rest of the world would have to judge me mad, the world that hadn’t yet seen, or refused to admit it. If only you police could have shot him, back in black-market days, when he was still astonished by his luck and all that money he made, and full of excitement and life. He was devil-may-care, in those days. He’d never even bother to take the keys from the car, never bother to lock a door or turn on a light when he went down a hallway. That all changed, later. It was as if he knew what it was he’d become—a man made of old dry rags, vulnerable to fire and damp. I was sick. ‘Clive?’ I said, but not because I thought he was alive. It was as if I thought he’d been dead so long now he might not be too dead this morning to answer. Who can say why I called? Because I felt like a person in a stage play, perhaps. A great moment of drama. It
did
feel like that, I remember. I was conscious of it. God help us, I played it to the hilt. Stuffed rags, all of us. Big Raggedy Anns gone gray from being left on the porch. God forgive us. You should have seen me. I stretched out my arm to the window—” She showed how she’d done it, the back of her right glove theatrically on her forehead, “—and I sank almost to my knees. I thought I would faint, but the breeze coming in revived me a little, though it wasn’t a cool breeze: an August breeze. I crossed myself. ‘He’s gone!’ I said. Horrible, isn’t it? I kneeled by that window a full ten minutes before I went over to the body to close the eyes. But I’m grateful, in the end. After a lifetime of delusion, I began to live on the morning of August twenty-third of this year, when I found my husband dead, exactly like a horse or like a starling on the lawn.” She raised her head triumphantly, gave Clumly’s hand a squeeze, and released him. A dozen people had gathered around and were waiting to speak to her, but perhaps they hadn’t been listening. They were talking now among themselves.