4.

Coop Lugmor wasn’t asleep, only drunk. He smelled of bad booze and filth; his unshaven face and wasted, haunted eyes were like a microcosm of the crumbling, weather-bombed farmhouse where he lived. Chest-high sawgrass and weeds were a moat around the house, and I literally had to beat a path up to the front door where Lugmor, alerted by the sound of the car’s engine, was waiting for me.

“Robby?” he mumbled. “That you?”

“The ghost of Christmas past, Coop.” Garth had sounded as if he were feeling sorry for Lugmor; but then, Garth had never been a dwarf. Lugmor had helped to make my childhood miserable, and I was feeling mean. “You still interested in hiring me?”

He licked his lips. Some of the drunkenness seemed to go out of him, chased by grief—or hope. “Sure am, Robby. Uh, I don’t have much—”

“This is what it will cost you to have me find out things for you. You’re an old boyhood acquaintance, so you get a very special rate; it’s a thousand dollars a day, plus expenses.”

At first I wasn’t sure he’d heard me. He continued to stare down at me in the bright moonlight, his mouth half open. “A thou—?”

“A thousand dollars a day, Coop, plus expenses. And I don’t guarantee I’ll find out a thing you don’t already know. What I’ll do is poke around and ask a few questions. You hire me, you’ll be wired to any answers I get.”

“Robby,” Lugmor rasped, “things haven’t been too good for me the last few years. I haven’t got anywhere near that kind of money.”

“Tough shit, Coop.” I turned and headed down off the porch into the jungle that was his front yard. “Ask your own fucking questions.”

Now I knew I was being really ornery, and I knew that neither my mother, father, nor my brother would have been very proud of me at the moment. Yet, I couldn’t stop myself; it was as if there were a cruel stranger growing inside me, taking over. Coop Lugmor had thumped me good, and now I was thumping back in the worst way possible—I was kicking his mind.

There was a cry like the bark of a sick dog, then a thump of flesh and crash of pottery. I spun around and crouched, thinking that Lugmor might be trying to attack me. The man was sprawled on the ground; rushing after me, he’d fallen off the porch and broken his jug. He sat up and sobbed; his right hand was bleeding, and tears ran down his face collecting dirt. Feeling slightly nauseated, I walked back to him. I’d have stooped to help almost any other creature in his position, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch the horrible memory that was Coop Lugmor.

“There are awful bad things going on in this county, Robby!” Lugmor said. “That’s God’s truth! Nobody cares! My brother and your nephew get killed and all they do is tell lies! Somebody’s got to show them we’re not all robots! Somebody’s got to do something!”

“I said I’d ask questions. You want to hear the answers, you pay my price.”

Lugmor flapped his bleeding hand at me. I grimaced, took a step back. “I haven’t got it!” he wailed.

“You’ve got land, which means you get money from the Volsung Corporation.”

“They cut me off last year. I’ve got nothing, Robby! I’ve been living off the vegetables I grow.”

“You’ve got the farm,” the cruel stranger in me said coldly and evenly.

“You want me to sell my farm?”

“Frankly, I don’t give a shit what you do. You came to me. I might suggest you get a mortgage. You’ve got a house, a barn, and a few hundred acres. It ought to be worth something.”

“Holy Jesus,” Lugmor moaned. “How would I pay off the loan? They’d take the farm, Robby, and I don’t want to live like some animal in the woods.”

“Think about it. If you change your mind, you can call me at my folks’ place.”

“Wait!” He struggled to his feet, swayed. “I’ll do it, Robby! I’ll get a mortgage, pay you what you want!”

“Splendid.”

“It’ll take time!”

“I’ll take a note to the effect of our agreement. Now, Coop.”

Lugmor led the way into his house, a hovel that would make any woods I’d ever seen look like the Ritz in comparison. Apparently the man really was existing on nothing but vegetables, because there were scraps of rotting greens scattered about what I assumed to be the living room. A single kerosene lamp was burning something that wasn’t kerosene, and Lugmor lit two others. Dirt was everywhere.

Standing in the center of the room as far away from any piece of furniture as I could get, I waited while Lugmor rummaged around for pencil and paper. He wrote something down, handed me the slip. I put it in my pocket without looking at it; it would be illegible. It was also worthless, but Coop Lugmor wouldn’t know that. I wanted him crawling around in the woods; I wanted him hurt and broken the way he had hurt and tried to break me.

Now I wasn’t too proud of myself. I was growing myself a monster, I thought, and the stranger was beginning to make my insides decidedly uncomfortable. He was crowding out my soul, making it hard to breathe. My heart hurt.

And there wasn’t even any satisfaction.

Lugmor had wrapped his bleeding hand in a filthy rag. He blew his nose with an equally filthy rag he carried in a pocket of his overalls, then dried his eyes with the back of his hand. “Thanks, Robby,” he said in a trembling voice. “I appreciate your being a friend to me. You’ll find out I’m telling the truth. Rod was no fag, and he didn’t kill himself and your nephew. You want a drink?”

“No.”

“Why don’t you sit down?”

“You sit, I’ll stand. I want to ask you some questions.”

“Shoot,” he said, grinning nervously as he eased himself down on the arm of a broken chair and leaned forward eagerly. “God, Robby, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”

“At the cemetery you mentioned that Jake Bolesh was working for a company. You meant the Volsung Corporation, didn’t you?”

“You got it, Robby. The Volsung Corporation. This county hasn’t been the same since they built that place.”

“Does Jake own land?”

“Nah. He sold his place when he was first elected sheriff. He lives in a house in Peru City.”

“How do you know Jake is taking money from Volsung?”

“Everybody knows it, Robby. He’s got a fancy car, fancy clothes, and he takes vacations in Hawaii. The reason nobody cares is because just about everyone around here gets money from Volsung one way or another. They get cash in the pocket if they lease land, and they get lower property taxes because of all the taxes Volsung pays. Also, Volsung donated a big park over by Polliwallow; it’s got a swimming pool and everything. Folks around here think it’s really something for a big company like Volsung to set up right in the middle of Peru County. Nobody wants to rock the boat.”

“You think the Volsung Corporation had something to do with the boys’ deaths?”

“Nah, I’m not saying that. I’m saying that everybody wants to keep things quiet because that’s the way Volsung wants it; they’re pretty secretive about what they do down there. Murders attract attention. It’s like this great big building filled with gold plopped down on the prairie one night, and nobody wants to blink or talk too loud for fear they’ll wake up and Volsung will be gone.”

“Why did Volsung cut you off?”

Lugmor flushed, ground the stumps of his teeth together. “Jake caught me checking out one of the plots they planted on my land; you’re not supposed to do that. He reported me. The next day the plot was plowed under and I was off the payroll. Jake also made sure the word got around so that nobody else would make the same mistake.” He paused, stared at me with his bloodshot, rheumy eyes. “I’ll tell you something, Robby. You see a drunk in front of you, but there was a time when I was a pretty damn good farmer. I know plain old ordinary field corn when I see it.”

“Field corn?”

“Yeah. If I’d had pigs or cows, I could’ve fed it to ’em, or I could’ve ground it up for silage. No good for anything else. There’s nothing experimental about plain old field corn; it’ll grow anywhere—which is a good thing, since most of those plots are half-filled with weeds.”

“Experiments need controls. How do you know your plot wasn’t a control?”

Lugmor scowled. “I know what field corn looks like; I don’t know anything about experiments or controls.”

“How long has the Volsung Corporation been here?”

“A little over three years. They put the place up fast—matter of months. One minute there’s nothing but prairie out there, the next thing you know there’s this big building.”

“Did Rod ever mention a place called ‘Mirkwood’ to you?”

“No, can’t say that he did.”

“What do you think Jake Bolesh does for Volsung?”

His eyes suddenly came to life, glittering with fear. “You’re not gonna’ tell Jake I’ve been talking about him, are you?”

“No.”

“Okay. The way I figure it, Jake provides them Volsung guys with extra security. He’s got patrol cars cruising around there all the time. He makes sure the farmers stay off the lands they’ve leased out, and he keeps an eye out for strangers nosing around—things like that. Like I said, I think he’s paid to keep things nice and quiet.”

“If what you say about the Volsung people being big taxpayers is true, they might figure they’re entitled to a little extra security. And, considering what everyone in the county gets out of the company, I can understand why no one would object. They’d probably vote Bolesh out of office if he didn’t give them extra service.”

Lugmor scowled again. I wasn’t making him happy, but I had to make an effort to see things from the points of view of the Volsung Corporation and the people of Peru County.

“For a thousand bucks a day, Robby, I’d think you’d be on my side.”

“You’re paying me to try and get a fix on things, Coop, to try to find out what really happened. It may be that things are just the way Bolesh says they are. Now, who in the county actually works inside the building?”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody?”

“That’s what I said.” Lugmor was grinning now, as if he’d finally scored a point in some mysterious game we were playing. “There’s maybe a half dozen young guys paid to run a weeder through the plots now and then, but that’s it.”

“What bars and restaurants do the Volsung people go to when they come into town?”

Another grin, another score. This one he savored, smacking his lips. “They never come to town,” he said at last.

“Their people never come out of the building?”

Lugmor nodded. “I told you it was a funny place. Oh, the shifts change every few weeks. They bring in people, supplies, and equipment in little airplanes. They got a landing strip out there. You can see the planes coming in real low over Peru City, and I saw them unloading once.”

“There must be somebody there who handles the local contacts.”

“Not that I know of; if anyone knows, it would be Jake. He’s the one who tells the local boys with the weeders what to do.”

“How much do they pay for the land they lease?”

“Five hundred dollars a month per acre.”

“Someone must have contacted you at the beginning about leasing acreage.”

“Guy never gave me his name. It was a phone call, and the guy just said he worked for the Volsung Corporation. Contract came in the mail, same as the checks.”

“What was the return address on the envelopes?”

Lugmor raised his hand and cocked a thumb toward the southwest, Duck Pond and the prairie beyond.

“No other corporate address in New York? Chicago?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Who signed the contract and the checks?”

“I never looked.”

“You have a telephone book?”

“I haven’t had a telephone for better’n two years, Robby. If it’s a listing for Volsung you’re looking for, I’ll bet everything I’ve ever owned that it isn’t in there.”

“Coop, according to the newspaper stories I read, you found the bodies. Is that right?”

Lugmor opened his mouth to speak, but only managed to produce a gagging sound.

“Coop,” I prodded, “it’s important.”

“Just a minute,” he mumbled. He rose, picked up a flickering lamp and shuffled through a door. I heard the sound of a cabinet door being opened, and I went after him. I caught his arm just as he was raising a jug to his mouth; obviously, Coop Lugmor still managed to distill alcohol. This batch smelled raw.

“I need this bad, Robby.” His eyes were wide and pleading.

“In a minute,” I said, wrestling away the jug. “I have to know exactly what happened, and what the scene looked like when you got there.”

He leaned forward on the greasy countertop where he had placed the lamp, bowed his head, and moaned softly as I stepped back, holding the jug with both hands like a football Coop Lugmor wasn’t going to take away until I’d found out what I wanted to know. There was almost a minute of silence. When he finally spoke, his voice was whiskey-hoarse, climbing up and down a ragged scale.

“I don’t sleep too good,” he whispered. “Hardly at all. It must’ve been two or three in the morning. It was clear, full moon like tonight; I could hear neighbors’ dogs barking from three, four farms away. Then I heard the shots. Two shotgun blasts, real loud. I got my own gun, went out. I … I … I found them down by the creek.”

“How far away is that?”

“I dunno, maybe a half, three-quarters of a mile straight out back of the barn. They were under a big willow. They … they … I found them …”

“Come on, Coop. Tell me exactly what you saw. I need to know everything in detail; I know it’s hard, but I have to know. Pretend you’re a camera looking back there; tell me what you see.”

“They … they …”

“Goddamn it, Coop, tell me!”

“Tommy … his chest and stomach and guts … Rodney … all of his head from his jawbone up was gone. Brains and bone were splashed … gagh! Gagh!”

Overcoming my revulsion, I stepped forward, gripped his elbow and turned him around, shoved the jug into his hands. I counted three heavy gulps before I managed to pull the jug away again.

“They’re dead, Coop,” I said quietly.

“You’re a pretty cold fish, Robby,” he said in a strained, accusing voice. “You oughtta’ be ashamed of yourself.”

I was ashamed of myself, but not for forcing him to tell me what he had seen. I was ashamed of the stranger inside me, and ashamed of the things he’d said and done. There were enough rotten people in Peru County, I thought, and I saw no reason to add myself to the number. The stranger was just going to have to go back to whatever dark place in my heart he had come from.

But Coop Lugmor was still going to have to tell me what had happened.

“From the way you describe it, the boys died instantly, without any physical suffering. Think about that, not what they looked like afterward; you’ll feel better. Now, I want you to draw me a diagram on paper showing everything—”

“I can’t, Robby.” Lugmor held up his hands; they were vibrating like bass tuning forks.

“Then you have to tell me what you saw, in detail. You said there was a willow tree. How were the bodies positioned?”

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, looked hungrily at the jug. I retreated into my end zone. “It looked like your nephew had been blown down next to the stream; he was half in, half out of the water. There were … crawfish at him.”

“Where was your brother?”

“Leaning against the tree.”

“The gun? You said it was a shotgun?”

He swallowed, nodded. “Remington 1100. Belonged to our pop.”

“How long is that gun from the trigger to the end of the barrels?”

He showed me with his flapping hands.

“Where was it?”

Lugmor screwed his eyes shut. “They didn’t suffer?”

“I don’t think so, Coop. No.”

“Rod was holding it.”

“How, Coop?” I looked around, saw a broken broom lying on the floor in a corner. I grabbed it, handed it to him. “Get down on the floor and show me exactly how Rod was holding it. Pretend the bristles are the butt end.”

My stomach tightened as I watched Lugmor slump down on the floor and angle into position against the broken door of a cabinet. I sighed as I saw him put his finger on the “trigger” and, with eyes popping from his head like great red moons, slide the other end into his mouth. The “gun” was short enough. I shoved the broom out of his mouth and hands, helped him to his feet.

“Coop,” I said gently, “so far you haven’t told me anything that wouldn’t jibe with the newspaper accounts and what I’ve heard.”

“What they say isn’t true.”

“We come back to the letters Bolesh is supposed to have found in Tommy’s pocket.”

“Not signed!”

“Written on Rodney’s typewriter.”

“Bolesh says! Nobody around here would know one typewriter from another!”

“The police certainly would, Coop. It’s a simple thing to check; it’s as if typewriters have fingerprints.”

He clenched his fists and shook his head.

“Just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that the letters were written on that typewriter. Could anyone else have gotten to that typewriter without someone in the family knowing it?”

“That week they couldn’ve. Rod was staying there by himself, and he was probably out of the house a lot. Our folks were away at a Grange convention.”

“I want to talk to them tomorrow, Coop, and they may not be too happy to see one of Tommy’s relatives coming up the driveway. I want you to come over with me.”

“Can’t, Robby. They both went away Saturday morning, right after Rod’s funeral. Took it real hard, said they couldn’t stand knowing that the whole county’s talking about us.”

“When will they be back?”

“Dunno. They’re paying a couple of neighbors to look after the place.”

“Coop, I asked you this before and I’m going to ask you again; this time I want you to think very hard before you answer. Who might want to kill your brother and my nephew?”

“I don’t know!” he wailed. “That’s what you’re supposed to find out!”

“The only thing you’re really certain about is that your brother wasn’t homosexual, right?”

“Yes! Barney Mason, a friend of mine who works in the drugstore in Peru City, told me he saw Rod in there one day sneaking peeks in some of those dirty magazines. Those magazines have pictures of naked women in them, Robby!”

“Great.” I handed him the jug. As I watched him suck at its contents, I took the paper he had given me out of my pocket, tore it up, dropped the pieces on the floor. “My regular fee is two hundred a day, Coop. That’s what you’ll pay, along with expenses. And you will pay it. The first expense is the biggest. I’m flying in a hacker from New York.”

“What’s a hacker?”

“Never mind. You can’t even take care of your own business, so don’t start worrying about mine. I sure as hell don’t want this farm, or any money out of it, which means that you’re going to have to haul your ass out and go to work someplace so you can pay me. Maybe I’ll talk to some of my relatives, see if one of them will take you on as a hired hand—which means that the nasty dwarf you ‘heard tell’ about will personally break your ass into little pieces if you drink on the job or otherwise fuck up.”

“Robby, I—”

“I’ve been known to carry client accounts for a time, so I may not bill you until you’ve got a job and saved some money. The first thing you do in the morning is take a bath, shave, find some clean clothes, and hitch a ride into Peru City. Go to the welfare agency. Don’t tell them about me, do tell them you need help. Drag somebody out here; once they see this place, they’ll fall all over themselves giving you emergency assistance.”

He drew himself up straight, stumbled, braced himself on the cabinet shelf. “I’m not taking any charity.”

“You’ll do exactly as I say, Coop!” I snapped, picking my way through the garbage and heading for the door. “Otherwise, you can start thinking about mortgaging your farm. And you can be damn sure I’ll check to make sure you go there.”