Cypress Grove by James Sallis Read Free Book Online

liked the new job.”
    “Job was okay, Sheriff. What he didn’t like was me.”
    Steering her to the desk, Bates said, “You had any breakfast? I could call across, have something sent over.”
    “Kids ate good this morning.”
    “They always do.”
    “Pancakes.”
    “Billie does great pancakes,” Don Lee told me.
    “Put pecans in, the way they like them.” Her eyes swept the ceiling. “Woodie has to turn in his geography project today. I made sure he packed it up safe.”
    “You get any sleep, sweetheart?” Bates asked.
    “I don’t think so. I made brownies, for the kids. C. R. likes them too. It was dark outside. I think maybe I burned them.”
    “Don Lee, why don’t you take Billie on home, see she gets settled in. That be okay with you, Billie?”
    She looked wildly about for a moment at the door, window and floor, then nodded.
    “He’ll take her out by the ballpark,” Bates said once they’d left. “They’ll sit in the bleachers a while. Don’t know why, but that always seems to calm her down.”
    “Is she okay?”
    “Basically. You couldn’t ask for a better person. Just sometimes, every six or eight weeks, things get too much for her. Get too much for all of us sometimes, don’t they?”
    I nodded.
    “Been going on for three or four months, we figure—the missing mail. That’s how far in arrears the mayor’s bills had fallen. Gas, water, electric. Near as we can tell, he didn’t know.”
    “Which tells us he doesn’t bother balancing his checkbook.”
    “Mm-hm.”
    “And service was still being provided?”
    “Things don’t get shut off much ’round here. Just not the way we do it. And he’s the mayor, after all.”
    “What about credit cards?”
    “Looks like he paid those from the office. Those and the phone bill.”
    “He works at home?”
    “Town this size, there’s not a lot of mayoring needs doing. Not much call for regular office hours.”
    “So why would he pay the phone bill at the office? Some reason he doesn’t want his wife seeing the bill, maybe? I assume there’s a wife.”
    “Oh,” Bates said, “there’s a wife sure enough.”
    “Can we get a warrant for his phone bills? Home and at the office? See who he called, who called him?”
    “No need for all that.” Fie grabbed the phone and dialed, spoke a minute or two and hung up. “Faxing it over. Give her half an hour, Miss Jean says.”
    “That simple.”
    “Seems simple to you, does it?”
    I understood. As a cop on city streets you learn to dodge, duck, go along, feint. You find out what works and you use it. Same here, just that different things worked.
    “Where’s the mayor live?”
    “Out on Sycamore. Far end of town.”
    “Anyone else on that route have mail missing?”
    “There’s only the one route. And if so, they didn’t notice.”
    “Or didn’t report it.”
    Mug cradled in both hands, Bates swung his chair several degrees right, right knee rising to a point northeast, then a few degrees left, right knee dipping as the left V’ed northwest. “Hard as this may be for you to believe, Detective, we did get around to asking after that. Took us a few days to think of it, most likely. Probably have it written down somewhere.”
    “I don’t mean any disrespect, Sheriff. I’m only here because you asked me, doing the job you asked me to do the only way I know how.”
    Our eyes met.
    “All right,” he said at length.
    “So you found the mayor’s mail in this guy’s pocket.”
    “Right.”
    “But no wallet, no identification.”
    He shook his head.
    “Don Lee mentioned a notebook.”
    “Nothing much there, far as we could tell.”
    “And he’d been holding some of this mail for what? Three, four months?”
    “Right.”
    “Thought he was some kind of postman,” I said.
    “Undelivering mail.”

Chapter Ten
    I’D KNOWN SALLY GENE for two or three years. She’d done a couple of ride-alongs back when she started with Child and Family. I remember giving her a hard time,