mouth shut. I don’t intend to go back to Santa Barbara, to pick up as Travis
Cornell. I’m Hyatt now, and that’s what I’m going to stay. My old life’s gone
forever. There’s no reason to go back. And if the government’s smart, it’ll let
me be Hyatt and stay out of my way.”
Lem stared at him a long time. Then: “Yeah, if they’re smart, I think they’ll do
just that.”
Later that same day, as Jim Keene was cooking dinner, his phone rang. It was
Garrison Dilworth, whom he had never met but had gotten to know
during the past week by acting as liaison between the attorney and Travis and
Nora. Garrison was calling from a pay phone in Santa Barbara.
“They show up yet?” the attorney asked.
“Early this afternoon,” Jim said. “That Tommy Essenby must be a good kid.”
“Not bad, really. But he didn’t come to see me and warn me out of the goodness
of his heart. He’s in rebellion against authority. When they pressured him into
admitting that I made the call from his house that night, he resented them. As
inevitably as billy goats ram their heads into board fences, Tommy came straight
to me.”
“They took away The Outsider.”
“What about the dog?”
“Travis said he wouldn’t show them where the grave was. Made them believe that
he’d kick a lot of ass and pull down the whole temple on everyone’s heads if
they pushed him.”
“How’s Nora?” Dilworth asked.
“She won’t lose the baby.”
“Thank God. That must be a great comfort.”
2
Eight months later, on the big Labor Day weekend in September, the Johnson and
Gaines families got together for a barbecue at the sheriffs house. They played
bridge most of the afternoon. Lem and Karen won more often than they lost, which
was unusual these days, because Lem no longer approached the game with the
fanatical need to win that had once been his Style.
He had left the NSA in June. Since then, he had been living on the income from
the money he had long ago inherited from his father. By next spring, he expected
to settle on a new line of work, a small business of some kind, in which he
would be his own boss, able to set his own hours.
Late in the afternoon, while their wives made salads in the kitchen, Lem and
Walt stood out on the patio, tending to the steaks on the barbecue.
“So you’re still known at the Agency as the man who screwed up the Banodyne
crisis?”
“That’s how I’ll be known until time immemorial.”
“Still get a pension though,” Walt said.
“Well, I did put in twenty-three years.”
“Doesn’t seem right, though, that a man could screw up the biggest case Of the
century and stilt walk away, at forty-six, with a full pension.”
“Three-quarter pension.”
Walt breathed deeply of the fragrant smoke rising off the charring steaks.
Still. What is our country coming to? In less liberal times, screwups like you
Would have been flogged and put in the stocks, at least.” He took another
deep whiff of the steaks and said, “Tell me again about that moment in their
kitchen.”
Lem had told it a hundred times, but Walt never got tired of hearing it again.
“Well, the place was neat as a pin. Everything gleamed. And both Cornell and his
wife are neat about themselves, too. They’re well-groomed, well-scrubbed people.
So they tell me the dog’s been dead two weeks, dead and buried. Cornell throws
this angry fit, hauls me out of my chair by my shirt, and glares at me like
maybe he’s going to rip my head off. When he lets go of me, I straighten my tie,
smooth my shirt . . . and I look down at my pants, sort of out of habit, and I
notice these golden hairs. Dog hairs. Retriever hairs, sure as hell. Now could
it have been that these neat people, especially trying to fill their empty days
and take their minds off their tragedy, didn’t find the time to clean the house
in more than two weeks?”
“Hairs were just all over your pants,” Walt said.