Pity Him Afterwards

“Yes. Get in touch with Captain Whitsisname at the trooper barracks. You know, down at the foot of Fourteen.”

“Captain Garrett.”

“That’s it. I don’t know why I can’t remember that name. Captain Garrett. Tell him we’ve got a murder reported, and I’m on my way to check it out. If there’s anything in it, I’ll call him direct from the scene.”

“Why do you need Captain Garrett, Eric?”

“Come on, Joyce. We’re traffic cops. Even if we had the training and the experience to handle criminal investigation, which we don’t, we still don’t have the necessary equipment. Was the dead man shot?”

“I don’t know, and it—”

“Say he was. We don’t have the equipment for a ballistics check. We can’t run a simple paraffin test on suspects’ hands. I don’t think a one of us could get a clean fingerprint from a mirror.”

“We ask the state to handle the science for us, Eric. That’s what the state’s for. But we don’t have to go running to Captain Garrett the minute the complaint comes in. You always downgrade yourself, Eric. You always—”

“Don’t start analyzing me, Joyce, you’ll just depress yourself. I’ll call you from the theater.”

“All right, Eric,” she said, with exaggerated resignation.

He hung up, got his officer’s cap, and left the office. Downstairs there was a giant mirror on the side wall, the architect’s futile attempt to make a tiny marble lobby look like a great big marble court. Sondgard saw himself in it, a thin man in a pale blue uniform complete with knee-high black boots. “Cossack,” he whispered at the reflection, and felt a little better. Stupid uniform.

Mike had the prowl car, of course. Mike always had the prowl car. Joyce would find him out at the practice range, shooting guns. Sondgard went around to the parking lot at the side of the building and got into his little black Volvo. He drove out to Broad Avenue and turned left, toward the lake.

Captain Eric Sondgard, forty-one years old, a man of titles. In June and July and August he bore the title Captain, and ran Cartier Isle’s four-man police force. From September till May he bore the title Professor — Associate Professor really — and taught the Humanities in a Connecticut college.

“There’s a dichotomy in you, Captain Professor,” he told himself. “Half of you is a humanist and half of you is a Cossack. You’re all mixed up, Professor Captain.”

He was talking to himself. Out loud. As soon as he realized it, he gave a snort of disgust and turned on the car radio. There was no local radio station, and the distant stations picked up a heavy load of static on their beamed way up through the mountains, but at least there was noise in the car now, and a part of the noise was discernibly a human voice. He wasn’t totally alone now, and he wouldn’t be talking to himself out loud.

He hadn’t always felt this way. But six years of marriage had ended, seven years ago, in an emotional and sloppy divorce, full of bitterness and recrimination, and one of the side effects of that breakdown had been this dislike for solitude, this watchful fear that he would turn into a mumbling recluse, divorced from the world as well as his wife.

This job, summer Cossack, was in its way another side effect of the divorce. He and Janice had always spent their summers together in the cottage on Stenner Lake, but Janice had received the cottage as part of the settlement. The first summer without her, he had spent his time in his apartment in the city, and being alone at the wrong time of the year in the apartment where he had lived so long with Janice had nearly driven him crazy. The second summer he had taken a camp counselor’s job, not because he needed the money but simply to have something to do and the reassurance of other people around him, and he had detested the job. That fall, through a student, he had heard of the vacancy in the Cartier Isle police force. The student’s family owned one of the estates on Black Lake, and through them Sondgard had obtained the job. And surprised himself by liking it. This was his fifth summer at Cartier Isle; he would probably spend every summer here for the rest of his life.

Cartier Isle was a strange town, really; at least in that part of the year when he saw it. In the off-season months it was a tiny quiet community of seventeen hundred, and Mike Tompkins served as its entire police force. But during the summer it was a resort town, with a population swollen to over five thousand, and with the police force increased to four — Sondgard himself, and Dave Rand, the Floridian who ran a boat for fishing parties off the Florida coast the rest of the year and operated the police launch on Black Lake during the summer, and a student of Sondgard’s, a different one each year, hired by him at the end of the school term. This year it was Larry Temple.

The policing of Cartier Isle in the summertime was complicated by two factors: first, the artificial boundaries of the town; and second, the type of people who were its summer residents.