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.Then I snugged the wings of the trench coat collar up around my face and began to walk back the way I’d come.If rain was God’s tears, the Old Boy sure was bawling about something tonight.I knew how he felt.I’d spent the afternoon in the upstate burg of Hopeful, only there was nothing hopeful about the sorry little hamlet.All I’d wanted was a few answers to a few questions.Like how a guy who won a Silver Star charging up a beachhead could wind up a crushed corpse in a public park, a crumpled piece of discarded human refuse.Bill Reynolds had had his problems.Before the war he’d been an auto mechanic in Hopeful.A good-looking, dark-haired bruiser who’d have landed a football scholarship if the war hadn’t gotten in the way, Bill married his high school sweetheart before he shipped out, only when he came back missing an arm and a leg, he found his girl wasn’t interested in what was left of him.Even though he was good with his prosthetic arm and leg, he couldn’t get his job back at the garage, either.But the last time I’d spoken to Bill, when he came in to New York to catch Marciano and Jersey Joe at Madison Square Garden, he’d said things were looking up.He said he had a handyman job lined up, and that it was going to pay better than his old job at the garage.“Besides which,” he said, between rounds, “you oughta see my boss.You’d do overtime yourself.”“You mean you’re working for a woman?”“And what a woman.She’s got more curves than the Mohonk Mountain road.”“Easy you don’t drive off a cliff.”That’s all we’d said about the subject, because Marciano had come out swinging at that point, and the next I heard from Bill—well not from him, about him—he was dead.The only family he had left in Hopeful was a maiden aunt; she called me collect and told me tearfully that Bill’s body had been found in the city park.His spine had been snapped.“HOW does a thing like that happen, Chief?”Chief Thadeous Dolbert was one of Hopeful’s four full-time cops.Despite his high office, he wore a blue uniform indistinguishable from his underlings, and his desk was out in the open of the little bullpen in Hopeful City Hall.A two-cell lockup was against one wall, and spring sunshine streaming in the windows through the bars sent slanting stripes of shadow across his desk and his fat, florid face.He was leaning back in his swivel chair, eyes hooded; he looked like a fat iguana—I expected his tongue to flick out and capture a fly any second now.Dolbert said, “We figure he got hit by a car.”“Body was found in the city park, wasn’t it?”“Way he was banged up, figure he must’ve got whopped a good one, really sent him flyin’.”“Was that the finding at the inquest?”Dolbert fished a pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket, right behind his tarnished badge, lighted himself up a smoke.Soon it was dangling from a thick, slobber-flecked lower lip.“We don’t stand much on ceremony around here, mister.County coroner called it accidental death at the scene.”“That’s all the investigation Bill’s death got?”Dolbert shrugged, blew a smoke circle.“All that was warranted.”I sat forward.“All that was warranted.A local boy, who gave an arm and a leg to his country, wins a damn Silver Star doin’ it, and you figure him getting his spine snapped like a twig and damn near every bone in his body broken, well, that’s just pretty much business as usual here in Hopeful.”Under the heavy lids, fire flared in the fat chief’s eyes.“You think you knew Bill Reynolds? You knew the old Bill.You didn’t know the drunken stumblebum he turned into.Prime candidate for stepping out in front of a car.”“I never knew Bill to drink to excess—”“How much time did you spend with him lately?”A hot rush of shame crawled up my neck.I’d seen Bill from time to time, in the city, when he came in to see me, but I’d never come up to Hopeful.Never really gone out of my way for him, since the war.Till now.“You make any effort to find the hit-and-run driver that did this?”The chief shrugged.“Nobody saw it happen.”“You don’t even know for sure a car did it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]