Artscape by Frederick Ramsay

Author:Frederick Ramsay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
Published: 2012-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

Ike sat in his office and stared through the glass panel at the room that served as police headquarters. Six o’clock. Essie gone for the day. The press corps, reluctant to cover a story that seemed to be going nowhere, had decamped to Roanoke where a gruesome murder story took front and center. Ike had no illusions—they’d be back, but for the moment he had some peace.

Billy had the three to eleven shift and sat in front of the radio transmitter reading Playboy. Saturday night. Things would get busy in five or six hours when paychecks were converted into beer or shooters, when kids in pickup trucks began to miss turns in the road, when college students with more money than sense began to tear through town on their way to God only knew where. But now things were quiet.

Ike picked up the phone and dialed information.

“What state, please?”

“The District of Columbia.”

“What listing?”

“I want the number of a bar in Georgetown, O’Rourke’s.”

“Thank you, just a moment.”

Ike waited, picked up the pencil, jotted down the number, and hung up. Six-o-five. Charlie had said between six and seven. Ike decided to wait until six-thirty, twenty-five minutes away—time to have a quick beer, read the paper, work a crossword puzzle, or call Ruth. Instead, he sat and stared at the glass partition thinking.

For three years, he’d enjoyed the luxury of quiet anonymity, and a career as sheriff away from all of it. Now, the whole world beamed in on him. Television crews from the national networks set up at the college. Stringers from all the major dailies were ensconced in Picketsville’s only hotel. The curious, the morbid, and people seeking a peripheral role in history arrived hourly to this little backwash of a town, filling its motels, boosting its economy, and annoying its inhabitants. The town’s only prior claim to notoriety was a very messy lynching of an African-American man accused, but never tried or convicted, of raping the lieutenant governor’s daughter. That was seventy years ago. The lynching had been given wide publicity. The discovery two days later that the girl had not been raped, indeed medical evidence proclaimed her virginity intact, had been buried with the shipping news, and the whole incident had not created half the coverage the robbery had.

On the whole, he preferred the attention the town received now, but wished it had happened before, or later, or somewhere else to someone else. He had picked this hiding place so well. Who would have known he’d be found so quickly? Well, he couldn’t do anything about it now. Maybe, when it ended, the last picture taken, everyone would go away and leave him alone. Of course, if the case weren’t solved…my God, he thought, they might never let me go.

Work it out. What? How? Who—it had to be someone inside. The Board decided to move the collection eleven days before the robbery—a coincidence? Not likely. The best time to pull this kind of job would be July or

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