Blunt Darts

disappearance?”
    Cal frowned and dropped his voice. “Smollett never even called me to put me on alert. I found out from one of my men whose wife works in the cafeteria in Stephen’s school. Nothing on the radio or the computer. Nothing at all.”
    We reached the targets. “Can you think of any reason the judge wouldn’t want his son found?”
    Cal clucked his tongue, perhaps at the question, but more likely at my miserable shooting. “Maybe the kid just doesn’t fit into his system.” He began penciling our shots. “The judge, who by the way this department and I have to live with, is a cold, cold man. Just the opposite of his brother, who was real personable, though in an unpredictable sort of way. But the judge... well, if you ever saw him in court, you’d know what I mean.”
    “I have. I’ve also met his bodyguard.“
    “Bodyguard? Oh, Blakey?”
    I nodded.
    “Blakey,” said Cal. “He’s a bad-ass, John. He was on the Meade PD, then broke up a fight in a tavern a little—no, a lot—too hard. Citizens’ group managed to raise enough fuss to get him off the force, because he was still probationary. But then the judge hired him on at the courthouse. One of those political moves that makes the judge look fearless to the law-and-order folks.”
    Cal pocketed his pencil but made no move back toward the firing line. “You have a jam with him?”
    “Sort of,” I said.
    “Watch his hands, John. He could open coconuts with ‘em. By the by, if memory serves, Blakey was the officer who noticed the smashed fencing when Mrs. Kinnington went into the river.”
    I perked up. “And then sometime later, when Blakey is squeezed off the force, the judge gives him a job?”
    Cal nodded.
    “How does that add up to you?” I asked.
    Cal gave me a philosophical look. “Small-town Police chiefs don’t add, John; they subtract. Every time they take a stand, they subtract from their support in the town. Support remembers only the times when you do what they don’t want. Enough subtractions and there’s a new chief to do the arithmetic. I don’t know what happened between His Honor, Smollett, and Blakey.”
    While I decided not to push my luck any further, al walked over to a locker at the end of the range and Came back with a stapler and two bigger cardboard targets. He stapled them onto the target easels. They were full-sized, human silhouettes.
    “Why these?” I asked.
    “You didn’t do real well on those first two strings, John. Never can tell when you might need to be better.” We turned and walked back toward the firing line.
    “Combat string,” he yelled to the tower man.
     
     
     

     
     
    Fordham Road was a short street of older houses three blocks from the center of town. I parked and rang the bell marked V. Jacobs.
    “Oh, John, I’ve been leaving messages for you all morning. Where have you been?” She was dressed in a halter top and shorts. Both were pastel and the colors clashed a bit.
    “What’s the news?”
    She ran back down the hall, disappeared, then reappeared with a picnic basket and a beach bag. |
    “I ran into Miss Pitts this morning in the market You remember, the retired teacher who had Stephen in the fifth grade? We have to go see her right away. 1
    She was past me and halfway to my car. I shrugged and followed after her.
     
    The living room was filled with the kinds of thing* one obtains with trading stamps. Plastic-brass floor lamps, plastic-walnut cocktail tables, and plastic Hummel-like sculptures on eight separate knick-knack-holding shelf arrangements. My rocking chair, however, was built of massive pine. It must have gone for twelve and a half books, minimum.
    Miss Pitts was plump and spoke in a soft purr. The three of us held teacups and coffee cakes in our hands and on our laps in a precarious balance that I’ve never been able to master. Miss Pitts had thus far covered her brightest class (1959), and her catlike voice was slowly putting me to sleep. I began to wonder why the hell she had the cocktail tables if she wasn’t going to use them for the tea and cakes. I was giving serious consideration to cutting a fart to change the direction of the conversation, when Valerie mercifully jumped first.
    “Miss Pitts, what year was it you had Stephen?“
    “Ah, Stephen, Stephen. What an unfortunate story. Oh, one of today’s wicked novelists would have a field day with his sad life. But the brightest boy, the absolute brightest I’ve ever seen. No one, not