Shallow Graves

get going,” she said.
    Pellam touched her arm. She froze, then stepped back casually. He said, “I’d like to ask you a question. In confidence.”
    Her thoughts raced but she just nodded slowly.
    He asked, “There any reason why somebody might not want a movie made in Cleary?”
    “We say no to drugs.”
    “Beg pardon?”
    “There’s some talk that there might be bad influences if your company came to town.”
    “Okay, granted. I’ve heard that before. . . . But let me be a little blunter. There any reason why somebodymight kill my friend to keep a movie from being made here?”
    Meg turned to him, her mouth open in shock. “You’re serious, aren’t you?” She turned back to the window. “That was a stupid thing to say. Sure, you’re serious.”
    “This is off the record?”
    “Sure,” she said.
    “Okay, Marty did have some pot. Except, it was in the camper . Along with the rolling papers—”
    “What’s that?”
    “Rolling papers? Cigarette papers.”
    “Oh. Right.”
    “So it wasn’t in the car with him when it blew up. Somebody planted those drugs on him.”
    She shook her head, but noncommittally, as if he were a lawyer taking down her reactions.
    “Then I looked over the car a little while ago.”
    “You did?”
    “And I found two bullet holes in it.”
    “Bullet holes?”
    “I think so. Near the gas tank. I think that’s what happened. Somebody shot the tank, it exploded and then they planted the drugs and left before the fire truck got there.”
    At first she thought this was impossible—in Cleary. But then she remembered the darker side of the town. The murders of those businessmen, the occasional rapes, two high school boys had driven into a tree at eighty miles an hour—they were both stoned on heroin, of all things.
    He continued. “I was hoping I could talk to Keith. Maybe there’s a test he could do. On the metal. See if they were bullet holes.”
    Meg said, “Why don’t you talk to Tom? Didn’t he investigate . . .” Then she understood. “I see. You think he’s involved in some way, do you? The sheriff?”
    “I just want to keep it low-key.”
    Nodding. She opened her purse and handed him one of Keith’s business cards. “Well, sure. Give him a call. He liked you.”
    Across the square she saw a couple staring at them. The woman leaned toward the man; there was an extended whisper going on. Meg felt the burst of discomfort again.
    Life in a small town . . .
    I’ve lived here for five years, Pellam. But it feels like ten.
    “Lunch?” he asked.
    She hesitated. Yes, no, yes, no . . . she said, “Uh, I don’t think so.”
    “Why not?”
    Don’t Do a Don’t. She said, “Because this is Cleary.”
    He nodded and said, “Got it.”
    “Good luck, Pellam.” She walked to the coffee shop.
    “Uhm, one thing . . . All I’m interested in is lunch. Nothing more or less than that.”
    Meg lifted her hands and dropped them to her sides with faint slaps. “You maybe have the most honorable intentions in the world . . .” She paused, and for a millisecond tried to read his face for his reaction to this. She couldn’t tell. She added, “But Cleary’s still Cleary.”
    “Suppose that doesn’t change.”
    “Not in your life or mine,” she said and walked into the diner. The screen door snapped shut with a wooden slam.
    M&T PHARMACEUTICAL WAS a one-story cinder block square outside of Cleary. Prefab. It was surrounded by a gravel parking lot, in which sat thirty or forty cars—a lot of old ones, Torinos and Novas, as well as newer Japanese imports. And, Pellam noticed, pickup trucks galore—many of them with back windows smeared from the noses of excited hunting dogs.
    Near the main entrance were several marked parking places. Mr. Torrens was the first. Beside it was an empty space with a sign that had been painted over. It was probably the spot reserved for Keith’s late partner. This had been L.A., Pellam thought cynically, that space would have been appropriated five minutes after the funeral.
    It was late afternoon, dusky, and just as he eased the Winnebago into two of the visitor’s slots, a sodium vapor light on a pole in the middle of the parking lot came on. He walked past the company sign, a swirling design of an M and a T, backlit.
    A young receptionist, hair shooting up in a frothy tease, smiled and shoved the Juicy Fruit into the corner of her cheek.
    “Hello, Darla,” Pellam said, reading the name off her gold-plate