The Empty Chair

opened the door and climbed out.
    The driver’s eyes now shifted to the sideview mirror and continued to examine her clinically. They registered some surprise, noticing, she supposed, that she wasn’t in her uniform—just jeans and a work shirt—though she was wearing her weapon on her hip. What would an off-duty cop be doing pulling over a driver who hadn’t been speeding?
    Henry Davett rolled down his window.
    Lucy Kerr looked inside, past Davett. In the front passenger seat was a woman in her early fifties, with a dryness to her sprayed blond hair that suggested frequent beauty parlor shampoos. She wore diamonds on wrist, ears and chest. A teenage girl sat in the back, flipping through boxes of CDs, mentally enjoying the music that her father wouldn’t let her listen to on the Sabbath.
    “Officer Kerr,” Davett said, “what’s the problem?”
    But she could see in his eyes, now no longer in reflection, that he knew exactly what the problem was.
    And still they remained as guilt-free and in control as when he’d noticed the gyrations of the flashing lights on her Crown Victoria.
    Her anger tugged at its restraints and she snapped, “Get out of the car, Davett.”
    “Honey, what did you do?”
    “Officer, what’s the point of this?” Davett asked, sighing.
    “Out. Now.” Lucy reached inside and popped the door locks.
    “Can she do that, honey? Can she—”
    “Shut up, Edna.”
    “All right. I’m sorry.”
    Lucy swung the door open. Davett unsnapped his seat belt and stepped out onto the dusty shoulder.
    A semi sped past and wrapped its wake around them. Davett looked distastefully at the gray Carolina clay settling on his blue blazer. “My family and I are late for church and I don’t think—”
    She took him by the arm and pulled him off the shoulder, into the shade of wild rice and cattails; a small stream, a feeder to the Paquenoke, ran beside the road.
    He repeated with exasperation, “What is the point?”
    “I know everything.”
    “Do you, Officer Kerr? Do you know everything ? Which would be?”
    “The poison, the murders, the canal . . .”
    Davett said smoothly, “I never had a bit of direct contact with Jim Bell or anybody else in Tanner’s Corner. If there were some damn crazy fools on my payroll who hired some other damn crazy fools to do things that were illegal that’s not my fault. And if that happened I’ll be cooperating with the authorities one hundred percent.”
    Unfazed by his suave response she growled, “You’re going down with Bell and his brother-in-law.”
    “Of course I’m not. Nothing links me to a single crime. There’re no witnesses. No accounts, no money transfers, no evidence of any wrongdoing. I’m a manufacturer of petrochemical-based products—certain cleaners, asphalt and some pesticides.”
    “Illegal pesticides.”
    “Wrong,” he snapped. “The EPA still allows toxaphene to be used in some cases in the U.S. And it’s not illegal at all in most Third World countries. Do some reading, Deputy: without pesticides malaria and encephalitis and famine’d kill hundreds of thousands of people every year and—”
    “—and give the people who’re exposed to it cancer and birth defects and liver damage and—”
    Davett shrugged. “Show me the studies, Deputy Kerr. Show me the research that proves that.”
    “If it’s so fucking harmless then why did you stop shipping it by truck? Why did you start using barges?”
    “I couldn’t get it to port any other way—because some knee-jerk counties and towns’ve banned transportation of some substances they don’t know the facts about. And I didn’t have the time to hire lobbyists to change the laws.”
    “Well, I’ll bet the EPA’d be interested in what you’re doing here.”
    “Oh, please,” he scoffed. “The EPA? Send them out. I’ll give you their phone number. If they ever get around to visiting the factory they’ll find permissible levels of toxaphene everywhere around Tanner’s Corner.”
    “Maybe what’s in the water alone is at a permissible level, maybe what’s in the air alone, maybe the local produce alone. . . . But what about the combination of them? What about a child who drinks a glass of water from his parents’ well then plays in the grass then eats an apple from a local orchard then—”
    He shrugged. “The laws’re clear, Deputy Kerr. If you don’t like them write your congressman.”
    She grabbed him by the lapel. She raged, “You don’t