Watchers

it’ll let me be Hyatt and stay out of my way.”
    Lem stared at him a long time. Then: “Yeah, if they’re smart, I think they’ll do just that.”
     
     
    Later that same day, as Jim Keene was cooking dinner, his phone rang. It was Garrison Dilworth, whom he had never met but had gotten to know
    during the past week by acting as liaison between the attorney and Travis and Nora. Garrison was calling from a pay phone in Santa Barbara.
    “They show up yet?” the attorney asked.
    “Early this afternoon,” Jim said. “That Tommy Essenby must be a good kid.”
    “Not bad, really. But he didn’t come to see me and warn me out of the goodness of his heart. He’s in rebellion against authority. When they pressured him into admitting that I made the call from his house that night, he resented them. As inevitably as billy goats ram their heads into board fences, Tommy came straight to me.”
    “They took away The Outsider.”
    “What about the dog?”
    “Travis said he wouldn’t show them where the grave was. Made them believe that he’d kick a lot of ass and pull down the whole temple on everyone's heads if they pushed him.”
    “How’s Nora?” Dilworth asked.
    “She won’t lose the baby.”
    “Thank God. That must be a great comfort.”
     
     
2
    Eight months later, on the big Labor Day weekend in September, the Johnson and Gaines families got together for a barbecue at the sheriffs house. They played bridge most of the afternoon. Lem and Karen won more often than they lost, which was unusual these days, because Lem no longer approached the game with the fanatical need to win that had once been his Style.
    He had left the NSA in June. Since then, he had been living on the income from the money he had long ago inherited from his father. By next spring, he expected to settle on a new line of work, a small business of some kind, in which he would be his own boss, able to set his own hours.
    Late in the afternoon, while their wives made salads in the kitchen, Lem and Walt stood out on the patio, tending to the steaks on the barbecue.
    “So you’re still known at the Agency as the man who screwed up the Banodyne crisis?”
    “That’s how I’ll be known until time immemorial.”
    “Still get a pension though,” Walt said.
    “Well, I did put in twenty-three years.”
    “Doesn’t seem right, though, that a man could screw up the biggest case Of the century and stilt walk away, at forty-six, with a full pension.”
    “Three-quarter pension.”
    Walt breathed deeply of the fragrant smoke rising off the charring steaks. Still. What is our country coming to? In less liberal times, screwups like you Would have been flogged and put in the stocks, at least.” He took another
    deep whiff of the steaks and said, “Tell me again about that moment in their kitchen.”
    Lem had told it a hundred times, but Walt never got tired of hearing it again. “Well, the place was neat as a pin. Everything gleamed. And both Cornell and his wife are neat about themselves, too. They’re well-groomed, well-scrubbed people. So they tell me the dog’s been dead two weeks, dead and buried. Cornell throws this angry fit, hauls me out of my chair by my shirt, and glares at me like maybe he’s going to rip my head off. When he lets go of me, I straighten my tie, smooth my shirt . . . and I look down at my pants, sort of out of habit, and I notice these golden hairs. Dog hairs. Retriever hairs, sure as hell. Now could it have been that these neat people, especially trying to fill their empty days and take their minds off their tragedy, didn’t find the time to clean the house in more than two weeks?”
    “Hairs were just all over your pants,” Walt said.
    “A hundred hairs.”
    “Like the dog had just been sitting there minutes before you came in.”
    “Like, if I’d been two minutes sooner, I’d have set right down on the dog himself.”
    Walt turned the steaks on the barbecue. “You’re a pretty observant man, Lem, which ought to’ve taken you far in the line of work you were in. I just don’t understand how, with all your talents, you managed to screw up the Banodyne case so thoroughly.”
    They both laughed, as they always did.
    “Just luck, I guess,” Lem said, which was what he always said, and he laughed again.
     
     
3
    When James Garrison Hyatt celebrated his third birthday on June 28, his mother was pregnant with his first sibling, who eventually became his sister.
    They threw a party at the