Bensenhaver felt better with lots of open space around him. His first employment had been the nighttime beat in a squad car, cruising old Route 2 between Sandusky and Toledo. In the summers it was a road speckled with beer joints and little homemade signs promising BOWLING! POOL! SMOKED FISH! and LIVE BAIT! And Arden Bensenhaver would drive slowly over Sandusky Bay and along Lake Erie to Toledo, waiting for the drunken carfuls of teen-agers and fishermen to play chicken with him on that unlit, two-lane road. Later, when he was the police superintendent of Toledo, Bensenhaver would be driven, in the daytime, over that harmless stretch of road. The bait shops and beer palaces and fast-food services looked so exposed in the daylight. It was like watching a once-feared bully strip down for a fight; you saw the thick neck, the dense chest, the wrist-less arms--and then, when the last shirt was off, you saw the sad, helpless paunch.
Arden Bensenhaver hated the night. Bensenhaver's big plea with the city government of Toledo had been for better lighting on Saturday nights. Toledo was a workingman's city, and Bensenhaver believed that if the city could afford to light itself, brightly, on Saturday night, half the gashings and maimings--the general bodily abusings--would stop. But Toledo had thought the idea was dim. Toledo was as unimpressed with Arden Bensenhaver's ideas as it was questioning of his methods.
Now Bensenhaver relaxed in all this open country. He had a perspective on the dangerous world that he always wanted to have: he was circling the flat, open land in a helicopter--above it all, the detached overseer observing his contained, well-lit kingdom. The county deputy said to him, "There's only one truck around here that's turquoise. It's those damn Raths."
"Raths?" Bensenhaver asked.
"There's a whole family of them," the deputy said. "I hate going out there."
"Why?" Bensenhaver asked; below him, he watched the shadow of the helicopter cross a creek, cross a road, move alongside a field of corn and a field of soybeans.
"They're all weird," the deputy said. Bensenhaver looked at him--a young man, puffy-faced and small-eyed, but pleasant; his long hair hung in a hunk under his tight hat, almost touching his shoulders. Bensenhaver thought of all the football players who wore their hair spilling out under their helmets. They could braid it, some of them, he thought. Now even lawmen looked like this. He was glad he was retiring soon; he couldn't understand why so many people wanted to look the way they did.
"'Weird'?" said Bensenhaver. Their language was all the same, too, he thought. They used just four or five words for almost everything.
"Well, I got a complaint about the younger one just last week," the deputy said. Bensenhaver noted this casual use of "I"--as in "I got a complaint"--when in fact Bensenhaver knew that the sheriff, or his office, would have received the complaint, and that the sheriff probably thought it was simple enough to send this young deputy out on it. But why did they give me such a young one for this? Bensenhaver wondered.
"The youngest brother's name is Oren," the deputy said. "They all have weird names, too."
"What was the complaint?" Bensenhaver asked; his eyes followed a long dirt driveway to what appeared to be a random dropping of barns and outbuildings, one of which he knew was the main farmhouse, where the people lived. But Arden Bensenhaver couldn't tell which one that might be. To him, all the buildings looked vaguely unfit for animals.
"Well," the deputy said, "this kid Oren was screwing around with someone's dog."
"'Screwing around'?" Bensenhaver asked patiently. That could mean anything, he thought.
"Well," the deputy said, "the people whose dog it was thought that Oren was trying to fuck it."
"Was he?" Bensenhaver asked.
"Probably," the deputy said, "but I couldn't tell anything. When I got there, Oren wasn't around--and the dog looked all right. I mean, how could I tell if the dog had been fucked?"
"Should've asked it!" said the copter pilot--a kid, Bensenhaver realized, even younger than the deputy. Even the deputy looked at him with contempt.
"One of these half-wits the National Guard gives us," the deputy whispered to Bensenhaver, but Bensenhaver had spotted the turquoise truck. It was parked out in the open, alongside a low shed. No attempt had been made to conceal it.
In a long pen a tide of pigs surged this way and that, driven crazy by the hovering helicopter. Two lean men in overalls squatted over a pig that lay sprawled at the foot of a ramp to a barn. They looked up at the helicopter, shielding their faces from the stinging dirt.
"Not so close. Put it down over on the lawn," Bensenhaver told the pilot. "You're scaring the animals."
"I don't see Oren, or the old man," the deputy said. "There's more of them than those two."
"You ask those two where Oren is," Bensenhaver said. "I want to look at that truck."
The men obviously knew the deputy; they hardly watched him approach. But they watched Bensenhaver, in his dull dun-colored suit and tie, crossing the barnyard toward the turquoise pickup. Arden Bensenhaver didn't look at them, but he could see them just the same. They are morons, he thought. Bensenhaver had seen all kinds of bad men in Toledo--vicious men, unjustifiably angry men, dangerous men, cowardly and ballsy thieves, men who murdered for money, and men who murdered for sex. But Bensenhaver had not seen quite such benign corruption as he thought he saw on the faces of Weldon and Raspberry Rath. It gave him a chill. He thought he'd better find Mrs. Standish, quickly.
He didn't know what he was looking for when he opened the door of the turquoise pickup, but Arden Bensenhaver knew how to look for unknowns. He saw it immediately--it was easy: the slashed bra, a piece of it still tied to the hinge of the glove-compartment door; the other two pieces were on the floor. There was no blood; the bra was a soft, natural beige; very classy, Arden Bensenhaver thought. He had no style himself, but he'd seen dead people of all kinds, and he could recognize something of a person's style in the clothes. He put the pieces of the silky bra into one hand; then he put both hands into the floppy, stretched pockets of his suit jacket and started across the yard toward the deputy, who was talking to the Rath brothers.
"They haven't seen the kid all day," the deputy told Bensenhaver. "They say Oren sometimes stays away overnight."
"Ask them who's the last one who drove that truck," Bensenhaver said to the deputy; he wouldn't look at the Raths; he treated them as if they couldn't possibly understand him, directly.
"I already asked them that," the deputy said. "They say they don't remember."
"Ask them when's the last time a pretty young woman rode in that truck," Bensenhaver said, but the deputy didn't have time; Weldon Rath laughed. Bensenhaver felt grateful that the one wi
th the blotch on his face, like a wine spill, had kept quiet.
"Shit," Weldon said. "There's no 'pretty young woman' around here, no pretty young woman ever sat her ass in that truck."