Window to Heaven

VI

Read: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V

A Truer Reflection

On the Interstate again and back into a world of neons and headlights, Hardin forcibly pulled himself out of the dark mood. This, in all probability, was going to be his only chance to get any kind of answer from the girl. The right tack just might elicit a bit of truth from Officer R. Model.

“It’s just us, Officer. The two of us alone. You can say why.”

“I don’t engage in conversations with criminals.”

Wrong again. He had to do better, but still, first lie. That’s exactly what a good officer did, cozy up to criminals to get them to admit more than they should. Something in her tone suggested she still fought with the shock of seeing another human being hurt by her intentional action.

He didn’t let off the pressure. “You knew my truck, and you knew exactly who it was you were stopping. Why?”

“You’re drunk. You haven’t even bothered to deny it.”

“You didn’t know that when you stopped me.”

“Is that an admission?”

“That’s locked solid. The blood test will show what it shows.”

He almost blurted that Miranda didn’t apply to misdemeanors. Drunk driving was misdemeanor. An admission from him counted for as much in front of a judge as physical proof. To let her realize he understood that would remove her motivation to talk.

Whereas assault was a felony requiring a Miranda warning if she intended to use anything he said. She would excuse her decision not to give him the warning by describing the assault as self-evident.

An admission he had been drinking might be enough to lock in the charge of possessing a weapon when intoxicated when the blood test didn’t show him past the allowed legal limit — or so she would be likely to think, being new. No actual law existed in Virginia making it a chargeable offense to be both drunk and armed, an obscure enough point that a new officer, even one with a law degree, might not know of it.

A subtle over-correction in her steering in the next turn told him she had assumed that the truth and gravity of her charges would cover any shaky or unclear probable cause leading to the stop, and she had just now considered the possibility they might not.

“But you still haven’t explained your unusual interest in me.”

“You’re dirty.” The venom in her voice chilled him.

“And low and old. But I suspect you’ve seized on some detail that’s eluded me. Why don’t you tell me what you imagine I’ve done that you find of interest?”

“The evidence. You disappear for years and show up with unexplained wealth — and everybody and I mean everybody — is afraid of you, all of the other officers, the sheriff included.” She hit the accelerator hard in her anger; coming out of the curve, the rear end fishtailed a bit.

This was new. Dead new. And it hurt. Was he a criminal?

Off balance, he didn’t have a worked out opinion. He did his best to avoiding revealing that he covered like a boxer who had taken too many gut punches, one who knew that if he couldn’t protect himself in the next few seconds, he wasn’t going to survive.

“And you’re not?”

“No, I think I just proved you’re not as hard to take down as everybody believes.”

The flush of fresh confidence rolled off her, an ancient lesson learned anew, that any man, no matter how proud, no matter how confident, could, with the right well-placed blow, be put in the dirt. It was an ugly realization to watch slowly dawning in the young. It kind of put the lie to the hope the old wanted to hold for the young.

Her simple answer: the flat confirmation of the righteous. She had studied him, tracked him, when he was home, when he wasn’t. During those times when he was on his land, he might not go out at night for weeks, other than to run these roads that were the fastest connection from some parts of the farm to the next. For her to know that and spend the hours waiting for his impulse to leave the house at night or return from a trip showed an upsetting degree of deliberation.

If he thought about it, the local law enforcement officers did show a natural reluctance to catch the attention of the wealthy, which if it was only the way of the world and true everywhere, still rubbed this young officer the wrong way, as it would have him were he in her position. She would have been bullied unmercifully by the senior deputies, and this was her way of showing that she wouldn’t be intimidated — showing them at his expense.

But none of this quite made sense. Regardless of what she thought about him, she’d never be able to sit out here for hours on the rare chance he might come by when she was supposed to be on the Interstate enforcing Section 42 motor vehicle violations. His housekeeper questioned him hard about when he was going to be gone, knowing he liked emptiness and quiet, and he often went hours or days without the most casual exchange from anyone. When he was gone, she had the weed eaters and the lawnmowers and the housekeeping staff working to intensity.

It’d be a simple matter for this deputy to have one of the young men from his lawn keeping service give her a call that he was expected. A simple whiff of perfume and those old boys would roll over on him without realizing they were doing it. And who didn’t have a drink or two when they had an evening on the town? He didn’t, but R. Model had no way of knowing that.

He had to keep her talking.

“I’m going to tell you one thing, young lady, and I hope you have the sense to listen before you go down a road you really don’t want to go down. I grew up with Sandy. I know him. I’ve seen him scared, and it doesn’t make any difference. He does what’s right.”

“You make my case. You even call the sheriff by his first name. He’ll try to stop me from going after you.”

“We grew up together. You’re too deep in the profile you’ve created of me to listen, but the strange thing is that I admire your insistence in doing what you believe is right despite the odds.”

“That’s just great. Just what I’ve been waiting all day to hear, a compliment from a criminal. Now shut the hell up.”

He did.

Was he dirty? Depended on how you looked at it. He’d met a number of legislators. He respected the power of the state, but he didn’t look to those people as examples of moral direction, although with a stroke of the pen they held the power to make him a felon. As it was, cross the state line in the wrong direction, and forget or refuse to drop the .45 she had taken from him, and he had committed a felony.

The instincts of this young woman could well be a truer reflection of what he was than the way he preferred to view himself. When absolutely examined, the working technicalities of the law made it an offense, sometimes a prison offense, not to submit your acts for the examination of the authorities. He was guilty of that plenty.

So what was he really? He respected the traditions of Blackstone, English Common Law, but they spoke of social order, the society of man. He had lived much in the wilderness, or on wild farmland that was way out there, on the edge, where morality was a touchier thing. Was there a right and wrong, a standard beyond live or die? He believed it existed. He didn’t necessarily consider himself the best example.

Continue reading part VII