“You got your swing straightened out?” John Stonefield said darkly.
“Haven’t made it out to the course since last Father’s Day. But I’ve been visualizing a good stroke. They say that works.”
John and Ebenezer exchanged a brief poker-faced look and concentrated for a moment on their pipe-stoking and -lighting efforts. This was to say that they both understood Clyde had paid them the compliment of starting to bullshit them.
“Does it work to get you elected?” Ebenezer said.
After this John and Ebenezer became even more reticent than usual, apparently on the theory that, whatever they had to say to Clyde, they could say on Sunday when they weren’t berating him over his poor golf game. Sensing the shift in mood, Terry and Clyde drew away from them, moving back toward the center of things.
Clyde sensed that there were a great many people who were eager to step forward and shake Terry’s hand, but who were restraining themselves forcibly lest they interrupt some high-level impromptu strategy session involving the inner workings of the sheriff campaign. Clyde, never the sort to inconvenience any such people, decided he would get to his point as quickly as he knew how.
“I was down at the jail yesterday,” Clyde said.
“The jail? What were you doing there?” Terry said sharply.
“Working,” Clyde said.
Terry looked mildly irritated. “Oh, yeah. Of course.”
Clyde hated working at the jail and knew that Sheriff Mullowney had been giving him lots of jail duty just to harass him, but Ebenezer had taught him not to whine. So he skipped over that part. “I was talking to Mark Becker.”
“Who’s Mark Becker?” Terry said, suddenly intrigued at the prospect of adding a new name to his mental Rolodex of behind-the-scenes movers and shakers.
“One of the prisoners,” Clyde said.
Terry screwed up his face with disgust and looked away. When he turned back, he was wearing an expression of patient, fatherly disappointment. “Now, why are you talking to people like that?”
“When I’m on jail duty,” Clyde said defensively, “I can’t help but talk to ’em. Mostly they talk to me, though.” Jail talk made high-school locker-room talk sound like an episode of Firing Line. “Anyway, Mark said he was on West Lincoln Way picking up litter as part of his community service—”
“Wait a minute, Clyde. Get the story straight. Why was he in jail if he’d already been sentenced to community service?”
“Community service was last week. For a previous infraction. Then I arrested him for disorderly a couple of nights ago. He’ll probably get jail time for that.”
“Oh, I see. So Mark Becker is a career criminal!” Terry said, outraged.
“That’s giving him too much credit,” Clyde said. “If I told Mark Becker he had a career, he’d probably stop being a criminal and do something else.”
“So what did Mark Becker have to say to you, Clyde?” Terry said, looking around significantly at all the people who wanted to bust in on the conversation, somehow giving each one of them a warm smile and a bit of eye contact. This unnerved Clyde, and so he let it all out in a rush.
“He was saying that fifty percent of the litter he picked up on Lincoln Way was ‘Vote Banks’ bumper stickers. He said he picked up bags of ’em.”
“Sounds like a box fell off a truck somewheres,” Terry Stonefield said.
“No, these were used. The backing had been peeled off. These were stickers I had handed out at church, around the neighborhood and so on, and people had put them on their cars and they fell off when it rained last week.”
Terry Stonefield considered this for a moment, then laughed nervously. He got an amused look on his face, and Clyde could sense that he was about to make light of the situation. Clyde realized it was time to pull out his ace in the hole, let go with his cri de coeur.
“Mark Becker told me,” Clyde said, “that he saw a dust devil moving down the median strip of Lincoln Way made up of Clyde Banks bumper stickers.”
Terry suddenly turned on his Serious Look. He stepped closer to Clyde. “Clyde, did you just try giving Razorback Media a call?”
“Their phone’s disconnected,” Clyde said. “Little Rock Triple-B says they skipped out on their lease.”
Terry mulled this one over and pulled at his face. “How’d you pay for those darn stickers?”
“Desiree’s credit card.”
Terry brightened. “That a First National Bank of NishWap credit card by any chance?”
“Sure is.”
“Well, there you go. They got a policy.”
“Policy?”