I’d driven the crows away from the dead body by flinging my flashlight and a screwdriver at them. They took off in a great black circle, just long enough for me to look at the body and see that it had been a man, not a woman. After that I backed away as fast as I could through the dead corn. I didn’t call the sheriff until I reached the edge of the road.
The dog wouldn’t leave her vigil at the entrance to the field, despite my pleas and commands. While we waited for the law, I poured more water over her head and into her mouth. She tried to lick my arm, but fell asleep instead, lifting her head with a jerk when two squad cars pulled up. Two of the deputies, a young man and an older woman, followed the bent stalks of corn to the body. The third phoned headquarters for instructions: I was to go into town and explain myself to the sheriff.
“Oh no, get the crows off of him.” It was one of the deputies in the field. We heard them flailing among the stalks, trying to beat the crows away, but they finally fired some rounds. The crows rose again.
I asked the deputy to help me lift the dog into my car. “Even though the dead guy in the field might have given her some of these wounds, she won’t leave while he’s out there,” I said.
When the deputy came over, the dog curled her lip at him and growled.
The deputy backed away. “You should just shoot her, weak as she is and mean as she is.”
I was a hundred miles from home, the law here was a law unto itself and could make my life miserable. I needed to not lose my temper. “You could be right. In the meantime, she’s innocent until proven guilty. If you’ll take her back legs, I’ll get her around the neck so she can’t bite you.”
The dog struggled, but feebly. By the time we had her shifted into the back of my Mustang, the two other deputies lurched out of the field at a shambling run. They had both turned a greeny-gray beneath their sunburns.
“We gotta get a meat wagon out here while there’s still some of the body left for the ME,” the woman said, her voice thick. “Glenn, you call it in. I’m going—” She turned away from us and was sick in the ditch by the road. Her partner made it as far as their squad car before he threw up.
My deputy called back to headquarters. “Davilats here. Got us an 0110 . . . Don’t know who; I drew the long straw and didn’t have to see the body, but Jenny says the crows been doing a good job having dinner off of it.”
The voice at the other end told Jenny to guard the entrance to the field; I was to follow Officer Davilats back to the county seat. To my surprise and great gratitude, Sheriff Kossel didn’t keep me long. He had me stay while Davilats drove him to the cornfield. Once Kossel returned from viewing the body he demanded my credentials.
“Warshawski? You related to the auto-parts people?” he asked.
“No,” I said for perhaps the fifty thousandth time in my career. “They spell it with a ‘y.’ I’m related to I. V. Warshawski, the Yiddish writer.” I don’t know why I added that, since it wasn’t true.
Kossel grunted and asked what I was doing down here. I gave him some names in the Chicago PD who could vouch for me.
“I was sent down here to look for a woman named Judy Binder,” I explained when the sheriff had gotten Chicago’s opinion of me (“Honest but a pain in the ass,” I heard one of my references rumble). “I didn’t know she lived in a drug house, but I went through the place and didn’t see any trace of her. Was the dead guy the only person living there?”
Kossel grunted. “It’s a shifting population and we don’t know all their names. Every time we bust them it’s been a different crew. House stood empty after the old couple who farmed that land died, then one of the grandsons showed up, started holding open house with his buddies and their girlfriends. We closed down the operation three times, but you know, it’s not hard to buy the components and start up again. The gal, Judy you say? We’ve never picked her up. They don’t have a phone, landline, I mean. If she was calling for help she did it from a cell, or a pay phone. Looks to me like the thieves had a falling-out and she got away with her skin in the nick of time.”
“The house was really torn apart,” I said.
“Could be they did it themselves while they were high. Nearest neighbors are a quarter section off to the south, and they hear gunshots out of there every now and then. One time, those morons forgot to vent their ether and blew out some windows. Heard the explosion all the way over to Palfry, but when we went out to look they wouldn’t let us in. Between the drugs and the guns and the dogs, everyone in the county kept a distance. We only arrested them when they started selling their shit out by the high school. Why’d you say you were looking for this gal Judy?”
It was the third time he’d asked: a test, to see if putting the question abruptly, out of sequence, got him a different answer.
“She left a message on an answering machine saying someone wanted to kill her. I got a call asking me to find her; the address down here was the only one I could turn up.”