It was also intriguing to think that you might one day abscond with the town treasury and go to live in Borneo, but it wasn’t likely to happen. Franklin brushed it all out of his mind and tugged at the top of the paper to get Lee’s attention. Lee was as young and hairy as Franklin was old and bald. When Lee put his paper down, his hair seemed to bristle and crackle with static electricity, and maybe to throw off sparks.
“Listen,” Franklin said, when he could finally see Lee’s face. “Don’t you think you should be out there doing something? Don’t you think you should at least be seeing to those camels?”
Lee smoothed the paper out against his desk. “I don’t like this one as much as I liked the last one,” he said, tapping his finger right on Gregor Demarkian’s oversized nose. “This one has too many rich people. The last one, that happened in a town just like this.”
“A town full of nuns and Catholics isn’t a town just like this,” Franklin said irritably. “And what about the camels? We can’t just leave them sitting in the middle of Main Street, causing a traffic hazard.”
“They’re not causing a traffic hazard,” Lee said reasonably. “Betty Heath called in and said they’d moved on to that open lot at the end of Carrow Street, and the only thing that’s causing a hazard now is what they left behind, and I don’t do that kind of work. I called Don Francis over to Clean-up and he said he’d send somebody out. You got a call from Benjy Warren.”
“Benjy Warren,” Franklin repeated. “Benjy” Warren preferred to be known as “Ben” Warren, now that he’d been all the way to Harvard Law School and back again, but he was fighting a losing battle and he knew it. He’d been Benjy in grammar school and Benjy in high school and Benjy when he’d come home for vacations from Bowdoin College, and he would go on being Benjy as long as he stayed in town. It didn’t help that he worked for a friend of his father’s, who had been calling him Benjy all his life and didn’t intend to stop. Franklin sometimes wondered about that. This friend of Benjy’s father’s was Camber Hartnell, until Benjy’s return the town’s only attorney and still the town’s most prominent son of a bitch. He wouldn’t have been Franklin’s first choice for a boss if Franklin had been the one with the degree from Harvard Law School.
Franklin leaned over Lee’s paper again. There was a second picture of Demarkian there, a smaller one, walking next to a small woman with a face as close to perfect as Elizabeth Taylor’s at twenty-five. Franklin knew that face—it popped up in stories about Demarkian all the time, and sometimes even in accounts of Demarkian’s cases—but he couldn’t remember the name. He wondered if Demarkian was sleeping with her. He supposed Demarkian had to be. All those people from Away hopped in and out of bed with each other all the time.
Franklin backed up a little and cleared his throat. “The thing is,” he said, “even if there isn’t anything to do, we ought to look like we’ve got something to do. For the papers.”
“Papers?”
“The Away papers,” Franklin said patiently. “I told you about this last year. The Away papers always send reporters, so do the television stations in Boston; they get people up here the first day and talk about the gala opening that isn’t so gala if you ask me. I was a tourist, I’d come in the second or third week when I could count on people knowing their lines. Never mind. The papers are going to be here, and we ought to look like we’ve got something to do.”
“Like what?”
“How the hell should I know like what? Like anything. Like fighting crime. That’s what we’re paid for. Fighting crime.”
“There isn’t any crime to fight,” Lee pointed out. “We’ll get some pickpockets later tonight when the crowds get thick. We catch a couple every year.”
“I know.”
“We’ll get some fifteen-year-old jerk trying to steal some Boston lady’s Ferrari,” Lee said, “and then he won’t be able to figure out how to get it out of the lots, and we’ll haul him in and yell at him for twenty minutes and send him home. If I’m guessing right that ought to be Hal Bonnard this year.”
“Hal Bonnard.” Franklin nodded. “Him or Joey Fay.”
“We’ll get six anonymous calls saying people are going at it in the bushes in the park, and the calls will all come from Dodie Fenner, and there won’t be a pair of squirrels necking by the time we get there. We’ll get Bill Varley calling in to say he’s seen a spaceship. We’ll get a lot of petty vandalism. This is Vermont, for Christ’s sake. You’ve been here long enough. You ought to know.”