Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 10, October 1990

That Lincolnesque figure hesitated only long enough to glare at two of them as they started to follow. He, like Beckett, would have his five minutes alone with the corpse and remember slower, happier days.

Spocker, saved from being mistaken for a balding, gray-suited, slightly overweight businessman by the gold lieutenant’s badge clipped to his breast pocket, held up a blue-bordered plastic I.D. card.

“Nothing in his pockets except this, Hoke.”

The man was younger in the photo. His name was Cyrus Nelson. The company logo was a large M, a smaller T tucked under the v of the M.

“Meridian Technology. Three miles down the road,” said Spocker. “Can’t figure if it was overlooked or left behind so that we could identify him. Not that we needed it. We have his car.” He motioned toward a late-model dark blue Olds Cutlass. “Since he worked for MT, he lived around here, so why did he check into a motel room at ten in the morning as Peter Cornwall of New York?”

Punctuated now and then by the deafening roar of a straining semi, the rubbery whir of the cars passing on the highway was unending, high midday sun flashing from sloped rear windows as they entered a slight curve beyond the one story motel. It was one of a low budget, no frills chain which had no intention of competing with the towering Holiday Inn next door, catering instead to touring families stretching dollars and a host of sales reps making calls on the high tech firms in the new industrial parks in the area, a place to freshen up when they arrived and make phone calls from at the end of the day, and an opportunity to pad expense accounts.

“Who are you giving this to?” asked Beckett looking around.

Spocker seemed a little angry. “I’m taking this myself.”

Understandable, thought Beckett. No matter how well it was explained away, the story would always leave one thought with a great many hearers: Undressed, wasn’t he? Hah. Who do you think he was meeting there? His wife? The impression would never be completely eradicated, and to Spocker, destroying a man’s reputation was on the same level as killing him.

“People are in and out of this place like K-Mart during a sale,” said Spocker, “so I’m leaving Gina Dalmaccio here to make sure we don’t miss anyone while she checks out tag numbers—”

Beckett lifted a hand. “Tell me later. Tolley and I have a council budget meeting in half an hour.”

At two in the morning, the Municipal Building would have been a leisurely fifteen minutes away. At this hour, only the rotating light on his car roof would get him past the traffic piled up at each intersection in time. One day, he thought, we’re going to have a traffic jam that will spawn a hundred thousand T-shirts lettered “I survived the Great Meridian County Gridlock.”

Tolley was now called Chief of County Police Services. For a change, he was presenting his case to the county commissioners without raising his voice, getting red in the face, or waving his arms too much. His hair was grayer, his eyebrows shaggier, and he always ended his conversations with Beckett with, “One more year, Hoke, and I’m gone.”

The politicians had chortled as they considered the expanded tax base, but they’d ignored the costs — jammed roads and thinned-out services as the lush farm fields became asphalt plots and meadows sprouted condominiums and houses for the people who worked in the buildings on the asphalt plots, all constructed of dark brown brick with tinted windows in a conspiracy of bad taste and speedy construction that extended to the shopping malls. Enormous, undistinguished, windowless piles of brick plopped down in the center of enormous parking areas studded with grass islands where only weeds grew and saplings fell victim to teenage expressionism — yet none of it as bad as the businesses like the motels, restaurants, and car dealerships lining the highways.

Meridian County, once green and peaceful, was now a great deal less green, and peaceful no longer. Many of the birds were gone, along with the small animals — and a growing number of the large ones called humans who had originally moved here to escape what was now engulfing them. Like Crystal Carpenter, the retired diva, who had watched as bulldozers flattened the hilltop across the small valley.

I’m out of here, Hoke. Damned if I’ll spend my declining years looking at the rear of ugly brick buildings, screened by shrubbery or not. I’ll know they’re there. One last drink together, and come visit me because I’m surely not coming back to visit you.