SUMMER of FEAR Read Online Free PDF Page B

first black. Clough got 150 years.
    More interestingly, Wald was made head of the Sheriff’s Reserve Units, a
position for which he would neither be paid nor deputized. He was given an
office on the same floor as the newly sainted Dan Winters, and the two men
crusaded to make the Reserve Units into potent allies of the professional
deputies. (The public ate up this idea, too: more law enforcement for the same
amount of money.) All of this reflected well on Jordan Clemens, a tough
politician whose years as elected sheriff would obviously not last forever.
    I watched these events from the uncomfortable position of junior
investigator, uncomfortable because I could hardly wait to abandon the
department ship in order to write and because my heart was still tender with
the tramplings it had received from parting with Amber Mae Wilson. Moreover, I
had met Wald on his late-day visits to the office of Dan Winters and had found
him—against the sum of all my efforts—both intimidating and likable.
    Physically, he was impressive, one of those tall and slender men whose
muscles knotted effortlessly with the most casual movements. He was handsome
and knew it, but he played off it in an apparently unselfconscious way that the
television cameras loved. His face was wide and boyish, with laugh wrinkles
parenthesizing a mouth that was quick to smile. His hair was a curly golden mop
that he managed to keep rather longish but still trimmed, a perfect compromise
between academic eccentricity and Sheriff's Department conservatism. He was rumored
to hold a black belt in a particularly difficult Chinese-Philippine martial art
and to be a collector of antique weapons. Most impressive of all was his mind,
however, which was possessed of a nonchalant sharpness that left most
people—myself included—eternally off balance. He could be outrageously charming
and mortally offensive, all in the same sentence. One more quality about Wald
struck me in those early years— namely, his willingness to offer confidences and
to receive them in return. I had never met a man in whom the illusion of trustworthiness
had been so deeply and convincingly cultivated. For that specific reason, I did
not choose to trust him. So, when Amber Mae began asking me about this
"handsome crime-buster type," I was unsurprised, if somewhat angered.
I was still not fully adjusted to the idea of being a used person.
    What sat most disagreeably upon my opinion of Erik Wald, though, was the
simple fact that he had applied to the Sheriff’s Academy three times and been
rejected each. This was common knowledge in the department and had even been
written after in the first feature articles regarding Wald's unconventional
help in identifying Cary Clough. Wald suffered from mitral-valve prolapse, a
leaking heart valve brought on by fever in his infancy. I was pleased that Wald
couldn't make the physical cut, though you certainly wouldn't have known it by
looking at him. His powers of compensation were magnificent. More important,
however, I was solidly resentful of the fact that he had risen to such
prominence with the Sheriff's without ever making grade to join it. I saw him
as some kind of immune diplomat, running stylish circles around myself and the
other rank-and-file deputies. And I will confess, too, that the wit and clarity
his dissertation language infuriated me. I envied him. I found ludicrous his
intimations of securing, someday, a paid position as undersheriff to Dan
Winters. His ego seemed to have no limit. I derived an arid comfort from realizing
that his insight into character of Cary Clough came at least in part from
kindred rumblings in his own thrice-rejected soul.
    Four years later, when I was working on Journey Up River, Wald
offered me some astonishing insight into the mind of the killer, who turned out
to be a forty-one-year-old part-time butcher (really) named Art Crump. Crump
was not yet a suspect at the time of my interviews with Erik. Upon Crump's
arrest, most