Sergeant Everett Whalen emerged from the lockup into the ivory-painted cinderblock-walled corridor outside the lieutenant's office before Merrion finished removing his supply of bail forms from his beaten-up tan leather briefcase and getting himself settled at the bare old wooden desk against the wall. "Amby, how they hangin'," he said. It was not an inquiry; Whalen walked soundlessly in his crepe-soled black uniform shoes and spoke as a courtesy, so that Merrion would not be startled to turn and find him standing there.
"Ah, two inna bunch, Ev, same as always," Merrion said absently, without looking at him, flopping the sheaf of multi copy bail forms onto the desk, the top copy, white, blocked off and printed in rust-colored ink. He snapped the briefcase shut and tossed it onto the top of the desk against the wall, turning to face Whalen and resting his buttocks on the edge of the desk so that his left foot touched the floor and his right foot dangled above it. "Our happy campers ready?"
Thompson'll start bringin' 'em out to see you in a couple minutes,"
Whalen said. He stood slumped with his hands in his pockets. In his late forties he had prematurely acquired the sallow skin, the shameful little paunch and the doleful, dismayed look of a careless man nearing sixty and discovering that the penalties of failure to eat properly, get sufficient exercise and moderate his intake of alcohol plenty of cheap beer, generic six-packs, in Ev's case are just about as disagreeable as medically predicted. He looked as though he had realized some time ago what was going to happen to him, sooner than it should, and had resigned himself to it. The dismissive scuttlebutt that Merrion indifferently remembered from a casual courthouse conversation was that Ev Whalen never had any good luck at all.
Apparently well before he'd been close to old enough to have learned very much about women or know anything at all about marriage, he'd made the bad mistake of marrying a somewhat older woman who'd had her heart set on having a husband and had pretty much settled for him as the best she was going to get. She had borne him two children, but then after those experiences and some further consideration decided that on the whole she wished she hadn't married him. While she still believed he had probably been the best she could ever have done, he didn't make much money; he bored her, and she didn't like him very much.
One night with four rum-and-Cokes in her she had disconsolately given him that news, confessing her realization that she would have been better off alone. Staggered, he said he wished she were. In his bleak grief he told her since she felt that way to get out of his house and he would raise the kids himself. She said she would like to do that and appreciated his offer, but they both knew he couldn't do it alone, not the way things had become. They were stuck with each other, fused by a bad event that wouldn't've happened if she hadn't grown impatient and they hadn't gotten together.
Merrion wasn't exactly sure what it had been. One of the children had some kind of serious disability, caused either by a birth defect that she could have prevented with better prenatal care or more prudent behavior, or else by a very bad accident during infancy. The calamity had occurred while Everett and his wife were still fairly young, ruining whatever slim chance they, with little else to hope for, had ever had of at least moving up a notch or two in the world on a policeman's pay.
When no-end-in-sight expenses threatened to destroy them, some of their friends and neighbors organized a ten-kilometer fund-raising walk around the Cumberland Reservoir. Disc jockeys at WMAS in Chicopee exhorted listeners to volunteer and sell sponsorships of themselves to relatives and friends for contributions of a buck per kilometer to 'this very worthy cause." The week before the 10K walk, volunteers impeded shoppers leaving stores and markets at the local strip-malls by stepping into their paths and shaking white cardboard metal-bottomed canisters containing coins in their faces, demanding that they "Please Help the Whalen Family." Friends and neighbors staged a couple of dinner-dances at the VFW Hall in Hampton Pond, "Benefit of the Whalen Fund." They charged couples $25 per ticket for access to a cash bar and Music By The Muscle-Tones, a four-piece amateur Sixties Oldies band formed by two firemen, a high-school teacher and a lab technician who worked out together at the Canterbury Spa and Health Club, playing and singing together for the bright-eyed pleasure that it gave them.
