The End of the Pier by Martha Grimes

official. Sedgewick told him it damned well wasn’t, and maybe he could have a word with Carl Butts, but not if he was going to harass that poor man. Boy Chalmers was in the county jail, with his next stop the state prison. Appeal turned down; case closed and neatly tied up. The discussion of the two murders was casual, what with the sheriff dividing his time between his beer and Tater; he’d reach for her thigh, growl, and look lecherous as she passed by, giggling. Sedgewick was a lecher; indeed, Sam wondered if the talk about Sedgewick and Tony Perry had anything to do with the sheriff’s vehemence in wanting so much to claim that first murder.
    Right now, the sheriff was happy enough to go one step further and be helpful by telling Sam that Butts was probably home because he’d seen him in town that morning. He drove his rig four days and got off three.
    â€œAnd don’t you go harassing that man—he’s bought his share of trouble and grief.”
    â€¢Â Â â€¢Â Â â€¢
    The only thing Carl Butts had bought that Sam could see was three cases of Bud tallboys and a half-gallon of Jack Daniel’s.
    Sam knocked on the trailer’s storm door, still with the summerscreen insert in it. That autumn, Sam remembered, had been especially chill, the air musky with the smell of leaves someone was burning illegally on the other side of the dank river that narrowed between its high banks as it slid through the trailer park grounds as if trying to shoulder off the debris: rusty tin cans and bread wrappers and empty plastic detergent bottles. The sheriff’s office had served the trailer park’s owner, Nicholas L’Amour, with several warrants, demanding he improve the conditions. But the L’Amour Trailer Haven (its dirty buff sign decorated with hearts filled in with information about lot size, price, and amenities—kiddies’ playground, for example, that no kiddies went near; sauna in a lean-to where you could see through the boards) never saw any improvements; money was changing hands, but not between the owner and the grounds keeper.
    Carl Butts, though he didn’t leave his chair, was a man of probably only medium height, but squarely built: square jaw set on thick neck, square shoulders and torso—the type of man that put you in mind of a trash compactor, pressed down hard and heavy inside, a lot more than meets the eye.
    Sam guessed it was a lot less, the way he stayed glued in the TV chair, the tube of flesh beginning to overshadow the belt, and the rather whiny voice that called to someone in the dark environs to get the door. He was sitting almost within arm’s reach of it himself, but the person who came to it was a woman. It must have been from her that Butts got his sweetheart looks and general ebullience. She had narrow eyes and a mouth like a mail slot—thin, squared off, and with a way of clamping down on words. Sam wondered idly, as he answered the question as to what his business was here, if Grant Wood had made his first pit stop here at the L’Amour Trailer Haven; Mother Butts was right out of American Gothic. Finally, she let him in, and then quickly reclaimed her seat before the TV, as if Sam might steal it.
    Butts looked up briefly from the soap they were watching,grunted out something about his day off, and returned his eyes to the screen. Neither of them asked Sam to have a chair; both of them wore equally puzzled looks, prompted by a witless dialogue between two interns and the open-mouthed, wide-eyed expressions of two nurses (meant, probably, to register shock, but managing only to look stupid). The Buttses were as intent on figuring this out as if it were the Idea of Order at General Hospital, an intellectual puzzle capable of being patched together only by a roomful of Harvard professors.
    Sam folded his arms and watched for a minute. He’d seen bits and pieces of this one; it was Florence’s favorite. He started