by Neil Mcmahon
All I could think of to say was, “Oh.”
I’d worry later about how Laurie had managed to hook up with Guy-Luc Marie DeBruyne.
“I gather that you set out to dispose of her husband,” he said.
“No, I backed off, I can prove it. I started thinking about—”
“Your reasons don’t concern me, Mr. Davoren. Neither does losing the enterprise, really. It was lucrative, but I have many others. To be truthful, I wouldn’t have entered into it except that Wesley Balcomb introduced me to Laurie, and arranged for the two of us to spend some delightful time together. She was very persuasive on his behalf.”
Did you ever meet him?
No.
“Anyway, what good is it to wail when the horse is out of the barn?” he said.
I winced.
“Look—sir,” I said. “I didn’t mean to interfere with you. I was just trying to save my skin.”
“Oh, I don’t bear you any ill will. My worry is strictly professional—that you may have talked about my connection to her husband. Especially since you’ve just had an interview with the police. It would draw undesirable attention, and that, I can’t allow.”
Business.
“No way I’d do that,” I said.
“Oddly enough, I was sure that was what you would tell me.”
“It’s true, I swear,” I lied, working to keep desperation out of my voice. “I’m suspected of murder, and I’m sweating blood trying to get the cops off my back. If I breathed a word about you, they’d be all over me. I didn’t even tell them I ever saw Laurie. I never heard your name. We’re not having this talk.”
We rounded a curve and I caught a glimpse of the city spread out like a carpet of buildings below, a long ways away and getting farther every second.
“What did happen to Balcomb, do you think?” he said.
“My best guess is it was the mule, Kirk. He disappeared, too. He’s the one I’m being blamed for. Probably he had some kind of grudge and came back to settle it.”
“Do you know where we could find him?”
“I don’t know anything about any of this. A few days ago I went to throw away a load of trash and next thing I knew, I was up to my neck in shit. Wait, sorry, I didn’t mean to be offensive.”
“Bouf. I spend a great deal of time in France, and there is no word more common than merde. Let me talk to Patrice again.”
I handed the phone to the gunman. He spoke, listened, and said something to the driver. The truck pulled off the road. Outside my door, the ground sloped steeply down into a brushy ravine.
My mind pointed out, with idiotic pedantry, another little irony. I had managed to barely evade disaster all along, mostly through luck. But I’d ignored one of the basic rules—to be careful what I wished for. I had conjured up imaginary heavies to mislead Gary Varna, and now they’d sprung to life and turned on me.
The gunman, Patrice, handed me back the phone.
“Well, Mr. Davoren, it’s been a pleasure talking with you,” DeBruyne said. “I’ll be saying good-bye now. But hold just a moment, you might want to thank Laurie. She assured me—again, very persuasively—that you can be trusted.”
The driver eased the truck through a cautious three-point turn and headed back toward town. Patrice lowered the pistol into his lap.
“I hope she’s correct,” DeBruyne said. “From what she tells me, you sound quite entertaining. I’d like to have a drink with you one day. Rather than to your memory.”
The phone felt like it had the weight of an anvil.
“Are you there?” Laurie said.
The sound of her voice burned right through me.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’m sorry I ran. I lost my nerve, alone in that motel. I called Guy-Luc. He sent a plane for me. I didn’t know those men would be on it.”
“It’s OK,” I said. I’d decided already that we were even, and maybe that I even owed her, for the persuading she’d done. “If you get questioned, you and I never saw each other. Your husband was acting scary, you took off, and that’s all you know.”
I listened to her breathing for a few more seconds.
“I really do care for you, Hugh,” she said. “I meant what I said about our kinship.”
The connection ended.
Goddamn me, I almost could have believed her.
The truck pulled up beside mine, right where they’d picked me up. I started to open the door, but the driver turned to look straight at me for the first time and, with one hand gesturing eloquently, growled a sentence. I could tell this was French, but it was too fast for me to catch. Along with his words came a blast of garlic I could almost taste. I stared back helplessly, wondering what final trap they were springing.
“He ask your pardon that we break your tire and not help to repair it,” Patrice translated. “Mais faut qu’on parte—we must go. You understand?”
I started nodding and kept on. “Yeah, sure. Don’t worry, I’ve done it a million times. Thanks, though.”
He tipped his hat, Old West style. The window rolled up. They drove away.
The bullet hole that had caused the flat was neatly centered in the treads—not surprisingly, a very professional job. I got the spare on in record time, in spite of my hands shaking and my head swiveling like a Ping-Pong ball in play. I just knew that the next thing coming down the pike would be Bill LaTray, leaping out of his rig and piling into me like a freight train.
When I finally drove through the gate to my cabin, the first thing that hit me was the lingering smell of the lumber that Laurie had burned.
SIXTY-FOUR
I called Bill’s Bail Bonds first thing, apologized to Bill for the trouble I’d caused him, and informed him that Gary Varna had cut me loose. He didn’t seem angry—considering what he dealt with routinely, this was no doubt a mosquito bite—and he told me I could come by any time to pick up my refund. I offered to pay a late fee, but he said forget it, and that he’d be glad to buy me a drink.
I took that to mean that I was still a potentially valuable client.
There were a few phone messages on my machine, and I started to check them, then stopped. I didn’t want any kind of news just now, good or bad—only to bask in the rapture of being back in my own place, with nobody trying to kill me. I was fried with fatigue but too wired to sleep. I started puttering around and trying to think about banal necessities like groceries, laundry, and a new used tire.
But I was uneasy, and after a few minutes, I couldn’t ignore that a bad switch had flipped in my head. The privacy I’d always loved up here felt like emptiness, and the solitude, a loneliness that almost amounted to dread.
It wasn’t because nobody else was around.
I knew it was temporary, just a function of the last couple of days’ madness. But I couldn’t get past the restlessness. I decided to take a shot at tying up one more loose end—following up my guess that Laurie had gotten her information about Celia from Beatrice Pettyjohn, Reuben’s wife. I drove back to town.
Reuben had moved Beatrice to the Pineview Assisted Living Facility after her Alzheimer’s disease got to be too much for him to handle. It was a nice new place out by the golf course. The woman at the admitting desk told me I was welcome to see Beatrice, but warned me that she got combative when something touched her off, and that this wasn’t uncommon. I asked if she had many visitors. Yes, the desk lady said, obviously proud of this connection to ranching royalty. Reuben stopped by often, other old friends came occasionally, and a new friend had come by several times over the past couple of months—Mrs. Wesley Balcomb.
A young woman attendant went with me to Beatrice’s private room. She was propped up in bed watching the Weather Channel on TV. Her formidable bearing had lessened—she’d become pale and thin. But she still had a sharpness in her eyes.
I hadn’t been at all sure that she’d recognize me, or understand who I was if she did. But the instant she saw me, it was clear that she knew at least one thing—sh
e didn’t like me any better now than before. I’d thought I might have to coax her into conversation, but she took the bit and ran with it.
“Oh, the way you looked at her,” she said witheringly. “You were the worst of them all.”
The attendant gave me a glance that was wary but maybe also interested.
Clearly, there was no point in formalities here, or in trying to persuade Beatrice contrary to what was set in her mind.
“What did you think when she first came back, Beatrice?” I said.
“I told her she didn’t have any more business here now than she ever did, and she could just turn around and leave again. That’s what.”
“But she didn’t. She started coming to see you here, right? What did you talk about—the old days at the ranch?”
Beatrice’s eyes took on a crafty look. “She asked about you plenty. So you’re finally getting what you wanted, is that it?”
“No,” I said, but it was futile—I had set her off. Her look changed again, this time to anger, and she struggled to get up out of bed, clenching one gnarled blue-veined hand into a fist and punching at me.
“Time for you to go—oh,” the attendant said, in a playful singsong tone.
I backed away with a hasty apology, and left the building. I got into my truck, but then just sat there, watching the few golfers still strolling the links.
I could see why Beatrice would have grabbed at the connection with Celia the first time she’d seen Laurie, like she’d done with me just now. If there was one thing that would stick in her addled mind, it would be the obsession about what had destroyed her family.
That mistaken identity must have triggered the first part of Laurie’s scheme. She’d then managed to pump Beatrice for information, maybe by overcoming the hostility and making friends, maybe by playing on fear—pretending that she’d come back from the dead to settle matters.
It didn’t make me feel any better to think I might have fallen for the same trick as a delusional elderly woman.
I knew that being objective about Beatrice was impossible for me. Even before Celia’s death, I hadn’t liked her any better than she’d liked me. I knew that was uncharitable, what with her illness. I knew, too, that she’d had good reason for disapproving of Celia’s attempt to work her way toward the Pettyjohn fortune in a time-honored, but not exactly honorable, fashion.
Still, to my mind, nothing justified the haughtiness that Beatrice had shown. In holding that Celia wasn’t good enough for Pete, she’d really meant not good enough for herself. That and her coldness toward her husband had added a lot of fuel to the engine of the disaster. A less arrogant and more generous woman would have accepted her son’s wishes in spite of her own feelings, or at least found a way to handle the situation without causing such grief.
In any event, learning about Laurie’s visits here pretty well satisfied me as the solution to the mystery of how she’d gotten her information—except for one thread still hanging that I couldn’t quite clip.
In the motel room, there’d been a few seconds when Laurie had seemed genuinely confused, and she’d said the words, “No to a horse, yes to a stallion.” At the time, I could only think she was suggesting that Celia really had been thrown and killed like the Pettyjohns had claimed.
But now I knew for a fact that Pete had done it, and I’d started to wonder if Laurie could have meant stallion in the sense of stud, and she’d been referring to Reuben—the dominant male—as the baby’s real father.
In all probability, she hadn’t meant anything at all—those were just words that had slipped out during her prattle to con me. If she had known, she must have learned it from Beatrice—although I wasn’t sure whether Beatrice had been aware of Reuben’s affair with Celia, or even that Celia was pregnant. That was the main thing I’d hoped to pry out of her, but I never would.
It was a quarter after three in the afternoon. I decided that as long as I was in town, I might as well pay one more call. I started the truck and headed for a flower shop.
SIXTY-FIVE
I walked into Sarah Lynn’s office at twenty minutes to four, carrying a dozen long-stemmed roses wrapped in green paper, along with an envelope containing the rest of the cash I still owed her. The place was quite a contrast to Gary Varna’s spartan digs—a corner room with big windows that let in a flood of light, walls of a delicate eggshell white that accentuated it, and a thick ecru carpet. The paintings and furnishings were very tasteful and very expensive.
She was sitting at her desk, wearing a deep blue dress that lit up her mane of tawny hair. She glanced at me, then turned right back to her computer screen, her fingers barely pausing at the keyboard.
“OK,” I said. “I just want to leave these, tell you I’m sorry, and I want to take you to dinner if you’ll ever talk to me again.”
She kept typing for a few more seconds, but then sighed and held out her hand to take the flowers.
“They’re beautiful, Huey,” she said, and raised them to her face and inhaled. “So what is this? Payoff? Buyout? Drag bet?”
“I don’t know what. But none of those.”
Her voice turned angry, and her eyes, hurt. “Where’ve you been? Why didn’t you call me, dammit?” My raw sense of unworthiness dug at me like a hair shirt around my heart.
“Things went from bad to worse,” I said.
Her eyes turned concerned. That was even harder to take.
“Are you still in trouble?” she said.
“A better class of trouble. I’m straightened out with Gary, at least for now.”
Sarah Lynn inhaled the flowers’ scent again, watching me over their blossoms like a geisha with a fan.
“I’d love to have dinner with you,” she said. “But I’m not going to be your fallback squeeze.”
“That’s not what I’m trying to do, Slo. It’s—” I groped for words.
Then, abruptly, I was slammed by the exhaustion that had been hovering over me. I started to sag, and I had to physically brace myself back up. I felt like I could have collapsed into a puddle on the floor.
“It’s not like that,” I finished lamely. “I’m wiped out. I’ve got to go. I’ll call you. I will.”
“You better,” she said, but she smiled. She lowered the flowers, inviting a quick kiss. I gave it to her, torn between shame and happiness. Then I stumbled out.
Helena’s little rush hour was gathering steam, and I forced myself to concentrate on the traffic. But as it thinned, my feelings began to surface as fatigue-dulled thoughts, centering on whether Sarah Lynn and I might have another chance.
She was everything that Laurie wasn’t. I still loved her in some way—not with the consuming passion of our youth, but with a deep, comfortable affection—and I was sure she felt the same. I wouldn’t be much of a catch for her, but I was warm and breathing, and I wouldn’t beat her up or steal her money and head to the casinos. She could probably even dress me up and take me out once in a while. From my side, I’d never come close to another woman who was simply so good, or to the satisfying life she had to offer. We had our differences, but they were far from insurmountable. And that young man who’d walked away from her was long gone.
Yet just in these past few days, something fundamental had changed for me and my life. I couldn’t get hold of it, but I was already pretty sure that no amount of effort or good sense was going to turn me back toward being the kind of man that she needed and deserved.
When I got home, I fired up the woodstove and dug my last can of corned beef hash out of the cupboard. While it fried, I drank a beer and a couple of splashes of Old Taylor bourbon. I sat on the steps to eat, and drank another couple of shots as the day faded toward dusk.
Then, at last, I slept a real sleep.
SIXTY-SIX
The next day was another of those autumn beauties, with the air clear and crisp and the sky almost shockingly blue. There wouldn’t be many more of them this year. In the afternoon, after making sure nobody was keeping tabs on me,
I fired up the Victor and rode into the Belts behind my place.
I had slept in a near coma from yesterday evening until this morning, getting up once to stumble outside and take a leak, then collapsing again. For the first few hours after waking, I’d wandered around in a stupor. But finally my mind had cleared and I’d started thinking about practicalities, like the scrutiny I’d soon be facing. Top priority was to make sure that Kirk’s interment was as hidden as I thought. Hunting season would be starting soon, and somebody just might go wandering by there.
The place where Madbird and I had stashed him was about three miles away as the crow flew, and a shorter trip overland than going down to the highway and looping up again. I took the familiar back trails through the woods and rock formations of my childhood sanctuary. That part of what I’d told Gary Varna was true. I left the bike at the logging road and hiked the last stretch through the brush.
The news was fine about the job we’d done. The site appeared perfectly natural—a passerby would never give it a second glance.
But I could almost imagine that I saw a hint of Kirk’s outline behind the facade of earth and stone, and that there was a sort of grim satisfaction in his posture. It looked good on him. He had never amounted to much in his father’s eyes, but he’d finally brought Reuben a kind of peace in a Byzantine way. Maybe that was another canceled debt, like the one between Reuben and me. I recalled thinking of Reuben in Shakespearean terms, as a kind of colossus. Now, with Kirk, another line from Shakespeare appeared in my mind.
Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.
I knelt down for a minute—not to pray, exactly, but to tell Kirk that although he’d given me no choice, I was bitterly sorry. Then I got back on the bike and started home.
My imaginings about Kirk were really for my own benefit, not his. I didn’t know what to believe about an afterlife—whether the dead knew or cared what happened here on earth, or if anything that the living did could help them rest, or even if they continued to exist in any way we could conceive of.
