Bad Company

by Virginia Swift

  “If you beg me,” she replied against his neck, using her tongue and what was left of her lips in the way of persuasion.

  When they finally managed to leave the garage, they saw that their front door was standing wide open. She hadn’t bothered to lock up after she’d stopped off to get her guitar. Nobody did; after all, this was Laramie. But she hadn’t left the door open.

  An uninvited visitor. They checked the stereo and television, which were still there. Hawk’s laptop computer was still on his desk, undisturbed. No robbery.

  Then Sally went into the bedroom. Somebody had dumped out her underwear drawer and taken a knife to her nightgowns and her fanciest lingerie. Shredded silk and lace littered the bedroom floor. And presumably the same somebody had taken Sally’s reddest lipstick and written a message on the mirror in the bathroom.

  IT WASN’T GOD WHO MADE HONKY-TONK ANGELS.

  Very original, thought Sally. Then the trembling began.

  Wednesday

  Chapter 8

  Studs and Duds

  All those mothers who reminded their daughters to wear clean underwear in case they were ever in a car accident would have appreciated Sally’s distress at having Dickie Langham and Scotty Atkins come into her bedroom and examine her shredded undergarments. The sight of Atkins putting on rubber gloves and picking up the tatters of what had once been a fetching cherry-red silk teddy trimmed with cream lace nearly did her in, and that was before the crime scene deputies showed up.

  Dickie had tried to convince Sally to talk to the department’s victim counselor, but she had refused. She couldn’t explain quite why, but she didn’t want to make a big deal of this. It was embarrassing to have a bunch of cops pawing through your lingerie, and of course somebody else had been doing the same at some point between the late afternoon, when she’d stopped by with Mr. Skittles, and about midnight, when she and Hawk had come home. But Sally hadn’t been physically present. The intruder had slashed up half a dozen garments and stomped all over the rest, but she could go to a store and buy new underwear. Nothing was missing.

  It had been a long, insane day. Two days, come to think of it. Yesterday a body, today this. Maybe she was just too done in to know how scared she ought to be. Too numb. Or maybe it was just that she refused to put what had happened to her side by side with what had been done to Monette Bandy.

  She did take the opportunity to tell Dickie and Scotty about the conversation she’d overheard at the Lifeway, between Adolph and Eddie, the produce clerks. And she told them about her and Delice’s encounter with Bone Bandy. They both took notes.

  “So what do you make of the message on the mirror?” Atkins asked her.

  “I don’t know. It’s got to be some kind of reference to Monette, right? She spent plenty of time in the dives trying to pick up guys—hell, she even treated the Lifeway like a singles bar. What else could it be?”

  Atkins looked up from his little spiral notebook, narrow-eyed. “I’d say the most obvious interpretation is that it refers specifically to you.”

  “We’ll check it out,” said Dickie. “There might be a connection.”

  Scotty added matter-of-factly, “In the last two days you’ve found a body, talked with maybe a couple dozen people about the death, been seen and heard talking about it in several places. We didn’t release the information that you and Joe—you call him Hawk?—found the body. But in a town like this, with a crime like this, rumors tend to spread, and that Dunwoodie case last year does make you something of a public figure. Not to mention the fact that you’re well known for your, er, colorful past.”

  “I was a professional,” Sally objected. “I got paid to hang out in the honky-tonks.”

  “As you like,” Atkins allowed. “It’s also possible that whoever killed Monette was still around when you two showed up. There are plenty of ways in and out of the Devil’s Playground.”

  Sally was beginning to feel like she’d found too many ways in, and not enough out.

  “Or”—Atkins looked straight into her eyes—“it’s conceivable that there’s somebody who’s got a slightly larger problem with women he thinks aren’t behaving properly.”

  “Great. So you’re saying there’s no telling who it was.”

  “We’re saying,” Dickie said, “that we’ll find out. Trust us. And keep a low profile for a few days, if that’s possible.”

  Her first act of keeping a low profile was to refrain from telling her friend Dickie and his ace detective that she was not simply exhausted, but also as angry as she’d ever been. A sex maniac in Sally’s own house? Maybe the same guy who’d savaged and killed Monette? Maybe getting ready to terrorize or hurt more women? Wasted and scared, yes, but infuriated too.

  “If you don’t mind,” Dickie said, “I think we won’t release the details of this particular home invasion. We’ll put it in the Boomerang as a reported prowler at this address.”

  “That suits me,” said Sally. “I’ll just tell anybody who asks that somebody came in while we weren’t home, and made a little mess, but they must have gotten spooked and split before they could take anything.” Yeah. Like she was going to feel like having a hundred conversations about this nightmare.

  Scotty Atkins looked like he was using the last ounce of alertness left in a tired body. He took out a business card and wrote a number on the back. “My home and work numbers. You call me anytime,” he said, putting the card into Sally’s hand. “Anything you think of, anything that makes you edgy.”

  “Edgy?” said Hawk, putting an arm around Sally. “You’ll be on the phone day and night.”

  Atkins looked at them both, smiled a little. “I suspect edgy works for you, Joe—er, Hawk.”

  Hawk had no comment.

  “And if either of you two get the urge to try to conduct your own investigation,” Atkins said, with an edge of his own. “Don’t.”

  “Ditto don’t,” said Dickie. “I meant that, Mustang, Hawk. I know you’re pissed. But seriously, don’t put yourself in the line of fire.” Dickie went with tough love. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with here. If we’ve got some guy who thinks it’s his job to purify the town of honky-tonk angels, Laramie could look like Waco before he’s through.”

  It was nearly two in the morning by the time they’d finished, leaving behind the residue of black fingerprint powder along with the mess and the obscene aftertaste of violation. Hawk insisted that Sally go out into the living room and sit on the couch while he cleaned up the bedroom and bathroom. He asked what of her underwear she wanted to save, and she told him to throw away everything that had been in the drawer. All of it.

  She’d have to go down to the mall in Fort Collins to buy new bras. Laramie was not exactly the bra capital of the West. The thought made her giggle, and then guffaw. Before long she was in full-fledged hysterics. Hawk emerged with the broom and took a bulging black garbage bag out to the trash, and returned to sit with her, arm around her, until she’d cried herself out.

  “You need to sleep, Sal,” he said. “It’s all too much.” He led her into the bedroom, neat and tidy now, the empty bureau drawer back in place, and offered to loan her a T-shirt to sleep in. She took the T-shirt, but slept only fitfully. They lay curled up together, Hawk cradling her with his body, and he felt warm and good and safe. But she was way too wired to relax.

  By six A.M. the birds were singing and Sally had just about had it with insomnia. Maybe if she got up and worked out, she could come back and catch an hour or two of rest before she had to go out to Wood’s Hole with Delice. She knew she was too fatigued to go for a run, but she had a free pass to try out Iron Man and Woman, a new upscale gym that had opened up on Second Street, downtown. She could spend half an hour on an exercise bike, then flog some machines, pretending to be a buff yuppie.

  Good thing she kept her exercise bras in a different drawer.

  Iron Man and Woman wasn’t really Sally’s type of gym. Of course, there’d never been an athletic club that wasn’t in the
business of cashing in on human narcissism, but in some places the clientele seemed to take vanity to the next level. This was the kind of facility where the tanning beds did a big business, and pumped young men fondled their own muscles when they got done with a set of biceps curls. There was a glass wall between the crowded weight room and a large aerobic studio, where a couple of dozen people were punching and grunting their way through a kickboxing workout led by a woman about half the size of an Olympic gymnast.

  Morning in America, thought Sally. Amber waves of grain and wet spandex.

  Up a flight of stairs, even more fitness freaks were flailing away on treadmills and elliptical trainers, Nordic ski machines, and rowing contraptions. All the stationary cycles were in use, so she got on a stair climber and began trudging up the hill to nowhere, feeling like the women on the bikes behind her were evaluating every spare ounce on her thighs. In the effort to block out their critical thought waves, Sally turned on her Walkman, closed her eyes, and stepped harder. Soon she was working on a nice little fantasy about going to Carolina with Mr. James Taylor.

  Three minutes later she opened her eyes to find Nattie Langham pumping along on the machine next to her.

  She had to hand it to Nattie. Not even seven in the morning, and her makeup was perfect. Sally had dressed in her usual hideous workout ensemble of black tights and ancient faded T-shirt (this one commemorating Los Lasers, a great, long-gone bar band) but Nattie was sporting the latest high-tech synthetic shorts and stretch top. You never knew when you’d run into somebody who’d buy real estate only from a perfectly groomed saleswoman.

  Seeing that Sally had come out of her trance, Nattie swung her attention away from a television that was silently broadcasting a Janet Jackson music video. “Jesus, Mustang, what happened to you? You look like you’ve been rode hard and put up wet,” Nattie shouted, looking shocked at the sight of her.

  Actually, underneath the powder and paint, Nattie didn’t look so great herself. But Sally was too weary for a war of words. She took off her headphones. “Tough day yesterday.”

  “Yeah, me too,” said Nattie. As usual, she was more interested in her own life than anyone else’s, but Sally was, for once, glad of it. The less said about Sally’s previous day, the better. “By the time I got done answering my voice mail it was after ten and I’d had it. I was supposed to meet Dwayne and our ecologist guy at the Wrangler, but I decided Dwayne could entertain him for one night. Not that it’s much of a chore.”

  Maybe it was a good thing that Nattie had showed up this morning. The mixed music tape she’d brought had moved from Mr. Taylor to Janis Joplin, and it was too early for “Piece of My Heart.” Sally was in the mood for a little sparring. “I’ve known Marsh Carhart for years. I acknowledge that it’s possible that you could consider him good-looking, but he’s so frigging conceited that I’m completely mystified that anyone, anywhere, could find him even excusable.” Even you, Nattie, Sally added silently.

  “I don’t know. Arrogance isn’t that bad in a man,” said Nattie. “In Marsh’s case, it’s made him very rich. He’s head of one of the biggest environmental consulting firms in the country, and a lot of people think he’s a visionary. Maybe arrogance is just another word for self-confidence.”

  “And maybe it’s just not giving a damn about anybody except yourself. Visionary—jeez.”

  “Hey, I heard he bought Microsoft the day they went public,” Nattie told her. “Tell me that’s not visionary.”

  “It’s good, but it’s not exactly being the Dalai Lama. You always did have a weakness for greedheads with big egos, Nattie,” Sally said, legs pounding faster, working up a nice sweat.

  “What about you?” Nattie shot back. “I wasn’t the only one boinking Sam Branch back in the day,” she pointed out.

  “Fair enough,” said Sally, “but at least I haven’t done him since Carter was president. Goes to show it’s possible to learn something in this life.” If lifelong learning could be measured in terms of the men Sally Alder had stopped sleeping with, they ought to give her another Ph.D. But then, complicated as they were, the old days had in some ways been simpler. “You’ve got to admit, Nat, we did have the luxury of making mistakes in those days. No AIDS, for example. Seemed like the summer of love went on for eight or nine years.”

  “Or at least the golden age of sex,” Nattie said, sighing a little.

  “Golden age? Probably just because we were too loaded half the time to care whether the guys were studs or duds,” Sally admitted. “Remember that little assistant football coach with the Napoleon complex? That night I walked into the Alibi bar and found you making out with him I nearly busted a gut. He was so short that you practically had to kneel on the floor to sit on his lap.”

  “Yeah, well, he might have been short, but he was built,” Nattie shot back. “Jesus, but he had a wicked temper on him. You wouldn’t have known it, watching him glad-handing around town, schmoozing up the boosters and all, but he couldn’t handle his liquor. I stopped going out with him when he came into the Gallery one night when I was tending bar, and he was already shit-faced. When I spilled a little of his shot he busted the glass and tried to cut me. I hate to think what would have happened if he’d gotten that mad sometime when we were alone.” A shiver ran through her, and Nattie stepped faster at the thought.

  Sally considered Nattie’s story. “You know, we were pretty lucky—Delice, you, me, Mary even. We let ourselves get in some damn dangerous situations. One night when I was playing a rodeo in Rawlins, I had a couple bourbons too many and ended up in a trailer with a cowboy. We were messing around, and two of his buddies came in for a piece of the action. Lucky for me, they were drunker than I was and I got out of there. Could have been a really ugly scene.” She blew out a big breath, pushing the machine harder.

  “We used to have a saying,” Nattie recalled. “If you mess with the bull, you get the horns. It’s a miracle none of us were gored to death.”

  “What about Tanya Nagy? I mean, there were plenty of lowlifes to choose from, but why run away with a textbook hard case like Bone Bandy?” Sally shook her head, baffled and sorry, sweat streaming into her eyes, sliding off the tip of her nose.

  “Who knows?” Nattie shrugged. “Maybe she thought he was Clint Eastwood. Maybe he had a lot of cocaine. Maybe he’s hung like a giraffe.”

  “My money’s on the dope,” Sally decided. Cocaine had never been her own drug of choice—it made her jittery. But in the seventies it had been everywhere. People who should have known much better, Dickie Langham, for instance, had succumbed.

  “Probably dope,” Nattie agreed. “Tanya was really into freebasing.”

  Freebasing: the coke-smoking technique that had turned David Crosby into an animal and blasted Ricky Nelson into the next garden party.

  “Remember those freight yard hobo guys, Shannon and Jackstraw? The ones who showed up in town one winter, and crashed in that abandoned hotel behind the Ivinson Street Senior Center, down by the tracks?” Nattie asked.

  “Yeah. They tore up the original oak floor to start a fire and smoked out about fifty old people having a hot lunch.”

  “As I recall, their fingernails were so dirty they could write their names on a bar napkin without a pen,” Nattie said, grimacing. “Scary. Somehow they had a whole lot of money sometimes, and they’d go get a big bunch of blow and party it all away as fast as they could.”

  Sally didn’t admit it, but she’d once—very briefly— visited the hobos’ crash pad with Dickie, who’d been making a delivery. What was left of the floor was littered with paraphernalia, including a syringe. They were getting set to shoot up. Sally had fled at a run at the sight of the needle.

  “Well, Tanya liked to hang out with them. So you see, maybe she could have done worse than Bone Bandy. At least he wasn’t a junkie, and at that time he had a job. Probably she thought he was the best she could do. Tanya wasn’t exactly the queen of the prom at Laramie High.”

  Since Sally, unlike Natti
e and Delice and Mary and Tanya, hadn’t grown up in Laramie, this was news to her. “Did she have a tough time?”

  “Let’s put it this way,” said Nattie, “she was famous for being ugly, but putting out. You know all those high school awards—‘Miss Congeniality’ and ‘Best Dressed’ and all that?”

  “Sure,” said Sally, who had, in fact, been voted “Most Likely to Succeed” but had never admitted the fact to anyone, ever. At the time, she had thought that success would mean getting into a good enough college to latch on to the richest possible husband. Talk about your lifelong learning.

  Nattie shot Sally a deadpan look. “Tanya was voted ‘Miss Barnyard.’ ”

  Horrible. “Were they actually rotten enough to put it in the yearbook?” Sally asked, dreading the answer.

  “Of course not—it wasn’t official or anything. They announced the real awards at the spring formal. Tanya got hers afterward. One of the football players lived out west of town, on a little hay farm. There was a party out there, and the story was that Tanya took the whole team on, out behind the barn, that night.”

  Hot as she was, Sally shivered. “What a world for women.”

  The thought of her lingerie cut to ribbons, of the terrifying note on the mirror, intruded. IT WASN’T GOD WHO MADE HONKY-TONK ANGELS. She shuddered again.

  And then she looked at Nattie. “If you think about it,” she said, “you and Delice and I weren’t that different from Tanya, or Monette, for that matter. We took a million drugs, drank our nights away, slept with losers, killed half the brain cells God gave us, and thought we’d live forever. You’re right. It’s a damn wonder most of us made it. If ever there were a bunch of pathetic sinners begging for their just deserts, it’s us.”

  No! Get a grip, Mustang old thing. There were differences too. For example, Sally had lost her taste for drugs (except Jim Beam, Budweiser, snooty California wine, and Peet’s coffee, but nobody was perfect). She had long stopped believing that snagging some guy was the answer to everything. Not that she was against marriage, and in fact she would have loved a kid or two. She liked a good romance as much as the next woman, and as it had happened, her taste ran to men. But during the years in which she might have thought about settling down, she hadn’t come across a man she wanted to marry and have babies with.