Bad Company

by Virginia Swift

  “Unh. Yeah.” He put his arm around her and pinched her biceps hard. She’d have a nice bruise. “Just kidding. You folks’ll excuse us, now, won’t you?”

  The little crowd dispersed.

  “Not in the truck, Bone,” Sally told him through clenched teeth. “If you want to talk, we can sit on a bench and talk. If you don’t mind, I’d just as soon we had our conversation in a nice, public place.”

  He appeared to consider his options. “Okay. This won’t take long.”

  They found a bench. Bone was sweat-soaked, plum-colored, and wheezing hard from their encounter, but as soon as they sat down, he reached in his shirt pocket, found a crumpled pack of Camel Lights, and lit up.

  “I thought you chewed,” she said.

  “Lotta places these days where you can’t smoke,” he explained. “I like to have options.”

  Mr. Pro-Choice. Sally had been running, lifting weights, watching her nutrition, and taking long, stress-reducing baths for ten years, and with all that, she’d been unable to overpower an alcoholic smoker who probably lived on canned beef stew and TV dinners, whose tongue would one day rot right out of his head. That really pissed her off. “Okay, Bone,” she snapped. “What gives?”

  He took a hard drag on his cigarette, double-inhaled through his nose (just to make sure he didn’t miss any carcinogens), blew out a stream of smoke long enough to document for a class action suit. And finally he said, “Who killed my daughter?”

  That was a curveball. “Why would you think I’d know?”

  Bone considered the glowing end of his cigarette. “I been keeping an eye on you and Delice ever since you hassled me at the Loose Caboose. The both of you always did think you got the right to stick your faces in everybody’s business. You’re even worse than she is, and that’s sayin’ a whole lot. You probably don’t remember giving me a raft of shit one night when Tanya and me had a disagreement at the Gallery. You got me throwed right out of that place. I been a little annoyed with you ever since.”

  He was right. She didn’t remember.

  He narrowed his eyes and stared her down. “Nobody likes a busybody. Last night at the rodeo, somebody let you know that, didn’t they, Sally?”

  “You saw me get pushed into the bucking chute?” she asked, matching him stare for stare.

  Bone looked back at her, silent.

  “Did you push me?”

  He took another drag of his smoke, crushed it out on the bench, very deliberately. “Reckoned you mighta had some idea about who did.”

  She squinted at him. “And what if I do?”

  He looked down, then back up. “Way I figure, you’ve probably mouthed off enough in your time that half the guys in town’d just as soon kill you as hose you. Then again, you’re the one found Monette, and you been stirrin’ the pot ever since.”

  Sally was aghast. “Found her? What the hell are you talking about?”

  Bone sighed. “That brilliant lawman Dickie Langham had me in for questioning Tuesday. In the middle of our little chat, one of his deputies came into the interview room and asked him something, and he got up and went over to talk to the guy. He’d been looking at the file on the murder and left it open, and I just read a little of it. When you been hauled in by the cops as many times as I have, you get real good at reading upside down. I know you saw her at the Lifeway Monday morning too.”

  Reading upside down. One more skill Sally hadn’t yet thought about mastering. “What if I did?”

  “I ain’t the only one talkin’ to Dickie these days. And that detective of his looks at you like he wants to slap you in jail a few days to keep you out of trouble.”

  Bone had seen a lot more of her than she had of him, at the Wrangler as well as the rodeo, and where else? Wood’s Hole? Taco John’s? Was he stalking her? Had he taken the opportunity to slip out Tuesday night and pay a visit to her house while she was watching Marsh Carhart display his bad barroom manners? “Why are you following me around?”

  “Let’s say I got an interest in finding out anything anybody knows about Monette. And let’s put it this way—if I seen what you’re up to, and me not half lookin’, whoever pushed you into that chute must be at least a step ahead of me.”

  Gosh, that was a comforting thought.

  Sally considered her options. Bone was vile, but he wasn’t stupid. Right now he was trying to convince her, in his weird way, that he wasn’t the murderer. If this whole conversation was a bluff, and he’d killed Monette, there was no point accusing him. It could lead to Sally ending up prematurely dead. If he hadn’t murdered his daughter, somebody else, a person who meant Sally no good, had. She had nothing to lose by talking to him. “An interest. What kind of interest?”

  Bone turned his head and gazed at the sky. When he looked back at her, his eyes were as mean and crafty as ever. “Maybe one I could take to the bank.”

  “Are you saying that you think Monette had some money stashed somewhere? Why would you think that?”

  “I told you before. When I called her, she told me to get lost and said she was in tall cotton. I got to thinkin’ about that, and last Sunday I went down to the Lifeway and let her know she better tell me what she thought she was doin’, blowin’ off her old man that way.”

  “Yeah, Bone. I bet you let her know.”

  “Damn right. And what she said was, she didn’t need nothin’ from me no more. She’d got herself into something sweet and she didn’t want me comin’ around, tryin’ to get a piece of it,” Bone said bitterly. He fished for another cigarette.

  “Do you have any idea what she was talking about?” Sally asked.

  A pause while Bone replenished his supply of toxic gases, noxious chemicals, and heavy metals. He scratched his scalp, shook his head. “Monette always thought she’d get herself a cowboy one day, and ride away.”

  “You think she had a boyfriend?” It couldn’t be Adolph Schwink. Nobody would ever consider a produce clerk a one-man gold mine.

  “Hell no,” said Bone. “Can you imagine any guy with eyes in his head wanting a sloppy little dog-face piece like Monette for anything more than a quickie behind the barn?”

  Nothing like paternal affection. Or spousal devotion. Nope: nothing at all. Imagine being Tanya Nagy Bandy, or Monette Bandy, and living with that. Sally closed her eyes and sighed. “Okay, Bone. What are you trying to tell me?”

  Bone looked exasperated. “I’ll just tell you what she said. She told me, ‘Daddy, I roped me a good one, and this week I’m gonna ride this sucker down hard and then get the hell out of town.”

  “So you think she was shaking somebody down?” Sally asked him.

  “I think she knew something, and she thought some-body’d pay her to forget all about it. If that somebody was a stud hoss cowboy, and I know Monette, she’d offer to take part of her payoff in nookie. You know what they used to say about Will Rogers. Monette was the hoochie version of him. When she was twelve years old I caught her with the propane delivery man. Near took her hide off, and his, but it didn’t do no good. That gal never met a man she wasn’t ready to drop her panties for.”

  Everything in the world really had slid to the bottom.

  Bone looked her up and down. Really. “So now it’s your turn, Mustang Sally. Did Monette tell you anything?”

  She was too disgusted to be afraid of him anymore. “Why in the world would I tell you if she had?”

  Bone drew himself up. He ruined the attempt at dignity by leaving the cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth, but something winsome cracked through the nasty façade. “Well after all, I am her daddy. Leastways, that’s what her ma claimed.”

  And at that moment, sitting on that bench, watching him sweat and smoke, Sally couldn’t help seeing Bone Bandy for the pathetic loser he surely was. “I’m sorry, Bone,” she said. “All Monette told me, Monday morning, was that she had things to do. She didn’t say anything more than that. I don’t have any idea what she was up to.” Sally sat a minute, and then asked very s
oftly, “What do you intend to do if you find the guy?”

  Whatever vulnerability she’d glimpsed in him, Bone shut it away instantly. “I raised her, didn’t I? Let’s just say as the surviving next of kin, I reckon I got payback comin’ to me.”

  Chapter 14

  Frito Pie

  So many people jammed the Ivinson Community Center for the memorial service for Monette Bandy that they had to leave the doors open and let people stand out on the lawn. The soft-voiced Unitarian minister, unaccustomed to evangelical cadences, had to yell to make himself heard. He’d kept it brief, ecumenical, simple, and familiar. “We’ve got to stop hurting and hating each other, people!” he’d exhorted. “Everybody get together. Try to love one another. Not next week, not tomorrow, but now, right now. Right now. Right now!”

  Sally had believed in that message from the first time she’d heard it, going on thirty years ago. But she’d wondered, even in those bead and bell-bottom days, how in the world human beings would ever put it into practice. As the minister finished, she turned to look at the crowd and saw Bone Bandy slip out the door. She was still wondering.

  After the service the crowd flowed outside, under the trees, talking and waiting and setting up folding tables and chairs while the ladies got out the food. To be fair, not quite all ladies. Burt Langham and John Boy Walton, partners in the marvelous Yippie I O café, had brought a whole poached salmon, glistening in aspic and garnished with cunningly carved vegetable flowers. Dwayne Lang-ham, ever the gentleman, had picked up a Sara Lee pound cake.

  If calories were horses, everybody in Wyoming could have ridden to Mexico on the spread for Monette’s funeral reception. Molded salads and covered dishes, stiff with mayonnaise and cream of mushroom soup. Half a dozen casseroles and platters courtesy of the Wyoming Cowbelles, the ranch women’s group, featuring the state’s favorite ingredient (Enjoy Beef Daily). Cold cuts and sliced cheese, iced tea and lemonade, pies and cakes, and five kinds of pickles. Sally saw Dickie Langham pile his plate with short ribs and crock pot meatballs and potato salad and then head for the desserts, stoking up for another tough day of crime fighting.

  There were a lot of folks she’d expected to see. The Langham clan, of course, this time dressed for the occasion in dark suits and sober dresses, and a contingent from the Lifeway, most of them wearing their uniforms, getting ready to head back to work. The feminist types— women who ran the shelter and the rape crisis center, the orthodontist and the university’s lawyer (the town’s lesbian power couple), Maude Stark, looking unusually formal in a tailored powder-blue skirt with matching short-sleeved jacket, her steel-gray hair in a sleek pony-tail. Polite old-timers like Molly Wood.

  And then there were people who came representing groups—contingents of firefighters and police officers paying their respects. They too were all in uniform, even Scotty Atkins in his Sheriff’s Department khakis, which made him look, er, taller. Local civic groups like the Cowbelles and the Sunshine Nellies (Laramie’s gay and lesbian barbershop quartet). Some rodeo cowboys had showed up too, Herman Schwink among them, with serious faces and slicked-down hair and creases pressed in their starched shirts. Some people surprised the hell out of her by being there—Sam Branch and Marsh Carhart, for two. It occurred to her that it was the second time that week she’d seen vultures circling.

  Most of all, there was an extraordinary number of humans she just plain didn’t know. Some of them she recognized by sight, the way you’d have some impression of a person who might have been sitting next to you in the doctor’s waiting room. But others she felt she’d never laid eyes on. Incredible that Laramie was that big. More amazing still that so many had turned out.

  Carhart was making his way down the buffet line just ahead of Sally, smiling and introducing himself, taking little bits of this and that and chatting up the ladies who’d brought the dishes. “You know,” she heard him tell one middle-aged woman sporting helmet-sprayed hair, a bad-fitting brown dress, and a giant diamond ring, “it’s a real treat to find Frito pie anymore. This is some of the best I’ve ever had.”

  The woman blushed and grinned and explained, “A lot of people just go ahead and make it with canned chili and American cheese and whatever ol’ corn chips they got on special down at the store. You just throw all that stuff into a dish and call it real Frito pie. I don’t mind using canned beans,” she admitted, “but the secret”—and here she beckoned him toward her, and lowered her voice—“is browning your own meat, and using real Fritos, and Cracker Barrel cheddar.”

  “You can always tell when somebody’s given it their own personal touch,” Carhart said, smiling, his face still close to the Frito pie lady’s.

  “And garlic powder,” she replied, and introduced him to her daughter. That Frito pie did look tempting, but Sally was determined to be moderate. Browning your own meat, indeed. Sally had bought one of the Cow-belles’ beef cookbooks at the county fair last year. You didn’t often see that many recipes calling for suet.

  She saw Hawk edge Marsh Carhart out for a seat at a crowded table, next to Molly Wood. In black jeans, a white shirt, and a silk tweed sport coat that some rich former girlfriend had talked him into buying, Hawk looked comfortable and elegant, at ease and alert. Sally wasn’t eager to join him. They’d had, well, a little disagreement about whether he ought to go ahead with his plan to look over the land swap property later in the day. He’d been just getting his breakfast when Sally had returned and told him about her skirmish with Bone at Washington Park. Hawk had slammed his cereal bowl on the table so hard that the bowl cracked and Cheerios and milk flew all over the room. She’d spent the next half hour watching him rage and clean up spilled milk.

  Then, of course, they’d had an adult discussion of their plans for the day (“I am damn well not letting you out of my sight!”

  “You damn well are! I’m not a baby!”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Shit!”) Sally wasn’t sure why it seemed so important to her that Hawk proceed with his plan to go up to the Laramies. Maybe she liked seeing what the connection with Molly Wood did for him. Or maybe she just didn’t want him around when she got together with Scotty Atkins. Her intentions, as usual, were probably purer than her motives.

  But at last she’d managed to convince him not to keep her locked up in the house while he stood guard with the Remington over-under shotgun he never used for hunting anymore. He was planning to head up to the mountains right after the reception, and for now Sally was giving him some room. Neither one of them was exactly him or herself today.

  She turned and saw Delice sitting at a card table, along with Brit, Maude, and Charlene from the Lifeway.

  “Can I squeeze in with you guys?” she asked, pulling up a metal chair to perch at a corner of the table.

  “Hey, you took some of the ambrosia salad,” said Charlene. “I brought that from the deli at the store. Can’t go wrong with pineapple, mini-marshmallows, and maraschino cherries, can you?”

  “Yeah, but it’s the whipped topping that really makes the salad,” said Delice dryly. “I see you’re taking the ladies’ lunch approach, Mustang. You’d be better off with these,” she added, sinking her teeth into a large, meaty barbecued rib.

  Sally had some of the poached salmon; a pile of salad made from sliced-up iceberg lettuce, shredded carrots, and radish discs; a spoonful of green bean casserole with cornflakes on top—so far, so good. And then the ambrosia and a piece of a cherry pie that could only have been baked by Maude Stark. Maybe there would be some ribs left if she got up for seconds. Buffets were insidious.

  “So,” said Delice, eyes glittering, lips smacking, “what’s this in the morning paper about an unlawful entry at your house Tuesday night?”

  Sally had her story all ready. “Dickie figured it was probably lowlifes from the rodeo. They came in and messed things up some, looking for valuables I guess, but they must have gotten scared off and left before they found my jewelry. No big thing.”

  Maude knew something
about attempted burglaries, and she knew Sally. Her face registered her skepticism. “In my experience, having an uninvited stranger in your house is always a big thing.”

  Delice was scowling over her ribs. “Dickie asked me if there’d been anybody hanging around my house. What the hell’s going on in this town anyway?”

  Charlene sighed. “We get our little crime wave every year during Jubilee Days. Down at the Lifeway, this time of year, we got more shoplifters than shoppers. With all the cowboys and carnies and transient scum, what do you expect? Three years ago a guy came to my door and said his car had broken down and his grandmother was sitting in it, and he’d lost his wallet, and could I give him a twenty for the tow truck? I fell for it, I swear. I bet he’s still laughing.

  “Burglars busted into my sister’s place last year and stole her TV and stereo. Jeez, even the tourist families think they’re entitled to steal everything in the motel room that isn’t bolted down. My niece works at the Reata motel, and she said she’d cleaned one room where the people had not only taken the towels, but even the toilet paper holder. One of the waitresses at the Holiday Inn restaurant told me they’d lost forty-six coffee cups during Jubilee week last year, and this year they’re going to serve the coffee in Styrofoam cups.”

  Delice laughed mirthlessly. “It’s a pain in the ass, but I figure rip-offs are part of the cost of doing business. Not that it’s any fun. I can’t tell you how many times the most wholesome-looking people try to beat the check and get out the door before we can nab ’em.”

  Brit chimed in. “It’s like people who are mondorespectable in some other town turn into criminals when they go on vacation. Last night at the Yippie I O, we caught a guy trying to stuff a candlestick into his sport-coat pocket. The guy said Burt better not mess with him, because he was a trial lawyer and a close personal friend of the vice president of the United States . . .”