Hawk ate some more soup as he thought about it. “Annoying and interesting. It was no problem getting up to the property—the road in is in decent shape. And Molly’s right—it’s a damn pretty place. A little shady and full of trees for my taste, but she’s got a perfect building site, up on a slope with a view of the red rocks out one side and the beaver pond out another. I saw a couple of deer, some black bear scat, and maybe a dozen beavers building lodges.”
He finished his soup, set down the mug, and leaned back in his chair. “Just as I was getting ready to do a thorough walk-over of the place, company showed up.”
“Let me guess,” said Sally. “Marsh Carhart.”
“For one,” Hawk said. “Sheldon Stover was with him.” Hawk chuckled and shook his head. “That guy cracks me up.”
“What were they doing there?” Sally asked.
“Carhart said he’s going to deliver his report to Nattie and Dwayne tomorrow. He hired Stover as a human resources consultant, or something like that. They were doing a final survey of the property.”
“Final?” said Sally. “Sheldon’s barely figured out that he’s not in New Jersey. What could he have to contribute?”
Hawk tilted his head. “It’s worth wondering about that. One way or another, they didn’t seem terribly surprised to see me, so I had a feeling they might have followed me up. Carhart saw me talking to Molly at the memorial for Monette—in fact, he was hovering over our table so close I thought about asking him to quit breathing all over my Frito pie. He clearly didn’t want me poking around up there, but when I told him Molly had asked me to take a look at the place, he couldn’t very well kick me off. So he offered to show me around. I wasn’t in a position to refuse.
“Not surprisingly, he made a point of emphasizing what was so great about the place. Of course he wasn’t showing me anything I hadn’t already noticed, but I couldn’t concentrate. Stover didn’t stop talking. Not even to take a breath. I think he has gills.”
“I hate to ask,” said Sally, taking the last swallow of whiskey. “What was he talking about?”
“Oh, some total crap about the impossibility of doing a study of anything except human impact on any place, because once the investigator arrived, the site was hopelessly tainted with something he called ‘ethnographic subjectivity.’ I asked him if it was contagious.”
“And what did Carhart have to say during all this?”
“Very little. Occasionally he’d nod at Stover and say something like ‘Very interesting.’ I can’t imagine what he found interesting, except maybe that trick about not breathing. Mostly Carhart just stared thoughtfully into the blue. Every once in a while he’d make some remark about what a great thing it was that there were still pockets of ‘intact ecosystems’ in the Rockies. Did you finish my drink?” he asked, scowling.
“I’ll get you a refill,” said Sally, and he followed her to the kitchen. “So, ‘intact ecosystems?’ Guess that lets us know what his impartial resource survey will reveal about the property, huh? Nattie and Dwayne must be thrilled.”
He got out another glass for her. “I can see why they would be. All you have to do is look at that beaver pond. The place appears to be thriving.”
“Appears?” she said, catching something in his voice as she dropped ice into both glasses.
Hawk smiled at her, just enough to get one dimple showing. When he smiled like that, it meant that he was entertaining ideas, often of the carnal variety. But this time it was his Mr. Science smile. She knew he was revving up for one of his famous detailed explanations. He was a reticent man by nature, but once he started in on an explanation, he talked it all the way to the finish. She poured the drinks with a lavish hand.
“It’s not that big a place,” Hawk began when they were back in the living room, sharing the couch. “We walked the perimeter in an hour and a half. As I said, it’s gorgeous, and evidently flourishing. But I kept wondering why, if the place was as good as it looked, they were leading me around. I figured there must be something they didn’t want me to see.”
“And what was it?” Sally had to ask, although she knew she’d never get Hawk to cut to the chase. For him, every explanation had its own rhythms and meanders, and there was no point being an impatient listener.
“Well,” Hawk drawled, dragging the word out for all it was worth, “it wasn’t actually on the property. But getting to it took some savoir-faire.”
“Savoir-faire?” Sally said. Make that Monsieur Science.
“French for ‘sneakiness.’ I decided when I first laid eyes on that beaver pond that I wanted to check out the creek they’d dammed to make the pond. I meant to follow it upstream as far as I could, off the private parcel and onto the national forest. I’d planned to hike right up the bank, but I couldn’t shake your buddies. So I decided to just play dumb, tag along with them until I got tired of it, and then announce that I was leaving. Which is what I did.”
“But of course you weren’t leaving?”
The dimpling smile again. “Nope. I got in my truck and drove back out, and then took off down a side spur and parked my truck out of sight of the main road. I hid in some bushes until I saw them drive out. And then I went back in on foot, and hiked up the creek.”
“And what,” she asked, “did you find?”
He put his glass down on the coffee table, leaned back against the arm of the couch, and hauled his legs into her lap. “About two miles upstream, the creek had been ditched. It wasn’t that much of a ditch, and it must have been a long time ago. It wasn’t a whole lot more than a kind of groove, all overgrown with grass and cluttered up with rocks and weeds, but if you know what you’re looking for, you wouldn’t miss it.”
“I would.”
“Not if you were with me,” he said. “Had to do some tough bushwhacking to follow the ditch, but finally I got to a place where there was an abandoned rail spur, and the remains of a building—the corner of an old stone foundation, some busted timbers. I walked around there for a while, trying to figure out what it was.”
“The Union Pacific Railroad was all over that country,” Sally said. “Still is.”
“Yeah, I know, but this is national forest now, and there’s no road to it. Some people have even talked about making it a wilderness area. Whatever got built came before the feds took over. I thought I’d go over to Cheyenne tomorrow and see if the state Revenue Department has any records of what might have been up there.”
The historian in Sally was intrigued. “I’ve got a little time tomorrow. I could do some digging in the archives here, see if there’s anything interesting in the railroad collections.”
“That’s my girl,” he said. “You know, what first attracted me to you was your research skills.”
“Oh yeah?” she said. “Well then, I have to confess that the thing I like best about you is your penchant for detailed explanations.”
“I thought it was my enormous . . .” he said, closing his eyes as she took his legs off her and stretched out next to him on the couch.
“Whatever,” said Sally.
“So how was your trip to Vedauwoo?” he asked.
It took her a minute to answer. “You may not believe this, but it was just what I needed. Scotty was a big pain in the ass, and I didn’t like being up there, but it got me thinking.”
“You’re great when you’re thinking,” he said, eyes still closed as her palm made circles on his chest.
“Yeah. I need to do it more. So he started out by asking me about honky-tonk angels, and I gave him a little lesson in country music history. Then, when we got up there, he kind of took me through Monday afternoon all over again. That wasn’t so much fun.”
He squeezed the hand rubbing his chest. “I can imagine.”
“The hardest part was going up to the outcrop. I kept seeing her arm . . .”
“I keep seeing it myself,” Hawk said.
“Yeah, with the rope dangling,” she said, sitting up suddenly. “But listen to this. Scotty t
old me that her hands had been tied together. They’ve got the first autopsy report, and it looks like she and the killer got loaded together, then had sex—Scotty called it a ‘rough game that got out of hand’—and she ended up shot dead. The guy had a hell of a time getting her down in the crack, had to cut the rope.”
Hawk was on it. “So why would he leave an arm sticking out if he was trying to hide her?” Now he sat up too. “Heard us coming.”
“It’s a reasonable assumption,” she said. “And Scotty has decided that the troubles I’ve been having are be-cause whoever killed Monette and saw us up there, recognized us. His number one candidate is Jerry Jeff.”
“Oh yeah, right,” said Hawk. “How insane is that? He’s just a boneheaded kid.”
“So you and Delice and I think. Scotty has other ideas. He mentioned that Monette was bound with a piggin’ string, and JJ just bought a new one. I allowed as how I didn’t really find his Jerry Jeff the Killer theory all that compelling, because JJ can’t drive yet. I oughta know. Delice keeps pressuring me to take him out in the Mustang, like that’s gonna happen.”
“But maybe it’s somebody who had access to JJ’s rodeo gear,” said Hawk. “That’s a troubling thought.”
“Your pal Atkins just takes this stuff in stride. He’s going to interrogate Jerry Jeff again tomorrow.”
“Don’t blame Scotty for doing his job.”
Hell, everybody was on this job. And now Sally remembered all the phone calls she hadn’t returned. Maude and Delice could wait. “Oh shit—I forgot to tell you. Molly Wood left a message—she wants you to call back. I wrote the number down there, on the pad. And Dickie wants me to meet him at the Torch. Do you feel like going out?”
Hawk yawned. “I’m ready to go to bed right now. But this is Jubilee Days. Let me try Molly, and then we can go.”
He picked up the phone, dialed the number in Centennial. He listened briefly, then left a message. “I guess it can’t be too urgent if she’s letting her machine pick up.”
“Do you think we should stay here and wait for her to call back?” Sally asked.
Hawk gave it a moment’s thought. “I don’t see the point. I’ll call again tomorrow when I’ve had the chance to look some stuff up. As for tonight, if the sheriff thinks we need to go downtown to purchase intoxicating beverages and see if some band can do anything new with ‘San Antonio Rose,’ I suppose it’s just our patriotic duty.”
Chapter 18
The Nightlife
The Torch Tavern was packed with drinking, hat-wearing revelers, squeezed in hip to ass. They were inhaling first-and secondhand smoke, spilling drinks on one another, and trying to holler over a band that believed that if a little amplification was good, putting the needle into the red zone was spectacular. Sally saw Hawk slip some earplugs out of the change pocket of his jeans and twist them into his ears. He offered her a pair, and she took them, but stuck them in her own pocket. She’d decided to take the place on its own terms, even if the noise level made her brain buzz in her skull.
Sally had never been a fan of audio terrorism as an entertainment gambit. She thought bands that played too loud were competing with the crowd, not courting it. For her, playing had always been about tasty licks, heart-felt vocals, the band and the audience coming together and riding the mood, crest to crest, to some point of abandon where everybody was rocking. The right mix of tempo and volume, instruments and voices, not the wall of deafening distortion these guys were cranking out.
On the other hand, nobody else much seemed to mind. The bartenders were flying, setting up shots and pulling beers and making change for a throng that stood three deep behind the stools. Out on the jammed dance floor she spotted Brit Langham and Herman Schwink, putting on a Western swing clinic, and Sheldon Stover, hauling Nattie Langham around, elbows and knees flailing in something that looked more like a high school wrestling match than a country pas de deux. Down among the tables, Dwayne huddled with Marsh Carhart, apparently carrying on a conversation just as if they’d been sitting in Dwayne’s office down at the bank. Not far away she caught sight of Adolph Schwink, hustling a waitress whose indomitable platinum-blond beehive warred with the deep lines of exhaustion around her eyes.
Sally recognized the song, a rocked-up take on “Move It on Over,” the Hank Williams classic. That could explain why Dickie was recommending the band. He loved all Hank Williams tunes, but this one especially. As a young loadhead, he’d always dropped whatever he was doing when a band started up that song. He’d run out on the dance floor, shimmying like Josephine Baker and hollering an obscenely personal version of the lyrics, in which little Dick was expected to move over, “’cause the big Dick’s movin’ in.”
In so many ways the old days were not gentle days. Now, when she found him, he was simply leaning against the wall, eyes closed, drinking a Coke, tapping a finger against the can in time with the music. At six-four he’d have been visible anyway, but his girth and his badge cleared a space around him roughly the circumference of a beer keg. She left Hawk at the bar ordering drinks and snaked her way through the crush, noting in passing a waft of smoke that smelled like mangoes, a number of people with red eyes or very runny noses, at least one small packet of white powder changing hands, and several guys who took the opportunity to grab a handful of her as she squeezed by. More alarming, she bumped against various hard objects that had to be sidearms.
Heat and crowding and dope and booze and guns were not that good a combination. Sally really hoped that nobody would take a fancy to anybody else’s hat.
The Torch Tavern wasn’t her cup of hemlock anyway. She’d played there a few times over the years, but the Torch didn’t generally book live music. Most of the year the management relied on the type of trade that brought the police on a regular basis and elicited frequent visits from the Ivinson Memorial Hospital emergency medical technicians. The regular clientele ran to bikers with their own pool cues, insane meth heads looking to get wired back up, johns hoping to hook up with moonlighting cocktail waitresses, junkies trying to act cool while sweating and shaking through a score, fast-aging daytime drinkers with noses like walnuts and brown teeth. And, of course, the vultures who fed their habits, and the cops who kept stopping by, learning enough for their troubles to make the occasional bust, but never enough to close down the Torch or dam the poisonous stream that wound through and out of it.
Tonight, between her morning with Bone, her afternoon with Scotty, and the nasty sensation that somebody she couldn’t name was in the bar and way too aware of her presence, the Torch was really putting her on edge. But at least her timing was good. Just as she reached Dickie, the band was shuffling up a little instrumental—break time. People were heading for the door to go out and cool off in the street, getting their hands stamped so that they could come back in and obliterate their eardrums when the music started up again. She looked around and said, “I never liked this joint.”
“No, you always preferred higher-class places like the Gallery,” he said, lighting a Marlboro.
“At least you could wade through the bathrooms there,” she told him. “Here you couldn’t even get in, because the stalls were always full of people hitting up.”
Dickie looked at the glowing end of his cigarette. “Too bad some things don’t change.”
“Can’t you do anything about that?” she asked.
Now he looked at Sally. “You’d be amazed how much ingenuity and strength of purpose some people will put into getting fucked up. When we come in, they go away. When we go away, they come back. If we hang around, they scatter, but they don’t go far. They need the shit that much. And every time we arrest a dealer, five more show up to take over the turf. There’s so goddamn much money to be made.”
“Doesn’t the owner of this place object?”
“The owner,” Dickie explained, “isn’t a person. It’s a corporation, headquartered down in Denver. The Torch has had thirty-two different managers in the last twenty-three years—every time
we close in on one, he or she skips and we’re dealing with some new scumbag. They all say they want to cooperate with us and run a clean operation, but these people aren’t what you’d call long-term thinkers. Somebody pays them off, and they’re on to the next hole.”
“But you keep at it.” She was trying to make him feel a little better.
“What the hell else would I be doing here tonight, besides indulging in my well-known masochistic urge to hang around watching other people drink? I had this brilliant idea of coming down here and waiting for somebody to waltz up to me and tell me who killed Monette. But unfortunately that hasn’t happened, so I thought I’d play cop. You missed all the fun. I was compelled to bust one cowboy who came in here with a sheet of blotter acid in his hatband and started handing around squares of Mr. Natural like it was Pez. I’m thinking about dropping the hammer on that little old gal over there at the bar, the one with the glitter all over her face. She’s gone out to the parking lot with half a dozen guys, fifteen minutes each. I’m beginning to worry that she’s starting an epidemic.”
Dickie’s summary of the nightlife made Sally feel smug about trading the bar stool for her endowed chair. But then it occurred to her that his description of the sleazy gypsy bar managers could, with very little alteration, apply to a certain class of itinerant university administrator: moving in, moving on, and leaving the place (at best) as big a mess as it had been before. She silently repeated the mantra that had stood her in excellent stead throughout both her musical and academic careers: There are assholes everywhere.
“So what else have you been up to today?” she asked Dickie as Hawk arrived with their beers and a fresh can of Coke for the sheriff.
“Well, let’s see. After the memorial thing, I went down to the Lifeway and had a word with young Schwink over there,” he said, pointing with his Marlboro. “Damn stupid little twerp started out with the same old song and dance about not having known Monette very well, just working in the same store and all, but I finally told him that several people had suggested that he had a somewhat more intimate relationship with her than that. He kept on lying for a while, but finally admitted that he’d—hmm, how did he put it? oh yes—gotten his rocks off with her a time or two, but that was it. He insisted that whatever was between them had been ‘all her fault’ because she was such a pathetic little skag and she kept on begging him, and after a while, well, he just felt so sorry for her that he had to oblige.”
Bad Company Page 20
