Bad Company

by Virginia Swift

  The crowd at the Yippie I O café was short on hats and long on attitude. It was the best restaurant within a two-hundred-mile radius—farther, if you didn’t count Denver, and maybe farther even if you did. The decor was pure nouveau cowboy glam—original pressed-tin ceiling, tall walls painted to resemble blue sky with puffy clouds, dark gleaming floor, and in between, a color scheme that Delice had once described as “a cross between a Hereford steer and the Castro District.” The showpiece decorating touch was the bar, a crimson resin swoosh mounted on a museum display of cowboy boots embedded in Lucite. In the open kitchen, the brick chimney of a wood-burning oven was festooned with a cow skull wearing a fez. The philanthropic owner, Burt Langham, and his genius chef partner, Frank “John Boy” Walton, had recently been inducted into the local lodge of the Shriners, for civic generosity that evidently overbalanced any uptight homophobic tendencies among the boosters. Rumor had it that Burt and John Boy would even be piloting mini-Corvettes in the Jubilee Days parade.

  Brit was at the host podium tonight, looking luscious as always but glowering at a couple who appeared to be leaving in a huff. “Assholes!” she hissed to Sally.

  “Aren’t you supposed to greet us with ‘Good evening. Welcome to the café’?” asked Hawk.

  “Yeah yeah. Those idiots claimed we lost their reservation. Said they made one a week ago—said ‘some young woman’ answered the phone. I guess it’s possible, but, like, the only young woman who even bothers to pick up the phone here is me, and I sure as hell don’t screw up reservations!” Brit fumed.

  “Temper, temper, now darlin’,” said Sally. “You’re in the hospitality industry.”

  “Hospitality, shit!” Brit pronounced through her teeth, snagging menus and stomping toward a small corner table, private but with the best view of the action. “I swore I’d never set foot in a restaurant again, but Burt kept upping the ante. If it weren’t for a month of free meals and double overtime, I’d be kickin’ back at the rodeo watching somebody else work.”

  “Don’t forget to ask Herman about Adolph,” Sally reminded her.

  “We’re going dancing later,” Brit murmured. “Leave him in my hands.” Then she pulled out chairs upholstered in brown and white cowhide and stood back, squared her shoulders, smoothed her silk skirt and blouse, and shot them a smile so dazzling that Sally wondered briefly if Brit had manic tendencies, or just a great game face. “Time to please the people,” Brit said. “Enjoy your dinner.”

  For such a nouvy-groovy place, the table setting was classic—white linen tablecloth, cut-glass vase with fresh flowers, creamy candles, silver and crystal. Their waiter, clad in Levi’s, well-worn boots, a crisp white shirt, and a wide tie decorated with a hand-painted giant saguaro cactus, appeared to understand the hospitality concept rather better than Brit. He said his name was Mike, and the special was a huckleberry duck breast, and they had some very nice sushi-grade tuna that the chef did with a wasabi butter and a bouquetiere of Asian vegetables, but personally he’d always been partial to the steaks. There were a few other things he’d be happy to tell them about, but first they’d probably want something to drink, right?

  Boy howdy.

  When Hawk ordered two Jim Beams, Mike the waiter allowed as how Burt Langham made the best highballs this side of New York City, and maybe they’d like to try something a little more uptown. “Okay,” Hawk said. “Tell Burt we’re in his hands. Just make sure it’s mainly something brown.”

  Shortly, they were sipping Manhattans out of martini glasses. Sally felt her heart rate begin, finally, to slow down. Hawk was savoring his cocktail, torturing her. Finally he said, “So honey, how was your day?”

  Lucky for her, Burt Langham and John Boy Walton believed that restaurant diners should be far enough apart that people wouldn’t be listening in on seductions in progress at neighboring tables. The high tin ceiling made the place just noisy enough that she could fill Hawk in on everything she’d learned since her unappetizing breakfast at the Wrangler that morning, without fear of setting the rumor mill whirring. She talked all the way through the ordering phase and well into their salads (ensalate caprese for her, romaine and Roquefort for him).

  Hawk listened. He had the gift of sitting in repose, utterly focused, eyes wide and intense behind his spectacles, taking in everything. Eating didn’t seem to break his concentration, although from time to time he put down his fork and rested his beautiful hands on the table, barely clasped. Watching Hawk listen as she talked produced an effect on Sally that some people got from reading erotic poetry.

  He finished the last of his salad and spoke. “It doesn’t really surprise me that Monette was tied up with JJ’s piggin’ string, or that she sold him dope, or that he’s smoking it. What they found out at the autopsy is horrible, of course. But it’s not astonishing news. The part about the garbage from the Wrangler ending up at the crime scene is a little puzzling, isn’t it? Why would somebody haul litter all the way out there?”

  Sally shrugged. “Trying to make it look like she’d been partying with lowlifes, I guess. Figure it this way— imagine if we hadn’t found the body when we did. It’s possible that she wouldn’t have been discovered until the next morning, at the earliest—we got a late start, and from what I saw, we were the last people up there Monday afternoon. Overnight, the litter would have blown around, but it might still look like a party scene. One way or another, it was meant to leave a false trail and confuse the cops.”

  “A false trail, left by somebody who somehow managed to snag Jerry Jeff’s piggin’ string,” said Hawk.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe Monette had it with her. After all, she’d had the chance to lift it last Saturday when she and Adolph Schwink and the kid were getting high. Of course, Adolph could have taken it, but we know he didn’t go up to the Devil’s Playground that afternoon. So if he stole the piggin’ string, somebody else would have had to get it from him. I asked Brit to get Herman to lean on Adolph a little.”

  Hawk pressed his lips together. “What about the brother?” he asked.

  “Herman? No!” Sally exclaimed. “I just don’t see it. He seems way too wholesome.”

  “So did Ted Bundy,” said Hawk. They’d moved on from the Manhattans to a decent Merlot. He swirled the wine in his glass, tasted it, and said, “From what you’ve told me, Dwayne had a chance at the piggin’ string too, when JJ left his bag in the VIP lounge.”

  “So did anybody else who went in or out of there. Scotty ought to have fun questioning the rodeo committee this weekend, huh?”

  “Scotty. Yeah. Hmph,” said Hawk.

  Mike the waiter arrived to take their salad plates. The pause in the conversation gave Hawk an opening to change the subject. “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the idea of old Sheldon Stover chasing you around. Ridiculous as he is, it bugs me.”

  “For God’s sake, Hawk, of all things to worry about! I mean, let’s face it, Sheldon’s experimental ethnography is pretty low priority at the moment.”

  “It’s not that, Mustang.” He held the wine to the candlelight, gazing at the glass. “What bothers me most is that even that moron could get close enough to hurt you without your even noticing. The events of the past week don’t seem to have had a good effect on your powers of observation.”

  No point being defensive. “Okay. I might be a little rattled. But I’m paying attention. And after all, I did manage to dig up some interesting stuff in the library and the archives today. Seems that ruin you found up at Happy Jack is an old railroad tie plant—”

  “My turn,” he interrupted. “Let me tell you what I found in Cheyenne, and then we can compare notes.”

  He knew what she knew, and more. The tie plant, closed down in 1963, had been operating on leased federal land, not by the railroad itself, but by a contractor called Golden Eagle Enterprises. It wasn’t entirely clear why the plant had closed—the interstate hadn’t yet been completed, so the rail lines were still the main conduits for freight, in and out of Wyoming. �
�I found that much in the state Revenue Department records,” Hawk said. “That took me a while. I was looking for tax records on the railroad’s holdings in Albany County. This Golden Eagle outfit was buried pretty deep, and there wasn’t much documentation there. They paid their bills, as far as I can tell, and then just folded their tent and melted off into the shifting sands.

  “That seemed a little drifty to me. So I decided to play a hunch and went over to the Department of Environmental Quality. Are you enjoying your steak?” he asked.

  Sally gently sliced off another morsel of succulent tenderloin persillade. She nodded enthusiastically, mouth full.

  Hawk looked down at his two-inch-thick New York strip. “Me too. Maybe I shouldn’t go on with this story.”

  “No problem. My stomach is plenty strong enough for fabulous food and tales of toxic waste,” Sally insisted.

  “You asked for it,” he answered. “All right. When I asked the clerk at the DEQ for anything he had on the tie plant, he hemmed and hawed and talked about ‘proprietary information’ and stuff like that, but I kept reminding him that he was supposed to be in the business of providing access to public records. Finally he went behind a door and came out with a nice, thick file.

  “Looks like for thirty-five years, the old plant just sat there decaying, dust to dust and all that. But then two years ago the state geological survey happened to hire a new graduate of the UW program in groundwater hydrology, who happened also to be an amateur photographer who had a thing for industrial ruins. He followed one of the dried-up wastewater ditches downhill, snapping away, and came to a spot where the grass was dead all around the ditch. And then, lo and behold, he found the carcass of a deer that had evidently been grazing by the brown patch. He called up the game warden, who came and looked at the deer, and noticed that there were blisters on its mouth.”

  Sally put her fork down. “Maybe you were right.”

  “Okay. I’ll leave out the dead animal stuff. One thing led to another, and by last year, the Environmental Quality Department had started doing soil and water sampling downstream of the mill.”

  “Water sampling? In the beaver pond on that swap property, for instance?” Sally was pretty sure she knew where this was going.

  “Yeah. The pond and the creek checked out clean.” Hawk carved off a big bite of his steak and chewed with relish.

  “Clean! Well, hell. I mean, that’s good news, but I have a feeling that’s not the end of the story,” Sally said.

  “Right. The surface water is fine, but there’s a bit of a soil and groundwater contamination plume spreading underground, downstream from the old plant.”

  “You’re kidding! How come it hasn’t been in the newspapers? How come they haven’t declared it a toxic site or something?” This was outrageous.

  Hawk gave her a long, tender look. “You know, Sal, in some ways you’re so naive. It’s kind of sweet.”

  Sally glared. “Thanks. Spare me the condescension and get to the point.”

  He laughed. “The point is that the soil sampling found enough creosote, dioxin, and PCBs to suggest that any wise stockman would think three or four times before letting his herd loose on the national forest up there. More importantly for our purposes, I’d guess that Molly Wood ought to be very wary of buying a piece of property where it would be, to say the least, imprudent to dig a well.”

  “Why? What would drinking the water do to a human?”

  Now Hawk put his own fork down. “How many ways are there for a person to get cancer?”

  She thought that over. Too much to get her head around, so she ate some steak and focused on the details. “Is it clear that the toxic stuff came from the tie plant?”

  “What do you think, Sally? Beavers make dioxin? You sound like Ronald Reagan announcing that trees cause pollution.”

  Poor Hawk. He was working on ironic detachment, but stuff like this killed him. She leaned over, touched a finger to his cheek, left it there, stroking lightly. “So back to my original naive question,” she said. “Why aren’t the newspapers all over this?”

  They were sharing an order of fresh asparagus. He selected a spear, ate it tip first. “Let’s see. At a guess, how many toxic waste sites do you think there are in the state of Wyoming?”

  “Absolutely no idea,” she answered, sipping wine.

  “Well, let’s put it this way. There are a shitload more of them than are identified, and out of the ones they’ve listed, only a few are likely to get cleaned up. It costs an ungodly fortune to remediate even one site, and the agencies in charge have to set priorities. A site that looks like it could poison, say, the entire city of Casper will get attention first. One that might affect a major ranch, or some endangered wildlife, or what have you, will be considered a long time before some mess that might be nasty, but doesn’t mess up the scenery and doesn’t appear to be having a direct effect on people or any crucial resources. It takes a ton of time and money to clean up these sites. This one isn’t even on the screen.”

  “But if somebody were to build on contaminated ground, and think about drinking the groundwater, wouldn’t that give the state or the EPA or whoever cause for action?” Sally asked.

  “Hard to say. My guess is that the Wyoming DEQ is pretty overburdened. And just think about the costs. Not only would they have to do the science, but they’d also have to put people to work tracking down the polluters. As far as I can tell, this Golden Eagle Enterprises just closed up shop and disappeared after 1963. And you haven’t even started the job of cleaning the place up.”

  Hawk shivered a little. “If you think this one site sounds like a gigantic job, consider the whole state. Wyoming’s been strip-mined, oil-pumped, dug up, and flushed out for the last hundred years. Some of the dirtiest industries in the world have paid a lot of bills around here. Not to mention the fact that our agricultural brethren have used their share of powerful fertilizers and pesticides.” Now he took a big slug of wine. “Prosperity ain’t pretty.

  “Then, of course, there’s the fact that enforcement of even the fairly loose laws on the books depends, as always, on the will of our splendid public officials—the ones appointed to clean things up and, of course, the ones we elect to provide the money for the job.”

  Great. Happy Jack was turning into Love Canal, and when it came down to it, the only ones who could save the day were...bureaucrats and legislators. People dependent on the will and the generosity of a Wyoming electorate famous for believing that the government worked best when it hardly ever worked. “What about the feds? Shouldn’t they be called in?”

  “Be assured, they’re on the job. That DEQ file was full of correspondence with the EPA regional office in Denver. EPA promised to ‘maintain oversight.’ ”

  “Uh-huh. The same way a doctor says, ‘Let’s keep an eye on that cough,’ as if he were going to be sitting around fixing cups of hot tea and listening to you wheeze instead of cashing HMO checks and heading for the golf course.” Sally grabbed Hawk’s hand. “You’ve got to get hold of Molly. This is really important, Hawk.”

  “I know.” He took a deep breath. A sip of wine. “I’m wondering why she hasn’t returned my calls. Maybe I should head out to Wood’s Hole tomorrow morning and make sure she’s okay.”

  And that was when they both noticed a loud cheerful party, barreling from the front door of the restaurant toward the bar. “Bust out the Dom Perignon, Burt!” shouted Nattie Langham, one arm around Dwayne’s neck, the other around Marsh Carhart’s waist, Sheldon Stover at their heels. “We just made the deal of the century!”

  Sally and Hawk exchanged stricken stares. “Maybe not tomorrow,” he said. “Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing to head on out to Centennial tonight.”

  Chapter 23

  An Appreciation for Avocets

  God bless Jubilee Days. Law enforcement personnel who might ordinarily be patrolling the Centennial road were otherwise occupied. The speedometer on the Mustang went up to 140, and before the night was over, Haw
k might use all of it. The front end was shuddering, and so was Sally.

  A distinct clunk, followed by a clanging, rapidly fading off behind them.

  “That noise,” said Sally, “was some part of the car falling off. It tends to happen at high speeds.”

  “Car’s still running,” said Hawk. “Guess it was nothing too crucial.”

  Hawk was in a hurry. He had, however, insisted on stopping off at home, just long enough to grab his day-pack. It sat on the console between them, top flap flipped back, drawstring opening loose enough for him to get a hand in and out with ease. It hadn’t occurred to Sally to wonder why, until they were hauling ass across the prairie.

  “What’s with the daypack?” she asked.

  “I copied some of the documents from the DEQ,” he told her. “I want Molly to see for herself.”

  “Really?” Sally had a bad feeling. “That’s it?”

  “I just like to be prepared,” he said lamely. “Prepared? What the hell do you have in there that you could possibly imagine Molly wouldn’t have?” Sally asked testily.

  “Er, the cell phone?” Hawk tried.

  “It would’ve been a good idea. We could phone ahead from the road. But it’s not in there, unless you took it out of my pack. We all know what a big fan you are of those things,” she said. “Unless, that is, Smith and Wesson is now making cellular telephones.”

  Hawk grinned weakly. “So what are you going to do, Hawk? If there’s somebody out there holding a gun to Molly’s head and making her sign away her ranch, are you going to walk in, yank open your backpack, whip out your pistol, and shoot the fucker? Or are you going to go in there with your gun drawn, and maybe she’s sitting around doing needlepoint, and you scare her to death? Or maybe she’s lying in bed, like any good Wyoming matron, with her own loaded piece tucked under her pillow, and she’s a quick-draw artist, and she shoots you right through the heart? This is a real estate deal, not a duel to the death. What’s the point here?”