Bad Company

by Virginia Swift

  “What do you think?” Sally asked Hawk.

  “We’re here now.”

  She went to get a sign from Maude, who gave her a piercing once-over and said, “You look terrible.”

  “Too much Jubilee Days,” Sally said vaguely. “I heard Molly Wood had a fall. Have you talked with her?”

  Maude looked at Sally with suspicion, but didn’t ask how she’d heard. “Yes. When she didn’t show up this morning to set up at the white elephant sale, I called her house, and her daughter told me she’d fallen. I spoke with her at the hospital. I’m going over to see her after the parade.”

  “The white elephant sale?” Sally asked. “I totally forgot. There was a captain’s chair I wanted.”

  “Someone bought it—sorry.”

  Damn. “So how is Molly?”

  “So far, they’re saying she broke her ankle, but they’re going to keep her in there a couple of days for tests. She’s going stir-crazy. What are you up to anyway?” Maude asked, eyes narrowing.

  “Oops. I’d better get in line,” Sally said, grabbing a placard and escaping. Sounded like Molly had kept quiet about their night visit—good.

  So Sally Alder was once again standing a little too near a horse, and with even more reason to be nervous than she’d had at the rodeo. This time she was holding a sign that said, “For Monette. For All Women,” and waiting for the Jubilee Days parade to begin. Sally had a lifelong predilection for the ironic, and in that moment of anticipation, she reflected on the ironies of enshrining Monette Bandy as a martyr for women’s rights.

  Nobody could dispute that Monette had been a victim. She’d grown up in an unhappy, even brutal household, at the mercy of a rotten father and a terrorized mother. She’d fairly begged men to treat her like crap, and it looked as if they hadn’t let her down. If Monette had ever had the chance to see herself as a valuable human being, not just a whipping post for men’s anger or lust, things might have gone a lot better for her. A world in which women really were equal would have given her that chance.

  But Monette had also been more than a victim. Even if Sally’s own idea of a desirable career ladder didn’t run to employment at the Lifeway, Monette had advanced from stocker to checker trainee: she was, in at least some measure, ambitious. If Bone Bandy had it right, his daughter was also unscrupulous and greedy (gee, wonder where she got that from?), possibly even a blackmailer. And say what you would about the possible causes of her aggressiveness about sex, there was no denying that Monette had lusted powerfully, and pushed hard to satisfy that lust. Ambition, greed, and lust—not exactly admirable traits, but not uncommon.

  Monette was, in short, a highly flawed human being, whose faults were not solely matters of gender. She’d been murdered and violated in a way that reflected a hatred of women, but also a grave offense against humans of all kinds. Maybe the sign ought to read: “For Monette. And for All Us Poor Sinners.”

  Not exactly an upbeat message for Jubilee Days.

  And now it looked as if the parade was about to roll. Sally saw the color guard march out into the street and head south, followed by the first of the bands, then the Jubilee Days Committee. (Where the hell was Dwayne? Was he at that very moment shaking hands to seal the deadly deal?) Parade marshals made sure everybody went in the order they were supposed to go, trying hard to keep the various groups from tripping over each other, and yet close enough together that there wouldn’t be gaps in the procession, a tricky task. At the edge of Sally’s group, the twirlers were pulling out Bic lighters and touching them to the cloth-wrapped ends of their batons, carefully wrapping fingers around the glinting chrome shafts between the flames.

  At last it was time for Sheriff Dickie Langham to lead the Monette Bandy Memorial Marchers, and the Esther Morris float, out into the street to join the pageant. Sally looked back over her shoulder at the cheering, sign-waving marchers, at the sight of the lifelong radical Maude, the Sierra Club stalwart, Nature Conservancy board member, contributor to all things green and progressive, in her proper patriot’s garb, waving her “Thank You Wal-Mart” sign. Herman Schwink, behind the wheel of the flatbed truck, was giving a thumbs-up, getting ready to put the big rig in gear. Brit stood next to the giant sculpture, one hand clenched in the wire and wood frame. Delice stood on the other side, her position mirroring Brit’s, down to the clutching hand. Like Mary Langham and the twenty-odd other people standing and sitting on the float, Brit and Delice were smiling and waving, but unlike the others, they were not whooping. They weren’t making any noise. Their smiles could pass for rictus grimaces, they were gritting their teeth so hard. The monstrous Mother of Women’s Rights swayed slightly as Herman eased off the break, and the truck lumbered into motion.

  Somewhere up ahead, the Laramie High School band was performing an out-of-kilter rendition of “Streets of Laredo.” The old Model Ts and Stutz Bearcats, Chrysler Newporters and Ford Edsels were honking their horns. Along the sidewalks the crowds cheered as they passed, the sheriff waving his hat (and with JJ’s help, appearing to be doing all right with that enormous horse), Sally brandishing her sign. Each group paused as it passed the reviewing stand in the center of town, right in front of the Wrangler Bar and Grill, and then marched on. Every time the parade halted, Sally shot a backward glance at the truck, where Delice and Brit were managing to keep Mrs. Morris erect, but clearly having a time of it. Indeed, three other people were also holding on to the sculpture’s skirts. From the waist up, Big Esther shuddered a little with each slow start and stop.

  As the Monette Bandy Memorial Marchers reached the reviewing stand, the parade announcer declared,

  “Ladies and gentlemen, please remove your hats and observe a moment of silence in honor of a young woman who recently fell victim to violent crime not far from our peaceful community. Let’s all work together to prevent such terrible things from happening to our children, our friends, our parents, and our neighbors.”

  And the crowd, for just that instant, fell completely silent. Sally would never have been able to predict how that fleeting stillness would affect her. The tears came instantly, followed by a surge of warmth toward everyone there, friend or stranger, anyone capable of compassion, anyone who might reflect on Monette’s death. She told herself she had to learn to be a little more generous and compassionate in the future.

  Her vision was still blurred, her heart still full, when the moment was over, and Dickie began to lead them forward again. Thus blinded by sentiment, she didn’t see the rock come whizzing toward her face, smack the sign next to her head, and ricochet off to hit the stallion right in the part of the anatomy that distinguished it from its gelded brethren.

  The palomino whinnied and reared. Dickie dropped the reins and nearly fell off. As the horse plunged earth-ward again, JJ scrambled to snatch hold of the bridle. Hawk yanked Sally’s arm and pulled her away from the irate animal. All around them, marchers scattered in panic.

  A screech behind: Herman had slammed on the brakes. The next noise Sally heard was the sickening crack of breaking boards. As Hawk dragged her to the side of the street, she looked back to see people leaping off the sides of the flatbed as the enormous sculpture heaved and rocked, wobbled, and finally pitched over backward.

  The twirlers, who’d only moments before been high-stepping gaily forward, saw the statue falling and dropped their batons, squealing in flight. Big Esther hit the ground right on top of the burning batons, and burst into flames. The Shriners, whizzing up from behind in their Corvettes, wrenched their little wheels to avoid crashing into the Mother of Women’s Rights, now blazing brightly in the middle of Third Street. Their carefully choreographed driving routine obliterated, they veered around in crazy patterns, fezzes flying. Four Corvettes careened, fortunately at low speed, into one another. Sally was relieved to see that both Burt and John Boy had avoided collision. It was probably all those years they’d spent driving California freeways.

  Jerry Jeff finally managed to get the stallion under control. Dickie jumped
off, ran to Sally, grabbed her by the shoulders, and said, “What the hell happened?”

  “Somebody threw a rock at my head, but it hit my sign and bounced off and nailed your horse. I think it came from that direction!” Sally pointed toward the Wrangler’s café entrance. The sheriff ran into the crowd, shoving people aside, his hand on the butt of his gun.

  Now the sirens were sounding. Two fire engines came barreling down Grand Avenue, turned onto Third, and pulled up by the flaming Esther, firefighters leaping off the trucks. Several got busy hooking up hoses, while the rest worked to push back the surging crowd, many of whom were quite certain that this was absolutely the best Jubilee Days parade in history.

  Esther was large, but crepe paper burned fast. Much to the disappointment of the crowd, the fire had soon been reduced to smoke and sodden ash, singed boards and blackened chicken wire. Now on the sidewalk in front of the Wrangler, Sally stood next to Brit, who was staring forlornly at the remains of Big Esther. “That was my most ambitious engineering project ever,” she said.

  “Happily, as a lawyer you’ll be using other talents,” Hawk told Brit, squeezing her shoulder.

  Herman, who’d been busy pulling the flatbed out of range of the flames, got out of the cab of the truck, walked over to Brit, and put his arms around her. “Cowboy up, darlin’,” he said.

  Assured that Brit was in comforting hands, Hawk turned his attention to the dazed Sally. “Are you all right?” he asked, shaking her by the arm.

  Sally looked down at the sign dangling from the hand on the arm he wasn’t shaking, then looked back up at Hawk. “You’re pinching me,” she said. “Let go.”

  But as it turned out, Sally wasn’t the only one getting pinched. “Comin’ through!” somebody yelled. “Police! Clear out of here!”

  Four sheriff’s deputies came around the corner from behind the Wrangler, pushing the crowd back as they moved. They were followed by Dickie Langham, panting hard from his riding and running, but trying to jolly the crowd into dispersing. “No cause for alarm here, folks,” he said, smiling and trying not to gasp. “Just a tiny bit of trouble with a fella who had a drop or two too much to drink this morning. You all get on home now, or have a bite of lunch, or go on out to the rodeo. Looks like the parade’s about over. Enjoy the rest of your Jubilee Days.”

  Unaware of what she was doing, Sally watched, hypnotized, as an Albany County Sheriff’s Department patrol car drove up in front of the café. Dickie walked past Sally and Hawk, over to the vehicle, put his hands on his hips, worked on catching his breath. And now, from around the corner of the building, here came Bone Bandy, weaving and reeking of whiskey, hands cuffed behind his back, held and prodded by an un-characteristically disheveled Scotty Atkins. Bone certainly appeared a whole lot too piss-eyed to have the vaguest idea of where he was, or what was happening to him. But drunks, Sally knew, could go in and out of consciousness, in and out of memory. Just as Scotty pushed him past Sally and Hawk, Bone raised his head, on a neck that had seemed all but boneless only a second before. He looked Sally in the eye. “Hello, angel,” he whispered.

  Chapter 26

  Daytime Nightmares

  “I don’t want to go home,” Sally insisted. “In fact, that’s the last thing I want. I’d just sit there and brood about the fact that I have hardly any underwear. It’ll be bad enough waiting around, wondering what that crazy bastard Bone’s telling the police.”

  “But you’re exhausted,” said Hawk. “And if you’re not, I am. Even without having your skull smashed with a rock, your brain must be fairly addled.”

  Not to mention another intimate moment with a frigging horse. “I am a little shaky,” Sally admitted. Maybe I’m so mixed up, I think I’m fine.”

  “In that case, come in and have a cup of coffee, and tell me exactly what happened,” Delice said firmly. She’d come jangling up just in time to see Bone bundled into the patrol car.

  Hawk looked Sally over carefully. “Okay,” he decided. “I could go for a burger.”

  It was noisy as hell in the Wrangler. Once the police took off, the parade-goers had flowed into the café and bar, jabbering about the thrilling surprise ending to the afternoon’s entertainment. Delice commandeered a table in the restaurant, and soon Sally and Hawk were settling down to a late lunch.

  Her heart was still hammering, but Sally figured that an order of Wrangler onion rings was just the thing to slow it down. Hawk had gone into brooding mode, saying nothing, barely looking up from the cheeseburger and fries he was demolishing, as if he hadn’t consumed a full pound of aged American beef only the night before. Then again, dinner at the Yippie I O seemed awfully long ago.

  Delice peppered Sally with questions. She mumbled answers while she crunched her way through four cheap paper napkins’ worth of hot, sweet, greasy rings. “So it seems,” Sally concluded, wiping the ketchup off her fingers with a fifth napkin, “that Bone Bandy is the one who visited our house Tuesday night, and called me up this morning, and just tried to bean me with a rock. Looks like it’s up to Dickie and Scotty to find out whether he pushed me into the bucking chute. What I don’t get is why? What’s he got against me? I still can’t quite believe that he was the one who killed Monette.”

  “That son of a bitch!” Delice spat. “Well, at least this’ll probably be the last chance he gets to terrorize women for a while.”

  Sally looked up from the pile of soggy napkins, trouble in her eyes. “Yeah. I guess. But how could I have read him so wrong Thursday morning? I guess some part of me really wanted to believe that he was capable of at least a little fatherly grief. Boy, what a sap, huh?”

  The burger was gone. Only a few hard, cold fries remained on Hawk’s plate. He pursed his lips, staring at the ruins of his lunch, then looked up, expressionless, the round lenses of his glasses gleaming. “There’s no evidence at this point that you were off-base. You said then you didn’t think he’d killed his daughter—why change your mind about that now?”

  Sally leaned on her elbows and put her head in her hands.

  “He’s no prince, but I don’t think he killed her either,” Delice told Sally. “Otherwise, why would he have been sitting at my bar at ten o’clock this morning, crying in his whiskey, telling everybody who could stand to listen that one way or another, he’d find the fucker who killed his little girl, and get all the bastards that ever did him wrong?”

  Delice put a hand on Sally’s arm. “Hey, I’m an expert on drunks. The ones who are bad off—and Bone’s definitely in that category—get real confused. When they happen to be sober, they can have their sensible moments, but when they’re loaded, they get wild hairs up their butts. Bone could have latched on to you because he’s imagined up some diabolical connection between you and the murderer. Then again, he could just be obsessing about something you did a million years ago, that seems like only yesterday to him. Drunks are like that. People who deliberately lobotomize themselves have problems distinguishing between fantasy and reality, or for that matter, twenty years back and this week.”

  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.

  “Actually, he did mention something about me getting him kicked out of the Gallery bar, way back when,” she said. “Maybe he has carried a grudge all these years, and this week’s events have just set him off. But face it, guys, if Bone didn’t murder Monette, then the killer is still on the loose. How reassuring is that?”

  “At least we know the cops have the guy who’s been bothering you. Take what you can get,” Hawk advised.

  She nodded reluctantly. “And there haven’t been any more murders. I guess it’s good news that it doesn’t look like there’s a serial killer, going around town stalking honky-tonky angels. So that leaves us back with Bone insisting that Monette was blackmailing somebody. Any theories as to who?”

  All three sipped the ineffectua
l Wrangler coffee. When Dwayne Langham pulled a chair up to their table, Sally was grateful for the distraction.

  “Hey guys! I hear I missed the parade of the century!” said Dwayne, with anomalous cheer.

  “Yeah, Dwayne.” Delice sneered at her brother. “Where were you? Down at the hospital, swindling crippled little old ladies out of their homesteads?”

  Dwayne gave her his patented blank stare. “Something came up,” he said mildly.

  “How’d you know Molly was in the hospital?” Hawk asked Delice.

  “It was the talk of the white elephant sale. By the way, Mustang, when you didn’t show up this morning, I bought that captain’s chair for you. Fifty bucks—figured you were good for it. I thought I’d better grab it before somebody else did.”

  “You’re a pal,” Sally told her.

  “So what’s going on with the land swap, Dwayne? Don’t try to play dumb—Burt told me Nattie drank up half the Dom Perignon in the Yippie I O cellar last night, and then gave him grief about not getting a family discount. Like you two need a discount! Where is the Wicked Witch of the West anyhow?” Delice asked.

  Dwayne ignored his sister’s insult to his wife.

  “At the beauty parlor,” he answered. “Or maybe getting a massage. Hair, nails, I don’t know. Seems to me she just had it all done a couple of days ago, but you know Nattie. Pretty high maintenance. I can’t keep her schedule straight.”

  Delice shot Dwayne an assessing glance. “Burt said you guys had closed the Wood’s Hole deal.”

  Dwayne smiled faintly, sphinxlike. “You’re not going to tell me a damn thing,” Delice said. “I know you.”

  Sally wasn’t either. Even though it had been Delice’s idea to get involved with the thing in the first place, Sally figured that what she and Hawk had discovered was Molly Wood’s business. Discretion was admittedly not her strong point, but in this case, the fact that Dwayne was sitting there made restraint easier.