“And so the Preacher can damn well butt out or get his butt kicked.”
“The thought had crossed my mind.”
I smiled again, with teeth, and put my hands on the edge of the desk in front of me and leaned some of my weight on them to bring my face closer to his, because I wanted him to hear every word I said and not think for a moment that they were anything short of sincere.
“You’re a good man, Ybarra,” I said, “and in other circumstances, or maybe in another place, we could get along just fine. Maybe that can happen here and now, too. But that depends on both of us being able to understand that I stopped taking orders and turning the other cheek and paying dutiful homage to my elders and betters about the time I got out of the army. If I am here in Farewell, it is because I want to be here, and if I stay, it will be because I want to stay. And if I go, it will be because I want to go, and it will be at a time of my own choosing.”
This time it was his turn to wait. He did it well.
“You tell me that you know Prescott’s death could be murder,” I said, “and you want me to believe that you are and have been investigating it, and I do believe it. But that doesn’t mean I am going to go away and lie down and go to sleep for the winter. The last time we talked, we agreed that a sheriff shouldn’t have to run for office. I don’t think you’d sweep a murder under the rug, because you’re a better man than that, and it’s my guess that you couldn’t make yourself do it even if you wanted to. But you’re still an elected official and you still have to live here and you have a stake in the town itself and you’re still personally involved with the people who run things in Farewell. You wouldn’t let one of them get away with murder, no. But you might very well handle the whole thing on tiptoe, very quietly, to keep from disturbing the status quo.”
“Would that be such a bad thing?”
“Maybe not. I don’t know. Not yet, anyway, and that’s the whole point, Ybarra, because neither do you. We’re both guessing, and we’re both being influenced by factors that really have nothing to do with the facts in the case. From where I sit, there are at least three people on this earth who deserve to know exactly how Pres Prescott died, and who did it, and why. And they deserve redress.”
He didn’t like that.
“Redress, my ass!” he growled, breaking in. “Now you’re talking like a high school poet. Redress. Don’t be a bigger fool than God made you. If ’Nam and all the rest of it taught you anything, it should have been that there is no redress for a life. Can’t be. Not in the nature of things. Unless you are talking about revenge, in which case—”
“In which case,” I said, stealing the sentence back and finishing it for him, “I can go to hell. And I probably will, Ybarra, just to keep you company. But not today. And not for any reason like that. Of course nobody can redress the personal loss to Marilyn Prescott and her children. Her husband, and their father, is dead and he isn’t coming back, ever, and no one can fix that. But someone stole—or tried to steal—something besides a husband and father here.
“Someone took a hell of a lot of money from Prescott, almost broke him and put him out of business, in the months just before he died. And someone is trying to finish the job now by stealing what’s left from his survivors. And that, by God, is something for which redress is well and truly possible. Or am I wrong?”
He picked up the stone and put it down again and looked past me at nothing and snapped the middle finger of his right hand into the palm of his left and then slapped them both palm down on the desktop.
“All right, Preacher,” he said. “We’ll leave it there. You’re right and you’re wrong, but sitting here and talking about it isn’t going to do anyone a lot of good, and I sure got other things to do besides worry about whether you get your butt kicked, and for all I know you got some things to do, too, and I am just too old and too tired to try and tell anyone, including myself, that I have got all of the answers.”
Sounded fair enough to me.
I waited to see if he had anything else on his mind, and when he didn’t seem to, I nodded in his direction and got up to leave. But he wasn’t really done.
“One thing,” he said when I got to the door, “and then to hell with you. I know there isn’t a hope in this world that you have got enough sense to listen to anything I say, but there seem to be a few people here and there who set a good bit of store by you, and I just wouldn’t feel right if I let you go without one final bit of warning, and it’s this: You mind where you put your feet, Preacher.”
I gave him one more smile—a real one this time. “Always do,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “But it takes a lifetime to get acquainted with a town like Farewell. To know who’s doing what with which to who. You got nice friends. Particularly the girl; she’s real good people. But you got a few aren’t your friends, too, and I don’t think you know all their names just yet. You’re still a stranger…and that is enough to get a man hurt bad sometimes. Keep your eye open.”
I noted his use of the singular.
Friendly.
And oddly comforting.
“Thanks, Ybarra,” I said. “I love you, too.”
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
People change.
Motives become clouded.
The mysteries of the human heart and soul are deeper and more convoluted than all the books ever written and all the poems ever sung have tongue to declare…
TWENTY-SEVEN
Mose Thieroux’s coffee was as good as ever, but his mood wasn’t.
He had brewed up the second pot of the morning by the time Dana and I arrived—we had half expected a side-road confrontation with Vollie Manion, but he didn’t show—and the first few minutes were occupied by questions (What the jeezly hell had been going on in there?) and explanations (Your sheriff’s a nice enough guy, but he’s got some weird playmates) and with pourings and sippings and expressions of pleasure. Dana surprised me by not lighting a Marlboro, and thinking back on it, I couldn’t remember seeing her smoke all morning. But I let it pass without comment for the moment because more pressing matters seemed to be at hand. The room around us had turned silent again, and when I stilled my own center to touch the old lobsterman’s wa, I found the spoor of something dark and ugly that he wasn’t ready to talk about just yet.
“Great-grandkids okay?” I asked, more to create sound than anything else.
The warmth and pleasure were immediate. “Ayuh!”
A startling rictus that might have been an incognito grin—if nobody looked too closely and the day was cloudy—flickered for a brief second across the unfamiliar landscape of his face, and he ducked his head back into his coffee mug, perhaps to prevent it from reaching escape velocity.
“Little devils put a horny toad in my bed last night,” he said. “Son of a howah! Scairt the livin’ shit out’n me, and I lit a shuck after the two of them, but they got out the window and onto the top of the house and stayed up there till I was cooled down.”
He sipped and snorted and sipped again. “Shouldn’t wonder we’ll get on right well,” he said. “For sure they have got the makin’s.”
“Adoption papers coming along?”
More warm feelings, close to the surface. “Monday week.” He nodded. “All drawn up. Just one more thing that you’n me got in common, Preacher: We use the same lawyer. That cold-pissing Pemberton bastid. Temperature goes down ten degrees anytime he’s around, and I sure as God wouldn’t want him on the other side of nothing I was interested in, I can tell you. But a feller don’t get no Christless choice around these parts. Any other lawyer you could trust is too stupid to pour piss out’n a boot, and the ones smart enough to do the work would steal the pennies off a dead man’s eyes. So it’s Pemberton.”
“Spooky bastard,” Dana agreed.
Thieroux shook his head, weighed by the vagaries of human nature, but that unfamiliar smile-rictus flashed again as he looked at her.
“Son of a howah!” he rep
eated. “I am some glad to see this Bible-thumper had sense enough to do like I told him and bring you along. Ain’t never been enough smart, pretty women in this world to suit me—and none like you in this house since m’wife died, b’Jesus.”
He gave her a long up-and-down of frank admiration. “Was I even ten year younger…” he said.
And then, in an instant, the smiles and the warming mood were banished and we were back to square one. Thieroux downed the remainder of his coffee, got up for another cupful, and detoured on the way back to open the right-hand drawer of what I had taken for an old-fashioned potato bin on the underside of the tall kitchen cabinet that stood by the pantry door.
“Kitchen’s my office,” he explained. “Do my business here, so the things I need for it are here, too.”
The bin hadn’t held potatoes for a long time. If ever. Instead, the space was occupied by files, neatly color-coded and arranged for easy access, beside what appeared to be an extremely sophisticated high-tech telephone equipped for data transmission. I glanced around the room, searching for the computer that I knew must go with it. Thieroux noticed, and nodded to the left of the cabinet’s work surface, which I now realized was at desk height rather than at the drainboard level repeated elsewhere in the room.
“Bread box,” he said.
Looking with unblinkered eyes, I could see now that it was somewhat too large to be a real bread container. The door at the front, I decided, would be the back of a fold-up LED crystal monitor, with the computer keyboard and drives concealed behind it. I looked a question at our host.
“Just cantankerousness,” he said, pulling one of the files out of the drawer and bringing it to the table along with the coffee pot. “Showing my age. Never could decide whether I liked being alive in this part of the twentieth century. Got used to the furniture and the colors and the—hell, the whole world that I grew up with, and never felt at home with no others, so I go right on living in that kind of a world most of the time, because I got rich enough to afford it. But all the same, a man has got to make an exception here and there. Or die…”
He slapped the file down in the middle of the table and topped off all the cups of coffee before sitting down himself.
“Once’t you woke me up and got me to moving and looking in the right direction,” he said, opening the packet and handing me the topmost sheet, “it wa’n’t too jeezly hard to find out what had been going on while I was asleep.”
The paper in my hand was a rough summary, and some of it was couched in the arcane obscurities of New Mexico–style land descriptions. But the message of it all was clear enough: Doing part of the work by personal inquiry and part by long-range computer sorting, Mose Thieroux had followed a trail through two years of local real-estate transactions—and corporate shenanigans covering a period perhaps three times as long—to a single door. It wasn’t anything you could take to a prosecutor or even to the civil courts as yet, and it involved a few offshore holding companies and corporate entities that might or might not be legally penetrable. But it was enough to nail down the main players.
“Llano Escondido Exploitation and Development,” I said.
“In-gawdam-corporated.” Thieroux nodded.
I looked at him expectantly, waiting for the other shoe to hit the floor, but the answer to my unspoken question wasn’t on the paper he had given me, and he seemed oddly reluctant to spit it out with the rest of his words.
“Who?” I finally asked.
He swallowed half a cup of the good coffee and put the mug down, and his face declared that this was a bad day for the world and there was no fixing it.
“Man gets to be my age,” he said heavily, “he had ought to know better than to go around looking for happy endings or pots of gold. Or friends he can trust. It would be nice to say that things was different once’t; there are people this world who make a good living just from telling how it was better and nicer and you could depend on a man’s word to be his bond, way back when. But the hell of it is, my memory is still too clear to lie to myself thataway, so finding out that people are still just people—like they always were—shouldn’t make me feel so low in my mind, should it?”
“But it does,” I said.
“But it does. I live out here and purt’ near never go to town, but I hear things, ’most everything that I need to hear. Anything that’s public property and quite a bit that’s not. And a lot of the things I hear have got something to do with some business or other that I am in, because I am in a lot of different businesses. But mostly I am in the land business. Always have been. Found out real early that’s where the money was and that I was some good at it, so you would think I would hear and know what was going on around me.”
He was beating himself about the head and ears for failing to spot a gaffed game, and that didn’t make sense to me.
“You weren’t intended to hear or know,” I said. “No one was. That was the whole idea.”
“Ayuh,” he said. “Makes no jeezly difference. Didn’t take me the whole of one day to find out, when I got to looking in the right direction. But it needed a stranger, someone who didn’t know the town of Farewell from a can of paint a week ago, to tell me what I should be looking for. The only reason I didn’t see it right off was that I was sitting out here asleep. And because I done that, because of me being a damn fool, a man is dead who oughtn’t to be—no, don’t go lookin’ at me like that, I mean Orrin Prescott, not my grandboy—and a lot of other people stand now to lose their ahss and all their fixtures.”
It still sounded like a bum rap, but I could see arguing wasn’t going to help much, and anyway I still wanted the answer to the question I hadn’t exactly asked, so this time I kept my mouth shut.
“Forty year now,” he said, “I been doing business with two men here in town who I trusted. Partnered them in many a thing and bought from them both and sold to them both and half the time no more than a handshake or a word on the telephone needed between us. Stood godfather to my boy, one of them did, and both friends to me. Or I thought they was, anyhow. Till yesterday.”
He wanted me to break in now, take him off the hook. But all I could do was wait.
“For two years,” he said, “Llano Escondido has been sitting doggo in the weeds, putting together a parcel of land a bit here and a bit there. Always through third parties and never enough to make a stir. Never enough land changing hands to rate more than a paragraph in the local paper. No two parcels to the same buyer, always just some corporation with a name like XYZ or Acme or How-Dee…and when you get to checking, it turns out that corporation is owned by another one and that one is off in the Caribbean or Liechtenstein or some damn place where it costs your eyeteeth to bribe someone to tell you who the hell it really is. One of the parcels they got even come from me. Not that I mind that too bad—kinda unfriendly, but business is business and I understand about it; ain’t nothing I ain’t done m’self one time or t’other.”
He nodded reflectively, not seeing us or the room around him for a moment, but then came back to the world with a snap.
“But this about it, Preacher,” he said, pointing a finger at me. “There is a big difference between sharp trading and thief trading, and the line of work you’re in is one of the best ways of showing it: A man who wins his money by bluffing the other feller out of it or sucking him into a hand where he can’t win is one thing—that’s the game. But a man who marks the cards or mechanics the deck or is partnered with someone else at the table is something else again, and that is b’Jesus what we have got ourselves here. Putting the money in a bank account down in the Caribbean or in Switzerland and setting up five different dummy companies to make a smoke screen ain’t the kind of thing a sharp trader needs. That’s for a Christless pack of thieves, so there can’t be no horse pukkey about how this was all just business.”
He looked questioningly at me, but I couldn’t see where he needed any answer. “No argument,” I said.
He nodded and went on. “The parcel
s was all centered on one place, and a baby coulda seen it if he’d looked. Minute you told me what you suspicioned, I thought of the old Good Hope. And sure enough…”
He waited expectantly, but the name meant nothing to me and I said so.
“Ayuh. No reason you should know about it, I expect,” he said. “Before your time. The Good Hope was an oil field—biggest strike ever in these parts and purt’ near the only one, come to that—first deep hole got drilled here and the first one that spouted anything but dust. And people remember it because it was what people nowadays call tech-no-logical theft…pure unarmed robbery!”
His eyes went opaque with memory.
“The Good Hope came in just a little after folks learned how to slant-drill a well,” he said. “Before, you just drilled straight down. That way, you could always tell right where a oil pool was by looking where the derricks or pump heads was setting. But with the jeezly slant-drilling, you put all the derricks in one place, and it can be miles and miles from the pool—all you do is slant the wells over to where it is, like someone using a straw to snitch soda water out’n his neighbor’s glass. Nothing wrong with it if you got permission to get the soda…or the oil. But it’s a scandal for sure if you do it on the sly.”
I still didn’t see what this had to do with a modern-day real-estate swindle, but he had my interest. “Scandal?” I said.
“Bet y’ahss, boy! People who brought in that old well—the Good Hope—had slant-drilled without telling nobody. They’d had one duster drilling straight down and knew they wasn’t a drop of oil under their own lease. But they thought they knew where it was—and they was right! Only the man who owned the land it was under was a crazy furriner called Lupe—Lupidischi-something it was—who wouldn’t sell to them, nor lease it neither. He was trying to farm the land at the time and wouldn’t listen to nobody. So what they done was to drill on a slant, like I said, and tap into the pool down below Lupe’s land without anyone being the wiser.
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