The Clincher

by Lisa Preston

  “The deputies said you were out at the Rocking B, some shindig going on there.”

  Nichol hadn’t been at Weatherby’s hootenanny, I realized.

  So it was possible, I had to admit, that Nichol could have vandalized his own place just to make someone else look guilty. Which worked for about a minute in my case.

  Then, instead of continuing down this stupid road of thinking Nichol had tried to frame me for vandalizing his office, I named the people who’d been at the Rocking B, people who had definitely not been bothering his office that night. Weatherby, Schram, all those cowpokes and semi-regulars.

  “Mr. Harper wasn’t there,” I continued, “but his son was.”

  I thought again about Patsy-Lynn. I mean, things were peaceful here in Cowdry before she died in her garage. It seemed like there was a crime wave of sorts, given a death and a major vandalism and—

  “Rainy.”

  I focused. Nichol looked to be waiting for me to make another comment. He knew I knew he hadn’t been at Weatherby’s potluck. Come to think of it, Nichol had been missing at the funeral and reception, too. Really he was as much a newbie in town as me. I considered this and sort of liked it. Maybe I am doing all right. Sometimes I feel ready to panic, like no one can understand how it is, me trying to make it on my own, with my head and hands to support myself. A vet, with a big money education behind him and a big money future ahead, he can’t understand the boots I’m wearing. And lots of folks, me included, would have rather stuck with Doc Vass.

  Other folks weren’t at Weatherby’s the other night. I wondered if the detective was already making a list. I could think of one who’d probably had a spare rounding hammer.

  Chapter 18

  A BIG BLACK RIG LURKED IN the grocery store parking lot beyond the veterinarian’s office. As I walked back to Ol’ Blue, I realized the lurking truck was Dixon Talbot’s shoeing rig. With six wheels and a professional shoer’s box in the back, his rig’s a sight more truck than mine. I listened, satisfying a sudden powerful urge to know if Talbot’s truck carried an automatic tranny or a stick shift. Wind up, clutch, wind up.

  Stick.

  Talbot drove off as I reached Ol’ Blue, never looking my way. Instead I was treated to a profile of his clipped cut and size extra-large Adam’s apple. I can’t be the only one who thinks of skinny turkeys when seeing the side of his throat. If Dixon Talbot was tall, he’d be one of those super thin lanky types, but he’s not much higher than me. His make-up-for-shortness white cowboy hat was on the dashboard. Maybe it’s too big to wear in the truck. He cleared the traffic light late, his truck roaring. I’d get shed of that attitude, myself. If we needed to have words, let’s have ’em.

  I flipped my key in Ol’ Blue’s ignition to warm the glow plugs, waited, then fired up to follow Talbot down the main street. If I could flag him over, we’d parlay, provided he’d give me the daggummed time of day. But I got caught at the red light by the almost-dead second strip mall at the bottom end of town.

  Here on the south end of Cowdry, things are a little more run-down than the north end. A few blocks past the sheriff’s office, this other strip mall is half empty. It used to have a pizza parlor, a used bookstore, and some sort of cheapie trinket store, but they all gave up the ghost. There’s still a tiny library, a tanning salon, and a drug store there, but one thing this little town could use in a big way is that pizza parlor. Lordy, I do love the stuff. The pizza place that used to be here shut down not long after I moved to Cowdry. The place deserved a sad, longing look from me and I obliged.

  Guy’s scooter, in front of the shut-down pizza joint, caught my eye. I let go thoughts of chasing down Talbot’s truck. Instead, I parked Ol’ Blue next to the plastic motorcycle-wannabe.

  The front door of this not-open business was open and Guy was inside, sitting in a booth with Abby Langston’s daddy. Neither of them were quick enough to look up at me and I caught the tail end of Langston’s words.

  “. . . You’d sure think he would have offered every assistance.”

  Guy was frowning, and muttered back. “If Harper won’t give a blood sample voluntarily, well, I mean, he must have something to hide. But no, that doesn’t make sense, of course he can’t have had anything to do with . . .” Guy saw me and got up with open arms to try and hug me.

  Langston said hey to me as he rose, allowing as to how he and Guy about had things wrapped up so he should excuse himself.

  My mind was trying to catch up, but it was tailing so far behind I was never going to make it, not today, not tomorrow. Guy got to blabbing, but I wasn’t listening because some of my brain cells were chewing on what I overheard. About busted a fan belt inside my skull, the thinking gears whirred so hard.

  Keith Langston rubbed his temples as he made for the door. “I’ve got to check on my kid. She’s about dropped her basket, lately. Says she’s sick. I think she’s playing hooky, but she’s old enough to stay home by herself.”

  “Thanks again, good talking to you,” Guy hollered, loud enough for me to know I was being corrected for my missing manners.

  “Bye,” I called, getting a wave from Langston in response. Soon as he was gone, I demanded of Guy, “What’s all this? What were you guys jawing about?”

  Guy nodded like Talking Time had come due. “Well, we both gave statements, blood samples, fingerprints, everything the police asked for, but Keith heard a rumor that Harper wouldn’t give blood, just fingerprints. And the investigator didn’t think he could get a warrant for—”

  “Huh? Winston Harper? Warrant?”

  “Harper was with us too, you see.”

  Guy had left out a few things and that, coming from Mr. Let’s Talk About Everything, was pretty rich. I took a seat in the booth across from him. “He was with you . . . when?”

  “When Patsy-Lynn Harper died that afternoon. When you were with Keith Langston’s daughter, shoeing her horse. We’re each other’s, well, witness, alibi.”

  Alibi is a word that provokes consideration. I pushed myself back in the booth, farther from Guy. “Why would they be wanting blood samples from all of you? If you were together, you don’t need to be eliminated from the Harper garage.”

  Guy shrugged. “I didn’t ask. Maybe they were just covering all the bases.”

  But they couldn’t cover all the bases if one of the three wouldn’t give a blood sample. Could Langston or Harper have been driving that truck to the Flying Cross as I was leaving that afternoon? I remembered the clerk taking my fingerprints, talking about police things like consent and probable cause. There was quite a bit more going on than I understood. The sheriff’s man got a blood sample from Keith Langston? It occurred to me again that Langston was a man without a woman . . . unless he had a woman on the side. Could Abby’s daddy have had something secret with Patsy-Lynn? The Langstons did live pretty much right across the highway from the Harpers.

  People have secrets, that’s for sure.

  “Rainy?”

  “Explain all this.” I bellowed to help Guy understand that he was the one being a bonehead. “What are you doing here, in this place?”

  “Well. We’re going to have a restaurant, trying to, anyway. Surprise.” He paused, leaning back and fairly gushing in a grin. “What do you think about calling it Rainy’s?”

  My name means my shoeing business, which is all mine. It’s me. I’m the one who makes the appointments and keeps them, shapes the shoes. I nip and rasp and nail. I clinch. I eyed Guy. “You’re giving me a size 5 headache.”

  “And size 5s are the really big horseshoes, right?”

  I nodded. It had taken Guy a while to learn to tell a triple aught pony shoe from a burly draft horse’s size 3, 4, or even 5 footwear. He thought a size 5 nail would go in a size 5 shoe, too. It flips him that for much of my work, I use size 5 nails in shoes that are size 0, 1, or 2.

  “I’ll get you some aspirin.” Guy hopped up. Lickety-split, he rounded up a glass of water and two white tablets.

  I took the
bitter pills. “What were you and Langston talking about when I walked in here?”

  “The restaurant, of course.” Guy beamed.

  “No. You weren’t.” I looked at him stiff and square to let him know he’d best come clean.

  His eyeballs took a couple circuits around their sockets, then an Oh Yeah look showed up. “The blood samples. And I mentioned you were going to the police station.”

  “You mentioned that, did you?”

  Guy did a frown with the nod. “Why? Does it bother you that I mentioned it?”

  I took one hand off my head long enough to wave a demand for him to keep trying to explain himself, encouraging him with, “Keep going.”

  “Well, fine. Keith and I both thought it was remarkable that Winston Harper wouldn’t give a blood sample. After all, he certainly wasn’t at home when his wife died.”

  “You never told me that you knew Harper couldn’t have been the one headed to the Flying Cross as I left. You were all Mr. Gee Whillickers when I was chewing on this stuff before.”

  His eyeballs took another lap. “Rainy, I had this surprise cooking, so I didn’t tell you about my business with Keith Langston and Winston Harper. This is a big deal.”

  “Isn’t you giving a blood sample for a murder investigation a big deal?”

  “I have a dream.” Guy made a tiny speech that no doubt had the good Dr. King spinning. “Thanks for your enthusiasm and support.”

  “When did you give the deputies blood? The night they first questioned me?”

  “Later in the week, like you. They asked a lot of people.”

  That made no sense to me. And why didn’t they ask me right away? “And they asked these business associates of yours? The ones you never mentioned to me?”

  Guy shrugged, going all the way with pretending I wasn’t mad at him. “Not Keith at first. I guess they’ve asked Winston Harper a couple times.”

  “But, really, what’s Langston got to do with anything here?”

  Guy looked around the ghost restaurant. “He’s helping with financing, setting up the business end, helped get Harper to come on as a backer.”

  “So, you’re trying to get money out of Winston Harper.”

  Guy looked offended, sitting up straighter and squinting at me with his jaw set.

  I felt defensive, too. “I mean, he’s my client. He is now. And you never said.”

  “Well, Keith and I think your client ought to give the sheriff’s office a tube of blood. We cooperated. So did you. And you gave fingerprints, although that was regarding the vet’s office, right?” Guy beamed. “Your alibi for when that happened is that you were at that chili-feed cow-catching-thing.”

  Reconsidering that crowd at Weatherby’s—I needed to have a think about Ted and his boyfriend—I was a little impressed with how Guy had obviously already thought about the Harper stuff and the vandalism at the vet’s office. “You know who wasn’t at the hootenanny?” I hadn’t intended to speak out loud, I was just thinking too hard.

  “What is a hootenanny?”

  He knew high well my meaning, so his words needed ignoring. I held out a few fingers to commence counting. “Dixon Talbot wasn’t there. Winston Harper wasn’t, but his son was. Lots of regular horse people were there, like Felix Schram. Weatherby was there, of course, being it’s his place.”

  “Who else?”

  “Keith Langston wasn’t there.” I said, counting off a third right finger.

  “Well, fine, but why would he be?” Guy said.

  “The sheriff should know about this,” I said. “He wasn’t there either.”

  Cowdry’s as far as it can get from the county seat, which is why the deputies’ office over here is just a few rooms in a strip mall. Maybe because Magoutsen isn’t kicking around here day and night, he makes an easy target for some good old boys to smirk and call him Mr. Magoo. People who ride on glass horses and all that sticks and stones stuff would seem to say a person shouldn’t be teased for his name, certainly not the sheriff. Teasing’s awful and really finds my fire. It should be outlawed in early adolescence, that’s for sure and for certain.

  Rainy fainy fatty. Fatty, fatty, fainy Rainy.

  They’d needed new material in the worst of ways, those skinny, trendy witches and their preppie boyfriends. Their kind of bullying was, well, it wasn’t physical, but I’d have rather it was. After I’d get miserable enough to get my mama to send me back to Texas, when daddy’d go on the road again it was even worse to think about coming back to the school in Los Angeles. I dreaded facing those bully-girls and their talk.

  Then one day they let me come to a party. They said they were my friends and they gave me beer.

  They introduced me to Jesse.

  And things went downhill from there, but I didn’t know it at first. Blamed near wrecked my life over it all. In a lunge, I shoved away from Guy and his old pizza joint table then and there. I needed air. Made for the door, telling Guy to give me some space.

  But outside, all over again, I felt put upon because Ol’ Blue’s longhorn hood ornament was gone.

  Chapter 19

  FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, WHO’D BOTHER my truck? I marched right back into the old pizza place. Plastic booths, some patched with duct tape, chipped tables, stained carpet. All stuff I hadn’t paid attention to when I first spied Keith Langston and Guy inside. Outside, the strip mall effect dimmed the beauty that is Oregon, part buttes and prairies, mixed with mountains and evergreen forests. Crowding out that natural world with flickering fluorescent lights so a body wouldn’t even know what’s being missed seemed like a terrible idea.

  Did Guy really think he was going to turn this dump into an upscale eatery?

  “Rainy? Is that you? Are you okay?” Guy entered the beater dining area from the commercial kitchen.

  “My truck was ripped off.”

  “Your tools?” He looked appropriately concerned, setting aside his dream for my dirt. I knew he’d been none too thrilled with my refusal to chat about his Big Dream. I’d been adjusting to that idea, among others. The back of my brain nagged me to try thinking on some things, but wasn’t exactly fetching a pencil and making a list.

  “The hood ornament. Someone ripped it off. I saw Dixon Talbot on my way here.” No need to say I was following him instead of the other way around.

  “Oh, he’s a horseshoer, right?”

  I nodded. “Drives a black truck. Not too keen on me, being as I did quick fixes for a couple of his clients this week.” I wondered if he hated me enough to try to frame me.

  “I saw a big dark pickup truck drive by while you and I were talking,” Guy said, frowning. “Someone really, like, vandalized your truck?”

  “Like that.” My back had been to the window when I came inside on Guy and Keith Langston. I twisted my ponytail now and gave it a tug.

  “Well that’s the kind of thing that doesn’t usually happen around here.”

  “I’d say.” And I’d say more unless I kept my lips from flapping, but here goes. “I don’t get the deal with the police looking at you and Keith Langston. It doesn’t make sense. Where were you meeting that afternoon she died?”

  Guy squirmed. “We were here. All three of us.”

  “There’s more to it.”

  He studied the sorry carpet. “I guess Harper’s son told the police Patsy-Lynn wasn’t big on his dad investing in this. And he said there was money missing from their house.”

  It was all a little fuzzy. A vandalized shoer’s truck notwithstanding, Cowdry doesn’t see much evil. And the police thought Guy might have killed her to get backing on an eatery? I had news for them and him. “I’m another alibi. I could clear you of being the one who was driving up to the Harpers’ that day. How does that grab you?”

  Looking like I’d landed my anvil in his back, Guy gaped like a guppy for a while then said, “That’s a little weird, Rainy. It’s well established where I was that afternoon.”

  “But people make mistakes. And people lie. Maybe the po-
lice thought your, um, alibi wasn’t as good as you thought.”

  “My alibi is fine. And I can’t believe anyone really thought for a second that I had something to do with the poor woman’s death.”

  “There was cash missing from the Harper place, and you had all that money in the cookie jar.”

  “Rainy!” Guy fair gasped. “That was all your rent money!”

  I gave him the shrug that Abby’d schooled me on so well. This earned me an annoyed look and a little old tirade.

  “You thought you had a way to clear me—not that I need it—yet you kept quiet? It doesn’t grab me really well. How does that grab you?” Guy said this with a little spunk.

  “Shabby,” I admitted.

  “We’re so much alike, you and me,” he said.

  This ought to be good. We were alike in no way. Anticipation built up as I fixed to see how Guy’s new We’re So Alike game was going to go.

  “I don’t get it,” I said when he didn’t elaborate, not bothering to make the long list of things I didn’t get.

  “I know you understand what it’s like.” Guy was on a roll. “We both went to trade school and are self-employed—I mean, I’m self-employed in my catering business and I will be with the restaurant once I get my own place. We’re making it with both our heads and our hands. We create. We serve others. I see a lot of similarities in our jobs. And they’re not just jobs, they’re callings for both of us. Don’t you see that?”

  Guy bustled back to that commercial kitchen, waving his arms like he was directing traffic. “I’ve got to show you something. Would you come here?”

  In the kitchen, Guy set out a plate of dark brown ravioli with smooth white gravy on top and some green leaves on the side. “Dessert. Chocolate ravioli with cream sauce and mascarpone filling. Mint garnish.”

  Took a taste to be polite. Got four on the spoon and packed them into my ravioli-hole. These chocolate ravioli? They were way better than Milk Duds. Quick as can be, I belonged to the clean plate club.