I Scarce Can Die (Quill Gordon Mystery Book 5)

by Michael Wallace

  “Good enough, then.” He rose to leave. “One thing, though. What’s the big stone building just up the hill?”

  “The courthouse,” she said. “Built in 1905. More building than we need today. But the real attraction is on the other side of the parking lot from it.”

  “And that is?”

  She gave him a flirty wink. “You’ll have to see for yourself.”

  He started for the door, and as he reached it, she added:

  “Oh, and if you’re looking for local color, you can always pick up the gossip at the saloon on River Street. Especially on Saturdays when everybody’s there for karaoke night.”

  “Thanks. I’ll remember that.”

  He closed the door and crossed the street to the Cherokee, thinking about the saloon. It was where he was meeting Joey Vargas at 5:30 and he had a feeling it wouldn’t be his only visit to that establishment.

  GORDON DROVE A HALF-BLOCK and curved left on Main Street instead of crossing the bridge. Two blocks up the hill, he turned left into the courthouse parking lot. At nearly four in the afternoon on a Friday, the lot was half full, and Gordon stopped to look around before driving to the far end of the lot. No cars were parked there, so he drove across the parking lot, getting as close as possible before stopping.

  “This must be what she was talking about,” Gordon said.

  “Say what?”

  “Sorry, Peter. Carla, the real estate agent, said there was an attraction across the parking lot from the courthouse. I’m guessing it’s commemorative.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Peter said, staring at what appeared to be a functioning gallows. It was made of pine, painted a drab olive green. The scaffold stood eight feet off the ground, and a rope with a noose at the end dropped from a beam above. On the side facing the courthouse, a flight of stairs led up to the platform.

  “There’s a plaque by it. Want to get out and see what it says?”

  “I have a better idea,” Peter replied. “Why don’t you take a look and report back. That way only one of us gets wet.”

  Gordon left the vehicle, looked at the plaque and returned.

  “It says this is a replica of the gallows originally built on the site in 1888 for the hanging of one Jasper Bingham.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Horse thief.”

  “Probably had it coming.”

  “The plaque says they haven’t hanged anyone since.”

  “That shows a certain lack of initiative. Surely, over the course of the last century this town’s had someone who deserved to be hanged.”

  Gordon started the engine, backed up and turned around.

  “Tell me something, Peter. Do you come by your cheerful nature naturally, or did you have to cultivate it?”

  “You must admit, though,” Peter said, “this is really a good example of government efficiency. If they ever need to use the gallows again, they could do the hanging during the afternoon coffee break and have the employees back on the job as soon as the villain finished twitching.”

  THEY BACKTRACKED to the general store. It was about half the size of a small supermarket in the Bay Area, but Carla was right about its having all the necessities. They came away with a bag full of groceries and set off for the house Gordon had rented, sight unseen.

  A one-lane bridge crossed Dutch Joe Creek past the curve on Main Street. It had two wide planks laid over steel grating, a guardrail that seemed none too high, and a rusty coffee can attached to the guardrail by the bridge entrance on the town side. A bouquet of mixed flowers had been put in the coffee can within the past day, and they glistened with drops from the afternoon rain.

  On the guardrail opposite the flowers was a plaque put up by E Clampus Vitus, a California historical group. It read: “On an earlier bridge at this site, Maria Valdez was hanged May 26, 1852, for murder. She was believed to be the first woman executed in the newly formed state of California.”

  “I wonder if the flowers are for Maria,” Gordon said, stopping to look at them. He drove on over the bridge, the Cherokee rumbling and jolting as it rolled over the planks, and turned left onto Soldier Street on the other side.

  Number 124 was the newest home on the block by far, built in the last decade or so. It was a light gray wood house with a notched blue metal roof and sat on a small piece of land 15 feet above the creek. Gordon pulled into the carport to the right of the front door.

  The interior was simply designed. On the left side were a bedroom and a bathroom, and on the right was a small living area with a couch and three chairs facing a freestanding fireplace. Beyond the living area was a compact kitchen with a stove, refrigerator and table for four (or five, in a pinch). Next to the kitchen was a door leading to the master bedroom, and between the kitchen and living area, a sliding glass door opened onto a deck with a covered gas grill and three outdoor chairs.

  “Wonder who owns the place?” Peter asked.

  “Summer home. Belongs to a dentist from Danville.”

  “Should be nice and cozy. Let’s get our stuff in here before your appointment.”

  THE RAIN HAD STOPPED by the time they were ready to leave, and they elected to walk the few blocks to the saloon. Crossing the bridge again, they proceeded a block to Bellota Street and took it to River Street. They passed the Taqueria Michoacan and the Acorn Theater, a summer playhouse that showed movies one weekend a month. A block further, they arrived at the Rope’s End Saloon, identified by a sign extending over the sidewalk, with a noose dropping below it.

  “Seems to be a running theme here,” Peter said.

  They stepped inside and were greeted simultaneously by a blast of warmth and an odor of stale beer and years-old cigarette smoke. It was still early enough that the place wasn’t too crowded. On the far wall, opposite the entrance, was a stage set 18 inches above the floor and vacant at the moment. To the left, a bar ran nearly the length of the room, stopping short of the stage. Several tables lined the wall to the right, and in the center of the room, near the door, was a pool table. Two men in their twenties were playing Eight-ball and stopped to give Gordon and Peter a hard look before resuming their game. Between the pool table and the stage was an open area, presumably for dancing.

  Giving the pool table as wide a berth as the layout of the room would allow, Gordon and Peter made their way to the bar. Two men of retirement age sat at the far side, nursing drinks and watching the beginning of a postseason baseball game on the TV behind the bar. The bartender, a stout man in his late forties or early fifties, wore a plaid flannel shirt in blue and gray with a black garter on the left sleeve. He looked like a backwoods version of Jackie Gleason’s Joe the Bartender.

  “Kind of quiet for a Friday night,” Peter said as they reached the bar.

  “It’ll pick up soon,” the bartender said. “Sometimes, when it’s slow like this, I try to amuse myself by imagining what it must have been like in the old days.”

  “When were the old days?” Gordon asked.

  “The real old days. During the Gold Rush. In 1851, two years after Sutter found gold, this town had 7,000 people, 12 hotels, 28 saloons and seven whorehouses.”

  “Only seven?” Peter said. “How many are there today?”

  The bartender leaned forward, winked and lowered his voice.

  “None that I know of, but if you come here tomorrow for karaoke night, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll meet some loose women.”

  “Thanks for the lead,” Peter said.

  “What can I get you, gentlemen?”

  Gordon looked at the beer on tap.

  “We’re meeting Joey Vargas here,” he said. “Do you know him?”

  “A regular,” the bartender nodded. “Comes in every night around 5:30, has two beers and goes home. That’s all his wife allows.”

  “Wives are like that,” Peter said.

  “That’s why I don’t have one,” the bartender said.

  “What does Joey drink?” Gordon asked.

  “He’s an MGD
man.”

  “Then that’s what I’ll have. Peter?”

  “Club soda with a twist.”

  “Ah, like the detective on Law and Order. One of my favorite shows.”

  “Lenny Briscoe,” Peter said.

  “Right, right.”

  One of the men at the far side of the bar stirred slightly and tapped the edge of his glass.

  “Hey, Reg,” he said. “Refill.”

  “I’ll be right there, Jerry.”

  Reg the bartender drew a pint of Miller for Gordon, filled a glass with ice and soda for Peter and added a lemon twist. He set the drinks on the bar, and Gordon handed him a twenty.

  “That should cover these, and Joey Vargas’s first,” Gordon said. “Keep the change, and when he gets here, send him and his beer over to the table in the corner.”

  “Will do, and much obliged,” Reg said.

  They went to the corner table and sat down, Gordon taking the chair with a view of the entrance.

  “Sorry about this,” Gordon said, lifting his beer. “But if we’re going to be pumping him for information and he’s drinking, then one of us should join him.”

  “Doesn’t bother me,” Peter shrugged. “My compulsion to drink is gone.” He sipped the soda. “Seven thousand people in 1850. What’s the population now?”

  “Eleven hundred, I think.”

  “And every one hiding a secret, no doubt.” He lifted his glass. “Well, here’s to your investigation.”

  OVER THE NEXT TEN MINUTES, another 15 or so people came in, and the noise and the energy level increased noticeably. Gordon was grateful for that; it would provide more cover for the conversation with Joey. One of the newcomers was a waitress, barely over 21, and attractive in a pert, youthful sort of way. Watching her as she set to helping the bartender, Gordon realized he was doing so with a full awareness that she was too young for him. He wondered how long that had been the case.

  The minute Joey Vargas came through the door, Gordon recognized him. He was five-five, in his mid-thirties, wearing jeans, a denim jacket over a T-shirt, and work boots. His wiry build and weather-beaten face fit in with what Melissa McConnell had told him: Joey was a crew foreman for the county road department. He checked in with Reg, who provided him with a beer, and pointed toward Gordon and Peter’s table.

  “Thanks for the beer,” he said after introductions. He took a large swallow and looked at Gordon. “So you’re here to help Gary?”

  “More like seeing if he can be helped. But I’m on his side.” He didn’t add what he was thinking: “For now.”

  “Well, I’ll try to help.” He took another swallow of beer. “Though I don’t know that I can.”

  “Fair enough,” Gordon said. “I don’t have a lot in the way of background information. Why don’t you maybe start by telling us how long you’ve known Gary Baxter, and how your friendship developed over the years.”

  “Right. Well, we moved here from Arthur when I was in eighth grade. My father got hired by the sheriff’s department. I was the new kid in school, and a bit of a runt, as you can see, and the first week or two were kind of tough. Then one afternoon, as we were leaving school, Gary asked if I wanted to play some catch. We did for about an hour, hit it off, and we’ve been friends ever since.”

  “Your father was a sheriff’s deputy,” Peter said. “Was he involved in Gary’s case in any way?”

  Joey shook his head. “He’d retired by then, but he was still in touch with a lot of the other deputies. I talked to him a week or so after Gary was arrested, and he said, ‘I know he’s your friend, Joey, but there’s no doubt about it.’ That’s when I began to realize it must be true.”

  “So you were friends through high school?”

  “Uh-huh. We were good buddies, played on the football team together.” He downed the last two gulps of his beer, and Gordon caught the waitress’s eye and signaled for two refills. “You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I was a kamikaze defensive back, and I even returned a punt for a touchdown once. You look like an athlete.”

  “I played a little basketball,” Gordon said evasively. He didn’t want to mention, at least not now, that he’d been a second-team all-conference player at Cal and that years later people still asked him about it.

  “Then you know how you always remember it. Anyway, we graduated and sort of went our own ways for a while. My dad put in a word for me, and I got hired by the road department. Gary went off to community college in Sacramento. His dad died of a heart attack our freshman year in high school, and his mother — she remarried a couple of years later — was big on education, so she pushed him to do it.”

  “Is she still alive?” Gordon asked.

  Joey shook his head. “Six months after Gary was sent to prison, she ran her car off the state highway, and down an embankment into the Bellota. They called it an accident, but she’d been drinking and some of us wondered if what happened to Gary didn’t send her over the edge. Her second husband was gone by then, and Gary was all she had.”

  The waitress arrived with two beers. Gordon finished his first one in two gulps, and she took the glass. He realized it was going to take some effort to keep up with Joey.

  “So he went to community college,” Peter said.

  “And that’s where he met Connie. Gary wasn’t much of a student, but he could do all right if he was really interested in the subject. Which he usually wasn’t. Connie wasn’t what you’d call intellectual, but she was smart enough, and she always jumped through the hoops to get the grades. I think she liked Gary a lot but didn’t think he’d amount to much. So he decided to show her.”

  He took a big swig of beer and continued.

  “He joined the Army. They offered to train him as an Apache helicopter mechanic, and he figured that would teach him a job skill. After he graduated from helicopter mechanic class, he came home on leave for Christmas and asked Connie to marry him. I remember the party at his mother’s house when the engagement was announced. Three days before Christmas, the snow was falling outside, fire in the fireplace. Who’d have known then that it would go so wrong?”

  “Was that the first time you met Connie?” Peter said.

  “I’d met her once before, and he told me about her a lot. But that was the first time I realized she had a mouth and knew how to use it. Late in the night, when Gary had a couple more than he maybe should have, they got into a fight. Didn’t last long, and they kissed and made up, but she got the better of it. She sure did. Looking back now, I can see that maybe should have set off an alarm. But at the time, I was thinking maybe he knows he needs a woman who’ll push him a bit.”

  Peter stirred slightly in his seat. “You said he had a couple too many at the party. Had you seen any sign of that before?”

  “You mean a drinking problem?” Peter nodded. “It was pretty obvious by the time Connie was killed, and when I think about it now, there were some things before. But I didn’t notice them at the time. I mean, the camping trip should have been a giveaway.”

  He took a large swallow of his beer, now below the halfway mark.

  “The summer before our senior year in high school, three of us — Gary, Jim Munson and I — went up to Carolina Lakes for a long weekend in August. Jim’s older brother bought us two six packs of Oly for the trip. The first night up at the lakes, we got a campfire going and hit the cooler. In the next two hours, Jim and I had three each, and Gary had the other six. It’s not like he was being a pig about it — he was just drinking faster. Jim and I had a little buzz going and we were fine with that. But Gary was pretty sloshed, and he still wanted more. He was ready to start going around to the other campsites to see if they had any beer to spare, and we had to hold him back. Next morning we all laughed at it, but like I say, maybe it should have told us something.”

  He downed two more gulps of beer, leaving an inch and a half at the bottom of the glass. The waitress came by and asked if he wanted another.

  “Go ahead,” Gordon said. “You’re t
alking. That works up a thirst.”

  “One more, then.”

  “So back to Gary and Connie,” Gordon said after she left. “They got engaged and then what?”

  “They were going to wait a year to two, and after two years, Desert Storm came along. Gary was going but had a week of leave before he went. He came back, drove her to Tahoe, they got married in Nevada, had a two-day honeymoon and he was gone. The Nevada marriage was a sore spot, I think. She wanted a formal wedding but went along because she felt they had to act fast.”

  “Were you at the wedding?”

  “No. They just went. Not even the families knew. I think the best man was some retired guy from Fresno who was at the casino for a little action with the nickel slots.”

  “An affair to remember,” Peter murmured.

  “And then?” Gordon asked.

  Joey saw the waitress heading their way and finished his beer as she was setting down the next one.

  “He got back from Desert Storm in ‘91, and two weeks later racked up a DUI off base on a Saturday night. The Army let him out early, cause he’d been in the big show, and he and Connie moved to Dutchtown.”

  “And lived unhappily every after,” Peter said.

  “You know, it might have looked like that to some people, but I’m not so sure. I mean, yeah, they fought. In fact, they were known around town as the ‘Battling Baxters.’ But he never hit her — at least, that’s what he told me. They just yelled at each other and threw things. I think they were like that old slogan, ‘I’d rather fight than switch.’ It was part of how they related to each other.”

  “You said they threw things?” Gordon said.

  “Not at each other as far as I know. They’d throw dishes and stuff. The local hardware store carries a line of cheap dishware that they call ‘Baxterware’ because Gary and Connie were always buying replacements.”

  “They weren’t a marriage; they were a franchise,” Peter said.

  “What did they do — I mean for a living?” Gordon said.

  “That was part of the problem. Connie, like I say, was sharp and not bad to look at. She got hired as a receptionist and secretary at the county auditor’s office. Not big money, but a steady paycheck and a health plan.