Joe and I looked at each other.
"It wouldn't be a good idea," Joe said, shaking his head.
As if he thought that might actually stop me.
* * * *
"This was Geoff's 'study,'" Mrs. Bettis said, making a little joke.
It was a bedroom without a bed, and that was just as well: Only a twin would have fit inside and left room for anything else. As it was, a small garage sale wooden desk and matching straight-back chair had the room's limited floor space all to themselves, and still the room seemed overcrowded. Adding to its claustrophobic effect were four walls someone had turned into virtual collages. Pinned, stapled, and taped to every inch of their surface was a mind-boggling display of paper: letters, posters, and newspaper clippings; magazine photographs, Post-it notes, and brochure pages:
A NaturLife bumper sticker.
A Worldway Products price list.
An American Scholastic Encyclopedia poster.
"My God," I said, without thinking, taking it all in.
Mrs. Bettis stood beside me in the doorway and brought another cigarette to life. "Yeah. Impressive, isn't it?"
A trio of bookcases were filled to capacity with books and magazines, their shelves bowed like rubber bands from the weight. A half dozen stacks of newspapers stood waist-high against one wall, staggering this way and that in an effort to remain upright.
"The king's domain," Mrs. Bettis went on wearily, as Joe and I stepped fully into the room to examine its contents more closely. "Many a big deal was made here. Many a fortune lost."
She managed a short laugh before a smoker's cough broke it off.
"What is all this?" I asked her.
"You can't tell? It's research. Homework. What every genius reads just before making his first million. At least, that's what Geoff always said it was." She took a long drag on her cigarette and held the smoke in her lungs for a good minute. "I say it's crap," she said when she finally exhaled.
I flipped through the magazines in one of the bookcases. They were mostly old issues of True Detective and Entrepreneur, Money Matters and Business Opportunities. The books, predictably, were all similarly themed self-help titles: You're Better Than You Think You Are, Using Crystals to Maximize Your Earning Potential, Supercharge Your Selling Power, etc., etc.
"There wasn't a single get-rich-quick scheme that man didn't try, at least once," Bettis's widow said. "You name it, he tried to sell it. Health food products, household products, homemade jewelry, encyclopedias, life insurance. Nothing was too idiotic for him to try, if getting filthy rich was the payoff. And when he wasn't trying to sell something, he was trying to find something, or someone, instead. For the finder's fee, or reward money. Of course, that was always a total waste of his time too." She allowed herself a little sigh before going on. "So you know what he'd do then? He'd just change philosophies. Like you and I change our socks, he'd change his spiritual beliefs. One day he'd be heavy into meditation, the next he'd be chanting to Buddha. First there was power in crystals, then in pyramids. I couldn't keep up. It was always something new. Existentialism, reincarnation, pseudo-Christianity…" She shook her head and tried to smile. "What a putz."
She fell silent. I watched her take her cigarette in and out of her mouth for a while, before I said, ''I'm sorry."
"Yeah. You too." She used her hand to brush a wisp of gray hair back into place behind one ear, but it wouldn't stay put. "So maybe you understand now why I'm such a lousy grieving vlidow, huh?"
She turned and started down the hall, confident this time that we would follow. A moment later, we were all standing out on her front porch, working our way up to an awkward good-bye.
"Tell me something," Mrs. Bettis said, again addressing herself to me. "Why did you people come over here, anyway? Really."
"Because my moms thinks the cops have the wrong guy for your husband's murder," Bad Dog blurted out, finally ruining the blessed silence he'd been maintaining up to now. I could have killed him.
"We're gonna go on out to the car," Big Joe said with a smile, putting a viselike grip on the back of our son's neck before leading him away.
Mrs. Bettis watched them cross the street, then turned to me and said, "Is that true? You think the police have arrested the wrong man?"
"Not exactly. I'm just not sure they have the right one, that's all." I shrugged noncommittally.
"Why not?"
"Because of these." I handed Mrs. Bettis the envelope Dog had taken from her husband's safety deposit box and waited for her to open it. "Your husband had these locked in a safety deposit box in a bank at the Canyon. We—I—think he was trying to hide them from somebody." I let her look the photographs and drawing over for a moment. "Do they mean anything to you?"
She looked up at me and shook her head. "No."
"I was afraid you might say that."
"You say Geoff had these locked in a safety deposit box? At the Grand Canyon?"
"That's right." I could already see her next question coming.
"So how did you get them, you don't mind my asking?"
"I'd just as soon not say," I said.
"Oh." She was looking right through me. "I guess the police haven't seen this stuff yet, then."
"No."
She just stood there, waiting for me to explain.
"Look. I'm a busybody. A strange man was killed in our trailer, and I feel like I have a right to know why. So, I've said some things and done some things without the authorities' knowledge I probably shouldn't have in order to learn the truth about what happened. I know it's none of my business, but I don't care. Sue me."
"Maybe I should," she said. When I started to walk off her porch in a huff, she said, "I'm sorry. I don't have any idea what this stuff is, or what it means."
I looked back to find her holding out the envelope and its contents for me to take.
"You don't recognize the man in the photographs?" I asked.
"No."
"What about the house?"
"Never seen it before." She shook her head.
"And the drawing?"
"What can I tell you? It's a foot. What am I supposed to make out of that?"
"You don't know whose foot it might be?"
"Besides someone with ugly toes? No. I don't."
I turned one of the photographs around and pointed to the address scrawled on the back. "What about this address? Do you know where this is?"
She took the photograph from my hand for a better look, then shook her head again. "No."
"But that is your husband's handwriting?"
She nodded. "Near as I can tell." She pushed the photograph back toward me. The look on her face said she was just about ready to do something else with her time.
"Mrs. Bettis, do you have any idea what your husband might have been doing up at the Canyon when he died? Did he go up there to meet someone, do you think?"
"I couldn't tell you. He didn't tell me anything, he just disappeared. That's why I reported him missing. I didn't know where he was. I just figured he was hiding somewhere. Or worse."
"Hiding?"
"That's right. Hiding. Laying low." She produced a small shrug. "We were in a little trouble with Uncle Sam, and they were starting to send agents around to the house. You know, trying to get a statement from him. So I thought maybe he'd just decided to go away for a while. Or he'd been picked up and thrown in jail, and nobody'd bothered to call and tell me."
"Uncle Sam? You mean the Feds?"
"I mean the IRS. Internal Revenue Service."
"Oh."
"Listen. Mrs. Loudermilk. It's been fun, but—"
"Of course. One more question, and I'll let you go."
She tipped her head to one side as if to say, If you insist.
"The shoe store where your husband worked. You wouldn't happen to have the phone number on you, would you?"
"I don't have it handy, but it's in the book. The name's Sherman's. Sherman's Shoes. Ask for Bob—he was Geoff's manager."
"Bob. Sure." I put the photos and sketch back in their envelope and shook her hand. "Thank you, Mrs. Bettis. You've been very kind."
"Forget it. You went a little out of your way, I went a little out of mine. We're even."
I smiled and started down her walkway toward the street.
"Hey!" she called after me abruptly.
I turned around.
"You really think they have the wrong guy?"
"I don't know," I said. "But I'm going to find out."
She took one last drag on her latest cigarette, then flicked it into her front yard and said, "Good."
8
"I don't have anything to say to you people," Bob said.
By "you people," he meant reporters. That's what I had told him I was when he'd finally come to the phone: a reporter. Maybe I should have represented myself as an IRS agent instead.
"I only have a handful of questions for you, sir," I said. "This will only take a moment of your time, I promise."
"Listen, I've said all I'm going to say about Geoffry Bettis, all right? I worked with him, that's all. I don't know anything about what happened to him, or why. Nothing."
"He never told you why he was going up to the Grand Canyon?"
"No. All he told me—" He cut the sentence off sharply, nearly giving something away. When he spoke again, several long seconds later, I could almost smell the fear that had come over him; his voice was leaden with it. "Look. Don't call me here again. You understand? I can't talk to you!"
He hung up the phone.
When I rejoined Bad Dog and Big Joe at our truck, Joe grinned at me and said, "Well? He wouldn't talk to you, right?" I guess he figured if he couldn't stop me from playing policewoman, the least he could do was gloat like a madman when things didn't go well.
"No," I said.
"Ha! What'd I tell you?"
"I don't mean, no, he wouldn't talk to me. I mean, no, that's not what happened. Exactly."
Joe frowned. "You wanna run that by me again?"
"In other words, he didn't say he wouldn't talk to me. He said he couldn't talk to me. That was the last thing he said, 'I can't talk to you!'" I fell silent for a moment, thinking about it. "That's a little strange, don't you think?"
"I think you callin' someone else strange is like the pot callin' the kettle black," Joe said.
He and Dog had a good laugh at that before we drove off.
* * * *
Fifteen minutes later, we found a stationery store m town and bought a street map book for twenty dollars and some change. Dog thought we should just leaf through the book in the store until we found the page we needed, then rip it out discreetly and walk out, but I wouldn't let him do it. When Joe heard how much the book cost, he almost overruled me.
The address Geoffry Bettis had written on the back of one of the mysterious photographs he had placed in his safety deposit box was 50S West Fir, but when we followed the appropriate map to that address, there was no home to be found there. Instead, 50S West Fir lay at the end of a cul-de-sac high up in the northern hills of Flagstaff, where a sparse collection of clean but ordinary single- and two-story homes had been set into the towering woods. Some of these homes stood close together, but most were distant neighbors at best, separated by acres of trees and vacant earth. The clearing that had been formed at 505 West Fir—or what a marker at the curb said was 505 West Fir—was surrounded by such empty expanses on both sides, but now there was no house on the site to enjoy the isolation. There was nothing there but pine needles scattered over a giant, level bed of dirt.
"What happened to the house?" Bad Dog asked, scratching himself under one arm as he surveyed the area.
"I don't know," I said. I was studying one of the Bettis photographs again, comparing the stand of trees in the background of each print to those I was actually facing, and yes—when I finally found the right viewing angle I could see that we had come to the right place. Albeit at the wrong time.
"All right. Enough is enough," Big Joe said. He'd been standing over by our truck, arms crossed and lips tight, refusing to take part in our examination of the grounds.
"Joe, don't start. Please."
"Look. I went along with this nonsense as long as I could, bur this is as far as I go. It's time to give it up."
"Where did the house go, Joe? And the mailbox?"
"I don't know, and I don't care. None of this is any of our business!"
"I think it is. I think it's everyone's business when a man is killed and his murderer is still out there on the street somewhere, waiting to kill again."
"Dottie—"
"You think this house just flew away, is that it? Like that old farmhouse in The Wizard of Oz? A tornado just swooped down the street yesterday and whisked it off, I guess."
"All right. So the house being gone is a little bizarre, I'll grant you that. But what if it is? Bizarre or not, none of this is leading us anywhere. We're not finding out anything useful, and we're just getting ourselves deeper and deeper into trouble with the law. Now, so far we've been lucky, and the local authorities haven't caught us snooping around, but sooner or later they're going to, and when that happens—"
"The shit is really gonna hit the fan," Bad Dog jumped in, anxious to lend a hand.
"Go wait in the truck," I told him.
"Yes ma'am."
When he had shuffled off, I turned to Joe and said, "I want to talk to some of the neighbors."
"No. We're getting out of here. Right now."
"I want to show them these pictures and ask them if they know who this man is. Or was."
"No, Dottie."
"Joe, if no one recognizes him, I'll call it quits. I promise." I started walking toward the nearest house on the east side of the street.
"Dottie!"
He had turned to give chase when we both saw him: a black man the size of an aircraft carrier reaching into the open passenger-side window of our pickup truck to remove Dog from the seat.
"Come on outta there, you," Dozer Meadows said, laughing.
"Yo! Moms! Pops!" Dog shrieked at us, being drawn from the truck like a minnow on a short line.
"All right, all right! Put the boy down!" Joe ordered, racing me over to where the giant stood.
His prize in hand, Meadows held our son aloft with the greatest of ease and said, "This boy an' me got some business to take care of, old man. So butt out."
"You heard what my husband said! Put our son down!" I cried.
I was standing directly in front of him, my neck turned up at a ninety-degree angle so that I might see his face. It was like trying to spot the heliport atop the Sears Tower from down on the street.
"These are your folks, huh, Doggy?" Meadows asked Bad Dog casually, still not setting him down.
Dog tried to nod.
"Pleased to meet you," Meadows said, looking down at me again.
"Pleased to meet you. Now, please—put Theodore down before my husband has to hurt you. All right?"
It was a threat that Joe found far more terrifying than Meadows did, of course, but in one way or another it worked, because the big man finally did as he'd been told and dropped Dog back on his feet.
"Man, how the hell did you get here?" Dog asked Meadows, rolling his head around in a wide arc to get some feeling back into his neck.
"I followed you down here. What else?"
"You followed us down from the Canyon?" Big Joe asked.
"Yeah. I seen you an' my boy Doggy here comin' outta the rangers' office yesterday an' followed you to your cabin. I shoulda come in an' got 'im right then, see, but I thought maybe it'd be better if I could catch 'im alone somewhere later. You know, so as to keep my business with 'im private. Discreet. So I waited around an' just watched you guys, hopin' you'd split up sooner or later. Only you never did. Next thing I know, man, you all have jumped in your truck and headed for the exits. So what else could I do? I got in my car an' went after you."
"All the way down here to Flagstaff," I said.
"Yes ma'am." He nodded his tiny head at me. "I figured you guys'd have to go somewheres quiet and halfways deserted, I followed you around long enough. And this place is pretty quiet and deserted, right?" He grinned like a little boy. "It's like I said, ma'am. Your son an' me got us some serious business to take care of."
"I know all about that. His father does, too. And I can tell you right now, you're out of luck. We don't have your money, and neither does Theodore."
"Moms! Don't play like that!" Bad Dog said.
"So you can just go on back to the Rams and serve your suspension like a man, and leave my son and his parents alone."
"You mean the Raiders," Meadows said.
"What?"
"I play for the Raiders, ma'am. Not the Rams."
"The Raiders, the Rams—what's the difference?"
"The difference is, we play football, ma'am," Meadows said.
Big Joe started cracking up, and before I knew it, all three men were in stitches.
"Damn, that's a good one," Big Joe wheezed, wiping his eyes.
"I don't get it," I said.
It took several minutes for the laughter to wind down. When it finally did, Joe looked at Meadows and said, "Hey, look here, Dozer, man. What do you say we settle this dispute you have with Dog in a civilized manner? What do you say?"
The giant shrugged. "I'm all for that."
"The boy hasn't got your thousand dollars, and his mother and I don't have it either, but he does have a good-size piece of it. Don't you, Theodore?"
Dog wasn't sure where his father was going with this, but he nodded his head anyway.
"'What's a 'good-size piece'?" Meadows asked him.
"About six hundred dollars," Dog said, and closed his eyes. He didn't want to see the blow that might be coming.
Meadows laughed, but not because he had just heard something funny. "Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Six hundred dollars? I don't think so, partner, no." He shook his head emphatically.
"But that's all I've got," Bad Dog said.
"Then you're about two hundred and fifty dollars short of gettin' outta here alive, my man. I'm sorry." Meadows took hold of the back of Dog's neck again and squeezed.
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