Harkness leans forward with you. Her hair smells like it would taste of fruit.
“Cloudy,” she says, leaning back into her chair.
What the logbook has Koenig doing Thursday until 9:22 is spraying, flying, cropdusting. You flip back a few days and see that in spite of his attitude and appearance, Darryl Koenig’s logs are meticulous. As if he’s had them called into question once or twice before.
You pretend to read the logbook longer than you really do, try to focus on the words and numbers and think.
Nothing’s coming.
Felson lifts the phone to the side of her head. “Should we confirm this, Mr. Bruiseman?”
You stare at her stapler, don’t answer. Koenig has long hair. Sitting across the seat from you in the wrecker last Thursday, he couldn’t have hidden long hair from you, even if you weren’t looking for it. And his voice, the nasal way he sounds, like he wants you to hit him—
It’s not him.
Then, who?
Dan Gates, like Felson was joking?
“Detective?” Harkness says from her comfortable chair.
Back in her throat, Felson chuckles, settles the phone back down onto its base.
You shake your head no about Dan Gates. Not just because Rory was his father, and not the guilty one anyway—the one stepping out with an ex-con—but because he’s sixteen, seventeen, not smart enough to have orchestrated it all—Jim Martindale, the guilty shotgun in Fin’s trailer, his mom hiring you. And, anyway, you know from the way he hit you over and over last week that he’s really grieving. He didn’t want this to have happened. It’s not about guilt with him, but unfairness. He’s tasting it for real for the very first time, and in the worst way.
If not him, though, and not Koenig, and not Fin, then who? Gwen? Did she do it herself?
You raise your face back to Felson.
“What?” she says, but you shake your head, haven’t thought it through yet. How Gwen could have walked, drove or hitched home from the old house.
It would explain why it was an execution, though. Toby Garrett’s baby brother said it: Rory Gates could fight, would have fought. Unless it was his wife, and he was daring her, on his knees, saying she’d already taken everything else, why not this too?
“I’ve got—” you start, your arms cocked back on the armrests of your chair, but Felson opens her hand, stopping you.
“There’s still the matter of…” she starts.
Instead of finishing, she sets her silver microcassette recorder up on the desk. From the way Harkness looks over to you, you know she’s heard it—heard you and Fin in the interrogation room, talking all around the film that’s not supposed to exist anymore. As if to hide it, you lift the recorder from its perch, study it in your hand.
“Obviously that’s not the only copy,” Felson says.
You pretend not to have thought it might have been.
“Detective,” Harkness leads off, finally getting around to why she’s here in the first place. “If memory serves, you swore, promised, and vowed that you had surrendered all of the…incriminating evidence. That you were starting over.”
“It’s something different,” you lie. “What we were talking about.”
She smiles. “And that would be why Jimmy Bones is out on the sidewalk? Isn’t he the one who requested your services back then? For his friend’s…wife?”
Don’t say anything here.
“Look at it from my bench,” Harkness says, leaning forward, one hand in the other. “You were supposed to deliver certain products to him. Now, months later, after the heat’s died down, he’s come to retrieve them.”
“I gave them all.”
Harkness restarts her gum, shrugs to you. “I’m confident you’re telling the truth, Detective. Because, if you weren’t—”
She nods to Felson, who finishes: “We still have you for impersonating an officer in Big Springs. That’s a federal facility. So, federal charges. And taking Rory Gates’s truck for a joyride. And distributing alcohol to minors. Driving an unauthorized lawn maintenance vehicle on public roads.” She smiles about that one. “Not to mention attempting to obstruct a murder investigation, hiding evidence, breaking and entering—”
“Breaking and—?”
“We found your prints in Fin’s mobile home.”
You look down to the leg of her desk.
“As well as in your lawyer’s stolen Mustang,” she adds. “There’s even unofficial reports that you were back in Midland County for a night, Mr. Bruiseman.”
“All of which can become an issue,” Harkness finishes.
“What about today?” you say.
They both look to you, wait.
“Another auto theft,” you say, “right?” You nod out Felson’s window for her, to the wrecker, the Ford. “To say nothing of parking in four handicapped spaces at once.”
Felson shakes her head in something like disbelief.
Harkness laughs, tells you you’re digging a hole here.
“More like a grave, right?” you say, pushing up from the chair now.
“I don’t need to tell you that if a fifth roll surfaces—” she starts.
You look up to Felson.
“Can I return the trucks, at least?” you say. “One less charge, I suppose.”
Felson narrows her eyes at you, considers this. Finally shrugs what the hell.
You give her the same shrug back, nod once to Harkness, say, “Judge.” It means goodbye.
“Detective,” she says back. It means see you later.
As you’re walking out her door, Felson asks what you’re really up to here?
Where she can’t see, you smile.
Because you’re on a holy mission, the wrecker starts for you without the jumper cables. It would have been complicated anyway, dropping the Ford, pulling it around to the front of the wrecker. Felson and Harkness watching.
What you’ve got to do, you’ve decided, is get Gwen to confess. It’s the only way. Otherwise she’s pulled off the perfect murder, pretty much. She’s even given away the money from it. Maybe she even feeh bad about it now, a week after the ugly fact. But that doesn’t make her innocent. Not by a long shot. The rub, though, is that there’s not any physical evidence tying her to the murder. The only thing that can convict her now, get Fin out, get you the film, either save you from Harkness or fry you with Jimmy Bones, is if she confesses. And if you can record it on the silver microcassette recorder Felson hasn’t missed yet.
You think you can make this happen, too. She’s stressed, close to the edge, ready to spill it all. More than that, the way she grabbed your arm, how it felt protective, it cued you into something else—that she does care about something, about someone.
Dan.
The way to get her to confess is to tell her what Felson said when she was illustrating for you how ridiculous all your theories were, trying to one-up you: that Dan shot Rory.
Maybe she’ll get all maternal, take the blame that’s hers in the first place.
And where she’s going is where you’re going, where she thinks Dan still is. The Rankin place. Never mind that Dan’s already in town.
It’s beautiful.
You go over it again, try to keep it straight in your head, and steer with your knee, both hands fiddling with the recorder, looking for the voice-activated mode.
The next time you look up you’re almost to 137, by the Town & Country. On the side of the road, his cane lifted, flagging you down, it’s Jimmy Bones.
You brake with reluctance, the wrecker’s ancient drums barely enough to stop it and the Ford both, even ten yards past Jimmy Bones and, stepping from behind a dead tree, Arnot King. The Ford swings forward on the straps, its nose clinking against the arm of the wrecker, and then it falls back, pulling you a couple of feet back, closer to Jimmy Bones.
Arnot King opens the door for him.
“Gentlemen,” you say, and feel suddenly like Jim Martindale, not picking somebody up off the side of the roa
d because you want to—because you’re nice—but because you have to.
Jimmy Bones works his way over to the middle of the bench seat, plants his cane into the hump of the floorboard like a second gearshift, and Arnot King pulls the door closed.
“Guess you’d be looking for your car, right?” you say, groaning onto 137.
Jimmy Bones’s chest rises and falls in what you think is a laugh.
By your best guess, he’s sixty-two years old, five-seven in boots, but still: the reason he could raise a pipe over you, let it fall, it has nothing to do with size or strength. With him it’s more about demeanor. And that, if you resist the pipe he’s known for, he’ll extract the famous .22 from his shoulder rig, rest the barrel between the back of your jaw and your ear.
Three times he’s been up for homicide, and three times he’s skated. It’s made him a legend, the big fish Homicide never could quite reel in, the math problem Sanders could never add up right.
He’s not somebody you can pretend you didn’t see on the side of the road.
Instead of closing your eyes as you pull under the missile angled over the fence of the military surplus, you hold your breath, hope that’s good enough.
“I supposed to say something here?” you finally ask, because, for once, even Arnot King is quiet.
Beside you, Jimmy Bones lifts one shoulder in answer. “The lady judge doesn’t know you have it.”
“Maybe I don’t.”
“Then keep driving,” Jimmy Bones says, nodding to all the empty pastureland ahead, past 829. “I should imagine we can settle this now.”
You turn onto 829. “I was just saying maybe.”
Jimmy Bones doesn’t look over.
“Where we going this time?” Arnot King says, leaning forward to catch your eye for a flash, like he’s on your side here. “To get your car,” you say. “I left it out here. To keep it safe.” Arnot King doesn’t call you on this.
“Is the film in it?” Jimmy Bones says.
You rattle over the cattleguard to the Rankin place, shudder up into third. “In a manner of speaking.”
Jimmy Bones looks over, waits for you to explain.
You hand over hand the wheel to swing around Mrs. Rankin’s house and tell him that if you can just get the woman who’s out here on tape saying the right things, then the ex-con who’s come into possession of the film will get cut loose, hand it over.
“Hmn,” Jimmy Bones says, switching hands on the end of his cane so that the left one is under now, the right on top. “So this is what you do now, solve other people’s murders?”
“Better than my own,” you say, and slide to a sudden stop when Gwen’s Town Car is on the other side of a rusted tank.
“That’s not it,” Arnot King says. “Mine’s black, as I recall.”
You’re already stepping down, the wrecker still running. You point to the Davidson place for him. “It’s over there. Number three-twelve, I think.”
“Three-what?” Arnot King says, but you’re already walking away, the sharp, dry weeds cracking around your thighs, grabbing at your fingertips.
The pop-up camper looks naked without the wrecker nosed up to it.
You hear Arnot King grind into second behind you and pull around Gwen’s Lincoln, but you don’t look back. Maybe the Town Car with Carlotta plates will be there, maybe it won’t. Either way, you have to talk to Gwen, have one single conversation with her where she says real things, where she’s not the one with the angle.
Because she has to be in the pop-up camper, out of the sun, you knock twice on the door and step back, the right corner of your lips pulled between your teeth, the recorder high in your pocket, mic facing out.
After thirty seconds you knock again, then step inside saying her name.
She’s not there.
You stand in the doorway and survey the Rankin place, consider that she could be in the house but decide not. That would be real trespassing, would be you going into somebody’s private space, not just their boxed-up junk.
She is a murderer though, you remind yourself, and then study the barn, finally nod about it, that it would be cool enough for a woman with make-up, maybe. The concrete floor, the shotgun doors front and back to pass the wind through. A good place to wait for Dan, to watch.
To have a final showdown, you add, liking it.
And the acoustics are probably decent in there too.
You walk to it with your eyes half-closed, because she might have a gun now, somehow, but she hasn’t read the script you’ve already written for her, doesn’t know where she’s supposed to be.
From the tractor-wide doorway you look back to her Town Car, pan all around again, not real sure what to do.
Was there some other vehicle here she could have left in?
You shrug, realize what a good idea it would be to make sure her keys aren’t in the ignition, and then see her again an hour ago, taking her four skidding steps across the street, right after stuffing the partial check into your pocket. Past her, you think—know—was Rory’s tall three-quarter ton that you definitely should have clued in on, if you were any kind of real PI.
You walk slower, to be sure, to see it again in your head. Tell yourself that just because you didn’t register it at the time—as far as you knew then, Dan was still out here, in the draw—that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t. The prize truck of the man she killed? The one her son’s been driving, her son she’s hired you to look for?
She would think every truck was that truck, would be looking twice at anything tall and white.
But still, she came out here.
You shake your head slow back and forth, open her door, have to sit down to be sure the keys aren’t there, that she can’t strand you.
Satisfied—with that at least—you plant your hand in the seat to climb up, back into the heat, but are heavy enough that the Town Car rocks the slightest bit, and you see what the sun’s been trying to tell you: dangling from the cigarette lighter is a simple wedding band, worn thin on one side, dull everywhere else. The one Gwen had to identify Rory with.
You take it, hold it up, try to make sense of the barely-there 5, 2 or N etched into its underside, then smile, see that you can look through it like a telescope, can pan across all the derelict cotton trailers for Gwen.
This isn’t how the real private eyes do it, you know.
This isn’t how anybody does it.
You hang the ring back onto the lighter knob, drop it, and scrabbling on the floor mat for it—probably the kind of thing she wants to hold onto—find Gwen’s alligator skin purse instead.
You open it with the back of your fingers, like it might be rigged to blow. When it doesn’t, you let the gum wrappers and lipstick tubes and credit cards spill out, roll towards the backrest of the passenger seat.
The last thing is light enough that you have to pull it out, by the corner: a white cash envelope from the bank, the flap tucked into the body, not licked shut.
You lay it on the seat like a thing that was once alive, might still be, and look all around for Gwen. Because you don’t want to get caught in her purse like this. But you have to know, too.
Slowly, with the edge of one of her credit cards, you lift the flap, pull out the only thing the envelope has for you: the invoice for Rory’s headstone. A photocopy of it. You set it down on the seat, dig through the rest of the stuff that’s spilled from her purse. Why photocopy it? A scrapbook or something? For Brock & Associates, maybe? Wouldn’t a real live death certificate be more legal?
Crumpled, stuffed, and hidden in the rest of the trash are six more photocopies, some of them weathered, it looks like, dried in the sun. Like the headstone guy thinks she’s going to leave town or something, or needs her confirmation, or keeps wanting to remind—
That’s it.
Somebody else knows what she’s done, that she killed Rory. Has been leaving these under the windshield blades.
It would explain her nerves in the library the other day. And why she
doesn’t want the money anymore.
You shake your head, put the envelope back, put it all back. Getting Gwen to confess is going to be easier than you thought. She might even already think it’s you whose been leaving the invoices.
And maybe for the purposes of a certain recording you’ve got plans to make, she’s right.
You finally find the ring, hook it back on the lighter then push on the steering wheel with the heel of your right hand, stand all at once from the seat, sling the door shut.
Yesterday, the high was 111 degrees. Kid stuff compared to today.
You wipe your forehead with the back of your arm and walk a straight line through the weeds to the concrete stock tank, for the beer you know has to be there, for the beer the world owes you. Tell yourself that if you can’t find the wire or string it’s hanging on, you’re going to ram the tank with one of these old trucks, push the side in, let the water out. Then it’ll see who’s boss here.
It never comes to that.
Running your hand around the rough lip of the tank, you see something that makes you slide your hand back: Gwen’s alligator-print sunglasses bobbing in some green sludge near the surface.
The world rotates around you, the clouds wheeling overhead, trees living and dying and living again, the sun shooting overhead like a tetherball, and even though it’s the last thing you ever thought you’d do, you peel your shirt off and slip over the edge of the tank, into the water, the moss slick on your face, caressing your shoulders, the world perfectly silent under there.
At the bottom, a chain across her chest, is Gwen.
You stand with her in your arms, fall twice getting her to the side before balancing her on the edge. When you can breathe again you try to breathe into her, but it’s been too long, and finally you just hold her by the upper arms and lower your face to her left collarbone, hold her as close as you once promised yourself you would when you were sixteen and none of this was ever going to happen.
23.
WHEN THE PHONE in Mrs. Rankin’s stripped kitchen doesn’t work you start opening drawers for a book of matches. If you can’t bring Felson and the rest with a call, you’ll bring them with smoke.
Not for Nothing Page 18
