Bum Steer

by Nancy Pickard

  We promised to return to testify if they found the killer, if it came to trial, if they needed us as witnesses.

  Witnesses who hadn’t seen a thing.

  The only thing to which I could testify for sure was that Laddy got the telephone number of the Crossbones Ranch from me, that he called his father, that he left the message of his mother’s death on the answering machine, and that nobody called him back, at least not while I was there.

  We left Laddy in the sheriff’s office.

  “I’ll watch out for him,” Miss Rose promised.

  That was followed by the long, sad, weary return to Fort Worth, with Miss Rose still insisting on doing all the driving. She took us to the Holiday Inn then insisted on waiting while we packed, then personally drove us to the airport. We said good-bye to her there. I spent what little was left of the night making reservations for myself and getting Lilly onto a plane for Kansas City.

  And now I was entering yet another city. Santa Fe. As different from Winnetka, even from Fort Worth, as Rock Creek was from Kansas City, and Kansas City was from Port Frederick. I’d experienced so many different cultures in one week that I felt like a guide on a nonstop tour of an anthropological museum. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, we have come to our Native American wing …”

  During the shuttle ride from the Albuquerque airport, I thought about the talk I’d had with Lilly in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport terminal. After all that had happened, Lilly’s guard was down, all the way down.

  “I really liked her at first,” she’d said.

  We were sitting across from one another in one of those ubiquitous airport cafeterias. Lilly had a Dr Pepper and a plate of french fries; I had a pot of tea and a piece of cherry pie. The girl looked as if she might burst into tears at any moment. I felt terrible for having exposed her to the danger and the trauma.

  “I did, too,” I said.

  “Even if she hated me.” Her lips trembled.

  “She couldn’t hate you, she didn’t know you. I mean, what I mean to say is—”

  “It’s Aunt Meg’s fault.”

  I had stared at her then, figuring I had misheard her, figuring my brain had finally melted from exhaustion, and that all of the little gray cells were lying in a pool at the base of my cerebral cortex. “What, Lilly?”

  “It’s Aunt Meg’s fault that Judy hated our family. My mother told me all about it one time, even though I’m not really supposed to know.”

  “Please tell me about it, Lilly.”

  “Well, there was a time when Mom and Dad were married and Aunt Meg and Uncle Ray, that was her husband, were married, and my grandpa and they all tried to get to know each other. They invited him to their weddings, which were, like, within a year of each other, and he actually went, and then he invited them down to one of his ranches in Texas, to go horseback riding and hunting and stuff.”

  “So what happened?”

  “What happened was that when I was four years old, they left me with my nurse and they all went down there. Only Uncle Ray didn’t want to go. But Aunt Meg made him go, ’cause she wanted to suck up to Grandpa ’cause of all the money—”

  “Your mother says that?”

  “Well, not in those words, I guess.”

  “I guess not.” I smiled at her, but she didn’t return it.

  “I’m serious. That’s really why she made Uncle Ray go, because she wanted to get in good with Grandpa so he’d be sure to give her lots of nice stuff. So they went down there and Grandpa had it all planned that Aunt Meg and Uncle Ray would ride out on a picnic with him, but Uncle Ray hated horses, so he said he wouldn’t go, and he wanted to go hunting with my dad and mom, instead. Well, Aunt Meg was furious. She said they couldn’t disappoint Grandpa, so my dad had to take Uncle Ray’s place and go on the picnic. And that’s the time Dad fell off the horse and got paralyzed. And then when Uncle Ray got back and Aunt Meg told him what he’d done, he turned around and went back out into the fields, and that’s when he had his accident and shot himself.”

  “That’s tragic, Lilly, but what’s it got to do with Judy?”

  “I think she was there, and she probably thought they were all fools, and she hasn’t wanted to have anything to do with any of us ever since.”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  “Really,” she said solemnly.

  “I guess your family didn’t want to go back to the ranches after that?”

  “No,” she said mournfully.

  “And they lost contact with your grandfather?”

  “They sure did, before I ever met him!”

  “Hmm.”

  We walked together to her gate.

  “Bye,” she said, suddenly shy.

  “Lilly, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  I put my arms around her and hugged her.

  “Really, Jenny, it’s okay.”

  I remembered that this was the girl who’d rather fight lions, but I patted her on the back anyway before I released her.

  She walked away, turning briefly, once, to wave.

  I slept sitting up in a chair at the airport for the next forty-five minutes until the nice young woman behind the ticket counter woke me for my flight to Albuquerque, New Mexico, then on to Santa Fe, the last known address of Freddie Sue Gomez, former and last wife of Cat Benet, and former best friend of Marvalene Podhurst.

  36

  Her address turned out to be a stylish adobe-style solar home on a dirt road in the foothills north of town on the road to Taos. The house blended so beautifully into the hill that at first glance I couldn’t tell where the earth ended and the house began. She didn’t have any grass in her yard, but then neither did her neighbors. I assumed the houses were simply plunked down in the middle of patches of dirt, rocks, wildflowers, and cactus, until I looked more carefully and realized that each “patch” had been landscaped painstakingly to merge with the scenery.

  I parked my rental car in her gravel drive and walked beneath a trellised veranda to her carved and weathered front door.

  Someday, I thought, as I waited to see if she answered my ring, my life will return to normal and I’ll actually call ahead when I want to visit people, instead of just dropping in to surprise them.

  There were hollow footsteps on tile within, and then the knob turned. I expected the door to open on a woman who’d be as flamboyant as her former best friend.

  “Yes?”

  She was shorter than I, slender, dark-haired, and plain, wearing huarache sandals, a full rust-colored skirt that fell to her ankles, a Mexican-style peasant blouse belted with turquoise and silver, and a squash-blossom necklace. The trifocals she wore gave her the appearance of an English professor who had been interrupted while grading essays.

  “Dr. Gomez?”

  “Yes?”

  “Dr. Gomez, my name is Jenny Cain, and I really need to talk to you about Cat Benet. I don’t know if you know that he was murdered, but I hope you can help me figure out who did it.”

  She grasped the door for support.

  “Charles, murdered?”

  Thinking she might fall, I reached out to support her, but she held up a hand against me and saying harshly, “Come in,” made her own way through the tiled foyer, trailing her left hand along the wall to keep her balance, into the living room. She collapsed onto a sectional sofa, and I sat down at a right angle to her.

  “I suppose it would be appropriate for me to cry,” she said.

  “If you feel like it,” I said, feeling awkward myself.

  “I don’t have any idea of how I feel. At one time, I had a good friend named Marvalene who did my feeling for me. When something bad happened to me, she cried for me; when good things occurred, she rejoiced; if I was wronged, she was the one who was furious. I seem to have an internal thermostat that remains set at the same temperature at all times. However, I realize that my body seems to be doing odd things right now, collapsing on me, as it were, and I know I’d like a drink. Charles always said that was my
problem, that I knew how to think, but I didn’t know a damn about feelings, particularly his.”

  “He was a fine one to talk about other people’s feelings,” I ventured.

  She bristled at that. “He was a fine one. Period. I want to know who you are, why you’re here, how you know about me, and what exactly happened to Charles to make you say he was murdered. I knew he had died, of course, but this! 1 can hardly believe it. I would offer you a drink, but I don’t yet know if you deserve my hospitality. Please start with who you are.”

  I told her everything I knew, ending with, “You are the F. S. Gomez, Ph.D., who wrote The Barons of Branchwater, aren’t you?”

  “I am.” She pushed herself up from the sofa. “I’m having a margarita. In fact, I’m probably going to have several of them. What about you?”

  “Make a pitcherful,” I suggested.

  She returned from the kitchen carrying a hammered silver tray on which there were a matching silver pitcher, a bowl of lime wedges, and two chalices. In a small, napkin-lined Indian basket, she’d put warm, deep-fried chips around a small bowl of salsa.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked as she poured.

  “Always.”

  “There.” She finished filling the chalices, sat down again, and lifted hers. “I can think of no appropriate toast to offer on an occasion such as this.”

  I dropped a lime wedge into my drink, then lifted the chalice toward her: “To the truth?”

  She touched hers to mine. “We can attempt it, but we historians know better than anyone else that truth is the most elusive quarry of all.”

  “Did you write the truth in Barons?”

  “I wrote half of the truth, the good half, the flattering half. That is what the Longhorn Foundation paid me to do, and that is what I did. I don’t apologize for that, not even to other historians. It was their family, after all, and the story belongs to them. They can remember it as they wish. History is the study of lies, anyway, because no witness ever recalls events with total accuracy, not even eyewitnesses. Every history book, no matter how ostensibly objective, is basically lies filtered through bias and a certain amount of relative ignorance. Barons differs only in the degree to which I knew and admitted those biases.”

  Her cynicism left me breathless; either that, or it was the tequila. If that was really what she thought of her profession, it was no wonder that she’d rather drink than feel.

  “You met Cat while you worked on the book?”

  “No, I met him while he was married to a woman who used to be a good friend of mine, Marvalene Podhurst. I got the job because he recommended me to the foundation. When he and Marvalene divorced, in 1980, I was doing my research and that required long interviews with Charles. One thing led to another, as I suppose it usually did with him, and we were married the following year. It only lasted three years, which was longer than it actually took for him to decide that I wasn’t much fun, and for me to weary of his perpetual, adolescent search for perfect freedom and amusement.”

  “You say you interviewed him at length, and yet there’s really nothing in the book about his generation of Benets.”

  “No, he insisted on stopping the story at the marriage of his parents. He said it was supposed to be a history and that history was about dead people and he wasn’t dead yet.” She took a quick drink from her chalice. “I told him he was being too modest, but he only laughed at that.”

  “Do you have a picture of him? I’ve met Carl and Slight, but I never met Cat, and I’m curious to know what he looked like.”

  “Of course.” She only had to point over my shoulder, to show me what I wanted, and it was even more and better than I’d expected: a photograph, framed in hammered silver, of all three of the Muskateers, Slight, Carl and the third man—Cat Benet, a brown haired, slim-hipped fellow with a moustache. He was attired, as were the other two, in the full working cowboy regalia of boots, jeans, chaps, long sleeved shirt, gloves, kerchief and cowboy hat. I couldn’t really detect in the photograph his apparently extraordinary appeal to women, but I had Marvalene’s word for it, and now Freddie Sue’s, that the man had fairly sizzled with sex appeal.

  “He must have been something,” I murmured.

  “Yes, he was,” she said into her drink.

  The more Frederica Sue drank, the straighter she sat and the better she enunciated her words. It occurred to me that Slight Harlan would find this little professor vastly entertaining. As her phrasing got more academic, his would slip into drawling colloquialisms; as her posture improved, he’d slouch further down on his spine, squinting those blue eyes until she would barely be able to detect the twinkle in them. I was willing to bet she’d had the same effect on his boss; it may even have been her charm and her appeal for him. Some men did dearly love to pull the bobby pins from a straitlaced woman’s hair.

  “What didn’t you put in the book, Freddie Sue?”

  She finished her second drink, poured another.

  “I didn’t write,” she said, “that the Benets who remained in France forever after snubbed the Benets who came west. I didn’t write that the early ones nearly died of loneliness and starvation and poor hygiene in south Texas. Or how many babies died before they walked, and how many young wives died in childbirth. I didn’t write about the times they got cheated, or the times they did the cheating. I didn’t describe the increasing burdens that their wealth placed on their descendants, or the prison it created for the last of their line—”

  “Cat?”

  She nodded solemnly. “There were three centuries of expectations placed upon him at the moment of his birth, and yet he was a man who had so few expectations of life. He wanted friends. He wanted lovers. He liked hard work, but not too much of it. He wanted a good time and enough money to buy a bed and clothes and a truck and a horse and food and drinks for his friends.”

  Freddie Sue studied her own drink.

  “He said I wouldn’t know a feeling if it bit me,” she said, “but I knew that he was a sad man. He reminded me of a little boy who had found everything he ever wanted under his Christmas tree, but who felt like crying anyhow. I would have liked to have made him happier.”

  “Did he make you happy?”

  She had to think about that. “I don’t know. I suppose not. Except for the sex, I can’t say that I missed him when he was gone.” She gulped the rest of that drink, poured another. “I have missed Marvalene, though.”

  “She misses you, too.”

  “Do you think I should call her?”

  I tried to think of a way to say it that would convince her. “I think it would be the appropriate thing for you to do.”

  “All right then, I will.”

  “Call her now,” I urged, because I had something important to talk over with Marvalene Podhurst, too. Frederica got right to her feet and walked to a phone across the room.

  “Marva, you’ll never guess who this is,” she began, sounding nervous.

  I heard the reply: “FREDDIE SUE!”

  Soon they were gabbing ninety miles a minute, and I found that even I was grinning, listening to the former best friends make friends again. Finally, Frederica said, “Yes, she’s still here, and I think she wants to talk to you, hang on.” She held out the phone to me, and I walked over to take it.

  “Marvalene?”

  “Jenny, you sweet thaing, this is just the nicest thaing you’ve ever done, braingin’ me together with my best pal again. Freddie’s the onliest person in the world knows how ah fee-yel ’bout losin’ Catty. How you doin’, doll baby?”

  “Hangin’ in there. When did you marry Cat, Marvalene?”

  “July seventeenth, 1975.”

  I did some quick calculating in my head. “But you said you didn’t know any of the members of his other families, didn’t you?”

  “Well—”

  “And it had to be in 1975, when Lilly Ann Lawrence was four years old, that those awful accidents happened at one of the ranches, when Merle Lawrence fell off a horse a
nd was paralyzed for life, and when his brother-in-law shot himself. Isn’t that right?”

  “Well, I guess it is, honey.”

  “Marvalene, were you there?”

  She sighed, then confessed. “Well, the truth is, I was. Jenny, honey, I don’t like to talk about that time. I don’t even like to recall it. I would like to plain forget it, it was plain awful, just a awful time, and I do blame myself for the whole kit’n’caboodle, even if my sweet little ole Catty-Balls never did blame me. But wasn’t it me who kept tellin’ him he ought to invite those people down and get to know them, them girls bein’ his daughters and all? And wasn’t it me kept after him to ask ’em until I just plum wore him out and he couldn’t hardly say no? And wasn’t it me said a picnic would just be so much fun? Lord forgive me, that poor man’s in a wheelchair and that other poor fella’s dead, and even if the Lord forgives me, I am never, I am never goin’ to forgive myself.”

  “Aw, Marvalene,” I said, feeling pretty guilty at the moment myself. “Come on, it couldn’t have been your fault, not really. I’m sorry I mentioned it if it’s going to make you feel so bad.”

  “Why did you, honeybunch?”

  “Well, Cat’s granddaughter, Lilly, told me about that trip, and I just had a feeling that since she wasn’t even there, she might have had the story wrong. She thought the other woman there was Cat’s sister, Judy, but I got to thinking about when you’d probably married him, and I figured it might have been you, instead.”

  “He didn’t have any sister, honey buns.”

  “Yes, he did, Marvalene, and she was shot and killed about twenty-four hours ago.”

  “Lordy, I don’t hardly know what to say.”

  I had to laugh. “This has to be a first.”

  She was still laughing at that when I handed the phone back to her reinstated best friend. They talked for another hour. I got drunk on margaritas. Freddie Sue, who didn’t show any effects of the alcohol except that her vocabulary got ever more abstruse, poured me into a guest room that night. She, very decently, allowed me to sleep it off in the morning, then she even drove me to the Albuquerque airport on Friday afternoon. Lord, was I ever sick of airplanes.