The Bookwoman's Last Fling

by John Dunning

  I didn’t push him on that point. I’d had all I could drink of his coffee, but we were still fencing, feeling each other out. “Hell, I’m doing the same thing you’re doing,” he said. “Groping around. Looking for Cameron.”

  “You got reason to think he’s here?”

  “There were places we went together, years ago,” he said quickly, “before bad temper and other things drove us all apart.”

  “What places?”

  “There’s a canal that cuts along the edge of the farm, and a stand of trees across the back road where the woods are thick. We used to shoot birds there a hundred years ago.”

  “You really think he’s there now?”

  He blinked and took his time. “I don’t know what I think. But I thought he might be.”

  “And that’s why you came out here?”

  Almost a full minute passed before he said, “Maybe I’m the crazy one. I came here thinking he might show up, and I’ve been shivering in the house for three hours. What do you make of that?”

  “Jitters…everybody gets ’em at some point in life.”

  “This is more than any jitters. I told you I’ve got a hunch.”

  “About what?”

  He didn’t answer—just looked at me hard across the table, said, “You wanna take a walk?” and suddenly I shared his hunch, that something had happened even if we didn’t know what. I said, “Sure, I’ll take a walk with you.” Then, to my own unease, he picked up his gun and motioned me ahead of him through the door to the porch.

  Out in the yard he tucked the gun into his belt and draped his coat over his shoulders. “Your lead,” I said, and he struck off at once, through the fence and across the field. He walked with long decisive strides, eating up the ground, and I kept pace a step behind him. His breath floated out of him in small white puffs, swirling and disappearing into the air. We started up the hill. The place had an air of eternity, as if it had been sculpted out of the plain in some former lifetime. I said as much but he only grunted a response. We had gone halfway up the hill when he said, “Yeah, they were always workin’ on it when Candice was alive: hiring landscape people, having trees planted along the road; shrubs and stuff.” I wanted to ask what he thought of Candice. The moment didn’t seem right but I backed into it anyway. “Candice sounds like a fascinating woman.”

  Again he took his time answering. We had almost reached the top when he said, “Oh yeah, she was a doll,” as if his brain had slipped into some kind of slow-motion mode, almost as if he had been taking a hallucinatory drug. We crested the hill and on the other side was a long downward-sloping pasture that ended in a wall of trees. “That’s the canal,” he said. “You can’t see it yet, but it goes there through the trees.” He was walking fast now and I had to hustle to keep up with him. I could hear his breath coming hard; I could see it clearly in the frosty morning, puffing around his head like smoke from a train. Suddenly he said, “Yeah, Candice was a living doll,” and he veered left toward the woods. I could see a small building there in the trees, and off to the left of that, a number of corrals and another smaller house. “They used these for feed houses when she was alive,” he said. “The house straight ahead was to store hay in.” We were now on a rutted road, which cut through the field to the feeding area. He stepped nimbly for a big man, dancing around the water-filled potholes, slipping once but getting his footing without missing more than a step. “Candice would be proud if she could see it now,” he said.

  He stopped suddenly, I came up on his flank, and we collided gently. He cocked his head and again had that strange time lapse in his thinking. “She brought new life to the old man and that had to be a good thing. This place cost her a pretty penny even then, but she didn’t care. Nice having money like that, huh?”

  “Seems like she used it well.”

  He nodded and I said, “How well do you remember her?”

  This time he answered immediately: “I remember everything about her.” He looked at the sky over the hay house. “I remember everything.” He watched a flock of birds circling over the woods. “Like it was yesterday,” he said.

  I doubted that but I let him talk. He started walking again, slower now. “I heard she took this walk every morning when she was here. She loved the fields and the trees. She put up with Idaho, but she liked it best of all down here.”

  He opened the door and we went inside. It was a four-room house, the rooms still had hay residue on the floors, and there were a few old bales of straw, smelling dry and stale. “Like it was all yesterday,” he said as we crossed into the back rooms. We went out the back door and looked inside the smaller house. “So much for hunches,” he said.

  He turned and started back up the hill. But we had only gone a dozen steps when he whirled around and said, “Wait, I want to see the canal,” and he doubled back past the corrals into the trees. There was an old path, mostly overgrown now, but he found it as if he had never left here, “like it was all yesterday,” he said again. I followed him by about ten yards, and soon I saw the water running slowly in its bank just ahead. We came into a clearing and he went to the edge and stood transfixed, looking at the water. “Don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said. “I feel cold.” I told him it was cold, but I knew that wasn’t what he meant. “That crazy bastard,” he said, striking off along the bank. We went two hundred yards and he stopped and wavered in the gentle breeze.

  “Oh, God,” he said, covering his face with a handkerchief. “Oh Christ, I’m gonna puke.”

  Then I smelled it too, a rotten stench that hung over the cut like a shroud. I came out to the edge and there was Cameron, draped over a piling, half in and half out of the water. The birds had been at his eyes and his head had been blown open, the wound full of maggots. His body swayed in the water, his hand making a macabre little ebb-and-flow greeting, like a man saying hello to people he barely knew.

  14

  Erin sat coldly through my account that night. The police had arrived at two o’clock with the coroner’s men on their heels; Baxter and I had been questioned in separate rooms; I explained why I was there and showed them my note from Sharon; I told them about my own adventure in the trunk of Cameron’s car and the gun, recently fired, that I had found there. I was released after two hours with the usual polite request to keep in touch. They were still questioning Baxter as I left. I knew they weren’t satisfied with his part of the story: If he had told them what I had seen or heard from him, I wouldn’t be satisfied either. They would ask, for example, how he had suggested a walk and then led me almost straight to his brother’s body. I hadn’t told Baxter about this likelihood: the last thing I wanted was to coach the suspect, if that’s what he turned out to be, but this was one of those times when I longed to be on the other side of the badge. I did take his gun away from him when he put it on the table: I picked it up carefully, put it on another table across the room, and left it to the cops to deal with when they arrived. Other than a few brief comments, we had nothing else to say until the police came.

  “I didn’t kill him,” he did offer at one point. “How long’s he been dead do you think?”

  I didn’t say but I thought it could be a week on the long end.

  “I’ve been up at Golden Gate till early this morning.”

  People could verify that, he said, he was well known up there. “Besides, why would I kill him?”

  Now, hours later, Erin listened to my story without a word. We ate our dinners in that awful silence, and at last I said, “Okay, if you’re gonna chew me out, let’s have it.”

  “Would that do any good?”

  “In what context?”

  “Don’t be dense, Janeway, it doesn’t become you. I’m just very calmly asking if you’d do it again under the same circumstances, which of course you would, like a bat out of hell. I thought we had all this out months ago. Years ago.”

  “If it makes any difference, I did bring my sword to fall on.”

  “Which means nothing when push
comes to shove. I predict one of these days we will have us an ugly parting over something like this.”

  A scary thought. I pondered it and said, “But what would we do without each other?”

  “That is the question, isn’t it?”

  That was indeed the question. I had once come so close to losing her that now I got edgy if she was running late in traffic, tense if she failed to call. I was nervous in all those harmless down times where before, in my old life, I had felt invincible.

  “You worry way too much,” she said. “You’re becoming…”

  She fished for a term and I gave it to her. “A pain in the ass.”

  “Thank you. I was thinking of a mother hen but your description is better.”

  “So,” I said expansively; “what do you think of our little dilemma?”

  “I don’t think with all your scratching around you’ve done much to further your cause.”

  “Getting brained with a poker and left for dead; finding Cameron’s body—you don’t count that as progress?”

  “You’ve demonstrated again that you have an uncanny ability to stick your head in front of hard, fast-moving objects. I admit that’s a nice talent, but what did you learn?”

  “Somebody killed Cameron.”

  “A fact that surely would have materialized anyway, but yes, you did let the brother lead you straight there, I should give you points for that. That does make the brother the top suspect. So far, however, your footwork has been lagging.”

  I glared at her.

  “Far be it from me to tell you what to do; your experience as a cop far outweighs mine. But forget about Cameron for a moment. Doesn’t sound like anybody will miss him anyway, so, unless his death is connected to Candice somehow, what’s the point?”

  “I believe it is connected. It’s not often that you get two unrelated murders in the same family. Rare, actually, as people like to say in the book business.”

  “That’s an overused term in books as well. Where is the connection and how are they connected and why? Did someone kill her, did she do it herself, or was it an accident? We still don’t know these things yet. I’m sure it must have occurred to you to question some people if you have any hope of finding out what happened to that woman all those years ago, but so far the only ones you’ve pushed at all seem to be Sandy and that dumb guy across in the next barn.”

  “There’s a reason for that. Can you guess it?”

  “You’re reluctant to give up your undercover status.”

  “That’s true. Once you go public, so to speak, you can’t ever change your mind and tell people to forget it, you really are just a racetracker like them.”

  “Okay, but what’s the harm?”

  “I’m afraid if the stewards find out they’ll kick me out of there. Where would I be then?”

  “Hmmm,” she said. “I admit that’s one argument I hadn’t figured on.”

  “No, but you were starting to have some great fun at my expense.”

  “Would they kick you out?”

  “For coming in under false pretenses? What do you think?”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Sandy might get in trouble as well. Now maybe you see it’s more complicated being a cop than a lawyer. Especially if you’re a cop without a badge.”

  She ignored this dig. “What about that guy you hassled…what’s his name?”

  “Rudy.”

  “Yeah. Won’t he tell?”

  “Rudy can’t tell time without help. He has no clue who I am.”

  “But he knows you’re somebody now.”

  “You give him way too much credit. I don’t worry much about a guy who struts around and then, when some inevitable showdown happens, hasn’t got the balls, pardon me, to back it up. I doubt if he’s had a real thought in thirty years. His act is his whole life.”

  We sat for a while in a ponder-mode, saying nothing.

  “Hmmm,” she said. “Want some dessert?”

  “No thanks, but you go ahead.” I looked at her with admiration. “You burn calories like other people breathe and you never gain a pound.”

  She smiled sweetly and ordered a piece of lethal-looking chocolate swirl cheesecake.

  “So,” she said. “This does make it difficult. This will require some deep thought.”

  We thought deeply, but in the end she said, “You can’t just keep coasting. At some point you’ll have to take a chance and shake things up.”

  Of course I knew that. Meanwhile I asked how Blakely was and her face lit up.

  “Incredible library, fascinating stuff; what can I say? Your friend Carroll Shaw was cool, too. But you know all that.”

  “Actually I’ve never been up there. I’ve always done business with them by telephone.”

  “Do yourself a favor and stop on your way back to Denver. You could spend days and never see a fraction of what they’ve got.”

  I asked about Carroll and she said, “Nice man. Spread a little thin when I dropped in on him out of the blue so he had an assistant show me around. He did say hi to you.”

  She had picked up an artist’s drawing of the new library, which would break ground next year and be finished in 1998. A pamphlet integrated its mission statement with drawings of the various rooms and listed its current officers and benefactors. Lots of old money, plenty of public spirit. I recognized many high-class horse owners among the board of directors: Gallaghers, McWilliamses, Adamses, Wentworths, and in fact Sandy’s friend Barbara Patterson was on the board.

  “There’s a woman who gets around,” I said.

  “Good to have a busy life.” She pushed her dish across the table. “Last bite of the cheesecake.”

  I shook my head and she ate it.

  Later, as we prepared to call it a night I said, “You wouldn’t leave me.”

  “Not till the pain really outweighs the joy.”

  15

  Baxter Geiger had his horses stabled in Barn 14, a few rows over from my tack room. He had already arrived when I walked into his shedrow at quarter to four the next morning, a solitary figure standing in an open tack room drinking coffee from an old porcelain mug. I could hear his ginneys stirring about in the other rooms: I heard an alarm clock ring and a radio softly playing elevator music nearby. Bax stood like a statue and watched me come to him. I came up close and said good morning and he grunted out a response. “Thought they threw you in the clink,” he said.

  “Is that what they told you?”

  “They didn’t tell me anything. But you weren’t there when I came out.”

  “And you had me figured for Cameron’s killer.”

  “Just like you figured me.”

  “I try not to jump to conclusions like that, Bax. If you do, it leaves you with egg on your face when the truth comes out.”

  “I told you I didn’t kill him. But you didn’t believe me.”

  “Didn’t believe or not believe. I had just met you, what did I know? But you don’t seem too broken up about it.”

  “Cameron’s a hard guy to mourn, even for a brother. So what do you know now?”

  “Not much more. I was wondering if we could have a little talk.”

  “Got to be after work this morning. This rain’s played hell with my schedule.”

  “You say when.”

  “Come back around noon, I’ll talk to you then.”

  I crossed over to Sandy’s barn and began the morning’s work. Again he was moody and tense. He was short with his ginneys and the bug boy but said nothing to me. I heard him raise his voice as I walked Erica’s Eyes down the shedrow: “Jesus, Obie, hold him still; can’t you even keep his head straight?” I turned my horse into her stall and hugged her head, then started another walk. The tow ring had dried considerably and we were able to walk in the sunshine as the morning spread its glory over the backstretch and on across the bay. It was a crisp cold autumn day. Sandy took ten horses to the track, six to gallop and four to work. This made the morning busy for his hands. I walked with
out letup, around and around, yet my mind was full and I never got tired or bored. The horses were alert and feisty, they kept me on my toes, and so the hours passed.

  At the end of the morning Sandy came up to me and said, “Let’s talk.” We went into the tack room and he closed the door. “How’s it going?” he said.

  “Slow.”

  “You got anything solid yet?”

  I shook my head.

  “I heard you found Cameron yesterday.”

  “Yeah, Bax was with me.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t mind having a progress report now and then.”

  “What kind of report do you want, Sandy? I haven’t even had time to call Sharon yet.” I looked at him, expecting the worst. “She is my client, after all.”

  His face boiled over with anger. “I know who she is. I shouldn’t have to remind you that you are here in the first place as a personal favor to her.”

  I nodded, warily, but I hoped pleasantly. He said, neither warily nor pleasantly, “So from now on I want to be kept better informed about what’s going on.”

  “Sounds like you’re already pretty well informed.”

  “Goddammit, Janeway, don’t play games with me. Everybody on this racetrack knew what had happened before I got here this morning.”

  “I’m sorry about that. But surely you don’t expect me to chase you down every time something happens, just so you can hear it first.”

  “I expect you to use a little courtesy and respect. Is that too much to ask?”

  “I don’t know, it might be. Depends on what it means.”

  A long thirty seconds passed. He held his ground and I could see he was trembling mad. He got up from the saddle trunk, walked to the door, and turned to me. He said, “I’d like you to wind this up as soon as possible.”

  I smiled, the soul of reason. “So would I.”

  “So I’m asking you how long this is gonna take.”

  “And I’d tell you if I knew. I can’t even guess at the moment.”