“They were probably afraid that if they flew you to Laramie, somebody would poison your T-bone,” Dickie interjected. “So what did you say?” He mopped up blue cheese dressing with a bunch of fries.
“I knew it was fishy. I asked her how much money we were talking about,” Sally returned in a reasonable tone of voice. Dickie waited. Sally was coy. “It was enough. Put it this way. On the way up here, I stopped in at John Elway Toyota down in Denver to have a look at the new Land Cruisers. They say you get a personally autographed football if you buy a car from him.” Dickie was impressed. “I’ve also been wondering where I oughta take everyone in town who still considers me a friend out for a steak dinner to celebrate my great good fortune. What do you think—the Old Corral or the Cavalryman?”
Dickie tried to calculate what that meant, starting merely with the bar bill from the steak dinner, and decided it meant that she would be making more than enough to infuriate the average chronically underpaid Wyoming history professor. He’d taken his share of domestic disturbance calls involving faculty families, and usually the victim tried to explain that they’d just been having a loud family argument about money. How much worse that Sally Alder had once put herself through a master’s program in history by singing songs like “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mothers.”
“So one week later, I met them in a suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel,” Sally continued, dipping a ring in what was left of his salad dressing and crunching happily at the memory. “Edna was there. So was Egan Crain from the archives. Part of the Dunwoodie Center money is supposed to pay for them to acquire collections in American women’s history. There was only one other person—this Denver lawyer, Ezra Sonnenschein, very cool dude in a very expensive suit, who is the executor of the Dunwoodie estate, and who said he was there on behalf of the Board of the Dunwoodie Foundation, whoever the hell they are.
“Anyhow, we chatted for a while, then they called room service and ordered up drinks, then we went out to dinner at an incredibly expensive restaurant, and over a dessert that should have been in a museum somewhere they asked me if I wanted the job. Just like that.”
The whole thing seemed pretty slippery to Dickie, who knew something of the extreme pettiness of academic politics. “So basically, you said okay, shower me with money and I’ll come on back to Wyoming and not worry about anybody who ever saw me puke on my own shoes.”
“I never puked on my shoes—that was you. And you puked on the cop’s shoes. And he told you to drive on home,” Sally retorted.
She sat back, watching Dickie smoke. She had hated cigarettes ever since quitting herself almost twenty years ago (all right, nineteen). Annoyingly, after nearly two decades of aerobic exercise, part-time vegetarianism, antioxidant supplements, and meticulous application of number 30 sunscreen, watching him suck smoke made her feel like bumming one. Really Wyoming.
“So did you take it, just like that?” Dickie asked, measuring her covertly.
“Not just like that. I thought it over for a couple of weeks. But then, I figured, this was probably the best college gig I’d ever be offered. I was sick of LA. I thought about who around there would miss me, really, and after ten years, decided there wasn’t a soul in the whole city who couldn’t live without me. LA’s a lonesome town. I needed to get out.”
Sally did not tell Dickie that she’d given herself a way back to LA. This unorthodox Dunwoodie bequest could easily end up in court, or in the toilet. She hadn’t quit her old job, but instead had taken the classic academic back door, a year’s unpaid leave from UCLA. She could get another year, if she needed it, to make up her mind. If, in the meantime, the University of Wyoming decided that it couldn’t, in good conscience, continue to take the Dunwoodie money, she had a job to go back to.
“When I left here, I thought I’d had enough of places where everyone you know knows everyone else you know. But the more I thought about it lately, the more that seemed, I don’t know, comforting.”
“That wasn’t how you felt when you lit out of here,” Dickie reminded her.
“I wasn’t looking for comfort then—I was just escaping.” Sally’d made a career of escaping back then. “But now, sixteen years later, who’s going to remember me?” She thought about that Boomerang headline he’d mentioned. “Well maybe some people will, but people change, don’t they? Live and learn, forgive and forget, absence makes the heart—”
“Forget it,” Dickie said. “If nobody else in this town remembers you, Bosworth and some of those happy people in the history department do. And of course Mary and I do, and Delice and Dwayne, and then there’s Sam Branch—”
“Enough, Dick. I just got here. Give me at least an hour before I have to start worrying about who around here wants me tied up and whipped. You know, Dunwoodie must have had to deal with that every day of her life! She wasn’t exactly Miss Congeniality, either.”
“Have you read the poetry?” Dickie asked.
“Actually, I read it when it first came out. I thought it was, I don’t know, raw and warm and plain and ...”
“Troubling. Seductive,” Dickie finished. “Terrifying. Furious. Hilarious. Surprisingly sexy. Seems like she knew everyday things we don’t even suspect.”
“Seems like,” Sally agreed, dismembered phrases of Dunwoodie’s work flitting in and out of her mind.
“I tell you one thing—she was one hell of a pissed-off woman.” Dickie chuckled. The collection of poems had been titled Rocks and Rage. “But who would have predicted that some old maid would have such a feel for sin? Anyhow, it’s probably all for the best that she didn’t get famous until after she was dead,” Dickie allowed, “because nobody around here had read the poems until they won the award.” He ground out his cigarette in the round glass ashtray and grinned. “My particular favorite was ‘Still Life of Fascists with Herefords.’”
Sally grinned back, going to work on her second beer. “Yeah, those poems weren’t intended to be flattering. And the five million dollars she left UW has so many strings attached that she’ll have the satisfaction of making life crazy for everybody around here for years to come.”
Dickie snickered. “Well, you’ve got to figure, leaving her money the way she did, she meant to see one or two of ’em get their drawers in a wad.”
Sally sipped her beer. “They’re going to be even more ticked off when they hear what I’m supposed to be doing with my first year as Dunwoodie Professor.”
“Which would be?” Dickie asked.
“While everyone else is punching the time card on the industrial teaching assembly line and trying to figure out how they’ll retire on thirty K a year take-home, I’ll be living for free in her beautiful house, going through her papers, writing her biography.” Dickie looked amazed as Sally continued. “I just met with her lawyer in Denver to get the house keys and find out what I’m supposed to do. Nobody except her housekeeper—not even Egan Crain at the archives—has been allowed in the house. There are forty boxes of assorted stuff in there, full of God knows what. I have the whole year off from teaching to organize things, arrange publication for her stuff, do whatever other research I need to do, and figure out how to write her life story. I have the option of asking for another year of research and writing time if I need it.
“Some of the conditions are weird. I’m not supposed to talk about anything I’ve found out until Dunwoodie’s work is safely in press and the biography is published. When I’m done with her papers, they’re to be given to the archives, but until then, nobody, not even Egan Crain, gets a peek but me. And I had to promise to live in her house until I’m done!” Sally looked amused, and a little bit worried.
“That’s fairly strange, don’t you think—live in her house?” Dickie asked.
“Yeah, it’s a little twisty, but it’s a great deal. The place is supposed to be a museum of upper-class ’20s and ’30s taste in furniture and art, very deco, very elegant, very comfortable, very Carole Lombard. I could get used to a little luxury after the pest-hol
e I had in Westwood!”
“I can think of a number of people who would be real pleased to get into that house and have a look around,” Dickie replied, a crease appearing between his eyebrows. He didn’t find it necessary to tell her that since Margaret Dunwoodie’s death, the sheriff’s department had already collared three or four punks trying to break in and steal Dunwoodie’s television set, or whatever. Dickie himself had heard the rumor that Dunwoodie had stashed a fortune in gold and jewels somewhere in Wyoming. It was a ridiculous rumor, of course, but it didn’t have to be true to cause problems for Sally. It only had to be believed. “I’m going to have to keep an eye on you, and that house.”
“You always did watch out for me.” Sally smiled, grabbing his hand as it moved to his pocket to get another cigarette. “Even when you needed some looking out for, yourself. I wouldn’t worry too much, though, Dick. Just think about it,” she said, by way of changing the subject. She gave him a hard look. “It’s a miracle either one of us is alive.”
Chapter 2
The Wranglers’ Club
A sudden shriek disrupted the sentimental moment, as Delice Langham came barreling through the archway between the restaurant and the bar, clattering straight for Sally.
“De-leeeeece!” said Sally, leaping up. Then they were both hollering and hugging.
Delice was Dickie’s sister. She’d hired Sally for her first Laramie gig. Dickie and Delice also had a brother named Dwayne, who had been working at the Axe Attack Guitar Shop the day Sally happened into Laramie back in 1977, needing picks and strings. Dwayne sold her three sets of strings and a dozen picks and asked her if she wanted a gig, and she figured, why not? He’d sent her to see Delice at the Wrangler. She’d walked in that cold and windy May afternoon, gotten out the Martin and sung three songs. Delice took her on, paying her twenty-five bucks a day for two weeks of happy hours in the cavernous dance hall. This was big money for somebody who had open-miked and Tuesday-nighted her way through two hard-luck years of the Bay Area music scene. Sally looked in the paper, found a cheap apartment on a monthto-month lease.
One afternoon when Sally was playing, Dickie had come in to talk to Delice. He told her he could get her a gig at Mudflaps for two consecutive Thursday through Saturday night solo shots: fifty bucks a night. Bliss among the orange plastic booths. The second Thursday, Dwayne and some of his reprobate musician friends had come by Mudflaps for various reasons of their own. That led to five years of hauling a pickup full of P.A. equipment all over Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, the Dakotas, and hell, following the music and the money around.
She’d gigged by herself and with partners and with bands that formed and re-formed under names like The LowDowns, Lost Cause, Saddlesore (no kidding), and her personal favorite, a short-lived western swing band she’d fronted with the amazing Penny Moss, the Sister Brothers. Through poor judgment, however, Sally’d mostly been hooked up with Sam Branch and Branchwater. Along the way, she’d written maybe two hundred songs, including possibly a dozen good ones. Including seven good songs about Hawk Green, but she didn’t want to think about him just now. Hawk was a long way back in her Laramie past.
Over five years of raucous hard living, Sally and Delice had come to depend completely on each other. They’d formed a club, the Wranglers’ Club, consisting of themselves and Dickie, conducting bleary meetings on Monday mornings over eggs and hash browns. Both women had managed to get into sticky situations and to fish each other out again, most of the time anyway.
Langhams had been running the Wrangler for more than fifty years, and Delice was the latest of the Langham women to take over Laramie’s most revered combination greasy spoon and sleazy dance hall. It was a matter of pride with Delice that the food at the Wrangler had not improved in over five decades, although she admitted to a light twinge of guilt every time one of her regulars wound up in the Ivinson Memorial Hospital with a coronary episode. Delice was secretly negotiating to open up a Nouvelle Southwestern Pacific Fusion Arugula place on Ivinson Street, which would be managed by cousin Burt Langham, who had run off from Cheyenne to San Francisco and returned with a degree from the California Culinary Institute and a slim, brilliant partner named Frank Walton, whom Burt affectionately insisted on calling John-Boy. John-Boy was a wizard with wasabi: he could probably figure out a way to put it on elk steaks and sell it in Laramie. Delice preferred not to have it known she’d ever heard of wasabi.
Delice looked pretty much the same, give or take the usual wrinkles. She was wearing her Levi’s 501s tight, with a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut out and a little bit of tummy showing. Her jet-black hair (jetter than it had been in her youth, truth told) hung down to her ass, and she wore so much silver jewelry she jingled even while hugging.
“I knew it I knew it I knew it,” she exclaimed, eyes closed, enveloping Sally in a shockingly familiar cloud of Chlöe perfume. “I told Dickie you’d be back today! I figure he picked you up speeding somewhere near the Holiday Inn.” Sally and Dickie exchanged glances but said nothing. “And then I saw that Mustang with the California plates parked right out front and I thought, I am always right. I’d have been here sooner, but I had a Historical Society board meeting I couldn’t walk out on.”
Delice had always had a thing for Laramie’s Endangered Architectural Heritage, beginning with the Wrangler itself, which she had managed to get on the National Register of Historic Buildings, roaches in the food preparation area and slime in the ice machine evidently being no barrier to historic preservation and its attendant tax breaks.
“Can I buy you a beer, Dee?” Sally asked, slapping her on the back and shoving her into a chair.
“Nah,” said Delice. “I know the owner.” Without asking, the waitress brought her a shot of Cuervo Gold and a Budweiser. “Saving our precious past always gives me a thirst.”
“So what are you saving these days, Delice? Ought to be about time you put the cement plant on the register— it’s been puking out pollution more than twenty-five years now, hasn’t it?” Sally thought historic preservation was an oxymoron and a real estate scam.
“Still a riot, Sally,” Delice answered, mouth puckering as she licked her hand, shook salt on it, licked it again, took a hit off the Cuervo, took a bite out of a lime wedge, took a pull off the Bud. “But it takes fifty years. In a couple of years we could get Dickie nominated.” Dickie appeared not particularly glad to hear this. “Actually, I bet you’ll be delighted to know that we’re hoping to put together a Register application for Margaret Dunwoodie’s house!” Delice said the last as if she truly believed Sally would be thrilled and raring to help out, although why Sally should care one bit was anybody’s guess. “What with all the attempted break-ins while it was empty, a bunch of us were getting ready to take turns sitting on the porch with a shotgun to discourage prowlers.”
Historic preservers with shotguns? And what was all this about break-ins? Evidently this research project had some unanticipated complications, Sally decided. But after all, she’d spent ten years in LA, where every decent stereo she’d ever bought had been stolen within a month of the date of purchase. “Don’t shoot anybody on my account,” she said, setting doubt aside and putting an arm around Delice for a half-hug. “At least not until I’ve had the chance to give you a list of who I want dead.”
“I could probably come up with a short list on my own,” Delice remarked, and cackled until the clanging of her jewelry deafened three nearby tables full of customers. Dickie pulled at his earlobe as if he was trying to work something loose, and suddenly Delice remembered that her brother was there. Abruptly, she settled her arms on the table and her bracelets jangled to a halt. She looked a pointed, silent question at Dickie, who carefully acted as if he were still ignoring her. Sally was suspicious.
“You didn’t tell her, did you?” Delice narrowed her eyes at the fidgeting Dickie.
“Tell her what?” Dickie asked, feigning an innocence so guilty it might have been endearing, had the hairs on Sally’s neck not st
ood up in apprehension.
“You big lard-ass goat-sucking shithead,” Delice yelled at Dickie, who was by now very busy shaking his Bic and trying to light a Marlboro. “You haven’t told her.”
“Told me what?” Sally asked, her voice rising and the three tables of customers now leaning over to hear. “What?! What haven’t you told me, Dickie? Goddamn it, what?”
Delice threw down the last of the shot and looked straight at her, eyes shining with what might have been tears and might have been tequila shock. “You’re back, and we are glad, darlin’,” she said quietly, sitting very still. “But you’re not the only one.” Sally waited, going hot and cold and hot again, knowing what Delice was about to tell her. “You might as well hear it from me,” she said. “Hawk’s back, too.”
Sally choked down the last swallow of Bud, muttered, “Who gives a damn anyway?” and explained that she was beat and had to go get settled in Meg Dunwoodie’s house.
Delice just shook her head and said, “My my. Here we go again.”
Dickie insisted on driving along behind her the nine blocks over to the Dunwoodie place, getting the suitcase out of her trunk, walking her to the door, stepping inside to look around as she turned the key in the lock and walked into the dim foyer. Margaret Dunwoodie’s housekeeper, Maude Stark, had turned a few lights on. In fact, the house was subtly lit for nighttime welcoming. In the foyer, a black and gold lacquered 1920s deco table held a silk-shaded lamp and a crystal bowl full of fragrant sweet peas , reflected from behind by a matching lacquer-framed mirror. “Guess they’re expecting you,” Dickie said.
Sally noticed, for the first time, that he seemed to have his hand on his gun.
Brown-Eyed Girl Page 2
