Sam squinted steely-eyed at Bobby. “I’m trying to figure out why I should give a rat’s ass.”
Now Branch was gaming him, and it pissed Bobby off. Branch was worth a bundle, Bobby’d heard, but he was not in the same financial universe as Elroy Foote. “The rat’s ass you give,” he told Sam sharply, shoving his odious lunch aside, “may be your own.”
Sam smiled. He could learn to like this guy. “Exactly how?” he asked, unwrapping and lighting a thin cigar.
Bobby was all lawyer now, on home court. “As of this morning, the ball is already rolling on a challenge to the Dunwoodie bequest, on the grounds that various aspects of the management of the gift violate principles of academic freedom, compromising the integrity and standing of the University. An associate and I met with a professor in the history department, and he’s been talking with a group of faculty on whose behalf the suit will be filed. I’ll be handling the case, and I just thought you might like to know what’s going on from the get-go, so that you have time to plan your response when you’re asked where you stand.”
“Who’d you talk to, Bobby? The Boz?” Sam had of course known Bosworth a long time—the man’s second, or was it third, ex-wife used to buy grams from him. Every time the Boz showed up in a bar where Branchwater happened to be playing, Sally Alder had said, “Oh goodie. Here comes the blancmange.” Sally said looking at Byron Bosworth always reminded her of that episode of the Monty Python show where the blancmanges—white jiggly Jell-O puddings from outer space—turn all the tennis players into Scotsmen because Scotsmen are notoriously bad tennis players and the blancmanges want to win Wimbledon. The man was shaped like a soft, lumpy, glutinous pyramid, pale beige from head to toe.
“Professor Bosworth is a party to the suit. But as I understand it, there’s been considerable discussion among the faculty about the bequest.”
Sam smoked, thought. “I’m sure there has. But this still doesn’t tell me why I might find any reason to get on board on this, which is what I presume you’re trying to get me to do.”
“I’m not trying to get you to do anything,” Bobby lied carefully. “But you might also be interested in knowing that, in addition to the fact that Whipple, Hipple and Abernathy will be representing the plaintiffs, the legal expenses will be paid by the Foote Freedom Foundation.”
Deep pockets. Elroy Foote owned companies worth more than the state of Wyoming. Several. For that matter, he owned companies worth more than most states, and many countries. If Foote wanted to pursue this matter, not only could he pay lawyers until everyone involved was broke, busted, disgusted, or dead, but he could also pay for a publicity campaign that would saturate Wyoming like a sponge full of piss. The question was, why. As everyone knew, Elroy Foote was a Harvard man.
“Why in the name of God does Elroy Foote give his own very wealthy rat’s ass about a piddling five-milliondollar gift to a university he didn’t even go to?” Sam asked.
“Let’s just say he chooses to see this matter as an assault on the only public university in his home state, by the forces of repressive political correctness. Mr. Foote doesn’t mind putting his money where he thinks it can do some political good,” Bobby tossed out, looking like a man baiting a hook.
“Oh, he doesn’t?” Sam said, carefully grinding out his cigar stub in an ashtray that might never have actually been washed. He looked up and met Bobby’s earnest, calumnious eyes with a gaze equally frank and dishonest. “Well now. That’s an admirable trait in a man.”
Chapter 19
Good Answers
The winter snowpack had come early to the streets of Laramie. Down on Old Ivinson Avenue, the muffled crunching of tires and the curses of pedestrians slipping and falling on icy sidewalks vied with the blare of endless repetitive Christmas music. Right after Thanksgiving, the Merchants’ Association had decided to inspire holiday shoppers by putting up loudspeakers on stanchions and blasting everyone with a taped selection of spending-friendly, non-sectarian music. You could not therefore avoid Brenda Lee singing “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” Jose Feliciano’s ever-popular “Feliz Navidad,” and of course Bill Haley’s always enjoyable “Jingle Bell Rock.” By the second week in December, employees in the bars and boutiques were ready to shoot out the speakers.
On the corner of Second and Ivinson, the workers who were gutting and remodeling the future home of Burt Langham’s Yippie I O Cafe took a page out of the U.S. Army’s psychological warfare book, so successful in Panama when they captured Manuel Noriega, and blasted heavy metal music right back. On days when the wind blew out of the west, which was most days, you could hear the racket six blocks away at the Wrangler. Delice finally got sick of it and called the mayor, who got the city council to pass an emergency antinoise ordinance covering Christmas music. Peace restored, Delice could go back to running her restaurant, pretending not to be running the future Yippie I O (while meeting with Burt and John-Boy and the architect and the contractor and suppliers almost every day) and worrying, when she had time, about Sally Alder and the Dunwoodie House. By now, she’d become so accustomed to thinking of Sally’s temporary residence as a historic site that she was mentally capitalizing “House.”
Sally herself was not a bit distracted by the Ivinson Avenue war between Megadeth and Brenda Lee. The moment she laid eyes on the mess in the basement, she’d given up on any illusion that this was a typical history project. Unlike anything else she’d ever worked on, and unlike 99 percent of historical enterprises, somebody really cared about this one. Cared enough to bust into a locked, usually occupied domicile, beat up a big woman, ruin precious manuscripts. To Hawk’s mild amazement (though he was getting used to the idea that Sally had achieved a measure of self-control), she didn’t even stop to have hysterics. She walked through the ragged heaps of paper with Dickie, assuring him that there was no way she could tell if anything had been taken, if she ever could, until she’d gotten things straightened up. Dickie, reasonably, understood that she was right and there was no point pressuring her. They agreed, however, that it had begun to seem that there was some unknown urgency to what she was doing.
Dickie’d had no luck finding Shane Parker. Nobody had seen him since before Thanksgiving. But then, as everyone he asked about Parker was inclined to say, “Shane is kind of a loner.” Dickie assumed that Shane was hiding out until things cooled off, but he had no idea where to start looking. For that matter, he had no clear idea as to Shane’s motivation. Looking for stuff to fence to buy dope? A Parker family feud? A skinhead harassing a Jewish feminist from California in a town where both skinheads and California Jewish feminists were scarcer than surfboards? Maybe hoping to find that map to buried treasure? From what his daughters had told him about the former Laramie High School loser, Shane was dumb enough to pull something like this for nothing more than the hell of it. Dumb and obviously violent. Bad combo. Next time he showed up, Dickie wanted to be ready.
Egan Crain was lobbying hard to have all Meg’s papers immediately moved to the Archive. He’d been haranguing Edna McCaffrey about it every day, and she could see his point. She’d mentioned to Sally that it might not be a bad idea, given the fact that whoever was interested in the papers obviously didn’t mind assaulting people. Edna was pragmatic, as usual. The papers should be kept safe, and there was of course the matter of the University’s liability in case of mishaps. She was also genuinely scared for Sally. Egan insisted that he understood the restrictions placed on the bequest, and would leave strict instructions that no one at the Archive but Sally was to have access to the papers until she was finished with them. Sally knew that there were excellent reasons to let them move the papers.
But Maude was against it. They talked about it over coffee and fresh cranberry scones in Meg’s warm, wellinsulated kitchen. “Nobody asked me,” she said, as if that had ever stopped Maude from offering an opinion, “but I think Meg’s stuff ought to stay here. I reckon Egan means well, and he may think he can keep people away, but he doesn’t sleep at
the Archive. And he can’t be everywhere at once. The story about Mac’s treasure, stupid as it is, is common knowledge by now.” That was putting it mildly. When the Boomerang ran its story on the break-in, the reporter managed to include virtually the entire rumor about the alleged subterranean cache, including the alleged Krugerrands, really playing up the mystery of—what else?—“the Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” Sheesh.
Maude was far from done. “The Archive is a big building, and even if they put the papers in a locked room, there are plenty of people in and out of that building every day. You can’t be there all the time to control access, Sally,” she continued. “Do you think Egan himself would be able to resist the impulse to take a little peek?”
And of course, Maude had her own take on Shane Parker. “I’ve known him since he was a miserable snotnosed brat,” she said. “You have to understand, Sally—I grew up in Laramie. And for as long as I’ve been alive, everyone’s been saying there are two kinds of Parkers: the ones who leave, and the ones who are too shiftless to go anywhere. The family started ranching in this country in the eighteen-eighties, and a fair number of them made a go of it. But by the Depression, the smart ones started looking for something more profitable to do, and the throwbacks just kind of squatted on the land until they lost most of it. Shane comes from a long line of good-fornothings who think the world did them wrong. The one thing none of them ever had was guts. He screwed up, and he won’t be back.” She devoutly hoped.
Maude made Sally feel like the two incidents were the work of a bungling malcontent who would be too chickenshit to try anything else. This was very reassuring. Sally had decided Egan was more or less honest, but she also figured he was human, and susceptible to temptation. And, goddamn it, this was her project, her responsibility. She put the question to Hawk, who weighed the pros and cons carefully, summed up the pluses and minuses efficiently, sympathized with her predicament satisfactorily, and declined to offer an opinion one way or the other, absolutely. It was her call.
And so in the end, Sally said she thought the papers ought to stay put. She reminded Egan and Edna that any change in the execution of the bequest had to be approved by the Dunwoodie Foundation, which meant getting the okay from Ezra Sonnenschein. Sonnenschein had finally called his secretary from a luxury encampment somewhere on the Elephant River in South Africa. Over a very scratchy transatlantic telephone connection, he’d said that he’d seen literally thousands of gemsboks and kudus and was heading out of the Kalahari by Range Rover within the week. He had plans to visit three more game parks, and would be in Capetown by the middle of the month. He would be returning to the U.S. around the first of the year (this news made Sally grind her teeth, awaiting the closet key), and as far as he was concerned, there was no rush about moving the papers. A will was a will, and shouldn’t be violated frivolously. He had known Maude Stark for nearly forty years, and he had great confidence in her judgment (and would put her up against anybody of any sex or size when properly warned and riled). He was, however, insisting that his own Colorado security experts check out the system Maude was installing at the house, and make recommendations for anything else they thought necessary. Sonnenschein assumed that the Wyoming idea of an alarm system was a handgun and a large ugly dog.
Dickie really wished they’d move the damn papers, but with Sally and the formidable Maude dead against it, and the Foundation’s representative withholding consent, there was nothing he could do. He would make sure patrol cars drove by at frequent, irregular intervals. He might drop in now and again himself. He’d had his fill of Entenmann’s fat-free coffee cakes and was ready to test-drive all those goodies Maude was supposed to be such a genius at baking.
The matter of the location of the papers settled for the time being, Sally set to work with a vengeance. The Coloradans arrived and wired every potential point of entry, installed panic buttons by the doors, put in a new telephone system, and even pruned Meg’s trees and shrubs, but Maude balked at the thought of bars on the windows, and Sally backed her. Meanwhile, Sally barricaded herself amid chaos with the intent of making order.
The time had come for plodding, for precision, for method. She was feeling guilty at having nearly succumbed to the temptation to leave the job of cataloguing half-done, and digging right into the juicy stuff she was sure she’d find in the Ernst Malthus correspondence. Not to mention the idea of breaking into the closet—Maude had surely had enough of break-ins for a while.
She’d given herself a stern lecture about discipline, damn it. She was an experienced professional with an endowed chair, and Meg Dunwoodie deserved careful treatment. Before she gave herself permission to pick and choose what she’d work with, Sally needed to get the whole crazy collection of stuff in reasonable shape. Sigh.
This time through, she had an idea of the categories under which she could classify papers, and decided to make files instead of piles. She set up a phalanx of empty boxes along one wall. Having asked Egan to supply her with fifty archive boxes, a thousand archive-grade, acid-free folders, ten boxes of labels, and six dozen boxes of plastic paper clips—a request he found reassuring in a small way—she made labels to be clipped to each document, letter, poem, or souvenir. Each labeled artifact would go in an appropriate file, which would go in a designated box. There would be boxes for folders dealing with Meg’s early childhood, her years in high school in Laramie, her time as a student at UW. Boxes for her time in New York and her years in Paris, with folders arranged both chronologically and topically. Boxes for the many years back in Wyoming, again filed topically and chronologically. Correspondence would be filed by year, except for the people who had written to her a lot, in which case it would be filed by the name of the writer (Dunwoodie, MacGregor;
McIntyre, Clara F.; Malthus, Ernst, for example). Those files would be put in boxes set aside for correspondence. If any file or set of files got too complicated or cumbersome, she could relabel, reclassify, subdivide. It would be the system that worked for her, and if the Archive didn’t like it, well, they could take off all the labels and start over.
It was a good plan—systematic and flexible. She was willing to work twelve-hour days as long as it took to get it done. And she put in a number of such days, slogging and slaving away, before she emerged from the basement feeling as if she’d spent a year in solitary confinement. An hour and a half later she was sitting at the bar at the Wrangler with a Budweiser, staring glassy-eyed at Hawk and listening blankly to a band called, honestly enough, Hat Act. The band was playing a tepid cover of “All My Exes Live in Texas.”
“I can’t keep up with it, Hawk,” she whined exhaustedly. “It’s too much. In ten years at UCLA I was known for having the messiest desk in the history department. I had memos buried on it so deep and for so long that they became historical artifacts before I threw them away. Now I’ve become the world’s highest paid file clerk. And I suck at it. I’m okay with the labeling—it gives me a chance to take a quick look at the papers, and I’m getting a real good picture of Meg’s life as I go along. But the filing, the fucking filing!”
Hearing her yell, Delice came over from the other end of the bar to see what was up. Delice put up a shot glass and poured her a Wild Turkey, on the house. Delice was fairly beat herself, having spent the entire day shuttling back and forth between the future Yippie I O (where they were having problems with a city inspector who wondered if the historic building in which the restaurant was to be housed was going to burn down if it was wired and plumbed and bricked and hooked up for all the fancy kitchen crap Burt wanted to put in—a wood-burning pizza oven ?), dragging Jerry Jeff out of the principal’s office, where he’d been sent for staring into space in math class (the teacher was obviously having a lousy day, too), and dealing with an actual (but small, and not too odiferous) grease fire at the Wrangler. While she was at it, she poured herself a shot of the Bird.
At that moment, Brittany Langham walked in and sat down next to Sally. She looked even worse than everybody else (i
n the case of Hawk, that wasn’t hard; he looked fine). She ordered a glass of white zin and bummed a cigarette off the bartender.
“I thought you quit,” Delice nagged.
“I quit quitting,” Brit snarled. “I got fired tonight.”
“Fired?” Delice hollered. “Since when does Foster’s fire anybody? I thought you had to barf on the floor or slug a customer to get canned there.”
Brit drew hard on the cigarette, took a sip of wine, and looked down. “Well, there’s at least one other alternative,” she admitted.
“And that would be?” Sally asked, becoming interested.
“When you’ve just gotten stiffed by, like, your third table of the night, and your feet are killing you, and you think it’s the absolute most demeaning and tedious job in the entire world, and Mr. Howitz, the manager, starts hissing at you for, like, the millionth time that you’re not ‘servicing the customer,’ you have finally had enough, and you yell, ‘You want me to suck what?’”
Sally and Hawk and Delice nodded thoughtfully. Delice took a sip of whiskey, cocked her head, pursed her lips, considered, and said, “Yep. I’d fire you for that.” She poured Brit more wine.
“On the other hand,” Sally put in, “I would be surprised to hear you ask her to service a customer.”
“We are not that kind of establishment,” Delice announced solemnly.
“And all these years I’d kept hoping,” Hawk lamented.
“I suppose now you’ll be reduced to doing something more in line with your abilities, like running the Pentagon or the ACLU,” Delice said.
“Brit is very capable,” Sally explained to Hawk, “but what she’s said to be best at is underachieving.”
Brit grunted something unintelligible.
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