Greasy Bend

by Kris Lackey

“Have you noticed anything different about him?”

  She sighed and looked at the ceiling. “Oh. He’s more offish, I guess. Don’t ever look at me. Don’t act pissed at me. Kind of like a zombie.”

  “You notice anything different about his shoes?”

  “He didn’t start wearing high heels, if that’s what you mean.”

  “No.”

  She scanned the floor again as if looking at her son’s shoes. “Sssssss. Not the same ratty red tennis shoes, last time. Darker. Shiny. Shit, I can’t hardly remember that.” The coquette had gone out of her.

  “Was he wearing gloves?”

  “No. He never would do outdoor work where you had to wear gloves. Lord, I hope he ain’t in any real trouble.”

  “I hope not, Mrs. Crum.”

  “Marlene.”

  “Thank you, Marlene.”

  “I think I did hear him tell somebody on the phone once to meet him at Tim’s Roadhouse, out by Stratford.”

  “Thank you again.”

  “Marlene.”

  “Marlene.”

  She watched him put on his campaign hat as he walked across her dirt yard.

  CHAPTER 10

  One minute before his shift began, Maytubby parked his cruiser in front of Chickasaw Lighthorse Police headquarters on the west end of Main in Ada. The building sported a new facade—metal siding overhang and stucco ground floor, in the manner of new rural high schools. The dispatcher/receptionist buzzed Maytubby in. He stopped at her desk. “Hey, Sheila.”

  “I’m really sorry again about Tommy Hewitt. His little girls?”

  “They were asleep.”

  She nodded slowly. Maytubby was grateful she said nothing. “Chief wants to talk to you.”

  “Thanks.”

  He walked on thick old carpet into the dark warren of offices. Chief Les Fox’s was the first and the biggest. It also had the biggest interior window. Fox saw everyone who entered and left. He motioned Maytubby in. The nation’s governor, in a large framed photo, gazed with amiable impassiveness over the chief’s shoulder.

  Fox turned from his laptop screen and faced Maytubby. The glass on the governor’s portrait reflected Fox’s screen. He was playing solitaire, and old Sol was winning. “Sit down, Bill. You had a tough day yesterday. I thought you would be the right person to notify Mrs. Hewitt.”

  Maytubby nodded.

  “How is she?”

  “Not good.”

  Fox shook his head. “Too bad.” He looked at his hands a few seconds and then said, “You know I can’t assign you to this case. The main reason is jurisdiction. Member of the nation is killed on nation land, no evidence an Indian did it. That’s fed business.”

  “No evidence the killer wasn’t an Indian.”

  “Even if he is, you were too close to Tommy Hewitt.”

  Maytubby watched Fox’s eyes.

  “Anything goes wrong, it’s chalked up to revenge,” Maytubby said. He had intended, after this planned admission, to flank his boss. But Maytubby didn’t say anything.

  “Correct. I’m glad we understand each other.”

  The chief’s speech was smudged with irony. Maytubby was right about the eyes. A smile ghost in there.

  Fox said, “I need you to stay on the trail of those rustlers in Nebo. They are striking fear in the hearts of our fellow citizens down there.”

  Oh. Okay. Don’t flog it.

  “That’s your only assignment. And I’m hands-off. You are free to move about the nation as your investigation demands.”

  By now Fox was almost winking at him. Maytubby stood up. “Got it,” he said.

  The chief swiveled his chair and resumed his administrative duties.

  As Maytubby softly closed the door, he looked down the empty hall and said, “Huh.”

  Though the sun shone brightly outside, the interior of headquarters, wherever there was no fluorescent, was dark as a cave. Maytubby walked slowly toward his office, dreading the metal in-box and the glass in-box. Without the tubes overhead, the only light in his office was a pillbox window that framed a slit of rolling prairie.

  Maytubby scooted his laptop aside and opened a worn copy of Oklahoma Atlas and Gazetteer to the page containing the tiny grid that represented Wilson. One by one, in his memory, he followed the roads leaving Wilson, until his memory ran out, usually at one of the nation’s borders. Sometimes, he was looking across the Red River into Texas.

  As the houses and barns drifted by, he looked for signs of—not neglect, but inattention. Signs that whoever lived in a house was preoccupied with something bigger than the property. The land surrounding a building might be leased, so ruling out working farms and ranches wouldn’t help.

  An hour into this exercise, he was almost lost in a back-road reverie sixty miles from Wilson when he realized he hadn’t driven that stretch of blacktop for many years and that he had no idea what the houses would look like now.

  He slapped the atlas shut, leaned back in his chair, and gazed across the Red. Texas was really big.

  CHAPTER 11

  Jim’s Roadhouse had occupied an abandoned Onan gas station since Maytubby was young. The oil company sign, black letters on gold, had never been painted over. Neither had the smaller sign beneath it, pump yourself. Plenty of Stratford’s citizens read the Bible and might have seen the funny, but Maytubby suspected that the story of Onan, whom God punished for spilling his seed upon the ground, was not a regular sermon topic.

  Jim’s was between Ada and Stratford, the Peach Capital of the World—one of seven in the United States. Maytubby parked at the end of a line of middle-aged pickups. Behind Jim’s, a peach orchard spread north, its small gnarled trees like frozen scourges. When he opened the metal door, cigarette smoke rolled over him. But the place smelled more of Onan’s spilled oil than either booze or smoke. Maytubby recognized the bartender. “Hey, June,” he said, quickly to cut the cop tension. The half-dozen silverbacks at the bar resumed talking. He didn’t have to look at their faces to know that Lon Crum was not in the room.

  “Hey, Bill. Long time, no see.”

  “Sorry about the café.”

  “Thanks.” She wrinkled her nose. “Ancient history.”

  “I still miss your peach salsa.”

  “I know you, buster. You figured out the recipe and make it at home.”

  “Could be.”

  “Who you looking for?”

  He unfolded a photo and held it out to her. “Lon Crum. Used to live with his mother in Ada.”

  She took the photo, held it a second under the register’s desk lamp, then snapped it back at him. “He comes in every few months. Just long enough in between that I card him and then remember I carded him the time before. I call him Pigpen. Not to his face.”

  “He meet anybody?”

  She looked up the bar, down a row of empty tables. “Good question. I know if he met a girl I would remember that. That’s rare in this place. I don’t remember, Bill. Sometimes, I get busy. Show it around to these old turds.”

  Lon Crum’s mug shot roused the old turds. They tilted their heads back to get the highest diopter in their trifocals, shifted the picture until it got the most neon light. Almost ten minutes passed before the last man told Maytubby he didn’t recognize Crum.

  “Gimme your card, Bill. If I remember, I’ll call you next time he comes in.”

  Seventy-five minutes later, in fading light, Maytubby drove past the Golden Play Casino to the first intersection west, Dog Pen Road. Knocking at the house nearest the intersection and working outward, he asked if anyone had seen a white Supercab go by around one in the afternoon the day before. Everybody knew about the robbery and murder. Nobody had been home.

  With his strobes on, he drove slowly down the shoulder of US 70, looking through the imaginary eyeholes of the getaway driver’s pirate mask
. He also looked for discarded pieces of the fake guard uniforms. At Tribble Road, Maytubby stopped. He looked in every direction and saw neither house nor vehicle. Easy place to vanish.

  The pirate king had to get off the highway before he ran into sheriff’s deputies or the OHP. Driving north took him right into Healdton. Maytubby turned south. At the intersection of Whiskey Lane, he noticed an older man unloading sacks of pig starter from the bed of his pickup into a trailer hitched to an old tractor. The man saw the cruiser pull up his drive but continued to load his sacks. When Maytubby got close to him, he turned and smiled, lifted and reseated his flapped corduroy cap. He had spidery fingers.

  “So I call the sheriff, and the Indian police come. Maybe I should of called the Indian police.”

  “What did you want to tell the sheriff’s office?”

  “I seen that pickup from the robbery yesterday.”

  “How did you know it was the same pickup?”

  The man pointed north up Tribble Road and traced it back to the intersection. “He came from up there and hardly slowed down when he came ’round left.” His finger followed Whiskey Lane eastward. “I thought that truck was going to roll. Another reason I know it was the same truck, KXII said there was men in the back of the pickup. Well, there was men in the back of this pickup.”

  “Anything else unusual?”

  “Yeah.”

  Maytubby waited. There was a twinkle in the pig-starter man’s eyes.

  “Must have been really unusual.”

  “Was.”

  “The driver was wearing a pirate mask.”

  The twinkle disappeared, and Maytubby felt a little mean.

  “Yeah,” the man said, flat.

  “You see anybody throw anything out?”

  “Happened pretty quick.”

  “Did you see him turn off Whiskey Lane?”

  The pig starter man squinted as he stared down the road. Maytubby’s questions reignited the twinkle. “Like Moses said, it turned not from it neither to the right hand nor to the left hand.”

  On the back of one of his cards, Maytubby wrote the phone number of the US Attorney’s Office for Western Oklahoma. He handed it to the rancher. “Officially, the feds are investigating this, not the sheriff. Give them a call and tell them what you told me.”

  Two miles from the intersection, Whiskey Lane rose over a small hill and vanished from the rancher’s view. Reluctant to give up on his vision of the getaway, Maytubby did not stop before Jehovah Road. No one answered the door at any of the three houses nearest the intersection.

  Driving north, he saw in the distance a low-slung white metal building that appeared to be flashing, like an electric road-construction sign. Nearing it, he saw the blue star of a welder’s arc, and bursts of orange sparks. The welded object—some sort of structural frame—was too big to fit inside the metal building. A listing aqua Bronco pickup from the seventies sat in the lot, two gas cylinders upright in its bed. The building’s large sliding doors were open, so the welder was likely working alone. If this was a business, it had no sign.

  After the welder had played his electrode to a nub, he lifted his hood with a heavy black glove. When Maytubby made eye contact with him, the welder, in his early thirties, remained seated and said, “Yeah?”

  “You heard about the robbery and murder at the Golden Play yesterday?”

  “Sure did. Terrible thing.” The man shook his head dolefully, the hood making him look like a comic stage horse. “Whoever done that had a heart of frozen ice. Widowed a wife and one-half orphaned the children. It’s a dern abomination.”

  “Have you read or seen a description of the getaway vehicle?”

  “I have not, Officer.”

  Maytubby held out a photo of a matching pickup. The welder cradled it ceremoniously in his stiff leather glove. Matted sandy hair framed his gray eyes. As he studied the photo, he rubbed his chin with the other gloved hand like an eighth-grade thespian.

  This man was too old to be such a sorry liar, Maytubby thought as he looked past the welder and quickly scanned the metal building. The low winter sun flung some dim amber light through the open garage doors—not enough to be helpful. That building would hold a pickup.

  “You know, Officer …” The welder scrunched his brows. “This picture reminds me. I did see a pickup like this yesterday. It was going like a house afire.”

  “Which direction?” Maytubby already knew what he would say, and noted the absence of floodlights on the property.

  “That way,” pointing in the direction Maytubby had come.

  Maytubby took the photo back and folded it. “Anything unusual about the truck or the driver?”

  Again the chin-rubbing. “I believe the driver was wearing a gold baseball cap.”

  “Gold like Byng High?”

  “Whut?”

  “That’s their color, the Byng Pirates.”

  Even in the shadow of the hood, Maytubby could see him flinch. The welder looked down and shrugged. “I didn’t see nothin’ on the hat,” he said to the ground.

  “You’ve been a big help,” Maytubby said. The welder looked up. “Do you know Lon Crum?”

  “Long Crumb? What kind of name is that?” The welder looked genuinely at a loss.

  “Doesn’t matter, man. Thank you very much.”

  “Sure,” the welder said. He clamped a fresh rod and flipped his hood down.

  In case the welder was watching, Maytubby drove back the way he came, turning his rearview mirror toward the metal building. Only a few seconds passed before the arc died and the hood went up and pivoted.

  If the pirate king did hide his truck and crew in that building until dark yesterday, Maytubby thought, he could have gone either to the right hand (north) or to the left hand (south). But the welder had raised the odds on the right.

  CHAPTER 12

  When Hannah Bond saw Jeff Lang coming out of the Tille Mart in Wapanucka with a six-pack of Hamm’s, she was glad she had decided not to break into his house. He would have caught her. Lang saw the cruiser and shot Bond the finger, moving it up and down slowly.

  Back at the bend on State 7, she switched on her radar, woke her laptop, and searched “Alice Lang” on the Ada News website. Once she passed the few headlines about Lang’s murder, the next results were from a decade before. “Bookkeeper Pleads Guilty to Embezzlement.” Bond stared at the headline. Alice Lang?

  The cruiser radar beeped. She swatted it off.

  MUSKOGEE. In Federal District Court, Richard James, from Sulphur, pleaded guilty Thursday to the charge of embezzlement and theft of more than $1000 from an Indian tribal organization. An investigation by the Chickasaw Nation and the FBI yielded evidence that James had embezzled more than $100,000 from Paska Manufacturing, a Chickasaw steel fabrication enterprise in Marietta. As part of a plea deal, James was sentenced to one month in prison and ordered to repay the Chickasaw Nation. James was arrested six months ago after another accounting officer, Alice Lang, discovered that he had created invoices from a false vendor and collected the money himself.

  Two years before Bond was commissioned. Four years before she met Alice. Alice never mentioned it. A black-and-white photo of the felon showed a boyish face—light-colored eyes, delicate features, wispy blond hair.

  When Maytubby answered her call, the road noise on his end was loud. “Hannah.”

  “Hey, Bill. Did you know Alice Lang testified in a big Nation embezzlement case ten years ago?”

  “No. Neither of us had a badge back then. Never heard of it from anyone else. She tell you that?”

  “No. I was just this minute searching her name on the Ada News website, and it came up.”

  “Did the thief do time?”

  “A month plus restitution to the nation. Defense blamed a gambling addiction.”

  “Good counsel. He got off easy
. Not murder-material grudge.”

  “It’s been ten years—a long time to wait, but long enough that people forget.”

  “And that’s no help since the internet forgets nothing.”

  “Do you know if Scrooby has asked your boss about this?”

  “Just a sec.” Over the road noise, Bond could hear Maytubby talking to Chief Fox on the two-way. She heard the mike go back in its cradle. “Fox says no. He’d never heard of it, either. Nobody else in the office. Want me to tell Scrooby your news?”

  Bond gave him a raspberry.

  “Obstruction of justice, Deputy.”

  “All right, you tell Fox what you’re doing right now.”

  “He’s looking the other way. You believe it?”

  “He’s too smart to say that to you. Wink, wink?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hell must’ve froze over.”

  “It was Tommy.”

  “Course it was. I’ll let you go turn over some more rocks.”

  “Turn over enough, maybe …”

  “Yeah, I know. Find a scorpion. Bond activated her radar and looked at her watch. She was short-time on her shift, needed some citations outside the earlier clump … 45, 52, 49, 56, 55, 57 … The parade of law-abiding citizens grew longer. A red-tailed hawk circled high in the golden sunlight … 54, 56, 56, 55 … When she looked up again, the hawk was much lower. It descended gently, then bolted to the ground. It thrashed the roadside grass as it rose heavily, a cottontail in its talons.

  Suddenly, the hawk burst in a spume of feathers, and the carcass of the rabbit smacked the cruiser’s windshield. Bond was not a flincher, but the rabbit made her blink. She stared at the spattered blood and zigzag crack for less than a second before the flashing radar caught her eye: 112.

  As the cruiser stormed onto the pavement, Bond had to look below the rabbit to see the road ahead. The wipers wouldn’t budge it. She leaned most of her long torso out the window, grabbed the rabbit’s hind legs, and flung it into the ditch. There was no washer fluid, so she threw half a paper cup of black coffee onto the glass, opening a clear streak in the gore, and pulled down the visor to cut the setting sun.