Wolf, No Wolf

by Peter Bowen

  Her husband die about five years ago, Du Pré thought. She looks like the queen of a small country. Small, tasteful country, lots of traditions.

  Taylor was laughing a lot. He got up and took glasses in his hands and he headed off toward the bar. His mother stared straight at the dancers on the floor. She tapped with the band’s rhythms, her red nails against a white saucer.

  “The Queen Bee there,” said Corey Banning, at Du Pré’s side. Du Pré turned. “Where’s Madelaine?”

  “She has a kid got an ear infection,” said Du Pré.

  “She thinks rich folks are silly, more like,” said Corey. “So do I, but I got to snoop. I’d never seen the Queen Bee—I didn’t have a good enough reason to request an audience. If I got one, I’d get nothing, maybe a nice glass of sherry, some petit-fours, an offer to help me. Jesus, the old broad’s moral force about blows my dandruff off, here to there. You know her?”

  Du Pré shook his head. Me, I am just the nice cattle-brand inspector comes to sign off on three million dollars’ worth of cows when they ship. You want to buy a thousand head of yearlings, ask if they got ’em, they nod and pause, then ask, you want them all one color? What color?

  Taylor Martin returned to the table and he set down the drinks he was carrying and he looked over at Du Pré and Corey Banning and he waved generously at them to come over.

  “The prince bids us come,” said Corey. “Now, don’t pick your nose and you can’t fart within a hundred yards of the Presence, there. Come along, Du Pré, remember to genuflect when I do.”

  They made their way to the table. Mrs. Martin rose to greet them. When Du Pré shook her hand, it startled him. Her horsewoman’s strength gripped him hard.

  “Are you finding enough to eat and drink?” said Mrs. Martin. She had soft southern notes in her voice, and deep education.

  “A surfeit,” said Corey Banning. “What the hell do you do with this place between shindigs? Train cavalry troops?”

  “Just horses,” said Mrs. Martin. “The long winters are hard to bear. At least with this place, one can work. Helps me to make it through.”

  “Morgan and her horses are something of a family joke,” said Taylor. “If my father hadn’t employed cooks, her children would have starved to death.”

  “I had the children,” said Mrs. Martin, “and that was, I think, something of a contribution. Diapers, bottles, and the daily feedings, I said, would be up to someone else. Anyone else.”

  Corey laughed. Du Pré smiled.

  She laughs at herself, Du Pré thought. This Mrs. Martin, there is a good deal here.

  “You want to talk to me, dear,” said Mrs. Martin to Corey, “so let’s us just go do that. Taylor, could you have some brandy sent to the greenhouse?” She lifted a suede jacket from the bench and hung it over her shoulders. She took Corey’s elbow and steered her toward a door at the far end of the paddock.

  “We are well out of what’s next,” said Taylor Martin. “Come on, I need to dispatch the brandy, and we can have a drink.”

  They walked over to the bar, and Taylor spoke with one of the barkeeps. The man nodded and grabbed a bottle of brandy from below the bar and he set it on a tray and put two snifters on it and filled them halfway with boiling water.

  “Corey, she is kind of frustrated,” said Du Pré. “It is kind of your mother to talk with her.”

  “Very funny,” drawled Taylor Martin, “since the two of them will be sticking skewers in each other and never a hint of pain. Banning’s been following very faint tracks. They don’t stop here, mind you, but she naturally wonders just what goes on in our little kingdom here.”

  Du Pré shrugged.

  If it is you people, he thought, you will come out of here and do it again, anyway. All I can do is wait.

  Taylor handed Du Pré a drink. Du Pré glanced down at the man’s hand. There was livid scar tissue on the back and the fingers were twisted. One of the fingers was missing, and the two joints of the little finger were gone.

  “Mortar round,” said Martin, holding up his hand. “I’ll not forget that day. You in Nam, Du Pré?”

  Du Pré shook his head. “Germany,” he said. “Drank a lot of beer.”

  Martin nodded.

  He glanced up and his jaw tightened and Du Pré turned and looked. There was a little knot of men at one corner of the dance floor starting to fight.

  Martin set his drink down and moved toward them, gliding across the floor, the floating dance of a fighter closing in. Du Pré followed him. The men were yelling by now and a couple had squared off while the others backed away.

  “Not here,” said Taylor Martin sharply.

  Young cowboys, all set for their Saturday night sport. Du Pré didn’t know who they were. Maybe hands from a neighboring ranch.

  The two ignored him and one balanced back to throw a punch.

  Martin stepped between them and the cowboy swung. Martin reached out idly with his damaged hand and he grabbed the cowboy’s wrist and twisted and then half idly swung his right bootheel into the man’s kneecap. The cowboy yelped and went down.

  “None of that here” said Taylor Martin, “and not outside, either. It’s too cold. Now, come on, let’s all go get a drink.” He reached down and grabbed the fallen cowboy’s shoulder and lifted him easily to his feet. The cowboy looked dumbly at Taylor.

  “Damp it down or I’ll break your fucking neck,” said Martin.

  “OK OK sorry,” said the cowboy, both hands on his knee. “We just forgot ourselves, you know how it is.”

  Martin led the cowboys over to the bar. He told a funny story or two, saw to their drinks, and then he clapped a hand on Du Pré’s shoulder and steered him away.

  “Youth is very young,” said Martin. “If one starts, they all do. The happy cowboy idiocy of fistfights for the fun of it.”

  Du Pré nodded. He’d been in a lot of them himself.

  The band took a break, the fiddle and steel guitar rippling behind the lead singer’s smooth and practiced voice. Talk erupted on the dance floor and knots of people headed for the bar.

  “Taylor!” a voice yelled. It was Clark Martin, grinning and striding toward them.

  “Saw you break the fight up,” said Clark. “One of those boys works for us, you know.”

  Taylor nodded. “Well,” he said, “till he knocks my block off he still works for us. Can’t blame a man for wanting to fight a little on a Saturday night, especially with a winter as long and mean as this.”

  “Where’s Morgan?” said Clark.

  “Took that lady FBI agent to the greenhouse,” said Taylor.

  “Investigate the orchids?” laughed Clark.

  “Place is plumb full of exotic blooms,” said Taylor, “so let’s get us a drink.”

  Du Pré couldn’t help but agree.

  Chapter 20

  A MARCH BLIZZARD LASHED hard at the land. The huge flakes shot along, pushed by winds that screamed overhead. It was fairly warm, but impossible to see fifty feet.

  Corey Banning and Du Pré stood at the bar. Corey was rolling a cigarette, one practiced seamless motion. She licked the paper and flipped the smoke into her lips and lit it and tapped the lighter on the scarred wood.

  “Darts,” she said. “This place needs a nice dartboard.”

  “Wrong season,” said Susan Klein. “Little later, most folks stand a tourist against the wall over there and throw knives as close as they can to them. See the stains on the floor? Makes the tourist real nervous.”

  The winter had been hard. Snow and cold alternating. Starving deer and elk were dying in the fields. The ranchers put out hay for them, but all the willow shoots had been browsed down and the animals couldn’t digest the grass. They were starving to death with full bellies.

  “You talk to that Morgan Martin,” said Du Pré, “at that party. But you never tell me what she said.”

  “Morgan Taliaferro Martin,” said Corey Banning, “to the likes of you and me. Oh, the Queen Bee and I admired the orchids and sh
e, in her royal way, inquired gently as to just what the fuck it was I wanted. So I said that I was investigating these murders and did she have any employees she thought poorly of. She said she didn’t employ people she thought poorly of. We drank very good brandy. The center of that bitch is frozen stone. No damn wonder sonny boy was such a hero. After growing up around her, not much would scare anyone ever again.”

  Du Pré laughed.

  “You don’t like her,” he said.

  “Actually,” said Corey Banning, “I like her a lot. Strong women are my favorite. I must, however, find these swine who slaughtered six people so efficiently, and though the county is fairly well peopled, my nasty little mind has been reduced to essential thoughts. Like who is there competent enough to pull something like this off and tough enough to keep it hid. So my mind wanders back, inevitably, to the Queen Bee and her lovely sons. I had hoped for just a couple of psycho rednecks who’d get drunk and brag. I love guys like that. I hunger for ’em. But there ain’t any around smart enough, unfortunately.”

  “Maybe they were not even from here,” said Du Pré.

  “Hogwash does not comfort me,” said Corey Banning. “What I would really like to do is talk with Benetsee. I have flat picked the real world I am sentenced to to bits. I need that old man, get him to tell me what he sees in his world. But he’s gone.”

  “I’m kinda worried about him,” said Susan Klein.

  “Oh,” said Corey Banning, “he’s just fine, I am sure. It’s just he wants me to toss and turn at night and fret over him. He’s doing this just to piss me off. I just know it.”

  Du Pré laughed. Whenever he had tried to pin Benetsee down, he felt like he was trying to nail water to the wall.

  “Maybe he’s there, home,” said Du Pré. “Just decided to not leave no tracks in the snow.”

  Corey looked hard at Du Pré.

  “I’m gonna go on out there,” she said. “I’d appreciate it if you stayed here. No offense. Actually, I don’t give a shit if it does offend you.”

  “You see him,” said Du Pré, “you tell him Madelaine wants him to come and eat, do that often, he don’t want to worry Madelaine.”

  Corey shrugged into her leather coat and pulled on her gloves. She nodded to Du Pré and Susan Klein and she left.

  “How’s Bart doin’?” said Susan.

  “Ah,” said Du Pré, “he is doing very well. He should have been a cop or a priest, you know, there is nothing that he likes more than to help people.”

  “Throw folks in jail when they fuck up so he can talk to ’em,” said Susan Klein. “I think I get it.”

  “We don’t have so very much crime here,” said Du Pré. “Maybe some kids, they steal something. But then we got this, these murders, and this is some different.”

  “It is that. Listen, would you mind waving a shovel out round the door? Damn snow slamming down, I dunno anyone can find it now.”

  Du Pré got up and he walked to the door and took the grain shovel leaning against the wall and he went on out. Snow splattered against the plastic and the translucent sheets bellied in the wind.

  Du Pré shoveled the deep drift that had built up in the last hour away from the beaten path through the plastic sheets. The snow wasn’t letting up and the tracks of Corey’s big pickup were already half filled.

  Du Pré saw some headlights glow in the white whirl and then the front end of Bart’s Rover, thickly covered, nosed slowly up to him. Du Pré walked to the driver’s window.

  “And a fine spring afternoon to you,” said Bart, as he rolled the window down. “Agent Ms. Banning passed me up the road a ways. I was doing about ten, she was doing about seventy. Split the difference, I guess she wasn’t speeding. What’s happening in the social center?”

  “Just me and Susan Klein,” said Du Pré. “We are just all waiting around for things to melt.”

  “All but the cattle,” said Bart. “The calves are starting to come on. They like this weather, so they can be born and die the same day.”

  Du Pré nodded. He remembered all the calves he’d pulled and he could think of very few that hadn’t arrived in a blizzard.

  “Come on in, I will buy you a soda, coffee, something,” said Du Pré.

  Bart pulled round and parked and he got out and came to Du Pré, still shoveling.

  “Snow’ll have it back there in ten minutes,” said Bart, “but the thought was nice.”

  Du Pré sighed. He threw one last shovelful off and they trudged back through the visqueen flaps and on into the bar.

  Susan Klein set them up and they sat there in silence, sipping and waiting for nothing much. A truck ground up outside. Doors slammed.

  Benetsee and Corey Banning came in. The old man was sopping wet; his ragged clothes ran water. He was smiling.

  “She came by so fast she made me jump into the ditch,” said the old man. “She drive like that, she come up on the rear end of a snowplow and kill herself.”

  “Pour some wine down this old bastard,” said Corey. “I want to loosen his tongue.”

  Benetsee drank three very big glasses of fizzy screwtop wine. He belched and grinned. Susan Klein set a cheeseburger and fries down in front of him. He wolfed the burger down and then picked at the potatoes. She filled his glass and he emptied it in a long swallow.

  “What do you see?” said Corey.

  “Two pretty ladies, two men, a lot of snow,” said Benetsee. “You want me to tell you who killed the people up in the mountains, who killed the people down here, all six of them, well, I can tell you that they are well liked by the coyotes.”

  Du Pré looked off, only half listening.

  “Why’s that?” said Corey.

  “Coyotes don’t tell me why they like them, just that they do. And you need to go now. Stay here, you get killed.”

  “Me?” said Corey Banning.

  “Yes,” said Benetsee, “but I don’t know no more than that. You make this too much your fight. Lose sight of things.”

  Corey shrugged.

  Du Pré felt the hair on the back of his neck rise.

  If Benetsee said she was dead if she stayed, she would be.

  If that’s what the coyotes meant.

  “Other people, another time,” said Benetsee, “some stories, people don’t go all the way to the end. You know, people die, they go away, the story leaves them.”

  “Madelaine, she want you to come to dinner,” said Du Pré, before Corey could speak.

  “Yah,” said Benetsee, “I got to talk her, anyway, so I go now, you come along later.” The old man rose and drifted out the door.

  “What you going to do?” said Bart, looking hard at Corey.

  “Stay,” said Corey Banning, “until I got this wrapped and knocked. My job. Danger’s part of it.”

  “That does it,” said Bart. “I think I’ll see if I can get you pulled out of here.”

  “Listen good, you guinea son of a bitch,” said Corey. “You can try and you can even maybe get me pulled out of here. You got a long arm. And what I’ll do then is resign and go right on as a PI, for one lousy dollar. If I got to pay myself the dollar. Kiss my ass, Fascelli. You piss me off.”

  She walked out.

  “Shit,” said Bart. “She would.”

  “Yeah,” said Du Pré. “I sure wish this damn winter would quit.”

  Chapter 21

  “SOME DAMN WINTER, THIS,” said Du Pré.

  Bart and Booger Tom and Du Pré were standing in the mud of a snowplow turnout, looking down on the lands below the bench. The Chinook wind had come, warm and thick with rain. The snows were melting, the creeks roared, the river was jammed with ice and out of its banks, and all the flat fields were flooded with water and sheets of ice. The cattle were soaked, their hair plastered; the horses snorted nervously and kept to the highest ground they could find.

  “If it freeze bad,” said Du Pré, “we will have some bad trouble.”

  “Ain’t seen this since ’49,” said Booger Tom.


  “The Gold Rush?” said Bart, sweetly.

  Booger Tom looked at Bart for a long moment.

  “Of course,” he said. “I don’t come to Montana till after they invented grass.”

  Du Pré looked down at the county road. Bill Stemple’s pickup was struggling up it toward them.

  “Hey, Bart,” said Du Pré, “something is…Stemple, he would not come up to us unless he had to. Too much work he has now.”

  Bart went to his truck and he switched on his radio, shaking his head. He spoke into it for a moment.

  “Let’s go down,” he said when he came back. “There’s bits of cloth and I don’t know what all washing out of Cooper Creek. Pieces of those idiots got killed by the avalanche. Stemple tried to get hold of me but I’d turned off my radio. The dispatcher couldn’t raise me.”

  They drove down toward Bill Stemple, who turned off and waited.

  Bart pulled up and rolled down his window.

  “Howdy,” said Stemple. “Listen, there’s scraps of cloth floating out from under that mess of snow up the canyon there. I can’t figure it. The cloth’s been torn up, ripped. It don’t look like the avalanche done it.”

  Bart nodded. “Puzzling,” he said. He looked at Du Pré.

  “How much cloth?” said Du Pré, shouting past Booger Tom, who was sitting in the middle of the seat.

  “Damn near half a bushel,” said Stemple, “strips and scraps.”

  “We’ll be right along,” said Bart.

  They drove on down the hill. Stemple turned around and followed, not close. The road was either muddy or slick.

  “What do you think?” said Bart, as they plowed on toward Stemple’s.

  Du Pré and Booger Tom shook their heads.

  At the ranch they got on a pair of snow machines, Bart and Booger Tom, Du Pré and Bill Stemple, and slopped and roared up to the mouth of the canyon. Du Pré looked up at the deep, deep snow, melting down rapidly. The creek roared, high and brown.