Death Without Company

by Craig Johnson

  Vic was right. By the time we got outside, it was snowing so hard that you couldn’t see across the street to the courthouse. I squinted against the sting, tugged at my hat, and took in the vague halos of the arch lights that ran the distance of Main Street. There was only one car, and it was parked about halfway between the Busy Bee and the Sportshop. The dog halted beside the truck and turned his nose into the wind with me. I opened the door and watched as he climbed across and onto the passenger seat. He turned and looked at me, waiting for me to climb in, but I looked back at the parked car. He stretched across the seat and settled in for a short nap, knowing full well what I was going to do before I did.

  I walked down the slight grade to the parked vehicle, careful not to slip, stooped down, and wiped the snow from the front plate of the maroon Oldsmobuick: state plates, county 2, Cheyenne. I looked around at the storefronts, but the only one that showed any signs of retail life was the Euskadi Hotel bar where the Rainier and Grain Belt beer signs softly glowed in the two tiny windows.

  Except for the Christmas decorations, the bar at the Euskadi hadn’t changed much since Lucian had hired me there all those years ago. The jukebox was still there, playing an unintentionally ironic version of Sinatra’s “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow.” There was an ornate burl wood bar and bar back along the right side, whose ancient mercury mirror was tarnished and faded in its attempt to hold on to the glory of the age and it reflected the blonde at the bar.

  I pushed my hat back to its best Dashiell Hammett advantage and felt the slick of melted snow slide down between my shoulder blades and my sheepskin coat. As entrances, I’d made better.

  “Hello, Sheriff.” Jerry Aranzadi was still the full-time bartender. A small man with a stooped back and black-rimmed glasses, his narrow shoulders hunched as he scooped into the cooler and popped the cap on a Reindeer beer before I could stop him. It was at times like this that I wished my habits were a little more exotic. “What brings you out on a night like tonight?”

  I sat a few stools down as Jerry placed a paper napkin on the bar along with the bottle of beer. He knew all my patterns, even the one about sparing the glassware. “It’s chess night.”

  I took a sip of my beer. She didn’t look at me but seemed absorbed in what looked to be an Irish coffee. He gently patted a hand in front of her cup to get her attention. “Miss Watson, this is our sheriff, Walter Longmire.”

  I always try to hold on to the first impression I get of a person; usually it’s a feature, but with her it was the energy that was there, an animation that couldn’t be concealed by age, fatigue, or alcohol. Afterward, I noticed that she was just plain beautiful, with large, frank blue eyes and well-defined lips. “Sheriff, this is Maggie Watson, and I bet you can’t guess what she does for a living.”

  “Ms. Watson works for the state.” I took a sip and looked back at both of them. I really enjoyed watching those big blue eyes widen as they looked at Jerry and then back to me. I guessed mid to late forties; outdoorsy, and always had been from the face, nicely weathered to perfection. She had an athletic build, probably a skier. “The plates on the car outside. ‘Elementary, my dear . . .’ ” The eyes narrowed. “Bet you wish you had a nickel for every time somebody said that.”

  “You have no idea.” She had a nice voice, too. It was soft, but also strong and with just a touch of a southern accent. “State Treasury Department.” She smiled a sly smile and took an elegant sip of her coffee. “Unclaimed property project manager.”

  It was her turn to look self-satisfied. “We don’t see many of those up in these parts.” I nodded and looked over at Jerry. “Can’t say we’ve seen any at all.”

  It got a laugh that was melodic but short. “I restore the contents of abandoned safe-deposit boxes to the owners or rightful heirs.” She sat her mug down and gave me a sharp look. “At least I was, till I got stranded.”

  I thought about it for a moment, then felt duty call and sat the almost full beer back on the bar. “Gimme your keys, and I’ll start it for you. I think we can get you a room, if we move quickly. Motels get to be at a premium when the weather gets like this.” I tried to pay Jerry, but he just waved me off.

  Back at my truck, Dog greeted me with a terrific yawn and confirmed my thoughts about his concern for my welfare while I was gone. I cleared the accumulated snow with the windshield wipers and turned on the cautions on the Bullet’s light bar. A vague feeling of sadness always came over me in the presence of the lights: too many seat-belts that were unfastened, too many bald tires. I pulled in front of her car, snagged the long-handled scraper from under the seat, and pushed the majority of the snow off her vehicle onto the covered street. An hour from now, the car would have been a permanent addition to Main. She came running out and jumped in. She was taller than I thought, or else she just didn’t sink into the snow like I did. “Follow me and drive in my tracks, okay?”

  She nodded, and I closed the door.

  She dutifully made the illegal U-turn and followed me back up the hill and around the courthouse as we slowly made our way toward the mountains. The red glow of the Log Cabin Motel’s neon wasn’t far and, if worse came to worse, she could walk to all the banks in town from there. I pulled up to the office and got out, ignoring the NO VACANCY sign.

  I ushered her to the porch and rang the buzzer on the intercom, pulled her in a little closer to the building, and blocked the majority of the wind with my back. She smelled really good. There was no response to the buzzer, so I pressed my thumb against the button and held it there. After a moment, an angry voice screeched at us through the yellowed plastic intercom. “No vacancy, can’t ya read?” There was no more talk but presently a gaunt individual in a threadbare plaid bathrobe appeared around the counter in the tiny lobby and unlocked the door. “Jesus, Walt, what are you doing out in this?”

  I ushered Maggie in before me. “This lady needs a room.”

  I took the key from Willis’s wife, Erma, and trudged off into the snow to turn the lights and heat on in one of the cabins at the end of the short lane. It would be a cozy little place but, as I told her, the temperature wouldn’t get above forty for about twenty minutes.

  “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “Well, if you come up with any Declarations of Independence in any of those boxes . . .”

  “It’s doubtful, but I could buy you lunch.”

  The trip over to the Durant Home for Assisted Living didn’t take all that long, just a couple of blocks of backtracking. When I got there, there was an EMT van waiting at the main entrance, not a completely novel experience at the place but still a little unsettling. The doors were closed, but it was still running and the amber lights made racing, yellow ghost-wolves that darted across the brick surface. I pushed the doors of the building open, only to be audibly driven back by Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians singing “Ring Those Christmas Bells” at an ear-piercing volume; most of the residents at the home were deaf as fence posts. Dog followed me in. As we went past the Christmas tree behind the abandoned front desk and rounded the hallway leading to Room 32, a slight sense of panic began to set in. The door was ajar as we approached, and I quickened my step, but the place was empty. The chess set was out on the folding table, and it looked as though Lucian had already consumed the better part of a tumbler full of bourbon. Dog looked around with me and followed as we quickly made our way out of the room, back down the hallway, and again toward the front desk.

  The Pennsylvanians were still singing as we turned the corner. I caught a glance of the EMT van pulling away, but my attention was drawn to a white-clad attendant. He was being held against the far wall by what I knew to be the strongest grip in the county.

  I took the direct route behind the counter, which turned out to be something of a mistake in that my legs got tangled with Dog and the hammer of my .45 snagged the lights on the fully decorated tree, lurching it from the wall in a short spark of holiday exuberance.

  It took both hands and all the
weight I could leverage to tug Lucian’s hand free from the choking assistant whom I recognized as Joe Lesky. “Well, it’s about goddamned time.” He rolled off me against the far wall and pushed himself up with his arms; he glared at Joe who was massaging his throat and coughing as Dog, who had escaped unscathed, continued to bark.

  “Shut up!” Dog stopped and went over and sat beside Lucian as if nothing had happened. I was not so forgiving. I pushed the tree off me. “What the hell is going on around here?”

  It was mostly directed at Lucian but, after a coughing fit, Joe was the first to respond. “Mr. Connally was interfering with the transport of a departed client.” He coughed some more and leaned against the opposite wall.

  “I want the room behind me sealed up as a crime scene, and I want a full autopsy arranged immediately.”

  I stared at him as he looked at the battle-weary tree that lay between us. “Lucian, have you lost your mind?”

  It was a bad time for Joe to talk, but he didn’t know that. “Sheriff, I was explaining to Mr. Connally that we couldn’t hold the body of the deceased without the permission of next of kin.”

  He wouldn’t look up from the tree. “You got it.”

  I disconnected the electric light string from my holster and gave the tree one last kick for holly-jolly good measure. “Lucian, you can’t.”

  The dark eyes came up slowly, and the world was swallowed. “Hold your peace.” He looked old just then; small, old, and tired, as I had never seen him before. His eyes returned to the dead lights of the tree. “She was my wife.”

  2

  Room 42 at the Durant Home for Assisted Living had been locked off, and the body of Mari Baroja was now waiting for the medical examiner from the division of criminal investigation.

  In Room 32, two old widowers were sitting over a forgotten chessboard and were looking off into the distance in so much of a Dickensian fashion that it could have been an illustration by Phiz. The exposed punt in the twenty-year-old bottle of Pappy Van Winkle’s Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey sat in the middle of the contained golden sea: tempest in a teapot, lightning in a bottle, or the muse contained.

  Dog was already asleep on the only sofa he was allowed to sleep on.

  I kept expecting the thick glass to loosen itself from the bottom of the bottle and float to the surface. Maybe I expected it to sail up through the extended neck and dance about the room; it was, after all, the season for miracles. Maybe that was what I was waiting for, something to jog us loose like the punt in the bottle, something that would allow me to approach the black king sitting across the battlefield, a man up until tonight I thought I knew.

  “You have to talk or move or I’m going to fall asleep.”

  He didn’t move. “Fall asleep, then.”

  I had opened with the Queen’s Indian Defense, Petrosian Variation, a move I had neither the skill nor the determination to prolong, but Lucian liked to ponder it when I tried.

  I didn’t consciously fall asleep; it’s just that the chair was soft and comfortable, the room was dark and warm, and maybe it was the protection of those black eyes that reflected the blinking of the silly lights. Those eyes were not looking into the small darkness outside the double-paned windows; they were looking farther and to a place about which I did not know. There was nothing that would overtake us tonight that those eyes would not see, nothing that would not deal plainly with a king not in his perfect mind.

  I must have slept longer than I thought. I didn’t remember waking up, and maybe that’s what he had intended by starting to tell me the story while I was asleep. I remember hearing his voice, low and steady, coming from some place far away, “After the war. Her family were Basquos from out on Swayback, Four Brothers.” He paused to take another sip of his bourbon. “My gawd, you should have seen her. I remember lookin’ over the top of Charlie Floyde’s ’39 Dodge when she came out on the porch. Her hair was black and thick like a horse’s mane.” He stopped with the memory; the only other sound in Lucian’s apartment was the scorched-air heating. His two rooms weren’t any different from any of the others in general design, but they had all the style and mass of the Connally ancestral furnishings. I shifted my weight in the overstuffed horsehair chair and waited.

  “It was summertime, and she had on this little navy blue dress with all the little polka dots. The wind held it against her body.” It took him awhile to get going again. “She was the wildest, most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my entire life. Hair, teeth . . . We sparked that whole summer before her father tried to break it up in the fall. They wanted to send her away to family, keep us from each other, but it was too late.”

  I looked at him, and the night in my head seemed darker. “We used to tremble when we touched each other. She had the most beautiful skin I’d ever seen. I would forget from night to night. She wasn’t like American girls; she was quiet. She’d speak if spoken to but only then. Short, soft replies . . . Basque. There was a part of her that I knew I couldn’t get at, ever. It wasn’t hostile or intentional, but it was there, like this life apart from us. Maybe she just knew.” He stared at the chessboard. “The Basquos have an old proverb, ‘a life without friends means death without company.’ ” He sighed. “We ran off together, got as far as Miles City and snagged a justice of the peace off his hay field to come in and marry us.” He snorted a short laugh. “His wife played the foot-pump organ, and he stood there in his rubber, shit-caked boots readin’ the words.” He took another sip, and I listened to the ice in his glass. “They caught us a little north of there. It was her father and three Basquo uncles.” He paused again, and I became aware that my eyes were open and he was looking at me. “Hell of a rumpus.” He reached across and took my hand, rubbing it under his hat along an ancient ridge that ran from the crown of his head to behind his left ear. He let go and resettled his hat. “One of the uncles finally went back and got a tire iron.”

  That was two run-ins with Basques that I knew about, this one and the other with some bootleggers where he’d lost his leg. “They sent her away?”

  He worked at something caught in his teeth, or maybe his jaw still wasn’t ready to call that one even. “Annulled us and married her off.” He placed an elbow on the arm of his tooled leather chair and cupped his chin in his palm. “I’d see her father and them uncles every once in a while in town, even after I was sheriff. They didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything right back.”

  “When did you see her again?” It took awhile for him to reply, and I had the feeling I was getting in further than he wanted. It didn’t matter; when I had sealed Room 42 and had the EMTs stow her at Durant Memorial, it had gotten official.

  He was staring back into the dark reflection of the glass. “About a year ago, a friend of mine said there was a woman over in the far wing who asked about me, new woman. I went over, and it was her.”

  “Must’ve been quite a shock.”

  “Humph. She had a little house down in Powder Junction. I guess that’s where she’d been livin’.”

  I edged up in my chair a little. “Lucian, why is it I’ve got her room sealed up and her waiting on a table over at the hospital?” His eyes swiveled to mine and stayed there. “All I’m saying is that an absentee husband of a three-hour marriage that was annulled more than fifty years ago is going to be a hard press as next of kin.” I rubbed my hand across my face, tried to straighten my beard, and continued to look at him. “Lucian, you have to give me something to go on before the children and grandchildren show up and start making my life miserable.” I waited. “You’ve got to give me something more to work with here.”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  I let it sit there for a while. He wasn’t being rational, and it might take a few moments for him to recognize it. I went through the file cards on Lucian’s outburst and came up with fear of the unknown and frustration with society and the system, mixed with an ingredient I’d never seen in him before, love. Lucian in love; it was hard to summon up.


  His eyes shifted back outside, and I could tell a little shame was lurking there. “You have the ME down at DCI do a general, then you come back here and we’ll talk some more.”

  When I got back to the front desk, the tree had been placed back in its original spot; it was minus a few ornaments, and I noticed the lights weren’t working. Nat King Cole was now singing in German, giving the place an international flavor it sorely needed.

  I figured Joe Lesky was one of those people that fill the gap of human misery, doing their best to make everybody’s lives a little better; about my age, with dark hair and dark eyes, he looked like he might have a touch of Indian, but all the time spent inside must have taken a lot of it out of him.

  I leaned against the counter, and Dog sat on my foot. I glanced back over at the tree. “How’s the patient?”

  He leaned back in his chair and looked over his shoulder at the abused conifer. Some of the arms looked as if they were signaling aircraft. “I don’t think there were any family heirlooms lost, but I still can’t get the lights to work.”

  “You don’t happen to have the file on Mrs. Baroja?” He slid the folder on the counter toward me. “I had it out for the EMTs.”

  “No arguments?”

  “You’re the sheriff.”

  “That’s usually why people argue with me.”

  With the advent of modern CPR techniques, organ transplants, and life-support systems, home field advantage was shifted from the heart and lungs to the brain. In an unprecedented agreement between both lawyers and doctors, the terminal indicator of the grim reaper’s touch is now the point when all cerebral function has ceased and is deemed irreversible. Brain dead.

  For Mari Baroja, the bell tolled at exactly 10:43:12 P.M. Chris Wyatt and Cathi Kindt were the attending EMTs. Six attempts at resuscitation were made, standard for this kind of incident, and a code 99 was radioed to the hospital. Wyatt went for the electric defibrillator paddles, and the woman’s body arched five more times like a head of rough stock on rodeo weekend. They canceled the code, and they canceled Mari Baroja.