Death Without Company

by Craig Johnson

  She placed a fist on her hip and cocked her head. “You’d be surprised at what all I’ve got in here.” She walked past me and behind the counter. “I’m the best kept secret in Durant, not that it’s doing my bank account any good.” She straightened her arms and leaned against the counter. “I assume you’re here because you have some news for me?”

  I looked at the cases and tried to spy the item that Isaac had recommended. “Arugula?”

  “Excuse me?”

  My courage was fleeting. “Something like arugula?” She continued to stare at me as if I were an idiot. “Dr. Bloomfield’s favorite?”

  She looked at me through a finely arched black eyebrow and very long lashes. “Ruggelach, a traditional Hanukkah pastry, crescent-shaped, filled, and made with a cream-cheese dough?”

  “That would be it.”

  “As opposed to arugula or rocket, an aromatic salad green with a peppery mustard flavor?”

  “I’ll take both.”

  “I only have the pastry.”

  “I’ll take that then.”

  She smiled and wagged her head; she was enjoying herself. Most people did when it was at the sheriff’s expense. “You’re sure?”

  “Anything but.” As she slid back the door of the glass case and extracted a plate of the delicate pastries, I reassessed my thinking about Lana Baroja. There was something old world about her, a practical quality that superceded the popular beauty of the day and drew its warmth from the earth rather than the air. She turned back around from the opposite counter and placed a small waxed bag in front of me. I looked at it. “It’s a gift.”

  “For what?”

  “Caring about my grandmother.”

  I nodded. “Thank you.” I studied the little sack and thought about Mari Baroja. “Did she bake?”

  “Yes.” She looked at the little white bag, and it was obvious to both of us that it was symbolic of something important and tactile that was being passed between us: it was a contract. “Whenever we visited from Colorado Springs she would bake things with me.” The dark eyes came up. “I guess that’s how I got started.”

  “Your father was at the Academy?”

  She brought her palms up from the counter. “Air force.”

  “He died in Vietnam?”

  “Yes. I didn’t get much of a chance to know him. Did you?”

  I thought of the sad-eyed young man. “No, but I know a guy a lot like him. How about your mother?”

  She stared at me for a second. “She’s still in Colorado Springs; her, a mean little shih tzu, and Jesus.”

  I nodded. “I see.”

  “What did Dr. Bloomfield say?”

  I leaned a hip of my own against the counter. “He said that your grandmother had heart complications due to a chronic condition, and the medical examiner from Billings seems to concur with the prognosis so far.”

  “So far?”

  I started for the door; things had gone so well I didn’t want to spoil them. “We should have a death certificate by the end of the day.”

  “It really isn’t fair, you know?” I stopped with my hand resting on the brass handle. She still leaned against the counter with her arms folded, staring at the worn surface. “Just when you get to the point where you can enjoy them, they’re gone.”

  I thought about it. “It’s that way sometimes with children, too.”

  She continued to stare at the wood and extended a finger to trace the grain. “I wouldn’t know.”

  I paused for a moment more. “On the subject of family, what can you tell me about your grandfather?”

  The finger stopped. “He was a prick, and he’s dead.”

  I was relieved but tried to hide it. “He’s dead? Do you know how he died?”

  The dark eyes looked straight at me and blinked only once. “Surely you know. Lucian Connally killed him.”

  4

  I told the ladies at vehicle registration to punch up Charlie Nurburn on the DMV computer and show me what they had or I was going to set fire to the place.

  It didn’t take long for them to tell me zip, so I asked them how far back the data went. They asked me how far back I wanted to go. The ladies at vehicle registration were like that. After all the years of abuse at the hands of the local citizenry, they had developed the finely honed tact and manners of Russian wolfhounds. I asked for the forties, and they came forth grudgingly with nothing. I asked for the fifties, and they eventually showed me that Charlie had registered a 1950 Kaiser but had failed to pay taxes or registration a year later. He had also failed to have his driver’s license renewed. There were no further records to date. I asked them what a Kaiser looked like. They said it looked a lot like a Frazer. I asked them what a Frazer looked like. They said it looked like a Hudson. Before I left, I reminded them about the fire. They asked me when the fire was going to start so they could be sure to call the county commissioners and get them in the courthouse for a meeting. I told them I was going across the hall to the county clerk’s office. They said that was a good place to start a fire, that there was enough blue hair over there to burn down the whole damn county.

  I walked across the hall and once again put forth the human query of Charlie Nurburn. Wyoming has no income tax, so I asked for anything the ladies there might have concerning Charlie’s birth, life, marriage, children, or death, not necessarily in that order. They were nicer than the ladies over in vehicle registration and came back with more. There were three birth certificates for his children, David in ’47 and the twins in ’48, a death certificate for the sad-eyed young lieutenant, circa 1972, and a marriage certificate dated 1946. Nothing else. No death certificate for Charlie Nurburn, so I copied down his social security number and warned them about the impending fire. They didn’t seem to care either way.

  I walked down the hall past the stairs that led to the courtroom above but got corralled by Vern Selby. He wanted to talk about the outstanding warrants we had on people who had neglected to show up for jury duty, which told me that we might not have reached our quorum for the afternoon. He leaned an elbow on the newel post like Clifton Webb in repose and twisted the end of his mustache; it was officially winter because the judge had grown his matinee-idol lip warmer. He didn’t seem pleased. “ We only had seven jurors today.”

  “Maybe you need to get more entertainment values involved, you know, bang the gavel more?”

  He studied me a while longer. “I knew you were the wrong person to talk to about such things.”

  I shrugged and headed for the assessor’s office but stopped after a step. “Vern, do you remember a Charlie Nurburn from the southern part of the county, married to Mari Baroja?” I was saving the lawyers as a final connection.

  “Related to Kay Baroja-Lofton over in Sheridan and Carol Baroja-Calloway in Miami?”

  I should have known. I noticed he didn’t mention Lana; her not being a lawyer probably dropped her down to the level of the rest of us mere mortals. “He was the father, of those two and another one.”

  “David Nurburn?”

  “Yes.” So Lana’s father had kept his father’s name, but she hadn’t. Interesting.

  “I believe he was about the same age as my William, and you, come to think of it.” The judge contemplated the acoustical tiles in the ceiling for a moment. I wondered how he could play with his mustache that much and still leave it intact. “I don’t seem to recall the father.”

  “He wasn’t on the scene for long.”

  “Ah,” he smiled. “But I remember her.” I was a little taken aback by the smile. “She used to come to town on Thursday afternoons, park her car in the exact same spot. I used to watch her from the windows of my office as she walked up Main Street.”

  The image of his honor hanging out the second-story window of the courthouse and watching Mari Baroja sashay down the sidewalk was almost too much. “Jeez, Vern. You’re a pervert.”

  He looked at me and shook his head. “She was a beautiful woman and very hard not to look at.” H
e took his elbow from the post and patted it in thanks for supporting him. Even inanimate objects were good for votes in Vern’s book. “In any case, I’m not the one you should be talking to. Lucian used to have lunch with her every Thursday, like clockwork.” He stepped down to my level, turned the corner, and carefully put on his coat and muffler. “At least I assume it was lunch . . .”

  I stood there for a moment, getting my bearings, until I became aware that the judge had stopped, turned, and was looking at me. “How is she?”

  “Dead.”

  He continued adjusting his coat. “I suspected as much; too bad, really.” He misunderstood my staring at him. “One hates to see that much beauty go out of the world these days.” The next thing I knew, he was standing next to me with his gloved hand on my arm. “Walter, are you all right?” I mumbled something, and he nodded. “Let’s see about getting some more jurors, shall we?”

  After the stun had worked its way off, I went into the assessor’s office and asked Lois Kolinsky if she had anything on Charlie Nurburn. She looked up with her little Mrs. Santa Claus glasses and asked me who was asking, and I remembered to tell her about the fire. She snickered and looked for the ledgers as I stood there thinking.

  Lucian had lied. Lucian had lied when he said that he hadn’t seen her for all those years. I looked up at the large map of the county that was illuminated by the flat, winter sun and wondered where in the hell I was. The place on the wall wasn’t where I happened to be as of late; I was in a strange new place, a place where the people I had safely put on shelves were wandering around getting into messy things.

  Lois came back into the room, placed a large ledger on the cast-off library table, and opened it to the exact page held by her index finger. I pulled out a chair. It amused me that the two places that had computers couldn’t seem to slap their asses with both hands, but the nice little old lady in the assessor’s office could conjure Charlie Nurburn in a matter of moments. Always follow the money; rendering unto Caesar what is his may not be pleasurable, but the records are great. I was having second thoughts about the computer; maybe I didn’t need one after all. I could use the extra money for a lie detector.

  We have ledgers like these back at the office, three of them to be precise. They are beautiful, handbound leather with golden edging and marbled inner leaves with information that stretched back to the mid-1800s. Now we have floppy discs. The ledger was alphabetically organized, so it didn’t take long to find Charlie on the open page; he was the only Nurburn in the county. He had bought a small property in 1946, about 260 acres adjacent to the 50,000-acre Four Brothers Ranch; the brothers had sold it to him. Both Mari and Charlie were on the deed. He had paid the taxes on the property until 1950, whereupon he must have piled his syphilitic, wife-beating ass into his Kaiser, whatever it looked like, and driven off into the sunset. Or not.

  Mari had paid the taxes on the property beginning in 1951. The Four Brothers had been split between her and her cousin, the priest, according to the Will of her father, the last of the four brothers to die. I asked for the B book. She said that it had been a popular letter lately. I asked her why, and she said that Kay Baroja-Lofton had been in yesterday to check things out on her mother’s behalf and that Carol Baroja-Calloway had requested information to be faxed to Calloway, Moore, and Gardner in Miami; the letters in Mari’s room were from that firm. It just kept getting better and better.

  Where was Charlie Nurburn? I looked at the nine-numeral scrawl that I had made on the scrap pad. It was time to use my own resources. I left the courthouse, completely forgetting to set fire to it.

  I keyed the mic. “Charlie Nurburn.” I read her the number from the piece of paper.

  Static. “Who is this character?”

  “Somebody I’m not so sure I want to find.”

  It was only forty-five miles south to Swayback Road, then another three miles east toward the Wallows where the Four Brothers Ranch was located, or where I thought it was located. As I drove down the interstate, the tailgate of my truck buffeted by the gusts from the northwest, I started feeling like I was being pushed.

  I had stood there in the doorway of Lana’s shop. It was one of those moments when you weren’t quite sure if what you heard was what you thought you had heard. In the second that it took me to make up my mind, she laughed. It was a wonderfully musical laugh, one that you couldn’t help but join. After I did, questions didn’t seem appropriate. I told her that if she wanted to see her grandmother, she could probably do it this evening; but, on the lonely stretch of highway between Durant and Powder Junction, with the Big Horn Mountains guarding my right and the Powder River flats racing east, my mind began to wander back to a man who had had the one woman in his life taken away. It’s one thing if she’d been gone but, as near as I could tell, she had only been forty-five miles distant.

  There’s no way I’d have been able to stay away. I flattered myself by thinking that, if faced with such a circumstance, I would respond within the letter of the law; but passion is a strange thing, a thing that warps and twists everything with which it comes in contact. It was like the combination of moisture and sunshine on wood; sometimes it turned out all right, most of the times it didn’t, but you couldn’t ignore its strength. I had always dealt with passion with an evenhanded balance of attraction and mistrust, but I was talking about Lucian Connally, and he was a mechanism that operated on the caprice of passion as if it were jet fuel. Thursday midmornings would never be the same for me again. Where was Charlie Nurburn, and what was he feeling lately, if anything? Maybe I needed to see what Mari Baroja was about, but if that were the case then I would have to make an extended search in better weather for the place where a small house leaned away from the blows of the wind.

  There was an aged wooden sign for the Four Brothers Ranch, which contrasted with the new one that read PRONGHORN DRILLING, RIG # 29, when I cut off the paved road and onto the county gravel. The snow wasn’t too deep, and there appeared to have been quite a bit of traffic as late as this morning. I slowed to a stop as I rounded the hill that led to the small valley where the homestead still sat, the snow sweeping around me and dropping into the rolling hills of the high plains. I thought about those hard men on their short horses. I wondered if they were still here and if they were aware that Mari was now with them.

  I watched the sage straining at its roots to escape the force of the northwest wind, edged the truck farther out on the road that followed the hills, and descended into the valley of the four brothers and one lost girl. I buttoned my coat, flipped the sheepskin collar up, and twisted my hat down tight. With the sun starting to ebb, the temperature was dropping fast, and I was just starting to hear the little voices that spoke to you when you were out where you shouldn’t be when nobody knew where you were and the weather was getting bad.

  I stumbled up to the first wheel hub and locked it in, trudging through the midcalf drifts to the other side and locking the mechanism there as well. Over the sound of the big ten-cylinder engine, I listened to the keening of the wind and to the cry of things you didn’t hear in town. If I could just separate Mari Baroja’s voice from the screaming cacophony, I felt that she would tell me the things I needed to know. There was a small switchback around a juniper tree at the base of the hill where the snow had filled a trough, but other tires had busted their way through and had created a path of sorts. I drove up the slight grade and stopped at the edge. This area was slightly sheltered, and the snow blew over the cab of the truck like a fake ceiling.

  I had wondered what it was that could be of so much importance and, now that I was looking at it, I felt like a fool. I could make out at least a dozen methane wellheads, containment tanks, and a compression station. If all the wells I could see, and the ones I suspected I couldn’t, were on line and producing, someone was making a lot of money. I followed the most recent set of tracks across the arch of the hill. From this vantage point, I could make out another three dozen wellheads. There was a vague outline of a
drilling rig with numerous vehicles parked below it; I shifted into low and headed in that direction.

  Methane development in the northern part of Wyoming had become a mixed blessing, and it seemed like every jackleg that could turn a wrench had suddenly become a roughneck. The amount of trucks with plates from Oklahoma and Texas had certainly increased, but the number of people who were actually benefiting financially from the methane boom was few. In Wyoming, there is a practice of carving off a portion of the mineral rights from a property at the point of sale, resulting in ranchers who had very little say over whom the leases were sold to and, consequently, who could drive on your land and pretty much do as they pleased. The methane industry’s propaganda poster children were the ones who had retained their mineral rights, could enforce a suitable surface agreement, and got a portion of the money from the gas that was produced.

  The impact the industry had made on my life had been relatively negligible. Other than the odd roughneck getting overly self-medicated and needing some downtime in the jail, keeping the ranchers and the drillers from killing each other was about it. I suppose I looked at methane development as a false economy in a boom-and-bust cycle.

  When I got to the site, there didn’t seem to be anybody outside, and there was no activity on the rig itself. I don’t know that much about methane drilling, but just about everything shuts down in my part of the world when the temperature closes in past zero. The printing on the truck doors read NORTHERN ROCKIES ENERGY EXPLORATION, an outfit out of Casper. I waited, but no one in the truck was moving very fast to see what I wanted; finally, the man in the driver’s seat tightened the hood of his Carhartt coveralls and climbed out. He walked in front of my truck, opened the door, and climbed in on the passenger side, slamming the door behind him.