Death Without Company

by Craig Johnson

  She was leaning on the counter with one elbow, the palm of her hand supporting her chin. “ I thought only women went to the bathroom together.”

  She shifted to the other palm and was suddenly a lot closer. “He’s a good friend.” I squeezed in and popped an elbow on the table and rested my chin in my own palm only a little ways away from her face. “I’m beginning to think that you are, too.” I smiled and looked down at the table. The flame of the candles shifted like the owl feathers on the Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead. There was something bothering me about something I’d just seen, an inkling of sorts, but nothing I could pin down. Was it something in the photographs or something Henry had said? I looked back up to Maggie just as Henry came back in, and I’m sure I looked like I had just broken a vase. Maggie, on the other hand, leaned back in her chair, reset a pixie chin on the palm of her hand, and batted the blue like a signal. “How’s dinner coming?”

  He smiled and joined Brandon at the stove. I sat there for a moment and stared into her eyes, but it became too much, so I glanced out the window. I watched the flakes fly at the pane and momentarily pause before slipping away. It was as if they were trying to drift through the glass and remind me of something that skipped like a stone on smooth water.

  The photographs, it was something in the photographs.

  I stood quickly, made my way around the room, and threaded through the crowd until I was standing over the assorted snapshots. They were as I’d left them. I studied the one of Lonnie with the beaded leggings that encased the now missing legs and could see him sweeping through the infield like a red-tailed hawk, the top grain leather sailing toward first like a war lance; but it was the car that was parked to the side along the foul line, a large convertible, fancy for the period in two-tone paint that had pricked my thoughts.

  I slid the photo aside and looked at the next. A small group of Indians were gathered around the same car. The automobile was closer in this shot, and I could make out the buffalo hood ornament and the letters running down the chrome.

  Maggie had followed me and placed her hand on my arm. “Is there something wrong?”

  “There is.” I let my heart slow back to normal and looked at the photo again. “Let me ask you.” I placed a finger on the picture for clarification. “Does that look like a 1950 Kaiser?”

  She leaned in and inspected the car in question. “I’m not so sure about the year, but the front emblem says Kaiser.”

  There was only one white man in the photograph, and I was pretty sure who he was. Henry had come over to my other side, and I shifted my finger. “Does the name Charlie Nurburn ring a bell?”

  His eyes narrowed as he studied the image. “Yes, I have heard that name.” He breathed for a moment. “From the southern part of the county, sold bad liquor for a year or so. He blinded and killed some of my people.”

  I shook my head and studied the tall, thin man in the photo. “That sounds like Charlie, all right.”

  His head shifted. “This involves a case you are working on?”

  “Yep.” I thought about it. “No. I mean there really isn’t a case, and he’s really not a part of it since he’s alive and living in Vista Verde, New Mexico.” I stopped talking for a moment to allow myself to think.

  I turned to look at Henry, but as I did, the lines on his face disappeared, his cheekbones were more pronounced, and water trailed from the crow-wing black hair. His shoulders were narrow, before the high-octane testosterone of adolescence had made an all-state middle linebacker out of him and, when he smiled, the canine baby tooth that had stayed with him through junior high suddenly reappeared.

  “You are chicken!”

  I looked down at him and the swirling water of the Little Powder near the confluence of Bitter and Dry creeks. A bridge was to our right, with a black framework that loomed against the brilliant blue of a July day. My spine felt as though it was falling through my rib cage, and a cold chill scraped along my arms and shoulders. “I am not!” I yelled back.

  “Then jump!”

  I looked down and instead of the man-sized boots, I saw a pair of scrawny, sunburned legs that shot from a pair of cut-off jeans to bare feet. I shifted, and the sheet metal I was standing on popped back against my weight.

  He cocked his head and laughed, the skinny fists resting on the narrow hips. “You are chicken!”

  I stared at the faded yellow paint on the metal, the chrome strip with the letters indented, Powder River sediment lying in the lower edges. I looked at the buffalo standing on the hillock of the hood’s crest and the large K insignia . . . and jumped.

  I refocused my eyes in the kitchen and met his. “I know where it is.” I turned to look at Maggie. “Stuck in the bank of the Little Powder, about a mile from here.” I tapped the picture for emphasis. “This very car.” I looked again. “Along with seven or eight other cars that are used to hold the bank where it curves under the bridge.”

  His voice doubted me. “How long has it been there?”

  I smiled. “As long as I can remember. It was there when we were kids.”

  He smiled for a moment, and I watched as he made the journey. “You cracked your head open there.” He didn’t move for a moment. “This is important?”

  “Maybe.” I continued to look at the photograph. “This is the car.”

  He shrugged. “There were not that many two-tone Kaiser convertibles on the Rez.”

  The blue eyes shifted back to the photograph, and her lips thinned in concentration. “Why would somebody bury a practically new car in the river bank of the reservation?”

  I looked closely at the man I assumed to be Charlie Nurburn. He was thin, tall, with the thumbs of his bony hands hitched into the front pockets of his work pants. You could just see two pearl-handled automatics sticking out from the waistband, and there were two more in a crossed, two-rig shoulder holster. Charlie Nurburn was well armed. His jeans looked like shedded snakeskin that rolled at the cuffs to reveal a scuffed pair of lace-up logging boots. An old CPO jacket was draped on his narrow shoulders, and a flannel plaid shirt buttoned up to the turkey throat. He wore one of those old hunting caps, the ones with the earflaps that tie on top, perched at a rakish angle to the left. I looked at the face and could make out what appeared to be a gold tooth, front and right. I tried to see a woman-beater and a murderer behind the lowered eyebrows that hid his eyes, but he looked like everybody else. It’s that kind of thing that worries me.

  If Charlie had left Absaroka County forever back in 1951, why wouldn’t he have taken his almost brand new Kaiser with him? I looked at the two of them. “This is the man who was married to the woman in the nursing home, the Basque woman who just died.”

  Maggie Watson took a seat on the nearest stool and folded her hands over her lap. “What woman in what nursing home?”

  “Mari Baroja, the one that was married to Lucian.”

  It took a good three seconds for the Bear to respond. “What?”

  “Mari Baroja is the woman that died in the nursing home. She and Lucian Connally were married for a couple of hours back in the mid forties before her family annulled it. He said that he didn’t see her again till about a year ago when she got planted in the Durant Home for Assisted Living. For some reason, Lucian has suspicions that the cause of her death might be more than natural, so I locked up her room and called in an ME from Billings for a general. He says she probably died of heart failure, but there are millions of dollars being pumped out of the ancestral manse down at Four Brothers.”

  “And that is the Baroja place?” He raised an eyebrow as I nodded. He looked like he was getting ready to ambush a stagecoach. “Motive, yes, but is there a case here?”

  “During the autopsy it was discovered that Mari Baroja was beaten and, during consequent conversations with Lana Baroja, Isaac Bloomfield, and Vern Selby, I discover that Charlie Nurburn was possibly the slimiest thing to ooze across the surface of the earth until his disappearance under ever increasingly mysterious circumstances.” />
  He still looked puzzled, and I was aware that most of the conversation in the room had stopped. “Lana Baroja is?”

  I took Henry by the arm and steered him to the far side of the kitchen. I apologized to Maggie as we receded. I pressed Henry into a corner. “Lana Baroja is the granddaughter of the deceased and clearly of the opinion that Lucian Connally had something to do with the death of her grandfather.”

  “I thought you said that he is alive.”

  “It’s complicated. Also, it appears to be common knowledge that Mari Baroja and Lucian were involved in a Thursday afternoon tryst that lasted for years, but Lucian doesn’t admit to the affair.” I thought for a moment. “That and a ’50 Kaiser imbedded in the bank of the Little Powder for as long as we can remember.”

  “So, we are talking about two potential murders separated by more than fifty years.”

  I stood there for a while looking at him. “What do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “Do you think Lucian did it?”

  For the first time that evening, the Cheyenne Nation was silent.

  6

  “I like your friend Henry.”

  I had taken route 87 back from the Northern Cheyenne Reservation because, in a fit of optimism, I thought it might have been plowed. Mari Baroja had probably traveled this way in the opposite direction a few hours earlier; I wondered how she had felt about it. She rested uneasily on my mind, so I thought about sharing part of the burden with Maggie as we rode along on the inch or two of compacted snow. I looked over at her; if women knew how good they looked in the dash light of oversized pickup trucks, they’d never get out of them. “Really?”

  “Uh, huh.”

  The snow had slackened a little, but the fat wide flakes still swooped out of the darkness into the headlights and disappeared around the windshield in uncountable little games of chicken. I was munching on ruggelach and was trying to concentrate on the road and not let the thrill of a new association put us in a ditch.

  “How long have you known each other?”

  “Since grade school.” I felt a slight twitch as the rear wheels of the truck slipped a little. “I used to go to his auntie’s house, and we would watch the Lone Ranger. We’d play in the yard, and I always got to be Tonto.” She laughed, but I thought about the case. I wondered if Saizarbitoria had spoken to Charlie Nurburn. I’d given Sancho the job in hopes that I’d never have to speak to the man.

  “You’re thinking about the Basque woman again?”

  I glanced over. “Just concentrating on the road.”

  It was pretty obvious she didn’t believe me. “What was her name again?”

  I took a glance at the center console, where I had stowed the autopsy photographs. “Mari Baroja.” She was smiling. “What?”

  “It sounds like ambrosia.”

  I sighed. “Yep, it does.” I watched the snow for a little while. Lana’s statement still worried me. I guess Lana’s statement didn’t matter if her grandfather was alive but, if he was, why would he have abandoned a perfectly good Kaiser and moved to Vista Verde, New Mexico, without it?

  She was still looking at me. “You’re a funny kind of sheriff.”

  I chewed on the inside of my cheek, something I always did when I was forced to really think. “I don’t like mysteries, and I don’t like it when things don’t add up.” I turned and glanced at her. “How about we talk about you?”

  “Hey, I’m one of my favorite subjects. Let’s talk about me.” I laughed. “What do you want to know?”

  “Oh, everything.” I glanced back at the road but ended up looking at her again. “How does something like you get around without being married?”

  She folded down the visor and opened up a small leather purse. “As the queen apparent of Norway, I am only allowed to marry once I’ve reached the age of consent.” She pulled out an even smaller cosmetic bag, glanced at me, and reapplied her lipstick.

  I nodded. “That age being thirty-five?”

  She closed the vanity mirror and turned back to me with a ravishing smile. “Oh, I do like you.” She replaced the lipstick in the tiny bag and then the bag in the hand-tooled leather purse. “It’s really not all that interesting. I just found myself in an emotional and geographic place where I wasn’t happy.”

  “And where was that?”

  She cocked her head. “Charlottesville, Virginia. Louis taught at UVA, and after a while we began to regard each other as electives.”

  “You chose Cheyenne, Wyoming, instead of Charlottesville, Virginia?”

  “It seemed like a clean slate, and the South is full of ghosts. I had a job similar to this one and a degree in economics, so I came out for an interview at the Wyoming state job fair which, by the way, consisted of three balloons tied to the end of an event table in the conference room of the capitol building.”

  “We’re a frugal state.”

  She kept studying me, but it took a while for her to get up her nerve. “You don’t seem divorced.”

  “Seem divorced?”

  Her eyes squinted, but the blue sparkles were still evident. “Too much unreined compassion still there, not enough baggage.”

  I waited a moment in respect. “Widower.” She nodded but sat there silently with her legs curled beneath her. I didn’t want to talk about Vonnie, but that wouldn’t have been fair. “There was another woman about a month or so ago.” She didn’t say anything. “I don’t think you could call it a relationship in the sense that it was consummated, but we were close, and it didn’t end well.”

  Her voice seemed small and far away. “Can I be honest with you?”

  “I would hope.”

  “I read about it in the newspapers.”

  I felt strangely violated, like somebody had burgled my personal life. “Well . . . that’s a price you pay for being a public figure.” She reached an arm out and rested a hand on my sleeve, somewhere alongside my heart. I could feel the welling in my eyes, and I wasn’t sure whether it was for me or for the women whom I had lost. I concentrated on the road and none of the moisture escaped, but I’m pretty sure the blue eyes didn’t miss the emotion. I was pretty sure those eyes didn’t miss much of anything. “We’re talking about me again.”

  “Sorry.” Her head tilted forward. “Well, you’re stuck with me for another couple of days at least. I’ve got nine unclaimed security boxes at three different banks so I’m thinking that my predecessor didn’t consider Durant to be high on his list of priorities.”

  I was relieved at the change of subject. “So, what do you do when you crack one open?”

  “First I ascertain whether the owner is alive and the box has been forgotten or if the box is abandoned due to a death. Next I check on-line credit records or cold-call for possible relatives; if there’s no contact with an owner and the rent hasn’t been paid in five years, it gets turned over to us.”

  “How does that go?”

  “I get hung up on a lot.” She laughed and shook her head. “It’s really hard to get people to believe that we’re legitimate. They always think it’s some kind of scam, but we turned over eight million dollars to recipients and generated over fifteen million in unclaimed property just last year.”

  I whistled. “Fifteen million. I’d say the state is getting its money’s worth. Maybe they’ll buy more balloons.” The visibility was dropping, so I slowed the truck down even more. At this rate, we might as well have gotten out and walked from the Rez. “You’re the department?”

  She saluted. “Unclaimed property manager. I’m my own branch of the Wyoming State Treasury Department.”

  “I have to ask. What kind of stuff do you find?”

  She looked back out the windshield. “All kinds of things. We found an 1863 ambassadorial appointment signed by Abraham Lincoln, and just last week I found an old collection of Nazi campaign ribbons from World War II. Pocket watches, stocks, bonds . . . There was this one in Gillette that had a complete change of clothes, a ski mask, and a pist
ol.” I turned and looked at her. “Then there are the Polaroids. We’ve got a stack of nude snapshots that is over a foot tall.”

  “Must be great decoration for the bulletin board.”

  “Not really.” She rolled her eyes. “Most of the time they’re of people you wish hadn’t taken their clothes off.”

  That image was broken by an ice slick where melted snow must have collected on a short overpass and frozen. Past that, there was another, and the truck kicked sideways; I steered into the skid and touched the brakes but, as the snow curtain blew away, the dark bulk of a vehicle loomed in front of me. I stomped the ABS brakes and felt the surge of the master cylinder as it attempted to keep me from locking the wheels and sliding into the ton of steel that lay on its side ahead of us. Even with the system-assisted brakes, I wasn’t going to get it stopped. In that split second, I saw the opening between the bridge guardrail and the undercarriage of the disabled car. The adrenalin-induced slow motion allowed me to categorize the median beyond as sloping but not bad enough to tip the Bullet; I just had to make sure I kept the tonnage pointed straight so that we didn’t end up like the other vehicle. As we went off the road, I could feel the sudden deceleration as the big tires snagged on the fresh snow. We slid down into the shallow frontage, up the other side, and slowly mired to a stop past the last post and out of harm’s way. I took a deep breath and looked down my outstretched arm, which was holding Dog from catapulting through the windshield and was pinning Maggie against her seat. Dog scrambled as I studied Maggie. “Are you all right?” She opened her mouth but didn’t say anything.

  I flipped on the light bar and hit the automatic program two on my radio, landing me at 155.445, the HP’s frequency. I needed a lot of help, and I needed it pretty fast. I handed her the mic. “Tell the highway patrol that you’ve got a 10-50 at mile marker 12 on route 87, that you need emergency response with an ambulance and a wrecker.” I smiled. “Got it?”