Rode Hard, Put Away Dead

by Sinclair Browning

“So Abby walked over here from the camp site?”

  “Nope.”

  I love it when he does this. This man can say more with fewer words than anyone I've ever met.

  “Okay, so we have the bull and we have the socks.” I squatted and studied the ground as though I knew what I was doing and pointed to both prints. “And a great big puzzle. Why would she follow the bull over here?”

  “She didn't.”

  I thought about this a minute and then asked, “Well, then, why would the bull follow her over here?”

  “He didn't.”

  “Shit, Sanders, I give up. I just don't get it.” I stood and threw my hands up in the air. “She sure as hell didn't ride the bull over here.”

  “Yep.”

  “Yep? You think she rode the bull?” God, that made no sense at all. I didn't know any bull you could ride where you wanted it to go. Even J.B. with his bull riding school and former pro career couldn't get one of the recalcitrant creatures to go off on a trail ride.

  “She rode the bull over here.”

  “Rode the bull,” I repeated. This really was crazy.

  “Yep. But it only had two legs.”

  “Abigail Van Thiessen rode a two-legged bull over to this tank,” I said, and then I finally got it. “There's no such thing as a two-legged bull.”

  Sanders broke out in a wide grin as though I'd just won the national spelling bee. He dropped back down to the ground and studied the bull prints once again. “Look at this.”

  He had a small twig in his hands now and pointed to the pressure releases of the bull's track. “There's no life there. No twists or clenches.”

  I nodded although I could not in all honesty see what he was talking about.

  “It's dead. Dead as a can of corned beef.”

  “And not made by a bull,” I said brilliantly.

  He nodded. “There's not enough weight here for a bull. It's a stamp strapped to a man's foot. He carried her piggyback over here from where they camped.”

  That explained the smudged prints behind the pseudo bull's track. Whoever had carried Abby away from camp had had to rest periodically. And whoever that was hadn't wanted anyone to pick up his actual footprint.

  “If she was riding piggyback, she would have had to be awake.” I was thinking out loud. “Or he wouldn't have been able to get her to hang on. Why didn't she just walk?”

  “Didn't you say something about some drug test?”

  I made a mental note to call my friend Emily Rose in the medical examiner's office once I got home. It looked like I was going to need those toxicology results.

  When we got down to the pond, Sanders again started working slowly from the bank, finally ending up at the water's edge. While the damp borders of the stock tank had probably done a good job of preserving last week's story, it was a very populated manuscript. There were a lot of tracks here—horse, cattle and human, stories on top of stories.

  Judging from the horse tracks, J.B. hadn't been lying about his hesitation about going in after Abby's body. The horseshoe prints were everywhere. Sanders studied these for a while and then walked over to a mélange of cattle tracks.

  While the mud had exaggerated the prints, I thought I spotted those of the “bull” we had followed over from the camp site. “That's him again, isn't it?”

  Sanders nodded and pointed to smaller tracks that were clustered near the fatter, wider print. “That's the crossbreds we saw.”

  Looking at the two different kinds of tracks, one made by the smaller cattle and the big stamp print, it was obvious that the stamp print would have jumped out at any seasoned tracker. There was that much difference between them.

  “I wonder if the police picked this up?”

  Sanders shrugged. “What do those boys know about cattle?”

  He had a point. The sheriff's department wouldn't, in all probability, have been casting a suspicious eye at the cattle tracks.

  It seemed to me that whoever had made the fake prints if he was smart enough to try and pull off a murder should have been smart enough to make a stamp at least the same size of the cattle that were in the area.

  13

  I WAITED UNTIL A DECENT HOUR THE NEXT MORNING BEFORE I called Emily Rose at home. Em is a good friend. We team-pen together often, although now that the days were so hot, most of our penning was done at night, which meant that we didn't get home until midnight or so. Since roundup had taken up a lot of my time, we hadn't penned for several weeks, but I was eager to get back to it before the monsoon season hit. Here it was sweltering June with no hint of rain and I couldn't stop thinking about the monsoons.

  After catching up on some gossip I finally got around to the Abigail Van Thiessen death.

  “That was a strange one,” Em agreed. “Looks like a homicide, but those drowning things are always tough.” After thirteen years in the county medical examiner's office not much gets past Em.

  “I heard that there may have been alcohol or drugs involved,” I said.

  “We're running the average screen, heroin, cocaine, morphine, the prescription drugs.”

  “Are the results back?”

  “Don't think so. Oh, I get it,” she said.

  “Get what?”

  “She was married to that bull rider.”

  “J.B. Calendar.”

  “Do I need a crystal ball?”

  “Probably not,” I said with a sigh. “Listen, Em, when you do get something, will you let me know?”

  She assured me that she would and we hung up.

  I called J.B. next and asked when I could interview Abby's staff. He told me this morning was good since the Covarrubiases were there. I told him nothing about my trip into the Baboquivaris, preferring to keep the information about the fake bull prints under wraps until I knew something more definite.

  I was just walking out the door when the telephone rang.

  “Ellis, I caught you.”

  “Morning, Charley.” Even if he wasn't the only person in the universe who called me by my last name, it would be difficult not to recognize Charley Bell's cheery voice. “You're up awfully early.”

  “Do you know what you call a smart blonde?”

  I had to confess I didn't.

  “A golden retriever!” He chortled. “Say, I got your new baby ready.”

  My stomach lurched. Shit. I'd forgotten about the computer. It wasn't so much the huge check I'd be writing to Charley as it was the fact of the damned thing that was making me queasy. Was I smart enough to figure out a computer? Suddenly the reports I'd been doing on the old typewriter didn't seem that bad. My clients could surely live with a missing “o.” Still, he'd gone to a lot of trouble to put the machine together for me, so I really couldn't back out of the deal now.

  “That's great,” I lied.

  “So, when do you want me to come by and set this up?”

  “Well, Sundays are probably bad for you. Maybe later in the week?” The longer I was going to put this off, the better it was going to make me feel.

  “Sundays? Schmondays, Mondays, they're all the same to me. How's 'bout I come down this afternoon?”

  Crap.

  “All right,” I said, hoping he wouldn't pick up on the fear in my voice. After all, since I'd been stupid enough to give him the go-ahead, the inevitable was at hand. “I've got to run an errand but I should be back by mid-afternoon.”

  “Great. I'll see you about three-thirty then.”

  And with that my techno geek friend hung up the phone.

  I arrived at the Brave Bull just after ten. Parking in front of the house was no problem, for the hordes of cars that had been there on my previous visits were missing this morning.

  When Gloria Covarrubias answered the door I was assaulted with the wonderful smell of something baking. A cinnamon something.

  The round little woman was wearing an old denim apron dusted with flour over the perky Brave Bull polo shirt and cotton cooking gloves. I wondered what her thing for gloves was. She was als
o wearing a nice smudge of the same staple on her right cheek.

  “May I help you?” If she remembered our previous kitchen encounter, she showed no sign of it.

  “I'm Trade Ellis. J.B. has asked me to look into Abby's death.”

  “Oh yes, he mentioned that you'd be coming by. Why don't you come on back?”

  She let me in and I followed her back to the kitchen. Once again my investigative skills were right on. A large crock pot, with its lid steamed up, sat on a sleek granite counter, next to baking sheets filled with plump, un-cooked cinnamon rolls. It sure seemed like a lot of cooking was in progress for the three people that I'd figured were in permanent residence.

  “Is Peter here?” I asked, thinking I could also talk to him as long as I was up here.

  “No, he went for a run on Mt. Lemmon. Left early this morning.”

  “And Laurette Le Blanc?”

  Was it my imagination or did Gloria's eyes narrow at the mention of Abby's assistant?

  “She left last night for the Caribbean.”

  “Really? Seems like odd timing for a vacation.”

  “It wasn't one. Her mother had a heart attack.”

  “I'm sorry to hear that. When's the funeral?”

  “Oh, she's alive,” she said. “Laurette won't be back for a while, though. She's gone to help with her recovery.”

  What rotten timing. Had Le Blanc's mother really had a heart attack? Or was it just convenient for Abby's personal assistant to disappear for a while? I made a mental note to check it out.

  “Would you like a lemonade or a soda?”

  I declined both and jumped right into the interview. After confirming that Gloria was married to José Covarrubias I asked how long they'd been working for Abby.

  “Eleven years.”

  I was surprised. Judging from Peter's comment about their being with his sister for a long time, I'd expected the Covarrubiases had been with her at least twenty years. But then, maybe eleven years was a long time in the working-for-rich-people business.

  Then I began asking about Abby's private life.

  “Did she have boyfriends before J.B.?” This was a path I felt I needed to explore briefly, although I had a gut feeling that if in fact her death had been a murder, it would have been connected to someone in her recent present, rather than an old beau. If one of her old boyfriends was going to get upset about her marrying J.B., it seemed as though he would have taken umbrage to the idea long before now.

  “Well sure. Abby was a beautiful woman. She had men friends.”

  “Do you think you could get together a list of names and addresses for me?”

  She gave me a shocked look. “Why no, I wouldn't have access to that kind of information.”

  I continued asking her questions about the routines of the household, other people who worked there, and whether Abby had had any recent arguments with anyone. When none of Gloria Covarrubias's answers shed any light on the case, I headed down another avenue.

  “How about Abby and J.B.'s relationship. Did they get along well?”

  She continued rolling out the pastry dough on a slab of marble, but did not look up at me. “Yes. They got along well.”

  “So, as far as you could tell, they didn't have any arguments, any fights or disagreements, anything like that.”

  “I didn't say that.” She picked up her dough, floured the marble and slapped the floury paste back down.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means,” she said, “that they got along like any husband and wife. They had their disagreements.”

  “What did they argue about?”

  “The usual. Money. Friends. Whether or not one or the other of them wanted to go somewhere.”

  “Did Abby want to go on that camping trip?”

  “Oh yes. She was really looking forward to it. She had me fix some of J.B.'s favorite things to take along. It was going to be like a long picnic ride for her.”

  “Let's get back to the money. You said they fought about money.”

  “Well,” she hesitated, clearly concerned that she might be divulging damaging information about a man who was now her sole employer. “Not like when José and I fight about money, or like when you and your husband fight about money.”

  I didn't correct her assumption. I had no husband.

  “I mean it wasn't like they argued about running out of money, or spending too much on things.”

  “No, I don't imagine it would have been,” I said, having no idea what it would be like to have $200 million to spend.

  “And they used to argue about it a lot more.”

  “Well, if it wasn't about spending too much money, then what were the arguments about?”

  “He said he felt like a gig, gig something.”

  “Gigolo?”

  “Yes, that's it. I'd never heard the word before.”

  “It usually means a man who is supported by a woman in return for his attention.”

  She smiled. “Well, I guess that's what Mr. Calendar was then.”

  I saw no distaste flicker across her face and guessed she was just stating a fact as she saw it.

  “So J.B. told Abby that he felt like he was a kept man?” She looked puzzled.

  “Like she was paying him to stay here? To marry her?” I prodded.

  “Uh huh. But that was quite a while ago, right after they first got married.”

  “So they stopped arguing about that then?”

  “Hmm, for the most part.”

  “What else did they fight about?”

  “I didn't say fight.”

  While Gloria Covarrubias had been fairly forthcoming, I realized that I needed to be more careful with my word selection. “What else did they disagree about?”

  “Well …” She went to one of the double ovens and retrieved a tray of golden cinnamon rolls. God, they looked good. “Mrs. Van Thiessen was older than J.B., you know.”

  Uh huh. As if anyone who saw them didn't know that.

  “And she was a little sensitive.”

  “It bothered her.”

  A black look crossed Covarrubias's face again. “I didn't say that.”

  Cripes, I was going to have to stop trying to put words into this woman's mouth. Clearly she was having none of it.

  “Sometimes, she got a little jealous about J.B., about other women, that kind of thing.”

  She put a fresh tray of rolls into the oven, and when her back was turned I jotted a quick note on my pad. The possibility of another woman, or women, had already occurred to me.

  “Was there a particular woman?” I asked, almost holding my breath to see if I'd offend her with this question.

  “Not that I'd know about,” she said.

  And that was about all I could get out of her.

  14

  IT TURNED OUT THAT JOSÉ COVARRUBIAS WAS NOT AT THE Brave Bull. Gloria said he'd gone into town to run a few errands. When I'd asked about J.B. she told me he was down at the bull pens so I headed down there next.

  As I walked past some of the guest houses, I was surprised to see various vehicles in front of them, including several rental cars. Maybe some out-of-town friends were staying on, which also explained Mrs. Covarrubias's cooking frenzy.

  As I rounded the last bungalow, I almost ran into Jodie Austin. The model was wearing Wrangler's and another bull riding T-shirt. This one said “Feel the Rush.”

  “Hi, Jodie.”

  I'd startled her and I could see that she was searching her memory banks for where she knew me.

  “I'm Trade Ellis. I was here the other day for Abby's service.”

  “Oh right, yeah, of course.”

  “You decided to stay on for a while?”

  “Stay on? Oh no, no, I'm here for the school.”

  “J.B.'s doing the school now?” I couldn't believe it. His wife had been dead a week and here he was going on with business as usual.

  “Well, yeah. He had to cancel it last week you know.” She punctuated her wor
ds with popping gum.

  I walked with Jodie down to the bull pens where we found four other wannable bull riders sitting with J.B. in the wrought iron under the oak tree outside Double Indemnity's corral. Calendar was lecturing his rapt students. The huge Brahma was ignoring him.

  While J.B. nodded in my direction, he was not going to take a break until he was ready. A huge orange Gott cooler rested on a wooden table close by so I reached for a paper cup and filled it, brushing flies away as I drank from it. That's one of the problems of being around livestock in the summer. There are always a lot of flies around.

  “You got to remember,” J.B. said, “that when you're riding that bull you're also riding the opinion of those two judges, plus the guy in the chute.”

  A slim young man raised his hand. “But I thought you just stayed on for the eight seconds.” His New York accent grated through the dry desert air.

  Jesus. The kid probably had never even seen bull riding, but here he'd plunked down two thousand bucks for a week to learn how to do it.

  “Well.”—J.B. spit a stream of tobacco in the dust—

  “that's one of the criteria. What are some of the others?”

  A fat, bald guy, who looked to be at least fifty, said,

  “You can't touch the son-of-a-bitch with your free hand.”

  “Bingo, Fred.” J.B. pointed a finger at him.

  “Speed, drop and whip,” said a young Hispanic cowboy, who sounded like he just might know what he was talking about.

  “Very good,” J.B. said. “Remember, that bull is your dance partner, and you want to cha-cha-cha as fast as you can. Best-case scenario is that your partner will swoop, buck, drop, spin and change direction, all in eight seconds while you stay with him like flies on shit.”

  That sounded like a pretty shitty dance partner to me, but then I've never been one to follow well, which means that when I do get asked to dance, they usually don't come back for seconds.

  “That's eight seconds with the bull rope,” Jodie added.

  The men turned to look at us.

  “Right,” J.B. agreed. “The clock's still running, even if you are up in the air, not even touching the bull, as long as you still have that bull rope in your hand and haven't touched the bull with your free hand.”