They weren’t particularly fascinating footprints, except they were broken and irregular, footprints made on hard, crusted snow, not soft new snow. I thought about that. It had last snowed three days ago—not counting the gravelly stuff spitting off and on yesterday—and it hadn’t been all that cold in the meantime. Cold enough, sure, but not bitterly cold, because the skies had stayed overcast and that held in what warmth there was. The clouds blew out sometime in the small hours this morning, the hard, granulated snow quit entirely, and the wind came on with a vengeance, driving temperatures down to antarctic levels.
And crusting over old snow that had still been soft and moist where it lay untamped. Like in a person’s back yard.
I went back to the garbage cans, following a path parallel to the footprints. The police wouldn’t be able to do anything with them, but you try to be considerate. There were plenty of other prints, not only to and from the back door but also alongside the house, where the garbagemen would walk from the street, but these tracks were partly filled in and themselves crusted over, telling me they had been made some time before the temps dropped so sharply last night.
I yanked the lid off the nearest garbage can. It was full of garbage. I poked at the brown bags and newspapers, but they didn’t look too interesting.
I yanked the lid off the second garbage can. More garbage. But half hidden beneath a white plastic bag was a dented three-pound Butternut coffee can with the orange plastic top in place. I fished out the can and peeled off the cold-stiffened lid.
The can held a dirty beige towel, wadded up.
The towel held a .38 Smith & Wesson Model 10.
CHAPTER SIX
Kim Banner said, “What’ve you got there?”
I handed her the coffee can. “It followed me home, Mom; can I keep it?”
She held the can in her left hand, lifted out the dirty towel with her right, and shook it. The ends of the rag fell away and the revolver glinted darkly in her palm while she frowned at it like she didn’t know how it got there. “What’s this?”
“That’s a gun, Detective,” I said.
“Boy howdy, you sure are quick with those snappy comebacks.”
“Us hard-boiled private eyes have a reputation to live up to.” I shucked my parka and refilled the mug I’d left on top of the fridge. “But I wasn’t trying to be wise when I asked about taking out the garbage.” I explained about the footprints I had seen in the back yard and how they had to have been made after the snow froze over, sometime between, say, midnight and sunup.
“Well, aren’t you clever,” Banner murmured, lids drooping over her dark eyes.
“We aims to please, ma’am.”
“My hero.” She weighed the gun in her palm. “What do you know about this?” she asked Christina in a deceptively lazy fashion.
The redhead shrugged. “The yard’s wide open; anyone could’ve stuck it in our trash cans.”
“He says the tracks are new, and they run from here to the trash and back.”
Christina gave this some thought. Then she sighed heavily and rolled her eyes. “All right. It’s Walt’s gun. I threw it away.”
“When?”
“Last night, after Walt left. The first time, I mean. He talked lots about getting that banker, but this time—I don’t know; this time I was scared he was going to go out and get good and drunk and maybe do something stupid.”
“Like come back for his gun,” Swanson prompted.
She nodded, head lowered.
Banner rewrapped the gun, put it back in the can, and worked the orange plastic lid back into place. I asked how long she thought the gun would stay fresh in the can and she said long enough to run ballistics tests—if “the boys” had ever found the bullet that went through Jack Castelar’s brain. Then she put the can on the table and stood with both palms flat on either side of it, leaning over Christina Jennings. She studied the red-haired woman for a minute, maybe longer. Christina studied her coffee mug. The mug, I noticed, had my name on it, in white lettering against a red field. I must be more popular than I thought; just the other day I had seen a department-store counter full of toy footballs with my name on them. Come to think of it, they were red, too.
Banner let her head drop and she looked at me from under her right arm. “It doesn’t work, does it?” she said.
I shook my head. “Still too warm last night. The snow Wouldn’t’ve been crusted over yet. The footprints would be all different. Smoother, better defined.”
Christina made a face at me. “Okay, so maybe it was later than I remember. I wasn’t punching a time clock, you know.”
“Yeah, it was later, all right,” Swanson said. “Like after Jennings had already used the gun on Castelar.”
Her metallic hair glinted as she spun around in her chair. “You don’t know that,” she said loudly.
He matched her volume. “You already told us he killed him.”
“I didn’t mean it,” she yelled. “I mean, I was afraid he did. So that’s why I tried to get rid of the gun.”
“That’s good.” Banner’s tone was heavy with sarcasm. “That’s great. If the gun was lying around here, Jennings must not have used it to kill Castelar. Your getting rid of it would help him out a lot when he tried to prove his innocence.”
Christina looked like she’d been hit between the eyes with a rubber mallet. “I didn’t think of that,” she said slowly.
“When?” I said. “When you threw the gun away last night—or just now, when you made up the story?”
She frowned and pursed her lips. “I don’t—”
“You sure as hell do know what I mean.” I tossed a glance under the table. “You need bigger feet to make prints like those outside—something more like a cop’s.”
Swanson started to protest but Banner cut him off. “Jennings threw that gun away when he came home to pack, didn’t he?” she demanded of Christina.
The redhead looked up, first at me, then at Swanson, as if she expected one of us to break down and confess to it.
“Didn’t he?”
She nodded. “That’s what woke me up, hearing this back door slam when he came in from out back.” She slumped back in her chair, which squeaked in response, and rubbed her eyes until they were red. “I didn’t really think Walt was going to kill him. I mean, I heard it all before, you know? I just figured he was going down to one of the bars he hangs out at, or going to boff that other little bubblehead, so I just went to b—”
“Whoa, wait a minute, what other little bubblehead—Kate Castelar? You knew about her and Jennings?”
Christina made a noise that you might call a laugh. “Well, it ain’t much of a secret, is it?”
Banner looked at me a little dazedly. “I guess not. Well, tell me about it.”
Christina rolled her shoulders a little. “What’s to tell? Walt’s usually got a little piece on the side. He always has, as long as I’ve known him. Shit, I used to be it when he was living with this other broad—I mean, before him and me got married, you know?”
“You don’t mind?” Banner was incredulous.
“Honey, I can tell you never met Walt Jennings. If he wasn’t getting any on the side, he’d be all over me like fat on a pig, all the time. As it is I only get about three nights’ sleep a week. No, I don’t mind, as long as he keeps it kind of, you know, discreet. And he does. He thinks he’s sneaking around behind my back.”
“Well, how long’s he been not sneaking around with Kate Castelar?”
“Oh …” She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth while she considered the question. “Six months, eight months. I don’t know; they come and they go. It was still hot when this one started up, I’m pretty sure.”
I said, “How’d they happen to get together anyway?”
She gave me a look. “I don’t exactly keep records, you know. I suppose he met her in one of the bars he hangs out in. That seems to be where he meets most people. Come to think of it, he met me in a bar …”
“What bars? Where does he hang around, usually?”
“Excuse me,” Banner said testily. I looked at her. “Innocent bystander, remember?”
“Well, don’t you want to know too?”
She mussed her short blondish hair, then smoothed it out again. “Oh, all right.” To Christina: “What places?”
“God, I don’t know. They’re just bars. You know, kind of cowboy bars, most of them, I suppose on account of the stockyards. There’s one called the Cattleman he goes to a lot, I think. Another one called the Bottom Dollar. They’re all off sort of that way”—she waved a bony hand—“off of L Street and around there.”
It was hard to picture Kate in places like those names suggested. But, then, it was hard to picture her with someone like Jennings, too.
I said, “Did you see her when she was here yesterday?”
“I saw her, sure, the poor dumb kid, crying all over the place, pounding on the door, and yelling for Walt—but I didn’t talk to her. No way do I need that kind of scene. No, I just pretended I wasn’t home, and she finally went away.”
“Gosh, I hope no one minds if I try and get us back on the subject here,” Banner said impatiently. I shrugged. The other cop, Swanson, was watching us as if we were a not very interesting movie. Christina looked up expectantly. “You woke up when you heard him coming in the back door,” Banner prompted.
“Oh, yeah. Well, that’s it. I didn’t know what he had been doing out there, and I guess I didn’t even think twice about it, what with him running all over the place throwing things into that duffel bag. I forgot all about it until he”—I got the nod—“brought in that can.”
I tried to look modest.
“I knew right away what was in it, and I knew Walt must’ve gone out there to hide it when he came home last night. And I knew why.” She shook her head in disbelief. “I never thought he’d really go through with it.”
Banner straightened herself up, stretched, and rubbed her lower back. “I guess that’s it, Swanee, for now at least. Mrs. Jennings, you’ll have to get dressed now. We’d like you to come with us and give us a formal statement.”
“Jesus H. Christ, what’ve I been doing all day?” she griped, but she got up, went through the living room and into the bedroom.
Banner made a noise and rolled her head a couple of times, working the muscles of her neck. “Better call the lab,” she told Swanson, “and tell them we’ve got something for them if they’ve got something for us.” He moved heavily, solidly, into the living room. “Well, I guess maybe it’s a good thing I let you sit in after all,” she told me, reaching past me for the coffeepot and emptying it into her mug. “Finding that gun’s the closest thing to a break we’ve had, and you did a good job of helping get the straight story out of her.”
“Her original story would have come apart like a crumb cake even without benefit of my staggering intellect. Then you’d’ve called in the Dead End Kids to tear the joint apart, and they’d’ve found the gun in no time; it was hardly well hidden.”
“And he’s modest, too. Any more like you at home, sailor?”
“I’m the last of my breed,” I said casually. “Why, am I being propositioned?”
Her eyes were direct, open and smiling. “I have an unbreakable rule about keeping my professional and personal lives separate. I don’t date cops.”
“I’m not a cop.”
“I know. And this case won’t last forever.”
“Even though it feels like it has already,” I said, rubbing my neck.
“Well, then, maybe we’ll see later.”
“Maybe we will. I should tell you first—I’m sort of married.”
“Sort of? That’s a neat trick. What are you, another Walt Jennings—too much man for one woman?”
She laughed and I joined her. “Not quite. I—oh hell, it’s a long story, and very complicated, and I’m not entirely sure I understand it myself. I suppose it’s fair to say we’re separated, and have been for a long time. We get back together every now and then—we’re together now, in fact—but that only seems to underscore the fact that our differences can’t be worked out.”
“Sounds wonderful. I’m sorry, that was crass. I guess maybe I’m a little disappointed. I don’t date married men.”
“That’s okay, neither do I. Cases aren’t the only things that don’t last forever, I’m afraid. I don’t know where my situation is going, but it can’t go on as it has been. I’ve known that for some time, I just haven’t known what to do about it. I’m not sure I do yet. But—well, as you said, maybe we’ll see later.”
I grinned at her and she grinned back. “Maybe we will.”
We were still grinning like idiots when Swanson reentered the room. I cut it out but Banner didn’t care; she smiled up at him questioningly.
“They found the slug,” Swanson reported. “It’s pretty banged up—it was imbedded in a tree trunk, and they figure it must have ricocheted more than once to get there.”
Banner raised her eyebrows. “Heavy sucker.”
“Solid lead. Flat-nosed. And from a thirty-eight, all right.” Banner looked up at me cheerily. I smiled back. “As for the trees on the other side of the road, where the killer hid: no good,” Swanson continued. “Bartels says it’s next to impossible to get decent footprints in snow anyhow, and this was all messed up and stuff besides.”
“Figures.” Banner was philosophical. “You know, if this character hadn’t gone around shooting off his big mouth about killing Castelar, he could have probably gotten away with it pretty easily. The setup is perfect, just perfect—way out in the middle of nowhere, darker than the inside of a ripe olive, more than half a mile away from the nearest neighbor.”
“You know what they say,” I said. “There is no such thing as the perfect crime.”
“Hah. You don’t know my mechanic.”
Christina emerged from the bedroom wearing gray slacks and a maroon sweatshirt over a white turtleneck. She had run a brush through her stiff red hair and put a little makeup on her face and she didn’t look half bad—or wouldn’t have, if she’d lost her ugly scowl.
“All right,” she said shrilly, “let’s get this over with.” To me: “Unplug that pot, will you? Walt’d kill me if I let this place burn down.”
“Lucky we have his gun,” Swanson said, and steered her toward the front door.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Millar College is one of those peculiar little liberal arts institutions you’ll encounter here and there on the Great Plains—or, as I notice they’ve been calling them in recent years, the Central Plains—springing up like sunflowers and, sometimes, vanishing just as quickly. Frequently they exist in remote, even isolated areas, and you wonder who on earth thought to put a college here, and who on earth attends it. Back when I was in college, lo, these many years ago, the consensus was that such schools existed for students who couldn’t get into a real school, or were afraid of the competition, or both. You went to a place like Millar, the reasoning went, you got your 2.5 average, and then you left and got married or sold Dodges or something.
The analysis was a little shaky, but that didn’t bother us then and it didn’t bother me now. Kate Castelar, after all, seemed to fit the profile. From what I gathered, she had hardly been a scholastic ball of fire, having had to stick around a semester after she ordinarily would have graduated in order to rectify some deficiencies in her academic record. She had managed to escape with her B.A. at the end of the fall term, just before Christmas, so there were still kids around who knew her. In fact, her best friend and a boyfriend had another semester to go before they were turned loose on society. Kate’s mother had given me their names and the assurance that they were very close to Kate, but I knew from experience that such assurances aren’t always worth much. Even on through college, kids change friends at an astounding pace, and parents are typically hard-pressed to keep up. But then, it was a place to start—and what else did I have?
I parked ille
gally in a permit-only lot and, lowering my head against the wind, trudged up a hillock to the campus. A handful of fairly new buildings, a handful of fairly decent teachers, a handful of fairly conscious students—that was the norm for such schools, and by outward signs Millar was no different. It being only a few days into the spring semester (although a Midwestern January is hardly what you’d call springlike), I knew better than to waste my time in the library. I asked a kid where the student union was, and he pointed me toward a half-buried flat-roofed one-story rectangle slung between two taller sand-colored buildings that could only have been dorms. A dirty diagonal path to the union was tramped in the snow on the lawn, but I stuck to the sidewalk. Bad enough I was trespassing—having a twenty-year-old dislike of academic bureaucrats and no particular reason to expect any cooperation if I went through proper channels—I could at least keep off whatever grass may have been dormant under the snowcap.
Whoever Maureen L. Hathaway was, her Memorial Student Center was nearly deserted. That may have been because the one o’clock classes were in session, or it may just have been because the place was astonishingly unappealing. It was all linoleum and hard plastic chairs at wobbly round plastic-topped tables, cold harsh fluorescent lights, and pale green concrete-block walls—all steeped in the smell of old hamburger grease emanating from the ubiquitous snack bar at the opposite end. Hungry as I was, I was not yet so famished that I would actually consider eating there.
I asked a trio of girls at one of the tables if they knew either Jo Richter or Tom Black, and, if so, where I might find them now. The girls knew them both—it was a tiny college; they probably knew everybody—debated the issue a bit, and decided that Jo had class this hour, but Tom was probably at his work-study job in the campus post office. They gave me directions; I thanked them and left. No one asked my name or business, the beard notwithstanding.
Moving Targets Page 6
