by Rex Burns
“Smell?”
Wager nodded. “They might still be there.”
“Oh?” Then, “Oh, Lord!” The patrolman swallowed uneasily and peeked down the driveway beside the house. “Maybe there’s a dog back there.”
“Here you boys are, nice and cold. Why, you ain’t going yet, are you, Officer?”
“Yes, ma’am—I thought I’d cut through the yard and see which house you meant.”
“Oh, land sakes, sit down. I’ll show you just as soon’s you finish that ice tea. There’s too much rushing around, and it’s just too hot for it.”
“Ma’am—”
“Sit, young man!”
“Did you ever talk to the family, ma’am?” Orvis asked.
“Sure. All the time. They hang out their wash, I hang out mine. They have plenty of it, too. Nice folks, though. Just as friendly.”
“They ever say where they came from?”
“No. Can’t say that. We just talk. Recipes, kids’ sicknesses, whatall. My! You boys were so thirsty and all I been doing is talking. Here, let me get you some more.”
“No thanks, ma’am. It was real good. But if you’ll just show us the house.”
“Well, if you got to …”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, it’s right behind my place. Here, we can go right through the yard. There’s gates.” She walked with the caution of a heavy person afraid to stumble and fall. The uniformed officer reached for one of her elbows when they came to the rougher ground of the backyard. “Oh, my, ain’t you kind though!”
They followed across the stubbled clump grass and between two laden apple trees to an unpainted gate hanging slack in a rusty wire fence. The uniformed officer occasionally sniffed loudly.
“Right there—just across the alley.” She pointed to a backyard bound by a picket fence that still showed flakes of white paint. Wager saw the scattering of children’s toys, the holes and sand piles of kids’ aimless digging, the silence of the house’s long shadow.
“Let’s find out,” he said.
The uniformed officer volunteered, “Let me take you back, ma’am.”
“Oh, my!”
No one answered their knock at either door. Drawing a deep breath, Wager put his nose to the keyhole and sniffed lightly.
“Well?” asked Orvis.
“I don’t smell anything.”
Orvis went to one of the windows and cupped his hands around his reflection to peer in. “I don’t see anybody. Let’s get legal.”
By the time the warrant arrived, Wager and Orvis had interviewed the people living on both sides of the house. Yes, they recognized Kruse, but his name was Hartley. They were a friendly bunch of people who nonetheless kept to themselves and never said anything about where they came from. They never bothered anybody, but if somebody needed something they’d help out. Good, quiet neighbors. One morning they packed up and went, and everybody expected them back. But that was a couple weeks ago now.
“Did they have a car?”
“A pickup with a camper shell that they barely fit into. Mrs. Hartley, her younger sister, and their five kids and a dog. A blue GMC, it was. The dog’s name was Elmer.”
“Mr. Hartley wasn’t with them?”
“No—is he the one that got shot? Is this the picture that was in the paper a while back?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You know, I thought at the time that could be him, but I never really believed it was! It looks a lot more like him here than it did in the paper, and he was such a nice man, always said hello. I never dreamed anybody like that could get shot.”
The house was empty. The drawers hung open and were stripped; the refrigerator contained only moldering scraps of food; the washing machine on the back porch held a wad of clothes forgotten and now dried into a hard tangle.
“They got away. It looks like they made it,” said Orvis. Wager, too, felt a surge of relief. “Now we want to find them before the avenging angels do.”
There were the usual ways of looking for missing persons, and Detective Orvis took care of those: an all-points for the vehicle if it was still in the state; an interagency query in case it moved across the line; a national missing-persons alert for possible victims matching the following descriptions … Wager, after calling Chief Doyle and reporting his findings, placed a call to Loma Vista and Sheriff Tice.
“I seen that bulletin on the murder of the Beauchamps, Detective Wager. I’m glad to hear the Kruse people got away.”
“Do you have any idea where they might go?”
“No, I don’t. I’ll ask around, though. And I’ll tell the deputies to keep an eye out for their truck in case they come this way. But if it’s been two weeks now they probably found a place to hole up. And that could be anywhere.”
“I think the killers are still after them.”
“Yes, so do I. And we’ll do what we can, Detective Wager. Our district attorney got word from the attorney general that we’re supposed to help you people all we can.”
“We appreciate that, Sheriff. You know about the statewide task force set up for this thing?”
“Not much. Suppose you tell me about that.”
Wager did, mentioning casually that Bulldog Doyle was coordinating it.
“Doyle? I don’t know that I ever met him. But you tell him I’ll be glad to work with you—you seem to know what you’re doing and how we do things over here. You even got Orrin to take you over to the benchland, didn’t you?”
Wager was no longer surprised at the osmosis of news in Loma Vista. “Yes. But it didn’t do much good with the Mueller killing. The people I talked to didn’t know why Mueller would be linked to the avenging angels or to Beauchamp.”
“That’s what I been telling you.”
“You don’t have anything more, then?”
“Absolutely nothing. Have you talked to Orrin since you found the Beauchamps?”
“No.”
“You ought to. Wait a minute—I’ll get you his phone number.”
When Wager finally reached Orrin at the newspaper office, the newsman said he’d read about the Beauchamp family in the morning papers. “In fact, I took a copy over for Zenas to read. It makes the both of us sick, Gabe.”
“I’d have called sooner, but I haven’t had time. I’m in Pueblo now. We finally located Kruse’s house. It looks like his family got away in time.”
“Thank the Lord!”
And a fast GMC pickup. “We’re trying to reach them before the avenging angels do. Have you any idea where they might run?”
“No, I don’t.”
“They must have had a place picked out,” Wager insisted. “Everything else is so well planned that they must have planned for this possibility, too.”
“That makes sense, Gabe. But, Lord, I don’t know. Something like that, they wouldn’t tell anybody, probably not even Zenas.”
That was so. “Can you talk to Zenas? See if he can come up with some guesses? Anything at all—if we find them we can protect them. If we don’t it’s only a matter of time.”
“Gabe, these people don’t want your protection—they’ve been running from the law all their lives.”
“But they’re not polygamists anymore; they’re widows and orphans. I don’t know any goddamn law against being widows of the same man.”
“Well …”
“And Zenas sent you to me, didn’t he? He wasn’t shy about asking help when he was scared, was he?”
“No, he wasn’t. That’s true. Okay, I’ll go over … Let’s see, tomorrow’s distribution day. … I can go over as soon as I get loose tomorrow afternoon. Where can I call you if I find out something?”
“Go through Tice’s office. He’s got a number for the task force—they’ll reach me.”
There was one more call Wager had to make, but it was a personal one and it kept until he was flat on his back on the hard bed of a motel room. His belly was full of something called “beef-tips Burgundy,” and the muscles of
his neck and back were finally relaxing from the pummeling of a hot shower.
“Jo—it’s me, Gabe.”
“Hi, stranger! I heard about you finding that family who was shot. That must have been terrible.”
“Just another day at the office. Listen, I wanted to call and apologize for not coming by last night—I tried to call, but you weren’t home.”
“I was over at Mother’s. I left you a note.”
“I found it. It was the only thing in there besides ads and bills.” That didn’t sound quite right. “It was good to find it,” he added lamely.
“Why, Gabe! That’s downright romantic!”
“Let’s not get too damn sentimental.”
“All right.” A touch of apology under the laughter in her voice. “Come on over; I’ll feed you and rub your back before you go on duty.”
“I can’t. I’m down in Pueblo. Doyle told me to stay here tonight. He’s afraid I’ll fall asleep at the wheel.” Suddenly everybody was worrying about his health. Maybe he was beginning to look old and frail. Wager had never thought about becoming old and frail, like one of the skinny, bent men with white hair and dark wrinkled faces that used to shuffle around the barrio when he was a kid. They’d gather on the warm side of a wall, sitting on tilted chairs in the morning sun and swapping the same jokes and tales they’d shared since they were wet-nosed kids running around in the same streets. Now, of course, those streets were no more, nor was there a place to sit and re-create a past. Any old men remaining were hidden away from the little boys who used to squat nearby to listen. Now there was progress.
“I said when are you coming back?”
“Tomorrow morning. I’ll drop by.”
“Okay.” She added, tentatively, “It’ll be good to see you.”
“And you.”
CHAPTER 8
IT WAS GOOD to see Jo. Wager arrived in Denver just in time to take her to lunch at My Brother’s Bar, just up I-25 from Mile-Hi Stadium—Bears’ Stadium it was called before professional football caught on. The tavern was run by a quietly smiling Greek, and the music was classical stuff, which Wager liked because it was quiet and interesting even if he didn’t know what it was, and even if, with this crowd, you couldn’t hear it very well. The tavern spread through two large rooms filled with heavy tables and did not have a single fern. Despite the noon swarm of blow-dried salesmen and young lawyers wandering in from historically salvaged lower downtown, the place still gave Wager the sense of community he had enjoyed at the old Frontier Bar before it was torn down. He tried to explain that feeling to Jo and to apologize for the noise and people—it was a different place in mid-afternoon or later in the evening. But he saw that the only thing she was really interested in was the sound of his voice and not what it said. Which, he decided, wasn’t too bad; so the lunch, if hurried and noisy and jostled, was a fine one, though he could not tell you what they ate.
When he dropped her off at the police complex, he surprised them both by kissing her hard under the amused glances of office cops returning from lunch.
“I suppose that’s the result of getting a good night’s sleep.”
He shook his head. “Just the result of being with you. Maybe,” he added, “… maybe it’s a feeling of refuge. Everywhere—so much, so fast …”
“I never thought of you as feeling that way,” she said.
“What way?”
“Feeling that you could be whirled away. I always think of you as a rock.”
She had stated exactly the way he felt, and there came again that sense of completeness with her, of sharing even those thoughts that had not yet been clearly formulated. But despite that warmth, he found it hard to admit her to an area that was intensely private as well as subject to his own ridicule. “Right, a rock: silent, hardheaded, and always on somebody’s toes.”
“You’re starting to sound as cynical as Gargan.”
“That bastard.”
“Do you really feel that way sometimes? Uprooted?”
“I guess. Sometimes. It used to be it was enough to be a good cop. You knew who and what you were and how good you were at it.” He added, “I lost a wife in order to be a good cop, and it wasn’t her fault.”
“Or yours.”
“That’s nice to say. But not true. I told her either she changed or she got the hell out.”
Jo gazed out the car window at the massive concrete slabs that formed the blank, gray face of the police building’s lower floor. “Just like that?”
“Pretty close. She wasn’t important at the time.”
“Oh.”
“Now maybe she would be. And I’d be less of a cop.”
“I can’t imagine you being less of a cop. Or anything being more important to you than that.” Her dark eyes turned to his. “But I can imagine you being lonely. It’s tough to have to be right all the time—to think that you have to be too hard to make a mistake.”
“I’m not feeling sorry for myself, Jo.”
“And I’m not trying to mother you. It’s just hard to be alone. Like it’s hard to learn you’re not important to someone you … believed you were important to. I just never thought of you worrying about those things—you seem so self-contained, so complete in what you do and who you are.”
“I am.” He tapped the steering wheel for emphasis. “I am!”
“But now you want something more, is that it?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t.” He tried to put it into words as much for himself as for her. “I think of that whole family wiped out—the Beauchamps—kids who never even had a chance to enjoy the world … to even see the goddamn world …” His hand tightened to a fist on the wheel. “Jo, if I could pull the switch on their killers I’d feel completely, totally happy. I want them that bad, and right now that’s all I want!” The fist slackened. “And yet, in a way, those dead kids had more than I’ve got—call it a history, a bunch of people they shared their lives with. I look around and suddenly things have changed so much … I don’t have that kind of history anymore—this isn’t the town I grew up in. The old neighborhood’s gone—places I used to be at home in. Even the mountains are changing. I guess I feel like I could disappear, like everything else, and it wouldn’t make a ripple anywhere. Except,” he reached for her cold hand, “except when I’m with you. Then it feels like I—we—could build something that wouldn’t change. Something that wouldn’t give in to … chaos.”
They both looked at her hand lying in his. Finally she asked, “Is that a kind of proposal?”
“No!”
“I didn’t think it was.” Her laugh was forced.
And he did not know how to make that reflexive answer sound less bad.
“Let’s call it ‘midcase depression,’” she said, opening the door quickly.
“I’ll phone tonight.”
“If you want to.”
Even in the glare of afternoon sunlight against the balcony curtains, the red light on his telephone recorder was sharp. Pressing Rewind and Play, he listened to Doyle’s secretary’s voice tell him that he had a message via the Loma Vista sheriff’s office: one Orrin Winston wants Wager to call as soon as possible, followed by a telephone number. Time, 10:39. He tried. A woman’s twangy voice at the distant end told him that Orrin had left the office to go over to the benchland somewhere, but had not said when he would be back. Would he like to leave a message?
“Just tell him Gabe Wager called from Denver. I’ll try to get him at home later.”
“Okay. I know he wanted to talk to you. I’ll leave a note.”
He called Doyle’s office next. Doyle’s secretary brought him up to date on the new facts, and there wasn’t much: “Detective Devereaux got a description of the Beauchamps’ car, a Country Squire station wagon, blue or gray and sort of beat up. No license number.”
“Motor Vehicles have anything turn up?”
“No abandoned cars matching that description.”
The secretary’s voice was beginning to ec
ho the cadence of her boss’s. Wager had noticed elsewhere that people who shared the same office and heard each other on the telephone month after month began to speak alike. But as long as she didn’t try to share Doyle’s authority toward his people, or smoke cheap cigars, he could stomach her. “What about NCIC? Anything come in yet on fingerprints?”
“All the prints so far belong to the victims. Detective Ross believes the killers wore gloves. Probably surgical-type.”
Surgical gloves, silencers, persistence, planning. The avenging angels were turning out to be very good in their line of business. So good that it was going to take something special to catch them. Special effort, special skill, and even special luck.
That was the thought he carried with him as he puttered around his apartment, giving it the monthly swipe with a vacuum cleaner, sniffing the towels and sheets to see if they needed washing this week, rattling Saran-wrapped plates and bowls in the refrigerator to toss out the blue-green fuzzy wads that he had forgotten about. He dumped a bowl of something slimy that had once been liquid. Buffalo soup. There was an old recipe for buffalo soup that began, First you catch a buffalo. So far they hadn’t even set a trap.
At six he called Jo. “You want some dinner?”
“Not tonight, Gabe. I think I’ll wash my hair and read a book.”
“Jo—look, I’m sorry about this afternoon.” Why in hell did a man always end up telling some woman he was sorry for something? Mothers, sisters, girlfriends, wives, mistresses—the whole damn progression.
“That’s all right, Gabe. I shouldn’t have kidded about that.”
And they always said it was all right when it wasn’t.
How in God’s name did a polygamist manage? “It’s a whole mixture of things, Jo. I’ve never been able to talk to anyone about a lot of things that are important to me. It started a long time ago, when I was a kid. It’s just something I can’t help.” The line remained silent. “It’s not just marriage, Jo—it’s,” he groped for a word that would sound neither pretentious nor trite, but only came up with “life.”
“I know that, Gabe.”
Well, if she knew everything, there wasn’t much sense trying to explain anything. Wager said something about seeing her tomorrow morning and she said something about his having a good tour of duty and they hung up. Leaving him to stare at the silent telephone as if it were a mechanism that consciously twisted words out of their meaning and intent. Someday he would have to figure how much time he spent talking to machines instead of to people. And trying to talk to people but sounding like a machine. That part would be easy—there weren’t many he talked to that he considered people. Sighing, he dialed another number, a long-distance exchange, and listened to the switches click automatically into the rattle of a bell. A woman’s voice said, “Hello?”
