by G. M. Ford
7
“MR. SPRINGER IS DEAD.” HE SAID THE WORDS IN A NEUTRALvoice. No “I’m afraid to say” or “I’m sorry to report.” Just the fact. Sheriff Nathan Hand was fifty maybe. Narrow shoulders and no gut. Shaven smooth, his narrow face looked like it’d fit through the mail slot. His uniform was perfectly pressed and fit him precisely.
Rebecca and I spoke simultaneously. She asked, “How?”
I asked, “Where?”
He pretended to draw it from memory. “Let’s see, if I recall…it was two weeks ago tomorrow that…” He turned to the deputy. “I am right about that, aren’t I, Harlan? It was two weeks ago tomorrow that we had the big fire over on West River.”
The deputy’s name tag read: HARLAN R. SPOTS, DEPUTY, STEVENS FALLS, WASHINGTON. Spots had narrow little eyes, thick red lips and an ass so big it wobbled when he walked. I know because the minute we’d told him what we wanted, he’d said we’d need to talk to Sheriff Hand and had wobbled off to find him.
“Yes, sir, I believe you are correct,” he said in a wheezing tenor.
I had the feeling that if Hand had asked Spots to verify the presence of aliens in our midst, he’d have gotten much the same response.
“Terrible car accident,” Hand said. “Just terrible.”
She frowned. “You said something about a fire?”
For a second I thought he was going to pat her hand. Instead, he gave her a patronizing smile and a tone of voice that said she shouldn’t worry her pretty little head about something so tawdry. He put both elbows on the counter and leaned toward her.
“Yes ma’am,” he said. “More terrible than a lady like you could possibly imagine.” Bad move. She tossed a business card onto the desk between them.
“I wouldn’t count on that, Sheriff,” she said. “People in my line of work tend to lead rich fantasy lives.”
Hand ran his eyes over the card once and then slid it over to Spots. His lips moved as he read. “Well, well…” Hand said.
“The fire?” she prodded.
He tried to keep the question casual, but something in his demeanor had changed. No more Mr. Nice Guy funnin’ with the tourists. Suddenly the cop.
“So…you’re here in an official capacity, then?”
“I’m here to find out what happened to Mr. Springer,” she snapped.
Not liking what he was getting from Rebecca, he turned his attention my way.
“And you?”
“I’m a friend of the doc’s.” I scribbled my cell phone number on the back and then handed him my card. Same deal, a quick robo-scan and over to Spots. I watched as the deputy sounded out Investigations. Hand stood up straight, took a hitch in his belt.
“Harlan, get me the yard keys,” he said. Hand walked to the far end of the counter, lifted the gate and came around toward us. Deputy Spots slapped a ring of keys into the sheriff’s outstretched palm. Unlike his deputy, Nathan Hand walked with a martial economy of motion. He strode on past us and pulled open the door. “After you,”
he said.
He led us around the west side of the building, where a black gate on rubber wheels spanned the drive. Behind the gate, three police cruisers. Two five-year-old Chevy Citations. Stevens Falls logo on the doors. One brand-new Crown Victoria, same logo but with the word SHERIFF painted above it in gold.
Hand rolled back the gate. Behind us, a passing car tooted its horn. Hand waved without looking. He pulled the gate behind us but didn’t bother with the chain and lock. We followed him along the length of the building. Beige cinder block with a single ground-level window about halfway down. Blinds tightly drawn. Air conditioner. Sheriff Hand’s office, I was willing to bet.
When he stopped and turned back our way, I sensed he’d regained some of his bravado. “Now, normally,” he began, “I’d feel compelled to warn you all”—he stepped aside and beckoned us forward—“but with you all being in the law enforcement field and all…”
It was one of those wrecks that freezes your innards. Reminds you of those times when you’ve been stuck on the freeway for hours and hours, ranting, raving, cursing your fate and damning every other driver on the road, especially the nitwit son of a bitch who caused this particular logjam, and then finally you see the flashing lights up ahead, you’re about to make your escape when you look over on the shoulder and see the wreck that caused all this, and instinctively something in your gut knows that nobody, no living creature could possibly have walked away alive. And you drive the rest of the way home wondering about yourself. Again.
What had once been a stylish Subaru Outback had been reduced to its metal parts, and most of those were mangled. The front end was pushed in so far the floorboards had buckled. The roof was peeled back, the edges jagged and uneven, like the track of an old-fashioned can opener. Not a shred of rubber or plastic, or fabric, or glass, or for that matter any of the god knows how many other substances it takes to make a car. Nothing remained but soot covered metal. I don’t know what Rebecca was thinking, but Sheriff Hand read my mind.
“No way of telling whether the gas tank exploded and then set off the ten gallons of unleaded he had in the car with him, or whether it was the other way around.”
“Where exactly did this happen?” I asked. He pointed east. “You know the bridge back there?” I said I did. “Three-point-nine miles from the bridge. A steep little gully leading down to Taylor Creek. You could see the smoke all the way to town.”
“Why would he have ten gallons of gas in the car with him?” I asked.
Rebecca moved over to the side of the wreck and was moving around it slowly.
“No idea,” Hand said. “His insurance company had that same question. We both asked his missus, but she didn’t know, either.”
Rebecca stopped. “Where’s Mrs. Springer now?”
“Couldn’t tell you,” he said. “She and the kids came in to make the arrangements for the body, then a couple of days later I went out and served her.” He rubbed his chin and shook his head. “I certainly hated to have to do that. What with her just losing her husband and it being the holiday season and all.”
If he was looking for somebody to feel sorry for him, he’d fallen in with the wrong crowd. “Served her with what?” I asked.
“Eviction,” he said. “Had thirty days to pack up and vacate.”
“On what grounds?” Rebecca demanded.
“Taxes,” he said. “Something to do with it being a homestead.”
I walked over to the car carcass and looked into the black hole that had once been the hatchback. “To tell you the truth,” Hand said, “I been kinda worried about the Springer family myself.”
I felt Rebecca stiffen. “Why’s that?” I asked. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “About a week later, I sent two of my deputies out to remind her—Bobby and Roy, three weeks to go now—and they found the place all shot up and the family gone. They said it didn’t seem like anyone was present when the shooting happened. Naturally I hustled out there myself.” Naturally.
Sitting on top of the rim that used to hold the spare tire was the galvanized top of a five-gallon gas can. The part with the flip-up handle and the screw-off top.
“No sign of any injury to anyone—”
I interrupted him. “What kind of progress have you made at finding out who it was shot the place up?”
He bristled. Didn’t like being questioned about his work. Probably couldn’t remember the last time it had happened. Rebecca had finished her circumnavigation of the car and was back at my side. Hand folded his arms across his chest.
“Mr.…er…a…”
I helped him. “Waterman.”
“Mr. Waterman…I don’t know how much you know about hunting and outdoorsy activities”—I tried to look rugged—“but we’re right in the middle of deer season around here. At any given moment, I’ve got hundreds and hundreds of people walking around in the woods with rifles and, as if that isn’t bad enough, it just so happens that bunches of those people with rif
les have absolutely no use whatsoever for the late Mr. J.D. Springer.”
I wanted to hear what he’d say. “Why was that?” I asked. He ran it by me pretty much the way I’d heard it before. I only stopped him once, and that was early on. He was talking about how pissed off everybody was when Mr. Bendixon sold the property to an outsider. “Of course, feelings just magnified when it turned out he’d cheated the old man.”
“Whoa,” I said. “Cheated the old man how?”
“On the price,” he said. “You can look it up down at the clerk’s office. It’s a matter of public record. Springer paid one hundred thousand dollars for thirty-five acres. The figures are right there in black and white.”
Rebecca piped in. “So?”
“So…a year ago the county offered him the better part of three.” He waved a hand. “Two hundred ninety-something anyway. That’s also a matter of public record.” I opened my mouth to speak, but he beat me to it. “I’ve been told that half a dozen private parties offered him even more than that over the past couple of years. Check with the realtors, they’ll tell you.”
“How is J.D. supposed to have pulled that off?”
“Nobody knows for certain,” he said. “Most folks think he caught the old man when he wasn’t rational and got him to sign the papers. Old guy was eighty-two or so. Drank like a fish. Down to Freddy’s Timbertopper every day at nine. Back home at six. Regular as clockwork.” The sheriff shook his head. “I kept telling myself that the first time he drove off the road or hit something, I was going to have to tell him to either quit drinking or quit driving. Kept my fingers crossed, I did.”
“Your point is?” from Rebecca.
He sighed. She sighed back at him. Bigger. I was hoping they’d keep at it and maybe we could have a Bugs and Daffy moment. But it wasn’t to be.
“My point…is that it didn’t take a genius fly fisherman to figure out that if you showed up at old Ben’s place ’long about six-thirty in the evening, you were very likely to find the old man snockered. Most people figure that’s just what Springer did. And I’m telling you, they didn’t like it one bit. That old man was kind of a landmark around here. Like he was their link with the past in some manner or another.”
I thought it over. J.D.’d said that he’d stopped in to see the old guy all the time. He’d admitted to trying to wear him down. What had he called it? Winning through persistence.
Maybe J.D.’s definition of persistence included catching the old man at an unguarded moment, maybe even drunk, and taking advantage of him. Hell, I’d only met him twice, and god knows, with those kind of numbers, there’s no shortage of people who would do the same thing in a heartbeat and called it good business.
“Anybody ask the old man about it?” I asked.
“He was packed up and gone before anyone had the opportunity.”
“Who did the autopsy?” Rebecca asked.
Hand chuckled as he slid the gate shut and locked it. “First off, Miss—”
“Doctor,” she corrected him.
“Yes…Doctor…like I was saying…we don’t have a coroner or anything like that. If and when we need that kind of work done, we call the state police. Second…anyone who has seen that body isn’t likely to have the slightest doubt about the cause of death, believe you me.”
Apparently she didn’t. “Who prepared the body for burial?” she asked.
“Dewitt Davis,” he said. “Davis Funeral Home up on Third.”
He eased over by the cop shop door and put his hand on the handle.
“Did he take any pictures of the body?” Rebecca asked.
“I believe he did,” the cop said.
I wasn’t sure whether I meant it or not, but I said, “Thanks,” and turned to leave.
“Ah…listen,” he said. We waited. “You seem like nice folks,” he started again. “A word to the wise.” I could smell what was coming. “A great many people around here aren’t altogether sorry about what happened to Mr. J.D. Springer. As a matter of fact, the way most people around here see it, when it comes to Mr. J.D. Springer…” He hesitated. “The way most of them see it…the deader the better.” He waited for it to sink in and then said, “So you be careful now.” With that, he turned the handle and stepped from view.
8
ONE OF THE REASONS WHY REBECCA DUVALL AND I HAVEbeen friends for thirty-five years is because we learned early on that our minds don’t work the same way. I’m a batch processor. You send me out for a goat, I’m coming back with a goddamn goat. No…I won’t get the dry cleaning on the way home. This is a goat trip. Next, I’ll make a dry cleaning trip. Rebecca is totally the other way. Interactive. Everything is connected to everything else is connected to everything else. What store we start out for has no effect on where we end up. Whatever product we went there to get has little or no bearing on what we walk out with. All plans are subject to change without notice. You cope.
We were ensconced in a Naugahyde booth along the west wall of the Chat and Chew Café. A pecky cedar palace half a mile east of the police station on the opposite side of the highway. We’d perused the lunch menu and ordered coffee. Halfway through our second cup of brown water, she rolled her eyes up out of the cup. “What did you make of the sheriff?” she asked.
“Not what I expected.”
She nodded. “Me neither.”
“Seemed too…too something for a small-town cop.”
“Urbane.”
“You check out that uniform?”
“Hand-tailored.”
“You think so?”
“Women know these things.”
“I don’t think he was used to uppity women.”
“Uppity?… Moi?” She took a sip, made a face and put the cup on the table. “I’m worried about Claudia and the children,” she said.
“J.D.’s parents probably picked them up,” I said. “Which would also explain why the Blazer is still in the driveway.”
She had to admit this made sense. For my part, I didn’t believe a word of it. As a matter of fact, I thought I knew just exactly where Claudia and the kids were, but I couldn’t be sure and I didn’t want to get Rebecca’s hopes up. So I downplayed it.
“I’ve got a plan,” she said.
“Let’s hear it.”
She spread her hands. “We’re here…right?”
I couldn’t find any loopholes in the statement, so I agreed.
“As long as we’re here, let’s do everything we can.” She looked to me for agreement and got it. Hell, I make my living running errands for people who know full well I can’t solve their problem. They just want to feel like they’ve done everything possible. Makes it easier to live with themselves later.
“I want to talk to the undertaker. By state law, he has to have a set of pictures of the body. I want to see them.”
I blew out a lungful of air. “If J.D. was in that car—”
She held up a hand. “I just want to be sure,” she said. I said I understood.
“I also want to find out about these eviction proceedings.”
Again, I agreed. Everything Claudia and the kids had was tied up in that property. No way we could let anybody walk off with it without a fight.
“You want me to do that?” I asked.
“You’re no good with bureaucrats,” she said. She had a point. Sooner or later they’d say something about how they had a policy against something or other or about how they just worked here and weren’t actually responsible for shit and then I’d start to get snotty and things would go down the toilet from there. “You want to handle that, too?”
She nodded. “The assessor or the city attorney or whoever handles things like evictions in a burg like this is probably in the same building with whoever keeps the records. While I’m checking on the eviction, I can see if what the sheriff said about J.D. getting the property cheap is true.”
I liked the sound of that. I was uncomfortable with the possibility that J.D. might have stepped over the line. Color me with a c
ynical crayon, but if I’m forced to bet my body parts on the likelihood of whether, out of the goodness of his heart, one man chose to sell a piece of property at a fraction of its value or whether it is more likely that the other man screwed him out of it…well, damn…sort of asks which is more prevalent, generosity or greed, doesn’t it?
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“What you do best,” she said with a grin. “Do what you always do. Turn over some rocks. Make bad jokes at people. Be obnoxious. Piss somebody off.”
It’s nice to be appreciated. “Meet back here when?”
The time was twelve-thirty. We agreed on two hours, give or take. Two-thirty or three.
9
I READ A BOOK ONCE BY SOME SOCIOLOGIST NAMEDOldenburg. He called it The Great Good Place. His point was about bars, coffee shops, beauty parlors, health clubs…what he called “third places,” those places between work and home that allowed the unrelated to relate to each other. He believed these places, rather than job and family, were the glue that held a community together. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that when you’re in a shitburg town like this and you want to find out what’s going on, you head for the local watering hole.
I’d counted three, so I knew a little trial and error was going to be involved. When you’re on foot, whether you like it or not, life gets linear. First one I came to was Freddy’s Timbertopper Tavern. Turned out to be the old man’s bar. The place you gravitate to when you don’t hear well enough to talk around the jukebox, and you don’t mind if the old woman comes with you, ’cause you no longer do anything she’d object to. I pulled open the door to find a room full of giveaway baseball caps advertising heavy equipment, chain saws and the ever-present John Deere tractor. I ducked back outside and kept walking.
Downtown Stevens Falls was decked out in its holiday finery, the hanging flower baskets replaced by Santas and reindeer and holly and mistletoe. Light posts were wound with red ribbon to simulate candy canes. Colored lights in the store windows. As I moved from store to store, I tried to work up a little holiday cheer, but I couldn’t push that burned-out car from my mind. Some perverse instinct kept asking me to imagine what J.D.’s last moments must have been like. The loudspeakers were having a “Holly Jolly Christmas.” I hummed along, but my heart wasn’t in it. Smack in the middle of town was the Stevens Falls Bar and Grille. Yeah, with an e at the end. Dead giveaway. A quick peek in the door confirmed my suspicion that the place had been urban-renewed. The butcher paper and the jars of crayons on the tables said it all. No…this wasn’t the place, either.
