“I might be guilty of a white lie there, but I was telling the truth about the pipes.” He opened a drawer in the desk and withdrew three pipes, setting them down, one after the other, on the oak surface.
“In the stories,” he said, “Holmes often smoked a briar”—he pointed to a straight-stemmed wood pipe—“or a cherrywood”—he pointed to a larger pipe with a burl bowl and a flat bottom. “He smoked one or the other when he was in the mood to talk, as you are, Mr. Johnson.”
“How do you know my name?” The voice was defensive.
Sean did not answer the question directly, but said, “I’ve been expecting you.”
A silence gathered in the room’s corners. Sean could hear the man’s intakes of breath.
“Aren’t you going to ask about the clay pipe?”
No reply.
“Holmes’s favorite,” Sean said. He picked up the third pipe and turned it in his fingers, then handed it to Johnson. “He saved it for times he was in a reflective mood, when he was trying to get to the bottom of something. If the mystery laid before him required a lot of thought, he called it a three-pipe problem. I don’t think we have a three-pipe problem here, two pipes at the most. Why don’t you tell me about it?”
Johnson set down the pipe. “Tell me something about myself. Isn’t that what Sherlock Holmes would do? Notice a speck of mud on a trouser cuff and deduce a man’s livelihood and where he’d been that morning and why?”
“Fair enough.” Sean leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head, a habit he’d picked up from Martha. “First,” he said, “the color of your cheeks and the white skin at your temples tells me you’ve had a shave and a haircut, and the length of your stubble suggests that it was directly after you came out of the mountains. You are trying to change your appearance. That means you weren’t just doing a bit of hunting. You were seen there by someone who might recognize you. It must have been under low light conditions. If he’d seen you in daylight, close up, or was someone you knew, a bit of barbering wouldn’t be much disguise. You’re wondering how I knew to come to your house and how much I know, and you’re afraid because whatever you got tangled up in is a serious business.”
Sean brought his hands back to the desk. “Those are the obvious deductions. Besides that, you play the piano and at least one stringed instrument, probably several, but including a violin or viola. My guess is the former. You had a dream once of being a famous musician, but settled for a career a few steps down from the top rung of the ladder. Still, it was a comfortable life until recently, when you suffered a reversal of fortunes that is causing your family a lot of stress.”
For a long moment the man sat in a stunned silence that seemed to echo. “My children knew I went into town to get a haircut,” he said in a small voice.
“I think that’s the least of it, don’t you? It’s why that matters. I know you want to tell me, and I can promise it will make you feel better afterward.”
“You can’t promise any such thing.”
“You’re right, I can’t. I gave your daughter one of my cards. Here is another.”
Sean penned a number on the back of the card that read USUAL SUSPECT INVESTIGATIONS. He pushed it across the desk. “That’s Martha Ettinger’s direct line. Do you know who she is?”
Johnson nodded.
“I work for her. You can verify with that number. You’ll be expected to make a full statement, probably to one of the sheriff’s deputies.”
“But . . . I don’t know anything. I mean, I’m just a hunter. What do you want from me?”
Sean looked at him, noticing a tremor in the fingers that had picked up the card. He didn’t look like a hunter, in his elbow-patch jacket, but that was Montana. Everybody hunted, the grandmother with the purple hair who hustled pool at the Depot, the barista at the Tree Line coffee shop with world-class dreadlocks tucked under a watch cap, the married gay-couple architects who had an office two doors down the hall.
Sean let the silence stretch. He felt a little guilty at the way that he was treating the man as an inferior. Sean prided himself on being a kind person; it was his stock-in-trade as an investigator and opened doors that otherwise might have stayed closed. But something about the man’s manner bothered him, and Sean found himself slipping into a part rather than being himself.
Johnson quit fiddling with the card and crossed his arms, his hands cupping his elbows. He feigned indignation at the thought that he had anything to do with anything.
“What I want from you, Leonard”—it was the first time Sean had used the man’s name and he drew out the word—“is the truth about your relationship with the woman who was living in the trailer. She’s dead, but I’m sure you know that. The sheriff will be making a public statement this afternoon. Whether she says the department is talking with a person of interest in the case who is being noncooperative, well, that’s up to you.”
“But I don’t know about a woman in a trailer. Yes, I saw it. You can’t help but see it, but there were no lights in the windows, no generator hum, no truck parked there, nothing.” His voice trailed away.
“If you had nothing to do with her, then why did you park in back of the trailer, where no one would see your truck?”
“How do you know—I mean, why do you say that? I parked farther up the road.”
“No, you parked behind the trailer. We read your license plate.”
“What are you talking about?” Again, the indignation, but an effort required. Sean watched as beads of sweat formed on the man’s temples.
“When you left Sunday morning, you backed into the snowbank trying to turn around. The raised letters on your plate were stamped against the snow. If you’d stopped the truck one inch short, ‘Maestro Five,’ you wouldn’t be sitting here getting an education about pipes.”
“Okay, okay. I was there. But what the hell? It was a place where the snow was beaten down. When I drove in, there were hunting rigs in the other good spots to park. I mean, swear to God. All I was doing was hunting—you got to believe me. I don’t know anything about this dead woman.”
“So you’ve said. But why lie about where you parked?”
“I didn’t. Okay, I was going to park there, but then I thought, whoever was with the trailer, they were probably out hunting somewhere else, up some other trailhead, and when they drove back, I’d be in their spot. So I turned around and left to park somewhere else. That must have been when the license plate hit the snowbank.”
Sean nodded, his expression agreeable, waiting. Give him time enough and he’d fill in the silence.
“I never even saw her. I thought it was hunters, you know, drove off somewhere to hunt.”
“Leonard . . .” Sean put disappointment into his voice.
“It’s the truth!”
Sean watched the hands clench together on his desktop. He noticed the short fingers that the daughter had mentioned as being her inherited curse.
“Come on. This isn’t a murder case. I’m just trying to piece together the last hours of a human being’s life. I need her name and I need to know how you knew her and what you know about Saturday night. Nobody has to make a house call and disrupt your personal life.”
“My wife doesn’t have to know?”
“Good chance, no. Not if you tell me the truth. She certainly will know if you don’t cooperate, or I have reason not to believe you’re telling the truth.”
“But I am telling the truth. I didn’t know she was dead. I thought maybe, okay, I don’t . . . I didn’t know what happened to her.” He hung his head and shook it. “Is it true? Did a . . . lion get her?”
Sean didn’t answer him.
“Where it dragged her, that’s tough country.”
“How do you know where it dragged her, if you didn’t follow it?”
“I could see a light. It was way up high, up on that ridge
that rises behind the trailer. She went out to get wood for the stove. And something, it . . . it just took her. I was going to report it, make an anonymous call, but I . . . it was too late. I mean, she couldn’t have survived.”
“Did you hear anything?”
“No, nothing. I just got worried when she didn’t come back.”
“So she left the trailer and when you went to look for her, you saw the light of her flashlight on the mountainside.”
“I think it was her. I don’t know what else it could be.”
“You were sleeping with her.” Sean made it a statement. He expected the man to hang his head or at the least not be able to hold his eyes. But here he was surprised.
“I won’t apologize for it,” he said.
CHAPTER NINE
Love on the Cusp of Nowhere
He’d met her in the Sleeping Bear Lounge, he said. Across the border in Last Chance, Idaho. Sean knew the place, a spacious log cabin with a center fireplace, a pair of Bernese mountain dogs named Mutt and Jeff who slept on a rug by the fire, a bar, and a cook-it-yourself grill. You grilled your hamburger patty, then ate it under the glassy stares of mounted game. There was even a ratty stuffed fox like you’d spot in an English pub. It was one of those optimistic operations that limp along for a few years but aren’t close enough to a ski resort to stay afloat during six months of winter. It would burn to the ground sooner rather than later, arson suspected. Collect the insurance and start all over somewhere else. Preferably warmer.
“Go on, Leonard,” Sean said. “Start from the beginning.”
Johnson said he’d been hunting up Mile Creek that morning and twisted his ankle and quit early. The bar was only a few miles away and there was a woman sitting on a stool. She was the only patron in the joint, had a beer on the counter. He’d stood her another, and she’d told him her name was Cheryl and that she was from Tucson, Arizona, but had grown up in Montana on the Flathead Reservation in St. Ignatius. She said no one in her genealogical tree ever owned up to having Indian blood, but she suspected she had some—people saw it in her cheekbones and the line of her chin. She had been visiting relatives and was on her way back south, trying to beat the first heavy snows because she didn’t have snow tires, and her truck had broken down and was being repaired in Ennis. In the meantime she’d been living in a trailer belonging to a friend. It was parked up in the Gravelly Range on national forest land. Did he know the Johnny Gulch Road, south of Ennis?
Johnson said he did, and after another beer he offered to drive her back there. He lived in Ennis. It wasn’t that far out of his way.
Sean interrupted the narrative. How did she get from the trailer to the bar if her truck was broken down? It was fifty miles away.
Johnson said she’d been hanging out with a friend in Last Chance, just up the road from the bar. The friend had a family emergency and had dropped her at the bar, didn’t know when she’d be coming back, and left her to the “kindness of strangers,” as she had put it to Johnson. She’d been hoping someone could give her a ride. He had come along. Her lucky day.
It had just the right touches of detail to be true, but Sean remained skeptical. He urged Johnson to continue.
Johnson shrugged. He’d driven her back to the trailer.
“When was this?” Sean asked.
“About eight p.m.,” he said. “Friday night.”
When he’d left the bar, or when he’d got to the trailer?
When he got there with her. They’d left the bar about six-thirty.
“So, her lucky day turned out to be your lucky night,” Sean said.
The man hung his head, then shook it minutely. “I’m not proud of it,” he said, “but you don’t understand my situation.”
He said Sean had been right about him suffering a reversal of fortune. His wife wouldn’t even sleep in the same room with him anymore. She looked at him like he was a stranger.
“I . . . I did something,” he stammered. “I mean no, I didn’t, but because she said I did, I lost my job. It was in the newspaper. Everybody knows.”
“Because who said?” Sean asked. “Your wife?”
“No, not my wife. It was a girl in the orchestra.”
Johnson said that he’d been giving the second-chair cellist private lessons at her home. He said he always made sure there was an adult in the house when he gave lessons, but this time her parents had to go somewhere and so they were alone. When the mother and father returned, the daughter told them that Johnson had touched her inappropriately, had reached across her body to demonstrate a bow position and pressed the back of his hand against her breast. The parents had filed a complaint with the principal.
Johnson opened his palms in a what-can-I-do gesture.
“I never so much as shook that girl’s hand,” he said. “I’m very careful about that kind of stuff.”
“Why would she say that if it didn’t happen?”
Johnson said it was to get back at him. The accuser had previously been the first-chair cellist. The girl who at the time was second chair had challenged her for her chair, and he had been the judge.
“I thought the second chair was better and jumped her to first,” he said. The girl who accused him resented the decision.
“She doesn’t know what it’s like to have a family that depends on you, how something like this can upend a man’s life.”
Sean vaguely remembered a newspaper story earlier that fall about the alleged misconduct.
Johnson shook his head when Sean mentioned the piece. The story had been kicked around the state in print and on air, and while it presented the accuser’s story, there was not one word about the competition for the chair. That was unfair. If people understood that she had a motive, maybe they would sympathize with him. But no, he was guilty because a girl who had an ax to grind said he was.
As a result, he’d been suspended from his job and become a pariah in the community. “My wife won’t look at me,” he pleaded to Sean. “Hell, she thinks I did it. Even G-Ma, she looks at me and shakes her head. ‘Oh, Lenny, how could you?’”
Sean read the defeat in his eyes.
“They used to call me ‘Maestro,’” Johnson said.
Now, he said, nobody would hold his eyes. So hell, yes, he’d taken some comfort when it was offered. His wife hadn’t expected him home until Sunday night, wouldn’t have cared if he walked off a cliff. Cheryl had told him it was scary to be alone out on the cusp of nowhere.
“That’s what she called it up there—‘the cusp of nowhere.’ We made our own world.”
Sean picked up the briar pipe and tapped it on the desk. “You spent Friday night with her. Tell me what happened Saturday.”
Johnson said they hadn’t done that much. Got up late. Made coffee. She had a book of crossword puzzles, surprised him by how good she was—politics, history, geography—he hadn’t expected that. When he’d said something about it, she said, Don’t judge a book by its cover. She told him that she’d majored in English at the University of Arizona and that she’d wanted to be a writer. But then she’d got tangled up with people she shouldn’t have, and dropped out of college, and the dream died. He had the impression that some of the things she’d done to get by, she’d been ashamed of. But they didn’t talk very much about her past. There was a wall there. She let you think you knew her but you didn’t, really. He didn’t even think that Cheryl was her name.
That afternoon, he told Sean, he helped her out with chores. Shoveled snow, split firewood, like that. They’d had a dinner Saturday evening that she cooked on the woodstove and then made love. Afterward she wanted a smoke, so they’d pulled on their boots and stood outside under the stars and passed a cigarette back and forth. She had on his jacket and looked dwarfed inside it. “Look at me,” she’d told him. “I’m almost gone.”
They’d turned in early and he’d lain awake a long time
after she fell asleep, thinking that her words were prophetic and that when he left the next day, he would never see her again. It made her the perfect affair, heaven while it lasted, then gone without repercussions. Only he didn’t see it that way. He saw it as a candle dying, a glimmer of light that would never brighten his world again.
He looked up at Sean, brought his forefinger up in front of his mouth, and blew on it. “Pfft.” He shrugged. “Gone like smoke. You don’t have to believe me, but you feel what you feel. ‘The heart is a hunter whose aim is true.’ Somebody said that. I don’t know who.”
“When did she leave the trailer?” Sean asked.
Johnson guessed about nine p.m. She’d told him she would get up in the night at least a couple of times to go to the bathroom or add wood to the stove, and shook off his offer to stoke the fire. The sheepherder’s stove could be tricky, she’d said, and she knew the tricks. So when he felt her shifting weight and awoke to the sound of the trailer door handle turning and the brief cold wind of the night as she stepped outside, Johnson thought nothing of it. He had drowsed, waiting for her to return, and then minutes later, it could have been longer, he came awake feeling the cold where she should be lying. He’d gone to the door and called out her name. It was snowing lightly and he got his flashlight and began to follow the depressions of her tracks. He came to the place where she had apparently fallen and saw a drag mark in the snow. He began to follow it and then, thinking he’d heard a noise, turned around and saw spots of blood that he had kicked up while following the trail. Just a few, but ruby red, nothing else it could be. He’d gone back to his truck and got his rifle and that’s when he saw the flicker of a light way up on the ridge. He saw that the light was moving and thought it must be a lost hunter. It couldn’t be her, could it? He tried to force his legs forward but couldn’t. Whatever had happened, he was too late to help, anyway.
At this point in the telling, he put his head in his hands and began to cry. Sean thought, He’s either told me the truth or he’s told the lie so often to himself that it has become the truth. He waited for the man to compose himself, and after a minute the breathing slowed and Johnson lifted his head.
The Bangtail Ghost Page 6
