Authors: Virginia Swift
Now they were getting somewhere. “Rope case?” she asked.
“On the professional circuit, team ropers, calf ropers, guys like that keep their ropes in a special case, a kind of round leather thing. You can buy ’em in a good ranch supply store, but some people get fancy designer ones.”
“I bet you guys take pretty good care of your stuff.”
Herman laughed. “Some do, some don’t. Me, for instance, I can’t stand anything out of order. Every jump— that is, every time I have to move to another town—I have this list I keep, and I inventory my stuff before I leave. But then, of course, some guys, for whatever reasons, couldn’t find their boots if their feet weren’t in ’em. And even then, some of those ones have problems with the feet!”
Sally laughed with him. She could think of one Montana cowboy whose feet had parted company with his boots one night long ago, over a hand of poker.
Herman smiled at her, and his damaged face took on a gentle glow that gave Sally a glimpse of what Brit saw in him, and reminded her, once more, of the power of cowboy sex voodoo. “For some of ’em it’s drinking or drugs makes ’em careless, but I guess some of it’s just human nature. My mom always said that if she went into a coma for twenty years and came out, and somebody took her to my house and Adolph’s, she’d be able to tell which was which by whether or not she had to use a shovel to get in the front door.”
“So can you tell when a cowboy’s young whether he’ll be more like you or more like Adolph?” Sally asked, abandoning the pretense of subtlety.
Herman finished his soda, crushed the can, looked Sally in the eye as he rose to go back to work. His eyes were still friendly, but now shrewd too. “Yeah. Can’t you?”
He nodded a farewell, the gesture of a man so used to a hat that even when he wasn’t wearing one, you had the impression he was tipping it. Gazing up at him, Sally was just trying to make up her mind whether to pursue him when she heard someone at her back say, “Hey, teacher!”
Of course it was Scotty Atkins, Pink Floyd aficionado, fresh from a day of putting the heat on young Jerry Jeff Davis. “So are you following your own advice, Scotty?” she said. “Shall we leave the kids alone?”
“Looks like everybody around here has something to do but you, Sally,” he said. “Want to go inside and get a beer?”
“That depends. When I leave here, I’m on my way over to pay a call on a kitten I rescued from an imbecile a couple of days ago. My friend Jerry Jeff is taking care of him. Do I want to be cold sober so I can take care of JJ?”
“If it were me,” Scotty said wearily, “I’d drink a fifth of something brown right about now. Then again, doesn’t matter if you’re knee-crawling or straight, he’s still a little squirrel, so why don’t we settle on beer?”
“Fine with me,” said Sally, “but given what you’ve presumably been doing to her boy, are you sure Delice will serve you?”
“I never heard of a businessperson who thought it was a good idea to refuse service to a cop,” Scotty answered.
“All the Langhams are unorthodox thinkers,” Sally countered, but he was already headed around the building, toward the front door.
Coming in from bright sun and heat and fresh air, Sally took some time adjusting to the dim bar light and the smell of old smoke and spilled beer. Some people liked the sensation of plunging fast into a cold dank pit, but that was one of the things that had always made her an indifferent afternoon drinker, even in her worst days. Scotty was standing at the bar, ordering for them. She found a tiny table in a corner past the dance floor, surrounded by empty tables, where there wouldn’t be any chance of anyone listening in on their conversation. Lucky for the detective, Delice was nowhere in sight.
When Scotty arrived with two Budweisers, she raised her eyebrows. “I’m taking the night off,” he explained. “I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I know when I’ve hit a brick wall. My brain needs to go off the clock.”
“So your interview with JJ wasn’t quite as productive as you anticipated?” Sally asked disingenuously.
For an answer, Scotty raised the bottle and drank half the beer in one swallow. “Well, I did learn one thing. That is his piggin’ string. Took him two hours to open up at all, but finally he allowed as how, yeah, his old one was missing, and actually, yeah, he had marked his rope with some red nail polish so he could identify it, and he had to admit that there was some red nail polish in the same pattern on the rope we had, so he guessed it made sense to suppose that thing probably did belong to him. But of course, he had no idea how it had come to be used in a murder. Said he’d had it with him when he went out to the fairground last weekend, but he explained in great detail that he doesn’t always keep an eagle eye on his gear. Claimed he didn’t check his stuff until Monday morning, when he discovered it was gone, and bought a new one.”
“Sounds reasonable to me. It’s not like he was in an airport or something, with somebody hollering over a loudspeaker every five minutes that you’re supposed to tightly control your belongings or else they’ll be taken off to a bulletproof chamber and incinerated.”
Scotty pounded down the rest of his beer, slammed the bottle on the table, and glared at her. “Don’t bait me. I’m doing the best I can. And you can quit protecting Jerry Jeff. After spending so much quality time with him, I confess I have a hard time imagining him doing what somebody did to Monette Bandy. You were right—he’s too much of an airheaded kid. But I’m telling you, he’s hiding something.”
“Did you have to spend extra time at police interrogation class to unearth that startling revelation?” Sally asked, ignoring his plea about baiting. “His mother told me as much this morning. That’s why I’m going over there to see him. Maybe he’ll talk to me.”
Scotty laughed bitterly. “Oh, definitely. I bet he’ll tell you all his secrets, right down to where he keeps his condoms and what girls at the high school he thinks might give him reason to use one. I wonder what it is about you that makes closemouthed people want to reveal their deepest hopes and fears and dreams. Your sensitivity? Your sweet temperament? Your global reputation for sitting quietly and listening to what other people have to say? Why, I myself can hardly control the urge to confess everything I’ve never told anybody, just in the hope of basking in your famous warmth and empathy.”
“Do you hate me?” Sally said softly.
“Hell no!” Scotty shot back, emphatic but turning the volume down. “You drive me nuts, that’s all. You seem to have this insane desire to do exactly what’s likely to get you in the most trouble. For instance, if JJ does know something the killer thinks might lead to him, and you make a big point of going over there and dragging it out of the kid, don’t you think it’s in the bad guy’s interest to stop you from pursuing things further? Or maybe just to stop Jerry Jeff from talking? Have you noticed that wherever you go, somebody else is at least a step behind you—sometimes a step ahead? Get out of my case, Sally. You’re going to get yourself hurt.” He tipped back his chair, stuck out his legs, dropped his chin on his chest, and blew out a big hard breath.
Sally gave him a long, long look. “You’re worried about me. That’s very sweet.”
“Shit,” said Scotty, closing his eyes.
“You can have my beer,” she told him, pushing the bottle over to his side of the table. “You look like you need it more than I do.”
He took it, drank.
And now she pressed her advantage. “So along with the piggin’ string, you got the rest of the state’s preliminary report, right?”
“You don’t exactly work your way up to things, do you?” His eyes were still closed.
“Not when there’s something I want. And I want you to tell me what’s going on, Scotty. I’ve got a right to know.”
“That’s debatable.”
“Don’t debate. Just tell me.”
He opened one eye. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before? Were you the one holding the rubber hose?” He put the bottle to his lips.
She leaned forward on her elbows, clasped her hands together, and for once, said nothing.
He put the bottle down and imitated her posture. “Okay. We got some prints off the Skoal can, very distinctive prints—the middle finger is missing the tip. Our print specialist happened to remember a similar set from a bull rider who got arrested here last year for firing his gun down on Ivinson Avenue after getting fueled up at the Buckhorn. We’ve been leaning on him, but he didn’t get into town until Monday morning, and he’s alibied for the afternoon. Had an early lunch right here at the Wrangler—the waitress remembered him because he stiffed her—and then checked into a motel, where he had to wait in the lobby while they cleaned a room. When they finally got a room ready for him, he went in and took a nap. The motel manager reported that his truck was in the parking lot the entire afternoon.”
Weird. “So how’d the can get up to the Devil’s Playground?”
“Interesting question. We also got some prints off that Marlboro package you put in your pocket. Some are yours, of course.”
“So how do you trace my prints?” Big Brother was watching.
“You have a Wyoming driver’s license?” Scotty replied.
“Ah.” Wyoming highways could use a little bit of Big Brother. “What about the others?”
He sighed, and leaned still further forward. And said in a low voice, “Belonged to Sheriff Dickie Langham.”
Sally just stared.
“We should have known, of course. You saw yourself how that foil top had been shredded. I’ve seen him do that a hundred times or more.” And now he polished off the second beer.
“You couldn’t possibly think . . .” Her head was spinning.
“I don’t. The sheriff and I have talked. Like our bull rider, Dickie also had lunch at the Wrangler about eleven o’clock on Monday—his usual Double Roundup Platter—and then came back to work. Our best guess is that our perp raided the garbage cans out back, left us a nice messy bogus trail to slow us down.”
“A litterbug!” said Sally.
She hated that. “Right. And if we find this joker, we’ll charge him with that too. Throw the book at him.” Scotty was almost smiling. Cops were great humorists.
“So . . . what about the autopsy report?” They were practically nose to nose.
“I really shouldn’t tell you any more, Sally,” he said. “This is the ugly part.”
“Tell me,” she said. “I can deal with it.”
He took a deep breath. “All right. I’ve gone this far down the road with you, God knows why. Must be that empathetic demeanor I mentioned before. Maybe it’s the brown eyes.”
Silent thunder rumbled. “Maybe that’s the beer. Go on, Detective.”
“Monette was shot with a .22 caliber pistol. In this state we’d call it a children’s gun.”
Sally shook her head.
“There was alcohol and marijuana in her bloodstream. The medical examiner determined that she had, indeed, had unprotected sexual intercourse sometime around the time of death. Not to put too fine a point on it, there was sperm in her vagina. But the physical evidence doesn’t tell us whether it was forced contact or not. There were rope abrasions on her wrists, but they weren’t bad enough that it appeared she struggled.”
“I don’t understand.” Sally was puzzled.
“It looks like the sex, anyway, could have been consensual. Some people don’t mind being tied up.”
“But you said before that it appeared she’d been assaulted,” Sally told him, pulling back.
“Most of us would consider getting shot to death an assault,” Atkins said, leaning back himself.
“You know what I’m talking about, Scotty. I don’t have to spell it out.” Acting brave, but dreading what he’d say next.
“No. But I bet you don’t really want to hear this,” he said.
“No, I don’t. Just say whatever you’ve got to say and let me worry about that.”
“You asked for it.” His eyes were almost transparent, frozen. “It’s impossible to tell whether the deposition of semen occurred before or after she was shot.”
“Oh. God.”
“That’s not all. Somebody—presumably the bastard who shot her—also penetrated her with some other object. The examiner found paint chips.”
Sally wished she had the beer Scotty had just finished. “Paint chips?” she echoed faintly.
“Like from a broomstick, or maybe a shovel. The medical examiner’s report can’t tell us jack about the time sequence of events. But one thing is pretty clear. We’re not dealing with a gentleman here. Now, does that give you some idea of why I wish to Christ you’d get a clue and leave this thing alone?”
She didn’t recall walking to her car. She was barely aware of sitting, for a long time, in the driver’s seat, her forehead on the steering wheel. After a while somebody knocked on the window—a stranger, a passerby, mouthing the words, “Are you all right?”
Sally nodded, mouthed back, “I’m fine,” though she was, it seemed, not up to actually speaking the words. The stranger looked concerned for a moment, then moved on.
If she’d been a Christian, she’d have headed for a church. If she’d been any kind of decent Jew, she’d have sought out a temple (not an easy thing in Wyoming). But being who she was, Sally took a deep, deep breath, closed her eyes, sent a fervent hope out to the cosmos, and turned on the radio.
The cosmos answered, in the gentle, wayward voice of Jerry Garcia. The guitar work was simple, lilting, reliable. The words offered solace, images of still water, invitations to reach out her hand and have her empty cup filled. Garcia, gone too soon across the Great Divide, had never in life known Sally Alder, but even now, he was wishing he could show her the way home. God knew he hadn’t died pretty. Almost nobody did. But here was his beautiful music. It was enough. It had to be enough.
By now, she thought, she’d heard the worst of what Scotty Atkins could tell. How could anything else she found be much more horrible than what she’d just learned? She was scared. Borderline petrified. But at the moment it was just as easy to worry about Jerry Jeff.
When she got to the house, Delice’s Explorer was parked in the driveway. Sally pulled the Mustang up behind. The front door was open, and through the screen she could hear screeching rock music, and even louder, Delice yelling at her son.
“You damn bonehead! What in holy hell makes you think burning something that smells like a cross between geranium death bomb and a junkyard fire will cover up the smell of weed? Goddamn it, JJ, talk to me!”
As she let herself in, Sally’s nose confirmed Delice’s impression. Jerry Jeff had indeed been burning quite a lot of extremely cloying incense. Of course, incense was nearly as old as fire, but in Sally’s youth, when millions of Americans had first begun to discover the pleasures of the recreational use of burning aromatics, there hadn’t been the varieties of incense there were now. You had your sandalwood, your jasmine, and your patchouli. Then as now, kids had thought incense burning a great device for masking the aroma of marijuana, which, of course, it had never been. Nowadays incense came in zillions of smells—everything from coconut to bat guano. JJ had chosen a fruity bouquet—wild strawberry? harvest peach? Sometimes consumerism wasn’t a good thing.
One look at Jerry Jeff told her that he was indeed good and stoned. He lay on the living room couch, red-eyed and giggling at his livid mother, stroking Mr. Skit-tles with one hand, eating a Kit Kat bar with the other. A music video blared from the television, and wadded-up candy wrappers lay heaped and scattered on the floor next to him. “You’re supposed to be at work, Ma,” he managed between bites and guffaws.
“And you’re supposed to have half a brain, goofball! Is this something you do all the time, or do you use illegal drugs only on occasions when the police already have you under suspicion?”
She picked up a magazine and whacked him upside the head. “Get up and get this mess cleaned up. Then go take a shower while I air the house out. Try to get a foot on the ground, boy. You’ve got some explaining to do.”
Sally could almost see the wheels turn in his skull as Jerry Jeff got to his feet, still cradling the cat. Pot paranoia warred with marijuana euphoria, and then the giggles were gone and he’d moved into sulky teen mode. “Give me a break, Mom. I mean, didn’t you and Sally and all your friends smoke pot? Didn’t Uncle Dickie do stuff that was even worse? What kind of hypocrite are you?”
“The kind that can kick your ass. Don’t start that shit with me, Jerry Jeff Walker Davis. Just because I killed a lot of brain cells, that doesn’t mean I have to like it when you start obliterating the few you’ve apparently got. I’m not taking the blame—I don’t buy your ‘Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Potheads’ crap. Now go get in the damn shower. Your taste in incense sucks.”
He slouched off then, but as he trudged up the stairs, Sally heard a chuckle escape him. It suddenly occurred to her that it might be a lot easier to get answers out of him stoned than straight. Whatever he’d been smoking, it looked as if it had been strong enough that a shower wouldn’t sober him up. If she could get Delice to cool down, he might say a lot more than he meant to.
Delice was slamming around, cussing and throwing windows open. Sally went over to the couch and began picking up candy wrappers. Did kids these days still call the stoner’s sugar binges “mad munchies”?
She wondered if what Jerry Jeff was hiding had anything to do with the fact that he was smoking dope.
“So is this the first time you’ve caught him getting loaded?” she asked gently.
“How could you tell?” Delice snapped back.
“Hey, I’d be pissed too. Especially given his situation with the cops.”
Delice stomped into the kitchen to open more windows. Sally followed. “So what are you going to do about it?”
“Oh, for starters, rip his room apart, find his stash, flush it, and then tear him limb from limb,” said Delice.
Sally nodded. “Sounds reasonable to me. Do you suppose he figured you’d be this furious if you found out?”
Delice pulled open a cupboard, found a glass, filled it with water, and drank it down. “No. I
suppose
he thought I’d be a hell of a lot madder even than I am. He knows what it’s like when I’m really in orbit.” And then she looked at Sally with misery in her eyes. “He’s all I’ve got.”
Sally’d never had kids, of course, but at that moment, looking at her dear old friend, she knew how children could shatter your heart. “He’s a good boy, Dee. A hard worker. He goes after what he cares about. He loves you.”
Delice was not one for crying, and as the tears came into her eyes, she flung them away with the sleeve of her satin cowboy shirt. “I know. I just don’t get this. What’s wrong with him?”
Sally didn’t want to upset her more by being too nice. Then again, the woman obviously needed comforting. Sally obliged, and for a long moment they stood in the kitchen clinging to each other. “Maybe,” Sally said softly, “it’s just this. Just the reefer. If he expected you to go nuclear on him, maybe that’s what he’s been hiding from you, from the cops. As you so kindly pointed out to him, doing dope is illegal. He’s only fourteen. It probably looks like a pretty big deal to him. Maybe that’s all there is to it. It’s a place to start, anyhow.”
The hug had helped. They sat down at the kitchen table. “Think back, Dee. Remember when we were getting wasted? I seem to recall stoned conversations that went in a hundred different directions. Maybe they were a little light on coherence, but we covered a lot of ground. Put him at ease. Make him feel like you’re on his side. If you don’t holler him deaf and dumb, I bet he’ll talk.”
Delice put her elbows on the table, and rested her chin in her hands. “Are you suggesting that I take advantage of his intoxicated state to worm information out of him?”
“Exactly,” said Sally.
“Well, in that case, maybe you’d better stick around and help him relax. He does think you’re cool.”
“Of course he does,” Sally said. “I am cool.”
“For someone old,” Delice added.
Sally gave her a baleful stare.
Ten minutes later Jerry Jeff walked into the kitchen, hair wet and shoulders damp under his white T-shirt, handsome, vulnerable, spacy, and contrite. “I’m sorry, Ma,” he said. “Really, really sorry. I don’t want to make you mad or sad.”
That was all it took. Now they were on his side.
“Oh God, Jaje,” Delice said, rising and wrapping her arms around him, heedless of more dark water spots spattering her shiny shirt. “Just tell me what’s going on. Let me help.”
“You know, JJ,” Sally put in softly, “nobody’s going to lock you up for smoking marijuana. Your uncle’s got lots better things to do with his time and his jail. Just for the moment, let’s not worry about what doing drugs is doing to you, and talk about something a little different.”
Jerry Jeff looked relieved and confused. “Yeah. What do you mean?” He sat down. There was a bowl of fruit on the table. He couldn’t help himself; he reached out and snagged a banana.
Delice started right in. “How long,” she began, working very hard at keeping her voice steady, “have you been getting high?”
Thickly, through a mouthful of banana, he replied, “I just started in the spring. I haven’t done it that often, Mom, I swear. This is the first time I’ve ever bought it myself.”
Before Delice could push further, Sally kicked her under the table. “Okay, JJ—so you’re telling us this isn’t a habit with you.”
He finished the banana in three bites. “No. It’s just kind of something I’ve done for fun now and then. Lots of kids at Laramie High get stoned every morning before school, but I never did anything like that. Just weekends and stuff. It relaxes me.”
“What the hell do you need relaxing from?” Delice exclaimed. “You’ve got a roof over your head, all you can eat—”
“Mom, please,” he said.
“Yes, Delice, please,” Sally added, then turned back to Jerry Jeff. “I can understand. You’ve spent the week working and rodeoing. There’s been a death in the family, and everybody’s upset. The police have been hassling you. It’s Friday afternoon. I can see why you’d feel like doing a number and kicking back.”
Jerry Jeff rolled his eyes. “Doing a number?”
“Old,” Delice told Sally. “Not cool.”
“Okay. Anyhow, JJ, what I’m trying to say is that we’ve got some notion of how you’re feeling. And even if your mom busted you, she’s not going to make a federal case out of it.”
“No,” Delice agreed, “but I am going to ask you to hand over all your stuff, and I’m going to get rid of it.”
“I know,” Jerry Jeff said, reaching in his back pocket, pulling out a rolled baggie full of dried green vegetation and setting it on the table. “I figured you would. This is all there is, I swear it.”
Delice picked up the bag, opened it, took a whiff, nodded. “You haven’t been doing any other drugs?” she asked.
JJ shook his head. “Just weed. I know people who do all kinds of stuff, but I’m not into it. Seriously, Mom, you’ve gotta believe me.” Mr. Skittles, toenails clicking on the kitchen floor, approached Jerry Jeff and then sprang into his lap. Kitten sympathy.
“What other drugs do they do?” Delice pursued.
The boy looked troubled. “Probably anything you can think of, and some things you never heard of.”
“How do they get it?” Sally wanted to know.
He looked at her as if she were an idiot. “How do you think? Look, I don’t want to get anybody in trouble. Let’s just leave it at me, okay Sally? I gave my mom everything I have, and I promise not to do it again. Isn’t that enough?”
“All right. We’ll leave it at you. Where’d you buy this lid?” Delice zipped the baggie closed and put it back on the table.
And now, for the first time, the boy looked like he was thinking about crying. “Do I really have to say?”
His mother took his hands. “Yes, honey, you do. I need to know.”
He looked at the table, struggled with his composure, and ultimately lost. One choked sob. Silence. They waited. When he raised his eyes, Sally thought she’d never seen anybody look that unhappy. “I bought it from Monette.”
Sally and Delice exchanged anxious glances. Neither was surprised, but it wasn’t reassuring news. “When?” Sally asked.
“Last weekend. She met me out at the fairgrounds.”
Too far to walk. And Scotty had said that Monette’s car wasn’t working. “How did she get out there?”
“A guy drove her.”
Sally had some sympathy for Scotty Atkins—JJ wasn’t giving up any more than he had to, one morsel at a time. Then again, Scotty himself wasn’t exactly Mr. Tell-all. “Who, Jerry Jeff? Who drove her?”
“Come on, it doesn’t matter . . .” he tried.
“Forget it, JJ. It does. I’ve had just about enough teenager crap. Who was with Monette at the fair-grounds?” Delice said.
He mumbled the name.
“I’m not sure I heard you right. Speak so I can understand.” His mother was beyond cutting him an iota of slack.
“Adolph, Adolph Schwink, okay? I’ve roped with his brother Herman.”
As Sally had expected. “Do you think she was getting her drugs from him?” Sally asked.
Jerry Jeff shrugged. “She didn’t say. I didn’t ask. He was just there, kind of hanging around.”
“Tell us exactly what happened. Everything, Jerry Jeff. And don’t make me have to drag it out of you one piece at a time.”
He peeled another banana. “Okay. Exactly what happened.” He chewed a large chunk of banana, swallowed. “Could I get something to drink, Ma?”
Delice poured a glass of milk and set it in front of him, scowling.
“Thanks. So let’s see . . .” He looked down at the kitten, at his hand caressing its fur.
“Stay on track, kid,” said Sally, sensing that his brain might be slipping out of gear. She gritted her teeth and pushed on. “What happened when Monette and Adolph came to the fairgrounds?”
“Oh. Oh yeah. Well, it was last Saturday. I was out there getting some practice in, and checking out the stock. They showed up just as I was finishing. That guy Adolph was driving, a little red Japanese car of some kind—I didn’t pay too much attention. We went out to the parking lot out front, and sat in the car. Monette rolled a joint, and we smoked it. We got pretty wasted.” The milk had disappeared. Two banana peels lay flat on the table. Mr. Skittles was asleep. Jerry Jeff eyed an apple in the fruit bowl.
“Keep going,” said Delice, handing him the apple.
He took a bite, chewed, swallowed. “Well, then they wanted me to show them around, so we kind of wandered around the stock pens and the arena and the waiting areas and all that. I don’t remember, exactly. We were pretty messed up.”
Sally was getting hungry watching him power through every edible item in sight. “All right. I want you to think hard, JJ. Where was your gear while you were showing them around?”