Bad Company (30 page)

Hawk looked like he was about to grab Sheldon again. Sally put a warning hand on his shoulder.

He took a steadying breath. “If Molly buys the place, she’ll be the one doing the drilling and drinking. And if the state does ever decide to do anything to clean up the mess, she’ll be liable for at least part of the cost of the cleanup. The money your partners are paying her—well, that’ll be a drop in the bucket, so to speak.”

“Three things,” said Sheldon, holding up three fingers as if Sally and Hawk were idiots or freshmen. “First, the state reports are certainly open to interpretation— they’re models of nature, human creations, not things that exist in nature. Virtual reality, if you will, and a decidedly different virtual scenario from the one Marsh Carhart has constructed, using his own scientific methods. Scratch the surface of science, and you find— voilà!—scientists arguing.”

“Where I come from,” Hawk said quietly, “we resolve this kind of dispute by trying to figure out who’s wrong. Or in some cases, who’s lying.”

Sheldon ignored the challenge. “Second, the money our group has offered Molly Wood will leave her, and her descendants, extremely wealthy. Whatever the hydrologists may have reported, the state is unlikely to move any time soon, so even if there is a problem, which I doubt, the question of liability is unlikely to arise.

“Third, Molly Wood has lived a long, full life, but she is even now showing signs of failing health. Even if you grant the proposition that she will build a house up at Happy Jack, and that any well she digs up there might not provide optimal water, the effects on her health are unlikely to matter much.”

Hawk gaped. He had gone far beyond angry, into astounded. “No liability? Health effects that don’t matter?”

The devil wore a brown mustache, a wine-stained T-shirt, cutoff blue jeans, black socks, and walking shoes. Verbosity was his weapon of choice. “Let me put this as simply as possible,” Sally said. “Don’t you think you have an obligation to tell Molly about the problems with this land?”

For once Sheldon gave it to them straight. “No,” he said. “And I’d suggest that the two of you stay out of what’s not your business.”

Chapter 28
Jubilee Saturday Night

“I completely underestimated the slimy little fucker,” said Hawk, on the drive home.

“At the same time,” Sally mused, “I wonder what Molly’s thinking? She must suspect that the other guys know they’re offering tainted goods.”

“One way or the other, it seems she hasn’t signed off on the deal yet. She’s holding back,” Hawk said.

Sally considered. “You know what really pisses me off?”

Hawk cocked an eyebrow. “How long is this going to take?”

“No, seriously. It’s that Sheldon’s not totally wrong about things. The world is an uncertain, mixed-up place. We do spend a lot of time and energy trying to make things that are, on some level, crazy, appear normal and natural and inevitable. Places and people are never what they appear to be,” Sally reflected.

“But that doesn’t mean that a guy like Sheldon has the right to go around acting like a smug, self-absorbed ass-hole, all the while hosing anybody he chooses,” Hawk pointed out. “And he’d be just as much of an asshole if, instead of making everything as complicated as possible, he believed in idiotically simple causes. It’s not what he thinks, or even the incredible crap that comes out of his mouth. It’s what he
does
. He’s venal and maybe criminally irresponsible.”

Sally thought that one over. “Do you think Dwayne and Nattie know about the groundwater?” she asked.

“Impossible to tell. Hell, maybe they just don’t care. Maybe it’s all just money to them.”

What a depressing thought. It wouldn’t surprise Sally to find out that Nattie knew she was brokering a toxic deal—knew, and didn’t give a good goddamn. Sally had been acquainted with Natalie Charlay Langham for twenty years. Nattie had proven, time and again, that her emotional range stretched from pure malice to mild self-interest, by way of lust. Nattie’s callous response to Monette’s murder was only the latest evidence of exactly how shallow Nattie’s compassion ran. Sheldon Stover didn’t seem to be worried about the prospect that an old lady, or anybody else, might end up drinking from a poisoned well. Why expect more from Nattie?

But what about Dwayne? Sally had never had reason to believe that Dwayne was dishonest, or fickle, or even irresponsible in any way. A little fussy—priggish, at times—and evasive, maybe, but not without scruple. Sure he was a banker, but that wasn’t prima facie evidence of moral delinquency.

But Dwayne Langham, as Sally had known for years, was a puzzle. He wore his life like a suit with a dozen hidden pockets. She’d never know one-tenth of what went on behind his mild eyes, but she’d seen for herself how he could tuck his troubles away and turn himself into nothing more than a medium for music. Could he do that with money?

Memories flashed through her mind—a night when Nattie had followed Dwayne into the Wrangler, screaming and spitting and slapping at him, while he pleaded with her to calm down. Another night, when Branchwater had played a gig at the Medicine Bow Lodge. Everybody else saw a blizzard coming, and decided to get a head start on the sixty-mile drive up into the mountains, but Dwayne had to close up the guitar shop and couldn’t get out of town until almost dark. It had started to snow shortly after he’d left Laramie, and Dwayne had finally made it to Medicine Bow around ten-thirty, battling two broken tire chains and windshield wipers that had quit working somewhere around Bosler. Fighting a whiteout, he’d spun off the road into the ditch, flagged down a passing truck, gotten himself towed out, and kept on driving.

And no matter what Dwayne had just been through, he stepped up on stage as if nothing had happened, and played his music as if nothing else in the world existed. In honky-tonks all over Wyoming, Sally Alder had heard what Dwayne Langham’s fingers could do with the strings of a pedal steel guitar, and known what it must be like to hear the lifted voices of the heavenly host.

If she was really going to get up and sing tonight, she’d have to stand by Dwayne’s side, and follow Dwayne’s example, even as she was wondering whether he deserved to be behind bars. She’d need to leave herself behind and step into an alternative universe.

Sally had a trunk she used as a bedside table. She cleared off the lamp, the alarm clock, the clutter of books and paper, and opened the latches. Right on top, carefully wrapped in tissue and packed in plastic dry cleaner’s bags, were the pieces of her Rose of Cimarron suit. Mid-calf red wool skirt with matching tight-waisted jacket, fringed at the sleeves and embroidered, on the lapels and skirt, with big blooming American Beauty roses. Stiff-collared white poplin blouse. High-button black boots. She’d bought the antique outfit long ago at a pricey vintage clothing store in Berkeley, blowing the whole paycheck she’d earned for a month-long stand at a shit-kicker joint in Hayward. She’d never spent that much on clothing in her entire life; she couldn’t remember ever wanting anything more.

It was a costume, pure and simple. The kind of thing that every woman in country music, Kitty or Loretta or Dolly or Tanya, Emmylou, Reba, Mary Chapin, or Faith, would put on, step onstage, and feel like she was the Queen of the Opry.

But the prize of the collection was the hat—a flat-brimmed, black felt number with a wide band and a slide chin strap, in nearly mint condition. She’d found it in its original Montgomery Ward box, labeled “Our Cowboy Hat, 1907,” one long-ago summer when some lovesick South Dakota boy had taken her exploring through the buildings of a ghost town that hadn’t yet been discovered by historic preservation. Our Hat fit perfectly.

She hadn’t put on the suit since the mid-eighties. It hadn’t been her style in an awfully long time. Since her golden heyday as a honky-tonk woman. It was a little tighter in some places, a little looser in others, and on the whole, absolutely over the top. In the old days, her nearly black hair would have hung halfway down her back. Tonight, silver threaded freely through the dark, and her hair barely reached her shoulders. Her lips were a little thinner, her hips, well. Her eyes were still brown, steady, and clear.

All in all, owning up to who she was and who she’d become, older, to be sure, but not bad.

“So what do you wear under all that?” asked Hawk. “Silk stockings and satin garters, one hopes.”

“One may keep hoping,” Sally said primly, adjusting the chin strap so that her hat hung down her back, and admiring Hawk’s simple approach to cowboy dressing: Levi’s, boots, a white shirt, a belt with a Navajo silver buckle. “I’ve got a job to do.”

By the time Sally and Hawk arrived at the Wrangler for the Millionaires’ sound check, there were already dozens of early party-goers milling around. Technically, Delice’s Jubilee Saturday Night was a private party, admission by hundred-dollar ticket only. The ticket entitled the holder to all the booze she cared to swill, along with a barbecue buffet a notch above the Wrangler’s usual fare, not to mention the fabulous live music. Invitations to buy tickets had been sent out to pretty much everybody the Langhams knew in town, which meant pretty much everybody. People who weren’t interested in partying in the bar (like Maude Stark, or Molly Wood) didn’t attend, but bought tickets anyway. Delice donated the place and the food, covered her costs on the drinks, and got her brother’s aging but entertaining hobby band to play for free. The rest of the proceeds from this year’s party would benefit the shelter. Hundreds of people would show up before the night was over, bringing in thousands of dollars for women and children who needed all the help they could get.

It was a night, as they said in Wyoming, to get Western with it. Beginning with the band, everybody in the place had taken the occasion to dig out his cowboy finest. Dwayne, Sam, and the rest of the boys wore matching black and tan Western suits reminiscent of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys—where they’d found the suits, Sally couldn’t imagine. Delice wore a dress modeled on a frontier cavalry officer’s uniform, midnight blue with a yellow neckerchief, a double row of brass buttons down the front, a silver concho belt three inches wide, and her usual subtreasury of bangles, dangles, and rings. Nattie had gone for the gunslinger look, black leather from head to toe and even a hip-slung holster, aiming at Johnny Cash but hitting a mark somewhere to the right of Joan Jett. When she made her entrance, Sally was talking to the bartender. Delice was on her way to the buffet table with a giant bowl of potato salad the exact color of her neckerchief, but she detoured, put the bowl down on the bar, and held out her hand. “No guns,” she said shortly. “Give it here.”

Nattie clucked her tongue. “Yeah, Delice. I’m a mortal danger to everybody here,” she said, unsnapping the tooled leather cover and pulling her weapon, which turned out to be a chrome and plastic Mattel cap pistol of precisely the type Sally’s brothers had begged for, and gotten, on a Christmas morning somewhere back in the Kennedy administration.

“Didn’t anybody ever tell you that playing with guns is stupid?” Delice asked.

“You really want to make a big thing of this?” Nattie retorted, with what seemed to Sally more heat than the situation warranted.

“Jeez, Nattie, chill out,” Sally said, wanting to ask about the land swap, but figuring that Nattie was too testy at the moment to talk real estate. Instead she turned to Delice. “Give her a break, Dee. If she wants to play with her toys, let her. You’ve got potato salad and baked beans to haul. Come on, I’ll help.”

“I don’t like this,” Delice grumbled. “If I let her keep her little popgun, what happens when some big yay-hoo with a .357 magnum comes in here and complains about unequal treatment?”

“Relax. People are here to eat and drink and dance, not shoot the place up. Take your boyfriend Marsh Carhart, for example,” Sally said, sneering and inclining her head toward the other end of the bar, where Carhart stood with Sheldon, who was wearing a polo shirt with a red bandana tied around his neck, and pounding down whatever red wine the Wrangler, in its wisdom, was pouring. In a black slouch hat and a heavy canvas cowpuncher’s duster, Carhart was smiling his most engaging, boy-screen-idol smile and sipping his Stoli. “He’s gonna be hot as hell in that duster.”

“He’s not my boyfriend, but he did buy ten tickets,” said Delice. “He can get as hot as he wants.”

At last it was time for the music. Any other night of the year, the Millionaires liked to mix in lots of rock and blues, soul and jazz, and even a touch of salsa. On Jubilee Saturday Night, they kept it in the country vein. It wasn’t monotonous—they did everything from Western swing to bluegrass, gospel, hillbilly music, and Southern California country-rock, Texas outlaw, Parrothead pop, and Nashville classics. They could swing it, rag it, stride it, or paint it blue, but whatever it was going to be, they were going to do it country. They fired right up with “Hey, Good Lookin’ ” and never looked back. Neither did the crowd. From the moment Dwayne counted them off and let a pedal steel lick fly, the dance floor was packed.

Halfway through the first set, Sally saw Brit push her way up to the stage, dragging Herman Schwink behind her. Both looked distraught. Brit was making it plain, over the music, that she needed to talk to Sally. “On the break,” Sally mouthed, refocusing her concentration on Sam Branch, who was flat-picking the hell out of Doc Watson’s “Tennessee Stud” and expecting her to come back in with a harmony on the chorus. Neither Brit nor Herman was dressed for the occasion—Brit wore shorts and a tank top, and Herman looked to be wearing the same clothes he’d roped in that day at the rodeo. Hmm.

Never had a set seemed so long to Sally. She sleep-sang her way through “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad,” managed to do her bit on four more songs, and sighed with relief when they finally polished off the last hell-bent note of “The Race Is On” and Sam announced, “Y’all come back in fifteen minutes.”

“What what what, Brit?” Sally asked as she stepped off the stage. Brit grabbed her by the arm and hauled Sally away, Montgomery Ward hat bouncing against her back. “Can I at least get a drink on the way to hearing what you have to say?”

“This is important, Sally,” Brit insisted, but Sally strode purposefully to the bar and made Brit and Herman wait while she got a whiskey. She spied Hawk by the pool table, leaning on a cue, a Budweiser longneck dangling from two fingers, and gave him a wave. He smiled.

Brit, out of patience, pulled her toward the back of the bar, shoving past Dwayne and Nattie, who were drinking shots of Cuervo, and Marsh Carhart, still in the duster but not sweating visibly—Joe Cool. Finally Brit pushed her through the swinging doors to the back, past a broom closet, and into Delice’s office, Herman bringing up the rear. “We need privacy.”

“This has to do with your brother Adolph, I assume?” Sally asked Herman.

“Yes, ma’am. He’s still down at the sheriff’s. Seems they want to take their time getting a statement from him.”

Sally flopped down into Delice’s desk chair, winced as she nearly crushed the hat, flung it out of harm’s way, and leaned back again, taking a sip of her whiskey. “Did he kill Monette?” she asked, although she knew Adolph’s alibi was tight.

“No ma’am!” Herman exclaimed, turning red. “The thing is, it looks like he knew her a whole lot better than he was letting on before,” he admitted.

But Sally had been aware of that fact ever since she’d stood in the produce aisle, cradling an overloaded basket of fruit and eavesdropping on a conversation that was very much none of her business. “Brit told me about the day Monette was killed. And it appears she was with him at least one time when he was selling marijuana. I take it they had an ongoing thing of some kind?”

Herman swallowed. For a big, strong cowboy, he looked like he might cry any minute. “From what he told me this afternoon, they started up right after she came into town. She was lonesome, I guess, and, well, even though my brother likes to make out that he’s some red-hot lover or something, he’s never had all that much luck with the ladies. From the sound of it, they were both kind of ashamed of what they were doing, so they hid it. But I guess there was a lot to hide. They snuck off every chance they could.”

Second oldest story in country music: cheatin’ hearts. But was it really cheating if neither of them had anything else going? Or did the cheating start when Monette came on to every loser who walked through her checkout line? Or when Adolph said mean things about Monette to other people? Or not until the moment when Monette went off with some other guy?