Authors: Virginia Swift
She understood self-interest, but could people really be this callous? Maybe Maude had a point. Sally took a sip of cappuccino, and tasted rage. Poor Monette. She’d been nothing but a transient and a loser, and her death was barely a blip on the screen. If the
Boomerang
was any evidence of anything, the town’s boosters were more worried about maintaining the festival atmosphere, and the accompanying profit potential, than about the brutal snuffing out of a fellow human, a pathetically exploitable young woman, a neighbor. It was disgusting. What if, instead of Monette, one of the rodeo princesses had been raped and murdered? Sally bet the
Boomer
would’ve paid attention.
Boy howdy.
If she had anything to say about it, she vowed as she drank the last, rich, dreg-free swallow from her cup, they wouldn’t bury Monette Bandy so damn deep and easy.
Just her luck. Sally arrived at Dickie and Mary’s at the very moment that Nattie Langham was pulling up in front, taking up two parking spaces with her big, shiny four-wheel-drive Cadillac Escalade, an automobile name that always gave Sally the appalled giggles. Sally had been known to covet a fully loaded off-road unit or two, but down deep, she held it as an article of faith that the luxury sport utility vehicle was a multiple oxymoron, designed chiefly to swill gasoline and impress other people who had more money than sense. She could just imagine what would happen to Nattie’s deep pile carpet and leather upholstery if she were ever compelled to actually take that Escalade on a Wyoming dirt road in the rain. How much good would the satellite navigation system be, wallowing down a gully-rutted track fast turning bottomless, ending up hub-deep in red gumbo? Then again, how much good would Nattie’s stiletto heels be when she had to walk out for help?
But today Nattie had put aside the spike pumps for bright turquoise lizard cowboy boots, with toes pointy enough to skewer the most active cockroach scurrying into the least accessible corner. The boots matched a new turquoise cowboy hat festooned with a whole pheasant’s worth of feathers, a sleeveless Western shirt in the same color with white silk fringe dangling fetchingly from the front and back yokes, white jeans tight enough to leave no doubt about what Nattie wasn’t wearing underneath, cinched up with a black leather belt with a solid gold reproduction of a championship rodeo buckle. She was also wearing a button bearing the message, “We’re the Real Deal, Podner”—the company slogan for Branch Homes on the Range. Just your typical cowgirl drag.
Nattie was giving the seams of her jeans a stress test, trying to haul an industrial-size coffee urn out of the back of the Escalade. The coffeepot had gotten jumbled up with all the other junk she kept in the car. Most Wyomingites did, of course, keep emergency equipment in their vehicles. Every fall Sally outfitted the trunk of her Mustang with a winter supply box that held tire chains, a quart of antifreeze, a scraper, window de-icer, a whisk broom for sweeping snow off the windows, a flashlight with spare batteries, a sleeping bag, some highway flares, and a first aid kit. Year-round she carried water (frozen solid all winter, of course), a shovel, a couple of boards, and jumper cables. The toolbox in the back of Hawk’s old Ford pickup contained a slightly more elaborate set of gear since he did so much off-road driving, out in the field. It made sense to be prepared.
Hawk, like most people in the state, also kept a loaded gun in his vehicle; in his case a Smith and Wesson .38 in the glove box. Sally made a point of not keeping a gun of any kind, anywhere. Those of her Wyoming friends who knew about her eccentric weaponlessness considered it a delusional vestige of sixties liberalism.
The stuff in the back of Nattie’s Escalade was, well, the escalated version of anybody’s emergency kit. Three gallons of antifreeze. A propane torch. A Coleman lantern. An assortment of different-size boards, a sawed-off broom, and not one but two shovels. Not just tire chains, but a tow chain, a saw, and enough rope to pitch a circus tent. If the visible stuff was any indication, Nattie probably had a howitzer in her glove compartment. Judging by everything she’d accumulated in the back, you’d think Nattie was a maniac lumberjack, heading out to pull stumps in the dead of winter. But in fact, in an automotive crisis, Sally couldn’t imagine Nattie hefting anything much heavier than a cell phone to call the Triple A. She’d never risk one of her famous fingernails.
Today, Sally noticed as she parked and went to help, the nails were bright orange with white diagonal pin-stripes. The orange matched Nattie’s hair, which would probably never be permitted to develop either stripes or whiteness. Knowing that the day would go worse for them all if Nattie experienced so much as a chip in her manicure, Sally dislodged the spigot of the coffeepot from under the broom handle, found the big lid wedged between the torch and a leaky five-gallon water jug, retrieved the innards of the pot from the tangle of shovels and broom and damp, muddy ropes and chains. “You ought to clean out for the summer, Nat, or at least hose this shit down,” Sally said, surprised to find evidence that somebody had actually had the Escalade out on the dirt, sometime since the day it had rolled off an assembly line in Mexico or Canada (buy American!).
“Oh crap, that’s Dwayne’s problem,” said Nattie, picking up the coffeepot without bothering to thank Sally for helping. “He’s the one that said he wanted me to get the Escalade, for safety reasons. He’s so worried about me, afraid I’ll be out in some new development or showing a ranch sometime and end up in the ditch. He just loads the back up with everything he thinks I could possibly need. I think there’s a case of Spam buried in there somewhere, if I’m stuck for a month and need survival rations. Or at least that’s what he tells me. Then he borrows it all the time to go fishing, and I end up having to drive around in his little-bitty Beamer—like, how safe is that if I’m broadsided by some goombah in a monster truck?”
Sally shook her head. “Yeah. That really does suck.”
Nattie missed the irony. “I guess!” she said, sighing as they walked up to the door and rang the bell. “I really hope this Monette thing doesn’t mess up Jubilee Days.”
Sally chose to act as if she hadn’t heard. With what the Langhams had to face in the next few days, it wouldn’t be fair to anyone to have to open the door this morning and find Sally socking Nattie on the nose.
Brit Langham answered the door, and Sally half wished she’d gone ahead and done the clobbering. Brit would have appreciated it, for one thing. For another, Sally liked the idea of doing something that might get a reaction out of the Langham family’s most blasé member. Sally would never have predicted that she’d have to come to Wyoming to understand the meaning of “sangfroid,” but the term must have been invented for Brittany Langham. In the two years that Sally had been back in Laramie, she’d often amused herself watching Brit fail to react to things that turned other people into hysterics. On those occasions Sally recalled Dorothy Parker’s famous remark about Katharine Hepburn’s acting running the gamut of emotions from A to B. Sally had once seen Brit moved nearly to C, but that was a life and death matter.
At twenty-three, Brit was blessed with a supermodel body, ash-blond hair and aquamarine eyes, and the kind of lips that made a disinterested pout a weapon of mass destruction. Men tended to assume that anyone that beautiful must be stupid, and Brit always used their pathetically false assumptions to her advantage. She was headed for law school at the University of Wyoming in the fall, and Sally got positively gleeful contemplating what would happen to the first fool who faced Brit across a courtroom.
“I’ll take that,” Brit said, relieving Nattie of the coffee urn and holding the door open. “Looks like we’re gonna need it. We’ve had, like, sixty calls already, maybe half of them from people who say they’ll be bringing a coffee cake by. Maude says she’s already baked four loaves of pumpkin bread and a plum kuchen. Now all we need is ten pounds of coffee.”
“Somebody else can do that,” said Nattie, sweeping past Brit. “I’ve done my part.”
“I’d be glad to get coffee and whatever you all need, later,” Sally said. “I don’t mind.”
“She borrowed the pot from her office,” Brit whispered to Sally. “Big deal.”
“You might want to run some water and baking soda through it,” Sally advised, making a face. “I saw the inside, and I’d bet that nobody at Branch Homes on the Range has washed that sucker out since private property was invented.”
“I’d better get to it, then,” Brit said. “We’ve been telling people not to come until later this afternoon, but it hasn’t been easy fighting them off. A lot of them aren’t even really friends of Mom’s. I don’t know why the hell they think they should barge in.”
Sally narrowed her eyes. “Most of ’em are well-intentioned. But then again, some people in Laramie would have been great in Victorian London. They’d have made a point out of getting to public executions early so they’d get a front row seat for the hanging.”
Sally entered to the sound of the ringing telephone. So far, however, only the family had arrived. Mary, eyes red but dry, sat on the couch, next to Delice. Neither of them was dressed for mourning. Mary wore loose black-and-white print pants with a matching short-sleeved tunic top, the kind of outfit she’d wear to her job as a secretary in the College of Education, comfortable but presentable daywear for a middle-aged woman who’d given up on the battle of the bulge. Delice was attired for business too, but her job had a different dress code, especially this week. She wore a cream-and-brown Western shirt, a pair of form-fitting Levi’s, her thousand-dollar Charlie Dunn boots, and enough silver jewelry to keep the Navajo economy afloat on her purchases alone. She looked distressed but great as she always had, trim and wiry, long black hair in a fat braid fastened with a carved silver clip. Obviously, she was planning to go from Dickie and Mary’s straight to work at the Wrangler.
Mary probably didn’t plan to go in to work today, but everybody else was obviously taking the morning off from their jobs. Sally herself had planned to catch up on some of that backlog of scholarly reading, and was feeling secretly guilty for having put the work aside. Brit, who’d sworn that, as God was her witness, she’d never waitress again, was wearing a long flowered skirt and tailored white shirt—Sally surmised that she must have been pressed into service as an extra hostess at the Yippie I O. Nattie’s costume, ridiculous as it was, was supposed to make her a walking billboard for Branch Homes on the Range. She was already on her cell phone, calling into her office to check for messages, rescheduling appointments, chatting up clients. Dwayne walked in, making a concession to the rodeo in a Western-cut jacket instead of his usual banker’s pinstripes. Delice’s son, Jerry Jeff, who at not quite fifteen seemed to have grown a foot since Sally had seen him a month ago, followed, with grass stains on his pants and green dirt under his fingernails from his summer yard work business. Sally told herself she’d never seen such a hardworking bunch.
With the exception of Dickie, whose job it was to find Monette’s killer, and Brit’s brother and sister, who were away for the week, the Langhams were there for Mary. Much more than for Monette. Nobody, as far as Sally knew, had been close enough to the girl to really grieve for her.
Sally went over to the couch. Mary stood up. As they hugged, Sally felt the sorrow and fatigue radiate from Mary’s warm, soft body.
“Thanks for coming, Mustang,” Mary said. “I guess the hordes are going to start descending this afternoon, and we might need you to do a little steppin’ and fetchin’. I don’t know if this could have come at a worse time. Everybody’s so busy.”
“There’s no good time with something like this,” Sally said. “It’s just senseless and sad. But Dickie’ll find the guy who did it, I know.”
There was a bleak expression on Mary’s round, pretty face. “You think so? There are a couple thousand people a day passing through town this week, not to mention all the highway traffic all summer long, or all the local garbage a girl like Monette could have picked up since she moved here. And the guy who killed her could be way long gone, just some piece of poisoned trash rollin’ down the highway. I really wish I felt more optimistic about that.”
Brit came in the room, bringing a can of Diet Coke for her mother and one for herself. She flopped down in an overstuffed chair, and Mary sat back down on the couch, making room for Sally beside her.
“You’d be surprised what the cops can do,” Sally said, trying to sound reassuring. “Dickie’s got a great team. It’s amazing to watch them work. Far as I could tell, they collected every single conceivable piece of anything that was lying around up there, and I guarantee, in the next couple of days they’ll be talking to everyone in Laramie who even saw Monette in the last week. I bet that if Dickie has his way, his guys’ll talk to anybody who ever bought a box of cereal at the Lifeway. And that Detective Atkins guy, jeez. By the time he was done asking me questions, I was looking at my arm to see how deep the teeth marks were. They’ll find a trail.”
“Yeah, that Scotty’s a real bloodhound. But with Monette, there’s liable to be a whole bunch of trails. She took after my sister. She never met a jerk she didn’t want to take home and beg to abuse her.”
“Bummer to admit it, but it’s true,” Brit put in. “Monette was sitting at the bar at the Wrangler last weekend, pounding down White Russians and doing her damndest to pick up the worst-lookin’ men in the place. She ended up leaving with an ugly little guy who had about three teeth in his whole head, none of which met.”
“Did she have a thing for guys with bad teeth?” Sally wondered, thinking that might be a clue to who had lured her out to Vedauwoo.
“Nope,” said Brit. “She went for all kinds, as long as they were gross. This particular one wasn’t a regular, just some skank passing through, and from the look of it she was planning to take him home with her that night, or go to his motel, or whatever.”
Nattie, punching “end” on one call, pressing more buttons and getting ready for “send” on another, chimed in. “Dwayne and I were down there too, and it was downright embarrassing. She was making a spectacle of herself. Disgusting.”
Sally heard Delice mutter something about pots and kettles, and Sally said, “So what do you think, Dee?”
“Yeah, I saw her,” Delice admitted. “And it wasn’t the first time. Sometimes when I was bartending I had to cut her off when I thought she was getting too wasted for her own good. It never seemed to help. She’d get surly, or she’d get all baby-faced and hurt, but one way or the other, it seemed like the whole purpose was to hook on to some loser for the night. It was like Russian roulette.”
Sally had run women’s centers, had volunteered for rape crisis hotlines. She knew something about that kind of sexual compulsiveness in women. She tried to put the question delicately. “Mary,” she said, holding both of her friend’s hands, looking straight into her eyes, “is there any suggestion that when she was a kid, some man may have messed with her?”