Authors: Bill Pronzini
He knew he ought to feel at least some anxiety, but he was perfectly calm. Funny. If this were the city a week ago, and he was about to be braced by a couple of tough-looking types, he would probably have peed in his pants. Today, here, even though it was their turf, he felt equal to the confrontation. Maybe the sense of courage had to do with his early-morning thoughts about risks and edges. Well, one thing for sure: Just how sharp this edge turned out to be depended as much on him as it did on the two cowboys.
He drew a couple of deep, slow breaths. Then he set the parking brake, shut off the engine, and eased himself free of the sticky leather seat—keeping his movements deliberate, the way the men had. He stood for a few seconds, measuring them, before he closed the door and walked forward.
The mustached one said, “Mr. Jim Messenger,” and spat into the grit a few inches from Messenger’s right foot. “He don’t look like much, does he, Tom?”
“Sure don’t,” the other one agreed. He was a few years older, around forty. The stubble on his cheeks was flecked with gray. “Hardly seems worth all the fuss.”
“Reckon he’d break easy?”
“Oh, sure. Neither of us’d even work up a sweat.”
“How about that, boy?” the mustached one said to Messenger. “You figure you’d be easy to break?”
“Not as easy as you think.”
“By God, Tom, he’s got sand in him after all.”
“Might be we let some of it out.”
Messenger said, “Tom Spears, right? And you’d be Joe Hanratty.”
That stirred them a little. They exchanged a quick look. “How in hell’d you know that?” the mustached one, Hanratty, demanded.
“Lucky guess.”
Spears did the spitting this time. The gob spattered against the toe of Messenger’s hiking boot; he didn’t move his foot.
“It’s too hot to play games,” he said evenly. “Why don’t you just say what you’re here to say and get it over with?”
Another shared glance. They didn’t like the way he was behaving. They’d thought they could intimidate him, and now that he’d refused to let it happen they weren’t sure what to do next.
Hanratty was the leader; he made up his mind first. He shoved off the Ford, crowded up close with his face a few inches from Messenger’s, and poked him in the chest with a callused forefinger. Messenger didn’t move, didn’t react except to start breathing through his mouth. Hanratty’s breath smelled sourly of cigarettes and beer.
“I don’t like you messing around my sister, you hear?”
“I’m not messing with her. I talked to her while she served me breakfast this morning.”
“That ain’t all you did. Made a date with her for four o’clock this afternoon.”
“She tell you that?”
“She didn’t have to tell me. Ain’t nothing you do in Beulah, city boy, that’s a secret more than five minutes.”
“I know it. But I’m not looking to keep secrets. Not from anybody, including you and your friend here.”
“I don’t want you messing with Lynette.”
“I offered to buy her a beer, that’s all.”
“Yeah. What do you get in return?”
“Not what you’re thinking. I don’t have any romantic interest in your sister.”
“Why not?” Spears said. “Ain’t she good enough for you?”
Messenger said, “Talk, that’s all I want with her.”
“Talk about Dave Roebuck,” Hanratty said harshly. “She don’t have anything to say about that pile of shit.”
“She was seeing him. She broke up with him not long before he was killed.”
“So what?”
“I’d like to know why.”
“None of your goddamn business.”
“Something must have happened between them. You had a fight with Roebuck about it.”
“Fuckin’ outsider—it’s none of your business! He’s dead and damn straight good riddance. Anna did us all a favor, blowing his head off.”
“Did he hurt Lynette in some way, Joe?”
The question earned him another poke in the chest, hard enough this time to make him wince. “Joe to my friends. Mr. Hanratty to you. Ask about Roebuck one more time, I’ll knock you on your ass. Bother Lynette and I’ll kick your ass until it’s purple. Keep poking your nose in where it ain’t wanted and I’ll rip it off your face. You hear what I’m saying?”
“I hear.”
“You believe it?”
I believe you’re another one who’s hiding something.
“Well? You want that kind of trouble, city boy?”
“Not particularly.”
“Not particularly, he says. Not particularly.”
“Ain’t got so much sand at that,” Spears said. “Good thing for him he don’t.”
“Damn good thing,” Hanratty said. His eyes raked Messenger’s face; then he snapped, “Just remember what you been told,” and turned on his heel and stalked around to the pickup’s passenger side.
Spears grinned, aimed another gob of spit onto Messenger’s boot. When Messenger didn’t move Spears lost the grin, slid in under the wheel, and slammed the door. The starter ground, gears clashed; the Ford bucked away, spewing dust, and then turned in through John T.’s gate.
Messenger had been holding his hands tight against his sides; he lifted them, extended them palms down. Steady. Not even the hint of a tremor.
Test passed. The first edge hadn’t been very sharp at all.
H
E HAD JUST
come out of the Western apparel shop on Main, wearing his new wide belt with its oblong Nevada buckle—not too big, not too fancy—when he spotted Maria Hoxie. She was maneuvering the Jeep wagon he’d seen at the parsonage into a space across the street. When she got out and headed west in no hurry, he jaywalked across at an intercepting angle. Before he reached her she entered one of the storefronts: All-Rite Pharmacy.
He followed her inside. It was an old-fashioned drugstore, the kind with a soda fountain along one wall—among the last of an endangered species, doomed to eventual extinction as surely as the great auk and the Great American Dream. Maria was the only customer; she had gone into the cosmetics section and was examining a bottle of something the color of mud. She looked flushed, a little wilted, her black hair windblown and sweat-damp at the temples. Preoccupied, too. She kept nibbling at her lower lip.
“Hello, Maria. Remember me?”
He hadn’t meant to startle her, any more today than in the church cemetery on Tuesday; but she reacted in the same sort of defensive fashion—wheeling, tensing, raising the bottle as if to throw it. Even when she recognized him it took her a few seconds to relax. “Oh, it’s you,” she said, “the Messenger.” She bit her lip again; her black-eyed gaze was almost accusing. “What do you want?”
“Nothing much. I just thought I’d say hello.”
“You know, you could’ve confided in
me.
”
“Confided? I don’t …”
“The other day. I’d have told you everything my father did.”
“Well, you seemed busy and I—”
“That poor woman. Don’t you think I care about what she did to herself?”
“Anna Roebuck?”
“Suicide. God have mercy.”
“Most everyone I’ve talked to thinks her death is a cause for rejoicing,” Messenger said. “You don’t feel that way?”
“No. No one’s death is a cause for rejoicing.”
“But you do think she was guilty, even if you didn’t hate her?”
“God knows who’s guilty and who’s not,” Maria said. “I don’t hate anyone. I was taught to love, not hate.”
“Did you love Dave Roebuck?”
She chewed her lip, ran a hand through her tousled hair. “No. I didn’t love him.”
“You and he were close once, though?”
“Close? No. He was—”
“What, Maria? What was he?”
“Wicked,” she said. “Satan made him, not God.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He hurt people. Everyone he touched.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“Everyone he touched,” she said. Then she said, “I have to go now,” and backed away from him. She was at the door before she realized she still held the cosmetics bottle. She hesitated, flustered; started to turn back, changed her mind, put the bottle down on a display of plastic kitchenware, and then hurried out, half running, as if she were afraid Messenger might decide to chase her.
Strange one, he thought. Strange, confused mixture of child and woman, earthiness and piety. Seduced by Dave Roebuck, probably, and when he dumped her she was caught like the rope in a tug-of-war between opposing feelings:
I was taught to love, not hate.
If her rage at Roebuck had been strong enough, and her elemental side had won the inner struggle, she might have been capable of ignoring the biblical edict, Thou Shalt Not Kill. But the little girl, Tess? He didn’t see how Maria could have committed an atrocity like that.
All his speculations kept coming back to the death of Tess Roebuck. It was the central enigma and the key to the truth. How could anyone shatter an eight-year-old’s skull with a rock? Why would anyone change a dead girl’s clothing and then put the body down a well?
THE SADDLE BAR
was just what he’d expected. Western decor dominated by saddles, bridles, and other tack room paraphernalia. Pool and snooker tables. Video poker and slot machines. Country music pounding from a jukebox. All that was missing was an electronic bucking bull. But then, that was the plaything of urban cowboys; real cowboys rode real bulls if they felt the need to prove their manhood.
He sat in a booth near the door, nursing a glass of beer and ignoring the glances and murmured comments of the bartender and the half dozen other customers. Whoever was playing the jukebox liked Reba McEntire; her voice and her music beat at him in shrill, atonal waves. It made him yearn for Miles Davis. There were plenty of things he liked about this desert country, but its typical watering hole wasn’t among them.
He’d been there fifteen minutes when Lynette Carey walked in alone. Her arrival was a small surprise. He hadn’t really expected her to keep their date, particularly not after the in-your-face tactics of her brother and Tom Spears. But she was her own woman; she honestly didn’t give a damn what anybody else in Beulah thought she should or shouldn’t do.
She slid into the booth across from him, looking as flushed and wilted as Maria Hoxie had. “Whew,” she said, “what a day. My legs feel like my ass weighs three hundred pounds. Where’s that Heineken draft you were gonna have waiting?”
“I’ll get it. I wasn’t sure you’d come.”
“Told you I would.”
He went to the bar for her draft. The fat bartender and the customers were staring openly now, the bartender with thin-lipped hostility; he slammed the full glass down hard enough to slop foam out over the rim. Messenger smiled at him, thinking: To hell with you too, buddy.
Lynette drank thirstily, said “Ah!” and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Then she said, “Why did you think I wouldn’t come?”
“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m something of a pariah in this town. Just like Anna Roebuck was.”
“What’s that? Pariah?”
“Outcast. Somebody no one likes.”
“You’re not so bad,” she said. “I like guys who do things, even if they’re not popular things. Most guys I know just sit around on their hams like vegetables.”
He smiled. “Hams like vegetables.”
“Huh?”
“Your brother doesn’t like me or anything I do.”
“Joe? What’s he got to do with you?”
“You haven’t talked to him today?”
“No. Why?”
“He found out you made this date with me,” Messenger said. “From someone who was in the café this morning, I suppose. He warned me to stay away from you.”
“Oh, he did, huh. Where’d you see him?”
He explained, briefly.
She drank more of her beer. Wire-thin anger lines bracketed her mouth now. “I’ve told him and told him,” she said. “Mind his business, not mine. But he doesn’t listen. Mule-stubborn, that’s Joe. And Skinny-Shanks Spears is worse. What’d they do, gang up on you?”
“They tried. Joe said if I bothered you he’d kick my ass purple.”
“Big tough guy. Scare you?”
“Some,” Messenger admitted. “From what I hear Joe’s a fighter. And he’s got a quick temper where you’re concerned.”
“Yeah, he’s been known to go off half-cocked.”
“Like he did with Dave Roebuck?”
Small silence. She broke it by saying, “Like that, yeah,” in wary tones.
“What set him at Roebuck’s throat the week before the murders—the fight in the Hardrock Tavern? You’d already broken off with Roebuck by then.”
“What if I had?”
“Why would Joe jump him to protect you? Why not before, while you were still seeing him?”
Lynette didn’t say anything.
Messenger asked, “Or
did
they have a fight before?”
“No.”
“Then why the one at the Hardrock?”
“Why ask me? Why didn’t you ask Joe?”
“I did ask him. He wouldn’t tell me.”
“Well, I’m not gonna tell you, either.”
“Why the big secret, Lynette?”
“Some things you don’t talk about, that’s all. Not even to friends, let alone strangers.”
“What could be that bad?”
“Plenty of things. They happen in Beulah, same as big cities like San Francisco. You like to think they don’t but they do.”
“Is it the reason you broke off with Roebuck?”
“Damn straight.”
“Something he did to you?”
“I told you, I’m not gonna say. Don’t ask me again.”
“But it made you hate him. You and your brother both.”
“I didn’t shed any tears when I heard he was dead, that’s for sure. If Anna hadn’t blown his head off—”
“What, Lynette? Would you have killed him?”
“No. I couldn’t kill anybody.”
“How about Joe? He could, couldn’t he?”
“What’re you getting at? You think
Joe
killed him and that poor kid?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Sounded like you’re thinking it.”
“No. Just tossing out possibilities.”
“Well, toss that one in the garbage. He could’ve used a shotgun on that asshole, Dave, sure, but he’d never hurt a kid. He loves kids.”
“Anna loved kids, too.”
“Sure she did. She loved her daughter enough to bust her head with a rock and throw her into the well.” Lynette finished her draft, slammed the glass down the way the bartender had. “You know something? I see why people don’t like you, Jim. You’re like a burr under a saddle with your goddamn questions.”