The Painter: A Novel (36 page)

I waded across and spent a few hours dismantling the tangle of driftwood blocking the ramp, enough to get through. I was thirsty and drank straight from the creek, fuck it, I was sure I’d already had giardia, then I started the truck and turned around and nosed into the stream which ran easy and clear, and crossed it on the old ford. And the rough road out of the canyon was mostly already dry, amazing, and I chugged and churned up it like any happy hunter. I was starving.

They were waiting for me as Irmina said. Three squad cars. Two were Jeeps. I saw the bar lights reflecting red and blue in the hotel windows before I turned in to Don Gaspar and I thought they looked festive. Perpetrator’s holiday. Wheezy leaned against one of the SUVs drinking coffee and talking to Sofia. Sofia. Huh. Steve was there, too, in conversation with a uniformed officer, high ranking by the look of the stripes. It was like homecoming. Only ones missing were Sport, Willy.

I pulled up behind the cop cars, double tapped the horn, stepped out, waved. Sofia jumped forward and a deputy caught her. Steve squeaked like a groupie. They were on me. Two big local cops, I knew their families most likely.
Hands on your head, turn around please. Okay hands on the hood. Please spread your legs
. Fast frisk, hard against the junk. Wheezy wheezed,

“Okay, good, thanks, step back.” This to his boys.

“No arrest?” I said.

Wheezy’s sad smile. “Not today.”

He looked me up and down, glanced over the truck. I followed his eyes. My knees and shins were skinned, there was mud all over my shorts, and there were leaves stuck in the gap between the camper shell and the truck cab.

“Rough night?”

“No arrest?” I said. “What then? You wanna come up to the room and have a Coke? I made a new painting, think you’d like it.”

His smile.

“We already tossed the room. Nothing violent. I saw the boat painting. Nice. The brothers again?”

“Probably. Art is weird.”

“That’s a fact.” His smile widening. “You made two. Steve here has already hung the horse and the crow. I’d buy it if I could afford it. Couldn’t get to him before he put the sticker on it.”

“I can tell him to give it to you. Seriously.”

Shake of his big head. “Conflict of interest.”

“You wanna toss the truck?”

He nodded.

“You’re wondering about that gun again?”

No reason to cat and mouse him. They either had enough to put me away or they didn’t. He wasn’t smiling now. Tipped back the
last of his Starbucks, held out his hand and one of the cops took the cup. Wheezy nodded.

“Yep, the gun again.”

I said: “If I did the things you think I did, be pretty dumb to keep the gun, wouldn’t it?”

“Criminals can be really dumb. Not saying you are, don’t sue me. Okay, you’re gonna have to sit in the car while we do this, if you don’t mind. Not detaining you, just creating a little space. Also, I figured you may not be ready to talk to your posse yet.” He tipped his head toward Steve and Sofia.

I nodded. Note to self: when you are in the pen serving twenty to life make sure you make him some killer pictures.

“You got some new information I guess?”

He held up a hand, held the cops off.

“Yup, found somebody you might know. The shooting up at the Pantelas’ was an escalation that frankly didn’t please anybody in the department. And then both your trucks dropped off the map. Got a warrant from a sympathetic judge and tracked your phone until we lost the signal. Tracked it back the next morning. That left only three ranch roads that were real roads, that a man might head down to camp if he were tired. After that it was a cinch. Three miles up the northernmost road was a lot of beaten down grass and sage off the shoulder and fresh tracks headed straight into the mesquite. Straight for a gully. Arroyo I guess you’d call it. If we had missed the tracks we wouldn’t have missed the buzzards.”

Buzzards. Hadn’t thought of that. I wanted to tell Wheezy that criminals weren’t really dumb, they just sometimes didn’t think of everything.

“Guess what was down there?”

“A bunch of crows.”

“That, too.”

Now he looked at me really serious.

Wheezy said: “Grant had a loaded and racked .223 ranch rifle in his front seat. With a night scope. He had a spotlight out his window. He was wearing a .45 with a tac light and red dot sight. He had a .41 magnum slug in the side of his truck, shot from long range. Very long. He was hunting somebody, somebody he may have shot at a couple of days ago, we’re still waiting on ballistics. Somebody whose life he may have threatened on the phone. As he had threatened this somebody’s neighbor just minutes before as the neighbor tells it in a sworn statement. It is my understanding that his killing was most likely an act of self-defense. You with me?”

“I think I understand.”

“It is also my understanding that whatever happened on that creek in Delta County in the middle of the night could also be reasonably construed as self-defense. Bad blood, a fight the day before, signs of a scuffle. Dellwood much bigger and stronger than even, say, you. And armed, by the way: both a .44 and a Bowie knife on his belt. Actually, just the sheath, clear that Dellwood had already drawn the knife first on whoever hit him with, say, a rock. It is my further understanding that whoever might have killed the Siminoe brothers might come clean and make a very compelling
case of self-defense in both deaths. I have had long chats with the lead investigator in Colorado and the DAs both here and in Colorado—”

“Sport.”

“What?”

“Sorry. You talked to Sport.”

Wheezy winced at me, wheezed a few breaths and refound his thread.

“And”—
wheeze
—“and furthermore, the longer whoever it is killed these men delays in coming forward with the truth, the less compelling the case for self-defense becomes. It would behoove this individual to come back with me to the station and write out a formal statement just as soon as we toss this gentle soul’s truck and probably not find the handgun that would, if we could find it, probably exactly match the slug buried in Grant Siminoe’s truck.”

He wheezed hard, licked his lips, and locked eyes. “Think about it,” he said. He put out his pudgy hand and touched my elbow.

“It’s not a betting proposition, Jim. I’m not joking. There’s a clear path here. You own what you’ve done and what you never did”—he paused, let that burn into my viscera—“you do your time or not. Whatever happens at trial”—
wheeze
—“and that’s not up to you. Remember what I said about secrets eating away at us. They do. I mean it. Can eat a man’s life away like a cancer. I’ve seen it more than a few times.”

I nodded. Christ, he almost had me jumping to confess. He was either a really good man or a really good cop. Maybe both.

“You get a lawyer yet?” he said. I shook my head.

“Why not?”

“I’ve been busy.”

He nodded. “Get one. Okay, go sit in the car.” He nodded at the cops and I followed them back. I couldn’t look at Sofia and Steve just then. I had a lot on my mind.

Didn’t take them long. They knew all the places to hide a pistol in a pickup. Good for me that I thought to bury the box of shells as well. No incriminating notes, no pools of dried blood. They did come up with a few crumbs of broken windshield glass which they took out with tweezers and put in a Visqueen envelope. Wheezy held it up to the light of midday and looked uncharacteristically thoughtful. He glanced at me, back at the glass, worked the scenarios in his mind, I could tell. That tightened my guts. He would be back up the highway maybe this afternoon, looking for matching crumbs at the site of Grant’s shooting. Does window glass match up like bullets? When they were done with the inside of the truck they took imprints of the tires.

Huh. They could place me there, I was sure, already had put me nearby with the phone. Proximity. Probably not enough to convict. A lot might depend on how close they could put me to Grant’s body. And what he’d said about self-defense. Would a DA really want to get into a complex murder trial and then have the suspect turn around and claim a clear case of self-defense?

Can you please explain to the court why you didn’t come forward before?

Because I just can’t stand courtrooms, no offense. Jails aren’t much fun either
.

But. But. Always the but. Would the but haunt me? Like Wheezy said?

Wheezy pocketed the envelope, stepped over to the squad car, motioned me out, held up the truck keys.

“Want me to have them valet park it?”

“I think I better change hotels.”

“Nah. The guests love this stuff. Think of the stories they can tell.”

“Newspaper?”

“Nope. Not protocol to report executed search warrants. Think how that would mess up investigations. Go upstairs, take a hot bath. We left the bathroom nice and clean.”

I got out of the car, stretched, took a long draught of cool, high altitude autumn air.

“Nice place to paint, that roof room,” he said. “We were up there, of course.”

“Can you match broken window glass?” I said.

His head came around. All his cheer fell away. He studied me. I was thinking that one crumb on the shoulder of the ranch road that matched the pieces in his envelope would place me unequivocally at the scene. Not proximity, but ground zero. Not to mention if they found the pack while they were looking for the glass.

“We can try. It’s not a precise science. It’s like tire tracks: the most you can say is that the pieces are of the same type and match two million other trucks on the road.”

I took the keys.

“Things can pile up,” he said. “What they mean by the weight of evidence. It just piles and piles up and you carry it all with you until you’re walking around like a hunchback. You, not me.”

He wheezed. He shook his pant leg out of his shoe. “Try to be good,” he said and walked off.

What Bob had said at the gas station. Be good. I was good. I think. Being good, on the other hand, is really hard.

I watched Wheezy go, and then watched as he turned around abruptly. He came back.

“Just had an idea,” he said. “I’m going to take a little trip now”—
wheeze
—“back up to the scene of Grant’s demise. Go look for a little broken glass. Why don’t you come? You know, see some new country.”

New country. He and I, we both knew it wasn’t new for either of us. His eyes were dancing.

That’s what they do, don’t they? I thought. They get the killer back to the scene of the crime and they watch him like a hawk and wait for him to trigger and slip up and give it all away. And just after I thought that, I thought,
What the fuck! Of course I’ll go with you!

I’ll go, because if I don’t you’ll stumble on the rucksack, my personal warrant to the pen, stumble on it while you’re looking for crumbs of windshield—and why you didn’t find it already I’m not sure, it must be under some brush, you must have been focused on the mess in the gully. Of course I’ll go. And if I can distract you somehow, or you can distract yourselves, I’ll slip over to that rock and get rid of the pack. Not sure where, or how, but I have two hours of highway till then to figure it out, make a plan.