The Quiet Streets of Winslow (32 page)

“We have a lot of circumstantial evidence on Kevin Rainey as well,” he said. “Plus he has an assault on his record, plus he has a motive, maybe not as strong as Nate's, but strong enough. Jody doesn't want to see him anymore, won't so much as be friends, and so on. No apologies. Just it's over. I've moved on. Then there are Kevin's parents getting together, after Jody's body is found, deciding to protect him from us, right from the beginning. They suspect him, basically, before we do.”

“That's how it seems to me,” I said.

“Kevin Rainey also knew quite a bit about Nate, presumably. He would have known about Nate's ties to Black Canyon City.”

“Jody was generous with personal details. That's according to a number of people.”

“You said that you could see the place where Jody's Toyota was found from Kevin Rainey's trailer?”

“From his living room window.”

“Why would he have positioned the body, do you think?”

“I don't know. Control, maybe,” I said. “He has none. As you say, she tells him it's over. She won't accept a drink from him. She won't stop telling him about Nate. So Kevin loses his temper and she ends up dead. And once she is, he positions her the way he wants to think of her. A throwaway. She didn't want him; now he doesn't want her. She's under his control now. And maybe he wants to make it look as if Nate
Aspenall has dumped her, literally and figuratively. Give Jody what's coming to her.”

Bob was quiet a minute, thinking. “What about Mike Early? Anything else we should be looking at with him?”

“He had more of a relationship with Jody than he wanted us to know. Paying her for sex, basically. Is it possible she didn't want to, with him, that last time? Didn't want to continue the arrangement? Or threatened to tell the ex-wife he wanted to get back together with? But he does have that alibi—not airtight, but the brother-in-law was forthcoming about Early receiving that phone call. My sense was that he was telling the truth, which means Mike couldn't have done it, despite whatever his involvement was afterward.”

Bob put on his glasses and looked through the paperwork one more time, while I went to the window. His office was on the third floor, with a view of the courthouse and the downtown streets. The clouds over the hills were lifting and the sun was out. The flag in front of the courthouse was flying briskly.

“Here's the problem we're faced with,” Bob said. “The Brady rule. What the prosecution knows, the defense has access to. So if we prosecute Nate, Nate's attorney raises the possibility of Kevin Rainey as the perpetrator, and if we prosecute Kevin, Kevin's attorney raises the possibility of Nate Aspenall. If the Brady rule didn't exist, we might be able to prosecute them one right after the other. It's possible. It would be unusual, but not illegal. But the Brady rule does exist.”

“So what do we do?” I said.

“What are the chances of more evidence turning up?”

“As far as physical evidence goes, it's hard to say,” I said. “Unlikely but not out of the question. I could imagine Kevin Rainey being foolish
enough to talk, but even then it's just hearsay, unless he tells somebody something that might help us, that leads us to evidence perhaps.”

“And Nate?”

“Nate is smart and closemouthed. But Mike Early is a different matter. And at present, anyway, he and Nate are neighbors. It's possible that something might happen in the future to make him think twice and give us what we need.”

“Any chance of either Nate or Kevin confessing at some point?”

“I don't know,” I said. “You know how that goes—time moves on, and people start justifying themselves and their actions that much more. I won't be waiting for it to happen.”

We sat in silence, hearing somebody walking past in the hall, and a telephone ringing.

“Frustrating,” Bob said.

“Yes.”

“So for now,” he said, “we arrest nobody and see what happens. As for the family we had hoped to give good news to—well, I guess there isn't much of one.”

“No,” I said. “We probably care more than Jody's mother will.”

chapter forty-six

NATE ASPENALL

E
VENING WAS BEGINNING
as I drove into Winslow. I lost sight of Jody's car on the interstate between Highway 87 and the Winslow exit, but I caught up with it on Powell Street as she drove east past the high school and the city park to Nelson, where her mother lived. Her mother's trailer was small and white, with a broken step. Parked in front was a red pickup with the passenger door smashed in. Jody parked behind it and went inside without knocking. I heard arguing begin. One voice was male, and it predominated. Then Jody's mother started, and after a few minutes Jody raised her voice, speaking quickly. A woman in the trailer next door came out, listened, then went back in. The arguing continued. I was not close enough to make out the words.

The door flung open, and Jody stood sideways in the doorway, talking loudly. Behind her was the man, small and thin and shirtless. I don't believe he pushed her, but she stepped out stumbling on the broken step and somehow kept herself from falling. She looked at the trailer as if wondering if she should go back in, and she put a hand to her face and pushed her hair back. Then she got in her car, slammed the door, and accelerated fast, heading west toward the high school, then
south toward Third Street. I followed a block behind and saw her run a four-way stop. An SUV came close to hitting her. On Third Street she turned into the parking lot of PT's and parked crookedly, and I parked along the street, behind a Suburban. I was close but not so that she could see me. She was reaching for something on the seat beside her or in the glove compartment. Cigarettes, it turned out—one more thing I had not known about her.

It was a clear night with a moon that was still faint. The streetlights had come on. Jody had her window open, and I could see the cigarette smoke drifting out. Except for the movement of her hand she was still. It seemed to me that her hand was shaking. Her car was running and “Pretty Woman” was playing. A long-haired man in overalls appeared without my having seen from where. He went up to her window, and I heard bits and pieces.

“. . . but I live . . . not far. Come . . . we can . . .”

“Don't . . . make . . . asshole . . . Johnny. No.”

He had one hand on the roof of her car, and when he persisted she opened her car door and ducked under his arm. Then she half ran, half walked to the bar. He took two steps in her direction, turned, and walked drunkenly down the sidewalk. I wasn't sure how long to wait.
Sometimes I just have a drink or two, Nate, then I go home, where I can be alone, but feeling good
. Men bought her drinks, and she liked the attention, and she was lonely; there was that, too. She would admit those things herself. To an extent she was an honest person. She felt compelled to tell the truth, even as she was tweaking it for her own purposes.

I went just far enough into the bar to see her standing at the other end of it with a drink in her hand, talking to a light-haired man about
my age, who wore a blue work shirt. She still wore the ring, despite how crucial it had seemed to her to get rid of it. I wanted her to tell me she wouldn't have married me even if we hadn't seen each other at the overlook, even if I not stayed in Flagstaff, even if I had done as she asked and gone home to Chino Valley and waited for her decision. I wanted her to say that I hadn't come that close. It wasn't the no I couldn't live with. It was the only-if-you-hadn't, the almost-but, the why-would-you-screw-things-up-like-this.

The light-haired man worked out, you could see. A girl walked past and gave him a look. He probably had a regular job and an apartment as opposed to an RV. He and Jody seemed to know each other, although she could behave that way with a man she had met five minutes ago. She had probably eaten nothing since lunch and was drinking on an empty stomach. Then I thought about her and Mike Early at the overlook and the vulgar jokes you could make. What had I been doing asking a girl like that to marry me? Yet if she had walked over and said,
I'm sorry, Nate. Can we still
. . . I would have said yes. But it wasn't in her nature. The tragedy was not what people wouldn't do, I thought, but what they couldn't do.

I ordered a drink and stood near the door; each time it opened I was hidden behind it. The bar was crowded, more so as time passed. The jukebox was playing “Bad to the Bone,” and three people in back were arguing over a pool game. Jody moved away from the light-haired man, and a younger man, dark in complexion, reached for her hand and moved her into the space where people were dancing. She held her drink the whole time. She put her hand on his shoulder and danced close to him although that didn't fit the song. He put his mouth to her ear and she laughed, then stepped away and sat alone at a table,
tilting back the glass, getting it all down. She looked up suddenly and might have seen me. It was hard to tell. The dark-complected man came between us as he put a drink in front of her. She looked at it as if confused. Then she smiled and picked it up and put her finger in it, touching the ice.

I left before she could see me, held my drink low under my arm, crossed the street and stood behind my pickup and drank and waited. A block away I could see La Posada, the windows lit in the darkness, the well-kept grounds, the bar in which we had sat and talked. I could see the blouse she had worn and the shine of her hair. It was just yesterday, I kept thinking; it seemed so long ago. A hundred lifetimes in a moment, a hundred plans, a hundred years. I saw that what people had done to me they had done, and what I had done to myself and others I had done, and I experienced a second of freedom, standing on that Winslow sidewalk with an empty glass in my hand. The stars were coming out, and the wind was blowing. Jody emerged from the bar and stood in the parking lot with the moon above her. She spun around as she looked at it, Jody at seven in a dancing class, in a skirt and ballet shoes.
Not real ones
, she had told me.
Mine were slippers, Nate. I have kept them for Hannah
. She had taken lessons after school in the basement of the public library.
There were eight of us little girls, Nate, and the teacher didn't like me. If it hadn't been for her, I could have been in the recital
.

The door to the bar opened and the light-haired man stood watching her. We were both watching her. From down the block a man shouted something, then a police car sped past, and the drunken man from earlier was wandering in the street, holding something in his hand. A train was coming. The night was full of sound and motion, as if the future were already here. As if what was going to happen already had.

chapter forty-seven

TRAVIS ASPENALL

“L
ET
T
RAVIS STAY
,” my father said, and I sat at the kitchen table with him, Sam, and my mother. It was almost eight. My mother had made coffee and set out slices of cake. The dogs, who had come in when Sam had, lay close to us as if they knew this was important, that this was what we had been waiting for.

“How's this one settling in?” Sam said, and reached down to scratch the boxer's head. Sam was wearing his uniform. It seemed as if we would never see him as he used to look.

“So?” Dad said.

“I met with the county attorney this morning. We had a long meeting, and you wouldn't want me to go into all the details, believe me. We'd be up until midnight.” He smiled thanks to my mother, who was pouring him coffee.