The Royal Wulff Murders (16 page)

“Lodge. A teepee, you mean?” Martha said.

“Eighteen footer, fifteen-pole Sioux design. Comfortable. You want to join us, let me know. Howard’s wife rides in, too. We cook beaver, lamb stew make your mouth water, elk liver someone gets lucky. Bring your bedroll and your Winchester. You can ride my old paint, Chester. It’d be my pleasure to show you that good country.”

Martha felt sweat beading at her temples, saw snow swirling on wintry escarpments, steam blowing from a horse’s nostrils. She knew her foot was only a shoelace span from touching his under the table. His hands folded, inches away from hers. Darker. Walnut, like the tabletop.

“I’d love to,” she said.

CHAPTER TWENTY

“Y
eah, yeah, so fucking what?”

Rainbow Sam, propped in the hospital bed, his left arm suspended from a ceiling contraption to keep the pressure off his broken rib, scratched at his bandaged side. He grimaced.

“So I found the dead guy’s rod. Man’s bloated up like a fish. He’s got no use for it. Why give it to the sheriff? You know how much it costs to buy a Winston new. Six bills, my man. Six big ones.”

Stranahan just looked at him.

Sam exhaled. “Yeah, okay, I made a mistake. Fishing guide, trying to put food on the table, keep his dog in Kibble…” His voice trailed away.

“I feel for you, man,” said Stranahan.

“Don’t make me laugh, you bastard. It hurts my side.”

Sam coughed. He groaned.

“You think you could sneak me a smoke? I’m going batshit in here.”

Stranahan ignored him.

“What was the name on the rod? The name you sanded off?”

“I don’t recall.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, man. It’s the truth. I’ve got short-term memory loss from the shot. Retro-something amnesia. Shit, I didn’t know Darcy when she walked into this room.”

Stranahan waited.

“Fuck you,” Sam said. “Do what you want with the bloody rod, I don’t care.”

“Bloody?”

“I have a client, limey from South Africa. What can I say? I’m an impressionable man.” He managed a weak smile.

Sam reached to the bedside table and passed Stranahan a plastic bag holding a blob of shredded metal.

“That’s what they took out of me, Kimosabe.”

“The bullet?”

“Nah, the deputy took the bullet. This is what the bullet hit. It’s a spoon, man, a fucking spinning lure I found on the bank last week. I hung it on my vest, you know how you just do things for no fucking reason.”

“So, you’re telling me you were saved by a spinning lure?” Stranahan examined the blob of metal.

“It deflected the path of the bullet.” Sam shook his head. “It’s an omen, man. The big fella’s trying to tell me to give up fly fishing.”

“Maybe he’s just telling you not to take another man’s rod.”

Sam didn’t respond.

“While we’re back on the subject, where exactly did you find it, the Winston?”

“In the drink. Thirty, forty yards upstream from the logjam.”

“How did you find it?”

“Shit man, what’s it matter? I just saw it when I hiked up to the cabin to call the sheriff. The tip was sticking up. You see it, it calls to you. Glowing that Winston green, like the felt on the poker table in the back room of the Crystal Bar. So I waded out and got it, stuck it in the boat.”

“How did you explain the rod to your client?”

“Izard the Third? He’d been ralphing up his noodles. I don’t think it registered.”

“If you hadn’t scratched off the name, there’s a good chance it
would identify the man who drowned, you know that. It’s evidence. I’ll have to turn it over to the sheriff.”

“Do what you got to,” Sam said.

He shook his head and heaved a sigh. “I fucked myself in the ass big time, didn’t I?” He reached his good arm across his body and pointed toward the bed stand. “Look in my wallet. It’s on the back of my card, behind the license. I wrote the fucker’s name down.”

Stranahan found the card with Sam’s name inscribed inside the outline of a leaping trout and turned it over. His skin pebbled for a second, and he felt a wrinkling of the muscles in his chest wall. But he wasn’t as surprised as he could have been.

J.J. Beaudreux
.

Jeffrey Jeremiah Beaudreux. Vareda’s brother.

T
he button was flashing on the answering machine when Stranahan entered his office. He glanced at his watch. Half past four. After speaking with Deputy Walter Hess on the hospital room phone, he had driven to Sam’s trailer and fed Killer, then let him outside to do his business. They were buddies now, but Stranahan felt relieved that Sam would be released after the doctor made his rounds in the evening, ending his sitter duties. He reluctantly punched the message button, dreading a callback from Sheriff Ettinger after her deputy told her the news about the rod. Now that she had the probable name of the victim, she’d want to pump Stranahan for anything else he might know, and he’d have to give up Vareda before he had a chance to speak with her. But the voice was a man’s—authoritative, brusque.

“Mr. Stranahan, this is Richard Summersby. I bought your painting at the TU banquet. I have a job for you if you want it. I’m on the river.” He gave a number. “I’m looking forward to doing business with you, Mr. Stranahan.”

Stranahan hit Stop on the message machine and punched the numbers
into his phone. The static, twice-removed pickup of a roaming cell echoed back to him.

“…ello.”

“Mr. Summersby?”

A second lag. “That you, Stranahan?” The cell was going in and out.

Stranahan affirmed that it was, noting how quickly the Mister had been dropped.

“Are you a good fisherman?”

Stranahan could hear a muffled roaring in the background. The river? “I can catch a fish, yes.”
What the hell?

“The reason I’m asking is that I can’t. I’ve been through about six fly changes and all I’m catching is God’s green grass on the back cast. Do you have any suggestions?”

Is this what he was calling me about?
Stranahan thought of his checkbook balance. He sighed. He’d play along with about anything.

“Where are you?”

“Down the hill from the bungalow. It’s above Raynolds Pass.”

“Have you tried a caddis?”

“An elk hair, a Goddard’s, some foam bit of nothing I bought at Bud Lilly’s Trout Shop. Nada, nada, nada.”

“How much water have you covered?”

“I don’t know. I started in, ah… not a lot. I’m a deliberate fisherman.”

“Here’s what you do. Put on a size fourteen elk hair with a greased sparkle pupa on the dropper. Pick all the pockets, keep wading upstream. Never make the same cast twice. The trick with dry caddis is covering lots of river. Later, when you start to see trout stick their noses out of the water, clip off the elk hair and tie on a soft hackle, leave the pupa on the dropper and work back downstream, swinging the flies in the current seams, the slower parts of the riffles.”

“Is that going to work?”

“It works for me, sir.”

“You know, I’m going to try what you said. I called because I had some work for you. I haven’t made up my mind how much I’ll offer. The next hour will tell. Stay by your telephone, Stranahan. Good-bye.”

Stranahan set down the receiver. He looked at his walls, at the combinations of colors that carried him back and forward in time. How much was his life’s work worth compared to a rich man’s like Summersby? When he was younger, he would have felt superior to any businessman. But that was before he took up a line of work that depended on their whimsy.

“Yes, sir,” Stranahan said out loud. “Yes, sir, I will tie your fly on your leader. Where would you like me to make that cast? Behind that rock, sir? I’ll put more of the ochre in that piece if you want me to, sir. No, sir, I didn’t mean to make the trout look small. I know it was a big one, sir.”

Stranahan mock saluted the telephone, noticed the answering machine was flashing for a second message and hit the button.

“Why did you have to make it so hard for me?”

The voice was a whisper. Then there was the undertone of the tape and a click as the message ended.

Stranahan felt his chest expand and fall. He had the feeling you get in deep wading, the pressure building, rising water everywhere. Once already he’d had to break the news to Vareda that the body found in the Madison River might be her brother’s. He’d been relieved to learn that the description didn’t match. But descriptions could be deceiving, and finding her brother’s rod only thirty yards from the body cemented the connection. From the quiet desperation in her voice on the phone message, Stranahan wondered if she already knew.

The phone rang. He gripped the receiver.

“Mr. Stranahan?”

It was Summersby.

“I just caught a sixteen-inch rainbow trout. I’ll make you that offer
right now. I have twelve rooms in my place here and what I’d like you to do is paint a picture for each, plus a second one for the living room. That’s thirteen, minus the painting I already have. So an even dozen. How’s two thousand dollars each sound? I like to keep the math simple.”

Stranahan collected himself. “It sounds like a deal to me,” he said. He had been prepared to swallow his pride and take a far lesser amount. “What is it you had in mind?”

“You don’t sound like you’re overcome with jubilation,” Summersby noted.

“I’m sorry. There may have been a tragedy in a friend’s life. I just got the news.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that. Why don’t you come down here for supper tonight? Thrash out the details in person.”

“I think I’ll be out of town.”

“Tomorrow then. Drive down in the afternoon and we can get a couple hours on the river before cocktails. Ann and I are having the neighbors for dinner.”

“I’ll do my best to be there.”

“Good. Now, that soft hackle you mentioned. Let me open my fly box and tell you what I have….”

Stranahan talked fishing for a minute and hung up the phone.

He walked down the stairs into the slant of afternoon light and found the Montana map above the visor of the Land Cruiser. He spread it over the hood, the metal hot to the touch. She’d said the town had a snake’s name. Near Butte or Billings. He ran his finger west. Whitehall… Butte… Deer Lodge. Drew his finger south. Phillipsburg… Anaconda… Wise River. Anaconda. That had to be it.

There was no lake by the town, though. The closest body of water was fifteen miles away, on the Anaconda-Pintler Scenic Byway. Georgetown Lake. Maybe there was a lodge there, someplace she could sing.

The Winston fly rod was in the Toyota. The deputy had told Stranahan to bring it to the Law and Justice Center, but that could wait until his return. Knowing Vareda’s reticent nature, he thought seeing it could elicit information that she might otherwise withhold. If not, there was still Georgetown Lake. Stranahan felt like a cretin for even considering it, but he’d been a trout fisherman so long that the thought was automatic.

For lake fishing, a six-weight was a good all-around rod.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

U.S. 90 arrowed west into the sun. Stranahan saw shocks of wheat shot through with gold, the rivers at Three Forks glinting under their bridges. On a bluff where the Madison, Gallatin, and Jefferson rivers joined currents to form the Missouri River, Lewis and Clark had camped for several nights, debating a course in their quest to find a water passage to the Pacific.

Stranahan continued on, crossing the Continental Divide at Homestake Pass, then downshifting through the Batholith rock spires known as The Dragonback. Butte sprawled below him, a brick town dwarfed by the caldera that until the 1960s had been the world’s largest open-pit copper mine. He remembered that Dashiell Hammett, the noir detective writer, had called Butte “Poisonville” in his classic novel
Red Harvest
. It had been a city of toxic waste and payrolled politicians. Today, denied its copper teat, Butte still clung to life with the stubborn blood of its Irish immigrants.

Half an hour later, Stranahan stopped at a gas station on the outskirts of Anaconda, where the skyline was dominated by a dormant copper-smelting chimney. He fed coins into a newspaper bin and slid out the
Montana Standard
. The lead story was about a brothel museum commemorating the working women who had serviced miners and frustrated husbands in Butte until the early 1970s. He leafed through the pages, looking in vain for a section on the local nightlife. He went back into the convenience store and
asked the pimply attendant if he knew any clubs or bars that had live music.

“There’s the Bean and Cup, that’s a coffee house; the Stockman has cowboy bands. You have to go to Butte for funk.”

“How about Georgetown Lake?”

“There’s the Georgetown Inn. They have music.”

Twenty minutes saw Stranahan to the lake. The water shivered under a light breeze, wavelets blinking copper in the evening slant of light. A hundred yards into the lake, float tube fishermen were rafted up like ducks. Farther out, a red canoe trailed a reflection under the peaks of the Pintler Range.

He turned into the asphalt drive of the Georgetown Inn, a rambling, two-story building with a fading coat of yellow paint and a broad, roofed-over porch. He climbed the steps. Beside the door was a placard denoting the inn’s inclusion in the historic register.

“An American aristocrat sliding gracefully into decay. The hotel, I mean.” Stranahan turned toward the voice. A man was sitting in an Adirondack chair under the porch overhang, a paper cup in front of him set on a varnished spool table. He motioned to Stranahan with his left hand.

“Have a seat.”

“Actually,” Stranahan said, “it’s sort of important that I find a friend of mine who may be staying here.”

“A him or a her?” The man’s long legs, crossed at the ankles, stretched out in languor. He had a narrow face, hollowed cheekbones, silver hair parted in the middle. In elegant decay himself, thought Stranahan.

“A her. I’ll ask inside.”

“They’ll just send you back out. I own the inn. Not supposed to give out names of our guests, though. We’ve had some well-known people here who insist on their privacy. Hemingway stayed, 1939 I believe. With Martha Gellhorn. They were living in sin at the time.
We have a photograph of him in our bar, drinking gimlets. One after another. Gary Cooper was a guest, he was the one who recommended it to Hemingway. Eric Clapton made a visit last summer. He’s a trout fisherman. I kept hoping he would uncase his guitar some evening, but he turned in early so he could be on the water by dawn. Perfect gentleman.”