The Royal Wulff Murders (21 page)

Ann caught Stranahan’s eye and winked conspiratorially. He winked back.

“…sheriff and…”

Stranahan’s ears pricked up. He hadn’t been listening.

Sinclair went on: “Said they wanted to check the pond. My guess is it had something to do with that man who drowned downriver. Didn’t give a damn about the antelope, though.”

There was a rap at the porch door. Stranahan was nearest and opened it.

“Let me guess. You’re that painter fella.”

A darkly tanned man took Stranahan’s outstretched hand. He seemed vaguely familiar.

“Lucas Ventura,” the man said in a chesty voice. “Call me ‘Lucky.’”

“Sean Stranahan. Did I see you at the TU banquet last Sunday?”

“Guilty,” the man said.

Lucas Ventura was about Stranahan’s height, thick through the shoulders, with black hair combed straight back to reveal a pronounced widow’s peak. The V on his forehead was bracketed by heavy eyebrows; his manicured goatee arrowed down toward a swatch of chest hair that erupted from the collar of a lavender fishing shirt.
FISH WORSHIP. IS IT WRONG
? read the logo on the shirt. Stranahan thought Ventura looked like a jovial Satan. Forty or so.

“Tony,” Ventura said, looking past Stranahan.

Sinclair said, “Where’re the kids? We’ve missed them this summer.”

“Ex-wife issues. Don’t get married, that’s my advice. Too late for you, Tony, but”—Ventura turned to Stranahan—“maybe hope for you. I used to say ‘Keep your dick wet and your flies dry.’ Now I’m regretting taking my advice.”

“You look like you do a lot of it… fishing, that is,” Stranahan said. The ovals of skin underneath Ventura’s eyes were light where his sunglasses protected them.

“A dabbler in the art.” Ventura made a dismissive wave with his hand.

“Don’t believe him,” said Sinclair. “Lucky was runner-up in the one-fly contest. Imagine how those guides in Jackson felt taking a backseat to a Hollywood movie producer.”

Ventura’s voice was self-deprecating. “Minor leaguer, retired.”

Stranahan was impressed. Not by the man’s film credits—he knew nothing of that business—but by the fishing. He frowned on competition in angling, but in the one-fly the angler had to fish a single pattern all day. The contest drew hotshot anglers to the Snake River from across the country. Winning didn’t have much to do with luck.

“What fly?” he asked. He was genuinely interested.

“Small olive streamer fly I tied with Arctic fox fur. Most of the other fishermen were using Turk’s Tarantulas, stones with—”

He cut himself off abruptly. “Now what the fuck is
he
doing here?”

And to Stranahan, “Pardon my French.”

Stranahan followed Ventura’s eyes, which had fixed on a man wearing a khaki safari jacket who stood half inside the front door chesting Summersby and then shoving brusquely past the host to jab a forefinger in the direction of Tony Sinclair.

“You. Outside.” The man’s belligerence was palpable.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Sinclair said.

“Do I sound like I’m kidding? I got a visit from the sheriff this evening. She asked if I shot an antelope on your property. Who do you think you are to accuse me without a shred of fucking evidence? I’ll kick your ass.”

Stranahan saw Sinclair take a step forward as the stranger’s fist shot out, a sucker punch that caught Sinclair on the point of the shoulder. Sinclair recoiled, then charged forward. In a blur of grunting bodies the two men had careened through the doorway and were rolling on the porch. Stranahan threw himself onto the pile and grabbed Sinclair in a bear hug as Lucas Ventura locked onto the interloper.

Stranahan heard Summersby’s voice. “This isn’t the goddamned Wild West. I’m calling the authorities.”

Ventura grunted between clenched teeth. “I’ve got a better idea, Richard. Let’s toss Mr. Gentry here into Tony’s pond. That ought to cool the bastard off.”

Sinclair had calmed enough for Stranahan to release him and the three men half dragged, half carried the cursing party crasher the fifty-odd yards to the pond. Five minutes after Ventura said “one, two, three” and Gentry twisted out over the high bank of the pond to land with a silver splash, Stranahan had heard the whole story—the Texas taxidermist’s obsession with firearms, the gopher shooting that had alarmed the neighbors, and the hole in the antelope’s chest.

Stranahan tucked his shirt into his pants back on Summersby’s porch, where the returning heroes were applauded by Summersby.

“By god, I’ve heard hundred-pound tarpon jump,” Summersby said, “but I don’t think I’ve ever heard so satisfying a splash as that one.”

“You boys wash up now,” Ann said from the doorway. “It’s time for dinner.”

I
t was a dinner without appetite, people talking a little too loudly and laughing a little too whole-heartedly with the ticking suspicion in the back of the mind that Gentry, who had been seen stumbling toward his house in the early twilight, might at any moment walk back rifle to shoulder and nothing but a glass pane between the dining room and a copper-jacketed bullet.

Ann and Eva Sinclair had been for pressing charges, but the men, standing on Western principles, prevailed and no phone call was made, nor unease betrayed.

Nonetheless, Stranahan noted that the table seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief when Summersby tapped his dessert fork against a wineglass and proposed that the guests see Stranahan’s painting, which had been hung on the landing of the hall stairway inside the house.

The work was fittingly praised and the night ended on the porch, on the side of the house opposite Gentry’s property, women in conference to one side, the men sitting in slatted redwood rockers, sipping brandy from squat glasses that captured miniature trout flies in crystal. One neighbor had joined the party late. Apple McNair was a swarthy man, short but powerfully built with full beard and deep eye sockets. He drove in on a bicycle, accompanied by a heeler dog that had one blue eye and one brown one. It was McNair who owned the homestead cabin up the river past Sinclair’s residence. Summersby, in an aside to Stranahan, remarked that he was surprised that McNair had responded to tonight’s invitation, for the man was a bit of a recluse and gone as often as he was home. It wasn’t clear how he had come by the money to own Madison riverfront. His only apparent income was from fixing up vintage bicycles and running a custom knife business out of a toolshed in his yard. The shed, the dilapidated cabin, and McNair’s rundown Dodge Sierra Classic rusting amid bicycle parts had done nothing for real estate values, Summersby confided, but then with a shrug he added that his property wasn’t bound by the covenants that restricted the newer developments. It was Montana. What could you do?

Stranahan felt uneasy with the rich-man-to-rich-man intonation and made a point of talking to the newcomer. It was a disjointed conversation, with the two men facing each other on the dark end of the porch. McNair seemed pleasant but was uncomfortable socially to the point of being practically mute. When Stranahan asked where he was from, the man had extinguished the cigarette he’d been smoking, flicked the stub, and uttered a single-word response—“North.” He handed over a Damascus steel hunting knife from the sheath on his belt, evidently looking for comment. Stranahan tested the blade on his thumbnail and whistled appreciatively, then handed the knife back, holding the point and offering the sambar stag handle.

“You could skin a bear with that,” said the man.

The conversation stalled and Stranahan found himself talking with Lucas Ventura about Lucky’s Adirondack guide boat, which dated to the 1880s and was, he declared, the most elegant craft ever designed. He said they’d have to fish from it sometime—how about Saturday a week? He had to fly to L.A. for a few days. Stranahan said sure and they agreed to meet at the lower access road to Quake Lake, just above the dam. Stranahan figured it was the kind of invitation that wasn’t recalled the next morning, let alone ten days down the pike, and excused himself to his host, saying he had an appointment in Bridger early in the morning.

“Nonsense,” Summersby said. “You’re not going any farther than that guest cabin.” He pointed. “There’s a new toothbrush in the medicine cabinet, Navajo blankets in the steamer trunk at the foot of the bed. You say you have to be back by eight. Hazelnut pancakes are at six a.m. sharp.”

There was no point arguing. Summersby had been getting his way for more years than Sean had been alive.

As he walked to the cabin in a loose gait prompted by too much whiskey, Stranahan felt guilty about allowing himself to be wrapped in the soft arms of summer home society. He drifted into a fitful sleep, then awoke in the early morning and stepped out the door to relieve himself, passing a perfectly functional bathroom on the way. He stood looking at the heavens. All was dark in Sinclair’s residence on the far side of the fence. Beyond Sinclair’s slumped McNair’s cabin and past it was the sprawling riverfront house belonging to Lucas Ventura. Two squares of amber light shone in Ventura’s upstairs windows, a third from a sconce light on the porch below. A fellow insomniac, ventured Stranahan. He squinted, the lights bleeding together into a triangle, like candlelight flickering from a jack-o-lantern. His eyes returned to the surface of the pond, peppered at this lonely hour with the reflections of stars. He thought about the half gainer the taxidermist
had taken and then he thought about a doe antelope with a small hole in her chest.

Stranahan was suddenly wide awake. He hurriedly dressed and threw his gear into the Land Cruiser. Lights out, he idled down the drive and pointed the nose of the old truck toward Bridger.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

F
ive-thirty a.m. The horizon dark, although the birds in the ash trees that lined South Gallatin Avenue said it would soon be otherwise. Stranahan listened to the haunting three-note whistle of a varied thrush as he walked the short block from his Land Cruiser to the cultural center. He noticed a midsize pickup parked outside the double front doors; the cab light was on, illuminating a figure in the driver’s seat. The passenger door swung open.

“Mr. Stranahan, I’d like to have a word with you.”

“Sheriff?”

“That’s me.”

“I thought you said eight.” He bent to peer inside the pickup.

“I did. But then I thought maybe we should have a chat, just the two of us, before we roused your girlfriend from her beauty sleep. I heard through the grapevine that this is where you hang your hat.”

Stranahan’s voice betrayed his exhaustion. He was just too tired to be flustered.

“Let’s go up to the studio.”

“That won’t be necessary. You can keep me company right here.” She patted the bench seat of the cab.

He shrugged, got into the truck.

“Coffee?” She poured him a cup from a thermos without waiting for the reply. “Donuts in the bag.” She gestured toward the dash.

“I was going to come down to your office this morning,” he said. He brushed powdered sugar from the corners of his mouth.

“Good, huh? I like the old-fashioneds myself.”

“I put something together this morning,” Stranahan said carefully, “or might have. It’s just speculation.”

“Speculation?”

Stranahan nodded.

“Then speculate,” she said. “I’m in the mood for a story.” The police radio crackled. She dialed it down.

“First, I want to know if it was her brother, the man Sam found.”

“She ID’d the body. Didn’t betray an ounce of emotion, so Walt says.”

“She wouldn’t, not in front of a stranger.”

“You must know her so well by now,” Ettinger said.

Stranahan let it pass. He said, “I have a guess who shot Rainbow Sam.” He waited, expecting… well, he didn’t know what to expect. To be interrupted if nothing else.

“Go on.”

“It could be the same man who shot the antelope at a pond belonging to Tony Sinclair. He lives up—”

Ettinger cut him off. “I know the name,” she said. “I heard about the antelope. I talked to the guy Sinclair accused. There’s bad blood between them, but he’s got no evidence.”

Stranahan told her about the fight on the porch. Ettinger made a clicking sound with her tongue to betray her exasperation at the antics of grown men.

“Here’s the thing,” Stranahan said. “I asked Sinclair when the antelope was shot and he said Monday morning, right at dawn. Sam was shot about an hour later, eight miles down the road.”

“So?”

“So it seems like a coincidence. Plus, this Gentry’s a real asshole.”

“I can’t arrest someone because he’s an asshole.”

Ettinger rested her chin in her hand and tapped her fingers against
her cheek. Until now the conflicted feelings she’d had toward Stranahan hadn’t included the thought that he might be on her side. There was no denying her initial attraction was stronger than she cared to admit, but with the shooting at the lake, not to mention the bizarre story he’d fed her about fishing for the woman, her regard for him was tempered by skepticism. Was it really possible he’d stepped in something and was just trying to help?

“Sheriff?”

“You got a number for Sam Meslik?” Ettinger said.

He told her he did.

“Call it.”

“Now? I don’t have a cell phone.”

“Oh, for crissakes, get with the twenty-first century.” She fished in her breast pocket. “Use mine. Put it on speaker.”

“What do you want me to ask him?”

“Ask if he knows Gus Gentry. Do I have to tell you everything?”

Sam knew Gus Gentry all right. All the guides who fished the upper Madison knew the son of a bitch who’d posted his property and confronted any fisherman who tried to walk the bank, whether he’d violated the high-watermark rule or not. The two men had just about come to blows earlier in the summer when Sam was guiding an angler on a walk-in trip.

Stranahan brushed aside Sam’s inquiry about the purpose of the call and was on the verge of hanging up when Sam said, “Aren’t you going to ask me how I’m doing?”

“How are you doing?”

“Well, let’s see. It’s six in the morning two days after I took a bullet. Not so fucking good.”