The Royal Wulff Murders (9 page)

The hood yawned open with a pneumatic hiss. Spare tire, hydraulic jack not original to the car, tow rope, a coil of bright orange tube for sucking air from a full tire to inflate a flat. And a cardboard box of tools, well used.

“Handyman,” Walt said. “This ain’t the ride of no CEO.”

Martha put her hand on the carpet flooring.

“Damp?”

“Damn gloves make it hard to tell.” She rolled up a sleeve and pressed the underside of her wrist here and there. “Maybe against the side here. Yeah, I think so.”

Martha shut the trunk, set her hands on her hips, and looked out across the water.

“Okay, I’m going to think out loud for a minute,” she said. “We’ve got a campsite nobody’s been seen in for five days, a car that’s been stripped of ID, right down to scraping off the bumper stickers. We got a generic name on the camper registration and license plates that have a Bridger prefix, even though the registration card says the camper is from Dillon. So I’m thinking the plates could have been boosted and our guy got too cute. We’ll call the numbers in, see about that. In the meantime, assuming this is the victim’s car, and I think there’s a strong possibility, the question is—how does it get here when he’s twisting in the current twenty miles downriver?”

“That’s easy, Marth,” Walt said. “The guy who killed him drives it up here, sets up a camp under a name he picked out of a hat so no one will make a connection to our floater. While we waste time figurin’ out what’s what, he takes a powder.”

Martha grunted. “Doc Hanson says he drowned in still water ’cause there’s algae in his lungs. ’Cause there’s wicked microscopic bugs. So we’re looking at a river backwater or a lake. But instead of leaving the body where he kills him, our killer drags him out of the drink, stuffs the body into the trunk of the victim’s car, drives it to the river. Hauls the body out to the logjam, grunts it upstream to the head of the jam—the stick in the eye tells us that much—all this effort to make the case for accidental drowning look convincing. Then what? He changes plates, scrapes off the bumper stickers, removes any ID from the vehicle, drives it back here, throws up the tent—the camping gear must have already been in the car—and walks away.”

She reconsidered. “No, I’m wrong about the order. He drives here first to set up camp. Remember how the host said he saw him wrestling with the tent at ten o’clock? That’s barely twilight this time of year, be too risky to dump a body in the river that early. Maybe he leaves the man where he was killed long enough to drive the car up
here and set up camp. Then, after nightfall, he drives back to the scene, wraps up the body, and puts it in the trunk. He dumps the man in the drink, drives back up here again, and abandons the vehicle. Walks away.”

Walt pressed his lips together.

“Walks away, Marth? This camp is nowhere and grizzly country to boot. What do you think about an accomplice? There could be a second car.”

Martha nodded her head imperceptibly.

“Yeah, maybe.” She paused. “I don’t know, though. Most murder is personal. No, I think he’s alone, he ditches the car, he walks away. He could be a local, has his own car parked a few miles away. Or maybe he’s staying in another campground or at the cabins at Slide Inn or up by the Grizzly Bar. It’s what, six-seven miles to Slide? Walkable.”

“Somebody might have seen him if he walked the road.”

“Late at night, there’s not much traffic. He could duck away if he saw headlights coming.”

Walt said, “Be worth putting out the word in the radio and the newspaper, see if anybody spotted a man on foot.”

“We’ll do that. But right now what we do is ribbon off this campsite. Then I need you to put a plastic sheet on the driver’s seat and drive the car back to Bridger. We’ll need to run the VIN number.”

Walt nodded. “Okay. But ’fore we go, all your supposin’ is based on supposin’ that the killer put the body in the trunk of this car, drove around with him awhile, then put him to sleep with the fishes. Switched license plates, for the love of Pete. That’s a lot of exposure. What I’m saying is, well… two things. One, why bother movin’ the body at all? Why not leave it to be discovered by the lake, or wherever it was he was drowned? ’Cause it would be found earlier? It was found the next day anyway. Two, why drive the car here? Why not just remove the ID, wipe your fingerprints, and leave it by the river? Doesn’t add up.”

Martha tapped her foot on the ground.

“Unless there was something about the place where he was drowned that could tie the two of them together. But you’re right,” she said. “We’re missing something and I don’t know what it is. Hmpff. Come on, let’s go see that Lurch fellow who runs the camp. See if our visit jogged his memory.”

She walked back to the car.

“You coming, Walt?”

“I’m comin’.” Walt swallowed, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.

Without turning around, he said, “You feel it? You feel the difference in the air? Like a chill. Normal police work, it just makes you jaded. But killin’ does something else. It gets in your bones. You’re around death, it gets in your bones. You can’t be a normal person anymore. You try to talk to a lady, carry on a conversation, there’s this gulf. You’re not living in her world. It’s like an eternal twilight, like you’re doomed to live in fog where it’s cold all the time. A boogeyman’s life. You can’t wash it off. It’s no way to be. I moved out here to get away from it.”

Martha felt a muscle flutter above her collarbone. She felt it all right. For the second time in twenty minutes the hairs of her arms lifted against the sleeves of her shirt. She could smell it, smell it in the earth and the pines. Or maybe just knowing sharpened the senses. She looked away from the sepulchral lake and its ice-pick tree trunks and took a couple breaths.

“It’s a bastard all right,” she said.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“I
 knew you couldn’t stay away,” Doris said. “Didn’t even have time to change your clothes, just shucked your waders and had to see her, didn’t you?”

“Our relationship is strictly professional.”

“And what relationship might that be?” Doris cocked a hand on her hip.

“One of mutual admiration, I suppose.” Stranahan took a swig of beer, holding the sweating bottle with two fingers on the neck. Except for a cupped handful of water from a seepage spring on the riverbank, it was the first drink he’d had since dawn, when he’d brewed cowboy coffee at his campfire on the West Fork.

“Crowd’s bigger tonight,” he offered.

“They’re not coming for the listening. It’s the watching. It’s like she’s left a scent trail around town and all the men have followed their noses. Tell me honestly, Stranny: What do men see in her? She’s superficial. No, she’s worse than that. She’s artificial. Every word she says, it’s like honey pouring out of the comb.”

“It’s Southern, Doris. It’s her heritage.”

“Bullshit.”

Stranahan had to smile. “There’s the fact that she’s a babe,” he said. “That might have something to do with it.”

“I’ve got a niece who’s pretty as she is. She’s one of the dairy Sizemores, three sections up on the Musselshell River. Deeded land right
up against the national forest. Let me set you up with her. You’d have your own trout stream.”

“You sound like my mother before she passed.”

“She really knows how to milk a cow, if you know what I mean.” Doris suddenly blushed. “I didn’t say that, did I?”

“Yes, you did.”

“I bet your mother wouldn’t have said that.”

The lights went down in the ballroom.

“No. Shssh. We’ll talk about it later. And, Doris?”

“Huh?”

“There aren’t any trout in the Musselshell. It’s catfish and suckers.”

Doris deliberately screeched her chair getting up and walked back to the bar. “Phil,” she said to the logger, “I hear one word tonight and I’ll toss your skinny ass right into the crick.”

“
I
t’s only three hundred. There was some misunderstandin’ on my pay tonight.”

“I could talk to Doris,” Stranahan said, pocketing the wad of twenties she’d handed over.

Velvet Lafayette lit a cigarette and waved the smoke away with her hand—the offer, too. She was flushed from singing. A sheen of sweat clung to the smooth skin of her chest, above the scoop neckline of a peach dress.

“Doris is that old farm girl sits with you?” She added a syllable—“gu-url.”

“She’s not that old farm gu-url. She’s my friend.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. I’m from a farm; it’s a takes-one-to-know-one thing, that’s all.” She lifted the hair from the nape of her neck and flipped it over the back of the chair. “It’s hot up there; never thought I’d be sweating in Montana. My mama wouldn’t let me use that particular word. A girl perspired, farm labor sweated. Look, I’m short two hundred from what we agreed on. I can send it to you next week.
I’ll be playing near Butte… or maybe it’s Billings. A name like a snake. Near one of those B towns. That’s west of here, right?”

“One’s west, the other’s east.”

She waved a hand at the smoke, at the absurdity of directions.

“Forget the money,” Stranahan said. “You’ve hired yourself a fisherman. It’s not like it’s real work. I take my paints to the river, anyway.”

“The least I can do is buy you a drink.”

Doris walked over, stared down at them.

“Two Wild Turkeys. Ice.” Velvet glanced at Stranahan.

He nodded.

She took another pull at her cigarette and tamped it out in an ashtray.

“That’s my quota. One cigarette when I’m done singing. Three, four a week, tops. Do you smoke?”

“No. I mean yes.”

“You either do or you don’t.”

“My dad gave me a pipe. I puff at it to keep the mosquitoes away when I’m fishing. I’m like Bill Clinton. I don’t inhale.”

“I do. That pretty much applies to everything in my life. They can put it on my tombstone—She inhaled.”

“I felt like somebody was watching me today,” Stranahan said.

“The sheriff. You told me.”

“No, I think there was someone looking through binoculars from a cabin. More like a log mansion, really.” He looked at her, saying nothing.

“Why would anyone do that?”

“I don’t know.” Stranahan held her eyes. “Do you?”

“What do you mean by that? No, of course not.”

Doris brought the whiskeys, said they were on the house, wheeled on a heel, and left. Stranahan sipped the drink thoughtfully. Liars embellish their version of the truth. They look off to the left, he’d heard once, something about the lobes of the brain. Liars offer explanations. She hadn’t
and he believed her, but it wasn’t the same as thinking that she had told him the whole story.

She reached across the table and took his hand, squeezing it hard under her thumb.

“All I’m asking you to do is help me bury my father,” she whispered. She let go of his hand, picked up her drink, and swallowed the amber liquid. Stranahan could feel the burn as blood returned to his fingers. She tinkled the ice cubes in the glass and set it down. She stood up.

“I’m no longer at the inn. I’m up the street a ways now. Walk me home, Mr. Stranahan.”

“If I walk you home,” he said, “it isn’t Mr. Stranahan. And are you Velvet, or is it Vareda?”

“Vareda. Walk me home… Sean.”

T
hey walked without looking at each other along the footbridge that spanned Bridger Creek, then up Gallatin Avenue past two-story Victorian houses with leaded windows paned with uneven glass that reflected prisms of lamplight. After a few blocks, Vareda turned up a stone walkway toward a house with a trellised second-story balcony. The house looked like it ought to be fronting a square in Savannah, Georgia. The walkway led to a secluded backyard and stopped at a white country cottage with a shake shingle roof and a porch with a swing.

She patted the seat of the swing for Stranahan to sit beside her. Above them, the arms of an elm tree cast shadows that flickered across her face as the swing swayed back and forth.

Her voice came from the shadow.

“This is a bed and breakfast. Called Aberdare, after the mountains in Kenya. It’s owned by a Kikuyu couple. He looks like an ebony god and she’s like his queen. They have guest rooms on the top floor and keep this cottage for honeymooners and, well, anyone who wants to pay. The whole house is filled with African art.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “You’re wondering how I can afford to stay here when I can’t pay you properly. But when there’s a cancellation or a room open, they offer it to musicians playing at the inn. All I have to do is play piano for an hour before the dinner meal—it’s bed and breakfast and dinner, too—and they let me stay free.”

“Rocky Mountain South,” Stranahan said.

“Not any South I ever knew.”

“What South did you know, Vareda?”

“The one where nothing’s the way it seems to be to others,” she said without hesitation. “But I’ve talked more than I should have. It’s your turn. You’re from Vermont, you said.”

“By way of Boston.”

“What brought you out here?”

Stranahan was silent for a minute. It was a question he’d asked himself many times over the past three months.

“Don’t laugh,” he said, “but when my wife and I separated, when I was done packing up the truck, I drove to a crossroads at the edge of town and sat there for half an hour. I didn’t know where to go. My sister would tell you it’s because after Dad died I spent so much time taking care of the family that I lost track of who I was, and my wife would say there wasn’t enough of me left to be there for her, but I don’t know. I turned west, I think, because my father had talked about taking me on a trip to the trout streams out here. He liked this quote of Hemingway’s, something about where a man feels most at home, except for where he was born, that’s where he’s supposed to go. My dad figured that was the Rockies for him, though he’d never actually been to the mountains. So in a way I came here to complete his dream. And to find out if it was mine. I’m still not sure.”

Stranahan was aware of the warm pressure of her hand. He felt her fingers interlace with his.