‘We really, really can’t be here,’ he said as I got out.
‘We’re innocents, here for hot dogs. You’re going to consume your usual load.’
‘No chance,’ he said, but he did get out.
‘Find us a table before people start to stare.’
He shot me a contemptuous look, for no one was sitting at the pigeon-strafed picnic tables. They’d carried their lunches to the Willahock and were lined up like crows on a telephone wire, watching the blue lights flashing down by the dam. And turning, occasionally, to glance at the two sheriff’s deputies just a hundred yards away, inspecting the river bank for marks.
My cell phone rang as I walked up to the peeling trailer. It was Jenny. ‘What’s shakin’?’ she asked.
‘I can’t talk,’ I said.
‘Bad?’
‘Manageable.’ It was more wish than truth.
‘Call when you can,’ she said, and clicked off.
Young Kutz lowered his grizzled gray head to see beneath the greasy film on the order window. ‘The midget can’t order for himself, Dickweed?’ he asked, watching Leo sit at a table.
There was nothing young, or nice, about Kutz. He was on the wrong side of eighty and had seen little good along the way. Certainly there was little good in the food he served up. His hot dogs weren’t hot and his carbonated drinks had long lost their fizzle, but Leo and I had been eating there since we were kids, and that made it good enough for us.
‘Leo needs to sit down,’ I said. ‘His bowels knotted up as we drove in. They sensed the age of the grease surrounding this place and knew they were going to be punished.’ With Kutz, it was best to battle charm with charm.
He looked over at Leo, sitting with his back turned resolutely to the river, glaringly uncurious. ‘He don’t want to know what’s going on?’
‘Obviously there’s been a drowning.’
‘Possible floater,’ he said, squirting a small cardboard tray of shiny red fries with the yellow stuff he passed off as liquefied cheese. I’d tried one of Kutz’s special barbecue cheese fries once and could only hope the yellow stuff was disinfectant, but Leo loved them.
‘Possible floater? No one’s sure?’ I asked.
‘Someone saw a big black garbage bag banging against the dam, all blowed up, maybe from rotting inside.’ Kutz slid the cracked plastic tray under the order window, with effort. The counter has been sticky for years.
Leo looked away as I set down the tray and took my hot dog and diet cola. I’d bought his usual six hotdogs, barbecue cheese fries and the forty-eight ounce cup of semi-fizzed root beer that too strongly resembled the faintly bubbling water in the often fermenting Willahock River.
‘Eat,’ I said.
‘Can’t.’
‘Then turn around and pretend you’re interested in what everyone else is looking at down the river.’
He picked up a hot dog instead. It was an achievement of sorts.
The two sheriff’s deputies left the riverbank and walked up to the order window.
‘They gave up,’ I said. ‘I’ll bet the ground is too hard to find tire marks.’
He nodded. In the instant I’d looked away he’d finished the first hot dog at his usual warp speed. ‘So tell me,’ he asked, his voice stronger as he picked up a second, ‘how does a body happen to get stuffed in your Jeep?’
No doubt there was something restorative in Kutz’s grease, or perhaps in the secret red and yellow squirtable substances that were dissolving his fries. Leo had been resurrected and was looking at me now, normal and curious about the latest mess I’d gotten myself into.
I started with Rosamund Reynolds, told him of my futile search for Gary Halvorson, the demise of David Arlin and the purportedly traveling Dainsto Runney.
‘You think the preacher’s the one I dumped in the river?’
‘Him, or Halvorson, since Arlin’s dead in Laguna Beach, for sure.’ I picked up my own hot dog and felt my youth in its reliable chill.
‘Why would the Reynolds woman want to get you arrested for murder?’ His eyes were unblinking. For sure, he was back in control.
‘I’m easy. I’m broke enough to work anywhere for a few thousand dollars and still tainted enough by the Evangeline Wilts trial to get readily blamed for something new and nasty. I like that explanation better than thinking that it’s personal, that someone’s really got it in for me.’
‘You’ll go back to the day-rate office where you met the Reynolds woman?’
‘I’ll start there but I’ll be unable to trace her. She was too careful covering her real identity.’
‘And then?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not ready to risk going to Oregon, for fear of also getting linked to Dainsto Runney, especially if he’s met a bad end here. The bank where Rosamund got the cashier’s check won’t tell me anything.’ I nodded downriver. ‘The best I can do now is wait to see what pops up.’
He winced at my word play. ‘Any chance the police from Tucson or Laguna Beach will ask the Rivertown coppers to pick you up for questioning?’ By now, red sauce and yellow cheese encircled his ample lips like clown’s make-up, but the set of his mouth was dead serious.
‘I didn’t leave my name in Tucson. I left a card with a lieutenant in the Laguna Beach police but I was careful to come across as a plausible insurance man, merely following up on Arlin’s policy.’
‘But …?’ He let the question dangle, unfinished.
‘That parcel left in my Jeep was only the first round. Someone, likely Rosamund, wants me tagged for murder. She’ll figure out a way to try again.’
He’d started to nod glumly when a small ruckus rose among the people standing by the river. Several were pointing toward the dam. I got up and tried to look casual as I walked down to join them. Four flashing red lights had joined the blue ones.
An ambulance had arrived.
Someone had indeed popped up.