| |
“I don’t believe Reba has been seeing anyone at all,” Dr. Bagley said in a tone that suggested Ledbetter and I should take no notice of anything her son said.
“She’s been carrying on with Jimmy,” said Duke.
“Jimmy Throckmorton?” I asked.
Duke all but growled. “I’d bet money he and Reba are carrying on. You know he just got let out of the Pen.”
Knowing what I did from Juanita about Duke and Jimmy’s fraught relationship, I suppose his accusation shouldn’t have surprised me, but following so closely on Duke’s statement that it was Reba and Blake who were carrying on an affair, this speculation that it was actually Reba and Jimmy who were involved with each other lacked credibility.
“I’ve never heard Reba say a word about any Jimmy,” said Roberta.
“Of course, you wouldn’t have. Reba is probably ashamed to be two-timing,” Duke said.
This statement that Reba might be embarrassed about her behavior was wildly inconsistent with Duke’s earlier insistence that Reba was “shameless” in her dealings with men. I wanted to hear more from Duke, but Ledbetter had gotten a grip on my elbow and was tugging me down the steps.
“Jimmy did time. He’s a no-good drug—” I heard Duke say as Ledbetter shoved a helmet over my head.
“Why were you in such a hurry to get out of there?” I asked Ledbetter as soon as we were heading back down the dirt road toward the gate.
Ledbetter has those fancy helmets that are wired so you can talk to each other while you’re on the road.
“That man’s not right in the head,” Ledbetter said. “It doesn’t take much to set a dude like him off.”
“You think Duke is mentally unstable?”
“I don’t mean to imply that just because someone has mental health issues, they are dangerous,” Ledbetter said. “Duke probably is diagnosable, but that’s not what scares me.”
“What does scare you?”
“Duke strikes me as someone who might have started out with legitimate grievances against the world and the people in it, but he’s dwelled on how he’s been wronged for so long that he’s lost all sense of proportion. He’s a ticking bomb of bitterness and anger. People like him can get to the point they feel they have nothing left to lose. An angry man with nothing left to lose is terrifying.”
“That’s a rather complete assessment,” I said. It was nearly the longest I’d ever heard Ledbetter speak on any subject, so I was inclined to take him seriously.
“Well, I call it like I see it. Don’t ever go up there on your own,” said Ledbetter as if I was in the habit of wandering off on my own and knocking on the doors of strangers. I hadn’t even gone up to Duke’s on my own before I’d witnessed his admittedly somewhat unhinged behavior, so Ledbetter’s scolding rankled a bit.
“What do you think is wrong with Duke?” I asked. “Besides being angry with the world?”
“How should I know? I’m no shrink, but I know off-his-rocker when I see it.”
“Duke didn’t do anything that terribly strange, other than make unsubstantiated accusations about Reba.”
And suggest that whoever hit her in the back of the head ought to have finished the job.
”It’s just a look about him when he talks,” said Ledbetter. “I can’t quite explain it.”
Whatever Ledbetter was basing his feeling on—perhaps some other person he’d known in his past—he clearly didn’t want to go into details, so I said, “I’ll take your word for it. Do you think anything Duke said about Jimmy Throckmorton is true, or did Duke just make it all up?”
“I have no idea, but I’m quite sure you won’t rest until you’ve confirmed the existence of Mr. Throckmorton’s criminal record.”
Ledbetter was right about that. While Duke did not strike me as a credible source of information, I could not resist adding James Throckmorton to my very short list of suspects.
I put limited stock in Duke’s conviction that it actually had been Crystal, enraged by Reba’s supposed involvement with her husband, who’d hit her best friend in the back of the head with a rodeo trophy, but I thought it quite likely that Jimmy Throckmorton might somehow be entangled in the whole mess.
It didn’t take much putting two and two together—assuming Duke’s truncated accusation about Jimmy’s out-of-control drug use was true—to figure out that Jimmy’s sister Julia, whether wittingly or unwittingly, might be an accessory to Jimmy’s plundering of Dr. Bagley’s drug supplies.
Dr. Bagley seemed to believe the current thefts were being committed with the aid of a key, not breaking and entering. Had Reba surprised Jimmy in the act of raiding the supply cabinet, and Jimmy had hit her in the back of the head in an attempt to either muddle her memory or snuff out her life entirely?
Had he then called 911 in a fit of immediate remorse?
Or, perhaps, had he witnessed someone else attacking Reba, fled the scene to save his own hide, and then call emergency services?
I had no evidence to support either of these theories, but it was certainly an interesting train of thought to pursue.
I intended to track down more information on Jimmy and his possible criminal record, but, first, I had another important person to interview: the victim herself.
Normally, when a person wants to look up someone’s home address, they go to the internet. This is not the case with Amatista, where half the houses aren’t numbered, a quarter of the streets are actually alleys, and two-thirds of the official population of the village lives scattered up and down narrow and marginally passable dirt tracks that create a tangled web of narrow roads out from the village proper.
As a consequence, when I want to know where someone lives in Amatista, I rarely turn to the internet; instead, I go out back to the trailer court and knock on the door of Katie-the-mail-carrier.
Katie has lived in Amatista only a few years longer than I have, but even though everyone in the village proper has to go to the Post Office to pick up their mail in person, Katie still knows more about where everyone lives than pretty much anyone.
As soon as Ledbetter pulled into the trailer court and I levered myself off the back of his bike, I walked over and knocked on the door of Katie’s trailer.
“Do you know where Reba Vance lives?” I asked Katie after I’d dispensed with the customary how-are-yous.
“The new vet?” Katie asked.
“That’s the Reba I’m talking about.”
“She moved into the old Sanchez place.”
The last Sanchez to live in Amatista died three years ago, but that didn’t matter. The place in question will still be referred to as “the old Sanchez place” for decades to come.
“Is that the little adobe next to the old chapel?” I asked.
There are actually two little adobe houses next to the chapel, but one is pasted cheek by jowl against the old adobe church. Father Orejo lives in that one, so neither Katie nor I saw the need to specify.
“It used to have an old wooden picket fence out front, but Janey ran into it last winter when it was icy and put it out of its misery,” Katie told me.
Janey is the other waitress at the Bird Cage. She lives two houses down from the old Sanchez place, and she’s famous for running into things whenever the streets get slippery.
“Great,” I said. “I have one other question: do you know anything about anyone by the name of James Throckmorton, possibly recently relocated?”
“James? Jaaaaames?” It took Katie a minute, but she finally got it. “You mean Jimmy Throckmorton? Lives with his mother out north of town?”
“Supposedly, he recently got released from prison.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” said Katie, “but Priscilla Throckmorton has lived out there for years, and there’s been mail for a Jimmy/James going to her address off and on for as long as I’ve been delivering the mail.”
Katie rarely disappoints, and she hadn’t this time, either.
I was turning to go when Katie sprung a question of her own on me.
“I heard you and Jason Wendell finally made it official.”
Making it official was rather overstating the status of our relationship, but I knew what Katie really wanted to know was if Jason was off the market so that her daughter, Chamomile, who’d had a transparent crush on Jason for quite some time, might finally get it through her head that she ought to move on to a man her own age.
Chamomile is barely twenty, and Jason is pushing thirty. Katie had never approved of the age gap—not that Jason had ever shown the slightest interest in taking advantage of her daughter—and she hadn’t hesitated to tell me so.
“I think Jason and I are heading in the direction of a commitment,” I told Katie.
“Good!” said Katie. “Get engaged, and I’ll feel even better.”
I hadn’t even been divorced that long, and I certainly wasn’t in any hurry to get married again, but I got a little fluttery feeling in the pit of my stomach, picturing Jason Wendell getting down on one knee.
“The other evening,” I told Katie. “Jason and I had dinner together at the Bird Cage. Chamomile waited our table, and I got the distinct impression that she had decided to gracefully concede her claim on Mr. Wendell.”
“Glad to hear it,” said Katie.
I was just turning to go a second time when Katie said, “Have you seen the circular yet?”
“What circular?” I asked.
“I just delivered them today,” said Katie. “I know he paid his postage just like everybody else, but I wasn’t happy about having to hand them out to everyone on my route.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think it’s a scam.”
“I meant: what’s the substance of the circular?”
“It’s trying to sell that crazy contraption of Hanks!”
“I don’t think it was originally Hank’s idea,” I said.
“Well, if it wasn’t originally his idea, then he’s certainly heavily involved in it now,” said Katie. “His picture is right on the front of the brochure.”
“Do you have one of them I can look at?” I asked.
When Katie reached into the rack beside her door and handed out the glossy full-color abomination to me for my perusal, it was even worse than I’d feared.