Mrs. Poult had been knocking on Sheriff Dudival’s door and getting no answer. Quietly, she opened the door to find him asleep at his desk. He was holding a tin pie plate that Buster had tapped out for him when he was a boy living with the Dominguez family. Buster had created a square-jawed profile of the sheriff with Vanadium’s Main Street as the backdrop. She smiled and cocked her head sweetly, “Darling…I mean, Sheriff Dudival…” She rolled her eyes at herself. The sheriff stirred and gave a start seeing her there.
“What is it?”
Mrs. Poult winced at his brusqueness then recovered to make her report. Due to the Lame Horse Mesa’s power outage last night, dispatch had only moments ago received reports of two massive explosions. One was called in by a neighbor of Cord Travesty’s. The other was from a client of Cookie Dominguez’s who, seeing firsthand the aftermath of the munitions and chemicals detonating at the meth trailer, clawed at his own face in horror a la the Münch painting. According to the First Responders, all of the residents were either dead or missing. Sheriff Dudival, hearing this news, wearily got up from his desk, went over to the office sink and washed his face and brushed his teeth. No use rushing. He seemed to know that, most likely, they were all dead.
“Careful when you go out the door,” warned Mrs. Poult.
“Why?”
The sheriff opened the jail’s door to the momentary blinding sunlight. At least fifty people from the media were waiting for him, microphones shoved in his face.
“Sheriff Dudival!”
“Have they found the body?”
“Was sex the motive?”
“Were they running away together?”
Sheriff Dudival fumbled for his sunglasses. He wasn’t used to this.
“I have nothing to say to you people.”
b
Arriving at the corporate headquarters of Busy Bee America, Inc., Sheriff Dudival was able to determine a simple explanation for what was, to any trained criminologist, a murder scene. Cookie’s death was the result of an occupational hazard—meth labs were notorious for their combustible instability. A lightning strike could have easily triggered the explosion in evidence before him. Sheriff Dudival motioned for an impromptu crew of orange-suited prisoners that had been waiting for his arrival to assemble. Each was equipped with rubber gloves and a black plastic highway department litterbag. County Health dictated that coroners make “best efforts” to gather body parts; in this case, the Busy Bees were scattered as far as two hundred yards from their notorious crank hive.
“Don’t bother with any piece smaller than this.” Sheriff Dudival leaned over to harvest a severed hand with three fingers that was nestled in nearby sagebrush. He knew whom it belonged to, and he also knew who had blown off the missing digits. In the past, that kind of thing had been jocular coffee conversation between him and Jimmy. Dudival then had the men stretch crime scene tape around the perimeter and placed a deputy there to keep anybody out who might get it in their head to drop by for a leftover snort.
Dudival’s next stop on the mesa was the Cord Travesty property. Travesty’s board-and-batten house was laid out in a perfect daisy pattern emanating from Cord’s antique brass bed. It was here that Destiny Stumplehorst gave Sheriff Dudival her surreal deposition. Unlike the Dominguez explosion, the Travesty crime scene was harder to explain. The purported phone call carrying the sound of Destiny’s mare being the reason for her leaving the house before the explosion—the very large horsefly in the ointment. There seemed to be foul play.
“Do you think you could be mistaken about your horse?”
“No, Sheriff. I’m sure it was her.” Sheriff Dudival accepted her adamancy then slowly walked around the bed. He couldn’t help himself from tucking in the corners of the bedcover, military-style.
“Destiny, if I were to take you down to the clinic for a blood draw right now…would there possibly be any traces of something that might—how should I put this—color your testimony that you heard your horse whinny to you on a cell phone?” He already knew the answer to that one. “Cord is gone. We can’t change that. But you gotta live here. You understand what I’m saying, hon?”
“You want me to drop that part of my testimony.”
“I’m not asking you to do anything. That would be conspiracy.”
“Right.” She looked into Sheriff Dudival’s eyes and finally understood what he meant. Dudival had deftly steered the debutante onto the dance floor of her first crime cotillion and had managed not to step on her feet.
“Well, I do recall something…now that I’m thinkin’ back on it.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, somethin’ in the middle of the night woke me up.”
“Some thunder or lightning, perhaps?”
“Yeah, and I just happened to look out the window, and I saw my horse. So I put on my clothes and went and got her.”
“And when you took her home, did you see anyone around the house or anything suspicious in nature?”
“No, sir.” Dudival scribbled all of that in his little notebook then flipped the cover closed.
Sheriff Dudival patted her shoulder comfortingly and then turned to get into his cruiser. As he opened the door, his eyes fell on a footprint in the mud—the shape of a small cowboy boot. Sheriff Dudival looked over his shoulder at Destiny. She was wearing flip-flops.
“Somethin’ else I can do you for ya, Sheriff?”
“No, just wondering if you or Cord ever had trouble with that old gas stove of his?”
“It could be finicky at times,” she said, stitching a little embroidery of her own into the narrative.
“Sounds to me like an unfortunate confluence of events,” the sheriff said with a slight smile. “I’m just going to have one more look around before I go—if you don’t mind.” Dudival then turned and walked back to his police cruiser to get some plaster of Paris.
“If Buster did this, then it’s my fault.”
“I can’t comment on that.”
b
Up at Jimmy Bayles Morgan’s place, the thumping bass of her home oxygen compressor, combined with the buzzing of hundreds of bottle flies that circled her like buzzards, created the semblance of Senagalese dance music. Jimmy was laying in her crusty bed, dozing and sanguine after a night gorging on murder. If her pillow was slightly tear-stained, it was not out of fear of her impending death, but thoughts of her dearly departed Ranger.
Sheriff Dudival arrived in the Authentic Western Experience parking lot with a bag of groceries. He headed for the opened front door, but stopped short before walking in when he heard the faint double-click of a revolver hammer cocking.
“Hello there, Jimmy Bayles. It’s Shep.”
“Come in,” said a weak voice.
He waited until he heard the hammer safely release then stepped inside. He had to mask his surprise at the sight of her. She had lost an alarming amount of weight. And she was filthy. She hadn’t changed her long johns in days and the bedsheets were smeared with mud.
“I didn’t see you in town for our regular coffee, so I thought the mountain might as well come to Mohammed.”
Jimmy’s brow furrowed. “Who the hell you talkin’ ’bout?”
“It’s just an expression.”
Dudival took the coffee, eggs, and bread out of the bag and placed them on the counter of her camp-style kitchen noticing the array of heavy-duty prescriptions she was taking.
“So what did the doctors say in Junction?”
“Oh, them damn doctors. They jes wanna keep checkin’ for this and that so’s they can run up a nice, fat bill. Ah blame the Medicare! Take away Medicare and those sonsofbitches would jes feel your pulse then send your ass home! But ah diserppointed them, see, cause ah’m all right. False alarm. Jes need a lil rest, cuppa Mormon tea, and ah’m good to go!” She finished that diatribe with a coughing fit.
“Glad to hear it.” Dudival opened a cabinet and found a clean set of sheets and another set of underwear—probably her grandfather’s. He went over to her bed and lifted her up and set her down in her only chair. The groceries weighed more than she did.
“Now what the hell’re ya doin?”
“I’m just going to make you a little more comfortable.”
“Ah was comfortable before you come up here botherin’ me!”
Dudival ripped the soiled sheets off her bed and changed them. Then he got a pan from the sink, filled it with soapy water and grabbed a sponge.
“What you plannin’ to do with that?”
“You’ll see. Stand up.” Wobbily, she got to her feet and steadied herself on the back of the chair. Without any warning or permission, Dudival walked over and pulled her long johns down to her ankles.
“What the fuckin’ hell! Shep Dudival, have you lost yor cotton pickin’…?”
“I’m washing you before I put you in these clean clothes.”
“Ah can wash myself, thank you very much.”
“All right then. Go ahead.” He handed her the sponge and stepped back. The moment Jimmy let go of the back of the chair, she crumpled. She shook her head in dismay.
Dudival began to sponge her body matter-of-factly, the dirty run-off disappearing down the cracks of the floorboards. Dudival washed her hair, her face then her back. Naked, without the macho deception of her cowboy mufti, she looked like a scrawny, featherless baby bird. Her tan ended at her collarbone. All points south were like a US Interstate map, blue-veined against a white background—never having seen the sun in an entire lifetime.
“Ah caint fuckin’ believe this,” she grumbled.
“Shut up,” he said softly. Dudival rinsed out the sponge and then washed under her arms and her chest. Her breasts, bound with Ace bandages since puberty, had finally achieved the flatness, thanks to the cancer’s cannibalization, that she had so long desired. Her buttocks had shriveled into two wrinkled pouches no larger than the bags under an accountant’s eyes. He washed her blistered ass and worked up her legs to her frizzy gray-bearded genitalia, her pubis bearing an uncanny resemblance to the poet Ezra Pound.
“Happy? You finally espied my cooter.”
“I can scratch that off my bucket list. Next stop, Mt. Rushmore.” Now he pulled the clean underwear over her head, buttoned it, carefully tucked her back in bed and propped her up with a pillow.
“How’s that?”
Jimmy’s cruel mouth began to form a wisecrack, but she aborted the launch.
“Better. Much better. Sheppie, ah’m right sorry ah said sech things to you the other day….’bout you bein’ a coward and all.”
“I knew you didn’t mean it.”
Jimmy reattached her nasal canula and saw that Dudival was just standing there looking at her. “You okay there, pard?”
“I’d like a drink.” Dudival went into her kitchen and found a bottle of Crazy Crow under the sink. It was next to a ten-pin frame of bottled poisons. Dudival stopped for a moment and tried to remember which dead Vanadian citizens in the recent past had been diagnosed with intestinal or renal failure.
“Ah serpose you do need a drink after seein’ what you jes seen,” she croaked from the other room. He poured a stiff belt into a Quarter Horse Association coffee cup and casually looked around. There was evidence all over the place: On the work bench—blasting caps and Vulcan dynamite—the same brand he found eleven years ago at the Dominguez place—electrical wiring and a soldering gun from the Cookie job, a cell phone, which he was sure would give up Cord Travesty’s number on the “recently called” list, and muddy boots that were probably a match with the mud from the reservoir. There was one pistol in plain sight next to a bottle of Hoppes gun cleaning solvent, which meant the other revolver, that he had heard earlier, was within her reach—probably under the bed. Either she hadn’t had the energy to clean up after herself, or she was daring him to do something about it.
“Drinkin’ on duty…thar’s a new one fer ya.”
“Jimmy, I’m up to my ass in alligators.”
“Sorry to hear it. There some kinda…trouble in town?” she rasped disingenuinely.
Dudival reappeared at her bedside.
“We had a mudslide last night that took out half of Main Street. I’m not sure yet whether it was natural or man made.”
“Ah recall we had a mudslide back in nineteen…fifty-eight. That’s when we put in the town’s storm drains. But you weren’t here then, were you?” Jimmy would never miss an opportunity to point out to Dudival, that even though he had lived here since 1969, he was still a greenhorn.
“There were nine homicides last night.”
Jimmy propped herself up on a boney elbow and feigned surprise.
“Whoa, Nellie! Nine ho-mo-cides!”
“Cord Travesty, Cookie Dominguez, six of his gang and…Mr. Mallomar.” The news of Mallomar’s demise momentarily threw her for a loop.“Mall-ee-mar? You don’t say. How’d he get it?”
“I don’t know yet. We’re excavating the house to recover the body.”
“Folks in town must be hailin’ the killer of all them bastards a goddamn hero!” Jimmy said.
“Not really,” Dudival said, not giving it to her.
“Well, they should, godammit! Ever’one of them sonsabitches had it comin’!”
“You feel pretty strongly about it?” Dudival took and sip of whiskey and smiled. Jimmy froze for a moment then threw her head back and laughed and laughed.
“Ah wisht ah could have done it myself. Ah surely wisht ah could. But as this chamber pot here’ll testify…” she said as she bent over and sloshed the chamber pot around. “Ah cain’t hardly get m’self outta bed to take a whizzer.” Dudival held off her invitation to corroborate. “Be a pal, wouldja, and fire me up a Commander?” She yanked the canula out of her nose and waited for him. “Ah suppose you already have yor person or persons of inneress.”
“We’re holding Buster.”
“What! What the hell’re you doin’ that for?”
“He was with Mrs. Mallomar in the house the night of Mallomar’s disappearance. And he was having an affair with Mrs. Mallomar.” Dudival took some amount of sadistic pleasure watching the creaky wheels turning in her mind.
“That’s just bullshit. He aint cap’ble of all that. He’s a damn harmless crybaby.” She took a drag on her cigarette. “So there was three people up there in that house. Since one of ’ems dead, it just leaves her word against Buster’s. The only witness.”
“That’s right.”
“Uh…where’s she now?” Jimmy asked innocently. She and her grandfather were not shrinking violets when it came to eliminating a troublesome witness.
“She’s in protective custody someplace in New York.”
“Well, shit. That’s too bad…maybe a stretch down in Canon City’ll toughen ol’ Buster up.”
“If he’s convicted, they’re going to ask for the death penalty.” The slightest flicker of pain registered on Jimmy’s face, and then hardened.
“What does the big doofus say ’bout all this?”
“He won’t talk. He thinks it’s in violation of the gentlemen’s code in Miss Humphrey’s Manners For Men.”
“That damn book Grampie done give ya?” He didn’t say anything. “Well, that’s where all that gennelman stuff gets ya!” This made Jimmy laugh for real this time.
“I’m glad you’re taking it so well.”
“Ah tole that kid not to get mixed up with them people. He dint lissen to me. Now, I’m wipin’ my hands of the en-tahr af-fair.”
“So…you don’t think that there’s something you could do that might help straighten this thing out?”
“Like what?” She looked at him blankly. To Dudival, her instinct for self-preservation, even at this point, was nauseating.
“You tell me.”
“Yor talkin’ stupid. Now, ah think you should skedaddle. I’m tahred.” Duival stood, but wasn’t ready to leave. “What’s he done?”
“What the hell’s that suppose to mean?”
“Something’s changed between you and Buster. I know how you operate. Buster’s done something you don’t abide. What is it?”
“It’s b’tween me and him.”
Dudival waited.
“We had words. Ah done a lot for that boy and now… he’s crost off my list.”
She flipped the cigarette out the door and replaced her cannula. “Now, like ah tole ya, ah’m tahred.” And with that, she turned her face away from him. Dudival just stood there for a moment glowering over her, then walked out with one of his grocery bags.
Back in his police cruiser, he had a shooting pain in his left arm that radiated all the way up to his jaw. His hands were shaking so badly he had trouble putting the key into the ignition. He tried to relax, took some deep breaths then lit a cigarette—his eyes fixated on Jimmy’s doorway. When the pain subsided, Dudival looked inside his grocery bag and retrieved the items that he had collected when he was in the kitchen out of her sightline. Dudival had the cell phone and the bomb-making detritus that he was sure would match the pieces that he had recovered at Cookie Dominguez’s meth lab, the dynamite, and her cowboy boots. He had also helped himself to a crusty bottle of arsenic.