Eldon plopped into one side of the booth and reached for a menu, even though he’d already said what he intended to order. One of the waitresses, Phyllis this time, came over and slid down two ceramic mugs of coffee with the spoons already in them. Tillis gave his head a half-shake, while Eldon still looked down at the menu. Phyllis put her pad back into the front pocket of her apron and shoved the pencil up into her red-dyed hair. She hustled off to another couple of rancher types who had just sat at a table by the door.
“Why’d you have to go and hire her?”
“Who?” Eldon looked up from the menu.
“Esbeth Walters.”
Eldon rubbed a finger across his upper lip, perhaps to mask the beginning of a smile. He’d squawked about Esbeth too once, about her even thinking she might help a trained professional like a county sheriff. The trouble with that was that she had delivered the goods, and saved both himself and Tillis some embarrassment. He’d been as reluctant then as Tillis to show any appreciation, though now it seemed to tickle him a bit that the idea of hiring her irritated Tillis. He worked most of the expression off his face and said, “She moved out here, got some kind of little retirement place or other. Sure, she’s no spring chicken, but she’s good at this kind of stuff. Hell, you should know, though you probably resent any kind of help makes you look like you need help, no matter what you always say about yourself on that subject.”
“It’s not that. Finding her here and working for you isn’t what’s rattling my cage.”
“What is it, then?”
Phyllis came back to the table, and they stopped long enough to order. Eldon ordered his biscuits and gravy, a breakfast dish, but you could get breakfast all day here. Tillis went for the liver and onions and some deep-fried okra.
As soon as Phyllis had turned and started off toward the kitchen, Tillis leaned closer across the table. “Tell me about the diamonds, Eldon.”
Eldon got that country-sly look he could do stretched across his face. He leaned back and lifted his coffee cup. Before he took a sip, he said, “Catch me up on what you got on Denny Spurlock’s murder first.”
“I’ve got the tip about the pawn shop.”
“You got that from Thirsty Mills, a reporter on that Hoel’s Dam version of a Daily Planet, a newspaper I wouldn’t use to wipe myself with half the time.”
“Except when you’re running for re-election,” Tillis said. He caught the twist of Eldon’s mouth and skipped to the subject of the pawn shop. “Well, the place is missing a few pages from its register. Thirsty even said he had it from a source he refused to name that assault weapons had been sold out the back door at night from there.”
“But you got nothing about any 7.65mm throwdown gun being sold out of there, or bought in the first place?” Eldon pinched the tip of his nose with thick, blunt fingers and thumb.
“Nothing on that but vagueness from Tony, the owner, or James, the thirty-year-old kid who works most of the hours at the place. Not to mention the fire that started at the place and could have eradicated anything like evidence.”
“You know, Tillis, when you start talking about someone who’s thirty as a kid, it kinda says something, don’t it?”
“Are you going to just ignore that fire?”
“Hell, that could be one of them seren-dinkity sort of things Esbeth likes to talk about.”
“I believe you mean serendipity.”
“Anyway, that fire went out on its own—hardly did no damage. You could have all the evidence you want there, if there was any. I think your boss, Lieutenant Comber, came up with that piece of busy work for you, said stake the place out, so you’re staking it out. I got no beef with you Rangers about that.”
“You want this or not?”
“Oh, go ahead.” Eldon drank the rest of his cup and waved the mug over his head until Phyllis spotted him.
“That’s all of it. I staked the place out for fourteen hours. Nothing.”
“And you think that’s worth trading over.”
Phyllis filled their cups and scurried off.
“I’m not asking for a trade, Eldon. I want to know what you know.” Tillis sat very still on his side of the booth and let no emotion show on his face.
Eldon glanced around at the other tables, then leaned back and looked at Tillis with what the Ranger thought was a brooding scowl. The sheriff had just tilted forward and looked ready to speak when Phyllis came hustling to the table with their plates. She futzed around, filling their coffee mugs before leaving. Eldon tore one of his biscuits apart and poured gravy across it. He was adding pepper when Tillis prodded again. “Eldon.”
The sheriff shoveled in a bite and chewed. He looked up at Tillis, and held up one finger. He seemed to chew in anger, which shifted to a satisfied smile in spite of himself. When he finished the bite, he glanced around again and leaned a bit closer. He waved the gravy-covered end of his fork while speaking. “I’d hoped this whole damned thing was all done with, that we’d heard the last of it. It’ll crop up every now and then, and I’m always glad to see it go to bed again for a few years.”
“You’re going to have to be more specific than that, Eldon.”
The sheriff took another bite and worked on that. With a partially-filled mouth, he said, “You better eat while your food’s warm.”
For a while they both ate, Tillis stealing looks at the sheriff, who seemed able and happy to focus on his food. The piggish glee of Eldon eating his rasher of bacon was nearly enough to make Tillis think cannibal.
But, for all his enthusiasm and size, Eldon had very good table manners, for the most part, and even had a dainty way of dabbing at his mouth with a napkin between bites. There were some people Tillis had watched dine, who should be made to spend their eternity paying for their ways by having to watch themselves eat. He was grateful Eldon wasn’t one of those. He was tolerable to watch, though by no means a joy.
Eldon wiped up the last bit of gravy with a crumb of biscuit and finally pushed away his plate, which looked empty and sparkling enough to have just been washed. Tillis was done with his meal as well. Eldon waited until Phyllis had filled their coffee mugs and whisked away their empty plates before leaning forward on the table, his thick forearms rested against the table’s granite surface and his hands half-curled into contented fists.
Eldon tilted his head an inch to the right. “You moved out here to Hoel’s Dam what? Four or five years ago?”
“Yeah, about that.”
“You maybe only heard a scrap or two of this, but quite a while back, we had a kind of mess out here that I don’t want to get started again.” Two rows of flesh wrinkled into lines on Eldon’s forehead.
“You’ve got two bodies in a little over a week. I’d say that’s a mess too.”
“Hell, one’s too stale to count,” the sheriff said.
When Macrory started to respond, Eldon cut him off with a frown.
Tillis made a brisk hand-sweep for Eldon to go ahead, though the gesture looked more irritated than he intended.
“Okay. Okay.” Eldon leaned another half-foot closer. “A few years back we had us a real cow-teat-in-the-wringer tango around here—the kind I don’t want to repeat. It happened before I was sheriff, and, like I said, way before you were around here. But it was sure a hornet’s nest I don’t want you or anyone else stirring up. Got me?”
“I thought it was a can of worms.”
“Don’t patronize me. I can mix my metaphors with the best of them, and play the country fool of a sheriff while doing it.” There was a bit of an aggressive edge to Eldon’s otherwise cheerful smile.
“Sorry.”
“That’s a start.” Eldon lifted his coffee cup, found he’d already drained it. He glanced around for the waitress.
Tillis sat watching Eldon try to do anything but tell this story. It would have to be a good one.
Eldon looked back at him, his expression almost embarrassed and awkward this time. “It’s about the diamonds.”
“The ones not native to Texas.”
“I know that. But you have to remember that all this happened over forty years ago. Things were different then. We didn’t have this Internet, a hundred TV stations, and books and magazines on everything but weaving armpit hair.”
Tillis nodded in what he hoped was an encouraging way.
“Anyway, the dam being built, and the lake covering up farming and cattle-ranching land the way it did, changed a lot of things around here. For ten years or so, things were kind of in an upheaval, until everyone got settled again. And just about the time they did, ten years or so after the dam went in, there started to be talk of diamonds being found. Hank Spurlock was the one finding them, or so everyone said. His wife, Sadie, was a natural gossip. Hank himself wasn’t much of a talker. His boys could vouch for that, if either of them was still around.”
Eldon paused, seeming to remind himself that it was Hank’s two sons who were found dead in the past few days.
“If it wasn’t for Donnie, that’d be the end of the Spurlock clan, wouldn’t it?” Tillis said, more to be making conversation than anything else.
“Yeah, and that’s a big deal, because families are sure enough clannish out in these parts, and in their own strange ways. Hank Spurlock was one of the worst. Don’t know what he’d say about young Donnie courting a girl who’s not related to another Spurlock.”
“And you say Hank’s the one who allegedly found diamonds?”
“So the word trickled out from Sadie. It does sound a bit like tall tales on the Texas frontier, don’t it? But the trouble it started was real enough.”
“Where was he finding the diamonds?”
“That was part of the big secret. Hank never said. Didn’t even tell his wife, though we know now why he didn’t.”
“Why’s that?” Tillis wondered if Eldon was making the story hard to follow on purpose.
“Because of all the trouble.”
Tillis sighed. “What trouble?”
“Well, you let the hint of a thing like that get out around here, and it could be like those tales of the Lost Dutchman mine area in Arizona, or Jim Bowie’s lost silver mine here in Texas.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know much about them.”
“Every few years someone thinks they’ve got wind of one of those and starts digging around where they shouldn’t.”
Tillis didn’t want to interrupt any flow. But by now he was beginning to suspect that Eldon might be the worst storyteller he’d ever heard. “What trouble?” he said again.
“You know how a rumor is, especially about something like a gold mine, or, in this case, a diamond one. Those kind of rumors had people stampeding across America to California once, and Colorado, and even Alaska. Silver had them turning cartwheels in Nevada, even a bit here in Texas.”
“But diamonds? Here?”
“It don’t matter if it was real, or if it wasn’t, Till. Don’t you see that? It had people laying for each other and family stirred up against family.”
“You make it sound like the Civil War.”
“It was more like the Johnson County War.”
“Where ranchers battled each other and hired guns were brought in?”
“Or, the Hatfield-McCoy feud.”
“Like you say, this was quite a while before I ever lived out here. I’ve heard a historical ripple or two, but never much more than that.”
“That’s kind of the way the community’d like to leave it, Tillis. Are you getting that through to that thick Ranger skull of yours?”
“Maybe that decision isn’t yours and the community’s to make. You ever think of that?”
“You know, I don’t really have to tell you all this.”
“Eldon, we’ve worked together a number of times, especially since Claire and I moved out here, and you never stonewalled me before.”
The look on Eldon’s face as he leaned back in his side of the booth showed more than he intended. It seemed to make light of anyone whose wife would leave him. Eldon was too much the politician to normally share so much. As soon as he realized what Tillis must be seeing, the look flickered away from his face.
Once he had his stone-man face back on, Eldon stared at Tillis another minute, then sighed and leaned closer again and took on what he seemed to think was a storytelling tone. “First of all, you have to remember that when everyone lived down there in the valley that’s flooded over with Lake Kiowa now, they were cut off from the rest of the world.”
“And?”
“Like I hinted at before, there was quite a bit of inbreeding going on down in the valley in those days. Hell, it was bad as Dalmatians.”
“What do you mean, Dalmatians?”
“You know, how they’ve been inbred so much they have twisted personalities. Some of the people around here got like that, only the people didn’t end up with a movie.”
“You’re forgetting about Deliverance.”
Eldon’s face took on his nasty scowl again. “Don’t make me regret telling any of this to you.”
“Okay. Sorry. Go ahead.” There was a little friendly antagonism in any of Eldon’s professional relationships. He seemed to respect other people best when they dished it back and forth with him, the way Esbeth did. But Tillis knew you had to be careful to know how far to go.
“You know what I mean.” Eldon’s thick, stubby fingers swept through his short-cut hair as he shifted in his seat and looked around at the other people in the restaurant. “We still got a few folks who resemble each other too much, and there’s the recessive chin trait.”
Tillis could have commented that Eldon’s chin was a bit recessive, at least one or two of them. But he kept quiet and looked interested.
“In addition to the few clannish families around here that didn’t socially mix or intermarry much, there’s also the fact that everyone likes the idea of getting rich quick, too. As soon as there was any talk of real money, the sides, that were already getting far too rigid, lit into each other.”
“Over diamonds, you say,” Tillis said. “Anyone end up dead? Seems like the scraps I’ve heard of point that way.”
“Fourteen people were killed in a little over three weeks,” Eldon said.
“That’s not a feud. It’s a small war. And this little place swept all that under the rug?”
“As much as anything, from embarrassment. Turns out, according to the tale I’ve always heard, that there never were any diamonds.”
“Then what was everyone fighting over?”
“The idea of them, I guess. Things got started and then they accelerated. I wasn’t old enough to be taking notes then either. I just know it’s a damn-all tender point around here.”
“Well, if it’s got anything to do with Denny Spurlock’s murder, it’s a boil that’s going to be lanced, to throw in yet another metaphor for you.”
Eldon just made a low, grumbling sound.
“What do you think, Eldon? Were there any diamonds, or weren’t there?”
“No one knows. The only one to claim to see them was Hank Spurlock. His widow said he had a whole strongbox of them. But she’d not seen them herself.”
“So it may’ve been just rumor.”
Eldon shook his head slowly, and started to push himself to his feet. He gave his belt a short tug and leaned closer so he could speak in a near-whisper. “Whether there were or not is only part of it. But I’ll tell you what started all the fighting. It was nothing less than native raw greed.”
* * * * *
The two of them sat in the room waiting. They had little to say to each other. Thurston Mills looked down at his square-edged fingernails. There was still a smear of ink inside the corner of the right ring-finger’s nail. He started to reach for his small penknife, then thought, “What the hell?” He’d leave it for what bit of character it gave him. At a tick of noise, the reporter, who the locals called “Thirsty,” looked up at the closed door as if at any moment a waiter with a tray of drinks would come through. He wore the pants to a Hickey Freeman suit, to which he had long ago worn out the jacket. His long-sleeved shirt was his last unfrayed, white one, open at the collar. He’d learned to go without a tie the first week he lived in Texas. It might only be an hour and a half drive from Austin out here, but it might as well be on the moon, as far as any past link with so-called civilization went.
Thirsty’s tired eyes quit scanning the room, and he said, “‘Though patience be a tired mare, yet she will plod.’ Henry the Fourth.”
“Why don’t you just give that a rest?” Selma said. “I honestly wonder if you don’t enjoy for people to think your education isn’t nothing more than an albatross around your scrawny neck.”
She stared at Thirsty with almost no expression on her face, although someone coming new to the two of them might suggest she wanted to bite him.
Coming out to live in this puddle in the road town, allowing himself to be lured out here by the need to have a job of any kind, had been a mistake. He’d told himself he didn’t need people the way others did, those weak and nonintellectual clods who knew only rough-eating and mating, the legacy of beasts. Half the time, in the mundane quotidian drag of each labored day, he forgot even what it was he wanted. Perhaps it was to have one halfway intelligent conversation; or, it could be as simple as just wanting to have the money to start over somewhere else, without having to work.
The worst thing of all for him was realizing he had the learning and acumen to know what greatness was, while also being clever and aware enough to know that he did not possess the raw talent to ever rise above a mediocre state.
It would be far better to have never known at all, to be swept along in the idle silliness of those who dream and try and never, never have a heartbeat of a chance of any breath of success. And they wondered why he drank a bit.
He certainly couldn’t expect understanding from the likes of someone like Selma. When her face flickered toward any emotion, Thirsty thought, it was with desire for power. He’d been around people with aspirations long enough to sense this woman’s frustration with just being a city councilwoman. She was the type who butted in, from the county library to the school board, to reconfigure their decision processes. No committee could form and meet without her wanting to be on it, and running it. She was a small-town control freak, and there were her detractors who felt she might best have shown more of that bent at home, what with a daughter like Sandy, who everyone knew could no longer be surprised by any physical mysteries life might offer, and the even more delicate Pebble, who was a “special” student and had to be bussed to another county where preschool teachers were better trained to deal with manic mood swings in a girl who Thirsty felt had an I.Q. slightly lower than a cabbage.
Selma had lived in Hoel’s Dam all her life, had been there when Mills arrived ten years ago. He knew he was pretty seedy-looking even then, with his hair streaked with gray in a ponytail, and he had a beard some wild goat might have thought twice about growing. Folks thought it was his way of saying he didn’t care, that all he seemed to want was enough money for beans and beer.
“Well, that’s all right with me,” Selma’d said. “If that’s the kind of product Dartmouth College wanted to spit out, and the sort of reporter Herbert Hoel, the newspaper’s owner, wanted to inflict on the community, fine with me.”
The hell it was fine. She knew, as did too many others, that Thirsty had bounced around on a dozen newspapers before finally landing in their town. It was a dead end for someone with the problem that had given him his nickname, a tag that had started out in a jocular way but by now had more than a bit of nasty edge to it. He was as aware of that as any of them.
Selma broke the silence first. “I don’t know why they don’t just make me mayor and be done with it.”
Thirsty pulled his eyes away from the door and looked over at her. There was no surprise at all on his face, nor did he hesitate to consider the comment serious. Coming from Selma, of course it was. The calculating gray eyes behind the thick lenses of his glasses barely moved.
“Being Denny’s opponent in the coming election doesn’t automatically make you next in line. What it does do is make you a prime suspect in his killing. You, or one of your boys.” His voice was an uninterested monotone. His eyes swept around the room with the narrowed and suppressed glitter of an awakened barn owl trying to look toward the sun.
“My boys been in some scrapes, but they wouldn’t kill anyone, especially Denny, unless he needed it.”
“I’d be careful of talk like that right now,” Thirsty said. He went back to watching the door. They were waiting on Morgan Lane. The room they sat in was the back room, where every Thursday night Morgan held a table stakes poker game, one at which it was rumored the sheriff himself occasionally sat in and played. The table was an eight-sided cherry wood affair, with a top that lifted off to reveal a felt-covered center and eight places to hold poker chips and beverages. Thirsty knew all about the table, even though he had never been to any of the games. He’d seen the cars parked in a row outside, including the sheriff’s personal vehicle sometimes. It was one of the town’s obvious secrets, as solid as the table itself, and the matching chairs they sat on now. The rest of the room was done in hunter green and dark paneling, with a small wet-bar against the far wall. That’s where Thirty’s eyes strayed most often, though he was self-aware enough to know what a sad cliché his life had become.
“You ever do a background check on Morgan?” she asked him.
He looked across the table at Selma. He’d been at the hospital when they brought in her two sons, had seen the look on her face then. How she could be around the man the way she was now was beyond Thirty’s powers of understanding. He was here too, although he knew he was here because at bottom he was as weak, and maybe as greedy, as she was.
He waited, hoping the question would drift away like a trail of smoke. But her squinty hazel eyes were still locked on him when he looked up from the table. “Yeah, I poked a bit. Then a couple of guys showed up, checking on me. That killed my curiosity quicker than whatever got the cat.”
“What kind of guys?”
“The ones not afraid to wear suits in a tiny cow-flop town like this. Not from here and not concerned with who knows,” Thirsty said.
“They threaten you?”
“They did the minute I saw them, without their having to say a thing. You know the type—eyes like the deep-burned sides of a well.”
“Like Morgan’s?”
“Yeah, like that.”
“But they didn’t rough you up, or say anything threatening to you?”
“Guys like that don’t have to.”
“Some folks around here think my Rocky and Stone are like that.”
“Selma, your boys are tough nuts all right, but you know they’re not quite in the league I’m talking about.”
“Yeah, Morgan’s league.” There was a sour twist to her words.
It was quiet in the room for a few minutes. Thirsty saw a poker chip lying half-hidden under the edge of the wet-bar’s counter. He had a notion to pick it up, but realized it was worthless to anyone who didn’t play in the games. After a few minutes, he looked back at Selma, whose thick-featured, wide-pored face showed every one of her fifty-five years. Her hair was a ratty yellow, even though Thirsty knew it was dyed and done up at the little Mane Attraction beauty shop that was the highest-priced beauty restoration spot the town of Hoel’s Dam had to offer. Though, to appearances, it had been wasted money. Selma wore a dark blue dress that looked like a Donna Karan to Thirsty’s eye, though he had to work from memory. But it might as well have been a grain sack for all it did to Selma’s doughy figure. After a minute more of looking at her, more than he really needed, he suppressed a shudder and spoke again.
“How’d your family make its pile, Selma?”
“You mean, all the old money around here that’s just a little moldy to the smell.”
“I’m just asking.”
“Haven’t folks told you?”
“I heard a bit of gibber about a gold mine back on his old spread that’s now underwater. Your ex, Slim, was gone when I got here.”
Selma let out an unwomanly snort. “Oh, you know all about what really went on. Everyone around here has an idea. Slim’s daddy, Old Man Granite, made the money growing dope,” she said. “Marijuana. Any good digging would uncover that. But he went legit way back ‘fore I was born. None of that’d do you much good now.”
Thirsty nodded. He’d done his own homework, but wasn’t as motivated for a hot story that’d upset this small pond of a town as some cub reporter might be. There were a lot more things he didn’t say in print than he did. Herb Hoel didn’t believe in making waves, especially when it came to any story that might involve the few truly rich folks in the county, among whom his father, Old Bill Hoel, was richest.
Selma barely acknowledged his nod. “Oh, sure. Slim’s daddy always had a notion there was gold on his place down there in the valley. But we’ll never know. Like everyone knows, it’s all underwater now.”
“How long’s he expect us to wait?”
Selma took a deep breath. “Maybe he’s out bumping off someone who he thought cheated at cards.”
“Don’t even kid about stuff like that, Selma.”
The door opened and Thirsty’s head snapped in that direction. He wondered if Morgan had waited outside the door and listened, then shrugged off that. A guy like Morgan Lane didn’t need to know if people were afraid of him. He had to know they were.
His eyes swept over the two of them, and they were the kind of eyes you see in the shadow of a cleft of rocks just after you hear the rattle. Thirsty thought his own emotions had long ago cauterized, but he felt an irrepressible, chilly slime of fear oozing down along his spine. He straightened a bit in his chair, as if his shirt was soaked in sweat and was sticking to the chair, though in the brisk air-conditioning of the room that couldn’t be so.
“I’m not sure how smart us being together right now is,” Selma said. “What we should . . .”
There may have been more she was going to say, but when Morgan’s slow-moving head swung to her, she stopped, and she was a person used to dominating a room.
Thirsty watched her mouth close and the belligerent look on her face shift slowly to as little expression as she could manage.
No one really knew where Morgan had come from, although there were all kinds of interesting and unfounded rumors. He spoke a fluent Spanish that some of the local Hispanics had told Thirsty was an erect Castilian. They understood it, but it was elitist even to the more laid-back of them. Thirsty had been in a room once, when Morgan was asked to speak with a visiting Frenchman. The man had later said that Lane’s French was pure Parisian. How did a man like Morgan, harder than flint as well, come to be all the way to hell and gone out here in this armpit of Texas? Thirsty often wondered about that, but not out loud.
Morgan eased down into one of the chairs at the table, and for a few seconds it was easy to imagine he was scoping every corner of the room with his peripheral vision. Then his eyes focused with their full intensity on Thirsty and Selma, and it was this unflinching intensity that most made him stand out in a sleepy burg like this. His stare was like lasers cutting through steel.
Selma stirred in her chair. “What’s this about? I thought we weren’t going to meet like this unless something . . .”
Whatever was in Morgan’s look, as his face swung to her, stopped her cold.
“You think their finding another body will stir up things. It needn’t have any impact on us, should it?” Thirsty said.
Morgan’s now-expressionless face made a slow pivot to the reporter. “It might start them on another round of questions. That’s my concern.”
Thirsty started to say something, but stopped himself. After a few seconds of Morgan’s staring, he swallowed, then said, “What do you want?”
“What I want . . . what I asked you here for,” he said, “is to ask if either of you’ve had a second visit from the sheriff, or a first visit from that Ranger.”
“No.” Selma.
Thirsty shook his head.
“Well, you probably will.”
“I hope you didn’t call us here, giving us that ‘step lively’ crap, just to tell us what we already know . . .”
“Selma,” Morgan interrupted. “Shut up. What have you heard from the sheriff, Thirsty?”
“He doesn’t actually confide in me. The sheriff, that is.” He was thinking that if he was the law looking into a murder, Morgan would be high on the list of people who stuck out in this community.
“What is all this? We suddenly have to answer to you? I thought we were all in this on an equal footing.”
“No one cares just this second what you think, Selma. I was speaking to Thirsty here.”
“You never did say why we’re here. This goes against everything we agreed on.”
“Shut up a minute, Selma. Now, Thirsty, did you have anything to share with the Ranger or the sheriff?”
“Just what you said, what we agreed on, about that pawn shop, the back-door trafficking stuff as well. Though I’m getting a lot of pressure on that now, because it’s a murder case.”
“You’ve said all you need to. Add nothing to that. Now, Selma, how about you?”
“How about me what?”
“What exactly did you tell them?”
“That Denny Spurlock’s death was a terrible tragedy.”
“Tragedy?” Thirsty let out a harsh snap of air. “What a farce calling Denny’s death a tragedy. A true tragedy only occurs when there are noble intentions. Try finding that in this town.”
“Thirsty?”
“What?”
“Shut up.”
Thirsty lowered his head, felt the beginning of a warm flush along his temples. Alice, his ex of eleven years ago, would sure get a kick out of all this. She’d always said that what Thirsty really craved was being a martyr. She’d yelled something about ashes and sackcloth as she’d pulled away in the packed Volvo stationwagon.
Morgan gave the stare a couple of ticks and turned back to Selma. “Now, what did you say to the sheriff?”
She hesitated, glanced at Thirsty, then back to Morgan. “What you said. What we agreed.”
Thirsty sat up a bit straighter. “The box they found was empty, but we’re here, having anything to do with the likes of you, because we believe that somewhere around here there still is a box of diamonds . . .”
“Why don’t you hold that thought a sec, Thirsty,” Morgan interrupted, with a warning glance.
Selma let out an almost-relieved puff of air. “We could have just said we were together. That would have given us all solid alibis for Denny.”
“That’s exactly what I don’t want you to say,” Morgan said, and his eyes had narrowed a bare quarter-inch. Thirsty started to say something, then stopped, but not Selma.
“Why?” Selma insisted. “We could always say it was a discussion about how to get me elected.”
“No one would buy that.”
Thirsty wouldn’t have wanted to be stared at the way Morgan was glaring at Selma. Morgan was about the last person you’d ever want to cross, and that idea flickered across Thirsty’s mind because he was giving strong thought to crossing him.
“Thirsty, you know why we can’t do that, don’t you?” Morgan said.
Thirsty sighed. “Because we don’t want to draw any attention to us as a group, what we know.”
“Oh, crap,” Selma said. “We could have been playing cards. No one has any idea about anything.” She said it in a way that made Thirsty think of thin ice.
“That’s not the point. We just weren’t together, then or now. Got it?”
Selma said, “There just had better be some goddamned diamonds.”
Morgan’s eyes narrowed even more, and glittered from the tight slits. “There are, just not where we thought. This is a blessing, really. It eliminates that.”
Thirsty scooted an inch more upright in his chair. He glanced at Selma.
She said, “None of us trusts the others a hell of a lot. We got that out on the table, right?”
Selma’s hard matter-of-fact oblivious tone stung Thirty’s sensibilities. Things like this were better to sneak up on, not bull toward, right through the tall grass. He looked closely at her face, as if the open pores and rough skin had something to do with her thinking.
The diamonds were the last thing he wanted to talk about too much, even though it was the flimsy thread that held them together. He’d done too much digging to share everything, or, for that matter, anything, with these two.
“We couldn’t have done this by phone? I don’t like this being together right now at all,” Selma said.
“Selma, there is so much you don’t know or understand here. Why don’t you give yourself a break and listen for a bit? Trust me on this.”
“What do you think, Thirsty?” Selma’s prune-like eyes had fixed on him. “Do you picture Morgan here as someone we might actually trust?”
Thirsty was fascinated by the way Morgan was looking at Selma, like he wanted to break her in half like a used match.
Anticipating how much Selma was getting to Morgan gave Thirsty misdirected confidence. He almost grinned at the councilwoman when he said, “We could just ask him, Selma. He’s right here.”
Morgan’s head pivoted slowly from Selma to fix on Thirsty. It seemed to take an hour for him to pan across and lock eyes. Thirsty knew, for the first time, what it felt like for a deer to be transfixed by headlights.
“What did you say?”
“I . . .”
“What . . . did . . . you . . . say?”
“Nothing.”
“I didn’t think so. It just seemed like something there for a second.”
The wave of fear and self-loathing that washed through Thirsty was palpable to him. It was what he’d been hiding from all his life. Knowing he had a good education but had amounted to squat bothered him some. But worse, he’d always pictured himself as standing up under a crisis, under real pressure. And now he knew, as he’d always known, that there was no spine or sand in him. Thirsty felt the prickle of a pink flush sweep all the way across his own gaunt, time-hardened face this time. He would let this man, or any other who wanted, take whatever he wanted from him. The awareness sucked every bit of manhood out of him.
“Why don’t you go home, Thirsty,” Morgan’s words were softer, though no one would confuse them with tender, “and put a nipple on that jug of yours?”
* * * * *
For some inconceivable reason, Esbeth was thinking about pie—not just any pie, a Carol Bean’s Mean Baking Machine Granny Smith green apple and cranberry pie, heaped high, with a towering shortbread crust all browned into a crispy . . .
“Are you drooling, Esbeth?” Gala had looked up from her paperwork.
“No.” Esbeth dabbled at the corner of her lips with a tissue.
Across the room, a slim figure stood in the doorway. It was that Cinco fellow again. He stood with his straw hat in both hands while peering through the room, looking for the sheriff again, Esbeth figured.
“Gala,” Esbeth said.
The deputy was on her feet and hurrying toward the door, talking a rapid string of Spanish Esbeth couldn’t begin to understand.
“Shouldn’t he wait for the sheriff, Gala?”
“All Eldon will want to know is if he’s here to confess. Otherwise he’s of little interest to the sheriff.”
At the door, Gala waved back to Esbeth, and with the other hand ushered Don Cinco outside.
Esbeth sat staring at the door that closed behind them. “Now doesn’t that just scald your preserves. People are shooting around here all over the place like greased bars of soap, and I don’t have the beginning of an idea what it’s all about.”
* * * * *
When Eldon and Tillis came into headquarters again, Tillis glanced around the room, and saw only Esbeth turned at the dispatch station, looking back at him with a stare that was the opposite of eager pleasure at seeing them return.
Gala was gone, though Tillis could still picture her quite clearly. Hers hadn’t been a beautiful face, not by conventional standards. But it was a haunting one. Not that it mattered to him, he told himself a couple of times while he crossed the room behind Eldon.
“She’s not here,” Esbeth said to him.
“Who?” Tillis felt his face flush a bit in spite of himself.
Eldon just shook his head and plopped into his squeaky wooden swivel chair. Tillis eased onto the corner of the nearest desk.
Esbeth’s round, puzzled face still stared at Tillis.
He said, “I hope we can get along?”
“Why shouldn’t we?” She was still far from smiling.
“I didn’t detect any cartwheels for joy when I showed up.”
“I got the impression you weren’t doing any cartwheels to see me again, either.”
“Your intuition’s working overtime.”
“At my age, my intuition’s lucky to get up when I do. You men are a lot more obvious than you think. Ask Gala. She could tell you the same thing.”
“You’re a touch crankier than your usual grouchy self, Esbeth. What’s got you riled at the moment?” Eldon asked. “And where the hell is Gala?”
“She bustled out of here with that Don Cinco who was here to see you earlier.”
Eldon glanced toward the door, started to take a step, then shrugged.
“That’s sure a real good way to make a new deputy and dispatcher feel. You and the Texas Ranger here going off to have a private chat. How’re you going to get any help on Denny Spurlock’s case, if you don’t open up a bit?”
“Why? You have an idea of where Tillis here might be better spending his time than staking out some pawn shop?” Eldon scratched the rounded part of his shirt front, where the biscuits were buried.
Tillis pushed back a small wave of resentment. Eldon had a way of making it seem Tillis was thrashing around a bit, when he had barely started on what was turning out to be a pretty screwy mess.
Eldon squinted at Esbeth. “You got some way of knowing what ole Denny was thinking?”
She looked thoughtful, reluctant to answer. In the past, she had been slow to offer advice to either of them. The retired schoolteacher in her had always told them that they would never learn anything, if she told them everything. At the time, Tillis had thought she had just been kidding, until she had been right enough about aspects of the case that only made sense to him in hindsight.
Esbeth finally said, “No one can tell what another person’s thinking. That’s for sure. But if it was me, I’d be talking to someone who did know what Denny was thinking.”
“I’ve made myself unwelcome with all of his family and friends,” Tillis said.
“Then maybe you can try someone who used to be close, but isn’t anymore—his former best bud, Pudge Hurley.”
Eldon’s eyebrows shot upward. “You know, Till, that isn’t such a bad idea.”
“Pudge Hurley. He’s the dam manager, isn’t he?” Tillis asked.
“And according to him,” Eldon added, “the best dam manager around.”
* * * * *
“I don’t know what to do.”
“You could hold me,” Karyn said. She sat on the far side of the car. They both looked out over the deep end of Lake Kiowa at the lower dam end. The windows on both sides of the boxlike 1951 Dodge Meadowbrook were open, and a vigorous breeze up this high on the cliff pushed through the car. It wasn’t that cold, but Karyn didn’t feel like sitting so far away, especially after the past few days. The inside of the car was like being inside a small, square room, though made more cozy by the leather seats that had replaced the cloth ones. It was the first time she’d ever been in it. When she’d dropped by Donnie’s place, he was inside the car, removing the seats to look behind them, even though he hadn’t really expected to find anything, since his father had been still looking too. The car was Denny’s tinkering machine. He’d replaced all the fabric inside and had the outside painted a dark teal green. Classic car enthusiasts wouldn’t like what he’d done to the car, but Denny had never been one to care too much what others thought. The car had belonged to his older brother, Hugh, and had sat in the garage for years, until finally even Denny had given up on his brother ever returning. Donnie had never been allowed to drive the hobby car before. Now it was his, so he’d asked Karyn if she wanted to go for a ride. She’d gone, hoping it’d take his mind off everything for a while, but here they were parked where earlier in the day the idle curious had watched the law fish out what remained of Hugh Spurlock.
“I’m sorry.” Donnie moved closer and lifted an arm. She snuggled in under it. He said, “I was just thinking. I’m kind of stuck about what to do.”
They had been a long time getting to this arm-around-the-shoulder stage, and he didn’t seem in a hurry to rush much further along, which was one of the things she most liked about him. Some of the other kids, when they’d been in high school, thought Donnie lacked ambition. But Karyn knew he could be more obsessed than any of them. For years, they had been mere acquaintances at school, then pals, and finally best friends. They’d gotten there by accepting each other’s foibles. There was some sexual tension between them by now, but neither seemed inclined to push it, though her father would probably neither believe nor understand that, even if she explained. He seemed to anticipate the worst. But Karyn didn’t expect anything to happen with Donnie, until the whole mess about his father was cleared up for him.
Donnie gave her shoulder a soft squeeze, but still stared ahead. She looked up at his face. “You could let the law do its job. Or at least tell them more than you have.”
Even though the sun was at its hottest, the air whipping through the car chilled her bare arms. His arm around her felt good to Karyn.
“You’ve been around here long enough to know that’s sometimes just going through the motions. Besides, there’re still one or two things maybe only I can work out.”
The radio played softly in the car. It was an old tube-driven model that took a while to warm up, but had a rich sound to it. For all she knew, Denny had upgraded the speakers. The tuner was set on an oldies station, and she could make out Joe Cocker singing, “Don’t let me be misunderstood.”
“I wish you wouldn’t be so stubborn and try to do things on your own. You’re just like your dad. If it hadn’t been for his friends, I doubt if he’d have been mayor.”
“I don’t know about that. I just want to do something.”
“Well, you get that honestly enough.” She rubbed one hand across the leather of the seat and looked at the glowing face of the big radio. The Spurlocks’ house, this car, and a lot of other things told her the family was one caught up intensely in the threads of its own history.
He didn’t say anything, but gave her shoulders another soft squeeze.
She said, “I know you’re upset about your dad. But part of it’s the diamonds, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. That’s part of it now.”
“You don’t think they’re down there now?” Karyn watched the wind form patterns in the low ripples of waves.
“No. All those divers. Somebody’d’ve come across something.”
“But you were so sure before.”
“That was guesswork, based on what I’d heard Dad work out.”
“You need more than guesswork now.”
He nodded and stroked her long, smooth red hair where it ran down past her temple.
“What next?” she said.
“I don’t know. I wish I did. But I don’t.”
* * * * *
Tillis parked in one of the only open spaces in the gravel lot beneath the tall, turbine buildings beside the dam. All the Texas shade hounds had gotten to the good parking places first, by the time he’d driven all the way back to Hoel’s Dam from Fearing.
He crunched across the lot and climbed the metal steps up to a door with no other markings than a stenciled, “Employees.” He pushed it open and went inside.
The room was a wide and tall open area with steel girders painted a flat battleship gray. In the distance, there was the deep, angry whir of turbines at work. A walkway led to a set of offices with wide windows and blinds that could be closed. He could see one or two people inside, moving around in usual workday office slowness.
Tillis opened the door to what passed as a reception area. A woman was bent over an open lower file drawer. A man with about the same build as the sheriff leaned against the doorway that went to other offices. He saw Tillis, but didn’t say anything.
Both of them could see the white hat and badge, so he didn’t have to waste time with that. Tillis said, “I’d like to see Pudge Hurley, if I could?”
The woman looked up at him. The man in the doorway turned and yelled back into the offices, “Pudge, better hide those girlie magazines. It’s the porn police.”
The woman straightened up and frowned at the man who’d yelled. “Will you quit fooling around?”
The man grinned with a false sheepishness that seemed to delight him a lot more than the woman. He turned to Tillis and held out a hand. “I’m Pudge Hurley,” he said.
Tillis reached out and shook a very firm hand. On closer inspection, Pudge was not all that pudgy. He was a hard slab of country man who cultivated that look, and was probably a lot more clever than the bumpkin he appeared to be. He grinned at Tillis with real enthusiasm, but seemed to be appraising him at the same time. His long, square face on his oversized head looked like it had been carved, somewhat hastily, from the local rock. It was also too tanned and weathered to belong to someone who spent all his time in the guts of the dam’s inner workings facility. Tillis imagined the man got outside every chance he could.
Pudge led the way back into the offices and, when they came to his, he entered and waved to a chair. He sat on the desk and looked down at the Ranger. It was a strategic position, and he knew it. But it didn’t bother Tillis. He put his white cowboy hat on the desk and tilted back in his chair, so he could look right at Pudge. He crossed his legs and waited.
The office was like any other government-furnished one; the desk and cabinets looked like they went back to the Eisenhower era. On one wall was a plaque of various kinds of barbed wire, from the early days when Texas converted from free-roaming plains. On another wall there were three framed photographs of Texas cutting horses in side profile. A trophy with a horseshoe on top was in front of a row of flood plain atlases on one of the bookshelves. Another plaque behind Pudge’s desk was a little less serious. It was for bull throwing, and was made to look like a rodeo award. But it was dedicated to Pudge from his staff, and the wording made it clear he’d never won it in any sawdust-sprinkled rodeo arena. Tillis had enough time to inspect the office.
“This about Denny?” Pudge finally said.
Tillis nodded. “Have you got any ideas?”
“About who killed him? Why, I’d give worlds to know. I would’ve sure enough told the sheriff if I knew.” Pudge was using a poker face, though not a good one. Any really good gambler would be able to pick up half a dozen telling tics from him.
“He already talk to you, did he?”
“Of course.”
“Figures. Did Denny have any of what you’d call enemies?”
“Hell, the man had gotten into politics. That means that about half the area didn’t like him, or thought they could do better, or would have done whatever he did differently.”
“You know what I mean. Was there anyone in particular?”
Some of the silly farm-boy grin slipped a bit on Pudge’s face. “You mean like his opponent, Selma Granite. What’re you fishing for?”
“I don’t know. You’re Denny’s former best friend, I hear.”
Pudge’s wide, thick body slumped for a second, and his face that seemed carved from stone turned away from Tillis. He looked off at nothing in the corner of the room. His face showed nothing, though his upper lip quivered for a second before he snapped his mouth shut.
“You guys grew up together, didn’t you? What made you fall apart the way you did?”
“Oh, hell. That hardly matters now. We disagreed once over something . . .”
“What?”
Pudge hesitated, then shrugged. “I gamble a bit. Denny didn’t think I should. He thought it might reflect on him, but I insisted it had nothing to do with him. It was a monkey on my back, not his.” Pudge’s head, that would have been too large for any other body than his, swung slowly back to Tillis, and the bleak look in those eyes was nothing to wish for. “If I could tell you,” Pudge’s words quivered a bit this time, “what it was like helping haul Denny’s casket out to the cemetery, knowing that I was never going to be able to patch up things between us . . .” He stopped, and looked away. One rough, thick hand reached up to his face.
Tillis looked down at his own boot. He reached out to pick out a piece of gravel where it was wedged between the sole and side of the boot. He’d have gone on doing other chores, but Pudge’s face turned back toward him, as if surprised and a bit irritated to find him still there.
Tillis said, “I was hoping you could tell me something, maybe even if you think Denny’s death’s in any way connected to the body of his brother we just pulled out from in front of your dam.”
“Oh, that.”
“There’s something more in the way you said that.”
“Well, Denny and I may’ve not of been as close as we once were. But I kept track of him, tried to be supportive even when I . . . wasn’t around anymore.”
“What was he up to? The election?”
“No. Denny couldn’t seem to get caught up in that this time. He didn’t much care if he won or lost. At least that’s what the folks I talked to said.”
“What was bothering him?”
Pudge blinked and looked up at whatever it was in the empty corner of the room that attracted him. After a minute, his low, rumbling voice filled the tiny office. “He was obsessed about his brother, about Hugh.”
“Who Denny’s son Donnie just helped locate under the lake out there.”
“The boy won’t talk, though, will he?”
“Nope.”
“Denny was the same way. It’s a wonder he ever communicated enough to get elected.”
“Maybe that was a plus—what the voters wanted.”
“Could be.”
“What do you know about what happened to Hugh? Did you ever get anything out of Denny about that?”
“No. But I heard plenty about Hank.”
“So, tell me. What do you think happened on that dark and stormy night?”
“Which one?”
“The one where Hank Spurlock, the father, disappeared.”
“I know what others in town know, but don’t like to talk about. Hank Spurlock was supposedly coming across the lake at night in a boat, in a storm as bad as that one the other night. It was a helluva storm. I don’t know that anybody could have really seen anything through it.”
“And?”
“Folks say that’s where he was last seen.”
“What do folks say about the box of diamonds that he was supposed to have with him?”
Pudge’s head stayed rigid and still, staring at Tillis. It was supposed to reveal nothing, but it showed as much as if his head had snapped up. After a minute, he realized it too and said, “If they know what’s good, they don’t say anything.”
“That’s true enough. I’d never heard anything about these ghost diamonds before.”
“Ghost diamonds?” Pudge made a sound like he was warming up to spit. “Oh, there were diamonds all right. Hugh and even young Denny saw them—almost enough to fill a strongbox.”
“What happened to them?”
Pudge’s shrug this time was a touch over-elaborate.
“Where did Hank get them?”
“He couldn’t say, of course. He was supposed to stake a mineral rights claim, and when he did, the land around wherever it was would shoot through the roof. But none of that ever happened when Hank disappeared.”
“Do you think all of this ties in with Denny’s death?”
“Like I said, I’d give worlds to know.”
“And you don’t have a single idea who might’ve killed him.”
“No. No I don’t. But I will tell you this, for what good it is to you, though I doubt it’ll be worth much. If I had to pick one mysterious stranger in this whole town for you to focus your efforts on, it’d be Morgan Lane.”
“Don’t you play in his game?”
“Not anymore.”
“Just since Denny’s death?”
“I should have quit before that. But I didn’t, and that’s just the way that is.”
“But you wouldn’t mind if I could hang Denny’s death on Lane?”
“I don’t want you to hang the death on anyone who didn’t do it.”
“But if some harm comes to Morgan, you wouldn’t mind that, would you?”
“No. That I wouldn’t mind. I wouldn’t mind it a bit.”