Sometimes, living in Laramie made Sally feel like she was in the middle of an old movie. Just now the feature film seemed to be Paint Your Wagon. People were working, chattering, flirting, enjoying themselves, getting into the swing of the community activity. Of course, there were some signs that these were no longer the days when a smooth-faced Clint Eastwood could be found warbling onscreen. Fatigue-clad lesbians with shaved heads mingled with rodeo cowboys in Grateful Dead T-shirts, sorority girls with pierced navels, senior citizens wearing Birkenstocks. In the flatbed of the tractor-trailer, Brit, Herman Schwink, and an assortment of young people were building some kind of elaborate structure out of chicken wire, plywood, and two-by-fours. Paint, Magic Markers, paper, wood, and sheets lay everywhere. Maude, dressed in her usual faded jeans and sloganeering T-shirt, was supervising a couple dozen men, women, and children in the art of sign painting, nodding her approval as each sign was finished, stapled to wooden stakes, and stacked against the wall. Delice dashed in and out the back door of the café, shouting encouragement, and even bringing out a cooler full of cold soda and bottled water.
“Delice giving out free drinks?” said Sally. “There’s one for the history books.”
“Yeah,” Brit agreed, jumping down from the truck bed, “and it’s, like, not for the glory. We already put the Wrangler on our banner thanking our sponsors and volunteers, for letting us use the parking lot.”
As Brit bent over the cooler to inspect the beverage selection, Sally watched Herman’s eyes zero in on the back pockets of Brit’s little cutoffs, then travel down her legs and all the way back up. Sally thought she might have heard him whimper. When Brit pulled out two Dr Peppers and took one over to him, you could practically see the twittering lovebirds circling his head. That boy had it bad.
“Hey Brit,” Sally whispered, after Herman had gone back to work. “Do you think you could see if your buddy Herman can find out if his little brother knows more about Monette than he’s been admitting so far?”
“Why?” Brit asked.
“It seems Monette and young Adolph had some kind of thing going.”
“Gag me,” said Brit.
“Fine,” said Sally, “but could you get Herman to lean on Adolph a little?”
Brit put a hand on her hip. “I think,” she said, “that I could get Herman to lean on a prickly pear cactus if I asked nicely.” And then she too went back to work.
Sally walked over to check out the signs. They varied from the spunky and unobjectionable (“Wyoming Women Rule”) to the straightforwardly memorial (Mary Langham painting one that said “Remember Monette”) to the in-your-face feminist (“WIMMIN-POWER!!!”) to the marginally commercial (“Wyoming Women Thank Wal-Mart”—presumably Maude’s gesture). Coalition politics, Laramie style, although Sally noticed that Maude did remind some of the volunteers to stay on message (“Sorry, Sukie, I know we’re all here to protest a killing, but I think you’d better save ‘Abortion Is Murder’ for another time”).
“Looks like you don’t really need me,” Sally told Maude. “You got a great turnout.”
Maude pulled a bandana from her pocket and wiped her face. “They’ve done a good job. We’ll probably have forty or fifty people marching all told, and that thing on the float sure is big, anyhow.”
“What is it supposed to be?” Sally asked.
“Don’t know. Brit and her friends are in charge. They’ve been looking at a drawing and making modifications in the structure, but they’re keeping it a secret from us old people.”
Sally squinted up. “It doesn’t look like anything in particular at this point.”
“They’re not done. They said they wouldn’t put the finishing touches on until tomorrow, when they cover the whole thing in wadded-up crepe paper. I figure, if they want to treat this like they’re building the home-coming float, that’s okay. I trust Brit’s taste.”
“No one,” Sally told Maude, “has a more finely tuned sense of the tacky than Brit. It’ll be fine.”
“Speaking of fine,” Maude said, drinking from a water bottle, “are you? You never returned my call. And you’d better tell me the truth about what’s been going on, because I’ll find out one way or another. For instance, I already know that you and Hawk found Monette. Now tell me about what happened at your house Tuesday night.”
Sally didn’t ask how she knew. It didn’t really matter. This was Laramie, and sooner or later, anyone who put her mind to finding out anything, would. “A little vandalism. Forget about it.”
“Not a chance,” Maude replied. “And that business about you fainting at the rodeo? Rumor has it you’re hypoglycemic.”
“That’s right,” said Sally. “The doctors are prescribing one of your oatmeal raisin cookies every two hours. Better start baking, Maude.”
“You worry me, Sally.” Maude frowned.
“My blood sugar’s fine,” Sally tried.
Maude gave her the steely glare. “Is there any chance that break-in had anything to do with Monette’s murder?”
“Maude!” Sally said, then lowered her voice. “Why don’t you just take out a full-page ad in the Boomerang?”
“Sorry,” she said. “Maybe this isn’t the time. But I just want you to know I’m on to you. And you surely understand how things are around here—I’m generally among the first to know what’s going on, and I’m never the last. Let me know if you need my help with anything. Anything,” she said.
The second “anything” presumably meant that Sally should make sure to contact Maude if anybody needed intimidating. Maude actually was pretty good at that. She never flaunted her money, but Maude made it a point of womanly honor to use her height, fitness, stubbornness, and firearms ownership when the occasion suited.
“Come to think of it,” Sally said, “maybe you could help me with a different matter. What do you know about an old tie plant up in the Laramies?”
Maude poured some water on her bandana, then tied it around her neck. “It wasn’t a very big operation. I’m not sure when they opened it up, but it closed down in the mid-sixties sometime. You know, when they finished the interstate, the railroads lost a lot of business and they started cutting back. One more Wyoming boom busting, I guess,” Maude said, and then squinted at Sally. “My brother worked there a few summers. Why do you ask?”
“Just doing some research for a friend,” Sally answered.
“Yeah, I bet,” Maude said suspiciously. “You do a lot of this sort of friendly research?”
“I do all kinds of research, as you know,” Sally said genially. “So was your brother a railroad guy?”
“Nope. He just worked up there as a summer job. Sometimes he did construction, but the tie plant paid more. Put him through the engineering program at UW. He was a lifer at IBM—retired five years ago.”
“Any chance I could call him up and ask him a few questions?” Sally said.
“No. He died October before last. Lung cancer,” Maude answered flatly.
“Oh. I’m sorry,” Sally said.
“So am I. You’d think a brilliant scientist would have had a few brains. But he was a two-pack-a-day man for damn near fifty years.” Her gaze sharpened. “You know, I’ve wondered sometimes about that tie plant job. From what I’ve read, those kinds of places are just chock-full of toxic chemicals. I wonder how many of the other workers have turned up with cancer?”
Sally should have known better than to raise the subject with Maude Stark, a woman whose bleeding heart often bled green. So devoted to the earth was Maude that she lived off the power grid, generating power from a small wind farm, and often modestly boasting that her solar panels collected enough energy to heat her own house and half of West Laramie. From the moment Sally had first learned about the tie plant, she’d had her own thoughts about pollution problems. Naturally, Maude would make the connection.
But she wasn’t about to let Maude stare her down. Sally went for nonchalance. “I haven’t really thought about it. I was just doing some reading, and happened to run across a mention of the plant. I’d never heard about it, that’s all.”
“With you, ‘that’ is never all. Why in the world are you researching the Happy Jack tie plant?” Maude thought a minute. “It can’t be connected to Monette— too far from the Devil’s Playground. This wouldn’t have anything to do with that Wood’s Hole land deal, would it? Is that why Hawk was hanging around Molly Wood at the memorial?”
“Damn it, Maude, would you give it a rest?” Sally sputtered.
“Don’t ever try to bamboozle a nosy old lady,” Maude said.
“If you were just a nosy old lady, you’d be a lot easier to bamboozle. But for the time being, I’d appreciate your backing off. I swear I don’t know a bloody thing about any pollution from that plant. If I learn something, I’ll let you know.”
That much was true. The papers Sally had seen referred only to the period during which the plant had been in operation, from 1942, when it opened as a temporary facility meeting the war emergency, to 1963, by which time production had fallen way off, and the place shut down. For something that had turned trees into industrial equipment for a good twenty-one years, it hadn’t left much of a paper trail, at least in the documents Sally had seen. Mostly she’d found ledger sheets with columns of figures, showing board feet of timber ripped from the forest and prices and profits and overall outputs. There had been letters between the plant superintendent and railroad executives, talking about production quotas and employee turnover, now and again mentioning the odd accident where somebody sawed off a finger, or dropped a log on somebody else. But those were, in the parlance of industrial safety, operator errors, not environmental hazards. So Sally hadn’t learned what she’d hoped. Maybe Hawk had found more in state records.
Maude finished her water and shook her head. “You’ll let me know when you’re good and ready, I reckon. But don’t ever think you can put one over on me, or anybody else for that matter, Sally Alder. You’re clever enough, but you lack guile.”
Sally sighed. Maude was right. Sally had developed a measure of professional discretion over the years, but in her heart lurked the rash youngster whose idea of indirection was to wait fifteen seconds to barrel full-steam ahead. Since the beginning of the week, she thought she’d been slipping quietly around, making subtle inquiries, sly, cunning, artful, careful. Uh-huh. Cunning as a stack of railroad ties, and careful? The returns were in. Even goons like Bone Bandy and Sheldon Stover had gotten the drop on her.
And of course, she was not hypoglycemic.
Just now she wasn’t even feeling very clever. If she had any sense at all, she’d leave the busy parade crew to its work and go directly home. Do not hang around trying to pick up information; do not attempt to question Jerry Jeff Davis. But hell, she’d flogged things this far, she might as well go for it. She might not be crafty, but at least she was persistent.
Sally sidled over to the flatbed. Herman Schwink, in pressed cowboy jeans and a sweaty cotton shirt, was banging a nail into a board on the side of the structure (did it look like a space capsule? A Coke bottle?) Brit was helping him by standing close by, holding the thing steady. By the time he finished nailing, the poor cowpoke was panting, and not just from the exertion of swinging a hammer. “Hey Herman,” Sally said, “are you riding tonight?”
Obviously grateful for an excuse to take a breather, he picked up his can of soda and walked over to sit down, dangling his long legs off the back of the truck. “Yep,” he said. “Gotta stay in the saddle to win the big purse for the week and rack up points for the year. Understand you missed the show the other night.”
“Unfortunately I did.”
“Sorry to hear it. We came in second. Well, if you can’t come tonight, maybe you could catch us tomorrow. We rodeo in the afternoon, so we can all go party Saturday night. I’d be glad to leave a pass for you at the gate.”
“Thanks. I’m not sure I’ll get there, but I’d appreciate it.”
“Pleasure’s all mine,” said Herman, stealing a glance at Brit.
He was such a nice guy. And also distracted—a perfect time to pump. “So your parents live in town, right?”
“Sure do. And my grandparents and about thirty assorted uncles and aunts and cousins.” He grinned. “It’s always great to come back home. When I’m out there in Tulsa or Tucumcari, the stands aren’t exactly filled with people yelling, ‘Herman Schwink is the Bomb!’ ”
Now for her very wily move. “So when you’re here, do you keep all your gear at home, or what?”
Herman looked puzzled. Justifiably. She plunged on. “I mean, when I’ve been out in the stands, and seen everybody milling around, I’ve just always wondered about the life of a rodeo cowboy. How do you organize your stuff for living on the road?”
“Ohhh, I see what you’re talking about, now. For a minute there, I wasn’t following. You mean, like, do I have some specially equipped van or something to haul all my tack and ropes and saddles and stuff. But there’s nothing as elaborate as all that. The horse trailer does just fine for some things, and of course a cowboy’s horse is his most important piece of gear, not to mention his traveling buddy. Some other filly bucks me off, I always go home to McGuinn,” he said.
Sally enjoyed a moment of unexpected glee. However much she overpacked when she traveled, she would never, ever be compelled to include a horse in her baggage. Especially not that snorting evil-eyed mare.
“For everything else,” Herman continued, “I’ve got a camper on the back of my pickup. Everything has its place. I don’t need much.” Another quick peek at Brit, who noticed and smiled at him, and then shot a quizzical look at Sally.
“Sounds like a lot to drag around,” said Sally. “So have you been rodeoing since you were a kid?”
“Sure have. I was goat ropin’ when even the pygmy goats outweighed me. By the time I was in high school, I went to the nationals they have every summer over to Douglas. Started out teamin’ with my brother, but once Adolph found out it was gonna be work followin’ the rodeo around, he gave it up quick.”
“So who hauled the gear when you were young? Did your parents go along?”
“Aw, we didn’t need hardly anything then. I mean, we mostly rode around here, or competed with the high school team. When we had to travel we borrowed horses, sometimes even saddles. We could pretty much fit everything we needed for a weekend into a duffel bag. Even the rope case.”
Now they were getting somewhere. “Rope case?” she asked.
“On the professional circuit, team ropers, calf ropers, guys like that keep their ropes in a special case, a kind of round leather thing. You can buy ’em in a good ranch supply store, but some people get fancy designer ones.”
“I bet you guys take pretty good care of your stuff.”
Herman laughed. “Some do, some don’t. Me, for instance, I can’t stand anything out of order. Every jump— that is, every time I have to move to another town—I have this list I keep, and I inventory my stuff before I leave. But then, of course, some guys, for whatever reasons, couldn’t find their boots if their feet weren’t in ’em. And even then, some of those ones have problems with the feet!”
Sally laughed with him. She could think of one Montana cowboy whose feet had parted company with his boots one night long ago, over a hand of poker.
Herman smiled at her, and his damaged face took on a gentle glow that gave Sally a glimpse of what Brit saw in him, and reminded her, once more, of the power of cowboy sex voodoo. “For some of ’em it’s drinking or drugs makes ’em careless, but I guess some of it’s just human nature. My mom always said that if she went into a coma for twenty years and came out, and somebody took her to my house and Adolph’s, she’d be able to tell which was which by whether or not she had to use a shovel to get in the front door.”
“So can you tell when a cowboy’s young whether he’ll be more like you or more like Adolph?” Sally asked, abandoning the pretense of subtlety.
Herman finished his soda, crushed the can, looked Sally in the eye as he rose to go back to work. His eyes were still friendly, but now shrewd too. “Yeah. Can’t you?”
He nodded a farewell, the gesture of a man so used to a hat that even when he wasn’t wearing one, you had the impression he was tipping it. Gazing up at him, Sally was just trying to make up her mind whether to pursue him when she heard someone at her back say, “Hey, teacher!”
Of course it was Scotty Atkins, Pink Floyd aficionado, fresh from a day of putting the heat on young Jerry Jeff Davis. “So are you following your own advice, Scotty?” she said. “Shall we leave the kids alone?”
“Looks like everybody around here has something to do but you, Sally,” he said. “Want to go inside and get a beer?”
“That depends. When I leave here, I’m on my way over to pay a call on a kitten I rescued from an imbecile a couple of days ago. My friend Jerry Jeff is taking care of him. Do I want to be cold sober so I can take care of JJ?”
“If it were me,” Scotty said wearily, “I’d drink a fifth of something brown right about now. Then again, doesn’t matter if you’re knee-crawling or straight, he’s still a little squirrel, so why don’t we settle on beer?”
“Fine with me,” said Sally, “but given what you’ve presumably been doing to her boy, are you sure Delice will serve you?”
“I never heard of a businessperson who thought it was a good idea to refuse service to a cop,” Scotty answered.
“All the Langhams are unorthodox thinkers,” Sally countered, but he was already headed around the building, toward the front door.
Coming in from bright sun and heat and fresh air, Sally took some time adjusting to the dim bar light and the smell of old smoke and spilled beer. Some people liked the sensation of plunging fast into a cold dank pit, but that was one of the things that had always made her an indifferent afternoon drinker, even in her worst days. Scotty was standing at the bar, ordering for them. She found a tiny table in a corner past the dance floor, surrounded by empty tables, where there wouldn’t be any chance of anyone listening in on their conversation. Lucky for the detective, Delice was nowhere in sight.
When Scotty arrived with two Budweisers, she raised her eyebrows. “I’m taking the night off,” he explained. “I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I know when I’ve hit a brick wall. My brain needs to go off the clock.”
“So your interview with JJ wasn’t quite as productive as you anticipated?” Sally asked disingenuously.
For an answer, Scotty raised the bottle and drank half the beer in one swallow. “Well, I did learn one thing. That is his piggin’ string. Took him two hours to open up at all, but finally he allowed as how, yeah, his old one was missing, and actually, yeah, he had marked his rope with some red nail polish so he could identify it, and he had to admit that there was some red nail polish in the same pattern on the rope we had, so he guessed it made sense to suppose that thing probably did belong to him. But of course, he had no idea how it had come to be used in a murder. Said he’d had it with him when he went out to the fairground last weekend, but he explained in great detail that he doesn’t always keep an eagle eye on his gear. Claimed he didn’t check his stuff until Monday morning, when he discovered it was gone, and bought a new one.”
“Sounds reasonable to me. It’s not like he was in an airport or something, with somebody hollering over a loudspeaker every five minutes that you’re supposed to tightly control your belongings or else they’ll be taken off to a bulletproof chamber and incinerated.”
Scotty pounded down the rest of his beer, slammed the bottle on the table, and glared at her. “Don’t bait me. I’m doing the best I can. And you can quit protecting Jerry Jeff. After spending so much quality time with him, I confess I have a hard time imagining him doing what somebody did to Monette Bandy. You were right—he’s too much of an airheaded kid. But I’m telling you, he’s hiding something.”
“Did you have to spend extra time at police interrogation class to unearth that startling revelation?” Sally asked, ignoring his plea about baiting. “His mother told me as much this morning. That’s why I’m going over there to see him. Maybe he’ll talk to me.”
Scotty laughed bitterly. “Oh, definitely. I bet he’ll tell you all his secrets, right down to where he keeps his condoms and what girls at the high school he thinks might give him reason to use one. I wonder what it is about you that makes closemouthed people want to reveal their deepest hopes and fears and dreams. Your sensitivity? Your sweet temperament? Your global reputation for sitting quietly and listening to what other people have to say? Why, I myself can hardly control the urge to confess everything I’ve never told anybody, just in the hope of basking in your famous warmth and empathy.”
“Do you hate me?” Sally said softly.
“Hell no!” Scotty shot back, emphatic but turning the volume down. “You drive me nuts, that’s all. You seem to have this insane desire to do exactly what’s likely to get you in the most trouble. For instance, if JJ does know something the killer thinks might lead to him, and you make a big point of going over there and dragging it out of the kid, don’t you think it’s in the bad guy’s interest to stop you from pursuing things further? Or maybe just to stop Jerry Jeff from talking? Have you noticed that wherever you go, somebody else is at least a step behind you—sometimes a step ahead? Get out of my case, Sally. You’re going to get yourself hurt.” He tipped back his chair, stuck out his legs, dropped his chin on his chest, and blew out a big hard breath.
Sally gave him a long, long look. “You’re worried about me. That’s very sweet.”
“Shit,” said Scotty, closing his eyes.
“You can have my beer,” she told him, pushing the bottle over to his side of the table. “You look like you need it more than I do.”
He took it, drank.
And now she pressed her advantage. “So along with the piggin’ string, you got the rest of the state’s preliminary report, right?”
“You don’t exactly work your way up to things, do you?” His eyes were still closed.
“Not when there’s something I want. And I want you to tell me what’s going on, Scotty. I’ve got a right to know.”
“That’s debatable.”
“Don’t debate. Just tell me.”
He opened one eye. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before? Were you the one holding the rubber hose?” He put the bottle to his lips.
She leaned forward on her elbows, clasped her hands together, and for once, said nothing.
He put the bottle down and imitated her posture. “Okay. We got some prints off the Skoal can, very distinctive prints—the middle finger is missing the tip. Our print specialist happened to remember a similar set from a bull rider who got arrested here last year for firing his gun down on Ivinson Avenue after getting fueled up at the Buckhorn. We’ve been leaning on him, but he didn’t get into town until Monday morning, and he’s alibied for the afternoon. Had an early lunch right here at the Wrangler—the waitress remembered him because he stiffed her—and then checked into a motel, where he had to wait in the lobby while they cleaned a room. When they finally got a room ready for him, he went in and took a nap. The motel manager reported that his truck was in the parking lot the entire afternoon.”
Weird. “So how’d the can get up to the Devil’s Playground?”
“Interesting question. We also got some prints off that Marlboro package you put in your pocket. Some are yours, of course.”
“So how do you trace my prints?” Big Brother was watching.
“You have a Wyoming driver’s license?” Scotty replied.
“Ah.” Wyoming highways could use a little bit of Big Brother. “What about the others?”
He sighed, and leaned still further forward. And said in a low voice, “Belonged to Sheriff Dickie Langham.”
Sally just stared.
“We should have known, of course. You saw yourself how that foil top had been shredded. I’ve seen him do that a hundred times or more.” And now he polished off the second beer.
“You couldn’t possibly think . . .” Her head was spinning.
“I don’t. The sheriff and I have talked. Like our bull rider, Dickie also had lunch at the Wrangler about eleven o’clock on Monday—his usual Double Roundup Platter—and then came back to work. Our best guess is that our perp raided the garbage cans out back, left us a nice messy bogus trail to slow us down.”
“A litterbug!” said Sally.
She hated that. “Right. And if we find this joker, we’ll charge him with that too. Throw the book at him.” Scotty was almost smiling. Cops were great humorists.
“So . . . what about the autopsy report?” They were practically nose to nose.
“I really shouldn’t tell you any more, Sally,” he said. “This is the ugly part.”
“Tell me,” she said. “I can deal with it.”
He took a deep breath. “All right. I’ve gone this far down the road with you, God knows why. Must be that empathetic demeanor I mentioned before. Maybe it’s the brown eyes.”
Silent thunder rumbled. “Maybe that’s the beer. Go on, Detective.”
“Monette was shot with a .22 caliber pistol. In this state we’d call it a children’s gun.”
Sally shook her head.
“There was alcohol and marijuana in her bloodstream. The medical examiner determined that she had, indeed, had unprotected sexual intercourse sometime around the time of death. Not to put too fine a point on it, there was sperm in her vagina. But the physical evidence doesn’t tell us whether it was forced contact or not. There were rope abrasions on her wrists, but they weren’t bad enough that it appeared she struggled.”
“I don’t understand.” Sally was puzzled.
“It looks like the sex, anyway, could have been consensual. Some people don’t mind being tied up.”
“But you said before that it appeared she’d been assaulted,” Sally told him, pulling back.
“Most of us would consider getting shot to death an assault,” Atkins said, leaning back himself.
“You know what I’m talking about, Scotty. I don’t have to spell it out.” Acting brave, but dreading what he’d say next.
“No. But I bet you don’t really want to hear this,” he said.
“No, I don’t. Just say whatever you’ve got to say and let me worry about that.”
“You asked for it.” His eyes were almost transparent, frozen. “It’s impossible to tell whether the deposition of semen occurred before or after she was shot.”
“Oh. God.”
“That’s not all. Somebody—presumably the bastard who shot her—also penetrated her with some other object. The examiner found paint chips.”
Sally wished she had the beer Scotty had just finished. “Paint chips?” she echoed faintly.
“Like from a broomstick, or maybe a shovel. The medical examiner’s report can’t tell us jack about the time sequence of events. But one thing is pretty clear. We’re not dealing with a gentleman here. Now, does that give you some idea of why I wish to Christ you’d get a clue and leave this thing alone?”