CHAPTER EIGHT

Land’s End Bar was an unprepossessing building, long and narrow and low-seeming, painted a rusty green. It had a single entrance visible from the State Highway and a pair of long and narrow windows high up in the walls on each side of the door. It was shaded by plane trees that were, from their girth, substantially older than the building, even though the bar itself looked well advanced in years.

“Land’s End?” I asked, addressing myself to no one in particular. The four of us—Deputy Wroten, Victoria, Carver, and I—were standing in the roughly paved parking lot. At the far end of the lot, nearly on the other side of the building, half a dozen dust-grimed pickups were parked in a rough row, looking like horses in an old-time Western tethered outside the saloon, waiting patiently for their riders. Carver pointed out one of them as Mrs. Johansson’s. To all appearances it had not been moved since the afternoon before.

“No idea,” Wroten said. “It’s been called that for as long as I can remember. Sounds like it should be out on a headland somewhere, looking out to sea. It’s been through several changes of ownership over the years but the name always remains the same.”

“I can see why owners might want to sell out,” I commented. “It doesn’t look exactly prosperous.”

“It’s looked just like this for as long as I can remember, too. Run-down, beat-up, sagging along the roofline. But there’s a fair crowd out here on the week-ends. It’s outside the city limits, you see, so it’s exempt from some of the rather Draconian laws the City Council imposes on licenses liquor establishments.”

“I don’t believe I’ve ever been this close to it,” Victoria said. “I’ve driven past, of course, but usually it just passes through my vision, part of the landscape to be ignored and forgotten.”

“I can’t say that my experiences with the place have been quite that neutral. We get fairly frequent calls for d-and-d—that’s drunk and disorderly to the layperson,” Wroten said, addressing himself to me.

“I’ve heard the term. Believe it or not, we actually have bars in the big city, too,” I answered. He grinned at me, catching my light sarcasm. Deputy Allen would probably have tried to cuff me for insubordination, insolence, or something else.

“Well, we may as well see what we can learn,” Victoria said.

“Are you sure you want me to come in with you?” Carver sounded a bit uncertain. “I didn’t actually go in last night. I picked Rick up here in the parking lot.”

“Where?”

“Over there,” he said, pointing to a stretch of packed dirt along the side of the building.

Wroten walked over, searching the ground. At one point he knelt and followed something with his fingertip, as if he had found a track. He waved Victoria over. I followed, but Carver remained where he was standing.

“Here,” Wroten said, indicating some dark brown splotches. “Blood, I think. Certainly signs of a scuffle. One of the guys was down.” He pointed to a long series of curving lines where the dirt looked like it had been swept. “That would probably be Johansson. There were two, maybe three others. The ground’s too hard to be sure. But I’d guess that whatever happened...or at least the last round of whatever happened, happened out here.”

He stood, backed away a bit, and squatted down to take a few photographs.

“Where was Johansson waiting when you got here?”

Carver took a few steps closer to where the rest of us were standing.

“Right there, leaning against the wall?”

“How bad did he look?”

“Well, it was pretty dark. The lights don’t hit much of the parking lot. He looked like he was hurt. I could see blood on his face, and he was hunched over a little, like he was holding his gut.”

“Probably a few broken ribs, judging from the bruises I saw,” Wroten said. His face looked grim. “Why didn’t you take him to the hospital?”

“He wanted to go home. Said he’d be all right. He sounded drunk, you know, slurring and hard to understand. He was pretty wobbly but made it into my car on his own power and he didn’t start really fading until we were at his place. He was still awake when I wrestled him upstairs, otherwise we’d have never made it.”

“Looks like he might have thrown up here,” Wroten said. “Wouldn’t be surprised, if he was that drunk. Must have hurt like a bitch with all those scrapes and bruises.”

“Yes, well, should we go on in now?” Victoria began moving toward the front door.

“You sure you want to go in with me?”

“I don’t want to, but we really have to try to figure this out, don’t we.”

“Yes, ma’am. We do.”

The inside of Land’s End was, to begin with, dark.

For a moment, I felt as if I had been blinded.

It took several minutes for our eyes to get accustomed to the intentional twilight everywhere, except over the bar.

It was a fair sized room, with a row of booths along one wall, small square tables surrounded by chairs scattered along the center, and the bar at the far end. A man stood behind the bar, working on something. He ignored us as we came in.

I thought that peculiar.

Unless he was expecting some kind of fallout from the events of the night before and knew that we were the ones bringing it. The idea didn’t comfort me at all.

There were a couple of mirrors behind the bar, some plate-glass shelving holding bottles of various colored liquids. I’m not a connoisseur of adult beverages, so I couldn’t identify any of them by sight. I doubt I could have identified more than a few by taste.

An old-fashioned jukebox shared the long wall with a door, currently closed, that presumably led to another room.

Even though it was clearly long before opening time, there were several people there, the most visible being a couple of old men who no doubt made Land’s End home-away-from-home for most of the daytime hours and a goodly portion of the night. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the bartender opened the place especially for them, just so they would have somewhere to go during the day.

Mostly the place was silent. I thought I heard a soft clicking sound from the direction of the other room. And maybe, occasionally, men’s voices whispering. There was probably a pool table in there. I wondered who would be using it in the middle of the day.

The old men, I could understand. Pool hustlers were a different story.

The man behind the bar finally deigned to glance up and acknowledge our presence.

“Deputy.”

“Rafferty.”

It was clear that the two men had done business before from the tones of their voices, the slight movements of their heads that comprised recognition, greetings, and—on Rafferty’s part at least—wariness. As soon as Wroten had uttered his name, the other man lowered his gaze back toward the bar.

“Help you?” Rafferty was doing something behind the long, shiny bar that stretched along the entire end of the room. Whatever it was, it required a pad of paper, a stubby pencil, a pile of loose papers of assorted sizes, and absolutely all of his attention. Other than raising his head for that phantom greeting when Wroten had first entered, he had not moved.

Wroten stepped across the room toward the bar.

It was not quite the John-Wayne, thumbs-in-the-belt, boot-heels-clicking-on-the-hardwood-floor, I-don’t-give-a-shit-who-you-are-or-what-you-think-because-I-am-the-law swagger familiar from hundreds of bad movies and mediocre television shows but it wasn’t far from it either.

Yes, there had been business between these two before, not always pleasant, and Deputy Wroten was performing in the persona that the situation required. I didn’t know him all that well, but I had seen him at work before, when this kind of braggadocio had not been needed.

I liked him better the other way.

Still, the act did its job. As soon as Wroten crossed a certain invisible line across the floor, the other man carefully placed his pencil cross-wise on the pad, placed both hands ostentatiously—and fully visibly—onto the bar and leaned forward slightly. His version of “Okay, you’re the law, all right. What do you want?”

“Heard there was a bit of trouble out here last night. Care to tell me about it?”

“You mean with that punk city kid? Spiky hair? Ripped up clothes?”

“That’s the one. Kid got a name?” I suppose he was trying to find out, without actually asking, if Eric Johansson had frequented Land’s End.

“Yeah, that Johansson kid.”

Okay, so he had.

“His name was Eric, sir,” Carver said from the darkness behind me. His voice was tight and strained and made him sound like he was about twelve years old.

Rafferty must have caught the adolescent pitch in it as well as I had.

“Who’s that?” he called.

Carver stepped past me until he was only an arm’s length behind Wroten.

“Hey, who are you?” Rafferty sounded honestly surprised. So he didn’t recognize Carver.

“I’m Carver Ellis. I helped re-shingle your roof last spring.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Now I.... Hey, you’re not old enough to be inside here, the age limit’s posted right there on the front door. Deputy....”

He turned his attention to Wroten as if the officer was planning on arresting him for serving to a minor.

I must admit to a certain sense of relief. If Rafferty couldn’t immediately place Carver’s face, then the boy hadn’t been in the bar before...or at least not often. I didn’t want to think of Carver as drinking in a place like this. In fact, I couldn’t imagine him drinking at all. It just didn’t fit my image of him. So far my image was holding up fairly well, in spite of Deputy Allen’s apparent assumption that in his spare time Carver was a wild-eyed homicidal maniac intent on single-handedly controlling the population explosion in Fox Creek.

Wroten made a quick gesture with one hand, a kind of hold-the-horses-there flick of one hand.

“No one’s accusing you of anything, Rafferty. Mr. Ellis here is with me. This is an official visit, not a social one.”

“Who else is there?”

Rafferty kind of squinted at us. Apparently the lights over the bar—unusually bright right now, no doubt to help him with whatever paperwork he was doing—made it hard for him to see the rest of the room. During regular business hours, the lighting would be more evenly distributed.

“Hello, Mr. Rafferty,” Victoria said, a bit primly perhaps but perfectly politely. “I haven’t seen you since the last Community Picnic. It’s good to see you again.”

“Miz Sears?” Rafferty sounded taken aback. “What are you doing in a...here.”

“Oh,” she laughed lightly, “I’m part of an official police investigation. Isn’t that exciting?”

I stared at her. First Wroten and his big-bad sheriff pose, now Victoria doing a Helen-Hayes little-ole-me bit.

I decided just to be me.

“I’m Lynn Hanson. I’m renting the Van Etten Place,” I said as evenly as possible.

“Ma’am.”

Formal greetings had been exchanged. Now it was up to Wroten.

I was a little surprised when he didn’t repeat his request for Rafferty to talk about the events of the night before.

The silence lengthened. After a long few moments, Rafferty cleared his throat.

“All right. There was a...a set-to here last night. Young Johansson and a couple of locals.”

Eric Johansson had been living—permanently, from what I could gather—with his grandmother for the better part of a year. But he wasn’t local. He probably would never be considered a local, even if he combed his hair just like everyone else, bought his clothes at the same stores, and spent hours with an elocutionist learning just the right touch of a drawl to help him blend in with everyone else.

Or he wouldn’t have if he was still alive.

I expected Wroten to ask who else had been involved.

“What went on?”

“Not much. The Johansson kid...Rick same in half-soused. He was blinking like the light in here hurt his eyes, kind of weaving and stumbling, you know, not falling-down-drunk, not quite, but pretty far along the road.”

“You serve him anything more?”

“Nah. He never asked for anything. Just fumbled his way to one of the booths back there and half-collapsed in it. Normally I’d have insisted that he buy at least a beer, pretend to nurse it for a while, but like I said, he was pretty well out of it.

“I’d heard a car drive up just before he staggered in, so I figured I’d let him rest a bit—him being a fairly regular customer and all—and just be sure to get his keys before he tried to leave.

“I did, too.” Rafferty was almost bursting with glowing self-righteousness, the conscientious barkeep always on the look-out for the well-being of his clients. After serving them poison.

“You can ask the ki...Carver, there. I heard Johansson calling him for a ride because I took his keys.”

“Very civic minded of you, I’m sure, Mr. Rafferty,” Victoria said. I could tell she felt the same way about the situation as I did.

“All right, Rafferty. We have Mr. Johansson sitting in the booth back there by himself. Then what?”

“For a while I would think he’d drifted off, then he’d shift around a bit. Once he got up to hit the head. But mostly he just sat there, staring.

“Then, maybe half an hour, three-quarters of an hour, a bunch of locals came in, like I said....”

Again a distinct hesitation about naming names. I began to wonder about that. And apparently Deputy Wroten did also, because instead of pressing that issue, he again skirted it, as if he wanted to see how long it would take Rafferty to cough up the information Wroten already knew...that it was the man Greta called “Snake” who had entered.

“They...uh..., they milled around the bar for a while, ordering beers, shooting the shi...shooting the breeze with a couple of guys sitting on the stools, generally acting the way guys act when they stop in here after work, relaxing, letting off a little steam. Mostly laughing and arm-punching over jokes, that kind of thing.”

He paused and looked down at the pad and pencil with a kind of longing in his eyes, as if he would rather be doing the paperwork—as if he would rather be doing almost anything—than recounting what had happened to Eric Johansson.

“Then...I don’t remember how it happened, but then they caught sight of the Johansson kid sitting back there in the dark, and they kind of drifted over that way. Not mean-like, not like they were aiming to start any trouble.

“At first, they just talked to him. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, not over the noise in the rest of the room, so they must have been speaking pretty normal to him.”

“But he wasn’t paying them any attention, was he.” Victoria said. It wasn’t a question. It was a statement.

Her voice startled me. The little-old-lady pitch was gone and she sounded more like herself, clear-headed, sharp, insightful.

More than that, what she said startled me. And it startled Rafferty as well because he stopped speaking altogether and just stared at her.

“Well?” Wroten asked. “Does Miz Sears have it right?”

“Uh...yeah. One of the guys grabbed Johansson by the shirt and pulled him out of the booth.

“‘Hey!’ I yelled, and one of them turned to me and said, ‘It’s okay Rafferty, we’re just talking to Spike here’—that’s what they called him sometimes, Spike—‘and we want to make sure that he listens closely.’”

“‘Yeah,’ someone else said, ‘’cause paying close attention could be good for his health.’”

“In other words,” Wroten said drily, “several of your customers were manhandling and threatening another of your customers, who had already had too much to drink and was not fully aware of what was going on around him, and you stood back and did nothing.”

“Uh...it wasn’t like that...uh...I...he....” Rafferty stumbled to a stop.

I wondered just how much Wroten knew about what went on in a place like Land’s End.

Given the little scenarios Rafferty had just sketched, and the packet of white powder Allen had no doubt passed on to Wroten during their exchange of information in the kitchen, I was fairly sure that more than state-approved liquors changed hands in the Land’s End.

“What happened then, Mr. Rafferty?” Victoria said quietly.

“Then?” Rafferty seemed almost to snap out of a trance. “Yeah, then. Well, two of them grabbed Johansson under the arms and kind of walked him to the door. He didn’t seem to mind.”

“I’m sure he didn’t,” Victoria said softly.

“They stopped at the door and said they were taking him out for a breath of fresh air. And then they went out.”

“The whole group?” That was Wroten’s voice.

“Uh...yeah. Five or six of them.”

“And did you hear anything else while the five or six of them were giving your drunk customer a breath of fresh air?” Wroten’s contempt was clearly evident.

“No, I didn’t,” Rafferty said firmly. “Not a sound. Not a thing. It’s pretty quiet in here and....”

At that moment an eighteen-wheeler ripped past on the State Highway. We all heard it clearly.

“It’s...uh...pretty quiet in here,” Rafferty continued, patently rattled but giving it a good try nonetheless. “I didn’t hear anything, I swear, Deputy.”

“Okay. What happened then? Did the gang....”

“Hey,” Rafferty said, again the self-righteous barkeep-slash-public servant, “it wasn’t a gang. I don’t allow gangs in my place. They were just some...uh, guys that stop by now and again.”

“Like every night?”

Rafferty didn’t answer.

“So back to the ‘five or six guys.’ Did they come back in?”

“No. They left after ten or fifteen minutes. I heard their cars.... No. They didn’t come back in.”

“And Mr. Johansson?”

At that, Rafferty had the good graces at least to look down at the bar. He couldn’t meet Wroten’s eyes.

“Yeah, he did. About half an hour later. He was...it looked like he was drunker than before, I don’t know, like they had all shared some beer or something outside.”

Even I could tell that Rafferty didn’t believe that pretty little story.

“And it looked like he must have...uh...fallen down in the parking lot or something. Like he hit his head. Maybe hurt his leg, because he was limping and kind of wincing now and again.”

“And out of the kindness of your heart, you asked him for his keys because he was too drunk to drive, let him use your telephone to call a friend, and then told him to wait outside until the friend could arrive.”

Again, not a question but a flat statement. Wroten was as good at that technique as Victoria was. There was no sign of the posturing, swaggering law-man now. Just a good—even outstanding—officer of the law zeroing in on a wrong-doer who had condemned himself by his own words.

“Look, Wroten, I didn’t want any trouble in here. Outside is outside, you know. I didn’t see anything and I didn’t....”

“I know, you didn’t hear anything.”

Rafferty nodded.

“But you did hear something, didn’t you, Mr. Rafferty,” Victoria said, again so quietly that you could hardly expect anyone else to hear. But we all did.

Rafferty did not answer. He held stiffly still, as if any movement might give him away. More than his words already had.

“Okay, Rafferty, just a couple more questions.”

Rafferty looked up at Wroten with a touch of wonder in his eyes, as if he could hardly believe that the rough part was over with so little damage done.

“Sure, anything.”

“You’ve told us pretty much everything that happened to Mr. Johansson while he was here, directly or indirectly, but you seem to have left out the most interesting part.”

“I did? What would that be?”

“Just the names of the ‘five or six guys’ that were so concerned for Johansson’s health last night. Names that I’m pretty certain you know.”

“I...uh...no, I....”

Again, he stuttered to a halt.

“Come on, Rafferty. You know the name. Who was so interested in Eric Johansson last night?”

“That would be me,” said a calm, level voice from behind us.