Montana Noir

  Tonight, Mindy wants me to go feed Theodore with her. I tell her I’m too tired after my shift. I don’t tell her John Junior got in a fight with his wife at dinner. Or she got in a fight with him. Flo was out back having a smoke, so I was the one who had to break it up. I could smell the beer on his breath when he grabbed me. It was only when Flo stepped toward him that he backed away.

  “Coward,” his wife said.

  After he paid, Flo said, “We see a lot of things we shouldn’t have to in this job,” before letting me off fifteen minutes early. I want to be like Flo, wise and tough, and fear I’ll end up like her.

  My arm is still tender. Bruises have formed. I just want to sit with my feet up. I tell Mindy not to worry, the killer isn’t going to hunt her down on the farm.

  “A man died in a field just like ours,” she says.

  I pull myself off the couch. When I pry open the barn door, she peeks her head in and looks both ways like she’s crossing a busy street.

  * * *

  The next morning, Mindy tells us she wants to see where the stranger was found. My aunt—a hospice nurse used to dealing with death—says it’s weird, and that no good can come of it, but my uncle tells me to take her, so we climb into the old Ford and crawl down the bumpy back roads. I don’t know why she wants to go. I don’t think she knows why. I suppose that for her, murder used to be something on TV, something far away. Now it’s in our county.

  At Sig’s, all that are left are the indentation marks from the cars. The field is a field. It’s lonesome, but not sinister. The fireweeds are a foot high. Once I told my uncle they looked like Christmas trees and got the lecture of my life: Do you know this “Christmas tree” is toxic to cattle? Do you know a single plant can produce 50,000 seeds? Do you know it’ll break off at the base and travel for miles? Looking over the long strip of summer fallow, I see the lines that tumbleweeds have drawn, sowing Russian thistle or fireweed on their journey. It drives Uncle Jarl crazy to see land abandoned like this. I understand why he asked me to bring Mindy. I glance over at her. Her blond hair is in a ponytail, and she has that look on her face, the one she gets when folks start bidding on her steer. Sad but stoic. She starts pulling up stalks of fireweed, ripping the roots from the soil. I wish I could remove the angst she feels as easily.

  “Poor man,” she says. “I feel bad for his family.”

  When she’s ready to go, I tell her to take the wheel. We roll down the windows and turn up the volume. Maybe singing Dolly Parton at the top of our lungs will exorcise Mindy’s feelings of fear. I learned to drive when I was ten, too. She hits the gas and the truck flies down roads that run parallel to the big sky.

  * * *

  We survey your land, we survey your life. We hear what you won’t say. Nothing escapes us. Nothing escapes. If you were born here, you will die here. I think of the stranger. Even if you weren’t born here, you’ll die here. We know everything. We know that Nancy Mallard loves her horses more than her husband John Junior. We figure her brother Davey might be gay. We know the hospital administrator resigned because he got caught embezzling. (He’s not from here.) Knowledge moves through us, around us, with us, against us. So why don’t we know who killed the stranger?

  * * *

  Rob Skelton, the posse lawyer, starts coming into the café earlier. Choose your friends wisely, College Girl. Partiers might be fun, but you’ll end up bailing them out for the rest of your life. Do you know how many times I had to go get John Junior from the drunk tank this summer? Nancy won’t pick him up anymore. You sure do look good, College Girl. I begin to think of him as apart from the posse. Rob. In crisp suits that still smell of dry-cleaning chemicals, he makes me think of life in New York City. Talking to him lets me dream of other worlds. It doesn’t feel like he’s almost twenty years older than me.

  When John Junior and Brad Halsted join Rob, I move on to the Ladies’ Auxiliary table. At my graduation party, Hazel Murphy gave me a homemade laundry bag embroidered with my initials. It’ll come in handy in the dorm. Betty Davis gave me twenty-five dollars in quarters. “For warsh,” she said loudly. But in my ear, she whispered, “Play the slots. I hope you win big.”

  People are still talking about the stranger. “What drove him to come here, of all places?” Brad asks as I pour his coffee.

  “A Ford!” my uncle shouts out for a laugh. The Town Dump is a boxing ring after all, full of fights, jabs coming from all corners. It’s a place we see everything, we hear everything.

  Who killed Sullivan? Why here? Why now? Speculation continues all week though there’s an hour intermission for church. After Pastor Joe frees us, we lumber over to the church hall for donuts. At the pulpit of the percolator, the sheriff tells us what he knows: “The stranger was”—a pause as he sips his coffee—“here undercover.”

  Like heavy heads of wheat whispering to each other right before harvest, murmurs ripple through the room.

  “FBI?”

  “Border patrol?”

  “Workers’ Comp?”

  “PETA?” They were here last year, nosing around the Bar None feedlot, just out of sight of the highway, where 1,700 horses were crammed together in two corrals completely unprotected from the elements.

  “I knew it,” Uncle Jarl says. “He was investigating someone.”

  This is the thing: we’re used to watching. But we had no idea we were being watched. That an outsider was interested in us.

  “An investigator?” I ask my uncle. “What was he doing here?”

  Was he after Jim Ballestreri? Jim said he injured his left shoulder plumbing underneath Blanche Hellinger’s sink. He’s been on disability for years. He’s also the town’s best southpaw bowler, playing in weekly winter tournaments.

  Was the investigator targeting Meg Walker? She said she’d hurt her back hoisting bags of flour at her job in Albertson’s bakery. In front of God and Great Falls, the doctor (her brother-in-law) swore that she could barely lift a bar of soap. Yet who hadn’t seen her picking up fifty-pound bags of Purina for those pit bulls of hers?

  Or maybe it isn’t about disability at all. Maybe it’s about fraud. Several tavern owners pay barmaids under the table. That’s how farmers, even my uncle, pay summer help.

  The possibilities are as endless as our horizon.

  * * *

  At noon, the Starks, who own the Breeze Inn, sit in one of Flo’s booths. They answer our questions tersely. Mrs. Stark admits they talked to the stranger when he checked in. He kept to himself. Had been here two days. Hadn’t ordered any of those extra TV channels. The Starks didn’t know if he had any visitors. They didn’t find any binoculars among his belongings, no camcorder either, just an empty Minolta and a metal briefcase they hadn’t tried to open. There was a copy of The Grapes of Wrath on the nightstand.

  No, they didn’t know when he was at the motel or when he was out in the field, so to speak. They had twelve rooms and prided themselves on the privacy reserved for their guests. No, they didn’t think he was having an affair. He was a middle-aged man, just like you see in the background of movies or at the mall.

  * * *

  The sheriff, who wears his holster strapped underneath that reassuring gut, is tight-lipped as he and Deputy Dina examine the dead man, his motel room, our faces. They find fingerprints on the gun, alibis in the bar. If they have a suspect, we don’t know about it. And a suspect would be reassuring. Someone to blame. Someone to target. Someone who would let us relax, knowing the killer and his accomplice are locked away.

  With no suspect, everyone is suspect. People start asking what Jim was doing on Sig’s land. It was hunting season, but Billy insisted Jim hadn’t asked permission to be there. Maybe Jim murdered the investigator and couldn’t stand to wait till Billy got around to finding the body. And then there’s Meg Walker, who has a permit to carry a concealed weapon. “So she carries a gun,” Flo says. “How would she ever find it in that purse of hers?”

  “Laugh all you want,” John Junior says. “I’m telli
ng you, she gets a look in her eye.”

  “So does every woman who sees you,” my uncle says. “You ask me, Duke Miller has the most to lose. What if Uncle Sam makes Duke reimburse all the workers’ comp payments? There goes his bar. His house. His wife.”

  “That bar’s his life.”

  “Some life.”

  A man is dead. There has to be a reason.

  * * *

  The sheriff and the deputy drive to the funeral in Helena, where there is already said to be talk of naming something after the inspector. The Sullivan Building. Or maybe Sullivan Street.

  The widow comes up a week later. The sheriff’s wife offers to let her stay with them, but Mrs. Sullivan wants to stay where her husband did. She reserved his room for a week. She walks around town in a daze. We don’t know what to do. Meet her eye and nod? Give her privacy to grieve by glancing away and pretending we don’t know who she is?

  The Ladies’ Auxiliary takes over homemade buns and salads. Mr. Stark puts his daughter’s old dorm refrigerator in the room so the food will keep. In the end, Mrs. Sullivan stays just two nights before quietly bundling her husband’s things into the trunk of her Chevy. Folks in town take care of her bill.

  * * *

  Late fall, it already feels like winter with flurries of snow swirling along the Hi-Line. Farmers feed their animals, then come in. Harvest long over, they have time. All morning, they sit in one of my booths. They talk taxes. Politics. Murder. I like the cadence of their voices, smooth as the cream they pour in their decaf.

  “Remember the Johnson case?” one asks.

  “It’s been what, twenty years now?” my uncle responds.

  “No, thirty.”

  It’s hard to understand how they let an entire decade slip from their grasp. The minutes of my life tick by so slowly.

  The Johnsons were accountants, from Arizona originally. After a forty-year career here on the plains, he wanted to return there for good. The cold had seeped into his bones and maybe even a part of his brain. She wanted to stay in the home where she’d raised her kids and now spent time decorating with her son’s old wrestling trophies and her daughter’s photography. But Old Man Johnson wasn’t sentimental. To get her around to his way of thinking, he doused the house and burned it down. She retaliated the only way she knew how: she grabbed her daddy’s rifle and shot him. The judge, who we call “Catch-and-Release,” was understanding. She’d been provoked. Still, he said, she couldn’t stay in Montana. And that was her sentence.

  “Duncan McKenzie,” my uncle says.

  The men look deep into their cups.

  I wasn’t alive when he raped, tortured, and strangled Lana Harding, a young teacher. Years of legal pirouettes keeping him on death row have not kept McKenzie slim. Most people want him to hang, but he’s so fat that a noose would rip his head clean off his body. Frankly, no one sees a problem with this.

  That murder happened not far from a one-room schoolhouse in another Montana field. Years later, my uncle still tears up when he thinks of Lana and her parents.

  But these cases are different. The Johnsons were from Arizona. McKenzie was born in Chicago. We could console ourselves that these killers were not from here. But whoever killed Sullivan is.

  * * *

  Snow continues to come down, flakes glint on the garden and whisper along the sidewalk, the first of the season that stick. When I come back from feeding the steers in the barn, Mindy is thrilled because KSEN announced that today is a snow day. For one day, no blaring bells, no soggy fare in the lunchroom. It is the middle of the week and her time is her own.

  While she puts her pajamas back on, I get ready for work, tying my brown apron over my uniform, a sherbet-orange dress.

  “Do you have to go?” asks Mindy, holding up the Parcheesi board.

  “Waitresses don’t get snow days.” When had I sailed from salutatorian to waitress?

  “Just a few more months,” she says, echoing the words I keep telling myself.

  “I don’t want you driving those roads!” my aunt—probably attached to her curling iron—yells from the bathroom. “Why don’t you call in and tell ’em you can’t make it?”

  I perk up at the pity, but my uncle says, “She can handle herself.”

  Suddenly, I don’t feel so bad about going in to work. I tell Mindy to get dressed again because I know she won’t want to stay alone on the farm. “You can help me wrap silverware in napkins.”

  Uncle Jarl started my truck and scraped its windows, so by the time Mindy and I step into the cold, the cab is warm. The drive to town is only fifteen miles. Up the dirt road onto the Hi-Line, which runs parallel to the tracks, which runs parallel to the Canadian border. The sky is white, the highway is white. The snowplow passed by earlier this morning, but the wind has already whipped the snow off the skinny shoulders and flung it back on the road. On days like this, the road feels narrower than ever, an ice rink rather than an artery that leads to the heart of town. I crawl along at forty, grateful my uncle has weighed me down with feedbags that stop the Ford from fishtailing.

  We walk through the door of the Town Dump just as KSEN announces that the highway patrol decided to close the highway, 120 miles of whiteout. My first thought is, why couldn’t they have decided before Mindy and I got in the truck? My second thought, as I pass behind the counter and hang up my coat, is that if the snow keeps up all day, we might be stuck in town and have to spend the night at Flo’s. My third thought almost makes me drop the carafe as I pour myself a coffee. Among us is the killer. He can’t get far and neither can we.

  At the counter, Mindy swivels on the stool. The daily ballet begins. Though the wind revs up to forty miles an hour, locals aren’t afraid to drive short distances. It feels like most everybody passes through for a cup of coffee or Flo’s hot chocolate, to marvel out the window at the snow or to complain about winter before it even starts.

  Rob comes in. “Hey, College Girl,” he says, and I grin.

  Flo notices us smiling at each other. “Maybe I should take the posse table for a while.”

  I shake my head, unwilling to give Rob up.

  “Did you get that early admissions application in, College Girl? Did you . . .” Rob stops talking when John Junior sinks into the booth, still hungover. He should be just plain John—his dad’s been dead for a decade—but we call him Junior because he’s still the high school jock who copied Rob’s homework.

  “Pity he and Nancy never had children,” Flo tells me. “Sometimes a man like that grows up at the same time as the kids.”

  Ever the real estate agent, Brad Halsted goes around to each table and hands out flyers with photos of the house his agency is selling, like we all haven’t been inside the Thornton place a thousand times. He nods politely at Flo before sitting with Rob and John Junior.

  We all watch the sheriff hold the door open for Deputy Dina. The holster at her waist accentuates the sway of her hips. Both of them look tired. The sheriff listens as she speaks. She’s much younger than him. If he desires her, he hides it well. When I finish taking their order, Dina tells me the night before was spent trolling the highway and pulling out-of-staters from ditches. They are always looking out for us. If we go down the wrong road, they will bring us back. I feel safe when they are here.

  The farmers come in next. My uncle pulls off his old work gloves. His callused hands cup the beige mug. County trucks sidle up to the café and work crews bring in gusts of cold with them.

  “Close the damn door!” Meg Walker yells from a booth close to the entrance.

  One of them is the fiancé who jilted her at the altar twenty years ago, so no one takes offense. Another flirts with me. I don’t flirt back. He dated my best friend—she’s at Carroll College now—and I know what’s hidden behind those smiles.

  “Leave her alone,” Jim Ballestreri warns him.

  “No way,” Meg Walker tells her daughter as I set the bill between them on the table. “You’re not quitting, I worked too hard to get you on t
he squad!”

  Meg comes up to the register to pay. She digs around in her Dooney & Bourke, and I wonder if she really has a revolver in there. Finally, she finds her checkbook and writes out the exact amount, $8.53. Anyone else would have made it for ten. She has the money to buy a $150 purse but can never seem to find a few quarters for a tip. I imagine her riding in the car with the stranger, things not going her way. I wonder if they were lovers. When she leaves, I tell Flo, “It’s easy to believe a bad tipper might be a murderer. No respect for rules or social contracts.”

  “Hon,” Flo says, “it’s more complicated than that.”

  But this is the lens through which I see people.

  Snow is still falling, downy as dandelion fluff. It sticks to windshields, the parking lot, the wet sidewalk.

  “Report came in yesterday,” the deputy says, just loud enough for everyone to hear. An informal press conference. No one makes a sound. “The Smith & Wesson .357 revolver on the seat of the car wasn’t the murder weapon.”

  “It was a Colt .45 automatic,” the sheriff adds. He looks over at the posse. “A few folks around here have one.” He ambles over to the men.

  “I thought it was suicide,” John Junior says.

  “Oh, you thought,” the sheriff scoffs. “We almost missed finding the .45’s ejected shell casing way back under the front seat. The killing bullet blasted out the roof to who knows where, but the state crime lab in Helena says they can match the casing to the gun that shot it.”

  “We’ll need to see your gun,” the deputy tells John Junior.