Bum Steer

  When a large dark car came over the horizon and drew near to us, I expected Slight to give the driver the same cool one-fingered greeting. Instead, he slowed and then came to a complete stop in our lane. The Caddy halted in its lane, too, and both drivers rolled down their windows.

  It was Carl Everett.

  “Where you goin’?” Slight inquired.

  “Flywheel’s in,” Carl said cryptically.

  “Well, pick up some bacon.”

  “I wasn’t plannin’ on grocery shopping.”

  “Now don’t get any more of that thin, skinny bacon, either. Make her cut you off some thick-sliced. We could use some more instant coffee. And buy me a TV Guide, will you?”

  “You need diapers, too, do you?”

  “No, Dad, just the bacon and the coffee and the TV Guide. You plannin’ on stopping by the liquor store, Carl?”

  “I could,” the other said with a bit more enthusiasm.

  “You could drown in your own beer piss, too. I didn’t ask it to encourage you, Carlton, I asked it to discourage you. We got us enough empty cans as it is now to set up target practice for Fort Riley. I think you ought to drink what you got left if you have to, and then give it a rest for a while. I expect your liver’s looking more like Swiss cheese every day.”

  “I expect you got a tongue made of baloney.”

  Carl drove off in a bad-tempered cloud of dust.

  “Man’s going to drink himself to death.”

  “What’s a flywheel?” I inquired.

  “Tractor part.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I knew that.”

  After we drove a bit further, I said, “Did I tell you I saw the sheriff this morning?”

  “Um, you may have.”

  “At least now she knows about the shooting.”

  “Um.”

  Slight shook a cigarette loose from the pack he kept on the dashboard, stuck it in his mouth, and reached over to push in the car lighter.

  “You tried to reach her last night?”

  “Uh-huh.” He pulled out the lighter before it was quite hot enough, so strands of tobacco stuck to it after he finally managed to get the cigarette lit. “Well, shit.” He pushed the lighter back into the dash and sucked on the cigarette to keep it going.

  “Why couldn’t you reach her?”

  He blew smoke out his window. “Couldn’t get through to her.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because nobody answered the goddamned phone. Shit.” He picked a loose strand of tobacco off the tip of his tongue. “You’d think they’d answer the goddamned phone at the sheriff’s office, wouldn’t you?” Slight spit out the window, as if trying to dislodge other bits of tobacco. He was certainly having a difficult time with that particular cigarette.

  So he’d called, but nobody had answered. It was one of those defenses anyone could claim.

  “So you were going to try her again today?” I asked.

  He smiled slightly. “Now that you mention it.”

  “She’s coming out to take a look.”

  “Always glad of company,” Slight said, and turned in toward the padlocked front gate that seemed to contradict those very words.

  16

  But company had already come calling.

  When Slight and I drove up to the house, there were two extra cars parked on the gravel out front, two sedans, one white and boxy, the other tan with long, silver antenae sticking out of it and a thin man in a blue suit leaning against it. I saw smoke curling up out of the open window on the driver’s side, and as we approached, I could see that the man sitting there was the one who’d been smoking in Benet’s hospital room. A slim, young black woman wearing a plain, gray business suit got out of the white car.

  “How’d they get in?” I said.

  “There’s an old gate with only a cattle guard down the road apiece and around the bend. It’s pretty well hidden by cottonwood trees, but if you poke around, you’re bound to find it. I guess they poked around, all right. Offhand, I would say those are probably not insurance salesmen.”

  “No, they’re Kansas City homicide detectives.”

  I was only two-thirds right about that.

  The thin man in blue was Luis Canales.

  “Detective Ben Krulick,” the other man said after he emerged from the sedan. He appeared to be in his late twenties, taller and thinner, looser-limbed than the intense and older Canales. The young woman stopped beside the front bumper of Slight’s truck and said, “Fran Bradley, KBI.” She remained there, not coming any closer, so we had to turn our heads to see her. I had the feeling of being “surrounded” in an old-fashioned “lawman” sort of way.

  Kansas Bureau of Investigation. I felt as if she’d applied a lug wrench to my breastbone and tightened my ribs.

  “Why KBI?” Slight asked, sounding no more than curious.

  “Because,” Krulick cut in, “the victim was murdered in Missouri, and this is Kansas we’re standing in.” The detective made a point of gazing around and widening his eyes at all the empty space. “Definitely Kansas. So how you folks doin’ this afternoon?”

  “Doin’ pretty good until you three showed up,” Slight said with a wry smile. “I’m Quentin Harlan. Carl’s gone into town, if you’re lookin’ to talk to him, too. Your bein’ here reminds me of what I’d just as soon forget, that ol’ Cat’s done used up his ninth life. Come on in the house, why don’t you?”

  But Krulick inhaled deeply and shook his head.

  “We don’t get much time in the open air,” he said. “Do we, Lou?”

  So we remained in the gravel drive, Slight and I leaning against his truck, the two detectives leaning against their car, both of them taking notes now and then in their own little pads. Canales, I saw, had one of those spiral-bound jobs with lined pages; Krulick (and my own Geof) preferred the flip-top variety, unlined. The KBI agent stood so quietly beside the bumper, just out of our line of vision, that it was easy to forget she was there.

  “When did Mr. Benet purchase this ranch, Mr. Harlan?” Canales inquired.

  “’Bout a year ago.”

  “I understand he’d always operated before in Texas.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So why the move up here?”

  “Detective, have you ever worked cattle in August in Texas?”

  Canales smiled slightly. “Kansas is not known for its mild weather, either.”

  “It wasn’t just the summers,” Slight said with an air of remembering hard times, “it was the droughts and the mesquite and the sheer amount of land it took to feed just one goddamned cow. You can feed a cow and calf on ten and a half acres up here, Detective, and you need thirty acres to do the same thing down there. That’s a lot of hours on a horse. That’s a hell of a lot of fences to maintain. It’s just a hell of a lot of hard work, and we weren’t any of us gettin’ any younger. A man’s butt gets thin after thirty years in a saddle, Detective Canales, that kind of work, it gets to wearin’ down your bones.”

  “How sick was he when you moved here?”

  “Not too bad, good enough to make the move.”

  “One of the best cancer treatment centers in the world is in Houston,” Canales said.

  “You mean, so how come we moved him away from it?” Slight was squinting slightly, but I didn’t think it was because he was amused. “Because he didn’t want to be ‘saved’ just so’s he could keep gettin’ sick. He just wanted to finish bein’ sick, and then die. They couldn’t of cured him, not even in Houston; all they could of done was to prolong his life. That didn’t sound real interestin’ to him. And he didn’t want a fuss made over him, the way it would have been if he’d stayed in Texas. He wanted to go by himself and he wanted to go quiet, Detective.”

  “So you made that possible.”

  Slight stomped out his cigarette under the heel of his boot before he looked up. “What are you sayin’?”

  Krulick spoke up. “Lifetime employment. That’s a pretty sweet deal for you. Can?
??t be easy to find this kind of employment anymore, with so many farms and ranches goin’ belly up.”

  “Shit,” Slight said, and folded his arms on his chest. “That’s the most piss-poor excuse for killin’ a man I ever heard, and I’ve heard a few of them.”

  “Where were you and Carl Everett two nights ago?” Canales asked.

  “Here.”

  “I suppose you’ll vouch for each other.”

  “You got that right.”

  Canales glanced at me. “You ever meet her before?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why’d Mr. Benet leave this ranch to her foundation?”

  “He was a philanthropist.”

  “Why didn’t he want his relatives to come here?”

  “He wasn’t much of a family man.”

  Krulick said, “You got any ideas about who killed him?”

  Slight smiled thinly. “Probably one of those crazy nurses who goes around putting patients out of their misery.”

  Canales smiled that hunter’s smile of his and said, “There have not been any other cases of smothering by pillow reported from that hospital.”

  Krulick laughed. “But we’ll watch out for it.”

  “Where can we find Carl Everett?” Canales asked.

  “He’s gone for supplies. If you wait here long enough, he’ll show up, but you won’t get much out of him.”

  “Oh?” Canales said.

  Slight looked at his watch. “It’ll be the middle of the afternoon by then, and Carl’ll be well on his way to drunk. He gets things confused when he’s drinkin’, and his memory’s not so good, either. But hell, you can stick around if you want to.”

  Krulick and Canales exchanged glances.

  “Do you have anything to add to any of this, Ms. Cain?” Canales inquired.

  “Just that Mr. Harlan and I were out in one of the pastures last night, checking on pregnant heifers”—I caught a hint of a smile in Slight’s blue eyes—“and somebody took a couple of shots in our direction. One of them killed a little heifer that was giving birth.”

  “Goddamn poachers,” Slight said.

  Krulick addressed me. “Are you saying you think that has something to do with Mr. Benet’s death?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  Slight moved restlessly. “You finished with us?”

  Canales looked over Slight’s shoulder, and suddenly I recalled who was back there. The lug wrench tightened my ribs another notch.

  “Are we finished, Frances?” Canales asked her.

  She didn’t move, but she finally spoke, in a voice as deceptively neutral as her gray suit and her white car. “Mr. Harlan, you and Mr. Everett must have been extraordinarily devoted to Mr. Benet to work for him all those years, take care of him when he was sick, even move up here with him. I’d think you’d both be interested in seeing his killer apprehended.”

  Slight gazed at her for a long moment, a look that she held without blinking, and without any apparent effort. “Yeah, well, don’t think I’m not,” he finally said. “Now if you will excuse us, I promised Ms. Cain I would ride her around the ranch, give her a few lessons in raisin’ beef cattle. Okay with you?”

  She glanced over at Canales as if to say: your game.

  Canales nodded, and Krulick said, “We’ll wait for Everett.”

  “Up to you,” Slight said. “Come on then, Jenny.”

  I noticed what Slight didn’t—that Canales’s eyebrows rose at the familiar way in which Slight addressed me, and that the detective continued to stare after us as we walked side by side to the barn.

  “He thinks we’re Bonnie and Clyde,” I whispered.

  “Nah, you’re better lookin’ than Faye Dunaway.”

  I stubbed my toe on a rock and stumbled into the barn.

  “But a damn sight clumsier,” he added.

  17

  It was after two o’clock by the time we rode out of the big barn, I on a small gray mare by the name of Molly, Slight on a big palomino he called Buck.

  “For obvious reasons,” he said, by way of explaining his horse’s name. “You know what a gelding is, Jenny?”

  “Yes,” I said quickly. “You don’t eat those, too, do you?”

  “Nope.” He grinned and gave Molly a swat to get her moving faster. I hung on for dear life. The horse felt fine under me, it was the saddle that hurt, digging into certain tender places that leather didn’t usually reach. I hadn’t ridden a horse since my mother took me on pony rides at the zoo.

  “I’m not going to last long, Slight.”

  “We won’t be riding long, Jenny.”

  What he meant, it turned out, was that we weren’t actually on horseback all that much, because we were constantly mounting and dismounting our horses—one or the other of us—to open and close gates, or to get off and sit on a fence while Slight lectured me on the economics of ranching. I learned that he and Carl could run a place this size alone, with only part-time hired hands. I heard all about breeding seasons and salt licks, bromegrass and stickleburr, winter feed and equipment prices, weather patterns and pasture burnings, weanings and brandings, pregnancy testing and spraying for flies and ticks, making money and losing it. Mostly losing it, it seemed to me. The more I heard, the more I marveled at Cat Benet’s choice of the Port Frederick Civic Foundation to own this place, and the more I realized how very difficult it was going to be for me to oversee 13,000 acres from 1,500 miles away.

  Finally, we tied the horses to one last fence and perched ourselves on top of it. By now, we had covered so much ground—literally and conversationally—that we’d put a lot of distance between ourselves and cops and KBI agents. The ride had bounced my ribs—and every other bone—loose. There was a large pond—Slight called it a tank—over a small rise just in front of us.

  “Tell me about yourself, Slight,” I said, “to which you will reply, ‘Not much to tell.’”

  He laughed. “Well, you’re wrong there. There’s a lot to tell, and there’d be a lot more if I hadn’t been dead drunk and unconscious a good part of it. Liquor’s a terrible thing, Jenny. Look what it did to Cat’s liver, look how it’s destroyin’ Carl. Well, what the hell, I can’t complain. A lot of it was fun, and I seem to be survivin’ it.”

  “So is this the story of you or of demon rum?”

  “All right! Are all easterners as persistent as you are? Hell, I was born in Midland, Texas, one mother, one father, three sisters. Worked oil rigs, ran a goat farm for a while, a short while, thank God, but mostly I’ve spent my life lookin’ down a horse’s neck at the back of a cow. Strangely enough, it is a view to which I am partial, and I think I’ll probably keep doin’ it until I get so old they just let me tumble off Buck into an open grave. Adiós, Quentin.”

  On impulse, I blurted, “Slight, can I trust you?”

  He looked at me in a startled way.

  “Because I’m going to have to,” I said. “How in the world am I ever going to know if you’re running this place as it should be run? There’s no way I’m going to turn into an agricultural expert in one easy lesson. No way. And there’s not a soul in Port Frederick who knows a cow’s tail more about this business than I do right now, this minute, sitting in this darned pasture with you. I’m going to have to take your word on everything. Everything! What kind of way is that to run a business? It’s crazy. With all respect, I think your pal Cat Benet was nuts.”

  “There are books—”

  “Books!”

  “There’s an International Stockman’s School—”

  “Right.”

  He smiled. “I got no good reason to run this place into the ground, Jenny. It’s my livelihood now, mine and Carl’s for the rest of our lives, I guess. I’ve got every reason to make it work. For all of us.”

  “So I can trust you?”

  His smile turned into a wolfish grin. “I didn’t say that.”

  I jumped down from the fence on which we’d been sitting and looked up at him. “Say it.”

&
nbsp; His look turned skeptical. “Say what?”

  “Say, yes, Jenny, you can trust me.”

  An airplane buzzed overhead, causing both of us to look up. It was a single-engine type that looked a lot like the one that had delivered me the day before.

  “Descending,” Slight noted, both of his hands shading his eyes as he peered upward. “Must be going into Rock Creek Airport.” He lowered himself down off the fence and then reached back with his right hand and dug around in his right back pocket until he came out with a bone-handled pocketknife. He opened the knife. Then he opened the palm of his left hand and used the knife to knick the tip of his middle finger so that blood trickled down into his palm.

  “What are you doing!”

  He raised his bloody hand toward me and with his other hand, pointed the knife in my direction.

  “Open up your hand, Jenny.”

  I stepped back from him. “What?”

  “You want a pledge? Let’s make it a blood pledge, like the Indians.”

  “You’re crazy!”

  Slight leaned closer to me and reached out for my left hand. I stumbled back from him and then ran until I was several feet away. “You come near me with that thing and I’ll kick it out of your hand, you hear me?”

  He flicked the knife so that it whizzed through the air, passing me en route. It landed, point first and sticking straight up and vibrating, in the ground behind my left shoulder. I looked back to find that Slight was sucking his stuck finger and chuckling to himself.

  “You crazy son of a bitch!”

  He squinted at me, grinning. “God,” he chortled, “Cat would have loved this.”

  I walked over to where the knife still quivered in the ground and pulled it out. Then I folded the blade back into its handle. I grasped it in my right hand and lifted my arm high in the air—

  “No! Don’t you do that—”

  He ran toward me just as I rared back and threw his knife into the middle of the cattle pond.

  “Goddamit, that’s my favorite knife!”

  He raced to the pond, stopped on the rise above it, and stood staring down at the ripples where his knife had drowned.

  “God,” I said behind him, “Cat would have loved this.”