When I went back into the sitting room, I could hear the rattle of ice cubes as Mac rubbed the ice bag against Lorna’s blistered thigh. I finished my drink, whispered “Later” at the bedroom doorway, then let myself out.
I just made last call at the motel bar, grabbed a bottle of Rainier, bummed two Camel straights from the bartender, then went out to the empty poolside. The full moon had lodged at the zenith, smaller but still white-hot, as intense as a halogen flood. The night seemed full of scraps of party sound—pointless laughter, the bass-line thrum of overamped car stereos, and loud voices, hoarse with senseless anger. South of the Clark Fork River a siren whooped for a long moment, then stopped. I didn’t really want the beer, just the cigarettes, the ephemeral clarity of nicotine. I smoked slowly, even though I knew my throat and sinus cavities would hurt in the morning, a throbbing ache as if I’d spent the night snorting ground glass.
Beyond the pool I could see that the light in our room was still on. Whitney, I assumed, burning the midnight keystrokes on her notebook. Damn. Goddamn love. But I did owe her my life. When they got me to the hospital in El Paso after I’d been gutshot, the only number in my wallet was hers. When they’d called, she quit her job and flew down from Montana, although we’d only been out once. She sat by my bed until she persuaded me to live. She smuggled tacos and beer into my hospital room, and for reasons neither of us exactly understood, she married me. We’d never slept together, we’d had a single date, and there we were doing the vows in a hospital room. And she ran with me during the crazy times, hiding from the contrabandistas who had tried to kill me, hiding first in Utah, then later in the Davis Mountains of West Texas. I owed this woman my life and what little sanity I possessed.
When I finished the second cigarette, I left the rest of the beer, then went back to our room.
Whit was sprawled across the bed, asleep among a scattering of legal documents, her long, lean, lovely body stretched across the bed. When I leaned over to kiss her, her eyes opened slowly, eyes the clear blue of the desert sky reflected in a slickrock pool after a passing shower.
“You’ve been smoking,” she said quietly.
“Just a couple,” I said. “Four actually.”
“Well, just because I’m gone, don’t be smoking in my house,” she said, smiling widely. “I’ll be back.” I took that as a good sign. She rolled into my arms, whispering, “Get in the shower, cowboy. I’ll wash the stink right off you.”
Later, in the predawn half darkness of the room, she asked, “What did Mac want? Does he have another wild goose chase for you?” Then she kissed me on the shoulder.
“I caught the goose last time,” I said. Sometimes her mind startled me. “How the hell did you know?”
“He’s been making calf eyes at you all weekend,” she said. “Like a virgin in heat. What did he want?”
“Just an odd chore for a few weeks. He asked me not to tell you, hon,” I said without any hope that Whit would settle for my answer.
“His last odd chore took you out of law school, love,” she said. She was never going to let me forget that. Or forgive the way I lived my life.
“It paid off your loans,” I said. “And set up your office.”
“True,” she said cautiously. “Watch your ass,” she said. “Remember, he deals with crazy people.” Then she rolled away. She was asleep before I knew what to think. Maybe this case wouldn’t be as hard as it seemed.
The hard part was saying good-bye to Whitney as she climbed on the flight from Missoula to Minneapolis. Really hard. When I got home, I found myself sitting in my office glancing seriously through the classified ads looking for a dog I didn’t actually want.
As it turned out, moving to the white-shoe, latte-sipping heart of the frozen Midwest would have been easier all around.
TWO
PEOPLE HAVE A lot of theories about life—what it means, how to survive it, and other unadulterated bullshit. The only thing I’ve ever heard that made any sense came many years ago and in a country far away, not on some windswept mountaintop but among the crumbling sandbags of a night defensive position, and my guru wasn’t some bearded, balding wise man but a giant Hawaiian-Black-Mexican M60 gunner in the middle of his second tour in Vietnam.
Because my job as a private investigator lent itself more toward the mundane and realistic, I didn’t have much use for theory, but it was a fine late-summer morning in the Winding Woods neighborhood of Meriwether, Montana, and I was lulled into aimless illusions of theory as I carried a clipboard and wore a fake name tag on my short-sleeved white shirt that identified me as joe don loony, real estate agent, ostensibly checking for somebody who wanted to sell his house in the old neighborhood, but actually working a job I didn’t much care for, the crazy chore for my old buddy Dr. William MacKinderick, when Nacho’s dark face suddenly rose before me, not like a flashback—I knew about those—or a nightmare, just a sudden solid vision out of my past, a moment of unexpected laughter.
The past hit me in the face like a bloody hand. Back during the Vietnam War, Nacho and I had survived a bad day in the bush. My first one, really. We had nearly lost a reinforced platoon patrol through the usual stupidity and lack of leadership. All of our officers were new guys getting their tickets punched in the combat zone, and most of the experienced NCOs were back at the base camp club or drunk in Bangkok. The company commander, a young first lieutenant, was an ROTC jerk from Georgia. An NVA company was cleaning our plows—30 percent casualties in ten minutes—and we would have gone the way of that idiot Custer if a passing flight of Cobra gunships that had been fogged out of their mission hadn’t been close enough to save our badly charred bacon. Their rockets and miniguns cleaned the NVA off the ridge top, flattened the hidden encampment, and showed me what hell really looked like.
When it was over, it was too late to extract anybody but the dead and wounded, so we set up a night defensive position on the ridge line. Just before good dark, Nacho calmly stirred coffee over a burning scrap of C4. My hands were still shaking so badly that I had trouble holding my cup still when he asked me how I liked my baptism of fire.
“Jesus, we were lucky,” I said breathlessly.
He laughed, then reached over to poke his finger through a hole in the pocket of my fatigues. “Hey, man, look at it this way,” he said, still chuckling, “fistfights, firefights, and fucking love affairs—nothing counts but luck and geography, man.” Then he tugged on the bullet hole, laughing even harder as I shit my pants. Again. “Luck and geography.”
For me it was laugh or cry, or some of both.
I didn’t have much to laugh about, exactly, now or then. I already missed my wife. But it was my fault. I had refused to even consider moving with her a thousand miles away to Minneapolis, where she had taken a job at a high-powered firm in the Twin Cities. She was still miffed that I refused to go back to law school, and if that wasn’t bad enough, she had also taken my son with her. Insult to injury, as they say. And I’d been having endless nightmares since the day they left.
So I turned my face into the late-summer Montana sun and collapsed against a little table in a small park, smoked a quick doobie, laughed for no reason until I almost cried, ignoring the curious neighbors, the lazy yardmen, the remodeling teams, laughing until I stretched out and went to sleep.
Surveillance is never as easy as it looks in the movies, and working a one-man job in a small city like Meriwether made it that much harder. Plus Mac’s restrictions made it much harder than it needed to be. Television or telephone repair trucks always seemed to call forth angry neighbors who wondered why you hadn’t come to fix their sets or phones. Delivery trucks were only good until one of the real drivers drove by your fake van. You couldn’t park a plumbing truck anywhere there weren’t a dozen clogged drains in the neighborhood. It took a couple of days to work it out and get equipped. I finally settled on a ruse I’d used before: scouting for the real estate broker. Mac had talked one of his broker friends into vouching for me, so I put on a sho
rt-sleeved shirt, a tie, and the Joe Don Loony fake name tag. I rented an anonymous Taurus sedan, equipped it with my handheld police scanner and cell phone, added a small pair of binoculars and the Leica 35-mm camera with the 150-mm telephoto lens, a bouquet of gimme caps, a selection of windbreakers, and a couple of pairs of sunglasses, and I was ready: your average, run-of-the-mill, hardworking private investigator perfectly equipped to track a bunch of Dr. MacKinderick’s neurotics around town.
Except for a weapon. They were all hanging in the gun safe in my office in the converted garage. They had been in the safe since the day I discovered that my son, Les, was as agile as a raccoon and smarter than your average PI. I hadn’t had much occasion to carry a gun since my partner and I had taken our revenge on a bunch of contrabandistas some years before, and, after almost thirty years of carrying a weapon, I had gotten out of the habit.
Mac’s patient list was organized by appointment times instead of the alphabet, with one name on each page. I assumed that meant something so I didn’t bother looking beyond the first name on the list. And it was one I knew, as Mac said might happen. When he had given me the prohibitions on this case, he hadn’t said anything about background checks, which make my job easier. So I took it on myself. The background on this guy was easy. I just hung around the college bars for a couple of nights posing as a retired English professor on vacation, logging a half-a-dozen expensive hours and picking up gossip.
Professor Garfield Ritter saw Mac at 8:00 a.m. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Ritter had been the chairman of the English Department at Mountain States since gasoline was eighty-nine cents a gallon. Ritter had come west with his Yale Ph.D., shoulder-length curly hair that went with his politics, and a bellyful of academic ambition. Twenty-five years later, the hair, like the politics, had disappeared; none of his scholarly papers had ever been published; and now he had the belly of a Republican banker with the only fire inside his spastic colitis, caused, perhaps, by his fat, rich Main Line Philadelphia wife, Charity, who by all accounts had none and was reputed, when drunk, to be meaner than a tow sack full of drowning cats.
The Ritters lived in a large restored Victorian in the Winding Woods neighborhood south of the Meriwether River, a collection of winding streets that often fooled even the natives. By nine o’clock that Wednesday morning I was parked and ready. Except for a pair of house painters struggling down the street with their scaffolding toward the Ritters’ neighborhood, the streets were empty. I started out going through the motions: carrying my clipboard around and asking dumb questions, waiting for Ritter to come home after his appointment with Mac and before he went to the college for his eleven o’clock office hours. I thought I would see what the professor did with his free time between nine and eleven. Mac had told me that he didn’t want me to follow his clients to or from his office. I didn’t think it would be a problem. But after moving the Taurus several times, filling a dozen sheets with useless real estate information, wandering around, and drifting into some very vivid and very bad dreams, I began to wonder if this was the job for me.
Winding Woods was beautifully calm. It had been built after the First World War; the trees were mature, the houses richly maintained. West of the divide, the mountains cut into the horizon, so it wasn’t Big Sky Country exactly, but on a clear late-summer morning there seemed to be more blue than the eye could absorb. The Norwegian maples and elms glowed with fringes of gold as the sun topped the foothills of the Diablos, and the morning chill retreated into the pools of shade.
Around a quarter to ten, I was suddenly awakened by the slap of a nightstick against my boot soles and the rasp of smoky laughter. Then I looked up into the bloodshot eyes of Sergeant Fergie Ferguson, just about the last of the old guys on the Meriwether police force.
“What the hell’s going on, Sughrue?” he growled.
“Just a little snooze, officer,” I said. “You know about a little snooze.” Fergie was famous for cooping on the night shift, but equally famous for hearing his radio calls through a dead sleep.
“No,” he said. “What’s with your boots?”
I looked down to find that some smart ass had painted the soles of my boots white.
“I don’t know, man,” I said.
“Well, clean them up,” he said, laughing again, “or I’ll run you in for defacing public property.” He tossed me a dirty rag, and when I finished, he tossed it in the park’s trash can. “I don’t know what you’re doing, man, but try to stay awake.” Then he walked to his unit, where his new partner, a kid who had the makings of a good street cop, grinned as he watched his partner carry his laughing face and bouncing beer gut in front of him.
As far as I could tell, Ritter still hadn’t shown up. I walked up to the door of his house, picked up the rolled paper on the steps, and rang the bell. It seemed that I could hear distant chimes through the thick oak door, but I wasn’t sure. After a bit, I rang again, waited, then knocked. The heavy doors unlocked, swung open slowly. Nobody answered my “Anybody home?” shout, either.
I glanced at the alarm keypad and the security company sticker below it. I suddenly felt very exposed. I dropped the newspaper, trotted to the rent car, and moved it to a wandering cross street where I could see the front door. All the way, I told myself that nothing was wrong, that I was just unsettled, perhaps even slightly nervous because this case had seemed so ambiguous from the beginning. I’d always been better at finding people than following them. I also knew better than to work for friends. It seldom worked out as well as the malpractice suit I worked for Mac had done. But we weren’t friends then. I watched and worried. The longer I looked at the open door, the more it bothered me.
I called the Ritter residence several times on the cell phone, without an answer. The professor didn’t answer his office telephone, either. So I called Mac on the hour.
“What’s going on?”
“Did Ritter show up for his appointment this morning?”
“Of course, why?”
“How did he seem?”
“Fine, why?”
“The front door of his house is open,” I said.
“Oh, hell,” Mac said. “I know his wife’s at home. He told me they had words this morning. But they have words almost every morning with their bran flakes.”
“And you can’t tell me what they were, right?”
“I can tell you that they were just the usual, nothing out of the ordinary,” he said.
“Look, buddy, I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” I said. “We’ve got three choices. I can go in and out like a cat burglar, and if nothing is wrong, we’re cool. Or I can place an anonymous call to the alarm company. Or the police.”
“What do you think?”
“He forgot to lock the door on his way out,” I said, “and she’s sleeping one off. Except …”
“Except what?”
“They’ve got a three-car garage, so he probably went out that way,” I said. “And rumor has it that she has her first vodka of the day with the morning paper.”
“And the paper is still on the front steps?”
“You got it,” I said.
“You better check it out,” he said without further explanation.
“Be prepared, Mac,” I said.
But no one could have been prepared for this.
The double front doors opened directly into the bright light of a large atrium formed by a skylight cut through the attic and the roof above, with living and dining rooms and library set off to the sides, the kitchen at the end, and a wide stairway on the right leading to a balcony. But I didn’t know that then. That information all came later. As I stepped across the threshold, I heard a strangled scream from above. Through the flood of sunlight pouring into the atrium, I glimpsed a giant pale shape teetering on the balcony rail, a flash of light behind her—Mrs. Ritter in a white nightgown and robe, I later learned—then the figure screamed and swooped down toward me.
The cotton clothesline around her neck had been tied to an open r
oof beam just below the skylight. Time congealed. I had a moment to think that, like many people, Mrs. Ritter probably hadn’t the vaguest idea how to hang herself. Too much slack in the rope for her weight. But when she hit the end of the slack, her head popped off with a sound that can’t be described, one which I’ll spend the rest of my life forgetting, and her body plowed into me, a fountain of blood drenching me and the room. The head flew toward the other end of the room, tumbling into the shadows, and the body’s momentum blew me backward out the front door, in a cloud of blood. As I rolled down the front steps, I vomited through a dark burst of laughter that I couldn’t stop no matter how hard I tried.
THREE
GIVEN THE WAY the police treated me that afternoon in front of Ritter’s house—except Fergie, who grabbed his chest and collapsed, stroked out by the headless gore, and his partner, the kid, who stood like a stone statue—the other cops would have been pleased to see me stroke out, too. They didn’t want to touch me, drenched in Charity’s blood and my vomit, but they really wanted me to stop laughing hysterically. So they did what any good cop would do: took me down, jerked my arms behind me hard enough to dislocate my shoulders, cuffed me, and started to throw me into the back of a cruiser. Until they considered the chore of cleaning out the backseat. So I was led around like a country idiot until the new chief of detectives, Johnny Raymond, showed up. Johnny and I had a long, unhappy history, and he was more than happy to stuff me into his backseat because he planned to make me clean up the mess with my tongue.
My life and sanity were saved only because I had managed the energy and sense to call Mac just after I called 911. I must have sounded insane, stuttering and stammering and shouting as I sat on the front steps covered with blood and vomit as I waited for the law. Who came in droves. By the time Mac and Musselwhite arrived, I had talked to any number of cops who were as disturbed as I was but didn’t know it, including Johnny Raymond. I was shaking so badly in the back of his unit that I thought I was going to break my wrists before help arrived.