Bad Company (20 page)

It took her a minute to answer. “You may not believe this, but it was just what I needed. Scotty was a big pain in the ass, and I didn’t like being up there, but it got me thinking.”

“You’re great when you’re thinking,” he said, eyes still closed as her palm made circles on his chest.

“Yeah. I need to do it more. So he started out by asking me about honky-tonk angels, and I gave him a little lesson in country music history. Then, when we got up there, he kind of took me through Monday afternoon all over again. That wasn’t so much fun.”

He squeezed the hand rubbing his chest. “I can imagine.”

“The hardest part was going up to the outcrop. I kept seeing her arm . . .”

“I keep seeing it myself,” Hawk said.

“Yeah, with the rope dangling,” she said, sitting up suddenly. “But listen to this. Scotty told me that her hands had been tied together. They’ve got the first autopsy report, and it looks like she and the killer got loaded together, then had sex—Scotty called it a ‘rough game that got out of hand’—and she ended up shot dead. The guy had a hell of a time getting her down in the crack, had to cut the rope.”

Hawk was on it. “So why would he leave an arm sticking out if he was trying to hide her?” Now he sat up too. “Heard us coming.”

“It’s a reasonable assumption,” she said. “And Scotty has decided that the troubles I’ve been having are be-cause whoever killed Monette and saw us up there, recognized us. His number one candidate is Jerry Jeff.”

“Oh yeah, right,” said Hawk. “How insane is that? He’s just a boneheaded kid.”

“So you and Delice and I think. Scotty has other ideas. He mentioned that Monette was bound with a piggin’ string, and JJ just bought a new one. I allowed as how I didn’t really find his Jerry Jeff the Killer theory all that compelling, because JJ can’t drive yet. I oughta know. Delice keeps pressuring me to take him out in the Mustang, like that’s gonna happen.”

“But maybe it’s somebody who had access to JJ’s rodeo gear,” said Hawk. “That’s a troubling thought.”

“Your pal Atkins just takes this stuff in stride. He’s going to interrogate Jerry Jeff again tomorrow.”

“Don’t blame Scotty for doing his job.”

Hell, everybody was on this job. And now Sally remembered all the phone calls she hadn’t returned. Maude and Delice could wait. “Oh shit—I forgot to tell you. Molly Wood left a message—she wants you to call back. I wrote the number down there, on the pad. And Dickie wants me to meet him at the Torch. Do you feel like going out?”

Hawk yawned. “I’m ready to go to bed right now. But this is Jubilee Days. Let me try Molly, and then we can go.”

He picked up the phone, dialed the number in Centennial. He listened briefly, then left a message. “I guess it can’t be too urgent if she’s letting her machine pick up.”

“Do you think we should stay here and wait for her to call back?” Sally asked.

Hawk gave it a moment’s thought. “I don’t see the point. I’ll call again tomorrow when I’ve had the chance to look some stuff up. As for tonight, if the sheriff thinks we need to go downtown to purchase intoxicating beverages and see if some band can do anything new with ‘San Antonio Rose,’ I suppose it’s just our patriotic duty.”

Chapter 18
The Nightlife

The Torch Tavern was packed with drinking, hat-wearing revelers, squeezed in hip to ass. They were inhaling first-and secondhand smoke, spilling drinks on one another, and trying to holler over a band that believed that if a little amplification was good, putting the needle into the red zone was spectacular. Sally saw Hawk slip some earplugs out of the change pocket of his jeans and twist them into his ears. He offered her a pair, and she took them, but stuck them in her own pocket. She’d decided to take the place on its own terms, even if the noise level made her brain buzz in her skull.

Sally had never been a fan of audio terrorism as an entertainment gambit. She thought bands that played too loud were competing with the crowd, not courting it. For her, playing had always been about tasty licks, heart-felt vocals, the band and the audience coming together and riding the mood, crest to crest, to some point of abandon where everybody was rocking. The right mix of tempo and volume, instruments and voices, not the wall of deafening distortion these guys were cranking out.

On the other hand, nobody else much seemed to mind. The bartenders were flying, setting up shots and pulling beers and making change for a throng that stood three deep behind the stools. Out on the jammed dance floor she spotted Brit Langham and Herman Schwink, putting on a Western swing clinic, and Sheldon Stover, hauling Nattie Langham around, elbows and knees flailing in something that looked more like a high school wrestling match than a country pas de deux. Down among the tables, Dwayne huddled with Marsh Carhart, apparently carrying on a conversation just as if they’d been sitting in Dwayne’s office down at the bank. Not far away she caught sight of Adolph Schwink, hustling a waitress whose indomitable platinum-blond beehive warred with the deep lines of exhaustion around her eyes.

Sally recognized the song, a rocked-up take on “Move It on Over,” the Hank Williams classic. That could explain why Dickie was recommending the band. He loved all Hank Williams tunes, but this one especially. As a young loadhead, he’d always dropped whatever he was doing when a band started up that song. He’d run out on the dance floor, shimmying like Josephine Baker and hollering an obscenely personal version of the lyrics, in which little Dick was expected to move over, “’cause the big Dick’s movin’ in.”

In so many ways the old days were not gentle days. Now, when she found him, he was simply leaning against the wall, eyes closed, drinking a Coke, tapping a finger against the can in time with the music. At six-four he’d have been visible anyway, but his girth and his badge cleared a space around him roughly the circumference of a beer keg. She left Hawk at the bar ordering drinks and snaked her way through the crush, noting in passing a waft of smoke that smelled like mangoes, a number of people with red eyes or very runny noses, at least one small packet of white powder changing hands, and several guys who took the opportunity to grab a handful of her as she squeezed by. More alarming, she bumped against various hard objects that had to be sidearms.

Heat and crowding and dope and booze and guns were not that good a combination. Sally really hoped that nobody would take a fancy to anybody else’s hat.

The Torch Tavern wasn’t her cup of hemlock anyway. She’d played there a few times over the years, but the Torch didn’t generally book live music. Most of the year the management relied on the type of trade that brought the police on a regular basis and elicited frequent visits from the Ivinson Memorial Hospital emergency medical technicians. The regular clientele ran to bikers with their own pool cues, insane meth heads looking to get wired back up, johns hoping to hook up with moonlighting cocktail waitresses, junkies trying to act cool while sweating and shaking through a score, fast-aging daytime drinkers with noses like walnuts and brown teeth. And, of course, the vultures who fed their habits, and the cops who kept stopping by, learning enough for their troubles to make the occasional bust, but never enough to close down the Torch or dam the poisonous stream that wound through and out of it.

Tonight, between her morning with Bone, her afternoon with Scotty, and the nasty sensation that somebody she couldn’t name was in the bar and way too aware of her presence, the Torch was really putting her on edge. But at least her timing was good. Just as she reached Dickie, the band was shuffling up a little instrumental—break time. People were heading for the door to go out and cool off in the street, getting their hands stamped so that they could come back in and obliterate their eardrums when the music started up again. She looked around and said, “I never liked this joint.”

“No, you always preferred higher-class places like the Gallery,” he said, lighting a Marlboro.

“At least you could wade through the bathrooms there,” she told him. “Here you couldn’t even get in, because the stalls were always full of people hitting up.”

Dickie looked at the glowing end of his cigarette. “Too bad some things don’t change.”

“Can’t you do anything about that?” she asked.

Now he looked at Sally. “You’d be amazed how much ingenuity and strength of purpose some people will put into getting fucked up. When we come in, they go away. When we go away, they come back. If we hang around, they scatter, but they don’t go far. They need the shit that much. And every time we arrest a dealer, five more show up to take over the turf. There’s so goddamn much money to be made.”

“Doesn’t the owner of this place object?”

“The owner,” Dickie explained, “isn’t a person. It’s a corporation, headquartered down in Denver. The Torch has had thirty-two different managers in the last twenty-three years—every time we close in on one, he or she skips and we’re dealing with some new scumbag. They all say they want to cooperate with us and run a clean operation, but these people aren’t what you’d call long-term thinkers. Somebody pays them off, and they’re on to the next hole.”

“But you keep at it.” She was trying to make him feel a little better.

“What the hell else would I be doing here tonight, besides indulging in my well-known masochistic urge to hang around watching other people drink? I had this brilliant idea of coming down here and waiting for somebody to waltz up to me and tell me who killed Monette. But unfortunately that hasn’t happened, so I thought I’d play cop. You missed all the fun. I was compelled to bust one cowboy who came in here with a sheet of blotter acid in his hatband and started handing around squares of Mr. Natural like it was Pez. I’m thinking about dropping the hammer on that little old gal over there at the bar, the one with the glitter all over her face. She’s gone out to the parking lot with half a dozen guys, fifteen minutes each. I’m beginning to worry that she’s starting an epidemic.”

Dickie’s summary of the nightlife made Sally feel smug about trading the bar stool for her endowed chair. But then it occurred to her that his description of the sleazy gypsy bar managers could, with very little alteration, apply to a certain class of itinerant university administrator: moving in, moving on, and leaving the place (at best) as big a mess as it had been before. She silently repeated the mantra that had stood her in excellent stead throughout both her musical and academic careers: There are assholes everywhere.

“So what else have you been up to today?” she asked Dickie as Hawk arrived with their beers and a fresh can of Coke for the sheriff.

“Well, let’s see. After the memorial thing, I went down to the Lifeway and had a word with young Schwink over there,” he said, pointing with his Marlboro. “Damn stupid little twerp started out with the same old song and dance about not having known Monette very well, just working in the same store and all, but I finally told him that several people had suggested that he had a somewhat more intimate relationship with her than that. He kept on lying for a while, but finally admitted that he’d—hmm, how did he put it? oh yes—gotten his rocks off with her a time or two, but that was it. He insisted that whatever was between them had been ‘all her fault’ because she was such a pathetic little skag and she kept on begging him, and after a while, well, he just felt so sorry for her that he had to oblige.”

“Mr. Good Samaritan,” said Hawk.

“Mr. Full of Horse Crap. Once I’d dragged that much out of him, I knew he was the kind who’d keep holding out on us and make us have to work for every single crumb of the true story. Took me another half hour to get him to admit that he’d driven her home after her shift, when he was on his lunch break. Christ, I wish I could pin this one on the little worm, but he only had a forty-five-minute break, and evidently after he took her home, he did come back to work.”

“Why would he take her home?” Sally asked.

“Said he was just being nice,” Dickie answered.

“Uh-huh. That Adolph is such a considerate guy. Couldn’t be that she’d invited him over, maybe to smoke a reefer or have a quick one,” Sally said.

“Adolph says he didn’t even go in, just dropped her in front. Who the hell knows? I didn’t have another hour to spend working on him. Places to go. People to see.”

“The life of a busy public official,” said Hawk.

“Ain’t no good life, but it’s my life,” said Dickie, draining the first Coke and popping the tab on the one Hawk had brought. “Bone Bandy was next on my list— thought I’d go look him up out at the campground. We have a couple of witnesses who said they’d seen him hanging around the Kum ’n’ Go mini-mart, across from the Lifeway, and one person who put him at the supermarket last weekend. His alibi for Monday has never been rock-hard, and I guess I’ve sort of been hoping we’d pull on a string that would eventually lead to him.” Carefully he crushed out his cigarette on the top of the empty can and pushed the butt inside. “I was being a bad police officer. I wanted to be able to arrest him for Monette’s murder because Mary’s always blamed Bone for her sister’s death. Couldn’t nail him for that one, but maybe we’d get him for this.”

“Can you get him for assaulting my girlfriend?” Hawk asked.

Dickie scowled at Sally. “Bone mentioned he’d talked to you, but he didn’t say anything about getting physical.”

“He tackled her,” Hawk explained. “But then they ended up being best friends or something. Ticks me off, but what can you do?”

“With her, not a damn thing,” said Dickie, and then asked Sally, “Do you want to file charges?”

She drank some beer and gave it some thought. You could consider a guy like Bone a public menace. Getting him off the street would be doing everyone a favor. Then again, was it worth her time, and Bone’s continuing resentment, to make a big fuss about a tackle? “Why bother?” said Sally. “He didn’t hurt me. And he didn’t kill Monette. He’s looking for the bastard who did. He’s of the opinion that she was shaking somebody down.”

Dickie had been leaning against the wall, but now he pushed off and stood upright, looking down at Sally from his highest height. “What makes you think that?”

“Because he told me so. He’s been following me around, and he has this idea that I’ve been taking an unusual interest in the matter, and he thought I might know something he didn’t know.”

“Following you around? Has he got some kind of grudge against you personally?” Dickie stared a minute, craned his neck to look around, and then slumped back against the wall, slugging down some more soda, hauling his cigarette pack out of his shirt pocket. The gold foil on top glittered briefly in the barroom light. “Well, he doesn’t seem to have tagged along tonight, but he did indicate this afternoon that he’d, uh, run into you this morning. He left out the part about grabbing you, and didn’t say a word about Monette being involved in any kind of shakedown.”

Sally watched as Dickie took out a Marlboro, put the pack back in his pocket, and lit up. “Maybe he thought it reflected badly on him. I couldn’t tell exactly whether Bone was hoping to collect the blackmail himself, or if he wanted revenge. He was being as coy as he could, but hell, the guy isn’t exactly a model of self-control and rationality. Maybe he figured he’d said more than he meant to with me, and decided to tail back on his story with you.”

Dickie rolled his eyes. “Why should he be any different from anybody else? Seems like everybody I talk to lately has the idea that everything they say to me can and will be used against them.”

“You’re the law,” Hawk said gently. “They’re supposed to think that.”

“Yeah yeah, I know,” Dickie said. “It sucks. Days like this, I end up just wanting to crawl into a bed with a nice bottle of Joe the Crow and never wake up.”

Hawk and Sally exchanged a look. The last thing Dickie Langham needed, after all his years of climbing up out of the pit one day at a time, was a tumble off the wagon and back into the dark abyss.

“Jose Cuervo is not a friend of yours,” said Sally, “but we are. Come on, boy. Let’s go over to the Wrangler and I’ll buy you a burger. If we leave now, before the band starts up again, I might have some chance of saving what’s left of my hearing.”

“Nah,” said Dickie, adding, to her amazement, “I’m not hungry.”

She put her hand up to his forehead. “Are you feeling okay?”

“I been better. But really, it’s just that I don’t feel like running into my sister right now.”

Sally thought of the phone message from Delice. When Dee was storming, people tended to go to the northeast corner of the basement. “She said you’d been over there asking questions.”

“Yeah. For, like, fifteen minutes before she booted my ass out and told me that I better not come in there aggravating her again, or she’d file a police harassment complaint.”

“You were down there asking about JJ, weren’t you?” Sally asked.

“I just wanted to let her know that I’d have to have some time for a serious talk with him about this case. You can imagine how she reacted.”

Hawk looked Dickie up and down. “You don’t look to be leaking from anyplace new.”

“I’m a spartan,” said Dickie. “Carrion birds could be ripping my guts out and I’d be whistling ‘Big Chief Got a Golden Crown.’ ”

“You’re a hoss,” Hawk agreed.

Dickie seemed to be cheering up a little. That was good. Sally and Hawk wouldn’t leave him alone until they’d convinced him that the wall of the Torch Tavern wasn’t the only thing he could lean on. She put her beer down on a table and put her arms around him and gave him back one of the hugs he’d given her, over the years. Those hugs had sometimes been all there was pulling Sally back toward the light.