Death Without Company (11 page)

“I figured I’d just stay here.”

“Okay, but you might need a vehicle. If anything happens, take Vic’s. There’s an extra set of keys on the wall by the door.”

I couldn’t tell if he was smiling when he left my office, and that probably was a good thing. I picked up the piece of paper. “We can no longer say.” It was capitalized at the beginning, which led me to believe that it wasn’t the continuation of a stanza or part of a poem. I didn’t know Mari Baroja but thought she might have had enough on her plate without political intrigue. She was Basque, though.

I stuffed the paper scrap back in my pocket and picked up my life in Post-it form. Vic appeared in my doorway with her jacket over her shoulder and wine glass in hand. “I can’t fucking believe you’re gonna get laid before me.”

“Maybe you should stop looking at this as a competition?”

“You are such an asshole.” She took a sip. “Not that I give a shit, but where have you been all day?”

I took a sip of my wine, its complex bouquet undiminished by the styrene stemware. “Following up on this Baroja thing.”

“There’s a thing?”

I blew out and thought back on my day. “Spoke with the ME from Billings. His opinion is that she smoked too much, she drank too much, and I’m coming to the conclusion that she might have done other things too much as well.”

She shrugged and toasted with her glass. “That’s how I wanna go.”

I curbed the urge to say something about slow starts. “Talked to the personal physician.”

“Who is?”

“Isaac Bloomfield, who concurred. There was something else, though.” She held the edge of the plastic against her lip. “She’d been consistently beaten.” Her eyes widened. “Massive tissue damage on the back and other areas.”

The lip slipped away. “Holy shit.”

“It gets better. I went to see the granddaughter.”

When I told her what Lana had said, she came and sat in the chair opposite my desk and scooted it in so that she could lay her arms on the flat surface and rest her chin there. The glass dangled over the edge, unseen. Her voice was low, but it cut like only a woman’s voice can. “No fucking way. Lucian?”

“It gets better.”

“It can’t get any better, unless you found the body.”

“Trust me, it gets better.” I told her about the conversation with the judge.

“Fuck me.” She glanced around the room; she had just been given a passport to strangeland where I had spent the day. The big eyes finally came back to rest on me, and they were heavy. “He did it. I’ll bet you anything he did it.” The cutting voice was back. “The love of your life is taken away and is being slowly beaten to death? Charlie Nurburn is lying in a shallow grave in Absaroka County or eaten by coyotes and shit off a cliff, which is too good for the son of a bitch.” She folded her arms on the desk again, having spoken. “What are you gonna do?”

“What do you mean?”

“What are you gonna do?” It was a smile, a wonderfully vicious and lovely smile with no warmth in it. “The sheriff has killed a man, the one-legged bandit, your pal.”

I leaned in until our noses were about sixteen inches apart. “I really wish you weren’t enjoying this so much.”

“I can’t help it. This is one of those great fucking moral quandaries, and I can’t wait to see what you’re gonna do next.”

I folded an arm and supported my head with a fist. “I’m going to wait and see what comes back from the NCIC.”

“It’s going to say that Charlie Nurburn is dead as the proverbial doornail and that somebody hammered him a very long time ago.” She trapped her lower lip in thought. “Can I go with you when you go to talk to Lucian?”

“No.”

She whined. “C’mon.” I didn’t say anything and, after a moment, she asked again: “C’mon.” We stared at each other for a while, and then she drank the last sip of her wine, placed the empty glass on my desk, and stood. “I don’t have to mention that there is no statute of limitations on murder, right?”

I sighed, still holding my head up with my fist. “No, you don’t. You also don’t have to impress upon me how easy it is to drive a man to the act.”

She pulled a wayward lock behind her ear, sparkled her eyes with a quick batting of the lashes, and quarter curtseyed. “Just here to help out.” She paused at the door. “By the way . . . ?”

“Yes?”

“I hope you get the clap.”

I collapsed my head on my arm and looked at the small amount of wine in my plastic glass, trying to figure out how to drown myself in it. What was I going to do? Hard as I tried, I couldn’t see myself marching into Lucian’s room and accusing him of something I wasn’t sure he had done. I was going to have to feel the outside edges of the thing first. I wanted to know why he had lied to me; it was a start, a chicken-shit start, but a start. As soon as I looked toward the Post-its, Ruby appeared in the doorway.

Her tone was stern. “Have you read those?”

“I’d rather have you tell me.”

She came in, and I noticed she had a large mailing envelope under her arm. “You want the good news or the bad news first?”

“There’s good news?”

“Charlie Nurburn is alive and well and living in Vista Verde, New Mexico.”

My head came off the desk like it was on fire. “What?”

She tapped the Post-its with a bright red nail, which had a little holiday wreath painted on it. “According to the records, Mr. Charlie Nurburn has been paying his taxes in Vista Verde since 1951. Here is his address and phone number.”

I yelled out the door. “Vic!”

“She’s gone.”

I got up and walked around the desk and kissed the top of her head again. “Thank you. You have no idea how much.”

She looked up at me. “Does this mean you’re ready for the bad news?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Mari Baroja is in Billings. The medical examiner said that there were tests he wanted to perform and that he couldn’t do them here.”

I stared at her for a moment and then rubbed my hands across my face. “When was this?”

“He phoned about an hour ago.”

“He already took her?”

“Yes. He said that he left a series of autopsy pictures for you at the hospital. I had the Ferg pick them up before he left.” She was watching me, but I was looking out the window and into the darkness of my life. I wasn’t in any hurry to see those pictures. She placed the large envelope on my desk.

“Is there any more bad news?”

“Cady called. She said to tell you she was packed and to remind you that she would be here tomorrow.”

“Oh, God.”

“No, it’s not that bad. I’ve got some ideas. Do you want me to just use the department plastic?”

“Yes, by all means. Just keep the receipts.” I nudged the Post-its with my fingertips. “Anything else?”

She shrugged. “The rest of it’s all kind of mediocre.”

“How’s the new kid?”

She brightened immediately and looked directly at me to let me know that she meant business. “We have to keep him.”

“I’m working on it.” I took the last sip of my wine, my mood having been improved. “He’s Basque.”

“That’s nice.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it; it just seemed like such a Ruby thing to say. “I don’t suppose Mr. McDermott mentioned what kinds of tests he wanted to run?”

“He did not.” She studied me for a while. “This is going to be a problem with the family?”

“Oh, yes.”

“The church?”

I snorted. “Worse than that, lawyers.”

“What are you going to do?”

“You know, I wish somebody would ask me something besides that today.” She waited. “I think I’m going to run away to the Rez.”

She smiled and had a little silence of her own. “Maybe you two need to touch index fingers and recharge.”

I picked up the Post-it with Charlie’s information and the pictures, feeling the weight of the photographs. I followed Ruby out the door and into the snow, scraped off her windshield, and watched her drive slowly away. I loaded Dog into the truck, sat on his snowy footprints, and stuffed the Post-it into my breast pocket. I didn’t look at the photos, choosing instead to place the manila envelope carefully in the center console. When the console lid snapped shut, it was very loud.

5

It was a zoo, like it always was. Maggie and the Bear were sorting through a container full of Mennonite photographs, which were destined for a spring show at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Art. The box the photos were in was for a Stetson Open Road model, a hat I had threatened to switch to about a month ago until Vic had voiced the opinion that I would look like LBJ. I looked up at the numerous and sundry pots and pans that glittered copper in the tasteful light of the small votive candles that were everywhere in the room and in the reflections of the bay windows that looked out over a receding hill and ancient sea. It was a culinary island, an eating oasis at the edge of a snowy ocean, and it was cozy, even with the other forty-three Indians eating, drinking, drumming, and roaming around the place.

I tried to concentrate on my appointed task of cutting onions, but the six conversations and the drumming were making it difficult. There were about a dozen of us who were seated and standing around the center island and, as near as I could tell, I was the only one working. I took a break and looked around to give my eyes a chance to clear.

This house knew my secrets. It knew about the time Henry and I had gotten so drunk after a junior varsity Sadie Hawkins Day dance that we had slid from the roof adjoining Henry’s room and dropped twenty feet only to be saved by the deep snow below. Henry’s father, Eldridge, came and got us, sitting us at the kitchen table and forcing us to drink bootleg hooch for the rest of the night until we both threw up and passed out. When he made us eat eggs and Tabasco sauce the next morning, he explained that if we were going to be drunks we should know what the life was like. The house knew about the night I had called from Los Angeles to tell Henry about being drafted by the marines only to find that he had received a similar letter in Berkeley from the army. The house remembered when I had introduced Henry to my new wife, Martha. It remembered when Cady was two and established the ritual of barking like a seal for the McKenzie River salmon that always seemed to be on hand. It had been the nerve center for getting out the Indian vote when I had run for sheriff the first time. It knew when Martha had died of cancer, and it had contained the both of us when I had come to tell Henry that four high school boys in Durant had raped his niece. The house knew a million sorrows, a million victories, and Henry and me apiece. It knew when you were hungry, it knew when you were sad, and best of all it knew when you needed comfort.

I looked longingly at the dark beer in the glass to my left through watering eyes, but I had made myself a promise that I wouldn’t have another sip until I had finished cutting another onion. I cheated and took a swig.

“Lawman, do you have those onions cut?”

I sat my glass back down. “I need some nourishment.”

“Yes, the onions are holding us up.” Brandon White Buffalo had pressed me into service when we had arrived, while Henry had absconded with my date. Brandon was the owner/operator of the White Buffalo Sinclair station in Lame Deer.

I looked around the table and knew just about everybody, including Lonnie Little Bird, who sat in his wheelchair, so close to my stool that you couldn’t tell his legs were missing. “When is Melissa coming home?”

He smiled so broadly that I thought his head might crack open. “She comes back tomorrow. Um-hmm, yes, it is so.” A product of fetal alcohol syndrome, Melissa was finishing her first semester at a community college in South Dakota. I had known the Little Birds for years. They were important in a case that I had solved less than a month ago and so, every once in a while, Lonnie would wheel himself into the office and give me updates on Melissa’s progress. “She’s liking school?”

“She is liking basketball. Um-hmm, yes, it is so.”

I went back to slicing. I yelled to Brandon. “How small do you want these onions?”

He glanced over. “Halves lengthwise into half-inch strips, Lawman.” I shrugged. For me eating was a necessity, but for Henry it was art, and the coda of his art was ease and originality. I was surprised he was allowing Brandon to do the cooking, but it was under close supervision. I glanced at the Bear and Maggie Watson, and it seemed as if they were sitting awfully close to one another. I stuck the knife out to get his attention above the halting tempo of the numerous Cheyenne conversations. “What are we making again?”

He glanced up. “
Ga xao xa ot
.” He looked at my blank face. “Vietnamese.”

I thought about it and continued in a loud voice. “I don’t remember having anything like this when I was over there.”

“That is because everything you ate over there came out of an American can.”

“I had a lot of Tiger beer.”

“I do not think that could be considered a gourmet item.” He reached over and touched Maggie’s arm as she smiled and looked back at him. They were drinking white wine; I didn’t like the stuff. I remembered a French expatriate at the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge who advised me that the stuff was all right for in the morning when you don’t feel well or for the ladies.

I watched her as she talked, the delicate way that her lips moved. They were pretty great lips, really well defined, and they always seemed to have a fresh coat of lipstick even though I had only caught the application a few times. She was positively brilliant now, flushed with the excitement of the exotic, alien surroundings and with the Bear’s stories.

“So, the onions are the first part?” He didn’t answer, but she stopped listening and smiled. “So, the onions . . .”

The response was a little sharp. “Yes.”

I waited a moment to let him know that he’d hurt my feelings. “I was just asking.” He nodded, sighed, and looked back at Maggie. “Well, I just want you to know that you’ve hurt my feelings.” I leaned toward Maggie so that she could feel my pain. “See . . . tears.”