Montana (7 page)

“Cribbage?”

“That’s right.”

“Ivory?”

“Elk antler.”

Lola withdrew one of the pegs, black and gleaming, topped with a blue-green stone. He answered before she could ask. “Buffalo horn, set with turquoise. Wilson Bird over on the reservation made it. The man’s an artist.”

“Beautiful.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “Any idea what Mary Alice was doing up on that hill with her sleeping bag? Were you two planning some sort of campout?”

“A campout? Like we were kids?” It was almost enough to make her smile, the idea of the two of them shaking out their respective sleeping bags under the trees, crawling in and whispering secrets, grown women shedding the confusions of adulthood with a return to schoolgirl ritual. It would have been fun.
Fun
. “Not the two of us,” Lola said. “Just her. I found this in her kitchen.” She pulled out the note she’d retrieved from the cabin and smoothed it onto his desk.

“Don’t!” He grabbed her hands and pulled them away. The paper fell back into its trifold creases. Lola extricated her hands.

“I don’t suppose it occurred to you not to touch this. The crime lab can lift fingerprints from paper. Could have.”

Guilt stabbed at Lola. She rejected it. “Any fingerprints that might have been on this note are probably on every surface in that kitchen.”

“Most of which you already touched,” he reminded her. “Verle, too.”

Lola prodded at the paper, belatedly stopping short of actual contact. “Are we going to talk about something that’s too late to fix? Or can we focus on this note?” She’d memorized its abbreviated contents. Mouthed the words as he read them.
Lola—Camping on the Two Medicine. Back before you get here. If you beat me home, you know where to find the liquor.

She gave him a minute to digest it. A wall clock hung behind his head, second hand twitching audibly in its endless circuit around the face. “The thing is,” she said, “Mary Alice was going to pick me up at the airport. She sent me an email a couple of days ago to double-check my flight number and arrival time. So that business about me getting to the cabin before her doesn’t make sense. And then there’s the voicemail she left me.” She pulled out her phone and played it for him. He jotted down the words.

Hey, you. I might be late. I’ve got to take care of something here. I’ll call when I’m on my way. You sit tight ’til I get there. Love you.

The sheriff’s hand hesitated over the
love you.
“She didn’t say what she had to take care of?”

Lola shook her head. “I’ve re-checked both my voicemail and my email. She didn’t leave me anything after that. But maybe she tried to send me something and it didn’t go through. You should look at her computer. I can probably help you unlock it. She’s changed her password every two weeks for years, but I know the formula she uses.”

“Can’t.”

The clock ticked and tocked. “Why can’t you?”

He dug the heel of his hand against bloodshot eyes. Lola guessed that despite the fresh shirt and hasty shave, he hadn’t slept the previous night. He’d knocked away the scab over one of the shaving cuts. A drop of blood swelled and glittered garnet-like in the awful fluorescent light. “You saw that house. We don’t know if this was a burglary or what. It was hard to figure out if anything was taken. But one thing we didn’t find in all of that was a computer. A television, either. Nor a cellphone, not in the house or on her. The phone’s not much of a problem. We’ll just get the records from the company. We’d sure like to have her computer, though. Unfortunately, she used the same laptop for work and at home.”

“Mary Alice didn’t own a TV. But a computer seems like a logical thing to go missing during a burglary. If that’s what it was. Besides, even if you find it, it won’t help you. Mary Alice was paranoid about security. She bought some pretty expensive software so she could scrub everything, even from her hard drive. She stored all of her files on flash drives.”

He leaned forward. “Where’d she keep her flash drives?”

“No idea. But that’s what you’ll want to look for when you’re searching her place. Do you really think this was a burglary?”

“We’re considering all the possibilities.”

Lola thought she’d probably heard those same words from every cop on every crime story she’d ever worked.

“Speaking of which,” he added. “It’s really a formality, but I’ve got to ask: Any reason Mary Alice would want to take her own life?”

“Mary Alice?” Recalling, even as she spoke, a day she’d showed up at Mary Alice’s place in Baltimore at dawn, furious and full of self-loathing after her longtime romantic entanglement had retreated yet again to his wife.

“You’ll dump him when it’s time,” Mary Alice had said. Standing in the doorway fully dressed. Warm toast scent from the kitchen. Coffeemaker burbling. Mary Alice held out her hand. “Give.”

“What?” said Lola. Her throat raw from the night’s shouted recriminations.

“I know how you are,” Mary Alice said. “Whatever it is, hand it over.” And took Lola down into her basement workroom and handed her a ball-peen hammer so that she could smash the new watch with the engraved anniversary message that Lola had lifted from her lover’s bedside table. Then gave her a whisk broom and dustpan. “Clean up your damn evidence.” They’d laughed, then.

“Not a chance,” Lola told the sheriff now. “Even if she had a reason—and she didn’t, not that I know of—she’s the least judgmental person I know. I can’t imagine her being any harder on herself than she was on anyone else.”

“We found a gun at the site. No computer, no phone, but a gun.”

“What kind of gun?”

“I can’t comment on that.”

“It was a .45, wasn’t it? She’s had that thing forever. If you knew her neighborhood in Baltimore, you’d know why. The drug dealers there had this saying: ‘.22—Just won’t do. .38—Best shoot straight. .45—Stay alive.’ Had it been fired? I’ll bet it hadn’t. Besides, a .45 didn’t do that to her. It was a rifle.”

“I can’t comment on that, either. Did Mary Alice know a lot of drug dealers?”

Lola tried to fashion a shorthand description for the creeping gentrification that led Mary Alice to overcome her parents’ objections and bet on a Pigtown rowhouse whose soaring ceilings and marble fireplaces seemed to outweigh the fact that the neighbors on either side had windowless steel doors and curbside parking spaces that no one other than the homes’ owners dared use. “Her neighborhood was—in transition, you might say. But Mary Alice managed to make friends with all the folks on the street, not just the ones moving in but the ones who’d been there all along, too. Maybe not friends, exactly. Let’s just say they had a working relationship.” Meaning that Mary Alice didn’t complain about the procession of suburban white boys who cruised the street in their parents’ SUVs, barely slowing to a stop for transactions made through windows opened just wide enough to pass cash out and take never-mind-what in. In return, nobody ever vandalized Mary Alice’s car—or Lola’s either, when she visited—despite the robust level of street crime that served as a sort of welcome wagon for newcomers.

“Any reason why anybody would want to kill her?”

“She’d have told me if there were.”

“What about a boyfriend? I never heard about one, but maybe you did. Or, maybe”—he slid his gaze away from hers—“more than one? Sometimes that happens. Two guys, one woman, and for reasons I’ve never understood, the woman pays.”

Mary Alice had occasionally disappeared for long weekends and returned smiling and maddeningly silent, in contrast to Lola, whose liaison with her colleague between and during his various marriages had been open newsroom knowledge for so long that it ceased to be fodder for gossip. Afghanistan had put a stop to that, just as Montana had presumably halted Mary Alice’s flings. But maybe not.

“From what I can tell about this place, everybody here would know more about that than I do. She was no nun, but she was the most discreet person I’ve ever met.”

“Girlfriend?”

“I’m straight,” Lola snapped. “Short hair just makes my life easier in the field.”

The sheriff’s pencil added another line to his pad, more words than a simple “no.” “I wasn’t asking about you.” Before the rebuke could settle in, he followed it up with another question. “What about someone mad at her for something she wrote?”

“You’d know more about that, too. Have you talked to the people at the newspaper here?” On surer footing when she was the one asking the questions.

“I called them last night. They were in a tough spot. Trying to deal with what I was telling them, and then needing to write a story about it, too. They’re coming in today to talk some more. She’d been spending a lot of time up on the rez—the Blackfeet reservation. There’s a guy up there campaigning for governor. Johnny Running Wolf. Maybe you’ve heard of him.”

Lola shook her head. “No. Wait. I think I saw a billboard on the way up here.”

“He’s gotten himself some national press. Indian candidate in cowboy country, that kind of thing. He’s some sort of long-lost cousin of mine.”

“Oh.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I hadn’t realized you were Blackfoot.”

“Not Blackfoot. You all named us Black
feet
. Singular or plural, you’re sorry that I’m Indian? I didn’t know it required an apology.” The same challenging tone he’d taken with Verle.

Beneath her own chagrin, Lola again saw Verle and the sheriff facing off from their respective vehicles, the bristling that accompanied their conversation. She wondered what Verle had said during his own interview with the sheriff. She threw a wild pitch. “What about Verle? Is he a suspect?” The clock’s second hand clicked its measured progress. Lola wanted to climb up onto her chair so that she could reach high enough to stop it. Then she registered the nod, the words that followed.

“Yes,” the sheriff said. “Verle is a suspect.”

Her stomach did a slow revolution, an ungainly fish turning in too-deep water. She hadn’t given nearly enough consideration to the fact that Verle had been loitering by the road not two miles from where Mary Alice lay freshly dead. Fear and shock had muffled her reason. Lapses like that got people hurt. Killed.

“Are you going to arrest him?” Her voice rose.

“No.”

“Because?”

He drew a circle with the pencil and slashed lines across it, dividing it into quarters, eighths. “Sit down.”

She hadn’t realized she was on her feet. He wrote something in one of the slices of the pie, gave the pad a small turn, and wrote something else. He pushed the pad toward her. “Here’s Verle’s name. And here’s yours.”

Disappointment tugged her back into the chair. “Of course,” she said. At this stage, everyone was a suspect. She’d have been dismayed by her own lack of judgment if the sheriff considered Verle a strong possibility. Still, it would be a relief to leave Montana with Mary Alice’s killer behind bars. The sheriff turned the pad again and wrote another name. “Here’s Jolee, over at the store. When I stopped by for coffee this morning, she told me that Mary Alice drove down there a couple of days ago. Said she was stocking up on stuff for your visit. Way it looks now, Jolee was the last person to see her”—those fleshy lips spat the word
—“alive
before she got killed. I’m interviewing her next.”

“Speaking of Jolee,” Lola said slowly.

“What about her?”

“There was a guy outside her store last night. It’s probably nothing.”

The sheriff tensed. “Everything counts at this point.”

“He said something about Mary Alice. ‘Poor Mary Alice,’ he called her. It seemed like a strange thing to say. Especially in retrospect.”

“Do you know who he was? Would Jolee know?” The weariness had fled his voice.

His enthusiasm, along with the thought that she could be useful, was infectious. “I can’t remember his name. But he didn’t have any teeth.”

The sheriff’s pencil jerked, trailing a long jagged line across the pad. “That’s Frank. He didn’t have anything to do with this.” He rubbed at the page with his eraser.

“You just said everything and everyone counted. Why not Frank?”

The sheriff tilted the pad, letting the crumbles of eraser fall into a trash can. “Because he wouldn’t have done it, that’s why. I know him.” Lola started to speak but he cut her off. “Technically, I suppose he’s a suspect, just like Verle. But face it. Until I get some more information, half the people in this town are suspects, and I haven’t even started talking to folks on the rez. Maybe one of them stopped by her place yesterday. Then I could add another name to my little pie chart.”

“What was that guy’s name again?” Lola asked. “The one Mary Alice was writing about? Where’s his name on this thing?”

“Johnny Running Wolf. He’s been down in Denver for a few days, doing some sort of fundraising with rich white-men. Mary Alice wrote about his trip. He’ll be in town for a meet-and-greet at the VFW the day of the funeral. He’s probably one of the few people I don’t have to worry about.” He handed her a business card. “Take some time. If you think of anything, you can call me. Here’s how to reach me. We should touch base again after the funeral.”

She shook her head. “I’m on a plane out of here as soon as it’s over.” She reached into her pocket and thumbed one of her own cards, printed in blocky English letters and Arabic curlicues of Pashto and Farsi, from beneath the rubber band and held it out to him. “Call me and let me know the minute you catch whomever did this. Or maybe”—she looked around the office again, at the cheap plastic clock, the government-surplus desk—“you can email me if you can’t afford the international call.”

The sheriff blinked rapidly. His hands pawed at the keyboard. “I’m afraid not.” He angled the computer screen so that she could see it, showed her the standard bulletin that would go to law enforcement departments around the country, as well as to airports, Border Patrol, Homeland Security. She watched him type her name in the blanks. Then he unlocked a steel door behind the desk and walked her down a short hallway and pointed out the cell where he could, if necessary, house her as an uncooperative material witness if she in any way, shape or form attempted to leave Magpie before his investigation was complete. A woman lay on the lower bunk’s thin bare mattress, skeletal brown arms clutching her knees to her chest, dark hair waterfalling over the side of the bed. She looked at them with dull eyes.