Nothing but Gossip (20 page)

Sixty seconds later, ten o’clock on the nose, the door clicked open and Jack appeared, dapper as ever in a knife-pressed brown cavalry twill suit, crisp white shirt, lizard boots, and a string tie with a silver bolo of long-horns. He placed his coffee carefully on the table and cleaned his glasses with a white handkerchief from his back pocket before pulling his chair over tight to McGee and sitting down. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d dusted off the seat first.

Lieutenant Evan fussed and hovered next to him as though he were balancing on a pogo stick, ready to boing into action at the slightest rise in his boss’s eyebrow. I wandered over and half-sat on the edge of the table, in tight on the other side of McGee. He was totally impinged upon. And he couldn’t do anything about it. All our faces were in his, and they were implacable.

“Mr. McGee,” Jack began, “this conversation is being recorded and videotaped, and I want to reiterate that anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Kennedy answered.

“Let the record show, it is ten-oh-five
A.M
., Thursday, September tenth. Present are the prisoner, Kennedy McGee; the prisoner’s attorney, Paul Decker; U.S. Marshal Lilly Bennett; Detective Inspector Lieutenant Geoff Evan; myself, Jack Lewis, Chief of Detectives Roundup P.D., and a sergeant-at-arms. We are questioning the
prisoner about the murder of Alma Gilhooly and the attempted murder of Elias Bennett.

“Mr. McGee, why don’t you begin by describing your relationship with the victim, Alma Rutherford Gilhooly.”

“I’ve already done this a hundred times.” Kennedy looked at Paul to get him off the hook, but no help was forthcoming. Paul was just like a damn cash register. He’d been happy to help with the elephant tusks, but a lengthy murder investigation and trial were more than he’d bargained for. Ethically, he couldn’t back out. He was trapped, and he knew it. It was almost physically painful to watch him. I wanted to laugh.

“And I’m afraid you’ll probably have to do it another hundred times before we’re through,” Jack told him.

Kennedy drew in a deep, peevish breath and relayed the facts of his and Alma’s relationship—the African safaris, the love affair, the resort hotel she promised to underwrite, and her backing out at the last minute.

“So you decided to come to America and have it out with her?”

“Not at all. I’m here to talk to clients, do a little hunting, attend the Rutherford Oil annual meeting. Alma and I remained friendly. It wouldn’t accomplish anything to ‘have it out with her,’ as you put it.”

Jack led him through the same interrogation I’d had with him three days earlier. Nothing new.

“Tell me about the threatening letters.” Jack said.

“What threatening letters?”

“The ones in Russian warning Rutherford stockholders.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Jack dragged the dictionary across the table to him. “You’ve never seen this before?”

“Not until you pulled it out of my luggage.”

“Where did you leave your luggage that the dictionary could have been put in it?” I asked.

“I left it in the hotel lobby while I went up to meet with Wade.”

“What did you and Wade fight about?”

“When?”

“In the ballroom lobby before the meeting.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t have a fight with Wade.”

“I saw it with my own eyes, Mr. McGee,” I said. “Mr. Gilhooly says he gave you one hundred thousand dollars.”

Jack and Paul and Evan all looked at me.

“What hundred thousand dollars?” Jack asked.

Paul didn’t say anything, but he relaxed considerably, cleared his throat importantly, and leaned forward a little, engaging himself somewhat in the process.

Kennedy would have killed me if he could have. “Wade gave me some cash in exchange for my vote against the Russian venture,” he said grudgingly.

I eyeballed Kennedy. He knew there was more and he knew I knew it, and he realized if he didn’t speak, I would ask.

“And the Russians gave me some cash to vote in favor,” he concluded.

“How much?” Paul asked, but McGee didn’t answer.

“So what did you do?” I asked.

“I left. Went to the airport.”

“Before the vote?”

“Certainly,” Kennedy said. “I could care less if Rutherford Oil drills in Siberia or not. My stock goes up either way.”

This guy was as low as Pleistocene goo.

“What stock?” said Paul.

“Did the Russians threaten to kill you if the vote failed? Is that why you shot my brother?”

“I didn’t shoot your brother,” Kennedy snarled. “I wasn’t even there. Ask the cabdriver.”

“Cabdriver corroborates his story,” Paul jumped in.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Jack and I said at the same time.

“You didn’t bag his hands,” Paul said. “There was no gunshot residue.”

“That doesn’t mean anything, either,” Jack fired back. “We didn’t catch him for two hours. Anyone with a brain would have washed his hands by then.”

I think Jack washes his hands at least twice an hour and wants to believe everyone else does, too.

“How did you get the rifle into the hotel, Mr. McGee?” Jack questioned.

Kennedy groaned. “I did not ‘get’ my rifle into the hotel. It had been stolen at some point out of my car. But the fact is, Chief Lewis, just for your information, I am a hunter. Hunters travel with their weapons—sporting rifles, shotguns. The guns have special cases. It’s simple to walk into any hotel with them. Not a bit unusual. The hotel people know you’re not carrying a semiautomatic rifle. Especially in Wyoming, hunters come up here all the time. Hell, it’s elk season right now. The hotel’s full of hunters.”

Well, he was right about that.

“This happens to be your rifle, Mr. McGee,” Jack said. “And it’s an elephant rifle. We don’t have elephant season in Wyoming.”

“It’s part of my sales pitch. Prospective safari clients like to see things like that. And, as I’ve already said:

Someone stole my Weatherby. I have the empty case to prove it.”

As Jack questioned him more about the shootings, I slid the plastic bag with Kennedy’s personal effects closer to me and shoved the contents around inside it. British passport. Thin leather wallet with no big wad of cash visible. Comb. ChapStick. Airline tickets. Address book and calendar. And an empty white number-ten envelope with McGee’s name written on the front.

I opened the baggie and removed the envelope. “What is this?”

“What does it look like?”

“Please just answer the question, Mr. McGee,” I said.

“That’s the envelope the money was in.”

“Which money?”

“Wade’s.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure.”

“How do you know it’s not the Russians’ envelope?”

“Maybe it is. What difference does it make?”

“Maybe none. But try to remember which one it is.”

“I think you’re being a little hard on my client here,” Paul chimed in, now that he could smell his fee getting close to his bank account.

“It could be the Russians’. It could be Gilhooly’s. I don’t know. What I do know”—Kennedy’s eyes raked the table—“is that I did not kill Alma Gilhooly. She was not worth it. And I did not write any letters in Russian. And I did not take a shot at you or your brother, although I must say I’m glad someone did. But I wish it had been you. And I wish they’d not missed.”

I gathered up my gear. “When’s the arraignment?” I asked.

“This afternoon.”

“Good luck, Mr. McGee,” I said. “You’re in for a long day.”

I went into the observation room, where three detectives leaned against the rail in front of the mirror.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“Evidence doesn’t lie.”

C
an’t you get this thing to go any faster?” I yelled into the cockpit at the pilot over the roar of the S-76’s powerful turbines.

“One hundred and seventy-five miles an hour is our top speed, Miss Bennett. We’ll touch down in about fifteen minutes.”

We’d stopped at the ranch long enough for me to pick up a couple of changes of clothes and then took off again immediately. We’d been airborne for twenty minutes, and I was ready to move.

I’ve never bitten my fingernails in my life, but now I was tempted. A lot rode on this particular boondoggle. Not only was I going to be late for the Kendalls’ party for Richard and me at the country club tonight, I was still pretty sure his parents hated my guts and this would finish the whole deal, not to mention the fact that if I stood up Richard, none of my family would ever speak to me again. But also, even though it was certainly possible—even obvious, if you chose to believe the evidence—that Kennedy McGee had killed
Alma and taken a shot at me that very nearly killed my brother, it was simply not plausible. Whoever took that shot did so because the information Elias had discovered was something very important, information worth killing for that the killer did not want him to say, nor me to hear. I intended to find out what it was before Wade or Johnny or Shanna or Duke or Mercedes figured out that the case was not closed and started hunting again.

Besides, I couldn’t ask Elias. He’d have tubes down his throat until tomorrow morning and wasn’t talking. And one arm was incapacitated and the other was full of IV needles, so he wasn’t writing. And they had him all loaded up on heavy prescription drugs, which he loved, so he wasn’t thinking, either. Basically, he was useless.

The airframe shuddered slightly as we changed airspeed and floated to the ground, a heavy, harried feather, in front of the general-aviation hangar at Billings’s little Logan Airport. By the time I’d popped the airstairs, the rental car, a white Ford Taurus, was parked next to the chopper and ready to go.

I hadn’t been to Billings for years, but I was pretty sure it hadn’t changed much. I mean, parts of Montana have become incredibly chic and precious, especially around Livingston and Bozeman and a little up toward Missoula, but the sad truth is that Billings will always be the state’s haunch, its hind end, a mail-order bride deceptively pretty in a blurred photograph taken in the gently screened light of summer, (which in Billings, like Siberia, is comprised of three weeks in July and the first week of August). But, in reality, it’s a living, freezing hell on earth—dusty, windblown, and cold as a brass toilet seat—for the other eleven months of the year. I
think they probably have more alcoholics in Billings, per capita, than in any other town in the country.

I gunned the Ford’s engine and peeled out of the airport onto Rimrock Road, which led steeply down the face of the butte and then turned right and wound along the edge of the Yellowstone Country Club golf course, until I found the Gilhoolys’ street: Strawberry Tree Drive. The cul-de-sac contained five good-sized, split-level, ranch-style houses, all of which looked as though they’d been built in the sixties. According to the Remax Realty sign, the Gilhooly house, number eighteen—“Pool. Gourmet Kitchen. Lots of Extras”—was still on the market. The driveway was empty, the lawn starting to turn brown with the approach of winter. Large picture windows reflected the north country’s gray, unfriendly sky.

I parked at Duke Fletcher’s house, next door to the Gilhoolys’ and rang the bell. I knew the senator wasn’t there, but Elias had mentioned drinking tea with a housekeeper. An older woman, who looked a little like a tiny white bird, opened the door. Bright blue eyes peeked out through heavy wrinkles and rimless glasses.

“If you’re with the newspapers,”—her voice was not especially inviting—“Senator Fletcher is not here.”

I showed her my badge. “No, ma’am,” I said. “I’d just like to ask you a few questions about the Gilhoolys.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know if you’ve heard or not, but Mrs. Gilhooly was shot a few days ago. She died yesterday afternoon. I’m working on the murder investigation, and I was wondering if you could tell me a little about what she was like.”

“Someone was here night before last. I already answered all the questions about them I’m gonna.”

“Yes, that was my deputy, and now
he’s
been shot, so maybe you could tell me what you told him.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that. He was a polite young man.” Her implication being that I was an impolite old woman, but she relented. “I suppose you’d better come in. We do believe in cooperating with the authorities in this house, unlike some of the other nuts who live around here.” She scowled up and down the street.

“Thank you, ma’am, I appreciate it.” I thought adding a “Gee” might be gilding the lily. But I did make a big show of wiping my boots on the mat before I stepped inside.

Half an hour later, I rang another neighbor’s doorbell.

“She was some kinda piece of work,” the man said once he’d gotten his Rottweiler, whose name sounded something like Gut, calmed down. He was neatly dressed in golf clothes and looked like every man I’ve ever known from Billings: bald, with a big beer belly. Maybe I’ve just had a bad run of eastern-Montana men, but they remind me of people in Maine, where the winters are so long, all they do is eat a bunch of potatoes and drink.

“She had one hell of a feud with the Fletchers. Well, first they had a love affair, not literally as far as I know, but the Senator, God bless him.” The man squelched a belch. “Say, do you want to come in and have a beer?”

“I’d like to come in, but no beer. Thanks.”

The house reeked of baked ham and buttered microwave popcorn. The dog lay down on the kitchen floor and watched me as if I were the change in menu he’d been being promised for a long time.

“Jerry Pierce.” He extended his hand. “Sorry about
the mess, but my wife’s visiting her parents up in Ekalaka for a few days.”

Ekalaka’s near Baker, which is basically nowhere.

“Yes, old Duke, he’s a dear, but he’s so money-crazy he loses his place sometimes. He and Martha Belle moved in here about five or six years ago. Kept the ranch in Cut Bank, but by then Martha Belle was pretty sick and I guess he felt they needed a place in town closer to the hospital. When Duke saw that he was living next door to a Rutherford, you could see those wheels turning. See him thinking, I’m gonna get some of that. And, the fact is, Alma helped him out a lot, started pouring money into his campaigns and PACs and all, until one time she asked him to vote against some new strip-mining law or other—can’t remember which one it was, we’ve got so goddamn many of them now—and he said no. Well, you know, Alma’s so far to the right she makes right-wingers look like communists. She went completely haywire.”