Till the Butchers Cut Him Down (17 page)

The neon signs blinked and shimmered. Motels sported No Vacancy signs. Tourist families strolled. Couples window-shopped.
At the central intersection two mule teams waited to take customers on hayrides.

Once again the town had it all. But did it really want its newfound hope?

I’d made a reservation at the La Rose Hotel; now I had mental reservations as well. But I was pleasantly surprised when I
found the four-story granite building at the far end of the strip: no neon flashed there; no banners advertised all-you-can-eat
buffets. A doorman in conservative livery met me and summoned a valet parking attendant and a bellman. Inside, the lobby was
tastefully restored in dark wood and brass; the reception desk and pigeonhole mailboxes looked to be original. To the left
I spotted an old-fashioned bar; through an archway to the right came the familiar burble of computerized slot machines.

As I registered, I asked if any faxes had arrived for me. They were there—copies of my notes on Suits’s turnaround files that
I’d requested Mick send when I’d called to check on how things were at the office. As the clerk handed them across the counter,
he gave me a curious look that made me suspect he’d glanced over them, maybe even read them. I wasn’t sure how I felt about
that; on the one hand his interest might be harmless enough, but on the other. …

My room was also a pleasant surprise: large, comfortably furnished in pseudo-antiques, decorated in Laura Ashley prints. Overly
warm, but that was to be expected; while desert people are a hardy breed, they seem to think that we city types are hothouse
flowers. I unpacked what little I had brought along, hung my toiletries case in the bathroom, and went over the notes. Then
I freshened up and took myself downstairs for a drink, dinner, and perhaps some conversation.

The old man whose acquaintance with Suits’s gambler friend had sparked Lost Hope’s renaissance had died during the turnaround—of
shame, perhaps. The new owner was Marty McNear, the old man’s nephew. I stopped at the reservation desk, gave the clerk my
card, and asked if Mr. McNear was available. He went into the office, came back, and said the owner would meet me in the lounge
in ten minutes. Before I went there, I checked out the slot machines.

All were of the new computerized variety rather than the noisy one-armed bandits with the pictures of cherries and oranges
and watermelons that had first piqued my mild interest in gambling. I dropped a quarter into one. After I pressed the play
button, it informed me that I had a credit of two dollars. Did I want to cash in or keep playing?

I kept playing.

Two bucks, four bucks, ten bucks, three-fifty. Three-fifty, two twenty-five, seventy-five cents, nothing.

They’ll get you every time—watermelons and cherries or not.

Marty McNear met me at the door to the lounge. He was perhaps in his early fifties, although it was hard to judge. His skin
had the brown toughness of an outdoorsman who doesn’t bother with sunblock; his dark hair had receded to a curly, low-slung
halo. He wore western garb and a big smile that told me he wasn’t the least bit wary of meeting with a private investigator.
By the time we were settled on a red velvet banquette with our drinks, I knew why.

“I’ve got to admit it, I’m nosy,” he told me. “I looked over your faxes. Didn’t intend to, but the name Gordon caught my eye,
and then I couldn’t help myself.” His smile faded and he took a sip of beer. “I heard about what happened to T.J.’s wife.
Pretty grim.”

“You know T.J., then?”

“Sure. I came out here a few years ago after my uncle died. Planned to fix up the hotel so I could sell it, then go back to
Baltimore. T.J. and his pilot were staying in the worst ratholes in the building. His other people were at a motel out by
the highway. You get to know a man when you’re living under the same roof—particularly one that leaks.”

“Would you say you and he were friends?”

McNear frowned, fingering a book of matches that was propped in the ashtray. “I don’t know as I could lay a claim to friendship.
But we were good companions, and seeing his enthusiasm for the town gave me the idea to stay on.”

“So you’re happy with the way the turnaround affected Lost Hope?”

“Well, sure. Oh, I know it’s kind of tacky, but you should’ve seen it before.”

“How do the natives feel?”

“The merchants’re happy.”

“And the others?”

“Well, there’re always people who resent progress.”

“Anyone in particular?”

He hesitated. “Ms. McCone, exactly why are you here?”

“I’m an old friend of T.J. I was a friend of his wife, too, although I only knew her briefly. T.J. hired me last summer because
someone was trying to sabotage a turnaround he was working on in San Francisco. What was happening didn’t seem to have much
connection to that, so we went over his past projects and pinpointed Lost Hope as a possible trouble spot.”

“Was Anna Gordon’s death connected to that sabotage?”

“Yes, I think so. I’m here because I want … no, I
need
to find out who killed her.”

“Well, I can understand that. She was a wonderful lady.”

“You knew her, too?”

“Sure. She visited T.J. for about two weeks shortly before he left here.”

Why hadn’t Anna mentioned that to me? Oversight? No—an intentional omission. “What do you recall about her visit?”

He shrugged. “Not a whole lot. I liked her. They seemed to be having a good time. We spent a few pleasant evenings together.”

“Can you think of anybody who could tell me more?”

“You might try Brenda Walker over at the Indian crafts shop. She and Anna hit it off, spent time together. In fact, Brenda
took on some of the crafts from Anna’s reservation. Did real well with them, she said.”

“Is the shop open tonight?”

McNear smiled. “No moneymaking enterprise in Lost Hope ever closes early.”

* * *

The Native American Crafts Outlet contained an eclectic assortment of merchandise: Zuni pottery, Navajo weaving, Hopi kachinas,
Plains tribes beadwork and quillwork, even Eskimo carvings. A short, round woman with close-cropped gray hair whom I took
to be Brenda Walker was helping a customer decide among a trayful of silver earrings; I began to browse, stopping at a display
of Shoshone basketry.

Recently I’d developed a curiosity about my Shoshone great-grandmother, Mary McCone—natural, I supposed, since I was the only
member of the family whose appearance mirrored our one-eighth Indian heritage. I’d done some reading on her people and learned
that they’re one of the many Plains tribes, now scattered from the Wind River Reservation in western Wyoming to settlements
in Idaho to small enclaves in Nevada. Their reputation as peaceable people is largely derived from their arms-open welcome
of the white man—an acceptance prompted less by fondness for their Euro-American brothers than by their violent hatred of
the Sioux. The white man rewarded them with some forty-four million acres in Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, and Colorado, then recognized
the value of that land and proceeded to take it all back. The Shoshone ended up sharing the Wind River land with another old
enemy, the Arapahoe—referred to by all good members of the tribe as “dog eaters.” The Arapahoe don’t even dignify their fellow
reservation dwellers with an epithet, merely turn up their noses and call them “non-Indians.”

I’d read many amusing tales about the odd-couple tribes of Wind River Reservation, but none of them told me the things I really
wanted to know. Such as what sixteen-year-old Mary had been doing in Flagstaff, Arizona, when my great-grandfather Robert
McCone passed through in 1888 on his westward journey from Virginia. Such as what made her take up with a much older Scotch-Irishman
and turn her back forever on her people. I wondered what her life had been as the Indian bride of a white man in turn-of-the-century
California. I wondered why we had only one photograph of her—a faded and browned formal studio shot that showed her in her
Sunday dress, rosary in hand, looking for all the world like a good Catholic matron. I supposed I’d be searching for the answers
to my questions till the day I died.

The gray-haired woman had made her sale, and the customer was leaving. I went over to the counter. “Ms. Walker?”

She had her back to me, was doing something with a credit-card slip. “Yes, may I help you?” She turned and glanced at me;
her round face paled. Her eyes moved from my face to the cape I wore and back again. When she frowned, I realized that for
a moment she’d thought I was Anna Gordon.

I identified myself and explained that I wanted to talk with her about Anna. She relaxed somewhat, pressing her hand to her
breastbone over her heart. “That cape,” she said, “it was woven by the same girl who made Anna’s?”

I nodded, unwilling to tell her that it actually was Anna’s; the explanation of how I came to have it was one I didn’t care
to go into with a stranger. “Can we talk about her?” I repeated.

“Why?”

I took out one of my cards and handed it to her. “Anna’s husband is my client.”

She studied the card, then set it on the counter. “He hired you to find out who killed her?”

“Not exactly. The authorities in California are investigating that. Mr. Gordon hired me before Anna died, to look into some
problems he was having with his current turnaround. I’m here because of them.”

“So why are you asking about Anna?”

“She was a friend of mine. Her death may be connected to those problems.”

“Are you licensed to work in Nevada?”

Oh, lady, don’t give me trouble! “Generally one jurisdiction honors a license issued in another.”

“Aren’t you supposed to check in with the local law?”

“I plan to do that.”

“The sheriff’s substation is at the south end of town opposite the truck stop. Deputy in charge is named Chuck Westerkamp.”

Why such strong resistance to talking with me? “Ms. Walker, I was with Anna Gordon the day she died. If we could talk about
the time she spent here—”

She picked up the receiver of a phone that sat under the counter.

“Who’re you calling?”

“Westerkamp. I’ll either tell him you’re on your way to check in, or make a complaint about you harassing me. Which will it
be?”

* * *

“Brenda’s a little cracked, but she means well.”

Chuck Westerkamp slouched in his creaky swivel chair. His tiny office was chilly, cold air leaking so badly around the aluminum
window frames of the prefab building that it stirred the venetian blinds. The Esmeralda County Sheriff’s substation was housed
in three such prefabs on a windblown mesa at the very edge of town. Across from it sprawled an enormous truck stop, where
semis hulked in shadow like slumbering mastodons. Others huffed at the gas pumps, then growled away into the ancient desert
darkness. When I’d arrived there, I stood beside the Land Rover for a minute, watching a convoy lumber onto the highway and
crawl south; as the night swallowed it I began to feel lonesome, and I wrapped Anna’s cape closer for comfort.

Now I perched on the metal folding chair that Westerkamp offered me and asked, “Why do you suppose Ms. Walker’s so sensitive
on the subject of Anna Gordon?”

The deputy, a wiry sunbrowned man with thinning white hair, shrugged. “Lots of folks in the town’ve got cause to be sensitive
on the subject of the Gordons.”

“But I understand Ms. Walker was a friend of Anna’s. She and I are—should be—on the same side.”

“Like I said, Brenda’s a little cracked. Watches too much TV, if you ask me. A week doesn’t go by without us getting a call
from her about some heinous criminal she saw on
Unsolved Mysteries
who’s holed up right here in Lost Hope.”

“Tell me about Lost Hope, Deputy. What kind of town is it?”

He took a paper-wrapped toothpick from the pocket of his uniform shirt and unwrapped it. Stuck it in his mouth and chewed
on it while he considered the question. “First word that comes to mind is ‘greedy.’ Was greedy way back during the silver
boom; was greedy during the Depression when the people in Washington more or less forgot we existed; has gotten
real
greedy since your T. J. Gordon performed what some folks call his miracle.”

He paused, pale eyes thoughtful. “It’s a rowdy town, too: Miners back when. Nowadays it’s drunks. What this department mostly
does is keep them off Main Street, out of their pickups, and from beating each other up.” He took the flattened toothpick
from his mouth, contemplated it, and returned it. “Nasty town as well.”

“In what way?”

“Goes hand in hand with the greed. Oh, you could say everybody’s got a nasty secret or two: man doesn’t want the wife to know
about the girl he’s got on the side; woman doesn’t want the husband to know about the booze she puts away when he’s not home.
But that’s garden-variety nastiness. I’m talking about the kind when folks do despicable things for pure profit.”

“Such as?”

“There’s a lot at stake in this little town, always has been. Maybe not fortunes by Vegas or California standards, but fortunes
to the kind of people who’ve settled here. That desert out there’s been an unholy graveyard since the first vein of silver
was uncovered back in the teens. If you knew where to look, you couldn’t go more’n a mile without stumbling over a grave—some
of them fairly fresh, too.”

“This is on the level?”

He nodded, gnawing the toothpick.

“I thought you said your department mainly dealt with drunks.”

“I should’ve added missing persons. People who’re missing because they want to be, others … who knows? Folks have a habit
of flat-out disappearing around here.”

“So what do you do?”

“Depends on how bad somebody wants them found. We take reports, make helicopter sweeps. One time we even had a psychic come
out, looking for her client’s rich husband.”

“She find him?”

Westerkamp smiled. “What do you think?”

“To get back to the Gordons—did you know either of them?”

“Never met her; she wasn’t here long enough. Knew T.J. and the rest of the crew. Him, you couldn’t help but. He had a habit
of prowling around town, talking to folks at all hours of the day and night. Trying to get in touch with Lost Hope’s past,
he said. It’s a wonder he didn’t get himself shot.”