The Quiet Streets of Winslow

by Judy Troy

  I shook my head. “It was parked in front of an empty house, it turned out. At the houses nearby, and there aren’t many, nobody recalled noticing. One person said they remembered a red pickup parked there at midnight; somebody else got the color right but the make wrong, said they saw the vehicle in the morning but weren’t sure it had been there the night before.”

  “The usual witness accuracy, in other words.”

  “Correct.”

  “That phone call to Mike Early from the pay phone in Holbrook,” Bob said. “You never got any reasonable explanation for that, am I right?’

  “Right.”

  “So Nate calls Mike Early at seven thirty in the morning, in Snowflake,” Bob said, “which he knows is reasonably close by, asking for a ride to Winslow. Maybe Nate tells Mike the truth about what he’s done, or some version of the truth, and says, ‘It’s your fault, Mike. I saw you two at the overlook.’ Then Nate and Early come up with that alibi about the water leak.”

  “Or Nate could have made up a story as to why he was in Holbrook,” I said. “Then, after Jody’s body is found, Mike is implicated. He gave Nate that ride. And he has his own history with Jody. So he keeps quiet. He doesn’t know for sure anyway.”

  “And there’s no indication that Kevin Rainey and Mike Early knew each other?”

  “None that I could find,” I said.

  Bob picked up his glasses and turned them around in his hand as he thought.

  “We have a lot of circumstantial evidence on Kevin Rainey as well,” he said. “Plus he has an assault on his record, plus he has a motive, maybe not as strong as Nate’s, but strong enough. Jody doesn’t want to see him anymore, won’t so much as be friends, and so on. No apologies. Just it’s over. I’ve moved on. Then there are Kevin’s parents getting together, after Jody’s body is found, deciding to protect him from us, right from the beginning. They suspect him, basically, before we do.”

  “That’s how it seems to me,” I said.

  “Kevin Rainey also knew quite a bit about Nate, presumably. He would have known about Nate’s ties to Black Canyon City.”

  “Jody was generous with personal details. That’s according to a number of people.”

  “You said that you could see the place where Jody’s Toyota was found from Kevin Rainey’s trailer?”

  “From his living room window.”

  “Why would he have positioned the body, do you think?”

  “I don’t know. Control, maybe,” I said. “He has none. As you say, she tells him it’s over. She won’t accept a drink from him. She won’t stop telling him about Nate. So Kevin loses his temper and she ends up dead. And once she is, he positions her the way he wants to think of her. A throwaway. She didn’t want him; now he doesn’t want her. She’s under his control now. And maybe he wants to make it look as if Nate Aspenall has dumped her, literally and figuratively. Give Jody what’s coming to her.”

  Bob was quiet a minute, thinking. “What about Mike Early? Anything else we should be looking at with him?”

  “He had more of a relationship with Jody than he wanted us to know. Paying her for sex, basically. Is it possible she didn’t want to, with him, that last time? Didn’t want to continue the arrangement? Or threatened to tell the ex-wife he wanted to get back together with? But he does have that alibi—not airtight, but the brother-in-law was forthcoming about Early receiving that phone call. My sense was that he was telling the truth, which means Mike couldn’t have done it, despite whatever his involvement was afterward.”

  Bob put on his glasses and looked through the paperwork one more time, while I went to the window. His office was on the third floor, with a view of the courthouse and the downtown streets. The clouds over the hills were lifting and the sun was out. The flag in front of the courthouse was flying briskly.

  “Here’s the problem we’re faced with,” Bob said. “The Brady rule. What the prosecution knows, the defense has access to. So if we prosecute Nate, Nate’s attorney raises the possibility of Kevin Rainey as the perpetrator, and if we prosecute Kevin, Kevin’s attorney raises the possibility of Nate Aspenall. If the Brady rule didn’t exist, we might be able to prosecute them one right after the other. It’s possible. It would be unusual, but not illegal. But the Brady rule does exist.”

  “So what do we do?” I said.

  “What are the chances of more evidence turning up?”

  “As far as physical evidence goes, it’s hard to say,” I said. “Unlikely but not out of the question. I could imagine Kevin Rainey being foolish enough to talk, but even then it’s just hearsay, unless he tells somebody something that might help us, that leads us to evidence perhaps.”

  “And Nate?”

  “Nate is smart and closemouthed. But Mike Early is a different matter. And at present, anyway, he and Nate are neighbors. It’s possible that something might happen in the future to make him think twice and give us what we need.”

  “Any chance of either Nate or Kevin confessing at some point?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You know how that goes—time moves on, and people start justifying themselves and their actions that much more. I won’t be waiting for it to happen.”

  We sat in silence, hearing somebody walking past in the hall, and a telephone ringing.

  “Frustrating,” Bob said.

  “Yes.”

  “So for now,” he said, “we arrest nobody and see what happens. As for the family we had hoped to give good news to—well, I guess there isn’t much of one.”

  “No,” I said. “We probably care more than Jody’s mother will.”

  chapter forty-six

  NATE ASPENALL

  EVENING WAS BEGINNING as I drove into Winslow. I lost sight of Jody’s car on the interstate between Highway 87 and the Winslow exit, but I caught up with it on Powell Street as she drove east past the high school and the city park to Nelson, where her mother lived. Her mother’s trailer was small and white, with a broken step. Parked in front was a red pickup with the passenger door smashed in. Jody parked behind it and went inside without knocking. I heard arguing begin. One voice was male, and it predominated. Then Jody’s mother started, and after a few minutes Jody raised her voice, speaking quickly. A woman in the trailer next door came out, listened, then went back in. The arguing continued. I was not close enough to make out the words.

  The door flung open, and Jody stood sideways in the doorway, talking loudly. Behind her was the man, small and thin and shirtless. I don’t believe he pushed her, but she stepped out stumbling on the broken step and somehow kept herself from falling. She looked at the trailer as if wondering if she should go back in, and she put a hand to her face and pushed her hair back. Then she got in her car, slammed the door, and accelerated fast, heading west toward the high school, then south toward Third Street. I followed a block behind and saw her run a four-way stop. An SUV came close to hitting her. On Third Street she turned into the parking lot of PT’s and parked crookedly, and I parked along the street, behind a Suburban. I was close but not so that she could see me. She was reaching for something on the seat beside her or in the glove compartment. Cigarettes, it turned out—one more thing I had not known about her.

  It was a clear night with a moon that was still faint. The streetlights had come on. Jody had her window open, and I could see the cigarette smoke drifting out. Except for the movement of her hand she was still. It seemed to me that her hand was shaking. Her car was running and “Pretty Woman” was playing. A long-haired man in overalls appeared without my having seen from where. He went up to her window, and I heard bits and pieces.

  “. . . but I live . . . not far. Come . . . we can . . .”

  “Don’t . . . make . . . asshole . . . Johnny. No.”

  He had one hand on the roof of her car, and when he persisted she opened her car door and ducked under his arm. Then she half ran, half walked to the bar. He took two steps in her direction, turned, and walked drunkenly down the sidewalk. I wasn’t sure how long to
wait. Sometimes I just have a drink or two, Nate, then I go home, where I can be alone, but feeling good. Men bought her drinks, and she liked the attention, and she was lonely; there was that, too. She would admit those things herself. To an extent she was an honest person. She felt compelled to tell the truth, even as she was tweaking it for her own purposes.

  I went just far enough into the bar to see her standing at the other end of it with a drink in her hand, talking to a light-haired man about my age, who wore a blue work shirt. She still wore the ring, despite how crucial it had seemed to her to get rid of it. I wanted her to tell me she wouldn’t have married me even if we hadn’t seen each other at the overlook, even if I not stayed in Flagstaff, even if I had done as she asked and gone home to Chino Valley and waited for her decision. I wanted her to say that I hadn’t come that close. It wasn’t the no I couldn’t live with. It was the only-if-you-hadn’t, the almost-but, the why-would-you-screw-things-up-like-this.

  The light-haired man worked out, you could see. A girl walked past and gave him a look. He probably had a regular job and an apartment as opposed to an RV. He and Jody seemed to know each other, although she could behave that way with a man she had met five minutes ago. She had probably eaten nothing since lunch and was drinking on an empty stomach. Then I thought about her and Mike Early at the overlook and the vulgar jokes you could make. What had I been doing asking a girl like that to marry me? Yet if she had walked over and said, I’m sorry, Nate. Can we still. . . I would have said yes. But it wasn’t in her nature. The tragedy was not what people wouldn’t do, I thought, but what they couldn’t do.

  I ordered a drink and stood near the door; each time it opened I was hidden behind it. The bar was crowded, more so as time passed. The jukebox was playing “Bad to the Bone,” and three people in back were arguing over a pool game. Jody moved away from the light-haired man, and a younger man, dark in complexion, reached for her hand and moved her into the space where people were dancing. She held her drink the whole time. She put her hand on his shoulder and danced close to him although that didn’t fit the song. He put his mouth to her ear and she laughed, then stepped away and sat alone at a table, tilting back the glass, getting it all down. She looked up suddenly and might have seen me. It was hard to tell. The dark-complected man came between us as he put a drink in front of her. She looked at it as if confused. Then she smiled and picked it up and put her finger in it, touching the ice.

  I left before she could see me, held my drink low under my arm, crossed the street and stood behind my pickup and drank and waited. A block away I could see La Posada, the windows lit in the darkness, the well-kept grounds, the bar in which we had sat and talked. I could see the blouse she had worn and the shine of her hair. It was just yesterday, I kept thinking; it seemed so long ago. A hundred lifetimes in a moment, a hundred plans, a hundred years. I saw that what people had done to me they had done, and what I had done to myself and others I had done, and I experienced a second of freedom, standing on that Winslow sidewalk with an empty glass in my hand. The stars were coming out, and the wind was blowing. Jody emerged from the bar and stood in the parking lot with the moon above her. She spun around as she looked at it, Jody at seven in a dancing class, in a skirt and ballet shoes. Not real ones, she had told me. Mine were slippers, Nate. I have kept them for Hannah. She had taken lessons after school in the basement of the public library. There were eight of us little girls, Nate, and the teacher didn’t like me. If it hadn’t been for her, I could have been in the recital.

  The door to the bar opened and the light-haired man stood watching her. We were both watching her. From down the block a man shouted something, then a police car sped past, and the drunken man from earlier was wandering in the street, holding something in his hand. A train was coming. The night was full of sound and motion, as if the future were already here. As if what was going to happen already had.

  chapter forty-seven

  TRAVIS ASPENALL

  “LET TRAVIS STAY,” my father said, and I sat at the kitchen table with him, Sam, and my mother. It was almost eight. My mother had made coffee and set out slices of cake. The dogs, who had come in when Sam had, lay close to us as if they knew this was important, that this was what we had been waiting for.

  “How’s this one settling in?” Sam said, and reached down to scratch the boxer’s head. Sam was wearing his uniform. It seemed as if we would never see him as he used to look.

  “So?” Dad said.

  “I met with the county attorney this morning. We had a long meeting, and you wouldn’t want me to go into all the details, believe me. We’d be up until midnight.” He smiled thanks to my mother, who was pouring him coffee.

  “What can you tell us?” Dad said.

  “To start with, there are people besides Nate we’ve been looking at. I believe I’ve told you that, Lee, or implied it. In any case we have a good deal of circumstantial evidence, which wouldn’t be so problematic if we weren’t looking at more than one person. So we have complications. That’s not unusual. Unless you have somebody caught in the act, or a clear confession, nothing about a case is simple, and that’s true here. It’s doubly true. As a result the investigation is now at a standstill when it comes to the legalities of the justice system.”

  “Which means what?”

  “Without more evidence we can’t prosecute. We can’t move forward, on anybody, with what we have.”

  “What do you mean, more evidence?” Dad said. “What kind of evidence do you expect at this point?”

  “I’m not sure I’d use the word expect. But it could happen. Things cool down, and somebody comes forward, somebody who knows something or has something or comes across something. Even a confession is possible, although in my experience few people feel that guilty.”

  “So what you’re saying is—” Mom started to say.

  “He doesn’t know, Julie,” Dad said. “There’s no certainty about anything. For all we know a stranger killed Jody Farnell.”

  “It’s not that open-ended,” Sam said. “We have a fair amount . . . well, no point in going into it. I can’t anyway.”

  “But it’s possible that somebody you didn’t know about,” Dad said, “or couldn’t have known about, did this thing.”

  “That word, possible,” Sam said, “is tricky. But yes. I suppose so.”

  The kitchen door was open. Soon it would be summer, I thought, and this would be in the past, all that had gone on and was going on now. With every day we woke up to, this would be further away, and we would be closer to a time when we wouldn’t talk about it anymore and maybe we wouldn’t think about it. I kept thinking that the whole time they were talking.

  “But what you’re bringing up, Sam, is just evidence and legalities,” Mom said. “What do you think happened?”

  “Julie,” Dad said.

  “Listen,” Sam said. “It doesn’t matter what I think. In fact, I don’t much think. I collect information and see what picture emerges. You believe one thing one day and another thing the next. You say something somebody else takes on faith, and it turns out to be wrong. That’s the biggest danger.”

  “The problem with the question is that it’s irrelevant,” Dad said.

  “You could put it that way,” Sam said.

  “But how would you put it?” Mom asked him.

  “The way I just did, Julie.”

  “We just get on with our lives, finally, and leave it behind us,” Dad said.

  “Yes,” Sam said, “to the extent that you can.”

  “Meaning everything will be different,” Mom said.

  “Meaning I don’t know what,” Sam said. “Honestly.”

  He looked at the piece of cake on his plate and broke off a piece but didn’t eat it.

  “What does Nate get told?” Dad said. “Unless or until there’s more evidence, et cetera?”

  “No. If he asks, I’ll say the least I can.”

  Sam looked at me as if to make sure I understood. Then he rose to le
ave. Mom wrapped up slices of cake for him, and Dad walked him outside.

  THE RING WAS wrapped in a Kleenex shoved into my cowboy boot at the back of my closet. Every night since finding it I had lain awake going through my choices: I could give it to Sam Rush and ask him not to tell Nate where he had gotten it. But I knew that Sam would have to tell the truth in court, if things went that far. I could give the ring to my father and leave it up to him to make the decision and ask him to leave me out of it, which probably he would do. Or I could call Nate saying I needed to tell him something important, and he could leave a message for me on Billy’s cell; Nate knew I didn’t have one. Or I could put the ring back in the Airstream and leave it for somebody else to find.

  Each time I went through the choices I believed there had to be more that weren’t occurring to me and that I needed to wait for those to appear. But they never did. I didn’t know what the ring meant, but now, after what Sam had told us, it seemed he was waiting for it or something like it.

  I locked the bedroom door, got out the ring, put it in the pocket of the jeans I would wear in the morning, folded the jeans, and placed them under the bed. Then I sat and thought, while in the background I heard my parents in their room talking quietly, arguing, then going silent and starting again.

  I called Billy and asked if he wanted to go to the Indian Ruins in New River tomorrow. “Can your mom drive?” I said. “That way we can bring your dad’s stuff with us. Otherwise we’ll have to take Damien.”

  Once that was arranged I knocked on my parents’ door and told them our plans, and they said fine, as long as I was home by six. Then I went back into the bedroom and sat on the bed, listening to the sounds outside and to the television in the den. It wasn’t on for long. Mom went in, then Damien came into the bedroom with the dogs coming in after him. After that everything was quiet, including my parents in their universe on the other side of the wall.