Another Man's Moccasins

by Craig Johnson

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  Nothing.

  I knocked again, but there was no sound. “Mr. Tuyen, it’s Sheriff Longmire.”

  One kick would do it, but I figured the management might appreciate a more subtle approach. As I walked past the Land Rover, I noticed the doors were locked, but the hard case was missing from the front seat.

  “You got a key for room number fi ve?”

  A young woman I didn’t know—with one earphone connected to a small device in her shirt pocket, the other dangling at her chest—handed me the fob from a hook behind the counter. “Is there some kind of trouble, Sheriff ?”

  “No, I’m just checking to see if all the mattresses still have their tags.” She continued to look at me, and I could hear what passed for music to her in the one loose earbud. “I’m kidding.”

  She blinked. “Oh.”

  I palmed the key in my hand and stood there for a moment, enjoying the air-conditioning. “Have you seen Mr. Tuyen this morning? ”

  She nodded. “Yes, he left pretty early and then came back a couple of hours ago. Is he in trouble?”

  I tossed the key in the air and caught it as I swung open the door and faced the wall of heat. “Only if he’s taken the labels off.” I left her there to wonder if I really was serious this time.

  I knocked again and waited, thinking about the missing hard case. “Mr. Tuyen, this is Sheriff Longmire. I got the key from the front desk, and I’m unlocking this door.”

  I turned the key and swung the door open. There was an entryway to the bathroom on the left, and I could see an open closet where a number of expensive suits hung along with plastic-covered and freshly laundered shirts.

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  I took a step inside and allowed my eyes to adjust. Tuyen’s toiletry and personal items were on the bathroom counter, along with a hand towel, which was saturated with blood, that hung from the lip of the sink, the excess dripping to the tile fl oor.

  I unsnapped the strap from my Colt and pulled it from my holster. I clicked off the safety, looked at the dark spots on the carpeting, and took another step inside.

  I raised my sidearm and heard a noise to my left. There were two double beds, with a kidney-shaped pool of blood at the foot of one, and there was more on the far side of the room.

  Even with the clattering of the aged air conditioner, I could tell the noise was coming from another room on the far side; it sounded like someone walking and possibly dragging something. I extended the large-frame semiautomatic.

  There were some clothes lying on the unslept-in bed and another pair of shoes, but what caught my attention was the phone cord that was stretched taut and led from the night-stand, across the wall, and out the adjoining doorway.

  I took another step and silently cursed the creaking fl oorboards under my boots. The noise from the other room stopped, and the phone cord grew slack and drooped to the carpet.

  I held the .45 toward the open doorway and took a deep silent breath before taking another step. I took another and could hear a slight creak and saw a flicker of movement. I swung the Colt around, pointing it at whatever had made the noise. Tran Van Tuyen was holding a tan push-button phone in one hand and a blood-soaked towel to his head in the other.

  Even from this distance, I could hear Ruby’s voice coming from the receiver of the telephone. “Mr. Tuyen? Mr. Tuyen . . .

  are you still there?”

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  The blood from the wound at the side of his head had drained down to his face and stained his smile that half-beamed from across the room. “Sheriff ?”

  The smile remained as his eyes rolled back in his head, and he slumped against the jamb, streaking a handwide smear of blood down the door and collapsing unconscious onto the carpet.

  13

  “Saizarbitoria thinks you did it.”

  I listened to the squeal from under the hood as we turned the corner and figured the staff vehicle from the Powder Junction detachment of the Absaroka County Sheriff ’s Department was going to need a power steering unit and soon. “Really?”

  “No, but we had a long talk about race relations.” I drove the faded red Suburban to the address Phillip Maynard had given us, as the Bear fiddled with the nonfunctioning vents, finally settling on rolling down his window, which stuck about halfway. “Santiago is a very intelligent young man.”

  I’d given Sancho my truck after we’d gotten Tuyen sta-bilized and sent them rocketing off to the hospital back in Durant; I figured a one-way trip in the Bullet was faster than a two-way trip with the EMTs. Even with the vast loss of blood, Tuyen had come to and said that he had no idea what had happened other than that he had entered the motel room and someone had struck him from behind.

  “So, we are basing our suspicions on a single set of motorcycle tracks outside the motel?”

  “Sort of.”

  “How sort of ?”

  I shrugged. “Exclusively.”

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  He sighed. “Why would Phillip Maynard kill Ho Thi Paquet and then try to kill Tuyen?”

  “I don’t know, but he seems our most likely suspect.”

  Henry pulled his shoulder belt out, where it hung loose across his chest. “Drive carefully. I question the ability of this belt to keep me from slamming face-first into the dash should we find ourselves in a crash.” We were headed for the south side of town near the rodeo grounds. “He is our only suspect.”

  He thought about it some more. “Sometimes living in Wyoming has unexpected benefi ts.”

  “Vic says that most of the benefits of living in Wyoming are unexpected.”

  “She is a modern woman and expects a great deal.” I could feel him watching me before he turned back to the road and smiled.

  Phillip Maynard’s house wasn’t really a house; it was more like an upscale chicken shack, which meant that in comparison to the other shacks that sat a little farther toward the banks of the middle fork of the Powder River, it seemed even more uninhabitable.

  Henry placed his hands on his hips and stood at the gate.

  “Where do you suppose the door is?”

  “Drawing from my ranch upbringing, I’d say it’s on the side.” I followed him as he walked around the end of the ramshackle building where we found a hollow-core door that had a tin sign tacked to the surface that read KEEP OUT.

  We could hear commercials squawking from a television inside, and I knocked on the door. We waited and listened but heard nothing but the TV. This was getting reminiscent of Tran Van Tuyen’s motel room. “Phillip Maynard, this is Sheriff Longmire. Would you mind opening the door?”

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  Nothing.

  We listened and learned how white our teeth and how fresh our breath could be if we would only use Brand-X tooth-paste, but nothing from Phillip Maynard. I tried the knob, but the door was locked. I glanced at Henry. “I hope we’re not seeing a pattern here.”

  “Do you want me to kick it down, or do you want to?”

  I studied the scaly and cupped surface of the interior door, which had spent at least a winter in the high plains exterior. “I think if we breathe on it, it’ll collapse.” Testing the theory, I grasped the knob and pressed. The door popped open, taking a little of the jamb with it.

  We shrugged at each other. The television was a tiny thirteen-inch sitting on a beanbag chair, and clothes were scattered across the dirty yellow linoleum- tiled floor and exploded from a large backpack that rested on a built-in bunk. Unlike Tuyen’s room, it didn’t look like anybody had been killed here, anybody besides Mister Clean.

  The Bear walked past me, watched Suzanne Rico anchor the news out of Channel 13 in Casper, and then clicked off the TV. There was an open paperback lying on the bed, along wit
h what looked like an old horsehide motorcycle jacket and a number of empty Budweiser bottles, and a full ashtray with a few joints mixed in with the butts. There was another collection of bottles beside the only chair.

  Henry crossed back and flipped over the book. “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”

  “Appropriate.”

  He showed me the cover as proof and then gestured toward the bottles by the chair. “It would appear that Phillip has been entertaining.”

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  from my shirt pocket, and tipped one over enough to lift it by the neck. Something rattled at the base, and I saw it was the cap, which had been bent in half. I set the bottle back down and looked up at the Cheyenne Nation. “I guess I’ll go check with the owner.”

  Gladys Dietz had rented her swank chicken shed to Phillip Maynard for the lofty sum of a hundred dollars a month, including utilities, but she was beginning to have second thoughts.

  I was having second thoughts as she smoked a cigarette with the oxygen tube attached just under her nose, expecting any moment to be blown off the porch.

  “The TV is going all the time, and that damn motorcycle makes such a racket.” She leaned on her walker one- handed and held the screen door back with the other.

  I knew Gladys. She and her husband had owned a commercial fishing lake that my father and I had frequented, and she had gladly told anybody then that she was intent on dying soon.

  I had passed more than a half century and was the chief law enforcer in the land, but she still addressed me as if I were eight. I held my hat in my hands. “Mrs. Dietz . . .”

  “Your shirt needs ironing, Walter.”

  I self-consciously smoothed the pockets of my uniform and desperately tried to remember her husband’s name. “Yes, ma’am. How’s George?”

  “Dead.”

  That’s what you got for asking about old people. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  She shrugged her silver head and studied my unpolished boots. “I’m not. He was getting pretty cranky toward the end.”

  I decided to try to keep on track. “Mrs. Dietz, have you seen Phillip Maynard today?”

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  She glanced toward the shack, where Henry was standing by the gate. “What’s that Indian doing out near my chicken shed?”

  “He’s with me.”

  She looked up through lenses as thick as the windshield on my truck. “I heard your wife died?”

  “Yes, ma’am, a number of years back.”

  “Was she cranky?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  She nodded her head. “They get like that, you know.”

  “Yes, ma’am, so they tell me. Now, about Phillip Maynard?”

  “Is he in trouble?”

  “We just need to talk to him. Have you seen him?”

  She continued watching Henry. “I usually don’t rent to those motorcycle types.”

  I sighed and hung my hat on the grip of my sidearm and held the screen door for her. “It’s pretty important.”

  “What is?”

  “Phillip Maynard.”

  “What about him?”

  I took that extra second that usually keeps me from strangling my constituency, always important in an election year.

  “Have you seen him today?”

  “No.”

  I glanced back at Henry. “Well, his motorcycle isn’t here.”

  “He keeps it in the barn.”

  I turned and looked at her. “I beg your pardon?”

  “That fancy new one that he doesn’t want to get rained on.” She glanced past me and at the cloudless sky, the smol-dering cigarette still frighteningly close to the oxygen nozzle under her nose. “Not that it’s ever going to do that again.”

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  corral toward the Dietz barn with a Dutch-style hip roof. “She thinks you’re going to steal her chickens.”

  “There are no chickens.”

  “See?”

  It was a standard structure, with the roof supported by a number of big, rough-cut eight-by-eights, which had been sided with raw lumber that had long faded to gray. There was a metal handle with a wooden latch on the door, which I pulled, and we stepped back as the big door swung toward us. Up in the loft there was a flutter of barn swallows, sounding like angel’s wings might. The Harley sat parked on its side stand, swathed with the same cover that I had seen at the bar. Henry lifted the vinyl shroud and whistled. “What?”

  “FLHRS Road King, custom job.”

  I vaguely remembered Henry having a bike, but he had rarely ridden it. “What’s that mean?”

  “Expensive. Close to twenty thousand.”

  I thought about the chicken shed. “Well, he hasn’t been spending his money on lodging.” I reached down and felt the chrome-bedecked engine, only vaguely warm. “And he hasn’t ridden it lately.”

  I took a step into the barn proper, and let my eyes adjust to the gloom. There was a smell, one that I knew.

  I unsnapped the safety strap on my .45, pulled the Colt from my holster, and glanced back over my shoulder at Henry.

  The main breezeway of the barn was empty except for the motorcycle, but there were two other passageways through the stock stalls. I motioned for the Bear to head right, and I would take the left.

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  broken equipment, and aged firewood. I worked my way through the four of them and met Henry at the far end of the center breezeway.

  “Well, he’s not hiding in the corn crib.”

  There was more fluttering, and I noticed the scar tissue under Henry’s chin as he studied the rafters. “No, not in the corn crib.” He turned in a circle until he was facing back toward the opening where we’d come in. “But it appears he has received a suspended sentence.”

  I turned and followed his eyes up to the rafters where, from a stout length of hemp rope, hung the dangling body of Phillip Maynard.

  “How long?”

  T. J. Sherwin was on another call in Otto, so we had Bill McDermott, who was the medical examiner from Billings, Montana. I hadn’t seen him since he and Lana Baroja had gone to Guernica together, but it was good to have him back. “Hard to say with the heat, but with rigor and approximate temperature, I’d say it was possibly early this morning or maybe very late last night.”

  “Suicide?”

  “I hate to guess, but if I was a betting man . . .” He looked at Maynard’s body. The pressure from the base of Phillip’s neck and from the area where the tongue attaches had forced his lower jaw open, and his tongue stuck out from between his teeth like the parody of a naughty child. “There’s some addi-tional contusion alongside the trapezoidal muscle, but that could easily be explained by the force of the drop.”

  I looked back up at the roof beams, which were at least eighteen feet high. “He did a number, didn’t he?”

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  “It takes surprisingly little; you don’t even have to be suspended.”

  “What would you suspect?”

  Bill looked like a choirboy, which belied his occupation.

  He peered up and calculated. “From the loft, I’d say about six-and- a-half feet.” He pulled back the body bag to reveal a V-shaped abrasion and furrow at the back of Phillip Maynard’s neck, which had been caused by the rope that had slipped up past the thyroid cartilage. “Incomplete circle where the ro
pe pulled away from the subject.” He looked at the dead man some more. “He didn’t change his mind after the fact.”

  “Why?”

  “No fingernail marks at the neck. I’ve even seen cases where the fingers are trapped under the rope, but this guy dropped the exact distance, which resulted in a fractured neck, and we’ll probably find the break between the third and fourth or fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae.” Bill looked up at me.

  “Was he a bad guy?”

  I took a breath and felt the closeness of the barn. The light glowing through the spaces between the slats made stripes as if it were shining through bars. I looked at Phillip Maynard’s sightless eyes and at the spot where a blood vessel had burst, clouding and unbalancing the pupil, which was ragged at the edge, unlike you’d expect. “I’m not sure yet.”

  Saigon, Vietnam: 1968

  I watched all the people who crammed into the few tiny blocks around Tu-Do Street and thought about all the bars we’d already checked, including the Flower Brothel, Rose’s, the assorted steam baths, massage parlors, boom boom rooms, and an honest-to-God 2 2 0 CR A I

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  Dairy Queen. Even this early in the morning, the street was in full swing, and I suspected it stayed that way for the full twenty-four hours of the day. It was leaning toward early morning, and I took a deep breath and felt like I was leaking time.

  Mendoza laughed. “Oh, come on now, it’s not that bad.”

  Baranski had pulled the jeep half onto the sidewalk, but no one had seemed to notice, not even the two ARVN QCs that we’d almost run over. With their oversized white helmet liners, the Vietnamese military policemen looked like those bobble-headed sports dolls.

  One of them tried to beg a cigarette from Mendoza, who shook his head and replied, “Toi khong hut thuoc lo.”

  Baranski, however, sat on the hood of the jeep and handed the two Mice cigarettes, lighting one for himself and then theirs. He paused for a moment and gestured. “Quels sont vos noms?”

  The two introduced themselves as Bui Tin and Van Bo.

  Baranski pointed at me. “Je suis venu avec quelqu’un d’impor-tant, il s’appelle Sammy Davis Jr.”

  The two QCs looked up, so I smiled and raised a fist. “Black power.”