by Homer Hickam
“No, Mike, please. It’s OK. Really.”
“What do you mean?”
She stood up and walked to the edge of the deck. I came over and put my hand on her shoulder. She didn’t move. Instead, she said, “Once a whore, Mike, always a whore.”
I took my hand away and sat down in one of the deck chairs and just went kind of numb.
22
Well, what’s a cowboy to do when his gal who isn’t his gal bounces the old bedsprings with as nasty a creep who ever drew breath? I had beat up Ted which was nice but it seemed like I should do more. What that should be I wasn’t sure so I just sat there, feeling miserable and maybe a little unnerved because of Toby, not that I much cared he’d been murdered. I mostly hated that murder had come to the place where I’d retreated to get away from murder. It had taken ten years but now the ugly things people do to other people had finally caught up with me even in deepest Fillmore County.
Tanya had gone inside room number thirteen and closed the door. I continued to sit until Ted came around. His lip was split and he had a black eye. We’d been easy on him the night before, just cuffing him around the shoulders and such, but this time I had done a pretty good number on his face. It didn’t make me happy. It made me feel ashamed. So what I did was go to work like the homicide detective I used to be. That meant asking the suspect questions, not busting his chops.
Ted wasn’t interested in cooperating. When I asked him if he knew anything about Toby being murdered, he said, through swollen lips, “You’re gonna be sorry about this.”
“I already am,” I told the federal agent and asked him the same question again. This time, his answer consisted of a series of obscenities so it didn’t look like I was going to get far with Ted.
The only hard evidence I had was lying on one of the picnic tables so I walked back to it. Toby was still there although someone had wrapped him in a sheet. Only his big feet, clad in wingtip brown leather shoes, were sticking out. I sought out Earl who was in his store, selling bait to a trio of walleye fishermen who, if they noted there was a dead man on one of the tables just outside, thought less of it than getting advice on catching fish. “I thought I asked you to move that body to a cooler place,” I said.
“Just a sec, Mike.” Earl replied then calmly finished his sale, gave the fishermen an advisory on where to find walleye, and turned to me while his customers took their leave. I like a man who has his priorities straight and I guess Earl did. Walleye fisherman were his customers while cowboy detectives were pretty rare. “I had my boys wrap it in a sheet,” he said.
“I know. I need to get it unwrapped. Then we need to at least get it in the shade.”
Earl used a handheld radio to whistle up his sons who met me at Toby’s picnic table. I supervised by sitting down and holding my throbbing head while they unwrapped him. He was still dead, his head was still knocked in, and his throat was still cut. Yes, I know as a homicide cop veteran, I should have known better than to mess with the evidence but this was Fillmore County and who knew when a state trooper would show up to investigate? Anyway, what I wanted to see was beneath his shirt, which was a garish Hawaiian print. It wasn’t easy to strip him of it as Toby was one heavy dude but the Williams boys managed. As I expected, when I finally stood up, ol’ Toby was covered with tattoos. I studied them, recognizing them for what they were, symbols of the Russian mob, or bratva as it is called. The word meant “brotherhood” but I knew there was little of that in the loose confederation of gangs that had formed around the world after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Rather than brotherhood, there was competition, i.e., killing each other at the slightest provocation or no provocation at all.
I was no expert on Russian mob tattoos but I knew enough to know Toby was a long-term member of these very bad guys because of the combination of blurred blue tats and some that were very fine and black. The blue ones were most likely done in prison where homemade inks and snips of guitar wire attached to an electric razor were used. The fine-line skin drawings looked fresher and were probably done professionally. The biggest tattoo on his back was the Kremlin with the silhouette of a wolf on the largest onion dome. As I recalled, a tat of the Russian capitol meant Toby was once a guest in a Communist prison. The wolf, I suspected, represented the bratva branch Toby was a soldier for. Below the wolf were Cyrillic letters, which I thought might be the name of the organization. Stars on Toby’s shoulders told me he was a high-ranking member of the mob. Russian churches, five on his left breast, four on the right, meant Toby had spent nine years in prison, all hard time because there is little else in Russia. Men who spent a lot of time in Russian prisons and came out sane were rare. Most of them would kill you over breakfast and then go on eating. All the other symbols continued the same theme. Russian mobster, a very bad guy, and a killer, our Toby. He was also Cade Morgan’s buddy.
But now this very dangerous man was dead, murdered in Fillmore County. Somehow, I didn’t think that was a good thing. Russian mobs don’t like outsiders killing their members. They prefer to do that themselves.
We were about to wrap Toby back in his sheet when Tanya walked up to the table. When she saw him, she didn’t look much surprised. “He was a man born to die,” she said.
“We are all born to die,” I said. “But not like this.”
Her eyes were swollen and I could tell she’d been crying. “Stop looking at me like that,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Like you know.”
“Did you have anything to do with this?”
“Do you think I would tell you if I did?”
I rolled Toby on his side and pointed at the letters below the wolf. “What does that say?”
She read the script, then said, “It says kill or be killed.”
“Nice. I thought it was the name of his organization.”
Tanya studied the myriad of tattoos and said, “He was a member of the Volk. The Wolves. I know this group. They are all brutes. They have to kill to be accepted.”
“Are they the ones who brought you here?”
“No. In fact, that mob was destroyed by this one. It is how I was able to escape when everything was in disarray. They specialize in prostitution, pornography, extortion, kidnapping, and especially murder. They are also loan sharks, as I think you say.”
A light bulb, somewhat dim, went on in my head. Cade Morgan was probably somebody who’d get mixed up with a loan shark. “What a delightful bunch to attract to Fillmore County,” I said.
“This is not my fault, Mike. I have nothing to do with this man.”
“How about Morgan Cade, sometimes known as Cade Morgan? Have anything to do with him?”
“No. Nothing.” She took her big blue eyes off Toby and rested them on me. They felt good. It made me hate Ted all the more. “What do you do now?” she asked.
It was a good question. In fact, for the umpteenth time, I reminded myself this was really none of my business. I was not a cop. I was a cowboy, a simple hired hand of Jeanette Coulter on the Square C Ranch, temporarily assigned dinosaur bone-digging duties. I gave it some more thought. So far, I was free and clear. There was no reason for the Russian Wolves to come after me. I could just walk away from Toby, let somebody else sort it out. Yep, that’s what I could and should do. Or not.
Earl’s boys wrapped Toby up and I instructed them to move him to a picnic table shaded by an old cottonwood. Then I took Tanya by her arm and walked her down toward the marina. We stopped when I saw Ted come out of cabin number thirteen and head for his truck. He didn’t look around, just climbed in and drove away.
“Nothing happened between us,” Tanya said. “But when I saw you believed Ted, I wanted to hurt you.”
I wasn’t buying this. “You spent the night with him and nothing happened? Then why do it?”
“Oh, Mike,” she said. “There are not explanations to everything, you know.”
“There has to be one for this.”
“I don’t want to tal
k about it. Will you give me a ride back to town?”
I could tell by the set of her pretty mouth that she was done talking. “OK,” I said. “But I want to wait until they come for Toby.”
“Why? This has nothing to do with you.”
In that I agreed but I knew I couldn’t just drive away, no matter how much I wanted to. Tanya shrugged, then went into the marina store. She brought out one of those cardboard carriers with two cups of joe and two peanut butter cookies. I took one of each and thanked her for breakfast. She shrugged, then walked to a far picnic table and sat down on it. I didn’t join her. I needed to think.
When the ambulance arrived, it was crewed by the same paramedics who’d taken care of Pick. I led them to the body and they unwrapped him, whistling at the bashed-in skull, the cut throat, and the tattoos. Paramedic number one, whose name was Charlie according to his nametag, said, “Man, this is one bad-looking dude.”
Paramedic number two—Henry according to his nametag—wondered, “Who woulda taken this monster on?”
“He was hit in the back of his head with what I bet was a hammer,” I said. “That was enough to kill him or at least put him down for a good, long while. I’d also be willing to bet his throat was cut after he was struck. An ambush, maybe.”
“Still, it would take some guts to hit this guy,” Charlie said.
I couldn’t argue with that. After they loaded him up, I asked, “Where’s he going?”
“We figured the Jericho mortuary,” Henry said. “Mr. Torgerson’s eyes are gonna pop out when he sees the tats on this guy.”
“Good idea,” I responded. “Tell Frank to send the bill to Cade Morgan.”
Charlie wrote that down and then he and Henry took Toby for a ride into town. I sought out Tanya who was still sitting on a picnic table. She was staring at the lake. “I’m ready,” I said.
She pitched her coffee cup and the cardboard thingy in the trash can and off we went in Bob. Tanya said nothing on the way and neither did I. When we got to Jericho, I checked the parking lot of Tellman’s. None of our trucks were there but Mori was, playing basketball with her kids. “They all checked out this morning,” she said when I asked her about Jeanette, Ray, Amelia, Laura, Pick, and the Marsh brothers.
“You need not bother with me, Mike,” Tanya said. “Laura will come back to take me to camp.”
“I think you should stick with me,” I said. “Anyway, I’m heading back to Blackie Butte.”
“I thought you would not go back there. I thought you were done with us.”
“I work for Jeanette,” I said. “She told me to dig bones so that’s what I’ll do until she tells me to stop. But before we go out there, I’d like to have a word with Cade Morgan.”
Tanya had no problem with the extra stop. When we turned out of the motel parking lot, I saw a State Police car rolling by. It turned toward the Hell Creek Marina so I drove Bob after him, flashing my headlights. The trooper pulled over and I waited for him to approach me.
As I expected, Billings had sent us up a kid cop. He looked all of eighteen, although he was probably in his early twenties. He walked up to the front of Bob and peered at me through chrome sunglasses beneath a Smokey the Bear hat. “What can I do for you, sir?”
“Are you going out to see that body at the marina?”
He studied me, then said, “Yes. Do you know something about that?”
“The body is in the Jericho mortuary. That’s on Main Street, across from the Hell Creek Bar.”
He withdrew a notebook from his shirt pocket and jotted something down. “Your name, sir? And can you tell me your interest in this?”
I gave him my name, address, and the Square C phone number and told him I was one of the guys who’d pulled the body out of the lake. When I asked the policeman his name, he said he was Trooper Philpot and I let drop that I was a brother, more or less, i.e., a retired cop. “Do you have any credentials to that effect, sir?” he asked.
I didn’t. “You can check with the Los Angeles Police Department. They still send me a disability check.”
“All right, sir. Thank you for this information.”
“Look,” I said, “I think this guy was a member of an organization that kills people and loves doing it. If this hits the newspapers, more of them might come here looking for revenge. I think you should talk to your superiors about the situation.”
Trooper Philpot’s eyes were heavy-lidded. “Sir, we have procedures for every case. I see no reason to talk to my superiors, as you say.”
“Trooper Philpot, these people will come after you and, just for the fun of it, cut off your head and use it for a soccer ball.”
“I believe I have all I need, sir,” he said. “Anything else?”
There was nothing else. Trooper Philpot got back in his car, turned around, and headed for the mortuary. Tanya saw my worried frown and said, “What are we going to do?”
“Visit Toby’s best friend,” I said and aimed Bob out of town, to Ranchers Road, and on to the end of it where the old Corbel place was, and also Cade Morgan.
23
Cade had no gate at the entrance of the dirt road that lead into his place. There was, however, a cedar-and-wrought iron arch over it, which read morgan’s mess. Well, we had a mess, all right, and Cade had identified whose mess it was. After all, he had brought Toby to Fillmore County and, for all I knew, had taken him out of it, too. The three main reasons for murder are, so the detective handbooks say: jealousy, revenge, and money. Based on my truncated cop career, I would also add insanity, passion, stupidity, and just because. In Cade’s XXX business, there was plenty of every one of those motives.
Cade’s house had been remodeled into a California-style split level, which was very nice and modern and therefore looked completely out of place on a Montana ranch. His pastures were overgrown with knapweed and leafy spurge, which were living testament to his ignorance. These were villainous plants, which, unhindered, could spread across the ranches of Ranchers Road like wildfire, choking out the good grass. I wondered if Cade had any idea of the threat his neglect was causing the rest of us. Most likely, he thought letting nature do what it wanted to do was environmentally friendly. For his neighbors, even if he’d killed Toby, this was his worst sin.
“Stay here,” I told Tanya who nodded and curled up on Bob’s seat, closing her eyes with a sigh. She was pretty as a picture, that girl. It was hard to imagine her with a hammer and a knife but at this stage, anything was possible.
Cade’s Mercedes was parked in his paved driveway. I walked by it and knocked on his door. After I knocked a couple more times, the door opened and there stood Cade, dressed neatly in jeans, a checked shirt, and running shoes. There was some cool jazz playing in the background. He smiled and asked, “To what do I owe the pleasure, Mike?”
I came inside. Cade, or whoever had decorated his place, had good taste. Leather chairs and sofa in a great room, modern paintings on the wall, expensive Persian rug on a hardwood floor, and so forth. It was cool, the hiss of the central air conditioner as subtext to the jazz. “I came to ask you about Toby.” Since Cade was not a true rancher, I saw no need to go through the usual discussion of the weather, price of beef, and whatnot before getting down to cases.
He waved me to one of the leather chairs. “Can I get you a drink?”
“No, but thank you.”
Cade sat on the sofa across from me. “I’m sorry Toby acts the way he does. He’s an odd duck.”
“No, Cade, he’s a dead duck. He was fished out of the lake this morning.”
I saw the blood drain from Cade’s face. It’s hard to make that happen so I assumed my news was news to him. That was kind of disappointing. It would have been far better for all of us if Cade was the murderer. We could chalk it up to California craziness and go about our business.
“What happened?” Cade croaked.
I gave him the run-down, then said, “When did you see Toby last?”
Cade thought it over, then s
aid, “He was interested in the Russian girl. You know, one of the dinosaur diggers. He said he wanted to talk to her. I told him to leave her alone but he had his mind made up so I said to hell with him and drove home. He had his own car. You should talk to the Russian girl if you want to find out what happened to him.”
“I will. What was he doing here?”
“He was an investor in my movies. This was years ago. What? You don’t believe me? You worked in Hollywood, Mike. You know how porn flicks get made. Somebody has to put up the money and men like Toby have plenty of it. Over the years, we became friends. He liked to come out here to get away from the stresses of his life.” Cade provided me with a wan smile. “As you can imagine, he had a great deal of it.”
“Why were you and Toby so interested in our dinosaur dig?”
Cade’s smile grew into a grin. “You pretend to be a cowboy but, boy, the cop in you just can’t stay hidden, can it? I already told you. I was interested in having somebody look for a dinosaur on my ranch, too. Toby was used to intimidating people to get what he wanted so that’s why you saw the side of him you did. Actually, he could be a sweetheart, at least for a Russian who’d spent time in prison.” He chuckled. “I told him how everything was low key here but he just never understood.”
I absorbed Cade’s story. It was slightly plausible but I wasn’t convinced. “Pretty soon, Toby’s buddies are going to wonder where he is. I suspect they’ll be calling.”
Cade shrugged. “Well, I don’t know any of them. I only worked with Toby. If they have a beef, I guess it will be with whoever killed him. That Russian girl, like I said.”
“Tanya hit him in the back of the head with a hammer, then cut his throat, then dragged him to the lake and threw him in. That’s what you think happened? She weighs maybe one-hundred-and-ten pounds. What was Toby? Two-eighty?”