Blue Lonesome

by Bill Pronzini

  Hanratty said, “What’s going on here, Dacy?”

  “What does it look like?”

  “You set that fire?”

  “No. You?”

  “Hell no. What’s the idea throwing down on us?”

  “Somebody set it. That’s the idea.”

  “If we’d wanted to burn this fucking place, we’d’ve done it long ago. We don’t know any more’n you do. I got up to take a leak, spotted the fireglow, and rousted Tom.”

  “Just Tom?”

  “Wasn’t any sense trying to wake up Mrs. Roebuck.”

  Spears said, “How long’s John T. been here?”

  “Long before we came.”

  “Chrissake, he didn’t torch the place, did he?”

  “We don’t know who did it.”

  “Well, where’s he at? John T.?”

  From down in the hollow there was a thunderous rumble that turned their heads: The barn’s roof had collapsed in a fountain of sparks and embers. Waves of heat rolled over them, driven by wind gusts. Sweat prickled Messenger’s neck, flowed down from his armpits. The smoke-heavy air was raw in his lungs.

  He said, “John T.’s in his car. He came up here to meet somebody, the way it looks.”

  “Meet who, this time of night?”

  Hanratty said, “Why don’t somebody ask him? Why ain’t he over here by now?”

  “Go take a look.”

  The cowhands exchanged a glance. Messenger watched them approach the station wagon; Hanratty opened the door. Their shocked reactions seemed genuine; Spears’s “Shit!” was explosive. When they came back to the Jeep Hanratty looked shaken and angry, Spears stunned.

  “We found him like that,” Dacy told them, “five minutes before you got here.”

  Spears said, “Who’d do that to John T.?” in a sick voice.

  “This bugger, for one.” Hanratty had stepped close to Messenger, “By Christ, if you had anything to do with it—!”

  “He didn’t,” Dacy said. “Jim was at my place all day and all evening.”

  “You with him the whole time?”

  “Most of it.”

  “He could’ve snuck out after you went to bed—”

  “No. We were together until after midnight.”

  “Yeah? Doing what, so late?”

  “Talking, not that it’s any of your business.”

  “Talking. Bet you were.”

  Messenger glanced at Lonnie. The boy didn’t seem to be listening; he stood jut-necked again, either lost inside himself or fixated on the blazing skeletons below.

  “You go to sleep easy every night, Joe?” Dacy asked coldly. “Sleep like a baby every night?”

  Spears said, “What’s the matter with you two? Jesus Christ, John T.’s lying over there dead with his face blowed off. Ain’t anybody gonna do something?”

  “He’s right,” Messenger said, “the sheriff has to be notified. Mrs. Roebuck, too.”

  “I don’t want no part of that job.”

  “We’ll go down and do it,” Dacy said. “You and Joe stay here and keep watch until Ben Espinosa comes. All right?”

  “No, it ain’t all right,” Hanratty said. “But I guess we got no choice.” He moved even closer to Messenger and did his chest-poking number again. “John T. was a good man, twice the man you are, city boy. Maybe you didn’t shoot him, but I’ll tell you one thing, sure. He’s dead on account of you. One way or another, no matter who done it, he’s dead because you brought your sorry ass to Beulah.”

  Messenger kept silent. There was no point in arguing: Hanratty was right.

  THE ROEBUCK RANCH seemed smaller up close than it did from a distance. Even so, there were twice as many buildings as Dacy managed—two barns, two trailers, a long structure that was probably a bunkhouse, several sheds, an old soddy that might have been the original home of John T.’s father and preserved for that reason. Plus a number of tumbledown ricks and a maze of corrals and cattle-loading chutes. The main ranch house was of native stone and shaded by geometric rows of cottonwoods, but it wasn’t much larger than Dacy’s.

  The house remained dark as she piloted the Jeep across the floodlit yard. In front she switched off engine and lights, told Lonnie to stay put, and she and Messenger went to the door. He banged an old-fashioned horseshoe knocker; the thudding noise it made echoed like a thunderclap. But it produced no response. He had to use the knocker half a dozen times, with increasing force, before a light finally went on inside.

  When Lizbeth Roebuck opened the door, Messenger thought immediately that she’d been hard to wake because she was passed out drunk. Bleary-eyed, puffy-cheeked, the smell of stale bourbon on her breath and leaking from her pores; sexless and sagging inside a blue chenille bathrobe. Steady enough on her feet, though—the carefully cultivated balance of the habitual alcoholic.

  She focused on Dacy and said, “So it’s you. What’s the idea making so much noise?” Her husky voice was almost a growl, but you had to listen close to hear the slur in it.

  “Something’s happened, Liz. We need to come in.”

  “You know what time it is?”

  “It’s important. Talk to you and use your phone.”

  “Phone? What for?”

  “Call the sheriff.”

  “Sheriff,” she said. She backed up, slowly, to let them enter. “What happened?”

  “It’s bad, Liz. You’d better sit down.”

  “Hell with that. Tell me.”

  “No way to say it except straight out. John T.’s dead.”

  No reaction, not even the flicker of an eyelid.

  “Lizbeth? I said John T.’s dead.”

  “I heard you. How?”

  “Somebody set fire to Anna’s ranch. Burned everything that was left. Maybe John T., maybe not—but he was there. Still is. Whoever else was there shot him inside his station wagon.”

  Still no reaction. Messenger remembered Dacy telling him Lizbeth Roebuck was a cold fish. Could be that was the reason, or it could be shock. The other possibility was that the news of her husband’s death wasn’t news to her.

  A stretch of silence; then she said, “Phone’s in the kitchen,” and went slowly to a red leather wet bar that dominated one wall. Neither Dacy nor Messenger moved. Lizbeth poured a tumbler three-quarters full of sour-mash bourbon and drank it slowly, steadily, pausing for air only once, until the glass was empty. She set it down and then stood as she had before, rigid, expressionless. “Well?” she said to Dacy. “I told you where the phone is. Go make your call.”

  “I will.”

  “But first, get him out of here.” She wasn’t looking at Messenger; she hadn’t looked at him the entire time. “I don’t want that bastard in my house.”

  “Jim didn’t have anything to do with—”

  “Get him out. Tell him get the fuck out right now.”

  Dacy said, “Jim …”

  He nodded. “I’ll be with Lonnie.”

  Lizbeth Roebuck was still talking to Dacy, saying, “Out, out, get him the fuck out of my house,” when he opened the door and went outside.

  The wind had died again; the hush over the ranch yard and buildings had a layered quality, like the hushes he was used to on foggy nights in San Francisco. The sky above the hills to the north was still flushed and smoke-stained, but the red glow was fading and the smoke columns had thinned and shortened. By the time Ben Espinosa arrived, the fire would be mostly spent and there’d be nothing left of Anna’s ranch except charred wooden bones.

  Lonnie was sitting quietly in the Jeep, head tipped back, a lighted cigarette in one corner of his mouth. It was the first time Messenger had seen him using tobacco of any kind.

  “She didn’t want me in her house,” he said as he climbed in on the passenger side. “Mrs. Roebuck.”

  “That surprise you?”

  “No.”

  “What’d she say about John T.?”

  “Nothing. Whatever she feels, she didn’t say or show it.”

  “Yeah, we
ll, that’s the way she is. Nobody knows what goes on inside her head.”

  “How about you, Lonnie? What’s going on inside your head right now?”

  “About John T.?” He drew on the cigarette without taking it from his mouth. “I didn’t much like him, you know that. But I hate it when anybody suffers or dies sudden—anybody or anything. I guess mostly how I feel is bad.”

  “That’s how I feel, too.”

  “Yeah? I figured you’d be happy.”

  “Why would you figure that?”

  “You think whoever shot John T. killed my uncle and Tess, that it’s all part of the same thing. Don’t you?”

  “Don’t you, now?”

  “No. Two separate things that don’t have anything to do with each other.”

  “Lonnie … when we first got to the fire you started to say something about your uncle. ‘What my uncle did—’ You remember that?”

  “I remember.”

  “Finish the sentence. What did he do that makes you hate him so much?”

  Messenger thought he wasn’t going to get an answer. But then, as Lonnie flicked away what remained of his cigarette, “You know what he did.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “All the women he cheated with.”

  “That isn’t it.”

  “How do you know it isn’t? You don’t know anything.”

  “What did he do, Lonnie?”

  “No, goddamn it. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You do want to talk about it. It’s half choking you, and if you don’t spit it out pretty soon you’ll strangle on it. I know; I keep things locked up inside me, too.”

  Another silence, shorter this time. “I can’t tell you,” Lonnie said. “I couldn’t even tell Ma.”

  “Sometimes it’s easier for a man to talk to another man. Even one he hasn’t known for long.”

  “I can’t. I just … can’t.”

  “All right. But if you change your mind …”

  They sat in the quiet dark, Messenger unmoving, Lonnie restlessly shifting position, lighting another cigarette and then discarding it after two drags. A voice rose from inside the house—Lizbeth Roebuck’s, making some kind of drunken protest that didn’t last long. The smoky fireglow died away behind the hills, leaving the sky clean again. The immense canopy of stars seemed even brighter, not quite real, like a heavenly map in a planetarium.

  And Lonnie said suddenly, as if the words were being torn out of him, “He messed with her.”

  “… Say that again?”

  “My uncle. Tess. He messed with her.”

  “Sexually abused her?”

  “I don’t know if he … you know. But he touched her, played around with her. More than once.”

  Jesus. “How do you know, Lonnie? Did you see him touch her?”

  “No. She told me.”

  “When?”

  “Not long before she was killed. A few days.” The words came spilling out of him now, a purge like the emptying of a pus pocket. His voice was heavy with anguish. “She used to like to be tickled, it was a game we all played with her. I was in the barn at our place forking hay and she came in—they were down visiting that day—she came in and I started tickling her. She said, ‘Stop it, stop it!’ and then she started to bawl. She didn’t want to tell me but I got it out of her. I didn’t want to believe it but it was the truth, she wasn’t making it up.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to break his fucking head—that’s what I should have done. Instead I told Tess … I said she …”

  “You told her to tell her mother.”

  “Yeah. Tell her mother. Because I didn’t want to do it myself.”

  “You did the right thing. Better for it to come from her.”

  “That’s what I thought. I thought my aunt’d believe her easier than she would me. I made Tess promise she’d tell. I made her promise. …”

  “You think she did tell,” Messenger said. “You think that’s the reason your aunt went crazy and killed them both.”

  “She must’ve blamed Tess as much as him. But it wasn’t Tess’s fault. Him, it was his fault. And mine.”

  “No, Lonnie—”

  “Mine. That’s why I couldn’t tell Ma or anyone afterward. It’s my fault Tess is dead!”

  21

  IT WAS THE heat that finally woke him. The interior of the Air-stream trailer was like a sauna: He lay marinating in his own sweat, the sheets sodden and tangled around him. What time was it? The sun must be high already for it to be so hot in here. …

  He rolled over, fumbling for his wristwatch. Almost eleven. That late? Dacy must have gotten up by now; why hadn’t she called him? Get moving, he thought, there’s work to do. But he couldn’t seem to make his body respond. He felt logy, desensitized: not enough sleep, and the few hours he’d had had been too shallow and exhausted to be restful. Almost dawn before Sheriff Espinosa had allowed them to leave the Roebuck ranch, and another hour after that before he’d been able to drift deeper than a fitful doze.

  He lay listening to the hot silence. As sweat-soaked as the bedclothes were, he could still smell Dacy’s scent on the sheets and pillowcase. That part of last night was clear in his memory: their lovemaking, everything they’d said to each other. But most of the rest had a blurred quality, like a poor black-and-white film print. In particular the scenes involving Espinosa’s endless questions, and the long, pointless drive back to Anna’s ranch that he’d made them take with him. The baked apple had been antagonistic enough toward him, though he’d seemed more bemused than anything by John T.’s death: a man who had suddenly lost his leader and didn’t quite know how to handle the situation. If it hadn’t been for the presence of Dacy and Lonnie, Espinosa’s hostility would have had a sharper focus and Jim Messenger might well have spent a rough night in a jail cell. He was the only person the sheriff could conceive of who had a motive for murdering another Roebuck.

  The only other parts of the night that were clear to him were the image of John T.’s bloodied corpse, and Lonnie’s revelation. There’d been no time at John T.’s ranch to think about what Lonnie had told him, to sort out its implications and possibilities; Dacy had come out of the house right afterward, and not long after that Espinosa and his two deputies arrived. No time to work on it now, either. He was too dull-witted from sleep and the trapped heat.

  He rested another couple of minutes, then dragged himself off the rollaway and into the tiny shower stall. The tepid water woke him up a little more. By the time he’d brushed his teeth, run a comb through his hair, and dressed, he was in a functioning state again.

  As soon as he stepped out of the trailer he saw Dacy. She was standing in the yard, facing out toward the valley road; and she clutched her rifle by its barrel, the butt down in the dirt at her side. What had her attention was a small, loose bunching of half a dozen vehicles and twice that many men and women on the road just beyond her gate. Like a ragtag encampment, he thought, that had sprung up overnight.

  She heard him approaching and swiveled her head. “There you are. I was fixing to go pound on the door.”

  “You should have. I didn’t mean to sleep so long.”

  “Well, it was a long damn night.”

  “What’s going on out there?”

  “Vultures,” she said bitterly. “Goddamn bone pickers.”

  “Media?”

  “Mostly. Some longnecker from town, too. One of those TV trucks drove in a while ago and I ran the bastards off. I put up with that trespass shit when Tess and Dave were killed, but not this time. Not this time.”

  She hadn’t slept much either; that was plain. Lines of fatigue were shaped out around her eyes, and bloody-looking veins mottled the pupils. Her hair was uncombed: the topknot had a curl in it like Woody Woodpecker’s. The fact that she looked vulnerable this morning made her even more desirable. Male ego: man the protector, the comforter. Right. Put that thought into words, and she’d pro
bably laugh in his face.

  He wondered if, after all, he was in love with her.

  He had no reliable measuring stick for his feelings. The only other woman he’d thought he loved was Doris, but with her it had been little more than body heat; they’d been at each other like rabbits before and for a while after their marriage. He’d been hurt when she divorced him, but it hadn’t been the kind of wrenching, lingering pain of something ripped loose from deep inside. No, he hadn’t really loved Doris; time had taught him that. His feelings for Dacy were stronger, more emotional. A sense of kinship and the sort of bond that could lead to oneness. But there was no use in kidding himself—the potential oneness might be all one-sided. And transitory and delusional on his part, an outgrowth of the passion they’d shared last night. Middle-aged body heat could fool a lonely man just as easily as teenage body heat could fool an immature one.

  Take it slow, he thought. Don’t push it. There’s too much else going on right now.

  “Where’s Lonnie?” he asked.

  “Gone. He got up before I did, saddled his horse, and rode off. Christ knows where.”

  Messenger closed fingers lightly around her arm. She didn’t draw away from his touch, but she didn’t respond to it, either. “Dacy, let’s go inside. We need to talk.”

  “If it’s about you and me—”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Good, because this isn’t the time.”

  “I know it.”

  They went into the kitchen, Dacy leaving her Weatherby propped against the wall near the front door. She said, “Coffee’s on the stove. You look like you could use some.”

  “The biggest mug you’ve got.”

  “Cupboard above the sink.”

  He found the mug, poured coffee. Thick and bitter—just what he needed.

  Dacy said, “Something’s eating on Lonnie. And I don’t think it’s what happened to John T.”

  “It isn’t. Not directly.”

  “That mean you know what it is?”

  “Yes. That’s what we need to talk about. He knows something that’s been cutting him up inside ever since Tess and his uncle were murdered. He spit it out to me last night, while you were in with Liz Roebuck.”