by Dakota Kahn
Blake tapped his hat, gave me a nod like a Western-movie cowboy, then hopped into the saddle of his Ford SUV, and drove off.
When I got to sleep about an hour later, I dreamed about Blake running that car on its side, going round and round a creepy gallows in the middle of the ghost town, with new earthquakes opening new ravines and bringing us new terrible things to see - fire and brimstone and nightmare visions.
A man swung from the gallows, all dark in silhouette… but I could see his eyes. And then his mouth opened…
And he started singing “Walking on Sunshine.”
My ringtone for Blake. I bolted out of bed like a frightened deer, and had the phone to my ear before I knew what I was doing.
“Drive safer!” I shouted in my still asleep voice.
“Huh?” Blake said.
“What?” I said, then blinked and was awake. No unsafe driving from Blake, no terrible gallows with a man hanging from it. The real world.
“You awake?” Blake said, and I answered in the affirmative. “Good, then hightail it here. On the double.”
“Where’s here?” I said.
“The station. I need you in our interrogation room stat.”
“Why? What did I do?” I said, on my feet now, looking around my room at the discarded remains of last night’s outfit. Somewhere on that floor were clean jeans, something I could wear to an informal meeting.
“James Wendover was murdered last night, and we’ve got a suspect writing out a confession right now.”
“Oh,” I said, then understood and said, “Oh”, threw the phone down, and dove into my closet for professional wear. This was not informal at all.
Whispering Pines is in Crestgold county, named for the recently excavated ghost town that had come here first. There were only about four towns in the entire county, and three of them were barely there, town-wise. Only Whispering Pines had a substantial population, a tourist trade, and enough crime (almost all of it petty) to be the reasonable home of the county sheriff’s station. It’s located right along the highway on what was once the outskirts of town. Well, when towns grow their outskirts become just… well… skirts, I suppose, and what was once just a commercial shooting range had become an entire sports complex where most of Whispering Pines elite did their Crossfit or Px90 or whatever the trend was at the moment.
When I parked at the far end of the sheriff station lot, I did not go in unobserved. Fitness knows no ideological enemies, so Mayor Reynolds and Miguela Sepulveda were both there in the parking lot, running in place while an instructor who looked like a prototype for Barbie dolls bounced in front of them, her ponytail slapping back and forth like it was attached to an angry cat.
I didn’t wave while they watched me go in. I was all business, in one of my power-suits, my hair up with a couple of discreet chopsticks, lipstick hastily applied. I didn’t have time to shower between Blake’s call and now, but I think I looked reasonably like a powerful woman attorney who took no guff. Whatever guff was, get it out of my way, I’m not taking any of it.
Blake was just inside the door when I pushed it open, engaged in a heated exchange of whisper shouting with his boss, Sheriff Dulap. While Blake looked like he could have been store bought from a Designer Cop shop, Sheriff Dulap did not look at all like a man who would be in his level of authority. I stood a head taller than him, so I could see right into his comb-over.
Between that, the thick glasses, and the way his sheriff uniform didn’t ever seem to fit right, how his gun was kinda hanging off his belt and how the cuffs of his shirts and collar were all ragged, you might think he was a dunce, a pushover, and a patsy.
He was none of these things. Sheriff Dulap was three times tougher than he looked and at least twice as smart. In last year’s election Mayor Reynolds tried to get Blake to stand against him. Blake had flat out refused, saying, “If Dulap’s not our sheriff, you’ll lose the entire department. And one of the best damn lawmen in the state” - meaning Dulap himself.
So I was surprised they were going hammer and tongs against each other, and right there in the middle of the office.
I was even more surprised that it was because of me.
“And now you think this is going to make anything easier?” Dulap said, pointing at me like I’d just come in the door to be exhibit A for his case.
“I’m following procedure,” Blake said with his mulish simplicity.
“Procedure is to contact a lawyer when the client asks. Not to go over your Sheriff’s head and call your girlfriend to get her some work.”
“Hey!” I said.
“Fiancé,” Blake said.
“Until there’s a date, a ring on the finger and a license signed by the county clerk, girlfriend,” Dulap said. He turned his eyes on me, where they blazed with intelligent anger behind his glasses.
“I’m not here as a girlfriend, fiancé or anything but a lawyer,” I said, consciously making my voice a little deeper than usual, and standing up taller.
“He hasn’t asked for an attorney,” Dulap said. He shifted his weight, and I think he really intended to block me if I came further into the office. I stepped, regally, toward the reception desk, where Desk Sergeant Toni Banks sat, tight-lipped and mousy behind the desk, clearly not sure what to do.
“I’m here to see my client,” I said with force and dignity. Then I turned to Blake, and said, “Who is my client?”
“Rip Chiaki,” he said.
Quick thinking kept my mouth from dropping open, but my left eyebrow did do the Spock thing, rising up to almost the ceiling.
Rip sat in the interrogation room, wearing his customary suit coat and pajamas. It was exactly what he’d had on yesterday when he’d accosted James Wendover at the presentation/demonstration. Except his fancy shiny stuff was missing - the tie pin and the cufflinks that he always showed off. The three tacky monkeys that I loved when I was a kid. Sure, they were pure kitsch, but with them gone he just looked… like a sad homeless man.
And this sad homeless man was hunched over a yellow pad of paper, his left hand chained to the table and barely able to lift the pen that he was using to write his life away.
“Rip, stop!” I said, my shout embarrassingly girlish, but I didn’t care. Anything he wrote down could and would be used against him.
“Hello, girly,” he said, smiling at me with missing teeth and a guilelessness that didn’t look the least bit murderous to me. “Just telling ‘em what I did with my day since the copper drove me off for some soup.”
“Let me see that right now,” I said, putting my hand on the yellow pad.
Rip looked a little put out. “Well, it ain’t finished.”
“I’m your attorney, Rip, let me see what you’re telling them.”
Blake and Dulap were both behind me in the interrogation room, both about to say something. I glared at them, then said, as icily cold as I could muster, “Deputy, could you please uncuff my client? And then leave the room, I want to meet with him alone.”
“Miss Becker,” Dulap started.
“Ms. Becker, if you don’t mind,” I said. I actually hated the stupid “mz” title, but I had a real need to show some authority in front of these men with their folded arms and tough attitudes. “And it is my right to meet with my client alone. Uncuff his hand, and don’t you dare touch that yellow pad until I’ve had a look at it.”
Blake looked at Dulap, who nodded with a grimace. He uncuffed Rip, who smiled at Blake and said, “I do thank you kindly.”
Then he did an odd maneuver with his hands. He rubbed the wrist of his left hand, but not with the fingers of his right. He used his other wrist and forearm, carefully pushing back on the sleeve of his pajamas to reveal the sun-weathered skin. After a solid minute of rubbing the wrist, he then set both his hands in his lap.
During this little production, Dulap and Blake both left. The interrogation room was fully enclosed, and there was a camera in the corner looking in on us.
“And turn that camera off,
” I said. There wasn’t any red light on it to indicate whether or not anybody did what I said, so I had to assume that my instructions were being followed, me being an official attorney person and all.
“Rip,” I started.
“Nice cop give me a ride. Nice lady drive me back. Rip’s been in cars a lot lately,” he said, then he burped. I felt, more than smelt, the whiskey that kept his mind flighty, and had to turn away while my eyes watered.
“Rip, please, tell me what happened.”
“Got out the car, went to my old stomping grounds, and drank a moderate amount,” he said, pointing with the index finger on his left hand to emphasize the words “moderate” and “amount”. Pleased with himself, he nodded, put his head down on the table, and went immediately to sleep.
Sighing, I grabbed the yellow pad and skimmed through what he wrote. It didn’t take long, as I’d heard it all before. Verbatim (with the spelling cleaned up):
“Nice cop give me a ride. Nice lady drive me back. Rip’s been in cars a lot lately. Got out the car, went to my old stomping grounds, and drank a lot a moderate amount.”
It wasn’t a lot to go on, and I had no idea what in the world evidence Blake and Dulap had conjured up against him, but there was almost no way I could see it sticking. Rip is harmless (if a little useless) and goofy. He’s a fuzzball, not some murderer.
I knocked on the interrogation room door, which flew open immediately. Blake and Dulap were both waiting outside, eyes on me. I stepped out of the room, leaned over so they could see the state Rip was in, then looked at them both, skeptical-eyed.
“Oh come on,” I said and waved my arms for emphasis. “Come on. The only person Rip is a danger to is himself.”
“Rip was found at the scene of the crime,” Dulap said. “He was also found with some articles from the deceased on his person. His fingerprints were on the deceased’s tie—”
“From yesterday, when he… stumbled into him,” I said.
“From yesterday where he assaulted the deceased physically and verbally. He was sent out of town, only to come back to finish what he had started when he found the deceased alone on the site of old Crestgold.”
“He was killed in the ghost town?” I said, eyebrow again doing the old rising trick.
Dulap leveled a gaze at me that was seriously spooky.
“He was hanged on his own gallows.”
A shiver went through me, like ice had just been poured down my back. A thousand possibilities came to mind all at once, hitting me like the proverbial ton of bricks.
James Wendover, one of the most hated men in the town, and an outsider to boot, had been murdered on the very site, in the very construction that had made him so hated. To a lot of people in Whispering Pines, this would be called just deserts.
“So you found Rip there, where James was killed. Was Rip sober?”
“After you’ve hanged a man, I can imagine you would have a nip or two,” Dulap said, coldly. “And if you were smart and wanted to absolve yourself from the list of suspects, I think getting stone drunk would be a pretty good way of managing it. Or at least… appearing stone drunk,” he said, his eyes flashing with that sudden, unexpected intelligence that made him such a formidable man.
“Rip doesn’t have to pretend. He’s… you know how he is.”
Just then the front door to the sheriff station burst open. I didn’t know it could do that, since it had one of those hydraulic things that slowed the opening and closing, but that didn’t stop the large Mr. Greene from bursting.
“Where is he? Let me see the man!” Greene said, his voice booming through the station like it was amplified.
Just behind him, moving with dignity and purpose, was Mrs. Wendover, wearing a dress-suit and hat, just like yesterday, though all black now. Curiously, her expression hadn’t changed from the hard, driven look I’d observed on the platform yesterday in the park.
“Lawrence,” she said, in a quiet voice that barely carried over his bluster.
Sheriff Dulap turned his eyes from me to the pair rushing in, and moved quickly to get between them and the rest of his office. He wasn’t about to let anybody shout in his territory.
“Mr. Greene, Mrs. Wendover, I’m Sheriff—”
“Don’t tell me who you are! I don’t care who you are,” Greene said, turning his volume down a notch but keeping his seething intensity. It was genuinely frightening. “My business partner, my best friend in the world hanged in your cheap-ass town and you think I’m going to let you rednecks deal with it? Uh-uh. I’m calling the state attorney’s office. No way—”
“Lawrence,” Mrs. Wendover said, touching him on the upper arm.
Lawrence Greene, like a bull in a suit, reared back and looked at her. For an instant I saw something in her eyes, some little dam that looked ready to break. For an instant, Mrs. Wendover looked more like a human being.
Greene took a deep breath, and turned back to look at Dulap, then at Blake, and then at me. I don’t think I shrunk back from his gaze… but I can’t completely promise.
“Who’s she?”
Dunlap’s shoulders knitted slightly, and then he waited for either myself or Blake to introduce me to this angry, angry man.
“She’s the accused’s defense attorney,” he finally said.
“You’re helping this murdering scum out?” Greene said, taking a step closer.
Blake shifted his weight, slightly. He was ready for action, in case Mr. Greene’s snorting and stamping turned into a real charge.
But I didn’t need him to. I stepped forward, and said, “Yes, Mr. Greene. I am Mr. Chiaki’s counsel.” I was about to move forward like Atticus Finch and hold court over the people here, but something about proclaiming Rip’s innocence directly in front of the bereaved seemed in poor taste.
I didn’t believe Rip had a thing to do with it. I didn’t know anything about the case, really, other than Mr. Wendover had been hanged on his own gallows in one of Rip’s regular drinking spots.
But I knew, just knew, he couldn’t be the culprit.
“Mr. Chiaki, that’s the old drunk’s name? The one that attacked Jim in public, in front of a hundred witnesses, and he was still wandering around free? You’ll all be lucky if we don’t come out of this suing the whole town to kingdom come. All of Whispering Pines owned lock stock and barrel by Wendover and Greene.”
“Mr. Greene,” Dulap said, his voice getting ever-so-slightly loud, “If all you have to offer is threats and belligerence, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“We came here for something,” Mrs. Wendover said, again her quiet, muted tones cutting right through.
Dulap looked between them, and said, “Well, then, whatever it is, come into my office and we can discuss it.”
Greene grumbled, but Wendover went on in, and silently. I watched them as they disappeared into the office.
“Look, Kate,” Blake started, but I whirled on him, doing my own little Mr. Greene impression.
“Chief Deputy, I expect by the time I get to my office to have Rip’s arrest report e-mailed to me or… I’ll… and see if I don’t!”
Blake probably watched me go, I don’t know. I was mad.
Chapter 4
I was mad all the way to my office, I was mad when I parked and unlocked the door, and was mad when I sat down without quite knowing why I was so mad.
As far as I knew, Rip was at the scene of the crime, he’d taken something from the man’s body… and he looked a little like he’d been in a struggle. Though he always looked like he’d been in a struggle. Rip’s life was a struggle.
He’d been missing those cufflinks and his own tie clip. See No Evil and Speak No Evil had been found on the dead man. So where did Hear No Evil end up? I sat, leaning back in my chair, trying to think that through when someone banged on my office door, then pulled it open.
Beet-faced and breathing heavily, Mayor Reynolds came through without saying hello, his big eyes growing bigger by the second,
taking in my office, my person, everything around me.
“Well?” he said, his voice hoarse and a little desperate.
“Well what?” I said, sitting up and looking him in the face. I gestured to a chair beside my desk. Mayor Reynolds decided instead to lean down on my desk and hover over me like some mean big bird.
“Well, what are you trying to do to this town?”
I had nothing to say to that, because I wasn’t trying to do anything to the town. My plans do not include town-level ambitions.
“Something…” Mayor Reynolds looked over his shoulder, then whispered, as if my office could be bugged. “Something terrible happened. Something that could be disastrous to everybody and everything in Whispering Falls. We were getting ready to jump a hurdle, and now I hear you got right in the way.”
“You’re talking about the Wendover murder?” I said, catching on.
“Shh! Shh! Shh!” Mayor Reynolds waved his arms around like he was suddenly being attacked by invisible bees. “This can’t get out! This has to remain as quiet as possible, or… or I don’t even know what might happen. We’ll look like fools. The town will be… the place where developers go to die, literally. It’ll be a disaster.”
“I’d say for James Wendover, it’s already gotten about as bad as it could get.”
“What? Who?” Reynolds said, eying me closer.
“James Wendover. The murdered man?”
Reynolds winced, like I’d just swore at a christening.
“Wendover met with an unfortunate man-made incident, the perpetrator of which has already been caught and is being brought to justice swiftly, expediently… and silently.”
“You mean you think Rip Chiaki did it, too? That’s absurd and you know it.”
Mayor Reynolds stood up straight, and took a deep breath.
“What I know is that Rip Chiaki has been arrested. Had he been arrested yesterday, Mr. Wendover would still be… would not have met with his incident on what was technically not city land, and we would be able to go on with picking the proper course of development without this hitch.”