Bad Company

by Virginia Swift

  Finally Dwayne called a halt. “Boy,” he said. “We’re really bad tonight.”

  “Maybe this gig isn’t meant to be,” said Sally. “Maybe we ought to cancel. After the murder and everything, I’m not feeling exactly inspired.”

  “Nobody’s expecting inspiration,” said Sam. “Just do the job. Besides, didn’t you say Delice is going to donate the proceeds to the women’s shelter? That oughta fire you up.”

  Could Sam Branch actually be showing some sensitivity? Implausible. He probably thought Delice ought to give the money to a shelter for real estate taxes.

  “Look, I’ve gotta go,” Dwayne said. “I told this Carhart guy I’d meet him at the Wrangler ten minutes from now.”

  Sally was meeting Hawk there, er, ten minutes ago. And looking for Dickie, and for Delice. And for trouble, it would seem.

  The Wrangler bar was packed and rocking. During Jubilee Days they had live music every night, and the band, imported from Austin, Texas, expressly for rodeo week, was doing a right lively cover of “Beyond These Walls,” one of Sally’s favorite tunes about love and jail. For the first time all day, she was off-duty.

  She remembered how she’d come to love this time of year, the weather idyllic, the town full of people looking for a good time, the rodeo season bringing in the green for any musician good enough to get a gig. The cowboys and cowgirls hauled their rigs and their horses from town to town in search of fortune and enough fame to get laid on demand. It hadn’t been much different for the pickers and the singers, although they kept slightly different hours. Instead of having to get up mornings and tend to animals, the musicians stayed up nights and arose in the afternoon to minister to their own wasted carcasses.

  Cowboys had their riding and roping, and God knew, that could beat up a body. But Sally’d had her own brutal schedule, sometimes doing as many as four performances a day—pancake breakfast jams, fairground tent nooners, happy hours, and then three or four sets, deep into the night. She’d done it for the money, and the exposure, and because she loved it.

  Love, as the sainted Gram Parsons had pointed out, hurts. She recalled any number of afternoons, lounging around some motel pool in the darkest possible sunglasses, eating a plate of Tabasco-drenched eggs and swilling translucent coffee that never quite cut the fog. By happy hour she’d had to be ready to get up on some stage and do it all over again. It had taken her years to realize that there could be any other way to live.

  But now she approached the Wrangler without having to sing for her supper. It felt good. Hawk was sitting at the bar, drinking a longneck Budweiser and chatting with Delice. Most of the people in the place were wearing cowboy hats, but Hawk was bareheaded. He had a battered, sweaty straw Resistol he wore in the field, and since he’d come straight to the bar after work, the hat was probably out in his truck. Refused to wear his hat in bars because, he said, it wasn’t polite. A fastidious man, Hawk Green.

  “Hello, darlin’,” she said, kissing him and plopping down on the bar stool next to him, requesting a beer of her own. “Good day at the office?”

  “About average,” he replied, leaving his hand in the middle of her back, producing a nice tingle. “We took two vehicles out of the university motor pool, and on the way out to the fossil sand dunes the grad student drivers managed to stick one in the ditch and get two flat tires on the other one. Cost us most of the day and half the evening. Maybe sometime we’ll get to do some geology. I ended up having dinner in the truck at Taco John’s.”

  “I had the burrito,” Sally commiserated. “You must have just missed me there.”

  By mutual consent, it seemed, neither of them asked how the other was feeling, one day after finding that body.

  “Life’s a bitch,” said Delice, completely unsympathetic. “For one thing, somebody came over and foisted a cat off on my son this afternoon.”

  Sally smiled brightly. “I know how Jerry Jeff loves animals. Mr. Skittles is such a cutie too.”

  “Yeah. Thanks a lot. You can tell Edna McCaffrey she owes me one.”

  “I’ll do that. And thank you for being a one-woman humane society,” Sally said.

  “Don’t push it. It’s not that big a deal. What really ruined my day was that two of my waitresses quit. One said she didn’t like having cowboys hit on her, and the other said she did, and she could make more money at the Torch.”

  “How so?” asked Sally.

  “Let’s just say that the Wrangler isn’t the kind of place where the waitresses who are willing to let the ’pokes live up to their names can book their dance cards,” Delice explained. “The Torch is kind of their headquarters.”

  Ah. One more way of cashing in on rodeo time. “You’re telling me you don’t hire hookers?” Hawk asked Delice.

  She wiped down the bar, thinking about it. “Let’s just say I prefer to have my help focus on making money doing what I’m paying them to do. And let’s say I also like to know that when some asshole starts pawing one of my girls, and she objects, there’s no misunderstanding about what kind of business we’re in. We got enough problems with boys hassling the paying customers.”

  “I tell you,” said Hawk, “Jubilee Days certainly does ring in a festive atmosphere.”

  “Actually, Sal,” Delice said, “I’ve been thinking about the Jubilee Days thing, and about Monette and all.”

  Sally drank a little beer, pondering. “I’m not sure what you’re driving at.”

  “I believe there’s a way we can all have what we want.”

  Delice was a businesswoman. People in business specialized in the idea that everyone got pretty much what they wanted, or at least what they deserved. “Which is?” Sally asked.

  “Some kind of public event commemorating what happened to Monette, but not disrupting this week.”

  All kinds of pictures came into Sally’s mind, many absurd, some obscene, some downright horrifying. None remotely tourist-friendly. “I’m waiting.”

  “The Jubilee Days parade,” said Delice. “A float in memory of Monette, and in favor of the community taking care of its girls. Banners, stuff like that. We can put it all together in the parking lot behind the bar. Anybody who wants to can march along. Hell, this is supposed to be the Equality State, right? It could be a celebration of being a Wyoming woman, and a kind of ‘I’m entitled to make my own rules’ deal at the same time. Accentuate the positive, and make everybody see what’s at stake.”

  Sally looked at Hawk, who looked back. “Damn,” he said. “I like that.”

  So did Sally. “It’s good. It gives us until Saturday, and between now and then, we can work on the design, and all kinds of people will see it getting built.”

  “And they can help out if they feel like it,” said Delice, pouring herself a shot of Cuervo Gold, downing it without benefit of salt or lime. “It was Brit’s idea. She and Maude Stark are already signing up volunteers. I’ve talked to a few people about it tonight, myself.”

  If building a float satisfied Maude, it was one more point for Brit being a genius. “Count me in,” said Sally.

  Suddenly Delice’s bar-owner radar pricked up. Out on the dance floor a stocky young cowboy in a mattress-striped shirt and a black hat was just about to take a swing at a tall, blond man. A little redhead was hanging on to the cowboy’s arm, her face an obvious plea to cool down. In a wink Delice was stepping between them, swinging a bank deposit bag of rolls of quarters in one hand.

  “Remind me not to mess with Delice,” Hawk told Sally. “Ever.”

  The cowboy backed away and stomped off to sulk at a table, the girl following with outstretched hands, mouth moving. Men fighting, women supplicating. Just another night in the barroom. And now Dwayne Langham had gone over to tap the blond man on the arm. They turned and walked toward the bar.

  Sally might have known. Marsh Carhart, making a move on somebody maybe thirty years younger than he was. At least he’d nearly gotten his ass kicked this time. Maybe the next tavern keeper wouldn’t be quite as efficient
as Delice.

  Maybe the cowboy and the three friends he was sitting with would be waiting in the parking lot when Marsh went home.

  Carhart had his hands on Delice’s shoulders, approaching the bar. “I swear,” he was telling her, “all I did was ask that girl to dance.” He smiled his most ingratiating, boyish smile. “Thanks for rescuing me, lady. I love a woman who runs with the wolves. Wanna buy me a drink?”

  Maybe Delice would disembowel him.

  “Amazing coincidence,” said Delice, peeling his hands off her shoulders. “We sell drinks. What’ll you have?”

  “Stoli on the rocks with a twist,” he told her, looking over his shoulder at the cowboy, still glowering away. “Around here, looks like a man has to keep his strength up.”

  Delice looked Carhart up and down, plainly assessing his state of inebriation, and evidently decided he was good for one more. “Yeah. I’ll let you know when I think you’re strong enough. That’s four bucks.”

  “Some trouble around here?” said Dickie Langham, casting a sideways glance at the cowboy and the redhead as he stepped up to the bar.

  “Nothing an experienced barkeep can’t handle. The cowpoke over there didn’t like the idea of his date dancing with somebody else.” Delice set a Coca-Cola in front of her brother. Dickie, in his sheriff’s khakis, had come in with Scotty Atkins, who was wearing the prepster plainclothes he’d had on at the Lifeway that morning. Atkins ordered a club soda.

  “On the meter?” Sally asked him.

  “Longish day,” said Scotty.

  Sally wanted information. “Doing what?” she asked.

  He regarded her over his club soda, pale eyes narrowed. “Our job.”

  Dickie threw her a bone. “As it happens, Scotty and I and the county coroner spent a good hunk of the day over in Cheyenne. In our line of work, we often enjoy passing a few hours watching an autopsy.”

  “So what did you learn?”

  “Sheriff . . .” said Atkins.

  “What the hell, Scotty—I’m not going to give away any trade secrets. We’ll get the preliminary report by Friday, but won’t have the results of the tricky lab stuff for a couple of weeks anyway. And by then, well . . .”

  “It could be too late,” Sally filled in. “The killer could be long gone. So how do you guys go about solving something like this?”

  “We hope the bad guy dropped his wallet, so we can go return it to him,” Atkins said sourly, scowling into his drink. “Christ, I wish this was a scotch.”

  “Be my guest,” said Dickie. “I won’t tell your boss.”

  “I don’t want to dull my razor-sharp powers of observation,” Atkins told him.

  “So there’s no physical evidence?” Sally asked.

  Scotty whistled. “Boy, you sure sound like you know what you’re talking about, Sally.”

  “Not really, but just from what I could see, there was plenty of litter around. And,” she swallowed, looking down, “Monette’s body was in such horrible shape.”

  Atkins patted her hand. “Let’s put it this way. I didn’t see anything today I feel like talking about with a nice lady like you.”

  “I’m not that nice,” Sally told him, looking up.

  “No? Hmm,” said Atkins, catching her eyes and making them go very wide.

  “Nice fake, Scotty,” Hawk said, softly. “You managed to distract her. But risky. Guys get shot for trying that twice.”

  “Hawk’s a crazy man,” Delice explained to Scotty.

  “He’d die for love,” Dickie added.

  Hoo boy. Sally was getting a glimpse of what Char-lene, the Lifeway checker, had been talking about. This guy Scotty had the flat-out je ne sais quoi. The hell with that. “So you guys went from the morgue to the bars?” she resumed.

  “In my experience, it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference,” Dickie said.

  “Yeah. We’ve been making the rounds. You know, you meet so many interesting people in bars,” Atkins answered.

  Sally wasn’t sure if he was making fun of her celebrated sordid past. “I understand that Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt met in a bar,” she said.

  Atkins shocked her by laughing out loud. “At least it wasn’t the morgue,” he said.

  “So come on, did you guys find out anything useful?” She really wasn’t giving up.

  Dickie acted like he hadn’t heard the question. He’d spent years bartending right in front of bands whose idea of amplified sound was to attempt to deafen everybody in the place, so he had the perfect excuse. The best ears of Sally’s generation were two-thirds impaired.

  Scotty Atkins, politely curbing the je ne sais quoi, gave her his best nonanswer. “We’ve got a lot of questions, and a lot of asking to do. It’s sort of like being a historian, only the people are alive.”

  “Not all of ’em,” Hawk put in, and Scotty nodded thoughtfully, draining his club soda.

  “That’s not very informative.” Sally stated the obvious. “I know you can’t say much, you guys, but seriously, I want to help.”

  This time Scotty did the deaf boy thing, and it was Dickie’s turn to answer. “You’re a helpful sort of person,” said Dickie, smiling faintly at her. “But leave the driving to us.”

  Sally decided on a strategic retreat. She could hassle Dickie anytime, and maybe work on Scotty sometime when Hawk wasn’t around. So they all looked around for a new subject, and found it just down the bar. Marsh Carhart was still hustling Delice. “Who’s your friend, little brother?” Dickie asked Dwayne.

  Carhart stuck out his hand and gave Dickie a big smile, aimed mostly at his badge. “You must be Sheriff Langham,” he said.

  “What was your first clue?” Dickie inquired.

  “Hello, Marsh,” said Sally.

  And now he turned and looked at her, squinting. “Do I know you?” he asked.

  “Sally Alder,” she said.

  “Remember me?”

  Carhart took a sip of his drink and the boyishness fled from his face. Busted. “Sally . . . Mustang Sally? Jesus. I’d never have recognized you. What happened—did you have a face lift or something?”

  So much for winsome charm. Sally, Dickie, Delice, and Hawk exchanged glances. “Am I crazy, or does everybody in this place sooner or later want to take a swing at this guy?” Hawk asked.

  “This is Dr. Marsh Carhart,” said Sally, “world-famous author of Man, the Rapist. Maybe you saw him on Sally Jessy, telling all the girls not to wear short skirts or they’d be asking for it.”

  “Call me Marsh,” he said, “and it wasn’t Sally Jessy, it was 20/20.”

  “Man, the Rapist?” Hawk said. “And all this time I’d believed all those ecstatic women who were yelling, ‘It’s you, only you, oh my God, yes yes yes!’ And they were nothing more than robots, programmed to serve the master race. I’ll never live it down.”

  “What the hell are you doing in Laramie, Sally?” Carhart asked, pointedly ignoring Hawk.

  “I teach at UW,” she told him.

  “A Berkeley Ph.D. and that’s the best you could do? I thought you were at UCLA,” he said.

  “I decided I could do better,” she replied.

  But Carhart was distracted. A very young-looking cocktail waitress had come up to the bar to place an order. She stood between the rails of the server station, rattling off a long list of drinks to Delice, and Carhart was fully engaged with gulping his vodka and ogling the waitress’s butt.

  “I’d consider relocating my eyeballs back into my head if I were you,” Scotty Atkins told him.

  Carhart favored Scotty with a condescending stare. “What are you, her bodyguard?”

  “Nope,” said Scotty. “But you could be her daddy.”

  “Maybe her granddaddy,” said Hawk.

  Even Dwayne snickered.

  “What are you guys?” Carhart shouted, “the Wyoming sex police?”

  “I think he’s strong enough,” Sally told Delice. This was the charisma that was going to get Molly Wood to roll over? Maybe so
me people found the combination of arrogance, ignorance, and Stolichnaya alluring. Maybe Carhart had a multiple personality.

  And maybe he was drunk enough to play loose with information. “So I hear you’re giving rape a rest, doing ecological stuff. Working for Dwayne here on the Wood’s Hole land swap,” she told him. The whole deal creeped her out. His involvement was just one more reason to be suspicious.

  “No,” he said, “I work for myself. I do independent consulting, evaluating environmentally sensitive areas. I’m doing a study of a parcel up in the Laramie Range, at Mr. and Mrs. Langham’s request. When I work on cases where private property transfers are involved, I focus on the science and stay away from the transaction part.”

  Not drunk enough, damn it. The bureaucratic squirm language must come naturally.

  “You wouldn’t want even an appearance of conflict of interest, of course,” Hawk said genially, his words for Carhart but his eyes on Sally’s.

  “Are you an attorney?” Carhart asked.

  “Nope,” said Hawk. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. I’m just a longtime friend of the land.”

  “It’s a friendly town,” said Sally, smiling at Hawk.

  It seemed likely to get even more sociable. Sally and Hawk drove home in their separate vehicles. She pulled the Mustang into the garage, and he parked the truck in the driveway just behind her. Before she knew it, he’d pulled her out of the car and wrapped her up and was kissing her lips off.

  “I can’t help it. I’ve been thinking about this all day,” he said finally, close to her ear, in a voice that clenched several of her intimate muscles and melted several others. “Feel like being love slave to the master race tonight?”