It was very much a gentleman’s handshake. I liked it.
I decided at the same time that I would probably like Mr. Neilson as well.
Wroten was already asking questions. Apparently he had not yet told Neilson—or the other hands who had clustered close by—that Johansson was dead. He was treating it like he just wanted some background on the boy. Maybe the kid had been speeding, or spraying graffiti on a wall somewhere in town. Something relatively minor but that needed to be dealt with.
Neilson answered his questions clearly and directly, without any apparent hesitation. His story matched Carver’s.
The Johansson kid had been hired as day labor and had spent most of the afternoon on the flatbed boosting and stacking the bales as they were handed up by the rest of the crew. He did an all right job, Neilson said, until about two hours before quitting time.
Then he had complained about feeling a bit feverish and achy.
“Not used to so much man-u-al labor, that kid,” one of the hands said. He was an older man, probably in his fifties, and looked as if he had spent every day of those years out in the field.
“That’s enough, Ed. He did a good enough job. Enough to earn the wage I was paying.”
The kid figured that he would do better driving the truck than wrestling the heavy bales, and the driver—another of the regular hands, named Bill—had no objections, so he had handed over the driver’s seat to the kid...who promptly drove the rig into the irrigation ditch.
That would have been bad enough, since it would have taken valuable time to pull it out. But the kid had somehow managed to mangle the front axle and, for the time being, the flatbed would be out of commission.
“It was hot, we’d been working all day, and I’ll admit it, I lost my temper. The thing with the flatbed was a stupid mistake that shouldn’t have happened. But then he tried to weasel out of being responsible for the truck, whining about how bad he felt, and I lost it. I came at him, he started toward me, Carver there stepped in between and got sucker-punched by the kid, and I let the kid have it.
“He went down, I fired him on the spot and told him to pick up his pay on the way out, and he got up, dusted off his sorry ass, and stomped away.
“End of fight. End of story.
“Except that he forgot to go by the house and get his pay. I guess I’ll have to mail it to him.”
“That’ll take some mighty fancy postage,” Wroten said.
“What?”
“Eric Johansson is dead.”
“Dead. Sometime last night”.
“How...? Was it a car accident? Or...?”
“So far all we know is that he was beaten up pretty badly. Head, face, torso, even kicked all to hell along the legs. Somebody, or somebodies did a full-out work-over on him.”
“Hey,” Neilson said, starting to take a step back, then stopping and standing his ground, “you don’t think I had anything to do with that? I gave him a good one, I told you that already, but he walked away from it and I haven’t seen him since.”
“Care to tell me where you were last night?”
“Sure. I was here until nightfall, along with the rest of the boys, working on this pile of scrap metal—that’s pretty much what it’s worth unless I can fix it. Then we all went back to the house and had a long, well-deserved dinner. Mom and I stayed up until, oh, maybe twelve-thirty, one o’clock, watching a little T.V. and trying to figure out how we were going to get the rest of the wheat harvested without that damn...without the flatbed. Then I went to bed.
“I didn’t see Johansson again after he left this field. I swear to it.”
I believed him. Not that that meant anything, of course, but there was something about him that rang true.
I think Wroten felt the same, because he gave up questioning Neilson, satisfied just to warn him to stay close in case anything else came up. Standard stuff. I’d heard it before, actually.
Just after the accident that had killed Terry and Shawn.
Funny, I could think that sentence and not get the shakes.
I looked around for Victoria. I half expected to see her standing near Deputy Wroten, taking in all of the questions and answers. Instead, she was walking around the flatbed, staring up at the bales of hay, checking out something on the ground a few feet from the truck, or standing and simply staring into space, thinking.
“Victoria,” I called.
She glanced over at me, gave me a little wave, and made her way back to the group.
“Are you finished here, Richard?”
“Yes, ma’am. And are you?”
“I think so. However, I think it might be...uh, wisdom if you were to request that Tom not move any of this equipment, not even to repair the flatbed, for a day or so, at least not until Doc Anderson has had a chance to examine the body. Would that be possible, Tom?”
Evidently she had taken Wroten’s agreement for granted, since she was looking directly at Neilson when she finished.
“I...well, I suppose so. I was going to off-load the bales to another flatbed if I could borrow one, maybe from Mitch Knowles or Evan Sanders....”
“I think that might be unwise,” Victoria said softly. “Don’t you agree, Deputy?”
“Yeah, okay. It is a death from unknown causes. Better be safe than sorry, right, Tom.”
Neilson nodded.
“Well, then, Richard,” Victoria said lightly. “Shall we on to Land’s End.”
“After me, ma’am.” Wroten made a small gesture, as if he were about to doff his hat to her.
They both smiled. It wasn’t the time or the place for an outright laugh.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Land’s End Bar was an unprepossessing building, long and narrow and low-seeming, painted a rusty green. It had a single entrance visible from the State Highway and a pair of long and narrow windows high up in the walls on each side of the door. It was shaded by plane trees that were, from their girth, substantially older than the building, even though the bar itself looked well advanced in years.
“Land’s End?” I asked, addressing myself to no one in particular. The four of us—Deputy Wroten, Victoria, Carver, and I—were standing in the roughly paved parking lot. At the far end of the lot, nearly on the other side of the building, half a dozen dust-grimed pickups were parked in a rough row, looking like horses in an old-time Western tethered outside the saloon, waiting patiently for their riders. Carver pointed out one of them as Mrs. Johansson’s. To all appearances it had not been moved since the afternoon before.
“No idea,” Wroten said. “It’s been called that for as long as I can remember. Sounds like it should be out on a headland somewhere, looking out to sea. It’s been through several changes of ownership over the years but the name always remains the same.”
“I can see why owners might want to sell out,” I commented. “It doesn’t look exactly prosperous.”
“It’s looked just like this for as long as I can remember, too. Run-down, beat-up, sagging along the roofline. But there’s a fair crowd out here on the week-ends. It’s outside the city limits, you see, so it’s exempt from some of the rather Draconian laws the City Council imposes on licenses liquor establishments.”
“I don’t believe I’ve ever been this close to it,” Victoria said. “I’ve driven past, of course, but usually it just passes through my vision, part of the landscape to be ignored and forgotten.”
“I can’t say that my experiences with the place have been quite that neutral. We get fairly frequent calls for d-and-d—that’s drunk and disorderly to the layperson,” Wroten said, addressing himself to me.
“I’ve heard the term. Believe it or not, we actually have bars in the big city, too,” I answered. He grinned at me, catching my light sarcasm. Deputy Allen would probably have tried to cuff me for insubordination, insolence, or something else.
“Well, we may as well see what we can learn,” Victoria said.
“Are you sure you want me to come in with you?” Carver sounded
a bit uncertain. “I didn’t actually go in last night. I picked Rick up here in the parking lot.”
“Where?”
“Over there,” he said, pointing to a stretch of packed dirt along the side of the building.
Wroten walked over, searching the ground. At one point he knelt and followed something with his fingertip, as if he had found a track. He waved Victoria over. I followed, but Carver remained where he was standing.
“Here,” Wroten said, indicating some dark brown splotches. “Blood, I think. Certainly signs of a scuffle. One of the guys was down.” He pointed to a long series of curving lines where the dirt looked like it had been swept. “That would probably be Johansson. There were two, maybe three others. The ground’s too hard to be sure. But I’d guess that whatever happened...or at least the last round of whatever happened, happened out here.”
He stood, backed away a bit, and squatted down to take a few photographs.
“Where was Johansson waiting when you got here?”
Carver took a few steps closer to where the rest of us were standing.
“Right there, leaning against the wall?”
“How bad did he look?”
“Well, it was pretty dark. The lights don’t hit much of the parking lot. He looked like he was hurt. I could see blood on his face, and he was hunched over a little, like he was holding his gut.”
“Probably a few broken ribs, judging from the bruises I saw,” Wroten said. His face looked grim. “Why didn’t you take him to the hospital?”
“He wanted to go home. Said he’d be all right. He sounded drunk, you know, slurring and hard to understand. He was pretty wobbly but made it into my car on his own power and he didn’t start really fading until we were at his place. He was still awake when I wrestled him upstairs, otherwise we’d have never made it.”
“Looks like he might have thrown up here,” Wroten said. “Wouldn’t be surprised, if he was that drunk. Must have hurt like a bitch with all those scrapes and bruises.”
“Yes, well, should we go on in now?” Victoria began moving toward the front door.
“You sure you want to go in with me?”
“I don’t want to, but we really have to try to figure this out, don’t we.”
“Yes, ma’am. We do.”
The inside of Land’s End was, to begin with, dark.
For a moment, I felt as if I had been blinded.
It took several minutes for our eyes to get accustomed to the intentional twilight everywhere, except over the bar.
It was a fair sized room, with a row of booths along one wall, small square tables surrounded by chairs scattered along the center, and the bar at the far end. A man stood behind the bar, working on something. He ignored us as we came in.
I thought that peculiar.
Unless he was expecting some kind of fallout from the events of the night before and knew that we were the ones bringing it. The idea didn’t comfort me at all.
There were a couple of mirrors behind the bar, some plate-glass shelving holding bottles of various colored liquids. I’m not a connoisseur of adult beverages, so I couldn’t identify any of them by sight. I doubt I could have identified more than a few by taste.
An old-fashioned jukebox shared the long wall with a door, currently closed, that presumably led to another room.
Even though it was clearly long before opening time, there were several people there, the most visible being a couple of old men who no doubt made Land’s End home-away-from-home for most of the daytime hours and a goodly portion of the night. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the bartender opened the place especially for them, just so they would have somewhere to go during the day.
Mostly the place was silent. I thought I heard a soft clicking sound from the direction of the other room. And maybe, occasionally, men’s voices whispering. There was probably a pool table in there. I wondered who would be using it in the middle of the day.
The old men, I could understand. Pool hustlers were a different story.
The man behind the bar finally deigned to glance up and acknowledge our presence.
“Deputy.”
“Rafferty.”
It was clear that the two men had done business before from the tones of their voices, the slight movements of their heads that comprised recognition, greetings, and—on Rafferty’s part at least—wariness. As soon as Wroten had uttered his name, the other man lowered his gaze back toward the bar.
“Help you?” Rafferty was doing something behind the long, shiny bar that stretched along the entire end of the room. Whatever it was, it required a pad of paper, a stubby pencil, a pile of loose papers of assorted sizes, and absolutely all of his attention. Other than raising his head for that phantom greeting when Wroten had first entered, he had not moved.
Wroten stepped across the room toward the bar.
It was not quite the John-Wayne, thumbs-in-the-belt, boot-heels-clicking-on-the-hardwood-floor, I-don’t-give-a-shit-who-you-are-or-what-you-think-because-I-am-the-law swagger familiar from hundreds of bad movies and mediocre television shows but it wasn’t far from it either.
Yes, there had been business between these two before, not always pleasant, and Deputy Wroten was performing in the persona that the situation required. I didn’t know him all that well, but I had seen him at work before, when this kind of braggadocio had not been needed.
I liked him better the other way.
Still, the act did its job. As soon as Wroten crossed a certain invisible line across the floor, the other man carefully placed his pencil cross-wise on the pad, placed both hands ostentatiously—and fully visibly—onto the bar and leaned forward slightly. His version of “Okay, you’re the law, all right. What do you want?”
“Heard there was a bit of trouble out here last night. Care to tell me about it?”
“You mean with that punk city kid? Spiky hair? Ripped up clothes?”
“That’s the one. Kid got a name?” I suppose he was trying to find out, without actually asking, if Eric Johansson had frequented Land’s End.
“Yeah, that Johansson kid.”
Okay, so he had.
“His name was Eric, sir,” Carver said from the darkness behind me. His voice was tight and strained and made him sound like he was about twelve years old.
Rafferty must have caught the adolescent pitch in it as well as I had.
“Who’s that?” he called.
Carver stepped past me until he was only an arm’s length behind Wroten.
“Hey, who are you?” Rafferty sounded honestly surprised. So he didn’t recognize Carver.
“I’m Carver Ellis. I helped re-shingle your roof last spring.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Now I.... Hey, you’re not old enough to be inside here, the age limit’s posted right there on the front door. Deputy....”
He turned his attention to Wroten as if the officer was planning on arresting him for serving to a minor.
I must admit to a certain sense of relief. If Rafferty couldn’t immediately place Carver’s face, then the boy hadn’t been in the bar before...or at least not often. I didn’t want to think of Carver as drinking in a place like this. In fact, I couldn’t imagine him drinking at all. It just didn’t fit my image of him. So far my image was holding up fairly well, in spite of Deputy Allen’s apparent assumption that in his spare time Carver was a wild-eyed homicidal maniac intent on single-handedly controlling the population explosion in Fox Creek.
Wroten made a quick gesture with one hand, a kind of hold-the-horses-there flick of one hand.
“No one’s accusing you of anything, Rafferty. Mr. Ellis here is with me. This is an official visit, not a social one.”
“Who else is there?”
Rafferty kind of squinted at us. Apparently the lights over the bar—unusually bright right now, no doubt to help him with whatever paperwork he was doing—made it hard for him to see the rest of the room. During regular business hours, the lighting would be more evenly distrib
uted.
“Hello, Mr. Rafferty,” Victoria said, a bit primly perhaps but perfectly politely. “I haven’t seen you since the last Community Picnic. It’s good to see you again.”
“Miz Sears?” Rafferty sounded taken aback. “What are you doing in a...here.”
“Oh,” she laughed lightly, “I’m part of an official police investigation. Isn’t that exciting?”
I stared at her. First Wroten and his big-bad sheriff pose, now Victoria doing a Helen-Hayes little-ole-me bit.
I decided just to be me.
“I’m Lynn Hanson. I’m renting the Van Etten Place,” I said as evenly as possible.
“Ma’am.”
Formal greetings had been exchanged. Now it was up to Wroten.
I was a little surprised when he didn’t repeat his request for Rafferty to talk about the events of the night before.
The silence lengthened. After a long few moments, Rafferty cleared his throat.
“All right. There was a...a set-to here last night. Young Johansson and a couple of locals.”
Eric Johansson had been living—permanently, from what I could gather—with his grandmother for the better part of a year. But he wasn’t local. He probably would never be considered a local, even if he combed his hair just like everyone else, bought his clothes at the same stores, and spent hours with an elocutionist learning just the right touch of a drawl to help him blend in with everyone else.
Or he wouldn’t have if he was still alive.
I expected Wroten to ask who else had been involved.
“What went on?”
“Not much. The Johansson kid...Rick same in half-soused. He was blinking like the light in here hurt his eyes, kind of weaving and stumbling, you know, not falling-down-drunk, not quite, but pretty far along the road.”
“You serve him anything more?”
“Nah. He never asked for anything. Just fumbled his way to one of the booths back there and half-collapsed in it. Normally I’d have insisted that he buy at least a beer, pretend to nurse it for a while, but like I said, he was pretty well out of it.
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