Bye, Bye, Love

by Virginia Swift

  “So you’re saying Mrs. Perrine’s in dire trouble, needs help. In a sense, this woman is as much a victim of her husband as my sister was.”

  Sally thought about that. “Yeah, I guess.” But the idea made her uncomfortable. Jimbo had been a certified sexist pig, to be sure, but she still had her doubts that he’d been a murderer.

  “What do you think Nina would have done, in this situation?” Cat asked.

  Without hesitation, Sally said, “She would have said that sisters have to help each other, and would have written a check.”

  “Yep. That’s what I think, too,” Cat said. “So I’m inclined to go ahead with the plan to cut the Perrine woman in on the profits. If there are any profits, by the time this insanity plays out.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’ve got about as big a PR mess as you need,” Sally said.

  Cat laughed, not heartily, but it was a recognizable laugh nonetheless. “Sally, I’ve been in the philanthropy business a long time, and let me tell you something. Nobody’s pure, even the most obvious victims of persecution. Hungry village kids in India beat up smaller hungry village kids.”

  “You blow my mind,” Sally told her.

  “I might be losing my mind,” Cat replied. “But I swear, the minute I got off the phone with that detective, before those idiots called from Laramie, I heard Nina’s voice in my head, telling me to live for peace, not anger and vengeance. Taking care of Mrs. Perrine and her kids is something Nina would have done. So we’ll go ahead as planned. Whitebird can deal with the fallout. He can take the woman an apple pie with a freaking American flag stuck in it, if need be.”

  “The last thing they need is food,” Sally told Cat, “but I catch your drift.” She paused, then brought up the delicate subject on her mind. “I hate to mention this,” she said, “but there’s this whole question of why Jimbo was shot. That was no hunting accident.”

  “No,” Cat agreed. “Seems obvious. Somebody paid him to kill my sister, then got rid of him. The cops are trying to figure out who, and why. Meanwhile, I’ve got Quartz working on the foundation’s computer files and trying to hack into Nina’s e-mail. I want answers, and I want them before the benefit.” For the first time, Cat Cruz sounded worn down. “I don’t know how much longer I can take this,” she said with a hitch in her voice. “It’s getting really hard. Part of me just wants to shut down this operation and go sit on a beach somewhere and cry.”

  “You could do that,” Sally said. “I certainly wouldn’t blame you, and neither would any reasonable person.”

  Cat gave a shaky laugh. “Right. But then, we’re talking about memorializing Angelina Cruz here. Not many people would have called her ‘reasonable.’ I owe it to my crazy little sister to put on the big show. After that, I guess we’ll just have to see.”

  “Does Stone know about the gun?” Sally asked, thinking it might do Cat good to talk to him.

  “I don’t know,” Cat answered. “I’d better give him a call. I’ll see you next week.”

  No sooner had she hung up than the phone rang again. This time it was Sam Branch, sounding as if he’d swallowed a porcupine. “Band practice is off tonight,” he croaked. “I’ve got a fever of a hundred and two degrees.”

  “God, I hope I don’t get whatever it is you’ve got,” said Sally, who dreaded colds and always contracted a touch of paranoia during virus season.

  “This from the anthrax poster girl,” Sam said.

  “It was talcum powder,” Sally said.

  “How about a little sympathy? But besides the fact that I feel like shit, Dwayne’s having second thoughts about the gig. You gotta admit, it’s a real cluster fuck, Mustang. You’ve really outdone yourself this time.”

  “Outdone myself! What the hell have I done?” she exclaimed.

  “Put it this way. You’re the only chick I know who could have dragged us into making an appearance on behalf of some California Bambi lovers’ outfit, for starters. Then, before we even hear about your grand plan, one of the eco-freaks is killed, and next our bass player gets shot himself, and now they’re saying it was Jimbo who blew away Nina Cruz. Then there’s the mad cow showing up in our little community. And with all of that, we’re still practicing away, acting like it’s just another gig at the Elks Club. Unbelievable.”

  “You act like I planned the whole thing, Sam,” Sally said. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “No. What’s ridiculous is your fantasy of playing with Stone Jackson, come hell or high water. Get a clue: He didn’t show this week. If he can’t be bothered to rehearse with us even once before the gig, we’re off the bus.”

  True. Stone had called to say he couldn’t make it to Laramie. Something about business to attend to with the Busted Heart Ranch. She’d been disappointed, to say the least.

  Sam continued. “Has it somehow slipped your mind that two people have gotten killed, and you yourself recently received an extremely creepy care package? How stupid is it to still be hanging in on this one?”

  Sam almost sounded as if he was worried about her. But she knew him better than that, of course. “I know you pride yourself on being pragmatic to the point of complete self-absorption, Sam Branch. But in this case, I have only two words to say to you: Arvida Perrine.”

  “Forget it. No way Arvida gets a piece of the take now. The tofu eaters will cut her off quicker than you can say ‘Tom Eagleton,’ ” Sam said.

  “I just talked to Nina’s sister,” Sally told him, feeling a wee bit smug at imparting the news. “No change in plans. They’re sticking by the suffering widow.”

  “Yeah. Well, that’s just peachy,” Sam said. “I still don’t know whether the boys will go for it.”

  “Tell them this. There’s going to be a big bash the day before, for performers and crew. They’ll get the fanciest Thanksgiving dinner in town, and they’ll get to eat it with Emmylou.”

  “I refrain,” said Sam, “from making the obvious comment.”

  Sally took the receiver from her ear and silently glared at the phone.

  “You know,” Sam said, “Jimbo was a racist and a sexist and a douche bag and all that, but I still can’t feature him plugging Nina Cruz. It’s not like she was an eight-point buck or something.”

  Sally had doubts of her own. She played devil’s advocate. “Come on, Sam. You heard the way he talked about her, getting what she deserved and so forth.”

  “It’s a free country. He can say whatever he wants. That doesn’t mean he was a murderer. If I had a dollar for every time you’ve threatened to shoot me, I could buy Wyoming and Montana, too. And that doesn’t even count the times you told me killin’ was too good for me,” he added.

  “Jimbo was broke,” Sally pointed out. “Somebody could have offered him a whole lot of money.”

  “Oh yeah?” Sam countered. “Well then, where is that money? I hear Arvida’s about to be out on the street. If Jimbo scored big before he died, he must have hid the cash.”

  Sally thought about it. Sam was right. Things weren’t adding up. “Maybe he didn’t collect. Maybe that’s why he was out in Albany the day he was killed.”

  Sam sneezed loudly. “Yeah. Whatever.”

  “Wait one more minute. I hate to say it, but I’m with you,” Sally told Sam. “However big an asshole he was, I just don’t see Jimbo having pulled the trigger on a human being.”

  He sneezed again. “You play detective. I gotta go back to bed.”

  Their conversation kicked off nearly a week of shitty weather and heavy speculation. By Friday afternoon, the cloud ceiling had lowered to about a foot above everybody’s head, and it pretty much stayed there. Soon, wet snow mixed with sleet began falling, then the wind picked up, and icy crystals swirled and eddied over the ground, sticking here and there in piles and swales. It warmed up enough by Monday morning for some of the snow to melt, but another front rushed in, blowing sixty-mile-an-hour bone-shaking winds, and freezing the slush on the ground into treacherous patches of black ice. The Albany County Sheriff’s D
epartment was stretched to the limit handling one-car spin-outs and rollovers, two-car skid collisions, and cell phone calls from people who’d slipped on sidewalks and broken elbows and hips.

  The Thursday before Thanksgiving, Sally opened one eye to watch Hawk waking up grouchy. He looked out the window, took note of the light snow falling, and cursed. “Look at that frigging weather. Now I’m gonna have to cancel the all-day field trip I planned for my graduate class. I’ll be one major assignment short for the term and have to shuck and jive my way through the rest of the semester.”

  Sally listened to the first round of complaining, assessed the extent of his surly mood. She didn’t have class until the afternoon, but she decided it would be worth slip-sliding through the snow to get the hell out of the house and spend the morning in her office. Still, she suggested he pick her up at noon and take her to lunch at the Wrangler.

  “I’d rather go to El Conquistador,” he said crankily. “I don’t feel like a grease burger.”

  Opting for lard-laden beans and deep-fried tortillas over burgers and onion rings wasn’t exactly choosing the path of virtue.

  She had a productive morning, grading her way to the bottom of the stack of term papers, plowing through mail and messages, returning phone calls. She tried again and failed to find Quartz, but this time, when she called the Wild West office, Kali answered.

  “I’m so glad I got you,” Sally told her, trying for cordial, but wondering if she’d overdone it and ended up more in the range of effusive. “As you’ve probably heard, I’ve begun working on a biography of Nina. I’m hoping to interview as many of the people who were close to her as I can, and I’ve talked with most of your colleagues already. They’ve been very forthcoming, although of course there are so many different angles,” Sally said, hoping that might inspire Kali to want to tell her version of the story. “I know how busy you must be, right now, but I’d really like to get your thoughts.” She put a little extra emphasis on the word your.

  “There are a lot of demands on my time,” Kali answered in her usual whisper. “I don’t really know when I’d be able to fit you in.”

  “Just half an hour would be great,” Sally said, hoping that once she got Kali talking, she’d be able to keep her going. “You were so important to her. I’ve learned a lot from my conversations with others, but it’s so hard to separate feelings and biases from fact. It’s really crucial to me to have your perspective.” Sally was determined to let Kali know that she was getting other sides of the story of Nina Cruz, and given the sniping and jealousies she’d seen and heard about, she figured Kali would take the bait. But was that laying it on too thick?

  Maybe it was. Or maybe not. Kali hesitated before responding, and when she did, there was a note of wariness in her voice. “All right. Half an hour”—shuffling of papers— “at eleven, on Monday. I’m going out of town for a few days, and will be very busy when I get back, so don’t be late.” She hung up without bothering to wait for Sally’s answer.

  Leave town? The week before the benefit? Where would Kali be going at such a time, and why?

  “She may not be going anywhere in this god-awful weather,” Hawk observed when Sally briefed him over chips and fire-breathing salsa at El Conquistador. “In case you haven’t checked your e-mail, they’re closing the university early this afternoon. They’re predicting gale-force winds and snow mixed with rain. Anyway, looks like both of our classes will be canceled.”

  “Bummer,” she said, and motioned the waitress over to order a Dos Equis with her chicken taco and chile relleno. Hawk opted for a Negra Modelo with his enchilada platter.

  El Conquistador wasn’t the rumor mill that either the Wrangler or the Yippie I O were (perhaps that had something to do with the presence, or absence, of Delice Langham), but at tables all around Sally and Hawk, people seemed to be offering up their theories on who had shot Jimbo Perrine. A grizzled man in gray twill work pants and shirt, eating tacos with a younger version of himself, claimed to have overheard a state game warden say that the only way to stop poachers was to shoot ’em. And everybody knew how Jimbo felt about legal limits on game. The younger man replied that maybe the answer was to shoot the game wardens.

  Sally’s cell phone rang.

  “Can you turn that stupid thing off?” Hawk said.

  She looked at the display. A number she thought she’d dialed sometime, but one she didn’t recognize. “I’ll be back in a second,” she told Hawk, getting up and walking across the restaurant to an empty dining room as she answered the call.

  It was Delice’s friend from the vet lab. “You didn’t ingest any of that nutritional supplement by any chance, did you?” she asked, nerves plain in her voice.

  “No,” Sally told her. “I only opened the can once, looked at the stuff, and then put the lid back on. I washed my hands a whole bunch after.”

  “Good,” said the woman, sounding relieved. “I wanted to get that squared away first thing. You see, we ran some tests on the powder. It’s protein all right,” she continued, “but not soy. It’s bovine material.”

  “Bovine? Dried hamburger?” Sally said.

  “Hardly. More like bonemeal, spinal cord, organ tissue,” said the woman. “We have to run some more tests, but we’re concerned that there might be abnormalities in the chemistry.”

  “What do you mean?” Sally asked.

  “Some problems with the proteins. I don’t want to say any more, but I did want to get back to you, in case you had more of the stuff. You don’t want to keep it around, and we’ll want to see if this sample is an anomaly, or if there’s a larger problem. We’ll be glad to come to your house and pick it up.”

  “That’s all I’ve got,” said Sally. “But there’s more of it out at Shady Grove. And I want to make sure I’m understanding you. Problems with the proteins—does that mean you think there are prions in this stuff?”

  “I’d rather not speculate,” said the woman. “You can understand that the last thing we want to do is cause a panic.”

  “I won’t say anything to anyone. And since I was the one who brought it in, at least tell me this. Are you concerned that this material came from diseased animals?”

  “You didn’t hear it from me,” said the woman. “I’m calling the police now.” She hung up.

  Sally ended the call and stood a moment, staring at her phone. Experience told her that the counterculture had embraced a lot of wacky ideas about health. She’d known a woman who swore by something she called Magic Mud to cure her children’s diaper rashes, and it had turned out to be bentonite clay. Nina Cruz might have thought that cow powder would keep her skin smooth and her joints lubricated. Might have, that is, if she hadn’t been a devout vegetarian. She couldn’t have known what was in that can. How in the world had she gotten hold of the stuff?

  Dickie’s cell number was programmed into Sally’s phone. He answered on the first ring.

  But now people were coming into the empty dining room, seating themselves at tables.

  “I’ve got something I need to talk to you about,” Sally told him. “I can’t talk now, but I can meet you at the station right after lunch. This is really important, Dick.”

  He said he’d meet her in half an hour.

  “We have to go to the sheriff’s office after lunch,” she told Hawk, looking around at the crowded restaurant. “I can’t explain now.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Should we leave now?”

  “Dickie won’t be there for a little bit. We might as well eat up.”

  Somehow, the taco and relleno didn’t seem quite so appetizing. But she finished her beer.

  Outside, the wind had died down, but the snow had thickened. Hawk and Sally stopped to clear the windows and windshield of Hawk’s pickup before taking off for home, snow falling so fast now that his wipers could barely keep up. Visibility was so bad that he had to pump the brakes hard and slide into the other lane at Third and Ivinson to keep from plowing into a skidding minivan.

  Sa
lly’s purse flopped over, spilling its contents out all over the floor. “Shit,” she said, bending down to stuff things back in, a fair undertaking. Later, she would reflect that her overloaded tote bag and the terrible weather had probably saved her life, since she was still bending down when the bullet shattered the back window of the pickup and slammed out the front.

  Chapter 22

  Cold Facts

  Sally would never know how Hawk did it, but he managed, somehow, to get the truck to the side of the road without further damage. Talk about grace under pressure. Then he was brushing chunks of safety glass out of her hair, and then he was hugging her so hard she thought her ribs would break.

  It was some time before she realized she was crying. It would be much longer before she stopped.

  Ordinarily, there would have been plenty of witnesses to a shooting in broad daylight, two blocks from the beating heart of downtown Laramie. But the weather had kept most sane people at home, and the fast-falling snow obscured visibility and slowed reaction time. A ski parka–clad woman pushing a very bundled-up child in a baby jogger had seen the glass explode, and she’d stood on the sidewalk and watched a light-colored car veer around Hawk’s truck and turn north on Fifth Street. But she’d been so stunned, she hadn’t really noted the make or model, let alone the license-plate number. She was the only eyewitness.

  The police arrived quickly, closed off four blocks of Ivinson Street, and got busy working the crime scene. They took about a million pictures of the truck, inside and out, the tire tracks in the snow, the bullet hole in the windshield. While Sally and Hawk demonstrated the positions they’d been in when the shot was fired, a deputy set out to follow the tracks of the light-colored car around the corner at Fifth. He disappeared into the veil of white, only to reappear minutes later with the bad news that the tracks had led back to Third Street, where the driver had evidently turned south. Third Street being one of two or three streets in Laramie that had any kind of traffic that day, more cars had since driven by and obscured the tracks.