FOURTEEN
THE Sheriff of Converse County was not in his office when I arrived. “Gone down to the drugstore for some salve,” the dispatcher offered, speaking to me via a microphone from her lair, which lay. beyond a bulletproof glass window and a cramped secretarial layout replete with wandering philodendron. “Secretary’s out for a minute,” she garbled through the microphone, managing to indicate that her absence was more keenly felt than the sheriff’s.
I tried to make eye contact with the dispatcher, but the glare on the glass prohibited such niceties. I could just discern the hunch of her shoulders and the glint of fluorescent lighting on her glasses, both unnervingly steady as she added, “Have a seat. He can’t be long.” She indicated my choice of three yellow vinyl lounge chairs that shared the tiny waiting room with an enormous red Coke machine. A fourth chair was occupied by a dried-out little man with faded hair who seemed to be decaying into a puddle formed by his oversized pair of jeans.
The dispatcher was right. Sheriff Elwin Duluth skulked into the building before I’d gotten even halfway through the can of belly wash I wrestled out of the vending machine to wash down the Fritos. I jumped out of the bright yellow lounge chair I had selected and offered him my hand to shake.
The sheriff momentarily froze. He was a tall, wiry man who carried himself with his arms tensed and elbows out, as if he feared an electric shock from his Sam Browne belt, or thought that at any moment someone might challenge him to a draw. I supposed this posture was meant to look imposing, but it led me instead to the impression that he suffered from some horrid rash in his armpits, a supposition that fit with the salve he’d just gone out to purchase.
The sheriff looked me up and down as if I were an impudent teenager he’d just caught necking behind the high school.
I let my hand drop, unmet. “Sheriff Duluth? My name’s Em Hansen. J. C. Menken—you know, the husband of the woman as was murdered here last summer—asked me to help him out a bit with his daughter. Terrible thing. Got a minute?” All this I spat out pretty fast, before the mental machinery behind those cold, arrogant eyes could figure out a way to get rid of me.
The sheriff grimaced. “I suppose.” Ever so gingerly, he grasped the leather of his heavy belt between thumbs and index fingers.
I glanced backward at the little guy who was still sitting quietly in the fourth yellow lounge chair, so near in that tiny room that his knees almost pressed into the backs of mine. Then I looked pointedly at the locked door that led into the inner sanctum of the offices and said, “In private, sir?”
Duluth worked his lips viciously.
The man in the chair smiled attentively. His smile greased Duluth with unctuous friendliness.
Bristling with anger, Duluth buzzed the dispatcher to let us through the door and stormed down a congested hallway past more tiny offices, an equipment vault, and a heavily armored door. When he’d gotten inside his office and put the protection of his desk between us, he eased himself slowly into his swivel chair, taking the last inch with teeth-clenching foreboding. Then he asked, “What exactly’s on your mind, miss?” His last word came out as a hiss, like from a snake.
Miss? Gagh. I hadn’t been called anything but Ms. in years. Welcome home, I thought, Julia Richards’s wrath against patriarchal shitheadedness echoing through my head. Revising my notion concerning the whereabouts of his rash, I took a deep breath to calm my stomach and leaned back in my chair to indicate that I was in no hurry. During the drive up, I had considered as an opening line something warm and cozy, like, I’m trying to get a feeling for how things looked the night of the murder, but clearly such sensitivity would be lost on the likes of Sheriff Elwin Duluth. So instead, I just said, “Cecelia Menken can’t remember what happened from that night until the following weekend. Could you tell me what you found when you went out there? You know, like how she behaved? I’m trying to get a handle on this memory blank of hers, try and understand what set it off.” I spread out in my chair as far as possible to indicate that I was not some compliant little cookie he could push around.
The sheriff leaned stiffly back in his swivel chair. He read the ceiling with his eyes, knit his brow into a fully theatrical frown, and drawled, “Oh, she was sorta dazed.”
“You think she was drugged?”
His eyes locked on mine. “No. Why?”
“I don’t know, just a thought.” Where had it come from? “She dialed the emergency number herself?”
“Right.”
“And when you got there, you were the only ones there—except for Miriam’s body—until when?”
Duluth snarled, “Just what are you trying to get at, Miss—”
I hooked my right foot over the opposite knee and returned his glare. “Hansen. Emily Hansen. My father was Clyde Hansen, down in Chugwater. I’m a friend of Cecelia Menken’s, and I’m trying to learn what I can about her mother’s murder so I can help restore that girl’s mind to balance.”
“I don’t think you’ll find folks very talkative around here,” Duluth sneered.
“Why not?”
The skin around his eyes tensed with anger, as if he found my question impudent.
“Well then,” I continued, “who else came to assist you that night?”
“Lissen here, you’re talking about an unsolved murder. I can’t go handing out any information—”
I held up a hand. “I understand that. Believe me. I’ve worked with crime-scene investigations before, and trust me, I don’t really want to get more than so involved with this one. I’m just trying to help the kid.”
“You saying you’re with law enforcement?”
“Huh? No, I’m a geologist by training. Well, you see, geologists are pretty good at sleuthing things out, too, but we usually prefer to work on mysteries involving rocks and minerals and hundreds of millions of years of missing evidence.”
Duluth narrowed his eyes in obstinate nonunderstanding.
“Erosion,” I said cryptically. “Wipes out more data than you’d want to believe. But getting back to Cecelia—”
“What crime scene, then?” he challenged.
Suspecting that he was about to laugh, I said, “Well, one up in the Big Horn near Meeteetse, and then one down in Denver. Here,” I said, pulling out one of my business cards, which held the now-defunct number of dear old Blackfeet Oil, “this is me. This is the oil company Mr. Menken was president of. Husband of the deceased. And this,” I said as I started to scribble on the back of the card, “is the number for Sergeant Carlos Ortega of the Denver Police Department, Homicide.” I pushed it across the desk toward him.
Duluth looked thoughtfully at the card, his face still drawn down in the guard of contempt. Then, dragging the telephone to him so he wouldn’t have to adjust the position of his hind end, he picked up the receiver and dialed. I could hear a voice connect at the other end. “This is Sheriff Elwin Duluth, Converse County Sheriff’s Office, up here in Wyoming,” he said suspiciously. “I got an Emily B. Hansen here,” he continued, reading from the card. “Says she knows you.”
I heard more chatter over the phone.
The sheriff’s eyebrows rose a half notch. He handed me the phone. “He wants to talk to you.”
I heard Carlos Ortega’s cheerful voice. “Emily,” he sang, “what you up to? And who you giving my desk number out to?”
“He’s legit, Carlos.”
“You didn’t answer my first question.”
“I’ll come see you when I get back in town—nice of you to ask.”
“You better. I’ve been lonesome for the sight of your face. I told the sheriff you were okay, but you play nicely with the lawman, you hear? Now give me back to him, please.”
Duluth took the phone back and scowled, said “Uh-huh” about five times, nodded his head, then asked, “You know this fellah Menken? I see. Oh, uh-huh. Well, I’ll hold on to this number, then. Okay. Uh-huh.” Then he hung up and turned his scowl back at me. “I say again: you’re asking me about an open
murder investigation. I can tell you only that I went to the scene and that your friend was dazed and upset.”
“So whom else could I talk to?” I asked sweetly.
He stared for a while longer, then said, “County coroner, but he’s similarly sworn.”
“Whose name is?”
“Fenton Wilder.”
“And?”
“Ambulance crew from the hospital here.”
“Names?” I had to fight back irritation. Given who he was and what he did, he would know every emergency health professional in this underpopulated part of the universe by their names—first, last, middle, and nick.
He shook his head.
I pulled a small pad of paper and a pen out of my jacket pocket and made a show of making notes. “Men? Women?”
“Couple guys.”
My patience was growing thin, and I fought to control my mouth. Okay, so he wasn’t going to tell me anything about the crime scene, but he was at least going to save me a trip to the county assessor’s office. Calming my voice as best I could, I said, “Well then, maybe you can tell me who owns the ranch Mrs. Menken had leased. You know, the one where she was murdered.”
At this, Sheriff Duluth’s hard lips suddenly stretched into a nasty grin. “Sure I can,” he crooned. “That’d be Po Bradley. You just go talk to ol’ Po; he’ll set you straight.” The grin widened even farther. “Sure, you’re a smart one, ain’t cha? Yeah, you go talk to Po. You’ll figger it out.” And with that, Sheriff Elwin Duluth rose and none too politely showed me to the waiting room’s door, which he quickly slammed against the adoring gaze of the little man in the baggy blue jeans.
FIFTEEN
SO I needed to find a man named Po Bradley. An obvious place to start would have been the telephone book, although it was unlikely that the average rancher might be near a phone at this hour of the afternoon, but Lady Luck had the UPS truck idling by the front of the building. In rural Wyoming, delivery drivers learn to recognize each rural resident and the vehicles they drive, so that if they have the good fortune to spot them in town on the day their new long johns arrive from JCPenney, the driver can save what might be an hour’s round-trip by simply flagging the rancher down. Or by dropping the package into the bed of the pickup, if its occupant is away from the vehicle. I hurried around to the driver’s side of the UPS truck and asked how to find Po Bradley’s place.
The driver glanced up from her electronic notebook. “Out the Cold Springs Road about twelve miles on your right, along La Prele Creek. Can’t miss it; it’s the Broken Spoke Ranch, big sign over the entry road. You lookin for Po?”
“Yeah.” I smiled. “Em Hansen.”
“Oh yeah, I heard you were about. Ginger Henley,” she said, introducing herself. “You’re driving that old beige Dodge pickup over there, right? Well, if you want to talk to Po, you can probably find him over at the Moose before long.”
“The Moose?”
“Moose Hall. About watering time, ain’t it?” She pointed over her shoulder in a general way. “He drives a Ford F-250 with a club cab. Brand-new. Silver. Plates say, ‘Po.’ But then, he’ll stop first at the LaBonte. Makes the rounds, our Po. Turn left at Walnut there.”
I nodded my thanks, made a mental note of the speed at which my arrival was being transmitted along the jungle telegraph, and turned left at the Converse County Bank onto Walnut Street.
Walnut street runs along the northern edge of the old part of downtown Douglas, a town that time has left unmolested. Douglas has stayed solvent and dignified (give or take a statue or two or three honoring the noble jackalope, that infamous cross between a jackrabbit and a pronghorn antelope that sings to lonesome cowpokes by the full moon), neither growing too fast nor dying of population drain. Douglas exists mostly for its own sake, neither bloating on the oil boom of the 1980s like Casper did nor identifying with state and federal government like Cheyenne. It has not lain down with rich folks like Jackson or Pinedale or Saratoga, nor tarted itself up as a Wild West tourist town, like Dubois or Cody. Douglas just is: a small, quiet city settled by Scots and Germans who labored long and hard and held on to their land.
The LaBonte Inn is a three-story turn-of-the-century railroad hotel built of red brick. I pulled my truck around the corner onto Second Street and parked, then sat in the cab for a moment, briefly surveying my surroundings: big brick post office to the south. Anthony’s clothing store to the west. Row of shops catercorner. On down Walnut, the old railroad station itself, now a video rental emporium. Not a single silver F-250 with vanity plates in sight.
I’ve seen grander hotels than the LaBonte Inn. Denver has the excellent Brown Palace and Cody has the atmospheric Irma, both of which were created with fancier trimmings which they’ve had the good sense to conserve. The LaBonte has a solid sense of itself none the less, right down to the five-foot-tall jackalope over the main entrance. I wandered past the coffee shop, a booth and counter affair with plate-glass windows (one embellished with a cowboy shouting and kicking his horse, which had its forelegs raised in victory over having just roped a calf; caption: GET LOST YA DURN GLORY SEEKER!), and ducked into a narrow hall that led under a plywood-faced marquee rimmed with twenty-watt lightbulbs. I found myself in a lobby that had as yet evaded the remodeler’s sledgehammer. It was graced by an old glassed-in registration desk, a lot of dark wood, and a lovely patterned tile floor. Yet one more jackalope peered jauntily at me from a glass case set into one wall. Several square wooden pillars gave way at hip level to tapering white plaster cylinders, and I could see in a wooden archway the remains of a fine old main entryway, beyond which now lay a banquet room full of spit-polished businessmen, one of whom was rousing the rabble from a lectern.
I turned toward the man who sat at the registration desk. “Help you?” he asked, without looking up from his paperwork.
“Ah, yeah. What’s a room cost here?”
“Range upward from thirty-three a night. Fix you right up.”
I hesitated. The current state of my finances wouldn’t cover many nights on the road, even at those rates. I smiled sheepishly and said something about scoping the possibilities, figuring I’d better give Menken a call before I started running a tab. “Which way to the bar?” I added, completing the impression that I must be a down-on-her-luck drifter. The man pointed to his left, smiled, and went back to his work.
The ceiling in the saloon had been lowered to give it that cozy feeling: I crossed the room past the Bud and Miller neons and the electronic dartboards and took a seat at the bar. As I passed, nobody in the room except the bartender looked directly at me, but my arrival was surely noted by every primate in the place. A stranger breaches the sanctity of the deep jungle. A hush falls through the treetops. Chatter and grooming cease as the newcomer is evaluated. Gender? Female. Bearing? Guarded, yet friendly. The alpha chimpanzee, a giant male, makes a show of ignoring the intruder, picks at a flea, scratches as if bored. The local females shift in their branches. The low-status males stare openly … .
It’s unusual for an unknown woman of any age to wander alone into a saloon in Wyoming, whether she’s a wanna-be detective investigating the local cause célèbre or not. I looked around. There were three men and a woman sitting in low chairs at one of the little faux-wood Formicatopped tables, a pair of weatherworn old men at another, and one lone man sitting three stools away at the bar. A typical turnout, I supposed, for a Friday afternoon.
Having been taught some manners, I addressed myself to the bartender, a middle-aged woman whose long suit in life was clearly patience. I ordered a beer to nurse and asked, “What’s in those bottles?” pointing at two large square vessels full of vile-colored liquids. One was labeled AFTER SHOCK, and the other, AVALANCHE. It was an idle question, meant to illicit a response like “Bourbon” or “Whiskey,” a kind of conversation opener.
“Oh, they’re terrible,” she said bluntly. “That one tastes like mouthwash, and the other one’ll make you sick.”
“Oh.” My eye t
raveled down the bar toward a row of bottles that were swathed to the neck in brown paper bags. A sign below them read $1 UNLESS YOU CAN GUESS WHAT rr is. THEN IT’S FREE!!! So much for promotional gimmicks. I took a sip of my beer and said, “I’m looking for a man named Po Bradley. You know him?”
The woman raised one eyebrow half a notch, as much as to inquire, Doth a bear void himself in the sylvan wilderness? “Not here yet,” she said. “You seen him, Fred?”
The man sitting at the bar cleared his throat. He was fiftyish, and he wore brown twill Sears work trousers, an insulated denim jacket, and a King Ropes gimme cap. His pendulous yellow mustaches quivered as he spoke: “Po Bradley?”
“Yeah.”
He was silent for a while, making a display of looking thoughtful. He ran one gnarled hand down his cheeks, a gesture that ended in a ritualistic smoothing of his mustaches. “No, ain’t seen him.”
Beta chimp wimps out. I took a sip of my beer. “Know who has?” I inquired.
He glanced involuntarily at one of the men seated at the table, a guy with enough flesh to build two men, with spare grease left over for a third. “Nope, sorry ma’am, can’t help ya.”
“Shall I ask him?” I suggested.
At my question, a bass voice boomed from the middle of the big man. “Ask me what?” he rumbled, without looking up from the plate of french fries he was consuming. He was one of those guys built to challenge the snaps on the biggest-sized cowboy shirt ever made, and on closer inspection, he wasn’t just fat. As he looked up, turning his enormous head and throat to regard me, my busy little brain quickly shifted metaphors. Jungle be damned: I was facing off with a bull in his private pasture, with no fence or red cape between us.
He chewed rhythmically. His eyes reflected a passing interest but held no fear toward a puny little varmint like myself. I half-expected to see a tasseled tail whip up to clear flies from his back.
My beer and I picked our way gingerly toward his table. Nice bull; just want to read the markings on your ear tag … Stopping a few feet farther out than I usually would in approaching a stranger in a public place, I nodded a greeting and said, “Hi. I’m Em Hansen.”
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