“You mean before he sucked the ranch up his nose.” In cash?
Gwen’s eyes closed. “Oh, you know about that, huh?” When her eyes opened, she spoke quickly, more easily, obviously relieved to have his little secret out. “Oh, yeah, that boy likes to think he can play like the big dogs. Keeps his old tail wagging, y’see.” She shook her head, willing her bitterness to consume her sorrow.
I set down my coffee mug and rubbed both hands over my face. “I don’t suppose when he’s down in Saratoga he keeps company with a man named Al Rosenblatt, does he?”
Gwen scowled fiercely. “I stay out of that business.” She looked sharply at me. “This Rosenbap ain’t the big blondie in the BMW, is he? Naw, blondie don’t look even half Jewish.”
I wanted to laugh at the boneheadedness of her stereotype, except that it wasn’t funny. Even less funny was the realization that Po knew damned well who Chandler was, and had known all along. So he’d been playing me, and successfully. “No, the man in the BMW would be Chandler Jennings, I think.”
“Oh, yeah, I heard that name once or twice.”
“And you’ve seen him.”
“Well, yeah, he started coming around two, three years back. Hah. Comes in over the back road like so much bad weather.”
“Over the mountains?”
Gwen gestured tiredly out her kitchen window toward the ramparts of the Laramie Range. “Yep. Comes in over the Esterbrook Road with his little deliveries from Saratoga. Damn Po. We was doin’ fine. I could of run that spread without him, let him fool around all he wants, but no, he’s got to go and get hitched up with that crowd. Wildcat oil wells, indeed!”
“You got this house out of it,” I said, half to comfort and half to confirm my suspicions.
Gwen’s eyes turned hard again. “I’d rather have my dignity.”
I looked deep into her eyes, mapping the damage. Chandler had barely met this woman, yet here was his mark. Miriam. Julia. Mrs. Wentworth. Heather. Cecelia. Why did I want to meet him? Was I una loca, as Sergeant Ortega said? Or did I just want to map the rest of this wreckage with my own eyes, then decide for myself just how much of him was devil and how much prince? “Gwen, would you have any idea how to reach this guy?”
She looked at me askance. “You looking for what he’s selling?”
“No. I’m just trying to find out—aw, hell, wouldn’t you like to get Po’s connection behind bars? Think: did he talk to him on the phone ever? You might have an old phone bill, or …”
Gwen examined me narrowly as she took a last drag off the short end of her current cigarette and groped for another. “Wait here a minute,” she said, and left the room. She was gone for perhaps five minutes, and I could hear her rummaging around through closets at the other end of the house. When she returned, she was carrying a packet of phone bills, all stuffed back into their envelopes and held together with a blue elastic band. Still holding her precious cigarette between her first two fingers, she picked through the stack with her thumb and finally selected one. “This ought to have it,” she said. She pulled the pages out of the envelope and began to read, holding the sheets at arm’s length to get them in focus. “Here, this call’s to Saratoga, and this one, too. Same number both times. Try that.”
“Let me write it down,” I said, pulling my notepad out of my pocket.
Gwen was talking again. “Course, I don’t think blondie is the kingpin of that gang. He’s strikes me more as the delivery boy. Or the scout.”
“How do you figure?”
“I hear cocaine costs a bundle, but we wound up with more, not less.”
“And?”
“And he was always asking questions. Cocaine for information, that’s the way it seemed. I never did figure out what the money was for.”
“What about the oil lease?”
“Oh, sure, that was the way they packaged it.”
“And then Miriam’s dead, and they change their minds.”
Gwen’s sharp little eyes riveted on mine again. “Yeah.”
I put the notepad back in my pocket. “Gwen, just one woman to another? I suggest you go on not liking it and go on keeping your nose out of it.”
“Mum’s the word.”
“You ever tell any of this to Sheriff Duluth?”
Gwen Bradley reeled back her head like I’d just made a bad smell. “Why would I want to go and do that?” she inquired as she lined the cigarette up with her narrow lips one more time.
Parking the rental car by the towering jackalope statue that graces the main drag of Douglas, I walked until I found a public pay booth and dialed the number Gwen Bradley had dug out of her husband’s telephone bills. A deep male voice answered. “Hello?”
“Oh, hi. May I please speak with Chandler?”
“Chandler?” the voice said, sounding annoyed. I heard the soft rumbling of a hand being placed over the receiver, but the cover was so sloppy that I heard, “Where’s loverboy gotten to these days? Oh, back up there with the movie stars and the big tits, huh? You ever figure out where his hidey-hole is up there?” The muffling went away, and the voice said, “He’s not here. Who should I tell him called?”
“Oh, just … um … a friend.” I tried to sound nervous, like I was a batbrained female looking for sex or drugs, or both.
“Sure, lady. Well, he’s not here, so I can’t help you.” I could hear male tittering in the background.
“Thank you.” Movie stars with big tits. Was Chandler in Los Angeles? No, movie stars and big tits. I rang off and dialed information. “Jackson,” I said, when asked what city. It was the only place in Wyoming that had movie stars as a regular diet, and it was world-famous for the mountains known as Les Grands Tetons, bigger than anything Hollywood could ever produce with mere silicon.
“Go ahead.”
“Do you list an Edward Jennings?” It was worth a try.
“No, I’m sorry.”
I hung up the phone and thought a while. Jackson, Wyoming, a nice little town that had been eaten alive by tourists. Why would Chandler hide there? Even as I asked myself the question, I had the answer: Because he would blend right in. The old boy knows the fine art of hiding in plain sight!
I lifted the phone back off the hook and dialed Jackson information again. “Do you list a place called the Rambling Rose?”
Pause. “Here’s your number,” said the operator, and clicked me off onto an automatic number server. I held my breath, punching the numbers into the phone before I could forget them. The phone rang once, twice. Clicked. “Rambling Rose Bed-and-Breakfast,” a hearty female voice told me.
“Oh, hi,” I said winningly. “I’m looking for my friend Chandler Jennings. Is he staying there?”
There was a slight pause. “He’s not here just now,” she said, curiosity giving her tone a lilt. “May I take a message?”
“Do you expect him later?”
Another pause, this time with rustling of paper. “He’ll be back tomorrow afternoon. Whom may I say is calling?”
“Thanks, that’s all I wanted to know.” I hung up quickly, before she could ask again.
Sheriff Elwin Duluth seemed as irritated by my presence as he had the week before. “So you want to hear the tape,” he muttered as he loaded a cassette into a machine. “Hold on to your hat.” The machine began to fight him. He punched buttons, swore.
“Is that the original?” I asked.
“No way. We keep that locked up. This is a copy we made to send to Denver for that psychiatrist lady.” At last, he figured out which button made the tape play and punched it.
I heard a squawk and a bunch of static, and then the dispatcher’s voice, barely intelligible over the tinny noise of the recording equipment: “Sheriff’s Department.” The voice was answered by a commotion and the roaring of the equipment, but no voices. The dispatcher’s voice came on again. “State your name and your emergency, please.”
In the background, I heard a woman scream: a long, harrowing sound descending into a groan, co
ming from some distance from the telephone. “Help me!” the woman pleaded. “Please.” There was weeping, and the sounds of more struggle. “Oh, God, please stop him!”
The dispatcher’s voice came again: “State your name, please.”
The phone was dropped, picked up again. “Cecelia.” This voice was close to the telephone, barely above a whisper. I wouldn’t have understood what had been said if I hadn’t known the voice.
“Who?”
“Cecelia Menken.” A crash in the background.
“Do you require assistance?” the dispatcher’s monotonous voice inquired.
“Um, yes. My mother—” Another crash, and heavy footfalls. Hysterical screaming began anew.
“Do you require an ambulance?”
“Um, yes. Anything.”
“State your location, please.”
“Um, the ranch.”
“You at Po Bradley’s old homestead?” the dispatcher said, interpreting the display on her instrument.
“Yes. And, um, can you hurry?”
“We have a cruiser on the way, dear, and the ambulance will follow. Make sure your gates and doors are unlocked so they can get in. Can you do that safely?”
“Um …” This last sound quavered with fear. The crashes were getting louder now.
“Who’s in the house with you?” the dispatcher asked.
“Please, God!” the voice in the background wailed.
The line clicked dead.
THIRTY-FOUR
DESPERATELY needing a friend to talk to, I found my way back to the telephone. I began to dial Ortega’s number. I wanted to tell him what I had heard, that she had died in agony, that she had sounded not just frightened and in pain but also incredibly sad. But I couldn’t bear to hear him worry about me again.
I hung and fussed through the phone book for a moment, looking for the county listings. Dialed. A woman’s voice said, “County coroner.”
“Mr. Wilder, please.”
“Oh, he’s down at the drugstore,” the woman said. “Getting some salve.”
I thanked her and headed down the sidewalk along Center Street toward the R-D Drugstore, wondering abstractedly just what kind of skin affliction was going around among public employees. As I neared the doorway, a slight man with a washed-out mustache, wire-rimmed glasses, and a classic old palamino-colored Stetson hat was just walking rather stiffly out the door, carrying a small paper sack. “Mr. Wilder?” I called.
He turned. Waited expectantly.
I introduced myself. “You’ve probably heard about me by now. I’m trying to help Cecelia Menken.”
He nodded and blinked, his eyelids coming to rest a bit lower than they had been, as if on guard.
“I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about the deceased.”
“I can’t talk about that,” he answered.
“Well, I know this is a murder case, and as yet unresolved, but—”
“And I’m a sworn servant of this county. Now, if you don’t mind,” he said, bending stiffly forward in preparation for his continued transit up the sidewalk.
“Was she badly bruised?” I asked.
Fenton Wilder brought himself up with a start and squinted at me from behind his glasses. He may not have been willing to use his voice, but his body English spoke volumes; it said, Now, how would you know about that? Recovering himself, he said, “Good day, miss,” headed along to his Carry-All, climbed in, and drove away.
As the gate to the old homestead of the Broken Spoke Ranch was locked, I parked the rental car by the side of the road outside the cattle guard and climbed over it, closing the final two-tenths of a mile to the old Bradley homestead on foot. The air was brisk but clear, bringing the distant backdrop of the mountains into a sharp, pale float beyond the ranch house. No dust kicked up around my boots; the winter’s snows had left the hard, dry ground packed as firm as asphalt. As I walked, I studied the bumps and ruts beneath my feet, then checked to see if my boots had left tracks. They had not, or at least no markings your average white-boy sheriff might notice. I wondered what condition the earth had been in the night Miriam had been murdered.
I made a complete circuit around the house, looking in at each window. Nothing had changed in the week since I’d seen it. Through one window, I could see both the kitchen telephone Cecelia must have called from and the passageway through to the bedrooms. There were bare wooden floors and plastered walls between the kitchen and that hallway. The sound must have amplified as in a drum.
I shook my head. No wonder Cecelia had blocked the memory.
“That’s where they found the girl,” a voice said behind me.
I spun around. Po Bradley stood not twenty feet behind me, one foot up on the outside of the split-rail fence that kept livestock out of the dooryard. Po, the one man in Douglas I did not want to see or have see me. “Nice to see you again,” he said.
I glanced quickly around, alarmed that I hadn’t heard him approach. I couldn’t see his truck. I looked back at him, scanned his hips and hands to make certain he wasn’t armed. “Where’d you come from?” I asked, trying to make the question sound friendly, which it wasn’t.
“Oh, an old hand has his ways of getting around,” he said slyly.
I could see my car up by the entrance road, where I’d left it carefully tucked out of sight of the road. It stood alone. I looked to the paddock by the barns. No truck.
“No, I didn’t come from the barn, either,” he said, now clearly enjoying himself. “Come on now; don’t you think I know my way around the place I grew up on?”
I scanned the surrounding territory: the hay fields, the line of as-yet-leafless cottonwoods that followed the banks of the stream. I followed the trees to the junction with the irrigation ditch that watered the hay fields, and caught a glint of chrome behind a budding willow, just beyond the requisite strands of barbed wire that would keep the livestock away from this steep-sided approach to life-giving water.
Po chuckled. “That’s right, the irrigation ditch. Now, a fellah wanted to get onto this place and not leave no tracks, what would he do?”
I didn’t like the way this was going. He was right: all a man had to do was walk in along the dry ditch, do his dirty deed, retrace his steps, and lift the floodgate. Whoosh, his tracks would be erased. I almost asked, Is that how it happened? but caught myself in time.
Very carefully, I started wandering toward the gate that led out through the rail fence. Po matched my pace. I continued walking toward my car, glancing at him only as if I was really thinking about something else, casually checking to make certain he was not armed.
“Didn’t expect to see you back here so soon,” he crooned. “Though, I must say it’s a nice sight, a young thing like you around the old place again.”
“Thanks,” I muttered. I kept on walking and talking, moving toward my car. “It’s a nice place. Don’t see many like it anymore. Just wanted another look.”
“Sure, sure,” Po said, swinging his near shoulder closer and closer to me with each stride. “Just a little visit to admire the scenery.”
I was halfway to the car now, and if need be, I was certain I could outrun him. I picked up the pace.
“You’re a little late for lunch,” Po continued, “but you can come on up to my place anyways. I don’t mind an early dinner.”
As my mind worked to decode the threat behind his words, part of it reeled at the thought that this line of palaver was enough to rouse the local women. Winters must be pretty boring here in Converse County, I thought. But wait, everyone except his wife holds this guy in affectionate esteem, and they distrust the Sheriff. They think Duluth wants to stick him with a murder he didn’t commit. Or for which they don’t want to see him hang. I shot Po a sidelong glance. Was I making him nervous? “Well, here’s my car,” I said, quickly jumping in and slamming the door. Then, not to seem spooked by his behavior, I rolled down the window and casually let my arm drape across the lock button, dropping it home. Maybe
he’d forget he’d seen me. Maybe he didn’t even know the men from Saratoga were looking for me. Maybe pigs had wings.
Po leaned his elbows onto the window frame. “Maybe you want to clear things up, where our old sheriff does not,” he drawled.
“Maybe I do.”
“Think on it. The irrigation ditch.” And with that, he straightened up, turned, and started to walk away.
I leaned out of the window and called after him. “Wait! Po, why don’t you just come out with it? Come on, tell me what you’re thinking!” I now had my hand on the ignition. If he tried anything, I could run for it. “Tell me about Saratoga, damn it!”
Po turned back. “Saratoga?”
“Yes, Saratoga. How did Miriam know to rent this place? Did you meet her there?”
Po looked at me appraisingly. “Well, I suppose you could say I did.”
“Where? Maybe at a dance?”
Po smiled saucily, bounced his head around with an effort at charm. “Well, now—”
“Or did maybe Chandler Jennings make the connection?”
Po let his face hang. He seemed to age ten years in an instant. “Oh, you know him, huh?”
“Never met the guy. But you have. You described him to me last Saturday as if he was a total stranger, which he is not.”
Po spread out one hand in a gesture of dismissal. “Can’t blame a fella for trying.”
“Trying what?”
Po leveled his brow, tried to look dignified. “Trying to bring him to the law’s attention. Hell, I didn’t want anyone to know about that other stuff, though.”
“The drugs he brought you.”
Po tipped his head coyly. “Liniment.”
“You don’t shove liniment up your nose.”
Po set his lower lip in a pout.
“I won’t tell the town about the coke, Po, but you’d better start talking.”
Po straightened up and let out his breath. Looked around quickly. “Well, okay, I went up to Saratoga a couple times.”
“And met this man Chandler. You meet him through some other men, or you meet him directly?”
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