"Excuse me," Cooper said to Joe and me, tipping his hat in my direction before trailing after the man we could only assume was the county coroner.
Big Joe immediately took my arm, scowling, and led me a few feet away, trying to get us out of our visitors' earshot.
"All you had to do was lock the door this afternoon," he grumbled. "Just lock the door, like I've asked you to do a thousand times. But nooooo…" He shook his head from side to side.
"I'm sorry, Joe. What more can I say?"
"We're going to be here forever, now, you know. They're not going to let us go anywhere until they find out who this man was, and who killed him."
"So?"
"So I'd only planned for us to be here long enough to see the Grand Canyon, Dottie. Not long enough to refill it. We were going to—" He caught himself, remembering our son on the lounge nearby, and lowered his voice to just above a whisper. "We were going to move on to the southeast Friday, remember?"
"We still might. Think positive," I said.
"Hmph. They're going to take Lucille away. You watch."
"Oh no. They wouldn't do that."
"They wouldn't, huh? This is a crime scene, Dottie. They have lab tests to run. And I'd be willing to bet they don't have the facilities to run 'em here at the park."
Suddenly, I was all out of optimistic reassurances.
"But then, maybe if you talked to the boy, he'd cut us some slack and just let us go. What do you think?"
He had lost me, and my face must have shown it.
"You gonna stand there and tell me you haven't noticed how sweet he is on you?"
"Who?"
"Your friend Cooper back there. That's who. Three hundred women in this park under thirty, and he's in here makin' goo-goo eyes at a fifty-three-year-old mother of five. I ought to slap those overgrown nose hairs right off his face!"
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said, starting to laugh.
"And you. Woman, you act like you've never seen a mustache before."
"What?"
"You trying to deny it? That your eyes weren't glued to the man's upper lip every time he opened his mouth?"
"Joe, that's ridiculous."
"It might be ridiculous, Moms," Bad Dog said, inviting himself into our conversation, "but it's the truth. I noticed it too." He shrugged apologetically at me, grinning from ear to ear.
Big Joe suddenly noticed the can in his son's hand and rushed to the refrigerator, yanking the door open. "Boy! That was my last beer! You know that?"
Bad Dog stuffed his mouth with a handful of potato chips and mumbled his latest weak apology.
2
Big Joe was right, of course. We were stuck at the Grand Canyon.
They had been extremely apologetic about it, but the two plainclothes detectives from the Coconino County Sheriff's Department who eventually showed up to take over the murder investigation from Ranger Cooper rendered us all but prisoners on the park grounds. We weren't under suspicion of anything, they said, but for several days, at least, we were going to have to stay right where we ·were. I had hoped this was only because they wanted us available for further questioning, but that was just wishful thinking.
"Sorry, folks, but we're going to have to impound your trailer," the detective named Crowe had said.
They told us they were going to have to take her down to Flagstaff to run some lab work on her, just as Joe had predicted, and we'd be without her no longer than three or four days, tops. I myself took the news badly, but it broke my heart to see the effect it had on Big Joe. It was as if they had told him they were going to tow me down to Flagstaff instead.
A small crowd of curious onlookers, having already witnessed the removal of a corpse from our trailer by several employees of the county coroner's office, watched as a pair of deputy sheriffs hitched Lucille up to a mustard-yellow Chevy truck with Coconino County badges on the doors, showing great restraint as Big Joe supervised the entire operation. While my husband snapped orders and mumbled complaints outside, driving Detective Crowe to distraction, Bad Dog and I removed a mere handful of belongings from Lucille under the watchful eye of Crowe's partner, Detective Bollinger, who inspected everything we collected with professional suspicion.
Then they took Lucille away.
Big Joe took my hand as we watched her vanish into the distance, her gleaming silver body rolling gently from side to side with each dip in the dirt road. I would say it was like watching one of our children pack up and leave home for good, except that Joe and I had always been tearfully ecstatic on those occasions. Suffice it to say that it was a difficult thing for us to do, Bad Dog included.
And so it was that we became the guests of the Bright Angel Lodge, one of the more historic and colorful hotels situated in the park proper, courtesy of the Coconino County Sheriff's Department. They gave us a lovely cabin with a fine view right on the rim of the Canyon, and the staff there treated us with great kindness, but all of this was wasted on Joe. Stripped of both his beloved trailer home and his freedom of movement, he couldn't have been any more miserable had they locked us all up in an outhouse.
"Damn, Dottie," he kept saying, over and over again.
"I know, baby," I would reply.
"If you'd just locked that damn door—"
My "baby"s still weren't doing squat.
Finally, exasperated, I told him, "Look. Why don't you try looking at the bright side of all this for a change?"
"The bright side? What bright side?"
"Well. For starters…" I had to come up with something fast, so I said, "This is all very exciting, isn't it? I mean, when you really stop and think about it?"
"Exciting? You call finding a dead man growing stiff in your bathroom exciting? Are you insane?"
"Coming from someone who used to think crime was the most thrilling thing on earth, Joseph Loudermilk, that's an awfully odd question to ask, isn't it?"
"What?"
"You heard me. And you know precisely what I'm talking about, too."
"I do not."
"Oh yes you do."
"I said I don't!"
"And I say you do."
"Listen. If you're trying to suggest I'm turned on by all this just because I used to be a cop, you can forget it. I've been retired from police work for over two years now, and that's just the way I like it."
"Is that so?"
"Yes, that's so."
"Just because a man's retired from something, Joe, doesn't mean he doesn't miss it," I said.
"So I miss it. So what? You do something for twenty-five years, you can't help but miss it a little when it's gone. But miss it enough to want it back?" He shook his head at me, grimacing at the thought. "No, Dottie. Not now, not ever."
"Joe, the man died in our trailer. Sitting on your favorite reading chair. Don't you think we're entitled to find out how and why, if we can?"
"No, I don't. I don't want to know the how or the why of it. It's none of my business, and it's none of yours, either. But I can tell you one thing." He turned his head in the direction of our son, who was camped in front of the TV in our room, absently watching a basketball game while spraying Oreo cookie crumbs all over the carpet. "If it were, I sure as hell know who I'd ask about it."
"Who? Me?" Bad Dog asked his father innocently.
"You're damn right, you. What the hell are you doing here, anyway? Who told you where to find us? And how the hell'd that dead white man end up in our house?"
There was that word again: house. I held my breath and waited to see if Dog's last brush with death had taught him anything at all.
"I told you. I don't know nothin' about that man. He was in the bathroom when I came in, just like you found 'im."
"Dead."
"That's right."
"And you didn't shoot him."
"No! My gun wasn't loaded! And it hadn't been fired, either. You said so yourself, remember?"
He had Joe there. Inspecting Dog's gun was the first thing my husband had
done after we found the body, and he'd told us both afterward that the weapon was clean.
"That doesn't mean you couldn't have used something else to shoot him," Big Joe argued. "If you're crazy enough to bring one gun into my house, you're crazy enough to bring a dozen."
"I didn't shoot the man, Pops. I didn't even know 'im."
"Then what the hell were you doing in the closet?"
"I was hidin'. What else? I heard you guys comin', and I thought it was the killer, returnin' to the scene of the crime. That's what they always do, right? Return to the scene of the crime?"
Big Joe didn't answer him.
"All right, Theodore," I said. "Your father and I believe you.
Joe made a face and directed it at me, but he remained silent.
"Now. Your father asked you how you found us."
Bad Dog nibbled on his Oreos and fell silent, just like his father.
"Did Mo tell you where we were?"
"Nobody told me nothin'," Dog said, in his inimitable double-negative style. I spent twenty-two years trying to break him of the annoying habit, but alas, I didn't never have no luck. "I found out where you guys were on my own."
"How's that?" Big Joe demanded.
Dog shrugged. "I saw a letter."
"What kind of letter? And stop dropping those cookie crumbs all over the carpet!"
"It was just a letter. Addressed to you. I don't know what was in it." He started brushing the crumbs he'd littered the floor with in all directions, as if by dispersing them throughout the room he could make them disappear.
"Where did you see this letter, Theodore?" I asked him, tired of listening to him dance around his father's questions like a mob boss facing a grand jury.
He looked at me, his eyes wide and helpless. He knew the truth was about to emerge from his lips, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
Sometimes, motherhood makes you feel like you've got every man on the planet by the short hairs. It's great.
"At Mo's," Bad Dog said.
"At Mo's?"
"Yes ma'am." He nodded to make sure I believed him.
Mo is what we all call Maureen, Dog's oldest sister. Mo is a tax attorney who lives in La Jolla, California, a USC grad and mother of two, and she takes care of all Joe's and my business affairs. Our bank accounts, our travel reservations, our medical bills—Mo handles everything, and under the strictest code of silence. No one knows our itinerary but her. No one else needs to know. (If I haven't yet made this abundantly clear, all our other children are pains in the derriere, for a vast assortment of depressing reasons, and when Joe and I left California, we didn't exactly leave them behind by accident.)
"What were you doing at Mo's?" Big Joe asked.
"I wasn't doin' nothin'. Just sayin' hello."
"Uh-huh."
"I can't go visit my sister if I want?"
"No. You wanna talk to your sister, make a phone call. Or write her a letter. Anything you have to say to her in person can wait until Christmas."
"Joe—" I said.
"Joe nothing. Only reason this boy went out to La Jolla was to find out where we were. You know it, and I know it. And if I have to tell you why, Dottie, you haven't been paying attention."
"I don't need any money," Bad Dog said, insulted.
"Boy, don't give me that. You always need money."
"Okay, so I could use a few dollars. But that ain't the only reason I wanted to see you."
"So what's the other reason?" I asked him, no doubt taking the words right out of his father's mouth.
"Wait a minute, Dottie," Big Joe said. "I wanna hear what he means by 'a few dollars,' first."
"Moms, it's like this," Dog said, deciding to ignore his father's presence in the room altogether. "All I need is a thousand dollars and a ride to Pittsburgh."
"Pittsburgh?" I cried.
"A thousand dollars?" Big Joe howled.
"What? You can't handle that? A thousand measly bucks and a little detour along your way?"
I leapt to my feet to block my husband's charge, stopping him before he could get up a head of steam, and said, "Joe, if we kill the child now, we'll never find out what he's talking about."
"I don't care what he's talking about. Whatever it is, it's gonna cost me a thousand dollars, and that's all I need to know about it!"
"Theodore," I said, turning to face Bad Dog again, but keeping myself between him and his father, "what in heaven's name is in Pittsburgh?"
"A job, Moms," he said. "The job. The one I've been waitin' for all my life."
So that was why he'd been refusing work all these year. He'd been waiting for the job.
"What kind of job?"
"You ain't never gonna believe it," he said.
"That much we know," Big Joe said.
Ignoring him, Dog pointed to the familiar logo on his dingy T-shirt and said, "I'm gonna work for the Raiders. I got me a job with the Silver and Black!"
"What?"
The Los Angeles Raiders are, to the best of my knowledge, a professional football team, and they have always been Joe's favorite. (Why men even claim to have a "favorite" football team, I'll never understand, because they'll watch any two teams play a game to the final gun no matter how little they care for either one. It's the game men are addicted to, sisters, not just a franchise or two, so don't let the warm-up jackets and bumper stickers fool you. Your man may profess to be a Seahawks fan, but he's going to watch the oh-and-fifteen Bengals play the one-and-fourteen Bills under six feet of snow on the last day of the season, no matter what else you had planned for him.)
"The Raiders?" Big Joe asked skeptically.
"That's right. The Silver and Black Attack! Commitment to Excellence, and all that!"
"Boy, you're crazy! What kind of job would the Raiders give you? 'Special Assistant in Charge of Dehydration'?"
"Huh?"
"I think your father means a water boy, Theodore," I said.
"Water boy? Hell no, I ain't gonna be no water boy!"
"What are you going to do, then? Let me hear a job description," Big Joe demanded.
"You ever heard of a trainer? I'm gonna be an assistant trainer! You know, one of those guys helps tape the fellas up before games, an' rubs 'em down after practice—stuff like that."
"Jeez Looweez," Big Joe said.
''I'm tellin' you, it's true. I swear it!"
"Boy, get off it. You aren't no assistant trainer. And anybody dumb enough to mistake you for one is too stupid to work for the Raiders."
"You don't understand. They're gonna train me, Pops. They're gonna teach me how to be a trainer."
"Who? Who's gonna teach you?"
"Cubby. Cubby Denkins. He's the head trainer for the Raiders, he's the one offered me the job."
"Cubby Denkins?" From the way Joe said the name, I could tell it was familiar to him. "Where would Cubby Denkins know you from?"
"I met him at this club, back in L.A. The Final Score. Him and a couple of the boys on the team came in one night a few months ago and we hit it off. You know, had a few drinks, talked a little 'ball. Next thing I know, he's offerin' me a job. An 'apprenticeship,' he called it. All I gotta do is pay for my materials, an' he'd do the rest, he said."
"And these 'materials.' They're what you need a thousand dollars for?" I asked him.
"That's right."
"A thousand dollars, Theodore?"
"Yes ma'am." He was staring down into the Oreo bag, his head practically inside of it, ostensibly looking for a whole, unbroken cookie. I was going to ask him to look me in the eye and answer the question again, but his father spoke up before I got the chance.
"Hell, Dottie, what kind of 'materials' cost that kind of money? The team bus doesn't cost a thousand dollars!"
"It ain't what I gotta buy, Pops. It's how much I gotta buy. Like a hundred rolls of tape, three electronic stopwatches, twenty-five clipboards, two starter guns… It all adds up, man."
"So why do you have to buy it? Can't the Raider
s supply you with all that crap?"
"Sure they could. 'Cept I'm not really gonna be workin' for the Raiders. Not at first, anyway. I'm gonna be workin' for Cubby. I'm gonna be his apprentice, like I told you."
"Yeah? So what?"
"So he's not gonna give me the job permanently—or pay any of my expenses—till he's satisfied I'm gonna work out. 'Cause the last apprentice he had, see, the guy ran out on him, an' took a ton of stuff with 'im when he left. Cubby had to reimburse the team out of his own pocket."
Big Joe just looked at me and shook his head, not buying a word of Dog's story.
"What does all this have to do with Pittsburgh?" I asked our son.
"That's where the Raiders are, Pittsburgh. They're playin' the Steelers there this Sunday."
"And this couldn't have waited until they got back home?"
"No ma'am. It couldn't. After Pittsburgh, they go to Cleveland, and Cubby said he needs somebody right away. He wanted me to join the team 'fore they left Los Angeles, but I didn't have the money then."
"And you still don't," his father said flatly.
"What about the gun, Theodore? What are you doing with a gun?"
"Well, it's like this, Moms. I didn't really know it was a gun when I bought it. You know what I'm sayin'?"
"No," I said.
"Hell no," Big Joe said.
"Well, I needed a couple of starter guns, remember? You know, the kind of gun they use to start races at track meets? So I tried to buy one. On the street. Only, the lyin' chump I bought it from—"
"Sold you a real gun instead," I said.
Bad Dog nodded and blushed, embarrassed by his alleged naïveté.
"Okay. I've heard enough," Big Joe said to me. "How about you? You heard enough?"
"Joe—"
"I say we buy him a ticket on the next Greyhound to California and let it go at that. What do you say?"
"I say we should give the boy a chance to prove his story before we do anything rash," I said.
"You want me to give him a chance? Fine. Here's what we'll do." Before I could stop him, he pushed past me to snatch Dog up off the floor by the nape of his neck. "I'm going to write a check for a thousand dollars and throw the both of 'em into the Canyon out there. If Junior hits the bottom before the check does, he can have it. Is that fair?"
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