“No, and I don’t want to have to hit him with a man-slaughter charge.” I put my hat back on and looked at her. “Did you find any keys on Geo?”
“What?”
“I’ve got a hunch I want to follow up on, but I need his keys.”
Her smile tempered a little. “A big ring of them. I took them because I thought we might need to lock things up.”
“What about the other set of boot tracks out there?”
She didn’t completely accept the change of subject but let it pass. “It was Duane. Says he was after the dogs, that they sometimes chase a rabbit and won’t come back, so he walked out there looking for them.”
I still couldn’t feel anything behind me, so I snuck a hand around to make sure I wasn’t half-assed. “Speaking of, did Duane let them out after me?”
“Yeah. He says he saw the flashlight and turned the dogs loose.”
“Where is he?”
“Outside in my unit. I thought you’d want to talk to him.”
“Boy howdy.”
“I can’t believe he’s dead.” People respond to the death of a loved one in different ways; Duane’s was the stunned way. He sank quietly into the backseat, picked his stocking feet up, and then set them down. We had his boots, and the smell of his socks in the close space was enough to take the hair out of our noses. “You’re sure he’s dead?”
“I’m afraid so.” I was having a hard time sitting on one cheek because even with the local, a dull throb was setting in. I took my hat off and put it on the dash of Vic’s vehicle. I held her clipboard up so that I could make out the notes from her previous interview. “Duane, when did you come out here looking for the dogs?”
He pointed at Vic, who was in the passenger seat. “I already told her.”
“Tell me.”
He sighed, and his voice sounded like a recording. “Close to midnight.”
“You turn the dogs out that late?”
“Yunh-huh, it’s the only place I can turn them loose that’s fenced in, otherwise they run off. Check with Mike Thomas, they been over to his place a bunch of times.”
I flipped to the next page but then let it fall back and looked at him. “Duane, I need to ask you something.”
He continued to stare at the floor mats. “Yunh-huh.”
“When I found your grandfather, your boot prints went right up to and then past where he died. Is it possible that you walked by him when you were looking for the dogs and just didn’t see him?”
He began searching the inside of the vehicle for answers. “I don’t know. I just . . .” He clutched his knuckles together.
“Duane, why don’t you tell me what you were up to this evening? Maybe we can get a closer idea about the time if you tell me.”
He thought about it. “Gina and me went to the movies again in Sheridan.”
“You guys go to the movies a lot, don’t you, Duane?”
“Yunh-huh.” He scratched his nose. “When we got home, I drank a few beers and kinda passed out.”
Vic and I looked at each other.
I turned back to him. “Passed out.”
“Yunh-huh. Gina woke me up when she went to work, and then I let the dogs out.”
“What time was that?”
He looked confused. “What?”
“When Gina went to work and you let the dogs out, what time was that?”
“She usually goes to work around eleven-thirty.” He thought about it. “Yunh-huh, it was eleven-thirty, I remember looking at the clock.”
“You’re sure?”
His gaze came up but didn’t make my face. “Is that important?”
“Maybe.” I put the clipboard down on the seat. “Duane, I’m trying to understand something and maybe you can help me with this. If your grandfather was trying to get home, why did he go to the junkyard?”
His eyes finally leveled on mine, and he looked genuinely confused. “I don’t know.”
“Well, his tracks led me down off the ridge to where the path cuts off to the junkyard. Do you know that spot, where the apple trees are?”
“Yunh-huh.”
I waited.
He looked uncomfortable and picked at a hole in the thigh of his coveralls. The quiet settled on all of us like a wool blanket, itches and all. “Is there anything else up there?”
“Nunh-uh.”
It was a quick response, too quick, as the cliché goes. “Aren’t those old tunnel doors up there? The ones that run out from the basement of the main house to where the cathouse stables used to be?”
He wasn’t so quick with a response this time. “Yunh-huh . . . Yeah, I guess.”
I glanced at Vic, who clinched an eyebrow back at me quicker than Duane would’ve ever noticed. “So, why wouldn’t your grandfather have just gone in the tunnel doors and made his way to the house and out of the weather?”
“Oh, those doors don’t work.”
I nodded and scooted farther up on my good cheek. “Then why is there a brand-new padlock on them?”
It took him a few moments to come up with something for that one, and when he did, it sounded like he had been coached. “Gaddamned insurance—they said we had to lock it up so kids wouldn’t fall in there and hurt themselves.”
“Can you get in the tunnel?”
“Nunh-uh, it’s collapsed.”
“From the basement of the house?”
He picked at the growing tear on his pants. “Yeah, I mean . . . a little ways, but there’s snakes.”
Again, he sounded like the dead man. “Snakes.”
“Yunh-huh.”
I looked at Vic and then back at him. “In February.”
He looked at Vic and then back to me. “Yunh-huh.”
There was a growing glow of gold- tinged red with just a sliver of platinum in the sky as Vic and I stood, looking off to the eastern horizon. The snow had stopped, but it was still diabolically cold and windy. I blew a thick pillar of breath and watched as it quickly dissipated between us. “Sailor take warning.”
She studied me. “Yunh-huh.”
Maybe our conversations were piling up in Nebraska after all. “Gee, Vic, do you think Duane is lying?”
She smiled and stamped her feet a couple of times, shuffling her Browning tactical boots and turning her full back to the wind. “As fast as a dog can trot.”
I groaned, figuring this was the first of many dog remarks to come. “Did you get a lot of photos?”
“Yes.”
“Print castings?”
“No, I did not haul plaster out there; it would’ve just frozen. We have his boots and believe me, the tracks are his—the boots match the prints, the prints match the boots.”
“Fresh?”
She nodded. “We can look at them a little closer in the photos, but I’d say the timing works out pretty close to what he said in his statement. That part didn’t change between my interview and yours.”
She looked up at me from under the black rabbit-fur flap of her bomber hat, which indicated that after two weeks of negative temperatures, she was now serious about keeping warm. She resembled Anna Karenina, the kind of woman that if you want to kill, you have to hit with a train. I loved the way she looked in that hat, but I’d never tell her because she’d stop wearing it.
“I wanna look in the basement. Do you wanna look in the basement?”
“Yep.”
She glanced back at Duane, still seated in her unit and wondering what we were talking about. “He’s not going to want us to look in the basement.”
“No.”
“We need a warrant.”
I started toward her unit. “Not necessarily.”
I closed the junkyard gate and locked it with Geo’s keys. Vic drove us back toward the Stewart house and adjacent lodgings. “What’d you do with the dogs, Duane?”
“I put ’em in the big house.” He paused for a second as he continued to stare at nothing. “I feel really bad about that, Sheriff. I didn’t know that was you o
ut there in the yard.”
He looked genuinely sorry, and I felt even worse about having peppered him with questions about his dead grandfather, but there was something about that basement that he and the recently deceased weren’t telling me. “Hey, Duane, do those dogs have their shots?”
“Oh, yeah. Tags and everything.”
“Well, do you think it’d be all right if we swung by the house so I could read them? I really don’t want to have to take those precautionary rabies shots if I don’t have to.”
His eyes didn’t make contact with mine when he responded. “Yunh-huh, sure.” We drove down the lane and made a right. “You’re not gonna shoot Butch and Sundance, are you?”
Vic glanced at me, and I shifted in my seat. “No, Duane, if I was going to do that, I would’ve done it when they bit me and not six and a half hours after the fact.” Vic and I got out of her vehicle, and Duane made a movement to follow us. “That’s okay, Duane, I think we can handle it.”
He flipped the passenger seat forward and kept a hand on the door. “No, I better come in with you. They mind Gina best, but they’ll listen to me. I don’t want them making any more mistakes with nobody.”
I held the door but kept it blocked with my body. “You don’t have any shoes.”
He shot a look down at his stocking feet, more holes than sock. “That’s all right, I can just run into the house.”
I glanced at Vic and shrugged. “Okay.”
Duane hopped along in front of us, displaying a great deal of agility as he avoided the snow-covered junk in the walkway. He jostled the doorknob and called into the house. “Dogs!” When he swung the door wide, the two of them were standing in the entryway like twin sentinels.
The place was just as dreary as it was the other night and still mildewed, which is truly a feat in Wyoming’s high desert.
It was warm in there, and I remembered thinking that it’d felt clammy when I’d discovered Mrs. Dobbs in the kitchen. I suppose Redhills Arroyo would be my next stop; breaking the news to Betty that her boyfriend was dead and that we were likely to charge her son with some form of murder.
What fun.
Duane brought the wolf mutts closer, and they were their old selves, smiling and wagging. I raised a hand, and Butch stretched his neck out to lap at it while Sundance stood just a little to the side and studied Vic as she closed the door behind us. I glanced at the basement door underneath the stairwell to our left and gestured toward the nearest hound. “All right, are you the one that bit me, you villain?”
Duane interrupted. “No, Sundance always attacks from the front. If you were bit from behind, it must’ve been Butch.”
“And here I thought we were pals.” I reached under his muzzle and swung his collar around in order to examine the tags. They actually were updated only this year, and I decided that I could now continue with part B of my plan. “Duane, could I have a glass of water?”
“It tastes like ass.”
I stared at him for a moment. “What?”
He stood in the entryway, framed by the stained-glass side panels that led to the dining room. “The water here in the big house comes from the original well, and it’s only about sixty feet deep. It’s coal water and tastes like ass.”
Vic turned her back, and I knew she was trying to keep from laughing. “That’s okay; I’d still like a glass of water.”
He started toward the kitchen and the dogs followed, but he stopped when we didn’t. “You wanna come into the kitchen?”
I looked down at the melting snow on my over-boots and the filthy, thread-bedraggled carpeting. “I don’t want to track into the house any more than I have to.”
He acted as if he’d never heard those words arranged in that order before, shrugged, and then ducked into the kitchen with the dogs at his stocking heels.
I stepped to my left and turned the handle of the basement door—locked. I pulled out Geo’s key ring and quickly flipped through the older ones, finally selecting the smallest of the skeleton type.
Vic whispered over my shoulder. “You dog. This is all very interesting for me. I’ve heard of things like illegal entry, breaking and entering, collusion, and inadmissible evidence, but rarely does one get to see all of it at one time in person.”
“Just a little ole-time law and order. Stick around; it’s going to get worse. When I take a drink of the water, turn your head the other way and mumble help.”
She stared at me. “Is this the accessory part of ole-time law and order?”
“Just put some feeling into it.” I slipped the key in the door and unlocked it, opened and closed it, and then redeposited the ring back in my Carhartts just as Duane returned from the kitchen.
He held the glass out to me, and I couldn’t help but notice that it looked yellow and smelled like sulphur; the sacrifices I made for my constituency. “Thanks.” I stopped just as I was about to drink and shifted my ear toward the basement door. “Hey, did you hear something?”
Duane looked at me as he petted the dogs. “Nunh-uh.”
Vic shrugged.
I brought the glass back up to my lips and took a swig of what, indeed, tasted like ass. I swallowed and looked around, especially at the brunette. “I thought I heard something.”
Duane shook his head. “Nunh-uh, maybe the wind?”
I looked at Vic. “It sounded like somebody crying for help.”
The young man pushed his greasy ball cap farther back onto his head. “I didn’t hear nothing.”
Vic looked at Duane. “I didn’t either.”
I studied the rusty liquid in the glass and took a deep breath as I raised it to my lips. “Well, I damn well better.” Duane continued to watch me, probably amazed that anyone would take a second drink of the water. I got smart this time and just held the glass to my lips and shot a glance at Vic, who covered her mouth for multiple reasons.
She turned her head. “Help!”
Duane turned to look at her. “What?”
I gratefully placed the glass back into Duane’s hands and stepped forward, leaning an ear against the basement door. “I’m sure I heard it that time.” I twisted the knob as Duane’s voice called out from behind me. “That door’s locked, there’s nobody . . .”
The door swung open, revealing a stairwell that turned at a landing below and continued to the left. There was a light switch to the right, just inside the doorway, and I flipped it on. The full force of heat and humidity wafted up from the basement as I took the first step down. “Duane, it sounds like there’s somebody in trouble down here, so I’m going to have a look, okay?”
He moved to the doorway behind me, edging a little in front of Vic. “Nunh-uh, there’s nobody down there.”
I raised a hand at his protests. “Vic, did you hear something?”
“Maybe . . .” She tromped down the stairs behind me and whispered, “What’s my motivation?”
Duane called after us. “Hey, there’s nobody down there, she just yelled that.”
As I turned the corner at the landing, I looked back up at her. “What, were you going to make me drink the entire glass of water?”
She smiled the crocodile smile. “I just wanted to see if you could do it.”
There was another light switch attached to one of the basement support poles and a new, reinforced BX cable that strung on into the darkness. I put my hand on the switch as Duane joined us—it appeared the dogs wouldn’t come down the stairs.
“Hey, you can’t go down there without a warrant thing.”
I glanced back up at him. “Duane, I’ve got an emergency situtation, and you wouldn’t want me to ignore it if someone is down here and hurt, would you?”
“Well, nunh-uh, but . . .”
I flipped the switch and glanced around as I stepped onto the dirt floor. It was your usual old house basement with a low ceiling and rough-cut beams and antiquated wiring with porcelain insulators and cast iron pipes that arrived from above and disappeared below. There was an aged washer an
d dryer that sat in a corner, unplugged, along with an operating hot water heater and a massive, coal-driven furnace looking like a giant metal octopus with a large chute that led to an opening along the hand-stacked foundation. There was the usual junk piled against the walls along with an inordinate amount of gardening tools, supplies, and at least eight fifty-pound bags of fertilizer.
A large blue tarp was tacked to the sill above and screwed into a four-by-four resting on the floor with a number of heavy-gauge extension cords disappearing underneath. As we stood there, the air pressure from whatever was on the other side billowed the plastic back toward us.
Vic stuffed her hands in the pockets of her jacket and leaned against one of the support beams as Duane joined me, still holding the glass of putrid water.
“I don’t see any snakes, Duane.”
“They’re in the tunnel.”
I gestured with my chin toward the blue plastic. “That way?”
“Yunh-huh, but it’s caved in real bad. That’s why we’ve got the tarp over it.”
I walked to the front of the opening and held my hand to the side where warm, moist air was escaping. I looked down and saw that two large eyelet bolts were screwed into the four-by-four and then up at two large hooks where the wood could be lifted and held in place. I stooped and, even with the pain in my rear, began lifting up the wood and consequently the tarp.
Duane was at my side immediately and placed a hand on my arm. “Look, you can’t go in there, you gotta have a warrant to be . . .”
“Duane, I’ve explained the situation and if you attempt to interfere with me any more, I’m going to ask my deputy over there to restrain you—and trust me, it’s something she really likes doing.”
I threw a glance back at Vic, who lowered a boot to the floor and began moving toward us in a smooth but determined gait.
Duane threw himself aside and sat on the bags of fertilizer; he was still holding the glass. “Fine, fuck it. Just go ahead and get it over with.”
I raised the board and hooked it up as Vic joined me at the jagged opening in the basement wall where many a bandit and whoremonger had escaped the local constabulary. There were a few small indicator lamps strung out like landing lights, but that was all. The warmth and humidity hit like a wave, and we both stood there. I couldn’t see anything but thought that there must be a switch somewhere, so I raised a hand past Vic’s face and felt along the wall. It was there, and I flicked the heavy-duty toggle and watched as fluorescent lights throbbed on full with a monotone thrum.
Junkyard Dogs Page 11