Deadman

by Jon A. Jackson

  Deputy Lee nodded at the driver and stared down at the body. He put his huge hands on his narrow hips and pursed his thick lips. Lee had a very large upper body but almost no buttocks and relatively short, slender legs. Still, he was over six feet tall. Seated behind a desk, or in a car, he would look even larger. Now he squatted down beside the body and picked up the limp wrist. He peeled back one of the man's eyelids and peered into the iris. The eye was glassy, but the iris shrank. Lee got to his feet with a huff and straightened his gabardine slacks, stooping to adjust the trouser legs over his dark and deeply polished boots.

  Without a word he strode back to the car and reached inside for the microphone. “Three-nine-six, four-twelve. Mile marker one-thirty-six, got a man down. Ambulance. Tell ‘em to bring blood, lots of it.”

  “Ambulance?” the bus driver said, incredulously. “Better call a hearse.”

  Lee didn't respond to this. He opened the back of the Blazer and got out a blanket, which he spread over the body. Then he turned to the driver, drew a notebook and a ballpoint pen out of his breast pocket, clicked the pen to expose the point, and said, “Name?”

  The driver gave his name and the few details he could provide. “I've gotta be getting on,” he said, “I got a bus full of folks.”

  “You're stopping in Butte, right?” Lee said.

  “For fifteen minutes, less if I can get ‘em to move,” the driver said.

  “If I'm not there, go ahead,” Lee told him, “but get the girl's name and address and a phone number and leave it for me.”

  The driver jogged off down the road, and Lee returned to the body and carefully searched it for information. There was no wallet or personal effects at all—strong evidence of robbery, given the victim's generally well-appareled appearance. The boots alone were worth a few hundred, and Lee wondered that the killer/thief hadn't taken them. Thrust into the half-closed, inert left hand, however, he found a card, just a piece of heavy manila paper that appeared to have been cut out of a larger sheet with not very neat scissor-work. The card, about the size of a business card, was smeared with blood on both sides, and someone had scrawled with a #3 pencil two names, one above the other, in childish lettering. The writer had not pressed down very hard, and the lead was not very dark. Later, on closer examination, Lee would see that the first name was actually “CARMINES,” but that the S had been obscured by blood and dirt. For now, he read it as “CARMINE,” and the name below it as “DEADMAN.”

  Lee held the card by the edges and found a plastic evidence bag in the car for it. By that time the ambulance had arrived.

  “Oh dear,” said Sally Gradovich when she saw the body. “Is he dead?”

  “Oughta be,” Lee said, “but he's still winkin’ . . . just. You better give him blood, he's about out.” He didn't exactly smile, but there was a faint easing of the heaviness about Lee's face. Sally appreciated it.

  “Okay, Jacky,” she said, “we've got him.” She and her colleague, Tom, eased the body onto a stretcher, and Lee helped Tom wheel it to the ambulance while Sally ran to radio in for full crash preparedness on arrival.

  After they left, Lee began his methodical examination of the area. He found an expensive Stetson cowboy hat, boot prints, bloodstains on the road, and six empty .32-caliber cartridge casings. That was about it. He went on into Butte, to the St. James Hospital.

  2

  Jack the Bear

  Jacky Lee was said to be taciturn, but he didn't see it that way. He could talk fine when he had something to say. It was just that he never saw the need for casual talk. Who knew, for instance, that his real name was Jacques LeBruyn? The last name had proved too difficult for most people, so when he went into the marines, he dropped the “Bruyn.” It was just too much of a pain in the butt to explain time and again—to people who didn't really care—what the name was, how to pronounce it.

  Too many people talked before they knew what to say, Jacky felt, before they actually knew anything. For instance, he knew nothing about the man he'd found on the highway, so when the admitting people at St. James asked for a name, Lee told them, “Carmine Deadman.” And when doctors and nurses or other cops asked him about Deadman, Jacky just shrugged. What was there to say?

  Within twenty-four hours, Deadman's condition had stabilized. But he was in a coma, and Dr. Morehouse, the emergency-room leader, was not optimistic about the man's chances.

  “The man's got a bullet in his head,” Morehouse said. “We could operate, but CAT scans and X rays cost money, and anyway, the prognosis is in the garbage can. I don't know if I'd recommend surgery at this moment if it was my favorite uncle. Who is he? Who will pay for it? The county? The bullet is antiseptic. It can stay there for now. Can't you find out who he is?”

  “How come he's alive?” Jacky wanted to know. “A man takes a bullet in the middle of the forehead, he ought to be dead.”

  “Oh, that bullet,” Morehouse said. “That's nothing. That bullet struck at a funny angle, I guess. It fractured the skull, but it didn't penetrate. It traveled along the surface, subcutaneously. Here it is.” He held out a misshapen chunk of silvery metal. “Found it in his hair, actually.”

  “You mean there's another bullet in his head?” Jacky asked.

  “Yeah, and four in the body. One in the shoulder was fragmented, the others were buried in the flesh of the back. You know, I'm gonna get me one of those ‘tin coats.’ I think that the low power of the bullet, plus the resistance of that heavy duck material, a shirt, an undershirt . . . it might be what saved his life—if he lives.”

  “What about the other head shot?”

  “It might have deflected, but it entered behind and below the ear. The X rays show it, with some destroyed brain tissue, probably. I probed but not too extensively. It's lodged in there. We really need better pix. And Dr. Wilder. He can pick a brain. I can't.”

  Deadman looked like his putative name. His face was swathed in bandages, but it was about the size of a large pumpkin. He was wreathed in tubes and wires. The machines said he was functioning all right, heart beating strong and respiration regular, steady brain waves. He had a body like a god, tan and muscled. Morehouse pointed to this as the key reason for the man's startling physical recovery.

  “The guy's got a hell of a lot going for him,” Morehouse said. “Anybody else lost that much blood he'd look like a deflated balloon. But this guy . . . hell, we hooked him up and he started cooking right away. Good brain waves, too. Who knows what's going on in that blown-up noggin?”

  Dr. Wilder, the brain surgeon, had by now examined the patient extensively. He was more reserved in his estimates than Dr. Morehouse. “I think he is thinking,” the doctor said, “but who knows what thoughts? Bullet in the left lower cranium . . . I don't know.” He shook his own closely clipped skull mournfully. “One thing for sure: Mr. Deadman won't think like he used to think.”

  Jacky had taken the fingerprints and transmitted them to the FBI, but nothing had come back as yet. The name Carmine Deadman didn't mean anything to the National Crime Net. Jacky had not given that as the victim's name, simply as a name found on him. They did come back with the name Dante “Carmine” Busoni, a well-known mobster who had been shot in Detroit six months earlier. Jacky Lee didn't make anything of this, but he entered it into the file.

  Two days after Deadman was picked up, an anonymous woman called St. James hospital. Presumably she'd read a press report, for she inquired after the condition of “Mr. Deadman.” She also inquired about the medical expenses. She was referred to billing, where Mrs. McCoy rattled off a figure that she said was growing by the minute and informed the caller that if they were unable to identify Deadman and if he had no insurance, then the county would have to assume the burden. The following day, ten cashier's checks totaling nearly $30,000 arrived at St. James, via Federal Express. They were drawn on ten different banks, or bank branches, in Salt Lake City and were accompanied by instructions that the amount was to be applied to the medical expenses of “the patient
known as Carmine Deadman.” Further funds would be available, the instructions said.

  With that the doctors proceeded. The patient's condition had improved considerably and surgery seemed a good bet. The bullet was removed and the patient responded well. He was young, healthy, and not just stable but improving. He did not regain consciousness, however, and the doctors weren't sure that he ever would. In subsequent days, more cashier's checks arrived via regular mail, each one in the amount of $2,995, and dedicated “for the recovery of Mr. Deadman.” At first the checks were all from Salt Lake City, but then checks appeared, usually in groups of ten or more, from Los Angeles, Reno, Denver, and again, Salt Lake City.

  When Jacky Lee heard of this development, he contacted the banks. It was a dead end: In every case, a woman had simply purchased a cashier's check with cash. The bank people remembered her, however, and generally described the purchaser as small and dark, about twenty-eight to thirty-four years of age, abundant black hair with a silver or white streak running back from the right temple. In a couple of cases, the woman wore a scarf, and then no mention was made of the hair, but she was always described as attractive. She never gave a name. One bank officer in Salt Lake City noted that she was suspicious of the woman, who had carried an expensive piece of luggage in which there was, she estimated, more than $50,000 in cash. But as the woman only purchased a check for $2,995, there was nothing to be said about that.

  The Federal Express people remembered the woman, who had given the name “Alice Williams” and a Main Street address in Salt Lake City. The phone number belonged to a realtor's office. They told Lee that they'd never heard of any “Alice Williams.” Subsequent letters didn't even have this information.

  The next interesting development came when Deadman regained consciousness. He couldn't talk. His jaw on the left side had been shattered by the bullet, and part of his tongue was macerated by bone splinters. But his blue eyes were open and he seemed mentally alert. He made some preliminary sounds, not much more than groans, then he lapsed into silence. But his eyes began to move around, to register what was happening.

  His nurse was Cathleen Yoder—Cateyo (or “Katie-Yo") to her friends. She was delighted with her patient's partial recovery. She'd been washing his body for several days, and she was impressed. “This is no dead man,” she told her fellow nurses, with a little smile.

  Dr. Wilder, the brain surgeon, told Jacky Lee that until Deadman chose to communicate, there was no way of knowing if the man remembered anything of the shooting, but he would be surprised if he did. “Usually a trauma of this sort blanks out the incident. It can be recovered, sometimes, in part, but rarely completely. We just have to wait and hope. For all I know, he doesn't remember anything at all.” Too much of the brain had been destroyed, the doctor suspected. The injuries to the jaw and tongue could be repaired. The man would need speech therapy, no doubt, but it seemed likely that he would talk again, though it wasn't clear just how all this would come about. For the time being, Deadman was a ward of the county. Assuming that his anonymous benefactor continued to provide assistance, the hospital would provide the best of care.

  In the meantime, Jacky Lee attempted to reconstruct the scenario of the crime. It had happened in broad daylight, practically high noon, but no one had witnessed it. Newspaper accounts had included a plea from the police for witnesses, but the only ones to come forward had said that they had noticed a pair of men hitchhiking in that area, about that time. An abandoned vehicle had been found some fifty miles west, on the same interstate highway, stolen in Missoula and out of gas. Had the hitchhikers been in this vehicle? Had another good Samaritan picked the two men up? If so, why would they be let out at such an odd place, nowhere near another road? Was Deadman one of the hitchhikers, or was he someone who had picked up the other two, who then shot him and left him out on the highway? There seemed no way to tell.

  The story soon disappeared from the news, the patient made progress, and Jacky Lee turned his attention to a series of arson fires that were plaguing the Butte area.

  3

  Ditch Bitch

  Blood is thicker than water, they say . . . but not in Montana. Ask Grace Garland.

  “Red” Garland was a reasonable woman, a kindly woman, in fact. She tolerated pheasant hunters and elk hunters on her land, if they asked first and closed the gates behind them (if they didn't close the gates, they could ask with their last breath, next time, and it wouldn't matter). She didn't mind trout fisherfolk at all, as they absorbedly drifted or waded through the Ruby River where it flowed across her property, or even crawled on their hands and knees up the twisty but trout-rich Tinstar Creek, which fed down from the mountains behind her spread. She had even welcomed over the years a dozen or so graduate students from the state university in Bozeman who were compiling an exhaustive census of fish, fowl, and mammal life on the Tinstar. But this amiable woman's eyes developed a reddish tint when the basic question of water rights was mentioned. In this she was one with every rancher or fanner in the West. Water is life. You don't mess with a rancher's right to water.

  Garland ran a few hundred head of red cattle and cut a few hundred acres of hay on her spread up on the north end of the valley. She was sixty-three, a widow with an accountant son in Seattle who had recently told her he had AIDS, and a daughter who had become a wildlife biologist in Yellowstone Park (she had initiated the Tinstar Research Project while in graduate school). Red's late husband's father and his grandfather had done pretty much what Red was doing on this same land, although they'd possessed a bit more of it. A few years ago, Garland had sold an entire section to a fast-talking, cheerful young man from somewhere else, Canada he'd said. This fellow, Joseph Humann, had purchased the land above Garland's, on Garland Butte, that abutted on the National Forest and Bureau of Land Management lands that were being considered for inclusion in the Tinstar Wilderness Area. Tinstar Creek arose on that small mountain and trickled down to the Ruby River. All the water rights belonged to Garland, although she had conceded a few miner's inches to Humann for domestic purposes. There was also a lovely little hot springs on the mountain, on Humann's property.

  Joseph Humann had been a good neighbor, so far. He kept to himself except for a few times when he'd dropped in at the ranch and shared a bottle of whiskey with Red, talking about the West and how it had been. Red had liked him. You couldn't ask for a better neighbor, although Red was a little uneasy about all the shooting that went on up there. . . . Well, not uneasy—it's certainly no sin for a man to shoot a gun on his own property, particularly out in the West—but a little curious, anyway, although she never said a word about it to the man. He wasn't a hunter, she knew that, somehow, but he sure was a shooter. It wasn't really a problem, it was a distant sound—Red figured he must be doing most of the shooting on the other side of the butte—but every time you hear a shot, even if you know it must be just sport, it kind of nags at your attention. After a while, of course, you ignore it, more or less.

  Red tended to think of Humann as a temporary resident, a renter. For one thing, Humann had purchased the land with a provision that Garland (or her heirs—not likely, she feared, although her daughter might still prove out) could buy it back at the purchase price if Humann died or decided to sell before death. He had also agreed that Garland could pasture cattle on the meadowland, though not more than usual, for no fee. It was almost as if Garland still owned the property.

  But a few months earlier, Humann had returned from one of his periodic prolonged absences with a young woman, whom he had introduced as Helen. He hadn't described her as his wife, and Red hadn't inquired further. This Helen was a pretty woman, about Joe's age. She looked as if she could be his sister: small, dark, athletic, with a lot of black hair that featured what Red considered an overly dramatic streak of silver in it—at first Red had been almost certain that it was a wig, but later she wasn't sure. The woman wasn't as cheerful and friendly as Humann. She and Red hadn't really hit it off. Red had been a little annoyed by a r
emark that Helen had passed, something about it must be difficult for a woman to run a big ranch like this, and didn't she get lonely? Red had simply said, no, it wasn't particularly hard and she'd never been lonely that she knew of. She'd been working on the land all her life; it seemed like a reasonable thing to do, something worth doing.

  Now Humann had been gone for a month or more and his woman for about as long. They had a separate access road and a gate, which they kept locked. Red didn't see much of them, ever, though she always had a sense of their presence or absence, somehow—if nothing else, several days would go by without any shooting.

  The problem was that the flow of water on Garland's land, below the Humann property, had noticeably declined. Part of this could be attributed to a dry summer. But Red Garland was beginning to think that there was more to it. She had ridden on horseback along her entire ditching system and the trout stream itself, but she hadn't ventured onto Humann's property. Because of the drought, water levels were generally down so much that even the most avid anglers were not traipsing up into this usually productive creek. There was minimal flow, and the trout were either hiding out in the pools or had fled to the Ruby. So it was likely just low water, but in low water the rancher measures each cupful, and Red was thinking that Humann, being an ignorant flatlander, might have left a sprinkler running on a garden or something while he was away, or even left the water running in the bathtub, or maybe the pipes broke, or . . . well anyway, it was being lost somehow, ‘cause there ought to be more water than this.

  Garland tried to call Humann, but there was no answer, just some dumb goddamn machine that she refused to speak into because she was damned if she was going to talk to a machine. She rode up there on horseback the first afternoon she could spare a half hour, and the gate was locked. There was no sign that a car had passed that way since the last rain, which was a couple weeks, which confirmed her feeling that he'd been gone a while and his streaky-haired whore not long after. Finally, Garland called the water judge and complained. The judge notified the ditch rider, Sally McIntyre, and asked her to check it out.