A ditch rider works for the irrigation district. They don't ordinarily ride along a ditch. Once upon a time they did, of course, patrolling on horseback the miles of irrigation ditches that make modern agriculture possible in the West. Nowadays, he or she cruises along the dusty access roads in four-wheel-drive pickup trucks, looking for violations. These violations occur at the headgates, usually, where some crafty fanner or rancher has tinkered with the inflow to gain a little more precious water. But sometimes there are problems that aren't visible from the road, such as when a blowout occurs. Say, for instance, that a badger has undermined a ditch, and it finally caves in, and the water flows out into a field, causing considerable loss of water for the downstream users. In mountainous country, such as this was, there could be a rock slide, or a fallen tree, perhaps beaver dams, that create ponds and little rills that run off into the woods. The ditch rider drives out along the system, looking for the break. Often enough they become ditch walkers. In this case, Tinstar Creek was itself a part of the ditch system.
That was what Sally McIntyre was doing in the lower Ruby Valley that morning. She'd been able to drive her truck along a good deal of Tinstar Creek on Garland's land, but she'd found nothing to account for the loss of water. She came at last to the fence that marked off the Humann property. The upper section was inaccessible by truck.
Sally McIntyre was a lean, rugged-looking woman. She was square-faced, handsome rather than pretty, and tended to dress in jeans and boots, a man's shirt, a sweat-stained cowboy hat crushed on her billowing red hair. She was in her thirties. She'd been a ditch rider for some fifteen years. It was a job she loved. From early spring, before the runoff started, until early winter when the snow and ice closed off the flow of water, she was empowered to roam this entire country, walk onto anybody's land without notice, and look at water. She called it playing with water. Like many people, Sally had loved to fool around with water, especially running water, from the first day she had toddled out into the sunshine—in her case, into a wonderfully muddy and reeking barnyard that was skirted by an irrigation ditch. She wasn't allowed near the ditch, but she could make puddles, divert rivulets, dig channels, and best of all, do all this in the bright sunlight or in the sweetly falling rain. She loved it. Nowadays, she still marveled that she was paid to play with water, to stroll along streams, to watch prairie dogs and badgers and coyotes, to pick flowers and dig river banks. There was a little metal sign on Joseph Humann's fence, warning that it was electrified, but as she expected it didn't react when she tapped it with a screwdriver. Just about every electric fence she encountered was off ninety percent of the time. She didn't hesitate to climb over it in her jeans and rubber boots and go tramping up the meadow, a trash fork over her shoulder. It was a beautiful day in late September. Her job was almost done for the year. The sky was so blue it broke your heart. You could see stars in mid-morning. The huge golden eagles were wheeling about the sky, the Clark's nutcrackers clacking away in the tall ponderosa pines. She saw three antelope beyond the ridge, bouncing away down the meadow. A fox drifted along the tree line, its red tail like a Chinese windsock. The last meadowlarks sprang up and twittered away, the white panels of their tail feathers declaring their identity.
Now and then she stopped to clear some debris from the trickle of the stream with her trash fork. She climbed on, up the hillside, appreciating the warm sun on her back. The stream wound around the shoulder of the hill, deepened into a gorge by untold centuries and lined with alder and willow that were turning a bright red. A few aspen were shedding their golden leaves, rattling brittlely in the breeze.
She walked the stream until she was up near the trees, mostly bull pine and ponderosa. Eventually she came to a diversion. She bent and felt the water. It was noticeably warmer than the main body of the creek. She had long heard that there was a hot springs up here—Garland Hot Springs, the old-timers called it, and complained that some flatlander had fenced it off—but she'd never visited it. Now she set off up the warm trickle until she came to a little glade where someone had rearranged a few rocks to form a simple dam. A little digging had been all that was needed to deepen and enlarge what had probably once been a small pool, perhaps no more than a hot mud bath, into a pretty little pond, maybe a hundred feet long and thirty or forty feet wide. The pond backed up against a low wall, or cliff, of granite outcrop and miscellaneous rock, the broken edges softened by wet, steaming moss. Obviously, the springs welled out of the rock, though probably there were many bubble holes, because she could see that there was a partially sandy bottom, which was probably a deposit from the upwelling water.
The pond was completely surrounded with giant old ponderosa pines, and their long brown needles lay scattered on the surface and collected against the flat rocks that formed the dam. The water was steaming in the cool September day.
Without hesitation, Sally laid aside her trash fork and sat down on a large flat rock that seemed to have been placed there for that purpose and shucked off her boots. She stood up and unbuttoned her denim shirt, tossing it onto the rock. She unhooked her bra and tossed it onto the shirt, then slid off her jeans and socks and her panties. With hardly a glance around, she stepped down into the pool. It was hot, easily ninety degrees or more. With a great sigh she sank down onto the gravelly bottom of the shallow pool. She lay there, her legs outspread, feeling this wonderful heat penetrate her body. She thought about a cowboy she knew, named Gary. She wished he were here right now. She slipped down into the water until only her brows and cheeks were exposed and stared blissfully up into the deep blue sky.
The lofty pines surrounding the pool created a great blue window eighty feet or more above her. Festoons of waving gossamer wove a threadbare canopy into which an occasional Clark's nutcracker or a Steller's jay flitted, calling down raucous comments at her pale pinkening body. Her red hair soaked and fanned out into the hot water as she gazed upward. This was the time of gossamer, the goose summer, when thousands of tiny, nearly invisible spiders spun out these long filaments of silk and then cast off in the autumnal breezes, sailing away to fetch up on pines and sagebrush. She thought about the cowboy's lean body, and her hand crept down between her thighs.
After a while she sighed and crept through the shallow water, drawing herself along with her hands, her body floating, into the deeper water at the head of the pool, against the low cliff. Several little siphons, or outlets, in the sandy bed of the pool kept the sand gently fluttering and soft. Suddenly, her hand fell upon something hard and alien. At first she thought it was a rock. She grasped it and drew up her knees, her shoulders rising out of the warm water. She looked at the object that she raised through the water. It was a shiny, chromed revolver.
Sally stood up. She felt a little weak, but the feeling was delicious, despite the oddly menacing effect of finding a .38 under one's hand, in a secluded hot pool. With one hand she slicked the water off her body. A gentle breeze chilled her and she stepped into the warm sunlight to hasten her drying. She laid the pistol down on the large rock, next to her trash fork. When she was dry in the sun, she dressed and stood for a moment considering the gun. She left it there with the trash fork and walked up the path toward where she thought Humann's house might be. It was just over the ridge a short ways. But it was soon clear that no one was home, just as Red Garland had told her.
The path came out next to a shedlike garage on the edge of the clearing, in which the low log cabin stood. There were two motorcycles draped with blue plastic tarp, parked against the back wall of the simple, open-fronted structure. A late model Ford Escort was parked in one of its two gravel-floored bays. The other bay was empty.
The gate on the driveway to the clearing was a hundred yards away, but Sally could see that it was chained and locked. She went up on the porch of the cabin and knocked, although she knew there was no one there. There was no answer at the door. Not a sound but the soughing of the wind in the ponderosas that stood back from the cabin.
Sally walked around to
the rear of the cabin, skirting a latticework structure of weathered cedar that concealed a propane tank which presumably fueled the range and/or the hot water heater, and stepped up onto a low deck supplied with a picnic table and some wooden lawn chairs. Someone had forgotten to take the cushions off the chairs and they were covered with pine needles and bird stains. There was a sliding patio door and she cupped her hands against the glass, trying to see inside. The drapes on the door were nearly, but not quite, pulled shut and all she could make out in the dark interior was the end of a brass bed and a view through an open door into a room beyond, presumably the living room, where a portion of a couch was visible. She shrugged and went back along the path, up the ridge and down past the pool, where she stopped to pick up her fork and the gun she'd found. She continued on along the warm trickle of runoff, the spill from the pond, until she came to Tinstar Creek.
She headed upstream. She had walked perhaps a quarter of a mile when she came upon a huge wet spill that spread down the mountainside. Under the water the grass was still a pale glistening green, flattened. Many little rills trickled off into the meadow and were lost among the rocks. The grass was deep green there.
A hundred feet farther up the creek she found the reason. Debris had jammed among the rocks, creating a dam. At first she thought it was just a mass of branches and possibly a chunk of rotted cottonwood. She set the pistol down on the ground and prodded among the debris with her fork. It was well-packed and oddly yielding. Then she saw a glint of paleness, and she thought it might be a dead fish, a pretty good-sized one, at that. She had heard there were some surprisingly large trout up these creeks, but in this dry season they would surely have fled down into the river. Maybe it had been spawning. She didn't know enough about trout to be sure, but she thought there was a fall spawning run and the spawning would take place in the feeder streams, rather than in the river.
This was interesting. She dagged at the white spot again with the fork. It had considerably more heft to it than she had initially thought. Much more than a fish. No fish could be that big in this creek. So what could it be? A sheep? Red Garland didn't run sheep. A calf? A white calf? Fallen into the creek? She raked away the debris and tossed it up on the opposite bank. She worked at this preliminary task methodically, like the earnest child she had once been, digging and poking, engrossed and unheeding a mother's tentatively anxious calls. She exposed more and more of what she began to think of, abstractly, as a waxy-looking bundle, when suddenly she realized that she was looking at the back of a human being. That tapering part of it led to a shoulder and an arm thrust into a mass of old black branches. And then she could see the back of the head—longish black hair tangled among the brush. And still the significance of it didn't strike her, so intent was she on her task. She was about to poke the major bulk of it with the fork again, when the enormity blossomed in her consciousness.
She gave a cry of dismay and stepped back, flinging the fork from her. She stood on the bank above this temporary dam for several long minutes, gawking down on this fleshy mass partially engulfed and obscured by debris, willing herself not to run. She breathed deeply and checked her watch. It was 2:30. She looked around. There was nothing of any interest, except for the eagles soaring and the distant view of a road, miles and miles away. A red fuel truck was driving down the road, trailing a plume of dust. Then she turned and searched in the grass for her fork and the pistol, found them, and walked back down the mountain.
At her truck she flipped on the CB radio. “Base, one-seven,” she said. When they answered, she said, “I'm up on Garland Butte, Doris. I found something odd. You better call Carrie, get her out here. Ten-four.”
Doris wanted to know what “odd” meant, but Sally said only, “Real odd. Too odd. Call Carrie, Doris. In fact"—she sighed—"you might as well call the sheriff's office, in Butte. But call Carrie, first. I'm on the service road above Garland's place. They'll have to come through the gate. I'll be waiting.”
Then she sat down. She felt a little ill, a little queasy, but not bad. The magpies were still sailing around. “Hey! Indian woodpecker!” she called out at the magpies, a name she'd heard old-timers use. “You're no woodpecker,” she said, as the long-tailed birds swirled about and glided up across the meadow to inspect the thing in the ditch, “you're a dead-skunkpecker and deer-hit-by-car-pecker. Call you the deathpecker.” She frowned, thinking of the implications of a phrase like “dead-skunkpecker,” then laughed. Why are you laughing? she asked herself. Well, why not? I'm not going to cry for this . . . this whoever it is, or was. She wanted to go back up and do something about the corpse, but what was there to do?
Carrie Conlin, the sheriff's deputy who lived and worked in the Tinstar area, arrived in her fancy county Blazer. She was a woman much like Sally. They had been to school together. They had both run off men who couldn't treat them right. But they were not friends, for some reason. Carrie Conlin was just too—what? Too cool, too distant?—for Sally's taste. Sally didn't think that Carrie liked her, or approved of her. Sally didn't fret about it, but there it was. It got in the way. Still, they got along, in a careful, gingerly fashion.
The two women hiked up the stream to the site. Sally fell back and waited a few yards downstream. She had no need to see the body. When Carrie had stooped and hunkered and looked to her heart's content, she walked on back, and the two of them descended the meadow in silence.
Jacky Lee arrived shortly afterward, with Deputy Kenny Dukes riding in the passenger seat. They got out and talked to Carrie for a few minutes, then Jacky came over to Sally. She liked Jacky. Once upon a time she had liked him too much, and then he had gotten married. She told him how and why she had found the body and then they all hiked up to the creek.
“Well, he's not going anywhere,” Jacky said, after he'd viewed the body. They had not attempted to move it. “Kenny, go back down and call. We'll need the coroner and the wagon, and make sure they bring a body bag, for a drowning.”
When Kenny had gone down, Jacky turned to Sally. “How did you happen to find this?” he asked. Carrie Conlin stood off to one side, listening but not part of the conversation; she might be guarding the body.
Sally told him again, the longer version now: about Grace Garland, declining water flows. Then she remembered about the gun. For some reason she had forgotten all about it, hadn't even mentioned it to Carrie. It was lying on the seat of her pickup, down on the road.
Jacky frowned when she told about finding it in the hot springs. “What were you doing up there?” he asked.
“I thought it might be closer, to call,” she lied. “It was just lying there in the shallows. You couldn't miss it.” For the life of her she couldn't imagine why she had made up this awkward version. It wasn't like her. Shock? Embarrassment? She didn't know, but it was too late to backtrack and it wouldn't make any difference. She would just tough it through.
“Nobody home up there?” Jacky asked.
Sally shook her head. “Didn't look like anybody'd been there in a while. There was dust and pine needles on the porch, in front of the door. No car tracks, no footprints.”
Jacky listened attentively to these observations, but said nothing. He looked at her carefully. She looked all right, a little upset, a little nervous, but okay. In fact, she looked pretty good—fresh, clean, her hair a little frizzled from the wind, he guessed. “How are you?” he asked.
“I'm fine,” she responded, returning his gaze frankly. She didn't say, How's your wife?
“Whose house is up there? Didn't Grace sell to some guy from California or something? A new house?”
Sally related the story she'd heard from Grace Garland, adding, “Red says the guy—Joe Humann—is some kind of gun nut. Target practice every day, when he's home. Maybe this gun didn't shoot straight and he tossed it.” She pointed off beyond the trees where the hot springs was. “The cabin is just beyond the ridge.”
Jacky asked Carrie if she'd mind sticking around, then he asked Sally to show him where
she'd found the gun. They set off for the woods. When they got to the springs, she pointed and said, “Out there.”
Jacky hadn't said a word on the walk up there and he didn't say anything now, just looked at the pool. Finally he asked, “Out in the middle?” When Sally nodded, he said, “You must have waded out to get it, eh?”
“Deeper'n it looks,” Sally said. “I had to take off my boots.”
Jacky glanced at her dry jeans. The faintest of smiles softened his large Indian face. “Pants too?”
Sally laughed. “Pants too,” she said.
Jacky looked away, up the path, as if to hide his smile. “This the way to the house?” She nodded and they walked on. He walked about the place, much as she had, even peering in the window and lifting the lid on the lattice-work frame that concealed the large white propane tank to find out who serviced it. He jotted some notes in a little book. Finally he said, “I think you're right, nobody's been here for at least a coupla weeks, or more. Well, a body was found on the property and a gun in the pond. I think we could get a warrant to go in. I'll have to check it out. We better go on down, talk to Mickey"—the coroner—"he'll be here by now. If I need you later, I guess I can find you.”
“Oh, really? You remember where I live?” She stalked away.
4
Dirty D
It was overcast, cool but not unusual for October. Jimmy Marshall found a parking place among the abandoned autos interspersed with the occasional late-model Chevy on the narrow street. This wasn't a neighborhood where you could find a lot of parking during business hours because not so many people were actually at work, not in the daytime, anyway. It was the east side of Detroit. The houses were brick multifamily flats, massive and unpretentious, though undoubtedly quite prosperous and encouraging, once upon a time. That was a long time ago, however. Now at least a third of the large front windows wore plywood glazing, and there was no grass, no flowers planted on the little yards in front of their front-wide porches. Here and there a wrought-iron fence was bent and battered ruthlessly, the gate always missing, though sometimes it could be seen nailed over a window.
Deadman Page 3