“You’ve got her?”
It was just a turn of phrase unless you were listening for it. “Yes.”
“Can I see her?”
Here we go. “There are just a few formalities we need to take care of concerning the late Mrs. Baroja.”
“Formalities?”
“I’m afraid that your grandmother’s death was specifically unattended with a declaration of death registered by the emergency medical technician, but we’re going to need a formal certificate from the attending physician indicating that the death was due to natural causes secondary to old age.” I thought it sounded like I knew what I was talking about.
“Or?”
She had spotted the flaw. “Or, if circumstances are complicated, a coroner will be asked to rule on the cause of death.”
“Complicated?”
“Mitigating circumstance that might lead us to believe that an autopsy may have to be performed.” I watched her for a moment, but she didn’t flinch. “Right now, we’re talking hypothetical formalities, but I’m sure you would want to know why it is your grandmother died.” She was silent. “Could you tell me who your grandmother’s doctor was?”
“Bloomfield.”
Isaac. “I’ll get in touch with him.” I had pulled my trump card and gotten some interesting responses. I took another step toward her. “Why don’t you go home, and I’ll give you a call later?”
“All right.” She started to leave.
“Ms. Baroja?”
“Yes?”
”You could give me your phone number. It would save me having to look it up.”
She came back and gave it to me, smiling a sad and covered smile. “I’m sorry.”
I reached out and lightly touched her shoulder. “No, I’m sorry. This has been a clumsy conversation at a very inopportune time. I understand your grandmother was a wonderful woman.”
“Really?” I had been waiting for the facetious sarcasm, and here it was in spades. “And where did you hear that?”
The early morning sun was still a thought as I crunched across the parking lot. Dog snapped at the falling flakes and crow-hopped in a wide sweep toward the truck. When I stopped to stare at him, he barked at me. I continued to stare, and he continued to bark, ready to play. His eyes were all wild from the exertion, and his tongue unrolled from the side of his mouth. I really had to give him a formal name some day.
After a little frozen difficulty, I jarred the door open and watched as Dog left snow-dappled tracks across my seat on the way to his usual spot. I had to get some seat covers. I climbed in and pulled the door shut, fired her up, and looked down at the manila folder in my lap, at the stuff of which legends were made. I flipped the defroster to high and watched as my breath spun across my chest and scattered as it hit the paperwork that Joe had given me. The blowers on the heater started leaching warmth from the engine, and the windshield slowly began to clear.
As I pulled onto route 16 and took a left, I could see Lana Baroja walking along the sidewalk like a mobile quilted teepee. I wondered mildly where she lived, then wondered where she worked this early in the morning. She had scribbled two numbers on the back of the folder at my side. I could have offered her a ride, but it seemed like she was anxious to be away from me. You get used to that kind of response from people when you’re in this line of work.
It looked like the plows had already made a pass or two, which meant that the little apex of downtown Durant was clear. I pulled off behind the courthouse and parked in my spot. Dog followed me into the office. I tossed the file onto my desk so that I wouldn’t be tempted to read it and continued into the holding area and cell 1. We only had two, but I tried not to use cell 2 or the jail downstairs because it wasn’t my pattern and, if something happened, no one would know where to find me. Dog jumped up and stretched out on the other bunk, and very soon we were both asleep. I don’t know if it was the quick once-over I had given Mari Baroja’s room or Lucian’s words, but it was dream filled and didn’t leave me particularly rested.
There was a house, just a little saltbox out along one of the spurs and ridges of the Powder River. There were arroyos that cut back along the foothills that headed for the Big Horns, and there were owls in the stunted black oaks and cottonwoods. It looked like the place I’d been to about a month ago, a place I didn’t want to go back to again. The house stood empty and deserted, desolate against a dark purpled sky. A screen door on rusted hinges slapped shut in the framework, and the windows were missing or broken; barren, empty eyes that stared out blindly. There was an old barn and a warped calving shed that leaned away from the wind. The missing slats looked like piano keys set on edge and, having grown tired of playing the same old song, had decided to quit.
It was a place of tangible dreams that could be touched like fingerprints and felt through the raised and weathered grain of the wood; whorls and swoops of passion and loss, of qualified success and absolute defeat. I was not alone in this place. There was a woman there with her face turned toward the mountains, the northwest breeze pulling at her dark hair like long fingers and pressing a threadbare, polka dot dress against her loins. She had strong calves planted a shoulder’s width apart, and she wore no shoes. Her hands held a silk scarf around her shoulders that was fringed and of an old world print, like nothing I’d ever seen before.
After a moment, she raised the scarf above her head. She held it there for an instant and then released it. I watched as it raced across the buffalo grass, where it snagged on a gnarled stub of sage and then disappeared. When I turned back to her, she was looking at me. Her eyes were like the black glass of last night and, as she moved past me toward the little house, she did not pause. I could see the delicate quality of her features, the careful shape of her lips. “A ver nire aitaren etxea defendituko, otsoen kontra.”
I tipped my hat up. Ruby was standing at the open cell door, Dog already having left his bunk to stand beside her. “Rough night at the Home for Assisted Living?”
I let the hat fall back over my eyes. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” As she turned, I called after her. “I might need DCI on the horn; it’s possible I’m going to need an ME for a general autopsy toot sweet.”
She was back with the coffee, toot sweeter. “It really must have been a rough night.”
I sat up, pushed my hat back on my head, and took my old Denver Broncos mug. “Thanks.”
“Sooooo?” She was petting Dog’s head, which rested on her knee, and was carefully sipping hers from her own Wall Drug mug, which proclaimed 5-cent coffee.
“Ever heard of any Barojas?”
I watched the binary computer in her eyes calculate an area the size of Vermont, divide it in a swift grid pattern, and locate the appropriate square. “Basque, down on Swayback, Four Brothers.”
“That’s them. Ever heard of Mari Baroja?”
She paused for a moment too long, and her eyes avoided me. “No.”
I sipped my coffee and let it go. “Then you missed your chance.”
“Does she have a granddaughter who just opened a bakery here in town?”
I yawned and covered my mouth with the cup. “We have a bakery in town?”
She continued to stroke Dog’s broad head. “What do you mean by might need a coroner?”
“Lucian thinks there might be some funny business going on.” I took a sip and looked at the snorting pony sticking out of the orange D. “Ruby, what do you know about Lucian?”
She thought for a moment. “I think he is a good man. I think he gets too caught up in the romance of things.” She raised an eyebrow. “You want to know about the romances of older men, ask a younger woman.” Her eyes stayed steady but then broke back to Dog. She crossed her legs and patted the bunk beside her. Dog was curled there in an instant. It took a while for her to gather her thoughts or decide to share them. “I was twenty-eight years old and between marriages when I came to work for Lucian.” I watched as she smiled, and the years unwrapped. She was like that; age w
ould not pause for Ruby, since she would not pause for it. “I was quite a hottie back then.” I laughed, and she started to rise.
I reached out and took her hand. “I was laughing at the word choice. Where did you get the term hottie?”
The neon blue lie detector was scanning me for signs of falsehood. “Your daughter.”
“I thought so.” I held on to the thin hand and ran my thumb over the web between her thumb and forefinger. “I’ve got news for you, you’re still a hottie.” She actually blushed and pulled her hand away. “So, old Lucian cut quite a wide swath around these parts, huh?”
“Yes, he was very dashing for a man with one leg.”
“Did you know he had been married?” Big blue. It was the second time today I’d used surprise to get a look at the woman I was talking to. “I’ll take that for a no.” Ruby was the poster child for unflappable, so it was fun to watch her take flight for a change. “He was married to Mari Baroja.”
“When?”
“For about three hours back in the late forties. Or about as long as it took for her daddy and three uncles to catch them, take her, beat the hell out of Lucian, and annul the whole thing.”
“Well, I’ll be.” I waited for her to make the connection, and it didn’t take long. In the meantime, I listened to the soft ticking of the radiators outside the cell. Our jail had originally been one of the tiny Carnegie libraries. It had been erected behind the courthouse at the turn of the century, the last one. Red Angus, the sheriff before Lucian, had shrewdly appropriated the red granite building and had converted it. “She’s the one that Lucian wants the autopsy done on?”
“Yep.” We sat there looking at each other.
“Did you tell him you’d do it?”
I had been hoping that the conversation wasn’t going to go in this direction; the last thing I needed was Ruby’s help in backing myself into an ethically nonneutral corner. “Maybe.”
“Are you absolutely sure there is no reason for an autopsy?”
I groaned and leaned back against the wall with a thump, a few dribbles of coffee sloshing up and running down the side of my mug. I wiped the bottom on my pants. “Of course not, but I am also not absolutely sure that there is a reason for one.”
She took my coffee cup and started out of the cell. “Then you’ll know after you have one.”
“Is it still snowing?”
She looked down the hallway to the windows out front. “Yes.”
“Then the whole thing is academic, because no one from DCI is going to make it up here in this snowstorm.”
She wasn’t looking at me, and she wasn’t going to. It was one of her techniques for getting me to do what she considered to be the right thing. “You can get a medical examiner from Billings.” She disappeared around the corner, and the dog followed her.
I thought about the old sheriff. I thought about how Ruby had just lied about Mari Baroja. I thought about what I didn’t know, about how I knew the anecdotes but, perhaps, not the story.
When I got to my office, my steaming cup was full and resting at the center of my blotter, and the red light on line one was blinking from Cheyenne. I picked up the receiver and punched the angry little button. There was the commensurate pause after I explained the situation. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“Things must be really slow up there in the hinterlands.”
I leaned back in my chair and tossed my hat onto my desk. It landed beside the mug. “I guess I’m going to need a general autopsy.”
“Do you want us to call Billings?”
I noticed Ruby standing in the doorway. “Well, it’s a blizzard, and we’re kind of short on personnel.” I nodded, and she brought the note over.
“I’ll see what I can do, but I bet they’re going to want you to transport.” I hung up. The note said we had an accident near the highway at the access road. It was a bad spot where the curve of the road and a stand of cottonwoods concealed the approach from the I-25 off-ramp. “I’m going to go out there and cut that stand of trees down myself.”
I reached out, picked up my hat, and twisted it down on my head. I looked up at the old Seth Thomas clock that had served the last four sheriffs of Absaroka County, a sum of almost a hundred years. It was just mornings like this that it felt like all hundred were mine. It was 7:47 A.M., and I guessed the citizenry wasn’t staying home after all.
Ruby was on the phone but cupped her hand over the receiver and looked up. “Another one at Fetterman and 16; I’ll call Vic and tell her to go directly out there.”
“Does it sound serious?”
“Fender bender.” The phone rang again, and she frowned at it.
“Call the Ferg and tell him he’s full time until further notice.”
It was like walking into a snow globe and, since I had parked the truck, it had gained another inch. Dawn was lingering, but there was a faint blush back toward the hills and, with the glow of the streetlights, the whole place was starting to look like Bedford Falls.
It didn’t take long to get to county road 196, and it didn’t take long to figure out what had happened. The best news was that all the participants in the vehicular altercation were alive, well, and arguing on the side of the road. I flipped on the light bar and pulled the Bullet over to the opposite side so that it would be visible from both directions. There was an older Chevy Blazer that I knew belonged to Ray Thompson, and a newer little Japanese SUV that had number 6 plates, Carbon County. There was one of those new-fangled racks on the top of the Nissan, and it had a bumper sticker that read, IF YOU DIE, WE SPLIT YOUR GEAR. Hello Santiago Saizarbitoria. He looked just like his photograph, only now he looked irritated. “Hey, Ray. This guy run into you?”
“Yer damn right.”
Ray’s wife was next, and I figured they must have been on the way to dropping her off at the school cafeteria where she worked. “Came out of nowhere, flew around that corner and ran right into us.”
Saizarbitoria was about to explode when I put a gloved hand up to his face. “Just a minute.” I took Ray by the shoulder and steered him away from the vehicles and over to my side of the road. I checked in both directions, but there hadn’t been any traffic since the wreck. “Ray, I wanna show you something.” I walked him behind my truck and over to the stop sign where the two roads converged. “Ray, these are your tracks, the ones that slide all the way through the intersection.”
“That’s not…”
“You can see from the tire marks that your vehicle didn’t stop at the sign, and you can also see from the point of impact on both vehicles that you went through just as he passed. Maybe in all the excitement you just didn’t notice.” He didn’t say anything else, just looked at the tracks and fumed. I waited for a while myself, as the blue and red light flickered over the smooth surface of the snow. “In a situation like this, it’s going to come down to who has his vehicle under control, and you didn’t. Now, I’m going to get my camera and take a few shots of these tracks so that if there are any questions later on, we’ve got answers. But my advice to you is to go over there, apologize to that young man, and get out your insurance card.”
By the time I’d taken the pictures, they were all grouped around the hood of the Blazer. I copied down information from both drivers, only partially listening as Saizarbitoria told the older couple that he was here for a job interview, and they wished him well.
The Blazer would continue to the school even though I doubted that there would be any, but the little silver SUV wasn’t going anywhere. Ray had hit right at the wheel well, and the left front was pretty much pushed into the engine compartment. I radioed in to Ruby after we got in the Bullet and arranged for his vehicle to be brought over to Sheridan where it could be repaired.
I also asked about Vic.
Static. “She’s at Fetterman, and the Ferg’s out on Western where one of the snowplows took out a mailbox and got stuck turning around. By the way, you got your coroner from Billings.”
“King Cole is driving down here in a snowstorm?”
Static. “You’ve got to keep up with Yellowstone County politics; Fast Eddie was replaced last November. The new kid’s name is Bill McDermott, and he’s very earnest, so be nice to him.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I turned to the sad young man beside me, pulled off a glove with my teeth, and extended a paw. “Walt Longmire, welcome to Donner Pass. You got anything in that car you’re going to need?”
“Everything.”
I watched as he climbed out and crossed, looking both ways. Fool me once… He gave the impression of being a lot bigger than he was. As I watched him dig a satchel bag, a Meeteetse Cowboy Bar ball cap, and a cell phone out of the car and walk back over, I would have sworn he was six feet.
I continued filling out the accident report. “So, what’s the plan?”
“Excuse me?”
“You and your wife. I’m assuming you have a plan for this interview?” I broke the scenario down. “If this goes well, what happens next?”
“Oh.” He nodded and quickly jumped in. “If things look good, we were planning on coming back over the weekend and taking a look at houses.” He looked past me at the crumpled metal of the Nissan.
“So you’re in for the long haul?”
“Sir?”
“Looking for a house? A place to raise kids?”
“Yes, sir.” He waited a respectful moment before asking. “You married, sir?”
I folded up my report book and stuffed it behind the four-wheel shifter. “I used to be. She died a number of years ago.” I sat there and looked out the window until the image of myself as a romantic figure quickly became ludicrous and faded.
“I’m sorry.”
I turned and looked at him to see if he was real and, at that instant, I came to two conclusions about Santiago Saizarbitoria: that he had been brought up right and that he had a heart. He was halfway to being hired. He was wearing a black fleece jacket, and one of the tumblers fell into place. I looked at him the way you size up a pot roast at the grocery. “You’re a climber?”
Death Without Company wl-2 Page 4