“Yeah.” She changed the subject. “Cady make it in?”
I nodded. “So you were in on it?”
She was already back to her reports. “Everybody was in on it.”
I picked up my beer and left. Some detective.
The door was closed to Room 32 when I got there, and no light was showing from under the sill. I checked my pocket watch, but it was too early for bed. I went ahead and knocked.
Nothing, so I knocked again.
Somebody moved in the room. “I got a gun.”
“Me too.” I tried the knob, but the door was locked. In fifteen years of visiting him, he had never locked the door. “Lucian, what are you doing in there?”
No answer. I leaned against the wall and gauged how much energy it would take to kick the door in. I was tired and didn’t feel like kicking in doors, so I went down to the end of the hall and got a passkey. Dean had moved on to “Winter Wonderland,” his voice gliding like a sleigh on cream cheese. Jennifer wanted to accompany me, but I wanted Lucian alone.
“Lucian, I’m unlocking the door and coming in.”
It took a moment for him to respond. “Go to hell.”
He said he had a gun, and I believed him. I unlocked and stood just to the side in case he was drunk enough to shoot. I brushed my fingertips across the door as the slab of light from the hallway bolted across the sand-colored carpet. The first thing to hit me was the smell. At some time during his vigilance, he must have soiled himself, and that smell overrode the tang of his unwashed body, the high heat of the room, and the bourbon. He was seated in a cowhide high-back chair with a 10-gauge sawed-off coach gun across his lap. Both hammers were pulled. “Lucian?”
“Go away.”
The empty bottle of Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve was on the floor next to his artificial leg. He was wearing his tattered, checked bathrobe, his Stetson, and one cowboy boot. There were no lights on, and the chair had been pulled against the wall. “What’re you up to, Lucian?” I put the beer down by the door, which I closed, and crossed to stand in front of the brindle sofa against the other wall. I took my jacket off and tossed it behind me. “It’s hot in here.”
“Wha…?”
“It’s hot. You mind if I open the outside door?” He watched me, then took his fingers from the shotgun long enough to gesture toward the sliding glass. I slid the heavy, double-paned glass back about a foot and took a deep breath. The miniature multicolored lights blinked around Lucian’s patio, flashing blue, green, red, and yellow across the icicles on the canopy and across the dimpled surface of snow that had dumped into the small bowl at the back of the building. There was a claptrap Datsun pickup parked in the closest spot of the elevated parking area. The motor was running, but there wasn’t anybody in it. Probably somebody warming his truck up for the cold ride home. I went back and sat on the sofa opposite Lucian and picked up the empty bourbon bottle. “You been drinking?”
He snorted. “Drinkin’ hell, ’m drunk.”
I nodded and watched his fingers still on both triggers. “Scattergun out for a reason?” The smell was getting to me, so I breathed through my mouth.
He wobbled a little, attempting to think and sit still at the same time. He stared at a space to my left, but I was pretty sure he was still talking to me, “ ’M waitin’…” The glittering mahogany of his dark eyes was still visible in the gloom of the unlit room. “You wait with me.”
“You bet.” I sat back in the sofa and wished I had one of the beers in the paper bag, but one drunk and armed sheriff in the room was enough. I scratched my face, felt the hair, and tried to remember the last time I’d trimmed my beard. I reached out with my foot and nudged the prosthetic leg. “Maybe while we’re waiting, we should get you cleaned up and put your leg on?”
He was quiet for a while, staring at the floor between us. “You can’t keep ’em safe, y’know?” His eyes strayed up to mine where they wobbled. “Not always.”
I thought about the woman who had died in Room 42, how she had haunted Lucian long before her death, and how she was now galvanized to his soul forever. “I know.” He started to fall forward, but I caught him before the shotgun fell to the floor. He leaned against my shoulder; he weighed about as much as Cady. “Spent most of my life tryin’ to decide whether ta shit or go blind. Guess I made up my mind to do both.”
I laughed until there was a warm soft lump in my throat and a heat behind my eyes. I palmed the Damascus-barreled coach gun from him and gently lowered the two hammers. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you cleaned up.”
It didn’t take as long as I thought. After I got him in the bath, Lucian was able to seat himself on the specially constructed seat. I was stunned at how old he looked: small, naked, and drunk. I watched him as he clung to the stainless steel help bar and allowed the water to cascade over his scalp and carry the bad things away. The dent where Mari Baroja’s uncle had finally settled the matter of Lucian’s one and only marriage was evident. The water pooled there like some little eddy in his life and collected memories that refused to be erased.
I patted the old man on the shoulder, closed the curtain, and sat on the seat cover. There was a fresh copy of the Durant Courant on the floor next to the toilet brush. When I picked it up, I noticed that it had been carefully folded back to the obituary page. I sighed and looked into the black and white of Mari Baroja’s obit. She had died on her birthday; that explained the drunken jag. I dropped the paper on the floor and went back to the main room to give the poor man a little privacy.
I took the soiled chair and put it out on the patio for future cleaning. The Datsun truck was still warming up and, as I slid the door closed, I could see the ghost of myself in the reflection of the glass, or maybe it was the real me trying to whisper in my ear and tell me what it was that was specifically rotten in Denmark. There were other eyes out there, other shapes that shifted and fell away only to drift back up from the falling snow to watch me and see if I was going to get it right. These shapes moved softly in the deep snow and between the trees; they provided no insight, just audience.
I thought about Vic who was doing my investigative work. I should let her go home. There wasn’t any reason I couldn’t stick around and gather what little information needed to be gleaned here, my daughter notwithstanding. I went back to the partially closed bathroom door. “Hey, Lucian?” I heard some shuffling noises. “You’re not going to drown if I go tell Vic to go home, are you?”
“I don’t give a damn what you do.”
I took the beer with me.
On the way back to Louis’s office, I discovered Joe had replaced Jennifer at the front desk. He looked much as he had two nights earlier when I had fought the Christmas tree. He wheeled his chair back and stuck his arms out, blocking my passage to the bottlebrush conifer. “Very funny.”
“I just didn’t want you to risk electrocution again.”
I leaned against the counter and listened for a second. “How come there isn’t any music?”
“Oh, shit.” He fumbled under the counter with the stereo system, and pretty soon Gene Autrey was crooning “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
“Joe, do you have any idea what could’ve happened to that container of Metamucil?”
“I’m sorry, Sheriff, but it was just on a shelf in the main supply closet. I showed your deputy where it was supposed to be, but a lot of the clients get in there. None of the stuff is prescription, but we try and keep everyone’s name labeled on them.”
Vic said Shelly Gatton didn’t know anything about the missing container. She had seen Lana the morning I had seen her, after her grandmother had died, and the day earlier when she had brought Mari lunch, along with the cookies. She said Joe Lesky was less helpful in that he hadn’t seen anyone with or without cookies, and that, when he showed her the supply closet, there were four containers of the Metamucil, but none with the name of Mari Baroja. “You gonna test them all?”
She absently pointed to the cans that were on top o
f her jacket in a brown paper bag. She had been kind of surly about where I had been for the last hour but got over it when I handed her a beer. I watched as she ate the rather bland meat loaf, limp green beans, and pasty mashed potatoes she must have been served quite a while ago.
“You didn’t get me any dinner?”
“You want mine?” She took a sip of her Rainier. “This beer’s not very cold.” I watched her play with the meat loaf, trying to give it a palatable posture on the turquoise plastic tray. “What are we going to do next?”
“The cookies were clean?”
“Will you give up on the fucking cookies?”
“I wish we had them now.” An elderly woman on a walker paused at the doorway of Louis’s office long enough to register a dirty look; maybe it was the language, maybe it was the beer, or maybe that was the way she looked at everything. I noticed that the cans of Metamucil had been opened. “You already start testing these?”
She nodded. “It doesn’t smell like they’ve got anything in them, which means they probably don’t have anything in them.”
“Well, so far that is pretty much representative of the case: where there’s smoke, there’s smoke.” I thought about all the things that needed to be done. “Could you throw a check on the terrible twins and see if anything turns up? I realize it’s a long shot.”
“I already did; Kay’s clean as a whistle, and Carol’s been involved in some questionable deals down in Miami, but nothing that leads me to believe that she’d be capable of something like this.” She continued to study me. “Walt, trust me, I’d like to like them for this, but there’s just nothing there.”
I stared at the window until she spoke again. “Now what’s the matter?”
“I’m resigning myself to the wonderful homecoming I’m giving Cady.”
She crossed her arms and considered me. “Yeah? Tell her to come out to the Morretti mobile manse by the motorway and listen to the wind and the 18-wheelers jake-breaking, then she’ll appreciate what she’s got.”
I looked at my recently divorced deputy, a beautiful, intelligent woman with a body like Salome and a mouth like a saltwater crocodile. I had been to her house trailer when I had hired her, but that was the last time I’d been there. I started to wonder why she hadn’t ever invited me over for dinner when it came to me that I had never invited her out to my place either. I guess it had never really occurred to me, even though I continually swam against the undertow of my attraction toward her. The thought of myself involved with a woman who was about the same age as Cady was an image so pathetic that I erased it in wide sweeps on a regular basis. “You going home for Christmas?”
“No. Mom says Nona should be dead by then, or so she’s promising. Vic Junior got this new girlfriend/fiancee who’s a hairdresser and pregnant, and Alphonse is running off upstate with some friends. Tony’s working at the restaurant with Uncle Al, and Michael said fuck the bunch of us.”
We talked about her extended Philadelphia family on an infrequent basis. As far as they knew, the world stopped at the Main Line in Paoli. I had the most contact with her mother, had spoken to her on the phone a couple of times and seen a picture of her once. Lena was languorously gorgeous with the same olive-skinned, exotic beauty as her daughter but with a few more years on the vine to ripen. She had an equally handsome husband who Vic said pretty much ignored her mother. He was severe and driven and occupied himself with being the Chief of Detectives North, Sixth District, and liaison officer with the Mayor’s Task Force on Organized Crime. “How’s your Mom?”
She crushed the Rainier after the final swallow. “She says I need a good fuck.”
I nodded, sage-like, and looked at the crumpled can still in her hand. “Maybe she’s right.”
“She says you need one, too.” She tossed the wad of aluminum in the trash can under the desk. “Don’t take it personally. It’s been her advice on the human condition since Khrushchev pounded his shoe on the table at the UN, and Dad says it’s always been the case.”
“Something tells me your mother doesn’t use the term good fuck.”
“No, she uses the term roll in the hay, but it just doesn’t have the same poetic ring.”
I found myself becoming slightly aroused as it dawned on me that Vic probably talked dirty during sex, which shouldn’t have come as such a surprise since she did it in accompaniment with everything else. “So, you think your mother needs a roll in the hay?”
“Since Khrushchev.”
“That’s a lot of rolling.”
Her attention went back to the reports. “Yeah. Well, she’s married to supercop.”
She didn’t talk about her father all that much, but his influence was plainly felt. It would have been easy to dismiss Vic’s relationship with him as the difficulties a man with four sons had when confronted with a daughter, but his dealings with the four boys didn’t seem any less rocky. She yawned.
“Go home.”
I helped her put her coat on, and she turned and stood there studying me, looking nothing like a deputy is supposed to look. She grabbed the lapels of my sheepskin jacket and then smoothed them with the palms of her hands. “I still can’t believe you’re getting laid before I am.”
I exhausted a short breath, a reasonable excuse for a laugh. “If it makes you feel any better, I’m not.”
She picked up the containers of Metamucil and waited till she was around the corner and a couple of steps down the hall before calling out. “It does.”
When I got back to Lucian’s room, it was quiet. The door was closed and locked again. I knocked. “Lucian?” There was no answer, but I could hear muffled sounds along with some splashing noises. “Hey, you getting bashful in your old age?” I listened and could swear I could hear more than one person in there. I glanced back down the hall, where I had returned the passkey, but there was another sharp noise, and I was committed.
I couldn’t hear anything anymore, and a surge of panic raised my head by contracting the muscles along my shoulders. “Lucian!” I pulled my. 45 out and crossed the hall; I knew from past experience that if I used my foot to break down the door, my foot would be the only thing that went into the room. I could hear more noises now, so I charged across and planted my entire side, shoulder first, into the door. It exploded and blew me against the wall beside the bathroom. I saw a leg move in the bathtub and brought my head around to see someone running up the hillside outside Lucian’s patio, someone big.
“Sheriff, freeze!” He was gone. I rushed into the bathroom, my lungs settling as I holstered my sidearm and bounced off the edge of the tub as I hit the slippery floor.
The shower curtain was wrapped around the old sheriff ’s body, and the water was still running. I pulled the curtain from around him and cut the tap. His leg was still up on the seat, but the rest of him was lying on his side with a fist clenched at his chest. I reached under his neck and pulled him up from the accumulated water that, having been freed from the curtain, was now swirling down the drain. He coughed, and I turned his face so that when he threw up, it would follow the water. It smelled like bourbon, and I held the one-legged man against my chest as he retched to a stop. He blinked his eyes and looked up at me. “What’re you doin’ here? Go get that son of a bitch!”
I grabbed a towel from the rack, placed it under his head, put him back down, and raced from the bathroom, through the main room, and out the patio doors. I pulled my sidearm, slid to a stop, and looked at the boot prints. They trailed up the hillside. It looked as though someone had brushed against one of the pine trees about halfway up the hill. He must have slipped but had regained his footing and had continued on. The Datsun pickup was gone.
I paused at the edge of the parking lot, having been careful to make my own path up the hill. The tire tracks and the exhaust melt of the Datsun were still compressed in the snow, and I knelt to look at the boot print where he had gotten in the truck. All the prints were marred enough so that we’d never get a decent imprint, but I placed my bo
ot alongside: big, bigger than mine.
Lucian had struggled up to a sitting position by the time I got back to the bathroom, and I was glad I’d shut the sliding glass doors. He was shivering and clutched his remaining extremities, so I propped him back up on his seat and wrapped another towel around him. I pulled a thick Royal Stewart bathrobe that Cady had given him last year from his closet and picked up one moccasin. I caught myself looking for the other one before remembering that he didn’t need it. His prosthetic leg was leaning against the door and on it was the other slipper. I snatched up the leg and continued back into the bathroom, where he looked up at me, still clutching himself. I sat on the toilet and wrapped the bathrobe around him, placing the leg against the tub, secure in the thought that this should be the order of things.
There was a little blood in his smile; he must have bitten his tongue in the struggle. I pulled the old man in and tried to warm him up before looking for a phone. He was struggling with something and, after a moment, his clenched fist came out from the folds of the robe, and he opened his hand. In his palm was an almost foot-long hank of jet-black hair.
The bloody smile held. “Got a piece of ’im.”
10
No one at the home drove a Datsun pickup, and the only one in our tax records was a rusted hulk out on the Miller Ranch down near Powder Junction. It hadn’t run since Steve and Janet’s daughter Jessie had planted it in an irrigation ditch back in ’89. Steve told Ruby I could have it for the annual sheriff ’s auction if I came and got it; I gratefully declined.
I sank my head back onto my folded coat and draped my arm down to pet Dog. I was having a hard time getting Ruby to concentrate on the Datsun pickup rather than Lucian.
“How about the DMV?” Except for the sound of the plastic keys, it was quiet in the office. Cady had left a message last night that she had gotten a ride from Henry and that she had arrived at the cabin safely. She also said that she and the Bear had stopped at the grocery on the way out. She also thanked God that they had. She also reported that it had only taken ten minutes to shovel out the living room and that Henry had used more duct tape to seal up the roof. She was asleep when I got there and, when I risked a kiss on the top of her head this morning, she hadn’t stirred.
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