Cold Dish

by Craig Johnson

  I rubbed my stomach. “Yeah, a little too appreciative.”

  “Oh, Walt. All the women in town chase around after you now. Can you imagine what it would be like if you were good-looking to boot?”

  I chewed for a moment. “All right, I’m not sure which part of that statement I’m going to take umbrage with first.”

  A modicum of silence passed. “I hear Vonnie Hayes is sparkin’ around after you now.”

  I looked up into the twinkling mischief in her eyes. “I’m supposed to be eating my breakfast.”

  “Oh, excuse me.” She went off in mock indignation to recoffee the hunters, and I shook my head in amazement at the speed in which information could be transmitted in this damn place. I spun the folder around and started decoding Turk’s scrawl.

  The Jules Belden Incident, as it shall hereafter be known, began at the Euskadi Bar in downtown Durant at approximately nine-twenty last night. At least that’s where the altercation took place, in the alley out back. Finding the men’s room occupied, Jules had decided to avail himself of the great outdoors and relieve himself in the fashion most convenient. It must have been a grand relieving, because it lasted long enough for Turk to pull up, get out of the Thunder Chicken, walk around, have a short discussion with Jules, and be irrigated. Damn, I’d have paid money to see Turk assaulted with urine.

  I put down the folder and started thinking about the other boys involved with the Little Bird rape case: Bryan Keller and George and Jacob Esper. I would have to give them a call; see if they’d had any contact with Cody Pritchard. Did I think there was some kind of connection? Did I want there to be? I just had to keep a lid on the situation long enough to find some pieces. I did my best work when I wasn’t thinking, sometimes considering my mind to be a body of water that worked best once things had settled to the bottom. The trick was not getting mired in the mud.

  I carried the to-go container of biscuits and gravy back to the holding cells. Jules was getting the usual, too. I walked past the partition wall between the male and female accommodations, a remnant of the unecumenical fifties, and pulled up for a second. Careful not to spill the paper cup of coffee and the usual, I leaned in and gave a hard look to the identification Polaroid that was posted on the bulletin board. It was a standard way of keeping track of people in the cells. Jules stood there smiling, holding up a number with his name scrawled by Turk on the paper below. None of this was what caught my eye.

  I took the keys, turned the corner, and flipped the light on in the small hallway. The mound under the blanket on the cot moved. I used the softest voice I could muster, “Hey, Jules. Breakfast time.” The mound moved again and rolled over as I unlocked the door and swung it wide. I went in and sat on the bunk opposite, placing the food on the floor between us. He was lying facing me but still covered over with the blanket. “C’mon, Bud. It’s biscuits and gravy, and it don’t age well.” With an exaggerated groan, he listed to one side, the thin arm barely supporting him. I reached over and set him up straight, as the Property of Absaroka County Jail blanket slid away from his face.

  I winced. Dried blood had scabbed over the right eye, and his prominent cheekbone and nose were skinned back, revealing a sickly yellow underneath. His nose had been bleeding, and he had applied some rolled toilet tissue into the left nostril. It had soaked through, hardened, and gave his voice an even higher whine than usual. “Mornin’, Walt.”

  “Jules . . .”—about fourteen dozen things were bursting out as I picked up the usual and handed it to him—“eat your breakfast.” I opened his coffee as he cannonballed into the biscuits and gravy. I watched the steam roll off of the fresh cup Dorothy had made for him and handed it over when he looked like he was having trouble swallowing.

  “Thank ye . . .” After a few sips and a little wincing on his own part, he cleared his throat. “I guess I look kinda shitty, huh?”

  His gums were bleeding as he smiled, but it was difficult to tell if that was from the beating or from alcoholism, which was his chosen profession. Jules Belden had been a hardworking cowboy and a carpenter of considerable repute. I remembered him being around town ever since I was a kid; he used to give me a quarter and candy every time I saw him. The only crime he was guilty of was having too big a heart. He was a small man, wiry, with skin that looked like it had been applied and set on fire. The eye that I could see was a ferocious blue.

  “Who did this to you?”

  He took another sip of the coffee. “I don’t wanna cause no trouble.”

  “You want to press charges?” It rumbled out of my chest like an avalanche, and the force of it pushed Jules back just a little before he shrugged it off and looked at his food.

  “Good gravy.” I waited as he handed me the coffee cup and took another bite. “I just don’t want to cause no trouble.”

  “We’re talkin’ legal trouble, and that ain’t nothin’ compared to the trouble that piece of shit’s gonna have when I lay hands on him next.”

  His eyes stayed steady, and his voice took on a patriarchal tone. “Now, Walt . . . don’t you hurt that boy.” I straightened up in indignation. Here was a battered man lying in my jail who hadn’t even been allowed to clean himself up after having been beaten. I was about as angry as I could remember being. “Hell, I peed all over him . . .” His smile broadened at the thought of it. “Then I peed all over the back of his fancy car.”

  I tried to keep a straight face, but the thought of anybody peeing all over the back of the Thunder Chicken brought joy to my heart. I thought of all the decals with little characters pissing on each other in Turk’s back window. It seemed like he should have a better sense of humor about such things. I chuckled along with Jules, in spite of myself.

  “I think I got’m again before he put me in here.”

  “The floor did seem a little sticky on the way in, Jules.” We laughed some more. “But I think you ought to press charges.” Between bites, he reached for his coffee and replied.

  “Stop it, yer ruinin’ my breakfast.”

  By the time I got down the hallway from the jail, my anger had subsided into a calculated ember. As I attempted to storm into my office, Ruby called out, “Vern Selby on line one.”

  I was at her desk before we both knew it. “What?”

  She stiffened a little, and her eyes widened. “Vern Selby . . .”

  Before she could say anything else, I slapped the receiver from her phone as she fumbled and punched line one, and I yelled at the circuit court judge on the other end, “What?”

  After a pause, “Walt, it’s Vern.”

  “Yep?”

  “I just called to remind you about the court appearance you’ve got Wednesday and see if you wanted to have lunch?”

  “Yep.”

  Another pause. “Yep yep or yep no?”

  “Yep. I’ll have lunch, goddamn it.”

  Yet another pause. “Well, I know Kyle Straub is looking for you. He was wondering if you had come up with anything on that Cody Pritchard thing?”

  I vented out a low burst of steam. “No, I haven’t interviewed all the butlers.”

  The longest pause yet. “Well, I know Kyle wanted to catch up with you, but I think I’ll tell him to go find something else to do today.”

  “That’d be wise.” Ruby was not looking at me as I slammed the phone down on her desk. “Omar?”

  “The airport at four o’clock; he’s picking up hunters.” The thank-you was all I could get out. “At the risk of having my head bit off, is there anything I can do?” She was one in a million.

  “Get the big first-aid kit and give it to Jules so he can get himself cleaned up. If he wants to sleep, let him. The door’s open back there. If he wants lunch, get it for him. I’ll be back later to give him a ride home . . . Do me a favor?” She smiled, and I was starting to feel better. “Call up the Espers . . .” The smile soured a little.

  “As in Jacob and George?”

  “Yes, and the Kellers at the 3K.”

  “Someth
ing I should know about?”

  “I hope not. I’m just checking to see if they had any contact with Cody before he bought the proverbial farm.” This thank-you was easier.

  I took the drive down to Swayback Road to cool off. Along with my better judgment, I took the exit and drove up toward Crazy Woman Canyon past the two fishing reservoirs, Muddy Guard One and Muddy Guard Two. Ah, the colorful contrasts of the Wild West. I spent twenty minutes crawling all over a patched-together ’48 Studebaker pickup trying to find a vehicle identification number that matched any of the ones on paper. After the third number, Mr. Fletcher and I were losing interest, and we settled on the first one, as it was the most legible.

  When I got back to town, Ruby informed me that Jules had wandered off. She had spoken with Jim Keller and asked him to bring in Bryan. She had left a message on the answering machine at the Espers and, as of yet, had received no reply. “What time do you want them in here?”

  I thought about Omar and the airport, Ernie Brown and the newspaper, and Vern Selby and the courthouse. “Oh, how about five? And call the Espers again; I’d just as soon get this all over with in one shot.”

  “Bad choice of words.” She reached for the phone and hit redial.

  I walked over to the courthouse and in the back door by the public library. Our courthouse was one of the first built in the territory, which gave the exterior a look of steadfast permanence. The inside, on the other hand, was steadfastly seedy after suffering the indignities of numerous remodelings. Cheap interior paneling, acoustic-tile ceilings, and threadbare green carpeting stretched as far as the fluorescent-lit eye could see. I called it the outhouse of sighs. Vern’s office was on the second floor and, as I swung around the missing newel post and trudged up the steps, I waved at the blue-haired ladies in the assessor’s office down the hall.

  I sat on one of Vern’s chairs and waited for him to get off the phone. He was a precise older man, about seventy, who had wispy locks of silver hair that looked like Cecil B. DeMille had stirred them. He was just the kind of person you wanted to look up in the courtroom and see: patrician, calm, and even noble. The fact that he made life and death decisions on peoples’ lives was only slightly diminished by the fact that he never knew what day of the week it was. “Isn’t it Tuesday?”

  “Monday, Vern.”

  “I guess I lost a day in there somewhere.”

  I wondered where, between Sunday and Monday, he had lost it.

  He rested his elbows on the desk and carefully placed his chin on his clasped fists. “This Pritchard boy . . .”

  I leaned back in the chair. “Haven’t you heard? That’s not a problem anymore.”

  The Norwegian eyes blinked. “I’m thinking that the problems are just beginning.”

  I spread my hands. “You know something I don’t?”

  No blink. “I’m simply thinking that this unfortunate occurrence may exacerbate some of the hard feelings that resulted from the Little Bird rape case.”

  “Exacerbate. Is that a double-word score?” I yawned and relaxed farther into the chair. “And what would you like me to do about this exacerbation?”

  Still steady. “Is there any chance of a quick resolution to this situation?”

  “I could plead guilty and arrest myself.”

  He leaned back in his own chair, and I listened to the soft hiss as the air escaped from the leather padding. My chair didn’t have any padding. I was exacerbated. “Walter, I am sure I do not have to warn you that this case has all the earmarks of blowing up in our faces.” He rested his fingertips on the edge of the desk and sighed. “It was a high-profile case, and there are still a lot of tender feelings both on and off the reservation.” He paused a moment. “Why are you making this difficult for me?”

  I slumped a little farther in my chair. “I’m having a bad day.”

  “I gathered as much. Does it have to do with the case?”

  I shook my head. “Not really.”

  “Well, perhaps we should tackle one problem at a time. You’ve talked to the girl’s family?”

  I leveled a good look at him. “You aren’t telling me how to do my job, are you Vern?” He raised his hands in surrender. We looked at each other for a while. “Lonnie Little Bird is a diabetic and had both legs amputated. I figure that moves him pretty far down the list of suspects.” We looked at each other some more. “He was the one that sat in the aisle in the wheelchair during the rape trial.”

  He shook his head slightly and dismissed me with a wave. “We’ll talk on Wednesday.”

  As I left, I cleared the air. “That’d be the Wednesday after tomorrow, Vern?”

  It was getting close to four, so I drove up to the airport. I figured Omar would be early; he always was. The local airport was famous for the Jet Festival, which celebrated an event that had taken place back in the early eighties when a Western Airlines 737 had mistaken our airport for Sheridan’s and had slid that big son of a gun to a record-breaking stop in only forty-five hundred feet. The town celebrated the avionic miracle by throwing a big party. They invited the pilot, Edger Lowell, every year. Every year, he declined. We never were made a hub, but we still got our share of polo players, dudes, wealthy executives, and big game hunters. The polo players come because of the Equestrian Center; the dudes come to play cowboy for a couple of thousand a week; the executives, to escape a world they had helped create; and the big game hunters, they come for Omar. So far, none of them had gotten him, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying.

  Omar was a local enigma, the big dog of outfitters along the Bighorns. You could run the entire length of the range along the mountains and ownership would concede seven names, one of which was Omar Rhoades. His ranch followed the north fork of Rock Creek at the top of the county, stretched from I-90 to the Cloud Peak Wilderness Area, and was about half the size of Rhode Island. He was originally from Indiana and had inherited the place from a rich uncle who had despised the rest of the family. Omar knew everything there was to know about hunting and firearms. His personal collection was known worldwide, and the number of international hunters he wooed as a clientele was legion. He had his own airport on the ranch, but after the FAA had curtailed the size of his landing strip, the hunters that arrived in larger aircraft landed here.

  I pulled through the chain-link fence and parked alongside the control tower. Old concrete pads patched with asphalt stretched across the flat surface of the bluff, and a frayed windsock popped in the strong breeze. I walked past the white cinder block building, which proclaimed DURANT, WYOMING, ELEVATION 4954; I guess they felt compelled to put the state on there just in case somebody really got lost. I had a great affinity for the few old Lockheed PV-2s parked along the end of the runway that dwarfed the three Cessna 150s chained to the tarmac in front of the building. There were no contracts for the naked aluminum birds, and they sat there with their cowlings and nose cones becoming a flatter and flatter red. The Pratt and Whitney engines slowly seeped aviation grade oil on the concrete, and the Bureau of Forestry decals had begun to peel away. At the end of the building, I looked down the flight way and saw what I was looking for: George Armstrong Custer leaning against a custom crew cab.

  To say that he looked like the General was partly slighting to Omar; Omar was better looking and, I’m sure, a head taller than Ol’ Goldilocks. A carefully battered silver-belly Stetson sloped off his head, and his arms were folded into a full-length Hudson blanket coat with a silver-coyote collar. The locals considered him to be quite the dandy, but I figured he just had style. We had gotten to know each other through a lengthy series of domestic disturbances. Omar and his wife Myra had attempted to kill each other in an escalating process of more than eight years that had started out with kitchen utensils and ended, as far as I was concerned, with a matching set of .308s that had been a wedding gift from the uncle. They were both crack shots and incredibly lucky that they had missed; they could live neither with nor without each other. At the moment, they were living without, and thing
s had become considerably quieter on Rock Creek. He always looked like he was asleep, and he never was.

  “So, if a man wanted to kill an innocent animal around here, what would he do?”

  “Move. There isn’t any such thing as an innocent animal, especially around here.”

  I leaned against the shiny surface of the Chevrolet and wondered how he kept all his vehicles so clean. He probably had about twelve guys on the job. “Didn’t you watch the Walt Disney Hour on television?”

  “I was more partial to Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.” He yawned and tipped his hat back. His cobalt eyes squeezed the distance to the mountains, and you could almost hear the clicking of his internal scopes as they measured the yards and calculated the trajectory. “Anyway, the animal you’re looking for is about as far from innocent as you can get.”

  I pulled the plastic bag from my coat and held it up in front of him. It looked like a Rorschach test in lead. “Which brings me to the point at hand.” His eyes shifted to the Ziploc, and he looked more like a lion than anything else.

  He yawned again. “Somebody meant business.”

  He held out a hand, and I dropped into it the most important piece of evidence in our case. He palmed it for a moment, bouncing it between the band of his gold-trimmed Rolex and the three turquoise rings on his right hand. Omar was ambidextrous. Style. “Soft?”

  “30 to 1, lead to tin.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Some sort of foreign substance, SPG or Lyman’s Black Powder Gold.”

  “Lubricant made specifically for black-powder cartridge shooting.”

  “Black-powder cartridge?”

  It was the first time he looked at me. “How many people have seen this?”

  “Vic, T. J. Sherwin at DCI, Chemical Analysis at Justice, and Henry.”

  He blinked and continued to look at me. “The Bear didn’t know what this was?”

  I paused. “We figured it was an antique shotgun slug, black powder?”

  “Hmm . . .” He could noncommittal hmm almost as good as me.