Cold Dish

by Craig Johnson

  “I guess you don’t forget that stuff.”

  I laughed and looked over at the fire. “No, you don’t. Now, granted, I was just some dumb kid from Wyoming, but it was all pretty confusing.”

  “The war?”

  “The war, the military, a foreign country; hell, I was just getting used to California. So, I decided to devote myself to the police side of my job. It was the only part that seemed to make sense. It wasn’t easy, because the marine police were not a formalized occupational specialty. We were only cops on a rotational basis, operating under a skeleton force of navy officers. I was lucky, and after a while I gained some experience and credibility as an investigator.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “A couple of cases.”

  “You don’t want to talk about it?”

  I went back to looking at the fire. “They’re not good stories.”

  “Good?”

  “Happy.”

  “Oh.” She shifted and warmed up both of our drinks with straight rum. “Do I seem like the kind of person who only wants to hear happy stories?”

  “Maybe not, but I’m not sure I want to be the one to tell you the sad ones.” She held on to my glass and wouldn’t let me have it. I laughed. “All right, you’ve broken me.” I took a sip of the almost straight rum and thought back, remembering the heat. “In January of ’68, I was assigned as a liaison to the 379th Air Police Squadron, 379th Combat Support Group, NCOIC Air Police Investigations. A number of Corps personnel were shuttled in and out of Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base, and a lot of them were turning up self-medicated.”

  “So the air force called in the marines?”

  “Oh, no, not at all. They didn’t want me there, but the Marine Corps Provost Marshall’s office did. They saw it as a wonderful opportunity for me to get some on-the-job training from the investigative operations officer there who was career air force and who consequently hated my guts because I was a marine.”

  “Nobody told him we were fighting the North Vietnamese?”

  “Only as a secondary front.” I laughed a little at the absurdity of the situation long passed. “I was assigned to him, but I wasn’t particularly one of his. I broke up a lot of fights, patrolled a lot of outlying areas, like Laos and Cambodia . . .”

  “You’re joking?”

  “Yep, but I did get to meet Martha Raye.” This time she laughed, hard. “Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the air police I worked with were the best, but they were overworked, and sometimes it helps to have a new set of eyes come in from outside. The Vietnamese were selling it right on the base in exchange for black market items from the PX. There were an awful lot of Vietnamese military police involved as ring leaders. I tracked the problem back to air force personnel.”

  “They must have really loved you for that.”

  “Semper Fi.”

  “What else? You said there were a couple of cases?”

  “Yep, I did.” I took another hit from my drink and rested it on my knee; the plain rum with the sugar remnants and cinnamon sticks was surprisingly good. “There was this prostitute that was killed off base. We really didn’t have any jurisdiction, but I made a personal campaign out of it.”

  She put her hand out and rested it along the back of the sofa near my shoulder. “How have you survived, doing this for so long? I mean, you still care.” Her eyes closed a little like they did. “Do most guys still care after thirty years in this line of work?”

  I thought for a moment. “No, I don’t think they can afford it. Nobody makes an emotional bulletproof vest, so you just have to carry the shrapnel around with you.”

  It took her a long time to respond. “You must be tough.”

  I turned and looked at her. “No, I’m not. It’s one of my secret weapons.” She smiled. “There was this prostitute in the village up near Hotel California, this old French fort where they housed an RVAN company at the northernmost tip of Tan Son Nhut Air Base. It looked like something out of Beau Geste. It had twenty-foot walls that were three-feet thick, whitewashed concrete that formed a perfect rectangle. It had solid iron gates that shut the arched doorways into this huge courtyard with all these smaller cubicles. There was a small village out past the fence line, a civilian mortuary, and a cemetery with thousands of little white headstones . . .”

  I thought back as I told the story, and it was amazing how all the details were still there, like some carefully packed footlocker that had withstood the consistent inspection of time. “Her name was Mai-Kim, and I met her over Tiger beers in the village at the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge. They told us not to drink the water, so I didn’t . . . habitually.”

  “Were you a customer?”

  “No, they told us not to do that either, and I was a young marine and did what I was told.” She laughed some more. “She was cute, though. Had good teeth, a rarity in that place. She was tiny, and she loved to talk about America. She took a great deal of pride in the fact that she had lots of American friends.”

  “As many as money could buy?”

  “Yep, but she was better than that.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean . . .”

  “No, I know that.” I rushed ahead, so she would know that no feelings were hurt. “They had an old upright piano in the bar, and I know I single-handedly overdosed all of Vietnam with Fats Waller and Pete Johnson.” I thought for a moment. “She would read Stars and Stripes at the bar between clients, and I would help her with the pronunciations and meanings of words she didn’t understand. After the drug thing, none of the air force guys would talk to me and neither would the Vietnamese police, so I talked to her.” I paused a moment, remembering. “She had a great voice, husky like yours. Like she had just gotten out of bed.” I nodded. “In retrospect, she probably had.” Another laugh.

  “She died?”

  “Yes. Badly.”

  I looked back at the fire and listened to the dog breathe. “Her body was found in one of our abandoned forward bunkers. She’d been raped and strangled. I still remember the crime scene. The killer had pulled down a number of the sandbags to make a bed, and it all looked so normal, until you saw her eyes or the marks on her neck.” I started to take another sip of my rum but stopped a little ways away from my mouth to just smell it. “Nobody was talking, nobody. So there I was, at the last outpost of the last war, investigating a murder that nobody cared about.” I exhaled a short breath, laughing at myself. “It was my way of introducing a little order into the chaos.”

  She waited a moment, but she had to ask, “Did you get him?”

  The dog yawned loudly and rolled over on his back. I watched as his huge fan of a tail slowly dropped. “War stories; I’m even boring the dog to death.”

  “Who did it?”

  I took another sip of my rum and got cagey. “Can’t tell you all my stories, then you wouldn’t have a second date with me.” She punched my shoulder, and I continued to lighten my tone. “She wanted to live in Tennessee. One of her customers must have sold her on it, telling her how it was the greatest place in the world. The Volunteer State, where Elvis was from; she knew everything there was to know about Tennessee.” I looked at the pineapple upside-down dog and waited, but she didn’t say anything. “Okay, let’s talk about you.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Yep, fair’s fair; it’s your turn.”

  “I don’t have interesting stories like you.”

  I gave her my most disbelieving look. “Tell me about New York. Isn’t that where you were for all those years?”

  She laughed. “I had a gallery on the Upper East Side, near Eighty-sixth Street.”

  “What’d you sell?”

  “Really shitty expensive art.”

  “You seem defensive.”

  “I’m an artist.” She swirled the sugar from the bottom of her glass. “We’re always defensive about shitty art; afraid we might be producing it.”

  “Are you still sculpting?”

  She was talking into her
glass, her eyes avoiding mine, so I placed my arm across the back of the sofa and gently touched her hair when the phone rang again. She looked at me with a sad smile and brushed her cheek against my hand before leaning over and answering it.

  I listened for a while, then got up and went over to the fire. The dog’s eye opened, and his head looked even bigger with the ears trailing up, but he didn’t move. I reached down, patted his stomach, and the eye closed. I guess he liked me, or at least he trusted me. I sat on the elevated hearth, pulled the poker from the stand at the right, and jostled the logs into a more active position. The glowing red embers made a checkerboard across the burning wood, and small sparks disappeared up into the darkness of the chimney.

  The wind continued to howl in the flume, and I thought about getting home. Tomorrow was the back-to-zero day. I figured I’d start with the Cody scene; if it was a murder, that was where the killer had started. I would reexamine all the evidence: the feather, the guns, and the ballistics sample. Then I would start reinterviewing. I was going to have to circle the wagons and bring Turk back. I looked at the dog, and he was looking at the rifle beside the door again.

  A little over two years, two years since the suspended sentences for all four boys. Why now? It just didn’t make sense. Why single out Cody Pritchard? He had been the most repugnant during the trial, but why kill him now? The feather was a real twist, and somehow I had to get some answers from it.

  I looked back at the Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead. Was it speaking in tongues? Could the dog hear it? I was dealing in a subject matter in which it was expert. I wished I had a war party of Old Cheyenne to follow me around and whisper things in my ear about life and death. Would old Little Bird or Standing Bear help me find the killer of the boy that had raped their great-great-great-granddaughter? I don’t know precisely why, but I believed they would. Lucian had told me stories about them, about their honor, their grace, and their pursuit of the Cheyenne virtues.

  There was this incident back in ’49 where Lucian did this routine pullover of an older Indian couple who were driving just outside of Durant and were headed for the reservation. He said it was one of those wonderful winter nights when the wind had died down and the snow looked like scalloped icing on a vanilla cake. The moon was full and bright, bright enough for him to spot this old Dodge slide through a stop sign, make a right, and head for the Rez with no taillights. Lucian wheeled the old Nash around and pulled in behind their car to just give them a warning about the lack of illumination aft. He said it took two miles for them to pull over, and they were only doing about twenty miles an hour.

  I could just see that little bandy rooster straightening his belt and buttoning up his old Eisenhower jacket as he got out and walked on two then solid legs up to the ancient, black-primer Dodge. I could see him pushing his old campaign hat back with a thumb, like he used to do, and leaning on the back of the Dodge’s windowsill as the window rolled down. “Hey, Chief.” He wasn’t joking; Frank Red Shield was a chief of the Northern Cheyenne. “I pulled you over ’cause you’ve got a couple ’a taillights out back here.”

  He said the old chief ’s eyes twinkled, and he patted Lucian’s arm that rested on the car. “Oh, that’s okay. I thought you were pulling me over ’cause I didn’t have no license.”

  Lucian said he nearly bit his lip to bleeding trying to not laugh until Mrs. Red Shield slapped her husband across the chest and said, “Don’t pay no attention to him, Sheriff. He don’t know what he’s sayin’ when he’s been drinkin’.”

  I smiled and laughed to myself. Maybe the old guys in the rifle were already helping me. I was aware of some movement from the sofa and looked up to find Vonnie holding the phone out to me. I had been so wrapped up in my musings that I hadn’t even heard it ring again. Her face was immobile, and her shoulders shook like she was cold. “It’s for you.”

  I looked at the phone, back to her, and then reached over and took it from her. She looked scared, and I suddenly felt very tired. I heard my voice say, “Sheriff.”

  I listened to the static of the mobile phone and the pitched battle the wind was having with her, wherever she was. Her voice was tight, and she was straining to be heard over the howl that seemed to match its brother in the fireplace perfectly. “Well . . . we found one of the Espers.”

  9

  “Welcome to Hooverville.” It was creeping up on midnight, and she was trying not to look like a turtle with her head ducked down in the artificial brown fur of her duty jacket.

  “Where is he?” She turned into the steady wind, with her hands buried in the depths of her coat pockets, and led me over to where all the headlights were shining. The pulse of the blue and red lights reflected off the frozen gravel of the impromptu parking lot that had been set up along the barbed-wire fence.

  Hooverville referred to the assortment of little shacks that surrounded Dull Knife Lake at the southern part of the Bighorn Mountains and was known by the locals as the South End. Outside the jurisdiction of the Cloud Peak Wilderness Area and the federal government, numerous lots had been bought and sold and built upon until the surrounding shoreline resembled a collection of chicken coops. Some of the little cabins weren’t bad, but the majority were hunting trailers with little annexes attached that had been towed in a long time ago. The fishing was good all around the lake, but the view was better at the northern part where the shore got steeper and the water disappeared into the thick forest. I thought about the original Hooverville in Washington, D.C., where WWI veterans had been chased out of town and figured it would take a young Patton and MacArthur to clean this one out, too.

  I shined the beam of my flashlight in the path and saw that the single set of tracks leading to the body were slowly filling in. I gave Vic my keys and asked her to repark my truck so that it would form a snow fence that would knock down the wayward flakes that were impeding the crime scene investigation.

  It was Jacob Esper all right, sitting with one foot folded underneath him and the other sticking straight out. He was leaning against the rear wheel of his truck and had a quizzical look on his face. There was a small torn spot at the center of his Carhartt jacket, and he was surrounded by a frozen liquid with brown shading. Dried blood, discounting the temperature, thirty minutes to two hours. I didn’t have to worry about his back, since most of it was a frozen smear on the side of the dirty truck. It started with the explosion behind the door and trailed to where he now sat. His eyes were open, but tache noire had already set in. Three hours. I reached out and tugged at his boot; the body was stiff with fully developed rigor. Six to twenty-four hours. We needed a body core temperature, and we weren’t going to get it for another seven hours.

  One of the footprints behind Vic’s yellow nylon barrier was close to me, so I blew into it and examined the impression: about a size nine, medium width. At the arch was a registered trademark, SKYWALK, with a medallion print of some kind with words around the edges and a diminutive mountain range. The headlights subsided in shadow for a moment. “Where are they?”

  “Over there in the Hummer. They’re about to run out of gas from operating the heater, so they’re in a hurry.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “I told them you’d be real concerned.” She stamped her feet, trying to get some feeling back in them. “I wasn’t sure about how to secure the sight, but Ferg and I thought we could zip-tie the tarp to the top of the truck and then tie it off to another vehicle. It’s probably going to flap like a Windjammer cruise, but . . .”

  “Yep.” I looked around me, trying to absorb it all because in another hour it might look like Stalingrad. There were trailing wisps of snow dunes arching away from the higher points of Jacob’s body already. “Tire tracks?”

  She kneeled down beside me. “Only those guys, pulling in once, circling back out, and then pulling in again.”

  “How did they call?”

  “Cell phone.”

  “Why did they pull out?”

  “Bad reception.”

&n
bsp; “You look at the boot prints?”

  “Yeah, Vasques. So’s the dearly departed and one of the execs.”

  “Popular boot.”

  “Popular size.”

  We both shrugged and looked at Jacob. “No sheep?”

  She pursed her lips and shook her head. “No sheep. Preliminary triangulation indicates an area across the lake, maybe even over where those really shitty-looking cabins are.”

  I turned in the opposite direction from the truck and peered through the darkness and the snow. The headlights of Vic’s unit weren’t helping. We stood up to escape them and strained our eyes into the darkness. “Where would you shoot from?”

  “Top of that ridge, along the tree line.”

  I turned to look at her. “Any local activity?”

  “They say they heard somebody shouting over on the other side about the time they pulled in, around nine.”

  “What’re they doing pulling in here at nine o’clock at night?”

  “Supposed to borrow a cabin from Dave McClure; drove up from Casper after work. Now they’re not sure if they have the right day.”

  “It’s Tuesday.”

  She nodded. “That fact’s been established and corroborated. Ferg is checking with Dave about their plans.”

  I thought about the next move. “Get the tarp tied down as soon as Ferg gets off the radio.”

  She stomped her feet again. “DCI in Wheatland by now?”

  “Weather permitting.”

  She was looking at the side of my face as I looked at Jacob. “We’re not going to be able to keep them out.” I continued to look at Jacob. “Walt?”