by John Dunning
“Don’t worry about it. He might seem like he’s out of joint, but then he’ll be fine tomorrow.”
“Why does he get a bum rap from the others?”
“I don’t know, maybe because he’s different.”
“Because he’s not exactly Mr. Warm, perhaps?”
“He’s got his moments. Really, he’s an okay guy. But he makes some people uneasy.”
“Why do you suppose that is?”
“I’ll tell you what, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it.”
“I can understand that. Life’s too busy. You know his brothers?”
“Can’t know Bax without you know Damon. Personally, between the two of them, I’ll take Bax every time.”
“What about Cameron?”
“He’s dead. You must’ve heard.”
“I heard he was murdered.”
“Yep. Only half the state for suspects.”
“A real sweetheart I take it.”
“Oh yeah. What’s the saying? Cameron was so crooked he had to screw his pants on.”
We laughed together. “Look,” I said, “I don’t want to pry too much…”
“Funny how I was just thinking that myself.”
“It’s just that I’ve already got a job…”
“And you don’t want to go from bad to worse.”
“Smart gal.”
“Who you working for now?”
“Sandy Standish.”
“Hey, that’s a class outfit. And the word is he’s gonna train Barbara Patterson’s horses. Why would you quit there?”
“No aspersions on Sandy. We just don’t see eye-to-eye on everything.”
“You’re not gonna see eye-to-eye on everything with any of these guys. If that’s what you’re lookin’ for, good luck.”
“I hear you.”
“You gotta remember who’s the boss and who’s the hand.”
“That’s what I needed, Ruth. Somebody to remind me of that.”
28
I had a note at the stable gate from Sandy: a two-liner that simply said Barbara was better but still not well and he hoped they’d be here in a few days. I lay on my cot and slept over the noon hour. At two-thirty I called Idaho and Erin answered the phone. “Sharon’s gone to town to get something for her horse’s eye,” she said. “Looks like you’re stuck with me.”
She had been pondering the wisdom of not going directly home. “I feel like a fifth wheel out here. On the other hand, I’m uneasy at the prospect of not being here. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah, it does. If you get too restless, Sharon will give you a pitchfork.”
“That’s the other thing. If I went back to Denver now I’d just get into some legal case. It would be much more difficult to get away again if I had to.”
Louie and Rosemary were great people, she said. She hadn’t spent much time yet with Lillian or Billy. “Did you know Billy thinks you’re great? I’ll try to straighten him out.”
She thought Bob was already in love with Sharon.
When we hung up I felt a sense of deepening isolation, as if I had cast myself adrift with no idea where I was or how long I might be here.
I asked around and quickly found a high-quality electronics dealer in this part of town. I told the man what I needed, the best, smallest tape-and-wire setup I could get. Cost was no object. People rise to the occasion when you speak those four words, and I paid lots of Sharon’s cash and left with a miniature system absolutely guaranteed to record the suspect without losing a breath or a cussword. I could stand far up the block and hear them talk.
Back in my tack room I played around with the wire—pushed its buttons, got comfortable with it. Bax returned after a late lunch. I saw him walking in the distance with Damon, who must have arrived within the last twenty-four hours. They walked over toward the kitchen together, heads down, Damon apparently doing most of the talking. I saw them come back about forty minutes later with a third man, a guy who looked like Junior. This time they crossed into a shedrow two barns down and I only saw them for an instant, but that cowboy hat of Junior’s was the giveaway.
I headed over to Bax’s shedrow again. Bax hadn’t chased me away yet: I still had afternoon chores. The daily grind. I mucked my stalls and brushed my horses starting with the gray, who forgot his sweet disposition of the morning and tried to take off my right arm. Treacherous prick, I said under my breath, but I fondled his ears and soon we were uneasy friends again. I passed time with Ruth and the other ginney, whose amazing name was Dulciana Hammermeister. Her nickname was Dulcie and that was what she went by.
“She’s a pussycat,” Ruth said.
Bax arrived. He seemed surprised to see me there but didn’t say so. I hauled my muck sack out to the bin. I now seemed to have four head, one of which needed his legs wrapped. “The secret is to get his bandages tight enough but not too tight,” Ruth said. She took me by the hand and showed me by touch. “Start your wrap like this, away from the tendon.”
I did him up and undid him, several times until I got the feel of it.
“He’s often sore, poor guy,” Ruth said. “Ice helps.”
“How do you use it?”
“Bax stands him in ice for two hours before a race. How do you feel about that?”
The idea didn’t thrill me. I wondered what a horse does if he’s breaking down and can’t even feel his legs. But for now I said, “Hey, Mr. Bax be da boss-man.”
“You got it, Mr. Bones. Two of yours get their ankles brushed with oil and Kendall’s. It’s a mix Bax makes up; he keeps it in a plastic jug in the tack room. I’ll show you how it’s done.”
She said the horses got a hot mash for supper. “I’ll show you how to cook it.”
Bax sat at the end of the shedrow, watched us work, and said not a word.
He left suddenly before the work was done. Ruth and Dulcie settled into a spirited card game with some visiting ginney guys from Barn 64 and I got out of there. Time was wasting.
It was a long drive in traffic over to Martha’s motel. She gave me a spontaneous hug and I spent the next half hour showing her how to use the little device I had bought. We went over it several times so there’d be no slipups; then we headed out to Larson’s Restaurant in my car.
I was still almost an hour early, which was fine. I wanted to case the joint and pick my best place for a stakeout. I was counting on my ability to see without being seen; I had been good at that back in Denver in my days before books, and I figured I had a pretty fair chance even when the perp knew what I looked like. But there was always the possibility I’d be seen no matter how good I thought I was, and then I’d have to improvise. Get in his face was always a plan. Make him forget about the others by turning myself into a tower of menace.
The restaurant was a pleasant surprise. The layout was just what the doctor ordered. Lots of light, plenty of vacant tables in the hour before the rush might begin. There was an old-fashioned drugstore across the street, complete with a soda fountain. The drugstore was as crowded as the restaurant was empty: lots of kids hanging out after school, eating ice cream floats and drinking cherry smashes. I put Martha at the fountain, on the last unoccupied stool near the end. I got her a Times, more newspaper than the average burglar and all the accomplices in Southern California could hide behind. She could easily see into the restaurant over the top edge of the day’s leading rape story: She could see the whole room wherever Bax might choose to sit.
“Go when the time seems right,” I said to her. “Don’t worry, I’ll be close.”
I went into the place next door and did some mindless browsing. Good thing I was diligent: Baxter also was early, arriving just a few minutes later. He looked around the dining room and finally picked his table, facing the outer door. The minutes stretched on: a waitress brought him some munchies, which he barely touched. However, he gulped his coffee and called for more. Nervous Bax, I thought: uneasy Bax. I wondered what he’d do or say when we finally did come face-to-face w
ithout all the camouflage, and I wondered when that might be. I wasn’t quite ready to mess with his day yet.
At quarter past six he called the waitress and asked her something. He’d be describing Martha now, wondering if any message had been left for him. Almost in the same second the waitress shook her head, but he kept her there through another long exchange. The waitress was beginning to look annoyed when Bax gave up and settled back for the duration.
We waited. Some dinner trade was beginning to trickle in and the staff was looking at Bax in annoyance. He sat in oblivion through all of this. He looked like a dime-store dummy or maybe a model for a funeral home. He seemed damned determined not to leave and then, suddenly, he erupted. He slammed his hand down with what must have been the velocity of a gunshot. Everybody in the place jumped half out of their chairs and the waitresses all froze where they were standing near the kitchen. From there I could see the face of the waitress: uneasy, uncertain, trying to be pleasant in a difficult situation.
Bax ordered more coffee and the waitress brought it. She asked a question and he shook his head. No dinner, he was saying: just the coffee. She walked away, looking over her shoulder.
It was some time later when I realized I was standing in a thrift store. I turned my head and stared at a wall of books twenty feet away. The usual crap, I could see from there, the sign said ALL BOOKS 75 CENTS. I forced myself to look across at Bax again, but the books kept drawing me back. Instinctively my eyes bumped along the spines and darted across the street again to Bax. I saw a shelf of detective fiction, probably all donated by the same guy. Book club stuff: I could tell it without ever touching a book or opening a cover. After you’ve been in the business a while and felt ten thousand of these goddam things, you just know. That’s also how you make mistakes, by assuming you know more than you do. I looked across at Bax, a study in scary eccentricity. The waitress was keeping her distance: If he wanted a refill, let him send up a flare and she’d bring him one posthaste. I looked at the books, dropping my eyes down a shelf and skimming along a row of mixed-bag fiction and nonfiction: trade editions, mostly thicker and taller than their book club counterparts, but you can never be sure from a distance. Damn, I wanted to rifle that shelf. How long could it take and where the hell would Bax go anyway? I could do it in half a minute, just long enough to touch them and feel the paper, just long enough to lose him. Talk about half-assed incompetence, how about a detective who loses both a killer and a witness while he’s groping through things like The Slim Man’s Girdle Book, looking for something that had never been there in the first place. Even Peter Sellers wouldn’t do that. Well, maybe he would but there wasn’t any salvation in that thought. It didn’t matter, I shouldn’t care: it was all dreck anyway. I looked across the street but Bax hadn’t moved. No sign yet of Martha: I hoped she was only waiting for the perfect moment and not getting cold feet. I gave the bookshelf a final gander and there, twenty feet away, was a copy of The Long Lavender Look by John D. MacDonald, Lippincott, very scarce in its first hardback edition. Maybe this was, maybe it wasn’t: It sure looked pretty good from here. Visions of five hundred bucks danced in my head, and that’s when Bax chose to get up and leave. I saw Martha come past my window and hurry down the street behind him. I looked back brokenhearted and left the book there.
She turned on her wire. “Are you with me, Cliff?” she said, but I had no way of answering. I was with her though as she followed Bax through the streets to a parking lot. “Sorry,” I heard her say. “I should have gone after him sooner but my feet wouldn’t seem to function.”
Yes, she was clearly nervous: her breath came quickly and shivery. “I’m okay now,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”
I watched her from a doorway. She approached him softly as he fumbled for his keys.
“Hey, Bax.”
What happened next was even stranger than what we had just been through. Bax said, “Jesus Christ, Martha!” and whipped around and sagged against his car. “Goddammit, don’t you know better than to walk up on a man that way?” I was standing not fifty yards away; I could reach them in less than ten seconds if I had to. I heard Martha say, “So what do you want, Bax?” and there was a moment of quiet when Bax said nothing at all. I had almost given up on him: The dark thought crossed my mind that my pricey little gizmo had malfunctioned in some way, but no, I could hear him breathe. He had a cold. Martha said, “Talk to me, Baxter” and what followed was five minutes of screwy dialogue.
“You talk to me, Martha. You goin’ away somewhere?”
“What difference does that make?”
“I was hoping, you know…”
“Hoping what?”
“We could get all this behind us. Become, you know, friends.”
Martha said, “What are you doing, Bax, asking me for a date?” and I thought, Damn, she’s good.
“That wouldn’t be the strangest thing that’s ever happened,” Bax said.
“It sure would to me. First that you would ask, second that you’d even think I might go.”
“Hey, you’re here, aren’t you?”
“I’ve got to admit, I am curious.”
“About what?”
She laughed. “About what? You’ve gotta be kidding.”
“Oh, loosen up for Christ’s sake. Let’s go back to that restaurant and have some dinner and get this straightened out.”
“Why don’t you straighten me out right here and now?”
“You really want to talk this out in a parking lot?”
Another pause. Then she said, “Come here. Come closer where I can see your eyes, and tell me you didn’t kill Candice.”
Oh, wow, she is good.
“I have no idea where you’re getting this,” Baxter said.
“One of your horses told me.”
“That’s what you said. You know if you repeat that, people will think it’s you who’s crazy.”
“Just say it again.”
“Say what?”
“Say you’ll put that horse in the ground, same place you put Candice.”
He whispered something, so softly that even my equipment couldn’t pick it up.
“I’ve never been much good at lipreading,” she said. “Say it so I can hear you.”
He laughed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re lying. You should treat your horses better than that, Bax, they’ll run better for you.”
“You’re saying I said this to a horse?” He blew his nose and it sounded like Krakatoa erupting. “You really need some professional help, Martha. That’s all I came out here to tell you. You’re sick.”
“That’s funny coming from you. Look at you, you’re losing it even as we speak.”
Suddenly his tone got angrier. “How the hell did you come charging into my life, anyway? Who have you told about this?”
“You think I’d tell you that?”
“You told Janeway for one. I know you did.”
“Who’s Janeway?”
“Oh, don’t give me that shit. How the hell do you expect to have a conversation if you’re just gonna stonewall me?”
“Look, all I want from you is this. Just admit what you said, that morning in the barn. Just admit it, Bax.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then we seem to have run out of things to say.”
“That would be your choice, not mine.”
I heard him get in his car and slam the door. Heard the window go down.
“I’ve always carried a torch for you, Martha. Bet you didn’t know that.”
“Actually I could tell, with those endearing looks you’ve been giving me across the kitchen.”
He made a kissing sound and I heard his motor start. “Last chance at the big time, Martha. Going…going…”
“What do you want from me?” she said, but he drove out of the lot and left rubber on the street.
Martha exploded in my ear. “Shit! Did you hear that?”
“I wanted him to at least admit what he said. I needed to have him do that.”
At last I walked into the lot and met her there. “Did you hear what he said? When he whispered to me, could you hear it?”
I shook my head and she looked upset, on the verge of tears.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “This wasn’t a total bust by any means.”
“Wasn’t any smoking gun either.”
“You did fine.”
“That bastard,” she said. “Oh God, I hate that man.”
I drove her to the airport, gave her some money, and waited with her, watching till her flight boarded and the plane pulled back from the gate. She was off to Idaho, where, for the moment at least, there was safety in numbers.
29
Bax and I now slipped into a game of cat-and-mouse. This was not planned: It just evolved from events that had led us down that path. I lay in my tack room before dawn and stared up into dark corners, coming slowly awake. I thought I’d heard someone at my door. I got up and opened it. Nobody there. I looked down the long shedrow and stood in the dark doorway. I stood there for a long time and nothing moved, no one came, no more bumps went bump in the night, and in normal times I wouldn’t have given it another thought. Just the remnants of a dream. I had no plan beyond this morning; nothing beyond the course I had set, to play it by ear. I would show up in Bax’s barn this morning and see what happened: I’d rattle his cage if the chance came up and see where that might lead. I sat on the bed and worked the cobwebs out of my eyes, dressed in the dark, opened my door, and there he was, standing in the empty shedrow not thirty yards away. He didn’t move and for a moment neither did I. He was wearing black clothes: a black windbreaker, black hat, dark pants; he might have been the invisible man if I hadn’t had great eyes and been watching for him anyway. I would be watching for him everywhere now, every minute, every step I took.