Brown-Eyed Girl

by Virginia Swift

  Chapter 25

  Putting Out Fires

  Bobby had just finished a grueling duel with the ButtBlaster when his cellular telephone chirped. He liked to get to the gym early and be pumped up and gleaming with sweat by the time the babes walked by the strength-training area, on the way to the sunrise step aerobics class. He’d met some interesting women that way. Well, maybe not interesting, but you could count on their knowing exactly what percentage of body fat they were carrying, and it was always within the acceptable range.

  It was Elroy calling, and for once he was showing the kind of real discretion the cellphone required. “There’s been a robbery at my ranch,” he explained in a flat voice. “A vehicle and a weapon have been taken. A temporary employee is missing, and so is the gun. The car was found by the state police in a remote location, where someone was apparently shot. Two Department of Criminal Investigations officers are coming to Freedom Ranch tomorrow to investigate, and I want you to be here when they arrive. I am, of course, eager that my privacy and my property rights be respected to the greatest extent, and I would prefer to minimize my own personal involvement in the matter. As my legal representative, it will be your job to remind the police of those rights.”

  “Let me check my calendar, see what I can rearrange, and I’ll get back to you.”

  “I am your calendar, boy,” Elroy said. Bobby had to admit that with what he’d been billing the Foote account, Elroy had a point.

  “Right. I’m sure I can clear my schedule,” Bobby continued, sweat dripping off his face and onto his phone. “I’ll charter a plane and fly to Jackson. Have someone meet me.”

  “Affirmative,” said Elroy, slipping dangerously into U.S. jargon. “Get here as soon as you can so I can brief you.”

  “Of course,” Bobby soothed, wiping off the phone with a towel and trying to calm Elroy’s fraying nerves. “Why don’t you give me the name and number of the officer you talked to, and I’ll call and let him know he’ll be dealing with me.”

  Elroy did so, then told Bobby, “Plan to be here a couple of days. We have several matters to discuss.”

  “At your service, sir,” Bobby answered, trying to mask irritation with obsequiousness. They signed off and he sat staring at the phone in his hand.

  He could just imagine what had happened. Some goddamn ranch hand had gone on a toot, grabbed a truck and snagged one of the countless guns Elroy owned, probably gotten into a tussle with somebody he picked up in a bar, and now a couple of traffic cops were about to violate Elroy’s sacred property rights. It probably wasn’t any of the half-dozen Unknown Soldiers who were staying at the ranch. Most of them were either too straight or too far gone to imagine stealing from Elroy. The only Soldiers there who were capable of such a thing were Danny Crease, who was far too calculating, and Shane Parker, who had Dirtbag sitting on him, probably literally by this time. Well, Elroy paid Bobby plenty for the privilege of having him sweat the small stuff, so he’d spend some more Foote money rushing to the rescue.

  So much for the hot Friday night Bobby had planned. He finally had a date with Brittany Langham. Bobby had managed to get her pager number, and he’d called a dozen times since The Millionaires’ Ball, but she’d only called back twice. The first time, the day after it had become public knowledge that he was handling the lawsuit against the Dunwoodie bequest, she’d told him she didn’t have time to see him. He asked her if she was shining him on because of her father being friends with Sally Alder. She said no, she didn’t give a damn about that, she was just pretty busy. The second time she’d called back she was friendlier, for her. What she said was, if he kept calling her, she’d probably break down and go out with him just to get him to stop bugging her. He’d said he’d come down to Laramie and take her out to dinner and dancing. She’d said, “Okay,” and he’d pounced on it.

  He’d thought that by now the Dunwoodie thing would be over, that the University would cave in at the first hint of bad publicity, or that the Foundation officers might be flexible. At the very least, he believed Sally Alder would decide that spending winter in Laramie wasn’t so much fun that it was worth the hassle of battling her fellow professors for the right to hang around and freeze. If any one of those things had happened, Bosworth and his fellow plaintiffs would get what they wanted, Elroy would think he’d knocked out one more radical sniper’s nest in Wyoming, and Bobby would have made some nice change for basically no work. To his amazement, they’d all stood firm. The University counsel had called him up and rejected the deal he’d outlined, explaining that the Foundation officers had no interest in altering provisions of a valid will, and that the University intended to accept the Foundation’s offer.

  According to the Boomerang, Foundation lawyer Ezra Sonnenschein said that, “These were the terms Meg Dunwoodie explicitly outlined to me, and we see no legal or ethical alternative to fulfilling the letter and the spirit of her most generous bequest to the university. The Foundation trustees are particularly eager that work already under way, including the cataloguing of the Dunwoodie papers and research on the biography, be completed in a professional and timely fashion by Professor Alder.”

  Sally Alder told the Boomerang, “Anyone who wants to get me out of the Dunwoodie Chair had better blow up a bomb under it.” Bobby hated to think that there were a few people among his personal acquaintances who could easily be induced to do so.

  He really didn’t feel like pursuing the matter further. In fact, he’d called Bosworth and advised him to abandon the lawsuit. Couldn’t a really motivated group of petty, spiteful professors make Sally Alder’s life in Laramie so miserable that she’d just go away? Bosworth was offended at the idea of dropping the suit. He kept Bobby on the phone for half an hour of very expensive billable time (on Elroy’s nickel, of course), pontificating about the principle of the thing. By the time Bobby got off the phone with Bosworth, he was sick enough of pompous academics that he’d called Elroy and told him he was wasting his money on the UW matter. Then he got another half hour of blab about Elroy’s daddy and his friends Shep Parker and Mac Dunwoodie, more drivel about the principle of the thing, and for good measure, a lecture on the universities as battlegrounds for hearts and minds. Bobby was a lawyer through and through, but even he reached a point where he began to wonder why he’d chosen a career that required spending so much time listening to assholes.

  So he still had the lawsuit, which he was pretty sure wasn’t worth pursuing (he, for one, didn’t give even a tick’s ass where the University of Wyoming got its money, so long as the least amount of it possible came out of his own pocket). And now he had this ranch hand business.

  He tried to be optimistic. Maybe it would distract Elroy from his paramilitary adventures for a while.

  Bobby called Brit’s pager, selected the message option and left word that something very important had come up, and he had to break their date. Then he closed up his phone, put it in his gym bag, slung the towel around his neck, and reminded himself that no matter how much he had to put up with now, the payoff could eventually be astronomical. Lots of people got paid a whole lot less to listen to assholes; waitresses and cops, for example. He thought briefly about calling the DCI, but then looked up to find Miss Casper Hardbody standing over him, smiling slightly. “Are you done with the Butt-Blaster?” she asked sweetly.

  Bobby wiped off the machine with his towel and smiled back, flicking a glance at her iron butt. “Blast away,” he replied warmly. He could call the cops from the car.

  Delice Langham was using her charm on Steve Baca, Laramie’s new fire chief, as he hassled her about the permit for her newly constructed brick pizza oven. She had so intimidated the regular fire inspector that Baca had decided he’d go and take her on himself. He didn’t half mind, being new in town, recently divorced, and susceptible to tight jeans, black hair, and the jangle of silver jewelry.

  “I’m not just nit-picking here, Miss Langham,” Chief Baca said, stroking his handsome mustache and looking sweetly serious.
“This is a hundred-year-old, heavily timbered building. You have just installed something called a ‘wood-burning oven.’ Does that strike you as a potential problem?”

  Delice had a weakness for firemen, who were always in great shape and always had cute mustaches. She considered Steve Baca a very promising prospect, but she wasn’t going to let him win this one. “My chef and manager assure me that every penny-ante tourist town in the West has a hundred-year-old building with an upscale restaurant in it, and every single one of those places has a brick oven. This building’s mostly brick anyhow. For heaven’s sake, chief,” she added demurely, closing in on her best argument, “do you know what kind of business was in this building in 1883?”

  “No ma’am,” said Baca, “but I bet you do.”

  “I looked it up in the city directory for that year,” Delice told him, inspecting her nails with a small smug smile, then raising her eyes to Baca’s. “Swensen’s Blacksmith’s Shop and Stable. Open fires, hot coals, dry straw, nervous horses, and the nearest running water at a pump a half-block away. If Swensen’s hot horseshoes couldn’t burn this place down, do you think a designer pizza can?”

  Baca gave her a wry look, shaking his head. “I’ll have to give it some thought.”

  Delice was just about to suggest that he call her by her first name, and do his thinking over dinner at her house some night, when the radio on his belt screeched. Two engines had been dispatched to a house fire south of Albany. Baca radioed back to ask for directions, received them, excused himself and ran out to his truck.

  “Damnation!” exclaimed Delice, the minute Baca was out of earshot. She recognized the location. The old Parker place, a ranch she’d been thinking about as a potential historic site. The house was falling down, but could be stabilized, even reconstructed. It had the potential to be a fantastic example of late nineteenth-century ranch culture. Delice was well aware that Meg Dunwoodie’s mother had grown up on the Albany ranch, and she’d halfhoped to persuade Sally to get the Dunwoodie Foundation to buy the place and have it restored.

  Despite what she had been saying not three minutes before, Delice knew precisely how fast a fire could scream through an old building. The Parker ranch house could have been burning for a while before anyone noticed and called it in, and it could very well be beyond saving. Still, she thought, even destruction was history in the making. She pulled out the cellphone that Burt had insisted she get, punched in Sally’s number. Sally answered on the second ring. “I’m coming to get you,” she said. “We’re going to watch a fire.”

  By the time Delice and Sally got to Albany, the blaze was pretty much out. There was a pickup truck stuck halfway down the road, and the fire engines had had to crash through brush to get around it. Firefighters had pumped water from a tank truck onto what was left of the house, and were now searching the smoldering, blackened ruin that had once been the Parker ranch for any sign of human remains. Dickie Langham and a deputy were banging in stakes and stringing crime scene tape around an area that clearly included the pickup. Delice and Sally parked and got out of Delice’s Explorer just in time to hear Steve Baca yell to Dickie, “Call the coroner’s office and have them get a van out here. We found something.”

  Dickie had just hung up his own cellphone, after informing PeeWee Corkett that they’d found the Barnes truck. He’d secured the scene and called in the state crime lab, but he’d be willing to bet that the prints they’d found on the Mercedes belonged to one Shane Parker, the repeat offender at whose residence the truck had been parked. The residence in question was now history, Dickie told PeeWee, and so, possibly, was Parker. According to the fire chief, Steve Baca, it looked like the fire had started in the chimney. Half the people in Wyoming who burned wood were unaware that they had to get their chimneys swept on a regular basis, with the result that chimney fires were a common cause of property loss, injury, and death in the state. Obviously, though, somebody had started a fire in the fireplace, and it was logical to assume that it was Parker himself.

  PeeWee, sitting in his office in Casper, thanked Dickie for the information. “At least someone around here is interested in figuring out this mess.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Dickie.

  “I just got a call from my commander,” PeeWee began, obviously annoyed by interference from his superiors. “He told me that he’d had a call from somebody from the governor’s office, who’d heard that we were going up to Freedom Ranch to investigate a crime, and he warned me to be careful to respect Mr. Foote’s privacy. He reminded me that it was my job to see that Mr. Foote wasn’t doubly victimized, first by the robbery and then by the police. Sounds like that damn lawyer called in some favors.”

  Helwigsen again. Dickie really wanted to talk to Sam Branch. And to Brit. “Somebody put the squeeze on,” said Dickie. “Have fun.”

  “Laugh a minute,” PeeWee said. “Does it strike you that this Foote is playing it pretty defensive for a crime victim?”

  “Well what do you expect from a reclusive billionaire?” Dickie asked him.

  PeeWee laughed. “Yeah, you’re right. He’s probably got his own private dungeon out back for people who tangle with him.”

  “Later,” Dickie signed off, catching sight of Delice and Sally. “What the hell are you girls doing here?” Dickie asked Delice.

  “The Historic Preservation Commission has been thinking about doing a site application for this place for the National Register. I just happened to be talking to Chief Baca when the call came in about the fire. I thought Sally would want to come along to see the last days of Meg Dunwoodie’s mother’s house, if you really want to know. We won’t get in your way,” she added, backing off a little.

  He turned to Sally. “Do you happen to know that the person living here now is Shane Parker, the guy we think broke into your house?”

  Both women gaped at him, for different reasons. Delice knew Shane Parker was living there, but Sally didn’t. Sally knew he was the only suspect in the break-in, but didn’t know he lived in Gert’s old house.

  “Is that his pickup?” Delice asked brazenly, knowing very well that she was poaching on police business.

  Dickie just gave her a look. The smoke had made his eyes smart and given him a headache, and a medium-bad morning looked like it might be turning into a genuinely trying afternoon. Somewhere in all this, Helwigsen, the lawyer who was chasing his daughter and suing the University, was involved. The last thing he needed was the assistance of two women he considered among the nosiest people on the planet, and now, to make matters worse, a silver Suburban was bumping to a halt down the dirt road. Maude Stark got out.

  “I saw the smoke from my place,” she explained, “and thought I’d come investigate. History repeats itself.”

  Dickie, Delice, and Sally looked at her. “What are you talking about?” Sally asked, shivering in her down jacket. She was looking at the bare branches of the neglected lilac bushes that surrounded the ranch yard, thinking how Gert Dunwoodie, as a young bride, had shaken the snow off the blossoms.

  “Guess you didn’t know that Mac Dunwoodie’s house at the Woody D burned, too, in 1966,” Maude said. “Old Mac was a careless smoker to the end. They said he had a heart attack and left a cigarette burning,” she told them. “Started a fire and burned the place right down to the ground. Wasn’t enough left of him to bury,” she finished, watching the firefighters inspecting the smoking rubble.

  “So Meg didn’t give him a funeral?” Sally found herself asking.

  “Meg wasn’t much of a one for funerals,” Maude said, avoiding Sally’s eyes.

  Chapter 26

  Everybody Was Frustrated

  Officer P.W. Corkett was frustrated. He and Officer Curtis Kates drove all the way to Teton County, six and a half hours in light snow, to take a look at Elroy Foote’s place and talk to him. Mrs. Foote had served them coffee, but Mr. Foote was not feeling all that hospitable. Helwigsen, the lawyer, was already there, clearly determined to limit Foote’s liability for a
nything that Shane Parker might have done with Foote’s car or his gun. Foote, followed closely by Helwigsen, took them into the room from which the Ruger had been taken. As a peace officer, PeeWee hated the thought that anybody in Wyoming possessed such a huge private arsenal, especially when Kates felt compelled to point out that he’d seen lots of bigger gun collections, growing up in Wyoming and all.

  Foote said he’d hired the man the police had identified as Shane Parker the same way he’d hired lots of temporary ranch hands, paying minimum wage and room and board for work not expected to last more than a couple of weeks. He’d never had any trouble before, praise the Lord: This was the first time. This guy had evidently drugged his bunkmate’s dinner, waited until he was fully knocked out, taken the Ruger and the Mercedes and hightailed it out of there while the whole ranch slept.

  As they inspected the garage, Kates took photographs and Corkett asked questions. The officers were mildly surprised to hear that the keys had been in the car, but Foote explained that on his property, it had been, and would continue to be, a matter of principle with him to feel secure in his possessions. Foote talked like that. He went on and on, paying no attention when Corkett wondered aloud how it had been possible for Parker to open the main gate, which was ten feet tall, topped with razor wire, and clearly built for heavy security. The keypad next to the entrance suggested that you had to punch in a code to get in or out.

  Helwigsen put his arm around Corkett’s shoulders (PeeWee hated it when guys tried to soften you up by cuddling—what were they thinking?) and drew him aside. “This is a little embarrassing,” he confided, “but actually, the Mercedes and one other vehicle are equipped with automatic bypass signals, because Mrs. Foote drives them, and she has a hard time remembering the combination. The electronic sensor recognizes the vehicle and opens the gate.” He smiled sympathetically. “Parker couldn’t have known, of course—he just got lucky.”