Brown-Eyed Girl

by Virginia Swift

  “It’s not very lucky to be burned up alive,” PeeWee commented sourly, but Bobby was hustling him along, asking if he wanted to see Shane’s bunkhouse.

  Dirtbag was nowhere in sight, having been sent, along with the other Unknown Soldiers and any regular cowboys who happened to have been previously convicted of crimes, to remote parts of the ranch. When Corkett asked where Parker’s roommate was, Foote could honestly say he didn’t know precisely, but that some cattle had gotten loose the day before and he’d been sent out to fix fences. The roommate’s name, said Foote, was Howard Robb, which was close enough to Robideaux that Foote could remember it. Bobby had advised Elroy to tell as much of the truth as possible, since most people, even sane ones, had a hard time maintaining a consistent lie.

  The bunkhouse was a disgusting mess, reeking of cigarette smoke and dirty laundry, but nothing suggested to Corkett and Kates that it was anything more than the temporary abode of a couple of run-of-the-mill lowlifes. Bobby had taken the trouble to remove the right-wing literature but had left the porno magazines, and had hauled off anything he thought might have Dirtbag’s fingerprints on it. Corkett and Kates took more pictures, bagged a beer bottle full of cigarette butts to dust for fingerprints, and picked through the piles of laundry, going through shirt and pants pockets. Kates felt something in the back pocket of a really nasty old pair of fatigues, and reluctantly inserted his hand in the pocket. He pulled out an old postcard from somebody named Ernst to somebody called Greta. Bobby’s heart lurched when he realized that he’d seen the postcard before, in a trailer in West Laramie. But then he reminded himself that the police had nothing to tie anybody but Shane to the burglary at the Dunwoodie house. He’d already worked out a strategy: Once they had Shane on the break-in, he and Elroy would profess surprise at Shane’s involvement with the Dunwoodie matter. He would gently suggest to the police that the demented and desperate Parker must have imagined somehow that Margaret Dunwoodie’s controversial legacy gave a twisted criminal like himself and a public-spirited influential citizen like Elroy Foote some common ground.

  “Find something interesting?” Bobby asked Kates, whom he judged to be the softer of the two because Kates, being born-again, said “amen” every time Foote said “praise the Lord.”

  Kates gave him the cop-stare. “Everything is interesting, Mr. Helwigsen,” he replied coldly.

  The roads were freezing up when they left, and after a slippery ride over Togwotee Pass, with gusting crosswinds nearly blowing the cruiser off the road, PeeWee and Curtis had decided to spend the night in Dubois. They were accustomed to long hours driving questionable roads, but they knew when to call it a day. They got a motel room, sent out for a pizza, and discussed the day’s events. They agreed that Foote definitely had something to hide, but they weren’t sure whether what he was hiding had anything to do with the theft and shooting. They couldn’t see any reason why Elroy Foote would have somebody steal and wreck his own car and shoot somebody with his gun. They wanted to bring in Parker’s roommate and ask him some questions, but they had no evidence of any involvement by anybody else. By the time they got to Casper the next day, there was another message from the commander reminding them to wrap up this no-brainer of a case, and telling them there was no need to further trouble that public-spirited influential citizen, Mr. Elroy Foote.

  The postcard, Corkett learned from Dickie Langham, confirmed the suspicion that Shane Parker had committed the November break-in. But that didn’t tell them anything they didn’t really know. They still had no motive for the theft or the shooting. Something about this smelled as bad as Shane Parker’s bunkhouse, and all too often, Corkett got to thinking about Jed Barnes, the young cowboy in Muddy Gap. It bothered the hell out of him.

  Dickie Langham sucked more poison gas out of a cancer stick and reflected on two weeks of fruitless police work. They’d been unable to identify the human remains from the Albany fire using dental records, so they had to go the much slower route. That meant sending what was left of the person everyone was sure was Shane Parker to the FBI lab for DNA testing. The Department of Criminal Investigations had matched the fingerprints in the Mercedes, along with some prints found on a beer bottle, with Shane’s, and they’d taken blood samples from the car to send to the FBI lab. Dickie had the Barnes truck at the Parker house, with Parker’s prints all over it and blood they ’d also sampled and sent to the FBI lab. In a couple of months, Dickie was sure, they’d have DNA matches all around, incontrovertible scientific proof that the person who’d stolen the car and shot the kid, and the one who’d died in the fire were one and the same. The image of O.J. Simpson riding on a golf cart across velvety green grass flitted through his mind, but he had no reason to assume that Helwigsen would pull a Johnnie Cochran on this one.

  The postcard the troopers had found in Parker’s pants tied him conclusively to the Dunwoodie burglary, which was on some level reassuring. The break-in had been such a rookie job that Dickie felt reasonably sure it was Shane’s idea, and probably wouldn’t be repeated. Shane Parker, he assumed, had committed a series of crimes, which had now been solved, with the perpetrator no longer in a position to ride on a golf cart. Once the FBI lab finished the testing and sent him the results, however many months from now that might be, he would close the books on some ugly stuff. He ought to feel like he was doing his job.

  But there were dots Dickie couldn’t connect. Why had Shane Parker broken into Margaret Dunwoodie’s house and stolen a postcard? Where had he gone after the burglary? When and why had he ended up at the ranch of the guy who was dumping a hell of a lot of money suing the University over the Dunwoodie bequest? PeeWee Corkett thought Elroy Foote and Bobby Helwigsen were covering something up. What was it?

  To answer those questions, he’d started with Shane’s “friends,” who included some of the most dishonest, most odious losers he’d encountered in nearly half a century of mixed living. Mostly he and his deputies got the same answers they’d gotten when they’d questioned them the first time around. Hadn’t seen Parker in months, didn’t know a fucking thing, so leave them the fuck alone or they’d scream police harassment. Dickie did turn up one nice piece of evidence when he’d gone to talk to a really fun couple, Terry the meth dealer and his junkie girlfriend Sherry. They said they’d kicked Shane out when he’d come to their place to borrow money the day of the shooting and the fire. He’d been driving a big F–250 with the County 6 plates. “You owe me, Langham,” Terry had yelled over the sound of barking dogs as Dickie walked back out to his car. Yeah, right. If they could ever actually manage to find Terry’s lab, he’d get what was coming to him. The first thing they’d do was get rid of those murderous pit bulls.

  Having worked the Shane connection dry, Dickie went to work from the other end, with Elroy Foote. That meant, he knew, starting with Bobby Helwigsen, whom he’d last seen groping Brittany at The Millionaires’ Ball. He needed to have a chat with Sam Branch.

  Dickie drove to Branch’s office out on Grand on a particularly hideous afternoon, the kind of winter day when it got dark around two o’clock. He fought to open the cruiser door against a fifty mile per hour wind and walked into Branch Homes on the Range unannounced. The receptionist sent him right into Branch’s office, where Sam was sitting behind a desk made from a gigantic slab of granite and in front of a paneled wall on which about a thousand plaques were hung, testaments to Sam’s prowess at bulldozing the prairie, spewing out cardboard developments, and selling people houses they couldn’t quite afford. Ah well, even back when they’d been in the same lucrative business, Dickie had never had the flair for profit that Sam possessed.

  “Sheriff,” said Sam, leaning back in his seat.

  “Realtor,” said Dickie, closing the door behind him.

  “Looking to move up to a home more befitting your recent rise in the law enforcement racket?” Sam inquired blandly.

  “With what the county pays me,” Dickie answered, “I’m lucky I don’t have to live in my squad car.” Sam sn
orted. “Sorry, Sam, but I’m here on my business, not yours. Tell me about your buddy Robert Helwigsen.”

  Sam didn’t really need any defense, but he believed in a good offense. “What’s he done to attract your attention, besides hang all over Brit at my party?”

  Dickie considered the question, got out a cigarette, lit it. “Actually, he did first attract my attention at your party, when you mentioned that he and Sally Alder had a lot in common. And then the next thing you know, he turns out to be suing the University to get her fired. I figure you might have had a little inside information.”

  “I wasn’t aware that it was a crime to sue the University,” Sam countered.

  “’Course not,” Dickie answered genially, “and that’s what makes this country so great. You can sue anybody you want for any reason including that they just piss you off. And I have no reason to suspect that Helwigsen has committed a crime of any kind, but his name just kind of keeps coming up. So I need to know what you know about Helwigsen’s connection with a Mr. Elroy Foote.”

  Since that revolting but interesting lunch at Hasta la Pasta! Sam hadn’t seen or heard much from Bobby Helwigsen. He’d let Bobby know that, much as he hoped Mr. Foote might help him out in the event he got around to running for office, he wasn’t committing himself to supporting the Dunwoodie lawsuit until he got a handle on the public reaction. Amazingly, the Dunwoodie Foundation and the University had stood firm. The public, not so amazingly, didn’t really seem interested one way or the other. Anybody hoping to end up on the board of trustees would be crazy to die on this particular hill, even if Sally Alder had once tried to run him over and continued to be a pain in the ass. There had been rumors in Cheyenne during the legislative session that Elroy Foote, always one Crayola short of a box, might have finally gone off into the Wonderful World of Color. When Sam had seen Bobby at the Hitching Post and asked him how things were going, the lawyer just smiled and changed the subject to the tax code.

  It was frustrating for Sam to think that he couldn’t come up with a way to grab some of Foote’s money without owing him something he might not want to pay. But it looked like that was the case, so he decided to more or less level with Dickie. “Yeah. Well, Helwigsen carries a lot of water for Foote,” he said. “Scuttlebutt is that he’s been handling pretty much all of Foote’s legal business, which is a significant chunk of change. Young Bobby’s a very shrewd little Harvard boy with an eye to the main chance, and Foote’s money is what you might consider a very main chance. The suit against the University is flea shit compared to the rest of it.”

  “So why bother with flea shit?” Dickie asked.

  “Price you pay for really big shit,” Sam answered. “Something the old man wants him to do, so he’s gotta do it. He took me to lunch, told me all about it, gave me this stupid line about the University being the battleground for the hearts and minds of our children. But to tell you the truth, Dickie,” Sam looked right at the sheriff, narrowing his eyes, “I didn’t buy it. Oh, I have no doubt that Elroy Foote thinks it’s worth a million or so to try to get some bitch who makes a hundred K a year fired from her stupid job. He probably thinks he’s making a stand for the American way. Everybody in Wyoming knows that Foote’s a freaking kook who gives a lot of money to what we like to call ‘social conservative’ causes these days. But frankly, Dickie, I think Bobby Helwigsen couldn’t give a good goddamn about social conservatism, or the Dunwoodie Foundation, or anything that doesn’t figure into his bank account. He’s a mercenary bastard, that Bobby,” Sam said, obviously hoping to get rid of Dickie and get back to making money that day. “I’d watch him with your daughter if I were you.”

  The last remark had the desired effect. Saying nothing, Dickie got up and left. He walked out to his car, wrestled the wind for the car door and won a narrow victory, nearly decapitating himself in the process. He sat for a minute, gritting his teeth, then drove over to the Dunwoodie house, where he found Sally buried among books about the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany, and Brit working through a stack of what looked like bank statements, typing notes into a computer. He asked if he could borrow Sally’s assistant for an hour, getting a distracted wave from the boss, who didn’t even look up from her books. Brit got into the cruiser and they drove down to El Conquistador, where Dickie ordered an afternoon snack of a large combo plate and a Coke and Brit asked for coffee.

  He dipped a chip in the flaming salsa, ate it, beat around the bush. “So how’s the work going?”

  “Fine,” she said. Dickie did actually seem to have some interest in Meg Dunwoodie’s life, but he wasn’t spending taxpayers’ time to talk about history or poetry with her, as Brit was aware. “Sally’s onto some interesting stuff, and she’s given me a couple of projects she considers too tedious to be worth her time. Okay by me, as long as she keeps paying.” Brit shrugged, taking a swig of coffee and bumming a forbidden cigarette from her father. “What’s on your mind, Daddy?”

  “You seeing anybody in particular these days?” Another shrug—she could drive Dickie crazier with shrugging than any human being he’d ever met.

  “Nobody particular,” she said. “Why?”

  Dickie stared at her, trying to work up a subtle way to ask her, and failing. “What about that Casper lawyer friend of Sam Branch’s?”

  Brit did not like this line of questioning from her father. She had a plan of her own for helping out Sally Alder while getting a couple of steak dinners out of a cute sleazebag she intended, eventually, to stomp upon. She’d vowed to get him after their night on the dance floor, when she’d found out that he was the lawyer suing to get Sally fired. Bobby had no idea that Brit was involved with Sally in any other way than her parents’ friendship, a pretty meaningless thing. Brit had told Sally he’d called her, and that she was going to go out with him to see what she could learn. Sally had been against it at first, but Brit insisted that there was absolutely no risk involved, and Sally finally gave in.

  Brit had almost been out to dinner and dancing with Bobby once, but he’d had to break the date. They’d talked on the phone some. He had never bothered asking about her work. She was sure he thought she was extremely dumb, a great cover. If she asked the right kinds of questions, she thought he’d let slip some piece of information Sally could use against the lawsuit, some night while he was bragging about how great he was. Brit found it frustrating that her dad might stick his nose in and screw up everything. “I might go out with him, Dad. No big deal,” she said smoothly. “He’s good for a filet mignon and a bottle of wine. Got some moves on the dance floor.”

  Dickie could tell that she was up to something. “You know he’s the one handling the Dunwoodie lawsuit, honey,” he said, searching her face. “Don’t you feel a little strange going out with the enemy?” She shrugged again, goddamn it. “Does Sally know?”

  “Yeah, she knows. She says that since there are only, like, eleven good-looking, reasonably intelligent single men in Wyoming anyway, she understands why going out with him is better than picking up morons at the Wrangler. She gave me a can of Mace and told me if he tries anything I should Mace his ass.”

  Dickie laughed. “That sounds like Sally.” His food came, and he dug in. “Gotta say I really wish you wouldn’t see this guy,” he said through a big mouthful of enchilada ranchera. “I can’t believe you’d actually go out with a Republican. Next thing you know, you’ll be blaming all the problems of the world on welfare mothers and subscribing to the Wall Street Journal. If I had my way, the next time he calls, you’d tell him your dad won’t let you go out with him.”

  Her dad was way too interested in this, Brit realized, much to her frustration. She figured that if he’d just leave her alone, she might be able to make her plan work. But Dickie wouldn’t, and it pissed her off. “I wasn’t aware I’d asked your permission, Dad. I’m not fifteen anymore,” she sulked, snagging a tortilla chip and dunking it into his refried beans. “Why don’t you, like, just put him in jail and get it over with?”

&nbs
p; The more Sally read, the less it seemed she knew about Meg Dunwoodie and Ernst Malthus. She was learning a lot about the Germans who fought Nazi domination in various ways. There were cells of resistance among the Communists, and certain groups in the churches, as well as in the army and civil service. A number of influential men in and around the famous Kreisau Circle had evidently managed to travel to other countries throughout the war, that is, until the failed assassination attempt of July 20, 1944, when virtually all of them were tortured and executed. Rainer Malthus, who turned up in virtually every account of the conspiracy, had been a military man who was considered an expert in foreign policy, and he’d been one of those who showed up in places like Stockholm and London, making contact with British and American intelligence agents. The problem was that anti-Nazi Germans who stayed in the Fatherland, holding important government jobs or military posts or positions in business, could never quite convince potential foreign allies that they weren’t double agents. No matter how passionately they insisted that they were determined to bring Hitler down, and no matter how much the Allies wanted to encourage the German fifth column, the British, especially, remained suspicious.

  You couldn’t entirely blame the Allies for leaving the Black Orchestra to its tragic fate. History was full of plots, counterplots, deep undercover agents, and opportunists playing both ends against the middle. The more she read about the people who had lived through Europe’s hell, the more she understood that their choices were unbelievably complicated. Sure, there were plenty of people of all kinds who signed on to the Nazi program and cheered it to the end, but they weren’t always easy to distinguish from the ones who informed on their neighbors because they didn’t want the next midnight knock on the door to be at their house. There were people who spent most of the war as “good Germans” who committed isolated heroic acts of sabotage or mercy.