Death Without Company

by Craig Johnson

  “I’m sorry, Sheriff.”

  I looked past the file and down at Joe. “Hmm?”

  “Did you know Mrs. Baroja?”

  “No.” I rubbed my dry eyes. “No, I didn’t.”

  “She’s gone on to a far better place.”

  I nodded. “Did you?”

  “Did I . . . ?”

  “Did you know Mrs. Baroja?”

  He thought for a moment. “Not really. I think she was very quiet. Most of the clients are asleep during this shift.”

  I smiled a little smile, far better places withstanding. “You know Lucian, don’t you?”

  He rubbed his throat and shrugged. “Everybody knows Mr. Connally. He’s a legend.”

  I looked back at the file. “I think Mrs. Baroja just might have been a legend, too.” I closed the folder and handed it back to him. “Can you make some copies of this for me? It’ll save me the official harassment later today.”

  “Sure.”

  “Who found her?”

  “Jennifer Felson. Mrs. Baroja must’ve hit the nurse’s button in her room.”

  “Anybody else visit her last night?”

  He was starting off with the folder but stopped to point. “I’m not sure, but you can check the guest register.”

  I flipped the handcrafted quilted book to where I could read it, scanned the names, and looked for any more Barojas. There was only one: Lana Baroja had signed in at 7:10 and left about an hour later. There were also a couple of Loftons who had gone to Room 42 less than twenty minutes before Lana. I could go there and do a little poking around. I looked at Dog, and Dog wagged.

  I laughed. “Let’s go get the butler that did this.”

  It honestly didn’t look like a murder case. It looked like a lonely room where a vibrant and beautiful woman had been warehoused to finish up her days. There is no allowance for murder, no curve in which we judge the value of human life on a chronological sliding scale no matter how I had teased Lucian. I owed Mari Baroja. I’d never met the woman, but she was from Absaroka County, and she was mine.

  There was a crucifix above the bed, which was the only decoration on the walls. There were a few personal items, and a quilt, a Bible, and a few letters from some law firm in Miami. I figured I’d get to the letters later.

  There were seven photographs, all in antique silver frames. Some of the pictures were so aged that their emulsion had adhered to the inside surface of the glass. The oldest looked to be one of what I was willing to bet were the four short brothers, all on short horses. They were thin and hard-looking men, and I’m sure the wind whistled when it cut around them; they appeared as if they were carved out of ironwood. I thought about that fight north of Miles City and was glad I wasn’t there for that particular apocalypse.

  The next was of a man, I believe the fourth horseman on the end, along with a woman whom I assumed was his wife. They looked dour and righteous, so I moved on. The next photo was that strange color that only seemed to exist in the fifties, like real color wasn’t good enough. There were two small girls in summer dresses and barrettes, seated on a doorstep. They looked happy but like they had to be. They both had long dark hair, and the one on the right was looking off to the right.

  The next was a young air force officer circa mid-sixties who looked vaguely familiar. He was a lieutenant and battle-awarded, with a green and yellow ribbon bar that told me it was Vietnam. There was a sad quality to the photo, and he didn’t seem to fit with all the others; he was blonder, and the eyes just looked different. The next set of photos was lying on the floor amid a pile of prescription medicines and a hardbound copy of Pride and Prejudice. I opened a reader-worn Bible and found a handwritten note in Basque that read, “A ver nire aitaren etxea defendituko dut, otsoen kontra.”

  I kneeled by a partially wrapped dish of what looked and smelled like almond cookies. I was hungry and was tempted to tamper with the evidence but instead picked up the next framed photograph. It was a group shot of the Baroja family. The vantage point of the camera and the distance made it hard to pick out the individuals, but the brothers were there with their wives and a priest. I thought I could make out the two little girls having grown and acquired husbands, but the lieutenant wasn’t there.

  The last was the most recent and was of a woman in maybe her late twenties who looked embarrassed in a chef’s jacket and hat. It was the only one that had official printing along the bottom, which read CULINARY INSTITUTE DU BASQUE, BAYONNE, FRANCE. She had short wisps of jet-black hair that were pulled back and behind the ears, revealing wide-set dark eyes steeped in facetious sarcasm. I liked her already, which was good, because when I turned she was standing by the door.

  It was a simple statement. “She’s dead.”

  I stood and looked at Dog, who was looking at her. Some guard dog. When I looked at her again, she was looking at the carpeted floor down and to the left. I took a step toward her, but her eyes didn’t move. I went ahead with my educated guess. “Ms. Baroja, Lana Baroja?”

  She hadn’t changed much since the cooking school photo, thinner, maybe a little more tired looking. She had on a full-length quilted coat that was just shy of purple and a red stocking cap that matched neither the scarf at her neck nor the gloves on her hands. She wore high-top waterproof boots, and I was thinking it was a good thing she could cook, because the career in high fashion wasn’t working out. I looked at her again and felt bad about the judgments I was levying on someone who had lost someone very dear. “I’m Sheriff Walt Longmire, and I’m very sorry. I’ve got Mrs. Baroja over at Memorial.”

  “You’ve got her?”

  It was just a turn of phrase unless you were listening for it. “Yes.”

  “Can I see her?”

  Here we go. “There are just a few formalities we need to take care of concerning the late Mrs. Baroja.”

  “Formalities?”

  “I’m afraid that your grandmother’s death was specifically unattended with a declaration of death registered by the emergency medical technician, but we’re going to need a formal certificate from the attending physician indicating that the death was due to natural causes secondary to old age.” I thought it sounded like I knew what I was talking about.

  “Or?”

  She had spotted the flaw. “Or, if circumstances are complicated, a coroner will be asked to rule on the cause of death.”

  “Complicated?”

  “Mitigating circumstance that might lead us to believe that an autopsy may have to be performed.” I watched her for a moment, but she didn’t flinch. “Right now, we’re talking hypothetical formalities, but I’m sure you would want to know why it is your grandmother died.” She was silent. “Could you tell me who your grandmother’s doctor was?”

  “Bloomfield.”

  Isaac. “I’ll get in touch with him.” I had pulled my trump card and gotten some interesting responses. I took another step toward her. “Why don’t you go home, and I’ll give you a call later?”

  “All right.” She started to leave.

  “Ms. Baroja?”

  “Yes?”

  ”You could give me your phone number. It would save me having to look it up.”

  She came back and gave it to me, smiling a sad and covered smile. “I’m sorry.”

  I reached out and lightly touched her shoulder. “No, I’m sorry. This has been a clumsy conversation at a very inopportune time. I understand your grandmother was a wonderful woman.”

  “Really?” I had been waiting for the facetious sarcasm, and here it was in spades. “And where did you hear that?”

  The early morning sun was still a thought as I crunched across the parking lot. Dog snapped at the falling flakes and crow-hopped in a wide sweep toward the truck. When I stopped to stare at him, he barked at me. I continued to stare, and he continued to bark, ready to play. His eyes were all wild from the exertion, and his tongue unrolled from the side of his mouth. I really had to give him a formal name some day.

  After a little frozen
difficulty, I jarred the door open and watched as Dog left snow-dappled tracks across my seat on the way to his usual spot. I had to get some seat covers. I climbed in and pulled the door shut, fired her up, and looked down at the manila folder in my lap, at the stuff of which legends were made. I flipped the defroster to high and watched as my breath spun across my chest and scattered as it hit the paperwork that Joe had given me. The blowers on the heater started leaching warmth from the engine, and the windshield slowly began to clear.

  As I pulled onto route 16 and took a left, I could see Lana Baroja walking along the sidewalk like a mobile quilted teepee. I wondered mildly where she lived, then wondered where she worked this early in the morning. She had scribbled two numbers on the back of the folder at my side. I could have offered her a ride, but it seemed like she was anxious to be away from me. You get used to that kind of response from people when you’re in this line of work.

  It looked like the plows had already made a pass or two, which meant that the little apex of downtown Durant was clear. I pulled off behind the courthouse and parked in my spot. Dog followed me into the office. I tossed the file onto my desk so that I wouldn’t be tempted to read it and continued into the holding area and cell 1. We only had two, but I tried not to use cell 2 or the jail downstairs because it wasn’t my pattern and, if something happened, no one would know where to find me. Dog jumped up and stretched out on the other bunk, and very soon we were both asleep. I don’t know if it was the quick once-over I had given Mari Baroja’s room or Lucian’s words, but it was dream filled and didn’t leave me particularly rested.

  There was a house, just a little saltbox out along one of the spurs and ridges of the Powder River. There were arroyos that cut back along the foothills that headed for the Big Horns, and there were owls in the stunted black oaks and cottonwoods. It looked like the place I’d been to about a month ago, a place I didn’t want to go back to again. The house stood empty and deserted, desolate against a dark purpled sky. A screen door on rusted hinges slapped shut in the framework, and the windows were missing or broken; barren, empty eyes that stared out blindly. There was an old barn and a warped calving shed that leaned away from the wind. The missing slats looked like piano keys set on edge and, having grown tired of playing the same old song, had decided to quit.

  It was a place of tangible dreams that could be touched like fingerprints and felt through the raised and weathered grain of the wood; whorls and swoops of passion and loss, of qualified success and absolute defeat. I was not alone in this place. There was a woman there with her face turned toward the mountains, the northwest breeze pulling at her dark hair like long fingers and pressing a threadbare, polka dot dress against her loins. She had strong calves planted a shoulder’s width apart, and she wore no shoes. Her hands held a silk scarf around her shoulders that was fringed and of an old world print, like nothing I’d ever seen before.

  After a moment, she raised the scarf above her head. She held it there for an instant and then released it. I watched as it raced across the buffalo grass, where it snagged on a gnarled stub of sage and then disappeared. When I turned back to her, she was looking at me. Her eyes were like the black glass of last night and, as she moved past me toward the little house, she did not pause. I could see the delicate quality of her features, the careful shape of her lips. “A ver nire aitaren etxea defendituko, otsoen kontra.”

  I tipped my hat up. Ruby was standing at the open cell door, Dog already having left his bunk to stand beside her. “Rough night at the Home for Assisted Living?”

  I let the hat fall back over my eyes. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” As she turned, I called after her. “I might need DCI on the horn; it’s possible I’m going to need an ME for a general autopsy toot sweet.”

  She was back with the coffee, toot sweeter. “It really must have been a rough night.”

  I sat up, pushed my hat back on my head, and took my old Denver Broncos mug. “Thanks.”

  “Sooooo?” She was petting Dog’s head, which rested on her knee, and was carefully sipping hers from her own Wall Drug mug, which proclaimed 5-cent coffee.

  “Ever heard of any Barojas?”

  I watched the binary computer in her eyes calculate an area the size of Vermont, divide it in a swift grid pattern, and locate the appropriate square. “Basque, down on Swayback, Four Brothers.”

  “That’s them. Ever heard of Mari Baroja?”

  She paused for a moment too long, and her eyes avoided me. “No.”

  I sipped my coffee and let it go. “Then you missed your chance.”

  “Does she have a granddaughter who just opened a bakery here in town?”

  I yawned and covered my mouth with the cup. “We have a bakery in town?”

  She continued to stroke Dog’s broad head. “What do you mean by might need a coroner?”

  “Lucian thinks there might be some funny business going on.” I took a sip and looked at the snorting pony sticking out of the orange D. “Ruby, what do you know about Lucian?”

  She thought for a moment. “I think he is a good man. I think he gets too caught up in the romance of things.” She raised an eyebrow. “You want to know about the romances of older men, ask a younger woman.” Her eyes stayed steady but then broke back to Dog. She crossed her legs and patted the bunk beside her. Dog was curled there in an instant. It took a while for her to gather her thoughts or decide to share them. “I was twenty-eight years old and between marriages when I came to work for Lucian.” I watched as she smiled, and the years unwrapped. She was like that; age would not pause for Ruby, since she would not pause for it. “I was quite a hottie back then.” I laughed, and she started to rise.

  I reached out and took her hand. “I was laughing at the word choice. Where did you get the term hottie?”

  The neon blue lie detector was scanning me for signs of falsehood. “Your daughter.”

  “I thought so.” I held on to the thin hand and ran my thumb over the web between her thumb and forefinger. “I’ve got news for you, you’re still a hottie.” She actually blushed and pulled her hand away. “So, old Lucian cut quite a wide swath around these parts, huh?”

  “Yes, he was very dashing for a man with one leg.”

  “Did you know he had been married?” Big blue. It was the second time today I’d used surprise to get a look at the woman I was talking to. “I’ll take that for a no.” Ruby was the poster child for unflappable, so it was fun to watch her take flight for a change. “He was married to Mari Baroja.”

  “When?”

  “For about three hours back in the late forties. Or about as long as it took for her daddy and three uncles to catch them, take her, beat the hell out of Lucian, and annul the whole thing.”

  “Well, I’ll be.” I waited for her to make the connection, and it didn’t take long. In the meantime, I listened to the soft ticking of the radiators outside the cell. Our jail had originally been one of the tiny Carnegie libraries. It had been erected behind the courthouse at the turn of the century, the last one. Red Angus, the sheriff before Lucian, had shrewdly appropriated the red granite building and had converted it. “She’s the one that Lucian wants the autopsy done on?”

  “Yep.” We sat there looking at each other.

  “Did you tell him you’d do it?”

  I had been hoping that the conversation wasn’t going to go in this direction; the last thing I needed was Ruby’s help in backing myself into an ethically nonneutral corner. “Maybe.”

  “Are you absolutely sure there is no reason for an autopsy?”

  I groaned and leaned back against the wall with a thump, a few dribbles of coffee sloshing up and running down the side of my mug. I wiped the bottom on my pants. “Of course not, but I am also not absolutely sure that there is a reason for one.”

  She took my coffee cup and started out of the cell. “Then you’ll know after you have one.”

  “Is it still snowing?”

  She looked down the hallway to the wind
ows out front. “Yes.”

  “Then the whole thing is academic, because no one from DCI is going to make it up here in this snowstorm.”

  She wasn’t looking at me, and she wasn’t going to. It was one of her techniques for getting me to do what she considered to be the right thing. “You can get a medical examiner from Billings.” She disappeared around the corner, and the dog followed her.

  I thought about the old sheriff. I thought about how Ruby had just lied about Mari Baroja. I thought about what I didn’t know, about how I knew the anecdotes but, perhaps, not the story.

  When I got to my office, my steaming cup was full and resting at the center of my blotter, and the red light on line one was blinking from Cheyenne. I picked up the receiver and punched the angry little button. There was the commensurate pause after I explained the situation. “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  “Things must be really slow up there in the hinterlands.”

  I leaned back in my chair and tossed my hat onto my desk. It landed beside the mug. “I guess I’m going to need a general autopsy.”

  “Do you want us to call Billings?”

  I noticed Ruby standing in the doorway. “Well, it’s a blizzard, and we’re kind of short on personnel.” I nodded, and she brought the note over.

  “I’ll see what I can do, but I bet they’re going to want you to transport.” I hung up. The note said we had an accident near the highway at the access road. It was a bad spot where the curve of the road and a stand of cottonwoods concealed the approach from the I-25 off-ramp. “I’m going to go out there and cut that stand of trees down myself.”

  I reached out, picked up my hat, and twisted it down on my head. I looked up at the old Seth Thomas clock that had served the last four sheriffs of Absaroka County, a sum of almost a hundred years. It was just mornings like this that it felt like all hundred were mine. It was 7:47 A.M., and I guessed the citizenry wasn’t staying home after all.