Death Without Company

by Craig Johnson

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I believe he is just the sort that might have angry little bastards strung all up and down the Powder River.”

  I looked back at my daughter. “Stepchildren?”

  “Nope, not unless adopted and stated in the Will.”

  Ruby appeared in the doorway. “Vic, line two.” She disappeared.

  I punched the conference button. “Absaroka County Sheriff ’s Department, Sheriff Walt Longmire speaking. How can I help you?” I thought I’d give Sancho’s methods a try.

  “What the fuck?”

  I guess it lost something in the translation. “What’ve you got for me?”

  “We have a problem.”

  I stared at the phone. “You mean besides the murder and the two attempted murders?”

  “The can of Metamucil is missing.”

  I continued to stare at the little red light on the phone. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “No, I’m not kidding, and they’re having a shit hemorrhage over here. You’d think that somebody stole one of the Dead Sea Scrolls or something.”

  “What the hell happened to it?”

  “Jennifer Felson saw it yesterday. Jesus, Walt, it’s a can of Metamucil. I can’t believe our case is hinging on this.”

  I started wondering what, exactly, our case was hinging on. “I guess I need to come over to the old folks home?”

  The line went dead, so I punched the button and looked at my daughter. Just shy of six feet, most of it leg, she ate like a tiger shark but never broke over 135 pounds. “I bet you’re hungry?”

  “Famished.” She smiled, but it faded quickly. “I’d rather not eat at the home.”

  I looked over at Henry. “Do you mind?”

  He glanced at her and then back to me. “Dinner with beautiful learned counsel?” He sighed. “I suppose not.”

  I helped her with her coat and looked down at her. “You’ve only been here for a few hours, and I’m already pawning you off.” She put her arms around me and rested her head on my chest as I breathed in the scent of her hair.

  “Daddy, I know what I’m going to get you for Christmas.”

  “What?”

  She looked up at me through mascaraed lashes. “A razor.”

  I remembered all the hours we’d spent napping when she was a baby, her tiny body only covering a quarter of my chest; how she didn’t speak for the first year and a half of her life, and how it seemed that she had been trying to catch up ever since.

  She pulled back and smiled as I lowered a fuzzy cheek for a soft kiss. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too. It’s wonderful to have you home.” I let her go and watched as she swirled around the corner toward Ruby. Henry turned back after she was gone, and I reached for my hat. “How in the world did you get Cady a flight up from Denver?”

  “Omar’s Lear. He says the labor is gratis but that you owe him for the fuel. Merry Christmas.” He took a deep breath. “I suppose the Bee is the only place open?”

  “Lucky Dorothy, getting to see you twice in one day. What an embarrassment of riches.”

  It took me a little more than five minutes to get over to the den of iniquity. I had stopped off and bought a six-pack as a peace offering for Lucian; I figured I was going to run into him before too long, and it was better to be wrong with beer than just wrong.

  I sat there in the parking lot of the home watching the ever-present Wyoming wind kick at the ridges of the drifts like a gale cutting the tops off waves. I sat there on my heated seat with the defrosters on high and stared at my mountains. I had liked California; it was a beautiful place, but my spirit developed a restlessness there that I couldn’t seem to shake. I had liked Vietnam, except that native peoples were shooting at you all the time, kind of like Wyoming in the 1870s.

  I gazed at the mountains and allowed my eyes to relax into the monochromatic landscape where the earth blended with the sky. There was a faint glow separating the two firmaments near Black Tooth, and it was almost like the moon had gotten hung up on the crumbling granite incisor.

  I sighed, switched off the ignition, stuffed the keys in my coat pocket, and began the trudge into the home. When I got inside, the place was in turmoil with the soothing strains of Dean Martin’s “Silver Bells” in the background. Vic was talking with Jennifer Felson, who always seemed on the verge of tears. I figured it was time to do a little social damage control.

  I collapsed in a seat after I sat the brown paper bag of beer under the chair closest to me. “I didn’t bring the rubber hoses, do you think we can find some here?” Jennifer smiled but still clutched a tattered Kleenex in her lap with shaking hands as her eyes continued to fill. “You know, they got Capone with a can of Metamucil.” I studied the wall, trying to give Jennifer a little room. “You saw the container yesterday?” She nodded. “Who’s been in contact with it since then?”

  She slumped into her chair and sobbed. “The entire staff, anybody.”

  I looked over at Vic, who seemed to be on her very last nerve. “You can check with the others?” She nodded but didn’t say anything, which was probably for the best, and went back to her reports.

  I watched Jennifer for a moment, letting her purge the ducts. “Now, Joe Lesky would have worked last night. Who worked today?”

  “Shelly Gatton.”

  “Is she already gone?”

  Vic interrupted. “Louis called her, and she’s on her way in. Joe Lesky didn’t answer his phone, but Louis said that that’s not unusual since he sleeps through the afternoon and might not get the message until he gets up to come here.”

  After Jennifer had gone, I leaned against the back of my chair and perused the AARP posters. I figured I’d let Vic start, just to see if her line of thought was the same as mine.

  “This makes no fucking sense.”

  I threw my arm over the back of the chair Jennifer had occupied. “Why would anybody go to the trouble of taking the can?” I didn’t really feel like getting up from my chair. “I guess I better go by Lucian’s and take my beating. I haven’t even told him that Mari was poisoned.” I stood up and tried to think of the last time I’d taken my coat off.

  “You look like shit.”

  I adjusted my hat, just this side of jaunty. “’At’s when I do my best work, when people are underestimating me. Check the supply closet, if you haven’t already; maybe the Metamucil is there. You can take a statement from Shelly Gatton and from Joe Lesky when they get here?”

  “Yeah.” She changed the subject. “Cady make it in?”

  I nodded. “So you were in on it?”

  She was already back to her reports. “Everybody was in on it.”

  I picked up my beer and left. Some detective.

  The door was closed to Room 32 when I got there, and no light was showing from under the sill. I checked my pocket watch, but it was too early for bed. I went ahead and knocked.

  Nothing, so I knocked again.

  Somebody moved in the room. “I got a gun.”

  “Me too.” I tried the knob, but the door was locked. In fifteen years of visiting him, he had never locked the door. “Lucian, what are you doing in there?”

  No answer. I leaned against the wall and gauged how much energy it would take to kick the door in. I was tired and didn’t feel like kicking in doors, so I went down to the end of the hall and got a passkey. Dean had moved on to “Winter Wonderland,” his voice gliding like a sleigh on cream cheese. Jennifer wanted to accompany me, but I wanted Lucian alone.

  “Lucian, I’m unlocking the door and coming in.”

  It took a moment for him to respond. “Go to hell.”

  He said he had a gun, and I believed him. I unlocked and stood just to the side in case he was drunk enough to shoot. I brushed my fingertips across the door as the slab of light from the hallway bolted across the sand-colored carpet. The first thing to hit me was the smell. At some time during his vigilance, he must have soiled himself, and that smell overrode the
tang of his unwashed body, the high heat of the room, and the bourbon. He was seated in a cowhide high-back chair with a 10-gauge sawed-off coach gun across his lap. Both hammers were pulled. “Lucian?”

  “Go away.”

  The empty bottle of Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve was on the floor next to his artificial leg. He was wearing his tattered, checked bathrobe, his Stetson, and one cowboy boot. There were no lights on, and the chair had been pulled against the wall. “What’re you up to, Lucian?” I put the beer down by the door, which I closed, and crossed to stand in front of the brindle sofa against the other wall. I took my jacket off and tossed it behind me. “It’s hot in here.”

  “Wha . . . ?”

  “It’s hot. You mind if I open the outside door?” He watched me, then took his fingers from the shotgun long enough to gesture toward the sliding glass. I slid the heavy, double-paned glass back about a foot and took a deep breath. The miniature multicolored lights blinked around Lucian’s patio, flashing blue, green, red, and yellow across the icicles on the canopy and across the dimpled surface of snow that had dumped into the small bowl at the back of the building. There was a claptrap Datsun pickup parked in the closest spot of the elevated parking area. The motor was running, but there wasn’t anybody in it. Probably somebody warming his truck up for the cold ride home. I went back and sat on the sofa opposite Lucian and picked up the empty bourbon bottle. “You been drinking?”

  He snorted. “Drinkin’ hell, ’m drunk.”

  I nodded and watched his fingers still on both triggers. “Scattergun out for a reason?” The smell was getting to me, so I breathed through my mouth.

  He wobbled a little, attempting to think and sit still at the same time. He stared at a space to my left, but I was pretty sure he was still talking to me, “ ’M waitin’ . . .” The glittering mahogany of his dark eyes was still visible in the gloom of the unlit room. “You wait with me.”

  “You bet.” I sat back in the sofa and wished I had one of the beers in the paper bag, but one drunk and armed sheriff in the room was enough. I scratched my face, felt the hair, and tried to remember the last time I’d trimmed my beard. I reached out with my foot and nudged the prosthetic leg. “Maybe while we’re waiting, we should get you cleaned up and put your leg on?”

  He was quiet for a while, staring at the floor between us. “You can’t keep ’em safe, y’know?” His eyes strayed up to mine where they wobbled. “Not always.”

  I thought about the woman who had died in Room 42, how she had haunted Lucian long before her death, and how she was now galvanized to his soul forever. “I know.” He started to fall forward, but I caught him before the shotgun fell to the floor. He leaned against my shoulder; he weighed about as much as Cady. “Spent most of my life tryin’ to decide whether ta shit or go blind. Guess I made up my mind to do both.”

  I laughed until there was a warm soft lump in my throat and a heat behind my eyes. I palmed the Damascus-barreled coach gun from him and gently lowered the two hammers. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you cleaned up.”

  It didn’t take as long as I thought. After I got him in the bath, Lucian was able to seat himself on the specially constructed seat. I was stunned at how old he looked: small, naked, and drunk. I watched him as he clung to the stainless steel help bar and allowed the water to cascade over his scalp and carry the bad things away. The dent where Mari Baroja’s uncle had finally settled the matter of Lucian’s one and only marriage was evident. The water pooled there like some little eddy in his life and collected memories that refused to be erased.

  I patted the old man on the shoulder, closed the curtain, and sat on the seat cover. There was a fresh copy of the Durant Courant on the floor next to the toilet brush. When I picked it up, I noticed that it had been carefully folded back to the obituary page. I sighed and looked into the black and white of Mari Baroja’s obit. She had died on her birthday; that explained the drunken jag. I dropped the paper on the floor and went back to the main room to give the poor man a little privacy.

  I took the soiled chair and put it out on the patio for future cleaning. The Datsun truck was still warming up and, as I slid the door closed, I could see the ghost of myself in the reflection of the glass, or maybe it was the real me trying to whisper in my ear and tell me what it was that was specifically rotten in Denmark. There were other eyes out there, other shapes that shifted and fell away only to drift back up from the falling snow to watch me and see if I was going to get it right. These shapes moved softly in the deep snow and between the trees; they provided no insight, just audience.

  I thought about Vic who was doing my investigative work. I should let her go home. There wasn’t any reason I couldn’t stick around and gather what little information needed to be gleaned here, my daughter notwithstanding. I went back to the partially closed bathroom door. “Hey, Lucian?” I heard some shuffling noises. “You’re not going to drown if I go tell Vic to go home, are you?”

  “I don’t give a damn what you do.”

  I took the beer with me.

  On the way back to Louis’s office, I discovered Joe had replaced Jennifer at the front desk. He looked much as he had two nights earlier when I had fought the Christmas tree. He wheeled his chair back and stuck his arms out, blocking my passage to the bottlebrush conifer. “Very funny.”

  “I just didn’t want you to risk electrocution again.”

  I leaned against the counter and listened for a second. “How come there isn’t any music?”

  “Oh, shit.” He fumbled under the counter with the stereo system, and pretty soon Gene Autrey was crooning “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

  “Joe, do you have any idea what could’ve happened to that container of Metamucil?”

  “I’m sorry, Sheriff, but it was just on a shelf in the main supply closet. I showed your deputy where it was supposed to be, but a lot of the clients get in there. None of the stuff is prescription, but we try and keep everyone’s name labeled on them.”

  Vic said Shelly Gatton didn’t know anything about the missing container. She had seen Lana the morning I had seen her, after her grandmother had died, and the day earlier when she had brought Mari lunch, along with the cookies. She said Joe Lesky was less helpful in that he hadn’t seen anyone with or without cookies, and that, when he showed her the supply closet, there were four containers of the Metamucil, but none with the name of Mari Baroja. “You gonna test them all?”

  She absently pointed to the cans that were on top of her jacket in a brown paper bag. She had been kind of surly about where I had been for the last hour but got over it when I handed her a beer. I watched as she ate the rather bland meat loaf, limp green beans, and pasty mashed potatoes she must have been served quite a while ago.

  “You didn’t get me any dinner?”

  “You want mine?” She took a sip of her Rainier. “This beer’s not very cold.” I watched her play with the meat loaf, trying to give it a palatable posture on the turquoise plastic tray. “What are we going to do next?”

  “The cookies were clean?”

  “Will you give up on the fucking cookies?”

  “I wish we had them now.” An elderly woman on a walker paused at the doorway of Louis’s office long enough to register a dirty look; maybe it was the language, maybe it was the beer, or maybe that was the way she looked at everything. I noticed that the cans of Metamucil had been opened. “You already start testing these?”

  She nodded. “It doesn’t smell like they’ve got anything in them, which means they probably don’t have anything in them.”

  “Well, so far that is pretty much representative of the case: where there’s smoke, there’s smoke.” I thought about all the things that needed to be done. “Could you throw a check on the terrible twins and see if anything turns up? I realize it’s a long shot.”

  “I already did; Kay’s clean as a whistle, and Carol’s been involved in some questionable deals down in Miami, but nothing that leads me to believe that she’d be cap
able of something like this.” She continued to study me. “Walt, trust me, I’d like to like them for this, but there’s just nothing there.”

  I stared at the window until she spoke again. “Now what’s the matter?”

  “I’m resigning myself to the wonderful homecoming I’m giving Cady.”

  She crossed her arms and considered me. “Yeah? Tell her to come out to the Morretti mobile manse by the motorway and listen to the wind and the 18-wheelers jake-breaking, then she’ll appreciate what she’s got.”

  I looked at my recently divorced deputy, a beautiful, intelligent woman with a body like Salome and a mouth like a saltwater crocodile. I had been to her house trailer when I had hired her, but that was the last time I’d been there. I started to wonder why she hadn’t ever invited me over for dinner when it came to me that I had never invited her out to my place either. I guess it had never really occurred to me, even though I continually swam against the undertow of my attraction toward her. The thought of myself involved with a woman who was about the same age as Cady was an image so pathetic that I erased it in wide sweeps on a regular basis. “You going home for Christmas?”

  “No. Mom says Nona should be dead by then, or so she’s promising. Vic Junior got this new girlfriend/fiancée who’s a hairdresser and pregnant, and Alphonse is running off upstate with some friends. Tony’s working at the restaurant with Uncle Al, and Michael said fuck the bunch of us.”

  We talked about her extended Philadelphia family on an infrequent basis. As far as they knew, the world stopped at the Main Line in Paoli. I had the most contact with her mother, had spoken to her on the phone a couple of times and seen a picture of her once. Lena was languorously gorgeous with the same olive-skinned, exotic beauty as her daughter but with a few more years on the vine to ripen. She had an equally handsome husband who Vic said pretty much ignored her mother. He was severe and driven and occupied himself with being the Chief of Detectives North, Sixth District, and liaison officer with the Mayor’s Task Force on Organized Crime. “How’s your Mom?”