The bum’s eyes widen. And I see that utter fear in his eyes as he realizes I intend to cut him.
I shake. Just a mild tremor at first. But it builds. The more frightened he becomes, the more I quiver with anticipation of what I could do. And I stand. I take a step toward him, and he falls. His legs backpedal. His arms scrape the pavement getting away. I have no desire to hurt the man. I am, after all, reformed, and the only thing I want to know is how close they are to finding out about me.
I pull the strings of my hood tight, and my watch cap down nearly covering my eyes, as I slowly step nearer to them when—
Anderson looks my direction. I turn my head, staring at the ground like I’m looking for loose change, and he turns his attention back to Ana Maria. She hands him a manila folder. It can only be police case files she’s somehow ripped off from the cops.
He passes her something through the window of his car. Damn that bum all to hell! If he hadn’t come along, I might have been able to inch closer to see what passed between them. It could only mean more information for the special she’s airing. I guess my little warning call to her meant nothing. I guess I’ll have to talk with her in person as soon as I talk to the bum. In my own special way.
Sixteen
Arn drove past the oil refinery, the acrid odor seeping through the Oldsmobile’s windows so thick he could taste it. Arn wondered how Frank put up with the smell, wondered if Frank’s eyes watered like his own did as he neared. But then he knew career criminals could put up with most anything. And Frank qualified as a career criminal, if Arn was to believe his rap sheet. Frank was sentenced to the State Boy’s School in Worland at thirteen for jacking one too many cars, and he’d gotten out of there just in time to begin his formal career: a strong-arm robbery of a Denver porn shop, which netted him two years at Colorado’s Four Mile Correctional Center, where he’d learned just enough to be a mechanic for a local gang.
Frank must have missed confinement, because the year after he was paroled, he was nailed at a Cheyenne home he’d burgled. The eighty-one-year-old lady living alone held Frank at gunpoint until police arrived. That was good for three years in the Wyoming State Pen in Rawlins. He’d remained out of trouble ever since—except for the burglary charge Butch had worked up on him, the charge that had disappeared when Butch died.
“Since he was released from Rawlins,” Oblanski had told him, “Frank’s been seen in and around a dozen residential burglaries, but nothing’s proven.”
“And your street contacts yielded nothing?”
Oblanski leaned back in his chair and thought about that. “Seems like everyone’s afraid to talk about Frank Dull Knife. Every scroat in Cheyenne has clammed up about him. Only thing I picked up from my snitches is that Frank went the straight and narrow after Butch was killed. Just one more reason I know he murdered him.”
Arn checked the map and turned south, away from the refinery. He had no argument for Oblanski’s reasoning. Most serious criminals he’d dealt with had begun their careers penny ante and graduated with honors to more serious crimes. Arn had arrested several who’d committed their first homicide, and it had scared them so badly they wilted from the mean streets they’d lived on all their lives, cowering in their cribs, waiting for someone like Arn to hunt them down.
Perhaps Oblanski was right that Frank killed Butch, accidentally or in the heat of the moment. Perhaps Frank had actually huddled whimpering in one corner of his shop that night, frightened at the thought of what he’d done. Or frightened of a lethal cocktail being injected into his veins if he was caught. Perhaps that had been Frank’s come-to-Jesus moment. Still, Arn couldn’t see how Frank could get inside Butch’s house to kill him. Unless Butch let him in.
A block past the refinery, Frank’s dirty Quonset loomed higher than the dead pine and cottonwood trees drooping over the lot. A fenced area behind the shop housed a dozen beater cars and trucks awaiting repair. Or awaiting the crusher, by the looks of them.
Arn climbed out of the car. He fished his bandana from his pocket and used it to open the door to Dull Knife Auto and Truck Repair. He closed it with his elbow as he stuffed the bandana back in his pocket.
A dented and stained gray metal desk with something caked down the front sat ready to greet patrons as they entered the shop. And if that wasn’t enough to make customers want to hang out in Frank’s little piece of heaven, there were the papers overrunning the desk, vying for space with a half-empty bottle of Ten High whisky, complete with an empty Welch’s grape jar just waiting to be filled up. Yum. Yum.
Sounds of a motor in the work area rose and fell and sputtered. Arn walked past one of those cheesy dollar bills that gets hung on the wall when a business first opens, and past a Snap-on Tool nudie calendar showing Miss November with a crescent wrench sticking out of her thong. Her eyes seemed to warn Arn not to step through the shop door.
Frank was leaning over the fender of a Dodge sedan, his head buried under the hood as he tweaked the carburetor. The chain hanging from his biker wallet clanged against the car’s fender. Scratches in the faded paint coincided with the chain, but Frank made no effort to pad the fender against the metal assault. War wounds.
Hearing movement in the shop, Frank half-turned his head. “You can’t be in here,” he yelled over the drone of the engine. “Insurance company will drop me like a hot hooker.” He disappeared again under the hood.
Arn remained where he was, careful not to rub against a scarred work bench with oil dripping down the jaws of a bench vice, parts of a carburetor scattered across it. He cupped his hand over his nose. Exhaust permeated the shop as it seeped through a gaping hole in the tail pipe extension running out of a cutout in the overhead door.
Frank looked up from under the hood and saw Arn still there. “I said, get the hell out of the shop area! You want something, I’ll be done in an hour after I take this beater for a test drive.”
“Another hundred-mile ‘test drive’?”
Frank pushed away from the car. The motor returned to idle, and he approached Arn. “Maybe your dumb white ass didn’t hear me.” He tossed his oily skull cap on the shop bench and squared up to Arn. His fists clenched and unclenched, his chest rising and falling atop a beer belly his greasy Levis barely contained. The top buttons of his red flannel shirt were missing, revealing stubby chest hairs that matched the chin whiskers he hadn’t shaved this week.
He took another step closer. Arn took a step back from the smell of his breath, either Ten High or feces. Could be either. “Not until I talk to you, if you’re Frank Dull Knife.”
Frank grabbed Arn’s arm and tried to shove him toward the door, but Arn was forty pounds heavier. And sober. He jerked away from the man and Frank staggered back, eyeing Arn suspiciously.
“I’m not here to fight,” Arn said. “If that were the case, I’d be wiping this dirty floor with your greasy butt.”
Frank took another step back. “What you want to talk about?”
“I think you know. Or did you forget that BS story about your one-hundred-mile test drive the morning Butch Spangler was murdered?”
One of Frank’s booze-bleary eyes twitched at the mention of Butch’s name, and Arn pressed a bluff. “I can always get a subpoena issued to have you testify at a deposition.”
“I got work to do,” Frank blurted out. “Damned hospital dropped my contract. I serviced their vans for years, and now I got to make up for it.” He jerked his thumb at the decades-old Dodge barely idling. “I’m a working stiff.”
“Must not have worked hard enough, if the hospital dumped you.”
“It was you bastards,” Frank said between clenched teeth. Or at least through what few teeth remained. “You guys told the hospital I was drunk when I dropped off one of their rehab vans.” He pointed to the door. “I got no time for your crap.”
“Maybe we could take that deposition at the county attorney’s office.”
Frank spun around and nearly fell reaching for a large crescent wrench on the fender of the Dodge. He grabbed it with his left hand, and Arn noted his wristwatch on the right, his belt cinched opposite from a right-handed person. He thought back to Butch’s murder: the photos and autopsy never mentioned if the killer might be right- or left-handed.
Frank took a step closer to Arn, and as Arn’s hand went into his pocket, he realized he’d given his gun to Ana Maria. His hand came to rest instead on a spanner wrench teetering on the edge of the work bench, and he braced himself. But Frank merely tossed the crescent wrench under the hood of the Dodge and shut the car off. “We can talk in the office. Five minutes. Then you can go get your damned subpoena.”
Frank staggered past him through the office door. He dropped into a one-armed captain’s chair with Cap. Ahab gouged on the one arm remaining. Guess no one had told Frank that Ahab lost a leg, not an arm. He reached for the Welch’s Grape jar. Dust swirled around his bleary eyes when he blew the dirt out before pouring three fingers of Ten High. Three very thick fingers, and he downed half of it before slamming it on his desk. Whisky spilled onto a work order, and Frank grabbed a dirty shop rag from his back pocket. He dabbed at the invoice for the Dodge. The printing on it was as neat as Arn’s writing was sloppy.
Arn took off his cowboy hat and hung it on a deer antler coat rack. When he turned back, Frank stood abruptly, knocking over another nudie calendar from his desk. Miss May ended butt-crack up while Arn backed away from Frank’s dragon breath.
“Now I recognize you, without that cowboy hat. You’re that retired Denver cop the TV station hired to stick his nose in Butch’s murder.” Frank polished off the rest of his whisky and grabbed for a refill. “You look a lot younger on TV. And thinner. But you’re no cop now.”
“Oh, you’re good.” Arn grinned.
“You can just do an about-face and get your ass out of my office.”
“I can still get that subpoena. You understand what that is?”
Frank remained silent as he glared at Arn.
“It’s four o’clock now. Say I come back with a sheriff’s deputy and serve you at around five. Isn’t that happy hour?”
“All right.” Frank refilled his glass. “All right. But I got nothing new to say that I haven’t told you guys … the cops … a dozen times. I had nothing to do with Butch Spangler’s murder.”
Arn picked out the cleanest part of the dusty wall to lean against and grabbed a small pocket notebook and a pen. “Then you won’t mind telling it again. To avoid that deposition.”
“All right then. Ask your damned questions so I can get back to work,” Frank said, backing away and plopping back down as if to get distance from Arn’s questioning.
“Let’s start by you telling me when you first hooked up with Hannah.”
Frank leaned back and scratched his testicles as he smiled. “Her and Butch came into the shop with an old Studebaker Lark. Who the hell’s got a Studebaker as their only car? Cheap-assed Butch Spangler, that’s who had one.” He swirled the whisky around in the glass. “Joey Bent over at Import Motors didn’t want to work on the Lark, so he sent them to me. I was hungry. I needed the work. That was before I undercut the hospital’s regular mechanic and got that contract. Now look at—”
“Hannah?” Arn pressed.
“Hannah. Sure. First time I saw her,” Frank continued as he took another gulp, “was when she stepped out of that Stude, halter top and short shorts begging to be stared at. It was love at first rub, which is what I did when Butch wasn’t looking—rubbed that itch Hannah was born with. That racist bastard was livid when he found out an Indian was pumping his old lady.”
“Maybe he was mad because anybody was messing with his wife.” Arn flipped a page. “Then there was the matter of Jerry Shine selling you a gun three weeks before Butch’s murder.”
“Jerry sold me nothing. Prove it.”
“Then you admit you knew him?”
“Of course I knew him. He ran a sleazo pawn shop down by the tracks. Just ask him.”
“Bobby Madden tried. His report says Jerry fled the country. Or came up missing a week before the murder.”
“That’s right.” Frank snapped his fingers. “I heard Jerry left. But then he was always talking about going to parts warmer. Jamaica, I think, mon.” He held his empty glass to the light and drained the last drops of whisky. “Hannah was just someone to have fun with. An all-right lay.” He wiped his mouth with his greasy sleeve and scratched his testicles again. “But she was getting long in the tooth. All those years of drinking and partying wear on women.”
And some men, Arn thought, looking at the specimen of manhood sitting in front of him, with his late-forties-going-on-sixties teeth as green as any spring meadow, the weary, bleary, bloodshot eyes trying to track Arn as he paced the room.
“Aside from screwing his wife, you must have had it out for Butch for working up that burglary case on you. You had”—Arn flipped pages for emphasis—“a preliminary hearing scheduled for the week after Butch was murdered. How convenient, the only witness suddenly dying.”
Frank leaned back and locked his hands behind his head. “I can’t lie, I would have been the recipient of good fortune with him dead. Fact is—if you check my case file, you’ll see—Butch got the county attorney to drop charges the week before he was killed.”
Arn had skimmed the reports again last night, but he recalled nothing about Frank’s charges being dropped. “Now why would he do that?”
“How the hell should I know?” Frank said, looking away for a micro-second that told Arn he knew exactly why. “All I knew is I was home free. So I had no reason to kill the man.”
“There was still his hot wife. And the fact that Butch could refile the burglary charge any time.”
Frank stood and knocked his glass to the floor. It broke, and he kicked glass aside with his boot. “Okay, Mister Detective, you tell me how you’d argue I killed him.”
Arn tucked the notebook back in his pocket and stared at Frank, feeling smug as the man plopped back down in his chair. In another life, in another time, he might have taken Frank out and throttled him. He was certain that he would have. “All right, how’s this: You left Hannah at the bar that night, presumably to go to sleep, as you had a job early the next morning. But you didn’t come back to this little Shangri-La.” He waved his arm around the filthy office. “You drove over to Butch’s and somehow talked him into letting you into the house. Maybe he wanted to avoid his nosy neighbor hearing an argument and calling police dispatch again. Once inside, you shot Butch twice with that gun Jerry Shine sold you.”
Frank smiled.
“Some speculate that the next day, instead of working at your shop, you were taking a little drive somewhere. About fifty miles one way to dump that gun. But me … ” Arn paced the room. “I don’t believe that. Call it the suspicious cop in me. I think you put those hundred miles on before you killed Butch. I think you took Jerry Shine for a one-way ride where he couldn’t say when he sold you that gun.”
Frank’s smiled faded. “Hell of an imagination. Except Jerry couldn’t have sold me a gun. I’m a felon. Felons can’t possess firearms.”
“Jerry knew that. That’s why he sold it to you under the table, and left a note in his safe that was opened by his wife a year after he went missing.”
Frank stood and slowly walked around the desk. “Maybe I took the customer’s car that night after I left Hannah at the bar. Maybe I was pissed ’cause she was dancing with some other dude, and I went out snagging without her. Maybe I spent the night in some babe’s house and drove home after I woke up.”
Arn took out his notebook again. “What’s her name?”
“Who?”
“The woman you claim you hosed all night.”
Frank frowned, and liquid courage kicked into high gear. He picked up a br
eaker bar from the desk and cocked it back. “And maybe I’ll crack that big Gumby head of yours. Then we’ll see how far your imagination gets you.”
“You’ll look damned funny to the ER docs.”
Frank looked wary and lowered the wrench a couple inches. “Why would they be looking at me?”
“When they try to figure out how to extract that wrench from your ass.”
Frank dropped the wrench and it clanged on the floor. “I got to get to work. And you”—he jabbed his finger at Arn—“should be looking up that dude Hannah danced with that night. He could have brought Hannah home and offed Butch after she let him inside.”
“The detectives never found out who he was.”
Frank tapped the side of his head. “I know who it was.”
“Then I’ll interview him.”
Frank smiled wide. “You just do that. You ask that fine Officer Oblanski how it was dancing and rubbing against Hannah that night.”
For the first time since he’d entered Frank’s domain, Arn stood speechless. He thought about Ned Oblanski and Hannah the night Butch died, and the reason the identity of the man she’d danced with never came up on reports. It had been Oblanski’s job to run down dead-end leads, and that would surely have been one of them.
“We’ll be seeing one another again.” Frank ran his finger across his throat. “And next time, I’ll be sober.”
Seventeen
The spotting scope is beginning to hurt my eyes, and I set it on the seat while I grab a thermos of coffee from the floorboard. But I can’t let it set for long. Ana Maria’s broadcast is over for the night, and she’ll get into that crappy brown VW Bug and drive to meet me.
I’m certain she didn’t tell Anderson where we plan to meet. She’s convinced she blew it the last time, when Anderson butted in. She assured me she will not let the same thing happen tonight. If I could just reason with her, tell her those deaths back in the day were necessary. And that I’ve been sinless ever since. Maybe that will convince her to back off. We need some quality face-time, Ana Maria and me.
Hunting the Five Point Killer Page 9