Cold Dish wl-1

by Craig Johnson

  As I stared at the spectacle of Al Monroe, a thought occurred to me. “Al, can you make coffee over at your cabin?”

  “Oh, hell yeah. Best coffee on the mountain.”

  “Would you mind going over and making us a big pot? It looks like we’re going to be here for a while.”

  “You damn well bet!” He saluted again and traipsed off toward the lake.

  “Al”-he turned as Vic came up beside me-“which one of the cabins is yours?” He pointed in the vague direction of one of the dilapidated shacks across the water. He saluted again before he climbed onto an enormous mule with only a rope lead and disappeared into the darkness without spilling a drop of his martini.

  Vic looked after the departing vision. “Who the fuck was that?”

  I looked sidelong at her. “You two are going to get along.”

  The two execs in the Hummer calmed down when I explained that they wouldn’t have to worry about a place to stay and that the Sheriff of Absaroka County always had a few extra beds he could share with the primary witnesses to a homicide. I told them that I would be happy to put them up for three to six weeks, meals included. They said no thanks. Maybe they’d heard about the potpies on weekends but, either way, they got a lot more cooperative and that was all I was really after.

  They had arrived from Casper after dark and had seen the truck when they drove by the first time. They were supposed to meet Dave McClure but weren’t sure which cabin was his; they had seen the truck and circled around to ask directions. By the time they had, the truck had stopped running. They pulled into the parking lot, and one of them got out to check on the guy who looked like he was resting on the ground. They hadn’t touched anything and said the only reason they had driven halfway back to Muddy Guard Ranger Station was so that they could get reasonable reception on their cell phone. 911 had routed them through to us, Vic had responded, and here we were standing in the wind and snow.

  I asked them about the yelling, and they said that someone had hollered at them from across the lake when they first pulled up to the scene. From the direction and colorful and varied usage of language, it could only have been the now infamous Al Monroe. He had wanted to know if he could interest them in a sour apple martini or twelve.

  Ferg had gotten through to a sleepy Dave McClure, who not only backed up the men’s story but also told us the location of his place and about the key that was hidden on the top shelf of his grill. I released them to go warm up in Dave’s cabin and joined Vic and Ferg as they set up work lights and began taking photographs of the scene. Vic lowered the camera and set her shoulders. “Is that what I think it is, sticking out of the deceased’s jacket?”

  “Yep.” I folded my arms and started in. “Ferg?” He joined me after adjusting the work lights, and the warmth of the halogen felt good along my shoulders. “You’re going to have to make the run.” He said he didn’t mind. Ferg was my mule, and I wouldn’t trade him for all the thoroughbreds in the world. “Get Ruby to throw us together some supplies, sandwiches, and coffee. Tell her to arrange with Lucian to pull an early watch on dispatch and to bring Turk up from Powder.”

  “Lucian?”

  I nodded. “Yes, Lucian. Also, bring Bryan Keller and George Esper in under protective custody.”

  “To the jail?”

  Vic half snarled, “No, the fucking Motel 6.”

  We were all under a lot of pressure and, having maximized our manpower to burgeoning, I ushered Ferg to his truck. “Call the Espers and then go by there if you have to. If they’re still not there, Reggie Esper’s sister lives in Longmont, Colorado. Call the Longmont city police and tell them that we’re looking for whatever it is that the Espers have registered with the DMV other than this maroon diesel.”

  “Then what?”

  “Get back up here.” I watched as he jumped in his little navy Toyota. I knocked on the window. “Ferg?” He rolled it down and leaned out. “Do you have one of those little digital Breathalyzers?” He handed it to me with a questioning look. “Don’t forget that metal detector. And, thanks.” I stuffed the device in my pocket and walked back to where Vic was still taking photographs. “When you get through, get in your truck and warm up some more. It’s going to be a long night. I’m going to walk over and get a statement from Al Monroe.”

  She nodded, lining up for the next shot. “Good luck.”

  It turned out to be a half mile around the east bank of the lake. No wonder Al had ridden his mule. Al’s cabin was homemade; it didn’t have the singularity of purpose of those that had started out as campers. The original structure was a sixteen-by-sixteen shack, complete with T-111 siding and a multicolored tin roof. The rest of the cabin was made of lean-tos, which leaned to with such ambition that the outer perimeter of the cabin lay on the ground. I wasn’t sure what Al did for a living, but it was a safe bet it wasn’t carpentry. The mule was in one of the upright lean-tos directly beside the cabin, and I had to take care not to step into her leavings. There were a good three cords of wood stacked alongside the door. The harsh glow of propane lighting illuminated the windows and the two-inch crack under the door on which I had just knocked. After a moment, I knocked again.

  “Hold yer goddamned horses!” I listened to more stumbling, crashing, and profanity. He yanked open the door and waves of heat rolled from the interior of the cabin, along with the smell. “C’mon in, General. Coffee’s ready.”

  The interior of Al’s cabin was far worse than the outside, kind of like Fibber McGee’s closet gone bad. There was a dilapidated sofa of indiscriminate color and shape along the wall, a La-Z-Boy of approximately the same vintage, and a gray Formica kitchen table surrounded by three folding chairs-two brown, one off-brown. At the center of the room was one of those homemade stoves that you put together with two 55-gallon drums; the underside of the bottom drum glowed orange, and I was sure it was close to a hundred and ten degrees in there. There was a halfhearted attempt at a Tiki theme, with native paintings of naked women and carved wooden sculptures as decoration. The most amazing stacks of magazines and catalogs towered against the walls; National Geographic and American Rifleman made up the visible majority. It was like being in the dead letter office on Fiji.

  I followed him in and reluctantly closed the door behind me as he threaded his way back to the kitchen area. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and his entire upper body was covered in tattoos. When he returned with a steaming cup of coffee, I expected to see an albatross hanging from his neck. He seated himself on the La-Z-Boy and gestured for me to sit on the sofa. I pushed back my hat and looked at him. “Merchant marine?”

  He scooped up his martini from a convenient stack. “Goddamned Eleventh Engineers, you?”

  “First Division.”

  “I’ll be damned.” He leaned forward and extended his hand, and we shook like old friends. “Semper Fi. I bet you seen some shit.”

  “Al, I need you to do something for me.”

  He did his best to look serious. “Name it.”

  I pulled the digital Breathalyzer out of my jacket pocket and handed it to him as I took off my coat and laid it beside me. “Need you to blow into this.”

  His eyes looked at the device and then back at me; then he shrugged. “No law against driving a mule drunk.”

  “Only way you’d catch me on one.”

  He blew into the device and handed it back to me. “How’d I do, General?”

  I tapped the Breathalyzer, but it remained at 4.2. “Rapidly approaching alcoholic coma.” He toasted with his martini glass and added to the percentage of complex sugars already racing through his bloodstream. “Al, how come I don’t know you?”

  He shrugged again; it seemed to be his favorite form of communication. “I don’t know. Hell, how come I don’t know you?”

  I looked down at my civilian clothes, my sheepskin coat, and the brim of my unadorned silver-belly hat. “Al, I’m the sheriff of Absaroka County.”

  “Really?” He processed the information for a moment. “W
here’s that?”

  “You’re in it.”

  He looked around as if there might be a sign. “I thought we were in Big Horn County.”

  I studied him for a moment. “You a bartender, Al?”

  “Thirty-two fuckin’ years.”

  “How’d you get here?”

  “Buddy’n me partnered up and bought it off some asshole in Kemmerer.”

  “That where you live the rest of the year?”

  “Lander.” He took another sip of his martini, and I took the first sip of my coffee; it wasn’t bad, and it was hot. “I need to ask you some questions.” I tried not to concentrate on the fact that my primary witness had been drunk for the last three days. “Hear any loud noises early this morning?”

  “Like that goddamned howitzer that went off just before dawn?”

  Our eyes met. “Hear that, did you?”

  “Well, hell, it’s hunting season, so it’s been soundin’ like a small arms war ever since I got here. Had to tie ribbons all over Sally, so the simple-minded bastards wouldn’t shoot her.” He paused for a second, remembering. “But this was different, closer; and it was early, real early.”

  “I don’t suppose you noticed what time it was?”

  He sniffed. “Oh-five-twelve.”

  My eyes widened after making the translation. “You’re sure of that?”

  “Oh, hell yeah.” He gestured to the large windup alarm clock that sat on the table. “Looked at my clock.”

  “Then what?”

  He gestured. “Went over here to the door and shouted for ’em to knock that shit off.”

  “Why did you go to this door?”

  “S’where the shot came from.”

  “East or west?”

  He shook his head. “Directly up the hill.” I nodded as he sipped his martini. “That what killed that boy?”

  “Maybe.” I leaned forward and rested the coffee cup on my knee; it was still very hot. “When you went over to the door, did you open it and look out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you see anything?”

  “Saw somebody walkin’ back up through the tree line with their back to me.” My expression was probably easy to misinterpret. “This any help?”

  “I never had it so good. What’d they look like?”

  “Pretty big, near as I could tell. It was early, and there wasn’t much light.”

  “Any distinguishing features? Hair?”

  He shook his head no. “Wait.” I could feel my heart beating. “It was long.”

  I’m pretty sure I skipped a beat. “Long hair…”

  “Yeah, now that I think about it. Yeah.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Yeah, long hair.”

  “How long?”

  “To the shoulders, at least.”

  “Color?”

  “Dark?” But then he shook his head. “Not enough light to tell, but dark, I think.”

  “Hat?”

  “Nope.”

  “Could you tell what kind of clothing?”

  He nodded slowly. “Overalls, one of those insulated jobs.” He waited for a minute. “You okay?”

  It took me a moment to think of a word and get some moisture in my mouth. “Yep. This individual was carrying a weapon?”

  “Yeah, a big one.”

  “Type?”

  “Couldn’t tell you. I mean, I could see ’im carryin’ something, and from the way he carried it…”

  “Both hands?”

  “Nope, one. Hanging down to the side.”

  “Why do you say big?”

  He sat his martini glass down and spread his hands apart by more than four feet. “Long.”

  “Anything else? Wooden stock?” He shook his head and shrugged. “Anything hanging off the rifle?”

  He continued to shake his head. “Sorry.”

  “Anything else? Anything at all?” He stared at the arm of his chair and shook his head. “You want to revise or amplify anything in these statements?”

  He looked confused. “Wha’? I’m under arrest or somethin’?”

  I shook my head and smiled. “No, you just made a very important statement in a homicide investigation. I want to make sure there isn’t anything you might have left out.”

  He looked around for the invisible signs that were supposed to tell him where he was, what he was doing, and when he should do it. I was starting to understand Al’s relationship with the clock. “Something might come to me?”

  “That’s fine. When did you notice the truck over there that was running?”

  “Didn’t.”

  “You didn’t. All day?”

  “Nope, went back over to the sofa there and went back to sleep.” He stopped and then looked around at the painted concrete floor for the thought he had lost. “Did notice it around lunchtime. Got up and heated some stew.” He started to get up now. “You want some?”

  I stopped him with a hand. “Maybe later. What time was that?” “Twelve hundred forty-seven.”

  I glanced over at the kitchen table at the two-handed face that told me it was now one. “You look at the clock a lot, Al.”

  “Thirty-two fuckin’ years of waitin’ for closin’ time.”

  He confirmed the fact that he had yelled at the two guys in the Hummer at exactly twenty-one hundred twelve. As I went off to check the ridge, I asked Al if he would hitch up the one-mule team and take my ardent deputy a cup of coffee and some stew. He said he would be fucking happy to.

  The hill was steep, and the fact that I was wearing cowboy boots didn’t help. The snow had tapered off, but the wind remained persistent, and by the time I got to the top I had worked up a decent sweat. I stood there, catching my breath and looking down at the lights of Al’s cabin and at the red-and-blue emergency lights revolving from our vehicles in the parking lot. The only consistent sounds were the wind, Sally munching, and the revolving click of our lights. It was a beautiful place, peaceful, terminally peaceful for Jacob Esper.

  It was a four-hundred-yard shot if it was an inch. It was colder this morning, probably with a slight to negligible headwind and an approximate scale of elevation would be eighty at four hundred yards. I sighed a full breath and watched the steam blow back in my face. It was quite a shot, even with a scope.

  I started at the first few trees at the ridge’s edge, shining my flashlight down along the partially covered ground. Al had said that the shooter was big, but Al is short, so I was beginning to wonder how big big meant. There were no telltale signs in the stiffening grass, so I began using this trail as my pathway as I searched the surrounding area on both sides. If I were shooting someone, would I use the trail? Probably not. I kneeled by the end of the opening that faced the lake and went over each blade of grass. If I were shooting someone from four hundred yards, would I lie down? Probably. There was something funny about the slight depression in the grass to my right, so I walked out of my safe area and looked back where the grass seemed to lay in an odd pattern. I kneeled down and looked back into the hypotenuse of a thin triangle: All the blades bowed in my direction.

  Blowdown. This is where it had all started, all. 45 caliber seventy grains of it. There was a weak swipe where someone had scuffed a foot across the area in an attempt to hide the marks, but Al Monroe’s appearance must have curtailed such activity. I extended my view and looked straight back through the trees. I suppose somebody my size could make it through, but their ability to limbo would have to be considerably better than mine. I went back to my path and began working my way deeper into the woods, searching the narrow area for footprints but finding none. If they were big, they were light on their feet. I transferred my search to above ground, looking for any disturbance in the thick foliage of the pines. Nothing.

  I thought about Henry and took my first full breath since Al had made his partial identification. I stood there with my hands in my pockets and tried to convince myself that a man with 4.2 blood alcohol content would be lucky if he could p
roperly identify his own mule. It wouldn’t wash; he had been too precise about all the other points. Al might be a professional alcoholic, but he was an observant one.

  Why would Henry do it? There was the immediate connection with the family; the oldest of motivations, revenge. If somebody had done this to my niece, how would I react? I kept thinking about Omar’s remarks about Henry; was it productive to look at those who had killed when looking for a killer? It wasn’t easy to do, take a life. Henry had killed men, but so had I. Try as I might, I couldn’t develop Omar’s line of thought and went back to the one I liked best, the rationalization of why it didn’t have to be Henry.

  With Al’s partial physical description, we were looking for a largish person, probably male and possibly Indian. Sticking with motivation, it had to be someone connected to the victims’ victim, Melissa Little Bird. And that meant Artie Small Song or Henry Standing Bear. I was going to have to have a conversation with Artie Small Song.

  Did long hair necessarily mean Indian? Omar had long hair and half my staff had longish hair. Vic and Turk both had hair at least to their shoulders. Vic had been growing hers for the last two years, and Turk’s hockey hair was perennial. I always tried to keep an open mind when lining up the suspects. Law enforcement personnel were people, too, which meant they could commit murder just like the rest of us. If I was going to play the game, everybody got a piece.

  Why would Vic do it? She was a pretty militant female, a master in ballistics, and she was also the first on both crime scenes. I had talked her into joining up about two years ago, when these boys had been handed down their suspended sentences. I looked down at the revolving lights, at the flickering shadows cast on the sides of the vehicles, and at Jacob’s shadow-smear that didn’t move. Her sense of justice just didn’t seem to fit. She didn’t have any reason to do it, and she wasn’t big, even if she had the hair.

  Why would Turk do it? Just being a prick wasn’t enough, and the fact that I was looking forward to our next meeting like Grant did Gettysburg shouldn’t interfere with my abilities to investigate. Did he want my job bad enough to try and make me look this bad? None of it seemed likely, but he was big, his name was on Dave’s list, and he had the hair.