Dreiser went back to working on the machine, wrench clanking against metal innards.
“Mr. Dreiser—” I edged around the door, having to step off the curb to get around it, and stepped back up on the sidewalk on his other side. “I’m trying to find Les, and—”
“How bloody likely is that?” he asked, pausing in his work to glare at me from under brows that reminded me of a prickly hedge. “And if you were, why would you be talking to me? I must be the last person on earth Goldman would get in touch with. Besides, he’s in Costa Rica.”
“No, he’s here in town.” I knew I’d made a mistake when Dreiser stiffened. Straightening, he turned to give me his full attention.
“Are you saying that piece of shit who wrecked my business and my life is here? In Colorado Springs?” He was practically drooling, and his grip on the wrench tightened so his whole arm trembled.
I stepped back. “Well, he was.”
A calculating look came into Dreiser’s beady eyes. “Look, Mrs. Claus, he screwed you over, too. You’ve got to be mad at him. How ’bout we make a deal? If you find him, you let me know where he is. I’ll get something out of him for both of us—you can’t tell me he doesn’t still have the money.” He tapped the wrench against his thigh like he was keeping a beat, but he was hitting himself so hard I knew he’d have a bruise.
I shuddered to think what he meant to do to Les. I was mad at my ex-husband, but not put-him-in-the-hospital-or-a-coffin mad.
“Whaddaya say?”
Dreiser moved toward me, and I shrank away, finding myself cornered practically inside the soda machine. Any other time, I’d have found it interesting with all the slots and levers and the shiny aluminum cans stacked one on top of another and a metal container holding coins. Now, though, I was only grateful there was no room for Dreiser to close the door and lock me in there, which he looked crazy enough to do.
“Mr. Dreiser, I guess you haven’t seen Les and don’t know anything about Heather-Anne’s murder, so I’ll just be going.” I tried to step forward, but he didn’t budge.
“Murder?”
Dreiser leaned close enough that I could smell a mix of coffee and alcohol on his breath. Uh-oh. He’d been drinking. That might explain his bloodshot eyes.
“Yes. Les’s … friend was killed on Sunday.” Dreiser’s reaction was making me pretty sure he had nothing to do with it.
“He did it,” Dreiser said with conviction, still uncomfortably close.
“He wouldn’t.”
“Hah!” Dreiser barked spittle onto my face, and I tried to push past him. “Not so fast,” he said, eyes narrowing. His body penned me in. “I think you know where Goldman is. I think you and he were in it together. You cheated me out of millions, cost me my wife, my—”
I was scared by him, but angry, too. I didn’t cheat or steal. I got my hands between us and shoved. I’d have had more luck moving Mt. Rushmore. “You think I’d be worrying about how to pay my utility bill and working as a PI if I had millions hidden away in some bank account? You think Les would have left town with that floozy if we were partners? Get out of my way.” The metal innards of the vending machine cut into my shoulders as I leaned back to give myself some momentum to propel me forward and, hopefully, past Dreiser.
“Tell me where the son of a bitch is. I’ll get it out of you if—”
I heard a clicking sound, and a lever somewhere near my elbow sank down. A rumbling came from the machine, and suddenly soda cans were spilling out the bottom, falling to the sidewalk, and rolling off the curb and into the parking lot.
“Damn it!” Dreiser yelled, tucking the wrench under his arm to reach for a can with each hand. “Now look what you’ve done.” He grabbed for more cans until he was juggling an armload. One can rolled under the tires of a passing SUV and crunched open with a gush of soda. I scurried away from the machine and Dreiser, sorry about the sodas but happy to make my escape. The river of shiny cans had attracted attention, and a couple of teens were trying to scoop some up while Dreiser ran at them, waving the wrench and dropping the cans he’d collected. A can of lemon-lime soda rolled up against the toe of my boot and began to hiss ominously. Before I could move, a crack opened in the flip-top and warm soda jetted all over my power ensemble.
A blue van rear-ended a hatchback that had stopped suddenly to avoid running into an elderly woman with a walker stooping for a Dr Pepper. Horns blared. A police car turned into the small parking area. I tried to make my way toward the Hummer, but my foot came down on a can and I fell to one knee, putting a hole in my damp tights. I felt frazzled and couldn’t help but think this was at least partly my fault.
A shout came from near the gas pumps. “Hey, idiot, you didn’t hang the nozzle up right!”
The man was apparently talking to the teenager standing near me, holding at least a dozen cans of soda. The kid whirled around, the long, pom-pommed tail of his knit cap whipping past my nose. A gasoline odor drifted to us.
“Uh-oh,” he muttered and ran toward where his car sat, gas flap open. A stream of gas trickled from the hose he’d let fall to the ground in his eagerness to round up some free soda.
A couple more people chased after escaping cans. Dreiser alternated between picking up cans and threatening people with his wrench. The police officer climbed out of his car and lunged toward Dreiser. The cigarette-smoking woman parked next to my Hummer jerked her head in time to the rap beat and made to toss her cigarette butt out the window.
“No!” “Don’t!” “Run!” Half a dozen scared voices shouted at the woman, but she bobbed her head to the music and kept her eyes on the store’s door. The cigarette butt tumbled, in slow motion it seemed, toward the ground.
Everyone ran.
25
Charlie was tired and her ass hurt by the time she and Dan reached the Triple E Ranch, where Robert Eustis Junior and his family lived. The road out of Cheyenne had been fine, but they’d been on a rutted dirt road for at least ten miles, and the jouncing was not speeding the healing process. As they bounced under the wrought-iron sign proclaiming TRIPLE E RANCH, Charlie figured the E’s stood for Eustis Senior, Eustis Junior, and maybe a brother or sister she didn’t know about. She wondered if they realized the words “triple E” brought to mind Victoria’s Secret rather than prime rib.
“‘Here you come again, looking better than a body has a right to,’” Dan sang in a Dolly Parton falsetto, making Charlie laugh as she realized they were thinking along the same lines. “Shall I sit in the truck?” he asked, pulling up in front of a weathered ranch house that looked as if it had once been white but was now the same dun color as the surrounding countryside.
“Hell, no,” Charlie said. “It’s too cold. Maybe being face-to-face with a priest will encourage them to tell me the truth.” She swung her legs out of the truck and winced at the pull in her glutes.
“You expect them to lie?”
“I expect everyone to lie,” she said. “That way, I’m not disappointed and I’m occasionally gratified by a kernel of truth.”
“That’s a happy outlook.”
“Don’t tell me you think most people tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Charlie gave him a skeptical look over the truck’s blue hood, now seemingly frosted with dun-colored dust particles.
Dan gave it some thought as he came around the truck. “I think many people are so busy lying to themselves about what they want and who they are that they can’t help but lie to other people. They don’t even know they’re doing it half the time.” He joined her on the walk to the front door.
It opened as they approached, as if the woman who stood there had been watching them. As weathered as the house, she could have been any age between thirty-five and fifty-five. Sandy hair showed an inch of gray roots. Thin, almost bloodless lips split a thin, sun-speckled face. She wore jeans, work boots, and a heavy shearling coat.
“Storm’s coming,” she greeted them, stepping onto the porch and closing the door. “I
’ve got to feed the stock. You staying in Cheyenne tonight?”
“We’re headed back as soon as we leave here,” Charlie said.
The woman directed a narrowed gaze at the sky. “You might make it.” Holding out a bony hand, she said, “I’m Tansy Eustis.”
Charlie introduced herself and Dan.
“A priest, huh?” Tansy’s gaze swept Dan. “I’ll bet you give a mean sermon.” Without waiting for a reply, she started across what would have been a yard if it weren’t grass-free, packed-down dirt. A dog the size, color, and general friendliness of a coyote emerged from beneath the porch to accompany her.
Charlie and Dan exchanged a look and followed, hands dug into their pockets against the stiffening wind. Inside the barn, a dim space smelling of hay and dung and warm animals, Tansy used a hose to fill the water troughs in each of several stalls. The dog snuffled at a hole that undoubtedly housed a rodent. “I already dropped hay bales in the pastures for most of our herd,” she said, rubbing a cow between the eyes. “These are here because they’re injured or sick. This one”—she swatted the cow’s rump—“got herself tangled up good in barbed wire.”
“I know it’s a busy time for you,” Charlie said, “so I won’t keep you long. I have reason to believe that there’s a connection between your father-in-law’s death and a case I’m working on.”
“Oh? What reason?”
Charlie explained about the newspaper clipping sent to Les Goldman.
“Someone sent this Les a newspaper article about Robert Senior’s death? What do you think the connection is?”
“I’m hoping you can help with that.” Pulling the Internet photo of Lucinda Cheney from her purse, she passed it to Tansy.
“I can’t see well without my reading glasses,” the woman apologized. She held the photo at arm’s length. “This gal’s younger, and Amanda had white-blond hair, worn shorter.” She chopped a hand at jaw level. “In fact, she looked a fair bit like Robert’s first wife. Her name was Amanda, too.”
Charlie nodded. “Could this be your Amanda?” She wished more people paid attention to face shape and the way ears were set against the head and brow prominence—things that were nearly impossible to change—rather than to hair and eye color.
“She’s not my Amanda. Best I can tell you is it’s possible,” she said, passing the photo back. “Amanda was on the plump side, and she wore glasses, so it’s hard for me to tell. But it’s possible.”
Charlie remembered what Gigi had said about the photo of Lucinda Cheney. “This may sound silly,” she said, feeling ridiculous, “but did Amanda get manicures?”
Tansy gave her a strange look but said, “Here she was, a rancher’s wife, afraid to get her hands dirty or break a nail.” Tansy held up her own work-roughened hands with their short, unpolished nails. “She always had her nails done so the tips were bright white with a clear coat over the rest of the nail. You should have heard her squawk if she ever broke one.” She shook her head in disgust.
Score one for Gigi, Charlie thought, prepared to accept that Amanda was, indeed, Heather-Anne.
“You said Amanda looked a lot like your husband’s mother,” Dan said, earning a surprised look from Charlie. “How long after the first Mrs. Eustis passed did your father-in-law remarry?”
“Within the year,” Tansy said, the corners of her mouth tightening. “My Robert was fit to be tied.”
“He didn’t like her?”
“He wouldn’t have liked anyone his father married.” Tansy moved away from the stall and ducked into a feed storage room, emerging with a brimming bucket. “But, no, he didn’t like Amanda. He didn’t like that she knew nothing about ranching and was useless on the ranch. Other than her baking—she was just as good with her pie crusts and cakes as Robert’s first wife, who used to win prizes—she didn’t have much to offer.”
“Robert Senior must have thought she did,” Charlie observed. “Where did they meet?”
“Funny enough, at the stock show and rodeo in Denver. That’s where my husband and youngest son are right now, as a matter of fact—been there since Wednesday. According to Robert Senior, he and Amanda got to chatting during the auction, and one thing led to another. They were married less than three months later.”
Tiny alarm bells dinged in Charlie’s brain. Denver was only about an hour from Colorado Springs. Was it coincidence that Robert Eustis Junior was in the area when Heather-Anne was killed? “Do you think Amanda killed your father-in-law?” Charlie asked, carefully not mentioning that the sheriff thought there was an equal chance Tansy’s husband was responsible.
“The way it happened, with brake fluid in his drink and all, I don’t see who else could have done it,” she said. Her voice was muffled and her face hidden as she ducked down to apply salve to a cow’s injured leg.
“Did she inherit the ranch?”
Tansy stood slowly, letting her gaze rest first on Dan and then on Charlie. “No,” she said finally. “We did.” Taking off her gloves, she slapped them together, and a puff of dirt rose up. “You better hit the road if you’re hoping to get home before the blizzard gets here.”
* * *
Charlie and Dan left Tansy in the barn and returned to the truck, not saying anything about Tansy’s information until they were bouncing down the road back toward the highway.
“You think Amanda Eustis, Lucinda Cheney, and Heather-Anne Pawlusik are the same person,” Dan said.
Charlie nodded. “I do.” She explained about the French manicure. “Why else would someone send that newspaper clipping to Les? I think that was a warning, that some Good Samaritan was trying to let him know that Heather-Anne’s last husband didn’t fare too well.”
“Do you think she killed Eustis?”
“I don’t know.” Charlie wriggled on the seat, trying to get comfortable. “Either she did and ran to avoid prosecution, or she didn’t and ran to avoid suffering the same fate, probably at the hands of her nose-out-of-joint stepson. I want to talk to him and make sure he was in Denver—and not Colorado Springs—when Heather-Anne was killed.”
“Even if Heather-Anne and Amanda were the same person, how would Eustis have known that, and how would he have known she was in Colorado?”
Charlie shrugged. “Beats me. Probably it’s just coincidence, but I’d still like to talk to him. You know,” she said, smoothing the Lucinda Cheney photo on her thigh, “it might be worthwhile finding out how Wilfred Cheney ended up in a wheelchair.”
Dan took his gaze from the road for a long moment to study her profile. “You worried she has a history of disposing of inconvenient husbands, that she tried to kill Cheney but something went wrong?”
Charlie shrugged. “The idea just came to me. I know it sounds far-fetched, but stranger things have happened.”
“For my money, the most curious thing about this whole case is that someone sent the newspaper clipping to Les. Assuming they did so because Amanda Eustis became Heather-Anne Pawlusik, who could it be? It’d have to be someone who not only knew that Heather-Anne was in Costa Rica with Les, but also knew that Heather-Anne used to be Amanda.”
“Maybe we’re on the wrong track here,” Charlie said slowly. The long gray ribbon of I-80 appeared in the distance. “The clipping was sent to Les, after all, so maybe Les is who we should be focusing on. Other than being Gigi’s husband and the father of the two most obnoxious teens in the tri-state area, what do we know about him?”
Dan raised his brows to invite her to continue since it was clear she had an answer in mind.
“We know he’s a cheating, swindling, embezzling criminal,” she said. “What are the chances he and Eustis were in business together somehow?”
“From what I know of Les, he was no more the ranching type than Amanda was.”
Charlie waved an impatient hand. “He wasn’t the PI type, either, but he still owned part of my business. He was a wheeler-dealer. I don’t think he much cared what a business’s product or service was as long as he thought he co
uld make money off it.”
“I guess he was wrong in at least one instance.”
Charlie backhanded his shoulder.
“So you’re saying we wasted a trip out here?”
“Not necessarily. I need to get Gigi started on researching Eustis’s business relationships to see if there’s any overlap with Les’s interests. If they were in business together, I’ll bet you a bottle of Lagavulin that Les ran off with some of his money.”
“Could even be that’s where the missing cash from Eustis’s bank accounts went.”
Charlie gave him an approving look. “You’re not half bad at this investigating thing, Allgood.”
“This isn’t investigation,” he pointed out. “It’s speculation.”
Charlie tried to reach Gigi as the truck merged onto the blessedly smooth asphalt of I-80. Dan hit the gas and the truck surged forward, rocking her back in her seat and jolting the phone from her hand. She gave him a look. “I thought I was riding with Father Dan Allgood, not Father Dan Andretti.”
In answer, he pointed out her window to the north. A sea of roiling charcoal clouds advanced toward them, lightning flickering in their depths, snow falling so heavily it was like someone had drawn a curtain across the northern half of the state.
“What are you dawdling for?” Charlie asked.
26
Nothing exploded. I had ducked behind the concrete-walled convenience store and scrunched my eyes shut, waiting for the boom, but it never came. Cautiously, I opened my eyes, stood up, and peeped around the corner. A fat man in a white shirt with a plastic name tag, who might have been the manager, stood by the big red button that cuts off the gas flow, his hand still on the switch. If the ice cubes and Coke-colored liquid were anything to go by, someone had dumped a Big Gulp on the cigarette butt. Another gas station employee was sprinkling sawdust on the spilled gasoline and sweeping it into a dustpan. Whew.
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