The Deader the Better

by G. M. Ford

  “Got your ad ready?”

  He reached under the bar and produced a videotape in a black plastic case.

  “Right here,” he said.

  “What’s the posse doing outside?” she asked. He didn’t answer. Instead he walked past her, lifted the gate and let himself out from behind the bar. He had everyone’s attention as he opened the door and stepped outside.

  “Can I get you something, Miss Haynes?” the waitress inquired.

  “I’m fine, Charlotte,” she said.

  The waitress shook her head. “You’re always in such a hurry,” she said.

  “No rest for the wicked.”

  The door opened and Glen reappeared. “Charlotte,” he called. “Call Nathan Hand. Tell him to come on down here.”

  Charlotte picked up the black phone and dialed.

  “What’s the story?” the Haynes woman asked. He leaned over the bar. I couldn’t hear what he said, but as he spoke, she kept turning her head and looking at me.

  “Oh…that’s nice,” she said when he finished. “That’s great. Just the image we want to project.”

  Glen shrugged. “You know Dexter,” he said. She walked the length of the bar and stuck out her hand.

  “Ramona Haynes,” she said.

  I took her hand. “Pleased to meet you,” I said.

  “I’m the president of the Chamber of Commerce and I want to apologize to you for any trouble those idiots may have caused you. I’d hate to have you go away from here thinking that’s the kind of town we are.”

  “No problem,” I said. I drained the last of my beer and got to my feet. “Everything’s under control.”

  She went on about what a nice place Stevens Falls was, but I was having trouble paying attention. All I could think about was rubbing my face in her.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” she said, “I think I better have a few words with that bunch before the sheriff gets here.” Heads turned like radar dishes as she walked to the door. Didn’t look a bit like Deputy Spots in motion. No siree. I tried to keep it adult and professional. “Attractive woman,” I commented.

  “I get a chubby when she walks in the door,” Glen said.

  “Least you got the bar to stand behind.”

  “Had that effect on me since grade school,” he said wistfully.

  “So you’re a native?”

  “Sure. Both of us. Her family owned the mill. My old man drove forklift for her old man for thirty years.”

  He pried his eyes off the door and looked at me. “Anybody told you about old man Haynes?” I said they hadn’t. “About how the day the bankruptcy court padlocked the building. Took his house, his land. How he walked all the way from his office down to the park in the middle of town. Apologized to every person he passed and then blew his brains out, sitting on one of the picnic tables.”

  “When was this?”

  “Few years ago. That’s when Ramona came back.”

  I threw a ten on the counter. Glen picked it up and handed it back to me. “Hell,” he said. “By the time Dexter heals up, I’ll have saved twice that in pool sticks.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You better stay inside till the sheriff gets here.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Dexter’s friends got a little welcoming committee for you out there.”

  I feigned astonishment. “And we’ve allowed the fair damsel to go unescorted?”

  He chuckled. “The fair damsel can flat-out take care of herself.”

  “Me, too,” I said with a grin.

  He stayed behind the bar, matching me step for step.

  “Now, come on. Just when I was takin’ a liking to you, you’re gonna have me thinkin’ you’re a troublemaker.”

  When I pulled open the door, she was yelling at a group of five guys. Four I remembered from inside. The fifth was an albino guy about my size. He wore a confederate flag cap, a pair of striped coveralls and workboots. No shirt of any kind.

  “…as if we don’t have enough problems and things to overcome around here without you fools…” She reached out and pushed on the forehead of the nearest guy until she had eye contact. “I’m up here, Noah,” she said. “No matter how hard you stare at them, they aren’t going to talk to you.” She got the laugh she was looking for.

  The pool partner, from the back of the crowd: “They talk to me, Miz Haynes.”

  She stopped talking when I stepped onto the porch.

  “O-oh,” she stammered. “You better—”

  “That’s him, Whitey,” somebody said. “The one suckered Dexter.”

  Whitey showed me a mouthful of green teeth. I walked right up to him.

  “They been doing this to you for years, haven’t they, Whitey?” I said.

  Everything got quiet. I could hear cars passing on the highway.

  I’d say Whitey looked dumbfounded, but that would be redundant.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Using you for a trial horse. Taking advantage of you.”

  His forehead looked like a washboard. “Nobody takes advantage…”

  “You know what I mean, man. They want to know if the water is deep enough, they talk you into jumping off the bridge. They want to know if the dog bites, they get you to try to pet him. They don’t know how tough some guy is, they get you to try him out. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts they been doing that stuff to you for years. They have, haven’t they?”

  Somebody yelled, “Don’t listen to that shit, Whitey, kick his ass.”

  Ramona Haynes shook a finger at him. “Don’t you dare,”

  she said.

  The area around his eyes was so pink it looked like he had a disease, and his pupils were nearly colorless. “Dex is my friend,” he said.

  “Dex isn’t anybody’s friend,” I countered. “As a matter of fact, I’d be willing to bet that most of the time when your so-called buddies here get you to do something stupid, I’ll bet Dexter’s the one who starts it.” I thought I saw a glimmer, so I stayed at it. “He is. Isn’t he?” I pressed.

  “Bust him up, Whitey,” a voice came. Partner again. Without turning, Whitey said, “Shut your mouth, Monk, ’fore I come back there and bust you up.”

  The Crown Victoria with SHERIFF painted in gold came sliding to a stop about ten feet behind the crowd. Nathan Hand and a deputy I hadn’t seen before got out, leaving the car doors open. Hand sauntered up onto the porch, while the younger cop leaned back against the hood of the car. The crowd parted. He tipped his hat. “Miss Haynes,” he said. He looked over at Whitey. “You still fighting their battles for them, Clarence?”

  Clarence took off his hat and checked his shoes. His scalp was iridescent pink.

  “Yessir…I mean, ah…no sir.”

  “Bobby,” Hand called.

  “Right here, Sheriff.”

  Bobby was a good-looking kid of about twenty-five. He had a long neck and a loose, easy way of moving that suggested competence. The gold tag read DEPUTY BOBBY RUSSELL. Like his boss, he’d had his uniform tailored. Except that the job wasn’t nearly as good. Along the inside of his right leg one of the seams was coming loose.

  “Check your watch.”

  “Yessir.”

  “In exactly two minutes, I want you to begin checking the licenses and registrations of every vehicle still in this parking lot. I believe I see some expired tabs out there.”

  “Believe I do, too, sir.”

  “And Bobby…”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Make sure you check for current insurance. Make ’em show you the paperwork. What’s that citation up to these days?”

  “Seven hundred seventy dollars, Sheriff.”

  Hand whistled. “A tidy sum.”

  By this time, Hand was playing for the deputy, the Haynes woman and me. The rest of them were long gone. We stood and listened to the sounds of grinding engines and pickups bouncing out into the road in a hail of gravel. The sheriff wagged a finger my way. “I knew you were going to ge
t yourself in trouble.” He checked his wrist.

  “Thought it might take you more than an hour, though.”

  “I didn’t start it,” I said.

  He gave a hearty chuckle. “Hell, with Dexter Davis involved, I don’t even have to ask. Neither of those Davis twins has got brains enough to blow his nose, but Dexter…” he shook his head. “They tell me he fell off his bike when he was nine, you know. Landed on his head. Hit the curb out in front of Mrs. Fontaine’s house. Never been the same, they say. Last sheriff told me for years after that, wherever the family lived in the valley, all the neighborhood cats would turn up missin’. Neighbors would call…they’d come out…find a little tabby foot here…a little tabby tail there…never could quite catch him at it, though.”

  “And Dexter and Mickey are a step up from the parents,”

  Haynes added.

  “Oh hell…two, at least,” said the Sheriff.

  “That’s a frightening thought,” I said.

  “I’m glad you think so,” she said.

  “Well…,” Hand began, “much as it pains me to break up this merriment, duty calls.” He cocked an eyebrow at me.

  “Now, you think maybe I can leave the big-city private eye alone for a couple of hours without him getting in any trouble?”

  I held up two fingers. He smirked.

  “Where you parked?” he asked.

  “I’m on foot,” I said.

  He shook his head. “No…no…that won’t work here, now, will it Bobby?”

  “No sir.”

  “You get to walking around out there, you’re just surer than heck gonna end up tied over the front of somebody’s truck. You better get in the car.”

  “You arresting me?” I asked.

  He looked hurt. “Now, why would you ask a thing like that?”

  “Because that’s the only way I’m getting in the car,” I said. Bobby bumped himself off the fender. Hand thought it over.

  “He can ride with me,” said the Haynes woman. She looked over at me. “Or am I going to have to place you under arrest?”

  “I’ll come quietly,” I promised.

  10

  “WHERE ARE YOU STAYING?” SHE ASKED.

  “I’m not,” I replied. “I’m just here for the day.”

  She stepped down off the porch and started around the side of the bar, talking as she walked. I hustled after her.

  “That’s what I figured,” she said. “You don’t look outdoorsy enough for most of what we’ve got to offer.”

  I don’t know why, but I thoroughly resented this aspersion of my rurality. Before I could take issue, however, she wanted to know where she should take me.

  “Anyplace in town. I’m meeting a friend at three. I’ll just wander around till then. Do a little Christmas shopping.”

  She popped the locks on a blue Dodge Dakota pickup and we got in. The seatbelt harness did wonders for her. “Did you tell me your name? You must not have. I’m usually good with names.” She dropped the tape into an upright paper bag on the seat.

  “It’s Leo,” I said. “Leo Waterman.”

  “So then you’ve got an hour to kill, Mr. Leo Waterman?”

  Her voice held the hint of a challenge, as if somehow I were being tested.

  “Yep.”

  “So why don’t you come along with me? I’ve got a few errands to run. It’ll give me a chance to convince you that we’re not all a bunch of crazed rednecks around here. Maybe even send you on your way with a positive feeling about the place. Wadda ya say?”

  “Probably keep me out of trouble, too.”

  She grinned. “Yeah…there’s that.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Gotta stop at the office first,” she said, throwing the truck into gear.

  She drove like a disaster movie, like molten lava was nipping at the rear tires. Fortunately, the truck was equipped with one of those “oh shit” handles up by my right ear, so I was able to look confident while holding on for dear life. In a roar, we headed back toward town.

  “Did I understand Nathan to say that you were a private detective?”

  I allowed how that was indeed the case as she fishtailed around a corner.

  “And you’re investigating what happened to J.D.?”

  “Nope,” I said. “I—we—just came out to visit some friends.”

  I told her of getting the packages back and of being unable to raise them by phone. “And come to find out he’s dead…somebody shot up his place…his wife and kids are nowhere to be found. I’m just trying to get some sort of personal handle on the thing.”

  “Poor J.D.,” she said.

  “You knew him?”

  “Oh sure,” she said. “By the time he…by the time it was over, I guess I was pretty much the only person in town still talking to him.”

  From this direction, the downtown area was backlit by a long line of poplars whose golden leaves shimmied in the breeze like a beaded curtain.

  “Why was that?” I asked.

  She told me the by now familiar tale. As much as it pained me, the story of the outsider taking advantage of an old-timer and then offending the whole town by closing off the river made more sense than the notion that town and county government were conspiring to put J.D. Springer out of the fishing guide business.

  We whizzed by the police station, rolling toward the east end of town.

  “He didn’t understand,” she said finally.

  “What?”

  “Oh…the culture, I guess. The people. How things are done in a place like this.” She took one hand off the wheel and waved it about. “Everything…poor J.D. just didn’t understand any of it.”

  A flush that had started below her throat had now reached her cheeks.

  “For instance,” I said.

  “Oh…for instance, he didn’t understand the ramifications of posting his property. I’ll bet there’s close to fifty men in this community who rent themselves out as fishing guides at one time or another during the season. That’s a couple of hundred people whose livelihoods are affected by his actions.” She was waving the hand again. “In a town like this that’s just holding on, mostly what they do is provide services to one another. That’s how they stay alive after the industry is gone. Most of the men in this town do four or five different things for a living. They cut some firewood. They drive school buses, hire out as mechanics, guides, handymen. Work part-time for the county. They do whatever it takes. I don’t think J.D. ever really got a sense of what he was doing to that system.”

  She stomped the brakes and crimped the wheel into a Uturn. I hadn’t noticed it before, but at the junction east of town, where you either go right and drive out to the ocean or you continue on ahead into Stevens Falls, a sparkling new A-frame sat on the triangle of property between the two roads. The sign read, VISITOR INFORMATION CENTER. WELCOME TO STEVENS FALLS: GATEWAY TO YOUR MOUNTAIN EXPERIENCE. She slid to a stop in front of the building, turned off the engine and grabbed the bag of tapes. “In the summer, we hire college kids to run the Visitor Center. This time of year, I do it myself, but only on weekends.” She yanked the door handle. “You can stay in the truck if you want; I’m only going to be a minute.”

  I got out and followed her inside. She walked around the counter and let herself into the cramped back room. Boxes full of brochures, a small battered desk with an old Macintosh computer, a video recorder and a big black electronic device I didn’t recognize.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “A combination videotape editor and converter.” She pointed to the bag of tapes. “I spend all of every Wednesday editing and changing the format. If I screw up, it sometimes takes me till the wee hours. I take all of those and put them on one tape. And then I convert a half-inch video into a threequarter-inch video tape loop.” She could tell I was lost.

  “We have our own TV station,” she said. “It used to be an electronic monitoring station for the Strategic Air Command. They gave it to us when they didn’t want i
t anymore. It was cheaper than tearing it down. We use it to run ads for local merchants, the community bulletin board, sports schedules, the church calendars. That kind of thing. Here in town it plays on Channel Fourteen all the time. Friday afternoons we broadcast to most of the peninsula for an hour.” Her eyes were bright. “It’s been a heck of a boost for business. Something like fifteen percent, we figure.”

  She picked up the phone, dialed her access code and listened to her messages. She made a few notes in a battered day planner and then got to her feet. “Ready?”

  When I said I was, she grabbed a red videotape box from the center desk drawer.

  “After you,” she said.

  She locked up behind us and got behind the wheel. I was already belted and hanging on. “Nobody likes my driving,”

  she said.

  As we were racing back toward town, I asked, “How come you’re…I mean…”

  A smile twisted the corners of her mouth. “You’re working up your version of what’s a nice girl like me doing in a place like this?”

  “Something like that,” I admitted. “I mean, I’m sure this particularly bucolic hamlet has its charms…”

  She knitted her brow and narrowed her eyes. “Careful what you say, now. I was born and raised here.”

  “And you can still speak in complete sentences.”

  She had a rich, muscular laugh.

  “That’s because I went away for a while.”

  When I didn’t say anything, she went on. “Chicago…fifteen years.”

  “What brought you back?”

  “Oh, a bunch of things. A divorce. A job I was good at but didn’t really like.” She shrugged. “Just a general sense of disconnectedness.”

  “So are you cured? Are you connected now?”

  She mulled it over. “I’m cured of some of it, I suppose.”

  She threw me a sharp look. “You ask a lot of questions, you know that?”

  “I’m a detective,” I said. “We’re allowed to do that.”

  “It was just so sad,” she said after a moment. “The town,”

  she said without me asking. “Lots of people were talking about leaving, they were talking about closing the school and busing the kids to Sequim. I don’t know. The whole way of life just seemed to me like something worth saving.”