Dead Dry (9 page)

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Authors: Sarah Andrews

BOOK: Dead Dry
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Michele contemplated this a moment. “I don’t think anyone should get so mad he flattens someone an inch thick.”
“We’ll be in Castle Rock in ten or fifteen minutes,” I said, changing the subject.
Michele glanced at me. “You know this area well?” she asked, deciding to change the subject.
“Well enough. I grew up in Chugwater, Wyoming, a couple hours north of here along this interstate highway. I went to college in Colorado Springs, which is forty-five minutes south of here, also just off the highway. So yes, I’ve been through here a few times.” I watched the soft contours of the prairie open up now that we were escaping
the buildup of homes. It was a landscape painted in the pale greens and yellows of sage and rabbit brush, broken by dry washes and stunted bluffs out into the country rock. How I loved the short-grass prairie in all its moods. Beyond us to the west, the high peaks of the Rockies danced in the summer’s heat, gathering up thunderheads with which to cool themselves in the coming hours. Call me romantic, but I love the drama of a good, pounding thunderstorm growling and flashing and hurling stones of ice—except of course if I’m caught out in it on horseback. “You turn off at the next exit and head west to Sedalia,” I told Michele.
She piloted the rental car off the highway and headed along the two-lane blacktop toward our target. We passed a jolt of outlet stores—one of those clever streamers of modern consumer culture that attach themselves like remora on modest neighborhoods—but then the landscape grew increasingly rural, following the lower reaches of Plum Creek, where it was little more than a dry swale between undulating, tawny hills. Presently, we rounded a curve and came upon the Sedalia Grill. Michele turned left into the parking lot, nestled the rental car in amongst a crowd of motorcycles, and shut down the engine.
The structure was as vernacular as the outlet stores had been alien: patriotic to a fault and decidedly—nay, elaborately—rustic, with signs indicating that this was one whopping good place to get victuals, and, the pièce de résistance, the wall nearest to the parking lot was painted up as a gigantic American flag.
I let Michele lead the way into the building. Inside we found all the trimmings of your basic wayside Western watering hole: pool tables to the left, a well-stocked bar in the center, and to the right, a dining room packed with varnished rustic pine tables set into booths made from benches that featured hefty peeled and varnished pine logs for trim. Sad sucker songs twanging out of the juke box. Neon advertising Coors. Illuminated plastic sign displaying
the Budweiser beer wagon and Clydesdales. Framed pictures of motorcycles. Menu listing jalapeño burgers. Local boys with tattoos and pool cues and summer cowboy hats with brims artistically bent and the sleeves of their cowboy shirts cut off. Ye-haw.
It wasn’t difficult to figure out which member of the clientele was Gilda. She was the only woman in the place. Moreover, she glowed in the dark, or should I say she glowed in the carefully modulated gloom of the establishment. Gilda was golden. Her electric blond hair curled like a corona around her head, collecting and reflecting light the way clouds do at sunset. Her skin was smooth and creamy and seemed lit from within, and her eyes emitted the emotionless, glassy stare of an antique doll. She was dressed in an ankle-length, rose-colored knit chemise that draped like a million dollars. A necklace made of thin gold chains and tiny faceted gems lay across the oiled perfection of her neck, and on the patrician feet that extended from the hem of that dress, she wore the kind of sandals that come over trade routes on camels’ backs.
But
this
was
Nature Girl
? Okay, maybe that dress was made of organic cotton, and she
was
drinking tea instead of the alcohol her companions preferred, and instead of hamburger, she had opened a lunch box filled with bean sprouts and, but really, now …
Nature Girl
? I calculated that she’d last about five seconds on a cattle drive, and if those pampered feet had ever stepped more than ten inches off a beaten path, I’d eat my Stetson.
As we approached the table, she extended a delicate hand that had never gripped any tool heavier than a silver spoon, but instead of offering it to be shaken, she raised it up and ran it lovingly through her hair. “Michele?” she said in a breathy, ethereal voice.
Michele gave her a nod that almost edged into a bow. “Yes, I’m Michele Aldrich. I’m sorry to interrupt your party. Who are your friends?” She indicated the men who had arrayed themselves around Gilda at the table.
“Oh …” said Gilda, as if she hadn’t noticed them until Michele pointed them out to her. “Yes … may I introduce Hugo Attabury, Todd Upton, Bart Johnson, and …” She thought for a moment. “ … Wayne Entwhistle.” She stopped to breathe after this effort of mental acuity, her small but shapely breasts rising and falling slowly. She raised one eloquent eyebrow and glanced briefly at me. “Whoever you are, it seems you bring your own pilot.”
I stuffed my hands into my pockets in a subtly insolent way and took a long squint at Gilda. I’ll make no bones that I wasn’t liking her very much. There was something funny about her, the kind of funny you don’t want to laugh at. Nature Girl, my ass.
I tried to reckon her age. Were those the first crow’s feet of advancing years I saw beside those dazzlingly spacy eyes, or was that just a shadow cast by her artfully arranged hair? I decided that she was my age or perhaps a bit younger. One never knows, when surgery can play such tricks.
After letting the conversation hang until the tension had built to a point of ripeness, Michele offered a smile but said only, “This is Em Hansen.”
I measured the three men who were seated around Gilda. Only one of them, Bart Johnson, looked like he belonged in a cowboy bar. He looked like a cattle rancher who’d been reprocessed through an upscale Western-wear shop. He was considerably older than the rest, and, under the fancy pearl-snapped shirt and greased-back tatters of silvered hair, he was considerably more beat-up. He sat stiffly, and the one hand I could see was bent with osteoarthritis.
Hugo Attabury was a big, meaty fellow with a brush of colorless hair and a forty-dollar polo shirt, who was drinking an American beer out of a bottle. His arms crowded the tabletop, and his burgeoning paunch pressed against its edge.
Wayne Entwhistle had his beer in a glass. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and a short-sleeved dress shirt and looked
like he’d been worked over with furniture polish along every inch of his rather globular body, including his caterpillar-like mustache. He had an over-compacted look to him that suggested to me that he was trying to go unnoticed.
Todd Upton sat under an antique sign with a bucking bronco that advertised explosives and blasting caps. He had a highball in front of him, serious drinking for so early in the afternoon. He was tall but built narrow and wiry, like a ferret. He had dark eyes that took in but emitted no light, and his thin shellac of hair had forsaken the crest of his skull. He wore a pressed, blue pinpoint cotton shirt with button-down collar, and one knuckle of his left hand was encrusted with a heavy gold class ring. I thought at first that the ring didn’t go with the shirt but then glanced at Attabury’s and Entwhistle’s hands and spotted matching jewelry, right down to the color of the faux stones. Home-town boys. Judging by the variation in clothing, each had gone his own way for a while after high school but had returned to the fold and had fleeced it for a good living.
“What do you fly?” Hugo Attabury asked me, his tone an odd mixture of aggression and charm.
I locked eyes with him long enough to say, “Piper Cheyenne II,” then returned my gaze to Gilda. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him purse his lips appraisingly. Faye’s plane is a fast, sleek, twin-engine job. If the big guy knew what a Cheyenne II was, that meant he was a pilot, too. But apparently a rude pilot: neither he nor any of his friends had gotten to his feet on our arrival or offered us seats.
Still standing, Michele got down to business. “Thank you for meeting with me. I’m afraid I bring bad news.”
No one moved. Gilda did not even blink. The men stared at Michele like so many parts of one big animal, tense and ready to spring.
Michele took her time looking each in the eye, then announced, “I am with the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Department. Afton McWain was found dead this morning.”
Nobody moved.
The moaning, groaning music from the jukebox, some sodden she-done-left-me song, flowed through the scene like molasses.
Michele put her hands on her hips. I realized that there was no place under that thin summer dress where she could have hidden a gun. Her slender body suddenly looked vulnerable, even as her face hardened.
Gilda began blinking at a hypnotically slow rate. Her great long eyelashes floated up and down like the peacock feather fans Indian servants wave over sahibs in B movies.
Several more long moments passed before Michele again dropped words into the strangely non-reactive tableau. “You are Mr. McWain’s … ah …”
Michele at a loss for words? This was new.
Gilda opened her perfect lips and pronounced, “
Doctor
McWain.”
“Did you hear what I said, ma’ am?”
I felt blood pounding in my temples.
Gilda said nothing. One of the men cleared his throat. I think it was Todd Upton. Hugo Attabury began to shift his bulk in his seat, like a whale attempting to remove barnacles. Wayne Entwhistle chewed at one corner of his mustache, his eyes darting from one face to another.
I was ready to start kicking over tables when somebody finally opened his mouth and said something. It was the big guy, Hugo Attabury. He said, “Surely there’s been some mistake.” The line sounded hideously contrived. He blushed angrily.
Michele said, “No, Mr. Attabury, there has not. Did you know the deceased?”
Attabury erupted into a relative frenzy of motion, swiveling his huge frame from side to side like the whale was now trying to stand on its tail. “Sure, we all knew Afton.”
Knew.
Michele’s body tensed. She had heard it, too.
Attabury read her posture loud and clear. He said, “I mean, you just said he was dead, right?”
Todd Upton spoke for the first time. His voice had a kind of nervy restraint to it that was decidedly unpleasant, and his eyes twitched into slits as he spoke, which exaggerated the narrowness of his face. “I think we should see some identification, Ms. Aldrich.”
Michele whipped out her badge, showed it around, replaced it in her pocketbook. I realized that she’d had her thumb on it, ready for the question. She waited, watching each person’s moves. When the tension reached a level where it could have blistered paint, she said, “What have you been discussing here today?”
No one answered.
Michele asked the question again in a different way. “May I know what you’ve been talking about?”
Gilda said, “The weather. There’s a drought on, you know. We were wondering if it might rain.”
Wayne Entwhistle pushed his plate away as if the French fries on it had turned to worms. Bart Johnson shifted stiffly in his seat. Hugo Attabury put a thick hand to his lips as if trying to protect them. Todd Upton did not even blink.
Michele said, “So, okay, the weather. And what else?”
Bart Johnson said, “Michele, honey, we’ve just had some bad news here. You want to take it easy on us?”
Michele opened her mouth to continue her interrogation, but just then Gilda swooned. I mean she slid back in her seat and laid a slender wrist across her forehead and groaned, the most delicate little groan you ever did hear.
The men crowded forward to her aid.
I wondered what kind of performance I was watching. This woman was either off her bean or on some kind of drug or she was blowing a smokescreen around a lack of real surprise in hearing that her lover was dead, and I was willing to bet on option three.
A blur of activity that erupted around the table rendered Gilda onto her feet and out into the parking lot, where she
stood wavering in the afternoon heat. In the full glare of the sun she looked peaked, even shocky, and I began to wonder if my prior judgment of her character might have been too harsh.
She turned to Michele. “Do you have a car?” she asked. “Yes, of course you have a car. Take me to the ranch.”
Todd Upton put out a hand to stop her. “I’ll take you there, Gilda.” He gestured toward a late-model BMW, beetle black with black leather seats.
She turned and looked at him as if surprised to find him there, and said quite firmly, “No, Todd. This lady will run me home.”
“But as your lawyer, I really think I should be there.”
“No, I want to go without you.”
He grasped her arm. “Don’t say anything,” he insisted.
Gilda wrenched herself free and walked toward the parked vehicles. The men headed to their cars. Johnson headed to an old truck, Entwhistle and Attabury headed to the shiniest and newest SUVs, and Upton stalked off toward the black BMW.
Michele unlocked the door of her rental car and hustled Gilda into it. “You just get yourself comfortable there and I’ll get you home straightaway,” she said.

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