Death Without Company (6 page)

She thought for a moment. “I think he is a good man. I think he gets too caught up in the romance of things.” She raised an eyebrow. “You want to know about the romances of older men, ask a younger woman.” Her eyes stayed steady but then broke back to Dog. She crossed her legs and patted the bunk beside her. Dog was curled there in an instant. It took a while for her to gather her thoughts or decide to share them. “I was twenty-eight years old and between marriages when I came to work for Lucian.” I watched as she smiled, and the years unwrapped. She was like that; age would not pause for Ruby, since she would not pause for it. “I was quite a hottie back then.” I laughed, and she started to rise.

I reached out and took her hand. “I was laughing at the word choice. Where did you get the term hottie?”

The neon blue lie detector was scanning me for signs of falsehood. “Your daughter.”

“I thought so.” I held on to the thin hand and ran my thumb over the web between her thumb and forefinger. “I’ve got news for you, you’re still a hottie.” She actually blushed and pulled her hand away. “So, old Lucian cut quite a wide swath around these parts, huh?”

“Yes, he was very dashing for a man with one leg.”

“Did you know he had been married?” Big blue. It was the second time today I’d used surprise to get a look at the woman I was talking to. “I’ll take that for a no.” Ruby was the poster child for unflappable, so it was fun to watch her take flight for a change. “He was married to Mari Baroja.”

“When?”

“For about three hours back in the late forties. Or about as long as it took for her daddy and three uncles to catch them, take her, beat the hell out of Lucian, and annul the whole thing.”

“Well, I’ll be.” I waited for her to make the connection, and it didn’t take long. In the meantime, I listened to the soft ticking of the radiators outside the cell. Our jail had originally been one of the tiny Carnegie libraries. It had been erected behind the courthouse at the turn of the century, the last one. Red Angus, the sheriff before Lucian, had shrewdly appropriated the red granite building and had converted it. “She’s the one that Lucian wants the autopsy done on?”

“Yep.” We sat there looking at each other.

“Did you tell him you’d do it?”

I had been hoping that the conversation wasn’t going to go in this direction; the last thing I needed was Ruby’s help in backing myself into an ethically nonneutral corner. “Maybe.”

“Are you absolutely sure there is no reason for an autopsy?”

I groaned and leaned back against the wall with a thump, a few dribbles of coffee sloshing up and running down the side of my mug. I wiped the bottom on my pants. “Of course not, but I am also not absolutely sure that there is a reason for one.”

She took my coffee cup and started out of the cell. “Then you’ll know after you have one.”

“Is it still snowing?”

She looked down the hallway to the windows out front. “Yes.”

“Then the whole thing is academic, because no one from DCI is going to make it up here in this snowstorm.”

She wasn’t looking at me, and she wasn’t going to. It was one of her techniques for getting me to do what she considered to be the right thing. “You can get a medical examiner from Billings.” She disappeared around the corner, and the dog followed her.

I thought about the old sheriff. I thought about how Ruby had just lied about Mari Baroja. I thought about what I didn’t know, about how I knew the anecdotes but, perhaps, not the story.

 
 
When I got to my office, my steaming cup was full and resting at the center of my blotter, and the red light on line one was blinking from Cheyenne. I picked up the receiver and punched the angry little button. There was the commensurate pause after I explained the situation. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

“Things must be really slow up there in the hinterlands.”

I leaned back in my chair and tossed my hat onto my desk. It landed beside the mug. “I guess I’m going to need a general autopsy.”

“Do you want us to call Billings?”

I noticed Ruby standing in the doorway. “Well, it’s a blizzard, and we’re kind of short on personnel.” I nodded, and she brought the note over.

“I’ll see what I can do, but I bet they’re going to want you to transport.” I hung up. The note said we had an accident near the highway at the access road. It was a bad spot where the curve of the road and a stand of cottonwoods concealed the approach from the I-25 off-ramp. “I’m going to go out there and cut that stand of trees down myself.”

I reached out, picked up my hat, and twisted it down on my head. I looked up at the old Seth Thomas clock that had served the last four sheriffs of Absaroka County, a sum of almost a hundred years. It was just mornings like this that it felt like all hundred were mine. It was 7:47 A.M., and I guessed the citizenry wasn’t staying home after all.

Ruby was on the phone but cupped her hand over the receiver and looked up. “Another one at Fetterman and 16; I’ll call Vic and tell her to go directly out there.”

“Does it sound serious?”

“Fender bender.” The phone rang again, and she frowned at it.

“Call the Ferg and tell him he’s full time until further notice.”

It was like walking into a snow globe and, since I had parked the truck, it had gained another inch. Dawn was lingering, but there was a faint blush back toward the hills and, with the glow of the streetlights, the whole place was starting to look like Bedford Falls.

It didn’t take long to get to county road 196, and it didn’t take long to figure out what had happened. The best news was that all the participants in the vehicular altercation were alive, well, and arguing on the side of the road. I flipped on the light bar and pulled the Bullet over to the opposite side so that it would be visible from both directions. There was an older Chevy Blazer that I knew belonged to Ray Thompson, and a newer little Japanese SUV that had number 6 plates, Carbon County. There was one of those new-fangled racks on the top of the Nissan, and it had a bumper sticker that read, IF YOU DIE, WE SPLIT YOUR GEAR. Hello Santiago Saizarbitoria. He looked just like his photograph, only now he looked irritated. “Hey, Ray. This guy run into you?”

“Yer damn right.”

Ray’s wife was next, and I figured they must have been on the way to dropping her off at the school cafeteria where she worked. “Came out of nowhere, flew around that corner and ran right into us.”

Saizarbitoria was about to explode when I put a gloved hand up to his face. “Just a minute.” I took Ray by the shoulder and steered him away from the vehicles and over to my side of the road. I checked in both directions, but there hadn’t been any traffic since the wreck. “Ray, I wanna show you something.” I walked him behind my truck and over to the stop sign where the two roads converged. “Ray, these are your tracks, the ones that slide all the way through the intersection.”

“That’s not . . .”

“You can see from the tire marks that your vehicle didn’t stop at the sign, and you can also see from the point of impact on both vehicles that you went through just as he passed. Maybe in all the excitement you just didn’t notice.” He didn’t say anything else, just looked at the tracks and fumed. I waited for a while myself, as the blue and red light flickered over the smooth surface of the snow. “In a situation like this, it’s going to come down to who has his vehicle under control, and you didn’t. Now, I’m going to get my camera and take a few shots of these tracks so that if there are any questions later on, we’ve got answers. But my advice to you is to go over there, apologize to that young man, and get out your insurance card.”

By the time I’d taken the pictures, they were all grouped around the hood of the Blazer. I copied down information from both drivers, only partially listening as Saizarbitoria told the older couple that he was here for a job interview, and they wished him well.

The Blazer would continue to the school even though I doubted that there would be any, but the little silver SUV wasn’t going anywhere. Ray had hit right at the wheel well, and the left front was pretty much pushed into the engine compartment. I radioed in to Ruby after we got in the Bullet and arranged for his vehicle to be brought over to Sheridan where it could be repaired.

I also asked about Vic.

Static. “She’s at Fetterman, and the Ferg’s out on Western where one of the snowplows took out a mailbox and got stuck turning around. By the way, you got your coroner from Billings.”

“King Cole is driving down here in a snowstorm?”

Static. “You’ve got to keep up with Yellowstone County politics; Fast Eddie was replaced last November. The new kid’s name is Bill McDermott, and he’s very earnest, so be nice to him.”

“Yes, ma’am.” I turned to the sad young man beside me, pulled off a glove with my teeth, and extended a paw. “Walt Longmire, welcome to Donner Pass. You got anything in that car you’re going to need?”

“Everything.”

I watched as he climbed out and crossed, looking both ways. Fool me once . . . He gave the impression of being a lot bigger than he was. As I watched him dig a satchel bag, a Meeteetse Cowboy Bar ball cap, and a cell phone out of the car and walk back over, I would have sworn he was six feet.

I continued filling out the accident report. “So, what’s the plan?”

“Excuse me?”

“You and your wife. I’m assuming you have a plan for this interview?” I broke the scenario down. “If this goes well, what happens next?”

“Oh.” He nodded and quickly jumped in. “If things look good, we were planning on coming back over the weekend and taking a look at houses.” He looked past me at the crumpled metal of the Nissan.

“So you’re in for the long haul?”

“Sir?”

“Looking for a house? A place to raise kids?”

“Yes, sir.” He waited a respectful moment before asking. “You married, sir?”

I folded up my report book and stuffed it behind the four-wheel shifter. “I used to be. She died a number of years ago.” I sat there and looked out the window until the image of myself as a romantic figure quickly became ludicrous and faded.

“I’m sorry.”

I turned and looked at him to see if he was real and, at that instant, I came to two conclusions about Santiago Saizarbitoria: that he had been brought up right and that he had a heart. He was halfway to being hired. He was wearing a black fleece jacket, and one of the tumblers fell into place. I looked at him the way you size up a pot roast at the grocery. “You’re a climber?”

He smiled and looked at his watch. “Damn.”

“Why are you looking at your watch?”

He sighed. “Because my old chief bet me twenty bucks that you’d make me and every motivation I had in less than an hour.”

Archie Pulaski was the chief in Kemmerer, and we had been known in years past to terrorize the Law Enforcement Academy and surrounding bars in Douglas. “You should know better than to bet with Poles in this part of the world.” I fastened my seatbelt and watched as he automatically fastened his. “What else did Archibald have to say?”

“He said you were the best sheriff in Wyoming, and that if I was smart I’d keep my mouth shut and maybe learn something.”

“Yep, well . . .” I put the truck in gear. “Archie drinks.” I pulled out onto the county road. “I’ve got a deal for you.” It wasn’t a question, and he looked at me. “How about I put you on for seventy-two hours, then we sit down and decide whether it’s working out or not?” I would have thought, with his background, that he wasn’t a gambler, but he didn’t hesitate and I started thinking that he was here for another reason.

“Yes, sir.” He was quiet for a moment. “By the way, how much does the job pay, sir?”

“Eighteen percent more than the job you’ve got now, and don’t call me sir. I ain’t your daddy near as we both know.” It was twenty-three years in the coming, but it still felt good.

3

I was enjoying the usual. “
Coronea custodium regis
.” He looked at me blankly. “I bet you can figure it out.” I negotiated the last chunk of biscuit back into the spicy gravy with my fork and lifted it into my mouth.

“Keeper of the king’s pleas?”

I looked at Dorothy, and we both looked at him. “Who says the values of a classical education are lost?”

I watched as the woman who kept me alive by operating the only café within walking distance of the jail refilled my coffee cup. “You did, just last week.”

“Richard the Lion-Hearted established these guys as a sort of tax collector. They were in charge of keeping track of convicted felons and their property, which was confiscated in the name of the king.” I laid the fork back on the empty plate. He was about to finish the same amount of the usual that I had, and I was impressed.

There wasn’t anybody else in the little café, so Dorothy’s attention was exclusively on us. “And the difference between a medical examiner and a coroner?”

She was reaching for the coffee pot, but I shook my head. “A medical examiner is trained, a coroner is elected.” The phone rang, and I watched as Dorothy reached to get it. “The last coroner up in Yellowstone County got into a little trouble back in the midseventies.” I went on. “Eddie Cole used to get paid about a thousand bucks an inquest, and it was only when four bear attacks one weekend came up with a victim of the same height, weight, and coloring that King Cole got into a little hot water.”

When I looked back, Dorothy was holding the phone out to me. “Very agitated deputy for you.”

I handled the receiver like it was loaded. “Hello?”

“Are you enjoying your breakfast?”

I pulled the earpiece a little away from my temple. “I was until now.”

“We just got a report here at the office of some very angry individuals over at the old folks home, and now we’ve got those same individuals over at the hospital. I have been informed that this is one of your little fucking deals, so I would advise you to get your ass over there as fast as it can waddle.” The line went dead.