Going Nowhere Fast (2 page)

"Hey. Look for yourself," Bad Dog insisted. "Man's got his pants down round his ankles and everything."

Joe had no intention of looking for himself, of course, so I did it for him. Dog's story was just too imaginative for a child who never received a grade higher than a C-minus on an English paper to make up. I turned to the bathroom door behind me and slid it open all the way. Dog and his father just stood there behind me, peering over my shoulders. And guess what.

"See? What'd I tell you?" Bad Dog asked.

*     *     *     *

"You ever see this man before?" Park Ranger Will Cooper asked us again, referring to the dead, middle-aged white man perched atop our chemical toilet.

"No. Never," I said. Cooper, Big Joe, and I were standing just outside the open bathroom door as a second park ranger looked the corpse over, scratching the side of his head and trying to keep a smile from taking over his face. We were all grouped together in the narrow space between Lucille's bathroom and closet door, fighting a common feeling of claustrophobia that Joe and I were ordinarily immune to.

"You sure?" Cooper asked.

"Yes."

"Maybe if you took another look at him—"

"She doesn't need another look at him," Big Joe cut in, snarling. He was not a jealous man by nature, but I could tell he was growing less and less tolerant of the way Cooper kept addressing most of his questions to me. Frankly, I had begun to wonder a little about that myself. "We don't know the man. How many times do we have to say it?"

Cooper showed my husband a smile, as thoroughly professional as it was condescending. The young man had a huge red mustache that spilled over his top lip like an overfed Chia pet, and bright, energetic eyes. He put his pen and notepad down and said, "This is tedious for you, I know, Mr. Loudermilk. But this
is
a homicide we're dealing with here, and, as there was no identification on the body … Well, you being a former law enforcement officer yourself, I'm sure you can understand why I have to ask these questions more than once."

I liked the way the red mustache wiggled when he talked.

"Okay. So I understand," Big Joe said. "But that doesn't change the fact that we've told you everything we know. At least a dozen times. We don't know who that man in there is, we don't know what he was doing using our bathroom, and we sure as hell don't know who killed him before he could finish. My wife left the damn door open when we went out for our daily run, just like we said, and the Thinker was there when we got back, exactly as you see him. We never touched a thing."

"And your business here today is strictly recreational. Is that right?"

"Of course. We're just tourists visiting the park like everybody else."

"And him? What about him?"

"Who? Theodore?"

"Yes sir." Cooper was looking at Bad Dog like something rancid he had found in his refrigerator. Our son was sitting up at Lucille's front end watching Oprah on television, one hand submerged in a bag of potato chips, the other clamped around a fresh can of his father's beer. He didn't seem to have a care in the world.

"What about him?"

"He didn't know the deceased either. Is that your understanding?"

"Yes. It is. I heard him tell you that himself, not five minutes ago."

"Yes sir, but—"

"It's the truth, Officer Cooper," I said flatly. "Theodore never saw that man before in his life." It was what he had told us before the ranger's arrival, and I believed him. Dog can tell his father any lie and never flinch, but he always falls apart when he tries to lie to me. In that sense alone, he is a mother's dream.

Cooper gazed at me and smiled. His mustache twitched to the right. "Yes ma'am," he said.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the crown of Big Joe's hairless head turning red, like the burner on an electric stove coming slowly to life.

"Look—" he said to Cooper, just as the door to our trailer opened and a fat man toting a heavy black leather case stepped inside to join us. I could hear Lucille's suspension groan a mild complaint beneath his additional weight.

"Ah. Henry," Cooper said. "Glad to see you could make it."

"Where is he?" Henry said, apparently in no mood for amenities, huffing and puffing as he dabbed at his face with a giant white handkerchief.

"In there. He's all yours," Cooper said, gesturing toward the bathroom.

"You did have the decency to flush the toilet, I hope."

The ranger just looked at him.

"Aw, damn," Henry said. "This job of mine isn't revolting enough, is that it?"

Cooper grinned. "Relax, Henry. The bowl's clean. Either our man got shot before he could get his engines started, or the killer propped him up on the seat as a gag."

"Hmph. Some gag. What the hell's this world coming to, sitting a stiff up on a toilet's supposed to be a gag?" Without waiting for an answer, Henry took a deep breath, squinched up his nose, and started toward the bathroom, shimmying like a bowl of Jell-O to slip past us along the narrow corridor.

"Excuse me," Cooper said to Joe and me, tipping his hat in my direction before trailing after the man we could only assume was the county coroner.

Big Joe immediately took my arm, scowling, and led me a few feet away, trying to get us out of our visitors' earshot.

"All you had to do was lock the door this afternoon," he grumbled. "Just lock the door, like I've asked you to do a thousand times. But nooooo…" He shook his head from side to side.

"I'm sorry, Joe. What more can I say?"

"We're going to be here forever, now, you know. They're not going to let us go anywhere until they find out who this man was, and who killed him."

"So?"

"So I'd only planned for us to be here long enough to
see
the Grand Canyon, Dottie. Not long enough to
refill
it. We were going to—" He caught himself, remembering our son on the lounge nearby, and lowered his voice to just above a whisper. "We were going to move on to the southeast Friday, remember?"

"We still might. Think positive," I said.

"Hmph. They're going to take Lucille away. You watch."

"Oh no. They wouldn't do that."

"They wouldn't, huh? This is a crime scene, Dottie. They have lab tests to run. And I'd be willing to bet they don't have the facilities to run 'em here at the park."

Suddenly, I was all out of optimistic reassurances.

"But then, maybe if you talked to the boy, he'd cut us some slack and just let us go. What do you think?"

He had lost me, and my face must have shown it.

"You gonna stand there and tell me you haven't noticed how sweet he is on you?"

"Who?"

"Your friend Cooper back there. That's who. Three hundred women in this park under thirty, and he's in here makin' goo-goo eyes at a fifty-three-year-old mother of five. I ought to slap those overgrown nose hairs right off his face!"

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said, starting to laugh.

"And
you
. Woman, you act like you've never seen a mustache before."

"What?"

"You trying to deny it? That your eyes weren't glued to the man's upper lip every time he opened his mouth?"

"Joe, that's ridiculous."

"It might be ridiculous, Moms," Bad Dog said, inviting himself into our conversation, "but it's the truth. I noticed it too." He shrugged apologetically at me, grinning from ear to ear.

Big Joe suddenly noticed the can in his son's hand and rushed to the refrigerator, yanking the door open. "Boy! That was my last beer! You know that?"

Bad Dog stuffed his mouth with a handful of potato chips and mumbled his latest weak apology.

2

Big Joe was right, of course. We were stuck at the Grand Canyon.

They had been extremely apologetic about it, but the two plainclothes detectives from the Coconino County Sheriff's Department who eventually showed up to take over the murder investigation from Ranger Cooper rendered us all but prisoners on the park grounds. We weren't under suspicion of anything, they said, but for several days, at least, we were going to have to stay right where we ·were. I had hoped this was only because they wanted us available for further questioning, but that was just wishful thinking.

"Sorry, folks, but we're going to have to impound your trailer," the detective named Crowe had said.

They told us they were going to have to take her down to Flagstaff to run some lab work on her, just as Joe had predicted, and we'd be without her no longer than three or four days, tops. I myself took the news badly, but it broke my heart to see the effect it had on Big Joe. It was as if they had told him they were going to tow me down to Flagstaff instead.

A small crowd of curious onlookers, having already witnessed the removal of a corpse from our trailer by several employees of the county coroner's office, watched as a pair of deputy sheriffs hitched Lucille up to a mustard-yellow Chevy truck with Coconino County badges on the doors, showing great restraint as Big Joe supervised the entire operation. While my husband snapped orders and mumbled complaints outside, driving Detective Crowe to distraction, Bad Dog and I removed a mere handful of belongings from Lucille under the watchful eye of Crowe's partner, Detective Bollinger, who inspected everything we collected with professional suspicion.

Then they took Lucille away.

Big Joe took my hand as we watched her vanish into the distance, her gleaming silver body rolling gently from side to side with each dip in the dirt road. I would say it was like watching one of our children pack up and leave home for good, except that Joe and I had always been tearfully ecstatic on those occasions. Suffice it to say that it was a difficult thing for us to do, Bad Dog included.

And so it was that we became the guests of the Bright Angel Lodge, one of the more historic and colorful hotels situated in the park proper, courtesy of the Coconino County Sheriff's Department. They gave us a lovely cabin with a fine view right on the rim of the Canyon, and the staff there treated us with great kindness, but all of this was wasted on Joe. Stripped of both his beloved trailer home and his freedom of movement, he couldn't have been any more miserable had they locked us all up in an outhouse.

"Damn, Dottie," he kept saying, over and over again.

"I know, baby," I would reply.

"If you'd just locked that damn door—"

My "baby"s still weren't doing squat.

Finally, exasperated, I told him, "Look. Why don't you try looking at the bright side of all this for a change?"

"The bright side?
What
bright side?"

"Well. For starters…" I had to come up with something fast, so I said, "This is all very exciting, isn't it? I mean, when you really stop and think about it?"

"Exciting? You call finding a dead man growing stiff in your bathroom exciting? Are you insane?"

"Coming from someone who used to think crime was the most thrilling thing on earth, Joseph Loudermilk, that's an awfully odd question to ask, isn't it?"

"What?"

"You heard me. And you know precisely what I'm talking about, too."

"I do not."

"Oh yes you do."

"I said I don't!"

"And I say you do."

"Listen. If you're trying to suggest I'm turned on by all this just because I used to be a cop, you can forget it. I've been retired from police work for over two years now, and that's just the way I like it."

"Is that so?"

"Yes, that's so."

"Just because a man's retired from something, Joe, doesn't mean he doesn't miss it," I said.

"So I miss it. So what? You do something for twenty-five years, you can't help but miss it a little when it's gone. But miss it enough to want it back?" He shook his head at me, grimacing at the thought. "No, Dottie. Not now, not ever."

"Joe, the man died in our trailer. Sitting on your favorite reading chair. Don't you think we're entitled to find out how and why, if we can?"

"No, I don't. I don't
want
to know the how or the why of it. It's none of my business, and it's none of yours, either. But I can tell you
one
thing." He turned his head in the direction of our son, who was camped in front of the TV in our room, absently watching a basketball game while spraying Oreo cookie crumbs all over the carpet. "If it were, I sure as hell know who I'd ask about it."

"Who? Me?" Bad Dog asked his father innocently.

"You're damn right, you. What the hell are you doing here, anyway? Who told you where to find us? And how the hell'd that dead white man end up in our house?"

There was that word again:
house
. I held my breath and waited to see if Dog's last brush with death had taught him anything at all.

"I told you. I don't know nothin' about that man. He was in the bathroom when I came in, just like you found 'im."

"Dead."

"That's right."

"And you didn't shoot him."

"No! My gun wasn't loaded! And it hadn't been fired, either. You said so yourself, remember?"

He had Joe there. Inspecting Dog's gun was the first thing my husband had done after we found the body, and he'd told us both afterward that the weapon was clean.

"That doesn't mean you couldn't have used something else to shoot him," Big Joe argued. "If you're crazy enough to bring one gun into my house, you're crazy enough to bring a dozen."

"I didn't shoot the man, Pops. I didn't even know 'im."

"Then what the hell were you doing in the closet?"

"I was hidin'. What else? I heard you guys comin', and I thought it was the killer, returnin' to the scene of the crime. That's what they always do, right? Return to the scene of the crime?"

Big Joe didn't answer him.

"All right, Theodore," I said. "Your father and I believe you.

Joe made a face and directed it at me, but he remained silent.

"Now. Your father asked you how you found us."

Bad Dog nibbled on his Oreos and fell silent, just like his father.

"Did Mo tell you where we were?"

"Nobody told me nothin'," Dog said, in his inimitable double-negative style. I spent twenty-two years trying to break him of the annoying habit, but alas,
I didn't never have no luck
. "I found out where you guys were on my own."