Going Nowhere Fast (8 page)

(Oh, and by the way—Joe's lie was more outrageous than mine, and by a wide margin. He and Baylor shared the same graduating class in high school, all right, but Joe was cut from the
junior
varsity basketball team after only three practices. The closest he ever came to actually playing with Baylor was, in his later role as the team's locker room attendant, flipping Baylor a towel in the shower room.)

Anyway, after a while of getting the Loudermilk cold shoulder, the vultures got the message and stopped circling about us. I figured our celebrity status had worn off for good.

But no. Here they were again. Two fresh new faces, at least, but insidious newshounds just the same. I knew that if I talked to these jokers, they would ask nothing but embarrassing questions, and distort my answers to those questions, and generally just make a mockery of what I had to say in tomorrow's morning paper.

So why did I go to the cabin door and open it? you ask. Because I
liked
having reporters scurry after me like paparazzi chasing down Liz Taylor—that's why. What did you think?

"My husband I have nothing to say," I said, confident that neither man would take me at all seriously.

"Mrs. Loudermilk?" the one without the camera asked.

They were both dressed to the nines. That struck me right away. Perfectly tailored Armani suits in a matching charcoal gray, razor-cut silk ties, and high-gloss wing-tipped shoes—the full
GQ
treatment, everything first-class. Cub reporters, these guys weren't.

"I told you my husband and I have nothing to say," I said again.

"Mrs. Loudermilk, please. This will only take a moment, I promise you." It was the one without the camera again. He was the taller of the two, and the more handsome, though neither man looked like anything a bright girl would shove off the love seat in the family parlor. "My name is Ray, and this is Phil." He extended his hand, amber eyes sparkling. "Phil and I are doing a story on the Geoffry Bettis murder case. But I imagine you already guessed that."

I shook his hand, but only indifferently. "That's an Instamatic camera," I said, staring at the tiny little thing tethered to the neck of the one just introduced to me as Phil.

Both men followed my gaze before Phil looked up and shrugged his wide shoulders, apologizing. "My Nikon's in the shop, ma'am," he said.

"You gentlemen are from a newspaper?"

"Yes ma'am," Ray said.

"
The Sentinel
," Phil said.

"Aren't you kind of late?" I asked them. "I mean, all the other papers talked to Joe and me two days ago."

"Yes ma'am," Ray said. "That's true. But that's because Phil and I are doing a different kind of story than the other papers. We're doing what's called in the trade a 'follow-up.' "

"A follow-up," Phil agreed, nodding.

"A follow-up's a more in-depth look at the people involved in a story. A more personal look, if you will."

"More personal," I repeated.

"Yes ma'am. In other words, we don't so much want to know what happened as we want to know why and how it happened. It's the human drama we're after here, not just the cold, hard facts."

"The human drama. Exactly," Phil reiterated, head bobbing up and down.

"For instance," Ray went on, "we'd like to know what exactly was the nature of your relationship with Mr. Bettis before his death. Were you and your husband friends of his? Old business acquaintances? What?"

"We didn't
have
a relationship with Mr. Bettis," I said impatiently. "We'd never even heard of the man until the day we found his body in our bathroom."

"I see."

Ray fell silent, trying to find a tactful way to pose his next question. After a moment, he said, "I hope you'll forgive me if this sounds disrespectful, Mrs. Loudermilk, but I find that rather difficult to believe. I mean, this is a big park." He swept his right hand in a wide arc before him to illustrate the point. "Mr. Bettis could have been killed in a thousand and one different places. But he was killed in your trailer. Sitting on your private commode. Now, there has to be a reason for that, don't you think?"

"There may be a reason for it," I said, "but if there is, neither my husband nor I know what it is."

I watched him toy with the idea of pushing me even further on the subject for a brief moment, before he said, "Okay. Stranger things have been known to happen, of course. We'll move on to our next question: What did Mr. Bettis say to you or your husband before he died? Anything?"

"Mr. Bettis was already dead when we found him. Haven't you read your own newspaper?"

"Please don't misunderstand, Mrs. Loudermilk. We don't mean to imply that you or your husband have been anything but honest with the press or the authorities regarding Mr. Bettis's death. In fact, we're certain you've both been entirely truthful in the matter. However… you've now had two days to think about what happened to review things in your mind, if you will—and we just thought you may have remembered a few things that you'd forgotten or overlooked initially. You see?"

"You think we're senile," I said.

"No, no, no! Absolutely not!"

"Absolutely not," Phil said, shaking his head at the absurdity of the thought.

"You're not taking any pictures," I told him, suddenly getting a little worried.

"Huh?" He looked down at the little black plastic camera resting against his chest, appearing to have completely forgotten it was there, and said, "Oh. Well. I was waiting for your husband. We 'want to get the two of you together."

"Is he here, by the way?" Ray asked, taking a step toward me and the cabin door.

"Yes. But he's asleep," I said, moving to further block the open doorway with my body.

"What about your son? Theodore, is it? Is he here?"

"Yes. But he's asleep too."

"Ah. What a shame."

He tried to make an innocent gesture out of it, but as he straightened the knot on his tie, Ray took a quick look around, clearly making sure the three of us were alone. I had seen very unreporterlike muscles bulge beneath his coat sleeve when his arm moved. "Look, Mrs. Loudermilk," he said, showing me his perfect teeth again. "I get the sense that you don't trust us. So you're holding back on us a little bit. Is that possible?"

He took another small step forward, and this time his friend Phil the Photo Hound followed suit.

"I think I've said all I'm going to say to you gentlemen," I said nervously, backing slowly into the cabin. ''I'm sorry."

But they had both advanced upon me yet another step, when someone behind them said, "Yo, what's up?" to freeze them in place.

It was Bad Dog, drenched in sweat and covered with dust, his hair as wild as a four-year-old Brillo pad and his clothes a disheveled, ill-fitting mess. He looked like a psychopath on holiday.

In other words, he was beautiful.

He stepped up on the cabin's porch, placing himself right where I hoped he would—between me and my two visitors—and, grinning, asked, "Everything okay?"

Ray and Phil shot a glance at each other, wondering how I was going to answer that.

"Everything is fine, Theodore," I said, smiling at the two alleged reporters before me with the smug overconfidence of a don in the company of his hoods. "This is Ray and Phil. They're reporters from the
Sentinel
."

Ray and Phil nodded at my son officiously.

"That's an Instamatic camera," Bad Dog said, staring at Phil.

"His Canon's in the shop," I said. "Or did you say it was a Minolta?"

Phil didn't say anything.

"It's a Nikon," Ray answered for him, no longer finding it necessary to smile.

"I thought we weren't talking to reporters anymore," Bad Dog reminded me.

"We're not. In fact, that's exactly what Iwas explaining to these two when you walked up." I turned to Ray. "Wasn't I?"

Ray paused a moment, then reverted to the electric smile. The snake who lured Eve into sampling the apple could not have had a better one. "Yes ma'am. You certainly were." He lowered his head in Phil's direction, and the two fashion plates stepped down off the porch. Looking back one last time, he said, "I'm sorry you chose not to talk with us, Mrs. Loudermilk. It would have made our job so much more painless if you had. Believe me."

I was going to say, "I'm sorry too," but he and his partner were walking away by the time I could get my mouth to move. I wasn't sure, but it seemed to me I had just been presented with a thinly disguised threat.

Only when the pair had completely disappeared from view did I turn to my son and give him a big, smothering hug.

"What was that for?" Dog asked when I finally released him.

"For being my son. Is there anything wrong with that?"

"For being your son? I've been your son all my life, and it's never turned you mushy before. Unless you were bailing me out of jail, or somethin'."

"Let's just say having a dead ringer for the Antichrist in the family sometimes comes in handy, and leave it at that. All right?" I looked out expectantly in the direction from which Dog had come. "Now. Where is your father?"

Dog shrugged. "Still down there somewhere, I guess. He's comin'." He started to enter the cabin, but I put a hand on his chest to stop him and turn him around.

" 'Still down there somewhere'? Down
where
, Theodore?"

"You know. In the Canyon."

"In the Canyon?"

"Yes ma'am." He tried again to go inside, but my hand went right back to his chest to halt him in his tracks.

"You left your father down at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, Theodore?"

"He's not at the bottom, Moms. He's about three quarters of the way down. That's as far as he would go before demandin' we turn around and head back up."

"And you just left him there?"

"I didn't mean to. But see, there was this mule team on its way down, and I went around it, but he wouldn't. 'Cause, see, the trail's really narrow in places, and he got spooked once when he almost slipped, so—"

"Go back and get him, Theodore. Right this minute!"

"But—"

"Boy, if you're still standing here when I get this shoe off, you and me are gonna be in the news all over again. You understand what I'm saying?"

I started pulling the shoe off my right foot.

"Okay, okay! Damn!"

Bad Dog scurried off.

"And take him down some water!" I called after him, waving my shoe at his back. When I was sure he was doing as he'd been told, I started back into the cabin, yawning, and kicked my other shoe off, once more drawn inexorably toward my afternoon nap.

Until, that is, I remembered Ray and Phil.

Dog hadn't taken three steps down the trail into the Canyon when I caught up with him.

*     *     *     *

Several hours later, as I was soothing Big Joe's furrowed brow with a freshly dampened washcloth, I asked him what he thought.

"I'll tell you what I think," he said, trying mightily to raise his weary head from the pillow on the bed. "I think he thinks there's money to be made in my demise, that's what I think! I think he thinks he's got some kind of inheritance coming when I kick the bucket! But he's in for a rude surprise!"

"Joe, I'm not talking about Theodore."

"You hear me, boy? There ain't no profit in killing me, all right? Makin' a widow out of your mother ain't gonna make you so much as one thin dime!"

Glued as usual to the television set, Bad Dog just sat on the floor at the foot of the bed and said nothing, either too big or too dense to be insulted by his father's accusations. He knew as well as I did that Joe was just blowing off steam. Joe had been tired and dirty when we'd come upon him less than a quarter mile from the top of the Canyon trail, but other than that, he'd been no closer to death than I was. He was in too fine a shape for that. Still, he had been furious, and I for one fully understood why.

He hadn't liked how Dog had just left him behind down there, like an old cripple too slow for a young pup to wait on.

Dog hadn't meant it that way, of course, but that's how Joe had taken it nevertheless. I could see the hurt in his eyes all during the climb back up to our cabin. So I'd run a warm bath for him as soon as we walked in, and laid out his favorite pajamas, trying to assuage his wounded pride with a little old-fashioned wifely nurturing. I knew it wouldn't quiet him completely, but I suspected it might reduce his griping to a mere grumble in an hour or so, and I was right. The big baby wasn't doing anything more now than thinking out loud, no real sting left in his tone.

For some men, bellyaching was therapeutic.

"Joe, enough about Theodore. I'm talking about those reporters. Phil and Ray."

"What about 'em?"

"Well, for one thing, I don't really think they
were
reporters. You heard how they were dressed."

"Yeah."

"And that camera the one named Phil had. Who ever heard of a newspaper photographer taking pictures for his paper with a fifteen-dollar Instamatic camera?"

Joe considered the question carefully, then nodded his head. "Okay. So they weren't reporters. What do you figure they were?"

"Baby, I was hoping you could tell me. You're the ex-policeman, not me."

He nodded his head again, seeing my point. "Well, I didn't see them, but based on your description… I'd be tempted to guess they were government men of some kind. Well dressed, well spoken. Polite. Except…" He let the thought fade away.

"Except what?"

"Except government men don't usually pretend to be anything else. They don't have to. They want to talk to somebody, they usually just flash their shiny badges and start leaning on people. They've got more weight behind 'em than anybody—why give up that kind of leverage just to play reporter?"

I didn't know how to answer that, so I simply shrugged.

"You say they tried to force their way in here?" Big Joe asked me.

"Yes. At least, it seemed to me that's what they were about to do, until Theodore showed up. I tell you, I've never been so glad to see that boy in my life."

Bad Dog turned his head in my direction and grinned.