Roughstock (A Gail McCarthy Mystery) (26 page)

Everything was brilliant and hard, the dark, jagged promontories sharply etched against the clear winter sky and the turbulent sea. Gunner snorted at a sudden flare of rustles as the wind beat at a nearby bunch of pampas grass; everywhere greasewood and patches of thin grass moved and jerked in the air currents.

This north coast country, I thought, though beautiful, was bleak and inhospitable, a place to visit, not a place to live. It was either foggy or windy ninety percent of the time, and I found the ocean, though spectacular, an oppressive, almost ominous presence after a while-too big, too impersonal, just too damn cold.

I looked back at the Hollister Ranch, trying to see it with the eyes of love. The old, carefully tended barns and well-repaired fences, the cottonwoods lining the drive and the stream running through the pasture, the walled garden behind the adobe ranch house, with its neat orchard and ancient climbing roses festooning the whitewashed bricks. Cattle grazed in a small field just below me, bordered by the beach, the red and black shapes of the cows and calves impossibly picturesque against a background of new green grass and rolling winter surf.

A person could love this, I thought. A person could love the ocean, too; it was possible. Many people did. It
was no doubt some fault in my own nature that rendered it forbidding.

I don't know how long I stood there, staring and thinking. Long enough that I started to get cold. I was in the process of running the zipper on my sweatshirt up to the top and tying my hood firmly over my head when Gunner pricked his ears. His gaze was focused back down the trail, in the direction from which we'd come. His body stiffened.

In a second I saw what his more acute senses had foreseen-a horse and rider coming up the trail. Bronc, I realized a moment later. Bronc and the newly dark brown, bobtailed Willy.

For a second, indecision rushed over me. I'd come out here for a solitary ride, to think, not to talk to Bronc. But here he was. He'd seen me, certainly. I could hardly dive Gunner into the scrub and gallop off at this point. So I held still, patting Gunner's neck to reassure him, awaiting Bronc's approach.

He rode up to me quietly, nodding in greeting. He'd been out checking cattle presumably; Willy was carrying saddlebags and there were two ropes tied to the saddle.

"Hi, Bronc," I said.

"Well hello, sweetheart." He didn't look at me as he said it; he was scanning the pasture, his eyes sharp under the brim of his cowboy hat.

"You out doctoring?" I asked him.

"Yes, ma'am. A couple of those young calves had the scours this morning. I found one and gave him a shot of penicillin, but I can't locate the other."

For a second we were quiet, both of us looking over the Hollister Ranch, before he fixed his hard, old eyes on my face. "You ever figure out who killed Jack?"

"I'm working on it."

"So what've you come up with?"

"You said you could give Travis an alibi," I began, and he glanced at me sharply.

"I don't think that's true," I went on.

"The kid had nothing to do with it." Bronc's voice was harsh, an old man's voice. "You don't know one thing about it if you think Travis had anything to do with killing Jack."

For a long moment Bronc stared steadily at the ranch below us. "Travis hasn't got anything in the world but that ranch," he said slowly. "When he came here he was just sixteen, and he'd run away from some big city back east-Chicago, he said. I guess his mom was dead and his dad knocked him around a lot. So he just run away. Came out west to be a cowboy." Bronc chuckled.

"People used to say he was really Jack's illegitimate kid."

"People say a lot of things. Jack was sterile like I told you. When he was married to the first one there was a lot of carrying on about it. I knew."

Bronc leaned off the side of Willy and spat reflectively. "Travis never did want anything to do with his family; maybe that's what got the talk going. People figured Jack must be his real dad, 'cause the kid didn't have anyone else.

"But I remember like it was yesterday the morning that boy came walking down the drive. He was wearing a clean shirt and jeans and carrying a little bag no bigger than one of these saddlebags. Everything he owned was in that bag. I was cutting up a big old dead oak in the front pasture and he walked right up to me and asked for a job."

I could see it in my mind, such was Bronc's storytelling; the kid, poor but clean, the old man out in the pasture, working.

"Now I wouldn't've hired any old bum who walked down my driveway, but this looked like a good kid and I thought I could use some help that day. So I said, 'I'll give you a day's work.' " Bronc shook his head. "And damned if he hasn't been here ever since."

"Did you hire him to stay on or did Jack?" I asked curiously.

"I did. Jack left all that sort of thing to me." Bronc's chin lifted. "Trav's all right, sweetheart. I know that boy; he may have a temper, but he hasn't got any meanness in him. Travis could no more have shot Jack than he could've jumped over the moon."

"Did you know he was seeing Laney? Jack's ex."

Bronc laughed, a short, sharp bark. "Is that right? Well, I wouldn't mind seeing her myself."

“
It gives him a motive, though. Laney's inheriting a lot of money." I waited, watching for Bronc's reaction.

He just looked steadily at me. "What I'm telling you is that Travis wouldn't do anything to hurt Jack, or to hurt his own chances of staying here on this ranch. He hasn't got anywhere else to go."

"What if," I said slowly, "he knew Jack was about to sell the ranch to some developers?"

For a second Bronc's impassive eyes were startled, but the expression was gone as fast as it came. "Wouldn't make no difference. Travis wouldn't have killed Jack."

"I still don't think you can give him an alibi, Bronc," I said gently.

"Sweetheart, you are barking up the wrong tree." Bronc's voice was hard. "I'm telling you Travis didn't do it."

"I think Travis is lying," I said quietly, watching Bronc the whole time. "I think that's why he's been so upset. I think he was over at my house last night, trying to scare me into staying out of this."

"Travis had nothin' to do with killing Jack." Bronc wouldn't meet my eyes.

"Okay," I agreed equably. "Maybe he didn't. Maybe he's trying to protect you. He knows you weren't on the ranch, because he was. He's afraid you were up in Tahoe."

There was a long moment of silence. Bronc's eyes flicked at mine and then away again. Shit. Why had I said it? I'd been thinking of this since yesterday, but I hadn't meant to put it directly to Bronc. I'd only meant to go on a ride and look at the ranch, see if I could understand any better.

Bronc's face had the appearance of carved oak, lined and brown, the same wooden consistency. Nothing in his eyes that I could read.

"The way I figure it," I went on deliberately, "you killed Jack to keep the ranch from being developed into housing tracts." Put baldly like that, it sounded ridiculous.

Still staring at Bronc, I tried to imagine what was in his mind. Grief? Anger? He seemed beyond all that, sitting there on his horse with his cowboy hat pulled low on his forehead, his coiled ropes at his side. More an icon than a man, an image welded to a tradition, the symbol of a way of life.

Eventually he smiled, or what passed with him as a smile. I'd noticed before that though he laughed and joshed and flashed those teeth a lot, he never really smiled.

"Are you gonna turn me in?" He said it almost lightly.

I gazed back at him. Maybe I should have been frightened, but I wasn't. It seemed impossible to be afraid of Bronc; we'd spent too much time sitting on arena railings together, teasing each other. I couldn't believe he'd hurt me.

Not answering his question, I asked him another. "Why'd you do it, Bronc? I mean I know why, sort of, but how could you? Jack was your friend."

Bronc turned his face away from me and looked back down at the ranch. For a long moment I thought he wouldn't answer, then he cleared his throat roughly.

"You didn't know Jack Hollister," he said, not taking his eyes off the ranch. "Didn't anybody know Jack Hollister but me."

TWENTY-SIX

What do you mean?" I asked him.

"Jack wasn't like people thought he was." Bronc kept not looking at me as he spoke, directing his talk to the ranch and the ocean beyond. "Ever since I've known him, ever since he was a kid, he could fool people. He had this nice way about him and he liked to make people like him, but Jack didn't really care about anything.

"I found that out early, right after Len died and Jack inherited the place. First thing he did was sell all Len's horses. Shit. Len worked his whole life to develop that horse herd. He loved those horses. Second only to the way he loved the ranch. Well, I already knew Jack wouldn't listen to anything, so I never said a word, I just asked him if he'd let me keep a couple of 'em. And he said sure; one thing about Jack-he liked to give people things. It
made him feel good."

Bronc patted Willy's neck briefly. "One of those mares I kept was his mother. But anyway, about Jack, I don't know if I can make you understand how he was. He never cared about the land or the livestock except to make money on 'em, and he never gave a damn about any human being that ever lived, except as how that person made him feel good. And he never had any heart. Not from day one.

"I remember that first summer I worked here, I was teachin' him to ride colts and he was the most athletic son-of-a-bitch I ever laid eyes on. It
all came natural to him. He rode those crooked, wicked suckers like it was as easy as a stroll in the park. And then one of them-a little grulla gelding it was-got ahead of him and doubled back and dumped his ass on the ground. And that great big kid just got up and walked off. He comes back five minutes later with Len's gun, and damned if he didn't want to shoot that horse."

Bronc leaned over and spat. "I knew all about Jack from that first summer, knew what he was and how different he was from his old man. Len was a good man, and Jack was his only kid; I guess Jack's marna died in childbirth, that's what I heard, anyway. So Len gave that kid any damn thing he wanted. And it just plain ruined Jack."

"So it was all right to kill him?" These were my first words since Bronc had started talking and he rebutted them with a flash of anger.

"Honey, you don't understand. I spent a lifetime with that son-of-a-bitch, and I don't know how to tell you what I knew about him. Only interested in Jack and playin' the goddamn big rancher-never gave a shit about anyone or anything else. That will he made, leavin' the ranch to the state-it was just because I asked him to. He didn't care about the ranch, but he always wanted me to like him. All his life he wanted me to think he was a big man, like everyone else did, and he knew I didn't. He was always trying to impress me."

"Didn't that make you like him a little?"

"Hell, no. I felt sorry for him sometimes, but mostly I felt sorry for ever' living thing he carne in contact with."

"So why'd you stay with him?"

"I didn't stay with him. I stayed on the ranch. Len, Jack's old man, he loved this ranch. He was raised on it, his daddy built it, and he told me more'n once how much it meant to his pa. I got to where I loved it, too. I wasn't goin' to leave it to Jack. Len didn't understand about Jack. Like most folks, I guess, he wanted to see the best in his kid. But I knew Jack would let the old place fall apart. He just didn't give a damn."

"But you went team roping with him. You hung around with him."

Bronc was silent awhile, looking down on the ranch, his hands folded quietly over the saddle hom. "Honey, it's hard to make you understand," he said at last, his voice rough. "It's like we were married to each other. One of those deals where you've been together forever and you more or less hate each other, but it's the only life you know."

Wind flurried in the pampas grass with a paperlike rustling, causing Gunner to cock a watchful ear. I thought about bad marriages and how they could be when people, for whatever reason, elected to stay and endure.

"I still don't understand how you could have killed him," I said finally.

"What the hell do you care? You didn't give a damn about Jack."

I was silent. In a sense, Bronc was right. I knew Jack as well, or as little, as I knew dozens, really hundreds of other people. He was just one of the many human beings who were part of the background of my life. Since his death, I'd been forced to recognize how slight that sort of knowing was. In fact, it was clear to me that I probably wouldn't have liked Jack if I had known him better. It had been shocking to think of him being killed, but no, I hadn't felt any grief over Jack.

I had felt a sense of dismay, though, and a strong sense of wrongness.
This shouldn't have happened
were the words that formed themselves in my mind.

"Murder is wrong," I said flatly. Simplistic, I know, but what else could I say? "To kill someone, other than to save your life, or protect someone else's, is wrong."

Bronc leaned off to one side of Willy and spat. "What about those bastards I killed in Korea?" I shook my head. "That's different," I told him, and was aware of how lame it sounded.