Another Man's Moccasins

13

“Saizarbitoria thinks you did it.”

I listened to the squeal from under the hood as we turned the corner and figured the staff vehicle from the Powder Junction detachment of the Absaroka County Sheriff ’s Department was going to need a power steering unit and soon. “Really?”

“No, but we had a long talk about race relations.” I drove the faded red Suburban to the address Phillip Maynard had given us, as the Bear fiddled with the nonfunctioning vents, finally settling on rolling down his window, which stuck about halfway. “Santiago is a very intelligent young man.”

I’d given Sancho my truck after we’d gotten Tuyen stabilized and sent them rocketing off to the hospital back in Durant; I figured a one-way trip in the Bullet was faster than a two-way trip with the EMTs. Even with the vast loss of blood, Tuyen had come to and said that he had no idea what had happened other than that he had entered the motel room and someone had struck him from behind.

“So, we are basing our suspicions on a single set of motorcycle tracks outside the motel?”

“Sort of.”

“How sort of?”

I shrugged. “Exclusively.”

He sighed. “Why would Phillip Maynard kill Ho Thi Paquet and then try to kill Tuyen? ”

“I don’t know, but he seems our most likely suspect.”

Henry pulled his shoulder belt out, where it hung loose across his chest. “Drive carefully. I question the ability of this belt to keep me from slamming face-first into the dash should we find ourselves in a crash.” We were headed for the south side of town near the rodeo grounds. “He is our only suspect.” He thought about it some more. “Sometimes living in Wyoming has unexpected benefits.”

“Vic says that most of the benefits of living in Wyoming are unexpected.”

“She is a modern woman and expects a great deal.” I could feel him watching me before he turned back to the road and smiled.

Phillip Maynard’s house wasn’t really a house; it was more like an upscale chicken shack, which meant that in comparison to the other shacks that sat a little farther toward the banks of the middle fork of the Powder River, it seemed even more uninhabitable.

Henry placed his hands on his hips and stood at the gate. “Where do you suppose the door is?”

“Drawing from my ranch upbringing, I’d say it’s on the side.” I followed him as he walked around the end of the ramshackle building where we found a hollow-core door that had a tin sign tacked to the surface that read KEEP OUT.

We could hear commercials squawking from a television inside, and I knocked on the door. We waited and listened but heard nothing but the TV. This was getting reminiscent of Tran Van Tuyen’s motel room. “Phillip Maynard, this is Sheriff Longmire. Would you mind opening the door?”

Nothing.

We listened and learned how white our teeth and how fresh our breath could be if we would only use Brand-X toothpaste, but nothing from Phillip Maynard. I tried the knob, but the door was locked. I glanced at Henry. “I hope we’re not seeing a pattern here.”

“Do you want me to kick it down, or do you want to? ”

I studied the scaly and cupped surface of the interior door, which had spent at least a winter in the high plains exterior. “I think if we breathe on it, it’ll collapse.” Testing the theory, I grasped the knob and pressed. The door popped open, taking a little of the jamb with it.

We shrugged at each other. The television was a tiny thirteen-inch sitting on a beanbag chair, and clothes were scattered across the dirty yellow linoleum-tiled floor and exploded from a large backpack that rested on a built-in bunk. Unlike Tuyen’s room, it didn’t look like anybody had been killed here, anybody besides Mister Clean.

The Bear walked past me, watched Suzanne Rico anchor the news out of Channel 13 in Casper, and then clicked off the TV. There was an open paperback lying on the bed, along with what looked like an old horsehide motorcycle jacket and a number of empty Budweiser bottles, and a full ashtray with a few joints mixed in with the butts. There was another collection of bottles beside the only chair.

Henry crossed back and flipped over the book. “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”

“Appropriate.”

He showed me the cover as proof and then gestured toward the bottles by the chair. “It would appear that Phillip has been entertaining.”

I kneeled down and looked at the empties, plucked a pen from my shirt pocket, and tipped one over enough to lift it by the neck. Something rattled at the base, and I saw it was the cap, which had been bent in half. I set the bottle back down and looked up at the Cheyenne Nation. “I guess I’ll go check with the owner.”

Gladys Dietz had rented her swank chicken shed to Phillip Maynard for the lofty sum of a hundred dollars a month, including utilities, but she was beginning to have second thoughts. I was having second thoughts as she smoked a cigarette with the oxygen tube attached just under her nose, expecting any moment to be blown off the porch.

“The TV is going all the time, and that damn motorcycle makes such a racket.” She leaned on her walker one-handed and held the screen door back with the other.

I knew Gladys. She and her husband had owned a commercial fishing lake that my father and I had frequented, and she had gladly told anybody then that she was intent on dying soon.

I had passed more than a half century and was the chief law enforcer in the land, but she still addressed me as if I were eight. I held my hat in my hands. “Mrs. Dietz...”

“Your shirt needs ironing, Walter.”

I self-consciously smoothed the pockets of my uniform and desperately tried to remember her husband’s name. “Yes, ma’am. How’s George?”

“Dead.”

That’s what you got for asking about old people. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

She shrugged her silver head and studied my unpolished boots. “I’m not. He was getting pretty cranky toward the end.”

I decided to try to keep on track. “Mrs. Dietz, have you seen Phillip Maynard today?”

She glanced toward the shack, where Henry was standing by the gate. “What’s that Indian doing out near my chicken shed? ”

“He’s with me.”

She looked up through lenses as thick as the windshield on my truck. “I heard your wife died?”

“Yes, ma’am, a number of years back.”

“Was she cranky? ”

“No, ma’am.”

She nodded her head. “They get like that, you know.”

“Yes, ma’am, so they tell me. Now, about Phillip Maynard?”

“Is he in trouble? ”

“We just need to talk to him. Have you seen him?”

She continued watching Henry. “I usually don’t rent to those motorcycle types.”

I sighed and hung my hat on the grip of my sidearm and held the screen door for her. “It’s pretty important.”

“What is?”

“Phillip Maynard.”

“What about him?”

I took that extra second that usually keeps me from strangling my constituency, always important in an election year. “Have you seen him today?”

“No.”

I glanced back at Henry. “Well, his motorcycle isn’t here.”

“He keeps it in the barn.”

I turned and looked at her. “I beg your pardon?”

“That fancy new one that he doesn’t want to get rained on.” She glanced past me and at the cloudless sky, the smoldering cigarette still frighteningly close to the oxygen nozzle under her nose. “Not that it’s ever going to do that again.”

She watched us as we turned the corner and walked past a corral toward the Dietz barn with a Dutch-style hip roof. “She thinks you’re going to steal her chickens.”

“There are no chickens.”

“See?”

It was a standard structure, with the roof supported by a number of big, rough-cut eight-by-eights, which had been sided with raw lumber that had long faded to gray. There was a metal handle with a wooden latch on the door, which I pulled, and we stepped back as the big door swung toward us. Up in the loft there was a flutter of barn swallows, sounding like angel’s wings might. The Harley sat parked on its side stand, swathed with the same cover that I had seen at the bar. Henry lifted the vinyl shroud and whistled. “What?”

“FLHRS Road King, custom job.”

I vaguely remembered Henry having a bike, but he had rarely ridden it. “What’s that mean? ”

“Expensive. Close to twenty thousand.”

I thought about the chicken shed. “Well, he hasn’t been spending his money on lodging.” I reached down and felt the chrome-bedecked engine, only vaguely warm. “And he hasn’t ridden it lately.”

I took a step into the barn proper, and let my eyes adjust to the gloom. There was a smell, one that I knew.

I unsnapped the safety strap on my .45, pulled the Colt from my holster, and glanced back over my shoulder at Henry. The main breezeway of the barn was empty except for the motorcycle, but there were two other passageways through the stock stalls. I motioned for the Bear to head right, and I would take the left.

The stalls hadn’t been used for their initial purpose for quite some time but had instead been filled with used lumber, broken equipment, and aged firewood. I worked my way through the four of them and met Henry at the far end of the center breezeway.

“Well, he’s not hiding in the corn crib.”

There was more fluttering, and I noticed the scar tissue under Henry’s chin as he studied the rafters. “No, not in the corn crib.” He turned in a circle until he was facing back toward the opening where we’d come in. “But it appears he has received a suspended sentence.”

I turned and followed his eyes up to the rafters where, from a stout length of hemp rope, hung the dangling body of Phillip Maynard.

“How long?”

T. J. Sherwin was on another call in Otto, so we had Bill McDermott, who was the medical examiner from Billings, Montana. I hadn’t seen him since he and Lana Baroja had gone to Guernica together, but it was good to have him back. "Hard to say with the heat, but with rigor and approximate temperature, I’d say it was possibly early this morning or maybe very late last night.”

“Suicide?”

“I hate to guess, but if I was a betting man . . .” He looked at Maynard’s body. The pressure from the base of Phillip’s neck and from the area where the tongue attaches had forced his lower jaw open, and his tongue stuck out from between his teeth like the parody of a naughty child. “There’s some additional contusion alongside the trapezoidal muscle, but that could easily be explained by the force of the drop.”

I looked back up at the roof beams, which were at least eighteen feet high. “He did a number, didn’t he?”

“It takes surprisingly little; you don’t even have to be suspended.”

“What would you suspect?”

Bill looked like a choirboy, which belied his occupation. He peered up and calculated. “From the loft, I’d say about six-and-a-half feet.” He pulled back the body bag to reveal a V-shaped abrasion and furrow at the back of Phillip Maynard’s neck, which had been caused by the rope that had slipped up past the thyroid cartilage. “Incomplete circle where the rope pulled away from the subject.” He looked at the dead man some more. “He didn’t change his mind after the fact.”

“Why? ”

“No fingernail marks at the neck. I’ve even seen cases where the fingers are trapped under the rope, but this guy dropped the exact distance, which resulted in a fractured neck, and we’ll probably find the break between the third and fourth or fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae.” Bill looked up at me. “Was he a bad guy? ”

I took a breath and felt the closeness of the barn. The light glowing through the spaces between the slats made stripes as if it were shining through bars. I looked at Phillip Maynard’s sightless eyes and at the spot where a blood vessel had burst, clouding and unbalancing the pupil, which was ragged at the edge, unlike you’d expect. “I’m not sure yet.”

Saigon, Vietnam: 1968

I watched all the people who crammed into the few tiny blocks around Tu-Do Street and thought about all the bars we’d already checked, including the Flower Brothel, Rose’s, the assorted steam baths, massage parlors, boom boom rooms, and an honest-to-God Dairy Queen. Even this early in the morning, the street was in full swing, and I suspected it stayed that way for the full twenty-four hours of the day. It was leaning toward early morning, and I took a deep breath and felt like I was leaking time.

Mendoza laughed. “Oh, come on now, it’s not that bad.”

Baranski had pulled the jeep half onto the sidewalk, but no one had seemed to notice, not even the two ARVN QCs that we’d almost run over. With their oversized white helmet liners, the Vietnamese military policemen looked like those bobble-headed sports dolls. One of them tried to beg a cigarette from Mendoza, who shook his head and replied, “Toi khong hut thuoc lo.”

Baranski, however, sat on the hood of the jeep and handed the two Mice cigarettes, lighting one for himself and then theirs. He paused for a moment and gestured. “Quels sont vos noms?”

The two introduced themselves as Bui Tin and Van Bo.

Baranski pointed at me. “Je suis venu avec quelqu’un d’important, il s’appelle Sammy Davis Jr.”

The two QCs looked up, so I smiled and raised a fist. “Black power.”

Baranski continued. “Il veut passer un bon moment. Tu vois ce que je veux dire.”

Bui Tin gestured toward the bustling street. “Choisissez une des portes.”

Baranski nodded his head and gestured helplessly with both hands. “Ouais, mais il aime les cowboys et il voudrait quelque chose qui fasse un peu western.”

Tin, who seemed to be in charge, pointed to a side street. “Il y a un club qui s’appelle Western Town un peu plus bas sur ce trottoir.”

As we walked past them, Van Bo grasped my hand and shook it. “Je suis tellement heureux de vous rencontrer, Monsieur Davis. J’ai tous vos disques.”

I followed after Baranski and Mendoza and nodded, completing the conversation with two of the twelve French words I knew. “Merci beaucoup.”

I caught up with them as they turned the corner. “What’d he say?”

Baranski stopped and looked across the street to where a neon cowgirl’s leg kicked up and down in a more than provocative manner and gestured to a hand-painted sign that read WESTERN TOWN. “He said he’s got all your albums.”

Static. “There are no records with the Chicago Police Department, other than the ones from the reports we’ve already received.”

“No next of kin? ”

Static. “There was a mother in Evanston, but that number’s been disconnected.”

I sighed and stared at the mic in my hand. “All right, pending any further information from the great state of Illinois, we’ll file Phillip Maynard with the boys up in Billings. Anybody comes looking for him, and we’ll defer to that other great state.”

Static. “And what are we?”

I keyed the mic. “Somewhere between. What’s the word on Tran Van Tuyen? ”

Static. “He lost a lot of blood, but it looks like he’ll make it. Isaac Bloomfield says it’s a pretty good blunt trauma from a not-so-blunt instrument.”

“Meaning? ”

Static. “He said something like an angle iron.”

“Or a motorcycle part? ”

Static. “Possibly, but why didn’t he kill Tuyen? ”

“Remorse.”

Static. “That would explain both crimes, wouldn’t it?”

“Roger that.” I started to hang up the mic.

Static. “Walt?”

I keyed it again. “Yep?”

Static. “Anything you’d like me to tell Cady?”

“Where are they?”

Static. “They were talking about coming down there.”

“Tell them not to. I’ll be in Durant soon. I need to talk to Tuyen, but I have to make another stop before I head back.”

Static. “Roger that.... Hey, you didn’t sing.”

I watched Phillip Maynard’s body being loaded into a step van. “I guess my heart isn’t in it.”

Bill came over and joined us as I backed out of the open door of the unit, propped my forearms on the top of the window, and looked at Henry, who had just rolled up the sleeves of his faded blue chambray shirt. He still looked cool and crisp, even in the heat. “Is this what they call an open-and-shut case?”

I nudged my hat back and rested my chin on my forearms. I didn’t look cool—didn’t feel it, either. “As far as Phillip is concerned, it is.” I stared at the shiny glare of chromed reflection in the Harley’s air cleaner, wondering where somebody like Maynard would get the money for a twenty-thousand-dollar motorcycle, and then voiced my real concern. “I’m wondering why he would want to kill Ho Thi Paquet, let alone Tuyen.”

Henry wrapped his arms over his chest, and I watched the muscles bunch under the dark skin, reminding me of the coiled rattler in the ghost town. “Perhaps she came back into the bar, and things got a little rough.”

“There are the charges from Chicago, but I’m just not sure . . .” I stopped suddenly and thought of the woman on the fax. “Damn.” I leaned back in the vehicle and keyed the mic. “Ruby, you there?”

Static. “You ready with your reprise?”

“Find the name of the woman who had the restraining order on Maynard, and see if you can get me a phone number?”

Static. “Roger that.”

I straightened back up, and the Cheyenne Nation was beside the door, along with McDermott. “What charges?”

“There was a domestic disturbance, an assault charge, and a restraining order concerning a woman in Chicago—Karol Griffith, I think her name was.”

McDermott looked between the two of us. “So this Maynard fellow had a record?”

“Yep, but something about all of this doesn’t seem right, and I’d like to talk to somebody who actually knew him before I tag him posthumously with murder in the first and attempted homicide.”

Static. “Walt?”

“I’m here.”

Static. “It’s a work number.” I copied it down. “Tattoo You.”

“Thanks.” I tossed the mic back on the seat as the Bear reached down and pulled out his cell phone from a nifty little leather holster at his belt. “So, do you want to go make a phone call? ”

I nodded. “Yep, then we’ll go get Tuyen’s Land Rover. I figure he’ll appreciate us picking up his stuff and bringing his car to him.”

Henry smiled. “That, and it will give you another chance to look over his room and the vehicle?”

“There’s that.”

He nodded. “I’ll drive the Land Rover.”

We parked by the veterinarian’s office, and Henry dialed the number and handed me the phone. Ms. Griffith answered on the second ring—she sounded personable and precise. I told her why I was calling, and she became less personable, but still precise. “He beat up my car.”

The reception, even in this key part of Powder Junction, was spotty at best. “He what?”

“He beat up my Charger with a baseball bat, but he paid to have it fixed the next day.” There was a pause. I had learned from years of experience to never interrupt the flow. “I’m sorry to hear he’s dead. Was it that piece of shit motorcycle?”

“The new one?”

“New, hell; he could hardly keep that ancient piece of crap running.”

“We’re not really sure.” I decided to keep the details to myself. “Ms. Griffith, would you say Mr. Maynard was given to acts of physical violence as a matter of course?”

“No, not really.”

I thought about it. “But you say he beat up your car? ”

I listened to the silence on the line. “Well, that was kind of my fault.”

“In what way?”

“I beat up his motorcycle first.” It was quiet on the line again, and I listened to or imagined the thousands of relays, switches, and electric impulses within the cellular system. “He wasn’t particularly devoted to our relationship. He had this thing for Asian girls.”

It was only a block and a half from anywhere to anywhere in Powder Junction, so rather than suffer the tin can of a Suburban, we parked at the office and walked to the Hole in the Wall Motel. “So, she said he had this constant stream of Asian women he brought in from Canada? ”

“Suspicious, considering the circumstances.”

“Yes.” We walked past Ethan and Devin, the two young boys who had identified Tuyen’s Land Rover. They were dressed in another set of automotive T-shirts. I waved, and they waved back. “And what about Virgil White Buffalo? With the most recent developments, you cannot still be seriously considering him as a suspect.”

I took a deep breath and felt the hot afternoon air burnish my lungs. “I don’t know what I’m going to do about Virgil.”

Henry stepped in front of me. “Let him go.”

I pulled up and stared at the dirt street. “I can’t do that, and you know it.”

His eyes stayed steady on me. “Why not? ”

“He’s a potential witness to a homicide, and I don’t think he can be released on his own recognizance.” I took another breath but still found it hard to look at him. “Henry, he fought two highway patrolmen and two deputies to a standstill.”

“Trying to stay out of jail for a crime he didn’t commit.”

I sighed. “Look, we can’t be sure . . .”

“He has spent enough time behind bars for one life.”

I finally looked at him, because I was getting a little angry. “If he is a potential danger to himself or anyone else, he becomes my responsibility.”

He shifted his eyes, and they shone like shards of obsidian. “And where does that responsibility end? ”

“It doesn’t.” We stood there, the echo of my voice coming back at us from the empty street, louder than I’d intended. “It doesn’t ever end. Ever.” I spoke softly now. “As long as he’s in my county, he’s my responsibility, and that puts me in line with a lot of other people who might consider leaving a seven-foot sociopath in a culvert under the highway a serious dereliction of duty.”

“So, you are going to keep him incarcerated for the common good?”

“Until I can find somewhere for him to go, yes.” I started to walk around him and then stopped. “Henry, I can’t let him continue to live under the highway. It’s not humane.”

“Neither is keeping him caged like an animal.”

I took another breath, this one even hotter than the ones before, and held it for a moment. “I am aware of that.” I continued on a few steps before turning and looking back at him. "What?”

He stood there for a moment and studied me. “I know you.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean? ” He didn’t move. “What? ”

“I know that the real reason you are holding Virgil is in an attempt to fix his life, and that is beyond your abilities. You look at him and see experiences and directions similar to yours, but badly taken.” He walked toward me. “You cannot correct the path he has chosen; it is his path. The only thing you can do is not punish him for something he has not done.”

“I’m not looking to punish him, Henry, but there’s got to be something better for the man than living under I-25.”

His face remained impassive as he answered. “Perhaps, but that is something for him to discover, not for you to give him.”

We walked along. “Well, maybe I can help.”

The Bear smiled. “I know. This is not the first set of moccasins in which you have walked.”