Cold Wind

22

Friday evening, Joe and Marybeth took Joe’s pickup to dinner at the Thunderhead Ranch. Missy had invited them, and Joe had been dreading the event all week. Lucy couldn’t join them because of play practice, and when they raised it with April, she said, “If I’m grounded, I’m friggin’ grounded.”

“Family events can be an exception,” Marybeth said.

“One of the problems with you people is you keep changing the rules,” April said, stalking back to her room and slamming the door.

Her favorite new phrase, besides “frigging” was now the accusatory you people.

Joe held the front door open for his wife. As she passed him, she said, “Marcus Hand better be as good as they say, because if he isn’t, April gains in power.”

“Ouch,” Joe said, flinching.

“I don’t want to do this,” Joe said, as they turned onto the highway.

“I know,” Marybeth said. “I can’t say I’m very excited myself. But my mother needs to know she’s got some support, Joe. Can you imagine how she feels?”

He bit his tongue and drove. If the woman had made any effort at all to befriend the locals or even show some respect for them, he thought, she might have a few allies.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Marybeth said.

“Can’t help it.”

He’d taken a shower and changed into jeans and a Cinch shirt, but his face still burned from being outside in the wind and sun all day. Mourning dove season had opened on the first, and he’d spent the last two days in the field checking hunters and limits. There was no other season where all a successful hunter had to show for himself was a small bag of the soft gray birds that would barely make a single meal-even though it was a tasty one. But because mourning doves migrated out of the area as quickly as they arrived, it was a furious few days of hunting and work and he’d not been able to pursue his investigation further.

Joe and Marybeth had not caught up because they’d been missing each other at home with his long days and her evening shift at the library.

As they turned off the highway and passed under the magnificent elk antler arches that marked the entrance to the Thunderhead Ranch, he said, “I guess this will give me the chance to ask Missy a couple of questions that have been nagging me since my talk with Bob Lee.”

“Like what?” she asked.

Joe chinned toward the north in the direction of the Rope the Wind turbine project. “The wind,” he said. “It blows.”

Dinner was served at the regal long table in the rarely used dining room. Jose Maria had been pulled from duty with the cows and dressed in a black jacket to serve ranch-raised beef tenderloin, asparagus with hollandaise, garlic-roasted sharp-tail grouse, and red-skinned new potatoes. Missy sat at one end picking, as usual, at tiny bits of food. She wore pearls and a black cocktail dress that showed off her trim figure and youthful legs, and Joe wondered if she could possibly be the same wan person he had seen in the courtroom.

Marcus Hand occupied the other end of the table. He wore a loose guayabera shirt over jeans and cowboy boots. His reading glasses hung from a chain around his neck. He ate huge portions and loudly enjoyed them and washed down each bite with alternate gulps of either red or white wine. Hand was well known as a gourmand, and he’d penned dozens of unapologetic essays about eating large quantities of rich food. In one piece Joe had read in a national magazine, Hand lamented that fried chicken was rarely offered in local restaurants and that elites should stop looking down on big eaters who enjoyed their food in quantity. Hand dismembered a grouse by pulling it apart and gnawed the meat off the carcass. Then he snapped the thighbones in two and sucked out the marrow.

Joe and Marybeth faced each other in the middle, shooting glances toward either end and exchanging puzzlement to each other when their eyes met. Joe had expected angst and gravity to accompany the meal, but not this. He couldn’t help but stare at the lawyer, who enjoyed his food with a kind of moaning passion that nearly made Joe feel like a voyeur.

“This grouse,” Hand swooned, sitting back and letting his eyes roll back into his head while a half-eaten thigh jutted out of his mouth like a fat cigar, “may be one of the most succulent dishes I’ve ever had. And I’ve eaten well all over the world, as you know.”

“It is good,” Missy said from the other end of the table. Her face beamed, and she seemed oddly relaxed. Marybeth obviously thought the same thing, and she had trouble hiding her agitation.

“Fresh grouse,” Hand said, “is like fine wine. You can taste the pine nuts and the sage they eat in the meat itself, as if master chefs infused it. Few culinary artists in the world can come close to replicating the savory flavor of freshly roasted grouse no matter how many fancy sauces they cover the fowl with, or what they stuff it with.”

“All these years,” Missy said, talking softly and directly to Hand as if Joe and Marybeth weren’t in the room, “I didn’t know how wonderful these birds could be. There they were, just flying around the place. I didn’t even know they were grouse. I thought they were just fat little birds.”

Hand laughed and shook his woolly head. He was charmed by her, or doing a very good impression of it.

“It’s like this dining room,” Missy said. “Earl never wanted to eat in here. He said it was too dark and he never liked to linger over fine food and wine. To Earl, food was just fuel. But it’s lovely, isn’t it? A lovely room to eat wonderful fresh grouse in.”

“Mom,” Marybeth said sharply, “are you okay?”

“I’m wonderful, honey,” Missy said, inflecting a slight Southern accent Joe had never heard before. He noted how the lilt made Hand smile in appreciation, as if she’d triggered something from his youth just the two of them understood.

Joe felt his scalp crawl. She was flirting with him.

“Marcus shot them,” Missy said. “He brought them to me this afternoon and said they would be as magnificent as they turned out to be.”

“I find upland shooting relaxing,” Hand said, still looking at Missy. “I take my Purdey side-by-side shotgun with me everywhere I go, just in case. Hunting and shooting helps me clear my mind and focus only on the things that matter.”

Missy turned her head slightly to hide her blush and her smile.

Joe said, “Grouse season doesn’t open for two weeks.”

“Excuse me?” Hand said.

“You’re poaching.”

It was suddenly very silent in the room. In his peripheral vision, Joe could see Jose Maria step backwards from Missy’s side into a dark corner.

“Those are my birds,” Missy said. “They’re on my ranch.”

“Nope,” Joe said. “They’re wild and managed by the state.”

“I didn’t realize we lived in Communist China,” Missy said.

Joe shrugged.

“Marybeth,” Missy said, an edge in her voice, “your husband is a kill-buzz.”

“That would be ‘buzzkill,’ ” Joe corrected. To Hand, he said, “I’ll drop off the citation later. Don’t worry. You can afford the fine.”

Marcus Hand grinned at Joe, but his eyes couldn’t completely hide his anger and resentment.

The rest of dinner proceeded awkwardly. Joe pretended not to notice. The grouse was delicious. Marybeth and Missy filled the vacuum with small talk about the girls, the library, the weather. Anything but the case.

Marcus Hand studied his wineglasses and filled them often. Joe could hear the rest of Hand’s Jackson Hole legal team in the small dining area beyond the door. He thought there must be six or seven people eating dinner in the other room, like the kids’ table at Thanksgiving. He doubted they were being treated to grouse.

As Jose Maria brought out small dishes of vanilla ice cream with bourbon sauce, Joe turned to Missy.

“How involved were you with The Earl’s wind project?”

Missy’s smile turned hard. “Why do you ask?”

“It’s one of the biggest in the state and it cost tens of millions to build,” Joe said. “It’s not like a new corral. I’m sure it was discussed.”

“What about it?” she asked, looking down the length of the table for her lawyer to step in. Since he was wrapped up with opening another bottle of rare red wine he’d found in the cellar, he didn’t respond. Neither did Marybeth.

“You asked me to help investigate the murder,” Joe said to Missy. “I’m on thin ice as it is, since I’m technically on the other team. So if I’m going to help at all, I need to have some things cleared up. I can’t be flying blind.”

“I thought that was your specialty,” she said. Then she noted Marybeth glaring at her and quickly added, “Not that I don’t appreciate what you’re doing, Joe. I know you’ve been spending quite a bit of extra time establishing that I had nothing to do with this.”

Missy filled the end of her spoon with a tiny bit of ice cream and stabbed the tip of her tongue at it. Her eyes closed slightly as she did, like her more delicate version of Hand’s food swooning. She seemed to know it would get his attention. It worked and he looked up, saw her, and appeared enchanted.

“He wants to know how involved I was in Earl’s business dealings,” she said.

“Why is it important?” Hand asked Joe.

“Because I talked to Bob Lee on the next place,” Joe said, thumbing over his shoulder in the general direction of the Lee Ranch. “He said The Earl approached him two years ago to buy his holdings outright, but Bob wouldn’t sell it all. So Earl negotiated a price for just the adjoining ridge. Bob didn’t mind selling that, since it was worthless for livestock or hay, and he thought he’d get the best of Earl since the price was twice what it had been appraised for. Then less than a week after the closing, Earl met some guy from Cheyenne and bought his company-Rope the Wind.”

Joe let that sink in. He checked Missy for a reaction, but she wore her best porcelain mask.

“Now Bob realizes the windy ridge was all Earl ever really wanted,” Joe said.

Missy said, “You are asking me about things that happened before we were married.”

“Right about the time you started sneaking around with him behind Bud Longbrake’s back,” Joe said. “I thought maybe he’d talked to you about his entry into the wind business.”

Her eyes became cold and hard, and she barely moved her mouth when she said, “We had other things to talk about.”

Joe nodded and said, “Rope the Wind was an established company at the time, from what Bob Lee told me. They’d gotten going before the current administration came into power and created the big boom in renewable energy. But apparently Earl could look ahead and see it coming, so he put everything into place before it did. He bought the company since they were up and running and he could move fast.”

Hand said, “Earl Alden was a kind of genius that way. He bought up depressed Iowa farms before the Feds started handing out ethanol subsidies, and it sounds like he had the same instinct when it came to wind.

“That’s something I’ve learned about the genius of Earl Alden,” Hand said, nodding his head, “and one of the three common categories of wealthy clients I’ve served over the years. The people who exist in a stratosphere outside of ours, although one could say thanks to them I’m now in it,” he chuckled. “But I digress. I’ve learned over the years there are three kinds of rich men, and only three. The first are those who had their wealth given to them. Those types generally get in trouble because they haven’t earned their wealth, although they certainly enjoy it. It gives them a skewed kind of entitlement, and they often step over the line because they think the rules don’t apply to them, alas. I’ve been hired by many of them. Even if they avoid prison-which they do thanks to me-they eventually spiral out. Many of them have such self-loathing that it’s contagious.”

Joe sat back, listening. While Hand talked, the thighbone bounced up and down in his mouth.

Hand said, “The second type is what I call the ‘makers-of-things.’ These are your entrepreneurs, the risk-takers. Most of them started out humble and figured out a way to make a product or a service that customers want to buy. These are the truly creative, mad geniuses. They’re quintessentially American. They produce real things-widgets, ideas, devices, inventions, you name it. Many of them started out at the lowest level of their fields and rose up. Although they aren’t self-destructive like the trust-fund babies, they’re fighters for what they’ve earned. They’d rather go to court to prove their innocence than take a plea and pay a fine or go home. I usually end up in arguments about my fee with them, for example,” he said, smiling.

Hand paused. “Earl Alden is a charter member of the third type. Earl is-was-a skimmer. He’s like many of the Wall Street and Big Business types we’ve heard so much of in recent years. Earl started with some money, but he learned early on to work the system and take a cut. He produced nothing of record and made nothing of note. But he worked the politics and figured out ways to be there when the money flowed. He didn’t care if the gusher of cash made sense or if it was moral or ethical. He just concentrated on the gusher itself. And apparently Earl saw the value of ethanol before the farmers did. Ethanol uses more energy to produce than it generates, and it deprives the Third World of corn to eat, but the politicians and the agribusiness firms benefit. And he foresaw wind power before the ignorant ranchers could. Earl was the best skimmer I ever studied.”

“I find that repugnant,” Marybeth said softly.

“If it wasn’t Earl,” Hand said, “it would have been someone else. At least Earl was here to take care of your mother, and your family to some degree. And for once he was actually building something himself instead of skimming only.”

Missy didn’t weigh in. The method of wealth had never interested her, Joe thought, only that her man had it. She was similar to her ex-husband in that she couldn’t see past the gusher.

Joe said, “I learned a lot from Bob Lee and I’ve got some leads to track down. Bob is a bitter man. He doesn’t exactly mourn the untimely death of Earl Alden. He thinks Earl cheated him out of that windy ridge-which he didn’t. Earl had a better use for the ridge than grazing cows.”

“When you say he’s bitter,” Hand said, learning forward and plucking the thigh out of his mouth and tossing it aside, “the question is how bitter? Bitter enough that maybe I should send my investigators over to have a talk with him as well?”

Joe shrugged. “He’s a tough old bird. That might not work out in your favor. Plus, he’s not in good shape. He’s on oxygen and can barely move around. There’s no way he hoisted Earl’s body to the top of that turbine.”

“Is there anyone around who could have done it?” Hand asked, arching his eyebrows.

“Well,” Joe said, “he has a son.”

“Wes,” Missy said, as she narrowed her eyes. “He’s a big guy. He’s some kind of biker or hot-rod type. I think we’ve run that redneck off our land more than once.”

Joe held up his hands. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m making no accusations here. The Lees are solid folks and don’t you dare smear them without solid proof, which we don’t have. My point is Earl had enemies other than his lovely wife.”

“Shame on you,” Missy hissed toward Joe. “Of course he did.”

“Have the sheriff and the comely Miss Schalk interviewed the Lee family?” Hand asked, gently sweeping his plates aside with his arm so he could steeple his fingers on the table and think aloud.

“No,” Joe said, nodding toward Missy. “They’ve had blinders on. They’ve got one suspect and they’re bound to convict her come hell or high water.”

“Thanks to Bud,” Marybeth said.

Missy said, “Yes, thanks to Bud.”

Joe turned to his mother-in-law. “How did the rifle end up in your car?”

Her eyes flared, and she took a breath to speak. Joe expected Marybeth to intervene, but she didn’t. She was just as interested in the answer.

“Never mind that,” Hand interjected. “Missy, don’t answer. It’s water under the bridge. Obviously,” he said to Joe, “whoever framed her put it there.”

“Don’t you want to hear from your client?” Joe asked.

Hand sat back, incredulous. “No,” he said finally, as if Joe had asked the most ridiculous question in the world. Then with a wipe of his hand through the air, he changed subjects.

“This is all getting very interesting,” Marcus Hand said. His eyes were lit up. “Do you realize what you’ve just done, Mr. Pickett?”

Joe and Marybeth looked over. “What?”

“You’ve established another theory,” Hand said, resting his chin on the top of his steepled fingers. “You’ve introduced a reasonable doubt in the prosecution narrative.

“Joe!” Marybeth said, surprised. Then to Hand: “But that doesn’t prove anything. It doesn’t prove Mom is innocent.”

“Doesn’t have to,” Hand said to Marybeth, suddenly professorial. “Our job here isn’t to out the killer. That’s the job of law enforcement and the prosecution. This isn’t Perry Mason. Confessions on the stand just don’t happen. All we need-and what your clever husband Joe might have given us-is the eight percent of doubt I need to build on.”

Missy said nothing. Joe didn’t expect her to shower him with gratitude. She simply leaned back in her chair with her most pleasant face. As if she’d been anticipating this and it was all her due.

Joe and Marybeth went outside toward Joe’s pickup as Marcus Hand stayed behind to give a new set of marching orders to his team. Joe heard enough to know Hand was building on the new theory, and dispatching personnel to blanket Twelve Sleep County and others to start collecting affidavits and interviews.

Marybeth walked with Joe in silence. As Joe opened the door for her, she said, “I was hoping this would all be a matter of proving her innocence. Something clean.”

Joe said, “It’s rarely like that in a high-profile murder case or when money and ambition are involved on both sides. Or when the defendant. ” He bit his lip.

“I’m going to check on Lucy and April to make sure they haven’t killed each other,” she said, digging her phone out of her purse. Joe reached across her lap and found his citation booklet in the box of documents and regulation books he kept on the floorboards. “Back in a second,” he said.

Missy met him at the front door. Over the years, both had made conscious efforts not to be anywhere alone with the other for fear of what would be said. Joe saw her standing in the shadow and he paused for a moment before continuing. She waited for him in silence. He realized she was sneaking a cigarette, and the cherry glowed red in the dark.

He said, “Here’s Marcus Hand’s ticket for poaching those grouse. See he gets it.”

She took it without a glance. “You never fail to disappoint,” she said, blowing smoke and keeping her voice down so her daughter couldn’t overhear her across the ranch yard.

“Thanks for the reminder,” Joe said.

“I know you’re doing what you’re doing more for your wife and daughters than for me. I understand that.”

Joe didn’t argue with her.

“You think I’m a heartless bitch,” she said. “I can see it in your eyes. You’ve nothing but contempt for me. Look around you,” she said. “Then think about it later. You think this has been easy, don’t you?”

Before he could respond, she said, “I was the last of eleven children and my parents never failed to remind me I was their mistake, as they put it. We moved every year to a new farm in Missouri or Arkansas, wherever my father could get hired. I never had a home. We slept two or three to a bed. The clothes I wore had been handed down through six different girls, so by the time I got them they were rags. I once was forced to go to school wearing boots my brother made of duct tape.”

She paused, and Joe shuffled his feet and looked down.

“I didn’t own a new dress until I was two years out of high school,” she said. “And I bought it myself. By then my parents were so old and broken they could barely remember my name. My older brothers and sisters all scattered and I don’t know-or care-where a single one of them is or if they’re even alive. You think I’m kidding, but I’m not.”

“I gotta get going,” Joe said.

“You’ve only seen me as your wife’s gold-digger mother,” she said. “You’ve never seen or even thought about what made me this way, or how I clawed my way out of it. And you never give a thought to how tough that was to raise Marybeth right-with the right values-from the hole I crawled out of.”

“No,” Joe said, “I guess I haven’t given it much thought.”

She smiled triumphantly, but it morphed into a sneer. “If anyone thinks they’re going to take away all this, they don’t know me, either.”

“Did you do it, Missy?” Joe asked suddenly.

The sneer remained. There was no flinch. She took a long drag on the cigarette and blew the smoke at him and said, “What do you think?”

Then she turned on her heel and went back into her house. The citation Joe had given her fluttered to the ground.

“What was that about?” Marybeth asked, when Joe climbed into the pickup.

“She told me about her childhood,” he said. “Some details I hadn’t heard before.”

Marybeth sat back in her seat and looked over at Joe, puzzled. “What about her childhood?”

“About growing up moving around, all her siblings, her parents, the poverty and all that. Like it sort of explains the way she is, I guess.”

Marybeth was stunned. “She said that?”

“Yup.”

“She didn’t tell you about shoes made out of duct tape, did she?”

“Yes. I hadn’t heard that one before.”

“Joe, you know my grandfather owned a dozen car dealerships in Southern California and my grandmother was an actress. Mom was an only child who grew up with everything she ever wanted. She was spoiled and she makes things up.”

Joe said, “I know all that. She lies without blinking an eye.”

“And the way she was flirting with Marcus Hand at dinner,” Marybeth said, “it was disgusting. Earl Alden is barely cold.”

“He’ll never be as cold as your mother,” Joe said.

On the way home, they divided up duties. Even if Hand and his people developed the new theory, Marybeth thought it imperative that she know for sure what had happened, who had killed Earl even if Hand didn’t care as long as reasonable doubt could be established.

Joe agreed. He said, “I’m curious about what you’ll find out about Rope the Wind. How they came to be. Who they are-or were.”

“I’ll find out what I can about them,” she said.

“Also,” Joe said, “if Earl was such a big-time skimmer as Hand described him, why would he invest so much of his own money into actually building a wind farm? It seems out of character. Since Missy didn’t seem to know much about the initial financing-and I think she would-I wonder if maybe someone else was putting up the money? That seems more like Earl’s style. And if so, who?”

“I never thought of that,” Marybeth said. “I’ll find out what I can. The state has corporation filings, things like that. They’re all public documents.”

“I’m going to keep looking for Bud,” Joe said. “I have a feeling he’s not far. And despite what we talked about tonight, Hand knows Bud is still the key. If Bud takes the stand and comes across as credible, the rest is history. So I want to talk to Dulcie. She’s got to have more on Missy than we realize or she wouldn’t have pushed it as hard as she has. She can’t have based everything on Bud’s testimony.”

“Maybe she wants to beat Marcus Hand,” Marybeth said.

“Maybe.”

“Or maybe she wants to put my mother away.”

“Could be.”

“We know what Sheriff McLanahan’s motivation is,” Marybeth said. “He wants to get reelected.”

“Yup.”

“Joe?” Marybeth asked as they drove under the archway. “Do you really think the Lees had something to do with it?”

Joe drove five minutes before answering. “No, I don’t.”

“Then why are we doing this? Is it just to help Marcus Hand create enough doubt?”

“Yup.”

She said, “If nothing else, I want to be assured Bob Lee had nothing to do with it so we can look elsewhere. Since Earl left a lifetime of deals behind him, he could have enemies we don’t know anything about. I can’t just sit here and let Hand get her off under a cloud. It makes me feel kind of dirty. Isn’t there another way?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Didn’t you ask me to do what I could to help her out? To help us out?”

Sighing, she said, “Yes, but I meant we should help prove her innocence. Not just muck up the water so badly the judge and jurors can’t decide. There’s a difference between innocence and being found not guilty.”

“Not to Marcus Hand,” Joe said. “Maybe not to your mother, either.”

“But we’re different,” Marybeth said.

Joe couldn’t think of a response that wouldn’t get him in trouble.

“Joe,” she said, “now would be the time we need more help with this. The trial starts in ten days.”

He nodded.

“Joe?”

“I tried to call him today,” he confessed. “The call didn’t go through and there wasn’t any way to leave a message. He might have switched phones. So I might have to go where I know he was last and try to find him in person.”

She said, “Then go, Joe. Put the rest behind you.”