Brown-Eyed Girl (26 page)

He turned to Sally. “Do you happen to know that the person living here now is Shane Parker, the guy we think broke into your house?”

Both women gaped at him, for different reasons. Delice knew Shane Parker was living there, but Sally didn't. Sally knew he was the only suspect in the break-in, but didn't know he lived in Gert's old house.

“Is that his pickup?” Delice asked brazenly, knowing very well that she was poaching on police business.

Dickie just gave her a look. The smoke had made his eyes smart and given him a headache, and a medium-bad morning looked like it might be turning into a genuinely trying afternoon. Somewhere in all this, Helwigsen, the lawyer who was chasing his daughter and suing the University, was involved. The last thing he needed was the assistance of two women he considered among the nosiest people on the planet, and now, to make matters worse, a silver Suburban was bumping to a halt down the dirt road. Maude Stark got out.

“I saw the smoke from my place,” she explained, “and thought I'd come investigate. History repeats itself.”

Dickie, Delice, and Sally looked at her. “What are you talking about?” Sally asked, shivering in her down jacket. She was looking at the bare branches of the neglected lilac bushes that surrounded the ranch yard, thinking how Gert Dunwoodie, as a young bride, had shaken the snow off the blossoms.

“Guess you didn't know that Mac Dunwoodie's house at the Woody D burned, too, in 1966,” Maude said. “Old Mac was a careless smoker to the end. They said he had a heart attack and left a cigarette burning,” she told them. “Started a fire and burned the place right down to the ground. Wasn't enough left of him to bury,” she finished, watching the firefighters inspecting the smoking rubble.

“So Meg didn't give him a funeral?” Sally found herself asking.

“Meg wasn't much of a one for funerals,” Maude said, avoiding Sally's eyes.

Chapter 26
Everybody Was Frustrated

Officer P.W. Corkett was frustrated. He and Officer Curtis Kates drove all the way to Teton County, six and a half hours in light snow, to take a look at Elroy Foote's place and talk to him. Mrs. Foote had served them coffee, but Mr. Foote was not feeling all that hospitable. Helwigsen, the lawyer, was already there, clearly determined to limit Foote's liability for anything that Shane Parker might have done with Foote's car or his gun. Foote, followed closely by Helwigsen, took them into the room from which the Ruger had been taken. As a peace officer, PeeWee hated the thought that anybody in Wyoming possessed such a huge private arsenal, especially when Kates felt compelled to point out that he'd seen lots of bigger gun collections, growing up in Wyoming and all.

Foote said he'd hired the man the police had identified as Shane Parker the same way he'd hired lots of temporary ranch hands, paying minimum wage and room and board for work not expected to last more than a couple of weeks. He'd never had any trouble before, praise the Lord: This was the first time. This guy had evidently drugged his bunkmate's dinner, waited until he was fully knocked out, taken the Ruger and the Mercedes and hightailed it out of there while the whole ranch slept.

As they inspected the garage, Kates took photographs and Corkett asked questions. The officers were mildly surprised to hear that the keys had been in the car, but Foote explained that on his property, it had been, and would continue to be, a matter of principle with him to feel secure in his possessions. Foote talked like that. He went on and on, paying no attention when Corkett wondered aloud how it had been possible for Parker to open the main gate, which was ten feet tall, topped with razor wire, and clearly built for heavy security. The keypad next to the entrance suggested that you had to punch in a code to get in or out.

Helwigsen put his arm around Corkett's shoulders (PeeWee
hated
it when guys tried to soften you up by cuddling—what were they thinking?) and drew him aside. “This is a little embarrassing,” he confided, “but actually, the Mercedes and one other vehicle are equipped with automatic bypass signals, because Mrs. Foote drives them, and she has a hard time remembering the combination. The electronic sensor recognizes the vehicle and opens the gate.” He smiled sympathetically. “Parker couldn't have known, of course—he just got lucky.”

“It's not very lucky to be burned up alive,” PeeWee commented sourly, but Bobby was hustling him along, asking if he wanted to see Shane's bunkhouse.

Dirtbag was nowhere in sight, having been sent, along with the other Unknown Soldiers and any regular cowboys who happened to have been previously convicted of crimes, to remote parts of the ranch. When Corkett asked where Parker's roommate was, Foote could honestly say he didn't know precisely, but that some cattle had gotten loose the day before and he'd been sent out to fix fences. The roommate's name, said Foote, was Howard Robb, which was close enough to Robideaux that Foote could remember it. Bobby had advised Elroy to tell as much of the truth as possible, since most people, even sane ones, had a hard time maintaining a consistent lie.

The bunkhouse was a disgusting mess, reeking of cigarette smoke and dirty laundry, but nothing suggested to Corkett and Kates that it was anything more than the temporary abode of a couple of run-of-the-mill lowlifes. Bobby had taken the trouble to remove the right-wing literature but had left the porno magazines, and had hauled off anything he thought might have Dirtbag's fingerprints on it. Corkett and Kates took more pictures, bagged a beer bottle full of cigarette butts to dust for fingerprints, and picked through the piles of laundry, going through shirt and pants pockets. Kates felt something in the back pocket of a really nasty old pair of fatigues, and reluctantly inserted his hand in the pocket. He pulled out an old postcard from somebody named Ernst to somebody called Greta. Bobby's heart lurched when he realized that he'd seen the postcard before, in a trailer in West Laramie. But then he reminded himself that the police had nothing to tie anybody but Shane to the burglary at the Dunwoodie house. He'd already worked out a strategy: Once they had Shane on the break-in, he and Elroy would profess surprise at Shane's involvement with the Dunwoodie matter. He would gently suggest to the police that the demented and desperate Parker must have imagined somehow that Margaret Dunwoodie's controversial legacy gave a twisted criminal like himself and a public-spirited influential citizen like Elroy Foote some common ground.

“Find something interesting?” Bobby asked Kates, whom he judged to be the softer of the two because Kates, being born-again, said “amen” every time Foote said “praise the Lord.”

Kates gave him the cop-stare. “Everything is interesting, Mr. Helwigsen,” he replied coldly.

The roads were freezing up when they left, and after a slippery ride over Togwotee Pass, with gusting crosswinds nearly blowing the cruiser off the road, PeeWee and Curtis had decided to spend the night in Dubois. They were accustomed to long hours driving questionable roads, but they knew when to call it a day. They got a motel room, sent out for a pizza, and discussed the day's events. They agreed that Foote definitely had something to hide, but they weren't sure whether what he was hiding had anything to do with the theft and shooting. They couldn't see any reason why Elroy Foote would have somebody steal and wreck his own car and shoot somebody with his gun. They wanted to bring in Parker's roommate and ask him some questions, but they had no evidence of any involvement by anybody else. By the time they got to Casper the next day, there was another message from the commander reminding them to wrap up this no-brainer of a case, and telling them there was no need to further trouble that public-spirited influential citizen, Mr. Elroy Foote.

The postcard, Corkett learned from Dickie Langham, confirmed the suspicion that Shane Parker had committed the November break-in. But that didn't tell them anything they didn't really know. They still had no motive for the theft or the shooting. Something about this smelled as bad as Shane Parker's bunkhouse, and all too often, Corkett got to thinking about Jed Barnes, the young cowboy in Muddy Gap. It bothered the hell out of him.

Dickie Langham sucked more poison gas out of a cancer stick and reflected on two weeks of fruitless police work. They'd been unable to identify the human remains from the Albany fire using dental records, so they had to go the much slower route. That meant sending what was left of the person everyone was sure was Shane Parker to the FBI lab for DNA testing. The Department of Criminal Investigations had matched the fingerprints in the Mercedes, along with some prints found on a beer bottle, with Shane's, and they'd taken blood samples from the car to send to the FBI lab. Dickie had the Barnes truck at the Parker house, with Parker's prints all over it and blood they 'd also sampled and sent to the FBI lab. In a couple of months, Dickie was sure, they'd have DNA matches all around, incontrovertible scientific proof that the person who'd stolen the car and shot the kid, and the one who'd died in the fire were one and the same. The image of O.J. Simpson riding on a golf cart across velvety green grass flitted through his mind, but he had no reason to assume that Helwigsen would pull a Johnnie Cochran on this one.

The postcard the troopers had found in Parker's pants tied him conclusively to the Dunwoodie burglary, which was on some level reassuring. The break-in had been such a rookie job that Dickie felt reasonably sure it was Shane's idea, and probably wouldn't be repeated. Shane Parker, he assumed, had committed a series of crimes, which had now been solved, with the perpetrator no longer in a position to ride on a golf cart. Once the FBI lab finished the testing and sent him the results, however many months from now that might be, he would close the books on some ugly stuff. He ought to feel like he was doing his job.

But there were dots Dickie couldn't connect. Why had Shane Parker broken into Margaret Dunwoodie's house and stolen a postcard? Where had he gone after the burglary? When and why had he ended up at the ranch of the guy who was dumping a hell of a lot of money suing the University over the Dunwoodie bequest? PeeWee Corkett thought Elroy Foote and Bobby Helwigsen were covering something up. What was it?

To answer those questions, he'd started with Shane's “friends,” who included some of the most dishonest, most odious losers he'd encountered in nearly half a century of mixed living. Mostly he and his deputies got the same answers they'd gotten when they'd questioned them the first time around. Hadn't seen Parker in months, didn't know a fucking thing, so leave them the fuck alone or they'd scream police harassment. Dickie did turn up one nice piece of evidence when he'd gone to talk to a really fun couple, Terry the meth dealer and his junkie girlfriend Sherry. They said they'd kicked Shane out when he'd come to their place to borrow money the day of the shooting and the fire. He'd been driving a big F–250 with the County 6 plates. “You owe me, Langham,” Terry had yelled over the sound of barking dogs as Dickie walked back out to his car. Yeah, right. If they could ever actually manage to find Terry's lab, he'd get what was coming to him. The first thing they'd do was get rid of those murderous pit bulls.

Having worked the Shane connection dry, Dickie went to work from the other end, with Elroy Foote. That meant, he knew, starting with Bobby Helwigsen, whom he'd last seen groping Brittany at The Millionaires' Ball. He needed to have a chat with Sam Branch.

Dickie drove to Branch's office out on Grand on a particularly hideous afternoon, the kind of winter day when it got dark around two o'clock. He fought to open the cruiser door against a fifty mile per hour wind and walked into Branch Homes on the Range unannounced. The receptionist sent him right into Branch's office, where Sam was sitting behind a desk made from a gigantic slab of granite and in front of a paneled wall on which about a thousand plaques were hung, testaments to Sam's prowess at bulldozing the prairie, spewing out cardboard developments, and selling people houses they couldn't quite afford. Ah well, even back when they'd been in the same lucrative business, Dickie had never had the flair for profit that Sam possessed.

“Sheriff,” said Sam, leaning back in his seat.

“Realtor,” said Dickie, closing the door behind him.

“Looking to move up to a home more befitting your recent rise in the law enforcement racket?” Sam inquired blandly.

“With what the county pays me,” Dickie answered, “I'm lucky I don't have to live in my squad car.” Sam snorted. “Sorry, Sam, but I'm here on my business, not yours. Tell me about your buddy Robert Helwigsen.”

Sam didn't really need any defense, but he believed in a good offense. “What's he done to attract your attention, besides hang all over Brit at my party?”

Dickie considered the question, got out a cigarette, lit it. “Actually, he did first attract my attention at your party, when you mentioned that he and Sally Alder had a lot in common. And then the next thing you know, he turns out to be suing the University to get her fired. I figure you might have had a little inside information.”

“I wasn't aware that it was a crime to sue the University,” Sam countered.

“'Course not,” Dickie answered genially, “and that's what makes this country so great. You can sue anybody you want for any reason including that they just piss you off. And I have no reason to suspect that Helwigsen has committed a crime of any kind, but his name just kind of keeps coming up. So I need to know what you know about Helwigsen's connection with a Mr. Elroy Foote.”

Since that revolting but interesting lunch at Hasta la Pasta! Sam hadn't seen or heard much from Bobby Helwigsen. He'd let Bobby know that, much as he hoped Mr. Foote might help him out in the event he got around to running for office, he wasn't committing himself to supporting the Dunwoodie lawsuit until he got a handle on the public reaction. Amazingly, the Dunwoodie Foundation and the University had stood firm. The public, not so amazingly, didn't really seem interested one way or the other. Anybody hoping to end up on the board of trustees would be crazy to die on this particular hill, even if Sally Alder had once tried to run him over and continued to be a pain in the ass. There had been rumors in Cheyenne during the legislative session that Elroy Foote, always one Crayola short of a box, might have finally gone off into the Wonderful World of Color. When Sam had seen Bobby at the Hitching Post and asked him how things were going, the lawyer just smiled and changed the subject to the tax code.

It was frustrating for Sam to think that he couldn't come up with a way to grab some of Foote's money without owing him something he might not want to pay. But it looked like that was the case, so he decided to more or less level with Dickie. “Yeah. Well, Helwigsen carries a lot of water for Foote,” he said. “Scuttlebutt is that he's been handling pretty much all of Foote's legal business, which is a significant chunk of change. Young Bobby's a very shrewd little Harvard boy with an eye to the main chance, and Foote's money is what you might consider a very main chance. The suit against the University is flea shit compared to the rest of it.”

“So why bother with flea shit?” Dickie asked.

“Price you pay for really big shit,” Sam answered. “Something the old man wants him to do, so he's gotta do it. He took me to lunch, told me all about it, gave me this stupid line about the University being the battleground for the hearts and minds of our children. But to tell you the truth, Dickie,” Sam looked right at the sheriff, narrowing his eyes, “I didn't buy it. Oh, I have no doubt that Elroy Foote thinks it's worth a million or so to try to get some bitch who makes a hundred K a year fired from her stupid job. He probably thinks he's making a stand for the American way. Everybody in Wyoming knows that Foote's a freaking kook who gives a lot of money to what we like to call ‘social conservative' causes these days. But frankly, Dickie, I think Bobby Helwigsen couldn't give a good goddamn about social conservatism, or the Dunwoodie Foundation, or anything that doesn't figure into his bank account. He's a mercenary bastard, that Bobby,” Sam said, obviously hoping to get rid of Dickie and get back to making money that day. “I'd watch him with your daughter if I were you.”