Going Nowhere Fast (11 page)

"No ma'am. I left everything in it 'cept for his safety deposit box key."

"And his receipt for the box, with the Jeffrey Bettman signature on it."

Dog paused, as if I'd suddenly shifted the subject from Bettis's wallet to Washington infighting. "Huh?"

"You forged his signature, Theodore. You must have had something with his signature on it to go by."

"Oh, yeah, his receipt. I forgot about that." He smiled and shrugged at me at the same time. The child's physical and mental coordination was uncanny.

"What about cash?" I asked him.

"Cash?"

"Yes, cash. How much cash money did you take?"

"Cash money?"

"You make me open my eyes, boy, I'm gonna close yours for good," Big Joe said, sighing.

Dog faced me directly, bravely staring down the barrel of his fate, and said, "Seven hundred dollars."

"
Seven hundred dollars!
" I cried.

Joe opened his eyes.

"Yes ma'am. Give or take a few. I don't have that much now, of course, 'cause I've been buyin' food an' drinks an' stuff but—"

"You mean to tell me you've been walking around here with seven hundred dollars in your pocket all the time you've been begging your father and me to loan you a thousand?"

"Yes ma'am."

"And you don't see anything wrong with that?"

"You mean, do I see anything wrong with askin' you guys for a thousand when I already had seven hundred?"

"That's the question, yes," I said.

He made a show out of thinking his answer through. "Well, not really." He shrugged. "I mean, I was gonna need some kind of
spendin' money
when we got to Pittsburgh—"

I immediately went to the dresser and started rummaging around in the right-hand top drawer for my good belt.

"What'd I do now?' Bad Dog cried, genuinely dumbfounded by this reaction. "What?"

''I'm about to show you. You just wait right there a minute," I said.

"All right, all right, so I was bein' a little greedy! I should've just asked you guys for three hundred bucks, not for the whole thousand."

"Damn straight," Joe said, just as I pulled my belt out and slammed the drawer shut.

"But if I'd done that, an' then found out the Doze wanted more'n his fine money to call us even—what was I gonna do then?" Dog asked.

"Take your lumps. Like a man," I said.

"Moms, the Doze doesn't leave you with 'lumps.' He leaves you in pieces. You think l'd've done all the things I've done if he didn't?"

He had the appearance of someone about to cry. I knew he wasn't, of course, but I also knew that this was as close as Dog ever came to real remorse; his heart wasn't heavy, but his conscience was annoying him.

What can I say? It touched me.

"Moms, I'm sorry. But this guy scares the hell out of me. You saw him yesterday. He's
crazy
."

"Maybe so. But that's no excuse, Theodore. None whatsoever."

"I know. I know. I'm sorry."

"Well, sorry's not going to cut it. You have to promise me from this moment forward that you are never going to lie to your father and me again, ever. About
anything
."

"Yes ma'am."

"And that goes for stealing, too."

"Yes." He nodded his head energetically.

"All right, then," I said, satisfied. Dog stepped forward and hugged me, and I hugged him right back, hard.

"You mean to tell me you're not gonna whip that boy's behind?" Joe asked, disappointed.

I looked at him and laughed. "No. I'm not."

"Hell," Joe said, and then he fell sound asleep.

7

The drive down to Flagstaff was a dull one.

For the first thirty-five miles or so leading out of the Grand Canyon, Highway 180 was just a two-lane swath cut through the Arizona flatlands, a colorless stretch of geography memorable only for its formidable monotony. Patches of piñon pine and Utah juniper trees interrupted this trend occasionally, but you had to be paying close attention to notice. When you finally came upon a large tourist trap overrun with giant Flintstones characters, Highway 180 turned east toward Flagstaff and left State Highway 64 to continue on south toward Williams. The change in direction made for more interesting scenery along 180, it was true, but only marginally; once you had taken in the snowcapped splendor of Humphreys Peak looming to your left, and admired the walls of ponderosa pine and aspen trees that eventually surrounded you on both sides, you were soon back to counting the minutes before a Flagstaff City Limits sign made an appearance.

This was more of a problem for me than it was for Joe, of course, because Joe had the distraction of driving to keep him company. And Dog, well, beautiful scenery or the lack of same has never much mattered to him; on trips of any duration, he's usually asleep in a car before the click of his seat belt fastening has stopped echoing in his ears.

So what, you might ask, did I do in the cramped cab of a pickup truck to fend off boredom while my youngest son slobbered on my right shoulder, and my husband peered intently at the alternating white and yellow lines splitting the road ahead? I read three issues of People magazine before studying the contents of Geoffry Bettis's safety deposit box one more time. What else?

"This drawing has to mean
something
," I told Joe, referring to the crudely sketched outline of someone's grotesque right foot.

"You keep saying that," Joe said wearily.

"I can't help it. I keep thinking I've seen a foot like this somewhere before. I just can't remember where."

"Well, don't look at me. I've got beautiful feet."

"This doesn't look familiar to you?"

"No."

"And he doesn't either?" I asked, referring to the three odd monochromatic photographs of a stranger visiting his mailbox.

"No. Why should he?"

"Because this stuff
means
something, Joe. It has to."

Big Joe just made a disgruntled sound deep in his throat.

"You don't think it does?"

"It's not that. It's just that I'm past caring whether it does or not. What Bettis did and who killed him was only my concern while we were being held in connection with his murder, Dottie. Now that we're not, I couldn't care less about the man, or anything pertaining to him. All I want to do now is pick up Lucille and head east."

"But, Joe—"

"I know, I know, he died in our trailer. But so what? We didn't put the man there. He invited himself in. Why should we feel responsible for him?"

"I didn't say we should feel responsible for him. All I meant was, I'd hate to leave here for good without finding out what happened to him, and why. And I should think you'd feel the same way."

"Because I was a cop."

"No. Because you were a
good
cop. Someone who was never satisfied with just a suspect, or a motive. You needed to know the
truth
about things. Good or bad."

"That was my
job
," Joe said. "This isn't."

"No, but—"

"They have a suspect, Dottie. They'll get the truth out of him, sooner or later. And they aren't going to need our help to do it, believe me. Besides—" He finally took his eyes off the road to look at me directly. "We're already more involved in their investigation than wisdom says we should be. It's just lucky for us they don't know it yet."

He glanced at the four items in my lap to make sure I got his meaning.

"You mean, if this stuff ever became relevant to their case…" I said.

"We'd be up the creek without a paddle. Yeah. One way or another, they'd connect Dog to that safety deposit box, and that would be that. Even if they couldn't pin Bettis's murder on him, the boy's committed enough other crimes to get himself put away for fifteen years. And us about half that for covering up for him."

He let me think that over for a while, knowing I could sit there for an hour and never come up with any line of discussion to counter his reasoning. He was right. Dog had put us all in a very precarious position, and there was no greater evidence of that than the photographs and line drawing I held in my hands. The longer they were in our possession, the longer they represented a threat to our freedom; rather than pore over them like Sherlock Holmes inspecting a heel print, I should have lowered a side window thirty miles back and tossed the whole works Onto the highway.

And yet…

"What are you thinking?" Big Joe asked. I'd been silent for several minutes now, and he'd apparently seen something in my expression he didn't like.

I turned to face him. "What?"

"I said, what are you thinking? I can see and hear the wheels turnin' from here."

"What wheels?"

"We've gotta get rid of that stuff, Dottie. Soon as we get into Flagstaff. You understand? We should've never kept it around this long."

"I thought you wanted to know what I was thinking."

"I've reconsidered. J\Ien can do that too, you know."

"I was just thinking that maybe there's a way to insure ourselves against prosecution if worse comes to worse and, God forbid, they do come looking for us."

"Yeah? And what way is that?"

"Well, by finding out what this means." I lifted the photos and drawing off my lap to gesture with. "How it's important."

"Nobody said it was important but you, Dottie."

"I know, I know. But if I'm right, and it did turn out to be important, and they were slapping the handcuffs on us… well, I just thought it might be a point for our side if we could tell them how this all fits in. You know, how it points to Bettis's murderer."

'They already have Bettis's murderer," Joe said.

"Do they? They have a man who was driving around in his car, yes, and a gun that mayor may not have been the one used on Bettis. But that doesn't mean they have Bettis's murderer. Does it?"

"Dottie—"

"Look, baby," I said, raising my voice to be heard above the din of Bad Dog's snoring. "All I'm saying is, we're going to be down there in Flagstaff anyway, right? What can it hurt for us to look up Bettis's address in the phone book so we can pay our respects to his widow?"

Big Joe gave me a long, thoroughly disapproving look, and then stopped talking to me altogether.

I took that to mean okay.

*     *     *     *

Naturally, less than an hour later, Joe found something about Lucille to complain about.

As one might have predicted, the Coconino County Sheriff's Department forensics team had decided to start their dismantling work in our trailer's bathroom, since that, after all, was where Geoffry Bettis had died. Joe and I had been relieved to learn that the bathroom was as far as they had had time to get, but that turned out to be small consolation to Joe the first time he tried to flush Lucille's chemical toilet. It seemed the lab technicians who dismantled it had reinstalled a rubber seal improperly, so that the bowl was leaking water from something Joe kept referring to as "the mechanism." No one, including myself, had noticed the leak but him. Which was typical.

It was well after one in the afternoon before he was happy with Lucille's condition. While Bad Dog and I sat around drinking coffee and assorted canned sodas, Joe reassembled the toilet bowl himself before proceeding to inspect every inch of our trailer for similar nerve-grating flaws, paying no heed at all to the lab boys' constant assurances that nothing outside of Lucille's bathroom had been touched.

Throughout this ordeal, Detectives Crowe and Bollinger bit their tongues and played gracious, apologetic hosts, humoring Joe with only minor objections and basically ordering everyone else to stay out of his way. They weren't saying much about it, but they were obviously quite content with the case they had built against the armed robber they picked up driving Geoffry Bettis's car. Otherwise, I knew, they would hardly have been so anxious to treat us like innocent bystanders they'd been fools to ever suspect. Suspicion wasn't something policemen moved intact from one person to the next unless someone came along who finally seemed to deserve it all; that Crowe and Bollinger no longer appeared to have the slightest doubt about our innocence spoke volumes about how convinced they were of their latest suspect's guilt.

But, like I said, they weren't saying much about it. In fact, they weren't saying anything at all.

"I'm afraid we can't discuss that, Mrs. Loudermilk," Bollinger said at one point, after I'd asked him if their suspect had a name.

"You can't tell me his name?"

"No ma'am. I'm sorry."

"We understand he was driving Mr. Bettis's car when you picked him up."

"Yes ma'am."

"And that he was armed with a gun?"

"That's right."

"And this gun, it was the same one that killed Mr. Bettis. Is that right?"

"Again, Mrs. Loudermilk, I'm afraid I can't answer that question at this time. I'd really like to, but can't."

He didn't know it, but there was no need for him to apologize; the slight glimmer of contentment that had shone in his eyes upon hearing my question had answered it perfectly. The results of their ballistics tests were in, and the two guns were indeed one and the same.

"Has he confessed to the crime?" I asked, determined to take Bollinger to the limit of his patience.

"Mrs. Loudermilk—"

"I just wondered if he's confessed, that's all. I only want to know what to tell all our friends back home when they ask me the same questions I'm asking you."

I smiled, and that seemed to buy me at least another smidgen of his generosity.

"No," he said, gulping at his coffee while his eyes remained glued to the lunchroom door, just in case his partner Crowe should come bursting in at any moment to catch us discussing the un-discussable. "The suspect has not yet issued a confession."

"Then, how can you be so sure—"

"That he did it? Easy. By listening to him try to explain himself. How he stole the car up at the Canyon, and just happened to find a loaded gun under the passenger seat. Would you believe a story like that, Mrs. Loudermilk? Do you know anyone that would?"

"Well—"

"No, you wouldn't. And neither do we." He stood up from the table we were sharing and tossed his empty coffee cup into a nearby wastebasket, crushing it into a ball first. "By the way. That daughter of yours is a real charmer. The one out in California? The lawyer?"