Going Nowhere Fast (12 page)

"Oh. You mean Mo?" I'd forgotten she had said she was going to give Crowe and Bollinger a call.

"I guess that's her. She told us her name was Maureen. Maureen Doubleday, attorney-at-law."

I laughed. "Yeah, that's our Mo. Doubleday is her married name."

"I see."

"I hope she didn't give you and Detective Crowe too hard a time."

He shook his head. "Naw. We hear that kind of language all the time around here."

I laughed again, and this time he laughed right along with me.

*     *     *     *

"Does this mean we can go on to Pittsburgh now?" Bad Dog asked, elated.

"Nobody's goin' to Pittsburgh," Big Joe said. "At least, your mother and I sure as hell aren't. We're goin' to Texas. Or Louisiana, maybe."

"Later," I said.

"Not later. Now. Soon as we drop this boy off at the nearest Greyhound station."

Dog made a face. "You're gonna make me take a bus to Pittsburgh?"

"Nobody's gonna make you do anything. You can do whatever you want. Go to Pittsburgh on a bus, or Hawaii on a wookie board, makes no difference to me. All I know is—"

"You mean a
boogie
board," I said.

Joe turned, his train of thought completely derailed. "Boogie, wookie—" he started to say.

"Bugle boy of Company B!" Dog said, and laughed.

I looked down into my bowl to keep from joining him and started in on my salad again.

We were having lunch at a Perkins restaurant only a few blocks away from the sheriff's station in Flagstaff. The boys were doing burgers while I was doing greens. Twenty minutes earlier, Joe had nearly finished the job of hitching Lucille back up to our Ford when I suggested we grab a bite to eat in town first, ostensibly to avoid the usual hassle of looking for a restaurant parking space big enough to accommodate a twenty-five-foot trailer home. I hadn't yet told him why I'd really made the suggestion, but I was working my way up to it, one inch at a time.

"You think it's funny?" my husband asked Dog, his dour mood impervious to levity. "Fine. Laugh and be merry. But see if you aren't just a speck in my rearview mirror inside of an hour."

Now
that
Joe found worth a chuckle.

"He's coming with us first, Joe," I told him, matter-of factly.

"Goin' with you where?" Bad Dog asked, his voice dripping with apprehension.

"Nowhere," Joe said. "Your mother's mistaken."

"We're going to go see a house," I said to Dog. "And if we're lucky, and somebody's home when we get there—"

"No, Dottie.
No
," Joe said, scolding me like a puppy that had soiled the living room carpet. "We are not going to stick our noses another eighth of an inch into this mess, I told you that on the way down here!"

"No you didn't. I asked you what harm it would do for us to look up Mr. Bettis's widow while we were down here in Flagstaff, and you said none."

"I didn't say none. I dropped the subject."

"Exactly."

"Exactly?"

"Joe, when a woman drops the subject, she's closing it. When a man drops the subject, he's capitulating. You know that."

But Joe's head was already moving from side to side in a perfect, unhurried rhythm, conveying but a single thought in perpetuity:
No
. "It's not gonna happen, Dottie. The Bettis case is closed, there is absolutely no sensible reason for the three of us to keep snooping around in it."

"But—"

"And don't give me any of that 'But what if they've got the wrong man' stuff again, either, because I don't wanna hear it. The guy was drivin' around in Bettis's car and pullin' holdup jobs with the gun that killed him. He couldn't be any guiltier if he'd been wearin' Bettis's Fruit of the Looms when the cops picked 'im up."

"All right. So maybe they do have the right man. And maybe they don't. Either way, I still say we'd be smart to find out why Bettis had those pictures in his safety deposit box before the authorities do. Wouldn't we?"

"Dottie, for God's sake—" Joe sighed.

"If you don't want to go, we won't go. I won't say another word. But San Antonio, Texas—or, worse yet, New Orleans, Louisiana—is hundreds of miles away from Flagstaff, Arizona, Joseph Loudermilk the Second—and that's an awful long way to go without hearing the sound of another human voice. Isn't it?"

I smiled and dug into my salad again.

A half hour later, Joe made a right turn out of the restaurant parking lot instead of a left, and another page was written in the Dottie Loudermilk Handbook of Shameless Bluffing.

*     *     *     *

We found the last address Geoffry Bettis would ever know in the telephone directory: 127 West Cottage Avenue. The pale yellow house the address belonged to was a tiny little thing on a tree-lined block full of tiny little things, all quiet as a monastery and engulfed in shade. A cobblestone wall ran waist-high around the Bettises' meager front yard, and two wrought-iron pillars dressed in white adorned their front porch. Old Route 66 lay just two blocks to the south; a block short of that, a long-dead neon sign peered over the trees from a height of fifty feet to promote its owner, the Sierra Vista Hotel.

I had to do some talking to get Joe and Bad Dog out of the truck, but when I finally did, we all stepped up on the Bettis porch together, the unease of the trespasser clouding our faces and making lead weights of our feet. Naturally, ringing the bell was a chore left to me. I pushed the button once, then twice, but nothing happened. If a chime or buzzer was going off inside the house somewhere, you couldn't tell by listening.

"Nobody's home. Let's go," Big Joe said as I tried the bell a third time. He was already off the porch and heading down the walk toward the street, Bad Dog scurrying right behind him.

I was coming off the porch to chase them down when we heard someone call out to us from the backyard, near the left side of the house: "I'm back here!"

It was a woman's voice; coarse as sandpaper and thoroughly indifferent. A little more energy, and it might have passed for rude. Following it, we went around the side of the house and through a chain-link gate to find a middle-aged woman in bare feet hanging clothes on a line, a cigarette threatening to tumble from one corner of her mouth. She was wearing an oversize white T-shirt and blue denim pants, and a time-worn scowl of disillusionment that could have been stolen from a gargoyle. Her dirty-blond hair was combed and pinned back in places, loose and unruly in others. Bending over to draw another piece of wet clothing from the wicker basket at her feet, she glanced at us briefly and said, "Can I help you?"

Again, her voice carried all the vitality and emotion of a heavy sigh.

"We're looking for Mrs. Geoffry Bettis," I said.

Her reaction to that was imperceptible; she just kept on hanging clothes. As if three black people she had never met came around the house to interrupt her chores at about this same time every day.

"Why?" she asked at last, working straight through the question.

"Well… We just want to offer her our condolences. That's all. For her husband, I mean."

She took a yellow blouse from the basket, shook the wrinkles and excess water from it, and hung it up on the line.

"You see, he died inside our trailer, and we just thought—"

She finally spun around, forgetting about her wash for the moment. I thought I had angered her, but then I realized she "vas simply annoyed; it was beginning to look as if a severe state of pique was the best this woman could do, passion-wise.

"What?" She sucked hard on the forgotten cigarette hanging from her mouth, then withdrew it and blew out the smoke at a menacing angle, down and to her left. "What did you think?"

"Look, Mrs. Bettis," Joe said. "If this is a bad time for you—"

"You can come back later? Don't be silly. You're here now, let's talk."

She was looking at me.

"As I said before, we just wanted to offer you our condolences," I told her, edging toward rudeness myself.

"Because Geoff was killed in your trailer."

"Yes. I know that sounds strange, but—"

"Did you know my husband?"

"Did we know him? No. We just…
found
him."

"On our toilet," Bad Dog elaborated.

I shot him the same quick glance Joe did, then turned back to Bettis's widow. "We didn't know your husband, Mrs. Bettis, but we feel badly for him just the same. That's really all we came here to say."

"I see." She took another long drag on her cigarette and exhaled the smoke to the east. "Well, it's nice of you to be so concerned, Mrs. . . ?"

"Loudermilk. Dorothy Loudermilk."

"Mrs. Loudermilk. Yes, well, it's nice of you to be so concerned, but you really shouldn't have bothered. Geoff was an asshole and a loser, and the world will be better off without him. Starting with me."

She smiled and started hanging clothes again.

"But he was
murdered
," I said.

"Yeah. So I hear."

"You don't
care?
"

"Do I care? Of course I care. What kind of woman would I be if I didn't care?"

She was still smiling.

Joe edged over to take my arm and lead me away, but I just shook him off. "I don't understand," I said.

"Listen," Mrs. Bettis said, turning around again, and this time she had more to show me than a mild case of irritation. "You didn't know the man, all right?
I
did. For twenty-one years. So when I tell you he wasn't worth a minute of your grief, believe it. Nobody knows how worthless he was better than me.
Nobody
."

She pitched her cigarette out onto her backyard lawn with the flick of a finger and eyed us, waiting to see if we would take her outburst as a hint to leave her in peace.

"Let's go, Dottie," Joe said to me firmly, reaching for my arm again. I didn't pull away this time.

"He was a loser," Bettis's widow went on. "A self-centered, misguided moron who thought he was a tycoon in the making. Twenty-one years I waited for that idiot to wise up, to stop dreaming his life away and start acting like a real husband to me, and a real father to our kids, but it never happened.
It never happened
." She stopped to smile again, trying to make light of her bitterness, but her eyes were suddenly brimming with tears.

"Sorry we bothered you, Mrs. Bettis," Joe said, turning me around to guide me out of the yard.

"Wait a minute. I wanna show you something."

Mrs. Bettis left her basket of clothes behind and started for the back door to the little house, where she turned to find that we had made no move to follow her. "In here," she said. "Come on." She pulled the screen door open and disappeared inside.

Joe and I looked at each other.

"It wouldn't be a good idea," Joe said, shaking his head.

As if he thought that might actually stop me.

*     *     *     *

"This was Geoff's 'study,'" Mrs. Bettis said, making a little joke.

It was a bedroom without a bed, and that was just as well: Only a twin would have fit inside and left room for anything else. As it was, a small garage sale wooden desk and matching straight-back chair had the room's limited floor space all to themselves, and still the room seemed overcrowded. Adding to its claustrophobic effect were four walls someone had turned into virtual collages. Pinned, stapled, and taped to every inch of their surface was a mind-boggling display of paper: letters, posters, and newspaper clippings; magazine photographs, Post-it notes, and brochure pages:

A NaturLife bumper sticker.

A Worldway Products price list.

An American Scholastic Encyclopedia poster.

"My God," I said, without thinking, taking it all in.

Mrs. Bettis stood beside me in the doorway and brought another cigarette to life. "Yeah. Impressive, isn't it?"

A trio of bookcases were filled to capacity with books and magazines, their shelves bowed like rubber bands from the weight. A half dozen stacks of newspapers stood waist-high against one wall, staggering this way and that in an effort to remain upright.

"The king's domain," Mrs. Bettis went on wearily, as Joe and I stepped fully into the room to examine its contents more closely. "Many a big deal was made here. Many a fortune lost."

She managed a short laugh before a smoker's cough broke it off.

"What
is
all this?" I asked her.

"You can't tell? It's research. Homework. What every genius reads just before making his first million. At least, that's what Geoff always said it was." She took a long drag on her cigarette and held the smoke in her lungs for a good minute. "I say it's
crap
," she said when she finally exhaled.

I flipped through the magazines in one of the bookcases. They were mostly old issues of
True Detective
and
Entrepreneur, Money Matters
and
Business Opportunities
. The books, predictably, were all similarly themed self-help titles:
You're Better Than You Think You Are, Using Crystals to Maximize Your Earning Potential, Supercharge Your Selling Power
, etc., etc.

"There wasn't a single get-rich-quick scheme that man didn't try, at least once," Bettis's widow said. "You name it, he tried to sell it. Health food products, household products, homemade jewelry, encyclopedias, life insurance. Nothing was too idiotic for him to try, if getting filthy rich was the payoff. And when he wasn't trying to
sell
something, he was trying to
find
something, or someone, instead. For the finder's fee, or reward money. Of course, that was always a total waste of his time too." She allowed herself a little sigh before going on. "So you know what he'd do then? He'd just change philosophies. Like you and I change our socks, he'd change his spiritual beliefs. One day he'd be heavy into meditation, the next he'd be chanting to Buddha. First there was power in crystals, then in pyramids. I couldn't keep up. It was always something new. Existentialism, reincarnation, pseudo-Christianity…" She shook her head and tried to smile. "What a
putz
."