Holding Lies (16 page)

A
NDY TRIB WOULD
go before a grand jury, charged with murder. Danny called to deliver the news, and when Hank called Walter, Walter said, “I'll pick you up, and let's give that two-bit sheriff the love he deserves.”

Hank left Annie a note on the counter, and forty minutes later he and Walter found Carter meeting a reporter at the Ipsyniho diner. They ordered coffee and sipped it silently as they listened to Carter answer the reporter's questions.

Carter had been born and raised in the valley, and was just a couple years older than Hank. He'd been elected sheriff for the first time in the seventies and, as far as Hank could recall, had run uncontested every cycle since. In a valley of libertarians, there isn't a lot of interest in being the long arm of the Man. But Carter had taken to the work and, in the eyes of most, did a decent job balancing the responsibilities of his position with the god-given liberties of his constituents. For instance, Carter let a lot of bad laws go unenforced, though he'd never admit as much publicly. Everyone knew that if you shot a deer or elk or bear out of season for the meat, Carter would look the other way. “A man has got a right to feed his family.” If you were sipping a beer on the way home but keeping between the lines just fine, Carter
would let you keep the bottle. “A man has got a right to cool himself down.” And if you were growing a plant or two or fifteen on the hill behind your house, Carter would shrug. “A man has got a right to farm his soil as he sees fit, don't he?”

And so it came as a surprise, especially to Walter, that Carter had rushed to arrest a guide for a murder that wasn't even a murder yet for sure. “Nobody has even seen that autopsy paperwork. Carter is looking to make himself a star here. This is a chance to end up on the Eugene news, and he knows it.” Walter sucked his tooth, called the server, asked for another coffee.

Finally Carter was shaking the reporter's hand, and Walter grabbed his arm as he came past the table.

“Hey guys. Didn't know you did breakfast down this way.”

“Have a seat, Cart,” Walter said. He nodded at the space beside Hank.

Carter checked his watch. “Love to but I'm swamped today. Don't know if you've heard, but there've been some developments on this Morell case.”

“Now, Cart. Have a seat.”

Hank smiled at Carter, trying to counterpoint Walter's barely bridled aggression. Walter always had a hard time holding his temper.

Carter sat, said, “Figure I got a minute or two to spare.”

“I'll make it brief, then,” Walter said. He finished his coffee and leaned forward. “This is bullshit. You know it, we know it, everybody knows it. Trib didn't do shit to that little punk. You've had it out for Trib for years, on account of his being a foreigner.” To Walter and Carter and most other folks native to the valley, the word
foreigner
applied to anyone born outside of Oregon.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Carter waved at the allegations. “All due respect, Walt, but you don't know every angle on this one. I've got some information.”

“Really? I know Morell's head was cracked like an old watermelon and I know that Andy and he were having a bit of a tussle, and I know you found a fish club in Andy's boat you think might be the ‘murder
weapon,' and I know you got your eye on running for the state senate. That ain't the whole story?”

“Well.” Carter cleared his throat. “There's a bit more than just that. Who told you I was running for the senate?”

“What more do you got than that?” Walter slapped a hand to the table. He leaned back and looked to Hank for support.

Hank said, “You're picking on Trib. Just about everybody in the valley had a bone to pick with Morell. And half of us got a fish club, the rest a Pulaski.”

Carter shook his head. “I can't be in the business of talking about ongoing thing-or-merathers. No offense, gentlemen. You know I got nothing but the utmost respect for both of yous, but this is an in-process matter. We're talking about a killing here.”

“Or we're talking about a cocky kid who slipped and cracked his head on rock,” Hank said.

“Here's the short and long of it,” Walter said, his voice quivering with anger. “Trib ain't a foreigner no more. Sure, he ain't no native, but he's got rights all the same. We can't sit by while you or any Johnny comes along and fucks with his shit. He's losing clients every day you got him locked up. You know that. Now, if he was caught in the act, or you had some of that DNA gimmickry, that'd be a different story. But to everybody in the know, it looks like you're just getting even for that state trooper thing, and well, that ain't right, and you know better.”

“He should have known better,” Carter shouted, then glanced around to see if anyone had heard. Leaning closer, “I was fishing with my grandson for fuck's sake. You don't go calling enforcement on something like that. Talk about rights.”

Hank and Walter shared a look.

Carter passed a hand through his hair and said, “I hear you, Walt. I do. But I've got a responsibility to solve this thing. Trib says he was home alone that whole day, but his truck was seen at the ramp, and that's not the all of it. According to Morell's girlfriend, Trib showed up at their house the night before Morell went missing, yelling and
carrying on.” Carter stood up from the table, suddenly thinking better, it seemed, of continuing this conversation. “Just give me few days on this one. I'm the sheriff for god's sake. You know I don't go messing in folks' business unless I got good reason.”

He walked all the way to the door before turning around and coming back. In a whisper, he said, “And don't go telling nobody about the senate, all right? My mind ain't made up on that yet.”

*

H
ANK AND
W
ALTER
drove straight to the fly shop, and found Danny at the casting pond with a customer. He was demonstrating a single-spey with a Scandi head. “The fly drags and provides the resistance. And you can pivot at that moment and send the cast anywhere.” Danny rotated forty-five degrees in midcast and sent the fly across the parking lot and into the bed of Hank's truck.

“Dropped her in the bucket,” Hank called.

Danny smiled and lifted the line in an oval that climbed twenty feet over his head and carried the fly all the way around and then out, across the casting pond to the circular target on the far end.

“Kid's good,” Walter muttered.

“The best.”

They waited by the coffee pot while Danny finished with the customer. The guy wanted the rod, but said he “needed to check with the wife” before he bought it. When the customer left, Danny said, “Now he goes straight to his laptop and buys the thing used online. Shit. This business, I'm telling you.”

“We were just about to go see Andy, if they'll let us.”

Danny nodded and pulled out his cell phone. A moment later he said into the device, “Hey, wondering if you can work the front for an hour.”

*

T
HE COUNTY LOCKUP
had been built in the early sixties using plans drawn up probably a half century prior, and the place still retained all the charm of an old-West jailhouse. There were two cells, each with bunk beds and a toilet, separated from each other and the larger room by heavily rusted iron bars. Outside the cells, there was a woodstove and a stack of split fir, and a few feet away, the jailor sat reading a hunting magazine. Andy was the only occupant. Not a lot of arrests were made in Ipsyniho.

Walter knew the jailor's father, and when Walter asked, the guy pointed his magazine toward the cells and said, “Have at it.”

“I keep waiting to wake up,” Andy said, slouched against his cage. There were no windows and no natural light. The place smelled of urine and mold, and Andy looked as if he hadn't slept since his arrest. “I'd much prefer the one where I go to class naked.” Before settling in Ipsyniho, Andy had done a stint at college. He brought it up often.

“Fuck this.” Danny torqued on the cage bars and dust shook free from the ceiling.

“Listen,” Walter said. “We know you didn't do it. Carter has got his ambitious head up the ass of some cartoon elephant.”

“What?”

“Don't matter. Point is, we won't sit by with you rotting in here.”

Hank checked to be make sure the hunter was lost among his carcasses, then pulled a paperback copy of
The Habit of Rivers
from his back pocket. “A little something to keep your mind on the water.” Hank and Andy had always had books in common.

Andy tucked the book down his pants, checking the guard as he did.

“You can keep that copy.”

“Tell us,” Danny said. “What do you need?”

“I didn't fucking do it,” Andy said. “I didn't. Sure we had our shit, but I'm no killer. You know me, I feel bad as hell when I bonk a fish. You gotta help me. You got to make Carter know.” Andy said this last part to Walter.

“I'm working on it,” Walter said.

“I can't stomach the thought of everybody thinking I'm guilty. This is slander. I'm going to sue the piss out of him.”

Sue
was a dirty word in Ipsyniho. Sports sued. Locals worked things out like people. “You ain't gonna sue nobody,” Walter said. “Now listen, somebody musta seen you that day.”

“I was alone. I parked at the ramp and walked down to this spot I found, just a few casts. I was alone. That was it. Then I came back up. Didn't see anybody. Didn't see anything.”

“This spot I found” was code for “a secret place that I've never shown you.” So, Andy Trib had a few tricks up his sleeve after all. Who knew.

“You didn't see Morell?” Hank asked.

Andy glanced at Danny before answering, and Hank got the impression there was more going on here than he knew. Andy shrugged. “I didn't see anything.”

“But you told Carter you were at home alone.”

“It was simpler. I didn't think anybody saw me up there. And he came gunning for me, asking all these questions, and I got spooked. So I told him I was at home. It seemed easier.”

“Do you have a lawyer?” Hank asked.

Andy nodded. “My father, he hired a guy from Portland. I'll see him tomorrow.” Andy came from money, everybody knew that.

“That's a start,” Walter said. “But a lawyer can't recognize his own dick unless he sees it on paper. We'll work the source, we'll work Carter.”

As they left, Andy called out, “Hey, do me a favor.”

“Anything.”

“Bring me something worth eating. That guy”—Andy nodded toward the jailor—“is bringing me leftovers from his house and, I swear, the meat's rotten.”

H
ANK AND ANNIE
spent the day in a raft on the fast and mean upper river, where
Class IVs
were stacked one atop the next; Caroline was at the oars. Annie seemed to love the ride. For a time, she sat on the bow, her feet dangling over, her hands gripping the oh-shit cord. When the raft punched into a standing wave, Annie would shriek, then laugh. She looked fifteen up there.

“Your mom had a reputation,” Caroline said while feathering the sticks, “for not putting up with any bullshit from her clients.”

“I'm not surprised,” Annie said. “She's got a similar reputation now.”

“Once when we were running a joint trip, I watched her broadside the boat through a rapid. This one guy took a wave in the face and fell inboard.” Caroline laughed at the memory. “Later, when I asked your mom about it, she said the guy had been telling sexist jokes all morning.”

They were passing Wolf Creek. Hank pointed at it. “We spent weeks last winter up there transplanting beavers.”

Annie laughed. “Excuse me?”

“From other drainages, private ones, where the owners were going to shoot them for flooding out their fields. Beavers are listed as vermin
in the Beaver State, go figure, right? But you put a few beaver families in a basin and water temps go down, rearing habitat goes up, and silt stays off the redds.”

He had to stop this, stop trying too hard in all the wrong ways. Like a teenage boy, he was, compulsively showing off for the pretty girl.

This time Caroline bailed him out. “Your dad here has a reputation of his own. Bet you didn't know he's somewhat of a guru.”

Annie smiled. Whether out of humor or surprise, Hank didn't know.

“He all but invented dry-fly-fishing for steelhead.”

Hank corrected her, explaining that dry flies had been fished over Atlantic salmon for generations and that Lee Wulff and Roderick Haig Brown, two famous authors and anglers, both fished dry flies to steelhead before Hank was born. “I'm just a fisherman.”

“But you can't deny you've advanced the technique. You've changed the way people think of it entirely. See,” Caroline said to Annie, “people used to fish dry flies that mimicked natural insects, thinking steelhead were striking because of some latent reflex to attack buglike things. But your dad didn't buy it. He thought steelhead were striking because of curiosity.”

“That's not
my
theory,” Hank said. “Enos Bradner was arguing the curiosity theory sixty years ago. Lee Spencer argues it now. I got it from him.”

“But you're the one who caused the radical shift in the flies people were fishing,” Caroline said. “Because of your dad, people now fish big flies in unnatural ways, not like bugs. Just look at the people on the river; they're all fishing Hank's way.”

Annie said, “Huh.”

“And you can't deny,” Caroline continued, “that you developed the lines for turning over those flies. That's all you.”

“It's silly,” Hank said. “Fly design. Presentation. Who cares?” “I think it's pretty neat,” Annie said.