Open Season (15 page)

He handed Joe the cup for Joe to try it. To be polite, Joe had a sip. Barnum had a disarming and likable way about him.

Joe nodded.

“Pretty good, eh?” Barnum said. “Who'd a thought there could be coffee from Africa? Plain old American coffee just isn't good enough for us anymore, I guess.”

Joe felt awkward. Then he came right out with it: “Can I ask you a question about the outfitter murders?”

“Pertaining to what?” Barnum asked, sitting a little straighter in his chair, his heavy-lidded eyes fixed on Joe.

Joe started to answer, but Barnum spoke again.

“First I need to know whose camp you're in,” Barnum said.

“Whose camp?”

“Wacey Hedeman's or mine,” Barnum said. “The guy who is running against me. Your pal.”

“I'm neutral,” Joe said truthfully. “I don't have a position on that.”

Barnum's expression never changed. Joe had no idea what Barnum was thinking. It was unnerving.

“Stay that way,” Barnum warned.

“I intend to,” Joe replied.

“I'm going to lose the election,” Barnum said flatly. “I've been around long enough to know this is the last one, even if no one else realizes it.”

Joe had no idea how to answer that. He couldn't imagine Bud Barnum not being the sheriff of Twelve Sleep County. Clearly, Barnum couldn't either.

“I don't know what the hell I'm going to do after that,” Barnum said. “Maybe the governor will give me a job, but then I'd have to move to Cheyenne. Probably I'll just stay here and drink a lot of coffee.”

Joe lamely suggested that there was still a month and a half until the election and that anything could happen in that time. Barnum nodded wearily.

“You had a question.”

“I'm wondering what the status of the investigation is.”

“The
status of the investigation,
” Barnum mimicked, his expression theatrically perplexed, “is obvious. The state crime-lab ballistics has proven that all three Mississippi yahoos were shot with the same nine millimeter semiautomatic pistol at close range, and that pistol was found on Mr. Clyde Lidgard by Deputy McLanahan and yourself and Mr. Hedeman. Lidgard is in critical condition in the Billings hospital, having never regained consciousness, and the doctors up there say every day that he won't live through the night but he has so far. Unless Mr. Lidgard regains consciousness and tells us a story that is different from what we already know, the case is all but closed.”

Joe waited for more. No more was coming.

“So when Clyde Lidgard dies, the investigation ends,” Joe said.

“Unless there is some kind of new evidence to open it back up,” Barnum said. “Simple as that.”

Joe nodded. “His trailer was searched?”

Barnum's tone was mildly sarcastic. “It was searched both by the sheriff's office and by the state boys. Nothing could be found that either implicated or exonerated Lidgard. The report is in the file if you want to read it over. Lidgard was a strange bird, and his trailer was a strange place. He liked to take a lot of pictures with his Kodak Instamatic. There are thousands of photos out there. He also liked to collect pictures of Marilyn Monroe, including that first-ever
Playboy
magazine with her in it. That magazine's probably the only thing Clyde owned that was worth anything. If that magazine is still out there, it will amaze me because more than likely it ended up in the briefcase of one of the state investigators. But aside from the magazine, everything that was in the trailer is still in the trailer, and the unit has been sealed and locked.”

Joe took it all in and waited for Barnum to finish.

“Do you mind if I take a look on my own?” Joe asked.

Barnum again resumed the perplexed look. Then he smiled slightly as if Joe amused him. “You going to do some investigating?”

“Just curious.”

“Can I ask why?” Barnum said, his eyebrows arching.

Joe shrugged. “I guess I'm taking this whole thing a little personal because Ote Keeley died in my yard. This whole thing has affected my family.”

“What's there to solve?” Barnum asked. “In my twenty-odd years of experience dealing with things like this, I've come to the painful and sometimes unpopular conclusion that many times things are exactly what they seem to be.”

“Maybe so,” Joe said. “But I need to convince myself.”

The sheriff studied Joe for what seemed an inordinate amount of time. “Go do what you need to do,” Barnum finally said. “Lidgard's trailer keys are in the file. Just don't take or disturb any of the evidence, because we might find a next of kin who wants some of that crap out there.”

Joe thanked him and stood up.

“Joe,” Barnum said, as Joe reached for the doorknob, “shouldn't you be out there in the woods catching poachers or counting gut piles or whatever it is you boys do?”

That stopped Joe and turned him around.

“Yes, I should be,” Joe said quietly. He did not say what he was thinking, which was,
Shouldn't you be out there following up every last possibility instead of sitting here on your butt, drinking coffee and worrying about the election?

 

Joe got a
copy of the crime report and the trailer keys from Deputy McLanahan.

“Depressing, ain't he?” McLanahan asked Joe. “This is a really fun place to work these days. When I try and make a joke or even smile about something, he tells me to quit trying to act like Jerry Lewis.”

Joe nodded and got his jacket and hat.

“Jerry Lewis,”
McLanahan echoed as Joe stepped outside. It was still raining.

 

Written with a
felt-tipped marker, the cardboard sign on Clyde Lidgard's trailer read: Anyone caught vandalizing or attempting to enter these premises will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law by order of the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff's Department.

The rain had caused the letters on the sign to blot and run, and there were several long rivulets of black running the length of the door.

It was dark inside the trailer, the heavy rain only allowing a meager amount of light to filter in through the grimy louvered windows. Joe searched for the light switch but discovered that the electricity had been cut off. It smelled musty, and there was the sharp stench of rotting food from the refrigerator and garbage. He decided to check them last, on his way out, because he guessed that the smell would be overpowering once he opened the doors. Joe drew his flashlight from his belt and turned it on. He felt wary and voyeuristic standing in the middle of the dead man's home. The investigations Joe conducted were usually done outside, more often than not over the carcass of a game animal shot and abandoned. In the trailer, Joe felt closed-in. He believed that he didn't know Clyde Lidgard well enough to be in his home. Plus he had no idea what he was looking for in the trailer.

The trailer was small and filthy, years of grit coating the floors and counters. He stood near the kitchen table in the middle of the trailer, trying to decide where to look first. He shone his flashlight around the room, exposing a hallway that branched off of the room he was standing in. All the doors were wide open, the result, Joe guessed, of the sheriff 's search. At the end of the hall, Joe could just make out the foot of a bed in a large bedroom. There were two rooms off of the hallway. One led to a tiny bathroom and the other to a small room that appeared to have been used for storage.

Joe started down the narrow hallway, and his holster caught on an exposed nail. He stepped back and unbuckled his cumbersome belt and put the holster on the table. He kept his flashlight.

Joe stepped inside the bathroom. Old Marilyn Monroe pictures, puckered from steam, covered the walls and ceiling. The staples that secured the pictures were rusty. Shelves against the corner were filled with dozens of brown, prescription drug bottles. Most of the bottles were dusty and hadn't been used in some time. Joe read the labels and saw most had been prescribed by doctors at the local VA hospital. The most recent had been filled by Barrett's Pharmacy in Saddlestring. Joe recognized the names Thorazine and Prozac but knew little about either drug.

The small bedroom was filled with boxes, clothes, and junk. So much had been haphazardly piled into the room for so long that the room couldn't really be entered without taking boxes out. Joe shone the flashlight into several of the closest boxes and found them filled with envelopes of photographs. As Sheriff Barnum had said, there appeared to be thousands.

Joe then entered Lidgard's bedroom and found that the twin bed nearly filled all of the floor space. Joe had to turn sidewise and shuffle around the bed to look around. There were a couple of yellowed posters of Marilyn Monroe stapled to the wall along with an army photo of a younger Clyde Lidgard and a calendar from Lane's Feed and Grain in Saddlestring. The sheets on the bed were not beige as he had first thought, but were white sheets so dirty they appeared beige. There was a stale smell in the room.

Joe slid back the closet doors. Lidgard had a surprising quantity of clothing—they completely filled the closet rack—but none of them looked to have been worn for years. Dust covered the shoulders of the shirts and jackets. On the shelf above the clothes, Joe saw a dozen boxes for .30-.30 rifle cartridges. The price tags on the boxes ranged from $8.50 to $18.00, indicating they had been purchased over at least 20 years. Joe reached up to find that the older boxes were empty but for whatever reason Lidgard had chosen to keep them. Judging by the photographs, junk, pill bottles, and cartridge boxes, Lidgard had been an obsessive collector of things. Joe stood on the end of the bed to make sure he had seen everything on the shelf. The heavy coat of dust was tracked with recent finger smudges, and Joe assumed they had been left by the other investigators. But Joe didn't see what he looking for.

Joe closed the closet and drew a small notepad from his shirt pocket.

“Lidgard's trailer,” Joe wrote. “No nine millimeter cartridges.”

It took Joe several trips to bring out all of the boxes of photographs from the junk room to the kitchen table where the light was better. It appeared that the thick envelopes full of photos were not really arranged in any manner. But in general, the top envelopes contained more recent photos than those at the bottom of the boxes.

Joe took out the newer sets of photographs, looked at them, and was careful to return them into the proper envelopes. The most recent photos had been developed at Barrett's Pharmacy, the same place Lidgard filled his prescriptions.

If Joe had hoped that the photos would reveal anything other than the fact that Lidgard was a poor if prolific photographer, he was quickly disappointed. The photos were generally of bad quality, and of mundane and inane things. Lidgard apparently carried his camera with him everywhere and from his car window took a lot of photos of things that only Lidgard could explain. Most were crooked, with a left-hand tilt to them. There were trees, lots of photos of trees and bushes. Joe squinted to see if there was anything in those trees and bushes, but he could not find anything of note. There were landscapes: sagebrush, foothills, mountains, the river valley. Sometimes there would be a photo of a part of Clyde Lidgard. There were several pictures of Lidgard's shoes taken as he apparently just stood there and shot down. There were a couple of photos of Lidgard's unfocused face as he held the camera away from him at arm's length and triggered the shutter. Joe studied Clyde Lidgard's face for any kind of clue, but what he saw was a dark, pinched, almost tortured scowl obscenely lit and shadowed by the flash. There was an eerie photo of Lidgard taken into the bathroom mirror with the flash obscuring most of the frame. There were pictures of the cabins Lidgard looked after in the mountains and photos of buildings in downtown Saddlestring. There were two entire rolls taken of snowdrifts. In one of the winter pictures, Joe could discern a herd of elk traipsing across the plains in the far distance, the animals no larger than fly-specks. And occasionally there were unfocused photos of Lidgard's shrunken penis.

Joe reached down into the box for a handful of envelopes from past years. Many of the pictures were taken inside a VA hospital. There were nurses, doctors, light fixtures, other patients, tile floors, and again, Clyde Lidgard's penis.

Joe went through photos until the light got so poor he could hardly see. The most recent photos were from the summer before, and they had been taken in and around Saddlestring. That left a gap of at least two months from Clyde's last photos until he was shot in the outfitters' camp. Joe noted the time lapse in his notepad. He wondered what had made Lidgard stop taking pointless photographs.

When he finally took the boxes back to the junk room, he realized he had given himself a headache. The drumming of the rain on the roof had toned down to sporadic pings. He had been trying to see things that weren't there in the photos, trying to find something in them that would give a clue to who Clyde Lidgard was and how he ended up in the camp. He had found nothing, and the photos had only depressed him. There was something intimate in looking at the photos, as useless as they turned out to be. Lidgard, for whatever reason, had chosen to take the photos, have them developed, and stored them away. Lidgard might see things in the pictures that no one else could see, Joe guessed. Or he might see things out there that he felt compelled to photograph, only to get the photos back and to discover they weren't really there after all. Joe concluded that he knew no more about Clyde Lidgard than when he entered the trailer, but because of the penis photos he now knew more about Clyde Lidgard than he cared to.

Joe took a deep breath and opened the refrigerator. A thick roll of stench washed over him and stung his eyes. He squinted as he moved the flashlight around—putrid hamburger, spoiled milk, oozing cheese. He reached up and flipped down the door to the freezer compartment and the stink was even worse although the compartment was nearly empty.