The Other Shoe (16 page)

“Nelda sent me up here. Gave me directions. I got some news on that case. I maybe even solved it. Or part of it.”

“You think so, huh? Which case we talking about?”

“The dead guy. That recentest dead guy? And the guy with the young wife. Brusett. So, I thought I better let you know, and I called Nelda, and Nelda said you could use some help up here. So I thought I'd come up.”

“There's not an hour of the night or day when I don't need help. I got all kinds of messes you can stumble into, if you want. Long as you're okay with getting dirty.”

“That's all right,” said the deputy. It was more than all right with him. He desired action.

“You got your service weapon with you?”

“Always,” said the deputy. “Keep it under the driver's seat.”

“Okay, but let's try some other tricks first. If you really wanted to help, what I need you to do is untie that rope from the bumper, and take your end of it, and crawl out there on that bucket. Careful you don't kick any levers or anything, and watch out for that hydraulic fluid. You get that stuff on your clothes, then it's there for good, and I've even tried that powder they sell on TV. Doesn't get it out. Wouldn't want to piss your wife off.”

“Not married,” Lovell said. “I'd have to get a raise or a rich girl to do that.”

“Now, right there, right there where your foot is, no the other one, that's exactly the set of knobs I don't want you kicking. That's right. Yeah, just shinny on out there. Nice of you to do this, by the way. Careful. Yeah, and look at this, I believe this belt's gonna reach all the way around. Yeah, just the way we want it to. This could work out, believe it or not. Look at this, we've got plenty of belt. We are set.”

Lovell lost a handhold and fell sideways off the bucket and into the mud. He leaped up, slipped, and fell again.

“Take it easy, now,” Meyers advised him. “This clay's slick when it's wet. But don't let that rope get away from you. I guess you'll have to try getting up there again; shouldn't be all that daredevil if you just remember to hang on.”

Lovell climbed out and onto the bucket.

Meyers directed him: “Tie up to that crosspiece behind you there. Now don't tip outta there again, that's not getting us anywhere.”

Meyers finished jury-rigging the belt and the singletree and the dangling rope, and he held the whole apparatus taut, standing on tiptoe in the muck, leaning on the cow's heaving ribs. “Now, what you need to do is get down there and start the loader and pull up on that bucket just enough that I don't have to hold this anymore. This'll get old very fast.”

“I've never . . . I've never run one of those before.”

“It's pretty easy. I'll talk you through it.”

“I don't think,” said Lovell, “that I want to take my first lesson with you standing almost right under it that way, Mr. Meyers. I'm usually up for anything, but not that. That could be bad.”

“Okay, you might have a point.” Meyers's junkyard hoist was heavy, and his shoulder cramped with holding it up. “All right, I said you might get dirty. Hop on down here, then—no, get your shoes off, first, you don't need to ruin those—come over here, and if you could just grab a hold of this outfit and pull it up tight, about like I got it, and hold it there until I can get the slack out with the bucket. Whole thing loses integrity, see, if you let any slack into the system.”

Meyers started the tractor again and slowly fed power to the bucket, and when his rigging was taut he supplemented the rope in his lifting system with a length of chain, and then from the driver's seat he told Lovell, “You better back away from there now. I'm not too sure what this'll do when I throw some torque to it, and you wouldn't want to find yourself under a swinging cow.”

As Lovell retreated, Meyers moved the control forward gingerly and throttled up the tractor, and the pressure of the belt rising under her chest pumped an unearthly bellow from the cow, and she began to struggle with new energy, with terror, but still she could not suck free, and Meyers slid the lever slowly forward and the bucket pulled and strained and the tractor had tipped slightly to bear its weight on its front tires, and the whole assembly was in equipoise, the motor howling, before the cow finally, explosively sprung free. She'd scrambled halfway up the bank when the canvas belt dragged her hind legs out from under her, and she fell and rolled once in the mud, and she shot up and over the bank, and in twenty seconds she was grazing with almost no recollection of what had just happened to her. Meyers throttled back. He switched the tractor off.

“Did it look to you,” Lovell asked him, “like it broke its leg coming out? Or maybe broke its rib?”

“No, I don't think so.”

“I could still shoot it for you, if you wanted.”

“She's fine.”

“You just hate,” said Lovell, still standing in the ditch, “to see 'em suffer.”

“Maybe you do, but I kinda like it. The sonsabitches. They bring it on themselves. That old girl never has had the sense God gave a goose. What a project she's been.”

Meyers told Lovell that they could rinse the mud off themselves in the stock tank, said the easiest thing would be to bathe in it, clothes and all. “This thing completely flushes itself, every two, three days,” he bragged, “it's all gravity-flow. So it doesn't matter if we muddy it up a little.” He lay back into the big round tank like a skin diver off a boat, and he spread his arms and legs as if to make a snow angel. The water billowed brown around him. “I've got perfect teeth,” he said, “and this is the stuff that did that for me—drinking it when I was a boy. All you really need is good spring water and organic prunes and plain beef. Maybe some bread and greens.”

“I've got the same thing going with Mountain Dew,” said Lovell. “That and Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. But anyway, I came to tell you I think I might have got a break in this case.”

“You did, huh?”

“I'm off-duty, but it just kind of came to me when I was sitting on my couch. I thought you better know what I found out because, you know, you're probably the one guy who can do something about it. Thing was, I got called over to Red Plain yesterday to look into some vandalism that was done on Larry Manion's lot. He had a car there that'd been left to be serviced, and somebody busted a window out of it, and he's got to report it or he can't make an insurance claim if he
needs to. So I ask Larry, I ask him, ‘Who's this belong to?' and he tells me that's the other odd thing, said that the kid who owned the car just wandered off, and he hadn't seen him since. Wasn't sure he was coming back for it. Or maybe it was even him—the guy—who broke the window, but why would he do that? Come back and break his own window?”

“So what's your conclusion, John?”

“I think that might be our guy.”

“You ask Larry what he looked like?”

“I told him what our guy looked like, our dead guy, and Larry said he sounded pretty much like the kid who owned the car, who hasn't come back yet, by the way. I checked with Larry again this morning.”

“Manion didn't have any paperwork?”

“No. He said the kid left him a fifty-dollar bill for a sort of deposit and then he pulled some stuff out of his car, camping stuff maybe, and he took off. Afoot.”

“So you ran the plates to see who the car belonged to?”

“Yep,” Lovell was pleased that his thoroughness was appreciated. “It was a car out of Iowa.”

“And it belonged to a Calvin Teague. Calvin
Winston
Teague.”

“That's right,” Lovell had already fallen a little behind; this always happened to him. He hated being the last to know.

“You didn't call his people, did you?” Meyers heaved himself up and out of the tank. “If you've got a billfold,” he said, “you better remember to take that out of your pocket first. Days like this are exactly why I don't carry one anymore. I bet I've lost twenty wallets in my life.”

“His people, you mean . . . ?”

“His parents, or wife, or whatever he might've had.”

“Oh, I . . . But how would I . . .?”

“Never mind,” said Meyers. “They've been notified.”

“Good.” Lovell let himself fall back into the tank as he'd seen Meyers do, but he did not know, as Meyers knew, that the springs were the fruit of a deep and frigid cavern. Lovell's breath escaped him all at once, and, convinced he'd never retrieve it so long as he sat in this water, that his testicles might never again descend, he bolted out. Meyers loosed a rotten giggle, and the deputy shook himself like a dog.

“That's a little brisk,” said Meyers, “isn't it?”

“Took me by surprise.” Lovell, once again the butt of a slight betrayal, did not appreciate having to be the good sport about it. “So now,” he said, “I guess you can go ahead and do some arrest warrants, huh? Now that we know who the guy is? I'm back on duty at six tomorrow, but I'd grab whoever you wanted me to grab as soon you could get the warrants done.”

“You think we better mobilize the National Guard?”

“Well, okay,” said Lovell, “I'm sure it's not that urgent the way you see it. But when there's an arrest, I want to be in on it. I really need that experience. I get drunk drivers. Them and wife beaters.”

“You don't like wife beaters?”

“It's kinda tame, usually, by the time I get there, or it's got to where you don't know who you're supposed to restrain. You should hear the things people argue about, the reasons they give for hitting each other, stuff you can't even believe.”

“I'd believe it,” said Meyers. “So, who was it you were you wanting to arrest?”

“No,” said Lovell. “It's whoever
you
want me to. You say the word.”

“I just can't think of anybody right now, but if I do, you'll sure be the first to know. You should try not to get too excited on some of these things, all right? Your even keel, that's the way to go. Over the long haul, you know.”

“They whacked that guy.”

“Whacked him? Where do you get this, uh, outlook? ‘Whacked'? The words you hear anymore.”

“What else could've happened? They killed him.”

“
They
did?”

“One of 'em did,” said Lovell. “I think the old man.”

“You mean the old, crippled guy? The guy who's got everything he can do just to stand up? Him?”

“Well,” said Lovell, “somebody did. He's still a pretty stout man, if you look at him. Been kind of tweaked, but he's still strong enough, I'd say. And that girl's no weakling, either.”

“All right, then,” said Meyers. “Which one? You pick.”

“Me? I'd say it was that Henry Brusett. He's the man of the family, so . . . ”

“All right, and what's the charge?”

“Murder?”

“Henry Brusett murdered him?”

“Well, he sure could have,” said Lovell. “Or she could have, too.”

“Yeah, and in either case ‘could have' doesn't cut it. I can just never impress that on you guys, can I? Do they teach
any
criminal law down there at that academy?” Meyers thought he might be more gracious to a kid who'd gone so far out of his way to lend a hand. “All right, here's the theory, the principle, we've got to work with: innocent-until-proven-guilty. I'll tell you right now, there's many and many a case like this where I don't have the goods to prove anybody guilty of any specific thing. So does that mean they're innocent? No. Not in the way you see it, not the way I might see it, but in the eyes of the law . . . This is not a rare occurrence in the law, John, and if you just can't take it, if the, you know, the weird result is more than you can stomach, then you might want to consider another line of work.”

“This is all I ever wanted to do.”

“You do it however you can do it. You come at it sideways, come at it backward. You do as much as you can, see what I'm saying?”

“No,” said Lovell.

“I am the guy who agreed to shovel out the barn,” said Meyers, “so that's job security, but in the course of my day, my usual day, I never,
ever
make anybody happy.”

Lovell dipped his legs, one at a time, into the tank and agitated them, and scrubbed barehanded at his pants legs until they were clean enough to reenter the Corvette. “Somebody,” he said, after long conjecture, “did something up there.”

Meyers lost his patience. “Somebody's always doing something wrong. But, look, we've got all these hardheads who always lived here, and now you also have the whole lunatic fringe of the United States moving in, all these people trying to hide out from the law or the dusky races or whatever, them and the military people retiring here, and down on the east end you've got your Indians, Native Americans that is, and it's been my observation lately that just about everyone is pissed off just about all the time, and so you've got this bunch of assholes running around, armed to their grimy fucking teeth—and that is the one and only principle they can all agree on, their right to bear arms—bunch of yahoos just aching to plug away at each other, and they're gonna play high minded and show everybody what a set of stones they've got with their gun. So the thing is, we get a good supply of cases. You'll be in on plenty of cases, John, and on most of those you'll have all the evidence you could ever want or need. I believe ballistics is their specialty down at the state crime lab.”