Till the Butchers Cut Him Down (16 page)

Hy couldn’t possibly know what I suspected, but when he tugged at the cape I wore, I started and glanced up at his face to
see if somehow he’d guessed. The cape was Anna’s, the one she’d given me immediately before the explosion, the one I’d worn
from the house to the JetRanger, its hood raised. When I’d thrown it on to go meet Hy at Oakland Airport the previous evening,
I’d done so as a symbolic act—a declaration that I was committing to a risky and possibly ruinous course of action.

On September 6, Suits had terminated his contract with me. A check signed by Dottie Collier arrived at my office, accompanied
by a brief note thanking me for my efforts on her employer’s behalf. A check for the full amount of my fee, plus a fifty percent
bonus—buying me off, buying me out of Suits’s life.

I hadn’t deposited the check; I hadn’t earned it. And I couldn’t be bought, especially not in this instance.

Hy gave up on me initiating a conversation and asked, “Did you go up to Mendocino County last week, like Gordon’s lawyer wanted?”

“Yes.” Suits had refused to return to the Bay Area with Josh and me after the explosion. Moonshine Cottage had survived intact,
and it was there he took up residence—had remained in residence to this day.

The week before, Noah Romanchek had called me. “It’s about T.J.,” he said. “He’s in terrible shape, won’t deal with the business.
GGL’s hanging on, but just barely. Decisions have to be made about the Hunters Point base. The Port Commission and the Southern
Pacific want to get moving on deepening that tunnel. A lot of people are depending on this project. Christ, Carole Lattimer
had brain surgery, and she’s pitching in from her hospital bed. If she can do that, T.J. ought to be able to pull himself
together.”

“Have you told him this?” I asked.

“Of course. I went up to the cove to talk with him last week. He threw me out of the cottage.”

“Well, I don’t know what I can do. I’m not working for him anymore.”

“T.J. once told me that he respects your opinion. Please go up there and try to get through to him. We’ll pay whatever your
usual rate is.”

For reasons of my own, I’d agreed and flown north in the JetRanger with a somber Josh Haddon. Had left the pilot walking among
the charred ruins on the clifftop and gone to the cottage.

Now I told Hy, “I found pretty much the kind of deteriorating scene Romanchek described. Suits is wallowing in grief; he seems
to enjoy it.”

“Drinking?”

“No, no drugs, either. He’s just … shut down, doesn’t give a damn about anybody or anything.”

“Well, maybe he’ll snap out of it. We all handle our grief in different ways. When Julie died, even though I’d known for years
that the disease would eventually take her, I went crazy for a while. Drank, self-destructed all over the map. Went berserk
at whatever protests the movement was staging, hoping some cop would blow me away and put me out of my misery.”

“But that kind of behavior was in character for you. Suits’s isn’t. After the explosion there was a lot of speculation in
the press, particularly the tabloids: had he been responsible for the explosion? No one ever went so far as to suggest he
actually blew the place up himself or hired someone to do it, but there were allusions to Anna’s and his ‘unusual lifestyle.’
And they dredged up about him turning the dope farm, and her addiction, as well as their four-year separation and the story
of how he bribed her to marry him.”

Hy grimaced. “Fuckin’ vultures.”

I nodded. “The man I knew would have reacted just that way. He’d’ve come out swinging at the tabloids, slapped them with huge
lawsuits. But as it was, he didn’t even issue a press release. And here’s what makes me angriest of all with him: he doesn’t
care why Anna died, doesn’t want to find out who set that explosion.”

I paused, thinking back to August. “You know, Suits said something once, to the effect that the butchers were trying to cut
him down. At the time I thought he was being overly dramatic, but that’s exactly what they did. They—his enemies and the press—butchered
his wife, and they butchered him.”

I pictured Suits lying listlessly on dirty blue sheets in the room I’d occupied at Moonshine Cottage. Trash had clogged the
fireplace; soft-drink cans and plates full of half-eaten food sat everywhere. I’d tried to persuade him to get up, clean up,
come out for a meal or at least a walk, but he refused. I’d tried to give him Anna’s cape, so he would have something of hers,
but he wouldn’t take it.

“Keep it, Sherry-O,” he’d said. “I don’t want it. I don’t want anything.”

It was the ultimate rebuff, of both his dead wife and our dead friendship. I left the cottage a few minutes later. When I
got back to the helipad I found Josh standing next to the JetRanger, fingering a piece of blackened stone and crying, as he
had on the day of the explosion. His eyes rested on the cape that I held over my arm; he turned and angrily hurled the stone
into the sea. We hadn’t spoken since then; I wasn’t even sure if he was still in the Bay Area.

Hy asked, “Do they have any leads on who set the explosion?”

“No. It was plastic explosives, but the blasting caps and wiring devices don’t tell them anything. They figure the charges
were laid earlier that week when Anna was down in Sausalito helping a couple of her protégés set up a crafts exhibit, and
detonated by remote control.” My voice quavered; I breathed deeply, steadied it before I continued. “They’ve got little enough
to work with; the only way they got an I.D. on Anna was that the dentist who takes care of the people from her reservation
recognized a couple of fillings as his work.”

Hy didn’t speak for a moment. I looked at him, saw he was staring toward distant Tufa Lake. Its waters were turning pinkish
gray now, the towers of calcified vegetation that gave it its name taking on definition.

He said, “All right, now let’s talk about what’s really bothering you.”

The old nonverbal connection that I’d feared lost was still in place. Thank God I’d come up here with a wait-and-see attitude
regarding Hy and me; maybe things would be all right between us after all.

“Okay,” I said, “I don’t think the explosion was intended to kill Anna.”

“No?”

“No. I think that initially it was supposed to be more of the same—an attempt to intimidate Suits but not hurt him, or anybody
else.”

“You said you felt like somebody was watching when you and Anna walked on the beach that afternoon. Whoever detonated those
charges knew who was at the house.”

“Right.”

“So what went wrong?”

“Okay, I’ve got to back up a bit. In my conversation with Romanchek before I went up to Mendo last week, he told me that one
of the reasons Suits went to Moonshine House that night was to ask Anna to move to the city. It wasn’t a snap decision; several
people on his staff knew. He planned to surprise Anna with it just before he left, get her to come along on the return trip.”

“Would she have done it on such short notice?”

“Romanchek claims yes. If Suits asked her in advance, Anna would’ve come up with all sorts of reasons not to. But she liked
to act on impulse, and Suits felt getting her to the city and then persuading her to stay was his best shot.”

“And then what happened to Carole Lattimer made him put off asking. But I don’t see—”

I plunged ahead, cutting him off. “Ripinsky, I think we can assume that whoever was responsible for that explosion had access
to all of the information that the people on Suits’s staff did. Including the fact that Anna was supposed to return to the
city with him. And that he’d hired me.”

Hy nodded. Waited.

“What would a watcher have seen when Suits and I boarded the JetRanger?”

He thought, shook his head. “You tell me.”

“Suits and a woman who looked like Anna. A woman of around the same height, with black hair, wearing this cape with the hood
raised.” I pulled the hood over my head, looked up at him from under its edge.

Hy’s jaw clenched. “So that’s it.”

“That’s it. I was supposed to be the one who died at Bootlegger’s Cove. What better way to stop the investigation that Suits
had initiated?”

For a moment all I could hear was Hy’s breathing, as fast and hard as my own. Then he said, “But he didn’t put a stop to it,
now, did he?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“McCone, you take Route Three-fifty-nine east out of here to Hawthorne, Nevada, and then it’s a clear shot south on Ninety-five
to Lost Hope. My Land Rover needs servicing, but you borrow it, get that taken care of, and you could be there by nightfall.”

I’d been thinking the same thing, since putting on Anna’s cape the previous evening.

The sun was spilling over the mountains behind us now, turning the mesquite to spun gold, chasing shadows deep into the creases
of the ridge. In the distance Tufa Lake glowed in violent hues, its surrealistic towers obsidian monuments against its flat
surface.

“Happy birthday, McCone,” Hy said.

Lost Hope, Nevada

September

The lights of the town shone far across the desert. I’d been moving toward them for what seemed to be hours.

Coming south out of Hawthorne the landscape had been rugged: unrelenting brown interrupted occasionally by the deceptive water-slickness
of dry alkali lakes, surrounded by the wild Toiyabe National Forest and the jagged peaks of the Monte Cristo Range. At a junction
with a dirt road that cut through sagebrush toward the mountains stood a collection of trailers and a bar-café; a neon sign
advertised Mimi’s Massage, a euphemism for brothel in this state where prostitution was legalized. After that I saw nothing
but an occasional car or truck and more barren land.

The highway was a good one, two straight lanes of asphalt ascending into the hills so slowly that I had to glance in the rearview
mirror to tell that I was climbing. I let the Land Rover’s speedometer drift near eighty; when dusk came on, I eased up some.
Even at sixty-five I felt as if I were barely moving. And out of the dusk the lights of Lost Hope appeared: just over the
next rise … just atop the next hill … just out of reach. …

I turned on the radio but could get nothing but static. Snapped it off in annoyance. The tires hummed on the asphalt; headlights
flashed behind me, and a pickup went past in a rush of speed, red taillights winking good-bye. The desert sky was wide and
clear, shot with ice-chip stars.

As I watched the town’s distant lights I thought of Hy. He was at his ranch house, comfortable among his books and his memories
of our time together. But out here in this lonesome land, my memories didn’t suffice. In just one night, my body hadn’t gotten
enough of his; my spirit hadn’t gotten enough renewal from the strong emotional connection that seemed to be working for us
once more. For company and reassurance I replayed our parting conversation.

He’d leaned into the window of the Rover, kissed me lightly, and said, “You know, before last night I had a suspicion you
might be coming up here to break it off with me.”

“It had crossed my mind.”

“Is that what you want?”

“No.”

“Then?”

“From here on out, it’s up to you.”

His lips tightened and he looked away. “McCone, I’m working toward being up-front with you. That’s not easy, given that deception’s
been more or less my way of life.”

Deception, his way of life. Was that a life worth sharing?

He added, “I want this—us. Give me a little more time. That’s all I’m asking.”

And so he had a little more time. Till the end of the year, that’s what I’d give him.

I’d have no choice, anyway. Tomorrow morning he’d be gone again. To San Diego in the Citabria, where he had to talk with some
people. Then he would catch a commercial flight to an unspecified destination on the East Coast.

I suspected who the people were: Gage Renshaw and Dan Kessell, principal owners of RKI, and figures out of Hy’s dim past.
Last June they’d engaged his services in an attempt to lure him into partnership in the firm. He’d turned them down, but perhaps
he’d had a change of heart. Perhaps he’d begun to crave more of what Gage Renshaw called “the old action.” Risk-taking, danger—that
was Hy’s métier, even more than it was mine.

Well, no use speculating. Maybe I would do well, as Suits had repeatedly told me, to just let it unfold. …

* * *

The highway ran straight through the town, its speed limit abruptly cut to twenty-five. At first there were gas stations,
fast-food drive-ins, and inexpensive motels; after about half a mile the old-fashioned central district began. High concrete
curbs bordered the pavement, and beyond them stood stone and wood buildings that harked back to the teens and twenties. On
the slopes behind them more lights shone, revealing a sprawl of small dwellings.

This was silver-mining country, the information from Suits’s files had said. Lost Hope had been a boomtown during the teens,
nearly died in the thirties, and languished for years after that, its residents eking out a living from travelers driving
between Reno and Vegas and tourists headed for Death Valley or Yosemite. Four years ago the city government had been bankrupt,
as were most of the businesses.

The town’s salvation had come in the form of a gambler pal of Suits’s, stranded there by car trouble on his way to a high-stakes
poker game in Vegas. During the day it took for his car parts to come by bus from Reno, he and the old man who ran the La
Rose Hotel had discovered a mutual fondness for gin rummy, and in the course of their conversation across the card table,
the gambler had mentioned that he knew a miracle worker who could transform the place into a profit-making enterprise. When
he left the next day, the old hotelier was several hundred dollars richer and in possession of T. J. Gordon’s phone number.

Transform the place Suits had. Yes, he certainly had.

Miner’s Saloon and Casino, Boomtown Museum, Montezuma Mining Company Tours, Sagebrush Bed and Breakfast, Rock and Mineral
Shop, T-shirts, T-shirts, T-shirts! Esmeralda Steak House, Old West Barbecue, Kiddie Korral, the General Store, Antiques,
Native American Crafts Outlet. …