Blue Lonesome (12 page)

“And maybe something. How long you fixing to stay in Beulah?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“I wouldn’t stay too long, if I was you. This is a tight little town and it can be pretty uncomfortable for an outsider hellbent on rubbing salt in healing wounds.”

“Is that a threat, John T.?”

“Threat? Lizbeth, you hear me make any kind of threat?”

“No.” Ice rattled in her glass; her hand was no longer steady. “All you did was tell him not to keep pissing against the wind or it’s liable to blow right back in his face.”

“Got a way with words, don’t she?” Roebuck said. “Tell you what, Jim. Have yourself a T-Bone and a couple of drinks in the Grill, on me. Then go on back to your motel, think things over, and maybe you’ll decide the best thing for everybody is to head out in the morning after all. Drive on down to Vegas. Hell of a lot more attractions down there, by a wide margin. It’s a friendlier place, too.”

“I don’t doubt that.”

“How about it, then?”

“I’m not in the mood for steak tonight,” Messenger said, “and I doubt I’ll be in the mood for Vegas tomorrow. Beulah’s got all the attractions I’m interested in right now.”

“Then you better learn how to duck. That’s my best advice, Jim: Learn how to duck real quick.”

HE WONDERED
, as he drove back to the High Desert Lodge, if he’d been foolish to provoke John T. Roebuck the way he had. If he might be getting himself in over his head. Small towns were bad places to make enemies, especially of the local honcho; he understood that from having grown up in one. And John T.’s thinly veiled threats hadn’t struck him as idle. Stick around, keep asking questions, and he was inviting more trouble than he was equipped to handle.

Maybe he
should
pull up stakes tomorrow morning. What did he know about playing either detective or the standing-tall hero? One man pitted against an entire town—familiar theme in mysteries and Westerns both, and not a role for somebody like him. He was a CPA, for God’s sake. He led a quiet, nonviolent, disciplined existence. He was so far out of his element in Beulah, Nevada, that he could blunder around here for the next two weeks and even if he stayed out of harm’s way, find out little more than he knew right now.

Still, he was reluctant to let go of the opportunity. He may be a passive individual, but that didn’t mean he ought to let himself be pushed around by men like John T. But it went beyond that. It even went beyond the question of Anna’s innocence or guilt, the challenge of systematically trying to prove an equation true or false. What he had developed was almost a compulsion, as if he were being manipulated into finishing what he’d started. Not by outside forces, but by forces within himself—the same forces that had led him to do what he’d done here so far.

Male menopause, he thought. Jim Messenger’s own private hot flashes. But it wasn’t funny. In a way it was crucial. A kind of rebellion, perhaps, against the slow downward spiral into resignation and despair that had claimed Ms. Lonesome, and that one day, if he allowed it, might claim him as well.

IN THE COLD
hour before dawn, he awoke to the moaning melody of a rough desert wind blowing outside. Blowing riffs, high notes and low, like a hot-licks horn man improvising at an all-night jam. He had been dreaming about Doris, and he lay there thinking about her—both for the first time in years. Lay remembering another cold, windy night four months after their marriage: Candlestick Park, Giants versus Astros, early May.

Doris loved baseball. She had a man’s feel for the game, an enthusiastic appreciation of strategy and statistics as well as for its subtleties, its fluidity and grace. When he’d voiced this perception to her she made a face and accused him of being sexist; but he hadn’t meant it that way at all. His own interest in baseball was not quite as keen as hers, particularly when it came to going to the ’Stick or the Oakland Coliseum for games; he was just as content to be a couch-potato TV spectator. But she craved the live atmosphere. Games were more exciting in person, she said. Besides, she loved hot dogs, peanuts, all the other ballpark trappings. They went to a lot of Giants and A’s games that first year—thirty or more.

He hadn’t wanted to go that May night because of the weather. Doris nagged him into it. Pleasing her was important to him then; it had been important to him, for that matter, right up until the day she’d told him, “It just isn’t working, Jimmy. I think we’d better end it right now, before things get any worse between us.”

The wind-chill factor at the ’Stick must have been close to zero—a raw wind so frigid it might have swept down from the Arctic wastes. Less than 2,500 other hardy souls were scattered through the stadium, most clustered in the lower deck behind home plate. Doris preferred to sit in the upper deck, the higher the better on the first base side; she thought you had a better perspective on the whole field from up there. As empty as the park was, they had an entire section to themselves: nobody above them, nobody within twenty rows below. Two castaways in the center of an island of empty seats, huddled and shivering beneath a heavy wool car blanket … he remembered that image crossing his mind at some point during the evening.

It wasn’t much of a game. The Giants scored six runs in the bottom of the first and after that it settled into a dull pitchers’ duel. By the sixth inning he was bored and numb from the cold. The wind penetrated coats, sweaters, mittens, the blanket; not even body heat or hot coffee from the big thermos they’d brought kept the cold at bay. Twice he suggested leaving. But she was such a diehard fan she wouldn’t hear of it. “I don’t want to miss anything, Jimmy. You never know what might happen.”

In the seventh a gust of fog-laden wind made his teeth chatter loud enough for Doris to hear. She snuggled closer. “Are you really that cold?” she asked.

“Well, my nose quit running ten minutes ago and now I’ve got icicles hanging out of it.”

“I’ll bet I can warm you up.”

“Nothing could right now except a hot shower.”

“I know a better way than that.”

“What way?”

Her hand slid along his thigh, stroked tight into his crotch.

“Hey! What’re you doing?”

“What does it feel like I’m doing?”

“Cut it out, Dorrie.”

“Why? Don’t you like that?”

“You know I like it. But we’re not home.”

“No kidding.”

“I mean this is a public place. …”

“And we’re under a blanket and nobody’s near.”

He tried to push her hand away. She resisted. She’d worked her mitten off; he felt her slim fingers tugging, heard the faint rasp of his zipper. The fingers insinuated themselves inside, icy cold, making him jump when they touched bare flesh.

“Mmm, that’s one place you’re warm.”

“Dorrie …”

“How about if I get right down there under the blanket and
really
make you warm?”

“No.”

“Hand or mouth, big guy, your choice.”

“No!”

Her breathing had quickened; it was warm and feather soft against his ear. In the privacy of their apartment, that would have excited him. In the privacy of their apartment, the touch and manipulation of her hand would have given him an immediate erection. Here, there was not even a stirring in his loins. He felt nothing except nervous embarrassment. He tried again to dislodge her fingers, his gaze jerking up and down, from side to side.

“Dorrie, for God’s sake …”

“What’s the matter?”

He heard himself say, “TV cameras.”

“What?”

“Game’s being televised back in Houston. There’re cameras all over the stadium.”

“So what? They’re focused on the field, not on us.”

“Sometimes they pan around the stands, you know that. One of them might be on us right now … all those people out there watching …”

“Jesus,” she said.

“When we get home … can’t you wait until then?”

She drew away from him, removing her hand at the same time. “I doubt I’ll be in the mood when we get home,” she said. “You just took me right out of it. I was getting pretty horny, too.”

“A public place, a baseball stadium …”

“That’s what made me so horny.”

“I don’t understand that.”

“No, I guess you don’t. Not you, Jimmy.”

“What does that mean?”

She wouldn’t tell him then; she sat stiffly for the rest of the game, staring at the field, not saying a word. It wasn’t until later, in the car on the way across the Bay Bridge, that she told him.

“The trouble with you, Jimmy,” she said, “is that you’re afraid to take risks. Any kind of risk. You want everything to be nice and safe.”

“That’s not true. …”

“It’s true, all right. No chances, no risks—not even little ones like tonight, the kind that make life more interesting, give it an edge. A safe life is a dull life, you know? I don’t think people were meant to live that way.”

You want everything to be nice and safe. No chances, no risks
—
not even little ones. A safe life is a dull life, Jimmy.

He hadn’t understood then, or in all the years afterward. But he understood now, here in this motel room in Beulah, Nevada. What Doris had said to him that night was part of the reason—perhaps the main reason—she’d begun the affair with the prelaw track star and then put an end to their marriage. It was also the reason he was a lonely man. And the reason there was so little substance in his life … his nice, safe, dull, empty life. And at least part of the reason for the compulsion, the rebellion that had taken root and was growing inside him.

The time had come to take risks.

The time had come for his life to have edges, even if he ended up hurting himself on one.

H
E WAS ON
his way to the Goldtown Café, walking as he had the previous morning, when the car drifted over alongside. He didn’t hear it at first because of the wind, still blowing in dry, humming gusts; didn’t see it because he had his head ducked down to keep the blown grit out of his eyes. The sound of its horn—a single sharp toot—made him aware of it angling into the curb in front of him. Blue-and-white cruiser with flasher panels on the roof and a sheriff’s emblem on the door.

He stopped, still hunched against the wind. The man who rose up out of the driver’s side was big and bulky in his khaki uniform. He motioned Messenger over to the cruiser, said when he got there, “Mr. Messenger? I’m Sheriff Espinosa, Ben Espinosa. Like to talk to you for a minute.”

“All right.”

“Talk better in the car, out of this wind. Slide in.”

Messenger slid in. The cruiser’s interior smelled of sweat, leather, gun oil, and a sweetish pipe tobacco. The tobacco aroma came off Sheriff Espinosa as well; a blackened pipe bowl was visible under a shirt pocket flap, like a Cyclopean rodent peering out. He was in his mid-thirties, high-cheekboned, flat-eyed. The clipped mustache he wore lay like a black anthracite bar across his upper lip. The flat eyes were steady, measuring. He didn’t offer to shake hands.

Messenger said, “I was planning to pay you a visit later this morning.”

“That right?” There was no particular inflection to the words, but Messenger sensed a hostile undertone just the same. “Why didn’t you pay your visit yesterday?”

“I didn’t see any official urgency, Sheriff.”

Espinosa said, “Maybe you didn’t. But I’d’ve liked to hear about Anna Roebuck’s suicide from you, instead of half a dozen locals.”

“My mistake. But it isn’t as if she was a fugitive.”

“Might as well’ve been, disappearing the way she did. It left a bad taste in my mouth.”

“Why is that?”

“Why do you think? The murders were still under investigation. She was still under investigation.”

“Did you warn her about leaving Beulah?”

“No. Too much time had gone by for that.”

“Then she had every right to leave, didn’t she?”

The flat-eyed stare had a little heat in it now; he met it steadily. “What puts you on her side, Mr. Messenger? From what I hear, you claim you hardly knew her out there in Frisco.”

“I saw her often enough. She was in a lot of pain and I don’t think guilt was the cause.”

“You don’t think. Just a gut feeling, then.”

“Just that.”

“You know about the murders before you came here?”

“No, not until yesterday.”

“Anything at all about her past?”

“No.”

“Why come here then? What do you figure to get out of it?”

“Nothing, except my curiosity satisfied.”

“Sure it’s not some of the money you’re after?”

“What money?”

“The insurance money, what was left of it. Fourteen thousand dollars, isn’t it?”

“If you think I’m angling for a reward, you’re wrong. I told Dacy Burgess about the money yesterday because she has a right to know as next of kin. She said she didn’t want any part of it and neither do I.”

“You didn’t tell John T. about the money.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“We didn’t get along very well. And he’s not related to Anna Roebuck except by marriage.”

“Still should have told him. He had to hear it from Dacy later on.”

“And you heard it from him right after that.”

Tight ridges of muscle appeared along Espinosa’s jaw. “Tell you something, Mr. Messenger. I don’t think we’re going to get along any better than you and John T.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I’m not trying to make enemies.”

“No? Well, you’re up to something and I don’t like it. Whatever it is, I don’t like it.”

“Are you going to tell me to get out of town by sundown?”

“You trying to be a smart-ass?”

“No, sir. I just asked a question.”

“You haven’t done anything to make me come down on you. Yet. But I’ll be watching you. The whole town’ll be watching you. If I were you I wouldn’t step out of line. I wouldn’t jaywalk or spit on the sidewalk. Or do too much pissing against the wind.”

“You’ve made yourself clear, Sheriff.”

“Sure hope I have. All right, go on about your business.”

Messenger stood looking after the cruiser as Espinosa wheeled it away. Two warnings in less than eighteen hours. No—the same warning issued twice, in almost the same words. John T. Roebuck not only ran Beulah, it looked as though he had a hand in running the local law as well.