Dead Man’s Fancy (3 page)

“Funny,” Walt said. He hopped to follow Martha into the trees.

“Oh Jesus.” Martha sucked a lungful of air as she looked at the wrangler's body.

“You didn't notice last night?” Harold said.

Martha shook her head. “I couldn't see this part of his face. What do you think? There was a fight?”

“I don't know. You get punched in the side of the head, this is what it looks like, like Walt's big toe there. But snow would tell me if someone was knocked to the ground, and the bruising looks more than a few hours old. Something else.” He pointed to an ankle-high cut in the leather of the man's right cowboy boot. The cut looked fresh, the leather lighter in color at the edges where it was sliced.

“Maybe when he bailed, his horse stepped on him,” Martha said. “Like Big Mike stepped on Walt.”

“Maybe.” Harold's voice sounded doubtful.

“Hurt like the dickens if it did.” Walt was nodding his head. “That's a trophy elk, I ever saw one. Look at the length of those G4 tines.”

Martha gave him a withering look. “We got a man twisting on the spit and that's all you have to say, it's a big bull?”

“Score three-sixty, maybe three-seventy. What do you think, Harold?”

“At least,” Harold said. “You look at the brow tines, good length on the main beams, hardly any points subtracted for asymmetry, he's maybe not Boone and Crockett but the Montana record book for sure.”

Martha looked from one to the other. “Let's . . . focus . . . here.”

They stood in silence over the body. Martha's fingers reached for the pulse in her neck. Harold crossed his hands over his belt buckle.

“That G4,” Walt said, “They don't call it the sword point for nothing, do they?”

I
t would be a stretch to call it a house. But then, Martha Ettinger thought, it would be a stretch to characterize the man who sat behind a feather-blown fly-tying bench on the porch a home owner. Until this summer, Sam Meslik had lived in a dilapidated trailer on three acres of cottonwood bottomland bordering Hyalite Creek. Dirt poor but land rich, he'd turned a dime on the place when a Kern County orange grove owner, looking for a place he could put his feet up for six weeks each summer and worry about something other than water rights and migrant labor, made him an offer he couldn't refuse. Sam had immediately parlayed his windfall into this place on a bank overlooking the Madison River.

“Is that beast of yours going to stay where he belongs?”

“You mean old Killer here?” Sam reached down to pat the broad head of the giant Airedale mix—“half terrier, half Hound of the Baskervilles,” as Sam liked to say—that was lying at his feet. “Why he wouldn't hurt a mosquito.”

“Uh-huh.” Martha stepped out of the Jeep. She placed her hands on her hips and took in the shack, it was a shack, it said so in crudely painted letters above the porch: Fly Shack. Took in the dilapidated barn from Septembers when ranch owners traded their straw Stetsons for felts and brought the cattle down from the high pasture, instead of handing the reins to the ranch manager and packing the family off to Carmel. She glanced at Meslik's trailered drift boat with a leaping rainbow trout painted on the bow. The bumper sticker on the back window of the old Nissan 4 X 4 read, I Don't Care if You Flyfish.

The fishing guide folded his hands under the fly-tying table.

“Tain't riverfront,” he said, “but I got the trespass rights.” He jutted his chin toward the ribbon of current under the high bank. “I still have to use developed boat ramps for my ClackaCraft, but Stranny can slip his raft in right down there by the willows. Gives us an option no other guide outfit has on this part of the Mad.

“So where is Sean?”

“He's on a fish-a-bout. I thought you two were like that.” Sam held two fingers pressed together. “Now that you're neighbors and all.”

“We haven't been keeping in regular touch. What's a fish-a-bout?

“It's like a fisherman's take on a walkabout. You jump in the truck and take off fishing without knowing where you're going. You know what I saw him do the Fourth of July? We were float tubing Henry's Lake for the damsel fly hatch, right there where I got shot a couple years ago, and when we pull up on shore, Sean takes off his fly vest and finds he got water in the pockets and it's shorted out his cell. I say these things are like Jesus after the cross, bury it in rice and it'll resurrect. And he says, ‘Or I can do this.' He sidearms the phone across the lake like a kid skipping a stone. Got a good half dozen bounces. You been inside that tipi? He's got it fixed pretty nice.”

Martha nodded. “Be a hell of a place to spend the winter, though he says he's determined.”

“That's something we agree on. So what I can do for you, Sheriff?”

“Do you mind if I sit? I've been up all night.”

“Be my guest.”

He indicated a folding camp chair. “You know, you're just the woman I wanted to see,” he said.

Martha sat down, one eye on the Airedale. She arched her eyebrows. “How's that?”

“I'm called Rainbow Sam, right? It's on my drift boat, it's on my card, it's like my business name. I even got a line of flies I tie and market here from the shop. ‘Rainbow Sam's Skinny Minnows.'”

“Um-hmm.” Martha examined the slim marabou fly clasped in the jaws of the tying vise bolted to the table.

“Well, this fishing guide works out of the Kingfisher, he's going around calling himself Cutthroat Bob. Like cutthroat trout. And he's got long hair like me. And . . . and the fucker's selling a fly out of the shop he calls ‘Cutthroat Bob's Busty Baitfish.' Isn't that, like, copyright infringement? Can you do something about it?”

“I don't think so, no.” She put her hands behind her head and took in the dead soldiers on the table. “Isn't it a little early to be knocking them back?”

Sam smiled, showing the Vs ground into the enamel of his front teeth, a result of nipping monofilament leader tippets instead of using clippers. “I got women problems,” he said.

“Tell me about your women problems.”

“I can't see how you'd be interested.”

“Then why did you put your hands under the table when I drove up.”

He looked hard at her, then deliberately brought his hands up and folded them amid the scattered feathers. Like everything else about Sam Meslik, the hands were oversized, the backs matted with hair. Sean Stranahan had told her that he'd seen Sam remove the skull ring from his pinkie and pass a quarter through it. She saw that the knuckles on his right hand were scraped, the one at the base of the middle finger was grotesquely swollen.

“There were witnesses,” he said. “I was defending myself.”

She waited.

Sam shrugged. “I was in the Silver Dollar, cowboy comes through the door, says I been six-inching his girl. I tell him redo the math and maybe we'll talk. Add a few inches. He takes a swing, I put him down.” He took a pull from a bottle of Moose Drool. “Long story short.”

“This would be when?”

“Night before last.”

“Were you?”

“Greasing the Robusto? Number one, Nicki wasn't his girlfriend. You can ask her. Number two, it was none of his business.”

“You didn't answer my question.”

“You don't like me much, do you, Sheriff?”

“No, I like you well enough. I just have a hard time believing you're for real. I think you're so far into this persona you've created that you don't know who you are. You're one of those people who can't draw the line between fact and fiction. My jail's full of them. For the life of me, I can't see what Sean sees in you.”

“And I can't see what he sees in you. That makes us even.”

“Back to this woman you fought over. You called her Nicki.”

“Short for Nanika. He fought over her, not me. Nicki worked for me this summer, did some guiding, kept the shop open while I was on the river. She didn't have any place to stay, so I let her crash in the barn. It doesn't look like a hell of a lot from the outside, but the guy I bought it from plumbed it and it's got running water.” He spread his hands. “It's good digs unless the roof collapses. I've been staying on a cot in the shack, but this winter I plan to beam the barn up, put in a woodstove and move in myself.”

“Why would this guy think you were, ah, six-inching her, as he put it?”

“Maybe because she'd lived here this summer. I don't know what Nicki told him. We haven't been buckle to buckle since mid-July. Anyway, it was a long time before he met her.”

“So you did sleep with her?”

Sam shrugged.

Martha mimicked him and waited.

“Is your own love life that boring? You ought to take off your badge and draw one down once in a while. I've heard sex is good for middle-aged women, keeps their juices flowing.”

“Humor me.”

“There isn't much to tell.” He shifted his shoulders, the big slabs of muscle rippling under his T-shirt, the sun pegged and the day warming. Already, the mantle of snow on the distant ridges had all but melted.

“You ever hear of the Fly Fishing Venus?” Sam said.

“I can't say I have.”

“Really?
Fly Angler
ran a picture a couple years ago. Ennis paper did a piece on her in July.”

“Enlighten me.”

“She guided out of a fly shop on the Kootenai. Most fisher chicks, they couldn't catch their tit in a wringer if they were churning ice cream and providing the milk. But Nicki was a good angler. They called her the Venus 'cause she has this hair that's like one of the seven wonders of the world. Sort of a copper waterfall. She's every fly fisherman's wet dream.”

Sam fished another beer out of a cooler. He knocked the cap off against the edge of the table and held the neck with two fingers while foam ran down the sides.

“Anyway, I'm sitting right here second week of June, up she drives on a beater mountain bike, got a fly rod case strapped to the frame, a pack on her back, pedaled all the way from Libby. Said it took her ten days. Told me she was a fishing guide looking for work. 'Course I knew who she was right away, she's halfway famous, but it was a high-water spring and I didn't see how I could afford to hire her, at least not until the river dropped into shape. Hell, I'd just moved in myself. I hadn't even opened the shop. She said if I gave her room and board, she'd help me start the business. Gave me the number of the fly shop she'd worked for on the Kootenai. I called it. The guy said she'd suck in clients like a vacuum cleaner.”

“And you decided to let her stay.”

“I told her I'd sleep on it. She let me know she'd help me sleep on it.” Sam smiled, showing the Vs. “Mama didn't raise an idiot. But we're talking high maintenance. I managed to get her out of my system before I ended up snake bit as that cowboy.”

“But you stayed friends?”

“Sure. It was a business arrangement. She had a head for numbers and there were clients who took one look at her, one look at me, and wanted her on the pins. I let her use my old drift boat and took a cut off the top.

“Where's that boat now?”

“She's got it at the dude ranch. I told her she's free to use it until the season ends.”

“Why did she leave you to work at the ranch?”

“After Labor Day, the guide business starts to die down. She figured she could make more money at the ranch and I encouraged her. But that job will peter out end of October. I don't know where she'll go once winter sets in, maybe back to Libby.”

“That's where she's from originally?”

“Nicki's sort of vague about the past.”

“Uh-huh. Let's talk about the cowboy. What's his name?”

“Grady Cole. He's a wrangler at the ranch. Probably got her the job. But I didn't learn that 'til after. When he came into the Dollar, I'd never seen him before in my life.”

“And after the fight, when did you see him again?”

Sam began to speak. Then a look came over his face. The creases between his unibrow deepened. His tongue pressed between his lips, tasting the corners of his beard. He abruptly stood up, his chair scraping across the floorboards of the porch.

“What aren't you telling me?” he said.

Martha said, “Sit down, Sam. Just tell me about the fight.”

For a long moment, Sam looked at her. She could see the gears grind. Then his face relaxed and he sat back down. “Hey, I don't have anything to hide,” he said. “The dude called me out. I didn't want to fight him, the guy's half my size, but he started swinging. What could I do? I waited 'til he got up to his knees. I'd just hit him the once, just the once. He was okay, I figured. There were a few guys came out to gander, but they went back inside. A half hour later I started feeling pretty bad about it and went out the back door and found him sitting there in the alley. I offered him a beer. I can see he's been crying and I say ‘What the fuck, buddy?' But Nicki, she must have cast a spell. And the thing is, all she gave him was a sniff. He ends up getting clocked and for what, the hope she'll kiss him someday? With all those rich broads at the ranch . . .” Sam shook his head. “He's got women leaving a snail trail on the saddle every time he helps them out of the stirrups, broads who don't think they've got their money's worth until they milk the wrangler, and he's as blind to it as the one-eyed monster. I told him to forget about Nicki, take what's shaking at him and go to college and make something of himself.”

“Aren't we the counselor,” Martha said.

Sam picked up his beer bottle and looked critically at it. They sat in silence, Martha watching Sam's blank expression. For the most part she had him figured as a no-filter guy. The second a thought formed in his head, it was out of his mouth. But he'd held back information from her before.

“So is this about Nicki? Is she okay?”

“I wouldn't know, Sam. Nobody's seen her since yesterday afternoon. She rode into the sunset and her horse came back without her. There's a manhunt up on Papoose Mountain.”

“What did he do?” Martha saw the color come into Sam's face. “Did he hurt her?”

“Grady? I doubt it.” She got to her feet and looked down at him. “He's too dead to do anybody much harm. But then that's something you might be able to tell me about. I got all day.”