Hawk Moon (11 page)

He put his hand out. "But that don't mean that every one of you is a stupid sonofabitch."

I shook his hand. "Right. Take me — I'm probably not a stupid sonofabitch now, am I?"

With a perfectly straight face, he said, "Too early to tell." He turned back to Cindy. "Your David did it this time."

"Maybe I don't want to know."

Fond as he obviously was of her, he wanted her to hear. "You remember all these years what I told you?"

"Please don't give me a speech, Gibby. Not now. Later on, all right. But not now."

We were silhouettes in the squad-car headlights that lit the leprous wounds of the trailer wall. The stars were faint now. A coyote cried out long and lonely from the limestone cliffs.

"I got a call."

"From who?"

"Don't know."

"They didn't leave a name?"

"Right. No name," Gibbs said.

"And they said what?"

"They said I should look inside his car trunk."

"For what?"

The other two cops came back out. "He's gone, Chief," one of them said. He had a blond crew cut and needed to lose thirty pounds. Everything about him was small town in a comfortable way.

"I would've told you that," she said.

"That's bullshit, Cindy, and you know it," said the cop who'd done the talking. "I tried to arrest him for public drunkenness that time, and you was all over me."

"You were hurting him."

"You seem to forget he kicked me in the nuts."

"That's enough!" Gibbs said. "All we're concerned about right now is tonight. Not the past."

But I was glad I'd heard the exchange between Cindy and the other cop. It made me understand better why the radio dispatcher had spoken about her with so much contempt. Cops run interference for family members all the time, but there are limits and I sensed that Cindy had pushed those limits pretty far.

"Let's go take a look at the trunk."

I didn't have any doubt what we'd find.

All the time they were trying various keys and pries to get the trunk-lid up, I knew exactly what we'd find. Pictured it perfectly.

"Gimme those," Gibbs said after a time.

He went through three more keys. The third one turned a quarter-inch or so to the right but it still didn't open the trunk.

"I wish you weren't here," Gibbs said to Cindy. "You'd really hear me swear."

"Be my guest."

Gibbs went back to working on the trunk. The two uniformed cops exchanged winks. The Chief wasn't any better at this than they were.

Gibbs said, "If this next one don't work, I'm gonna open the damn thing with a screwdriver."

Lights were coming on in windows around us. Police in the middle of the night guaranteed excitement. Infants cried; dogs barked; a frontier train rattled through the dark.

The lock clicked free.

"Gimme that flashlight," he said, holding his hand out so one of his men could fill it with a long silver light.

The trunk popped open.

We all gathered round.

Gibby played the light inside.

Her arm had been taken off pretty cleanly. That was the first thing I noticed.

The second thing I noticed was that the blue of the naked body matched the blue of the arm I'd seen earlier. Two, three days dead she was, at least long enough for postmortem lividity to set in, the body filling with gas and distending the areas of chest, stomach and thighs. The brown eyes bulged and the tongue looked like an eel trying to escape the swollen lips.

There was talk, but I didn't hear it, and running back to call for additional help, but I didn't pay any attention to that, either.

By now I was fixed on what had been done to her face, specifically her nose.

Whoever had done it had made the remains as crude and ugly as possible.

In Indian lore, as in the lore of Ancient Egypt, one cut the nose from a woman's face so that no man would ever again desire her. The mutilated woman often wandered into the woods and lived out her days alone. At least, these are the tales still told, though there is evidence that some of these women in fact took up new mates, and that others were simply accepted by the tribe the way a crippled person might be. Maybe it was only the most hideously defaced who had to flee to the forest to hide forever.

If she'd lived, this woman, who I now saw was a Native American, would have presented her plastic surgeon with some difficult problems. The killer had taken so much of the nose, and removed it so brutally, that only a bloody hole remained, one that was difficult to look at.

"He couldn't have done something like this, he couldn't have."

Cindy was talking to herself, but I could hear her quite clearly. She stood next to me in front of the open trunk.

Then she took my arm. "He didn't do it, Robert. Really he didn't."

Behind us, Gibbs said, "Cindy, could you come over here a minute, please?"

She shook her head. "You hear his voice?"

"Uh-huh."

"He's already got David convicted."

"You have to admit, this doesn't look real good."

"You think he'd be stupid enough to drive her around in his trunk?"

"You're a law officer, Cindy. You know how crazy people can get after they kill somebody. Especially if they've been drinking or something."

This time, she didn't take my arm. She grabbed it. "Goddamn it, Robert, didn't you hear me? He didn't kill her! He really didn't."

Then she went off to see the Chief. She was going to tell him the same thing.

Meanwhile, I spent some more time following down my ghoulish occupation. I borrowed the Chief's flashlight.

There's a little trick about postmortem lividity. Sometimes it can tell you if a body has been moved around in a cramped space, such as a car trunk. This means that even if the body has been moved, the lividity will indicate the original position. Sometimes it's helpful to know such things.

I knelt down next to the trunk, holding my breath — the stink being pretty bad — and started training my light up and down the right side of her body.

On the whole, I would rather have been back home with my cats sleeping on the bed next to me and a bowl of Cream of Wheat waiting to be microwaved in the morning.

O
n this part of the frontier, the cabins had generally been built of logs that had been squared with a broadax and stripped of their bark. The pioneers built cabins close to creeks and streams for the sake of the water supply; and in an area of woods that looked rife with wild game and crab apples and plums and haws; and where there was an abundance of prairie hay which, along with corn cobs and animal droppings, could be used for fuel in the long and harsh winters.

The pioneers would not have recognized the manor house perched above me on the bluffs. It sat on better than two acres of oaks and dogwoods, a brick Georgian Colonial that bespoke not only wealth and privilege but also a certain disdain for anybody who drove up the steep, winding driveway. The house itself seemed to sense that all visitors would be unworthy. The landscaping, which used vast maples and elms as walls to keep out prying eyes, only enhanced the sense of unwelcome.

I was two steps from my rental Chevrolet when I heard a tennis ball being
thwocked
back and forth. I decided not to try the front door.

Instead, I followed a narrow stone walk around the massive east side of the house. Below me, in a small valley, lay a most impressive tennis court. Not only was it a double court, it was an
illuminated
double court. Only one of the courts was presently being used. Claire and Perry Heston were playing, both looking fit and eager in their tennis whites that glowed in the early afternoon sunlight.

I was still sleepy and it showed in the slowness of my walk. I'd finally gotten to sleep around 9.00 A.M., after telling Chief Gibbs about finding the arm. He seemed wary of the fact that not only had I been one of the dreaded Feds — a criminal profiler, no less — but that I now possessed a private investigator's license and worked freelance for both law enforcement and criminal-defense attorneys. He didn't seem mollified at all that I was writing a book of Iowa history, and that I was presently occupied on a long chapter about law enforcement. He just couldn't find much to like about me at all.

I'd had five restless hours of sleep — sometimes when I take a certain amount of troubles to bed, I have nightmares about my wife's death again — when I was awakened by Cindy at my motel-room door.

She was no longer depressed and vulnerable. She was angry. She said that there were certain white men in this town who now had a good excuse to track and kill an Indian, namely David. She said that David would be too afraid and stubborn to turn himself in so, if he ever crossed paths with those men, he would fight back and they would kill him.

She said I had to help.
Had to.
There was nobody else she could turn to. She said she'd work the settlement, asking questions of anybody who knew David well, trying to find out about his relationship to the woman in the trunk. By now, I'd told her not only about the arm but also about the fire-gutted mansion I'd followed David to. I said I had a vague feeling that maybe the Hestons, and their hulking friend Bryce Cook, might know something about the old Victorian house. She pleaded with me to go talk to them.

So here I stood watching the Hestons play tennis.

From what I could see, and from what little I knew about the game, they looked reasonably good. They certainly looked energetic.

When Perry Heston finally realized who was walking down the stone steps toward him — he'd been glancing at me on and off for the past half-minute — he did a very strange thing.

He stopped playing altogether.

His wife's volley went zooming past his shoulder but he paid it no attention whatsoever.

He just stood, hands on hips, watching me.

His face bore the same disdain for weary travelers that the front of his house did.

Before I'd even reached the courts, he said, "Just what the hell are you doing here, Mr. Payne?"

"I came to talk to you."

"Not to me, Mr. Payne. Because I don't want to talk to you. Everything I ever had to say to you, I said last night. And now I want you the hell off my property."

Claire looked both slightly afraid and embarrassed. "Honey, why don't you give Mr. Payne a chance—"

"I won't give Mr. Payne a chance to do diddly shit."

"Honey, please—"

"Go in the house, Claire."

She started to say something but before she could get the words out, he repeated: "Go in the house."

Like a reluctant child, she looked first at him, then at me and then she leaned down and picked up a lime-green tennis ball, tucked her racket under her arm, and left.

She was just as gorgeous in the daylight, a forty-ish woman who took fierce pride in her face and body. She was going to battle time to her last breath. Only the melancholy of her blue eyes said that there was more to her than another fading country club beauty.

"He's really not a bad guy," she said to me as she came out of the door of the fencing.

"I'm sure we'll be great pals."

She paused a moment, and said, in a voice her husband wouldn't be able to hear, "I'm sorry about the girl being murdered, Mr. Payne."

"I told you to go in the house," Perry Heston said from the court.

There were probably at least two or three people on the planet who would refuse to obey a direct order from Perry Heston, but his wife was definitely not one of them.

"I need to go now," she said.

And was gone.

He came through the door in the cage, carrying his racket by the handle the way you'd carry a weapon.

Last night, he'd wanted to do a little public relations – a community leader probably shouldn't be seen beating somebody up in a parking lot – but this morning all he planned to show me was his contempt for my kind in general and me in particular.

"You've got some balls, I'll give you that, driving up here this way."

"I just have a few questions."

"I don't give a damn what you have, Sport. I just want you off my land."

"I don't think that David Rhodes killed the woman they found in his trunk."