Snowbound (9 page)

He said, “I don’t think I’ve been generous enough. And besides that, I want to do it, I want to give you something nice for Christmas.”

“You give me something nice every time we’re together,” she said, but the words were automatic, disassociated from her thoughts; she wanted to ask him how large the present was going to be—the way he talked, it was a substantial sum—but she did not want to seem overly expectant. Three hundred? Five hundred? Just how generous was he going to be?

“And you to me,” he said. “Tomorrow night, then?”

“Yes, Matt. Tomorrow night and any night you want.”

He drew her full against him, kissing her eyes as if in gratitude. Excitement stirred in her loins again, as much a result of anticipation of his Christmas gift as in response to his warm and naked masculinity. He clung to her, whispering her name, as she began to stroke him, make him ready again. And while one part of her mind concentrated on their rekindled passion, another part dwelled on the twenty-one thousand dollars she had saved thus far and the concomitant knowledge that if his present was as large as he had led her to believe, if she could prolong the affair with him and he continued to supply her with money, the time when she would finally be able to leave Hidden Valley was very close at hand. Another six or eight months, maybe even less; certainly no later than mid-fall of next year, before her twenty-second birthday, before the cold winter snows came.

Oh yes, long before the snows came. . . .

Wrapped in mackinaw and muffler and waterproof boots, Lew Coopersmith had just finished shoveling thick powder drifts from his front walk when Frank McNeil came to see him shortly past nine Tuesday morning.

It had stopped snowing sometime during the night, and the air had a crystal quality, clean and sharp like the slender ice daggers which gleamed on the front eaves of the house. A high, thin cloud-cover shielded the winter sun; but visibility was good, and you could see portions of the white-laced peaks marking higher elevations to the east. You could also see the thickening black snowclouds which obscured their crests, and you knew—sourly, in Coopersmith’s case—that there would be another heavy snowfall later in the day.

He leaned on the long handle of his shovel as McNeil’s ten-year-old Dodge plowed through the snow on Alpine Street and drew up just beyond his front gate—thinking irascibly: Fine, can’t think of anyone else I’d rather have come calling this morning. With McNeil, he saw, was the café owner’s son; the two of them got out of the car and came over to the gate.

“Morning, Frank, Larry.” Coopersmith’s voice was bland, without particular interest. “Something I can do for you?”

“I sure as Christ hope so,” McNeil said. His eyes shone with dark outrage, and his blunt face was flushed. “Somebody broke into the café last night.”

“What?”

“That’s right. Broke the lock off the rear door and then propped the goddamn door wide open. Storeroom was filled with snow when Larry and me went in to open up a few minutes ago—snow all over everything.”

Coopersmith abandoned his careless manner. “What was taken, Frank?”

“Nothing. Not a single thing.”

“You positive about that?”

“Hell yes. First thing we did was check the register and my cash box. They hadn’t been touched.”

“No supplies missing, either?”

“No.”

“Vandalism?”

“Just the rear door, that’s all.”

Coopersmith frowned. “Any idea who could have done it?”

“Damn it, no. It doesn’t make a bit of sense.”

“You report it yet?”

“I wanted to talk to you first.”

In spite of his dislike for McNeil, Coopersmith felt mildly appreciative of the implied confidence. He said crisply, “All right, Frank. Let’s go have a look.”

He propped his shovel against the cross-slatted fence and went with father and son to the Dodge. McNeil started the car and drove the four blocks to the Valley Café, pulled into the narrow, snowpacked alley that ran behind the building. He parked close to the café’s rear entrance, and Coopersmith got out immediately and went to look at the door.

The lock, old and flimsy, had been cleanly snapped by means of inserting a crowbar or some similar tool between the door edge and the jamb. There were splinter and gouge marks in the wood there which told him that much. The door was closed now. Coopersmith said, “You wedge it closed from the inside, Frank?”

“No. Latch still holds, even with the busted lock.”

Coopersmith opened the door and stepped into the small, somewhat cluttered storeroom. The floor inside was wet, still mounded in places with the snow—melting now —which had blown in during the night. To one side was a half-filled crate of oranges; indicating that, McNeil said, “Crate there was holding the door open.”

“That where you usually keep it—by the door?”

McNeil shook his head. “It’s supposed to be over there with the other fruits and vegetables.”

“Way it seems, then, whoever did it had nothing in mind except letting a lot of snow whip in here.”

“Yeah. But what the hell
for?”

“Could be a practical joke.”

“Some joke, if that’s it.”

“Or it could be somebody wanted to harass you a little.”

“Why’d anybody want to harass
me,
for Chrissake?”

“Well—you ruffle any feathers lately?”

“Not me. I get along with everyone, you know that.”

Yeah, Coopersmith thought. He moved slowly around the storeroom, found nothing, and pushed open the swing door that led to the front of the café.

Following him, McNeil said, “Like I told you: nothing taken, nothing disturbed.”

They went back into the storeroom, and Coopersmith said, “Best thing for you to do is report what happened to the substation in Soda Grove; but if you want, you can tell them not to bother sending a deputy over. Tell them I’ll look into it—ask around, see if anybody saw anything last night, and then check in with them later on.”

“What about fingerprints, stuff like that?”

“Frank, nothing was stolen, nothing was vandalized. Now I’ve got a fingerprint kit at the house, and I can get it and come back here and dust the door and the orange crate and everything else in the place, wet as it is. But what’s the point? Like as not, whoever did it is a valley resident, and I can’t go around taking prints of everybody who lives here. Besides, cold as it was during the night, he was probably wearing gloves anyway.”

“I’m supposed to just forget about it, then, is that it? Who’s going to pay for the damned lock?”

“I told you I’d look into it,” Coopersmith said. “When I find out who did it, he’ll pay for the lock or he’ll find himself up in front of a county judge.”

“He’ll go straight to jail, I got anything to say.”

Coopersmith pursed his lips. “You want to do it the way I said, or you want to call in a deputy from the substation?”

“Oh, you handle it. I guess you know what you’re doing.”

“Thanks,” Coopersmith said dryly. “You going to open up now?”

“Might as well, I suppose.”

“Well, I’ll walk home then. Exercise’ll do me good.”

“You’ll be asking around right away, won’t you?”

“I will. And if I find out anything, I’ll let you know.”

Coopersmith started for the door, and McNeil said abruptly, “Listen, Lew, I just thought of something.”

“What is it?”

“All of us who live in Hidden Valley, we know one another pretty well, and there’s none of us who’d pull a shitty trick like this. But there’s one person we don’t know nothing about. You understand who I’m talking about, Lew?”

“That Cain fella, I reckon.”

“That’s right. Maybe you’d better talk to
him
right off; maybe he’s the bastard who did this.”

“Why should he do it? You have some trouble with him?”

“Not exactly. But it could be he found out I asked you to run that check on him, it could be he’s got a hard-on for me over that.”

“I ran the check three months ago,” Coopersmith reminded him.

“Well, maybe he just found out about it. Anyhow, I don’t like that bird; I don’t trust him. Living up in the Hughes’ cabin all alone, don’t talk to nobody, walks around with his nose up like a dog just pissed on his leg. You can’t tell what somebody like that will do.”

Coopersmith thought about offering further words of reason, decided there was no point in reasoning with a man like McNeil, and said, “I’ll see what I can find out.” He nodded to the café owner and went out into the valley.

As he walked through the snow to Sierra Street, he realized that there was a certain purposeful spring in his step and that he felt better than he had in weeks. It was, he supposed, damned perverse of a man to feel good as a result of somebody else’s troubles, but he could not help himself; if only for a little while, and only on a very small scale, he was involved again, he was useful to others and to himself.

Kubion spent the morning prowling the large, slant-beam-ceilinged interior of the cabin at Mule Deer Lake: upstairs, downstairs, front and rear, smoking too much, drinking too much coffee. He no longer had the savage headache of the night before, but he felt restless and edgy—an impotent, caged kind of feeling. Two sticks of marijuana hadn’t helped either, although the joints he had blown after their arrival last night had dulled his proclivity for violence and allowed him to sleep. That was the problem with pot: sometimes it did for him, and sometimes it didn’t. As a result, he didn’t use it often, but he liked to keep a supply on hand; liquor soured his belly, and everybody needed some type of high once in a while—ease the pressure, get rid of the down feeling.

Neither Brodie nor Loxner had said anything about the near blowoff in the car coming in, and he hadn’t mentioned it either; all of them pretending it hadn’t happened. So he’d lucked out of another of those bastard headaches, but unless he could learn to hold himself in check, he couldn’t keep lucking out of them indefinitely. He’d wind up killing somebody, sure as hell, and when you killed people without good reason, you were as good as dead yourself. Well, he’d learn; he had to learn, and he would, and that was all there was to it. He just wasn’t going to do to himself what all the fuzz in the country hadn’t been able to do to him in seventeen years. No way. No frigging
way
.

Kubion came down the side hall from the rear porch into the living room. Loxner was sitting in one of the chairs grouped before a native-stone fireplace. He was his old bluff, stupid self today—pretending, too, that he hadn’t let his yellow show through when he’d taken the bullet at Greenfront. His left arm was suspended in a handkerchief sling; he’d found merthiolate and bandages in the bathroom medicine cabinet and had wrapped it up as soon as they’d come in. The bullet had missed bone, exiting cleanly, and he’d be able to use the arm again in a few days, once soreness and stiffness decreased.

In Loxner’s right hand was a bottle of Rainier Ale, and he was listening to the table model radio which had originally been in the kitchen—staticky country-and-western music, fading in and out at irregular intervals. The three of them had picked up a newscast on the radio over breakfast, and there were no fresh developments in Sacramento; the cops still hadn’t found the dummy car. The news announcer had no further information on the suspected whereabouts of the holdup men, but the implication was that local law enforcement officials figured they were still confined to the immediate Sacramento area. Which was fine, except that it didn’t change things much as far as they were concerned. Sure, the odds were good that they could leave today and make it to Vegas or L.A. without trouble and begin looking around for another score, a quick score; but when you’re wanted for Murder One, and one of you has a shot-up flipper, and you know how the little unforeseeable things can screw you up—like that security guard coming in at just the wrong time to screw up the Greenfront job—you don’t gamble, you don’t put your ass on the line.

Kubion wandered around the room and then stopped short near one of the front windows. Damn it, this aimless pacing back and forth wasn’t doing him any good. What he needed was to get out for a while: cold air, a sense of movement and activity. He went upstairs and got his coat off the floor in his room, where he’d thrown it last night. When he came down again, Brodie was standing with a paring knife in one hand and a potato in the other, talking to Loxner.

“You going out, Earl?” he asked as Kubion walked across to the door.

“That’s what it looks like, right?”

“For a walk, or into the village, or what?”

“Why?”

“Well, if you’re going into the village, I could use a couple of cans of tomato sauce. I want to make Veal Milanese for supper tonight.”

Tomato sauce, Kubion thought, Jesus Christ. Brodie had this thing for cooking—
culinary art,
he called it—and he was always making crap like Veal Milanese and baked stuffed chicken and pineapple glazed ham. He said it was a hobby with him—he’d gotten interested from his mother, who’d won some kind of national prize once. Some hobby for a man; it was more the kind of hobby you’d expect a fag to have; and Kubion wasn’t all that sure about Brodie. Vic had a reputation as a stud, Mr. Supercock, but with that pretty-boy face of his and this
culinary art
business, maybe underneath his hard professionalism he was Mr. Superqueer instead; you never knew these days who was taking it up the ass and who wasn’t.