The Deader the Better (15 page)

“Do tell?”

“Anyway…according to Mark”—she bobbed her eyebrows up and
down—“the tax rules for homesteads differ radically from those
which cover regular property.” She waved a hand.

“Did you know that a homestead reverts to the county if it’s
not continuously occupied by the owner or his agent?”

“Really?”

“According to Casanova. He went into all this legal mumbo jumbo,
but the deal is this: There’s an old law, still on the books, that
allows cities or counties to foreclose on homesteads after the taxes
are more than ninety days in arrears.”

“How long do regular property owners have?”

“According to Tressman, virtually indefinitely. All they have to
do is occasionally make some sort of token payment on the back taxes
and the city or the county is required to start the eviction process
all over again.”

“How long has she got?”

“Eleven days.”

“What if the taxes are paid?”

“Tressman claims it’s too late for that. He said J.D.
challenged the order and the edict was upheld by a county judge.”

“If the law were that cut-and-dried there wouldn’t be more
lawyers than white rats,” I said. “We better get Jed on this
right away.”

“Amen,” she sighed. “I stopped at the clerk’s office.”

“What’s he like?”

“She. Nancy Weston. And…pretty much what you’d expect. Fifty
or so. Struggling to stay in single-digit dress sizes. A bit full of
herself. A little officious, maybe.” She took a sip of coffee.
“Their records show that this year’s taxes were due on March
fifteenth and had technically been in arrears for several months
before the county took action.”

“Why aren’t the taxes part of the payment on the note? That’s
what everybody else does.”

“Because there is no note. J.D. paid cash. She also confirms
that the county did indeed make Mr. Bendixon a number of offers for
his property and…”—she bent over the table and made a
scrunched-up face—“and although she was not at liberty to divulge
the exact figures, she thought she could safely say that the figures
I had mentioned were by no means far from the mark.”

“Not that she’s one to gossip,” I said.

“Perish the thought.”

“What else?”

“The body.”

She pulled a handful of photographs from the bench beside her.

“Do I want to see those?”

She held the photos against her chest and leafed through them.
“You know…when the flesh is rendered this far asunder…” She
looked up at me. “Just think of it as E.T.”

She pushed the stack across the table. I picked up the top
picture, turned it right side up. Not E.T. What it looked like was a
mummy. One of those Egyptian mummies I’d seen on the Discovery
Channel a while back. All black like tarred leather and clenched up,
its mouth agape and eyeless sockets somehow seeming to bulge. The
face was gone from the nose down.

“What happened to the head?”

“It exploded,” she said. “Look at the last picture.”

It was a view from the back, with the mummy lying on its side. The
back of the head had a hole in it. “In a very hot fire, the brain
and the fluid surrounding it begin to boil. If the fire lasts long
enough and the temperature inside the skull gets hot enough, the
skull literally explodes.” I must have looked dubious. “Think of
those self-contained popcorn things you buy. The ones where the
tinfoil top swells up until it breaks open.”

I made a mental note to buy chips for a while. I worked my way
back through the photos until I got to the one I’d started on.

“Anything catch your eye?” I asked her.

“What catches the eye here is that, from a forensic standpoint,
we don’t know anything. J.D. could have died from bubonic plague
for all we know. The undertaker never even took an X-ray.” She
pulled the photos from my hands and rifled through them. “If you
are asking me what I’d get on the stand and swear to…From the
pelvis, it’s a male…by the table ruler, the cadaver measures
sixty-four inches, so even allowing for double the normal amount of
tissue shrinkage, he was probably under six feet in life. That and
the cadaver was badly burned in a fire that, in all probability,
included an accelarant.” She turned the photos facedown. “Any
more is speculation. What about you?”

“I discovered that just about everybody in town had an active
dislike for our former friend Mr. J.D. Springer.”

“Like Sheriff Hand told us.”

“Worse. I’m telling you, Rebecca, six to sixty, blind,
crippled or crazy, they uniformly despise the guy.”

“Isn’t it odd,” she said, “that you and I should have a
vision of a man that is so completely at odds with what everyone else
seems to think?”

“It’s eerie, is what it is,” I said. “Kind of makes me
wonder what else we might be missing.”

“What else?” she pressed.

I told her about my brief conversation with Linc.

“Am I missing some profundity here, too?” she asked.

“Just an odd little exchange, is all. I mean, why hem and haw
about it? Either he did or he didn’t sell J.D. the gas. Either way,
he’s not responsible.”

She wasn’t impressed. “Anything else?”

“Then I ran into the Chamber of Commerce person.”

“Bubbles with the blue truck?”

I knew there was no way it had gone unnoticed, Ramona Haynes had
gotten out of the truck with me. Before we got a chance to shake
hands and offer farewells, she gave herself a good stretch, lacing
her fingers together behind her, arching her back and rotating her
shoulders. I’d made it a point to check the clouds for rain.

“Yeah,” seemed like the right answer.

“Did she do those sort of contortions the whole time you were
with her?”

I did it well. Face like a rock. “What contortions were those?”

“That skywriting-with-my-nipples act she was doing out there in
the parking lot. The one that caused that old geezer at the front
table to drop his fork in his lemonade.”

Mount Rushmore. “I musta missed it,” I said.

“Hmmmm,” was her reply.

“Now, Miss Haynes—” I began.

“Bubbles?”

“Yeah…Miss Haynes, as far as I could tell, sort of liked J.D.
She just thought he was an insensitive, paranoid loser who had no
idea what he was doing.”

“Good thing she liked him.”

“Around here, that’s as good as it gets.”

“What now?”

“So…let’s go back to J.D. and Claudia’s place.”

“Why?”

“There’s something I need to check.”

She started to speak. I jumped in. “I don’t want to say
anything until I check back at the homestead, okay?”

“I hate it when you do this.”

I changed the subject. “Is that why you told me about this
Tressman character being such a letch and coming on to you?”

“What?”

“Because you were jealous of Miss Haynes?”

Flabbergasted, then disgusted: “Is that what you think? Don’t
flatter yourself.”

“It was, wasn’t it?”

She put on her conspiratorial face. “Let me ask you something.”

“Go ahead,” I said.

“Do you ever…” She wagged a finger in my face. “Tell the
truth. Do you ever wish that I had a set like that?”

I tried, “A set of what?” But it didn’t float. She cupped
her hands and held them about a foot from her chest.

“Arthritic hands?”

“Answer the question.”

“You mean knockers?”

She nodded. I gave her my best shit-eating grin and my best
southern drawl. “Hell, darlin’, you had you a pair a hooters like
that, I’d never leave the house.”

She got to her feet and put two bucks on the table. “You’re an
evil man,” she said.

THREE-POINT-NINE MILES PAST THE BRIDGE, I PULLED THE car into a
turnout. Two hundred yards ahead, the dirt road turned sharply to the
right. “This is about where the sheriff said the accident took
place. Let’s see if we can find the spot.”

On the left, the road cut rose ten feet into the dark trees above.
On the right the ground fell away in a hurry. The absence of reliable
light persuaded the vegetation to experiment. No two trees or bushes
or vines grew from the earth at precisely the same angle. Dark
shoulders of granite loomed among the sword fern and bracken.

Rebecca said what I was thinking. “Sheriff Hand said you could
see it all the way in town, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

Ahead the ground grew steeper, and the plants fewer. Mostly native
scrub oak. The boulders ran in lines like knuckles across the slopes.
“There,” she said. Must have been two hundred feet down the
ravine. Looked like it had been hit with a meteor. A thirty-by-thirty
boulder blackened nearly to the top. A quarter acre of black,
scorched earth.

“Went over right here,” I said, pointing to a broken piece of
embankment right in front of my feet. Thirty feet ahead, the tow
trucks had plowed a path with the burned-out chassis. Rebecca walked
over, looked down the chute and said, “Let’s go.”

It took us ten minutes to get down to the wreck site and half an
hour to climb back out. Not because the climb was so arduous, but
because it was on the way back out when we finally got smart and
stopped obsessing on the destination and started paying attention to
the journey. Actually, she, not we.

The site itself was nothing special. We tramped around on the
sooty vegetation for a few minutes, as if we were going to learn
something through osmosis, and then started back up, this time taking
the elliptical route the car had taken, rather than the nearly
straight up-and-down section we’d descended. We were halfway back
up the hill, sitting on a boulder for a breather, when Rebecca looked
at her hands.

“Did I touch anything when we were down at the scene?”

“Not that I recall.”

“Then why are my hands all dirty?”

I checked mine. Same deal. All black.

“Must be coming from the bushes,” I said, referring to the
omnipresent scrub oak that we’d both been using to pull ourselves
back up the ravine.

“I thought the scenario was that the car hit the rock and then,
for reasons unknown, burst into flames.”

I reckoned how that was likewise my conception. We continued up,
paying attention now, getting down on our knees to rummage among the
leaves. No doubt about it. Halfway down the hill the car had been on
fire. The wiry oak stalks were singed. Here and there, half-burned
leaves lay among their freshly fallen brethren. By the time we
reached the top, we were certain. When J.D. Springer’s car had left
the road, it had been fully engulfed in flames.

“Maybe he lit a cigarette or something?” I tried.

“What with…a blow torch?”

We started for the car. “I want to drive,” I said. I took it
easy, nosing my way around the blind corners all the way to J.D.’s
place.

“I need to use the bathroom,” Rebecca announced.

I started up the incline toward the shop. I didn’t like what I
was thinking at all. When I opened the spigot on the tank marked U, I
liked it even less. U for unleaded. D for diesel. I tried to shake
the tanks but they wouldn’t budge. I stooped down and put my back
under the unleaded tank as if I were going to dead-lift it. No way.

I searched the perimeter of the building and came up with a
weathered piece of one-by-two about five feet long. I climbed the
makeshift stairs at the back of the tanks, unscrewed the bung on the
unleaded tank and stuck the oneby-two down inside. The tank was
nearly full. My high school math had deserted me even before high
school, so I was forced to look at the tank and ask myself how many
fifty-five-gallon drums it would hold. Four, I figured. Something
like two hundred gallons of gas.

“Leo,” Rebecca yelled.

I hustled down the hill. Her face was in a knot.

“I called J.D.’s parents. They’re frantic. They haven’t
heard from Claudia and the kids, either. Not since she shipped the
body back.”

“How’d you get the number?”

“They were autodial number one,” she said. I told you. A smart
girl. Her face forced me to play my hand.

“Okay, listen…this isn’t for sure or anything, but I think
maybe Claudia and the kids are over on the reservation. Probably at
the daycare center where she works.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because the inflatable boat she’s been using to go to work is
missing.”

She put her hands on her hips. “Well, why in bloody hell didn’t
you say so?”

“Because it was a lot more likely she was with J.D.’s folks.
And because I didn’t want to get your hopes up and then turn out to
be wrong.”

She poked me in the chest with her finger. Once for every word.
“Tell you what…from now on, I want you to feel free to get my
hopes up…okay?”

I checked my shirt for holes and said I would.

“Why would she go over there?” she asked.

“Maybe because it’s safe,” I said.

I jogged inside and pulled the keys to both jet boats from their
hooks in the kitchen. Each had a blue floating key chain with the
Three Rivers logo.

I got the right key in the right boat on the first try. Set it
neutral, quarter throttle, turned the key…started right up with a
deep throbbing sound. I let it idle.

“What were you doing up there on the hill?” she asked.

“Checking those tanks.”

“And?”

“And the one marked ‘U’ has about two hundred gallons of
unleaded gas in it. Which begs the question—”

She finished for me. “Why a man with that much fuel at home
would be riding around with ten gallons of gas in his car?”

“If he’d been traveling toward town,” I began, “then
maybe—”

“But he wasn’t,” she said. “He clearly was on his way
home.”

Implications hung above us like cannon smoke. I pushed the red
handle forward a notch, increasing the rpms. “I don’t like it,”
I said after a minute. “I don’t like it that the guy who owns the
only gas station in town can’t answer a simple question about
whether or not he sold J.D. some gas. I don’t like it that J.D.
needed ten gallons of gasoline like a fish needs a bicycle, and I
really don’t like it that the car was fully engulfed in flame when
it left the road. Something stinks here.”