Bad Company Read online

“Sure,” Sally said, “if you don’t think it would be an intrusion.”

  “We need you around. Brit’s here, but with the other kids gone, Mary’s feeling a little bereft.”

  “I’ll be happy to help Mary any way I can,” Sally said. She knew that Brit’s sister was in London with the university’s summer abroad program, and her little brother was up in the Wind River mountains with some survival school where they gave you a box of matches and a sharp stick and sent you out to live on snowmelt and lichens. Mothers needed their children at times like this, but in a pinch, friends helped.

  “Hell, if nothing else, it’ll be good to have you there to give Nattie somebody to whine at,” Delice said. Natalie Charlay Langham was Delice’s sister-in-law, Dwayne’s wife. Nattie had started out adulthood as a bartender at the Gallery, a low-rent watering hole that specialized in good bands, bad bathrooms, and steamy Saturday nights. By marrying Dwayne, who’d done very nicely in banking, Nattie had risen to become a Realtor, known for her garish ways of spending Dwayne’s money and her rather too obvious predilection for screwing around on her husband. Delice had remarked on many public occasions that she hoped Nattie would one day fuck herself into a divorce.

  Sally wasn’t much on Nattie either, but she sometimes found entertainment in trying to piss her off. “If it helps you to have me deal with her, I’m willing. I should probably eat some yogurt or something first, so that my stomach’s well-lined. Should Hawk come?”

  “Hawk’s welcome to come too, but if he’s got something else going on, you can tell him that there’ll be plenty of stuff he can do for us later.”

  “Okay. I think he’d been planning a day in the field with one of his grad students. How’s Dickie?”

  “He’s already gone to work, down at the Lifeway talking to the other employees.” Delice paused, and when she started talking again, sounded more like her normal feisty self. “Jesus, I hope he finds the guy quick. You should have heard my cocktail waitresses going wacko last night when they heard the news. By the time we closed up, they were all demanding that somebody had to walk them to their cars. They were sure they’d be dragged off by a homicidal rapist. Imagine what the supermarket checkers are saying today.”

  Sally could. Tell the truth, she was feeling a little shaky herself. But then, she had the right. What she’d seen the day before was finally beginning to sink in. “I guess you can’t blame them,” she allowed.

  “I don’t blame anybody for anything, except the bastard that killed Monette. But I hate to think that tonight I’ll be walking my customers to their cars too. By tomorrow night people could be deciding to stay home behind locked doors and watch Walker, Texas Ranger on TV, or go back to wherever they came from and skip the rodeo, or just move along down the road. You know how rumors spread in this town. The paranoia could get out of hand pretty easy.”

  No kidding. Laramie had its share of bar fights, domestic incidents, drunk and disorderlies, traffic accidents, and small-time property crimes, but as in most small towns, citizens hardly questioned their safety. People didn’t much bother to lock their houses or their cars. With a population of twenty-six thousand, you’d never go more than ten minutes in public without running into somebody you knew. It might be some annoying person (Sally thought of Amber McCloskey and remembered, with vexation, that she had to go take care of things at Edna’s that afternoon). Still, there was something reassuring about living in such a neighborly place. Delice liked to tell the story of how her son, Jerry Jeff, had once left his bicycle at Washington Park after a soccer game, and two days later, not only was the bike still there, but a neighbor out for a morning walk recognized it, knew who it belonged to, and wheeled it back to Delice’s house.

  Rape was uncommon, or at least hardly ever reported. Murder was rare. Rape and murder, in combination, was almost unheard of. And it was, Sally thought with a rush of fury, unacceptable.

  “You’re right,” she said. “I’m sure that this is all people are talking about.”

  Sally had her first demonstration of that fact when the phone rang only seconds after she’d hung up from talking to Delice. She picked up the phone. “Have you seen the paper?” said a soft steely voice.

  “Not yet, Maude. I haven’t even had a cup of coffee.”

  “Well go get your coffee and your Boomerang and call me back. Something’s happened, and we’ve got to take action.”

  “Action?” said Sally.

  “A girl’s been raped and murdered—Monette Bandy. She works down at the Lifeway.”

  “Yeah, I know, Maude,” said Sally. “She’s Dickie and Mary’s niece. I’m going over there later to be with them. I’m sure they’ll be grateful for your concern.”

  “They’re next on my list,” said Maude. “I didn’t want to call them too early.”

  Maude Stark, chairperson of the Dunwoodie Foundation, was a six-foot, sixty-something pistol, who wore T-shirts with slogans like “Get Your Laws Off My Body.” She was also the richest former housekeeper in Wyoming, a stalwart friend of womankind who baked like an angel, benefactor to a passel of causes, and a person who knew exactly what to do with a shotgun. She had a little farm outside Laramie and had probably been up since four, feeding her chickens and working in her garden and greenhouse. She’d never scrupled about early morning phone calls to Sally. She was showing restraint.

  “That’s good, Maude,” said Sally, not sure what else was expected.

  “I really think the community needs to get together to talk about how to fight this kind of violence,” Maude insisted. “Maybe some public expression of outrage is in order. This kind of thing should not be happening in our town.”

  Sally tried to focus on what Maude was saying. “Like some kind of demonstration or something?” she asked. “I sympathize with your point, but in the middle of Jubilee Days? I don’t know about that. A lot of people aren’t going to be too thrilled about the idea of focusing on this murder during the biggest business week of the year.”

  In her younger years Sally would have been rushing to the barricades too. Like Maude, she was horrified, but she was more realistic nowadays. Thousands of people were coming to Laramie to watch cowboys do battle with large, unruly mammals, to drink rivers of beer and boogie until their shoes melted, maybe try to get laid. If instead, you laid a Take Back the Night rally on them, how many would just close up their wallets and say adios?

  “I know there’ll be people worrying about their bank accounts instead of our women, but for me it’s a matter of honor,” said Maude. “Let’s keep in touch. I’ve got some more calls to make,” she finished, and hung up.

  And so Sally’s day began. Hawk, always an early riser, was already up and gone. He’d left a note—“At the gym. Back soon. Here’s your newspaper. Love, Fido.” He was off to his early morning basketball game at the university gym. Sally wondered if Detective Atkins was there too, keeping to the routine. Such a normal thing to do, on such a strange day.

  Do normal things, she told herself. It helps.

  She began the elaborate but familiar ritual of morning coffee making, a consumer ceremony that was, Sally had to admit, threatening to get out of hand. She’d thought her coffee obsession bad enough when she’d insisted on mail-ordering coffee beans from Peet’s in California, to Laramie. But it turned out there was another level of fetishization she had yet to achieve. When Hawk gave her a cappuccino maker for Christmas, she reached that new plateau.

  It was an elaborate rite that bordered on excessive: meting out beans and grinding them, measuring water, watching every second while the coffee dripped to just the right level in the glass carafe, pouring just enough milk into a stainless steel pitcher, getting the amount of steam and foam just right. The results were pleasing, but were they worth the damn fuss? When it came right down to it, you could get just as good a caffeine buzz by drinking four or five cups of the translucent horse dung extract Delice served up at the Wrangler.

  Well, Sally thought, at least I know the difference be
tween shit and shinola.

  Good thing. More shit was on the way. She sat down at the table and unfolded the Laramie Daily Boomerang. The story of Monette’s murder appeared on the second page, below the fold—the top story on the front page was, of course, about the Jubilee Days rodeo queen and her court. There were large photographs of five carefully coiffed and made-up girls, smiling in spangled Western wear, with accompanying stories about their hobbies, studies, religious beliefs, missions in life, and favorite rodeo events. Young and pretty, full of fire and piety and promise, sweethearts of the rodeo.

  The murder didn’t even lead the second page. That honor was reserved for a piece about a rancher who’d found himself compelled to “put down” a calf that had been attacked, and grievously chewed up, by a coyote. Wyoming newspapers could be hell on predators, at least the four-legged kind. A color picture of the mutilated calf took up a quarter of the page, roughly five times the space allotted to the murder of Monette Bandy.

  Way down below, a small headline read, “Newcastle Girl Slain Near Cheyenne.” True, Sally thought, Monette had moved to Laramie only six months or so earlier, but she had been, after all, a resident of the community, gainfully employed at a local business, related by blood to one of Laramie’s really solid families. Saying she was a “Newcastle girl” was a little like stripping off her epaulets and tossing her out of the fort.

  And saying she’d been killed “near Cheyenne” was a bit of a stretch—Vedauwoo was between Laramie and Cheyenne, if anything a little closer to the former than the latter. Mentioning Cheyenne was a time-honored way of getting Laramie people to think that the story was about someplace else, a town full of politicians that was nearly in Nebraska.

  The story itself was brief and to the point—Monette Bandy, twenty-one, a Newcastle resident who had recently relocated to Laramie, had been found murdered at the Devil’s Playground in the Laramie Range. She’d been employed at the Lifeway. The Albany County Sheriff’s Department was investigating. Sexual assault was suspected. The police had, at this point, no leads.

  Obviously the Boomerang didn’t think it was in the best interest of the town, of the good citizens who survived through the long, dark winter and looked forward to the annual summer party, to play up the murder. Tourists wouldn’t be pleased. And that meant bad news for the many Laramie folk who waited all year not only for long, warm days, but for the sound of ringing cash registers.

  She understood self-interest, but could people really be this callous? Maybe Maude had a point. Sally took a sip of cappuccino, and tasted rage. Poor Monette. She’d been nothing but a transient and a loser, and her death was barely a blip on the screen. If the Boomerang was any evidence of anything, the town’s boosters were more worried about maintaining the festival atmosphere, and the accompanying profit potential, than about the brutal snuffing out of a fellow human, a pathetically exploitable young woman, a neighbor. It was disgusting. What if, instead of Monette, one of the rodeo princesses had been raped and murdered? Sally bet the Boomer would’ve paid attention.

  Boy howdy.

  If she had anything to say about it, she vowed as she drank the last, rich, dreg-free swallow from her cup, they wouldn’t bury Monette Bandy so damn deep and easy.

  Chapter 4

  Working People

  Just her luck. Sally arrived at Dickie and Mary’s at the very moment that Nattie Langham was pulling up in front, taking up two parking spaces with her big, shiny four-wheel-drive Cadillac Escalade, an automobile name that always gave Sally the appalled giggles. Sally had been known to covet a fully loaded off-road unit or two, but down deep, she held it as an article of faith that the luxury sport utility vehicle was a multiple oxymoron, designed chiefly to swill gasoline and impress other people who had more money than sense. She could just imagine what would happen to Nattie’s deep pile carpet and leather upholstery if she were ever compelled to actually take that Escalade on a Wyoming dirt road in the rain. How much good would the satellite navigation system be, wallowing down a gully-rutted track fast turning bottomless, ending up hub-deep in red gumbo? Then again, how much good would Nattie’s stiletto heels be when she had to walk out for help?

  But today Nattie had put aside the spike pumps for bright turquoise lizard cowboy boots, with toes pointy enough to skewer the most active cockroach scurrying into the least accessible corner. The boots matched a new turquoise cowboy hat festooned with a whole pheasant’s worth of feathers, a sleeveless Western shirt in the same color with white silk fringe dangling fetchingly from the front and back yokes, white jeans tight enough to leave no doubt about what Nattie wasn’t wearing underneath, cinched up with a black leather belt with a solid gold reproduction of a championship rodeo buckle. She was also wearing a button bearing the message, “We’re the Real Deal, Podner”—the company slogan for Branch Homes on the Range. Just your typical cowgirl drag.

  Nattie was giving the seams of her jeans a stress test, trying to haul an industrial-size coffee urn out of the back of the Escalade. The coffeepot had gotten jumbled up with all the other junk she kept in the car. Most Wyomingites did, of course, keep emergency equipment in their vehicles. Every fall Sally outfitted the trunk of her Mustang with a winter supply box that held tire chains, a quart of antifreeze, a scraper, window de-icer, a whisk broom for sweeping snow off the windows, a flashlight with spare batteries, a sleeping bag, some highway flares, and a first aid kit. Year-round she carried water (frozen solid all winter, of course), a shovel, a couple of boards, and jumper cables. The toolbox in the back of Hawk’s old Ford pickup contained a slightly more elaborate set of gear since he did so much off-road driving, out in the field. It made sense to be prepared.

  Hawk, like most people in the state, also kept a loaded gun in his vehicle; in his case a Smith and Wesson .38 in the glove box. Sally made a point of not keeping a gun of any kind, anywhere. Those of her Wyoming friends who knew about her eccentric weaponlessness considered it a delusional vestige of sixties liberalism.

  The stuff in the back of Nattie’s Escalade was, well, the escalated version of anybody’s emergency kit. Three gallons of antifreeze. A propane torch. A Coleman lantern. An assortment of different-size boards, a sawed-off broom, and not one but two shovels. Not just tire chains, but a tow chain, a saw, and enough rope to pitch a circus tent. If the visible stuff was any indication, Nattie probably had a howitzer in her glove compartment. Judging by everything she’d accumulated in the back, you’d think Nattie was a maniac lumberjack, heading out to pull stumps in the dead of winter. But in fact, in an automotive crisis, Sally couldn’t imagine Nattie hefting anything much heavier than a cell phone to call the Triple A. She’d never risk one of her famous fingernails.

  Today, Sally noticed as she parked and went to help, the nails were bright orange with white diagonal pin-stripes. The orange matched Nattie’s hair, which would probably never be permitted to develop either stripes or whiteness. Knowing that the day would go worse for them all if Nattie experienced so much as a chip in her manicure, Sally dislodged the spigot of the coffeepot from under the broom handle, found the big lid wedged between the torch and a leaky five-gallon water jug, retrieved the innards of the pot from the tangle of shovels and broom and damp, muddy ropes and chains. “You ought to clean out for the summer, Nat, or at least hose this shit down,” Sally said, surprised to find evidence that somebody had actually had the Escalade out on the dirt, sometime since the day it had rolled off an assembly line in Mexico or Canada (buy American!).

  “Oh crap, that’s Dwayne’s problem,” said Nattie, picking up the coffeepot without bothering to thank Sally for helping. “He’s the one that said he wanted me to get the Escalade, for safety reasons. He’s so worried about me, afraid I’ll be out in some new development or showing a ranch sometime and end up in the ditch. He just loads the back up with everything he thinks I could possibly need. I think there’s a case of Spam buried in there somewhere, if I’m stuck for a month and need survival rations. Or at least that’s what he
tells me. Then he borrows it all the time to go fishing, and I end up having to drive around in his little-bitty Beamer—like, how safe is that if I’m broadsided by some goombah in a monster truck?”

  Sally shook her head. “Yeah. That really does suck.”

  Nattie missed the irony. “I guess!” she said, sighing as they walked up to the door and rang the bell. “I really hope this Monette thing doesn’t mess up Jubilee Days.”

  Sally chose to act as if she hadn’t heard. With what the Langhams had to face in the next few days, it wouldn’t be fair to anyone to have to open the door this morning and find Sally socking Nattie on the nose.

  Brit Langham answered the door, and Sally half wished she’d gone ahead and done the clobbering. Brit would have appreciated it, for one thing. For another, Sally liked the idea of doing something that might get a reaction out of the Langham family’s most blasé member. Sally would never have predicted that she’d have to come to Wyoming to understand the meaning of “sangfroid,” but the term must have been invented for Brittany Langham. In the two years that Sally had been back in Laramie, she’d often amused herself watching Brit fail to react to things that turned other people into hysterics. On those occasions Sally recalled Dorothy Parker’s famous remark about Katharine Hepburn’s acting running the gamut of emotions from A to B. Sally had once seen Brit moved nearly to C, but that was a life and death matter.

  At twenty-three, Brit was blessed with a supermodel body, ash-blond hair and aquamarine eyes, and the kind of lips that made a disinterested pout a weapon of mass destruction. Men tended to assume that anyone that beautiful must be stupid, and Brit always used their pathetically false assumptions to her advantage. She was headed for law school at the University of Wyoming in the fall, and Sally got positively gleeful contemplating what would happen to the first fool who faced Brit across a courtroom.

  “I’ll take that,” Brit said, relieving Nattie of the coffee urn and holding the door open. “Looks like we’re gonna need it. We’ve had, like, sixty calls already, maybe half of them from people who say they’ll be bringing a coffee cake by. Maude says she’s already baked four loaves of pumpkin bread and a plum kuchen. Now all we need is ten pounds of coffee.”