Bad Company Read online

  “Somebody else can do that,” said Nattie, sweeping past Brit. “I’ve done my part.”

  “I’d be glad to get coffee and whatever you all need, later,” Sally said. “I don’t mind.”

  “She borrowed the pot from her office,” Brit whispered to Sally. “Big deal.”

  “You might want to run some water and baking soda through it,” Sally advised, making a face. “I saw the inside, and I’d bet that nobody at Branch Homes on the Range has washed that sucker out since private property was invented.”

  “I’d better get to it, then,” Brit said. “We’ve been telling people not to come until later this afternoon, but it hasn’t been easy fighting them off. A lot of them aren’t even really friends of Mom’s. I don’t know why the hell they think they should barge in.”

  Sally narrowed her eyes. “Most of ’em are well-intentioned. But then again, some people in Laramie would have been great in Victorian London. They’d have made a point out of getting to public executions early so they’d get a front row seat for the hanging.”

  Sally entered to the sound of the ringing telephone. So far, however, only the family had arrived. Mary, eyes red but dry, sat on the couch, next to Delice. Neither of them was dressed for mourning. Mary wore loose black-and-white print pants with a matching short-sleeved tunic top, the kind of outfit she’d wear to her job as a secretary in the College of Education, comfortable but presentable daywear for a middle-aged woman who’d given up on the battle of the bulge. Delice was attired for business too, but her job had a different dress code, especially this week. She wore a cream-and-brown Western shirt, a pair of form-fitting Levi’s, her thousand-dollar Charlie Dunn boots, and enough silver jewelry to keep the Navajo economy afloat on her purchases alone. She looked distressed but great as she always had, trim and wiry, long black hair in a fat braid fastened with a carved silver clip. Obviously, she was planning to go from Dickie and Mary’s straight to work at the Wrangler.

  Mary probably didn’t plan to go in to work today, but everybody else was obviously taking the morning off from their jobs. Sally herself had planned to catch up on some of that backlog of scholarly reading, and was feeling secretly guilty for having put the work aside. Brit, who’d sworn that, as God was her witness, she’d never waitress again, was wearing a long flowered skirt and tailored white shirt—Sally surmised that she must have been pressed into service as an extra hostess at the Yippie I O. Nattie’s costume, ridiculous as it was, was supposed to make her a walking billboard for Branch Homes on the Range. She was already on her cell phone, calling into her office to check for messages, rescheduling appointments, chatting up clients. Dwayne walked in, making a concession to the rodeo in a Western-cut jacket instead of his usual banker’s pinstripes. Delice’s son, Jerry Jeff, who at not quite fifteen seemed to have grown a foot since Sally had seen him a month ago, followed, with grass stains on his pants and green dirt under his fingernails from his summer yard work business. Sally told herself she’d never seen such a hardworking bunch.

  With the exception of Dickie, whose job it was to find Monette’s killer, and Brit’s brother and sister, who were away for the week, the Langhams were there for Mary. Much more than for Monette. Nobody, as far as Sally knew, had been close enough to the girl to really grieve for her.

  Sally went over to the couch. Mary stood up. As they hugged, Sally felt the sorrow and fatigue radiate from Mary’s warm, soft body.

  “Thanks for coming, Mustang,” Mary said. “I guess the hordes are going to start descending this afternoon, and we might need you to do a little steppin’ and fetchin’. I don’t know if this could have come at a worse time. Everybody’s so busy.”

  “There’s no good time with something like this,” Sally said. “It’s just senseless and sad. But Dickie’ll find the guy who did it, I know.”

  There was a bleak expression on Mary’s round, pretty face. “You think so? There are a couple thousand people a day passing through town this week, not to mention all the highway traffic all summer long, or all the local garbage a girl like Monette could have picked up since she moved here. And the guy who killed her could be way long gone, just some piece of poisoned trash rollin’ down the highway. I really wish I felt more optimistic about that.”

  Brit came in the room, bringing a can of Diet Coke for her mother and one for herself. She flopped down in an overstuffed chair, and Mary sat back down on the couch, making room for Sally beside her.

  “You’d be surprised what the cops can do,” Sally said, trying to sound reassuring. “Dickie’s got a great team. It’s amazing to watch them work. Far as I could tell, they collected every single conceivable piece of anything that was lying around up there, and I guarantee, in the next couple of days they’ll be talking to everyone in Laramie who even saw Monette in the last week. I bet that if Dickie has his way, his guys’ll talk to anybody who ever bought a box of cereal at the Lifeway. And that Detective Atkins guy, jeez. By the time he was done asking me questions, I was looking at my arm to see how deep the teeth marks were. They’ll find a trail.”

  “Yeah, that Scotty’s a real bloodhound. But with Monette, there’s liable to be a whole bunch of trails. She took after my sister. She never met a jerk she didn’t want to take home and beg to abuse her.”

  “Bummer to admit it, but it’s true,” Brit put in. “Monette was sitting at the bar at the Wrangler last weekend, pounding down White Russians and doing her damndest to pick up the worst-lookin’ men in the place. She ended up leaving with an ugly little guy who had about three teeth in his whole head, none of which met.”

  “Did she have a thing for guys with bad teeth?” Sally wondered, thinking that might be a clue to who had lured her out to Vedauwoo.

  “Nope,” said Brit. “She went for all kinds, as long as they were gross. This particular one wasn’t a regular, just some skank passing through, and from the look of it she was planning to take him home with her that night, or go to his motel, or whatever.”

  Nattie, punching “end” on one call, pressing more buttons and getting ready for “send” on another, chimed in. “Dwayne and I were down there too, and it was downright embarrassing. She was making a spectacle of herself. Disgusting.”

  Sally heard Delice mutter something about pots and kettles, and Sally said, “So what do you think, Dee?”

  “Yeah, I saw her,” Delice admitted. “And it wasn’t the first time. Sometimes when I was bartending I had to cut her off when I thought she was getting too wasted for her own good. It never seemed to help. She’d get surly, or she’d get all baby-faced and hurt, but one way or the other, it seemed like the whole purpose was to hook on to some loser for the night. It was like Russian roulette.”

  Sally had run women’s centers, had volunteered for rape crisis hotlines. She knew something about that kind of sexual compulsiveness in women. She tried to put the question delicately. “Mary,” she said, holding both of her friend’s hands, looking straight into her eyes, “is there any suggestion that when she was a kid, some man may have messed with her?”

  And now Mary looked truly wretched. “I’ve thought about it.” She swallowed. “But maybe she was just looking for somebody to be nice to her. It wasn’t like she had it easy at home, no matter what my sister tried to do. That Bone Bandy is one nasty-ass motherfucker. Pardon my French, but that’s the God’s honest truth. He’s little, but he’s mean as a rattlesnake and twice as twisty. Tanya stayed with him more than twenty years, and I’ll never understand why, as long as I live.

  “Before they were ever even married, when they were still just going out, she came to the apartment Dickie and I were renting, with a black eye and a bloody lip. Said that time he’d accused her of going around on him, and just lost it. Tanya claimed she was through with him, but he showed up maybe an hour later with a bunch of roses, swearing never to do it again, and she fell for it. The next time he’d hit her hard enough to knock out a couple of teeth. After that they left town, and I barely heard from her at all.”


  “They say that women who stay with abusive men get to be, like, prisoners in their house,” Brit said. “Like in The Burning Bed.”

  “The guys scare the life out of them,” Delice said. “You can always tell those shitheads. I’ve seen couples come in my bar, and they have a few pops, and maybe get into an argument, and the man will grab the woman’s arm and squeeze it, or maybe give her a little slap. The worst ones are the quiet ones, the ones who twist a finger or think they’re causing pain in a way nobody can see.”

  “It takes a hell of a lot of guts to leave,” Sally said. “When you’re living with that, and you think the alternative might be that he’ll just kill you.

  “Did Monette’s father beat up on her?” Sally asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mary admitted. “One of the few times I talked to Tanya, she told me she’d decided she could take whatever he dished out, as long as she could protect Monette. But that was a few years ago. And then the last time we spoke she’d called to tell me that Monette was thinking about moving down here, and asked me to keep an eye on her. I asked her how it was going, and she said about as good as could be expected. I shouldn’t have left it at that, but I did.” Mary teared up.

  “What could you do? She was up there, and you were down here,” Delice said. “What Mary hasn’t told you, Sal, is that she went up to Newcastle half a dozen times after they moved up there, and tried to convince Tanya to leave the son of a bitch and come back home with her. Tanya wouldn’t leave, and it wasn’t just because she was protecting Monette. Whatever the sick fucking reason, she was sticking it out.”

  Mary fought down the tears, but her voice shook. “I guess when Tanya finally did get it up to run, it was just too much. Bone had gotten drunk and beaten her up good, then passed out. She drank the rest of the bottle, then got the keys out of his pocket and took his truck. And then drove it off an overpass. I kept thinking there was something I should have done . . . When Monette moved down here, I figured, well, now at least I could keep an eye on her for Tanya. But she was so hostile. Dickie said maybe it would just take a little time until she trusted us. Just a little more time . . .” Mary began sobbing.

  “Come on, Mom,” said Brit, rising and pulling Mary up off the couch. “Why don’t you go lie down for a while.” The telephone began ringing, and everyone glared at it. “You ought to get some rest before other people get here.” She took her mother’s arm and led her off.

  Sally looked around. Nattie was finishing up another call, and Dwayne had answered the ringing phone. Jerry Jeff sat silent, looking at the floor. “It’s Dickie,” Dwayne said to no one in particular. “He says he’s on his way down to the courthouse, then he’ll be back home.”

  “If he’s coming soon,” said Delice, “we’d better get out and pick up some donuts.” Sally gave her a quizzical look, and Delice admitted, “I’m not in the mood to nag today. We can get the coffee too, and anything else you all think we need. Come with me, Sal.”

  Sally didn’t have to be asked twice, even if she wasn’t wild about returning to the Lifeway.

  The scene was familiar, a crazy parking lot, hollering cowboys, befuddled tourists, even the panhandling hip-pies; this time, they said, they wanted gas money. Delice gave them five bucks, telling Sally that maybe it would get them out of town. But in other ways the Lifeway was an eerily new place, transfigured in the last twenty-four hours. Two Sheriff’s Department cruisers were parked in the no parking zone out front. People who passed the cop cars on the way to the entrance gave one another quizzical looks: Why the police? Is there some reason why we ought to be buying our Hamburger Helper someplace else?

  The differences didn’t stop at the front door. Over the years, as a musician and a songwriter who’d done her fair share of recording, Sally had learned something about room tone, the sound a place has when there’s no foreground noise and everything is supposedly quiet. The background hum, a blend of muted small noises, was indiscernible unless you were listening for it. Sally had an excellent memory for sounds, and she knew that the previous morning, the room tone of the Lifeway had been lively, clattering, full of snippets of conversation, the rumble of wheeled pallets stacked with food, the frequent announcements over the loudspeaker: frozen catfish fillets on special at the seafood counter, baggers wanted at the check stands.

  Today the place had a kind of anxious hush. The shelf stockers, usually brazen as they careened around corners pushing racks of canned soda or laundry detergent, were moving slowly and silently. In the front of the store, Scott Atkins stood in conversation with a man in a white shirt and name tag, whom Sally recognized from the smiling picture over the store entrance: the manager. Two deputies were talking to a couple of the regular checkers, who kept casting anxious eyes on the lines building up at the three open registers.

  “This place feels weird,” Sally told Delice. “Like she’d died right in here.”

  “It’s a damn good thing she didn’t. And if they don’t get rid of the weird feeling real fast,” Delice retorted, “it’ll start costing them big money. I’m sorry if that sounds unsentimental,” she added, reading disapproval on Sally’s face, “but that’s the way it goes. You can’t just let business go to hell because of something like this.”

  Evidently one of the checkers talking to the cops agreed. They’d finished up with her, and she went into the office, got her cash drawer, and walked over to open up another register. Her name was Charlene, and she was a friendly, motherly looking woman with hair like a poodle and inch-long red fingernails (how did she run a cash register?), known to regular shoppers as something of a check stand comic. She picked up the phone next to the register, pushed the intercom button, and said, “Check stand five of the formerly demonic but now fully exorcised Lifeway now open for your shopping pleasure. We live to serve,” she added, and finished with a long, diabolical laugh: hooooohahahahahahahaha.

  Laughter broke out here and there in the store, and Sally and Delice joined in. Sally grabbed a hand basket. “You take the cart and go get the donuts,” she told Delice. “I’ll go pick up some fruit. It’s always nice to have something to munch on that isn’t fried. I’ll catch up with you.”

  Sally loved the fruits of summer—fat grapes and juicy peaches, sweet melons and plump berries. And it was high fruit season in America. She began loading the basket, figuring she’d quit when it got almost too heavy to carry. Just as she was zoning out over the strawberries, trying to decide if their season was really over, she found herself unintentionally (and then deliberately) eavesdropping on a whispered conversation between two produce clerks, one a pimply-faced kid, the other a middle-aged man who smelled like a carton of presmoked cigarettes, stacking a gigantic pile of watermelons.

  “You gotta tell ’em,” the older man was saying. “They’re gonna find out anyhow. It looks better if you come forward with the information, instead of them having to nose around and then weasel it out of you. If you clam up, it makes it look like you’re guilty or something.”

  Trying for nonchalance, Sally sidled over to inspect a display of cut watermelon, where she’d hear better but they wouldn’t notice, since they had their backs to her.

  “Guilty!” said the kid, his voice breaking. “They can’t do anything to me—I was here at work all day yesterday, just like you, and I didn’t do nothin’ wrong. Fer chrissake, all I did was let the bitch give me a hand job now and then. Well, maybe a little more than that, but it don’t exactly count as true love. I was careful. We’d go off where nobody ever saw us.”

  “Listen, I don’t care if she gave you blow jobs on the dark side of the moon. Sooner or later, with all the questions they’re askin’, the cops will dig it out, Adolph.”

  Adolph? What kind of parent would name a kid Adolph? Sally winced. But then, this was Wyoming. She knew a couple who’d named their baby Buster.

  “The sheriff already talked to me this morning,” Adolph said. “I told them I knew her, of course—hell, we all know each other— but
that we weren’t close friends. And that’s the truth. Monette wasn’t the kind of girl you had to be friends with. Shit, Eddie, I bet she even offered to do you. Did you tell the cops about that?”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Sally saw that the question surprised the one named Eddie.

  “Why the hell should I? Nothin’ ever happened. But you, now, you’re different. You say nobody knew, but shit, man, you bragged to me about how she wanted it all the time. Who else did you tell?” Eddie asked.

  “No-fuckin’-body. I swear it. I’m counting on you to help me out here, Eddie.”

  Suddenly the two turned around, as if they’d sensed somebody listening. Sally got very busy trying to load half a watermelon into her already groaning basket, and humming along with the muzak. The young guy— Adolph—scowled at her and stalked away. The older one—Eddie—said, “Looks like you need a bigger basket, ma’am.”

  “Heh-heh, yeah,” said Sally, blushing fiercely and tucking the watermelon under the arm that wasn’t carrying the basket. “Silly me. I’d better go get a cart.” And she was off like a shot.

  She caught up with Delice in the paper goods aisle. With a grunt, she put the watermelon in the top of the cart and dumped the heavy basket between an economy-size can of Folger’s and a large plastic sack of nested Styrofoam cups. Her first impulse was to say, “You’ll never believe what I just heard.” Her second, and more mature reaction, was to say nothing, for the moment. Delice was her best friend, but this was the kind of news that Dickie ought to hear first.

  So Monette had been having—was it an affair? Sex, anyhow—with this Adolph, an odious and interesting thought. Then again, if he really had been at work all day Monday, he had an ironclad alibi. He was a scumbag, but maybe even he was entitled to privacy. Sally had to think about it.