Going Nowhere Fast Page 9

  "But, Joe—"

  "I know, I know, he died in our trailer. But so what? We didn't put the man there. He invited himself in. Why should we feel responsible for him?"

  "I didn't say we should feel responsible for him. All I meant was, I'd hate to leave here for good without finding out what happened to him, and why. And I should think you'd feel the same way."

  "Because I was a cop."

  "No. Because you were a good cop. Someone who was never satisfied with just a suspect, or a motive. You needed to know the truth about things. Good or bad."

  "That was my job," Joe said. "This isn't."

  "No, but—"

  "They have a suspect, Dottie. They'll get the truth out of him, sooner or later. And they aren't going to need our help to do it, believe me. Besides—" He finally took his eyes off the road to look at me directly. "We're already more involved in their investigation than wisdom says we should be. It's just lucky for us they don't know it yet."

  He glanced at the four items in my lap to make sure I got his meaning.

  "You mean, if this stuff ever became relevant to their case…" I said.

  "We'd be up the creek without a paddle. Yeah. One way or another, they'd connect Dog to that safety deposit box, and that would be that. Even if they couldn't pin Bettis's murder on him, the boy's committed enough other crimes to get himself put away for fifteen years. And us about half that for covering up for him."

  He let me think that over for a while, knowing I could sit there for an hour and never come up with any line of discussion to counter his reasoning. He was right. Dog had put us all in a very precarious position, and there was no greater evidence of that than the photographs and line drawing I held in my hands. The longer they were in our possession, the longer they represented a threat to our freedom; rather than pore over them like Sherlock Holmes inspecting a heel print, I should have lowered a side window thirty miles back and tossed the whole works Onto the highway.

  And yet…

  "What are you thinking?" Big Joe asked. I'd been silent for several minutes now, and he'd apparently seen something in my expression he didn't like.

  I turned to face him. "What?"

  "I said, what are you thinking? I can see and hear the wheels turnin' from here."

  "What wheels?"

  "We've gotta get rid of that stuff, Dottie. Soon as we get into Flagstaff. You understand? We should've never kept it around this long."

  "I thought you wanted to know what I was thinking."

  "I've reconsidered. JIen can do that too, you know."

  "I was just thinking that maybe there's a way to insure ourselves against prosecution if worse comes to worse and, God forbid, they do come looking for us."

  "Yeah? And what way is that?"

  "Well, by finding out what this means." I lifted the photos and drawing off my lap to gesture with. "How it's important."

  "Nobody said it was important but you, Dottie."

  "I know, I know. But if I'm right, and it did turn out to be important, and they were slapping the handcuffs on us… well, I just thought it might be a point for our side if we could tell them how this all fits in. You know, how it points to Bettis's murderer."

  'They already have Bettis's murderer," Joe said.

  "Do they? They have a man who was driving around in his car, yes, and a gun that mayor may not have been the one used on Bettis. But that doesn't mean they have Bettis's murderer. Does it?"

  "Dottie—"

  "Look, baby," I said, raising my voice to be heard above the din of Bad Dog's snoring. "All I'm saying is, we're going to be down there in Flagstaff anyway, right? What can it hurt for us to look up Bettis's address in the phone book so we can pay our respects to his widow?"

  Big Joe gave me a long, thoroughly disapproving look, and then stopped talking to me altogether.

  I took that to mean okay.

  * * * *

  Naturally, less than an hour later, Joe found something about Lucille to complain about.

  As one might have predicted, the Coconino County Sheriff's Department forensics team had decided to start their dismantling work in our trailer's bathroom, since that, after all, was where Geoffry Bettis had died. Joe and I had been relieved to learn that the bathroom was as far as they had had time to get, but that turned out to be small consolation to Joe the first time he tried to flush Lucille's chemical toilet. It seemed the lab technicians who dismantled it had reinstalled a rubber seal improperly, so that the bowl was leaking water from something Joe kept referring to as "the mechanism." No one, including myself, had noticed the leak but him. Which was typical.

  It was well after one in the afternoon before he was happy with Lucille's condition. While Bad Dog and I sat around drinking coffee and assorted canned sodas, Joe reassembled the toilet bowl himself before proceeding to inspect every inch of our trailer for similar nerve-grating flaws, paying no heed at all to the lab boys' constant assurances that nothing outside of Lucille's bathroom had been touched.

  Throughout this ordeal, Detectives Crowe and Bollinger bit their tongues and played gracious, apologetic hosts, humoring Joe with only minor objections and basically ordering everyone else to stay out of his way. They weren't saying much about it, but they were obviously quite content with the case they had built against the armed robber they picked up driving Geoffry Bettis's car. Otherwise, I knew, they would hardly have been so anxious to treat us like innocent bystanders they'd been fools to ever suspect. Suspicion wasn't something policemen moved intact from one person to the next unless someone came along who finally seemed to deserve it all; that Crowe and Bollinger no longer appeared to have the slightest doubt about our innocence spoke volumes about how convinced they were of their latest suspect's guilt.

  But, like I said, they weren't saying much about it. In fact, they weren't saying anything at all.

  "I'm afraid we can't discuss that, Mrs. Loudermilk," Bollinger said at one point, after I'd asked him if their suspect had a name.

  "You can't tell me his name?"

  "No ma'am. I'm sorry."

  "We understand he was driving Mr. Bettis's car when you picked him up."

  "Yes ma'am."

  "And that he was armed with a gun?"

  "That's right."

  "And this gun, it was the same one that killed Mr. Bettis. Is that right?"

  "Again, Mrs. Loudermilk, I'm afraid I can't answer that question at this time. I'd really like to, but can't."

  He didn't know it, but there was no need for him to apologize; the slight glimmer of contentment that had shone in his eyes upon hearing my question had answered it perfectly. The results of their ballistics tests were in, and the two guns were indeed one and the same.

  "Has he confessed to the crime?" I asked, determined to take Bollinger to the limit of his patience.

  "Mrs. Loudermilk—"

  "I just wondered if he's confessed, that's all. I only want to know what to tell all our friends back home when they ask me the same questions I'm asking you."

  I smiled, and that seemed to buy me at least another smidgen of his generosity.

  "No," he said, gulping at his coffee while his eyes remained glued to the lunchroom door, just in case his partner Crowe should come bursting in at any moment to catch us discussing the un-discussable. "The suspect has not yet issued a confession."

  "Then, how can you be so sure—"

  "That he did it? Easy. By listening to him try to explain himself. How he stole the car up at the Canyon, and just happened to find a loaded gun under the passenger seat. Would you believe a story like that, Mrs. Loudermilk? Do you know anyone that would?"

  "Well—"

  "No, you wouldn't. And neither do we." He stood up from the table we were sharing and tossed his empty coffee cup into a nearby wastebasket, crushing it into a ball first. "By the way. That daughter of yours is a real charmer. The one out in California? The lawyer?"

  "Oh. You mean Mo?" I'd forgotten she had said she was going to give Crowe a
nd Bollinger a call.

  "I guess that's her. She told us her name was Maureen. Maureen Doubleday, attorney-at-law."

  I laughed. "Yeah, that's our Mo. Doubleday is her married name."

  "I see."

  "I hope she didn't give you and Detective Crowe too hard a time."

  He shook his head. "Naw. We hear that kind of language all the time around here."

  I laughed again, and this time he laughed right along with me.

  * * * *

  "Does this mean we can go on to Pittsburgh now?" Bad Dog asked, elated.

  "Nobody's goin' to Pittsburgh," Big Joe said. "At least, your mother and I sure as hell aren't. We're goin' to Texas. Or Louisiana, maybe."

  "Later," I said.

  "Not later. Now. Soon as we drop this boy off at the nearest Greyhound station."

  Dog made a face. "You're gonna make me take a bus to Pittsburgh?"

  "Nobody's gonna make you do anything. You can do whatever you want. Go to Pittsburgh on a bus, or Hawaii on a wookie board, makes no difference to me. All I know is—"

  "You mean a boogie board," I said.

  Joe turned, his train of thought completely derailed. "Boogie, wookie—" he started to say.

  "Bugle boy of Company B!" Dog said, and laughed.

  I looked down into my bowl to keep from joining him and started in on my salad again.

  We were having lunch at a Perkins restaurant only a few blocks away from the sheriff's station in Flagstaff. The boys were doing burgers while I was doing greens. Twenty minutes earlier, Joe had nearly finished the job of hitching Lucille back up to our Ford when I suggested we grab a bite to eat in town first, ostensibly to avoid the usual hassle of looking for a restaurant parking space big enough to accommodate a twenty-five-foot trailer home. I hadn't yet told him why I'd really made the suggestion, but I was working my way up to it, one inch at a time.

  "You think it's funny?" my husband asked Dog, his dour mood impervious to levity. "Fine. Laugh and be merry. But see if you aren't just a speck in my rearview mirror inside of an hour."

  Now that Joe found worth a chuckle.

  "He's coming with us first, Joe," I told him, matter-of factly.

  "Goin' with you where?" Bad Dog asked, his voice dripping with apprehension.

  "Nowhere," Joe said. "Your mother's mistaken."

  "We're going to go see a house," I said to Dog. "And if we're lucky, and somebody's home when we get there—"

  "No, Dottie. No," Joe said, scolding me like a puppy that had soiled the living room carpet. "We are not going to stick our noses another eighth of an inch into this mess, I told you that on the way down here!"

  "No you didn't. I asked you what harm it would do for us to look up Mr. Bettis's widow while we were down here in Flagstaff, and you said none."

  "I didn't say none. I dropped the subject."

  "Exactly."

  "Exactly?"

  "Joe, when a woman drops the subject, she's closing it. When a man drops the subject, he's capitulating. You know that."

  But Joe's head was already moving from side to side in a perfect, unhurried rhythm, conveying but a single thought in perpetuity: No. "It's not gonna happen, Dottie. The Bettis case is closed, there is absolutely no sensible reason for the three of us to keep snooping around in it."

  "But—"

  "And don't give me any of that 'But what if they've got the wrong man' stuff again, either, because I don't wanna hear it. The guy was drivin' around in Bettis's car and pullin' holdup jobs with the gun that killed him. He couldn't be any guiltier if he'd been wearin' Bettis's Fruit of the Looms when the cops picked 'im up."

  "All right. So maybe they do have the right man. And maybe they don't. Either way, I still say we'd be smart to find out why Bettis had those pictures in his safety deposit box before the authorities do. Wouldn't we?"

  "Dottie, for God's sake—" Joe sighed.

  "If you don't want to go, we won't go. I won't say another word. But San Antonio, Texas—or, worse yet, New Orleans, Louisiana—is hundreds of miles away from Flagstaff, Arizona, Joseph Loudermilk the Second—and that's an awful long way to go without hearing the sound of another human voice. Isn't it?"

  I smiled and dug into my salad again.

  A half hour later, Joe made a right turn out of the restaurant parking lot instead of a left, and another page was written in the Dottie Loudermilk Handbook of Shameless Bluffing.

  * * * *

  We found the last address Geoffry Bettis would ever know in the telephone directory: 127 West Cottage Avenue. The pale yellow house the address belonged to was a tiny little thing on a tree-lined block full of tiny little things, all quiet as a monastery and engulfed in shade. A cobblestone wall ran waist-high around the Bettises' meager front yard, and two wrought-iron pillars dressed in white adorned their front porch. Old Route 66 lay just two blocks to the south; a block short of that, a long-dead neon sign peered over the trees from a height of fifty feet to promote its owner, the Sierra Vista Hotel.

  I had to do some talking to get Joe and Bad Dog out of the truck, but when I finally did, we all stepped up on the Bettis porch together, the unease of the trespasser clouding our faces and making lead weights of our feet. Naturally, ringing the bell was a chore left to me. I pushed the button once, then twice, but nothing happened. If a chime or buzzer was going off inside the house somewhere, you couldn't tell by listening.

  "Nobody's home. Let's go," Big Joe said as I tried the bell a third time. He was already off the porch and heading down the walk toward the street, Bad Dog scurrying right behind him.

  I was coming off the porch to chase them down when we heard someone call out to us from the backyard, near the left side of the house: "I'm back here!"

  It was a woman's voice; coarse as sandpaper and thoroughly indifferent. A little more energy, and it might have passed for rude. Following it, we went around the side of the house and through a chain-link gate to find a middle-aged woman in bare feet hanging clothes on a line, a cigarette threatening to tumble from one corner of her mouth. She was wearing an oversize white T-shirt and blue denim pants, and a time-worn scowl of disillusionment that could have been stolen from a gargoyle. Her dirty-blond hair was combed and pinned back in places, loose and unruly in others. Bending over to draw another piece of wet clothing from the wicker basket at her feet, she glanced at us briefly and said, "Can I help you?"

  Again, her voice carried all the vitality and emotion of a heavy sigh.

  "We're looking for Mrs. Geoffry Bettis," I said.

  Her reaction to that was imperceptible; she just kept on hanging clothes. As if three black people she had never met came around the house to interrupt her chores at about this same time every day.

  "Why?" she asked at last, working straight through the question.

  "Well… We just want to offer her our condolences. That's all. For her husband, I mean."

  She took a yellow blouse from the basket, shook the wrinkles and excess water from it, and hung it up on the line.

  "You see, he died inside our trailer, and we just thought—"

  She finally spun around, forgetting about her wash for the moment. I thought I had angered her, but then I realized she "vas simply annoyed; it was beginning to look as if a severe state of pique was the best this woman could do, passion-wise.

  "What?" She sucked hard on the forgotten cigarette hanging from her mouth, then withdrew it and blew out the smoke at a menacing angle, down and to her left. "What did you think?"

  "Look, Mrs. Bettis," Joe said. "If this is a bad time for you—"

  "You can come back later? Don't be silly. You're here now, let's talk."

  She was looking at me.

  "As I said before, we just wanted to offer you our condolences," I told her, edging toward rudeness myself.

  "Because Geoff was killed in your trailer."

  "Yes. I know that sounds strange, but—"

  "Did you know my husband?"

  "Did we know him? No. We just…
found him."

  "On our toilet," Bad Dog elaborated.

  I shot him the same quick glance Joe did, then turned back to Bettis's widow. "We didn't know your husband, Mrs. Bettis, but we feel badly for him just the same. That's really all we came here to say."

  "I see." She took another long drag on her cigarette and exhaled the smoke to the east. "Well, it's nice of you to be so concerned, Mrs. . . ?"

  "Loudermilk. Dorothy Loudermilk."

  "Mrs. Loudermilk. Yes, well, it's nice of you to be so concerned, but you really shouldn't have bothered. Geoff was an asshole and a loser, and the world will be better off without him. Starting with me."

  She smiled and started hanging clothes again.

  "But he was murdered," I said.

  "Yeah. So I hear."

  "You don't care?"

  "Do I care? Of course I care. What kind of woman would I be if I didn't care?"

  She was still smiling.

  Joe edged over to take my arm and lead me away, but I just shook him off. "I don't understand," I said.

  "Listen," Mrs. Bettis said, turning around again, and this time she had more to show me than a mild case of irritation. "You didn't know the man, all right? I did. For twenty-one years. So when I tell you he wasn't worth a minute of your grief, believe it. Nobody knows how worthless he was better than me. Nobody."

  She pitched her cigarette out onto her backyard lawn with the flick of a finger and eyed us, waiting to see if we would take her outburst as a hint to leave her in peace.

  "Let's go, Dottie," Joe said to me firmly, reaching for my arm again. I didn't pull away this time.

  "He was a loser," Bettis's widow went on. "A self-centered, misguided moron who thought he was a tycoon in the making. Twenty-one years I waited for that idiot to wise up, to stop dreaming his life away and start acting like a real husband to me, and a real father to our kids, but it never happened. It never happened." She stopped to smile again, trying to make light of her bitterness, but her eyes were suddenly brimming with tears.

  "Sorry we bothered you, Mrs. Bettis," Joe said, turning me around to guide me out of the yard.

  "Wait a minute. I wanna show you something."

  Mrs. Bettis left her basket of clothes behind and started for the back door to the little house, where she turned to find that we had made no move to follow her. "In here," she said. "Come on." She pulled the screen door open and disappeared inside.