Bad Company (3 page)

Only that morning, Sally thought, she’d talked with a living human being, somebody she’d pitied more than liked, but a person nonetheless. Sally couldn’t remember exactly where Monette Bandy had grown up—one of the energy boomtowns, Newcastle or Gillette? She’d come to Laramie to widen her horizons, a young woman, probably damaged by a girlhood that hadn’t offered much in the way of comfort or encouragement or pleasure. (Sally could see her holding up that bag of artichokes: “What’re these?”) Monette had just been looking, as she’d said, to “get it on.” Rape murder, it’s just a shot away.

“Pull it together, girl,” said Hawk, putting out a hand to help Sally up from her seat on the rock. “The detective and the sheriff want to talk.”

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Atkins said, all business.

“I didn’t expect we’d have such a tough time getting the body out of that crack,” Dickie added. “Wish you hadn’t had to watch that.”

“I assume that was where you found her?” Atkins asked.

“Yes,” Hawk said. “We were headed up this way, and saw vultures overhead. We figured something was wrong. Came up to take a look. I got here first, but Sally was right behind me.”

Atkins just nodded, taking notes. “And you didn’t disturb anything? Didn’t pick up any beer cans or kick things around?”

“No,” said Sally. “Oh, wait a minute. Yeah, I did. Here.” She dug the cigarette pack out of her knapsack and noticed, for the first time, that somebody had torn the foil on top into strips, like the fringe on Buffalo Bill’s jacket. She handed the pack to Atkins, who gave her a look that said, “Real bozo move, girl,” and then handed it to a tech, who bagged it.

“Sorry. I guess you’ll find my prints on that one. But that was all I touched. We were careful. Still, when I saw her arm, I did go over there and look down into the crevice. That’s how we knew who it was.” Sally shook her head, fighting a small wave of nausea. “What was that cord on her wrist?”

Dickie looked up, his eyes grim, revealing nothing. “A piggin’ string. The calf ropers use them to tie animals down. There were rope burns on both her wrists.”

“That’s not for public consumption,” said Atkins, giving Dickie a quick glance. “I reckon we’ll ask the questions, Professor Alder.”

But Sally wasn’t really listening. The shock had fallen away, and anger was taking over. “Some fuckhead cowboy brought her out here for a party, tied her up, attacked her, shot her? Is that what you think happened here?”

“We don’t have any idea,” said Dickie. “We’re just collecting evidence.”

“Not our job to jump to conclusions,” Atkins added.

“Bullshit,” said Sally. “Tell me that isn’t what it looks like. Beer cans, butts, even a can of chew? Cowboy boot prints in the dirt? A piggin’ string?”

“We know what it looks like,” Dickie told her, with labored patience. “But at this point, that’s all we know. Lot of work to do on this yet, Sally.” He looked over at the crime lab guys and the coroner, getting ready to put Monette into a body bag. “We’re just beginning.”

And there was no time to waste. If Monette had been killed by some kinked-up bastard who’d come in Monday morning just for the rodeo and started his week off with a bang, Sally knew he might be gone already. Might stick around for the week, wreaking more havoc. Potential witnesses might only be passing through. Dickie and his people would have to work fast to get their man before the week was out. After that, the trail would get colder than a fence post in February.

Cold bloody murder and hot brutal rape. They just had to find the guy who did it and make him pay and pay. But what could Sally do?

Hawk was a step ahead of her. “You saw Monette this morning at the Lifeway, didn’t you?” he asked her.

“Yes. She checked me out this morning,” Sally told Dickie and the detective.

Poor Dickie. For a moment the wretched man leaked through and showed in the eyes of the dispassionate cop.

“Yeah. She got promoted this week. Mary was real proud of her.” He looked down at the ground, swallowed, got possession of himself. When he looked up, the man had gone back inside, and all that showed was the cop. “So did you talk to her?”

“Yeah, I did. Small talk. She was pissed off that she’d have to work nights most of the week and would miss the fun.”

Atkins, the investigator, wrote it all down. Dickie stared off into the distance, at something that had him swallowing hard again. “Monette had a fucked-up idea of fun,” he said.

And just the way he said it made Sally forget her own mad and sad, and remember that Dickie was the dead girl’s uncle, and a man who’d had, and paid for, more than a few wrongheaded notions about fun in his day. “I know what you mean. So when I was checking out, I was in line between a couple of guys who looked like the human versions of a sloth and a salamander—or maybe that’s not fair to the animals. Maybe they were lower species. A blob and a virus. Anyway, Monette hit on both of them. Told one guy she knew ‘all the best places’ in town to get a beer. Seemed like she was determined to hook up with a man, any man, the nastier and rastier the better.”

“Did the men act interested?” Atkins asked.

“The guy in front of me did. Said he’d love to ‘get a little something.’ He was a real wit, a regular Bob fucking Hope. He bought a carton of Kools for his wife.”

“Did you happen to notice whether he smoked them himself?”

“Couldn’t say. He acted like it was his wife who needed them, but she couldn’t come in and get them herself, because their baby was acting up, so she was out in the truck nursing. Great, huh—nursing and smoking? You ought to arrest her.” Sally was a real prohibitionist when it came to cigarettes. “Did you find any Kools butts?”

“I don’t know. We’ll see about that when we get things over to the lab. What about the guy in back of you?” Atkins asked.

“I don’t know. By the time I left, he hadn’t said much of anything. Just stood there looking stupid and revolting.”

Atkins glanced up from his notes and gave her a wisp of what almost looked like a smile. “Do you think you could give us a more precise description of these guys than that?”

She narrowed her eyes, trying to get the clearest possible mental picture of the two men. “Sure. I can even tell you what the first guy’s truck looked like. An old white Chevy pickup, maybe a ton and a half, rusty and dented. I didn’t notice the plates, but he said he was from Worland. And, of course, he was traveling with a woman and a baby.”

“That’s good. Let’s get down to details.”

“Okay,” Sally agreed. “The second guy was a biker, kind of scrawny and squinty-eyed, had that worked-over, windburned look.” But then she hesitated. She put her hand on Dickie’s arm, gave it a squeeze, and then said, “Look. I hate to say this, but the way Monette was going, there’s no telling how many guys she flirted with before she found Mr. Wrong. It’s not like she was being discriminating.”

As Scott Atkins recorded what Sally was saying, Dickie worked his lips, like a man who’d taken a drink of milk that had gone off. When he raised his eyes, they were glittering. “I’m not sure Monette Bandy ever had the luxury of being discriminating,” he said.

Chapter 3
Sweethearts of the Rodeo

The ringing phone woke Sally before seven on Tuesday morning. She fumbled for the cordless beside the bed, mumbled a hello.

“God, Sally. You and Hawk. You found Monette.”

It was Delice, and she was barely keeping it together.

“Yes,” Sally said. “It was horrible. I’m so sorry, honey. How’s Mary doing?”

“About as bad as you’d expect. She lost Tanya just last year, and now this happens to Monette. Her parents are dead. She’s pretty much down to Langhams.”

Sally knew what that was like. She was an orphan herself, her brothers far off in St. Louis, the rest of her family even more distant and scattered. More than twenty years ago she had been a bootless California country-rock singer, out on the road, looking for a place to land. The Langhams of Laramie had taken her in. Dwayne Langham had been behind the counter at the Axe Attack music store when she’d stopped in, her head still full of white noise from a marathon drive east from Berkeley to anywhere on I–80. She’d been looking to buy guitar picks and strings, and mentioned that she sang and wrote songs, might even be in the market for a gig. Dwayne had smiled and sent her to see his sister, Delice, who had hired Sally on the spot to play happy hours at the Wrangler. Given her then pathetic financial state, that job had looked to Sally like the opening of King Tut’s tomb.

Dickie Langham had followed suit, booking her into the “lounge” at Dr. Mudflaps, the phony gourmet restaurant where he tended bar and dealt dope. Almost before she knew it, she’d rented an apartment in Laramie. By the end of that summer she was gigging with Dwayne’s band, a sub-legendary group that went by the name of Branchwater, fronted by another of Laramie’s purveyors of illegal substances, the amoral Sam Branch. That had led to several years of making a hair-raising living in clubs and bars all over the Northern Rockies, and dragging her ass into the Wrangler for Monday morning hash browns and eggs with Dickie and Delice.

Sally had enrolled in grad school in history at UW, just to have something legitimate to do, and found that she’d accidentally discovered her calling. She’d ended up heading back to California, gotten a Ph.D. at Cal, taught women’s history at UCLA. It was a good enough life, but she’d known some lonesome times in the big city.

So when she’d gotten the offer to return to Laramie and the University of Wyoming sixteen years later, as the holder of the Margaret Dunwoodie Endowed Chair and head of the Dunwoodie Center for Women’s History, she’d jumped on it. To her infinite delight, not only had she and Hawk found each other again, but the Lang-hams took up with her exactly where they’d left off. Of course, Langhams knew how to welcome their prodigals home.

So Sally played a little music with Dwayne, hung out a lot with Delice, and cadged dinner at Dickie and Mary’s at least once a week. She’d come to think of herself as an aunt to their nearly grown kids, especially Mary and Dickie’s daughter Brit. Gorgeous, amusingly sulky, and bright as a golden Sacagawea dollar, Brit had worked for Sally when she was writing Meg Dunwoodie’s biography. Indeed, Brit had played a big part in solving that particular human puzzle. The Langhams were as much family to Sally now as her own.

And when she thought about it, they’d been Monette’s only family too. Her mother was dead, and her father— well, nobody ever had a good word to say about him.

Sally could only begin to conceive of what the Lang-hams were going through. “What can I do to help out?” she asked Delice.

On the other end of the line, Delice swallowed, sniffled, blew her nose. “We’re going to get together this morning at nine, over at Mary and Dickie’s. The coroner hasn’t released her body yet, but we’re going to plan the funeral, all that stuff. You could come over and hold everybody’s hand if you feel like it.”

“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 between 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.