Left Hanging (27 page)

I had to break in to get in my next question. “After you broke up, how long before Keith Landry, uh, became part of your life
 . . .
Found you crying that night, huh?
 . . .
Uh-huh, uh-huh. I absolutely do understand your feelings. One last question. Did you happen to notice your cowboy’s career after he broke off with you?
 . . .
Yes. Uh-huh. Right. Got it. Thank you. Thank you very much.”

I disconnected and started dialing the next number.

“You’re thinking it was more than Landry picking up after their hearts were broken?” Mike said. “But how—”

He broke off when I held up a hand to indicate my callee had answered.

Give Paycik full marks. He jabbed a finger to the third name on the list, grabbed his phone, and headed to the kitchen.

SEVERAL DIDN’T answer. But in less than half an hour, we had the same story from other women in other rodeo towns where Keith Landry had had a fling with the rodeo queen.

We sat on the couch and looked at each other.

“Why? Why would he do that to those women?” Mike asked, and his bafflement made me like him even more. “Okay, he might not have been with rodeo queens, especially not in recent years with him getting older and seedier, but—”

“It wasn’t about sex. It was about power. Sex was a way to keep score. To let him know he’d won and made them lose. Remember what I told you Street said about how for Landry it was all a game, and he not only had to win, he had to
beat
the other person?”

“Holy shit,” Mike said.

I agreed. “Same sequence of events each time. A rodeo cowboy down on his luck rushes a woman—mostly the rodeo queen. After a brief fling, the cowboy breaks it off abruptly and in a manner sure to break a woman’s heart. Keith Landry swoops in for a week or two of consolation sex—”

“With a woman who wouldn’t otherwise have looked at him,” Mike pointed out.

“Afterwards, the cowboy gets invitations to rodeos he otherwise couldn’t have afforded to enter. Gives him a chance to win some, and his career picks up.”

“Though in Evan Watt’s case, it slides back down,” he said.

“This can’t possibly be a coincidence. Not the same sequence every time. Landry wasn’t simply an opportunistic vulture or an emotional ambulance chaser, he was arranging it.”

Chapter Thirty-One

TOM CAME IN and sat while we were absorbing what we’d found. He looked from one to the other of us. “What’s happened?”

Mike’s gaze met mine with the same question as earlier. This time I nodded. Tom shot me a look but focused on Mike when he spoke.

“Tom, we’ve spotted a pattern in Landry’s activities.”

Tom’s brows rose. “In the time I was gone?”

“Yes.” I said to Mike, “The rodeo first.”

“If Landry
is
Sweet Meadows—”

“What?”
Tom demanded.

Mike backed up and explained what Jennifer had found and what she hoped to confirm with other rodeos and other DBAs.

“It would have worked something like this. He would come in as Landry, make a real high bid. Maybe a few times a year, just with the rodeos he thinks might be getting restless,” Mike said. “If the rodeo accepts the high bid, fine, he makes his money. If the rodeo balks and asks for more bids, he sends in a bogus company to undercut everyone else. His bogus company gets the bid, then goes belly-up—not hard, since it never existed except on paper.

“When the bogus company disappears, it leaves the rodeo in the lurch. Landry comes back to save the day. Gets bonuses piled on top of bonuses, making even more than he would have with the first, inflated bid. The next year, the rodeo pays what Landry asks.”

Tom remained silent so long that the urge to over-explain that Landry had arranged the whole thing in order to swoop in and take advantage financially nearly overwhelmed me.

Twice, Mike and I exchanged looks—each said, “How long do we wait?” and “I don’t know”—before Tom spoke.

“If you want, I can do some checking without raising suspicions. Maybe back up whatever Jen found.”

“That would be real helpful, Tom,” Mike said.

“There’s more.” I pulled out the list of women’s names that had started with towns and dates and phone numbers, and now had the names of rodeo cowboys added. “If Keith Landry operated like this in business, what are the chances he operated the same way in private?”

I explained why we thought the chances were excellent.

“That son of a—” He bit it off. “You’re going to report this? Make public what happened to those women? Pile on more embarrassment?”

“They have nothing to be embarrassed about—any more than someone who’s the victim of a robbery has cause to be embarrassed. But, no, we’re not planning to report on this. Unless one of them is a murderer,” I said. “But we need to confirm that what we think happened
did
happen.”

“Why?”

“Because if we need it as a lever to get information on anything else, or if it turns out to be the motive for Landry’s murder, we’re not likely to have time to work the angle later. Or access.” I looked at the list again. “What I don’t understand is why he selected some rodeo queens and skipped others.”

“I do,” Mike said slowly. “I think I do. Seeing the list of women and their rodeos got me thinking.” He dug a paper from the pile on the table, held out his hand for the list I had, then set them side by side.

“Landry’s schedule. The women he went after. He pulled his shit on the women only when he had a schedule break. When he had to move on to another town right away, he didn’t have time. That’s why he pulled it here some years and not others.”

A quick look showed he was right. Tom muttered something. I didn’t catch the words, but I shared the sentiment.

“What we have to look at now is who knew about this, and if that knowing gave them a motive,” I said.

“The women knew,” Mike said. “At least part of it. If any of them figured it out
 . . .
”

“You don’t have proof any of them figured it out,” Tom said.

“We don’t have
proof
of much of anything,” I said. “We’re gathering possibilities for motive. Not everyone could make that initial throw over the beam, but assuming Heather left Landry tied up as she described, most of Sherman has opportunity and means. So, we have to look at motive, and there’d be motive for any of the women who figured out what he did. But they also have to be here in Sherman, so that means Linda Caswell and Vicky Upton.”

“This long after the fact for Vicky?” Mike asked.

“Hey, you were the one backing her earlier. But, yeah, I think Vicky would have no statute of limitations on Landry’s crimes.”

Tom said, “Anyone who cared about the women involved—if they knew.”

“That lengthens our list considerably.” I was lamenting, not disagreeing. I added a line to the list to include the category.

“Including Stan Newton,” Mike said.

Tom agreed, but I was in the dark. “Why would he kill Landry over his sister-in-law?”

“Cas is her heir,” Mike said. “Aunt Gee told me that. If Linda took up with a man serious, he could become her heir. Not out of the question that she’d have a child of her own, too.”

“Stan was not happy when she was seeing Landry,” Tom said. “Or Zane.”

“Wait a minute,” I protested. “That would be a motive when Landry was seeing her, but what motive would Newton have after Landry dumped her? Especially after a few years.” Could that be why he’d checked on Zane’s arrival here? Worried that Zane and Linda would rekindle something? And what if his tirade Friday night about a cowboy taking things away from him had not been aimed only at Evan Watt’s forty-dollar mistake?

“Honor of the Caswell name,” Mike said promptly.

“Oh, c’mon. He’s not a Caswell. He makes a big deal of being a self-made man. Why would he care?”

“His son’s a Caswell,” Tom said.

Sometimes I felt as if I’d stepped back a century. Or stayed in this century and ventured to another continent. But just because it was foreign to me, didn’t mean it wasn’t valid. Besides, if we considered only motives for murder that weren’t foreign to me, our suspects would be limited to ex-wives of men who took the Jack Nicholson character in
Heartburn
as a role model.

“What about Oren Street?” I asked. “They didn’t travel together, but they overlapped at most rodeos. He must have seen Landry in action.”

“The rodeo was the set-up,” Mike said. “The payoff didn’t come until after the woman had been dumped, and Landry was there for the rebound. By that time, Street would have moved on.”

“After all those women, over all those years, he’d have to start noticing something. He can’t be
that
blind to anything other than livestock.” They looked back at me. “Okay, maybe he is. But I’m leaving him as a possibility. What about on the business side? Street emphasized he didn’t know anything about the business, and what Linda and Newton have said backs that. So, who else?”

“Evan Watt,” Mike said. “Several of the women named him, and, remember, he said early on that he’d worked for Landry, being real cagey about exactly what he did.”

“Landry was using Evan Watt
 . . .
?” Tom looked as if Abraham Lincoln’s good looking cousin had bit into a wormy apple.

I shrugged. “Some women go for that type. A walk on the wild side.”

Mike muttered something about the unwashed side.

“Watt’s on the list, along with the other men Landry hired or bribed to be his setup man,” I said. “But, just like the women, they had to be here to have opportunity. That means Watt and Zane.”

“I can’t believe it of Grayson Zane,” Tom said.

“Setting up a woman for Keith Landry? Or murder?”

He gave me a long, level look. He wanted to say both. And he knew I knew it. He also knew I would refute half with ease. “Murder.”

“Ability to ride a bull or rope a steer does not equate to a stellar moral center,” I said. “As he proved with Linda.”

“No one can know for sure what he—”

“She knows.” He had no response to that. “Anybody else either of you think might have known what Landry was up to?”

“Penny,” Mike said promptly. “She knows everything.”

As our chuckles fueled partly by tension faded, Burrell said, “What do you want me to do?”

“Give us your thoughts on which of these guys is our best bet to talk to,” I said. “With Landry dead, that’s our only way to confirm what was going on with these women.”

Burrell’s gaze held mine a moment, then deliberately shifted. From where he sat, he must have been looking at the irregular, roundish blot on the living room wall I hoped was the result of a bad job of washing red crayon. He looked grim. The room was enough to make anyone grim, but I didn’t think it was the decor.

Finally, Burrell leaned forward, transferred his gaze to the list on the coffee table that we’d gathered from the women and directed one long finger to a name.

Grayson Zane.

“Talk to him,” he said.

“Even though we only know of one time with him?” Mike objected.

“One of the men who’s not here might be more open to talking, since they’re not a murder suspect,” I said. “On the other hand, Watt was the most frequent, uh, introductory act among the women we talked to. If we get him to talk, it opens the floodgates.”

“That’s why he won’t talk,” Tom said, withdrawing his pointing finger. “Too much to lose.”

“Seems like Zane has a lot more to lose,” I protested. “Being a big shot in rodeo, I mean. It would be a big story.”

Tom shook his head, not denying what I said, but indicating something outweighed it. “He did it once and never again.”

“Because his conscience bothered him,” Mike supplied. Tom nodded, and they exchanged a look.

I interrupted their Code of the West moment. “Or because he didn’t need to repeat because his career took off. You can’t know—”

“Elizabeth, you were the one who pointed out his reaction,” Mike said.

“Possibly embarrassment or fear of being outed. If we appeal to his conscience when he’s thinking about protecting his own hide, we lose any hope of getting him to open up.”

“You’ll get him to talk.”

“Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence, Burrell, but you’re saying it doesn’t make it so.”

He picked up his hat, as if his proclamation settled the issue. “Because his conscience bothers him,” he said, echoing Mike. “Also, because it was Linda. She’s a fine woman. He knows it. And he knows he did wrong by her.”

And damned if Mike didn’t nod.

Tom rose. “I’ll say good-night now.”

“You’ll get back to us about the business angle?”

“Yes.” He kept heading for the door.

He had closed it when I rose, said to Mike, “I’ll be right back,” and followed Tom out.

“Burrell,” I called from the crooked steps. He kept going, around to the driver’s door of his truck, parked behind my car. I jogged after him. “Tom.”

He turned at that, releasing the door handle.

“If we get Zane to talk, it gives Linda double motive—business and personal.” I don’t know why I felt the need to give that warning.

“She didn’t kill him.”

“How can you know?”

He looked at me with those Abraham Lincoln eyes. “I know.”

I threw up my arms. It didn’t fluster him one bit. “Even assuming you’re 100 percent right, it could be miserable for her.”

“I considered that before I gave my opinion of which one of those boys to talk to. I’ve had cause to think about the matter,” his eyes glinted at me from under the brim of his hat, “and I don’t believe a murderer should go free.”

“You had different ideas when you thought your wife—”

“Ex-wife. And since then, I’ve decided I was wrong. I wouldn’t have been doing Tamantha any favors.”

I blinked at him.

If I’d been asked to rank Thomas Burrell on a stubborn-o-meter, I’d have said he would break the thing. Yet here he’d changed his mind about a vital matter, and admitted it. More than that, he’d admitted he’d been
wrong
—not that circumstances were different or any of those other face-saving phrases, but that he’d been
wrong
. And he was prepared to back his words by helping dig into Keith Landry’s business practices.

“So, you go on inside now, and you and Mike get back to work finding a murderer, Elizabeth Margaret Danniher.” He reached out as if to brush hair off my cheek with the back of his fingers.

“Elizabeth!” came Mike’s call from the open doorway. “Your cell. ID says it’s Watt—Evan Watt.”

Aware of Tom following, I jogged up the walk and inside to hear the phone still ringing. I scooped it up from the coffee table and answered in one motion.