Brown-Eyed Girl (24 page)

Father and son: strangers. And his father's arrival made the fact of his mother's tragic death inescapable.

Marc had a house in Paris, a partnership in an international financial house. He was resuming his position as a man of wealth and influence. Paul Blum, seeing disaster coming in the late thirties, had put all the family's holdings in Swiss banks. Ezra, at the age of ten, was a very wealthy little boy.

“A hell of a lot for a kid to handle, I thought,” Maude told Sally. Maude had been determined to do something to make things easier on her little brother, so she went to Meg to ask her to find some way.

Auntie Meg made the whole thing possible. She convinced Marc not to take Ezra away immediately, but instead to spend a month in Wyoming getting to know the boy's world, know what he was taking him away from, think about what he was taking him to. That month made all the difference. They made Marc welcome in Wyoming, and he ended up loving the people and the scenery (it was, after all, summer). By the time Ezra packed his baseball glove and his Tarzan books, they had all forged ties that would span the Atlantic and last half a century and more. Ezra promised he'd come back and live in the Rockies when he grew up, and to Maude's great amazement, he did.

Ezra had stayed with his father in Paris, attended the Sorbonne. Bilingual, bicultural, he always planned to return to the United States, and he wrote often to the Starks and to Meg. He convinced Marc that it would be a good thing for him to attend law school at Columbia. Upon graduation, he joined a top New York law firm and specialized in international corporate law. He shuttled back and forth between Manhattan and Paris, lived the life of a high-powered cosmopolitan. But he always took his summer vacations in the Rockies, and made a point of visiting Laramie every year.

“My father died in 1970,” he said. “And I realized that there wasn't anything holding me in New York. I'd gotten married a couple of times, but I turned out not to be very good at marriage.”

“That made two of us,” Maude commented, assuring Sally, “we can talk about that later.”

“So, to get to the end of this rather tedious story,” Ezra resumed, “I moved to Denver in 1972, set up my own firm, and have never regretted the change. I have a cabin in the Snowies, a place in Jackson that was, actually, a gift from Meg, and I'm where, it appears, through no fault of my own, I belong.”

“Now about you...” Sally said, rounding on Maude.

“It's past five,” Maude announced, and suddenly they were all aware that the sky outside was dark and the kitchen was dim. “What do you say we move into the living room and have a drink?”

They drank from crystal old-fashioned glasses the size of a baby's head. Ezra had a dry martini. Maude had a Gibson. Sally had a Jim Beam. They turned on the silk-shaded silver lamps in Meg Dunwoodie's living room, sank into chair and couch cushions. Sally contemplated a Tiffany cigarette lighter and Lalique ashtray and wished she could smoke something, anything.

Instead, she went after Maude. “About you,” she began pointedly.

Revelations clearly were in the offing, but Maude hadn't worn nerves on the outside for years. She narrowed her eyes, took a sip of her drink, and said, “Meg saved my life.”

“A familiar story by now,” Sally replied, meeting Maude's glare.

“What the hell do you know about anything?” Maude returned. “Why don't you shut up and listen?”

“I'm sorry,” Sally said, ashamed to have made Maude cuss.

Maude nodded, let her off the hook. “I graduated from UW in 1953.” The year Sally was born. “I hadn't exactly been the queen of the prom. I chased off every boy who wanted to date me, never had time for 'em. Most of 'em were perfect boneheads anyway.” Score another point for Maude's clear-sightedness. “I started out as a secretary, and worked my way up into management. By 1960, I got offered a job running the commissary over at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne. I was making good money. The military is full of idiots, but the ones who aren't, well, they keep things interesting.”

Sally waited.

“One of the interesting ones was Captain James Tolliver. He was a pilot. We got to be friends. Eventually I started going out with him. We ended up getting married in 1963,” Maude recited, reducing what was undoubtedly a really complicated and interesting story to its barest bones, but Sally was willing to put the details off for another time.

Maude took a big swallow of her Gibson. “Jimmy shipped out to Vietnam in September of 1964, just after the Tonkin Gulf incident. Was one of the first in there flying bombing runs over the country. On his first run, in October, he was shot down and killed.” Her face was ghostly. “And I was pregnant.”

Ezra stared into his drink. Sally looked at Maude, then at the floor. The wind shrieked against the big windows, rattled the casings, blew wisps of freezing cold between the cracks.

“Jim's pension was pathetic. My salary wasn't much better. I was thirty-one years old after all, and had never imagined myself as a mother, let alone a single mother. I couldn't see how I could raise a baby on my own. I thought I had two choices: kill myself, or get an abortion,” Maude declared quietly.

Sally looked up, met Maude's eyes. “I can't imagine how you'd go about finding out how to get an abortion in Wyoming in 1964.”

“You can't. Neither could I. And I knew my parents would be appalled. So I asked Meg.”

“Why did you think you could trust her?” Sally asked. “Meg once told me,” Ezra put in, “that she didn't give a damn about families or religion or country or any of that other pious crap. She had one rule, and that was that you always had to help out the people who proved you could trust them.”

“So how had you proved yourself, Maude?” Sally asked.

Maude couldn't find breath to answer. “By begging her parents to take me. They would have done it anyway, but the way Meg told the story, Maude was the one who had the idea and insisted they do it,” Ezra said softly.

They listened to the wind howl.

“So,” Maude resumed at length, “I told Meg, and she made the arrangements, and drove me down to Denver, stayed with me, brought me back and made me stay with her until I felt okay. By that time, I didn't feel like going back to my job at the base, and it was clear she needed somebody to take charge of her house. It's actually kind of funny,” Maude said, sipping her drink and managing a small smile. “She kept insisting on making me cups of tea, but by the first afternoon I was there I was washing the teacups because she apparently didn't comprehend the concept of doing dishes.”

“So you've been here ever since?” Sally asked.

Maude nodded. “There's plenty of time for ever since. I think we should go upstairs and have a look in the closet.”

Ezra handed Sally the key. She unlocked the door, opened it. It was, in some ways, a typical household storage closet for valuables. Shelves held objects in flannel bags, which Sally assumed were silver serving pieces. She opened one, pulled out a heavy cream pitcher, put it back on the shelf.

There was jewelry, too. A large box held a multitude of small velvet boxes. Earrings, bracelets, rings, necklaces. Gold, pearls, precious stones. Platinum. Plenty of diamonds. Lovely things, but nothing out of the ordinary for a wealthy woman who had lived nearly a century. “I can't believe this stuff isn't in a vault,” Sally said.

“This is Wyoming,” Maude replied, “Remember? But you're right. I should take it all down to the bank and get a safe deposit box.” She put the jewelry back in the box, closed it, and turned it over. Then she slid a section of the bottom sideways, revealing a satin-lined secret compartment that held a velvet pouch. Sally opened the pouch, and pulled out six carefully folded pieces of paper. Each held a glittering gemstone. The stones were enormous, each cut a different way. Three were deep yellow, one was pale blue, another deep blue, and the last was rosy pink. She put them back in the bag, speechless.

“They were here when she died,” Ezra explained. “We don't have any idea how she got them, or what they might mean. Neither of us knows much about gems, but we're pretty sure they're diamonds. I meant to take them with me when I went to South Africa, see if I could learn something about them, but then, well, I just didn't find the time to get up here to pick them up before I left.”

“Whatever the hell they are, they're gorgeous. I bet they came from Ernst, the diamond trader. A gift.” She handed the pouch to Maude.

“Maybe,” Ezra answered. “I don't know how you'd find out.”

“I might know somebody who could help. Could you hold off taking them to the bank for a couple of days? If you don't mind, I'd like to show them to Hawk.” Maude glared, Ezra looked concerned. “I'm sorry, but I broke the confidentiality agreement. I didn't want to make a big deal about it, but having somebody spray-paint swastikas on my car spooked the hell out of me. Then, after the breakin I had to talk to somebody. Brit Langham has seen the papers, of course, and I've been bouncing thoughts off Hawk since Thanksgiving. Brit's the kind of kid who'd keep a secret under torture, and I've known Hawk a long, long time. He won't tell anybody anything, and as it happens, he knows something about diamonds.”

“What do you think, Maude?” Ezra asked. “Who's this Hawk?”

Maude considered. What she knew of Hawk Green was pretty much limited to a couple of conversations when he'd showed up at dinnertime. He'd been friendly enough, funny, dry. He impressed her as a man who kept his mouth shut. She searched Sally's face, found not a trace of silliness, and nodded, handing the pouch back.

Sally looked around. In one corner of the closet stood a stack of large cardboard portfolios and canvases on stretchers. She opened one portfolio, carefully slid out an ink and watercolor portrait of Paul Blum, deep in concentration, working at a desk. “Are all these Giselle Blum's paintings?” she asked.

“All,” Maude said. “Eight watercolors, four oils, various subjects. Meg never framed them, for whatever reason. We haven't figured out yet what we want to do with them.”

“Shouldn't you have them?” Sally asked Ezra.

“These were Meg's,” he replied. “Over the years, she gave me thirty of my mother's pieces. These paintings are a collection that belongs with the bequest. How and where to display it is still a question. We could give them to the University Art Museum, of course. But if we decide eventually to turn this house into a museum, perhaps they belong here.”

Sally could see the point. She looked at the portrait of the artist's brother, was humbled by the drawing technique, the subtle color, the depth of feeling conveyed in simple strokes. She very carefully placed the painting back in its portfolio.

Another shelf held five manuscript boxes. Sally opened one. The top sheet read, “Rays of Doubt.” Paging through, she realized that she held in her hand the manuscript for a collection of poems never published. She'd seen drafts of many of the poems in the basement papers, but evidently Meg had taken care to put them together precisely as she wished. The other boxes held similarly arranged collections, varying in length from a few pieces to a hundred pages.

Sally looked up at Maude. “You knew these were here,” she said.

“Of course,” Maude answered. “Meg wasn't as brainlessly disorganized as people thought. She just couldn't throw anything away.”

“If you don't mind telling me,” Sally said, ignoring a passing urge to grab Maude by the throat, “what has been the point of having me flogging all that trash in the basement, looking for literary treasures?”

“The poems aren't all dated, or rather, some of the drafts downstairs are dated, whereas some of the versions here aren't. There's historical work to be done figuring out when they were written and why she put them together the ways she did,” Ezra replied.

Again, they made sense. Sally looked around at all the treasures. “Well,” she said, “I guess all that's missing is the Krugerrands, huh?”

Maude and Ezra looked at each other. “We know the rumors, of course,” Ezra began, “but Meg never, ever made a single reference to her father's supposed buried fortune.”

“If you want to know the truth,” said Maude, “after Mac died, she never even mentioned his name again.”

Chapter 24
Shane's Luck

Shane was sick of these freaks. He hadn't joined up with the Unknown Soldiers to be kept a prisoner in a freezing cabin on some asshole zillionaire's ranch. He'd had to lay low awhile, until the cops gave up on the break-in and got back to running speed traps. Well, he'd been holed up in East Bumfuck for months now. He'd smoked up all his pot, gotten bored enough to pierce his own eyebrow, and had been giving some thought to doing his tongue. Dirtbag, who almost never let Shane out of his sight, had begun to make suggestive remarks about prison and to look at Shane in a way he didn't appreciate. He had started to doubt whether the Unknown Soldiers gave a flying fuck whether he got his inheritance or not, started to wonder if they might, well, you know, be
using
him. By now, he figured, Sheriff Dickhead would have forgotten all about a little B&E in which nothing had been stolen except some scraps of paper, long lost. It was time to blow this pukehole.

He put on his crusty jeans, his jackboots, and his leather jacket and tossed a glance at Dirtbag, who was snoring in his bunk. The animal slept like a corpse on any given night, but on this one, Shane had made extra sure, dumping the contents of six capsules of phenobarbitol (stolen from Foote's wife) in Dirtbag's pork 'n' beans. It was a dose that could have sedated a steer, which Shane figured was about right.

Shane had sixty-one dollars, a .40 caliber Ruger automatic he'd stolen from Foote's gun room, three ammo clips, and a plastic Evian bottle full of vodka. He waded out into the snow, headed for the garage. The U.S. vehicles were parked far out of sight of the house in a converted stock shed, but Shane didn't want to attract attention by driving around in a camouflage humvee anyway. The ranch house garage held the vehicles used by the family: a couple of ATVs, two snowmobiles, a battered Dodge pickup, a fully loaded Jeep Cherokee, a Volvo station wagon, and Foote's personal ride, a vintage navy blue Mercedes. He settled on the last. Shane expected to have to disable the alarm and hot-wire the sucker, but found, somewhat to his disgust, that the zillionaire's paranoia did not appear to extend to worrying about his car. This was Wyoming, after all, not to mention Foote's ranch being a secured piece of private property bigger than some Arab countries. Foote's car was unlocked. The keys were in the ignition.

Shane got behind the wheel, sneering at the ease with which he was making his escape, and pressed the garage door opener. As the door slid up, he turned the key. The big German engine throbbed to life. He rolled down the driveway past the electronic eye that opened the ranch gate.

As he reached for the Evian bottle, he laughed out loud. If he felt like it, he could go to Casper and have a chat with Helwigsen about contesting old Meg's crazy will. Or maybe he'd go home to Albany, get some of his stuff, and head on down the road. Or maybe he'd knock over a liquor store somewhere, and head south. It would be cool at least to stop off in West Laramie and score some dope. So he decided to head for Laramie and then figure it out. He was a free man.

He didn't think the U.S. would come after him. Why the hell should they? They had nothing to gain by keeping him around, and some reason to hope he disappeared and couldn't be connected with them. He took a big swig of vodka, turned on the radio, which was tuned to right-wing all-night talk radio. He put the bottle between his legs, draped an arm over the steering wheel and leaned back to enjoy the ride.

By mid-February, Wyoming roads display an array of potholes, snowdrifts, black ice patches, and assorted hazards rarely achieved elsewhere. Even the most skilled and alert drivers are known to run afoul of one thing or another. Heading up over Togwotee Pass, through Dubois, Crowheart, and Lander, Shane's luck held up pretty well, considering that he'd gotten on the outside of a pint and a half of Smirnoff's. Route 287 was pretty much clear and dry, with only an occasional slick spot. Eventually, however, he found one. He nodded off heading into Muddy Gap. His tires skidded north and his luck headed south.

Shane considered himself a rebel and an outlaw, but he was from the generation that had imbibed the idea of buckling up along with mother's milk. The seatbelt had prevented him from hurtling through the windshield when the car spun off the road at sixty miles per hour. He woke with a wrenching start as the Mercedes plowed into a snowdrift and stuck fast. The steering wheel was covered with blood, as was he, and he realized he'd knocked out a couple of teeth. His chest was badly bruised, his neck had been jerked hard sideways, and his head felt like somebody had hit it with a brick, but nothing else seemed broken. For a while, he couldn't tell how long, he just sat in the car, bleeding and seeing stars and breathing hard. When his remaining teeth started to chatter, he realized he was shivering. He found a box of Kleenex in the car and shoved a wad into his mouth to stanch the blood.

He thought about lighting a cigarette, speculated briefly about whether the car might explode, and figured, what the fuck. As a kid, the first drug he'd ever bought was a bottle of Tylenol, purchased at the Safeway shortly after the landmark product-tampering incident in Chicago where some loony had poisoned a bunch of capsules with cyanide. Back then, he'd liked the idea that his number might come up any time he popped a headache pill (even though he'd doubted it would). When he flicked his lighter and wasn't blown to bits, he decided he might as well try to start the car.

By daybreak, he'd used up nearly all his gas running the heater and wondered what the hell to do next, a million miles from fuckin' anywhere. Just then, his luck rolled over again. A long-bed Ford F–250 with a king cab, big-hip fenders and double rear tires, made for hauling stock trailers, appeared over the horizon. Shane put on the emergency flashers and grabbed the Ruger. He sat very quietly as the truck moved closer, slowed, and pulled up at the place where the Mercedes had left the road. A tall, bowlegged young cowboy in a well-worn Stetson and a sheepskin coat walked over to the Mercedes to see what had happened and if anybody needed help. When the cowboy opened the driver's door, Shane shot him in the leg, blowing a huge hole in the kid's thigh. The kid staggered back and blood sprayed all over the snow, just before he fell into a drift.

Shane got out, threw up, spat hard, walked to the truck, and helped himself to the bills in the cowboy's wallet. Amazing. This was the second time that night that he'd happened on a vehicle with the keys in the ignition, just when he needed to go somewhere.

The cowboy's luck was obviously not great that morning, but it could have been decidedly worse. Falling in snow minimized trauma to the wound, and the cold slowed the bleeding. Not half an hour after Shane Parker had shot him, taken his money and his truck, and left him bloody and unconscious in a snowdrift, a police car drove up. Officers P.W. “PeeWee” Corkett and Curtis Kates of the Wyoming Department of Criminal Investigations, on their way home from working the night shift, saw the Mercedes and pulled over. If they'd been half an hour later, the victim would have been dead. Shane had left the kid's driver's license in his wallet, so while Kates administered first aid, Corkett radioed in the cowboy's name and address, ran the Mercedes's plates, and explained that they were heading for the hospital in Casper with a gunshot victim who was also suffering from hypothermia. The assailant, Corkett reported, appeared to have driven off in a long-bed truck with double rear tires, and they called for officers to secure the scene, and a lab team to be sent.

An hour later, law enforcement around the state received word that there had been a grand theft auto and shooting on U.S. Highway 287 in the vicinity of Muddy Gap. The nineteen-year-old victim, one Jed Barnes, was in serious but stable condition in Casper. All officers should be on the lookout for a silver-gray Ford F–250 long-bed king cab pickup with double rear tires, Wyoming plates #6–2985, registered to the victim's father, Jethro C. Barnes, at a rural route address outside Sinclair. The assailant, who had abandoned a vehicle registered to an Elroy Foote of Freedom Ranch, Wyoming, was presumed to be armed and dangerous.

Shane was at that moment hurtling east along I–80, hell-bent for Laramie at eighty-five miles an hour. Kates and Corkett were starting the paperwork and making phone calls from the DCI office in Casper, and they were not looking forward to dealing with the owner of the Mercedes, who was fairly well known in the state for acting as if the huge ranch he owned was an independent country.

Shane's luck was holding. Two Wyoming Highway Patrol officers who were, by this time, supposed to be taking their shifts on the stretch of the interstate between Rawlins and Laramie, happened to be tanking up on warmedover but free eggs and sausages and hash browns and coffee at the Country Kitchen in Rawlins when the pickup had sped onto the interstate entrance ramp. The officers were discussing college basketball and never saw a thing.

Dickie Langham was at home, taking a shower, when the call came into his office. The Albany County dispatcher radioed for two units to go out to watch the interstate. Lamentably, the county's Chevy Blazer was at home with a deputy who lived twenty miles north of Laramie in Bosler, where the temperature was only just pushing above zero. When the deputy turned the key, the engine gave a couple of labored coughs and died. It took him forty-five minutes to get the truck running. By the time he was on his way into town, Shane Parker was exiting Interstate 80, entering West Laramie.

He got to West Laramie in a curious state of exhausted frenzy, and headed straight for the house of Sherry, his methedrine dealer. Shane really needed a big hit of crystal. He knocked on the door and she answered, wearing a dirty tank top, smelling of stale cigarettes and sweat, hair matted, dark circles under her eyes, looking far better than Shane did.

“What the fuck do you want, you bastard? Where'd you get the truck?” she asked, eying the big rig parked out front, noticing the Wyoming plates that began with the number 6, meaning Carbon County. “You owe me a hundred bucks.”

“Shut up, Sherry,” he said, pushing her out of the way and walking into her filthy house. “I got money.” He'd found $270 in the cowboy's wallet. “I got what I owe you, and another hundred. Gimme meth and some weed.”

“Get outa my house, asshole,” she said, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “You get nothin'. The fuckin' pigs put out the word a couple months ago— they're lookin' for you. We don't need no trouble.”

He walked over to her, grabbed her by a bruised and pockmarked arm, and put his face right in hers. “You gonna give me what I want, or should I just take it, bitch?”

She snarled at him, yanking her arm away, and said, “Okay, but lemme see the money, and then you get outa here fast.”

Shane pulled out a wad of bills, peeled off five twenties and two fifties. He could easily beat the shit out of her and take the drugs, but he didn't want to risk dealing with Terry, her old man, who ran the meth lab in a series of ever-changing locations, and whom Shane had once seen eat a live cockroach. Terry kept pit bulls that were well known in West Laramie. He appeared not to be home but might come in any minute.

Sherry nodded, went into another room and returned with a baggie of marijuana and a small plastic envelope half full of white powder.

“Gimme some works,” he said, licking his lips, and she brought him a piece of flexible rubber hose, a torch, a spoon, an eyedropper, a syringe, a cup of water, and a stoppered bottle of bleach. Shane cleaned out the needle with the bleach, cooked, tied off, fixed. The speed roared up his arm and straight to his heart, blasting into his brain like a sonic boom.

At that moment, Sherry's boyfriend walked in and gave Shane the same look he'd given the unfortunate cockroach. “Get the fuck outa here,” said Terry.

“Yeah, get the fuck out, Shane,” Sherry snarled. “And don't come back.”

Shane went out to the truck, heart hammering, screamingly high. He was seized by the urge to take the Ruger back in and blow them both away. But the memory of the cowboy's jeans exploding in a wet red bloom had him dry-heaving by the side of the truck. He'd never before even seen anybody shot, much less shot somebody himself. He'd shot the kid with Foote's gun, left Foote's car sitting there. The realization that he had fucked himself
big
this time slammed into him like another hit of meth.

He could hear Terry's dogs barking. Wild-eyed, he jumped into the truck, rammed the keys into the ignition and peeled out of there, heading out of town on Highway 230, on his way home. He had no idea where else to go.

The phone at Freedom Ranch rang at 8:17 a.m. Officer P.W. Corkett of the Department of Criminal Investigations wanted to know if Mr. Elroy Foote was aware that a Mercedes registered to him was sitting in a snowdrift in Muddy Gap, and that whoever had been driving it appeared to have shot somebody with a large-caliber pistol and then driven off in the victim's truck. Elroy said that he'd been home all night and wasn't aware that his car was anywhere except his garage, but that there were a number of people on the property who had access to the many ranch vehicles. He would check it out and call Corkett back. Corkett said, politely but firmly, to do that as soon as possible, and added that he would be driving up to Freedom Ranch the next morning to talk with Mr. Foote in person.

Elroy went first to the gun room and noted the Ruger's absence (one of his favorite handguns, dang it!) and then to the garage. It might be that one of his regular cowboys had gotten drunk and a little out of hand. Then again, it might be one of the Unknown Soldiers, several of whom were staying on the place. In any case, there had been an inexcusable breach of security. It was bad enough that his gun and car had been stolen, but the telephone call from a Wyoming state policeman was beyond tolerating. The idea that state cops would insist on entering his personal domain, and that he probably had to permit them access, reminded him once again why he was dedicating himself to fighting government oppression. A crime, after all, had been committed against
him
! It ought to be Elroy Foote himself who administered punishment. But they'd taken away that right. When it came right down to it, though, Elroy just did not like having to deal with government lackeys, especially low-level ones.