Gray Ghost Murders (9781101606070) (10 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

Knocking on Heaven's Doors

S
tranahan didn't expect that anyone would answer his knock, let alone the estimable Weldon Crawford Jr., the state's sole representative to Congress. Dressed in creased Carhartt jeans and a snap-up black shirt with red piping in a lasso design, he looked like a page in a western wear catalog, right down to his snakeskin Larry Mahans. He smiled, the creases at the corners of his eyes running back into silver wings framing a full head of jet black hair that looked real enough, even though Stranahan knew from the papers that the congressman was in his midfifties. From camera front, the politician's view, Crawford was one of the handsomest men Sean had ever seen. From the side, his head was shaped like an egg with a golf-ball-sized bulge under the right ear.

“Congressman,” Sean said, “I'm sorry to disturb you. I'm from the Liars and Fly Tiers Club, the cabin down by the river.”

“Yes, of course. I sold that property. They did a first-rate job of fixing it up.”

“We had a break-in last week. I thought I'd let the neighbors know and see if anyone else was hit. You haven't had any problems, have you?”

“No. I've only been up for a couple weekends this summer, but I'm sure E.J. would have told me if there'd been any trouble. Emmitt Cummings, he's the caretaker of the property. Would you like a drink, Mr. . . . ?”

“Sean Stranahan.”

Crawford winked. “It's five o'clock in”—he glanced at his watch—“well it's five o'clock somewhere, after all. Oh, come in, come in. The family won't be arriving until the Fourth and I'm all alone in the house. In a place this size, you begin to feel small.”

Sean doubted that the congressman would feel small even if he was alone in the Governor's Mansion in Helena, to which he was said to have aspirations. He followed the man's nickel-diameter bald spot into a vast living area paneled in light wood with massive log support beams. A Shiras moose peered down at him from one wall, a bull elk with its mouth open to bugle from another. Over the mantelpiece, incongruous with the western theme, presided the shoulder mount of an enormous African Cape buffalo with a scabby black hide.

“M'bogo, that's the Swahili name. An old dugga boy from the Ruaha River. I shot him in full charge. You can see the crease under the right eye where the bullet went in. He was all cut up from fighting off lions. Scotch and soda's my poison.”

“That sounds fine.”

Crawford busied himself behind an antique zinc bar.

“Are you a hunter?” he called out.

Sean answered no, but now that he lived in Montana he was thinking about it.

“I can't hear you.”

He brought the drinks, indicated chairs for them to sit.

“‘Hakuna matata,' as they say in Kenya. No worries.” They touched glasses.

“I'm hard of hearing, so you have to speak to my left ear. My right eardrum burst in 1969. I was riding an elephant in the Terai. That's the belt of tall grass that runs under the Himalayas. We were beating the cover for tiger—this was just weeks before Indira Gandhi outlawed hunting—when the man sharing the howdah let go with a .375 Holland and Holland, the muzzle about six inches from my ear. He said he'd seen a cobra, but nobody else saw a snake. I rode that elephant the rest of the day while the side of my head swelled like a football. Long story short, a doctor in Delhi drained a quart of fluid that had collected in the abscess. People think I'm vain because I turn my left side to face them, that I'm hiding my reminder of that day—it's what doctors call a benign mass—but I just want to hear what they're saying.”

“Could you have it removed?”

“The mass? I see you have no experience in Montana politics. I was cursed by being born with a symmetrical face. Each side is the mirror image of the other.” He showed Sean by turning his head. “It's actually quite rare. Among movie actors, Denzel Washington and Kim Basinger have such faces. No one would disagree that they are very attractive people. But very few can pull off a perfect face. It brands them as effeminate, or in my case”—he made quote marks with his fingers—“a ‘pretty boy.' A rancher from eastern Montana sees this face on TV and he thinks twice. He wants to cast his vote for a feedlot manager with a crew cut, a tire around the middle, and a lopsided grin. The lump under my ear is my lopsided grin.”

He regarded Stranahan with shrewd eyes. “Are you a Republican, Sean? Or are you a granola-grazing liberal donkey who lies down with wolves? I like to know when I've invited an enemy into the camp.”

“I'm a fisherman.”

“Nicely played, but I have my answer all the same.” He stood up. “I'm keeping you from making the rounds. What was taken, by the way?”

Stranahan had anticipated the question and decided that he'd go with honesty.

“A collectible fishing fly. Two, actually. They're quite valuable.”

“I had no idea there was such a thing before meeting Polly Sorenson. He's the one member of your club I've gotten to know a bit. I'll admit I'm a spin fisherman myself. A number 9 jointed Rapala in a rainbow trout pattern is my go-to. A black number 6 Panther Martin with a gold blade if the water's muddy. I like to catch big fish that are eating the little fish that are eating the flies.”

“You're just saying that to appeal to people who can't cast a fly rod,” Stranahan said.

Crawford wrinkled the corners of his eyes. “Maybe you know more about politics than I gave you credit for.”

Stranahan felt himself smiling along with the man, despite disagreeing with nearly everything he stood for. “Congressman, it's been a pleasure.” He pointed to the Cape buffalo mount on the wall. “Do you mind telling me what gun you used to stop the charge?”

“A .470 Nitro double rifle built by John Rigby in London.”

“What weight of bullet does a gun like that shoot?”

“Five hundred grains.”

Sean set down his drink glass, trying to cover any expression of surprise.

“That Woodleigh solid,” Crawford said, “it's a stopper.”

As Stranahan settled behind the wheel of his Land Cruiser, he frowned inwardly. A little more than two hours had passed since Martha Ettinger showed him the bullet. You didn't just knock on a door on an unrelated matter and find the man who owned the rifle that shot that bullet. And that man a U.S. representative. Still . . . how many cartridges could there be that fired a five-hundred-grain bullet, and how many men owned a rifle that fired that cartridge? In, say, a hundred-mile radius of Sphinx Mountain?

He looked across the valley. The lion-headed mountain was just visible above the escarpment, its peak cut off by a layer of cloud. He heard a raindrop ping off the hood of the Land Cruiser and then another. He turned the key.

•   •   •

T
he rest of the interviews—of the half dozen doors he knocked on there were three answers—weren't so revealing. No one had reported a burglary. No one had noticed anyone suspicious driving or walking about on the posted land. But then, Stranahan hadn't expected anything. The break-in at the club—he had taken the liberty of exaggeration—had been an excuse to assess the neighbors as possible suspects in the theft of the fly. Which, with respect to the events of the morning, seemed much less interesting than they had the night before. He had turned onto the spoor of a much more dangerous animal than one who had taken a liking to a trout fly. But he had made a commitment to the club, and unlike Sheriff Ettinger's promise of money, the club's check was already in his wallet. Willoughby had cut it for the full amount when Stranahan had driven down in the afternoon.

His last stop was the house belonging to Emmitt Cummings, who Crawford said oversaw several of the neighbors' properties and, as the development's only year-round resident, acted as its unofficial watchdog. Cummings's twenty acres were set on the westernmost section of the old ranch property and included the original ranch dwelling set in a copse of gnarled aspens. As he pulled up the dirt drive, he saw a man wedging a peeled rail into an age-blackened jack fence that zigzagged along the toe of the hillside.

The man acknowledged Sean's wave with the tip of his hat and walked bowlegged down the hill, passing a chestnut quarterhorse that turned to follow him. Cowboy head to toe but not out of a catalog, the real thing, sweat-stained Stetson cracked in the crown crease, chambray workshirt with two pearl snaps missing, Levi's bought hard and blue-black and never washed. A belt buckle embossed with a bucking bronc winked in the sunlight that had opened a hole in the rain clouds. Cummings smelled of sweat and horseflesh.

“I'm sure as hell happy to meet you,” he said when Sean introduced himself. “I'd be amenable to shaking hands with a polecat this time of day. The old Swede who put up this fence was spit and vinegar on the outside and boot leather underneath. Or maybe 'tother way around.”

The left side of the man's face clenched in an odd expression and quickly relaxed. The eyes were a startling blue like cerulean, set in a network of deep creases. He pinched the crown of his hat and tipped it forward off his head, ran a hand through short sandy hair, wiped the sweat on his jeans. He got down on one knee and set the hat over the other knee, plucked a stem of grass and chewed it, his mustache working like a restless rodent.

Sean squatted down to be at the same height. The quarterhorse dropped its head and nuzzled the top of his head.

“Don't mind Sally. She's my air conditioner. Licks your hair and you feel cool enough for five minutes. 'Bout all she's good for anymore. Now what can I do for you?”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh,” he repeated as Sean went through his spiel. “You don't say? Why, I haven't heard of a burglary in this development since the sale went through in '02. No, sir, I haven't.”

Sean felt himself drawn to Emmitt Cummings as he had been drawn to other ranchers he'd met since moving to Montana. They were conservative to a man, resistant to change and wary of strangers, having developed a second skin to keep the first from getting burned. But polite if you weren't telling them what to do with their property—salt of the earth, roll up their sleeves and do anything they could for you.

“So this fly you're looking for, it's collectible you say?”

Sean told him how much it had brought at auction. Cummings whistled, high-low.

“Now, I can see the value of a good cutting horse or a fine firearm, yes I can, or one of them museum paintings though I lean to western art myself. Gary Carter, that man's painting just gets me. But a nickel's worth of feathers tied on a hook? But then it takes all kinds to make a world, doesn't it?” He spit out the stem of grass, plucked another.

Sean learned that Cummings had been born the sole son of a ranch manager and had managed ranches himself since he was twenty, had borrowed heavily to buy his own place up on the Milk River, 650 acres with another 450 in grazing rights, small outfit but a working cattle ranch with senior water rights on Hardy Creek. He'd lost his shirt in an outbreak of blackleg disease that claimed half his yearlings and sold out for a song, but maintained the mineral rights. Went back to ranch managing and outfitting, taking horseback hunters up into the Bear Paws for elk and mule deer in the fall, moved south when there was an opening to manage the Anderson spread, stayed on after the ranch was sold and subdivided. Lived a mite too close to the bone until a silver mining company bought the mineral rights up on the Milk property. Put the money toward the twenty acres the old homestead was built on. Now he was setting pretty enough what with the development stipend and the outfitting dollar, but would really like to get back to working cattle, it was where his heart was. Married, now a widower, his wife dying of breast cancer, two children, the son a groundskeeper for a couple North Dakota golf courses—“that there's what I mean by saying we live in changing times”—his daughter married into a ranching family out of Roundup—“good people but the place is sliding south, they wouldn't know to stand up a tipped sheep.” A ten-minute history of his forty-two years on the planet, then ten minutes with the grass stem bobbing as Stranahan told his own story—“uh-huh, now ain't that just how it is, yep, I remember something about that, that was you, why I'll be, life sure can be funny”—not an out-of-the-ordinary conversation between strangers squatting opposite each other in wide-open country in Montana.

They stood up, Cummings put his hat on and said he'd keep an eye out, he smiled with his cerulean eyes, and then hitched away in his bowlegged gait, the horse following. Sean walked back to his rig thinking rivers, sky, and people—
this is why I'll never go east again
—and drove back in time for supper with the club members without having learned a single useful piece of information concerning their missing trout fly.

What he did learn that night, lying in bed in one of the two spacious bunkhouses, was that Willoughby snored like a dragon and Robin Hurt Cowdry spoke to himself in his sleep, in what he'd later learn was a Zulu dialect called Ndebele. He woke up to the patter of rain against the windows and hiked up the riverbank after breakfast, fishing to take advantage of an on-again, off-again blue-winged olive hatch and talking to everyone who came by, which amounted only to a half dozen anglers. Three were buddies from Oregon who were camping up on the West Fork and had hiked down from Three Dollar Bridge. Two were local anglers and the last was a boy who cast a wet noodle fly rod as if he were whipping a Thoroughbred and asked Sean if he had permission to trespass on the property.

“My uncle says fishermen don't stay under the high-water mark. He says they want to fish the river they ought to pony up and buy their own property.”

“Let me guess,” Sean told him, “your uncle's from California. Either California or Texas.”