The Clinch Knot (7 page)

A Likely Sneed

 

“Ms. Park-Ford?”

“Yes, Sheriff.”

“Get Russell.”

“I will do that, Sheriff.”

“Thank you, Ms. Park-Ford.”

Sheriff Roy Chubbuck’s shaky hand lifted off the intercom button and went back to the business of writing out my ticket.
Driving with an expired license.
The tab came to three hundred and twelve dollars. I had fifteen days to pay the county. “Unless I catch you again,” the sheriff said, “in which case the fines double and must be paid within twenty-four hours. The third time I can put you in jail. And I will.”

He handed the ticket across his desk. I ripped it in half and tossed the pieces back toward him.

He showed me his tiny gray teeth. “You must have seen that on TV somewhere.” He folded the carbons into his shirt pocket. “It’s my copies that count. All you’ve done is lost the nice little envelope to put your money in.”

“I have no money.”

“Not my problem. I gave you gas.”

“I guess you fish the Roam River,” I said. “On Dane Tucker’s land.”

That startled him. “Do I?”

“You and your friends. Your buddies in the SUVs.”

He drew oxygen through his nose, his sore eyes narrowing. “My buddies …”

I said, “Those skinheads work for Dane Tucker, so given what you’re going through, I can understand why you looked the other way about the campground thing. I really can. Just the sight of that river makes my hands shake. But Tucker fired Henderson Gray a year ago. You can ask Gray where he was last Wednesday without messing up your fishing.”

He kept those red slits on me for a long, silent passage into what I slowly understood was a region of no return. I had picked a fight with a dead man, hooked into his grief. Behind him, his wall of treasures from the land said it all. Among the petrified wood and arrowheads and hunting and fishing photos, one treasure in particular caught my eye. It was a wren’s nest, a perfectly woven cup of dried bunchgrass and bison hair, wed to the three-pronged fork of a willow sapling. Chubbuck displayed this remarkable integration of natural elements like a trophy on the shelf behind his head.

“But I guess you’re not going after Gray.”

“That’s correct,” he said. “I am not.”

“I’m a nuisance here.”

“Pretty much.”

“Does he talk?”

“Does who talk?”

“My buddy Sneed.”

“He talks.”

“Did he confess?”

“Not yet.”

“Is his brain damaged?”

“Seems to be.”

“Does he have a lawyer?”

“Not at this point in time.”

I stared at this invalid, suffering man. He had to be delusional, had to be ripped on oxy-contin if he was headed where I thought he was.

“You’re going to try to take a confession from a brain damaged black man without a lawyer? What the hell do you think this is, Alabama, nineteen-fifty-five? Don’t you see how that’s going to work out?”

Chubbuck pushed his chair back a bit from the desk and opened a drawer. He put a fly box on the desk. “You might be surprised how things are going to work out.” It took him several tries to squeeze the clasp and open the box.

“As for a lawyer, I’m waiting on next-of-kin,” he said as the fly box separated to display neat rows of mayfly patterns. “Depending on how things develop, we may have a call to make on life support as well as legal representation. Leave me a phone number, Mister Oglivie. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

I snarled back. I told him Sneed had no family. I said his mother was an offender, someone he meant never to see again. Sneed ran away from his mother and his foster care at fourteen, I said, and no one followed. But Sheriff Chubbuck disinterestedly pushed papers around his desk, found a pair of tweezers. He aimed these unsteadily into the fly box. At length, he extracted a tiny baetis dun, a mayfly imitation, held it up in the light between us.

“Say what you will. But we found a likely Sneed,” he said, “working in the Houston Fire Department.”

He turned the fly around for inspection. “Open your hand.” He dropped the baetis into my palm. It was perfect, tight and balanced, uncommonly detailed for a size 18. “I tied that,” he told me. “Just a year ago.”

I looked up. Chubbuck put that raw, dry squint on me, gave it to me hard, and he held it.

“That one fools them every time.”

The door creaked open.

“Russell,” the sheriff snapped, “take this man out of my county. And do it right this time.”

A Desperate Tangle, A Wishful Mess

 

Outside in the lot, Deputy Russell Crowe said to me, “You want to see what Elmer Sorgensen can do?”

The skinny old drunk sat on a yellow parking cleat beside Crowe’s cruiser gnashing Doritos with his bad teeth and rinsing the shards down with Red Bull. He grinned at me in such a way as would only make sense if I had just that moment goosed him.

“Not really.”

“I think you do,” said Russell. “Come on. Follow a little. Elmer, get in, it’s show time.”

So once more I pulled the Cruise Master in behind the Park County deputy’s lead and tailed this son-of-a-former-sheriff who was not, as you might think, related to a famous actor, even though he had the same name.

I ground my teeth and went with it. What else did I have? This time we paraded around the block, past the fuel depot and up to the chain link gate of what looked like the county impound lot. Crowe unlocked the gate and we pulled in. There at the back of the lot, striking a shiver into me, rested Jesse’s dusty golden Oldsmobile.

I closed my eyes, tried to squeeze out the memory. But Crowe was at my window. He seemed driven now, edgy.

“See,” he said, “I put some thought to your idea that your buddy didn’t kill Jesse. There is a way. Come on. Have a look.”

I climbed down and followed. The Olds was surrounded by ant hills and localized tumbleweeds, its side mirrors spidered over. Strips of desiccated duct tape hung inside the window frames. The back-seat window I had rocked out was now sloppily sealed with black plastic sheeting. Crowe peeled that up, reached forward and unlocked the doors.

“It doesn’t seem possible at first, that anyone else could have done it,” he said. “Truth is, you don’t look too sensible in saying so—” he flashed me his long-jawed horse grin “—seeing as you’re the one who says the keys and pistol were locked in there with him.”

“They were.”

“Okay. Whatever you say. And all the window seams were taped tight from the inside. So nobody got out and then locked the doors after.”

“No.”

“But that wouldn’t be necessary, would it? To tape the windows?”

“What do you mean?”

“Would you do it?” he said. “Killing yourself? In a heat? Would you bother? See what I mean? These windows are tight enough. The tape is a sell job, trying to make the point that the doors weren’t locked after the fact. Window dressing.”

Crowe laughed at his joke. I wondered where his idea, his words, his jitters came from. But he had explicated, somehow, my unvoiced instinct. The set-up around Sneed was too thorough, too perfect. Supposedly he had just shot his lover. Then he had meant to shoot himself, only to discover my Glock was empty. In that state, with Jesse’s face in pieces on the ground, Sneed had come up with duct tape—where?—and bothered to tape the window seams?

So Russell had surprised me, making sense like that. Warily, I opened Jesse’s rear door and entered Sneed’s back-seat coffin. The charcoal smell was still strong. Shaggy strips of duct tape dragged against me. I twisted on the seat. I touched the roof and doors. How would someone get out?

“You ready?” Russell asked me. “I know what you’re thinking. It’s not possible. Right? Come on out of there. You’re too big. Elmer, get in the car.”

I got out. Russell held the passenger door open. Elmer Sorgensen slipped in past me on a breeze of evaporated urine. Russell locked the old man in, then sprung the trunk and left it open. “Go,” he said.

Sorgensen just sat there, rumpling his lips and blinking. “Elmer, go. Do what we practiced.” Russell rapped on the window. “Go.”

Now the old drunk activated. He moved aside and I began to understand. I had watched Jesse do a variation of what Sorgensen did next. The Oldsmobile’s rear seat split about 70/30, and both sections unlatched and folded forward, converting the trunk into a flat space that extended all the way to the front seats. Jesse did this from the outside, with the doors open. But Sneed was too long to sleep in there, and so they bought a tent.

Elmer Sorgensen, though, was inside the car, not outside reaching in. And Sneed, by hypothesis, was in there too, crowding the space. There was only room for Sorgensen to fold down the smaller seat piece, the thirty percent.

He did so—and jumped in fright. It appeared that a huge spider had set up housekeeping on the back, where the upholstery lipped over and met the trunk carpet. Sorgensen looked out at Russell, who reassured him with a flush of horse teeth. The old man looked more closely at the spider, then disregarded it and promptly wormed out through the small opening and into the trunk.

Russell and I walked around. Elmer Sorgensen said, “Uff-da.” He clambered out of the trunk and stumbled off sideways for a few steps before he fell down in the dust.

“You see it now?”

“I see it now.”

“The one problem,” Crowe said, “is getting that seat piece shut again.”

“Shouldn’t be hard.”

“You want to try it?”

I did indeed. I reached through the trunk but my arm wasn’t long enough. I needed a full two feet more. I hooked a leg inside, tried to fit my shoulder above the spare tire. I was too thick. The only method remaining was to go in head first, groin over the trunk latch, and flail blindly for a grip on a seat that was folded down away from me. Only when I abandoned all hope for self-preservation and lunged in completely could I grip the cushioned top of the seat section. I had to hang on and worm back out, using muscle combinations unrelated to normal human behavior—but then, when I tried to close the seat, my hand was in the way, and if I let go, the section flopped back down. I tried to throw it back, whisking my hand clear, but I could not do this with enough force to make the seat piece snap into its latch. It only bounced, flopped, gaping open.

Dog damn it.

Russell was pleased. “See?”

As I kinked back out, I felt a sense of the killer’s frustration, even panic. This problem with the seat was unforeseen. And maybe a clock was ticking. Sneed was stirring. Or the charcoal was burning down, the gas dissipating. All for a quarter inch of stubborn upholstery.

Russell leaned on the open passenger door, chin on his arms like a third elbow, those teeth taking air.

“What’s so funny?”

“Come here. See that?”

The spider hadn’t moved through all the commotion because it wasn’t a spider. It was one of my big, black Madame X flies, one I had tied especially for Sneed. The fly trailed a short length of heavy tippet, curled from the stress of snapping. I looked at Russell.

“The killer had to rig up a rod,” he said with complete confidence. “Then he had to jam the rod in here and hook the back of the seat with that big fly. Then he had to yank it shut and break the line.”

He paused, then answered my unvoiced question. “Because that hook is barbed. It ain’t coming out.”

I touched the Madame X. The foam thorax was half-shredded. A tiny tuft of wool from Sneed’s vest patch still clung to the hook’s barb. The fly had been fished by Sneed, clipped off and put on the patch, and then retied to a tippet.

“All you gotta do is snap the line, put the rod back where you found it,” Russell explained, “shut the trunk, and you’re good to go.”

Just in case, I tried to work the hook free.

“It won’t come. You’d have to cut it out. Am I right?”

“You’re right.”

“And who’s got time for that? And hey, speaking of time, we’d better get going. We’ve been in here about long enough.”

On a hunch, I bent closer to inspect the knot. Sneed was fastidious about his knots. If Sneed had tied that knot, it would have been a perfect clinch knot. But it didn’t look right.

“Gotta obey orders,” Russell said at my back. “Heh. Or at least I gotta look like it.”

I ignored him. I went to my knees, got out of my own light. Now it was clear: this was not a clinch knot at all.

“We been in here so long Elmer’s started looking for a home. Heh.”

I glanced up. The scrawny old drunk was trying the door handles on a confiscated panel van. But back to the knot. I checked it from a different angle. Knots were small, sure, and line was translucent, but when you fly fished, you inspected thousands of knots, the clinch knot ten times more often than any other. Every fly fisherman knew the clinch knot, and a good clinch knot, the type Sneed tied, looked like a microscopic baby’s fist, the thumb sticking up inside wrapped and fisted fingers.

Russell’s shadow moved over my light. “Gonna have to go deputy on you, Mister Oglivie. Load up and let’s go.”

No, this was not a clinch knot at all. This was a granny knot. No, worse. It was a desperate tangle, a wishful mess. The knot had held, as some knots will, by sheer luck, and by copious looping and winding and threading and cinching.

I let the knot go and straightened up. Elmer Sorgensen’s legs protruded, strained and wiggled, half out of the panel van’s busted windshield.

“You fly fish much, Russell?”

His eyes widened. His teeth appeared and he began to nod.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Absolutely. All the time.”

The Bozeman-Livingston Guide War

 

Take this man out of my county. And do it right this time.

The meaning of this, Russell decided, meant mostly that I, once out of Park County, should do whatever I felt was right while he, Deputy Crowe, should exonerate himself from blame in the event that I decided to come back.

To these ends, the son of Rita Crowe suggested that he should once more follow me across the county line, whereupon, using his training, he should inflict dramatic but minor wounds upon me—say, abrasions on the neck, which were easy, and maybe also a glancing blow to the scalp, good for blood production. In this way, we would commemorate Russell’s insistence that I leave the sheriff’s turf and keep on going. And in this way, if and when I returned to Livingston (which, of course, was my choice), he would not be blamed.

“That’s an interesting thought, Russell. You’re an interesting guy.”

“Or, you can beat yourself up,” he offered.

“Believe me, I know.”

“Just a good hard skim,” the deputy suggested, “to that ridge above the eye, bleeds like heck, makes a big mess over nothing.”

“Hit myself in the eye?”

“As an option,” he said.

We had only gone about one mile out of town on 89 South, however, when the deputy, behind me, seemed to upend all that careful planning. First his cherries flashed in my side mirror, then his siren whooped. I pulled onto the low shoulder only to discover that he wanted to pass. He rocketed around me. One hundred yards up the road he found himself behind another RV, Yellowstone bound. This continued—flash and
whoop!
and pass—until sight and sound of the deputy were gone.

It was dinner hour, and the highway was busy. It was a good slow while before I could wallow the Cruise Master back up out of the ditch and rejoin traffic. Volition being limited when you’re on a two-lane highway in a forty-footer with an un-tuned engine, I drifted along with the southbound tourists, trying to figure what next. Was Henderson Gray thin enough to squeeze out of Jesse’s car? Should I, in fact, find the tire iron and hit myself? Keep Russell on whatever track he was traveling?

But those ruminations vanished a half-mile short of Carter’s Bridge, as I passed the turn-in to Hilarious Sorgensen’s Fly ‘n’ Float Outfitters.

Russell’s cruiser was in there, lights flipping and snapping, and I glimpsed a milling crowd of fancy hats and vented shirts among the rental cars and pickup trucks and SUVs. The guides and their clients were back from a day of fishing, but something had gone wrong.

I turned around at the boat landing across the bridge and came back. Hilarious Sorgensen’s lot was roomy—space for all the boat trailers in high season—and I parked easily inside a windbreak row of spruce at the roadside margin.

The crowd of fishermen enclosed a bloody brawl. At the approximate center of the outfitter’s lot, two vehicles towing drift boats had collided. No doubt this had ignited the shoving and punching that erupted in every direction around a desperate Deputy Russell Crowe.

I wormed in closer. Real injury had been done to a paunchy, gray-haired man who lay unconscious beneath the boat hitch of a gleaming black Dodge Durango. He bled from a gash that seemed to relocate his nose into the hollow of his left cheekbone. Someone was trying to help him and Russell was screaming, “Back! Get back!”

The other vehicle in the collision was an old Jeep Wrangler, once white, with a ratty soft-top and rusted wheel wells. The apparent driver of the Jeep was bloody as well, but he was still a player, wheeling on his back in the dust, kicking at a young guide who was livid, howling with rage, trying to make good contact with a boat oar.

“Knock it off!” Russell hollered. He was spread too thin, dancing ineffectively between clusters of combatants. “You! Get back!” As I retreated he was screeching for backup into his shoulder radio, wading toward the injured man below the hitch. “Isn’t somebody here a doctor?”

In fact, this being Sorgensen’s crowd, the gallery had to be brimming with doctors and dentists and vets and pharmacists from Indiana and Wisconsin and wherever else Sorgensen’s marketing touched down. But the energy of these professionals seemed spastic and morally confused. “Where’s Bronowski?” I heard. “I’m an allergist,” came the excuse. And, “Touch one of these guys and get yourself sued. Just watch.” And then: “Heh-heh. That guy’s gonna need a dentist. Here’s my card. I’m kidding.”

I moved around the mob. Hilarious Sorgensen watched all this from the doorway of his shop. The massive ex-rodeo clown had no response except to gnash Planters peanuts from a mostly empty jar.

“You’ve seen this before,” I guessed.

Sorgensen flicked me a glance from drug-shrunk eyes. Twenty-seven broken bones and a lacerated kidney, Jesse said, were laid up inside that envelope of fat. He had a lot of pain to kill, and then a lot of painkiller to override with speed.

“Just a cat fight,” he grunted, batting peanut crumbs from his filthy beard. “My old man was a sheepherder. You know what that’s like? That means he was bat-shit crazy and made exactly enough cash to stay drunk between the good grass.”

These comments with respect to what, I wondered. Sorgensen lumbered to the porch’s side railing to flick his Planters jar into a dumpster below. He barely made it back to me with enough breath left to continue.

“Swore I was going to have a better life. But hell, working with these goofballs, I don’t know.” Those empty pinpricks again, right on me. “So how’s our buddy Sneed?”

“He’s alive. Talking.”

“Hmmm. What’s he saying?”

“That I don’t know.”

“Confession?”

“Not if he didn’t do it.”

“Hmmm.” At this point, Sorgensen had expended his capacity to stand. He ballooned to the rear in his huge culotte-shorts and leaned his forearms on the porch rail, making it creak. He jingled a set of keys, tapped the ring on the railing. Even at my safe distance, he smelled like the underside of a door mat, plus something close to creamed corn. “Woman!” he bellowed suddenly. “Get a move on!”

He swung his bison head toward the shop and back. Tap, jingle, tap-tap-tap. “Gonna miss her flight.”

“Lyndzee’s traveling again?”

“Death in the family.”

“Again?”

“They come in threes, don’t they?”

Out on the lot, Russell was making some progress. A fisherman had approached the wounded man and knelt beside him. Around this, most of the skirmishes had attenuated to jousting and shouting, all except the madman with the helicoptering oar.

“So what’s this about?” I ventured at Sorgensen.

A snort. “A bunch of girls pissing in my parking lot, mostly.”

Not the real answer, of course, so I waited. “Hell,” he grumbled on eventually, jabbing a key into the wood of the railing, “with the guide rates up so high, and the shuttle drivers nicking me—” His head again swung suddenly. “Damn it, woman! You’re gonna miss your flight!”

Lyndzee’s harried voice struggled to reply. “If you’d give me some time to get ready …”

Sorgensen grumbled, “This time her uncle in Memphis.” He shook his wooly head. “Woman and her damn people are bleeding me dry. As for this out here, this is an outbreak of the Bozeman-Livingston guide war. Every couple of years the Bozeman guides get the idea the fishing must be better over here and they show up by the dozens. They clog the boat ramps, jam up the river, acting like a bunch of spoiled little prom queens. Even though they got the Gallatin, the Madison, the Beaverhead, all that water over there. Pisses off the Livingston guides, these two girls have a fender bender and off we go.”

Before us now, a brave pair of perhaps orthodontists or veterinary surgeons had stepped in to try to curtail the flailing oar. As for one other remaining hot spot, a shoving match over near the Cruise Master, Russell seemed to be getting results with a taser.

“Jesse’s dad—” I began.

“You’re looking at it, Pal. Galen Ringer killed a Bozeman guide one day in a fight down at Otter Creek.”

“Jesse believed he was innocent.”

“Yeah.” The big man ejected breath. “Loyal to the death. Poor girl.”

Lyndzee clattered onto the porch with a pair of hardshell suitcases, pre-wheel. She set them down and yanked at a leather mini skirt, tried for bright.

“Oh, hello. I’m so sorry about your friends.”

“I’m sorry about your family.”

“You’re okay?”

“Not really. You?”

She had a voice like a squeaky pencil sharpener. “Oh … I … um … I’m …”

“You’re late. Get in the van.”

Her eyes clouded over. Now muttering, head down, she lifted her suitcases and carried them off the porch toward a battered conversion van beyond the dumpster. I repositioned myself and blocked Sorgensen before he could get moving.

“Jesse told me her dad cut the guy’s anchor rope and let the client go floating away down the river. She said her dad and the Bozeman guide fought, something about a cut-off on a boat ramp, but the Bozeman guide was alive and well when her dad drove off.”

“That’s Galen’s story.” Sorgensen watched Lyndzee into the van. “It took the jury eighteen minutes. They saw pictures of that poor sonofabitch trailing like a water weed with his skull busted and that anchor rope around his neck.”

“Jesse said somebody showed up just as her dad left.”

Lyndzee turned on the radio.
Rush,
maybe. Guitars and voice screeching off toward the Yellowstone.

“Jesse’d believe the pope did it.” Sorgensen wanted to move around me. He was not a tall man, was actually small when you looked inside the fat. He had tiny hands, tiny ears, narrow shoulders. This man had once fit inside a barrel. Thwarted, he considered me with those buzzed-up eyes. “I hear you’re asking a lot of questions about Jesse’s death.”

“Just a few,” I said.

“You got one for me? That’s why you’re here?”

“Actually, I do.”

He nodded slowly, waiting, whistling air out through his nose.

“A couple days ago,” I framed it, “when I was looking for Sneed and Jesse, you said you’d fired them. You said they’d stolen a rod. So whose rod did they steal?”

But while I asked the question, Sorgensen’s face transformed. He infused a cheesy lightness into his cheeks and eyes. Now he clown-smiled at me—crinkly eyes, grotesquely and falsely jolly—as he bulled out some space toward the porch steps. Passing, he reached out in a half-successful attempt to slap me on my stiffening shoulder.

“You take care.”

“Whose rod?”

“Crimenently, fella. I don’t know what you’re getting at. Believe me, it broke my heart—” Sorgensen gripped the rail, side-stepped off the porch “—to fire those kids.”

I tried once more, uselessly, at the mute slab of his back: “Did they steal a rod or not?”

He did a flaccid little jig-step, kept walking.