The Deader the Better (19 page)

I didn’t realize it until that moment, but the voice inside of
me that had been pressuring me to imagine J.D.’s last moments had
known what it was doing.

“Sheriff,” I said. “You know, I just had a thought. About
ways to die.”

“What’s that?”

“Well. Let’s assume you’re right and leaving his family with
the insurance money was the only way out that J.D. could see.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Now, you and I are in the kind of business where, I think it’s
safe to say, we’re probably as brave as the next guy. Maybe we’re
not heroes or anything, but I figure the truly timid find something
to do in life that doesn’t involve sticking their nose in other
people’s business like we do.”

“All right,” he said.

“So, I’m asking you…kind of like man to man. You think
you’ve got the stones for it? Think you could do what he did?”

Hand whistled softly. “You mean to…like Mr. Springer?”

“Yeah,” I said. He rubbed his chin but didn’t speak, so I
went on. “’Cause I’ll tell you, Sheriff, last couple of days
I’ve searched my soul, and I know damn well I don’t. No way, no
how do I have what it takes to pour ten gallons of unleaded all over
myself and then flick my Bic. Period. End of story.”

Hand was still mulling it over when I waved goodbye and began
walking to my car. For the first time in twelve hours, my to-do list
was empty. Got in, buckled up and gave her the gas.

I kept driving, past the motel, down to the Steelhead. I took the
stool at the end of the bar, keeping as far away from the Davis
brothers as possible. Glen fetched the waitress from the kitchen,
straightened his apron and walked down to me.

“You gonna behave?” he asked.

“Depends,” I said. “Can you put me together a couple of
cheeseburgers and an order of fries?”

He glanced over his shoulder at the dozen or so degenerates who
were milling around, taking notice of my presence.

“To go.” A statement.

“Fine,” I said.

“In that case”—he held out a hand—“good to see you.” I
shook it and watched as he motioned to the waitress, gave her my
order and then turned back my way. “Didn’t figure I’d see you
again.”

“I had a few questions and I thought you might be the guy to
answer them.”

“About?”

“Some of your local luminaries.”

“Like?”

“What do you know about Mark Tressman?” I asked. He thought it
over. “Just about everything, I guess.”

“Except who he’s sleeping with this week.”

“Hell, he’s always been like that. Wanted to screw now and
talk later.”

“Kiss and tell?”

He laughed. “With Mark, it always seemed to me that the telling
was more important to him than the kissing was.”

“You know his parents?”

“Just a mama. Fran worked for the mill about the same time as my
old man. Ramona’s daddy’s secretary for something like thirty
years. Died a couple of years back.”

Turned out they were all lifers. Tressman, Weston and Polster.
Small-town kids who’d gone off to other places and then returned to
their rural roots. Polster about ten years ago. The rest of them in
the past three or four years.

“What about Sheriff Hand?”

He shook his head. “Nah. He’s not from these parts. Hand’s
from back in the Midwest someplace. Used to be a corporate security
guy of some sort.”

“Doesn’t seem like the small-town sheriff type,” I said.

“Probably why most folks can’t stand his ass.”

“How’s that?”

Over his shoulder, Mickey Davis strained to make eye contact with
me as he carried a pair of empty pitchers up to the bar to be
refilled. The vibe pulled Glen’s head around. He pointed a thick
finger at Mickey. “You just get your beer and go on about your
business,” he said. “You start any more trouble in here, you all
are gonna need to find a new place to do your drinking.” I resisted
the urge to smile and wave.

“You were saying folks weren’t fond of the sheriff.”

“Yeah…some because of the way he took over from Buddy Brown,
the old sheriff. Some cause he’s a hard-ass. He busts drunk
drivers. He enforces the speed limit. He makes sure you’ve got
fresh tags and insurance.” He chuckled. “We had guys who hadn’t
renewed their registrations in fifteen years until Nathan Hand took
over. Hadn’t ever had insurance, most of them.”

“What about this Sheriff Brown?”

“Buddy Brown was sheriff around here since maybe the late
fifties. He and the town kind of fit each another like an old pair of
jeans.”

“And?”

“And one day…what, two years back…the City Council just up
and fired him. Next thing anybody knew, they’d appointed Nathan
Hand. And then Hand decided he didn’t like his chief deputy, Sam
Williams—the guy most folks thought would replace Buddy Brown—so
Hand pushed Sam into early retirement and hired that crazy Russell
kid, whose only law enforcement experience was from the other side of
the bars.”

“Do tell.”

“Hell yes…” He pointed over at the pool players. “Three
years ago, you’d have found Bobby Russell right over there with the
rest of those lamebrains. Hell, he was the worst of the lot. At least
Dexter and Mickey are stupid.”

The waitress was headed our way with a bag.

“Nice seeing you again,” I said to him. I reached into my
pocket.

He handed me the bag. “On the house,” he said. I started to
argue, but he cut me off.

“It’s like training a dog,” he said. “This is your treat
for not busting up the place today.” I thanked him and pushed my
way out the door, heading for another scintillating night of ESPN at
the Black Bear Motel.

BY NOON I’D WORKED UP A SERIOUS SWEAT AT THE cabin. In the grand
scheme of things, it probably didn’t matter whether the place was
shipshape or not, but it made me feel better, as if restoring a
little order to the universe would in some way help my mind to sort
out the strange passing of J.D. Springer.

As the fog rose from the rivers and morning bled into afternoon,
it occurred to me that, in spite of my having met him only a couple
of times, J.D. Springer had attained a symbolic status in my life. As
if the manner of his success and the insistence of his vision had
somehow validated many of the odd choices I’d made throughout my
own life and thus in some small way lessened that collection of
roads-nottaken regrets that seem to visit me more regularly with each
passing year.

I’d hauled everything but the bed out into the yard. Shook
everything out and left it there, hoping the damp air might dilute
the odor of fire. Then I swept up the glass and the splinters and
used the old-fashioned mop to wash the walls and the floors. Used up
half a million staples covering the broken windows with plastic
sheeting, inside and out, and then dragged all the furniture back
inside. Got a ladder from the shop, climbed up on the roof and
covered the burnedout rafter ends with plastic. It wasn’t much of a
job, but unless we had some big wind, I figured it would keep the
water from getting up under the roof.

Jensen the electrician had done a good job. He’d shortened the
mast coming down through the roof and tucked the new service panel
back up under the eaves and out of the line of fire. And for a scant
four hundred seventy-nine dollars, everything worked.

Same could be said for the eight guest cabins, too. Everything
worked. Heat, lights, toilets, refrigerators. I went from cabin to
cabin, testing things and pulling the red tags off of everything.
Each and every failed inspection notice was signed by one Emmett
Polster, City Building Inspector. Apparently a very fussy man, this
Mr. Polster. I figured I’d spend the night here instead of the
Black Bear. Maybe run into town, buy myself a clean shirt, do a
little grocery shopping and cook myself up something good. By two, I
had the radio blasting from the house, and was on my way up to the
shop to look for some fishing gear. George Thorogood playing sloppy
slide and growling about being the big dog. The rivers were clear.
I’d been watching fish roll all day and thought maybe I’d wet a
line and then…bang. Rebecca’s Explorer came barreling down into
the yard. From sixty yards, I knew that look from grammar school. Her
“I know all the answers on the test and you don’t” look. She
waited for me to walk down. Made a face at how dusty and dirty I was.
Didn’t want a hug.

“What’s up?” I said. “I didn’t expect you back so soon.”

“Somebody shot J.D. in the face,” she said. “With a
shotgun.”

I rescued my tongue from the gravel. “Tell me about it,” I
said. And she did.

Hadn’t even required an exhumation order, because they hadn’t
gotten around to burying the poor soul yet. Seems the cemetery that
J.D.’s parents had chosen was having a water table problem. An
unusual amount of fall rain in the Skagit Valley had made it
impractical to inter anyone at this time. Seems newly buried caskets
kept floating to the surface andbobbing about in an unseemly manner.
They’d had J.D. in a cold storage warehouse full of apples.

“Tommy timed the autopsy at fourteen seconds,” she said.

“That’s how long it took the X-ray machine to warm up.”

She was referring to Tommy Matsukawa, another pathologist with the
King County ME.

She pulled a glass vial from her pants pocket. Held it for me to
see. Shotgun pellets. About half a dozen. Some round, some flattened.
“He had thirty-two of these in his head. Tommy said it looked like
he was using his head to store nuts for the winter.” Tommy, like
many people in the dead body business, had an unusual sense of humor.

“You do realize how odd this is, don’t you?” I asked.

“How so?”

“How many times are you likely to arrive with the message that a
friend has been murdered and have it be
good
news?”

“It is, isn’t it?”

“At least the insurance company will have to pay Claudia.”

She nodded. “What now?” she asked.

I was sweaty and covered with dust. I’d planned on jumping in
the river after I was through fishing. “Let me get cleaned up a
little. Then we’ll go to town and see Sheriff Hand.”

“I brought you some clothes,” she said.

Nathan Hand paced the area behind his desk like a tiger in a cage.
“I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “I’m embarrassed about
this. For me, for my department, for all of us. Worst kind of sloppy
police work. Makes us look like a bunch of hicks who can’t look
after their own business.” He plunged his hands into his pockets.
“And I don’t mean it as an excuse or anything, but you spend
enough years handling nothing but drunks and domestic violence and
you forget. You get to

thinking that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s
bound to be a duck.”

Rebecca cut him some slack. “With the condition of the remains
and the facilities available to you, you reached the obvious
conclusion.”

“I appreciate the help, Doctor, but none of that’s an excuse
for sloppy.”

He rested one cheek on the corner of his desk. “Hell, I had to
have you two tell me that the car was on fire before it went down the
hill.” He slowly shook his head.

“What are you going to do now?” I asked.

“I’ll do what I should have done to begin with. I’ll see if
I can’t put together what his last day looked like and go from
there.”

“You like your chances?” Rebecca asked.

His face loosened. “You know the answer to that as well as I do,
Doctor. Case this cold, with this many suspects, the chance of
successful apprehension and prosecution is miserable,” he said.
“But I’ll tell you one thing: As God is my witness, that case
will be open and will be actively investigated for as long as I’m
in office.”

“J.D. told me he’d received threatening phone calls. He said
he recorded the number from his caller ID and gave it to you.”

He made a disgusted face. “Pay phone at the Steelhead. Could
have been any of them nimrods you met the other day.”

“Sheriff,” Rebecca said. “I don’t want you to feel like
I’m creeping around behind your back, so I think you should know
that when I get home this evening, I’m going to call a friend of
mine in the state police. I’m going to see if I can’t get them to
commit a couple of people to an investigation. Nothing personal…but
I believe they’re far better equipped to handle something of this
nature.”

“I don’t blame ya a bit,” he said. “The way we’ve
handled it so far don’t exactly inspire confidence. You can be sure
I’ll cooperate in any way I can.”

We got to our feet. I handed him another business card.

“I hope you’ll keep us posted on the status of the
investigation.” Hand said he’d consider it his duty. “And I’d
appreciate it if you’d keep a close eye on the property. I’m
going to stop down at Beaver Building Supplies and buy a lock and
chain for the gate,” I said. “Then I’m gonna run out and put it
on. I’ll drop a key off on our way out to the place.”

“I’ll have the boys make it a regular patrol stop on every
shift,” he said.

“You know what Claudia told me about the price of the property?”

We were at the east edge of town, on our way to lock the place up.
I’d spent thirty-two bucks on a serious lock and chain and had left
one of the keys in the care of Deputy Spots. Rebecca was filling me
in on her time with Claudia.

“What?”

“She said the old man asked J.D. what he could afford to pay for
it in cash and when J.D. told him how he wouldn’t be able to come
up with anything like its value, the old man said he didn’t care;
he wanted cash, and he wanted it right then.”

“Maybe he’s one of those old codgers who doesn’t trust
banks,” I offered.

I put on my signal, waited for an oncoming Budweiser truck to pass
and turned right over the bridge. The tires snapped and popped on the
rough wooden surface. I turned right, back toward the homestead. The
first mile of West River Road was scenic. After that, the river
looped out to the south and you were in that open high ground where
J.D. had gone over the edge.