The Never-Open Desert Diner (21 page)

I
had no idea what I was going to do with Duncan's body, or with the unwanted knowledge of what he and his father had done. For a little while I had succeeded in forgetting about Claire and her husband. It was almost a vacation.

At the turnout for Desert Home, I saw Walt on my left near the top of the hill leading to the archway. He waved me in.

Before I could get out of the cab he jumped up on the running board. “He's been down there about an hour. Took his rented SUV down the road across from the diner. On top of everything else, he's an idiot.”

He reached to steady himself on a mirror post. I could see the butt of a handgun beneath his short leather jacket. “You think you're going to need that?” I asked.

Walt gave my question more thought than I expected. “I hope not,” he said.

“Don't shoot anyone accidentally,” I said.

He jumped down and glared up at me. “I don't shoot people accidentally,” he said. “I shoot them on purpose.”

We walked up the hill toward the arch. “An hour's a long time,” I said.

Walt's answer was to the point. “They've been married a long time. You probably shouldn't be here.”

“Probably not,” I said. “But it doesn't take an hour to hand over the cello.”

Walt put his hand on my shoulder. “Don't go down there.”

I wasn't going to, and told him so. It wasn't true
—
part of me was already starting down the other side.

“She knows you're here, right?”

“She knows,” he said. “She doesn't need to see me.”

“Maybe she is your daughter.” It was something that had been playing in the back of my mind for quite a while. I meant it as a kind of joke. As soon as I said it I was filled with regret. Such a comment wouldn't sit well with Walt. When he didn't say anything, I looked over at him. He was staring stone-faced down at the house.

The two of us knelt on the sandy ground just out of sight below the rim of the hill. One of us was praying that there was nothing going on inside the house but talk. Walt could have been hoping for the same thing. I liked to think so. Both of us just wanted to see Dennis come out of the house with the cello and leave, alone.

“Why don't you go down there,” I suggested. “Just to make sure everything is okay?”

Walt glanced over at me with a mixture of understanding and pity on his face. It might have been a mixture of contempt and pity. It was an expression I'd never seen before, not on Walt Butterfield's face. “She's with her husband, Ben,” he said quietly. “Unless there's a sign of trouble brewing, neither one of us belongs there. You can't change whatever is happening behind those doors. It would be wrong to try.” He rocked back on his heels and stood up. “It's time for you to go.”

He walked me back to my truck. “Maybe she'll stay this time. Maybe not.”

“I thought this was her first visit,” I said.

“She showed up on my doorstep one morning about a year ago, right after she and her husband separated. I knew right off who she was. I let her cool her heels, hoping she'd go away. Stubborn girl. She stood outside the door to the diner or sat roasting in her car off and on for most of the day. She knew I was there. And she knew I knew. She wore me down. Late in the afternoon I let her in. She walked straight to Bernice's booth and sat down, like she'd been doing it all her life. She had her choice of any seat in the diner.

“All she wanted was for me to tell her about her mother. She knew about everything else. I made us a little something to eat. Before she left she asked for a keepsake, anything that was her mother's. I gave her those boots she wears. Had them made up special for Bernice just before…” He stopped. “And a little gold locket Bernice wore, with our wedding photograph inside. Then she asked for something to remember me by. Kind of surprised me.”

I asked him what he gave her.

“A quilt my mother made for me when I was a kid. She looked it over and put it in a bag. She thanked me and left. Never expected to see her again. Didn't want to see her again. Claire looks so much like her mother. It was like losing Bernice again. A few months later I wrote to her and told her it would be okay with me if she wanted to phone me or visit again. I gave her the number to the phone booth and said that if I was around I would hear it ring. Two weeks ago it rang. She was calling from New York. She wanted me to come and pick her up at the airport in Denver. I picked her up. She sent some of her belongings ahead. Used her mother's Korean name instead of her own. Said she had her reasons. I thought maybe it had to do with her husband.”

Walt looked back over his shoulder toward the archway, as if Claire was standing beneath it.

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked him.

“Thought you should know since you and Claire are together now.”

“I hope so,” I said.

“There's something else,” he said, “just between the two of us. Bernice and I had been trying to have children for years. Then those men violated her.” He scuffed at the dirt with his boots. I could tell for a moment he was in the diner again that evening. “She was still in the hospital when we found out she was pregnant. I couldn't stand the idea. I wanted the doctors to flush the damn thing and send it straight to hell. No matter how I felt, Bernice wanted to keep it. She begged me, but I wasn't having any of it. We argued. She said she would leave me if I harmed the baby. It wasn't just the baby. Those animals broke her all up inside. Carrying the baby and childbirth might kill her. I agreed to let her have the baby, though I didn't visit her until after it was born. It wasn't the rape and beating that took away her speech. It was having the baby. A stroke. By the time she recovered, the baby was gone, adopted. Healthy damn kid. I still had Bernice. She hated me as much as I hated those men. Until Claire showed up, and I saw her, I hadn't realized what I'd done to Bernice. What I'd done to myself.”

“A second chance?” I ventured.

Walt nodded.

“I hope you take it,” I said.

“Just thought you should know,” he said.

Walt walked back up the hill. What he really wanted me to know was that he had as much at stake as I did in whatever was going on inside the house, maybe more. Walt had made Bernice give up the baby. He had kept the corpse. Now he was trading back.

The sun was beginning to set. The wind was gusting, full of sand as it crossed 117. It made the sunlight dirty, like a bandage stretched over the sky. If I didn't keep my speed down, the sand would take the paint off my truck and trailer right down to the metal.

The flashing blue and red light bars of the two police units faded in and out of sight behind the windblown sand. They were parked side by side along the shoulder in front of the diner. When the officers saw me coming they got out of their vehicles and motioned me to pull over into the diner's parking lot. One car was a Utah Highway Patrol cruiser; the other was a Carbon County Sheriff's unit.

There was little doubt in my mind they had been waiting for me. I had no idea why, especially the need for two of them.

I
pulled off 117 onto the gravel and inched the nose of my truck forward until it was within a few yards of the two men. They looked a little nervous while they stood their ground. I recognized the highway patrolman. His name was Andy. We'd met on several occasions, none of them seriously official. He was a nice Mormon guy a few years younger than me with short blond hair and an easy way about him.

The three of us stared at one another through the windshield. They wore sunglasses. Not because of the sun
—
because of the blowing sand. There was nothing easy about the way they stood. In case there was any misunderstanding, they had put on their hats and pulled the brims down low and tight on their heads. It was cop sign language for “I'm on duty.”

I climbed out of the cab and said hello to Andy. I extended my hand. The wind and sand snatched up my greeting and sent it twisting over the roof of the diner. Andy didn't take my hand. The sheriff's deputy took a step backward and rested a thumb on his sidearm. The gun was still in its holster. Its cover was unfastened.

Andy glanced at the deputy. “We have orders to take you in to the highway patrol headquarters in Price.”

“Take me in?”

“Escort you in.”

“It takes two of you to escort me?”

“Deputy Tanner is here to ride along with you.”

“Am I under arrest, Andy?”

“Trooper Smith,” he said.

“Am I under arrest, Trooper Smith?”

“Not unless you refuse.”

“Can I ask what this is about?”

The deputy spoke up. He had a thick neck and a broad chest. He puffed it out in case I might not have noticed. “You could. It wouldn't do you any good.” His right hand on the butt of his gun, he reached around his back and produced a pair of handcuffs with his left. He rattled the cuffs between us. “What's your pleasure?”

It was clear to me Andy didn't care much more for his partner than I did. “No problem,” I said. “I'd rather Andy ride with me. You're too tough. I might get hysterical and drive off the road. My insurance would go up.”

The three of us spent a long minute listening to the wind roar between us. Though I didn't like the deputy, that wasn't why I wanted Trooper Smith to ride along with me. The bad weather meant it was going to be at least an hour's drive into Price. Maybe in that time Trooper Smith might turn back into Andy and tell me what the hell was going on.

Trooper Smith broke the standoff by simply walking to my truck. He stepped up on the running board and removed his hat. A gust of wind caught a small clump of wispy blond hair and stood it straight up. In the soiled red light he reminded me of the cartoon character Woody Woodpecker. For no reason I could fathom, I thought of Duncan Lacey's corpse in the refrigerator riding herd on the remaining cases of butter brickle ice cream. Without bothering to nod at Deputy Tanner, I followed Andy.

The deputy stood his useless ground while I maneuvered my rig onto 117. He still held the handcuffs, trying not to look like the last guest at a bad party. The wind took his hat. Our last glimpse of Deputy Tanner was as he chased his hat across the diner's parking lot. Nothing commands less respect than a barrel-chested cop chasing his hat, especially if he's holding handcuffs in one hand.

The wind rocked the cab from side to side. Neither one of us spoke. Nasty crosswinds howled loudly through the body fairing. We couldn't have heard each other speak if we had tried. The empty trailer was a metal sail. It caught the wind broadside, occasionally sending us snaking sideways onto the soft shoulder.

Andy took off his sunglasses and his hat.

Sooner or later there would be rain. The cauldron of wind and sand would stir up some moisture and the result would be even more messy and treacherous. Walt would stay on the ridge above the model home for as long as it took, no matter what the conditions. All night if necessary. This wasn't a possibility I wanted to consider. I cursed at the weather, forgetting about the sensitive ears of my Mormon passenger.

Once we had turned north toward Price at the junction with U.S. 191, the wind slapped harmlessly at the trailer from behind. The sun sank deeper into its brown bed.

Andy stared straight ahead toward Price. “You're an okay guy, Ben.”

“But?”

“But I think you've really stepped in it this time.”

“Stepped in it?” I repeated. “Is that an old Mormon saying? Or a legal assessment of my situation?” When he didn't say anything, I said, “I get it. This is serious. I'm telling you, for the record, I haven't committed a crime. I'm innocent.”

My comment lit up a smile on Trooper Smith's face. “I doubt that.”

“Are you going to tell me what this is about?”

“I don't know, Ben. That's the truth.” Andy checked the side mirror. Deputy Tanner was riding our tail with every flashing light he had. Talking to the mirror, Andy said, “What I know is that all the big phones started ringing this morning. There were even bigger phones making the calls.”

“How big?”

“Big. Attorney general. Special investigations captain.” He whistled softly. “Governor.”

I tapped the brakes. Deputy Tanner swerved onto the shoulder to avoid becoming a flashing blue and red suppository. “That explains the presence of Deputy Tanner,” I said. “I guess the governor calling makes me an advancement opportunity.”

“You staying out of trouble?”

When I said I was, he remarked that the condition of my face suggested otherwise.

“Walt Butterfield,” I said, as if that should explain everything.

It did. Andy shook his head. “Last year he punched a tourist who refused to leave without getting a piece of pie.” Trying to sound as if he were inquiring about nothing more important than the time of day, Andy asked, “Anything unusual happening on 117?”

It had been an interesting couple of weeks. I had discovered an abandoned housing development, gotten laid, and was in love. In the process I'd had the shit kicked out of me by an old man who, although he might be my best friend in the world, kept the corpse of his dead wife's rapist in his bathroom. Almost as an afterthought, there were both halves of a fugitive bank robber in my refrigerator unit.

“Unusual? You mean in general or for 117?”

“I mean like millions of dollars unusual.”

I glanced over at Andy and felt my knuckles go white around the wheel. “No,” I answered. “That would be unusual. UFOs. The occasional killing. Last year I heard about a talking dog, which, by the way, was true. The dog only spoke French. No one paid much attention. That's the usual. If everyone
—
man, woman, child, and talking dog
—
sold everything they had and then borrowed everything they could, among them they couldn't raise a million dollars. Except maybe Walt. Millions of dollars? Now, that would be unusual. The entire town of Rockmuse wouldn't bring more than a couple of dollars. That's if you could find a buyer.”

“Millions are involved,” he said. “That's all I know. And you, Ben. You're involved somehow. I'm just following orders. Doing any more is a couple of notches above my pay grade. Whether you know it or not, you stepped in something that smells. Being innocent probably won't help. If you were a Mormon it might not help.”

Andy's remark about not being a Mormon struck a serious chord. I was no one, doing a nothing job a hundred miles up the asshole of nowhere. I wasn't a Mormon. I tried, more or less successfully, to convince myself that whatever the trouble was, it had nothing to do with Claire. Runaway wives didn't usually merit this kind of attention from the law. If they did, the local law wouldn't have time for the fun stuff like homicides and drugs. The idea that Claire and her husband might somehow be the source of my immediate woe wouldn't quite go away.

“I've been thinking of converting,” I said.

Andy didn't respond, not that he needed to.

I'd heard that the Mormon church had been converting dead Jews for years, going that extra mile to save souls. Of course, I wasn't as worried about my soul as I was my skin. But saving the souls of long-dead Jews? This was exactly the kind of pioneering spirit you had to admire, if it didn't piss you off too much. It didn't sit all that well with the Jews. Recently they had struck a deal with the Mormons to knock it the hell off. No word from the souls on how they felt either way.

By comparison, run-of-the-mill evangelical Christians were a bunch of slackers. They confined their proselytizing to the living. All the same, I had a vision of church elders running around Jewish graves with nets, scooping souls out of the air like Hebrew butterflies that were destined to be dried and mounted with pins under glass on an LDS ancestry register. The thought made me laugh.

Andy took notice of the laugh. “Glad to see you still have a sense of humor. You're going to need it.”

That was true. I hoped I had enough to go the distance. I'd be riding this problem out as I usually did, without a safety net. Like every other house-renting, paycheck-to-paycheck, heel-dragging working American, it wouldn't matter if I stepped in it by accident or was pushed, or simply whiffed it as I walked by. With the powers in play, guilt or innocence had nothing to do with anything.

Andy understood this reality as clearly as I did. The stink, real or imagined, had attached itself to me, and there was nothing I could do about it. I was a falling man. At this stage all I was really curious about was how the concrete was going to feel against my head. It was almost exciting.

Andy instructed me to drive my rig into the gated impound lot next to the squat brick one-story building that served as the local headquarters for the Utah Highway Patrol.

The parking lot in front of the entrance was full of cars. Most of them were Price City police and sheriff cruisers. It was a frightening display of jurisdictional camaraderie, like carrion eaters making elbow room for each other at a tiny buffet.

I set the brake, turned my engine off, and looked around the cab as if leaving home for good. At least the leasing company holding the paper wouldn't have to bother Bob to unlock the gates at the transfer station. Andy put on his hat and sunglasses.

I held out my wrists. “You want to accessorize me, Andy? I don't mind. Someone needs to look good. It might as well be you.”

Andy peered out over the rims of his sunglasses. “No,” he said. “I don't need to look good. I am good. I'm a Mormon.” He forced a smile and slapped me on the shoulder. “Good luck, Ben.”

I took a deep breath. “I'm going under, Andy. Bankrupt. I'm drowning in red ink. Today was my last run. If I'd stumbled across millions of dollars I'd know it. And I'd be a million miles away from here.”

Andy shook his head. “Not a chance.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Everyone knows you've been struggling. Run off with millions of dollars?” The idea made him laugh. “You wouldn't take five dollars. You can't even bring yourself to collect what's owed you by the people who need you. You're a decent, honest man, Ben. Flawed, like all of us, but honest.”

“Is that your professional opinion?”

“Better,” he said. “That's my Mormon opinion. Not that it makes any difference.”

“Can I ask you a favor?”

He nodded.

“Tell Walt where I'm at?”

Andy nodded again. “Anyone else?”

I thought of Ginny. “No,” I said.

My door opened. Deputy Tanner jingled the handcuffs up at me. In a voice as quiet as iron and yet courteously measured, Trooper Smith leaned around me and said, “Get out of here, Tanner.”

The deputy walked away like a spurned suitor. Andy said, “I'm not supposed to tell you, but this is just questioning, Ben. It might not turn out as bad as you think. Just don't be an asshole.”

“Me? What happened to honest, decent?”

Andy sighed. “You are. But you are not exactly unknown to law enforcement around here. From time to time you have been an honest, decent, and stupid asshole. Don't make this worse. You have to trust.”