18••••

AS SOON AS WE GOT BACK TO THE HOUSE, BETIY SUE tumbled out of the pickup and raced up the stairs toward the front door. Fireball and I followed slowly— I was trying to be polite and he was practicing his aim—but she met us at the doorway, her finger lifted to her soft lips.

“He’s working,” she whispered.

“Listen,” I said as I set her bags down, “I think I’ll go fishing this afternoon. You know, so you can be alone with the great man.”

“Don’t be mean,” she said shyly. “And it isn’t necessary for you to go away.”

“I’m going anyway,” I said, then told Fireball, “let’s go kill a trout.” But he was sitting stolidly beside Betty Sue’s heel. “Will you keep an eye on the dog?” I asked her.

“He’ll keep an eye on me,” she said. “You have a good time.”

“You too,” I answered, trying to mean it.

As I walked to the pickup, beneath the heat of the late summer sun, a hint of cool, crisp air tickled my nose. Autumn soon, I thought, and another Montana winter waiting in the wings. Every fall I considered drifting south to San Francisco and renewing my California license, but I never went. Maybe this would be the year. But for now, I knew where there was a little roadside lake up in the mountains behind Cauldron Springs. Moondog Lake, where the trout had an affinity for worms, a place to waste an afternoon watching my bobber dance across the windy chop.

I drove down to the highway and turned right, away from town, but Catherine’s Porsche caught up with me before I crested the first rise. I pulled to the edge of the road, parked, and got out.

“What did she say?” Catherine asked as she walked over to stand beside me. “Well?”

“We didn’t talk about it.”

“Why not?” she demanded flatly. “This whole idea is … is terrible,” I said. “You can’t expect to pay people to do this sort of thing.”

“Why not?”

“There’s more than money involved,” I said. “That’s why Edna and I are willing to spend so much money.”

“Well, you’re going to have to get somebody else to do it,” I said. “Or do it yourself.”

“You’re the only one who could do it,” she said, “and if you don’t, whatever happens is on your head.”

“Sometimes I get the awful suspicion that this whole thing has been out of my hands from the very beginning,” I said, “so it can’t be my fault. But even if it is, I’m not going to try to bribe her to leave the man she loves.”

“If she loved him, Sughrue, she would leave him for free.”

“Betty Sue doesn’t—”

“So it’s Betty Sue now,” Catherine interrupted. “That’s very interesting.”

“That’s her name.”

“Fitting,” Catherine sneered.

“Look,” I said as I stepped behind the pickup to unlock the topper, “I’m going to give you those

damned checks back and then wash my hands of this whole fucking mess.”

“It’s on your head now,” she said, then ran back to her car and drove away before I could climb into the pickup bed.

“My ass.” I coughed into her dust as I locked up.

I didn’t leave Moondog Lake until full dark, so it was nearly midnight before I drove down the highway toward Trahearne’s house. The lights were still on, so I went on into town for a drink, then drove back out to check again. This time the lights were out. I eased up the driveway, parked, and let myself in through the basement door. As I mixed a drink the household above was silent. I switched on the television to catch the late movie from Spokane by cable, hoping for something rich with romance and scenery. The Hanging Tree, maybe, or Ride the High Country. Instead I caught The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, which put me to sleep. Occasionally I woke for a barbarian attack, a Christopher Plummer screeching speech, or Sophia Loren’s breasts nudging the small screen, then fell back into a confused sleep.

I woke to the sound of gunfire and the instant memory of a preceding scream. I glanced at the television, where an aggressive young man urged me to buy a new pickup from the thousands on his lot. Then another shot boomed through the house. Down the hallway, I heard glassware break in the basement bathroom. I dashed to my bedroom for the .38, then raced back and up the stairs to the main floor, listening to the grunts and thuds of a struggle. As I slipped through the darkened kitchen, another shot banged. I dove across the living room rug and rolled into a left-handed firing position behind Traheame’s lounge chair.

The desk lamp in the study was on, but it had been 173

knocked askew and it shined out the doorway directly into my eyes. Beyond it, though, I could see two shadowy figures struggling, wrestling for possession of the .45 automatic, which went off again. A shelf of books scattered into smoldering pulp. I fired a round through the ceiling and shouted Freeze! but nobody paid any attention to me. As I charged the door, I heard a fist strike soft flesh, and Betty Sue staggered toward me. I shoved her aside and crouched just outside the door. When Trahearne bulled his way through it, I slammed him on the side of the neck with the butt of the .38, then again as he was going down. As he fell, he swung the .45 toward me, but I clubbed it out of his hand with my cast. He hit the floor unconscious and belched a small puddle of vomit, which smelled like straight whiskey. I picked up the .45, unloaded it, and tossed it on his lounge chair.

“Is he all right?” Betty Sue panted behind me.

“He’s alive,” I said as I knelt to check his pulse, which beat along as strong as a bear’s, “but he’s dead drunk. Are you all right?”

“Just had the breath knocked out of me.” She huffed and puffed. “That’s all.” She moved over to kneel beside me. “Help me get him to bed.”

“Right,” I said, stuffing the .38 into my belt. “Glad I didn’t have to shoot anybody,” I added. “I’m terrible with my left hand.”

“Help me,” she answered, and the two of us levered the big man upright and walked him toward the bedroom. As we dropped him on the bed, he woke up long enough to tell us that he didn’t need our damned help, but he went to sleep before we could debate the point. “Thank you,” Betty Sue said, still breathing hard and deep.

“What the hell happened?” I asked.

“I need a drink,” she answered, then walked out of the bedroom.

“Me too.” I said as I followed.

But she wouldn’t talk to me in the living room, either. I poured whiskey into two glasses and handed her one.

“Can I have a cigarette?” she said. I lit two, and she grabbed one out of my hand and sucked a cough out

of it.

“Maybe you better sit down,” I suggested.

“Outside,” she said, and I followed her again.

As I leaned against the door frame, she paced back and forth across the deck, hitting the cigarette and the whiskey until she finished them both. When I went back inside, I noticed that the lights were on in Trahearne’s mother’s house. I hoped that they hadn’t heard the shots. Outside again, I handed Betty Sue a fresh drink.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” she said in a small voice. “When he finished working this afternoon, we went into town for dinner, and he started drinking—he said it was all right, a celebration, you know, because he’d just finished a section and I had come home. And it was all right. He was in great form, full of good spirits and jokes … “

“Until?” I said into her pause.

“Until we went to bed,” she murmured. She blushed and hugged herself against the chill night air, wrapping the new yellow nightgown tightly around her body. “He went to sleep—finally—and I guess I dozed off too,” she said. “When I woke up he was gone. I went down to see if he was in his study working—he does that sometimes when he can’t sleep at night. He was there. He was …holding the gun to his head …He was holding the gun and staring me right in the eye … It was almost as if he was daring me to make him pull the trigger. I don’t know … I remember screaming, then after that we were fighting for the gun. That’s all I—”

“You better pull yourself together,” I interrupted as

I saw the blue lights of a sheriff’s car racing out of Cauldron Springs toward the turnoff to Traheame’s house.

“Why?” She was close to crying. “Because the law is here,” I said.

“What should I say?”

“Don’t say a word,” I said. “Just sit down on that lounge chair and whenever somebody asks you a question, you break into tears. All right?”

As if taking me at my word, she fell on the chair and began sobbing loudly. I stepped back inside the house and flipped on the porch lights, then stood empty-handed in their glare as the sheriff’s unit skidded to a stop at the bottom of the stairs. The officer stepped out and leaned across the hood, covering me with his revolver.

“Shoot him!” came a wail from the direction of the creek. “He’s killed my baby boy! Kill him!” The old woman floundered out of the shadows, dragging Catherine as she tried to hold her back. “Kill him!” she wailed again.

“Mr. Traheame is perfectly all right,” I said to the deputy behind the car. “No One’s been hurt.”

“On your knees, buddy,” he growled, “and lace the fingers behind your neck.” I didn’t even bother to hesitate. As I assumed the position, he moved from behind the car and eased up the steps with his piece aimed steadily at my thorax region. “Tighter,” he said as he stepped behind me. “I want to see white knuckles.”

“The right hand and wrist were broken recently, officer,” I said as he grabbed my fingers and a handful of hair. He patted me down, sighing in my ear as he jerked the .38 out of my belt.

“Stand up,” he ordered as he cuffed my left wrist. As I stood up, he pulled it down behind me and grabbed the right and cuffed it above the cast.

“Easy,” I said as quietly as I could. “I told you that nothing has happened. There’s no reason to rebreak the wrist.”

“Kill him!” the old woman screamed again as she scrambled up the stairs like a wounded crab. Catherine didn’t even try to hold her back.

“Tell the old bitch to shut up,” I said to nobody in particular.

“You shut up, buddy,” the deputy said as he jerked the cuffs. “The sheriff will be here shortly,” he added, then jerked the cuffs again as if the alignment of my shoulder sockets didn’t suit him.

“Your baby boy is safe and sound, sleeping off a drunk,” I said to the old woman as she hobbled up and bared her gums at me.

“I told you to shut up,” the deputy said, then did his act with my arms again.

“Don’t do that again,” I said mildly.

He laughed and did. Some people never learn. Particularly country cops. They never get enough action to stay in shape. I grabbed the deputy’s heavy leather belt with my left hand and tugged him closer, then stomped the instep of his right foot and cracked him on the nose with the back of my head and butted him with my ass. As he staggered backward, reaching for his holstered revolver, I turned around and kicked him in the crotch so hard that his feet came off the deck. He hit the floor in a fetal position, but I untangled his arms with my feet and knelt on them and sat on his chest.

“You didn’t listen to me,” I said to him. He rolled his head sideways and spit blood. I heard grunting and scrambling feet behind me. Catherine kept a good hold on the old woman, though. From the smile on her face, I assumed that Catherine had decided that after what I had done to the deputy, I was going to be out of action for a while. Betty Sue sat on the chair, her mouth open as if she had stopped in the middle of a sob. “Hey,” I said to her, “get this dummy’s keys and unlock the cuffs.”

She didn’t say anything, she just did it.

“He really is all right,” I said to Trahearne’s mother when Betty Sue got the cuffs off me. “He just got drunk and decided to redecorate his study with a .45. That’s all.”

“Really?” Catherine asked with a cocked eyebrow.

“Take his mother down to the bedroom so she can see for herself,” I said as I lifted the deputy’s revolver and unloaded it. The two women glanced at each other, then went into the house. “Hey,” I said to Betty Sue, “could you get me a towel and a bowl of ice?” After she had stepped into the house, too, I stood up and released the deputy. “Did you hear all that?” I asked. He nodded and crawled toward the vacant lounge chair. “What kind of fool do you want to look like when the sheriff gets here?”

“You’re the fool, son of a bitch,” he muttered. “Just wait till I get you in a cell.”

“You think you’ll have a job ten seconds after the sheriff finds out a cuffed prisoner took your piece off you?”

The deputy sneered. “He’s my uncle.”

“But Roy Berglund’s no fool,” I said. “Nephew or not, he’ll shuck you like a hot tamale. He doesn’t get elected by hiring kinfolk who look like fools.”

He thought about that for a minute or two, long enough for his pride and his family jewels to stop aching quite so badly, then he glanced up at me, asking, “What did you have in mind?”

“Watering the grass,” I said, but he just stared at me. “It always gets those damned stairs wet and slick as owl

shit.”

“Goddamned stairs,” he muttered, then grinned and wiped at the blood on his face.

Betty Sue brought a bowl of ice and two dishtowels. I handed them to the deputy, then went to arrange the lawn sprinklers. Afterward, we sat down to wait for the sheriff. Everybody except for Edna Trahearne. She went home mad.

Roy Berglund looked like a sheriff. He was tall, blond, with crystal-blue eyes and a craggy face. As far as I knew, he wasn’t dumb or corrupt. But he was an elected official, more interested in how he looked than how he did his job. And he looked great in a uniform. He had taken time to dress in a fresh one before he picked up two extra deputies and a medical examiner. As he strode like a giant through the sprinklers and up the stairs, they followed like the mere mortals they were. Roy looked great until he stepped, with a leather boot heel, on the wet redwood landing. As he skated across it, his huge arms windmilled furiously as he fought for balance, and he felled a deputy with a backhand right. Betty Sue had to break into sobs to cover her giggles and the deputy on the chaise lounge snorted with laughter until his nose started bleeding again.

“Turn off that goddamned water,” he shouted at the’ deputy lying on the ground. Sheriff Roy was angry. The most important citizen, the son of the richest woman in the county, had been foully murdered, and Sheriff Roy’s dignity had been damaged. “Now, what’s going on here?” he demanded.

“I’m afraid it has all been a terrible mistake,” Catherine said as she stepped out of the shadows, taking charge with smooth assurance. “We—Edna Trahearne and 1—heard gunshots and assumed the worst. We leapt to a hasty conclusion.” Sheriff Roy looked both confused and disappointed. “My husband—my ex-husband, that is,” Catherine said with a slight smile, “was cleaning his pistol when it accidently discharged. No harm done, I’m pleased to say.”

“Oh,” the sheriff said, tugging on his thick lower lip. “Okay,” Then he turned to his nephew. “What happened to you?”

“I was going down to call you on the radio,” he mumbled, “and I slipped on them damned stairs.”

“Oh,” the sheriff said again. “Well, Miz Traheame, I’m sure glad nobody w(l.s hurt, but I’ve got to make out a report. If you could drop over to the county seat sometime during the next few days, I’d surely appreciate it.”

“Of course,” Catherine answered before Betty Sue could.

“Let’s wrap it up,” he said to his courtiers, then, as if it was an afterthought, he added, “Why don’t you walk down to the car with me, Mr. Sughrue?”

“Sure,” I said.

The sheriff waited until everybody else had a head start, then he wrapped a heavy arm around my shoulder and led me down the stairs.

“Watch your step there, C.W.,” he said pleasantly. Up close I could see that he had taken time to shave too. “Now,” he said softly when we were at the bottom of the steps, “what happened? The old boy try to punch his own ticket, huh?”

“I was asleep,” I said.

“It’s all right,” he murmured, drawing me still closer. “It’s just between us.” “Just between us, huh?”

“Absolutely.”

“Just between us, Roy, I was asleep,” I whispered.

“Don’t jerk me around on this, boy,” he answered, “or I’ll have your ass in a sling you can’t begin to carry.”

“It’s your sling, sheriff.”

“How about three to five in Deer Lodge for assault on a peace officer?” he said.

“I think it’s two to ten,” I said, but I didn’t know either.

“Whatever it is, you won’t like it,” he said, but when I didn’t answer, he tried another tack. “How come you didn’t stop by my office to let me know you were working in my county?”

“I’m not working,” I said. “I’m just visiting.”

“Hope not for long, boy,” the sheriff said, then slapped me on the shoulder and laughed as if he had just made a joke. “Don’t you even throw a beer can in the ditch, boy,” he added.

“You think knowing that Traheame tried to blow his brains out will buy you anything?” I asked.

“A man who has everything don’t need no presents,” the sheriff said over his shoulder. “I know what happened and I don’t care. I just hate to have a man lie to me.”

“Me too,” I said.

He laughed as he walked away. “See you around, Sughrue,” he said, then climbed into his unit and had a young deputy drive him home.

Back up on the deck, Catherine stood at the head of the stairs and Betty Sue sat on the lounge chair. They were both watching me as I climbed tiredly toward them.

“Betty Sue, would you excuse us, please?” Catherine said without looking at her.

“Of course,” Betty Sue answered, and went into the house.

“Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” I said as I lifted my foot up the last step. “Okay?”

“Tomorrow will be too late,” Catherine said. “Talk to her now.”

“I’m going to bed.”

“I’ll just bet you are,” she said to my back.

Inside, I went to the bar for a fresh drink. I was in the middle of my second one when Betty Sue came back from the bedroom. She had changed out of her nightgown and into her old baggy clothes.

“I liked you better the other way,” I said.

She didn’t bother to answer as she stopped to lean against the frame of the study door. The glare of the tilted desk lamp fell harshly across her pale, worn face.

“Let him clean up his own goddamned messes,” I said.

“I can’t,” she said. “What if you had felt that way about my mess?”

“That’s different,” I answered lamely, but she had already stepped into the study.

The angle of the light lowered, the line of shadow sweeping across the carpet toward the doorway, and the desk chair squeaked as if she were sitting down. I poured myself another splash of whiskey and went outside, switching off the deck lights as I stepped through the door. My .38 Airweight still huddled on the pad of the chaise lounge where the deputy had tossed it. I unloaded it and stuck it in my back pocket. A slice of moon like a hairline fracture opened the night sky, the dark bulk of the remainder clearly visible. As I stared at it, I heard Fireball whimper down on the lawn. I called him and heard his slow scuffle up the stairs. Up on the deck, he waddled over and climbed painfully up into my lap as I sat down on the lounge chair. His haunches were trembling furiously.

“That’s okay,” I said as I patted his head. “Everybody is gun-shy the first time.” The bulldog whined as I rubbed his neck until he stopped shaking. Then I sat him down and went back into the house. He followed, his nose brushing my heels.

Betty Sue still sat at the desk, her head in her hands as she leaned over the pile of tangled yellow pages. Her eyes were dry, though, when she glanced at me. Fireball walked over to her, and she lifted him into her lap. I went over too and leaned against the desk.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“What did I do wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why did he try to kill himself?” “He can’t handle it, I guess.” “Handle what?” she asked as she wiped at her nose with the back of her hand.

“Love and forgiveness,” I said.

“I think I’m leaving him,” she said softly.

“That’s probably the best thing.”

“For whom?”

“Both of you.”

“You’re probably right,” she said. “It might be the best for everybody.” “Where are you going?”

She stared at me for a long time, then answered slowly, “I’m ten years late but I’m going home.” “At least I’ll know where to find you,” I said. “Don’t,” she whispered, “please don’t.” “Whatever you say.”

“And don’t worry about Hyland and the rest of the money,” she said. “I’ll take care of it somehow.” “Are you really leaving?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, then went out to the El Camino to pick up the checks and her five thousand cash.

“What’s this?” she asked, as I gave her the envelope. “Look at it,” I said.

“My god.” She sighed as she pulled the checks out. “Catherine?” “And his mother.”

“If they want him back this badly, I guess I have to let them have him,” she said, then handed me the checks and the cash. “Give the checks back to Catherine and the cash to Hyland,” she said. “I pay my own way.”

I folded up the checks and stuck them back into my pocket along with the five thousand in cash. “In the morning,” I said. “I’m going to the bank to cash this one for forty thousand, then I’m driving down to Denver and put it in their hands. Catherine can have your five thousand and these other two checks back.”

“Please don’t,” she pleaded.

“Listen,” I said, “you’re not the only one involved— my ass is on the line too.”

“I’m sorry,” she answered. “Thank Catherine for me—tell her I’ll pay her back.”

“You tell her.”

“I’ll be gone before daylight,” she said. “I’ve got a few things to pack up in the studio and a few clothes, then I’m gone.”

“I’ll be gone before that,‘“I said.

“Come here,” she said, and I leaned toward her. She slipped a hand behind my neck and pulled my face toward hers. Our lips brushed lightly. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you for everything.”

“Do me a favor,” I said as I stood up.

“What?”

“When you go home, take that goddamned worthless bulldog with you.”

“Thank you,” she said again, a touch of laughter rising through a mist of newly born tears.

I touched her cheek with the fingers of my broken hand, then left her that way.