The Sheriff Of Heartbreak County

Chapter 2

It was half past eight when Roan walked into Buster’s Last Stand Saloon, which put it right about the time family dinner hour would be finishing up. He’d learned this was the best time to catch the regular crowd of Friday-night drinkers, just when they were starting to get their tongues loosened up but before they’d quit making any kind of sense at all.

He and the two SCU detectives had agreed Roan should be the one to question the victim’s last-known associates, since it stood to reason locals were more likely to open up to one of their own. Ruger and Fry had drawn straws to see who’d get the honor of driving to the airport in Billings to meet the senator’s plane. Ruger lost, so that left Fry to accompany the victim’s clothing and vehicle to the state crime lab in Helena.

The state detectives were nice enough guys, Roan allowed, easy to get along with and willing to let him take the lead in the case. No doubt they did know their stuff. Still, he was just as glad to have them out of his way, even though he’d been the one to call them in on the case in the first place. Which, to be honest, he’d done mainly because he knew the first thing Clifford Holbrook would want to know when his feet hit the tarmac in Billings was whether Roan had called in the big guns from state yet. Roan didn’t take it personally; the senator’d most likely be wanting to call in the FBI, the CIA and Homeland Security, too, if he could think of an excuse to do it.

However, Roan figured he was smart enough to know and man enough to admit when he was in over his head, and also confident enough to know when he wasn’t. In this case, the victim’s father might be a national figure, but the crime looked to be down-home local. The fact was, someone in this town—his town—had shot Jason Holbrook, most likely someone Roan knew well, somebody he’d spoken to, looked in the eye, maybe even gone to school with, played baseball with…or danced with, he thought, remembering that female blood evidence on the vic’s shirt sleeve.

Why do I keep calling him the vic? His name was Jason. Jason Holbrook. The guy was a bully and a sonofabitch—maybe even a rapist—but he was also my brother.

Buster Dalton, the owner of the Last Stand Saloon, was where he could be found most nights after the dinner hour—behind the bar, riding herd on his regular drinking customers. When there wasn’t a rodeo in town, Buster ran a fairly tight ship, and since he topped out at six four and 350 pounds—and looked even bigger because the bar was elevated two steps up from the rest of the room—there weren’t many that ever got drunk enough or stupid enough to argue with him when he decided they’d had enough for the night. Buster was first and foremost a good businessman who believed in looking out for his customers’ welfare, his philosophy being one of Live and Let Live—and Come Back to Spend More Money Here Another Night.

He greeted Roan with a cordial “Howdy, Sheriff,” which was echoed by most of those already occupying stools at the polished antique pine wood bar. The saloon keeper plunked Roan’s “usual”—a mug of black coffee—down on a paper napkin on the well-scuffed surface, and after a glance along the bar to see if his regulars were likely to be needing refills any time soon, folded his beefy arms, placed them on the bar and leaned on them.

“Figured you’d be in tonight,” he said in a low, rumbling voice he probably thought passed for a whisper. “Helluva thing about ol’ Jase, ain’t it?”

Roan didn’t answer as he laid down a dollar bill for the coffee and slid onto a stool. Buster leaned in closer.

“Don’t guess I oughta be sayin’ this, given the circumstances, but hell—can’t say I’m surprised. Lotta folks’d say Jase had been askin’ for it for years. Sooner or later, somebody was bound to oblige him.”

Roan didn’t smile. He sipped coffee, then swiveled a casual half turn on the stool, gave the saloon keeper a sideways glance then looked away. “You got anybody particular in mind?”

Buster gave a snort, the breeze of it stirring his thick gray walrus mustache. “You could start with the Hart County phone book.”

This time Roan let his mouth tilt sideways in a grin. He drank more coffee. “Let’s narrow it down a bit. How ’bout…say, last night? Was he in here?”

“Oh, hell yeah—like always.” Buster shook his head. “Man, this place ain’t gonna seem the same….”

“He get into it with anybody? More than usual,” Roan added with another crooked smile, beating Buster to the punch.

Which the barkeeper acknowledged with a grunt, then straightened up, looking uncomfortable. In response to some signal from the other end of the bar Roan hadn’t noticed, he busied himself filling a couple of beer glasses with draft, expertly raising the head to just the right level. When he’d delivered them to the customers and deposited payment in the huge silver antique cash register that rose like an altar behind the bar, he came back over to Roan, folded his arms and hunkered down again with a heavy sigh.

“Well, gosh darn,” he muttered, “I sure do hate to put anybody on the hot seat…”

“Why don’t you let me worry about that?” Roan said mildly.

Buster gave him an unhappy look, smoothed down his mustache with a meaty hand, then immediately undid the effects of that by exhaling like a locomotive blowing off steam. “Hell. Okay, well, I did notice he was hitting pretty hard on that little ol’ gal from the beauty shop. The one that bought out Queenie when she retired and moved down to Phoenix last winter,” he elaborated, when Roan responded with a slight shake of his head.

“Don’t know her.”

“Doesn’t surprise me. She hasn’t been here long—six months…maybe a little more, but definitely an out-of-towner. And, she’s kinda quiet—seems like a real nice girl, not the type to show up on your radar screen, if you know what I mean.” He frowned as he straightened up once more, looking thoughtful. “Funny thing is, you wouldn’t think she’d show up on Jase’s radar, either. Kind of a mousy little thing, not bad to look at, you know, just…not exactly a head-turner. Her name’s Mary,” he added almost as an afterthought. “That’s kind of what she looks like, too. The way you’d expect somebody named Mary to look. Definitely not ol’ Jase’s usual type, but for some reason, he was going at her pretty good last night.” He shook his head. “Not that she was buyin’. She made it pretty clear she didn’t want any part of what he was sellin’.”

“She got a boyfriend? A husband?” Like…a very jealous one? Roan thought. Jealous enough to murder.

Buster shook his head. “Not that I’ve ever seen or heard of. If you saw her, you’d understand why—she’s…like I said. Quiet. Nice, but kind of shy. Stand-offish.”

“If she’s such a nice, sweet, shy girl, what was she doing in here?” Roan half grinned and let his eyes crinkle at the corners to show he hadn’t meant any offense by it.

Buster snorted and gave him half a grin back to show he hadn’t taken any. “Not drinkin’, I’ll tell you that. Don’t think I’ve ever seen her order so much as a glass of wine or that weasel whiz they call lite beer. Naw, truth is, she likes ol’ Pedro’s cooking.” He jerked a nod in the general direction of the kitchen. “I guess Queenie told her before she left he was the best cook in town, and the poor thing never had the sense to learn better.” He guffawed a little at his own joke; everybody knew The Last Stand did have the best food in town, in spite of its seedy looks and rowdy reputation.

“Anyhow, she stops in most nights on her way home from the shop and picks up something to take home for her dinner. Told me she hates to cook.” He shrugged. “You just missed her, in fact. She left here just a couple minutes before you walked in.”

“This lady got a last name?” Roan asked casually as he slid off the stool. “An address?”

“She’s renting Queenie’s place over on Custer. Don’t know her last name.” Buster threw another quick glance at his regular customers, then draped a dishtowel over one massive shoulder and lumbered down the two steps and around the end of the bar. He followed Roan out to the saloon’s big double-doored entry, which was well-lit by the dozen or so neon beer signs crowded in amongst the Plains Indian paintings and artifacts on its knotty pine walls. The worn wood floor was crowded, too, with a couple of coat and hat racks, an assortment of gumball, candy and toy vending machines, and racks offering a variety of free advertising publications.

“Look, Sheriff,” the saloon keeper said, nodding at the dove-colored Stetson Roan had just taken from the rack, “I know what you’re thinkin’, but if that gal had anything to do with shootin’ Jase, I’ll eat that hat a’yours. Right here and now.”

Roan threw him a mild glance as he settled the hat on his head. “You know I’ve got to ask.” He tilted his hat brim toward the door of the saloon, through which he could hear the thumping accompaniment to an old Dwight Yoakum classic somebody had just programmed into the antique jukebox. “Chances are looking good you people in here are the last to see Jason alive. And you did say he was hitting on this woman pretty hard.”

“I never said she might not’ve had cause to kill him,” Buster muttered, looking uncomfortable again. “Just that I can’t believe she would.” Recognizing there was more the man wanted to say and wise enough not to push him, Roan waited him out. Finally the saloon keeper blurted it out in a muttered undertone. “Look—the fact is, I know something did happen between those two last night—Jase and Mary. He followed her out to the parking lot—you know, after she brushed him off? He had a smile on his face and a bad look in his eye—she’d given him the brush in front of a whole barroom full of regulars, and Jase wasn’t happy about it, you could see that. I thought about going out to make sure she got to her car okay. Only I got busy right then—somebody got to pushing and shoving at the bar, a glass got broke…you know how it is.” He dabbed his face with the bar towel on his shoulder and scowled at the Plains Indian dream-catcher hanging on the wall next to a neon Coors sign.

“Anyway, a few minutes later—maybe five or ten, like I said, I was busy—Jase comes back in. He’s dabbing at his lip—I could see it was bleeding—and I mean he was ticked. Couple of the guys started raggin’ him—well, hell, it was pretty obvious what’d happened. Jase was riled up, pushing chairs around, cussin’ and generally making an ass of himself. Then he knocked back what was left of his drink—he’d already had plenty, I was ready to cut him off anyways—and he slammed down some money for his tab, and out he went.” He paused…let out a breath. “Never did come back. That’s the last any of us saw him, I guess.”

“Except for the one that shot him,” Roan said, and got an angry look in return.

“Like I said, I can’t believe—”

“Like I said, I have to follow it up. You know that.” Roan laid a calming hand on the big man’s shoulder. “I appreciate you telling me about this.” Buster muttered something unintelligible but was obviously unhappy, and Roan clapped him good-naturedly on the back. “Hey, come on, you know I’m gonna be fair. If this lady’s as innocent as you say she is, she’s got nothing to worry about. But I am going to need to talk to her. Tonight.” The easy smile on his lips tightened into grimmer lines. “Be seein’ you, Buster. You take it easy, now.”

The sheriff touched the brim of his Stetson and plunged through the door and into the twilight.

“You can stare at me all you like, but that’s all you’re getting,” Mary said firmly to the beast watching her avidly from his perch atop the kitchen counter. “The rest is mine. You’re getting too fat anyway.”

The animal, a huge and amazingly ugly orange tabby tomcat, blinked at her in slow motion and went right on staring. He’d come with the house, and allowing him to remain there, as well as providing him with food and other feline comforts, had been another of the conditions under which Queenie Schultz had consented to leave her home and business in Mary’s custody. So, she tolerated the creature, and since he had no name that she knew of and because he reminded her—with a bittersweet ache of longing for a place and time lost to her now—of Audrey Hepburn’s cat in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, that’s what she called him. Cat.

For his part, the animal seemed to have accepted the alien presence in his domain, although he did insist on staring at her with unnerving intensity, as if he expected her to turn back into Queenie at any moment, in a puff of magical smoke.

Mary picked up the last triangle of her smoked turkey club on whole wheat bread and was about to sink her teeth into it when Cat startled her by coming abruptly to life. He leaped down from the countertop to land with a heavy thud on the linoleum floor, then vanished into the nether regions of the house. An instant later, there came a knock on the front door.

Her heart leaped, then plummeted, a fair imitation of the maneuver Cat had just demonstrated. Who on earth? Her eyes went automatically to the oversized purse on the table that sat in the dimly lit living room just to the right of the front door. In all the months she’d lived in Hartsville, she’d never had anyone knock on her door before. And at this time of night?

But then a strange sort of calm settled over her. Because, of course, she knew.

She laid the uneaten sandwich carefully on its plate, picked up the pair of dark-rimmed glasses lying on the table and arranged them on her face. She touched the tender place on her jaw and skimmed her teeth across the swelling on her lower lip. Then she drew a deep breath, rose and walked to the door.

She paused to open the wide mouth of the purse and shift it slightly so as to put it within easier reach of her right hand, before taking a deep breath and calling out, “Who is it?”