"This is Jesse," she said. "I do my best, but I can't control her."
"And shouldn't," I said.
I bent down and let Jesse lap me for a bit. Then we all went into Mary Lou's gleaming kitchen. The house was so polished, and swept, and scrubbed, and waxed, and ironed, and starched, that it felt as if I were making a mess just by walking through it. Mary Lou and I sat across from each other at a small bleached oak table. Jesse sat on the floor next to it and looked up with her mouth open and her tongue hanging out. Her tail thumped on the floor.
"This is a dog who's been fed from the table," I said.
"Do you disapprove?"
"No. Dogs are supposed to be fed from the table."
"Do you have a dog?"
"Susan and I share a German shorthair named Pearl," I said.
"That helps," Mary Lou said.
"If you're going to hire a thug, it's better to hire one who likes dogs?"
She smiled.
"Yes, something like that," she said. "Will you have coffee?"
"Sure," I said.
While she was making the coffee, Jesse kept shifting her attention from Mary Lou to me. Food can come from anywhere.
"What have you been up to?" Mary Lou said.
"Well, Mrs. Buckman…"
"Please call me Lou."
I nodded.
"Mostly I've been orienting. I talked with the bartender at the hotel. He knew less than Jesse here. I talked with some guy in a gun shop. He knew less than the bartender. I talked with the chief of police."
"Dean Walker," she said. "He's asked me out a couple of times."
"And?"
"And I'm not ready to date yet," she said. "Maybe in awhile."
"He was very interested in who hired me," I said. "He asked a couple of times if it were you."
"What did you say?"
"I ignored the question."
"Everyone will know soon enough," she said. "Who else would it be?"
"Your husband have family?" I said.
"No."
"Could I get a list of the names of people you know pretty well?" I said. "People I can talk to?"
"Yes, can you wait? I'll have to think."
"Sure."
She got a Bic pen and a white pad with purple lines on it and sat and made a short list of names, pausing now and then to think.
"I'm sure I've left people out," she said. "But these are the ones I can think of."
The list wasn't very long. It was limited to Potshot. There was no one on it from L.A.
"It's a start," I said.
"You won't be…? No. I hired you to investigate. You should just go ahead and do it."
I smiled.
"I won't be mean to them," I said.
Lou looked at me for a time without speaking, patting Jesse's head absently, her coffee sitting in its pretty china cup undrunk. The insistent desert light, cooled, but not dimmed by technology, came in through the kitchen windows and made everything gleam impossibly. The counters and cabinets were bleached oak. The floor and countertops were Mexican tile. The hood over the cookstove was also tiled in the same stuff. The dog's tail moved steadily as Lou stroked her head.
"It took a long time after Steve died for Jesse to realize he wasn't coming home. Every night before supper she'd go and sit at the door and wait."
I didn't say anything. I wasn't sure she was talking to me.
"It was hard to get her to eat for awhile, because Steve was always the one who fed her, and for whatever dog reason, she wanted to wait for him."
I finished my coffee. Lou stopped talking and stared off through the kitchen window at the desert. We looked at each other. She was wearing a light perfume. Her legs were evenly tanned, as well as her arms and face, and probably parts of her I couldn't see. She looked athletic and outdoorsy and clean, and very beautiful. The moment took a long time to pass.
"Not too much is known about dogs," I said.
Chapter 4
I STARTED WITH the first name on Mary Lou's list. J. George Taylor. I was wearing my casual desert detective outfit. Ornate sneakers, jeans, a gray T-shirt hanging out to cover the gun, a blue Brooklyn Dodgers baseball hat and shades. I paused to admire my reflection in the tinted glass door, then went into a real estate.office on the main drag, next to the Foot Hills Bank & Trust. The office was a small, round-edged, flat-roofed adobe stand-alone, with a low porch across the front and the overhang of the roof rafters exposed, giving it that authentic Mexican look. There were four small gray metal desks in the room with phones and nameplates and swivel chairs, and chairs handily arranged so that customers could rest their checkbooks on the desk as they wrote. In the back of the room was a big oak desk. There were a number of desert-themed prints on the walclass="underline" bleached cow skulls, a big cactus, and Native Americans wrapped in colorful blankets, one of whom wore a derby hat with a feather in it. Three of the small inauthentic desks were empty. A woman with a lot of rigid blond hair was sitting at the fourth, talking to a fat guy at the big oak desk. Her makeup was expert and extensive. She was wearing a green top and white pants. Her legs were crossed. Where the fabric pulled tight I noticed that she had a comely, if mature, thigh. Nothing wrong with mature. He had a red face and a lot of male pattern baldness. He reminded me of Friar Tuck. The room felt like a meat locker, but the red-faced guy was sweating lightly. Her nameplate said Bea Taylor. His nameplate said J. George Taylor. Being a trained investigator, I made the connection.
"Hi," she said. "Come in and sit down."
"You want to buy some property," he said with a big smile, "this is the place."
I took out two business cards and handed one to each, and sat down in a convenient customer chair.
"Actually I'm in the market for information," I said.
They looked at my card.
He said, "A private detective?"
She said, "I said to myself when you walked in that door, there's something unusual about that man."
"You're both on the money," I said. "I'm looking into the murder of a man named Steve Buckman."
"Somebody hired you?" J. George said.
"Fortunately, yes," I said. "Can either of you help me at all?"
"Do you have a gun?" the blonde asked. Somehow she made it sound as if she were asking something intimate.
I smiled at her. The big smile, the kind that would make her mature thighs ripple.
"Are you Mrs. Taylor?" I said.
"Yes, I'm sorry, and this is my husband, George."
J. George nodded like a guy accepting an award. Either he had more stamina than he showed, or she fooled around. I glanced at her again. She had her lips open slightly. She touched the bottom one with the tip of her tongue. Probably both.
"I can't think of anything we could tell you about Steve," Taylor said.
"You knew him," I said.
"Oh sure thing," J. George said. "My business you get to know pretty much everybody in town."
"Our business, dear."
J. George laughed. Jolly.
"Bebe doesn't let you get away with anything," he said.
"I can see that," I said.
Flattering Bebe held promise. "What kind of a guy was Buckman?"
"Steve was a peach," Bebe said. "Wasn't he, George?"
"A peach of a guy," J. George said. "Organized the kids around here into a Pop Warner league."
"I didn't know the town had enough kids for that," I said.
"Six-man football," J. George said.
"Did you ever play football, Mr. Spenser?" Bebe asked.
"Long time ago, Mrs. Taylor-you know, leather helmets and high-tops."
"What position did you play?"
"Strong safety," I said.
"I'm not surprised," she said, and ran the tip of her tongue along her lower lip.
My guess was she didn't know strong safety from traffic safety, but she recognized the word strong. I was glad I hadn't played weak side linebacker.
"So Buckman was active in the community," I said, just to be saying something.
Bebe smiled, as if she knew a joke she wasn't sharing.
"Great guy," J. George said. "It's a real tragedy what happened."