“When does he come down?”
“I don’t know. Are you a member of the family?”
“Where’s that little Irish nun that used to work here?”
“Sir?”
“There was an Irish sister that used to work on the second floor.”
“I don’t know who you mean.”
I walked outside with Beth toward the automobile. The snow had stopped blowing, and there was just a hint of blue light beyond the mountains in the east. The thin shale of ice over the gravel in the parking lot cracked under our feet.
“You want to go back home?” I said.
“No. Call Mrs. Riordan.”
“I don’t think we should do that.”
“She’s not sleeping tonight. One of the boys will answer the phone, anyway.”
“Beth, let it slide for tonight.”
“A phone call isn’t a lot to ask, is it?”
I put her in the Plymouth, started the engine, turned on the heater, and walked across the street to the cafe to use the public phone outside. My fingers were stiff with cold, and I had trouble dialing the numbers and depositing the coins for a toll call. Through the lighted window of the cafe I could see Melvin and Pearl drinking coffee in front of their empty plates.
Buddy’s little brother, Joe, answered the phone and said that Buddy hadn’t gotten back yet from the hospital, and no, there was no light on in his cabin, and no, sir, he would have seen the headlights if the pickup had come down the road.
I walked back across the street to the automobile and sat down heavily behind the steering wheel.
“Where do you want to go now, kiddo?” I said.
She shook her head quietly and looked straight ahead at the dark line of mountains. Her face was drained of emotion now, and her hands lay open in her lap. I put my arm briefly around her shoulders, and we drove back in silence to her house.
She wanted the glass of whiskey now, but I took it out of her hand and walked her upstairs to bed. It was dark in her bedroom, and she turned her head on the pillow toward the opposite wall, but I could see that her eyes were still opened when I covered her.
“I’ll be downstairs when you wake up,” I said, and closed the door softly behind me.
I fixed coffee in the kitchen while the blueness of the night began to fade outside and the false dawn rimmed the edge of the mountains. I poured a shot of whiskey into the coffee and smoked cigarettes until my lungs were raw and my fingers and the backs of my legs started to shake with fatigue and strain. I lay back on the couch and closed my eyes, but there were red flashes of color in my head and that persistent hum in my blood that I had felt in jail. I touched my brow, and my fingers were covered with perspiration.
I put on my coat and walked out into the cold, early light and drove to the sheriff’s office. The streets were empty, and newspapers in plastic wrappers lay upon the quiet lawns. Some of the kitchens in the houses were lighted, and occasionally I caught a glimpse of a workingman bent over his breakfast.
I walked up the courthouse steps, trying to light a cigarette in the wind. I was sweating inside my clothes, and when I entered the gloom of the hallway and smelled the odor of the spittoons and dead cigars, the hum started to grow louder in my head. Three sheriff’s deputies sat on wooden chairs in front of the dispatcher’s cage, reading parts of the newspaper and yawning. A drunk who had just bonded out of the tank was accusing the dispatcher of taking money out of his wallet while it was in Possessions.
“You used it to go bail,” the dispatcher said. The other deputies never looked up from their paper. Their faces were tired and had the greenish cast of men who worked all night.
“I had thirty-five goddamn dollars in there,” the drunk said.
“Get the hell out of here before I take you upstairs again,” one of the deputies said from behind his paper.
The dispatcher looked at me from his radio desk.
“Yes, sir?” he said.
I started to speak, but didn’t get the chance.
“What are you doing in here?” the sheriff’s voice said behind me.
His khaki sleeves were rolled up over his massive fat arms, and the splayed end of his cigar was stuck in the center of his mouth. He clicked his Mason’s ring on the clipboard that he carried in one hand.
“Do you have Buddy Riordan in jail?” I said.
“Should I?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s he been doing?”
“He didn’t come home last night.”
His head tilted slightly, and he narrowed his eyes at me.
“What is this, Paret?”
“I want to know if he’s in jail. That’s not hard to understand.”
He took the cigar out of his mouth and pushed his tongue into one cheek.
“Did you book Buddy Riordan in here last night?” he said to the dispatcher.
“No, sir.”
The sheriff looked back at me.
“Is that all you want?” he said.
“Sheriff, there’s something you might want to know,” the dispatcher said. “One of the deputies at the Ravalli office called on the mobile unit and said that three guys shot the hell out of Frank Riordan’s birds last night.”
The sheriff walked to the spittoon, his head bowed into position as though he were over a toilet, and spit a dripping stream into it.
“What was Buddy driving?” he said.
I wanted to get back out into the cold air again, away from the hissing radiators and the indolent, flat eyes of the men looking at me.
“Forget it,” I said. “He’s probably on a drunk over in Idaho.”
“Don’t fool with me, son. I ain’t up to it this morning.”
I lit my cigarette and wiped my damp hair back over my head.
“Give me that accident report that come in from Frenchtown,” the sheriff said to the dispatcher. He took his glasses out of his shirt pocket and squinted at the small writing on the paper.
“Was he driving a ’55 Ford pickup?” he said, pulling his glasses off his nose.
“Yes.” I felt something drop inside of me.
“Take a ride with me.”
He started walking down the hallway toward the front door, his waist like an inner tube under his shirt. I remained motionless, the cigarette hanging in my mouth, watching his huge silhouette walk toward the square of dawn outside.
“You better go with him, mister,” the dispatcher said.
I caught up with the sheriff outside on the glazed sidewalk. I could feel my shoes slipping on the ice, but his very weight seemed to give him traction on the cement.
“All right, what are we playing?” I said.
“Get in.” But this time his voice was lower and more human.
I got in on the passenger’s side and closed the door. The sawed-off twelve-gauge pump clipped vertically against the dashboard knocked against my knees. He flicked on the bubble-gum light without the siren, and we headed west out of town. He was breathing heavily from the fast walk to the car.
“About an hour ago a ’55 pickup went off the road on 263 and rolled all the way down to the river,” he said.
My head was swimming.
“So what the hell are we doing?” I said. “You’ve got a junked truck in the river. You want me to identify it so you can give Buddy a citation?”
He opened the wind vane and flipped his cigar out. He waited a moment, and I saw his hands tense on the wheel before he turned to me with his pie-plate face.
“The driver’s still in there, Paret. It burned.”
We drove down the highway by the side of the Clark, and the water was blue and running fast in the middle between the sheets of ice that extended from the banks. The sun came up bright in a clear sky over the mountains, and men were fishing with wet flies and maggots for whitefish on the tips of the sandbars. The thick pines on the sides of the mountains were dark green and bent with the weight of the new snow, and the sunlight on the ice-covered boulders refracted with an iridescence that made your eyes water.