“And you’d have settled for that?”
“Why not? Hell, a man can always hire sex by the hour. I didn’t need her for that.”
Watchman felt uncomfortable; he knew there were men like that but in his gut he didn’t understand them. What was the point in marriage if there wasn’t something more to it?
“If it wasn’t on account of your wife, why did you start hating Kendrick?”
“He’s slime.”
“You said that before.”
Rand had dropped the letter-opener. Now he picked it up again and abruptly stabbed it down into the desk top. When he removed his hand the letter-opener stood erect by itself, impaled in the wood.
Rand said almost musingly, “The son of a bitch is colorblind, did you know that? When he gets a little upset he runs red lights because he can’t remember whether it’s red on top and green on the bottom or the other way around. I saw him run over a dog in the road once and the damn dog was right in the middle of the crosswalk on the green light. You imagine how tough it must have been for that dog to learn about crosswalks and green lights? And Kendrick wiped it right out like that because the bastard couldn’t be bothered to think about whether the red light was on the top or the bottom.”
“And that’s why you hate him? On account of a dog?”
“No. But it’s a symptom. I look pretty ruthless to most people, don’t I, but it’s mainly because I’m a successful man. I’ve never treated another man like dirt. I just pick the best people for the jobs, that’s my secret. I picked Joe Threepersons for that lineshack because I knew he was pretty thickheaded, he wouldn’t get bored with the job and he had a sense of responsibility to his hire that you don’t find much in men any more, especially when you’ve got to stick them out in the woods somewhere on a job where nobody’s going to supervise them. I took one look at that wife of his and I knew she’d make sure he did his work. She had the puritan work-ethic right up her spine, that girl. Funny, considering the background she came from. Her father was a drunk.”
“Maybe that’s what made her the way she was.”
“Maybe. Who knows. But Kendrick, he’s the kind of man who’ll pull the rug out from under anybody at all if he sees an advantage to it. He’d stick a knife in his own mother’s back and twist it if he could get a good price for her blood. The day’s going to come when he finds a better lay than Gwen, and when it does he’ll throw her out like an old shoe. I never threw her out, I just didn’t stand in the way when she elected to walk out. That’s the difference between Kendrick and me.”
Now Watchman began to see it. Rand wasn’t as callous as he wanted to think he was. He still had something for Gwen and wanted to think himself a better man than the one she’d left him for. Rand was never going to admit it but he had been hurt by Gwen’s decision. Badly hurt, and that was why he hated Kendrick.
There were gaps. The identity of Maria’s benefactor went unexplained; Rand first denied it and then hedged on the denial and why would he be vague about it if he had simply kept his word to Joe and put up the money for Maria and Joe Junior?
Watchman said, “There’s a lot you’re holding out. Right now I’ve got no leverage to pry it out of you but sooner or later I’ll get it. You could save us the time.”
“I’ve told you everything I know that’s relevant to the case. I’ve told you a whole lot that isn’t. I don’t think you’re entitled to any more than that, and besides I can’t think of anything else that would help. I’ve wondered myself, all these past six years, who it was that killed Ross. I even thought of hiring a private agency to look into it but I decided against it; the case was officially solved and if people started asking questions it could stir up trouble. From my point of view it was better to let Ross’s killer go free than ruin my own position.”
“Didn’t you make any guesses?”
“Of course. It could have been some irate husband. It could have been somebody with a grudge from Ross’ past. He had a pretty checkered life on the rodeo circuit. Maybe it was some woman he’d left at the altar somewhere, who knows. It could have been anybody.”
“But it wasn’t,” Watchman said. “Anybody like that, they’d have had no reason to kill Maria Threepersons.”
“I can’t answer that one, I’m afraid. I’m as mystified as you are.”
The telephone rang.
Through the first three rings Rand didn’t react to it; he was following some private line of thought. Then he jerked his head back. “Hell I forgot Wilma left for the day.” And reached for the phone. “Hello?” Then he waved the receiver at Watchman. “For you.”
Watchman crossed the room. “Hello?”
“How, red brother.” That was Buck Stevens. “Listen, I’m still in Whiteriver.”
“Didn’t you find Harlan Natagee?”
“Seems he’s in Oklahoma this week, something about an intertribal powwow, some Indian nationalism outfit he’s tied up with. They don’t expect him back for three, four days.”
“I guess that’s just as well. Keep him out of the line of fire.”
“What you want me to do now?”
“I think maybe—”
“Hey,” Stevens interrupted, “I’m in that phone booth at the trading post here? I’ve got Tom Victorio tugging on my sleeve, he wants to talk to you.”
“Put him on.”
Victorio came on the line. “Listen, I couldn’t talk before, I was on the office phone. I got to talk to you.”
“Go ahead and talk then.”
“It’s what I found and what I didn’t find last night. Dwight’s got two file cabinets there. They’re both locked. I’ve got a key to one of them, but I know he keeps the key to the other one in his desk so I got into both of them last night. You know those files on the water-rights case, the ones that were stolen?”
“What about them?”
“I found part of them. In the dead files, man. A whole bunch of my notes on precedent cases, they were in the case-closed file right down at the back of the bottom drawer. That’s part of the stuff that was stolen. If I’d known that stuff was there it would have saved three months of work.”
“Any idea how it got there?”
“You bet your ass. You know Lisa Natagee, the girl on the front desk in the council house? She’s the one who usually locks up the place at night.”
“She’s Harlan Natagee’s daughter?”
“She’s Frank’s daughter, he’s the chief. But she’s Harlan’s niece.”
“Would she have a key to Kendrick’s files?”
“She might know where he hides the keys in his desk. She does have keys to the offices, all the rooms in the building.”
“Is she the only one?”
“No, there’s a lot of people with keys but it looks fishy to me. I mean she could have slipped in there one night and just moved that stuff from the active file into the closed files and nobody’d ever think of looking down there.”
“I thought you said there were jimmy marks on the window.”
“There were. And some of the missing stuff’s still missing. But I still want to know how that stuff got there.”
“What about the trust fund?”
“There isn’t any trust fund,” Victorio said. “At least no records. I even looked under Maria’s maiden name. No file. The only file under Threepersons was the murder case. Now that ain’t like Dwight, he’s methodical, he keeps everything in triplicate just the way the Army does. I think he’s got every letter he ever wrote or received.”
“What about the checks?”
“Nothing in the check stubs, man. Nothing at all. No deposits, no checks.”
“Couldn’t they be in his personal checking account at home?”
“Sure. But this is a case, right? He’s a lawyer representing a client. There ought to be records where he billed the client, collected his fees, all that stuff. I didn’t find a thing. I mean if somebody hands you sixty-five thousand dollars to establish a trust fund you’ve got to show where the money came from and where it went. Otherwise the tax people climb all over you. But there’s no sixty-five-thousand-dollar figure recorded anywhere on the books.”