The big man smiled slightly, and Jody saw how weary and bored he looked as he leaned over to pull her beer out of a refrigerator under the bar. Maybe what she had to ask him would wake him up.
“Bailey, I would never confuse you with a priest.”
He plucked a glass off a shelf and located a slice of lime in the refrigerator, too. “Good to know.”
“And as far as I know you’re not a lawyer or a shrink.”
“Where’s this going?” he asked, setting what she wanted in front of her.
“Where it’s going is…”
He watched her pick up the glass, tilt it and pour beer down its side. When it was upright again she ran the lime slice around the rim and then dropped it into the beer and took one swallow. Finally she said, “I got to thinking about you tonight.” She took another swallow, because it tasted so good and because she hoped it could relax her. The glass was cool in her palm, the beer was sweet and bitter in her mouth. “And what I thought is that I’ve been coming here all of my life and I’ve never heard you pass on gossip about anybody.”
Bailey looked at her with an impassive expression, but she thought she saw a hint of pride in his eyes.
“Which leads me to believe,” she said, after wiping her upper lip with a bar napkin, “that I can ask you something and it won’t go beyond us.”
He frowned a little.
“Don Phelps was out to the ranch this evening,” she told him. “My family pretty much accused him of making all this happen by running a dishonest investigation.” When Bailey didn’t say anything, she pushed a little. “So I wonder what you think about that?”
Bailey shrugged. “I think he ran a dishonest investigation.”
“Shit,” she said, involuntarily, and took another drink. “You do?”
“Well, yeah, didn’t the governor say so?”
“I guess, but-”
“You guess? No, he did say so. And as much as I respect your grandfather and the rest of your family, I think they have some nerve blaming Don Phelps for all of that.”
It was a lot of words for Bailey, and he looked like he had more to say.
Jody worked up her courage and asked, “Why, Bailey?”
He sighed and propped himself on his bar with his hands spaced wide on it. “Listen, your granddad is the biggest property owner in this county, right? Everybody thinks he shits gold. Nobody’s respected any more than him and Annabelle. They have the most money, so they wield the most power and influence, right? You know that’s true. And one night their oldest boy-who just happens to be a kid that folks think is the nicest young fellow around-gets murdered and those nice, rich, powerful people point to Billy Crosby. They believe he did it. They are sure he did it. They’re not lying. They really do believe it, and they expect him to get arrested and tried and convicted and be sent away for a long, long time.”
Bailey took a breath and backed off from the bar a little, then leaned in again toward Jody, close enough that she could see the gray hairs amid his whiskers and the broken capillaries in his nose. He leaned one meaty forearm on the counter and turned his back to the couple of customers farther down the bar who looked as if they needed refills. “And let’s say you’re the sheriff of this county where the Linders are royalty. And you’re an average guy, no Colombo, just a young guy who got elected sheriff because you always wanted to turn on a siren and drive a car real fast and, anyway, it’s a job. And you don’t know eff-all about investigating a homicide. If you’re that man-I’m not saying if you’re you, but if you’re that man-what are you going to do?”
“Find and arrest Billy Crosby,” she answered with reluctance.
“Are you going to waste time lookin’ for anybody else?”
“Probably not.”
“No probably about it. Are you going to give the time of day to anybody that suggests that somebody else might have done it?”
She hesitated too long, and Bailey said, “Trust me, you’re not.”
Jody asked, “Are you saying my grandfather-or somebody in my family-told the sheriff to ignore that other evidence?”
“No, I’m not saying that, Jody. I don’t know if they did or not, although knowing your grandpa, I’d guess not. But they wouldn’t have to, I do know that much. Don Phelps may not be a genius, but he’s no dummy, either. There was an atmosphere, there was a rush to judgment-if you want to call it that-and he knew enough to lead the rush. But let me tell you something. In my opinion, it’s a damned good thing Don did that, because if he hadn’t taken Billy to jail first thing that morning and kept him there, we would have had other violence in this town. There were people who would have dragged Billy out and either beat him to death or hung him. So I’m not blaming Don for what he did, and I don’t think your family ought to be blaming him, either, because they’re the ones who set him up for it.”
“Set him up?” She was shocked by his words. “Bailey, are you saying you think they did it on purpose?”
“No, they most likely did it out of honest grief and sorrow and a belief that they were right, but the result was just the same.”
“You mean the wrong man went to prison?”
But Bailey only shrugged again. “Oh, I think Billy Crosby was an absolutely right man to put in prison.”
Jody took a sip of her tart beer, looking down to hide her emotions. When she finally looked up again, she said, “There’s a flaw in your logic, Bailey.”
“Which is?”
“If Billy didn’t kill my dad, then somebody else did who’s more dangerous than he is.”
Bailey said, “It was those strangers your dad stopped that day.”
“And so we’ll never catch them and we’ll never know?”
For the first time, he let some sympathy into his eyes. “Probably not, Jody. It might be best for you to accept that fact.” He grabbed his lone waitress as she tried to squeeze past behind him to get to some bottles. “Sylvia can tell you what I mean.”
The waitress, older than Bailey, said, “Tell her what, baby?”
“Tell her about that day over at the truck stop when you were there.”
“Oh, honey,” she said, looking at Jody, “are you sure you want to hear this?”
“Yeah, she does,” Bailey insisted, before Jody could say anything.
Sylvia-white-haired and still shapely at over seventy in her T-shirt and blue jeans-leaned against Bailey but looked at Jody. “I used to waitress at the truck stop, did you know that, honey?”
Jody shook her head. Sylvia was fixed only to Bailey’s in her mind.
“Well, I did work there, so I was there that Saturday when that poor Sam Carpenter came running in, just so out of breath you’d have thought he would die right there. He came in yelling, ‘Where’s Hugh Linder, where’s Hugh Linder!’ and then he said that Billy Crosby had killed your daddy.”
“And how did everybody react to that?” Bailey prodded her.
“Well, shock!” Sylvia said, her hands flying up into the air as if she’d just been shot. “Pure shock and grief was what it was, people weepin’ and yellin’. We just wanted to go get that little bastard and string him up right then.”
“See, that’s what I was saying,” Bailey interrupted, releasing Sylvia back to her job. “It was a good thing Don Phelps did what he did that day. If he’s responsible for sending the wrong man to prison, then we’re all responsible for it, because there wasn’t anybody-including me-who really stood up and suggested we might be convicting the wrong guy. Oh, I told them how drunk Billy was, but that’s all I did. We all just went along, most people because they believed he did it and a few because maybe they knew better but they didn’t want to cross your folks, and a few of us because we didn’t mind so much if Billy got sent away. That probably saved some- other-body’s life, like his own wife or his kid, or who the hell knows who Billy might have ended up killing someday.”
Bailey went off to sell a few drinks, and Jody took the time to gulp down half of her beer, only to realize she didn’t want any more of it. She was already disoriented enough from everything that had happened and everything she’d heard since noon. When Bailey came back, she said, “But why would my family be so hard on the sheriff?”
This time there was no mistaking the depth of sympathy in his eyes.
“Ah, Jody. Think about it. Think about your grandfather and what kind of man he is. How’s he ever going to
