We’re pretty sure.’ The Missoula Sheriff’s Department is investigating crimes in Ravalli County?”
He’d slipped and she’d caught it. “I’m getting a crick in my neck looking up at you. Could you sit down?” he said.
“There’s no ‘we,’ is there?” she said.
He tried to look bored. “It’s a cooperative effort. In this instance, a burglary and a homicide are linked together in two jurisdictions. Who do you think that woman was?”
“Snow White, with four of the dwarfs. Get a life, Darrel.”
He grinned at her humor and wrote in his notebook. He was on top of it now-generous, confident enough to be indulgent. When they cracked wise, they had unknowingly admitted they were amateurs and probably guilty as well. In the old days, mainline hard cases took the beating. Today, the pros asked for an attorney and became deaf-mutes.
“About five years ago, I knew a gal from your background who went inside. Educated, smart, nice-looking, used to ski in Aspen and hang out in Malibu. Her daddy was a state senator, a big rancher, a wheeler and a dealer, with juice all the way to D.C. But the girl fell in love with a junkie who maxed out all her credit cards and made her drive the car whenever he turned over a liquor or convenience store.
“One night the junkie had a fierce jones going and decided to hold up a store in a strip mall. He killed three people, including a twelve-year-old kid. Our girlfriend got raped by a male guard her first week inside and the next week by a couple of dykes. She never came out. She hung herself. Think I’m kidding? I’ll give you her name. You can check it out.”
He had driven the barb in deep. Amber’s eyes were shimmering, her throat spotted with color. He felt paternal and wanted to stand up and touch her cheek and hair, to reassure her things were not out of control yet, that he would be there as her friend. His thoughts, although not deliberately erotic, caused a thickening in his throat.
But he saw the flicker of weakness and humiliation leave her eyes and her jawbone flex, her posture straighten as she removed her hand from the mantelpiece.
“Do anything you goddamn feel like, but in the meantime take yourself, your horny attitudes, and your hair tonic or cologne or whatever that stink is out of my house. If you come back again without a warrant, my attorney will pull the nails out of your shoes.”
He rose from the couch, clicked his ballpoint pen, and stuck it in his pocket. His face burned, then his embarrassment turned to anger and he had to bite down on his lip so he would not say the words he was thinking. He walked to the door and opened it, the sunlight blinding his eyes. When he looked back at her, her arms were folded on her breasts, one knuckle poised on her lips while she watched him. She had not only bested him again but insulted him physically. A bilious fluid rose in his throat.
His desire for vindication, even revenge, should have made him willing to pull out all the stops. But as he looked at the composure in her face, the paleness on the tops of her breasts, her cocked hip, her refusal to be bested by him, only one thought coursed through his mind: What an incredible woman.
Why couldn’t she accept his feelings for what they were?
Darrel and Greta Lundstrum had made a date that evening. Before he left his apartment on the river, he made an entry in the computer file he was now keeping on the case of Johnny American Horse and the individuals who threaded their way in and out of it. The entry read:
Greta Lundstrum-smart, confrontational, I suspect territorial as hell, maybe a sexual adventurer. Would she get in the sack with a guy like Wyatt Dixon just for fun? Or is she a player? Why was she at the house of a U.S. senator? An easterner out here among the cowboys just for kicks? No way.
As he drove down to Stevensville to pick her up, he tried to convince himself that his motivations were professional in nature. But his unrequited obsession over Amber Finley was taking its toll. Night and day he felt a vague sense of sexual need that left him not only uncomfortable but irritable and discontent, almost hostile, as though he were less in the eyes of others, an inept, clumsy man who smelled of locker rooms and had to wear his military history like an invisible uniform to know who he was.
Greta Lundstrum lived in a white bungalow with blue shutters, a solitary spruce tree planted on each side of the small porch. In the late afternoon light the yard, the spruce trees, and the house looked like a demonstration home removed from a 1940s subdivision development. She opened the door and came outside without inviting him in, dressed in a black skirt and a white blouse, a gold chain around her throat. A shiny black purse hung on her arm.
“Am I late?” he asked, looking at his watch.
“I made reservations at the Depot for six-thirty,” she replied, walking ahead of him.
“I didn’t know we were going to the Depot,” he said.
“You don’t like eating there?”
“No, it’s fine,” he said.
“Good. That’s where I usually eat when I’m in Missoula,” she said. She opened the car door for herself and got inside, her purse on her lap, waiting for him to start the engine.
The restaurant’s main dining area and the bar across the foyer were crowded. Outside, on the terrace, a jazz combo played under a striped canopy, the sun a soft orange ball above the hills behind the railroad tracks.
“I’m glad you got reservations,” Darrel said.
“You have to. On Saturday night university types take over everything,” she said.
“It’s that kind of town, all right,” he said.
She ordered wine and he a glass of seltzer with a slice of lime.
“You don’t drink?” she said.
“Not too often. But I can if I want to,” he replied.
“When do you want to?” she said, and smiled when she said it.
“When I feel like it. I just never had the taste for it.”
“Give me the sirloin, well done, sour cream and chives on the baked potato. No butter,” she told the waiter.
“Yeah, same for me,” Darrel said.
During dinner he realized she spoke to no one at the other tables, although her eyes seemed to take note, without personal interest, of everyone in the room. She had firm arms, square shoulders, a small cleft in her chin, and medium-size hands with clipped, pink nails. She ate with a good appetite and midway through the meal ordered another glass of wine. “Sure you won’t join me?” she said.
“Why not?” he said, nodding to the waiter.
Later, she had Bavarian cake for dessert, and when the waiter brought coffee, she looked sated, happy, her face a bit flushed. She didn’t order anything else to drink and he knew she wasn’t a real boozer. “I always like the food here,” she said.
“I’ve been looking into that guy Dixon’s background. You know, the rodeo guy?” he said casually.
She picked up her spoon from her coffee saucer and looked at it and put it back down. “I think I already told you I strayed into a dalliance with Wyatt. It was my fault, not his. But I’m not really interested in hearing any more about him,” she said.
“The Feds say he writes letters to the President. He’s a definite head case.”
He looked out the window, waiting for her reaction. “Is this why you asked me out?” she said.
“I shouldn’t have brought this guy up. Cops have a hard time getting off the clock. That’s why they hang out together. Lot of times in late night bars. I’m glad you wanted to go to dinner tonight.”
She let her eyes rove around the dining room, her thoughts veiled. “Ever been married?” she asked.
“For a little while. I was in the Army, moving around from place to place.”
“You seem like a frank man. What do you think of me?”
“You’re a classy lady. I got a feeling we’re a lot alike,” Darrel said.
“Who knows?” she said.
“Want to take a walk down by the river? There’s a concert in the park tonight. Actually, my apartment is across the river from the park. Sometimes I listen to the music on my balcony,” he said.
“You saying you want to go to the concert or to your apartment?”
“Whatever,” he replied.
She rested her chin on her fist and looked directly into his face again. “You go to Vegas or Reno very much?”
