be about, Greta-information. What do you say about that?”
She bent over and began putting on her painter’s pants. She lifted her eyes into his. “I say I think that’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”
“You don’t know anybody named L. W. Peeples or Tex Barker?”
“What did I just tell you?”
Her eyes were unblinking, her indignation convincing.
“How about somebody named Mabus?” he asked.
She buttoned her painter’s pants, her face lowered now, her jaws flexing with the effort to fasten a button. She reached over to pick up her shirt from a chair, and in the side of her eye he saw the bright glimmer of fear. “You do know somebody named Mabus?” he said.
“I’ve heard his name mentioned in business conversations. I don’t know how he could have anything to do with the destruction of my house.”
“I think Wyatt Dixon had the name of this guy in his possession. Why would a hayseed like Dixon be interested in it?”
“I’m sure I don’t know, Darrel.”
She tried to look abstract and uninterested, but he could see the prickles in her throat.
“I like you a lot, Greta,” he said, almost surprised at the genuineness in his statement. “I think you’re in trouble and can’t tell anybody about it. Sometimes people just get in over their heads. It’s like making a wrong turn in a bad neighborhood. You don’t know how you got there, but suddenly you’re drowning in a world of hurt. If you can be square with me, maybe we can get you out of this.”
“Perhaps you mean well, but this scenario you’re describing is comic opera. Really, I mean it. You’re a nice guy, but-” She picked up her cute white hat and placed it on her head. “You’re looking at a Maryland country girl, Darrel. There’s no mystery here. Just an upper South gal trying to make it out here in the Wild West.”
He was sitting on the bed in his trousers and strap undershirt, his shoulders rounded. Her denial filled him with a sense of depression like a chemical assault on his system. It was always ordinary people who got in the gravest trouble with the law, he thought. In a peculiar way they retained their innocent belief in a benevolent society that was created especially for them, right up to the time they shuffled off on a wrist chain and entered the belly of the beast.
“Why so glum?” she asked.
“No reason. Thanks for the nooner.”
She wagged a finger at him. “I like you a lot, Darrel, but I don’t appreciate coarseness. My father was a minister and I grew up in a good home,” she said.
Late the next evening two men pulled up in front of a bar on the lower end of the Blackfoot River, not far from the confluence it formed with the Clark Fork. Their pickup truck had an Idaho tag, and fishing rods were propped up in the bed of the truck. The men stood outside the truck, drinking beer from cans, surveying the stilt houses on the riverbank, the independent grocery store across the state road, kids jumping from an abandoned steel bridge into the river, the smoke from the sawmill drifting up the walls of the Blackfoot Canyon. The evening light was a greenish-yellow, the air warm and cool at the same time, the bloom from cottonwood trees floating on the breeze.
One man was truncated, his muscular arms too short for his torso. He had a high forehead, receding hairline, and eyes that were set too low in his face. He wore heavy shoes with thick heels and double soles, a wide leather belt through the loops of his jeans, a faded purple T-shirt with a winged dragon printed on it, and a nylon vest that still had a sales tag on it. There were furrows in his brow, as though he were frowning, but in reality a worried look was his natural expression.
His companion was tall and had a formless posture and skin that was milky and dotted with moles. He wore an old fedora, a dark shirt that hung outside his pants, and leather-laced alpine trail shoes that were dusty from wear. He finished his beer and leaned against a headlight on the truck, his chest slightly caved, his stomach protruding over his belt. He watched a young woman pull her laundry from a coin-operated machine, next door to the bar. When the woman looked up and realized she was being stared at, he tipped his hat to her and shifted his attention elsewhere.
The two men went inside the bar and ordered hamburgers and fries and cups of coffee. While they waited for their food, they took turns walking to the front door and glancing outside.
“You boys expecting somebody?” the bartender said.
“No, can’t say we are,” the taller man said. He let his eyes linger on the bartender’s until the bartender looked away. “We were wondering if it’s too late in the day to get on the stream. I hear the salmon flies are hatching.”
“There’s still a few hatching out,” the bartender said.
“That’s what I thought,” the taller man said, nodding, looking at the door.
“Your food’s ready,” the bartender said.
The men ate in silence, sometimes gazing at the massive elk head mounted over the front entrance or at someone playing the pinball machine. The truncated man used the pay phone, then sat back down and finished his coffee. “You know a cowboy name of Wyatt Dixon?” he asked the bartender.
“He comes in for his beer,” the bartender replied. He was a dark-haired, broad-chested man who had been a gypo-an independent or wandering logger-before he had suffered a heart attack, and the backs of his broad hands were laced with boomer-chain scars. Now he served drinks in a saloon and wore a waxed mustache for the benefit of tourists.
“He comes in on Thursday nights?” the truncated man said.
The bartender wiped the bar idly, then propped his arms on it, his gaze fixed on nothing. “Wyatt don’t bother anybody. Least not here he don’t. If you got the wrong kind of business with him, you take it somewhere else,” he said.
The man in the fedora put a toothpick in his mouth. “We owe him some money for some rough stock. That’s why we asked if he came in here. Otherwise we wouldn’t be troubling you. Can you relate to that?” he said.
“The two burgers and the coffee are eleven dollars,” the bartender said.
When the two fishermen left, the bartender walked to the front window, studied their license tag, and wrote the number in pencil on the doorjamb. Then he rubbed the number out with the palm of his hand and marked off the whole affair as none of his business.
Temple was the best investigator I ever knew. When she could not find information using conventional means, she would spend hours or days on the Internet, in libraries and county clerks’ offices, or on the telephone cajoling information out of various law enforcement agencies. I should have known she would not rest until she found out exactly who Tex Barker and L. W. Peeples were.
The same evening the two fishermen had visited the bar on the Blackfoot, Temple got off the phone in our home office and came into the living room, a clipboard in her hand. She blew her breath upward to remove a strand of hair from her eyes. “Don’t trust computers,” she said.
“What have you got?” I said.
“Wyatt Dixon told you he heard about one of these guys while he was in San Quentin? Something about a guy who’d do a yard job on another inmate for thirty dollars, right? But the computer search at the NCIC didn’t pick up the names ‘Barker’ and ‘Peeples’ as Quentin graduates, at least not during the time frame Dixon was there.
“So I broadened the search through the entirety of the California system. A guy named Jeff Barker was in Soledad and Atascadero during the same period Dixon was at Quentin. So I called up Soledad and talked to a psychologist there who remembered him. Barker’s nickname was Tex. He’s not from Texas, though. He got his nickname because he loves Tex-Mex food and was always smuggling it into his cell and heating it up on a stinger and blowing the circuit breaker on the cell block.
“Same computer problem finding L. W. Peeples. Because there is no L. W. Peeples. But a guy named Lynwood Peeples, from Opa Locka, Florida, was in the computer. As it turned out, Lynwood was a cellmate of Barker in Soledad.”
“You always amaze me,” I said.
“Why?” she said, amused, blowing her breath up into her face again.
She was sitting on the couch, across from me, her hair lit by a floor lamp. I sat down next to her and put my arm around her. Her shoulders felt smooth and firm, her upper arms taut from the daily kick-boxer workouts she did
