Билл Пронзини - Blue Lonesome

Hoxie returned with his lemonade, arranged himself in an old mohair chair, and leaned forward attentively. “Now, then,” he said. “What is it you’d like to know?”

“Whatever you can tell me about a woman I knew in San Francisco, briefly and not very well. She called herself Janet Mitchell but that wasn’t her real name.”

“Yes?”

“I think she came from Beulah. I’m curious about her true identity, and why she left here and went to San Francisco.”

“You say she was using an assumed name?”

“Yes. I have no idea why.”

“She told you nothing about herself?”

“No. I hardly knew her, as I said.”

“But I don’t understand. If you hardly knew her, why have you come all the way to Beulah? Are you trying to find her for some reason? Do you think she’s come back home?”

“She’s never coming home,” Messenger said. “She committed suicide three weeks ago.”

Hoxie’s smile turned upside down. “Dear Lord.”

“She didn’t leave a note, nothing to explain why. No one’s claimed her body yet. The police weren’t able to identify her or trace where she came from; it’s sheer luck that led me to Beulah. If she does have relatives here, they should know what happened to her.”

“Of course. She should have a proper burial.”

“There’s that, and also the fact that she left quite a bit of money in cash. Fourteen thousand dollars.”

A silence built between them. Messenger saw knowledge seep into the minister’s eyes; the man’s expression turned doleful. “Fourteen thousand dollars,” Hoxie repeated.

“It was sixteen when she came to San Francisco.”

“Yes, that’s about how much she received. How long ago was it she arrived there?”

“About six months.”

“Describe her to me.”

Messenger described her.

“Anna,” Hoxie said then, and sighed. “Poor Anna.”

“Anna?”

“Anna Roebuck. I should have realized it as soon as you mentioned suicide.”

Anna Roebuck. The name seemed strange to him; Janet Mitchell somehow fitted her better. No, that was a false illusion, created and colored by his impressions of who and what she’d been. He hadn’t known her — that was the thing.

“Tell me about Anna Roebuck, Reverend.”

“A tragic case,” Hoxie said. “She led a hard life, like so many sagebrush ranchers out here. Came from a poor family, and stayed poor even after she married Dave Roebuck. He was a black sheep and a womanizer; she couldn’t have made a worse choice. Still... such a terrible vengeance. Such terrible acts.”

“What acts?”

“She was never tried or convicted, mind you, except in people’s eyes. Never even arrested. And of course she maintained her innocence to the day she disappeared.”

“Reverend, what acts?”

“The worst of all sins against God’s law. The taking of human life.”

“ Murder ?”

“Double murder. Her husband, for one. Killed in their barn with a twelve-gauge shotgun.”

“My God. Who else was killed? A woman he was with?”

Hoxie shook his head sorrowfully. “If that were the case, she wouldn’t have been reviled and driven away. No, the second murder was far more heinous.”

“I don’t... heinous?”

“Her daughter, eight years old. The child’s skull was crushed with a rock and the poor broken body put down the well.”

Messenger said, “I don’t believe it.”

“Yes, I know. It’s difficult to believe anyone could do such a thing to an innocent child, especially a woman who seemed devoted to her daughter.”

“Even if she went crazy... what possible reason could she’ve had for putting the girl’s body into the well afterward? The husband’s body wasn’t moved, was it?”

“No.” Again Hoxie sighed and shook his head. “There’s something else too, even more bizarre. Tess was struck down near the barn; bloodstains were found at the spot. But before she was carried to the well her clothes were apparently changed.”

“Her clothes?”

“Anna swore that when she last saw Tess, the child had on jeans and a T-shirt. When the body was taken from the well it was clothed in her best Sunday dress.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Very little of what happened does, Mr. Messenger.”

He was silent. In his mind’s eye he could see the tattered old panda bear; it must have belonged to the little girl. And Tess must have been the child in the photo Del Carlo had found in the bloody bathtub. The pocket watch... To Davey from Pop. Dave Roebuck’s watch. Would a woman who’d murdered her husband and daughter in cold blood have kept mementos like that? Would she have kept a book on how to cope with pain and grief? He couldn’t imagine it. Most of what he’d heard the past few minutes was beyond his powers of imagination.

Questions occurred to him, one after another, crowding into the forefront of his thoughts. He had a logical, orderly mind, if not an inventive one, and he was used to devising and asking questions and evaluating the answers he was given. That was a part of his job at Sitwell & Cobb, some of whose clients were anything but logical and orderly, while others skated dangerously on the thin edge of deception and fraud.

“If Anna was a devoted mother,” he said at length, “how could people here be so quick to condemn her?”

“No one else could’ve committed the crimes,” Hoxie said. “At least, so it seemed then and still seems now.”

“Why not one of Roebuck’s women? You said he was a womanizer. A lover’s quarrel that turned violent, and the little girl killed because she was a witness?”

“A possibility, yes, but there was no evidence to support it. The only clear adult fingerprints found anywhere belonged to Dave and Anna.”

“The operative word being clear ,” Messenger said. “There’s also the possibility of gloves.”

“Perhaps. But the county investigators and Sheriff Espinosa questioned dozens of people, including the women Dave Roebuck was intimate with. And Joe Hanratty, a ranch hand who had a fistfight with him a week before the murders. They found nothing to incriminate anyone.”

“This man Hanratty couldn’t have done it?”

“No. He works for Dave Roebuck’s brother, John T., and the other hands swore he never left John T.’s ranch that day.”

“What about a stranger, a drifter?”

“Highly unlikely,” Hoxie said. “Dave and Anna’s ranch is far off any main road. When his body was found his wallet was untouched; it contained fifty-seven dollars in cash. And nothing was disturbed or missing from inside the house.”

“Well, there couldn’t have been any evidence to incriminate Anna, either. Otherwise she’d have been arrested and charged.”

“Circumstantial evidence, but not enough to satisfy the district attorney.”

“Where did she say she was at the time of the killings?”

“At the old Bootstrap Mine.”

“What was she doing at a mine?”

“Looking for gold.”

“... She was a miner as well as a rancher?”

“It was a hobby with her,” Hoxie said. “The Bootstrap has been shut down for thirty years, but there are traces of gold left in it. The mine and most of her ranch are on BLM land, less than a dozen miles apart.”

“BLM?”

“Public land. Owned by the Bureau of Land Management. Most sagebrush ranchers around here lease grazing land and grazing rights from the BLM. It’s a common practice in Nevada.”

“So she went alone to the mine that day?”

“Yes.”

“And no one saw her there?”

“No one.”

“How long was she away from the ranch?”

“Three hours or so, she claimed.”