Билл Пронзини - Blue Lonesome

“What I want,” she said slowly and distinctly, as if she were talking to a younger version of her son, “is for you to let me call the shots. And to keep quiet except to follow my lead. Think you can do that?”

“If it means getting answers.”

“It does. Okay, then? Settled?”

“What about Lonnie? Don’t you want to be here when he decides to come home?”

“What for? We can’t talk about what’s bothering him — you made that clear enough. You’re the one who needs me tonight, not Lonnie.”

Not just tonight and in more ways than one.

“Well?” she said.

He’d already given in. He wouldn’t be much good at this sort of tricky improvisation and she would; wiser for him to play sideman and let her handle the solo. He said, “All right. We’ll do it your way.”

They took the Jeep and rode most of the distance across the valley in silence. Messenger broke it as they neared the Y fork by asking, “Dacy, does it surprise you that Dave Roebuck was the kind of man who’d molest his own daughter?”

Quick sidelong glance. “Back to that subject, are we?”

“Not talking about it won’t make it any less painful.”

“I haven’t been avoiding it. Just brooding on it.”

“And?”

“It surprises me some, yeah. No woman was safe around that bastard, but I never knew him to go after one that wasn’t of legal age.”

“A recent aberration, then. Degenerates can always find a new low to sink to.”

“I reckon. Lonnie was sure it hadn’t gone as far as actual sex? Just fondling?”

“That’s what Tess told him.”

“At least she didn’t have to endure rape before she died. Damn little consolation, but at least that.”

“Did she have any adult friends?”

“You mean somebody she’d confide in?”

“Besides you and Lonnie.”

“No, I don’t think so. Not many people went out there to visit. If she couldn’t bring herself to tell Anna or me, and Lonnie had to practically drag it out of her... no, she didn’t tell anybody else.”

“Roebuck liked to brag. Maybe he told someone.”

“About a thing like that? He’d have been lynched.”

“Let something slip, then. When he was drunk.”

“Not likely. Not in the bars he drank in. One thing that boy didn’t have was a death wish, drunk or sober.”

Drunk or sober. The bars he drank in...

“The Hardrock Tavern,” he said. He sat up straighter. “The fight at the Hardrock Tavern!”

“Fight he had with Joe Hanratty? What about it?”

“We’re not going straight to the casino. I want to make another stop first.”

“Where?”

“Lynette Carey’s house.”

“What for? What’ve you got in your head now?”

“She has a child a year older than Tess was,” Messenger said. “I can’t recall her or anybody else saying if it’s a boy or girl. Girl?”

“That’s right. Karen.”

“Lynette broke up with Roebuck suddenly, remember? For no clear reason. And just as suddenly her brother attacked him at the Hardrock. And neither Lynette nor Hanratty will talk about why.” Some things you don’t talk about. Not even to friends, let alone strangers. Lynette’s words to him in the Saddle Bar.

“My God, you don’t think—”

“I do think,” he said. “Roebuck had been molesting Tess; isn’t it just as likely he’d try to molest somebody else’s daughter, too?”

Small, built of cinder blocks overlain with cheap, sand-scoured aluminum siding, Lynette Carey’s house squatted on a hillside south of City Hall. A scraggly cactus garden composed the front yard. Half a dozen child’s toys and a forgotten sweater strewn among the plants gave the yard an afflicted look, like the aftermath of a windstorm or flash flood on a small section of desert topography.

Dacy said as they pulled up in front, “You’d better let me do most of the talking here, too.”

“Do you and Lynette get along?”

“Well as any two people in this town.”

Lynette opened the door to Messenger’s knock. She had exchanged her uniform for a pair of crotch-tight shorts and a halter top that revealed swelling white flesh spattered with freckles. Cool air from a noisy air conditioner flowed out around her. The other loud noise from within was the blather of a television cartoon show.

A scowl pulled Lynette’s round face out of shape. “Well, well, look who’s here. Bonnie and Clyde.”

Dacy said, “Now what does that mean?”

“Half the town thinks you two murdered John T. last night. They don’t see how it could’ve been anybody else. You should hear some of the reasons they’re throwing around.”

“That half include you?”

“Nope. I think he got what he deserved, whoever shot his face off. So what brings you around? Looking for a hideout?”

“Some things that need talking about.”

“Such as?”

“In private, Lynette. All right if we come in?”

The big woman hesitated, then shrugged and stood aside for them. The interior was cool from the rattling air conditioner and as chaotic as the front yard. Through a doorway off the hall, Messenger could see the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote assaulting each other on a snow-flecked TV screen. Lying on the carpet in front of the set, chin in cupped hands, was a plump, dark-haired girl of nine or ten, dressed in T-shirt and shorts. She might have been in a hypnotic trance for all she moved; as far as she was concerned, she was alone in the house with the beep-beeping bird and the witless predator.

“That’s Karen,” Lynette said to him, “my daughter. She’s a TV junkie — likely to grow up deaf and blind. Come on in the kitchen where it’s quiet.” And when she’d shut the three of them inside the cramped, yellow-walled kitchen, “How about a beer? Some cold Bud in the fridge.”

Dacy said, “No, nothing,” and Messenger shook his head.

Lynette opened a bottle for herself, sat with it at a Formica-topped table. But when neither of them moved to join her, she sighed and stood up again.

Messenger asked her, “Why do you think John T. got what he deserved?”

“Why? He was an arrogant bastard, that’s why. All the Roebucks were and good riddance to the last of the breed.”

“That sounds as though you knew him as well as you knew his brother.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Just what I said.”

“Me and John T.? You’re nuts, if that’s what you think. He never interested me. I wouldn’t’ve spread my legs for that chingado if he’d had the last dick in Nevada.”

“But another woman besides his wife might have.”

“You saying some woman he was laying killed him?”

“It’s one possible explanation.”

“That why you came? You got an idea I blew John T. away?”

Dacy said, “No, that’s not why we’re here.”

“Well, I didn’t. I wouldn’t’ve met him in the middle of town at high noon to spit in his face. I don’t have any damn reason to want him dead or to burn up what was left of Anna’s ranch.”

“But you did have a reason to want Dave dead.”

“Dave? Why bring him up?”

“He’s what brought us here, Lynette.”

“Oh, so that’s it. Well, you’re dead wrong there, too. I never had a reason to want him dead.”

“We figure you did. Same one that made you bust up with him. Same one that set Joe on him at the Hardrock.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about...”

“Karen, he was messing with Karen. That’s it, isn’t it?”

She reacted as if Dacy had slapped her. “No,” she said. Then, more forcefully, “No!”

“Lynette, I’m about to tell you something we found out last night, something nobody knows except Jim and me and Lonnie.”