She nodded. “Yes, he left pretty early and then came back a couple of hours ago. Is he in trouble?”
I tossed the key in the air and caught it as I swung open the door and faced the wall of heat. “Only if he’s taken the labels off.” I left her there to wonder if I really was serious this time.
I knocked again and waited, thinking about the missing hard case. “Mr. Tuyen, this is Sheriff Longmire. I got the key from the front desk, and I’m unlocking this door.”
I turned the key and swung the door open. There was an entryway to the bathroom on the left, and I could see an open closet where a number of expensive suits hung along with plastic-covered and freshly laundered shirts.
I took a step inside and allowed my eyes to adjust. Tuyen’s toiletry and personal items were on the bathroom counter, along with a hand towel, which was saturated with blood, that hung from the lip of the sink, the excess dripping to the tile floor.
I unsnapped the strap from my Colt and pulled it from my holster. I clicked off the safety, looked at the dark spots on the carpeting, and took another step inside.
I raised my sidearm and heard a noise to my left. There were two double beds, with a kidney-shaped pool of blood at the foot of one, and there was more on the far side of the room.
Even with the clattering of the aged air conditioner, I could tell the noise was coming from another room on the far side; it sounded like someone walking and possibly dragging something. I extended the large-frame semiautomatic.
There were some clothes lying on the unslept-in bed and another pair of shoes, but what caught my attention was the phone cord that was stretched taut and led from the night-stand, across the wall, and out the adjoining doorway.
I took another step and silently cursed the creaking floorboards under my boots. The noise from the other room stopped, and the phone cord grew slack and drooped to the carpet.
I held the .45 toward the open doorway and took a deep silent breath before taking another step. I took another and could hear a slight creak and saw a flicker of movement. I swung the Colt around, pointing it at whatever had made the noise. Tran Van Tuyen was holding a tan push-button phone in one hand and a blood-soaked towel to his head in the other.
Even from this distance, I could hear Ruby’s voice coming from the receiver of the telephone. “Mr. Tuyen? Mr. Tuyen . . . are you still there?”
The blood from the wound at the side of his head had drained down to his face and stained his smile that half-beamed from across the room. “Sheriff?”
The smile remained as his eyes rolled back in his head, and he slumped against the jamb, streaking a handwide smear of blood down the door and collapsing unconscious onto the carpet.
13
“Saizarbitoria thinks you did it.”
I listened to the squeal from under the hood as we turned the corner and figured the staff vehicle from the Powder Junction detachment of the Absaroka County Sheriff ’s Department was going to need a power steering unit and soon. “Really?”
“No, but we had a long talk about race relations.” I drove the faded red Suburban to the address Phillip Maynard had given us, as the Bear fiddled with the nonfunctioning vents, finally settling on rolling down his window, which stuck about halfway. “Santiago is a very intelligent young man.”
I’d given Sancho my truck after we’d gotten Tuyen stabilized and sent them rocketing off to the hospital back in Durant; I figured a one-way trip in the Bullet was faster than a two-way trip with the EMTs. Even with the vast loss of blood, Tuyen had come to and said that he had no idea what had happened other than that he had entered the motel room and someone had struck him from behind.
“So, we are basing our suspicions on a single set of motorcycle tracks outside the motel?”
“Sort of.”
“How sort of?”
I shrugged. “Exclusively.”
He sighed. “Why would Phillip Maynard kill Ho Thi Paquet and then try to kill Tuyen? ”
“I don’t know, but he seems our most likely suspect.”
Henry pulled his shoulder belt out, where it hung loose across his chest. “Drive carefully. I question the ability of this belt to keep me from slamming face-first into the dash should we find ourselves in a crash.” We were headed for the south side of town near the rodeo grounds. “He is our only suspect.” He thought about it some more. “Sometimes living in Wyoming has unexpected benefits.”
“Vic says that most of the benefits of living in Wyoming are unexpected.”
“She is a modern woman and expects a great deal.” I could feel him watching me before he turned back to the road and smiled.
Phillip Maynard’s house wasn’t really a house; it was more like an upscale chicken shack, which meant that in comparison to the other shacks that sat a little farther toward the banks of the middle fork of the Powder River, it seemed even more uninhabitable.
Henry placed his hands on his hips and stood at the gate. “Where do you suppose the door is?”
“Drawing from my ranch upbringing, I’d say it’s on the side.” I followed him as he walked around the end of the ramshackle building where we found a hollow-core door that had a tin sign tacked to the surface that read KEEP OUT.
We could hear commercials squawking from a television inside, and I knocked on the door. We waited and listened but heard nothing but the TV. This was getting reminiscent of Tran Van Tuyen’s motel room. “Phillip Maynard, this is Sheriff Longmire. Would you mind opening the door?”
Nothing.
We listened and learned how white our teeth and how fresh our breath could be if we would only use Brand-X toothpaste, but nothing from Phillip Maynard. I tried the knob, but the door was locked. I glanced at Henry. “I hope we’re not seeing a pattern here.”
“Do you want me to kick it down, or do you want to? ”
I studied the scaly and cupped surface of the interior door, which had spent at least a winter in the high plains exterior. “I think if we breathe on it, it’ll collapse.” Testing the theory, I grasped the knob and pressed. The door popped open, taking a little of the jamb with it.
We shrugged at each other. The television was a tiny thirteen-inch sitting on a beanbag chair, and clothes were scattered across the dirty yellow linoleum-tiled floor and exploded from a large backpack that rested on a built-in bunk. Unlike Tuyen’s room, it didn’t look like anybody had been killed here, anybody besides Mister Clean.
The Bear walked past me, watched Suzanne Rico anchor the news out of Channel 13 in Casper, and then clicked off the TV. There was an open paperback lying on the bed, along with what looked like an old horsehide motorcycle jacket and a number of empty Budweiser bottles, and a full ashtray with a few joints mixed in with the butts. There was another collection of bottles beside the only chair.
Henry crossed back and flipped over the book. “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”
“Appropriate.”
He showed me the cover as proof and then gestured toward the bottles by the chair. “It would appear that Phillip has been entertaining.”
I kneeled down and looked at the empties, plucked a pen from my shirt pocket, and tipped one over enough to lift it by the neck. Something rattled at the base, and I saw it was the cap, which had been bent in half. I set the bottle back down and looked up at the Cheyenne Nation. “I guess I’ll go check with the owner.”
Gladys Dietz had rented her swank chicken shed to Phillip Maynard for the lofty sum of a hundred dollars a month, including utilities, but she was beginning to have second thoughts. I was having second thoughts as she smoked a cigarette with the oxygen tube attached just under her nose, expecting any moment to be blown off the porch.
“The TV is going all the time, and that damn motorcycle makes such a racket.” She leaned on her walker one-handed and held the screen door back with the other.