‘Clamp ordered it, to search for evidence.’
‘They find anything?’
‘All I saw was the guy doing the cutting.’
And destroying evidence.
The Materials Corporation was five hundred yards up the road, a scattering of several small house trailers used as offices. Six huge haulers were parked in a row at the end of the gravel lot. Though it was well past quitting time, three men stood smoking nearby.
‘Jonah Ridl, Chicago Sun-Times,’ he said, walking up. ‘Mind if I ask how many trucks come out of here every day?’
‘You mean just ours, or customers, too?’ one of the men said.
‘Total trucks.’
‘I’d guess, what,’ he looked at the others, ‘two dozen every day?’
‘At least,’ another man said. ‘June is high season for us.’
‘So maybe fifty trucks came in and out of here since early Tuesday morning?’
‘You’re wanting to know why not one of them drivers saw her in the weeds until this morning?’ the first man asked.
Ridl grinned. ‘They had to concentrate on their driving, and not the side of the road?’
The man spit on the ground. ‘Drivers aren’t blind.’
‘I’ll bet no one here is stupid, either,’ Ridl said.
None of the three asked what he meant, and that spoke plenty about what they didn’t believe coming from their sheriff’s department.
He walked back down the road, deciding against taking any more pictures. No matter how many he took, none would convince him that fifty drivers had missed seeing a body lying so close to the road.
SEVENTEEN
It was dusk, mercifully too late to lie to shopkeepers. He’d make one last stop and head back to Chicago.
He crossed the river and swung into the parking lot of Al’s Rustic Hacienda. Like last time, there was a crowd of underage drinkers lounging around the cars in the parking lot. Also like last time, inside there was a raucous mix of clinking glasses and liquored laughter. The place smelled of thick smoke and booze. Ridl worked his way through to the bar and ordered a ginger ale.
A smudged blonde in her early thirties was sitting on the stool next to him. ‘You’re new,’ she said. Her eyes were bloodshot. Most certainly she’d been perched at the bar for some time.
‘Yes,’ he said.
She cocked her head. ‘Reporter, or boy scout?’
‘Reporter.’
‘I thought… you’d all been run off by now.’ She shook her head. ‘Stupid.’
‘Some of us are more tenacious than others.’
‘No point,’ she said. ‘Ish done.’
A brunette of the same vintage, though less smudged, nudged herself between Ridl and the blonde. ‘For God’s sake, Evie.’
Evie tilted forward until her elbows steadied on the bar. ‘Ish true, goddammit. Nothing more to be learn.’
‘There seems to be leads pointing to the patrons of this establishment, or at least your parking lot,’ Ridl ventured to the brunette.
Her face tightened. ‘Plus gamblers down at the Wren House, a peeper parked just off Poor Farm Road and God knows how many jilted lovers. You can’t lay it all here.’
‘You think any of the leads will pan out?’ Ridl asked.
‘Never, bet your ash,’ Evie said, peering around the brunette. ‘Damn whore, that Betty Jo Dean.’
The brunette put her arm around Evie and walked her away.
‘Ginger ale or gin buck?’ Clamp Reems filled the space vacated by the two women.
It was no real surprise. ‘Gin buck?’
Reems pointed to Ridl’s glass. ‘A buck looks like plain ginger ale, but it’s got gin in it. It was Betty Jo Dean’s favorite drink.’ He paused, obviously enjoying the confusion on Ridl’s face. ‘We’re not hillbillies, Mr Ridl. We’re being thorough.’
‘You thought to find out what she drank?’
‘No, I said that to show off. She dated the bartender here for a time.’
‘She wasn’t in that field yesterday, Deputy Reems. I was there. I searched around that tree myself.’
‘Too many people say she was easy to miss, covered with last year’s leaves.’ Reems pointed to a small group of men sitting at tables in the back, barely visible through the smoke. ‘Go ask them directly.’
‘Who are they?’
‘Doc Farmont and his assistant, Randy White. Bud Wiley, our mortician, is at the next table with his nephew, Luther, and Horace Wiggins, our crime scene photographer. Any of them will tell you Betty Jo was covered with debris, and had spent quite some time exposed to the elements.’
‘There’ll be a more formal autopsy by your coroner, or the Illinois State Police?’
‘No need. Cause of death is obviously gunshot wound to the back of the head. Because of the decomposition, the Dean family wants her buried tomorrow.’ He pulled out his pipe and fished in his pants pocket. Coming out with a freshly torn cigar, he jammed it in the pipe and lit it with his Zippo. He grinned, comfortably Colonel Cornpone again. ‘Don’t worry about them parking tickets. Being as you’re leaving tonight, I’ll get the fines waived.’ He walked away.
‘Best be careful, mister,’ the bartender said after Reems had disappeared in front of his own smoke. ‘You never want him paying too much attention to you, and that goes double when you’re talking to his wife.’
‘His wife?’
‘That blonde you were talking to. She’s Evie Reems.’
‘She’s rattled.’
‘We’re all rattled.’
‘You went out with Betty Jo?’
The bartender looked wistful for an instant, then his face went blank. ‘We got along, for a time.’
‘When was this?’
‘I forget.’
‘All the boys liked Betty Jo Dean?’ Dougie Peterson over at the Constellation had said it. Evie Reems had said more than that, calling Betty Jo a whore.
‘Mister, we all liked her, about as much as we hated liking her. She was beautiful, too young and too old simultaneously. Be careful, is all.’
There was no point in hanging around to finish a ginger ale that would now taste like something left by a murdered girl. He’d call Laurel from Chicago the next day and write up what he had. He went out to his car.
As he pulled up to the highway another engine started up loud behind him. He waited, uneasy, but no headlights came on. It was paranoia; he’d spent too long in Grand Point. He turned east and eased the rattling Volkswagen up to a sedate forty miles an hour.
His headlamps lit a black-on-white sign five minutes later: ‘Leaving Peering County, One Mile.’ He chanced a last glance in the rearview. Something shiny glinted on the road, well behind him. Certainly there were no headlamps; it was unlikely to have been an automobile.
He watched the mirror more than the road, but nothing showed in the darkness. To be sure anyway, he killed his lights when he crested the hill at the county line, downshifting to a stop on the shoulder so as to not flash his brake lights. He shut off the engine, jumped out and ran back up the hill.
He saw and heard nothing for a few seconds, and then the rumble of a big engine grew louder in the night. There was no glow of lights, front or rear. The car was running dark. Good people did not run dark on a highway in the night.
He moved to the shoulder of the road and dropped onto his stomach. It was a damned dumb thing he’d done. There was no time to run back to the Volkswagen and accelerate away to safety.
The engine was almost deafening now. Only a big V-8 sounded that full and throaty. People hadn’t bought expensive, thirsty engines much since the energy crisis sent gasoline prices to the moon a decade earlier.
Except cops. Cops still liked the big engines.
The engine rumbled as loud as thunder; the car was climbing the rise. He pressed himself down as hard as he could. In a second, the driver would crest the hill. Even running without lights, its driver would see Ridl’s car in the moonlight, parked below.
The night went red from the taillights. The engine quieted, a little. The car had stopped.