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  “Gatorade, anyone?” the Captain called. The bases cleared.

  “This had better be good, Emma.”

  “Can you come home?”

  “No. We’re at the bottom of the fifth, and I’m up to bat. How did you find me?”

  “I called every number on that damned bulletin board of yours. You might have left me a note.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’ll remember to do that next time. I’ve got to go.”

  “Are you coming home?”

  “No. I’m playing a game of softball. What do you want?”

  “Sam . . .”

  “Wait,” I interrupted, “let me guess. He asked you to drive him to town. You refused. He hitchhiked. At first you were mad, but now you’re worried. The reason I have to go find him is that he’s more likely to get in the car with me than he is with you. If I say I don’t want to do it, you’ll say what if he’s at Francie’s house? What if he’s sick or dead in a ditch? But I’m telling you right now, Emma, I don’t care. I don’t care if he’s sick or dead in a ditch. I don’t care if he’s gone to Francie’s. I don’t care if he’s gone to the Shrine Circus. I’m busy.”

  There was a long pause. “Fine.”

  “You know I’m right.”

  “You’re right,” she agreed.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “I’m waiting for you to tell me off. To tell me I’m a shitty daughter and a selfish sister. Tell me why I should drop everything, once again, and go find Sam, who’s probably whooping it up over at the Main Street Market with a lot of underage bimbos.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re right, this isn’t your problem. Go finish your game.”

  I sighed. “I’m leaving now.”

  Chapter 8

  As expected, I found Sam at the Main Street Market. He refused to get into the truck, and I wasted nearly half an hour arguing with him. Francie was there, sitting in the back of someone’s car. She had a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other, both, no doubt, purchased by my brother. Clearly, all was forgiven. One thing I’ve learned about petty criminals—they’re a bunch of cock-eyed optimists. The cops were bound to catch Francie drinking, she was bound to point the finger at Sam, and he was bound to go back to jail. Somehow, the inevitability of this chain of events utterly escaped him. He thought every day was his lucky day.

  Back home, I found Emma pacing the floor. I shook my head to indicate that I’d failed in my mission. She gave me the bad news that I’d missed Sylvie’s phone call.

  “What did you tell her? Did she leave a number?”

  “I said you were out looking for Sam. She said you didn’t need to call her back. I didn’t know that you two were friends. Does she know that the cops suspect your brother?”

  I sat down heavily in Archie Bunker, my evening now thoroughly ruined. If Sylvie didn’t want me to call her back, then she didn’t want to talk to me. That probably meant that she knew about Sam. I ignored my mother’s questions. “Sam was at the Main Street Market with Francie. They were in the parking lot, drinking beer.”

  Emma collapsed into a heap on the sofa. “Why does he do this?”

  “I couldn’t begin to answer that. Where’s Hugh?”

  “Gone bowling. He said he needed to get out of the house before he poisoned someone himself. He’s afraid your brother is going to skip bail and we’ll have to pay the whole bond.”

  “Sam is a skinny black kid in the middle of Idaho. Where’s he going to go, Disneyland?”

  “His disability check came today. He’s got four hundred bucks in his wallet, and he’s feeling high, wide, and handsome. And speaking of high,” my mother reached into her pocket and pulled out a plastic bag containing three or four dried brown nuggets. “Do you know what these are?”

  I took the bag and examined it closely. “Looks like dried mushrooms to me.”

  “Magic mushrooms,” she corrected. “I found them in the pocket of your brother’s jeans.” At my raised eyebrows, she added defensively, “I was doing a load of laundry.”

  “Are you sure those are magic? They look like shiitakes.”

  “Why the hell would your brother be carrying a bag of dried shiitakes?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Should I phone the Cordon Bleu or the Betty Ford Clinic?”

  “Don’t be sarcastic. You know what this means, don’t you?”

  “It means he’s been tripping on mushrooms.”

  Emma stared at me. “Wood was hallucinating. The cops are going to find traces of this stuff in your brother’s urine. Sam is going to go to prison.”

  I shook my head. “Ma,” I said calmly, “listen to me. People don’t die from eating psychedelic mushrooms. They trip out and see things, but they don’t keel over.”

  “People die from eating poisonous mushrooms all the time!”

  “That’s not a bag of deadly toadstools you’ve got there. The only way one of those is going to kill you is if you choke to death on it.”

  She looked at me doubtfully. “How do you know so much about it?”

  “Not from personal experience, if that’s what you’re thinking. However, I have, in my travels, met the occasional user of Amanita muscara. Beer is my drug of choice, and on my present budget, I drink precious little of that. Would you like a signed affidavit?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head, “I believe you. I just don’t know what to do about your brother. Pot is one thing, but mushrooms . . .” She gestured at the weekend edition of the Cowslip Herald-Examiner sitting on the coffee table by her feet. “Take a look at the paper. Lower right-hand column.”

  I picked it up. The article was headed “Sheriff’s Department Still Looking For Leads.”

  The Lewis County Sheriff’s Department is still seeking information regarding a vagrant who died on the afternoon of August 25 in custody at the Lewis County Jail. The deceased, later identified as Burton R. Wood, was arrested late Friday afternoon. He was carrying no identification and refused to give police his name and address.

  Wood spent an unspecified time in jail before he collapsed, complaining of stomach cramps. He was pronounced dead on arrival at Cowslip Memorial Hospital. Autopsy results have not yet been made public.

  Wood is described as a white male in his late forties, six feet tall, weighing about one hundred and ninety pounds, with short brown hair and a bushy mustache. At the time of his arrest, he was wearing blue jeans, a black turtleneck, a brown jacket, and brown boots. Wood was arrested in the vicinity of the Lilac Court Trailer Court, after wandering into oncoming traffic at the corner of Main Street and Broad.

  Anyone who might have information regarding Wood or his movements prior to five o’clock on Friday, August 25, should contact Lieutenant Vernon Young at (555) 624-2695.

  When I was finished, I tossed the paper back onto the coffee table. “Still feeling sanguine about those mushrooms?” Emma asked.

  I wasn’t feeling sanguine about anything. Still, I thought I ought to offer at least a token objection. “Lilac Court is notorious, Ma. If Wood went there looking for a fix, it doesn’t necessarily follow that he got it from Sam. The place is packed with dealers. Besides, it just says that he was arrested in the vicinity. It doesn’t say he was seen going into trailer number eight, the home of juvenile delinquent Francie Stokes.”

  “It’s only a matter of time,” said my mother. “What this means is that your brother didn’t have to smuggle anything into jail. He could have given Wood something before they were arrested. People come and go at the Stokes’ trailer all day long. It’s like Grand Central Station. You can’t tell me they’re just stopping by to say hello.”

  “I doubt they’re stopping by to get drugs from Sam. He doesn’t live there.”

  “He might as well. It doesn’t matter who does most of the dealing, Bil, your brother was at Lilac Trailer Court on the twenty-fifth of August. And so was the late Burt Wood.”

  “But that would mean that Sam was lyin
g to us this morning,” I argued.

  My mother gave me a grim smile. “Oh, Pollyanna. You don’t think your brother lies?”

  Sam didn’t come home that night. When Emma went looking for him at all his usual haunts early Sunday morning, he was nowhere to be found. Fortunately, however, the good Christians of the Cowslip Sheriff’s Department were under the impression that all crime stopped on the Sabbath, so Sunday patrols were always light. If he failed to turn up by Monday, then I’d worry.

  I spent the afternoon working on homework for abnormal psychology, anthropology, and French. As the last two assignments weren’t due until Tuesday, I felt quite virtuous. I also felt justified in accepting Tipper’s invitation to meet him and the Radical Faeries for dinner at Fiesta Jack’s. I waved good-bye to the disapproving Emma, who thought I should be helping her look for Sam, and headed into town.

  I found Tipper and company sitting at a large booth, working on three pitchers of sangria. They offered me a glass, which I gratefully accepted.

  Tipper leaned over until his face was only about two inches away from mine. “I have some news for you. Burt Wood was arrested not once but twice.”

  I nearly choked on a mouthful of sangria. “Where did you hear that?”

  “In a minute,” he replied, mopping at my chin with a napkin. “You’ve dribbled red wine all over your shirt.”

  “Stop it,” I said. “People will think you’re my nanny.”

  “Near enough.” He poured me a fresh glass of sangria and continued. “The sheriff’s deputies picked him up just before noon on Friday, not far from Lilac Trailer Court. He refused to give a name, so they reckoned he was a vagrant.”

  “What did they do?”

  “What they always do with vagrants. They drove him to the county line and dropped him out with instructions to make his way to Spokane.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “It’s Cowslip’s answer to the homeless. Anyhow, when he turned up again later that afternoon—this time drunk off his ass and wandering into traffic—they were pissed. So, they hauled him off to jail, tossed him in with your brother, and . . .”

  “Ignored him when he complained of stomach pain,” I finished. “The whole thing stinks. Unfortunately, the fact that they were negligent doesn’t absolve Sam.”

  “Look,” Tipper said, leaning even closer, “did Sam give that guy anything? You can tell me.”

  “That’s the problem—I don’t know. Six months ago, I would have denied it with absolute confidence, but now . . . I wouldn’t put anything past him.”

  “Francie’s baleful influence?”

  I stared down at my drink. “It’s not that simple. It could be Francie, or it could be that he’s like every other addict. It could even be the cancer.” I was surprised to hear that word come out of my mouth. “Sorry, now I sound like my mother.”

  Tipper took a long pull at his sangria. “Well, you can’t blame him for being angry about this relapse. How’s Emma coping with it?”

  “Oh, about like you’d expect.”

  He nodded and smiled ruefully. “She’s running around like her hair’s on fire.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, don’t you go putting that fire out with an ax, however tempting it might be.” He gave me a reassuring pat on the arm. “Have the doctors actually said that he’s going to . . .”

  “Die?” I finished for him. “No, they always talk in statistics. The five-year survival rate for people like Sam is about seventy-five percent.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a death sentence, Bil.”

  “It’s one in four. Flip a coin.” I swirled an orange slice around in my glass, trying to bring it as close as possible to the rim without letting it slosh over. Then I drained my glass in a single gulp, blocking the orange slice with my front teeth. “How about a refill?”

  Tipper poured dutifully, but he said, “Why don’t you and I switch to beer next round?”

  “Good idea,” I agreed. “Those orange slices are a choking hazard.”

  “They are the way you’re drinking,” he observed tartly.

  I ignored this remark and took another long, deep drink. The Faeries were clearly having a high old time of it. Suzy and Jeff had tied their dinner napkins over their noses and were shooting at passing patrons with finger guns. The other three were playing quarters.

  “Now,” I said, dropping my voice so that only Tipper could hear me, “tell me where you heard about the cops arresting Wood twice.”

  He tapped a finger against his nose and pointed at Suzy, who was sitting close enough to Tom to get us all arrested. Suzy looked up and tipped his glass of sangria in mock salute before going back to his inchworm efforts to creep onto Tom’s lap.

  “That one,” Tipper said, “gets around. Only been here three weeks and already sleeping with a closet-case in the sheriff’s department.”

  “Fuck a duck. Who?”

  “He won’t tell me. I have managed to get him to admit that his nightstick isn’t the sheriff himself; it’s one of the jailers. Mystery cop is high enough in rank to know a thing or two, though. Suzy’s mole says that they gave your brother a urine test on Friday. They’re hoping to match any illicit substance to whatever they find in Wood’s autopsy.”

  “I know,” I began, “and Emma found these mushrooms . . .” Just then, a thought swam up through the sangria fog and floated on the surface of my brain. “Wait a second, Tipper. Sam took that urine test on Friday—this past Friday, not the Friday Wood died.”

  “So?”

  “So any match would be purely circumstantial. It wouldn’t mean a thing.” Between the sangria and this flight of logic, I suddenly felt ridiculously happy. “Fuck Suzy’s mole!”

  Suzy looked up and pointed his finger gun at me. “Apologize,” he said. “My mole is very sensitive. It’s a Marilyn Monroe stick-on beauty mark, and it cost me five dollars.” He dropped his bandit’s mask and showed me.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t apologize,” Tipper cut in. “That may be Marilyn’s mole, but it’s Cindy Crawford’s location. What kind of drag queen are you? That’s cross-dressing 101.”

  “I’m not a drag queen,” Suzy replied haughtily, “I’m a drag terrorist. In a mini-skirt and in your face, that’s my motto.”

  “Off with the mini-skirt and in your face is more like it,” Tipper said.

  Tom laughed and gave Suzy a not-too-subtle shove, pushing him off his lap. “Move your mark, honey. These Idaho spuds might mistake you for straight.”

  Suzy peeled the mole off and stuck it on the end of his nose. “How’s that? Now I’m Bella Abzug.”

  “Can I take you home to meet my mother?” I asked. “She’d be so excited if I came out of the closet and married you.”

  Everyone laughed, and I poured myself another drink. Several sangrias later, I was singing along to a Carpenters’ song with Suzy and Tom. “We’ve only just begun . . .”

  “Speaking of only just beginning,” Tipper interrupted, “who was that blond I saw you with on Friday at the Cowslip Café? I was driving past, so I didn’t see her face.” When I’d told him, he said, “Sylvie Wood! How long has this been going on?”

  The Faeries looked up sharply. Even Suzy stopped her renewed assault on Tom’s lap long enough to glance over at us. I grabbed Tipper by the arm and gave him a little shake.

  “Would you like to repeat that? I think someone in the next county might not have heard you. I met her at the funeral, and she asked me to meet her at the café. She wanted to know if her father had said anything to Sam while they were in jail together.”

  “Of course,” he said. “She’d be curious, wouldn’t she? I mean, he went off without a trace and no one knew where he was. Probably living under an alias somewhere.”

  “He gave an alias when he was arrested on Friday, Charlie Gibb.”

  “That’s a terrible alias. Every high school in America does Our Town.”

  “It’s better than Twatsa
Moré,” I replied, referring to one of Tipper’s drag names. “But it does make me think that it was spur of the moment. Why would Burt Wood need an alias anyway? He didn’t do the actual embezzling—the other one did, Frank Frost.”

  “Wood was an accessory. Besides, what if his wife wanted to track him down for child support? What if she wanted to punish him for all the humiliation and gossip? What if Sylvie wanted to find him and ask why he didn’t want to be her father anymore?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “That’s what you have me for. It’s all moot, anyway. There’s no way of finding out now.”

  “There might be a way,” I said slowly. “We could look him up. Wherever he went, he’d have to have a social security number. He’d have to work, wouldn’t he? Maybe he and Frost lived off the embezzlement money, but sooner or later, that would run out. What’s a quarter of a million to two gay men in someplace like San Francisco?”

  “Down payment on a one-room studio with a massage parlor next door and a methadone clinic downstairs,” Tipper observed. “But who knows—in the seventies, maybe it was a fortune. How do you propose to look them up? It’s not like there’s a directory of runaway gay boys.”

  “I’ll remind you that Sarah is an information specialist.”

  “She’s a librarian, Bil. I don’t see how a librarian’s going to help you.”

  “You obviously don’t know anything about librarians,” I replied. “You know the Myers-Briggs personality test? According to Sarah, the most common personality type among librarians is also the most common among CIA agents. She’ll know how to find out information about Burt Wood. Newspaper indexes, social security files, who knows?” I flicked the top of my glass with my middle finger, making it ring. “Ta-da!”

  “Congratulations,” Tipper said. “Let me know what you find out.”

  Eventually, we ordered dinner. We also ordered more drinks, and somehow, I found myself sipping a margarita. I knew better—I hadn’t been this stupid since my freshman year—but I had begun to forget my worries and feel truly happy. The Faeries were in fine fettle, and they seemed to think everything I said was extremely funny. By eight o’clock, we were all as tight as ticks. Suzy had broken into a chorus of “I’m just a girl who can’t say no” when I noticed Sylvie Wood, sitting by herself at a table about twenty feet away.