Chapter Two（1）

I awoke after a long, dreamless sleep. Slowly my vision focused on two beady eyes gazing into my own. A squirrel stood inches from my nose, whiskers twitching in alarm.

The alarm was mutual. I yelped and swung the makeshift pillow of my jacket at my bedmate. The squirrel scampered off in a cloud of newly disturbed dust and disappeared up the chimney of the fireplace at the far end of the room. Coughing, I staggered to my feet and looked about.

Layers of velvety dust covered everything not draped in sheets. Chairs, tables, lamps, most everything was covered in dust sheets. It was like waking up in the middle of a ghosts’ tea party. Cobwebs draped artistically from the blackened ceiling beams.

When I’d finally collapsed on the overstuffed sofa the night before I had been too frazzled and exhausted to notice. In the cold light of day it was clear to me that I’d had some kind of breakdown. Only a lapse of sanity could explain what I was doing shivering in my skivvies in the room that time forgot.

April is plenty bitter in the mountains despite the sunshine and wildflowers. I pulled on Levi’s, shrugged into a flannel shirt. In honor of Jake I fished a beer out of the cooler and swished a mouthful through my teeth as I sat on the ice chest lid considering my surroundings.

The long wide room had a huge stone fireplace at one end. The wooden floors were bare now; I recalled them covered by starkly beautiful Indian rugs. Black gargoyle feet stuck out beneath the dust sheets. If memory served, all those linen peaks and slopes concealed heavy walnut Victorian furniture upholstered in red velvet or smoky-gray tufted satin. Faded drapes framed picture windows and a view that was worth framing. Beyond the trees, in the distance, I could see mountains, still white-tipped with snow. The sky was cerulean—a word we don’t use much in LA. Not a cloud, not a plane, not a telephone wire to mar that wide blue yonder.

The silence seemed unnatural and would take some getting used to. I heard the sweet trill of a meadow lark, then nothing else. No distant roar of traffic, no voices. Pure silence. I listened to it for some time, waiting for something to break the spell.

Anything.

Then, lubricated by another swig of beer, the wheels began to turn. Already the events of the night before felt like some half-forgotten nightmare—much the conclusion local law enforcement had come to after they were unable to find any trace of “my” dead body.

“Probably just the way the shadows fall here,” the sheriff had said generously, not giving in to what was clearly his suspicious first thought.

“I’m telling you, it was a body.”

“Coyote maybe,” Deputy Dwayne suggested. “Could have been shot by a rancher and dragged itself off.”

“There you go,” the sheriff pronounced, pleased with this scenario.

“It was not an animal,” I said. “I got out and knelt beside it. It was a man.” I described the man to them for the second time.

“Could be Harvey,” the deputy said reluctantly, with a look to his superior.

“Sure, drunk again. Or maybe stoned,” the sheriff agreed. “I guess that’s possible.”

“Ted Harvey? The overseer?”

“Overseer?” repeated the sheriff. He and the deputy exchanged glances. “Sure, that’s it. Probably came to and staggered on home to sleep it off.”

“Probably puking his guts out right now,” the deputy comforted. He shot a stream of tobacco juice at a mustard flower swaying in the night.

I was shaking my head, and the sheriff said shortly, “Sir, I believe you think you saw something this evening. I don’t think you are deliberately wasting taxpayer money and tying up government officials for nothing ....”

“But?” Call me paranoid but I sensed an implicit threat.

“But you can see for yourself, there’s nothing here. No blood. No body imprint in the sand.”

“There goes the coyote theory.”

They looked at me without favor.

“Whatever it was, it’s gone now,” Sheriff Billingsly said. “Not much we can do about that. Moon’s setting. It’ll be black as a nigger in a coal mine in half hour.”

Charming.

I said, “You could check to see if Harvey made it home. He lives on the property in a trailer, I think.”

“Sir, I don’t have the author-I-zation to waste any more time on this bugaboo. There’s nothing here.”

So sayeth The Law.

They drove me back to the Bronco, advising me to head into Basking and get a room for the night at a motel. Charged to “Drive safe now,” I was left yawning with nervous exhaustion in the glow of their taillights.

I climbed in the Bronco and crept back down the hillside to the ranch, scanning the side of the road for my missing corpse. Like we could have somehow missed it.

Reaching the ranch at last, I unlocked the front door, unloaded my gear and crashed on the nearest sofa. If the missing dead body had been propped in one of the chairs I wouldn’t have noticed.

Four hours later I woke a little stiff, a little uneasy, but almost willing to believe I had been delirious with tiredness the night before. Almost.

Yet sitting there in the spring sunshine I felt oddly calm. Maybe it was the change of scenery. Maybe I was still too tired to feel much of anything.

I considered whether I had any responsibility to pursue the riddle of the riddled corpse. I had called the cops and they had investigated and dismissed the idea of foul play. So that was it, right? Case closed.

But it couldn’t hurt to check one last thing. Just for form’s sake.

Flapping into a shirt I strode outside to the trailer parked back behind the empty corrals. There was a battered white pickup, which I took to be Harvey’s, beside the trailer. I felt the hood. Cold.

I banged on the rusting door of the trailer.

From inside I heard someone speaking, urging quiet.

“Hey! Anybody home?”

The whispering went on.

I tried the door. It opened.

I poked my head inside.

It took only a glance to ascertain the cautioning voice came from the television. An episode of Bassmasters. Ted Harvey might be living here—it smelled like he had died here—but there was no sign of him now. There was plenty of evidence he led a rich and full life if the stacks of Playboy, empty beer cans and dirty dishes were anything to go by.

Walking the length of the trailer, I half-expected a body to fall from the closet or slump out of the cupboard-sized shower. But dead or alive, nobody was home. I glanced around for a picture of Ted; there was nothing in the way of convenient snapshots. I turned off the TV, clicked off the still-burning lights. The lamps must have been on when I arrived the night before, but I had been past noticing. I didn’t know what the cops would make of it; blazing lights and blaring TV indicated to me that Harvey had left after dark and unexpectedly.

I stood for a few moments staring out the 2 x 4 window at green hills splotched with snow; snow that was, in fact, white wild flowers. I asked myself what Grace Latham, would do—Grace being the sleuth creation of Leslie Ford, one of my favorite mystery writers. I guessed that in my position Grace would have done a bit of discreet snooping through Harvey’s personal belongings. Grace’s snooping usually led to Grace getting knocked over the head.

I backed out, shut the door again.

Even if my eyes had been playing tricks on me last night, and I had mistaken a man dead-drunk for a man dead-dead, the drunk had not picked himself up and staggered home.

I retreated to the house, reassessed my options. In the cold light of day my flight from LA seemed extreme. But since I was here, and gas prices being what they were, I decided I might as well make the most of my spontaneous combustion. One thing for sure, I’d probably get plenty of writing done. There didn’t appear to be a viable distraction in a thirty-mile radius.

In the kitchen I boiled a few dishes, scoured the stove and mahogany table, fried up some turkey bacon and the only two eggs that had survived the road trip. While I ate, I made my plans.

For the record, my plans had nothing to do with sleuthing, and everything to do with writing. I’d had enough sleuthing to last a lifetime.

The new year got off to a helluva start with the murder of one of my oldest and closest friends. For a while it had looked like, if I didn’t actually end up a corpse myself, I would spend the next twenty years playing touch-tag in prison with guys who had nicknames like Ice Pick and Snake.

But that was all in the past. I was done with a life of crime—except the fictional kind.

My own first mystery, Murder Will Out, featuring gay sleuth and Shakespearean actor Jason Leland, was now only months away from publication. I was hammering out the sequel between bouts of writer’s block.

The funny thing was that I’d never suffered from writer’s block until I sold a manuscript. That’s when the creative paralysis first set in.

“You’re probably thinking about it too much,” Jake had commented with that unexpected and irritating perception that made him such a good detective.

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