Another Man's Moccasins

“Expensive. Close to twenty thousand.”

I thought about the chicken shed. “Well, he hasn’t been spending his money on lodging.” I reached down and felt the chrome-bedecked engine, only vaguely warm. “And he hasn’t ridden it lately.”

I took a step into the barn proper, and let my eyes adjust to the gloom. There was a smell, one that I knew.

I unsnapped the safety strap on my .45, pulled the Colt from my holster, and glanced back over my shoulder at Henry. The main breezeway of the barn was empty except for the motorcycle, but there were two other passageways through the stock stalls. I motioned for the Bear to head right, and I would take the left.

The stalls hadn’t been used for their initial purpose for quite some time but had instead been filled with used lumber, broken equipment, and aged firewood. I worked my way through the four of them and met Henry at the far end of the center breezeway.

“Well, he’s not hiding in the corn crib.”

There was more fluttering, and I noticed the scar tissue under Henry’s chin as he studied the rafters. “No, not in the corn crib.” He turned in a circle until he was facing back toward the opening where we’d come in. “But it appears he has received a suspended sentence.”

I turned and followed his eyes up to the rafters where, from a stout length of hemp rope, hung the dangling body of Phillip Maynard.

“How long?”

T. J. Sherwin was on another call in Otto, so we had Bill McDermott, who was the medical examiner from Billings, Montana. I hadn’t seen him since he and Lana Baroja had gone to Guernica together, but it was good to have him back. "Hard to say with the heat, but with rigor and approximate temperature, I’d say it was possibly early this morning or maybe very late last night.”

“Suicide?”

“I hate to guess, but if I was a betting man . . .” He looked at Maynard’s body. The pressure from the base of Phillip’s neck and from the area where the tongue attaches had forced his lower jaw open, and his tongue stuck out from between his teeth like the parody of a naughty child. “There’s some additional contusion alongside the trapezoidal muscle, but that could easily be explained by the force of the drop.”

I looked back up at the roof beams, which were at least eighteen feet high. “He did a number, didn’t he?”

“It takes surprisingly little; you don’t even have to be suspended.”

“What would you suspect?”

Bill looked like a choirboy, which belied his occupation. He peered up and calculated. “From the loft, I’d say about six-and-a-half feet.” He pulled back the body bag to reveal a V-shaped abrasion and furrow at the back of Phillip Maynard’s neck, which had been caused by the rope that had slipped up past the thyroid cartilage. “Incomplete circle where the rope pulled away from the subject.” He looked at the dead man some more. “He didn’t change his mind after the fact.”

“Why? ”

“No fingernail marks at the neck. I’ve even seen cases where the fingers are trapped under the rope, but this guy dropped the exact distance, which resulted in a fractured neck, and we’ll probably find the break between the third and fourth or fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae.” Bill looked up at me. “Was he a bad guy? ”

I took a breath and felt the closeness of the barn. The light glowing through the spaces between the slats made stripes as if it were shining through bars. I looked at Phillip Maynard’s sightless eyes and at the spot where a blood vessel had burst, clouding and unbalancing the pupil, which was ragged at the edge, unlike you’d expect. “I’m not sure yet.”

Saigon, Vietnam: 1968

I watched all the people who crammed into the few tiny blocks around Tu-Do Street and thought about all the bars we’d already checked, including the Flower Brothel, Rose’s, the assorted steam baths, massage parlors, boom boom rooms, and an honest-to-God Dairy Queen. Even this early in the morning, the street was in full swing, and I suspected it stayed that way for the full twenty-four hours of the day. It was leaning toward early morning, and I took a deep breath and felt like I was leaking time.

Mendoza laughed. “Oh, come on now, it’s not that bad.”

Baranski had pulled the jeep half onto the sidewalk, but no one had seemed to notice, not even the two ARVN QCs that we’d almost run over. With their oversized white helmet liners, the Vietnamese military policemen looked like those bobble-headed sports dolls. One of them tried to beg a cigarette from Mendoza, who shook his head and replied, “Toi khong hut thuoc lo.”

Baranski, however, sat on the hood of the jeep and handed the two Mice cigarettes, lighting one for himself and then theirs. He paused for a moment and gestured. “Quels sont vos noms?”

The two introduced themselves as Bui Tin and Van Bo.

Baranski pointed at me. “Je suis venu avec quelqu’un d’important, il s’appelle Sammy Davis Jr.”

The two QCs looked up, so I smiled and raised a fist. “Black power.”

Baranski continued. “Il veut passer un bon moment. Tu vois ce que je veux dire.”