Frogskin and Muttonfat (A Thea Barlow Mystery, Book Two) Read online

  “Oh, he’s probably visiting with old Kate. I’ll show you the way.” She led me down the corridor to an end room, chattering all the way. “We’re so glad that Kate finally has someone to come see her. It’s helped her ever so much, though at her age,” she made a little moue of sympathy, “you know…” She shook her head, then perked right up. “Still, she’s much more alert than she’s been for months.”

  She motioned to the propped-open door of the end room, then bustled back towards her office. The name tag by the door said “Kate Webster.” I peeked in.

  A heavy-set woman sat in an armchair by the window with a crocheted robe over her lap. Her sparse white hair stood in feathery clumps all over her head. I didn’t see the Kid.

  “Okay if I come in?” I asked from the doorway.

  The woman turned alertly at my voice. “Come ahead,” she said, shielding her eyes with both hands in an effort to see me better.

  I stepped over the threshold and saw the Kid on his knees in front of a dresser, struggling to close the bottom drawer. He turned and looked at me. I couldn’t tell if he thought my presence an intrusion or not. Pulling something from the drawer, he impatiently rocked it shut and got to his feet.

  “This is Kate Webster, an old friend of mine,” he said, and tossed a sweater on her lap.

  “Do I know you?” Kate asked me in a quavering voice. “Did you bring me my lunch?”

  “No,” the Kid said, “she’s just visiting, Kate.”

  I moved closer so she could see me better. And she tried, poor dear, squinting through thick glasses, but I suspected her eyesight was next to nil. She appeared to be very old. Her soft doughy skin hung in puddles under her chin, swaying softly with every movement of her head. She wore a flowered cotton dress or duster with a front zipper and a thin blue sweater over her shoulders.

  “Come closer, dear,” she said, and stretched her hand out to me.

  I took it and held the gnarled bony fingers in both of mine. “Have you come to take me home? You know they don’t feed me very well in here.”

  I looked to the Kid to help me out.

  “Not yet, Kate,” he said, bending close to her. “Soon. I’ll take you home soon.”

  She looked up at him and a gleam of lucidity lit her eyes. She pulled her hand from mine and shook a finger at him gleefully. “Ha!” she said with a delighted cackle. “I know you! Remember those meals we used to have out to Forty Miles? You rascal, you!”

  “Sure do, Kate,” the Kid said with the first real smile I’d seen from him. “We gotta go now, but I’ll be back. Behave yourself, you hear?”

  “You better come back and see me, Fancy Pants.” She cackled again.

  Fancy Pants! The Kid looked chagrined. I struggled not to laugh. We left Kate happily talking to herself.

  Once outside, the Kid stopped and rested a moment. He coughed and spat into the gravel drive. “Nobody should have to live in a place like that. Worse than a goddamned prison.”

  I stood by, ready if he needed help getting into the Bronco, but he managed on his own.

  “Are you really going to get her out?” I asked as we drove away.

  “No way I can do that,” he said with a little huff of disgust. “Wish I could. She don’t remember half of what anybody says, but I figure it makes her feel good to talk about it.” He shrugged.

  “How old is she?”

  “I don’t know. Older than me, I guess. Must be close to ninety. She’s about the only person left around here that I know.”

  “It’s nice of you to go see her.”

  He snorted again. “She don’t remember nothing longer than fifteen minutes.”

  “Still, she enjoys it while you’re there,” I insisted. “Where to now?” I asked, glad to change the subject.

  He pointed and we drove through town, out past the fairgrounds, and headed for the country. I noticed without commenting that this was the direction he was going when I saw him with Phoebe in the Jeep.

  It was a beautiful day. Hot, but with a stiff breeze easing the main burn. Traffic thinned quickly to just an occasional vehicle. I whizzed by a flat-bed truck; I wanted to see that long stretch of empty road in front of me.

  I’d forgotten how dry Wyoming could be in July. Even the sagebrush looked crisp and dusty. But I hadn’t forgotten the vast stretches of emptiness broken only by bare rocky hills and hogbacks. Now I felt like I was in Wyoming. This was what I’d wanted to see again. Bare skies clear to the horizon.

  “Do you mind if I roll down the windows?” I asked, turning off the air conditioning. “It’s beautiful! I want to smell the air and feel the heat.”

  “Okay by me,” he said, but his look said he thought I was crazy. He himself couldn’t take his eyes off the Bronco. Like a kid, he opened and closed the glove compartment several times, moved his seat back, forward, up and down. Fiddled with all the gadgets he could find and watched enviously how I handled the controls and foot pedals.

  I laughed. “Roll the window down, Mr. Corcoran.” He grinned and did so. I sucked in a deep breath of hot dry air, and drove with my arm resting on the windowsill. I felt wonderful.

  I’m sorry, Phoebe, truly sorry, but after last night we really need a beautiful day. Unfair as it was, I wanted to forget all of last night and get on with my life. I would get a quick interview with the Kid, give him an hour out at his ranch, and be done with it. Max and I could get on with our agenda and forget the rest of this stuff. If I could whistle, I would have.

  I should have known better than to call down the gods in that particular manner.

  Seventeen

  We turned off onto a graveled road. “This place where we’re going,” I asked, “were you born and raised there?”

  “Yeah. My folks homesteaded the place. Then my brothers and me had it.”

  “Brothers?”

  “Two of them. Youngest died. Diphtheria. My brother Boyd, he stayed on the ranch. Me, I had an itchy foot. Times were tough and I couldn’t sit still. Boyd was a good man. I let him alone and he run the place anyway he liked. Always had a room for me if I needed one. He and his wife raised my oldest girl, Arvilla.”

  “You were married?” I’d assumed he was, but you never know, even in those days.

  “Yeah. She took off with some sailor boy when I was in Rawlins.”

  It took me a minute to realize that he meant the state pen at Rawlins, Wyoming.

  “Took the two youngest kids with her. Never saw ‘em again. Left the oldest, Arvilla, with Boyd. They raised her like she was their own and left her their share of the place when they died. Didn’t have kids of their own. Arvilla was a good girl. She wrote me pretty steady, kept me up on what was happening around here. Sent a newspaper now and then. Didn’t cut me out of her life like that daughter of hers, Florie.”

  Strangely enough, I found myself mentally defending Florie. After all, she hadn’t even been born when the Kid began his last prison stay forty years ago.

  “All that Florie wants to do now is sell the old place. Her mama wouldn’t’ve done that. Arvilla ran the place herself ‘til she died last year. Cancer.”

  His one link with the outside world. I voiced my sympathy. “That must have been hard for you.”

  “Yeah,” he said after a lengthy pause. “I would have liked to see her again.”

  On the other hand, it couldn’t have been easy to be the daughter of a man who spent his life in and out of prison, nor one who had been basically dumped by both parents. I’d be willing to bet that both Arvilla and Florie had paid dearly for the relationship, particularly in a small community like Rawhide. A rather tawdry, depressing story. Not what I wanted for the magazine. Nor me either, for that matter. Not today. This was a day for escapism.

  “That was all later in your life, wasn’t it? Tell me about the early days when the papers called you the Nickel Kid. Did that nickname come before or after Kid Corcoran?”

  “I was always called Kid even as a young squirt. That Corcoran kid. But the papers
started calling me the Nickel Kid back in the late twenties. I stuck up this bank in the little town of Bliss, Utah. Dropped a bag of nickels some young kids glommed onto. Told everybody I gave it to ‘em, I suppose, thinking that way they wouldn’t have to give the money back. So the paper called me the Nickel Kid. After that I kinda made a point of throwing some loose change around.”

  Building his image, I thought wryly.

  “‘Course, nobody knew who I really was then, it was just The Nickel Kid Strikes Again, sometimes right across the top of the paper.”

  His moments of fame. Well, I guess that must have been heady stuff for a poor, young kid. And this was exactly the kind of material I wanted.

  “Donkey Creek Road is up here a ways,” he said. “You’ll want to turn right at the next turnoff.” He went back to admiring the Bronco, running his hand over the dashboard, checking out the gauges. I wondered how long it had been since he’d driven a car. We turned onto the graveled road.

  He shook his head in wonder. “Things sure have changed. Used to be nothin’ but dirt tracks up here.”

  I hated to say the obvious, that after forty years one would expect changes.

  He snorted cynically. “Someone out here must be a County Commissioner. That’s the only way you could get any road work done; bet that hasn’t changed. Probably that Brocheck boy.”

  “Brocheck? What Brocheck boy?”

  “Always called Buster, far as I know.”

  I guess the mountainous Buster had been a boy, or at least a young man when the Kid left Rawhide. “Does he live out here?”

  “Yeah, ‘bout four miles beyond our place, as the crow flies. Longer by road.”

  I started to tell him about Max drilling a well on Brocheck’s land, but decided not to. I wanted to keep Max to myself at this point. And get on with the interview.

  “Tell me some more of your stories. I gathered that part of the pleasure the press took in the Nickel Kid’s exploits was your, uh, ineptness, and the fact that you were never very successful, if you don’t mind my saying so.” My understanding was that the sobriquet came not from largesse with odd change, but because he never got away with much more than a nickel.

  He didn’t take offense, just chuckled a bit. “I was a kid. Didn’t do much planning, just grabbed an opportunity if I saw one. Fell off my horse once, right in a bunch of cactus. He was a right ornery critter, that horse. Some local fool posse was chasing me, so I had to ride the saddle with my backside loaded with stickers. Hurt like hell. But they didn’t catch me. Should have. Small town law wasn’t much in those days, which is why I stuck to small towns.”

  Things haven’t changed much, I thought, thinking of Dwayne. And I wished he hadn’t impounded my tape recorder. I didn’t want to lose any of the details of Corcoran’s stories.

  “Look,” I said. “Would you like to drive?” The road was decent here, and there certainly wasn’t any traffic to worry about. “Then I can take notes while you talk.” His look of amazement delighted me.

  “You bet,” he said eagerly.

  I remembered how painful it had been for Gramps when he had to quit driving. He saw it as a humiliating defeat, and it marked the beginning of his downhill slide.

  The kid and I exchanged places and after a few brief instructions we started off. After a hesitant, jerky start, he drove easily, his face glowing with pleasure.

  The joy of driving made the old man garrulous. I scribbled furiously, taking down the comparative merits between a horse and an old jalopy for use as get-away vehicles.

  “The train jobs were the worst. I never liked them. You never knew who might come out behind ya. I never set out to hurt nobody, and I was always afraid something awful might happen on one of them trains. There was this guy Lovett once, who tried to do a train. Damn thing was loaded with Marines on their way to California. They were hot on his tail in a minute. I had enough trouble without running into a mess like that.”

  His stories were wild and funny and most likely apocryphal, but I knew what my readers liked. The Western myth. The cavalier gentleman robber. I’d throw in a few caveats at the end of the article, and a brief overview of the Kid’s life from the ‘forties on.

  I closed my notebook and asked, “And when did they find out who the Nickel Kid really was?”

  “Got caught in ‘forty-two. Found out I was that Corcoran kid from Rawhide, so’s I got the moniker Kid Corcoran. Didn’t matter to me, I was always called Kid. Did fifteen years in the state pen. Moved to California after that.”

  By my calculations that meant he’d had not much more than ten years of freedom during the late ‘fifties and ‘sixties before his final stretch of forty years. All that time in prison, and now an old man. And if his granddaughter had anything to do with it, he’d be back in the pen to end his days.

  “This is it,” he said, turning onto a dirt road. Ahead I could see a large barn rimmed with rusting machinery nearly hidden by tall weeds and nodding sunflowers. Scattered outbuildings littered the grounds, all showing various stages of neglect; some, abject dilapidation.

  Off to the side, and set back a ways, stood an abandoned two-story house shaded by a couple of ancient gnarled cottonwoods. Peeling green paint worn to the boards in places gave the building the mottled look of moldy cheese. Most of the windows were boarded; those that weren’t, were broken.

  Depressing. I glanced at the Kid, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He brought the Bronco to a whiplash stop and opened his door. He exited the high step nimbly enough and reached in back for the oxygen carrier. I climbed out, too.

  Hooking up the oxygen briefly, he held the nosepiece to his nostrils for a minute, but then left it by the car. So he could have a cigarette.

  “That’s the house my brother built,” he said. “I helped him a time or two myself. Hasn’t been lived in now for a long time. Arvilla had herself a trailer house over there.” He pointed to a large concrete slab with a tall light and electrical pole at one end. “Looks like, anyway,” he added. A sagging four-strand clothesline still stood behind the slab.

  “This wasn’t the house you were raised in then?” I asked, still staring at the decrepit ruin.

  “No. We had a house on the actual homestead site when I was a kid. It’s gone now. Site’s up the road a bit,” he said, pointing to a rutted trail that wound around behind the barn. “That’s where I really want to go.” But he wandered off towards the barn and its cache of old machinery.

  “Mind if I look in the house?” I asked.

  “Go ahead.”

  I guess I’d expected some kind of emotion from him, some show of nostalgia at finally seeing his old home, but maybe he’d spent too many years hiding his feelings. Well, he could look at old machinery if he liked, I thought. I walked toward the old house, which held more interest for me than rust.

  Piles of tumbleweeds lined the scattered remnants of fence that marked off the yard area. The grass was long gone, taken over by hardier weeds and ground cover. Vandals, active even here, had sprayed patterns and unreadable slogans on all the reachable areas. Hunks of bare wood hung off the front door where someone had jimmied the lock.

  I pushed the badly warped door open with some difficulty and stepped inside. The uneven floorboards creaked and groaned with my steps, as if pained by the intrusion. Man and animal footprints scuffled the dirt and blown-in debris on the floor.

  Generally speaking, I like old houses and seldom pass a chance to explore one, but this place had a nasty feel to it, that awful sense of eyes watching. What a cliché, I thought, trying to laugh at myself. I must have seen too many bad movies. Forcing myself farther in, I peered into the dimly lit kitchen area, but didn’t enter. Cupboard doors hung open or were torn off and thrown on the floor, even the sink had been pried out. A sound behind me made me whirl, heart thumping. Nothing. A breeze gusting through broken panes sent dry leaves dancing, or was it scurrying feet? Rats. I shuddered. Above my head a fine mist of dirt drifted down from the ceiling, as if someon
e waiting quietly above had shifted weight. It was all I needed. I turned and fled.

  The Kid stood by the car, smoking.

  “Why don’t they tear that place down?” I asked, hoping my nonchalance covered the true fear I’d felt. “It’s creepy.”

  He grinned. “That’s a good house.” It was probably as close to making a joke as he ever got. “I made Arvilla promise never to get rid of it as long as I lived.”

  “Why on earth not?”

  He shrugged and ground his cigarette into the gravel.

  I sighed. After all, what right did I have to judge other people’s sentimentality? Personally, though, I thought the place should be relieved of its misery. Shoot the blasted thing as you would a horse with a broken leg.

  “Let’s go to the homestead,” the Kid said.

  “Walking distance?”

  “Used to be,” he said, dryly. “Don’t know about now.”

  “We’ll drive.” I headed for the Bronco. He looked longingly at the driver’s seat, but I wasn’t about to turn complete control over to him. I handed him the oxygen carrier and said, “Here, you better hook this back up.”

  He took it, but set it on the floor of the front seat and climbed in. Nothing was easy with him, everything a struggle of wills.

  He was right, the distance would have been an easy walk, a half to three quarters of a mile, maybe. But not for him. I was glad for the heavy vehicle. The road was no more than a dimly marked trail.

  There wasn’t much to see, just a large clearing with the big rounded hump of an ancient dugout to one side and a pile of boards and rubble beyond. A small barn with a rock base—actually nothing more than a shed—stood at the other edge of the clearing. The boards were weathered to a soft gray, and the door hung loosely off its hinges. Only the rock foundation, its stones fit together with care, stood square and strong. The rest of the structure tilted wildly off center, looking as if the next strong wind would finish the job. Though that was obviously not the case, since it hadn’t toppled yet, and strong winds were a given around here.

  “Is that as old as it looks?” I asked the Kid.