The Dinosaur Hunter(89)
She smiled. “I think you have a great passion for the truth. Yes, I will tell you this.” She took my hands in hers. “The night of the dance, Toby found me sitting on one of the picnic tables. I was enjoying the music, looking at the lake, and, I must admit, thinking of you.”
She gave my hands a squeeze, I squeezed hers back, and she kept going. “Toby said he knew I was a whore but since he was a fellow Russian, he did not think he should have to pay me for sex. He said I should go with him into the trees and take care of his urges. When he grabbed my wrists—he was so strong, Mike—I told him I did not understand why he wanted me. There were many men at the dance and I was sure one of them was who he really wanted. If we have sex, I told him, he would only be closing his eyes and thinking of a man. This made him very angry but he did not deny it, either.”
She was squeezing my hands so hard they hurt but I didn’t say anything. I needed her to keep talking and she did. “When he walked away, I watched him and before he got far, a man came from behind the marina building. They stopped and talked and then they walked into the trees. It was the government man. Ted Brescoe.”
This, as they say, was a jaw-dropping moment. “Say that again,” I said.
“Ted Brescoe and Toby went into the trees together.”
Well, that at least cleared up why Ted and Edith’s marriage wasn’t exactly made in heaven. Tanya fell silent, so I prompted her by saying, “But the next morning, you were in Ted’s room.”
“Oh, Mike. It wasn’t his room. It was mine! I had reserved it, hoping you might join me that night.” She took her hands away. “But I saw at the dance that you only had eyes for Jeanette. I am not blind so I went to my room alone.”
I saw no need to deny my love for my lady boss. I put my brain in fast rewind. What had Earl, the marina owner, said when I asked him about Ted? He’d said, “Ted’s in room thirteen.” He didn’t say it was his room, only that he was in it. A good cop would have asked a follow-up question or two. Of course, I’m not a good cop, not anymore, anyway. “But the next morning Ted was in there with you,” I said.
“When I came outside in the morning—the mist coming off the lake was so beautiful—I found Ted curled up on the deck. He said he’d slept there all night. He was filthy and his clothes were torn. I knew nothing about Toby’s death so I let him come in to wash himself and go to the bathroom. I swear, Mike. That’s all that happened.”
“So…” I let the word hang for a long second but I didn’t have a finish for it. So what? Had Ted murdered Toby? But, if so, why the knock on the head and throat cut the same way the bull and the cows had been killed? Would Ted do that and did that mean he’d also killed our bull and the cows? He was an unpleasant fellow, make no mistake, and him murdering the Russian wasn’t entirely impossible, but killing cows? A Brescoe from Fillmore County? And what about the fact that Ted’s truck was in the marina parking lot all night. Why hadn’t he just driven home? “Curiouser and curiouser,” I said. Then, I actually asked a cop-like question. “That morning, when you let him into your room, did you see any blood on Ted?”
“No. Did you?” I confessed I hadn’t until I’d beat him up, and she said, “Later, I asked myself did Ted kill Toby? My answer is I don’t know.”
I pointed out the obvious. “Ted was the last man seen with Toby before he turned up dead.”
“As far as we know,” she said.
“As far as we know,” I agreed.
Well, this was all a fine howdy do. Even with these revelations, I didn’t know much more than before. It didn’t even prove that Ted and Toby had decided to play kissy-face or kissy-whatever in the woods, only that they’d gone into them. For all I knew, they went in there to discuss the latest stock averages and whether the Yankees were going to win the pennant. Then again, Toby had next been found floating face down in the lake. Then again, Ted curled up on the deck of the marina motel the next morning didn’t indicate a strong need to run from the scene of his crime. Then again, why didn’t Ted drive home that night, in any case? Then again, Ted was an idiot. Then again, I still didn’t have a clue who had done what to whom. Then again, why did I care?
The answer to that last one was I still had a suspicion that a load of coprolite (so to speak) was about to be dumped on all our heads because of Toby’s murder or maybe for some other reason I had not yet discerned. “What are we to do?” Tanya asked.
“Wait for further developments,” I said. This turned out to be a stupid answer. What we should have done was jumped in our trucks and four-wheelers and run like hell. But who knew? I should have but I didn’t. Maybe I thought we were so well armed we could handle anybody who wanted to do us harm. Or maybe I was just too stupid and tired to think straight. Probably a little bit of both. This, folks, is how things like the Alamo or the Titanic happen. So far, so good, and then, well, you know. Here come the angry Mexicans or the iceberg.