Bad Apple

By Richard S. Wheeler

The world's greatest cutting horse, Bad Apple, has been shot in his paddock. The grieving owner, Rex Pattee, wants to know who did it and why. He hires a livestock detective, Cletus Parr, with an office in the stockyards, to find out. The homespun Parr is soon talking to jet set horse owners, who think he's a rube. And that is an asset. He slowly figures out who did it-- and just in time.

Richard S. Wheeler is the author of over seventy novels, mostly set in the American West. He has won six Spur Awards from Western Writers of America, and the Owen Wister Award for lifetime contributions to western literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard S. Wheeler
• Release date: Aug 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301909124

Richard S. Wheeler

Richard S. Wheeler is the award-winning author of historical novels, biographical novels, and Westerns. He began his writing career at age fifty, and by seventy-five he had written more than sixty novels. He began life as a newsman and later became a book editor, but he turned to fiction full time in 1987. Wheeler started by writing traditional Westerns but soon was writing large-scale historical novels and then biographical novels. In recent years he has been writing mysteries as well, some under the pseudonym Axel Brand. He has won six Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America and the Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement in the literature of the American West.

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Contents

BAD APPLE

About the Author

Mysteries by Richard S. Wheeler

BAD APPLE

Chapter 1

It was Wanda Nogurski, his answering service.

Cletus Parr yawned and picked lint from his navel.

He wants you should get right up there. Bad Apple’s been shot totally dead. I mean dead! He says don’t bother calling, just git!

That woke him up. Bad Apple was the highest priced cutting horse in the country. Going on twelve, though, and maybe fading.

Keep on trucking, he said, and hung up.

Wanda tended toward hysterics.

Cletus rolled out of his heated waterbed, making waves. He was a clean limbed thirty three, with a slim waist and expanding gut.

A big timey shooting, he thought, so he’d get a big timey fee. Bad Apple was owned by Rex Pattee, the cutting horse king who had a spread up near the Bull Mountains about thirty miles north of Billings, right where the high plains dissolved into layered sandstone ridges covered with dark ponderosa. This one should be worth five grand for starters, he figured. That sorrel gelding had to be insured for megabucks. Maybe Rex bumped that horse off for insurance money.

Rex Pattee! You bet. Potbellied, fortyish, half bald, and the biggest name in cutting horse competition. More purses than a man could remember. He stayed at his spread up there when he wasn’t out on the circuit. He had that broad with the dyed blonde beehive, all sprayed down with a gallon of fixer, straight out of the 1950s. Maybe she took it off and set it on a styrofoam head before she went to bed. Be hell to kiss a gal like that, always worrying if a filament would bust loose.

That put Cletus in mind of Estelle, his secretary and occasional girlfriend. Estelle Suggswell. She was sort of blonde too, but her honey hair was always in a tantrum, flying off in all directions like a fright wig. He liked that better than sprayed down hair.

Cletus decided he’d skip the shower and roll on some extra Right Guard instead. He rolled some into the black hair of his armpits and then his navel. Never knew who he’d meet. Then he pulled on some new Levis with a knife edge crease in them. He liked that crease. It made him a man of parts. He changed Levis every day so that the machete blade crease would always be fresh. Estelle ironed them. That was part of her job as his secretary.

Next he pulled on his best $62 Larry Mahan western shirt, cream colored with cerise roses and curly black stems rioting all over it. The pearly snaps fastened with a satisfying click. He never wore anything with buttons any more. Women liked those pearly snaps because you could rip a shirt off in two seconds. He left the top snap undone so a little of his black chest hair would peek out. That always drove them crazy.

Next he slid on his Tony Lama gold lizards, size eleven. Actually, he had three Lamas, one Justin, one Hyer, and a pair of six hundred dollar kangaroo skin boots made by that Lucchese down in Texas. But he wouldn’t wear those today, not out in all that manure.

That Pattee now, there were plenty of dudes on the rodeo and cutting horse circuits gunning for him. He had started as a calf roper in professional rodeo and had gone right to the top, and then he left rodeo behind and began training cutting horses. He’d been king too long, living by wits now instead of catlike muscle. Arrogant bastard, too, and rubbed in all his wins, and never bought a drink. Cletus thought he should maybe hold up Pattee for ten grand—he was good for it—but he doubted that Pattee would go that rich. Still, Bad Apple was one of the greatest horses that ever lived, and maybe he could charge accordingly. He’d stick Pattee with a few thousand in expenses, too. Rex would bleat liked a roped calf, and then pay up.

He was ready now except for coffee, but he’d pick up some from Estelle’s pot and take it with him. He jammed on his fawn flat-crowned John B. Stetson and stepped out into a great spring day, except for the refinery stink. He’d have to wheel on down to the south-side stockyards first. His office was there, and so were his horses. Not far. He lived up against the sandstone rims on east Sixth Avenue in a weary, weathered little cottage hidden behind a tire warehouse. Estelle had always wanted him to move to a tonier part of Billings at the west end of town, but he liked it where he was, in an anonymous frame bungalow on an unpaved dead end not even visible from Sixth because of the warehouse. In his business that was an advantage. The only trouble was the rattlers that slithered down off the rimrock. Once he found a little one curled under his flush tank just when he was about to sit. The hell with Estelle. He liked the joint, even if the area was slum city.

He fired up the Silver Bullet, enjoying the throb of the supercharged griz engine. The Silver Bullet was a customized GMC three quarter ton club cab pickup with chrome running boards, four wheel drive, air conditioning, dark tinted windows, and swivel armchairs with a walnut console in between. In a special dashboard console were a cellular phone, CB radio, AM FM tape deck plugged to four Jensen speakers, a police and aircraft scanner, and mini TV. In the walnut console was a tiny bar, a one cup coffee heater, and a locked compartment where he stored his .41 magnum long barreled Smith and Wesson, snugged into a basketweave holster. On the gun rack at the rear window was an over and under twelve gauge Browning, the barrel custom cut down to the legal minimum eighteen inches.

He slipped on his mirror aviator sunglasses and tooled on down to the commission yards. He would take the horses. And pick on Estelle. He slipped a pinch of Copenhagen snooze under his tongue and pressed it there until the juices flowed. He did that mostly to annoy Estelle, who hated the smell and the sight of brown slimegobs he fired. Actually, he disliked the stuff too, but a man had to keep babes at arm’s length some way, and it boiled down to cigars or snooze.

The commission yards hunkered down close to the Yellowstone River and off the Interstate. He spotted the usual sea of Herefords in the pens, and big red stock semis parked in the lot. This was Tuesday, a cattle sale day. Saturdays were horse sale days and a lot more fun. On Saturdays he would often slip into the arena and watch teen age girls cry whenever a plug horse went to Alpo. He slid the Silver Bullet between a pair of battered pickups with Carbon County licenses and trotted on up to his second floor office, with the drone of the auctioneer audible as he walked.

It cost him $180 a month to rent that lousy oversized closet, but this was where the action was and he couldn’t escape it. Those studs that ran this show knew how to turn a buck. The embossed plaque on his door read, Cletus Parr, Livestock Broker. He did a little of that for show, but that wasn’t his real business. He was a livestock private eye, and it was a good living sometimes, like maybe once or twice a year. And often a headache. Especially when he crossed any of the state livestock inspectors, who told him he was a jerk and were always putting on the squeeze except when he had goods they itched to get, and then he was Old Buddy.

She was cleaning the coffeepot with nitroglycerine or something, the way it fizzed, her honey hair sailing off in all directions like a Junior League chorus line at a hospital benefit. Her twenty four year old curves, nicely sausaged into Wranglers, caught his eye. He patted her paternally.

You owe me a paycheck, she said solemnly, her large gray eyes on him. She wasn’t pretty but she made up for it.

Since Friday, she added.

I pay you with lots of fringe benefits, he said.

I gotta eat, she said patiently. That was her forte, being patient with him.

He pulled out the big blue checkbook buried in the green metal drawer of his desk and scratched one out.

If it bounces, try tomorrow. I’m gonna be five grand richer in an hour.

You got a case?

Yeah, someone snuffed Bad Apple. Or maybe shot a ringer. Or maybe it was Pattee himself or that gal he lives with.

That cutting horse?

That’s the one, baby. He’s the greatest. All those Texas dudes would sell their oil wells for him, just to have the world’s greatest cutting horse. I’m on my way. If you call me on the radio use the scrambler, okay? I don’t want the Bulls on it. Bulls was his euphemism for livestock inspectors, State of Montana dudes in cowboy boots.

Okay. Are you trying to impress someone? You got some complex or something? You reek, she said.

Yeah. A little Right Guard. I don’t get a cutting horse case very often. Those cutting horse people are all bluebloods and Texas millionaires and old money. Not like rodeo dudes. I think that’s why they all hate Pattee—he’s rodeo crude. Like a Hawaiian shirt at a tuxedo dinner.

This is your first cutting horse case, she said.

Guess it is, he agreed. I don’t get many rodeo cases either. I think the last one was that bucking horse herd I had to recover.

That was one of his better cases. A rodeo stock contractor, Buck Billingsley, wintered his bucking horse herd up east of Roundup. Bucking horses are hard to come by, and a good bucker is worth gold. Rustlers got the whole bunch during a cold spell, running in some ringers so close to the originals that not even Billingsley figured it out until they were getting ready to go out on the spring circuit. By the time Cletus got onto the case, the originals were scattered from Calgary to Tucson. But he got most back, and found who done it, and the ring was busted up. A Miles City bunch.

He bought the Silver Bullet with the loot from that one. But the brand inspectors were peeved because he had cracked the case before they hardly got started. Mostly, though, Cletus dealt with common cattle rustling, sometimes blooded broodstock rustling, especially prize bulls, and in the summers a lot of horseracing scams.

You got coffee?

Not yet. I was just cleaning the pot.

That’s okay. I’ll make some in the Silver Bullet.

He squirted a long brown gob into her wastebasket.

You want to come over tonight? she asked. You can come if you want. There’s nothing else to do in Billings, Montana, except go out drinking, and you always get embarrassing when we do that. Besides, I rented a John Wayne film.

I’ll think about it, he said.

Don’t think very hard, she replied. This is a one time coupon that expires at six pee em.

What kind of discount do I get?

She grinned evilly.

He got out of there. He could stand only so much fluorescent lighting and steel desks and feedstore calendars. How she stood it he didn’t know. Or maybe he did. She got in about two hours of coffee time down in the café, and left the joint to the vengeance of the answering machines. He didn’t mind. Where else could he find a doll like that?

He ambled out to the yards, watching gatemen and mounted riders haze ten lots of cattle down the aisles and into the sale ring. At the far side, over in the southeast corner, he penned his horses. He stood a moment at the rail, watching them while they whickered their greetings. He’d take them both. They liked an outing as well as anyone.

The pair sure looked good, sleek and shiny with that grooming oil he wiped them with. One was a big bay gelding Quarter Horse; great for cattle work and rough country. The other was a long dappled gray mare, a Thoroughbred with racing blood. Great for flatlands and speed. Both personally trained to handle his special needs. He had trained them with a long chrome plated cattle prod and they had learned fast. He had named the mare Herpes, but the Jockey Club wouldn’t accept it. And he had named the gelding Clap, but the AQHA refused to have anything to do with it. So they went unregistered, and to hell with it.

From the cargo bin of his matching silver Miley two horse trailer he pulled two blue nylon halters and slipped them on. He opened the trailer doors and the pen gate and whistled. The horses stepped unbidden, as if guided by an unseen hand, up into the trailer. He snapped the butt chains in place, closed the doors, and set the vents for maximum air. It would be a warm day. Then he threw a jag of alfalfa into the mangers.

That done, he backed the Silver Bullet until the tow ball was under the trailer tongue, or within an inch or so of it. He rarely missed. He jumped out, twisted the tongue a bit, and cranked the tongue down over the ball and clamped the bulldog hitch. Then he plugged in the circuits for brakes and lights, and hooked the safety chain to make it all legal. The fuzz harassed him because he was what he was, so he was careful to keep his buns covered.

He stepped back to look at the outfit. The trailer was enameled a perfect match for the Bullet. On its side was a bold blue legend: Stud Pickens, Livestock Trader. That was his current name, Stud Pickens. He changed it every few months. The previous one had been Shirley Flatts, Cattle Bought and Sold. He changed that after some dude accused him of being a girl.

He dropped his magic chromium wand, the prod, behind the swivel seats. He never needed to zap the horses these days but the sight of it kept them lined out right. It was nothing but a long swagger stick now, and maybe a little surprise weapon again humans if the need should arise.

He purred his outfit up past the Fairground and out to the Billings Bench on top of the rims, sleaze city, with a crummy catchpenny strip on the highway, surrounded by a scabrous scatter of houses in all directions. But then, after the Roundup turnoff, he hit open high prairie, a vast grass wilderness in Billings’s backyard. That open land scared hell out of the dudes in town who huddled together under the rimrock. But Clete himself got a high out there under the Big Sky.

He tuned the scanner to the Highway Patrol’s band, which was also used by the livestock bulls. He wanted to find out if they had any wind of Bad Apple’s execution. But the radio traffic was normal and virtually nonexistent. He set some water heating and dropped a coffee packet into the cup, and waited, counting antelope along the way. There were hundreds of them along this lonely road, gathered in white rumped bunches. Funny how the city dudes never saw them, he thought.

Rex Pattee’s lashup was east of the highway and maybe thirty miles north of town. Nice country. The Bull Mountains, dry plains country actually, layered up behind the place, with a lot of ponderosa and juniper popping out of the yellow sandstone bones of the mountains. Nestled below in a green and watered valley was a long shake roofed ranch house, a blue metal barn, a complete rodeo arena with a pair of starting chutes, a running oval, horse pens, and maybe a dozen horses and some steers visible. Pattee had bought a section in there and settled in to make prize rodeo and cutting horses.

Cletus wheeled the Silver Bullet into the gravel lane, kicking up a long tail of tan dust, and eased to a stop before the house. Pattee was there waiting for him, square-faced, gap-toothed, his gut pushing out from sagging jeans and stretching his pink shirt with honeysuckle crawling all over it. Beside him was the beehive, Emmalou something--Clete had met her a few times  and a couple of kids in tee shirts, probably young riders dreaming of big purses and lots of broads, but actually doing the dirty work out here for bunk and chow and experience.

The red corpse was in the pen closest to the house, a sorrel lump stretched across the baked earth.

Here’s where she starts, he thought.

Chapter 2

A swift introduction. This here’s Emmalou, you’ve met her before, and over there is my trainers, Harry and Mike. Them two really know cutting horse and rodeo stock.

Cletus howdied, glanced at the long faces, and then ducked over to Bad Apple’s peeled log pen. The great red champion cutting horse, the Cutting Horse of the Year for seven years straight, sprawled awkwardly on the ground, legs stiffened into the air, neck bent weirdly, a mass of greenbelly flies swarming around his grimacing mouth and in his nostrils and crawling over a deep neck wound. Clete felt his gorge rise even though he’d been in this kind of place a hundred times before. He let himself in and hunkered down over the long bulge of sorrel horsehair, smeared now with dust and blood. He found an exit wound in the neck just behind the head. The shot had torn out vertebrae