Shoot the Moon by Billie Letts Read Free Book Online

I’m in luck. I’m an attorney.”
    O Boy snorted. “I wouldn’t call that luck.”
    “Name’s Albright. Mark Albright.”
    “So what’s your business with me?”
    “I’m trying to locate Nick Harjo.”
    “That right?”
    “I’m handling an estate, he’s the heir.”
    “Don’t see as how it’s gonna do him much good.”
    “Why?”
    “He’s dead.”
    Mark could feel his pulse quicken. “I was told his body was never found.”
    “It don’t take a genius to hide a body, Albright. But sometimes you have to be damn lucky to find one. We musta dug up an acre of land on Joe Dawson’s place. Come up empty, but that don’t mean—”
    “You’re convinced Dawson was responsible?”
    “Gaylene was killed with his knife. Same knife he used to slice hisself up. I can put two and two together.”
    “And he was your only suspect?”
    “Oh, I looked at a few others. Some of the punks Gaylene partied with. But I had my eye on Dawson from the beginning. When the medical examiner matched Dawson’s knife to her wounds, that was that.”
    Mark leaned his hips against the workbench, crossed his arms, then gazed out over the river. “Well,” he said, “I’ve got a piece of property in Arkansas appraised at twenty-five thousand dollars that was left to Gaylene Harjo. Since she’s deceased, and from what you say, her only child’s dead, too, I need to find out who fathered him.”
    “Who the hell would leave her some property in Arkansas?”
    “I’m not at liberty to say.”
    “So what you’re telling me is that whoever knocked her up . . .”
    “Will inherit. Yes.” Mark tried not to sound overly anxious when he asked, “Do you have any idea who it was?”
    “Nope.”
    “Did you try to find out?”
    O Boy’s eyes flashed with anger. “What are you trying to say?”
    “I’m just wondering if—”
    “I did my goddamn job, Albright.”
    “What about Kyle Leander?”
    “What about him?”
    “I’ve heard he spent time with her.”
    “Hell, who didn’t? Let me tell you what you
don’t
know about Gaylene. She couldn’t keep her pants on. Slept with half the men in this county. Anyone who wanted her. And there was a lot of hard-dick old boys around here wanted her.”
    “Did that include Joe Dawson?”
    “Gaylene Harjo was a slut. Pure and simple. And I’ve never known a slut who culled.”
    Mark couldn’t control the tightening of the muscles in his jaw or the heat of anger coloring his skin, but the changes were too subtle for O Boy to notice.
    “Not much of a surprise she ended up the way she did,” O Boy said. “But that kid of hers . . . he deserved better.”
    The front office of KSET, small and spare, was deserted when Mark arrived. A metal desk in the corner of the room looked unused, its surface covered with a fine layer of dust. Between two plastic patio chairs, a chrome table held a stack of
Radio Journal
s, the most recent three years old. The walls were bare except for a framed certificate dated 1972 that named Arthur McFadden “Oklahoma Broadcaster of the Year.”
    When a phone rang somewhere in the back of the building, Mark followed the sound down a hallway to an opened door. The call went unanswered even though the bearded man sitting beside it could have picked up the receiver without doing more than bending his elbow.
    He wore faded jeans and a GRATEFUL DEAD T-shirt. His feet, shod in ratty sandals, rested on a littered desk. His ears were covered with headphones, his eyes closed, his head nodding to a percussion beat Mark could hear from across the room.
    This office, unlike the one at the front, was anything but bare. The walls, painted black, were covered with posters—Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Joe Cocker. A bedraggled American flag was tacked above one window, a lava lamp stood atop a stack of old LPs, and a floor-to-ceiling bookcase held a jumble of memorabilia, most of it from an earlier era.
    Mark studied a framed photograph of a teenage