Alpine Gamble (20 page)

This time I beat Milo to the punch and lighted a
cigarette first. “I don't get it. Was Leonard making a statement?”

Milo nodded. “Sure. He loves the natural wonders, but he's willing to sell out for the sake of his constituents. The art of compromise—that's our county commissioner.”

“Were the park rangers on duty last night?”

Milo evinced disgust. “Hell, no. They didn't have anybody available on such short notice. I promised Dwight triple overtime if he'd take a sleeping bag up there. He showed up at eight this morning, claiming he got fleas.”

I asked Milo if he'd made any headway tracking down the vandals. He hadn't. They'd taken pictures, but didn't have the equipment to make casts of the footprint impressions. As for fingerprints, Milo wasn't holding out much hope.

“No decent surfaces,” he explained. “Rocks, tree bark, underbrush. Nothing much that'd take a print.”

I remained dubious. “What about the beer cans?”

“Smudged. We're still waiting on the paper stuff. There's one funny thing, though.” Milo's expression turned bemused.

“What?” I exhaled lustily, relieved not to have Vida nagging me or Carla holding her nose.

“You have a son, you know kids,” Milo said with an eloquent shrug. Being the father of three, he knew them, too. “When they're sixteen, seventeen, they buy cheap beer, by the half rack or those forty-ouncers. Convenience store beer, where their IDs won't be checked as closely. But these dozen cans—and they
were
cans—had good labels. Coors, Henry's, even a Molson's. Sam Heppner made the rounds, in town and along the highway. The clerks swear they haven't sold beer to any underage kids lately. Maybe they're lying,
but if not, where did the good stuff come from? Did these kids raid their parents' stash?”

Milo had a point. There were only four places in Alpine that sold beer by the can: Safeway, the Grocery Basket, the 7-Eleven, and Marlow Whipp's small store by the high school. None of them, with the possible exception of Marlow, would knowingly sell to minors. And Marlow had had his own small brush with the law within the past year. I doubted that he was taking any chances these days.

“Another thing,” Milo went on, lighting up and forcing me to share the glass ashtray that was balanced atop miniature elk antlers, “there were two empty condom boxes—but no condoms, used or otherwise. What do you make of that?”

“Ah … I'm not even going to guess.”

“Seriously, Emma.” Milo was very much the lawman, his long face earnest. “No joints, either. The rest of the junk was empty chips, beer nut, and pretzel bags. Now why did they need a campfire?”

I was trying to follow Milo's train of thought. “No hot dog wrappers? No marshmallow bags? No whittled twigs? Maybe they got cold after dark.”

“Maybe.” But Milo was clearly skeptical. “The only other debris was some metal scraps like key rings, or maybe beer can tabs. There were some bolts, probably from the birdhouse. Oh, and a bit of plastic, that could have been the handle to something. The rest of it had burned or melted away.” The sheriff shook his head. “None of this plays for me.”

It rang some discordant notes in my ears, too. We seemed to have come up against a brick wall. That was when I unloaded about Skye Piersall. Milo blew his stack.

“Goddamn it, why didn't Honoria tell me? This Piersall woman must have been staying there Saturday
when I picked Honoria up for dinner. No wonder she wanted to make an early night of it!”

“I'm sure Skye asked Honoria to keep quiet,” I soothed. “Skye strikes me as secretive.”

“Skye strikes me as a pain in the ass,” Milo seethed, bolting out of his faux leather chair. “What the hell kind of name is Skye anyway? I'm driving down to Startup right now. That's something that bugs me about Honoria—
she's
too damned private. I have to unload everything—'let my feelings out,' she calls it—but ask her one dumb question she doesn't feel like answering, and she shuts up like a clam. Screw it, I'm out of here.”

So he was. I strolled into the reception area where Bill Blatt and Dustin Fong were staring in bewilderment at the still-swinging door their boss had left in his wake. They both swiveled to look at me, but I merely shrugged, caught the door on an inward swing and started back to
The Advocate.

At the entrance, I happened to look down the block, toward the Venison Inn. Leonard Hollenberg and Ed Bronsky were ambling into the restaurant. They were in deep conversation, and Ed had one arm draped over Leonard's shoulders. I felt like following them inside and hiding in an adjoining booth. Vida would have done it, of course. But I didn't have the nerve. Instead I dutifully returned to work.

The mail had arrived. Vida's stack was still in her in-basket. I sensed that she had already perused it and found nothing of immediate interest. Or at least no message from Mr. Ree.

“Well?” she demanded, looking up from her typewriter. “What did you glean?”

Carla doubled up in her chair.
“Glean!
Where do you get these words, Vida? Out of a
dictionary!”

Vida shot Carla a withering glance. “You might try it
yourself sometime, Carla. You'd be surprised. There might even be some words you already know.”

Ignoring Carla's expression of delayed umbrage, Vida gave me a sweet smile. “So? Is there anything new from the sheriff?”

Succinctly, I recounted my visit. I remembered to include seeing Ed and Leonard going into the Venison Inn. Vida was intrigued by almost everything. But she offered no immediate enlightenment.

“The beer cans are very curious,” she said, sipping at a mug of hot water. “So is the burned plastic. What did Milo think it was—a handle of some sort?”

“From a shopping bag, maybe,” I suggested off the top of my head. “The kids carried the stuff up there in the bag. They'd bring a cooler for the beer, though.”

Carla had recovered from Vida's effrontery. “How many cans?” she asked.

“A dozen, I think.” I sat down on the edge of Leo's desk. He was out, beating the bushes for next week's advertising. There was never a letdown for the newspaper's business side.

Carla wrinkled her nose. “That's all? Two people could get blitzed on six beers apiece. But if you're talking orgy with a bunch of boys
and
girls, that sounds pretty tame.”

It did. Carla's perceptiveness surprised me, as it always did on the occasions that it surfaced. “Okay, crack reporter,” I said, swinging around on the desk to face her, “what do you make of this—condom boxes, but no condoms?”

Carla grinned. “No sex is better than safe sex, right?” She saw my face fall and frowned. “Wrong. I give up. What's the answer?”

But my expression had changed for a different reason. Carla's initial response had given me an idea.

“Actually, you're right. They didn't have sex. They just had empty boxes.”

“Good grief,” Vida muttered. “Don't tell me— they're collectors' items? Like trophies, or marking your shield for the number of kills in battle?”

“No,” I said hastily, “not that. It's much simpler. Somebody is trying to fool somebody. The question is Who and Why.”

Carla, who usually wasn't one to join in the deductive process, seemed fascinated. Perhaps it was the element of sex, or the concept of partying. “You mean, like the boys showing off the boxes to the girls and pretending they'd used them all up?”

I paused before answering. “Sort of. Except not quite.” Frustrated, I shook my head. “Is it a coincidence that the murder site was vandalized less than twenty-four hours after Stan was shot? Another full day has gone by—how come nobody's heard about those kids going up to the springs? That's not like Alpine—tales breed around this town like mosquitoes in a pond.”

Vida's chin was resting on her hand. “They do indeed. You think the murderer returned to the scene of the crime, don't you, Emma?”

I jumped, almost losing my balance on the desk. The thought had been in labor; Vida had just completed its successful delivery.

“That must be it,” I said in a whisper of wonder. “Should we tell Milo?”

Vida rubbed the plain gold wedding band against her cheek. “No,” she finally replied. “Let him figure it out for himself. It sounds to me as if he's almost there.” She gave me that sweet smile again. “You made it, didn't you?”

I smiled back, but not so sweetly. Sometimes I wondered if Vida thought Milo and I were both a couple of
dumb clucks. I already knew what she thought about everybody else.

In my cubbyhole I did some thinking of my own. Who were the actual suspects? Leonard Hollenberg loomed largest, if only because he'd supposedly found the body. But why announce the fact if he had shot Stan? Why shoot him in the first place? If Leonard had second thoughts about the sale, why not simply bow out? Even if a contract had been signed, a good lawyer could extricate him. As far as I knew, no money had passed hands, because Stan and Blake hadn't yet secured their financing.

Scratch Leonard, at least temporarily. The Melvilles came to mind next, mainly because Scott was involved in the project. He had canceled his Monday morning appointment with Milo. Had the sheriff asked him why? Where was Beverly Fannucci Melville at the time of the murder? But I still could find no motive for Scott, and certainly not for Beverly.

Then there was Skye Piersall. As the perpetrator, Skye showed promise. She'd skipped our interview, her car had broken down between Alpine and the hot springs turnoff, and she might have more than one motive. Professionally, Stan and Blake constituted The Enemy. I doubted, however, that CATE's mission statement or whatever they called it recommended homicide as an acceptable method of keeping Mother Nature intact. I preferred a personal motive, such as revenge or jealousy. But a romantic link between Skye and Stan was mere guesswork. I wondered if Honoria would know. And if she did, would she tell Milo or me?

I put Skye at the top of my imaginary list. Somebody had to be there. With a sigh, I realized that most of Alpine could compete with her: Henry Bardeen, Cal Vick-ers, Rip Ridley, even Ed Bronsky, before he switched sides in the resort controversy.

There were too many suspects—that was the problem. No wonder Milo was out of sorts. He had been presented with a homicide in isolated, rugged terrain, and five miles away there were over four thousand suspects.

“Could you kill anyone?” I asked Leo as he stepped into my office.

“Sure,” he answered, setting a trio of ad dummies next to one of the vacant visitor's chairs. “I tried to strangle Liza's lawyer, but we both fell into a freaking potted palm.”

“Be serious.”

“I am.”

“I'm talking premeditation.”

“Hmmmm.” Leo sat down in the other visitor's chair. “Maybe. It would depend on who had done or was about to do what to whom.”

I sighed. “You are serious. You're saying that under certain circumstances, anyone is capable of murder.”

Leo raised his thick eyebrows. “Hey—why else would we have armies? Soldiers are trained to kill in combat. If they can't do it, then they're conscientious objectors. But most men—and now women, I suppose—are capable of pulling the trigger. Transfer that to civilian life, throw in a blackmailer or a cheating spouse or the one person who stands in your way to achieving your heart's desire. It happens all the time. Read the newspaper.” Leo almost managed to keep a straight face.

But I knew that underneath, he was deadly serious. So was I, which made me a glum luncheon companion for Vida. She was keeping to her diet, and refused to eat out. I had gotten a burger dip and fries from the Venison Inn. By the time I arrived to pick up my order, there was no sign of Leonard or Ed.

“I'll bet Ed's sucking up to Leonard in case he manages
to talk Blake into a partnership,” I said over the crunch of Vida's celery.

“That will never take place,” Vida asserted. “After what's happened to Stan, Blake will renege on the resort project. He's a very frightened man, and I can scarcely blame him. If you ask me, we'll never see Blake Fannucci again.”

As usual, Vida would be proved right.

AFTER
LUNCH I wrote a draft of the Summer Solstice editorial, even daring to suggest that it be held the third weekend of June. While that would move Alpine's annual celebration ahead by almost two months, the earlier date might encourage families who wanted a quick getaway as soon as school was dismissed.

Having completed that task, as well as having taken care of several minor matters including the morning's phone calls, I grew restless. There was an hour to kill before the papers returned from the printer in Monroe. At one-thirty I got into the Jag and drove over to the Icicle Creek Development.

Beverly Melville greeted me with more warmth than I probably deserved. “You must have thought I was an idiot the other morning at the bakery,” she said, her wide smile displaying orthodontically perfect white teeth, “frow about a glass of wine?”

While I'm not particularly fond of wine, I was trying to be an agreeable guest. A few minutes later Beverly and I were seated in the living room, surrounded by catalogues filled with fabric swatches.

“Decor plans for the remodeling,” she said, moving what looked like carpet samples. “If we stay.”

“More qualms?” I asked, noting that the broken window had been replaced.

“I can't help it.” Beverly swirled the wine in her
glass. “It's all this rain and the gray skies. I thought I'd get used to it. But it's depressing. And then …
this.”
She made a slashing gesture with one hand, apparendy taking in a multitude of sins.

“Stan?”

“Of course. Then there's the general hostility. The atmosphere is poisonous.” Beverly stared into her glass. Maybe she thought I'd slipped in a toxic little something.

“Have you gotten ugly phone calls, too?” I remembered my own experiences as a new arrival. When my status as an unmarried mother had leaked out, the calls and letters had grown more malicious. Eventually they dribbled away. Either I had won the locals over or they had lost interest. The latter was more likely.

“We did at first,” Beverly answered slowly. “They weren't threats—just a 'Califomians, go home' sort of thing. As soon as Scott got the bid to design the sheriff's new offices, the calls stopped.” She gave me an ironic little smile.