Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller (19 page)

“I know all that,” Grace said.

“Good. I’m driving down to Aspen in about an hour and I want to take the records with me. I need to determine if either Henry or Susan Lovell had an incurable disease. I may not use that fact, if it’s a fact, but it’s possible that it could save Bibsy and Scott from going to prison.”

Grace said, “There was nothing on the Lovells’ medical records that indicates an incurable disease. You can take my word for it.”

“I do, but I’d like to see them anyway.”

“I’ve destroyed them.”

Dennis stared at her. “When did you do that?”

“Thirty days after I filed their death certificates with the state.”

Dennis clenched a fist and tapped it against his thigh. It was hard to hide his anger. “Is that your common practice, Grace?”

“I am not under cross-examination,” Dr. Pendergast said, and turned away from her desk.

He went from there to the Henderson house and found Scott soaking in the hot tub on the deck, his face tilted to the winter sun. “Aches and pains,” Scott said. “Old age.”

“We need to talk about a few things,” Dennis said.

“Fire away”

“Why did you invoke the speedy trial statute?”

“You really want to know?” Scott sighed. “Just to get it over with. It’s hard on Bibsy, more than on any of us. The sooner we get to the end of it, the better.”

“Is there anything up there at Pearl Pass under the snow?” Dennis asked.

“Not that I’m aware of,” Scott said carefully. “But you never know, do you?” He twisted in the tub so that the strongest jet beat into the lower part of his back. “Listen, Dennis. You’ll conduct the trial and I know you’ll do a hell of a job. I trust you. Maybe I did a dumb-ass thing by representing myself, but the plain fact is there’s no one else around here I have faith in.”

Dennis nodded. Doing it alone was not the problem. “Have you ever been in court against Ray Bond?”

“I wasn’t a criminal lawyer. Maybe a DUI now and then for some kid from town. Ray is Pitkin County’s prosecutorial answer to the neutron bomb. All the buildings remain standing, but all the people succumb to his speeches.”

Dennis managed a light laugh.

“He’s not stupid,” Scott said, “just long-winded. And he’s got a temper.”

“Can he lose it in court?”

“Been known to happen.”

Dennis veered back to what troubled him most. “It would help if you would tell me your version of what happened up there at the pass.”

“I don’t think I’ll do that. I’ll let you imagine it… as long as what you imagine is in my and Bibsy’s best interests.”

Dennis, who had been sitting on the edge of the tub, got to his feet. “Are you all trying to drive me crazy?”

He left the house, slammed the Jeep into four-wheel drive, and drove toward Aspen. The plowed road twisted and turned toward Carbondale, and he could feel patches of ice under his tires. Shadows of wind-driven clouds raced across the forest.

Imagine what’s in our best interests
, Scott had said. Not so silly and cavalier as it sounded, Dennis reflected. Defense attorneys in trial routinely concocted—imagined—a reasonable theory of defense that a jury might believe. Toward that end they called friendly witnesses to bolster their theory and ruthlessly cross-examined the hostile ones. But imagination had to have some foundation in reality. A lawyer didn’t simply shoot from the hip and blow away the state’s evidence with the brute power of argument.

You could do that if you
had
an argument, but you couldn’t have much of an argument if you didn’t have a theory. And you couldn’t have a theory unless your client gave you a nail to hang it on. How, Dennis asked himself, do I account for what happened? For the pillbox? The fingerprints? The admissions to Queenie O’Hare? He knew that the Hendersons had been at Pearl Pass—the tale of the pillbox lost at Glenwood Springs three years ago was nonsense. If Bibsy had moaned, “I have no idea where I lost it,” Dennis might have found heart to believe. But what came out so brightly had been too rehearsed.

He drove slowly, absorbed in thought. A black delivery van appeared in his rearview mirror—it tapped its horn twice. When Dennis slowed down and edged toward the shoulder, it passed him, picking up speed.

All these people in Springhill, he thought, are friends of the Hendersons. They think they’re protecting them but in fact they’re harming them. Why can’t they see that?

He heard the familiar low boom of a distant explosion. Less than a minute later a guttural
whoosh
rumbled from far above him, followed by what seemed like a light clap of thunder. Dennis’s heartbeat quickened. He eased immediately onto the brake, slowing the car, looking in all directions. But his view was blocked by the forest itself. He saw nothing except a sunstruck glare of orange glinting through the trees against the skyline. Then the world was instantly silent again.

Beyond the next curve, up above, a steep chute led down to the road from an open bowl. Dennis’s heart pounded even more rapidly as he slowed to nearly a crawl. Coming up on the curve, he peered up at the immense sloping quilt of white snow. Something growled again—this time it was like a faraway pride of lions disturbed in their sleep—and a spiderweb of cracks shot silently across the slope.

The slope folded up and began to slide. Jamming his boot hard on the brake, Dennis skidded to a stop against a snowbank in the lee of a protecting grove of aspens. He leaned forward, staring, hardly believing what he saw. A giant cloud of powder rose into the air. A hundred yards ahead on the road, the brakelights of the black van that had passed him were flashing a violent red—and then a split-second later the van became a child’s tumbling toy. It pitched, yawed, and plunged down the slope below the road. Boiling white snow swept over it, bearing it in a crazy roll between the aspen groves. Suddenly it was gone from sight—completely vanished.

The snow settled; the rumble slowly died. The silence took hold again. The road ahead, blocked by the avalanche, had risen five feet. Dennis could no longer see ahead of him.

Sweat burst from his forehead. When he reached for his cellular phone, he was shaking so hard that he had to grasp it with two hands.

When the snowplows and emergency management force arrived from Glenwood Springs, it took more than an hour to clear the road. Dennis sat in his Jeep, shivering.

He was told he could go. He drove slowly down the winding road to Carbondale, and then on the crowded Route 82 to Aspen, thinking about what had happened. My God, I could be dead. If the van hadn’t passed me, and if I hadn’t slowed down when it did, the avalanche would have hit
me
, not the van.

From his office he called Sophie at school. Word had reached Springhill and she knew some details.

“Are you all right, Dennis?”

“Just a little shaken up.”

“Did they find the driver of the van?”

“They told me they found the van. I mean, they could
see
it. They couldn’t get to it. The driver’s door was ripped off the hinge. The driver was nowhere in sight.”

“Did you know he’d just delivered a new Sears refrigerator to Shirlene Hubbard?”

Somehow that news made the death of the delivery man even more absurd, even less acceptable.

Mickey Karp, Dennis’s law partner, reached the office late that afternoon. He was a volunteer with Mountain Rescue, a citizen organization that served in such crises.

“I was on call,” Mickey said, “but they didn’t need me today. Not next week either. They won’t dig that body out until summer.”

“Are you serious?” Dennis asked. “You mean they’re not digging wow?”

“Dennis, that was a slab fracture. You can send people into the scene to dig for an avalanche victim, but if the chute fractures a second time—and they do that too often—what then? You lose a dozen people trying to save one who’s probably dead already. You know how long you’d last buried under that snow?”

“I don’t think I’d like to guess.”

“Twenty minutes if you’re lucky—or maybe unlucky. Sometimes you can’t breathe. You inhale the snow. You’re in a vise—it’s like wet concrete. Or you’ve got some room but you dig in the wrong direction. Your breath can freeze and form an ice mask. Two feet of snow on top of you is enough to kill you. This guy thrown from the van was probably under five or six feet. And where to dig? They were looking at four or five acres of unstable snowpack—every square foot of it can fall out from under you. Last winter we had cross-country skiers, real assholes from Denver, who went up to the Tenth Mountain Division huts with avalanche warnings out, and they vanished in a storm. How many lives were we supposed to risk to save them? Choppers get knocked down in those storms like they were made of paper. We tried—by snowmobile, on foot, in the air, every way—and couldn’t find them. They were lucky and got out on their own.”

“What do you think caused the slide this morning?”

Mickey shrugged. “That was an open chute with an angle of about thirty-eight degrees. A classic disaster recipe. High wind chips off a piece of a cornice, an iced overhang. A bighorn sheep or a mountain goat wanders in there at the top, cracks it wide open. Fresh snow or hoarfrost may not bond to the old snow beneath it. A lot of snow, then warm weather to melt it—the snow falls off trees, hits a sensitive spot, and the whole mountain rolls. But the avalanche control guys from Springhill were up there this morning on the crest above the road, checking the chutes. They saw most of the slide. They said the guy in the van leaned on his horn just before the slope fractured—probably when he passed you.”

“Yes, he did that,” Dennis said.

“That kind of noise vibration could set it off.”

“Were the Springhill people up there in a Sno-Cat?”

“I suppose so.”

That was what he had seen, Dennis realized—that blink of orange far above, through the trees. And he had heard the muffled explosion a minute before the driver of the van tapped his horn.

“How do the people on the Sno-Cat control the chutes?”

“They get above the parts that look unstable, and they throw a TNT or dynamite charge. That fractures it, or if it’s solid, it stays put and theoretically you don’t have to worry. But they do that only late at night or before dawn. No way they would’ve been doing it in the middle of the morning with traffic on the road.”

“No, of course not,” Dennis said.

The weather cleared. One warm sunny day followed another. Serious skiers complained there wasn’t enough snow. The skies turned gray and it snowed again. Weekend skiers complained there wasn’t enough sun.

Dennis made discreet inquiry in the village of Springhill to determine who might have been up above the road in a Sno-Cat on the day of the avalanche. The usual crew, he was told, was made up of volunteers from the quarry, led by Oliver Cone.

Had there been time, he wondered, between my visit to Grace Pendergast and my leaving for Aspen, for Grace to reach Cone at the quarry? Did I tell her when I was going down to Aspen? He couldn’t quite remember. But why would she do that? And why would Cone and his gang want to bury me under fifty tons of snow? I want to help them. Don’t they know that? Don’t they care?

The trial date seemed to be approaching like an express train—or an avalanche. This time, Dennis wondered, who’ll be buried under it?

One afternoon, as he drove his Jeep up the icy driveway, Lucy sprang out from behind a snowbank, startling him.

“Are you all right, honey?”

“Daddy, what’s wrong with Sophie?”

He was alarmed. “What do you mean?”

“She’s so sad.”

He hugged his daughter, stroked her soft dark hair, which crackled with the electricity of the cold air. “Because Grandma is in trouble. I told you—that’s why I’m working so hard. So Sophie’s sad.”

“Did Grandma do something wrong?” Lucy asked.

He was always brought back to that. Not: was she guilty? But: had she done anything wrong?

“No,” he said.

He could lie to a child, but not to himself. The children had gone to bed. Winter starlight bled through the frosted windows of the living room. Sophie curled on the window seat, looking out at black night and falling snow. Dennis prowled the carpet. In a corner of the room he saw Sophie’s violin case resting against a bookcase. He picked up the case. “Why don’t you play anymore?” he asked.

“I can’t,” she said. He saw tears forming in her eyes.

Dennis bent and took her in his arms. He had never known her like this: beaten down and drab. She was like a wooden replica of the live Sophie. She drove off to school and to her meetings; she cooked but rarely ate. Her cheekbones had grown sharper. In the nights she went to bed early and turned her back to him. The blaze of her hair—so lustrous that sometimes in the dark, as she slept, he could see its dark red shine—had turned to a mouselike brown.

“It will be all right,” he said. “It will end. It will work out. Trust me.” He remembered how many times and for how many things Sophie had said those last two words to him. Now it was his turn.

Just before noon on a bright blue March day, he walked down the beige-carpeted corridor of Karp & Ballard to Mickey Karp’s corner office, which faced both the ski slopes and the downtown mall. Feet on his desk, halfglasses perched on the tip of his nose, Mickey was studying a real estate contract. He was involved in a typical Aspen civil law case, representing a member of the Saudi royal family who had bought a $30 million estate on a property zoned for no farther development other than barns for farm animals. The Saudi prince had built two such barns. Each contained three bathrooms with Jacuzzis and saunas and triple-jet showers, as well as six designated horse stalls with Berber carpeting and king-sized beds. Neighbors who were being kept awake by the midnight traffic and distant hilarity had filed a complaint with the county zoning board. They wanted the “barns” torn down.

Mickey was mounting a defense based on the theory that what’s done is done. He had tried to imply that a stiff fine, which the prince seemed willing to pay, would do Pitkin County more good than a high-profile demolition job.

“How busy are you?” Dennis asked.

“Anything in the world can seduce me from defending the rights of the rich and arrogant.”