Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller (2 page)

Stepping through the flap into the semidarkness of the tent, the old man made out two prone figures cocooned in sleeping bags. He snapped the switch on his flashlight, playing the beam first over Susie Lovell’s gray hair, and then down to the fine wrinkles of her face. She was still asleep, gently snoring.

In his down sleeping bag Henry Lovell raised his head and began to blink in confusion. One hand clawed for the rifle he had placed by the side of the bag next to a box of Kleenex.

“Don’t do that, Henry,” the older visitor said—quietly, but loud enough to be heard.

Henry’s hand instead plucked a Kleenex from the box, and he blew his nose. At that sound, Susie Lovell woke. She propped herself up on her elbows, immediately put on her metal-rimmed eyeglasses, and adjusted her eyes to the light and her mind to the situation. She said, in a sad, gravelly voice, “Well, hello. What a surprise. Why didn’t Geronimo bark?”

“I’m sorry,” the bowman said. “He never knew what hit him.” But there was more pride in his voice than sympathy. He couldn’t control it, and the others heard it.

Susie Lovell said angrily, “You had to do that?”

“We thought it was necessary,” the old man replied. “If we barged in on you at dawn or even daylight, and your haireem barked up a storm, you might figure this was the Alamo and you were Mr. and Mrs. Davy Crockett.” His glance rested for a moment on Henry Lovell’s Remington 30-30, which still lay next to the Kleenex box.

“That would serve no purpose,” he added.

Reaching out to squeeze his wife’s hand, Henry Lovell said, “Susie, it doesn’t matter now.”

The old hunter nodded agreement, although he realized the statement was said out of kindness and wasn’t true. If the dog were alive they could have taken it back to Springhill. Someone in town would have been glad to see him through his canine golden years.

Susie Lovell began to cry almost noiselessly. Henry put an arm around her, trying to offer comfort. “They’ll let us have some time,” he said softly. Then he looked up with eyes that were grave and resigned. “How did you find us?”

The hunter looked away. That was something he was not willing to discuss. He sat down cross-legged on the floor of the tent, still a supple man, although at ninety-four the lotus position was beyond his capability.

“Let’s harp,” he said. “It will help us all.”

Before that could happen, he heard from outside the sound of footsteps in crackling brush, a light cry of confusion, and then women’s voices. From a distance his wife said something he couldn’t understand, but she sounded relieved. He glanced up as the tent flaps parted. More light flowed in, and with it the scent of alpine clover and perfume. He saw a visitor who had appeared out of the wilderness.

His face broke apart into a warm, lined smile. “How about that. I didn’t think you’d make it in time. Welcome, honey.”

Chapter 1
The Woman on the Mountain

IN THE WINTER OF 1993, Dennis Conway, a New York criminal trial lawyer, flew to Colorado for a week of skiing. He rented a small condo at the edge of the slopes of Aspen Mountain. In the early mornings, after he waxed and burred his skis, he worked on an opening statement for the bank fraud trial he was handling back in Manhattan. In the evenings he began to reread Joseph Conrad and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Now and then he drank a few beers at Little Annie’s Eating House with a pair of old ski pals who lived nearby in the Roaring Fork Valley.

Dennis was a fairly tall, solidly built man with dark eyes and a gray- flecked beard that he often forgot to trim. Twenty-five years ago he had been on the Dartmouth ski team, but each year of city living took its toll: it was always a little bit harder to adjust to the altitude and get back into skiing shape. A Vietcong mortar fragment had given him a permanent ache in one knee. A calf muscle kept cramping when he dug in his edges for sharp turns. But the fourth day out he said to hell with it and tackled the double-black-diamond runs of the Dumps.

These runs, angling steeply between some aspen groves, were full of ungroomed moguls. Today they were almost empty of skiers: on Short Snort, the run he chose, he noticed only one other, a woman. It had snowed heavily the night before, leaving six inches of fresh powder. The mountain was silent, and the dry cold air in Dennis’s lungs felt rare and fine. Not a cloud in the sky, and on the whiteness below him as he shot down the bump run he heard his snow spray billowing behind and the sound of his edges carving through the turns. He let out a whoop of joy. This is
great.
This is the
best.

He flew down the steep hill, pumping his knees, placing his poles high on the crests of moguls, picking up speed, breathing hard. He passed the other skier, the woman, who had stopped to rest in the sun near some aspen trees.

A pain ripped his calf. His leg skidded out from under him—he felt himself falling. One boot, then the other, snapped loose from the bindings; the skis vanished from his sight. He was tumbling, sliding, trying not to tense up. Letting it happen: that was all he could do. Don’t let me break a leg, he prayed—I have no time for that. He skidded, somersaulted once, then came to a jolting stop against the side of a mogul.

His sunglasses had been torn from his head and the snow in his eyes blinded him. The breath had been knocked from his lungs. He wiped his eyes with the wet edge of a glove. He sat up slowly—a few inches at a time—moved his legs, then his arms, then flexed his neck. No pain. Nothing broken. Lucky! He had been shocked by the fall, but the soft powder had saved him.

Sitting upright, he spat cold snow from his mouth and peered uphill, searching for his skis. Gone. Invisible. Maybe buried in the powder. But he had to be thankful that the bindings had released, modern ski technology saving him from broken ankles or worse.

Feeling shaky, he raised himself up a bit more and scanned the slope. He saw the skis where he had first taken the fall, a good hundred feet uphill, jammed into a mogul. As soon as he could breathe properly he would get up and trek up there and haul them out.

Then he noticed the woman, the one who had been resting by the aspen grove, skiing across the slope and weaving gracefully through the valleys between the high moguls. She disappeared from view for a moment. Dennis blinked as a chunk of snow dropped from his hair into his eyes.

When he had cleared his vision and looked again, the woman was swinging down gently toward him. An angel now, even more than woman: she had his two skis slung over one shoulder. She carried her poles in her other hand.

She skied smoothly down to where he sat in the torn-up snow, and came to a quiet halt by turning a little uphill.

“You all right?”

“I think I am,” Dennis said.

“Nothing broken?”

“Nothing I can feel.”

“Rest awhile,” the woman said. “Don’t get up yet.”

“Thank you. Thank you for everything.”

He wiped more snow from his forehead. His hair and beard were still fall of iced chunks of snow. The woman laid his skis between two moguls and then with a gloved hand scooped up more salvage: his prescription sunglasses. “Want me to clean these off for you?”

“That would be kind of you,” Dennis said.

“Hit a rock under the powder?”

“Wish I had that excuse. Felt like a leg cramp. I’m out of shape.” The woman laughed warmly. “You looked pretty good up there until you wiped out.”

“Not as good as you did coming down the bumps without poles.” She handed him his glasses, which she had cleaned with a handkerchief. Dennis slid them over his ears—the frames ice-cold on the bridge of his nose—got to his feet, and began slapping snow off his parka and ski pants.

He knew already by her voice and silhouette that she was more young than old. Her goggles shielded her eyes. Under them, he thought, she might be beautiful. Hard to tell. And it didn’t matter. He’d come to Colorado to ski, not to hunt for the other kind of adventure. For several years now he had been divorced, and his ex-wife was dead. He was raising two children by himself. That was involvement enough.

“I’m okay now,” he said. “I don’t want to hold you up. Are you skiing alone?”

“This run. I’m meeting my friends up at the Sundeck at noon. They don’t do the big moguls. You ready to try this again? I’ll go down with you if you want company.”

“I’d appreciate that. Let’s do it.” He knocked the snow off his boots and bindings and stepped into his skis.

She led the way, arms reaching out in easy rhythm with the poles. He could see she checked her speed now and then to accommodate him. By the time they had skied out of the Dumps and down Spar Gulch and had reached the groomed slope of Little Nell, which led to the base of Aspen Mountain, he felt fine again.

“You’re good,” he said, while they waited in line for the gondola.

“Well, I love it. I try to be good at what I love. Seems worth it.”

He marked that down in his mind as something to remember, but made no comment. Despite his bluff appearance and despite being a silver-tongued courtroom advocate when such need arose, Dennis was not immediately at ease with strangers. But he wanted to be a friendly man, and it was a fifteen-minute ride to the summit at more than 11,000 feet. Although each car of the gondola carried six persons, he and the woman who had saved his skis and glasses were alone, facing down-mountain. The red-roofed old mining town fell away from view as the whitecapped mountain range rose against the horizon.

The woman unzipped her black ski jacket, loosened her neck gaiter, and unsnapped the buckles on her ski boots. She took off her goggles and gloves. Her fingers were long and slender. She had clear, vibrant dark eyes, high cheekbones, a wide mouth. She wore hardly any makeup. What struck Dennis most was her sense of calm certainty.

“You’re not a tourist,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“Do you live here in town?”

“No. In Springhill.”

“Springhill… I’m not sure where that is.”

“On the back range. Gunnison County. Above the Crystal River Valley.”

“Near Marble?” Marble, he knew, was a hamlet far away in the high country.

“About six hundred feet above Marble.”

“That’s seriously high. And have you lived there a long time?”

“I was born there.”

Almost everyone who lived here had come from elsewhere; Aspen and the Roaring Fork Valley were a mecca not only for skiers and sybarites but for those in pursuit of the good life. At a party in Manhattan where a few people in a corner of the room were comparing ski destinations, Dennis had heard a social worker say, “Aspen? It’s just not fucking
real
out there.” Dennis, after a long year defending dope dealers and multimillionaire corporate thieves, had responded: “Three cheers for unreality.”

“I’m Dennis Conway,” he said to the woman in the gondola.

“Sophie Henderson.”

Her hand when he shook it was cool, the fingers surprisingly delicate. He judged her to be in her middle thirties, but he was aware that women were always a few years older than his first guess.

“If you don’t mind my prying, what do you do up there in 9,000-foot-high Springhill?”

“I teach science to the kids at school. And I’m the mayor.” When she saw his expression she shrugged. “No big deal. There were only three hundred fifty people in town the last time anyone bothered to count.”

“I’m still impressed. How far did you say Springhill is from here?”

“Fifteen miles from the back of Aspen Mountain and past the Maroon Bells, if you know a friendly eagle who’ll give you a lift.” Sophie Henderson’s laugh was deep, vibrant, so that Dennis felt its echo in his chest. “By road, over an hour.”

“You’ve come a long way to ski.”

“You flew for five hours, Mr. Conway, didn’t you?”

“If you include changing planes in Denver. How’d you know that?”

“I can hear New York. And probably Ivy League.”

“New York, but not the city,” he protested. “Not by birth, anyway.” He wanted to tell her what he was, and hide his sins. “I’m from Watkins Glen—a small town on a lake in upstate New York you never heard of. And you’re right, I went to Dartmouth, then Oxford for a year, a little detour in the military, and then Yale Law School. After that I decided to practice law in New York City for reasons that don’t seem as valid as they did back then. I’m widowed. Or widowered. I’m not sure which is right. I live in Connecticut with my two kids. A nutshell biography. Tells you all and nothing.”

“Well, we have widowhood in common,” Sophie Henderson said. “And although I missed Oxford on my grand tour of Europe, it may surprise you that I’ve been to Watkins Glen.”

“It doesn’t surprise me—it amazes me. How did that happen?”

“I went to Cornell. Chemistry major. Ithaca is pretty close to Watkins Glen.”

She tugged off her ski hat, and a torrent of reddish brown hair flowed over her parka. He sensed what it would feel like to clench that hair in his hand. His attitude toward her changed, increasing in tonal value. Something seized him: the effect of some scented cream holding memories of childhood, or the natural smell that rose from clean skin.

“My father’s a lawyer,” she said. “Retired, but I know the species firsthand. You remind me of him.”

“I hope you get on with him.”

Sophie Henderson said, “I adore him.”

At the top of Aspen Mountain they stepped from the gondola and clicked into the bindings of their skis. “Do you see your friends around?” Dennis asked.

She scanned the flats in front of the Sundeck restaurant, then pointed to people near Lift Three who were waving at her. She poled over; Dennis followed. A minute later she introduced him to a blonde woman in her middle thirties and a man of about the same age; an older man with silver hair, gray beard and lively brown eyes; and a younger man, dark-haired and powerfully built. The latter offered Dennis only a surly nod. This might be Sophie’s lover, Dennis thought.

He caught only the first names: Jane, Hank, Edward, Oliver. They talked among themselves for a minute—they were all from Springhill, he realized. Adjusting goggles and boot buckles, they faced down the mountain.

“Which run?”

“Dipsy Doodle?”