Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller (3 page)

“Then Bonnie’s for lunch.”

Dennis asked, “Mind if I ski with you?”

The younger man scowled, but the three others looked immediately toward Sophie Henderson. Her eyes wavered.

Edward, the man with silver hair, turned to Dennis and spoke decisively. “By all means, do. Maybe you can keep up with Sophie.”

“He can,” Sophie said.

Dennis’s parents, academics, were simple people living in a small town. Even in his late teens and early twenties their son’s ambition had been to be like them: honorable, moral, and honest. Quite a few years later an opposing prosecutor said of him, “Dennis will whip your ass a hundred different ways in court, but he’s a decent man.” That prosecutor, Mickey Karp, at first had been Dennis’s fellow apprentice at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, when both young men had moved to the city from the provinces: Dennis from Watkins Glen, Mickey from North Carolina. Their common passion was skiing, and in four successive winters they traveled together, first north to Sugar- bush and Killington, then west to Tahoe and Aspen. After the last trip Mickey said, “I’ve had enough of the city. Colorado’s for me.” He had found another lawyer recently moved West from Chicago, and together they opened a practice in Aspen.

Dennis’s other Aspen pal was Josh Gamble, the six-foot-six-inch, 270-seventy-pound elected sheriff of Pitkin County, where Aspen was the county seat. Dennis had roomed with him at Dartmouth. Josh Gamble had slipped loose from a brokerage firm in Philadelphia eighteen years ago to be a ski bum, but even ski bums had to eat. He drove a bus for the Roaring Fork Transit Authority, then signed up to become a traffic control officer, chalking tires. It was an easy step to the raise in pay that went with the job of deputy sheriff. They gave him a gun; he put it on his night table and stared at it for a week before he ever opened the cylinder. He became patrol director and a year later ran successfully for sheriff. He didn’t like to lock people up and never hired anyone as a deputy who he suspected really wanted to be a cop.

“Anyone gets a wet spot in his jeans when he thinks of carrying a weapon and arresting somebody,” Josh Gamble told Dennis, “I won’t hire.”

“Then who works for you?”

“People I like. Ain’t that the point?”

Maybe it was, Dennis reflected. Most of the people he worked with, he realized unhappily, he didn’t like.

On this most recent trip, over breakfast one morning at the Main Street Bakery, Josh said, “The way I see it, Denny boy, you’re fed up with life back in the Big Rotten Apple. You got pollution, traffic, crowds, mayhem, designer drugs, fifteen-year-olds of all shades packing Saturday Night Specials. That’s a hell of a world, and the burbs are part of it, man. Why don’t you quit while you’re young enough? Move out West, where kids are still kids, men are men, and women do the shopping.”

Dennis squeezed his friend’s beefy shoulder. “Because I’m a criminal lawyer. Who would I defend here? You don’t have a criminal class. People have space, they’re not hemmed in by a ghetto or high-rises, they’re not pissed off at the world. Plenty of them are poor but they don’t seem to give a rat’s ass as long as they can ski in winter and hike in summer. It’s close to being a crime-free valley. How could I make a living?”

“Got a rise in ski thefts this season,” the sheriff said thoughtfully. “Fraud by check is known to happen. Cocaine’s coming into the valley big-time. Mexican road workers get drunk on Saturday night. Domestic violence is also a solid growth industry. You could find work. I don’t know about fees, but work, yes.”

When Dennis paid the check the sheriff didn’t protest. “I’ll think about it,” the lawyer said. “Meanwhile, I’m off for the mountain. You stay down here and defend the community against fraud by check.” That was the day he wiped out on the Dumps and Sophie Henderson dug his skis out of the snow.

They ate soup and salad together midmountain on the deck at Bonnie’s Restaurant. It was a cloudless February day, warm enough for a few hardy skiers to strip down to T-shirts. Dennis discovered that Hank Lovell, among Sophie’s companions, was the CEO of a marble quarry in Springhill. His wife, Jane, was a dental technician who worked for the older man, Edward Brophy, the town dentist. “If anyone develops a toothache today,” Edward explained, “they’ll have to find a bottle of brandy. I’m the only game in town.”

The other man, Oliver Cone, was Edward’s nephew. He was a shift foreman at the Springhill marble quarry. He still glowered at Dennis and had almost nothing to say.

By the end of the afternoon Dennis felt the first inchoate stirrings of that borderline psychotic state called falling-in-love. He forced himself to stay calm.
Do I need this?
he asked himself.
Do I want it?
More to the point:
Can I help it?
He was able to formulate the questions but unable to provide answers. When he and Sophie were leaning on their ski poles at Lift Three, waiting for the others to catch up, he said, “You’re widowed, is that what you said?”

“He died in an avalanche five years ago.”

“And Oliver?”

“Oliver is Edward’s nephew, and Edward is a dear friend of mine. Oliver’s not as unpleasant as he seems. And he’s unusually bright— he’s just a little shy about showing it.”

“That’s not really what I was asking,” Dennis admitted. “Are you and Oliver—?” He let the sentence hang there; he knew she understood his meaning.

“No,” Sophie said.

Dennis asked her to have dinner with him that evening.

“I can’t. Town Council and Water Board meeting. Springhill is a corporation. We have a home rule charter—we vote a lot of our own taxes for roads, education, stuff like that. Nothing earth-shaking going on right now, but the mayor chairs the council. I have to be there.”

“Tomorrow evening?”

Sophie bit her lip. She was thinking about it hard, and he wondered why. If not Oliver Cone, then another man in her life; it had to be. He felt gloomy for a moment.

But she said finally, in a strangely formal way, “Yes, if you’d like it, I’ll have dinner with you tomorrow evening.”

In the high-speed quad chair on the lift, after Dennis had said goodbye and skied off, Edward Brophy remarked to Sophie, “I like that lawyer fellow. He’s no jeekus. He’s intelligent and he’s cheerful. Seems to me that he keeps something in reserve. Not out to charm you or bowl you over. And he’s a ree bahl skier.”

She nodded and tossed her dark red hair. “He asked me out to dinner tomorrow evening.”

“I thought he would, if you gave him a chance.”

“I must have done that.”

“And what did you say?”

“I couldn’t think of an excuse. I said yes. But I’ve decided to break the date.”

“Just because he’s a skibtail?”

A skibtail, in the Springling lingo, was a stranger. Frowning, Sophie said, “You don’t think that’s a good enough reason?”

The dentist smiled affectionately. “You seemed to be getting on so well.” When Sophie frowned again, Edward raised his palm. “He asked you for a dinner date. It’s not the rest of your life. Take a chance, Sophie. Enjoy your time on this earth. So he’s a skibtail. I’ve looked around at home, and I’m sure you have too. You’ve turned down my bad-tempered nephew, for which I can’t quite blame you. Who else that’s decent is available?”

At the top of the lift she vaulted off the chair, planted her poles, kicked into a turn, and thrust herself alone down the mountain toward the long run of Copper Bowl.

Driving home later, she could not as easily thrust Dennis Conway from her mind. Craggy, a little rough-edged for a city fellow … doesn’t trim his beard too well. My type, no doubt of it. A successful lawyer, she imagined, with that same confident air her father had always had. She liked the way he’d reacted to her helping him when he took the tumble on the mountain. He hadn’t been embarrassed, hadn’t done any macho things afterward. In the gondola he’d listened when she spoke, seeming to digest her words and thoughts rather than merely waiting for his chance to sound off.

Maybe it was an act. A good con job. A city slicker. A skibtail; not one of us. That hardly ever worked out.

But Sophie was moved by him, stirred at a level that she could deal with only in her heart, not her head, and she decided to take the risk.

Chapter 2
Mystery of a Dead Dog

QUEENIE O’HARE WORE more than one hat. She was a Pitkin County deputy sheriff as well as one of five community safety officers working for the city of Aspen. And also at the moment, on this morning shift, she was supervising animal control officer.

She worked at a functional desk in a room with four other functional desks in the basement of the Pitkin County Courthouse. On the wall above the desk she had tacked two signs that said, “Wage peace” and “Be optimistic, even in the face of reality.” Flanking them were photographs of her spayed tabby cat and her two dogs, a Rottweiler and a black-and-white Jack Russell terrier. Queenie was thirty- five, unmarried and childless, but she had her little menagerie to keep her company and get her through the cold winter nights.

It was early November, elk-hunting season, and two burly men confronted her. The men smelled as if they hadn’t washed in several days, so Queenie O’Hare kept her distance from them. They wore camouflage jackets, mud-stained trail boots and orange caps. They had called first from the Texaco station but had had the sense to leave their deer rifles in the Ford pickup parked on Main Street opposite the courthouse.

“Ma’am, I’m Fred Clark,” the older of the two said. “And this is my brother Harold.” He explained that he and Harold had been camped up near Pearl Pass. Yesterday morning they’d come across a dead dog.

“This coyote was chewin’ at it,” Fred said, “and we run him off. We figured he’d dug the dog up where it was buried, ‘cause it was wrapped in a down sleeping bag.”

“The dog, not the coyote.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Coffee?”

“Kind of you, ma’am.”

In their early thirties, the brothers lived downvalley in a trailer park near El Jebel, where they worked on the construction of a new mall. They still had the broad drawl and country manners of rural Tennessee. Queenie didn’t feel it would be appropriate to squeeze two big men into the little space between her desk and the desk of the duty sergeant. So she chose the conference room. The hunters doffed their caps and sat down at the conference table while Queenie poured from the Silex.

Queenie’s father had been a longshoreman who had emigrated to the Roaring Fork Valley from Houston. She knew how to talk to Southerners and good ole boys. “You get your buck, Mr. Clark?”

Fred Clark smiled, revealing a missing front tooth in a jagged ocher row. “Yes, ma’am. A nine-point. Harold here got a ten. They’re out there in the truck on Main Street.”

“And the dead dog? He’s in the truck too?”

Fred Clark lowered his eyes slightly. “No, ma’am, we didn’t bring him in with us. He was pretty rotten.”

And so are you after three days in the high country without a bathtub or a bar of soap, Queenie thought.

“This dog was shot?”

“Quartering shot, heart and lungs. But not by a rifle. By an arrow, ma’am.”

“You could tell?”

“A bullet cuts one kind of hole into an animal. An arrow cuts another kind. Bigger ‘n’ wider. Not so deep.”

“Did you bring the arrow back with you?”

“It wasn’t there.”

Queenie thought that over. “What kind of dog is it?”

“Big. A male. Not a kind I ever seen. No ID tag and no collar.”

“If I show you a map, do you think you can point out about where you found this dead dog you think was shot by an arrow and was cozied up in a down sleeping bag?”

In her mind’s eye, after she had dealt with the tunneling four-tiered wound that a modern steel arrow would make through a canine heart and lungs, she pictured the topography of the Elk Mountain Range. The area described by the Clark brothers struck her as being on the border of Pitkin County and Gunnison County. If it was on the Gunnison County side, she would call her counterparts at the Gunnison County Courthouse and let them deal with the problem.

Queenie led the brothers to a large topographic wall map in the next room. Fred studied it for a while, then pointed with a blackened fingernail. “ ‘Bout cheer—’cause we could look over at the Maroon Bells to the south. And Pearl Pass was a few miles that way, to the north.”

“ ‘Bout cheer” was in Pitkin County. An arrow to kill a dog. Queenie wondered why. “Can you give me a more detailed description of the animal?”

With his other hand, from the pocket of his hunting jacket Fred Clark took out a little yellow-and-black box. Queenie realized it was a throwaway fixed-focus Kodak camera, the kind that sold at Wal-Mart for $9.95.

“Harold took pitchers of the bucks we shot. Took a couple pitchers of that dog too.”

He had moved a little closer to her, bearing the gift of the camera, and Queenie inhaled the three-day-old aroma coming from the depths of his thick woolen lumberjack shirt. She backed off a step.

“Mr. Clark, if y’all see your way clear to leaving that camera with me, I’ll get the roll of film developed. You give me your address in El Jebel, I’ll put the prints and negatives in tomorrow’s mail. The county will pay for the processing. “

Queenie thumbed through the file on missing dogs, but all she could come up with was a Labrador in heat that had run away from a famous actor’s home on Smuggler Street in the West End. She was wondering if the dead dog had been killed legally, while molesting human beings or wildlife, or illegally, for the hell of it, in which case whoever did it would be liable for prosecution under the state cruelty-to-animals statute. Or maybe it was an old dog or a sick dog and the owner had taken it up there to put it out of its misery. It wasn’t illegal to bury a dog on public land in the high country.

But then Queenie decided that if
she
were going to put her sick or suffering old dog out of its misery, she’d have a vet inject it. And if she were a hunter and had hiked up to Pearl Pass with poor old Fido on his last legs, she might shoot him in the head with a pistol, but she didn’t think she’d take what amounted to target practice with a bow and arrow.