The Poet (3 page)

After the funeral I took two weeks of vacation and the one week of bereavement leave the paper allowed and drove by myself up into the Rockies. The mountains have never lost their glory for me. It’s mountains where I heal the fastest.

Headed west on the 70, I drove through the Loveland Pass and over the peaks to Grand Junction. I did it slowly, taking three days. I stopped to ski; sometimes I just stopped on the turnouts to think. After Grand Junction I diverted south and made it to Telluride the next day. I kept the Cherokee in four-wheel drive the whole way. I stayed in Silverton because the rooms were cheaper and skied every day for a week. I spent the nights drinking Jagermeister in my room or near the fireplace of whatever ski lodge I stopped in. I tried to exhaust my body with the hope that my mind would follow. But I couldn’t succeed. It was all Sean. Out of space. Out of time. His last message was a riddle my mind could not put aside.

For some reason my brother’s noble calling had betrayed him. It had killed him. The grief that this simple conclusion brought me would not ebb, even when I was gliding down the slopes, the wind cutting in behind my sunglasses and pulling tears from my eyes.

I no longer questioned the official conclusion but it had not been Wexler and St. Louis who had convinced me. I did that on my own. It was the erosion of my resolve by time and by facts. As each day went by, the horror of what he had done was somehow easier to believe and even accept. And then there was Riley. On the day after that first night she had told me something that even Wexler and St. Louis hadn’t known yet. Sean had been going once a week to see a psychologist. Of course, there were counseling services available to him through the department, but he had chosen this secret path because he didn’t want his position to be undermined by rumors.

I came to realize he was seeing the therapist at the same time I went to him wanting to write about Lofton. I thought maybe he was trying to spare me the same anguish that the case had brought him. I liked the thought that that was what he was doing and I tried to hold on to that idea during those days up in the mountains.

In front of the hotel room mirror one night after too many drinks, I contemplated shaving my beard off and cutting my hair short like Sean’s had been. We were identical twins-same hazel eyes, light brown hair, lanky build-but not many people realized that. We had always gone to great lengths to forge separate identities. Sean wore contacts and pumped iron to put muscle on his frame. I wore glasses, had had a beard since college, and hadn’t picked up the weights since high school basketball. I also had the scar from that woman’s ring in Breckenridge. My battle scar.

Sean went into the service after high school and then the cops, keeping the crew cut as he went. He later got a CU degree while going part-time. He needed it to get ahead in the department. I bummed around for a couple of years, lived in New York and Paris, and then went the full-time college route. I wanted to be a writer, ended up in the newspaper business. In the back of my mind I told myself it was just a temporary stop. I’d been telling myself that for ten years now, maybe longer.

That night in the hotel room, I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time but I didn’t shave off my beard or cut my hair. I kept thinking about Sean under the frozen ground and I had a crushed feeling in my stomach. I decided that when my time came I wanted to be burned. I didn’t want to be down there under the ice.

What hooked me deepest was the message. The official police line was this: After my brother left the Stanley Hotel and drove up through Estes Park to Bear Lake, he parked his department car and for a while left the engine running, the heat on. When the heat had fogged the windshield he reached up and wrote his message there with a gloved finger. He wrote it backward so you could read it from outside the car. His last words to a world that included two parents, a wife and a twin brother.

Out of space. Out of time.

I couldn’t understand. Time for what? Space for what? He had come to some desperate conclusion, yet he never tested us on it. He had not reached out to me, nor to my parents or Riley. Was it up to us to reach for him, not even knowing of his secret injuries? In my solitude on the road, I concluded that it was not. He should have reached. He should have tried. By not doing so he had robbed us of the chance to rescue him. And in not doing so he had left us unable to be rescued from our own grief and guilt. I realized that much of my grief was actually anger. I was mad at him, my twin, for what he had done to me.

But it’s hard to hold a grudge against the dead. I couldn’t stay angry with Sean. And the only way to alleviate the anger was to doubt the story. And so the cycle would begin again. Denial, acceptance, anger. Denial, acceptance, anger.

On my last day in Telluride I called Wexler. I could tell he didn’t like hearing from me.

“Did you find the informant, the one from the Stanley?”

“No, Jack, no luck. I told you I’d let you know about that.”

“I know. I just still have questions. Don’t you?”

“Let it go, Jack. We’ll all be better off when we can put this behind us.”

“What about SIU? They already put it behind? Case closed?”

“Pretty much. I haven’t talked to them this week.”

“Then why are you still trying to find the informant?”

“I’ve got questions, just like you. Just loose ends.”

“You changed your mind about Sean?”

“No. I just want to put everything in order. I’d like to know what he talked about with the informant, if they even talked. The Lofton case is still open, you know. I wouldn’t mind nailing that one for Sean.”

I noticed he was no longer calling him Mac. Sean had left the clique.

The following Monday I went back to work at the Rocky Mountain News. As I entered the newsroom I felt several eyes upon me. But this was not unusual. I often thought they watched me when I came in. I had a gig every reporter in the newsroom wanted. No daily grind, no daily deadlines. I was free to roam the entire Rocky Mountain region and write about one thing. Murder. Everybody likes a good murder story. Some weeks I’d take apart a shooting in the projects, telling the tale of the shooter and the victim and their fateful collision. Some weeks I’d write about a society murder out in Cherry Hills or a bar shooting in Leadville. Highbrow and lowbrow, little murder and big murder. My brother was right, it sold papers if you told it right. And I got to tell it. I got to take my time and tell it right.

Stacked on my desk next to the computer was a foot-high pile of newspapers. This was my main source material for stories. I subscribed to every daily, weekly and monthly newspaper published from Pueblo north to Bozeman. I scoured these for small stories on killings that I could turn into long take outs. There were always a lot to choose from. The Rocky Mountain Empire had a violent streak that had been there since the gold rush. Not as much violence as Los Angeles or Miami or New York, not even close. But I was never short of source material. I was always looking for something new or different about the crime or the investigation, an element of gee whiz or a heart-tugging sadness. It was my job to exploit those elements.

But on this morning I wasn’t looking for a story idea. I began looking through the stack for back issues of the Rocky and our competition, the Post. Suicides are not normal fare for newspapers unless there are unusual circumstances. My brother’s death qualified. I thought there was a good chance there had been a story.

I was right. Though the Rocky had not published a story, probably in deference to me, the Post had run a six-inch story on the bottom of one of the local pages the morning after Sean died.

DPD INVESTIGATOR TAKES LIFE IN NATIONAL PARK

A veteran Denver Police detective who was in charge of the investigation into the slaying of University of Denver student Theresa Lofton was found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound Thursday in the Rocky Mountain National Park, officials said.

Sean McEvoy, 34, was found in his unmarked DPD car, which was parked in a lot at Bear Lake near the Estes Park entrance to the rugged mountain park.

The body of the detective was discovered by a park ranger who heard a shot about 5 P.M. and went to the parking lot to investigate.

Park service officials have asked the DPD to investigate the death and the department’s Special Investigations Unit is handling the matter. Detective Robert Scalari, who is heading the investigation, said preliminary indications were that the death was a suicide.

Scalari said a note was found at the scene but he refused to disclose its contents. He said it was believed that McEvoy was despondent over job difficulties, but also refused to discuss what problems he was having.

McEvoy, who grew up and still lived in Boulder, was married but had no children. He was a twelve-year veteran of the police department who rose quickly through the ranks to an assignment on the Crimes Against Persons unit, which handles investigations of all violent crimes in the city.

McEvoy was currently head of the unit and had most recently directed the investigation into the death of Lofton, 19, who was found strangled and mutilated three months ago in Washington Park.

Scalari refused to comment on whether the Lofton case, which remains unsolved, was cited in McEvoy’s note or was one of the job difficulties he may have been suffering.

Scalari said it wasn’t known why McEvoy went to Estes Park before killing himself. He said the investigation of the death is continuing.

I read the story twice. It contained nothing that I didn’t already know but it held a strange fascination for me. Maybe that was because I believed I knew or had the beginnings of an idea why Sean had gone to Estes Park and driven all the way up to Bear Lake. It was a reason I didn’t want to think about, though. I clipped the article, put it in a manila file and slid it into a desk drawer.

My computer beeped and a message printed across the top of the screen. It was a summons from the city editor. I was back at work.

Greg Glenn’s office was at the back of the newsroom. One wall was glass, enabling him to look out across the rows of pods where the reporters worked and through the windows along the west wall to the mountain line when it wasn’t hidden by smog.

Glenn was a good editor who prized a good read more than anything else about a story. That’s what I liked about him. In this business editors are of two schools. Some like facts and cram them into a story until it is so overburdened that practically no one will read it to the end. And some like words and never let the facts get in the way. Glenn liked me because I could write and he pretty much let me choose what I wrote about. He never hustled me for copy and never badly dinged up what I turned in. I had long realized that should he ever leave the paper or be demoted or promoted out of the newsroom, all of this most likely would change. City editors made their own nests. If he were gone, I’d probably find myself back on the daily cop beat, writing briefs off the police log. Doing little murders.

I sat down in the cushioned seat in front of his desk as he finished up a phone call. Glenn was about five years older than me. When I’d first started at the Rocky ten years earlier, he was one of the hot shot writers like I was now. But eventually he made the move into management. Now he wore a suit every day, had one of those little statues on his desk of a Bronco football player with a bobbing head, spent more time on the phone than on any other activity in his life and always paid careful attention to the political winds blowing out of the corporate home office in Cincinnati. He was a forty-year-old guy with a paunch, a wife, two kids and a good salary that wasn’t good enough to buy a house in the neighborhood his wife wanted to live in. He told me all of this once over a beer at the Wynkoop, the only night I’d seen him out in the past four years.

Tacked across one wall of Glenn’s office were the last seven days of front pages. Each day, the first thing he did was take the seven-day-old edition down and tack up the latest front page. I guess he did this to keep track of the news and the continuity of our coverage. Or maybe, because he never got bylines as a writer anymore, putting the pages up was a way of reminding himself that he was in charge. Glenn hung up and looked up at me.

“Thanks for coming in,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you again that I’m sorry about your brother. And if you feel like you want some more time, it’s no problem. We’ll work something out.”

“Thanks. But I’m back.”

He nodded but made no move to dismiss me. I knew there was something more to the summons.

“Well, to business then. Do you have anything going at the moment? As far as I remember, you were looking for your next project when … when it happened. I figure if you are back, then maybe it would be good for you to get busy with something. You know, dive back in.”

It was in that moment that I knew what I would do next. Oh, it had been there all right. But it hadn’t come to the surface, not until Glenn asked that question. Then, of course, it was obvious.

“I’m going to write about my brother,” I said.

I don’t know if that was what Glenn was hoping I would say, but I think it was. I think he had had his eye on a story ever since he’d heard the cops had met me down in the lobby and told me what my brother had done. He was probably smart enough to know he didn’t have to suggest the story, that it would come to me on its own. He just had to ask the simple question.