The Royal Wulff Murders (4 page)

“T
here you are,” he said, speaking around the stem of his own meerschaum pipe. The trout walloped on the surface, heavy sounding, then swung in an arc far downstream. There was nothing showy about this one—it exhibited none of the frantic antics of the first fish. For perhaps five minutes the trout bulled stubbornly before surrendering ground, a few feet at a time, to the pressure of the graphite rod. It wavered, thick-shouldered, in the thin water near the bank. Sean reached down but the trout fought back into the current, exhausting
the fathoms of its heart. When it swung back in, he reached under its belly and lifted.

It was a brown trout, heavily muscled, with a sprinkling of dime-sized blue and crimson circles on its sides. An old male, the fish had a jutting lower jaw and curved teeth that brought blood from Stranahan’s fingers as he backed the hook out. When it was free, the brown settled to the bottom in a foot of water, its gills flaring as it regained strength. Watching it, Stranahan sat down on the bank. Twenty inches, he thought. Maybe better. Twilight was an amber smear on the horizon; the river glittered in the slanted light. In a few minutes the polish would fade from the surface, the current’s mercurial song would slide into bass notes, and the wild night would claim it against further human intrusion.

He said, “You’d have liked this place, Pop.”

CHAPTER FOUR

T
he Cottonwood Inn, with its spacious dance hall, Polynesian-mahogany ceiling beams, and high-arched windows, had been, in its earliest incarnation, a terminus station on the southernmost spur of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway. It was a place where women carrying parasols against the sun disembarked with their banker husbands for stagecoach rides that would take them one hundred miles up the Gallatin Canyon into recently designated Yellowstone National Park. Built at the edge of wilderness in the 1920s, the inn was a place where you could get a meal, a room, and a whore for a sawbuck.

When Sean Stranahan walked through its double patio doors on his way back from fishing, it was a place where ten dollars bought you a beer with a whiskey chaser. It also offered, Thursday through Saturday nights, a couple dozen songs from one of the artists who made the Northern Rockies circuit. As the inn stood opposite the cultural center, Stranahan had made it a habit to stop in most nights for a Moose Drool Ale. He was a little sheepish about liking the place. It was, after all, a yuppie enclave in cattle country, but one could reasonably argue that the cowboy bars fronting Main Street were no more authentic, not with ceiling-hung TVs tuned to ESPN and electronic poker machines drowning out the jukebox.

Besides, the Cottonwood Inn had Doris Sizemore, a broad, beaming ranch woman who had raised eight children with a string-bean husband who wore overalls every day she had known him before he
wasted away from lung cancer—this being Marlboro country literally. She took orders with a pencil stuck in abundantly curled hair, barked them back to the kitchen, and had a wink and smile for everyone. Regulars like Stranahan she made a point to sit down with once in a while. She was a good listener who made people open up by praising them to kingdom come and then talking a blue streak until they’d become as exasperated with her as they were with their own mothers. Doris was the only person west of the Charles River who knew about Stranahan’s divorce, the deaths of his parents, even his sleeping quarters in 226A across the creek. She called him Stranny, which his mother had called him as a child to avoid confusion, because his father was also named Sean. He had hated the name, then came to like it once nobody called him that anymore.

“Who’s singing?” Stranahan asked when Doris brought him the Missoula brew in a long-necked bottle.

“You haven’t seen her?”

Stranahan gestured at the stage, where a microphone was cocked over a battered piano. “On break when I came in.”

Doris clucked, giving him her mother hen look of disapproval.

“I wouldn’t know her real name, but she calls herself—get ready for this—Miss Velvet Lafayette. She’s a cupcake, though, if you like red lipstick and a long-legged woman. And she’s a good singer. Suspiciously good, if you ask me.”

She pinched her lips. “A God-fearing woman like myself has a nose for her kind. I could sum her up in one word.” She waited a beat. “Trouble. T-R-O-U-B-L-E.”

“I was just asking,” Stranahan said.

She looked sideways at him. “A man is never just asking. Especially one lonely as you are, Stranny.”

He rolled his eyes as Doris bustled away. It was just like her to make something of nothing… of a woman he had never even seen. Hell,
walking in the door, he figured the talent would be a hippie with a six-string and a songbook of mountain treacle. But he kept his eyes on the stage as he took a pull from the bottle. Something nagged at his brain, an association he had tried to make earlier. But before he could resolve it there was a rustle of silk and a woman brushed his elbow as she walked to the stage, weaving with leonine grace between the tables. She trailed a scent like oranges.

“Thank you,” the woman said to the scattered applause.

A wolf whistle pierced the room. Stranahan didn’t have to turn around to identify the maker. It was Phil Halverson, an unshaven logger who had one of those pinched faces typically associated with cousin kissing and hog calling, and whose deep-set eyes were as black as a coon’s under his grungy hat with a McCulloch Chain Saw logo. Everybody called him Punxsutawney Phil, after the famous groundhog, because he began every conversation by telling you whether he’d seen his shadow that morning. If he had, then it was going to be a bad day. With the town of Bridger being on the east or sunny side of the Continental Divide, Phil had a lot of bad days.

“Ah, crawl back into your hole, Phil,” Doris said in a booming voice, and there was another scattering of applause.

“And I thank you, too,” Miss Lafayette said as she took her seat at the piano and spread her fingers against the keys, “even if some women don’t hold that kind of Cro-Magnon appreciation in high esteem. Back in Mississippi—that’s M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I, something every schoolchild knows how to spell by the time he’s knee-high to a sunflower—romance isn’t always ‘May I have this dance, ma’am.’ Sometimes it’s a whistle from the kudzu. Sometimes it’s just a look, you know, under a willow tree at a picnic on the bayou. And sometimes, even if you don’t want it to happen at all, it happens just the same; it happens just like this.”

She dropped her head over the piano.

Falling in love again

Never wanted to

What am I to do?

Can’t help it.

She had a husky contralto voice that painted each note with a smooth, sweeping brushstroke while letting the song stand by itself. Stranahan thought her a little theatrical in her gestures, but the voice was like her name, with none of the hysterical palpitations that pop diva vocalists used to turn singing into a gymnastic event bordering on orgasm.

Men cluster to me like moths around a flame

And if their wings burn, I know I’m not to blame

Falling in love again

Never wanted to

What am I to do?

Can’t help it.

She wore a black sleeveless dress with a floral appliqué of hibiscus that clung like crimson fingers to her right hip and wrapped around the bodice to flower over her left breast. Her auburn locks draped in loose waves across her shoulders; between stanzas, while her fingers rippled over the piano keys in jazz counterpoint, she closed her eyes and tilted her chin so that her hair fell in a waterfall down her back.

And the songs were real songs: “Wayfaring Stranger,” “But Not for Me,” “The Nearness of You.”

Stranahan sipped his beer and let her voice wash over him. He scarcely acknowledged Doris when she took the empty chair next to him as the set was coming to an end.

Velvet Lafayette bowed her head as the applause sounded. She waited until it had completely died before opening her eyes and smiling.

“That’s very kind of you. I’ll be playing here the next couple of nights, so make sure you tell your friends. Y’all have a good night, now.” She stepped off the stage, bowed slightly to exchange some pleasantry with a young couple at a front table, and then walked directly toward Stranahan. She looked to pass him, then caught his eye. She said, “I certainly hope you figured out where it was you were going this afternoon. A man ought not get too lost, lest someday he can’t find his way back.”

“Thank you for your concern,” Stranahan said gravely.

She flashed a smile and Stranahan followed her with his eyes as she climbed the coil of the stairway toward the guest rooms on the upper floor.

He turned to find Doris staring at him.

“Now Doris…” he began.

“I’m ‘ought not’ going to say a single word,” Doris said.

CHAPTER FIVE

S
tanding on the inn’s veranda, Stranahan looked toward the peaks in the Gallatin range, midnight blue under a silver moon. He had noticed a flyer advertising Miss Velvet Lafayette, Queen of Hearts—A Riverboat Song Stylist and Jazz Pianist from the Mississippi Delta, taped to the door on his way out. The picture showed a younger version of the singer standing in front of the paddle wheel of a gambling boat, holding a playing card—the queen of hearts—over her breast. He must have seen the flyer earlier. Thay was why she had seemed familiar when he had passed her on the street.

He could not deny the attraction he felt toward her, even if he told himself he was just a sucker for a Southern accent. Or maybe Doris had it right. Certainly he had been lonely enough the past few weeks. But there was an undercurrent of tension that had passed between them, the spark that had been missing from his marriage almost from its beginning.

Sean took a drink from his bottle of beer and sat down on a wrought-iron bench. He wasn’t thinking now of Velvet Lafayette, or of Beth, but of a woman he had met in Boston a year after he left his grandfather’s law firm. The woman, Katherine O’Reilly, had hired him to find evidence of her husband’s affair, which he had accomplished by the simple expedient of waiting outside the man’s office building, identifying him by a photograph, and then following him to the Park Plaza Hotel near the Public Garden. He had watched the man punch the
elevator button for the sixth floor, evidently having arranged a room earlier. Sean waited until he was out of sight and followed suit. Stepping out of the iron cage into the long hall, he hung around, looking purposefully at nothing, until a woman with sharp facial features and hair that matched the color of her camel hair coat stepped out of the elevator, knocked on the door of room 605, and was let in. He caught only a snatch of conversation, but the name “John” registered as the door shut. Stranahan caught the elevator down and phoned Mrs. O’Reilly from the lobby; she said she’d be there in fifteen minutes.

“I’m not going to cry,” she said when she met him on the hotel steps, although her hands trembled as she rummaged distractedly through her purse. Katherine O’Reilly was a handsome brunette in her midforties whose hazel eyes were a little too bright, betraying the emotion that her voice tried to cover up. She asked Stranahan for something to write on. He produced an envelope. After some more rummaging, she took a magenta lipstick from her purse and scrawled two words:
IT’S OVER, K.

“That isn’t too dramatic, is it,” she said to Stranahan, but it had not been a question, and she held up a hand when he attempted to follow her into the elevator. A few minutes later she was back down.

“I didn’t make a scene. I stuck it in the door,” she said. She looked directly at Stranahan. “The Copley Square is right around the corner. I’m going to get a drink at the bar. Are you coming?”

He went with her out into a light winter rain and, after the Scotch—drunk in dead silence—stood awkwardly beside her in the elevator of Boston’s oldest hotel. She looked at him intently, as if scrutinizing his face for sincerity. In the room, she stopped his hand when he reached for the light switch.

“No lights.” She kissed the rain off his face. And what started then as an act of retribution softened into a genuine regard and tenderness that seemed apart from the crisis that had led to the hotel and surprised them both.

“I want you to know,” she told him sometime that night, “that this wasn’t an eye for an eye. I’m not leaving him because he had an affair… again.” She laughed sadly to herself. “Men are men. No, I’m leaving because there’s nothing to say. We slide by each other like ghosts. Why is it we always fall in love with the wrong people? Answer me that.”

When he began to murmur, she said, “No, don’t answer.” She placed two fingers over his lips. “Sshh. Just hold me awhile.”

But he wasn’t able to sleep. When the wash of dawn suffused the room, Sean eased open the drawer of the night table and removed a few sheets of hotel stationery, then took a soft lead pencil from his jacket pocket. Throwing a hotel bathrobe across his shoulders, he sat down in a chair facing the bed and sketched Katherine O’Reilly as she lay on her side with the sheet drawn across her waist. He found her face beautiful in repose, as relaxed as a child’s face, the corners of her mouth twitching into smiles at some unknown dream.

She awakened before he finished, and, seeing him sitting there, she walked naked behind the chair and bent down so that her chin rested on his left shoulder and her hair cascaded over his chest. For several minutes she watched intently as he filled in shadows with deft strokes of the pencil. Then she softly kissed his neck and whispered, “What are you doing in this dreary town? You should be following your dreams, wherever they take you. Start your life over, like I am.”

Enveloped by her scent, Stranahan closed his eyes and let out his breath. It was like breaching a dam, and for the first time in what seemed like forever, he found himself thinking out loud with a fellow human. In the afternoon, Stranahan drove her to the furnished barn he rented behind a two-century-old farmhouse in Milton. In the loft he opened the old steamer trunk where he kept his watercolors and let her praise flow over him like warm water. She refused to accept the sketch he had made of her, assuring him that age had drained her
of narcissism, and besides, who could she ever show it to? No, you keep it, she said, it will remind you where you were and who you were with when you followed your heart.