I remember having asked him why he even bothered applying nail polish.
“It protects my nails,” he said, bending his hands to show his one-week old manicure. “Without those two layers, my hands would look pretty trashed. And only shellac will take this kind of abuse, too. My patients find trashed hands disconcerting.” And, truly, one week and three climbing sessions later, his nails looked only a bit scratched up. That was Chico for you, though. He cared about that kind of a thing.
I told them to sit down and set the plastic bag with Celia’s climbing gear in the middle of our little circle. They all settled down and listened until I was finished with the story.
“So, the timeline looks like this,” I summarized. “She was climbing as a semipro and picked up a part-time job doing accounting for Provoid Brothers. She was okay for maybe half a year. Then all the media started to notice the discrepancies in Provoid Brothers’ stock valuation. Somebody from inside the company leaked some information, which pointed to Provoid Brothers’ being just a house of cards—financially speaking—and they were hiding it using fraudulent accounting and reporting practices. Three weeks after this, Risby Haus, the VP of Collections, took Celia out on their first date. According to Jack, they got along pretty well, and Celia started to teach Risby rock climbing. All the while not realizing that he is in fact a top-notch, world-class climbing legend who just happens to hide behind his pseudonym, Demon of Santa Teresa.”
Tim Nolan, who worked for a regional newspaper, drew a sharp inhale. “Yeah, a guy like that has no business making any mistakes while checking her fall.”
I took her gear out piece by piece. I examined each component and passed it to Reyna, who passed it to Chico, who passed it to Tim.
We found nothing wrong with her harness. Its nylon webbing was strong and its buckles were fully functional. The carabiners looked okay—they were simple, oval devices made to screw shut and stay that way. The rope was slightly worn, its sinuous, green coil sitting snakelike in our midst. This very line slipped through Risby Haus’s belay device, allowing Celia to fall to her death. Next came two belay devices: a yellow GriGri 2, used by Risby to belay Celia, and a scratched-up blue GriGri, which Risby used to belay himself.
“How do you know which is which?” Tim asked.
“I am not sure, but Jack thinks this one was Celia’s, because it’s older and she was the more experienced climber. And blue was her favorite color. I figure it stands to reason that Risby, the novice, would buy the newest version of the equipment.”
“Okay.” Tim sounded mollified for a moment, but then his investigative journalist mind engaged again. He sounded downright suspicious. “Were the GriGris theirs?”
“So I’m told. Risby bought his shortly after Celia started to ‘teach’ him.”
“Yet he handled her device for her. How come?” Reyna asked. “Wasn’t it just a level 5.3 climb?”
“She was teaching him to belay her while she climbed the lead.” I sighed. “From what I’ve read about the accident at the North Face gym—where they don’t really want to talk to me about it, by the way—she usually climbed solo. That’s why she had a GriGri to begin with.”
We sat in a circle with our legs crossed. The equipment pile was in the middle, and nobody seemed to want to reach out and touch it first. Whether it was because this was somebody else’s gear or because the climber was dead, I wasn’t sure.
The lull in the conversation gave me some time to think. When securing one another, all we needed was just a simple stitch plate. Climbing on your own, it was advisable to go a little more high-tech, which is why Celia bought her device, and presumably because she used it, Risby decided to use it as well. But high-tech toys tended to break at times, and that’s why Tim brought out his toolbox.
“Let’s have a look at these babies,” he said, breaking the uneasy silence. Tampering was, of course, strictly prohibited by the manufacturer, but we did it anyway. We often found ways to improve gear we bought already used, saving a lot of money. If you and your buddies build something with your own hands and trust it, well… you’re good to go.
Tim worked until the metal plate snapped off and showed the mechanism on the inside. The rope was supposed to pass through multiple openings. If it did so slowly, the rope would pass with ease. If it got yanked hard, though, the increased friction made it choke up those little holes, and the rope stopped going through.
“He has a newer model,” Tim noted. The anodized metal gleamed yellow and bright. There was really no reason to tamper with it, but we opened it up anyway. Still, no problem presented itself: both devices looked sound. We put them back together.
“Let’s try it,” Chico said. He stood up, clipped Celia’s beat-up GriGri to his harness, and fed the rope through. He climbed up a few feet, took the slack out of his own line, and let go.
There he was, dangling in the air on one of our green, ten-millimeter-thick ropes.
“Worked fine for me,” he said, shrugging once he let himself back down. “Now Risby’s,” he said, repeating the process with equal success.
“Any difference?” Reyna asked.
“Risby’s was a bit smoother, but it’s newer, and a newer generation, too. I was thinking of buying one like that.”
“What about her rope?” I asked.
“Just a rope.” Chico shrugged, picking it up and coiling it about his hands. “Used, a bit dirty. Wow!” He reached for his water bottle and squirted his fingers clean. I saw him rub his hands. His eyes widened in dismay. “Why the hell are my nails so dirty all of a sudden?”
I gave him a bemused look. His formerly white, pristine fingers now sported black half-moons under the edge of his nails. “How beautiful, Chico,” I teased, unable to resist.
He snorted. “Let me go wash this off. The rope has been used outside, after all.”
We played with the rope some, waiting.
“All clean, Princess?” Tim teased.
“Shut up, Tim. It’s even worse now.” We looked at his hands; a blue stain seeped from under his fingernails over the rough calluses of his finger pads. He looked a mess.
“Heh, that reminds me of the time we were in college, tie-dyeing T-shirts without gloves,” Reyna chortled.
There was something important here, something significant. Green rope. All green ropes made by SpiderSilk were between ten and eleven millimeters thick. Thinner ones were red, and the thinnest ones went down to seven to eight millimeters and were yellow.
“Wait… wait, guys. How thick is this rope, really?” Tim always questioned everything. This quality got annoying at times, but it was awfully useful now. His voice was deadpan straight as our thoughts moved in the same direction. His face was as white as a sheet.
“It’s green, it should be a ten,” I said. I bent over to pick up the coil and walked it over to the wall, where I compared it to one of our own green ropes. “Is it just me, or does Celia’s rope look thinner than it should?” I said.
“Tie-dyeing,” Reyna forced out next to me. “I’d bet my next week’s salary that bastard over-dyed a thin yellow rope with blue dye to make it look green. Out in the field, you’d never notice.”
“Not if you think it’s your own old line,” Chico said, his expression grim. “When I was looking into buying the GriGri 2, like Risby Haus used, I wanted it because it can handle any thickness—but the older model Celia had, well….”
“It can use only the thick rope,” Tim finished for him. “Rated ten to eleven millimeters. Thinner ropes will slide right though. That bastard.”
We ran a simple test designed to prove whether we were right. Chico used Celia’s GriGri and Celia’s thin, green-colored rope. We all agreed it was best if Chico were double-belayed, with me holding him on the suspect rope and using Celia’s old device, while Reyna did the same thing with her own, reliable ten-millimeter climbing line and simple number-eight plate. The plan was to give Celia’s old gear a fair chance. If it failed to work, Reyna would break Chico’s fall with the other set of equipment. Both of us were anchored, making use of the ground straps attached to the strong bolts and cemented into the floor itself inches under the rubber padding. I watched Chico’s lithe, graceful form climb all the way up to the ceiling.
“Okay, I’m ready.” His voice was cool and steady. “I’m letting go on three. One, two,
three
!”
Chico let go of the wall, falling backward, simulating Celia’s fall. I did my best to make Celia’s older GriGri arrest his fall. He slowed down a little, but not nearly enough. The thin, green-dyed rope slithered right through the belay device as he hurtled toward the ground. As he descended, the thick belay rope kept slipping through Reyna’s hands and her stitch plate.
Reyna was letting Chico fall, giving me every chance to arrest his fall with the thin rope and the blue GriGri.
They failed.
Two-thirds of the way down the wall, Reyna lifted the rope up and over in her experienced hands, exerting force, creating friction and slowing Chico’s calamitous progress toward the thinly padded floor.
There.
Chico swung on the end of Reyna’s rope, having been halted only five feet before he hit the ground. His luminous black hair looked even blacker in contrast with his pale face.
“You okay, Chico?” Tim asked.
The slighter man swallowed a few times before his voice returned. “Yeah.”
Once down and back on the ground, he straightened and took a few deep breaths, letting the air out in a long stream. “How far did you let me fall, Reyna?” he asked in a conversational tone.
“Little over twenty feet,” Reyna said. “Sorry. Had to give the GriGri a chance.”
Chico nodded. “It’s okay. The GriGri usually engages within five feet, and it gives a famously hard stop. It definitely flunked the test.”
W
E
WERE
all shaken up and starving; a pizza was in order. The natural course of action was to go to Conti’s, a joint near the gym where the locals knew us and we knew the menu by heart.
The mood was somber. Now we knew how Celia died; however, the chain of evidence had been broken long ago and there was no way to prove Risby Haus was the murderer.
“I bet he let her climb all the way up.” Reyna ruminated over her beer. “I bet he stopped feeding the rope to her, which took her off balance.”
“He might have even pulled,” I said. “GriGris can have that problem in the hands of less-experienced belayers.”
“Which would have given him cover for the accident,” Tim murmured, his voice bitter and dark. “Just pull and let her fall until the rope slips out of the device itself. And the thin rope would have done just that.”
We ate a lot of pizza and wings and drank a lot of beer. None of us had to drive, so we did some shots. The topic slowly drifted to our own climbing war stories, close calls of bad falls, calamitous close calls….
“Once I hung on a building in a rainstorm,” I said, alcohol having loosened my tongue.
“No shit!”
“Yeah.” I hiccupped and giggled. “I was delivering a marketing study to Jack, my esteemed client.” I hiccupped again.
“What happened?” Chico asked, his eyes glimmering with amusement.
I told the story—only the good parts. Then I did another shot of tequila. “The rest is history. That’s how I got together with her brother.”
We all spoke of Celia as though we knew her personally. There were people out there who had in fact known her and would have been interested in finding out what happened.
“We have to take this to the North Face,” I said. “We… we need to reassure ourselves that we’re right.” I rubbed my numb cheek, vaguely aware I was slurring my words.
“All the guys at the North Face are stuck-up bitches,” Chico said, tossing his head.
“You know them personally?” I challenged. The bald guy, Carlos, had been really nice.
“No, but—”
We spent a little while discussing whether and how to approach the climbers at the North Face, and continued drinking in honor of Celia and speculating on ways to bring Haus to justice. After a while, I kind of got shitfaced.
Chico frowned. “They might not even believe—”
“Grrrawwwrrr!”
Everyone looked toward me, seeking the source of the unusual sound. Reyna’s eyes brightened in amusement, and I felt myself redden. My phone had another two orgasms before I managed to extricate it from the bottom of my backpack pocket. They stared at me incredulously, not quite believing their ears. “Heya, Jackie,” I said in a jaunty tone. “I missh you.”
“Wyatt—are you all right?” He had been asking me that question all day long today.
“You betcha your schweet assh I’m awright!” I slurred some more. Reyna broke into her typical, uncontrollable peals of laughter, and the guys snickered, banging their fists on the table.
“You are drunk.”
“Yesssh. I am. But I love you—hic!—anyway.” Now I wasn’t only slurring, I was hiccupping and saying….
Oh God.
Not that.
Tell me I didn’t say that.
“Coming home soon, Wyatt? It’s after midnight.”
“Oh. I dunno. I’m on the other side of town.” Usually, when we climbed late and drank even later, we all crashed over at Chico’s place. Chico nodded at me encouragingly. “Chi… Chico lets us crash at his pad when we get—hic!—like thish.”
“Who are you with?” Jack asked, and I could just feel the tense set of his shoulders in his voice.
“Our climbing gang,” I said, enunciating very, very slowly. “My best friends! Reyna, and Tim, and Chico.”
“I’ll come get you,” Jack said, sober and calm.
I could feel his steely resolution, but I wasn’t ready to leave my buddies yet. I wanted to bunk with them and endure their rude farting jokes and pretend the whole thing with Chico falling over twenty feet never happened. In fact, I hadn’t seen them in too long, and crashing at Chico’s overnight was exactly what I needed. “No. I… I’ll stay here tonight…. Hic!”
“What’s Chico’s address?” Now I could hear the way his jaw muscles worked, all tight and struggling for control.
I sighed. There was nothing for it—I just had to tell him the truth. “Don’t worry, Jackie! I jus…. I jus’ need shome time with Reyna and the guys. We figured out how your shister—hic!—was killed, and we are all traumatized. Poor Chico, he fell over twenty feet testin’ my theory…. We’re gettin’ sssshitfaced, Jackie!”