by Karen Black
“So I helped Mom sell the house, collect the insurance and move out to Fort Morgan to be with Isabel, my older sister. She had married some cowboy, they were living on a farm and she was poppin’ out babies. I even went through the motions of transferring to Fort Morgan High School, but I just couldn’t hack it. One day when Mom and Isabel were at the shopping center with the kids, I piled some stuff in my little car Pop had bought me when I turned sixteen and hit the road for Steamboat Springs. I’ve been a bum ever since. It’s as simple as that.”
“Is it really that simple?”
“It can get complicated in detail, but basically it’s simple.”
“Why Steamboat Springs?”
“Easiest. I met a bunch of eastern college kids up there when I was racing. They had an old house, I guess you’d call it a commune, and they were taking a winter off from school to ‘get their heads together,’ as the saying goes, each year a somewhat different bunch, but always some holdovers from the year before that somehow never made it out of Steamboat. A couple of times one or the other had said, ‘Hey, Corky, if you ever want to do some serious skiing for a couple of weeks, come up and bunk with us. We’ll take care of you.’ So I did.”
“How’d that work out?”
“Actually there were some pretty neat kids in the bunch. Some were quite smart and very idealistic, really sincere, a lot of philosophy and ideas. As you might guess, some were just jocks, and there were some real creeps–pushing drugs and trying to get into anybody’s pants. Most of them though were very protective of me, especially a couple of really nice, sort of brainy girls, who took it on themselves to educate me. Made me read books until I got to like it. Maybe they were compensating for copping out on their own educations, which they rejected as being ‘sterile’ and ‘stultifying’. Maybe I aroused their otherwise suppressed maternal instincts.”
I nodded my head in agreement, “Everybody’s pet.”
Corky made a funny little grimace and said with a touch of resentment, “Yeah. Corky, the pet.”
“Where did the money come from?” I prompted.
“Everybody shared. Some of those kids were loaded. Trust funds, soft-headed parents, some were just bums, like me. No, that’s not fair. I wasn’t a bum. Not yet. I was actually a really good skier, until I tore up my knee in the Alpine Olympic tryouts, but that’s another story too. Becoming a bum takes time. Besides, I’m a worker, like Pops. I started baby sitting and got into teaching tiny tots how to ski…which I’m very good at. One thing leads to another. You wait tables at lodges when they need extra help, and before you know it, you’re into fast food counters, short order cooking, clerking in ski shops, giving lessons, stunting in a hot-dog act. Summer comes along, swimming pools need attendants, a guy needs help running rafting trips on the Yampa, there’s a dude ranch that needs a wrangler that’s also good with little kids.”
“You’re good with horses too?”
“Oh, yeah,” Corky said matter-of-factly. “A guy wanted me to go on the rodeo circuit with a trick riding act, but, man, you hit too many towns like Fort Morgan in that game.”
I shook my head. “I’ve got to say, you are, at the very least, a talented, versatile and resourceful bum.”
“Thanks…I think. Anyway, that’s the way it goes. It gets easy. Except the new wears off wherever you go. Somebody says Jackson Hole is big this year, so you pile in the car and head for the Hole. Then it’s Sun Valley, Squaw Valley, the Bugaboos, Alta, Mammoth, Crested Butte, Vail, Breckenridge, and Taos.” She gave a short laugh. “Every year or so you meet some fantastic guy, and just when you think this might be it, it turns out that when he takes off his boots his brains go with ‘em, or he has this little problem he has to clear up before he can get his divorce, or he starts slapping you around because you think one girl friend ought to be enough.”
“Ever been married?”
“Once, right at the beginning, in Steamboat. A Yale boy, nice looking, maybe a little chubby, but really nice. He thought he was madly in love with me, so when the group broke up in the spring, and I was suddenly feeling at loose ends, he talked me into it. Then nothing must do but he has to take me home to Glen Alwyn, Pennsylvania, to show me off to his family. Stevie was not one of the big spenders in our little group. Still I had an idea he was one of the kids who actually had some money. But honestly, that really didn’t enter into it. I had no idea just how loaded he was until we started down a half-mile driveway to his house…actually mansion is a better word. His family greeted me. Polite, maybe a little formal, but I thought that was just the way those Mainline rich folks were. ‘She’s just darling, Stevie, dear,’ his mother said, and his father said, ‘Stevie told us you were pretty, my dear, but I had no idea.’ And I dimpled and giggled in my usual cutesy way.” She dimpled, then her expression turned into a scornful smile.
“A couple of weeks of what you might call an elementary workshop on wedded bliss among the rich went by, and then one night Stevie had to go to some Yale-male club affair. A very impressive looking gentleman named Ellsworth Hollingshead “just happened” to be coming to dinner, and when dinner was over, my father and mother-in-law excused themselves and left me to have coffee with Mr. Hollingshead. When the drawing room doors had been discretely closed by Alex, the butler, Mr. Hollingshead turned to me and said, ‘I must explain to you, my dear…they were big on my dears in Glen Alwyn…that I am the attorney for the Westleigh family. As such it has been my duty to look into your purported marriage with Steven. I am afraid the record shows that your age was falsified, you are a truant from Fort Morgan, Colorado, High School, and you were married without the knowledge and consent of your surviving parent. The marriage is obviously invalid and steps will have to be taken to have it annulled.’”
“The bastard!” I said.
“Oh, he was very kindly,” Corky said, her rather considerable flare for mimicry warming up to the number she was doing on mainline manners. “My dear,” he said, “I am sure you are finding this difficult to accept now, but as a lawyer who has seen a great deal of the workings of the world, and as a father in my own right too, I might add, I can assure you that in time you will see it as all for the best. Steven’s background and yours are simply too different for you to be happy as he assumes the heavy business, social and family responsibilities which will be his.’
“I just sat there looking at this character. I couldn’t believe him. It was so corny. Of course he thought my little heart was breaking beneath my stoic wooden-Indian-like exterior, and he patted my shoulder and said, ‘There, there, my dear,’ while I struggled to keep a straight face.
“Okay,” I said, when I had it under control, “What about…” I was going to say, what about poor Stevie, but he jumped in before I could get it out. ‘Yes, yes, of course.’ He pulled a sheaf of papers out of his pocket. ‘There are certain documents that need to be signed and certain…uh…arrangements that are appropriate.’ He spread the papers out on the coffee table, including a cashier’s check for twenty grand. I started to say I didn’t want any of their lousy money, but the minute I opened my mouth he whipped out another cashier’s check for twenty more. ‘I am authorized to…uh…augment the settlement, if you so wish, but beyond this I am afraid we will have to go to court, which will entail returning you to your legal parent and so forth.’
“I wish Mr. Hollingshead could have known how little that jazz intimidated me. Even then I knew I could take the jerk for ten times more if I really wanted to rake Stevie back and forth over the coals, but I just said, ‘Give me the pen. I’ll sign on one condition. Get me out of the house tonight before Stevie gets home.’”
Suddenly Corky’s irrepressible giggle bubbled up. “You know, Mr. Hollingshead was absolutely right. It wouldn’t have worked. I got a fair deal. After all, what did I lose? I’d already lost my virginity at sixteen someplace out there in a steamy van on the way home from a football game with the current senior class dreamboat, an event that left me feeling guilty and puzzled and sort of disappoint
ed, wondering if that is all there is to it and why I could have thought I was in love. And surprise, surprise, Mr. Dreamboat wanted nothing to do with me after he screwed me. Stevie, at least, had married me; I think he might have been the only guy I’ve ever been around, since Pops and before Charley, who truly cared for me. But the way Mr. Hollingshead handled it was just all so wimpy.”
“Corky,” I said, “You’re making an art form out of simple candor.”
“It’s the only way to go. Anyway, to wrap up this tale, I used my hard-earned cash to buy myself a brand new Volkswagen van all custom fitted as a neat little camper–my very own traveling bedroom. It’s out there in front with 280,000 miles on it and still in pretty good shape. I took a tour by myself all around the country, traveling all the roads Pops went down and the towns he hit in his big bull rig. That fall, I pulled into Jackson Hole about the time the snow started to fly, and that was that.
“Later you wake up one morning. It happens to be in Aspen, but it doesn’t really matter a damn by this time where you are or how you got there. It’s all been basically the same. You look in the mirror, and what do you see? A bum.”
“Hold it.” I held up my hand. “That’s not what I see. I see a very attractive girl with lots of smarts and a mind of her own who has had an unusual education.”
Corky snorted. “You see a fading female jock about to go over the hill.”
I laughed. “Over the hill? At twenty-six? Give yourself at least ten more years before you have a mid-life crisis.”
“Ten more years of what? Sliding downhill on skis, taking dudes on horseback rides, minding somebody else’s kids or somebody else’s store?”
“You’ve got brains. Go into business for yourself.”
“Are you kidding? I never even made it through high school.”
“Apparently neither did El Toro,” I said. Corky abruptly fell silent.
During the hour or so that we had talked it had grown almost completely dark except for starlight shining through the big window. Corky’s terry cloth robe was just a faint paleness among the shadows, and I suppose I was no more than a dark blob sunk in the black leather pouf, but up to then neither of us had wanted to break the thread that seemed to weave a bond between us as Corky spun her yarn.
Abruptly, she reached over and flipped on a reading lamp. In this small, sudden pool of light we looked at each other in some surprise, as if we had just come in from different spaces and met by accident. Corky got up and went over to pull the draperies. She circled restlessly around the room and came back to stand looking down at me. “Okay,” she said dryly. “Let’s get off my case and on to yours.”
CHAPTER IV
Aspen, Sunday Evening
I sat there in semi-darkness feeling depressed, partly by Corky’s honest revelation of old, deep hurts, and partly by the new one I knew I would soon have to lay on her. I put it off with one more question. “How long ago did you arrive in Aspen?”
“Five years. Long enough to forget prior bad memories, which usually I do. But something seemed to hit me today.”
“Me?”
“No, before you came, in the middle of the day, like all of a sudden there wasn’t any ground under me and I was just falling through space with my whole life passing in front of me. I’ve been too lonesome, I guess. Now you’ve come along and turned out to be one heck of a good listener, kind of a parachute for me.”
In the middle of the day. How strange. I wondered what kind of a parachute I would be when it came time to tell her what had really happened in the middle of the day.
Nagging in the back of my mind was the thought that maybe I ought to just preserve the myth of Malcolm Gregory with some story about Charley wanting me to appear like a genie out of a bottle the instant he got it into his head he wanted to talk to me, and thank you very much for a mellow evening and a good sandwich, but I’d better get back to Denver because maybe we got our dates mixed up.
Maybe the less Corky knew about me and where I was headed, the better. The police would learn Charley’s identity sooner or later, and Corky would hear the news soon enough. Meanwhile Malcolm Gregory would simply vanish, and I would be on my way to L.A. with my cover still intact. It was the hardball way to play it, but it also nagged at me that Corky would probably learn of Charley’s murder when she was alone and vulnerable, and the mysterious figure of Malcolm Gregory would take on sinister overtones. The trouble was, I liked the way she thought of him now. I must have heaved a big sigh.
“Come on, Greg,” Corky said, settling back on her cushion, “It can’t be that bad.”
“But it can,” I said, throwing hardball to the winds. “To begin with, Dr. Malcolm Gregory is a mere figment of Charley Farnsworth’s imagination.”
It was Corky’s turn to sigh. “It figures. The mythical Dr. Gregory was a little too good to be true. So who are you?”
“Wait, I’ll get to that in a minute.” I held up my hand as if to stop whatever train of thought she might have started. “Malcolm Gregory isn’t my brain child. I didn’t create him, and I don’t know why Charley did or why he cast me in this role. That’s one of the things I came here to find out.”
Corky stirred restlessly. “Why do you suppose he doesn’t call? Then we could ask him. Shall we try to phone him in L.A.?”
I leaned across the space between us and took her small, firm hands in mine, and shook my head sadly. “Corky, it’s no use.”
Her eyes widened. She knew. My face told her more than the words. I nodded slowly to tell her that what she was thinking was really true, and as the tears started, I pulled her over and held her like a child on my lap, her face buried on my shoulder, stroking her long, dark hair and gently rocking. I started telling the story, talking quietly, trying to be matter-of-fact. “He was murdered about noon today as he was walking across the park in Denver to meet me. He needed my help, but I couldn’t get to him in time.”
Corky shuddered, and I held her a little closer as I unfolded the whole story. “It was like an ordinary mugging, but I know damn well it wasn’t,” I declared. “The punks that did it got away, but that’s not so important for now. It was a contract killing. I want the guys who put them up to it.”
Corky sobbed quietly for just a couple of minutes more and then turned her wet face up to mine. I found the paper napkin on the sandwich tray beside the low, thick cushion we were sitting on and held it for her to blow her nose as though she were about four years old. Without even thinking about it, it seemed to be the natural thing to do, I kissed her. She was passive for a moment, then responded with soft, closed lips, like a little child kissing. We looked at each other in something like surprise, and then our arms tightened around each other, and we kissed long and tenderly, as though we were sealing some kind of unspoken bond.
Abruptly, Corky stood up. “I better go wash my face,” she said as she hastily left the room.
I heaved myself up out of the thick, soft, pillow-like cushion, picked up the tray and carried it to the dining bar. An elegant silver and ivory French telephone reminded me that there were calls that must be made, no matter how tired and drained I felt. I was just about to dial the Cliffe Motel in Santa Monica to tell them Dr. Gregory would not be in until tomorrow and ask for messages when a troublesome idea popped into my head.
As soon as Corky returned, I asked, “Did you say a telephone repairman was in here a few days ago?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“What did he say was wrong?”
“He gave me some kind of gobbledygook about the new system.”
I stared long and hard at the telephone.
“You think it’s bugged?” Corky asked, suddenly sensing the implication of my question.
“I think we better pretend it is.” I paced aimlessly around the room, thinking of calls that needed to be made and calls that might have been intercepted.
“So what’s bugging you?”
“Corky, I owe you a long story, and I’ll tell it before the night is thr
ough, but there are a couple of moves that need to be made now. Is there a pay phone in the neighborhood?”
“Yeah, they have one at the all-night laundromat; it’s just a few blocks that way,” she pointed to the left of the condo.
“Thanks, I’ll be right back.”
“Look,” Corky said as I was pulling on my jacket, “I don’t feel too great about being here alone, for one thing. And for another, what makes you think I won’t pick up the phone when you walk out and call the police to tell them there is a guy here that seems to know a lot about a murder in Denver earlier today?” She looked at me steadily, and I could see that those beautiful soft eyes could take on a steely set.
I was at a loss for a moment. Then I said, “For the same reason I didn’t give you a cock-and-bull story and walk out of here as soon as I found out you didn’t know anything about Charley.”
“Forgive me, Greg,” she said forlornly, “I’m a little scared and confused.”
“That’s understandable,” I said, and put my arms around her. “Now, listen, I’m going down there and call you. I’m going to say my name is Gregory McGregor, because that’s what it really is.” She stiffened momentarily. “I’ll ask for Charley, and all you have to do is play it dumb. Nobody is here and you don’t know where anybody is.”
She nodded her head in mute acknowledgment.
I slipped out into the night and walked in the direction she had indicated, away from the slopes, enjoying the crisp evening mountain air, until I found the laundromat. I dropped a quarter in the slot, and after a couple of rings Corky came on. I had an idea from her voice she’d been crying again.
“Hello,” I said, “This is Gregory McGregor.”
“Who?” Corky was playing it dumb all right.
“Greg McGregor. Is Charley Farnsworth there?”
“No.” She let the word drop flatly.
“Okay,” I said, trying to sound ingratiating, “Do you know where I can reach him?”
“No.”