Pariah

by Thomas Zigal

  The first thing he noticed was the smell. The marijuana was stronger in this room. When he sat down at the desk in front of the old Underwood typewriter, he saw that something had been typed on the sheet scrolled into the platen: she chose death over life, me over you. her bodys cold & hard but i can still make her squirm with my slide finger.

  He caught his breath. It was the bastard who had sent the letters. He was for real. Nicole hadn’t written them.

  The phone rang, sending his heart into his throat. He lifted the receiver and waited several seconds for a voice to speak. He sensed a lurking presence on the line, someone listening to his shallow breathing, measuring his sudden fear. Someone who enjoyed playing games.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” Kurt said. He had broken into a sweat despite the chill in the room.

  The laughter was deep and wheezing, a smoker’s blackened lungs. The sound caused Kurt’s own chest to tighten. “Tell me who you are,” he said, struggling to speak calmly.

  Another gale of dark laughter, then the line went dead.

  Kurt slammed the receiver and stared at the sheet of paper in the Underwood. His hands were trembling. He read the final typewritten lines: everybody that fucked her while i was gone will soon join us in the grave. think about it fool. you never meant shit to her.

  Nicole had had good reason to be frightened of this man. And now he was threatening Kurt as well.

  His mind groped through all the possibilities, trying to visualize the face that matched the raspy laugh. There was something deep in the laugh itself that sounded unused, sealed off, neglected. A shut-in, a prisoner in solitary, a monk in his cloister. A dead man risen from the grave.

  Chapter eleven

  Shortly before the deputies arrived, the phone rang again. Kurt hadn’t left the chair. He lifted the receiver and waited silently, expecting the sinister laugh.

  “Prepare yourself for a potential shitstorm.” It was Corky Marcus calling to tell him that he’d met with reporters from the two local newspapers. “They’re asking for an interview with you. According to these vultures, the public has a right to know every detail of Nicole Bauer’s final evening. I did my best to shoo them off, but you can bet they’ll hunt you down.”

  “No press conference. I’ll talk to them when I have time.”

  “And let’s cancel this town hall debate with Ben Smerlas,” Corky said. “I’ll tell the speaker committee there’s been an emergency. You’re involved in a case that needs your full attention. Not a total fabrication, by the way.”

  “No,” Kurt said. “This thing’s been planned for weeks.”

  “You’re distraught, Kurt. You don’t know how shaky you sound right now.”

  “I’ve been here before.” A couple of messy homicide cases in years past that Ben Smerlas had accused him of botching.

  “If the media decide to focus on you in the Bauer story, your career is over. The recall is a done deal.”

  Kurt read the last line in the typewriter: you never meant shit to her. “Tell the committee I’ll be there,” he said.

  “Goddammit, Kurt Muller! Are you listening to me? Carole! ” he howled away from the phone. “Carole, come talk to this stubborn ass! He’s doing his best to self-destruct!”

  Kurt sighed, waiting for Carole to pick up. “He’s right, you know,” she said when she came on the line. “You’re in no shape to sit on a public stage and defend your reputation.”

  He hated to withhold evidence from the two deputies he had summoned to his house, but he wasn’t prepared to show the typewritten message to anyone but Muffin and right now she was preoccupied with the Bauer brothers, walking them through the death scene at the Starwood mansion. So he played the break-in as a random crime.

  “The guy busts in the county sheriff’s home, lights a reefer, pops open a brew, and grooves on some sounds,” chuckled Joey Florio, shaking his head. He was down on one knee, dusting the handle on the broken sliding door for fingerprints. “He’s gotta be a fucking moron.”

  “Or a misguided youth snorting crank,” said Dave Stuber, browsing through the scattered albums. “Bitchin’ collection you got here, Kurt. What will you take for this Yardbirds’ Greatest Hits?”

  “I’ve got to go down to the office,” Kurt said. He assigned Stuber to watch the house for a few hours. “Joey, don’t forget to dust the typewriter keys on that old Underwood in the study.”

  “What’s that about?” Chewing on his thick black mustache, Joey Florio shrugged at him. It was the second time Kurt had made the request. “The bad boy sit down and write you a poem?”

  Kurt tried to smile, tried to pretend it was a clever remark. “And the needle arm on the turntable,” he said. “I touched it, but his prints might be there, too.”

  “Hey, you chauvinist pigs,” Stuber joked. “How do you know it’s a he?”

  Chapter twelve

  For many years the basement of the Pitkin County Courthouse had served as the coroner’s examination area, but now the long narrow space housed department records, an archive of old case files, and a disorganized evidence cage with an outdated catalog system. When they saw Kurt coming down the dimly lit corridor, the three deputies who were tagging items in the cage halted their conversation abruptly and he suspected that they had been talking about him.

  “Morning.” He nodded at them.

  They mumbled good mornings, avoiding his gaze. He was well past the cage, heading toward the east corner of the building where the dead cases were stored, when Mac Murphy raised his voice.

  “Whatever we can do, Kurt.”

  By now the talk had spread throughout the department. Everyone knew he had been with Nicole Bauer until two hours before her suicide. It was only a matter of time before the rest of Aspen knew as well.

  “I appreciate it,” he said over his shoulder. Then he stopped and turned back toward the deputies, realizing they were logging in evidence from Nicole’s place. “Murph, did you find anything in those ashes?” he asked.

  “No, sir. Not a thing. Just carbon and crumbles.”

  The letters were a dead issue. Gone.

  “Do a clean job, people,” he said. “The press and her family are going to be all over this thing.”

  At the far end of the building he switched on a bare bulb dangling from a long black cord and searched the case drawer marked Q-R-S, finding the folder he had come across once before. A few steps away, below a conjunction of exposed water pipes, sat a wooden table with a goosenecked desk lamp. He spread the contents of the folder across the table’s dusty surface.

  A dozen glossy black-and-white photographs documented the misshapen body of Rocky Rhodes lying naked where he had fallen into the boulder garden below Nicole’s deck. The photographer had shot the corpse from various angles, but only one image, a ground-level close-up, revealed any portion of the face, a bloody mass of bone splinter buried partway in the snow. Kurt picked up the magnifying glass in a tray of chewed pencils and loose paper clips. Even under close scrutiny there was no way to verify the identity of the dead man.

  He dug through the folder and found more photos. Morgue shots, the corpse stretched out on an autopsy table. Fully exposed, the face was in no better shape. The degree of damage made it difficult to distinguish his features.

  This was not easy for him. His own brother had died in a fall from Maroon Bells six years ago and Kurt had viewed the body stuffed inside a zipper bag. Bert had looked even worse than this, but crushed bone was crushed bone, and dead was dead.

  Flipping through the photographs, he eventually found what he was looking for. The victim’s hands lay slackly by his side, palms down, a large ring clearly visible on one finger of his left hand. Under the magnifying glass Kurt could make out the yin-yang engraved in the gold. It was the same ring.

  He knew two things for certain now. The letters were from someone other than Nicole and not the fabrication of her disturbed mind, as Westbrook had suggested. And the ring was either authentic or an impressive facsimile
. Nicole hadn’t contrived any of her story. She had had every reason to believe that the threats were from Rocky Rhodes.

  He wondered if Rocky’s family had been called in to ID the body, or if Ted Brumley, the crusty old coroner at the time, had simply taken Nicole’s word that the long-haired decedent was who she said he was. But what if Nicole had been involved in some elaborate hoax from the very beginning? What if the unidentifiable corpse wasn’t Rocky Rhodes after all? Surely Bumbling Brumley, as he was known affectionately by his colleagues, had fingerprinted the dead man. Kurt skimmed through the paperwork but couldn’t locate the prints.

  Brumley’s handwritten report told him nothing new—massive injuries, alcohol level 0.21 mg percent, high content of cocaine and thc in the urine. The police account was straightforward and produced no startling revelations. The forensics of the case had been thoroughly scrutinized during the trial.

  The letters had mentioned that bitch Pariah, blaming her for the fight that had led to Rocky’s death. Was Pariah Nicole’s alter ego?— Westbrook’s explanation. Could the name have been some sort of double-talk code word between two psychotic lovers, a name Rocky had given to Nicole’s bad-girl persona? Or was Pariah a real woman? Had she been there that night? Had Rocky caught her in bed with Nicole? The letters implied that the two women had ganged up on him during the altercation. Kurt looked carefully through the report for a reference to a third person at the crime scene, another woman, but there was no mention of one. What he found instead was the transcript of an interrogation conducted by Kurt’s predecessor, Sheriff Joe Stanton, two days after the incident.

  STANTON: You were partying pretty hard, isn’t that correct, Miss Bauer?

  BAUER: I don’t know what you mean.

  STANTON: Your friends say you two had been holed up in the house for several days.

  BAUER: Rocky was cooling out. He’d just come off tour, two months on the road. He was fried.

  STANTON: Were you doing drugs?

  BAUER: Drugs are illegal, Sheriff.

  STANTON: The autopsy showed he had cocaine and marijuana in his blood. And too much alcohol.

  BAUER: I don’t keep track of what people ingest in their bodies.

  STANTON: How about you, Miss Bauer? Weren’t you loaded when it happened?

  BAUER ATTORNEY: Don’t answer that.

  Kurt read quickly through the next part of the deposition, which covered the familiar territory of the fight and its aftermath. Nicole had told the authorities exactly what she later testified in court—and what she had steadfastly maintained for twenty years.

  STANTON: What were you two fighting about?

  BAUER: I don’t remember.

  STANTON: The fight ended with a man falling to his death and you don’t remember what started it?

  BAUER: What difference does it make how it started? Take a look at my face. This is why I tried to get away from him.

  STANTON: Did you go down to the boulders and see what happened to his face?

  BAUER ATTORNEY: If you make another inappropriate remark like that, Sheriff, this session is over. I will not allow my client to be badgered.

  STANTON: I’m sorry, Miss Bauer. I apologize. Let’s go on.

  BAUER: Yeah, whatever. But I’ve already told you people everything I can remember.

  STANTON: And we appreciate your cooperation. You’ve been very helpful. Just one or two more questions.

  BAUER: Okay. Do it.

  STANTON: Did you go down to the boulder slide to check on Mr. Rhodes after he fell?

  BAUER: I could see him from the deck.

  STANTON: You didn’t go down to see if he had survived?

  BAUER: No. I couldn’t. I heard the— (Pause. Witness asks for tissue.) I heard the sound his body made against the rocks. I knew he was dead.

  STANTON: You stayed in your bedroom?

  BAUER: I don’t remember what happened after that. My face was numb from his punches. My mouth was full of blood. Every bone in my body hurt. I think I passed out. The next thing I knew there were cops all over the house. I don’t even remember calling them.

  Kurt leaned back in the folding chair and tried to envision the scene the way it had always been portrayed in counterculture circles, by word of mouth. Nicole and Rocky had been boozing and mixing drugs for days on end. They were wired, strung out, gorging on junk food, playing music nonstop, fucking each other dry. How did their fight start? Stoned paranoia, jealousy and wild accusations, shattered nerves? A bloated ego wounded by something she’d said? There was a flashpoint, a moment when the debauchery turned violent and they’d tumbled out onto the snow-heaped deck in a flurry of fists and kicking and bloody screams.

  Is that how it had really happened? Or was there an entirely different scenario?

  He read the list of items confiscated at the crime scene. What surprised him was not what was on the list but what wasn’t. The sheriff’s deputies hadn’t retrieved a syringe or a joint or even a stray marijuana seed. No drug paraphernalia whatsoever. He wondered why no one at the time had asked the question that seemed so obvious now: Who cleaned up the place before the cops arrived? Nicole was in no shape to do something that coherent. No, Kurt thought, someone else had taken care of the dirty work and then called the police. A close friend, a confidante. Maybe someone who was already in the house that night.

  He thumbed through the file folder and found a second crime report, dated 3/8/77, the day after Rocky’s death. It was the mortician’s statement disclosing that the body had been stolen from his funeral home.

  Over the years the incident had acquired the aura of myth. The stories varied wildly. That Rocky’s keyboard man had rented a hearse and posed as a driver sent by the family to claim the body. That band groupies had loaded the corpse into an ice-cream freezer truck and had shot their way past highway patrolmen in two states, making their dramatic escape. Kurt’s favorite tale was the one in which grieving followers had borne their god by a horse-drawn travois for forty days and forty nights through icy mountain passes, trekking southward to the desert floor of Canyon de Chelly, where a blind shaman cremated Rocky and scattered his ashes across an ancient Anasazi kiva.

  The mortician’s account was limited to actual events and his story was far less sensational. In the middle of the night someone had broken into his Victorian funeral parlor by smashing the French doors. The mortician complained to the officer in charge that the body had disappeared before he’d finished the extensive cosmetic work requested by Rocky’s mother in Texas. According to the report, the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Department had issued a statewide all-points bulletin and dispatched deputies to interview the known associates of Rocky Rhodes living in the Roaring Fork Valley. There were no debriefings in the folder describing the results of the interviews, but Kurt found a list of names scribbled in the margin of one report sheet. He recognized the name Gahan Moss, the keyboard player who still lived on the outskirts of Aspen near Buttermilk Mountain. His eyes ran down the column until he discovered a name that grabbed his attention.

  Mariah Windstar.

  He stared at the two words for several moments, frozen in silence. There was a groupie named Mariah who hung out with the band, Nicole had told him. Rocky didn’t like her, so he nicknamed her Pariah.

  Mariah Windstar. Was this her? Pariah. A real woman and no alter ego.

  He copied the dozen names on a sheet of paper and returned the Rocky Rhodes folder to its drawer, then switched off the light and walked back down the corridor. The deputies were gone and the evidence cage had been locked. On his way to the stairs he stopped to have a look around the former examination chamber, its drain trap still embedded in the cement floor like an old high school shower room. The place was now filled with file cabinets and discarded office furniture, but Kurt could recall vividly how it had looked for so many years: the mobile body cart, the hoses and scales and fluid-collecting tanks. In the center of the room he stood over a stack of chairs where the autopsy table had once been located. With litt
le imagination he could smell the blood, the unforgettable stench of death. He had witnessed too many dissections here, the coroner explaining what had happened to a mother’s careless teenager while he placed a liver on the scale like a butcher weighing meat. Too many lessons in the cold calculus of tissue and bone.

  Closing his eyes, alone and isolated from the world above, Kurt could picture Rocky’s body stretched out on the stainless steel table. He could see the violent protrusions, the disfigured face and long, blood-matted hair. Something bothered him about this dead man. Maybe it was the lack of fingerprints and the impossible ID. Struggling to work through his doubts, he remained motionless in the dreamlike grayness of the room, his mind retracing every bruised inch of the corpse. Was a gold ring enough to prove that the body in the photos was indeed Rocky Rhodes? But what if Nicole was right—what if Rocky was still alive? That would mean the dead man was someone else. Would it also mean that Rocky and Nicole had pushed the man off her deck to fake Rocky’s death?

  Chapter thirteen

  Kurt emerged from the courthouse at the same moment that a TV satellite truck was arriving from a network affiliate in Glenwood Springs. He knew why they were here and hurried off down the alley behind a strip of commercial buildings before the news cameras had a chance to track him down. At the end of the alley he looked back to see if he was being followed, then walked quickly across the brick plaza and entered the new county library.

  The library computer listed only one biography of Rocky Rhodes, published in 1987, the tenth anniversary of the guitarist’s death. Kurt located the book on the shelf and took it to a secluded reading area, where he sat at a small cubbyhole desk and skimmed through the pages written by the same gonzo journalist who had covered the trial for Rolling Stone.