Pariah

by Thomas Zigal

  By now everyone in Kurt’s generation knew the sketchy details of Rocky’s life. A country boy from East Texas, he’d run away from home as a teenager to apprentice at the feet of his two blues idols, Lightnin’ Hopkins in the bars of Houston’s Fourth Ward and Mance Lipscomb on his porch overlooking a dusty Texas cottonfield. In the mid-’60s Rocky had played lead guitar with various Houston bands,

  cut a legendary live album jamming with Freddie King, and eventually found his way to L.A., where his life unraveled in one long rock ’n’ roll cliché. Groupies, drug busts, troubled recording sessions, disastrous tours, fired sidemen, broken contracts, dead friends, the Chateau Marmont. But in Kurt’s memory, Rocky Rhodes had been the real thing, his growling voice and soulful guitar work as close as any white boy ever got. The only surprise was that he’d lived to see thirty.

  Kurt didn’t know how Nicole had entered the picture, so he skipped to the last chapters in the book and read about the “Denver deb” in her wild early twenties. She was described as a spoiled rich girl from a prominent mining fortune, a dropout from Scripps College who had slept her way through valleys of L.A. musicians and hip young movie stars in the early ’70s. With her inheritance she was able to build the house in Starwood and still maintain a place in Laurel Canyon, where she threw extravagant parties and carried on turbulent affairs with a series of industry stars exposed in the book. Rocky had wooed her away from a notorious B-movie director when she was only twenty-three, “perhaps the worst mistake of Rocky’s mistake-riddled final years,” the biographer had written.

  Several pages of photographs occupied the center of the book, a visual history of Rocky Rhodes from dirt-poor childhood to his last days in Nicole’s mansion, a puffy, drug-addled junkie staring bleary-eyed at the camera with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. Kurt hardly recognized him. The tall, handsome lady-killer had put on fifty pounds of candy bar chunk and another twenty years of hard time. He was thirty going on fifty. The lines in his face were as deep as razor scars.

  Studying the photos, Kurt noticed that one of the pages had been torn from the book, leaving a ragged fringe in the gutter. He turned to the permissions page to read the list of credits and found that the missing page contained four photographs, two on each side, including “Rocky with Aspen friends, 1976.” The copyright symbol was followed by the photographer’s name—someone Kurt had known for many years. It struck him as suspiciously coincidental that the only ripped-out page in the book showed a photo of Rocky in Aspen.

  He checked the index at the back of the book for the name Mariah Windstar and discovered two references: “p. 196; see also photo number 27.” Mariah Windstar was pictured in the Aspen group shot on the missing page. These coincidences were beginning to irritate him.

  The passage on page 196 mentioned Mariah in a string of humorous countercultural names, the “druggy young pseudonymous hangers-on in Aspen, members of Rocky’s entourage who could be found day and night at Nicole’s Starwood pad, stoned out of their minds, listening to music and cavorting in ever-shifting daisy chains.”

  He closed the book and pulled the sheet of paper from his shirt pocket, reading the police list. Several names matched the ones in the biography. Crescent Moon. Boogie Downes. Wolfgang P. Gursted. Maggie Mae Turner. He remembered those days in Aspen with a fond smile. Everyone was young, naked, and stoned. Where had all the beautiful people gone? Where was Mariah Windstar now? OD’d or found Jesus, Nicole had told him. He turned toward the library window and examined his reflection in the glass, knowing how much his own features had changed in twenty years. Softer chin, crow’s feet, hair going gray. If he’d slept with Mariah Windstar in 1976, he probably wouldn’t recognize her today if she walked up and sat in his lap.

  Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was nearly one o’clock. His debate with Smerlas would begin in another hour. He went to the front desk and checked out the book, then found a pay phone near the library entrance and placed a call to Miles Cunningham’s remote cabin in Castle Creek Valley. He waited while the answering machine played Nixon’s voice insisting I am not a crook. After the beep Kurt said, “Hey, Miles, I heard you were back from R and R.”

  His old photographer friend had spent the past month in the Betty Ford Clinic, drying out from various chemical dependencies.

  “Hope everything went okay. I’ve been meaning to call you.”

  Kurt had been putting off the phone call because the idea of conversing with a sober Miles Cunningham left him utterly speechless.

  “I need to talk to you about a photo you shot in nineteen seventy-six. Your favorite subject—rock groupies. Give me a call.”

  With his last quarter he dialed Meg’s farmhouse in Basalt. Her new husband, a Zen master named Bhajan, answered the phone.

  “How are things going?” Kurt asked.

  “Things are harmonic,” Bhajan said, deadly earnest.

  “You haven’t shaved my son’s head yet, I trust.”

  Bhajan giggled. He was a serene, likable fellow with thin graying hair gathered in a knot at the back of his head and a penchant for hemp clothing. Kurt’s extensive investigation had revealed that the man’s given name was Robert Goldsmith and that he’d once taught comparative religion at City College, New York. He had been married once before and his children were grown. There were no skeletons in his closet, as far as Kurt could tell.

  “Lennon’s been helping us clean the rabbit cages all morning,” Bhajan said. Their household of six hippie Buddhists made their livelihood breeding pet rabbits. “I’ll bet he’s ready for some private space of his own.”

  Meg came on the line in a cheerful mood. She had been annoyingly cheerful ever since her elaborate Buddhist wedding last May.

  “Is it okay if Lennon stays with you the rest of the weekend?” Kurt asked, concerned about the break-in and the note in his typewriter. Even with round-the-clock police surveillance he didn’t feel comfortable with his son on the premises.

  “Sure, that’s fine, Kurt. We always love to have him with us. Is everything all right there?”

  “Somebody broke into our house. Probably a kid,” he lied. “He didn’t take anything but I want to be sure he’s not coming back.”

  By her long pensive silence he knew what she was thinking before she expressed the words: “This isn’t anything like last time, is it?”

  A couple of years ago four hired killers had broken into the house in the middle of the night and kidnapped Kurt. Lennon hid under his bunk bed for over an hour, crying his heart out until Kurt escaped and returned for him.

  “It’s nothing like last time,” he insisted. “It’s just some kid fucking around.”

  “I thought you were going to install a burglar alarm.”

  “I did,” he said. “I just can’t get used to turning it on.”

  “You’re the county sheriff, Kurt. That makes you an easy target for every nut with a bone to pick. Turn the goddamn alarm on at night and when you leave the house.”

  Meg had always been emphatic about protecting Lennon from the world of law enforcement and the ugly realities of Kurt’s job. The kidnapping had made her understandably more concerned. If she knew the truth about this break-in, he would have a nasty fight on his hands bringing the child home.

  “One of my deputies is watching the house,” Kurt said. “It’s no big deal, Meg. But keep Lennon another night just to make absolutely sure.”

  “Maybe we should consider a longer stay. I can take him to school this week.”

  “Let’s talk about it tomorrow. Right now I’ve got to run. Let me say hello to him first.”

  His son greeted him in his high, bright, eight-year-old voice: “Hi, Dad. When are you coming after me?”

  “I have great news,” Kurt said exuberantly, employing the usual positive-reinforcement technique. The one that never worked. “You get to spend more time with Mom! I’ll be there tomorrow night.”

  A long silence. “I’m sick of rabbit poop,” Lennon groused. “
And I’m dying for a cheeseburger.”

  For nearly two years Lennon had happily accepted the peculiarities of his weekends at the farmhouse in Basalt, but lately he had begun to complain. Mom made him eat too many vegetables. There were no children to play with, no television, no video games.

  “How is our bunny?” Kurt asked, hoping to reroute his attention.

  Lennon had picked out a beautiful white Himalayan with gray ears to be his pet. Kurt had promised they would bring the rabbit home as soon as he finished the large screened-in hutch he was building on the deck.

  “She’s old enough to come home with us, Dad. When is her place going to be ready?”

  “Soon, I promise. I just need to stretch the screen and then nail on some mink wire.”

  “Make sure nothing can get in and hurt her.”

  “Don’t worry, she’ll be the safest bunny in Colorado,” Kurt said.

  He told his son he loved him, and Lennon said he loved him too. “Oh, and Dad,” he added, whispering into the receiver, “when you come pick me up, bring some fries and hide them in the Jeep.”

  Chapter fourteen

  Old Doc Brumley was still alive at eighty-five, still picking up the newspaper every morning on the lawn of his run-down baby Victorian on Aspen’s West End, one of the few stately homes left ungentrified in the quaint, overpriced neighborhood. His wife had died decades ago and his children and grandchildren were all living in California, and the only time he appeared in public was at vfw meetings. During the Second World War, Brumley had served as a medic in the 10th Mountain Division, which had trained at Camp Hale near Leadville. He and his fellow troopers had spent their weekend passes in dilapidated Aspen, skiing Ajax and drinking their nights away in the rustic Hotel Jerome. Enamored of the Roaring Fork Valley and its sun-filled winter days, many of the soldiers had returned to live in Aspen after the war. When Kurt was growing up, Ted Brumley had been their family physician. For thirty years he’d volunteered as the county medical examiner because no one else in the small mountain village had witnessed as much death as Lieutenant Theodore Brumley fighting his way up 2,500 feet of Riva Ridge to overtake German artillery emplacements.

  Kurt banged the knocker on the front door of the Brumley residence and waited. The old doctor was notoriously hard of hearing, so he banged again. Finally the door opened wide and the man who had once sewn three stitches above Kurt’s eye stood gaping at him with his mouth parted slightly and a look of utter bewilderment on his pale, sagging face.

  “My god, son,” he said in a near shout. “I thought you were dead.”

  Kurt smiled at him. “Do you know who I am, Doc?” he asked, extending his hand. “Kurt Muller, Otto and Hanne’s boy.”

  Brumley was holding an uncapped tube that oozed something thick and clear, possibly petroleum jelly. He offered Kurt a sticky handshake. “Yes, yes, of course,” the old doctor said, the confusion slowly lifting. “I mistook you for your brother. Albert, wasn’t that his name?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The one who died in the climbing accident.”

  Everyone close to the incident suspected it had been a suicide. “Yes, that was Bert.”

  “The local football star.”

  Kurt smiled fondly. “Yes, sir.”

  “Your mother asked me to look after his body, you know. I went down to assist Dr. Louvier.”

  “Yes, sir, I know.”

  “Nine hundred feet of rock,” the old man said, picking at a dark substance on his fingertips. “As bad as I’ve ever seen it.”

  Every night for the past six years Kurt had seen his brother’s body, too, just before he drifted off to sleep. He didn’t want to see it anymore.

  “I’ve come to ask you some questions about another accident like Bert’s,” he said. “A fatal fall that happened twenty years ago.”

  Brumley gazed at him with a slack expression. “What kind of trouble are you in?”

  Trouble, Kurt thought. Let me count the ways. “I’m not sure what you mean, Doc.”

  “You’re the sheriff now, aren’t you? They’re trying to get rid of you.”

  Kurt nodded with a haggard sigh. “There’s a recall vote coming up.”

  “Whatever they’re saying about you, it’s crap. Don’t let the bastards get their way. I’m going down to the schoolhouse to vote for you. These newcomers, they want to change everything. We old-timers have got to stick together.”

  Kurt smiled. “Thanks for your support, Doc. I appreciate it. Do you mind if I come in?”

  “Certainly,” the doctor said, waving the tube, which Kurt now recognized as bonding cement. “I don’t get many visitors. Yes, please come in.”

  The house reeked of peculiar odors, flammable solvents and split-pea soup and something old and fleshlike, perhaps soiled laundry. Brumley had spent his entire life around foul smells and was no doubt oblivious to them. A tall man who had towered over Kurt when he’d poked and probed him as a boy, scratching his arm with the polio vaccine, shining a light in his ears, the old doctor now walked stiff-limbed and slightly hunched, his jet-black hair gone to baldness. Wearing a maroon buttoned sweater and loose slacks, he led Kurt through an archway into the formal dining room, where a stuffed owl perched with spread wings on the antique dining table under a blazing chandelier.

  “Hope you don’t mind if I do a little touch-up while we talk,” Brumley said. “Can’t afford to let the glue dry.”

  Kurt remembered now that Ted Brumley was an amateur taxidermist specializing in birds. The moldy owl was so old its feathers had begun to drop off. The doctor had arranged the strands of fallen plumage on a newspaper and was in the process of gluing them back on.

  Slipping on his half-moon reading glasses, Brumley bent over a dull brown wing feather, applying cement with an unsteady hand. “Were you the boy whose appendix I removed?” he asked.

  “No, that was Bert.”

  The old man glanced up with an affectionate smile. “Then you were the one who caught that fly just above your eye,” he said, studying Kurt’s face. An accident while fly-fishing the Roaring Fork with his brother and Jake Pfeil. “What were you, twelve, thirteen years old?”

  “Good memory,” Kurt laughed.

  “It comes and goes,” Brumley said, shrugging, squinting at him. “I can’t see a scar. You must’ve healed up pretty well.”

  Kurt had been inside this house many times back in the old days, when he was a classmate of the youngest Brumley boy, Tim. He remembered the china cabinet with its delicate wineglasses and the stuffed pheasant on the mantelpiece and the embroidered insignia of the 10th Mountain Division under framed glass. This was the kind of house he had wanted his parents to own, gabled and majestic and recognizably American, instead of the hay-barn Swiss chalet that had suited their quirky bohemian taste.

  “Dr. Brumley, I’ve been looking into the Rocky Rhodes case and I have some questions about his autopsy,” Kurt said.

  The doctor was leaning into his work with great concentration, but his body sagged noticeably at the mention of Rocky’s name. “I should have guessed,” he said, pausing, lifting his head slightly. “Everyone wants to know about that poor young man.”

  Kurt knew that Ted Brumley had been interviewed extensively by the Rhodes biographer. “I’m sorry, Doc. This is very important or I wouldn’t bother you with it. I looked through the case file and couldn’t find his fingerprint card. Do you remember taking them?”

  “Fingerprinting is standard procedure in an autopsy,” Brumley replied without hesitation.

  “I understand that. But the card isn’t in the file. Can you say for certain you took his prints?”

  “Son, for thirty years I examined every corpse in this valley,” he said, peering hard at Kurt over the top of his half-moon glasses. “And step four of each and every autopsy was always the same— fingerprints. If records are missing, it doesn’t surprise me. I housed my reports with the sheriff’s department, but they weren’t terribly security-conscious back then. T
oo many people had access to the files without supervision.”

  Misplaced. Scrapped. Stolen. After decades of shoddy filing practices, anything was possible.

  “I’ve looked at the photos,” Kurt said. “There was a lot of trauma to his face. Did someone ID him for you?”

  Brumley carefully fit a glue-daubed feather into a gap on the owl’s outspread wing and held it in place with his finger. “I don’t recall how I made the determination,” he said, wrinkling his mouth. “I believe I consulted his girlfriend—the Bauer girl—but I can’t say for sure.”

  Nicole had told Kurt she hadn’t viewed the body. “I don’t mean to be rude, Doc, but is it possible you just assumed it was Rocky Rhodes?” he asked. “Nicole Bauer told the cops he was the man who fell from her deck. All the evidence pointed in his direction.”

  Brumley was clearly annoyed by this idea and raised his voice even louder. “I can assure you I verified his identity,” he said. “Fingerprints, distinguishing marks, personal affidavits. Are my notes in the file, for heaven’s sake? Read my goddamned notes.”

  The high shrill screech of a smoke detector sounded in the kitchen. Kurt caught a whiff of something burning. “Are you cooking, Doc?”

  “Oh, my word,” Brumley said. “Hold your finger here, please. I’m burning my lunch!”

  Kurt held the glued feather in position while the old doctor padded off to the kitchen. An oven door banged, a utensil clanked against Formica, a window shuddered open. The detector continued to scream as heavy smoke drifted into the dining room. Through the doorway Kurt could see Brumley drag a chair across the linoleum and step up onto the seat with wobbling legs. He reached high over his head, opened the plastic cover, and yanked the battery loose from the alarm. The silence was sweet relief.

  Satisfied that the feather would hold, Kurt eased his finger away and walked into the kitchen, where dark smoke swirled around the overhead light fixture. Brumley was stirring something charred in a casserole dish.