Pariah

by Thomas Zigal

  “Leftover stew,” the old man announced loudly. “Have you had lunch, Bert?”

  “Yes, I have, thank you,” Kurt lied.

  Brumley opened a cabinet door and began searching through stacks of vintage porcelain. “I don’t know why everyone is so obsessed with that poor boy’s death,” he said. “You’d think by now they would let him lie in peace.”

  “Are you looking for this, Doc?” Kurt pointed to a large earthen bowl sitting on the counter near the sink.

  “Ah yes, there it is,” he said, sliding the bowl next to the casserole dish and spooning in burned stew. “Like I told that lady—when was it? Last week, I think,” he said, pausing to stare off into space. “I stand by my work. If I declared it was Rocky Rhodes, it was Rocky Rhodes. No one paid me to say otherwise.”

  Kurt watched him pick through the dark crust, choosing the more recognizable chunks of meat and potatoes. “Somebody else was asking about the autopsy?”

  “Oh, yes. Just last week a woman came knocking on my door late one night. Nice-looking gal. Anyone else, I would’ve told them to go to hell. But she was very polite. I figured her for a reporter writing another damn story, but now I’m not so sure.”

  Kurt pictured Nicole showing up on the old coroner’s doorstep after dark, frightened and overwrought, determined to discover the truth about the letters she was receiving. “Was it Nicole Bauer?” he asked.

  Brumley frowned. “No. No, I remember Miss Bauer quite clearly. A tall, striking redhead. Beautiful young woman, in spite of the drug abuse. This lady was middle-aged.” He seemed to have lost track of the years and hadn’t considered that Nicole had aged, too. “Forty, forty-five, I would guess. An attractive woman but much smaller than the Bauer girl. One hundred and ten pounds. Dark hair, dark eyes. Small-chested, but real nice calves.”

  Ted Brumley still had an eye for the human body. “What did she want?” Kurt asked.

  The old doctor tasted the ruined stew, added seasoning. “She danced around it awhile, but when it came down to it she was asking the same question you are. Was I certain the body I cut on was Rocky Rhodes?”

  Kurt looked at a camper jay sitting quietly on the window-sill, as serene and unruffled as the day Doc Brumley had stuffed and mounted it. “Your visitor,” he said. “What was her name?”

  Brumley put down the spoon and closed his eyes, thinking hard, his face like a crushed cigarette pack. “Something that reminded me of a song I used to know,” he said, struggling, frustrated with his poor memory.

  “A song?”

  “Frankie Laine,” Brumley said, beginning to hum a melody that Kurt thought he recognized.

  “Mariah?”

  “Yes, that’s it!” the old man said with a grateful smile. “Good old Frankie Laine.”

  “Mariah Windstar?”

  “That’s it! Nice-looking gal, very polite.”

  Pariah. She was still in Aspen after all these years.

  “Did she give you a phone number? A way to contact her?”

  Brumley shook his head. “No, I’m afraid not. We sat in the living room and talked for a good long while and then she left all of a sudden. I thought she was going to interview me for another story, but after she was gone I got to thinking she wasn’t the reporter type.”

  Kurt checked his watch. He was due at the Wheeler Opera House in five minutes. “Do me a favor, Doc,” he said, slipping a business card from his wallet and leaving it on the countertop. “If she contacts you again, give me a call right away. I want to meet this lady, too.”

  Brumley picked up the card and read the information. “Thanks for coming by, uh, Kurt,” he said. “By the way, how is your father doing? A gentleman of the old school. Not many like him around these parts anymore.”

  Kurt patted the old man affectionately on the shoulder. His father had been dead longer than Rocky Rhodes. “Don’t forget to reattach that battery,” he said, nodding at the smoke detector.

  Chapter fifteen

  When Kurt rounded the corner at Mill and Hyman, he saw the TV satellite truck parked in front of the Wheeler Opera House and a crowd of reporters surrounding Corky Marcus at the entrance to the elegant building. Deputy Gill Dotson, posted near the doorway, spotted Kurt approaching on foot and hurried down the sidewalk to escort him through the gathering.

  “The sharks are circling,” Gill said, placing his hand at the small of Kurt’s back. “Get ready to get physical.”

  Gill was a large man like Kurt, six four, 220 pounds, his waves of thick dark hair beginning to gray, matching the soul patch below his bottom lip. People sometimes mistook him for Kurt’s brother.

  “There he is! ” someone shouted. The reporters quickly abandoned Corky and rushed Kurt with a barrage of questions. Gill forearmed his way through the swarm, saying, “Make a hole, people.

  Sheriff Muller is late for the forum.”

  “Good to see everybody,” Kurt said with a politic smile. He recognized two staff writers from the Aspen newspapers. “I’ll talk to y’all later, when there’s more time.”

  The reporters followed them through the Tourist Information Office on the ground level and stayed hard on their heels up the thickly carpeted stairs to the second-floor lobby, tugging at Kurt like terriers with a pant cuff: Tell us about your evening with Nicole Bauer! Did you spend the entire date at Starwood? What did you talk about? How late did you stay? What kind of mental state was she in when you left?

  “Didn’t you hear the sheriff?” Gill snapped, pushing a cameraman out of their way. “He’ll answer your questions later.”

  He led Kurt by the jacket sleeve across the lobby to the theater doors, leaning close to whisper, “We’ll find you a back way out when this thing is over.” Then he turned to block the doorway with his large body, allowing Corky through but restraining the reporters from entering the seating area.

  Inhaling a lungful of the stale, vaultlike air of the old theater, Kurt passed down the aisle aware of hostile glances and furtive whispers, the packed audience mostly friends of Ben Smerlas. The only receptive smile he encountered was from Carole Marcus, who waggled her fingers at him in a mimelike greeting. But in the corners of that smile he saw her warning that this whole event was a very bad idea.

  Behind a velvet curtain in the dark wing of the stage, two men were going over the notes attached to a clipboard. They looked up as Kurt approached. “Hello, Muller,” said Matt Heron, the former movie star turned New Age wellness guru whose brainchild was the now bankrupt Star Meadow Holistic Institute. “We weren’t sure you would show.”

  “I’m here. Let’s get it on.”

  “The speaker committee has asked me to moderate the discussion,” Heron said. “I hope that’s cool with you.”

  Matt Heron was synonymous with Aspen. Wholesome, outdoorsy, superficial. Kurt neither liked nor trusted the pretty-boy narcissist, with his helmet of golden hair and ice-blue eyes. He suspected that Heron had had an affair with Meg just before the divorce, when she was spending night and day at Star Meadow working through the changes, as she had explained at the time.

  “No, you’re perfect for this, Heron,” Kurt said. “Absolutely perfect.”

  “Copacetic,” the actor said with an uncertain grin. “Then we’re ready to rock.”

  Onstage, Ben Smerlas greeted Kurt with a virile handshake and a gangster’s smile. Smerlas was a short man, maybe five-eight, gym-built and bronzed like a Mediterranean god. His thick black hair was combed back with a hint of oil and his face was perfectly structured, his nose and strong jaw modeled after classic Greek sculpture, his teeth expertly capped and gleaming. There was little doubt he had provided a Princeton education for the children of some expensive cosmetic surgeon from the Coast.

  The story on Smerlas was that he’d been a young L.A. cop when Watts exploded in the summer of ’65. Being shot at in the streets had convinced him to quit the force and move to Orange County, where he eventually made his fortune in used cars, waste management, and industrial properties. Ru
mors persisted about mob ties, Vegas debts. He was a fierce skier and workout fanatic, and since his arrival in town fifteen years ago he’d gone through two trophy wives and assorted bimbo girlfriends. Still, his splashy parties had endeared him to the older social set, who had supported his campaigns for county commissioner. From his earliest days in office he had championed growth and development in the valley, and he was a strict law-and-order man, openly attacking Kurt at every opportunity for the way he ran the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Department. If Corky was right—and Corky was always right about such things—Smerlas was using the commission seat to springboard into higher office.

  “Have you met my wife, Sheriff?” Smerlas said, introducing the attractive woman at his side. “Don’t get too friendly. She’s also my research assistant and it’s her job to dig up dirt on everybody in town.”

  “I’d hate to guess what you have on me,” Kurt said, shaking hands with Dana Smerlas.

  “Some targets are easier than others,” she said, challenging him with a clever smile.

  She was older and less glamorous than the women Kurt had usually seen Smerlas with, and it occurred to him that maybe the bastard was running short of flexible cash and had bagged this unfortunate woman for her Cayman bank account. She resembled the other wealthy middle-aged society women of Les Dames d’Aspen, charming and well-bred and pampered by the men in her past. Like her husband, Dana Smerlas showed signs of reconstruction, not in what was detectable but in what was not. The natural wrinkles were missing from the corners of her eyes, and her deeply tanned face had the skin-stretched quality of a surgical lift. But she looked good in jeans and a colorful handmade sweater from some third world sweatshop, and her short-cropped hair appeared its own natural color, graying at the temples with hints of red, an unfashionable statement in this town.

  “It’s nice to meet the infamous sheriff at last,” Dana Smerlas said with a derisive glint in her eye. “I’ve heard so much about you. But let me get out of the way and leave you two gentlemen to your stage.”

  KAJX radio had arranged to air the discussion live. A pony-tailed studio engineer hunched over his soundboard in the orchestra pit, adjusting knobs, issuing cryptic hand signals to the young female techie clipping a microphone to Kurt’s flannel shirt. Trapped by wire and ceremony, he gazed out at the quiet audience and noticed Muffin Brown slipping into a seat in the rear of the theater. She must have completed her walk-through with the Bauer brothers at Nicole’s mansion. Sooner or later he would have to meet with them himself, an unsettling thought he tried to force out of his mind.

  When the houselights dimmed and the engineer motioned for Matt Heron to begin the program, Kurt stared out at the ghostly silhouettes and remembered his afternoons in this old theater as a boy. His father, an Austrian composer and the creator of the summer music festival, had often dragged him and Bert in here to watch chamber rehearsals on this same stage where he and Smerlas were now seated behind a cafeteria table with notepads and dripping pitchers of water.

  “There are two main charges Commissioner Smerlas and his recall movement have made against Sheriff Muller,” explained Matt Heron after brief introductions. A proliferation of illegal drugs in the valley. A proliferation of undocumented Latino service workers.

  “Give me a few minutes and the list will grow,” Smerlas said, eliciting laughter from the audience.

  Kurt couldn’t bring himself to focus on the discussion at hand. He was still processing the thought that Mariah Windstar was a real woman walking the streets of Aspen. After twenty years, why was she suddenly curious about Rocky’s autopsy? Did she know about the letters to Nicole? Had they remained friends all along?

  “Okay, Commissioner,” Matt Heron said, “let’s begin with your remarks.”

  Smerlas wasted no time launching his attack. He claimed that the DEA had brought in their own agents to work Pitkin County and the Roaring Fork Valley because the sheriff’s department was either incompetent or unwilling to investigate drug trafficking among the Latino service workers in the Aspen area. “My sources inside the DEA tell me that Sheriff Muller and his staff are so unreliable, the agency routinely excludes them from their investigations,” Smerlas said. “I would like this county to have a sheriff’s department that doesn’t embarrass the good people who live here—one that works hand in hand with the DEA to stop the illegal drug activity running rampant everywhere you turn. But let me assure you, folks. As long as Kurt Muller is in office, the drug dealers know this is the sweetest place on the planet to set up house and do business.”

  There was a hum of low voices in the theater. “Sheriff Muller?” Heron said, inviting him to respond.

  A door opened in the dark balcony above the audience and the flash of light caught Kurt’s eye. Something long forgotten surfaced in his memory. He suddenly recalled sitting up there many years ago, just after he’d come home from the army, passing a joint among friends while Rocky Rhodes and his band blew out the fuses down here on stage. It may have been the same concert he’d seen on VH1. He wondered if Nicole and Mariah had been in the audience that night.

  “Sheriff Muller, it’s your turn,” Heron repeated, grinning boyishly at Kurt’s inattention.

  Kurt sat up straight and tried to refocus his thoughts. “I have no problem with, uh, the DEA,” he said, doodling on the pad in front of him as if making a note to himself. “Our department has cooperated with them on a number of warrants. But I think the agency needs to, uh, improve its percentages. Last year they busted one apartment for possession of tortilla mix, and a farmhouse in Old Snowmass for trafficking in herbal tea.” A snicker from the audience. “The DEA should do their homework before they pull weapons and raid a place. Thank god nobody was hurt in either incident. But I would suggest,” he said, a sudden inspiration, “that somewhere in their basic training these agents should learn the difference between cocaine and tortilla mix.”

  Everyone laughed. Even Smerlas seemed amused by Kurt’s comment.

  “What about that, Commissioner?” chirped Heron. “The DEA have blown it themselves a couple of times, haven’t they?”

  Smerlas’s long sputtering response sounded circular and defensive, as if he himself were responsible for the agency’s actions in the valley. Kurt made no effort at following the lame justifications. He could see that people were lining up in the aisle behind a microphone stand, eager to ask questions. He suspected they were all Smerlas plants.

  “Thank you, Commissioner. It looks like there are several audience members who want to participate in our open forum today,” Heron said. “Go ahead, young man. What’s your question?”

  “Yeah, first off I’d like to point out that Man is totally destroying this valley with his fences and mini-malls and monster homes. You so-called civic leaders up there onstage don’t give a rat’s ass, so long as you’re making some jack off your development deals on the side.”

  Squinting into the hot stage lights, Kurt leaned forward in his chair to see who was saying these things. The Gen-X voice sounded familiar.

  “Take a look at what’s going down all around us, people. The elk can’t migrate from the snow country to the warmer meadows ’cause all your ranch fences are blocking their runs. And now the bears, man. What’re the bears supposed to do?”

  It was Kyle Martin. He kept raking the long blond hair out of his eyes and gesturing dramatically.

  “Do you have a specific question for the speakers?” Heron asked with a patient smile.

  “I got no fucking specific question, dude. But I got some serious advice for you all.” He reached down into a backpack at his feet. “Stop raping the wild! ” he shouted, hurling a fat round object toward the stage. The balloon was intended for Kurt and Smerlas but fell short, splattering a thick red liquid across the flooring. “You got blood on your hands, you bastards! You’re raping the wild! ”

  Gill Dotson and a security guard moved down the aisle after him, but Kyle scooted along the orchestra pit and bolted up another aisle, escapin
g to the lobby.

  “Bye now,” Matt Heron said. “And thank you for sharing your thoughts with us.”

  It looked more like red paint than blood, but Heron called for a short break while two theater attendants wearing rubber gloves rolled out their squeeze bucket and quickly mopped up the mess.

  “Back in my day as a cop, that kind of behavior would get a man arrested,” Smerlas said into his microphone when the radio engineer signaled that they were back on the air. “But Sheriff Muller takes a bean-sprout approach to law enforcement and he’ll probably just arrange a massage and some Yanni music for that troubled boy.”

  The audience laughed. Questions resumed from the floor microphone. Kurt rocked back in his chair, gazing upward again into the theater’s gloom. A cigarette glowed in the dark balcony seats. Someone was sitting up there alone, smoking. He thought he could smell the faint drift of marijuana.

  “Sheriff Muller, I’m sure you’ll want to address that,” Heron said.

  Kurt hadn’t been listening. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Too much mike feedback up here. Could the lady repeat her question.”

  Heron and Smerlas exchanged glances. “She asked about the avalanches last March,” Heron explained. “Your policy of search and rescue. Considering what happened to Maggie Turner.”

  “Oh, right,” Kurt nodded. “Maggie Mae.” The same aging hippie whose name had appeared on the 1977 police list of Rocky’s friends.

  “Sheriff Muller, I would like to know why you didn’t try harder,” the speaker said in an accusatory tone.

  Last spring an avalanche had swept over Maggie Turner’s small rustic cabin in Castle Creek Valley, and after an initial attempt at rescue, Kurt was forced to call off the search because of whiteout conditions and the threat of another avalanche. Several days later, after Maggie’s body had been recovered from underneath the mangled cabin, there were signs that she’d been trapped alive in an air pocket for perhaps twelve hours. The media speculated that she might’ve been saved if the sheriff hadn’t given up so early.