Pariah

by Thomas Zigal

  “Don’t ruin the merchandise. I’m sure Florio will want to examine every page in detail,” Gill said, toeing at a small orange packet of Zig-Zag rolling papers.

  Kurt turned a slow circle, gazing out across the dark expanse of attic. “He has another way in and out,” he said. “Maybe a window onto the roof. There’s a fire escape down the side of the building.”

  Muffin stood up and pointed her light into the distance, the beam diffusing like a white mist over the prop graveyard. “I’ll radio for some more help,” she said. “We’ll search the place top to bottom.”

  Dotson’s flashlight ray nosed around the sleeping bag like a sniffing hound. He found the pile of excrement and fouled candy wrappers used for toilet tissue. “Looks like it’s just some nasty old bum getting in out of the snow,” he said.

  “Tell our people to treat this one real serious,” Kurt said. “He’s got a long blade and he’s not afraid to use it.”

  The fog was beginning to clear from his brain, but now he was more aware of the pain. His right ankle throbbed and his shoulders felt as if they were bearing a hundred-pound bag of sand. “Go through these magazines and see if he’s cut out any pictures or words,” he said, feeling the need to sit down again. “Look around for an old Underwood typewriter.”

  Gill stopped to regard him with a wide smile. “What, Kurt? You think this freak’s up here sending valentines to his sweetheart?”

  They heard a racket near the top of the stairs. Joey Florio called out their names. “Yo, where are you cowboys? Did the bogeyman get you?”

  The EMS team was close behind him, banging through the maze of crates with their oxygen equipment and their stretcher.

  “Okay, boss,” Muffin said, patting Kurt’s shoulder. “Here comes your ride.”

  Chapter seventeen

  Dr. Stephen Perry, Kurt’s personal physician, was making his rounds at Aspen Valley Hospital and came down to the emergency room to examine Kurt himself. The X-rays showed no broken bones. A nurse dressed the abrasion on Kurt’s scalp and taped an ice bag to his swollen ankle while Dr. Perry conducted further tests.

  “You’ve had a mild concussion, nothing serious,” the doctor said after probing and palpating Kurt’s head, scoping his pupils and ears. “No signs of a hematoma. You may feel dizzy and out of sync for a few days. A concussion can make everything seem like a weird dream. Your brain has been shaken up like one of those eight balls with the floating messages and there’s no predicting what will surface. You may suddenly remember the lyrics of an old song or a night of bliss with a girlfriend you’ve forgotten all about.”

  Dr. Perry smiled innocently at Muffin, who was sitting on a stool in the corner of the examination room.

  “Wonderful,” Kurt said glumly. “What I need now is more weirdness.”

  “Just take it easy, okay? Relax for a couple of days. Watch videos, listen to some good music. And stay off your feet until the swelling goes down in your ankle.”

  An RN wheeled Kurt to a room farther down the corridor and told him she would return in a short while to remove the ice pack. Muffin stood in the doorway, absently tapping the department cap against her leg, clearly preoccupied with other considerations. He recognized the familiar signs of her restlessness.

  “Will you be all right?” she asked. “I’ll call one of the deputies to drive you home.”

  “Sit down,” he said.

  “Don’t have the time, Kurt. Too much going on. One crew’s finishing up over at Nicole’s place, and now this thing in the Wheeler.”

  “Tell me about the Bauer brothers. How did it go?”

  She stared past his shoulder out the small window. “They brought their lawyer along, some wiseass from Denver. I walked them through the scene,” she said. “The younger one, Jeffrey, took it pretty hard. Needless to say, they want to talk to you.”

  He dropped his chin. The Bauers wouldn’t rest until their sister’s death was investigated to their full satisfaction. “As the sheriff of this jurisdiction?” he asked, curious how much detail she had already supplied them. “Or as Nicole’s last date?”

  She regarded him with the superior disdain he’d felt from her on other occasions. Something was bothering her. “I checked in with Louvier,” she said. “His examination indicates she had sex last night, Kurt. Is there something you’ve neglected to tell me?”

  She seemed to take dark pleasure in punishing him for his mistakes. She had had plenty of practice at it. But he suspected there were deeper motives, a delicate tension between them they wouldn’t acknowledge aloud, the intimacy of that night in her trailer a few years ago. They had decided it should never happen again, but sometimes the memory surprised Kurt, curled around his thoughts at unexpected moments.

  “The Bauers are people who got filthy rich sweating the details,” she said. “They’ll want to know who caused the penetration. You can bet it will be a topic of great interest to them.”

  “Please sit down, Muffin,” he said, softer now, an appeal rather than a command. He nodded to the paper-covered examination table, the only seat in the room besides a small aluminum swivel stool.

  “I’ll stand,” she said, glancing at the table. “Women usually end up on those things with their knees spread wide.”

  This wasn’t going to be easy. He reached across the wheelchair and poured himself a cup of water from the pitcher on the physicians’ desk. “About a year ago Nicole and I had an affair,” he said, avoiding her eyes. “I got to know her during the investigation, when that junkie chick broke into her house.”

  He took a deep breath, then another drink of water. He wasn’t accustomed to this side of a confession. “The affair didn’t last long and we hadn’t seen each other in a while, but we were still friends, I suppose. She didn’t trust anybody else. The date was an excuse to bring me to Starwood to look at those letters.”

  “And then one thing led to another.”

  He didn’t want to see Muffin Brown raise another eyebrow at him for the rest of his life. “I liked her,” he said, unwilling to admit how strongly he had been attracted to the woman everyone had treated as an outcast. “I knew she’d had her share of problems, but I didn’t realize how serious they were. I didn’t know she was suicidal.”

  Muffin ran a hand through her hair, exasperated with him. “Christ, Kurt, the woman killed her boyfriend. She’d slept with half the men in town. Everybody knew she was trouble. What planet have you been living on?”

  Kurt didn’t believe the rumors. There were men, yes. But Nicole had been discreet, selective. He suspected that over the years she had spent many long days and nights alone.

  “She asked for my help,” he said. “As a cop. She wasn’t fabricating the letters or playing some kind of head game with me. The son of a bitch who tried to knife me in the Wheeler is the one who wrote them.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He broke into my house and left me a message.” He told her about the sentences typed on the Underwood, recounting some of the phrases. “Same attitude, same style as the letters to Nicole. It’s him, all right. He even called me on the phone and laughed that sick laugh. The boy wants to play.”

  He had her attention now. “Jesus,” she said, stepping toward him with a grave expression. “Sounds like you might be his new target.”

  “He may look like a gnarly old freak who sleeps next to his own shit in an attic, but he knows exactly what he’s doing.”

  “We’ll get you some extra protection,” she said, visibly disturbed by the turn of events. “And I’ll put out an APB right away. It shouldn’t be too hard to track down somebody that out of place in Aspen these days.”

  The ice had numbed Kurt’s ankle and now the cold was traveling up his leg, chilling his entire body. He crossed his arms to stop the shivering in his chest. “He called her,” he said, clenching his teeth to prevent them from chattering. “Sometime around four this morning. That’s why she panicked.” He tried to calm himself. “The bastard scared
her to death.”

  Muffin saw that he was shaking and threw open the doors of a small white cabinet, searching for something to cover him. She found a blanket and wrapped it around his shoulders. “Are you all right, Kurt? I hope you’re not going into some kind of delayed shock.”

  “She left a message on my machine right after his call,” he said, shuddering under the blanket. “I want you to hear it. She thought it was Rocky Rhodes. It’s why she freaked out and ran.”

  Muffin rubbed his shoulders briskly. “I wish you would stop talking like it really could be him,” she said. “It’s giving me the willies.”

  “We need her phone records ASAP,” he said. “We’ve got to find out where he was calling from. And while you’re at it, run down the calls to my house this morning, too.”

  Voices echoed in the corridor, swift footsteps approaching. “Knock knock,” said Carole Marcus, appearing in the doorway. Corky was behind her, sullen and worried.

  “Kurt, honey, are you all right?” Carole said, rushing into the room. “We thought you—Well, we didn’t know what was going on, then we heard what happened.”

  He smiled dumbly and nodded at the ice pack. “Just a sprained ankle,” he said. “Otherwise I’m fine.”

  Before Corky could say anything, Muffin moved quickly across the room and took his arm. “I’m glad you’re here, Counselor. I was going to track you down. Can we talk a minute?”

  Kurt suspected that Muffin needed to brief Corky about her meeting with the Bauer entourage. “Don’t lose any more votes while I’m out of the room,” he said to Kurt, then stepped into the corridor with the deputy.

  “You’re making us crazy, darling,” Carole said. She held Kurt’s face in her warm hands, staring down into his eyes with deep concern. She was a good friend, but every time she touched him like this, something unwholesome stirred inside him.

  “I’m sorry, Carole. You were right. I should’ve listened to you and stayed at home.”

  There was a tear on her cheek. Her lovely dark eyes were wet and glistening. “Carole,” he said with surprise in his voice. He didn’t understand this sudden emotion. “Are you okay?”

  “I worry about you.”

  He knuckled the soft skin of her face, catching the tear on his finger.

  “Maybe this recall is the best thing that could happen to you,” she said, squeezing the fingers that lingered on her cheek longer than they should have. “I’m thinking about voting against you myself.”

  He smiled at her. “Now you’re starting to sound like Meg,” he said.

  Carole and Kurt’s ex were old friends. The two couples had been in the same birthing class when they were pregnant with Lennon and Joshua Marcus.

  “Somebody’s got to keep an eye on you,” she said, tucking the blanket around his neck.

  “If it’s any consolation,” he said, “I’m probably not going to vote at all.”

  Corky and Carole drove him back to the courthouse and helped him into his Jeep, which was parked in his designated sheriff’s space.

  “Would you like me to drive you home?” Carole offered.

  “You’re spoiling me,” he said. “I feel fine. Really.”

  “Don’t field any phone calls or talk to the media without me present,” Corky instructed him.

  “There goes my feature on Hard Copy.”

  “This is not an occasion for humor,” Corky said peevishly. “Go home and hide under a bed until further notice.”

  After they had driven away, Kurt sat numbly in the old Willys, the crutches angled against the passenger seat. The deep shadow of Aspen Mountain had crept across town, dropping the temperature. He rested his head against the seat and breathed in the crisp alpine air. There was a strange magnified quality to the surrounding light. He could hear water trickling down a rain spout, slush thawing in the gutter beneath his tires. He remembered this heightened sensation from long ago, this slowed-down rhythm of things unseen. It was what the world felt like after a long toke of Thai stick. It was the sweet vibration all through his body after making love with Nicole in her warm firelit bedroom while the wind howled outside in the night.

  “Hey, Kurt, you all right?”

  Gill Dotson was squatting down at the passenger window, smiling at him in his good-natured, Minnesota farmboy way.

  “How long you gonna be on these crutches?”

  “A day or two. It’s just a sprain.” Kurt glanced at the courthouse windows catching the last rays of afternoon sunlight. “How’s it going at the Wheeler?”

  “Poor Linda,” Gill sniggered. His gruff laugh sounded like an echo from a deep well. “I put her to work bagging that bad boy’s stash of dirty magazines and she found some sticky pages. She almost lost her lunch.”

  Linda Ríos had been in the department for only two years and still suffered from rookie status. She was a burned-out middle school teacher from rural southern Colorado. Muffin had recruited her to help with the county’s Spanish-speaking population.

  “At least our boy’s practicing safe sex,” Gill said, laughing harder.

  “Let’s work up his blood type,” Kurt said. “And dust the magazines for fingerprints.”

  He would ask the lab techs to look for a match with the late Rocky Rhodes. If they ever located his goddamned records.

  “Any sign of a typewriter? There might be one lying around somewhere—a prop from an old play.”

  “Nothing close by his camp,” Gill said. “But there’s a shitload of junk in that attic, Kurt. We could kill a week looking through it.”

  “Find the Underwood,” Kurt said, cranking the Jeep engine.

  Hiding in his house, watching videos until his ankle mended, was out of the question. His head felt clearer now and there was someone he wanted to talk to.

  “You’ve got this guy’s description.” He nodded toward the downtown shops. “Ask around. Somebody would’ve noticed him on the mall. You don’t see old freaks like him in Aspen anymore.”

  “Fuckin’ A,” Gill said wistfully. “Damn place has gone over to the Granola trustafarians.”

  He stood up to full height and fished for the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. “Ahh, for the bad old days,” he said, firing up a Camel.

  Chapter eighteen

  One of the names jotted in the margin of the 1977 police report was Gahan Moss, the keyboard man in Rocky’s band. For many years Gahan had lived at the foot of Buttermilk Mountain in a fabled residence the locals called the Magic Mushroom House. In his wild younger days Kurt had wandered into a couple of parties when the house was owned by a swinging ’60s movie star and her architect husband, who had designed the strange lair after reading J.R.R. Tolkien on psilocybin mushrooms, or so the story went. The interior doorways were shaped like warped Dali clocks, stairwells spiraled upward without destination, and the bedrooms were optical illusions, their rectangular planes receding smaller and smaller into corners where waterbeds lapped in slow undulating waves. As Kurt recalled, it had been a fun place to be stoned—if you didn’t get lost in the hall of mirrors.

  Neon toadstools decaled the mailbox marking the entrance to Gahan’s private drive. Kurt followed the sharp switchbacks uphill through a grove of bare aspen trees until he found a small dirt-packed parking lot and roughhewn stone steps leading onward up the cliff. The climb was strenuous on crutches, and when he reached the outdoor patio at the top of the rise, he paused to rest and take in the view of the valley below. Darkness was falling quickly, a wintry chill. He could see the landing lights at Sardy Field and a steady stream of headbeams on Highway 82. When he turned toward the house, round-roofed like the cap of a giant gray mushroom, he realized that the song he’d been hearing in his head was not a floating memory brought on by the concussion, but a real song wailing from speakers somewhere inside the place. It was “Blue Midnight,” the same guitar solo playing on his stereo after the break-in.

  Crutching his way down the cobblestone path to the main entrance of the house, he noticed high-voltage l
ight blazing through a long, narrow picture window. He stopped to have a look and counted four tall floodlamps placed strategically around the sitting area near the glass. A naked man stood peering into a tripod video camera, patches of coarse hair on his back and shoulders, his short pale body sagging under middle-aged flab, a rattail braid dangling from the nape of his thick neck. Kurt rustled through the hedge running alongside the walkway and hopped one-footed onto a stone bench for a clearer view. Two nude women were cavorting on a polar bear rug near the window seats, massaging each other and kissing, vamping for the camera. Even at this distance Kurt could see the difference in their ages. The older woman roiled around her partner’s small hard body like a sleek, bulbous sea lion sliding off a rock. She tongued her lips and played to the lens, beckoning the man to join them.

  Without warning, a huge black rottweiler sprang snarling out of the undergrowth and would have taken Kurt’s leg if he hadn’t swung his crutch full force against the beast’s skull. The dog howled and stumbled backward, legs churning, then lowered its nose and charged again. When Kurt swung the second time the dog snared the crutch in its teeth and yanked fiercely, a brutal crunching sound Kurt’s bones would make if that animal got to him. In a panic he glanced at the picture window and saw the two women scrambling for their clothes. “Hey!” he yelled. “Somebody come get this fucking dog!”

  The rottweiler splintered the crutch, dragging it out of Kurt’s hands, then pressed its attack, lunging and retreating while Kurt jabbed at its snout with the other crutch. He managed to pull the tube out of his pocket, and when the dog lurched again he pepper-sprayed the animal’s cold black eyes. It barked and rolled around in the dirty snow, pawing at its face, then disappeared into the brush with a wounded howl.

  Kurt struggled to catch his breath. His panting left vapor in the dying light. With the crutch still raised like a weapon, he stepped down off the bench and cautiously backed his way toward the hedge, prepared for another attack. When he turned, there was a man in a silk kimono waiting for him on the footpath.