Pariah

by Thomas Zigal

  Shorter and softer in appearance than his older brother, Jeffrey Bauer was sitting on a bar stool behind the Playmate, removed from the conversation and looking noticeably uncomfortable, disengaged, overwhelmed. Muffin had mentioned his emotional reaction to his sister’s death, and perhaps that explained why he was staring glumly into the wineglass set beside him on the bar.

  Jeffrey was battling a weight problem, fifty years old and furrowed by the awesome responsibility of keeping the family books. With glasses, a double chin, and a bald patch like a monk’s tonsure on the back of his head, he looked like a wayward off-breed of the imperial family, some recessive gene a lifetime of Bauer money and upbringing hadn’t been able to suppress. Kurt imagined him living in the shadow of his two beautiful siblings, perpetually hurt and ignored. It was enough to turn a young child to numbers.

  A cheer rose up from the rear of the house and all eyes turned toward the outside deck. Something was going on back there, and people began to wander in that direction. Curious himself, Kurt left the glass doors and followed a tall hedge glistening with ice crystals until he came upon a twenty-foot fir tree planted at the corner of the house. Hidden within the tree’s shadow he could observe the scenario unfolding in the backyard. There was no fence, and Ben Smerlas stood teeing off golf balls deep into the outer darkness, where a fairway lay hidden under a mantle of light snow. Each time he swung, driving the ball like a tiny meteorite into the black void, the audience cheered and whistled from the redwood deck. The bucket of balls at his feet was nearly empty. His face beamed from alcohol and he joked with his audience in a loud, exuberant voice, waving his club triumphantly as he bent over to tee up another ball.

  A woman walked out across the floodlit lawn with a drink in each hand. She was wearing jeans and a wool sweater, and her dark hair was cut short and fingered back behind her ears. Smerlas laughed and hugged the woman and took the drink she offered. They clinked glasses, drank, and exchanged a long sincere kiss. The onlookers burst into more cheers, and someone shouted a toast for the next Colorado congressman and his wife.

  Kurt scanned the boisterous crowd on the deck. Sitting with one hip hitched on the railing was someone else he hadn’t expected to see tonight. Dr. Jay Westbrook was sipping a glass of wine with an arm around his young blond-braided assistant, Tanya. The casual observer might have mistaken them for father and daughter.

  Walt IV soon appeared at their side. Tanya smiled at him. He leaned over and said something in Westbrook’s ear. The two men laughed heartily and tapped wineglasses in a casual toast.

  Smerlas, the Bauer brothers, Jay Westbrook. One cozy little circle of acquaintances. What was it that Westbrook had said? We’ve been family for quite a long time.

  In the midst of the raucous cheering a Latina housemaid raced onto the landscaped lawn bearing a bundle of clothing in her outstretched arms. “Señor, señora! ” Kurt heard the girl say, “You going to catch cold out here! Por favor, put on your coats.”

  Ever the gentleman, Smerlas accepted a coat from the girl and placed it around his wife’s shoulders. The coat was brown suede with a fur-lined hood. When she snuggled into it, fastening the buttons with a familiar touch, Kurt had found what he’d come looking for. The woman in the cemetery was Dana Smerlas.

  Chapter twenty

  Slumped down in the driver’s seat, the boot slipped off his sprained ankle, Kurt turned his beeper back on and dialed Miles Cunningham’s cabin on his cell phone. He was prepared to hear Nixon’s voice again and then leave another message for the photographer; instead, a clear, crisp male voice said hello after two rings. Kurt hesitated, confused. No one had ever answered Miles’s phone except the eccentric loner himself.

  “Is Miles there, please?”

  “Speaking. What can I do for you?”

  Though the voice sounded familiar, this wasn’t the Miles Cunningham he had known for twenty-five years. Where was the slur, the convoluted, incomprehensible scramble of language? Where were the insults?

  “Miles, it’s Kurt. If this is indeed Miles Cunningham.”

  “Of course it’s me, Muller. Who else would it be?”

  “Miles, you’re—you’re—”

  “Sober?”

  “Yeeaaah,” Kurt said with a puzzled drag to the word. He hadn’t experienced this before: Miles Cunningham sober after dark.

  “My primary care physician said I was killing myself,” Miles said. “Others agreed.”

  “Congratulations. You did the right thing.”

  “I’ve been clean and sober for exactly nine days, four hours, and thirteen minutes.”

  “Was it rough?”

  “Like somebody scraped out my soul with a manure shovel. But it had to be done.”

  “Incredible, man. Congratulations.”

  “You’ve already said that.”

  “Uh, yeah. Well, anyway, we’re all happy for you.”

  “That’s horseshit and you know it. Nobody wants a funny drunk to go straight. It spoils the party.”

  “You were getting worse these past few years.”

  “So I’m told.”

  There was something missing in his expression, something essentially Miles. His peculiar sense of humor appeared to be on hold. When they exorcised the demons at the dry-out farm, they may have killed off a few angels as well.

  “Did you get my message about the photograph?” Kurt asked.

  “Yes, I did,” Miles said, the words snapping off his tongue with a brazen self-confidence. “But this sobriety jones has had its side effects. Like for instance memory loss.”

  “You can’t remember my message?”

  “I remember your message, nitwit. I can’t remember being a photographer.”

  “Don’t take my word for it,” Kurt said, rubbing his sore ankle. “Go look in that bunker you built behind your cabin. It’s full of photo files. Thousands of them.”

  “Was I good?”

  “You were the best. You won a Pulitzer prize.”

  “I wondered how that thing got on the mantel.”

  “Miles, you’re joking, right? You’re fucking around.”

  “After Betty Ford there’s good news and bad news. The good news is I’ll live another fifteen years. The bad news is I can’t remember why I want to.”

  Kurt glanced at his watch. Ten-thirty. He didn’t have time for counseling. Not tonight.

  “You took some photographs of Rocky Rhodes and his groupies back in the seventies. I want to see what you’ve got on file. There’s one woman in particular I’m trying to track down.”

  “Rocky Rhodes, the dead rock star?” Miles asked, as if he’d never spoken the man’s name before. “You know, I’ve always wondered what it would be like to hang out with a faggy rock star, eat his primo drugs, and sleep with all the groupies.”

  “Miles, you did that. For several years.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “I have this feeling I’m being fucked with and I am not amused. Goddammit, you took at least one picture of a young hippie chick named Mariah Windstar—a group shot with Rocky and friends— and I need to see what she looks like. You’ve got to dig her out of your files for me.”

  Gahan’s photograph resurfaced in Kurt’s mind, the two women kissing, red and black. The small dark-haired woman with the butterfly tattoo on her shoulder blade could have been Dana Smerlas at twenty-five.

  “What makes you think I have what you’re looking for?” Miles asked.

  “There’s a picture of her in the Rocky Rhodes biography but the photo page was ripped out of the copy I saw. The credit line had your name on it.”

  Maybe Gahan had contacted Dana Smerlas tonight because she was an old friend from the Rocky days, someone who had been with them at Canyon de Chelly, and he was warning her that a cop was poking around in their past. Maybe the new Mrs. Smerlas had once been a young woman called Mariah Windstar. The elusive Pariah.

  “Why don’t you phone the publisher, genius?” Miles said. “The chances are nada
to nil I’ll find something in that slag pile out in the bunker. I don’t have a clue what’s in those file cabinets.”

  It was the weekend and Kurt would have to wait until Monday to contact the publisher. “How about if I lend you a couple of deputies to help look through your contact sheets?”

  “I may be obnoxiously sober at this point in my life, Muller, but I’m not entirely bereft of my old principles. To wit, lawmen of any ilk shall not set foot in my inner sanctum.”

  “We’ve known each other a long time, Miles. You know I don’t ask for your help unless I’m jammed against a wall.”

  Kurt heard him inhale, the telltale drag on a cigarette. Or maybe a joint. He could easily imagine Miles Cunningham giving up alcohol but no other drugs.

  “I’m not opening that bunker anymore. I go in there, my face gets rubbed in a lot of painful shit I’ve just spent half my life savings to get free of. In fact, I’m going to take a trowel and a bucket of wet cement and seal that motherfucker shut. Or maybe I’ll dynamite it to the ground, I haven’t decided yet. All I know is the past is a wash and the present is a cold bowl of sop. But I’m alive, goddammit. I’m alive.” He paused for another puff. “Ain’t that fucking wonderful.”

  Kurt could see that their conversation was headed straight into the dead end of denial and self-pity. He had been down that road many times himself. “When you get through being angry at yourself for being a survivor,” he said, “give me a call, Miles. We’ll sit down over coffee and I’ll tell you about an amazing photographer I once knew. He went into places where women and children were being tortured and murdered, and he brought back pictures to show the world that the horrors had to stop.”

  There was a long silence. Then, with an air of indifference, “I don’t think I ever knew that fellow. He sounds so earnest.”

  Once upon a time they had all been earnest. Miles, Nicole, Rocky Rhodes. Kurt and his brother, Bert. An entire generation. “Before you padlock the door, go into the bunker for one last look at the pictures,” he said. “You’re right, every one of them will scream at you. But the world needs to keep hearing those screams.”

  In the awkward silence, Kurt tried to imagine the aging war photographer sitting across from him at a latte bar, wearing a pressed cotton suit and a trendy tie, Oliver Peoples metal-rimmed eyeglasses, his nails pared, his bushy gray sideburns neatly razored. Miles Cunningham in the ’90s. It did not compute.

  “Be well, Miles. Call me if you decide to help. Or if you just want to talk.”

  Kurt shut off the cell phone and sat watching the party house down the street. The music was growing louder and no one was leaving yet. Ben Smerlas, U.S. Congressman, Third District. A scary thought. Kurt could expect Smerlas to harass him and his department, as he had as county commissioner, only with greater authority and more extensive means of curtailment. Maybe being recalled as sheriff wasn’t such a bad idea after all. He wouldn’t have to suffer Ben Smerlas any longer.

  The beeper sounded. Muffin’s desk at the courthouse. He dialed her back immediately. “I’ve been trying to reach you,” she said with irritation in her voice. “Don’t you have your beeper with you?”

  “I had to turn it off for a while.”

  “Got a call from Dan the Man.” Dan Davenport was the sheriff of Garfield County and a former deputy under Kurt. “He’s got Lyle Gunderson in custody. Speeding, avoiding arrest, GTA. Our young friend was booking it at ninety-plus in a stolen car, heading for Interstate 70, when one of Dan’s boys tried to pull him over. Lyle wouldn’t stop and there was pursuit and the kid rolled the car just this side of Glenwood. He’s banged up, but not too bad, considering. Damned lucky to be alive.”

  “Sounds like he was in a hurry to get out of the valley,” Kurt said.

  “He was driving Nicole Bauer’s Saab, Kurt, with a trunkful of videotapes. They figure two, three hundred, mostly homemade porn. Young Lyle’s specialty is what’s called ‘hiddens’ in smut circles—a camera hidden in a closet. Dan the Man thinks we should come take a look at the collection.”

  Kurt suddenly felt ill. Nicole’s houseboy with a hidden camera. Which would explain his eerie sense that someone had been watching them last night in her bedroom. “Has Dan looked at the tapes?” he asked in a small, troubled voice.

  “Apparently so,” she said. “But he didn’t want to discuss it on the phone.”

  The drive to Glenwood Springs took forty-five minutes on average, but with Muffin behind the wheel, pushing the department cruiser to eighty miles an hour on the dark two-lane highway northward through the valley, they were making record time. There was Saturday night traffic outside the small rural communities of Basalt and El Jebel, but she turned on the flashing overhead lights and forced everyone out of her way.

  “I had a creepy feeling about that kid,” she said, blazing past the nocturnal lights of a bedroom subdivision built near the highway on century-old ranch land. Somewhere out in that frigid darkness lay a freshly planted private golf course with eighteen holes. And probably another martini party where a swaggering loudmouth was teeing off from his backyard.

  “No priors, right?” Kurt said. “Let’s look into why he dropped out of college in Oregon.”

  Soon they were passing the location where Lyle had wrecked Nicole’s Saab. The short skid marks on the pavement told them he had flipped quickly. Muffin slowed down, the tires crunching fresh glass. By this time there was only one Garfield County Sheriff’s vehicle, a deputy shining his high beams on the two tow-truck men down in a shallow gully, hooking cables to a car with a flattened roof.

  “So we’ve got ourselves a peeper with a video camera,” Muffin said, slowly pulling away from the scene, “and some crazy old dude living in the Wheeler attic. What’s the connection?”

  Lyle and Rocky Rhodes. Kurt couldn’t imagine it. He didn’t know. “We’ve gone over the attic pretty good, Kurt, and we didn’t find anything new. Just those magazines and some trash,” she said. “Joey dusted the backstage phone where the guy made his calls to you and Nicole, but all he lifted was a greasy smudge.”

  “What about my house?”

  “Same thing. Stains and smears. Our man doesn’t leave anything solid. It’s like he’s, he’s—”

  “A ghost,” Kurt said.

  She cast her eyes aslant at him, showing her annoyance. “Don’t start that,” she said.

  The Garfield County Sheriff’s Department and its attached jail were located in a ’60s vintage brick structure on the south side of the Colorado River, three blocks off the main drag through Glenwood Springs. From the parking lot Kurt could see the elegant lights of the old Hotel Colorado across the river, where Teddy Roosevelt had stayed during his famous bear hunts in the territory. Vapor billowed up from the natural hot springs near the hotel. The Ute Indians had revered those springs as sacred ground. Enterprising settlers had built a sanatorium there. Doc Holliday had come here to battle his tuberculosis and was buried on a nearby hill; and some years later, when a doddering Buffalo Bill Cody was lowered into the waters to soothe his aged bones, he lapsed into a coma from which he did not recover.

  Dan Davenport was watching The Tonight Show on the television in his office. Davenport was a tall rope-muscled cowboy who had wrestled steers in the rodeo circuit before turning to law enforcement. Kurt had inherited him from the previous regime in Pitkin County. But Dan eventually lost his tolerance for the glitzy, fast-track Aspen of the ’80s and was hired on as a deputy farther north in Garfield County, still the rural West. A few years ago he’d been elected county sheriff.

  “Y’all made good time,” he said, rising from his desk to shake their hands. His drooping handlebar mustache was streaked with silver, and there was a permanent hat indentation through his short-cropped hair. “The Gunderson boy’s gonna be in Valley View for a couple days. His face is cut up some and he’s got two busted ribs and a broken leg. One of my deputies is sitting with him. His parents are down there, too.”

  “Can we talk to him?” Ku
rt asked.

  “He’s pretty doped up but you’re welcome to try,” Davenport said. “I thought you might like to see something first.”

  He walked over to a stack of cardboard boxes that filled one corner of his office. “The boy was hauling quite a load,” he said, retrieving a videotape placed aside from the others. “I’ve looked at enough to git the picture.”

  The portable television rested on a mobile cart near his desk. He slid the tape into a VCR and handed the remote control to Kurt.

  “Miss Brown,” Davenport said, “can I talk to you a minute outside?”

  He opened the office door and extended his hand toward the corridor. Muffin hesitated, glancing at Kurt for an explanation. “Is there some reason I shouldn’t see this tape?” she asked them both.

  Davenport stared at the scuffed tips of his cowboy boots. His embarrassment appeared mannered but genuine. “I think Kurt’ll want to watch this by hisself,” he said, his jaw flexing sternly.

  Behind Muffin’s eyes something locked in place. She nodded, agreeing reluctantly, a moment of comprehension. “Okay,” she said directly to Kurt. “For now.”

  After they had left the room, Kurt sat down in Dan’s swivel chair and pushed the play button. Within seconds his worst fear was exposed before him on the screen. He recognized the bedroom and the two people kissing, undressing each other. Lyle’s tape had been recorded from a pinhole camera high above Nicole’s bed, possibly through a grate of some sort, the central air duct. The view was partially obstructed, the video quality poor, the sound muffled, but there was no doubt what was going on and when it had taken place.

  Everything began to unfold before his eyes in a morbid déjà vu—the thin dress straps slipping off her shoulders, his hands gliding gently across her breasts. The sight of her long sinewy body, freckled and golden, took his breath away. He watched her sprinkle potpourri on the sheets like a flower girl tossing petals at a wedding. Smell, she said, raising her upturned palm to his face as if feeding him a strange fruit. Do you remember?