Pariah

by Thomas Zigal

  Kurt smiled at the shrewdness of her cover. “I tailed Gahan to the cemetery, Mrs. Smerlas. I watched you walk over and meet with him by the tombstones in the dark. I followed you back to this house.”

  Her face hardened. “You must have me confused with some other woman,” she said.

  “You joined a crowd of people heading down the sidewalk to the party. If I go through your guest list, somebody’s going to confirm that. They’re going to admit it seemed odd that the hostess was out for a long walk while her party was at full-tilt boogie.”

  She banged her cup against the saucer, a flare of temper. “I invited you into this house of my own accord, Sheriff. I have been as hospitable as I can be. But now you’re grilling me about a man I’ve never met. I’m sorry he was murdered, but I haven’t the slightest idea what that has to do with me. If you persist with these questions I’ll have no choice but to call my husband at the club, and he will contact our attorney. You can address any further questions to them.”

  Kurt finished the last sip of his coffee. “Okay, fine, lawyer up—it’s your right,” he said. “When you call your husband, tell him and your lawyer to meet you at the Pitkin County jail. Because that’s where I’m taking you for booking, Mrs. Smerlas.”

  “You’re what ?” She was indignant.

  “You met in secret with the homicide victim at ten o’clock last night. You had an angry exchange, which I personally witnessed. A few hours later he and his wife were brutally murdered. You’re my number one suspect, lady.”

  “Surely you’re joking!”

  “Am I? Unless you start talking to me about Gahan Moss, you’re taking a ride to jail. Now what’s that going to do to your husband’s political future? The day after he announces he’s running for Congress, his wife becomes a suspect in a bloody double murder.”

  Dana Smerlas gripped the edge of the table and pulled herself halfway out of the chair, crouching like a small, sinewy animal ready to spring from the brush. “You can’t do this,” she fumed. “The public will see it for what it really is—a desperate man smearing his political enemy by taking a cheap shot at his wife.” She straightened her shoulders and flashed small white teeth in a cynical smile. “When is that recall vote coming up, Sheriff? Two weeks? Is this some kind of diversionary tactic? There isn’t enough time left in your career for the ink to dry on these silly charges.”

  Kurt smirked at her. His career. He’d never put much stock in the concept. The only time he gave any serious thought to holding on to his so-called office was when someone accused him of being incompetent. The Ben Smerlases of the world.

  “You’ve got ten minutes to get dressed,” he said. “My Jeep is out front. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  He was halfway across the large den when she called his name. There was a note of exasperation in the way she addressed him: “Sheriff Muller, wait.”

  He stopped and turned to face her. She was standing in the open doorway to the sun room, backlit by the room’s sea-green glow. They studied each other for several moments without movement or speech. He knew she wanted him to appreciate her natural beauty, the diligent care she had taken to maintain her small, taut, forty-five-year-old body. When she left the doorway and sauntered down the steps toward him she displayed plenty of leg, showing off her muscular calves and the hardness of her thighs stretching against the silk robe. He suspected that she was the product of some personal trainer named Lars or Sven, one of those young muscle boys from the Nordic club. Weights, rowing machine, treadmill, laps in the pool. There was a social set of Aspen women who spent their entire days being pampered by long-haired romance-cover models passing themselves off as gym instructors.

  When she was close enough to touch him, Dana Smerlas paused to study Kurt’s large, unkempt body. “My husband was right about you,” she said, her breasts rising as she sighed. “You’re persistent.”

  He was in no mood for compliments.

  “Will you come with me, please,” she said, solemn now, conceding. “The walls have ears. If we’re going to discuss this, I don’t want the help to overhear.”

  With some misgivings about propriety, he escorted her upstairs and down a long sunny hallway past several open bedrooms. At the end of the passage a pull rope dangled from an attic door in the ceiling. With one good tug she lowered the door and unfolded the attached stepladder.

  “Where are we going, Mrs. Smerlas?”

  “Come now, Sheriff, you aren’t losing your nerve, are you?”

  “I always like to know what I’m getting into.”

  “Really? That’s not what I’ve heard about you.”

  She was teasing him now, trying hard to turn on the charm, but it wasn’t working.

  “You want to discuss private matters with me,” she said, gathering the robe at her knees and stepping up the ladder, “you’ll have to come into my private lair.”

  He watched her disappear into the rectangle in the ceiling, where buttery light shone down over him. He hesitated, then climbed up after her.

  To his surprise the attic had been converted into a spacious art studio finished out with pine paneling and a polished wood floor stained here and there with dried oil paints. A large skylight and a ventilation window at the end of the house provided strong natural lighting for her work. Three easels were located around the studio, each bearing an unfinished canvas. A supply bench was cluttered with rolled tubes of paint and Mason jars stuffed full of soaking brushes.

  “So you’re a painter, Mrs. Smerlas?”

  “I dabble,” she said, standing before one of her easels, studying the canvas with great concentration as if planning the next stroke. “And please call me Dana. Missus makes me sound like a schoolteacher.” She folded her arms across the thin robe and smiled at him. “And that, I assure you, I am not.”

  He turned a slow circle, amused by the bohemian messiness hidden atop her perfectly ordered ranch-burgher life. She had carved out a secret place of her own. “Okay, you’ve got me up here,” he said. “The help can’t hear us now.”

  She walked over to a corner of the studio furnished with an old couch and a small table rowed with liquor bottles. “Would you like a drink?” she offered.

  “It’s just past eight o’clock in the morning.”

  Her hand trembled slightly as she splashed brandy into a glass. “You’re not going to make this easy for me, are you, Kurt?” she said, speaking his name with an uncomfortable familiarity.

  “Why don’t you make it easy on yourself and tell me why you met Gahan Moss last night in the cemetery.”

  She tasted the brandy and gazed out the window in silence. He knew that small sensuous body, the shoulder blade where butterfly wings imprinted the white skin beneath her robe. He could trace its shape with his finger.

  “Gahan and I once had a very brief affair,” she said with a breathless reluctance. “Four or five years ago, before I met Ben. I was coming off a divorce and behaving badly. Closing down the clubs, snorting coke in the ladies’ room, that whole Aspen scene. I didn’t know Gahan had been a famous musician once upon a time, and it wouldn’t have made any difference. He was charmingly British, he treated me like a princess at first, and he had great blow.” She paused to sip her brandy. “The fling lasted about a month. I found out he was living with someone. And then things got a little too weird for my taste. He wanted me to meet his wife or girlfriend, whatever she was.” She turned with a wary look. “You can imagine where that was leading. I didn’t want to go there. I’m not into that kind of thing.”

  Kurt thought about the photograph in the groupie magazine. Three young women together. “Let me guess,” he said. “You’re going to tell me that after you married Smerlas, Gahan started becoming a nuisance.”

  She frowned at him. “He wasn’t after money, if that’s what you’re implying, Sheriff. Gahan was angry about a tape he’d given me when we were together.”

  She stepped over to another easel and studied her work, the sketchy outline of a reclini
ng female nude.

  “It was some songs he’d written. Just him on the piano and his voice. They were his only compositions in fifteen years, or so he told me. I’m not much of a music critic, Sheriff, but they sounded pretty lousy to me. After we broke up I tossed them in the trash. A couple of weeks ago he started calling me and demanding the tape back. He said he’d come across a bootleg of the songs for sale on the Internet and he accused me of selling them to some pirate producer in L.A.”

  Kurt ventured over to have a look at her drawing. He suspected that the nude was a self-portrait in progress.

  “And you expect me to believe that’s why he was yelling at you in a cemetery at ten o’clock last night?”

  “He wanted the tape back. When I told him I’d thrown it away, he didn’t believe me. He accused me of selling him out.”

  “So why couldn’t you and Gahan have discussed this problem in broad daylight over coffee?”

  “Because I didn’t want to be seen in public with Gahan Moss,” she shot back. “My husband doesn’t know about the affair. It was a period in my life I’m not particularly proud of. I live in a very different world now, Kurt. With certain expectations. Can’t you understand my dilemma? Haven’t you ever been involved with someone you shouldn’t have?”

  It was the way she said it that gave her away. A sympathetic arch of the brow. She knew about him and Nicole, and not simply from allegations in the newspaper. Perhaps she and Nicole had remained in touch for all these years. Confidantes. Lovers.

  “They were butchered, Dana,” he said flatly. “Would you like to see the photos?”

  With an irritated sigh she turned to study the canvas again. He came up behind her, staring at the wing of shoulder blade protruding through the silk. He wanted to see the butterfly with his own eyes.

  “Their throats were slashed. He even killed one of the dogs.”

  She shuddered and took a long drink of brandy, emptying the glass. “My god, that’s terrible,” she said with the drop of her chin.

  “He’s out of control, Dana. He’ll kill you if you aren’t careful.”

  She turned quickly, glaring at him, panic flooding her pale blue eyes. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “You know what I mean. Don’t play dumb with me, girl. Your story about Gahan is bullshit. Yeah, there may be a bootleg tape somewhere on the Net, but that’s not why Gahan was angry. You’ve known him and his old musician pals for at least twenty years. You used to hang with them pretty tight.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  He pulled Rock’s ring from his pocket and offered it to her in his open palm. “Gahan was pissed at you because he’d seen this,” he said, spinning out his suspicions. “He called you and threatened to show up and make a scene at your big announcement party if you didn’t meet with him.”

  She glanced at the ring. “I have no idea what this is about,” she said.

  “Come on, Dana. He called you out of your party because he wanted to know if you were the one who’d stolen this ring off the body at Canyon de Chelly.”

  When she raised her eyes to meet his, he saw fear and anger and a tenacious defiance. “These ridiculous accusations have gone far enough,” she said. “I’m going to ask my husband and our attorney to join us for the rest of this conversation.”

  Her sudden haughtiness made him smile. “I know who you are,” he said, his words matching the intensity of her glare. “Or at least who you were twenty years ago. I even know the name you used back then. Have you forgotten there’s a photograph of you in the Rocky Rhodes book?”

  It was a gamble. A wild bluff. The only kind that ever worked. He would either win on this hand or go home with empty pockets turned inside out.

  “A photograph of me?” she said with a bemused expression. “In a book? Imagine that.”

  “Rocky and his Aspen friends, nineteen seventy-six,” he said. “On a page in the photo section. Would you like me to show it to you?”

  It was her turn to smile. “Nineteen seventy-six,” she said, raising a dark eyebrow. “That was a long time ago, Sheriff. People change. Hair comes and goes. So do the pounds. Age makes us a different life-form. Have you been to your high school reunion recently?”

  “Some things change,” he said. “Tattoos don’t.”

  “Tattoos?”

  “A butterfly, for instance,” he said, moving closer. Her eyes followed him, suspicious. “Like the one right here.”

  He touched the silk robe with his index finger, drew it lightly across her bony shoulder blade. “I have two photos of you,” he said. “They both show the butterfly.”

  She blushed, smiling coyly. “A butterfly tattoo, Kurt? What a cliché.”

  “I know you and Nicole were once very close. Back when Rocky went through the railing. How close were you these past few weeks, when she was falling to pieces again? Do you have any idea what she was going through?”

  Her laugh surprised him. Low and guttural, mocking. “If this is all a guessing game,” she said with a triumphant gleam in her eye, “you lose.”

  She turned her back to him and lowered the robe to her waist. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Two thin white strap lines ran vertically down the smooth tan sway of her back. Her skin was rich and flawless, as tight as a teenager’s. There was no tattoo.

  “Don’t be shy,” she said. “Have a closer look. I understand that removing a tattoo creates a nasty scar.”

  He stepped closer. There was a light spray of freckles underneath the tan. No signs of scarring anywhere on her back or shoulders.

  “You can touch me if you like,” she said, turning her chin to observe his stunned expression out of the corner of her eye. “I don’t want you to go home wondering.”

  He studied her thin feminine neck, the sensuous narrowing v of her back, feeling too foolish to speak. She held her pose for a moment longer, then pulled the robe to her shoulders.

  “Sheriff Muller,” she said, rearranging the collar, tightening the sash, “I hope this will conclude your little witch hunt.” She turned to confront him face-to-face with a firm, unyielding expression. “I’m not the woman you think I am.”

  Chapter twenty-seven

  There were fewer mourners than usual for a Sunday morning, perhaps because of the light overnight snow. Thurman Fisher, the old gent who owned the pool hall in town, was visiting a daughter who had died twenty-five years ago in a kayak accident on the Colorado River. Stooped Mrs. O’Carroll, recovering from recent cataract surgery, puttered around her husband’s marker, replacing the plastic

  flowers in a permanent vase. When Muffin’s cruiser pulled up to the ornate iron fence, Kurt was standing at his father’s grave, staring at the name and dates etched in stone and wondering what desperate urgency had brought Gahan Moss and Dana Smerlas to this secluded place on a cold dark night. Maybe it was more than the ring. Maybe Gahan had demanded to know if Rocky was still alive. It may have been the question that had cost him his life.

  Muffin had brought breakfast from McDonald’s and a change of clothing from Gill Dotson’s department locker. “A little while ago two TV satellite trucks tried to sneak past the guard station up in Starwood to film the Bauer mansion,” she said. “And the reporters are camped outside your yard again. Now they’ve got a bloody double murder to chew on, too.”

  He settled into the passenger seat and turned up the car’s heater to warm his legs. After the first bite of food he discovered that he was ravenously hungry. “You want that hash brown?” he mumbled with a mouthful of egg and processed cheese, pointing to the white sack on the dashboard.

  “Jesus, Kurt,” she said, watching him devour everything in sight. Food steam and their collective breath clouded the windows. “You’re eating like a Dumpster diver. Here, take this sausage biscuit thing.”

  She surrendered her entire bag except for the tall paper cup of coffee. “What did you find out about Mrs. Smerlas?” she asked.

  “She doesn’t have a butterfly tattoo.”

  M
uffin held the coffee with both hands. “What is this fixation you have with a friggin’ butterfly tattoo?”

  He knew now that it had been absurd to hang everything on a couple of twenty-year-old photographs. Tattoo=Pariah=Dana Smerlas: a poorly formulated equation. The woman with the tattoo could have been anybody. A passing flirtation, here and gone. What was it Gahan had said about the women in Rocky’s circle? All the pretty birds have flown. You and I wouldn’t recognize them anymore.

  He needed to find the photo of Mariah Windstar printed in the biography. It was the only certain way to eliminate Dana Smerlas as Pariah. He would call the book publisher tomorrow morning.

  “She told me she’d had an affair with Gahan Moss,” he said, relating Dana’s story between bites of food. “I don’t believe her, but there’s nothing solid to charge her with.”

  “Did you tell her we have a videotape of her husband with Nicole?”

  He shook his head, spilling crumbs in his lap. “The timing wasn’t right,” he said.

  “Whose reputation were you trying to protect—his or Nicole’s?”

  He stopped eating and gave her a hard look. “This is not about marital fidelity. They’ll have to deal with that on their own dime,” he said. “This is about seeing Dana Smerlas right over there by those headstones last night. She had an argument with a man,” he said, “and a few hours later the man was murdered. That’s my interest here.”

  “Oh how I admire your powers of separation.”

  “I don’t care what you think. I’m not trying to bring down Ben Smerlas.”

  “Excuse me? Did anyone say you were?”

  Kurt knew he had to be very careful. If the tape’s existence was leaked to the media, Smerlas would accuse him of waging a vengeful smear campaign, as his wife had suggested. It would win Smerlas more sympathy at the polls.

  Like a bored child on a family car trip, Muffin leaned forward and drew a large tic-tac-toe board on the steamed windshield. “Okay, Sir Galahad, what have we got so far? Nicole Bauer’s where this whole thing started.” She swirled an O in the center square. “And now there’s Dana Smerlas,” she said, marking an X in one corner, “and Gahan Moss.” An X in another corner. “And let’s not forget our boy Lyle Gunderson.” An X in a third corner.