Pariah

by Thomas Zigal

  Chapter thirty-one

  After two hours of surgery, Muffin lay recovering, semi-conscious and heavily drugged, in a private room at Aspen Valley Hospital. Her tibia had been nearly severed by the steel jaws. The surgeons had done what they could to pin and stabilize the fracture, but they informed Kurt that she would have to be flown to Denver for extensive orthopedic reconstruction.

  After the attending nurses had left the room, he remained at Muffin’s bedside, holding her hand in the antiseptic silence. She didn’t know yet the magnitude of her injury and he wasn’t going to be the one to tell her. He was having enough trouble keeping his own emotions under control.

  “The pain was so bad I wanted to die, Kurt,” she said in a hoarse whisper, her eyes fluttering when she spoke.

  “I wasn’t going to let that happen.”

  “I know,” she smiled palely, squeezing his hand. She didn’t have the strength to crush a grape.

  He had broken his leg playing football in high school and had crutched around for two months, never regaining his original speed. Her recuperation would take even longer. Hospital, rehab, home care.

  She would never be as agile as she once was—the expert skier and leader of the Search and Rescue rappel squad, the point guard on the department’s basketball team. He suspected that if she returned to law enforcement, she would see limited duty for the rest of her career.

  He studied her wan face. Even under these conditions there was pride in the set of her jaw. A desk job would destroy her. “The guys found two more tiger traps underneath all those magazines,” he told her. “I’m lucky I’m not in here with you.”

  Her eyelids blinked open, then slowly sagged of their own weight. “Find him, Kurt,” she mumbled. “Bring him in.”

  They didn’t speak for several minutes. Eventually her hand went slack, the first sign she’d fallen asleep. Tears had pooled in the corners of her eyes. He found a Kleenex on the bed stand and gently dabbed them dry.

  Slouching in the Jeep in the hospital parking lot, surrounded by the long chill shadows of late afternoon, he picked up the cell phone and called Meg. “It’s been a helluva weekend,” he grumbled in a voice racked with fatigue. “Things are crazy here. I can’t come after Lennon right now.”

  “I read the newspaper, Kurt. You should’ve told me about the mess you’re in.”

  “I didn’t realize that Buddhists read newspapers.”

  “Are you going to be all right?” She sounded genuinely concerned.

  “There are a bunch of reporters following me around. They’ve got the house staked out. Why don’t you bring Lennon to Carole and Corky’s tonight?” he suggested. Otherwise it was a twenty-mile drive on a traffic-crawling two lane from the Basalt farmhouse to their son’s school. Forty minutes one way every morning, as bad as Denver at rush hour. “He can stay with them this week until everything dies down.”

  “I don’t want him to get caught up in your problems, Kurt. You know how I feel about that. I don’t want the ugliness to rub off on him.”

  “The world has its ugly side, Meg. We can’t keep him from seeing it,” he said. “Look, he’ll be fine at the Marcuses. I won’t bring him back home until things are perfectly normal again.”

  He heard the exasperation in her sigh. “Things are never going to be perfectly normal if you keep behaving the way you do.”

  “Don’t judge me until you hear the whole story.”

  After a long, awkward silence she said, “When this is all over, Kurt, and things are perfectly normal again, I want to sit down and talk with you about our custody arrangement. I would like more time with Lennon.”

  This was not the moment to start this discussion. “Fine,” he said dismissively. “You can explain to the judge why you left your son and holed up in an ashram for two years while I was left here running the county sheriff’s department and taking care of him by myself.”

  “I don’t want a fight, Kurt. I want an understanding,” she said. “A fair arrangement.”

  “Sorry, gotta go catch a killer. But I’ll meditate on it when I have some downtime,” he said, “and get back to you. In the meantime please bring Lennon to the Marcuses. If it’s no inconvenience to you and Bhajan.”

  “You’re being an asshole.”

  “Well, now. Is name-calling one of those steps on the path to inner bliss?”

  “You’re carrying a lot of anger, Kurt,” she said with another sigh. “I wish you would see a therapist.”

  “I have been seeing a therapist, Meg,” he said dryly. “I’m going to put him in jail.”

  After hanging up, he dialed the district attorney’s office and found Donald Harrigan at his desk on a Sunday afternoon. “How did it go?” Kurt asked, inquiring about the D.A.’s interview with Westbrook and his lawyer.

  “I had to let’m walk, Kurt,” Harrigan said in his slow country drawl. He was the only Texan Kurt had ever liked. “Dr. Westbrook claims he had no knowledge of anybody staying up there. He insists that those cabins were strictly off-limits to his guests because they needed repair and hadn’t been used in a couple years.”

  “He’s lying, Don.”

  “I believe you but it’s gonna be hard to prove in court. I’m sorry, Kurt, you don’t have a strong case here.”

  “Talk to Lyle Gunderson. Offer him a deal. He’s the weak link.”

  “I’m driving to Glenwood first thing in the morning.”

  “If we can get him to admit he showed the tapes to Westbrook, it’s a start.”

  “I don’t know how that will shake out,” Harrigan said. “So Lyle cops to giving his shrink some tapes. The shrink will say he studied the tapes to diagnose the young man’s illness and offer a proper treatment. All very professional. He’ll scream doctor-client privilege to justify why he didn’t turn the tapes over to the police.”

  “Goddammit, Don, three people are dead and my best deputy may never walk right!”

  “Stop yelling at me, Kurt. We’re on the same side, remember? But you’ve gotta give me more to work with. Why don’t you go find the cutter you say is causing all this grief?”

  After a few moments of staring at the dead phone, Kurt dialed the squad room in the basement of the county courthouse. Mac Murphy picked up the call. He was the only deputy in the building. “How’s Muffin?” Murphy asked. “She gonna be all right?”

  “No, she’s not, Mac. They’ve got to take her to the Denver Medical Center.”

  “Son of a bitch.” Everyone in the department was fond of Muffin Brown. “I feel like kicking somebody’s ass.”

  “Hold that thought. Right now I want you to do me a favor,” Kurt said. “Locate Walter Bauer. He’s probably at his crib on Red Mountain. I want to meet with him as soon as possible.”

  “Roger, boss.”

  “Call my beeper when you find him.”

  He pitched the cell phone into the glove box and sat watching the sky over Shadow Mountain soften into a beautiful amethyst hue. The air was cooling rapidly in this shoulder season between the golden waning days of autumn and the cold dead arrival of winter. The prospect of seven months of snow no longer cheered him, as it had when he was a younger man with his skis waxed and ready. At this moment he felt worn down by memory. Like a fool he had tried to save so many people in his life, recover the best parts of his past, and in the end he hadn’t saved his brother or his partner lying in a hospital bed with a crushed leg, or his marriage to the mother of his child. He had less to show for his years than Gahan Moss and his paltry shelf of mementos. He hadn’t saved a goddamned thing.

  The Sunday newspaper lay on the seat beside him. He stared at the front-page photograph of Ben Smerlas and his wife cutting a cake at his announcement party. She had survived the long strange trip from rock groupie to dutiful Republican wife. Anyone who could pull that off deserved everything that was coming to her.

  He peered into the rearview mirror to see if his eyes were as bloodshot as they felt. He looked wasted. His skin appeared puffy and red,
the tiny white l-shaped scar in his brow shining like a fresh scrape. He smiled about the silly fishing accident that had produced that scar many years ago and about the old doctor who had stitched him. And then he glanced at the newspaper photo of Dana Smerlas again and realized that Doc Brumley might be in serious trouble.

  Chapter thirty-two

  Kurt banged the knocker and pounded on the door of the old Victorian home but there was no response. Somewhere in the house a television was blaring so loudly he could hear the narrator describing the nesting patterns of bald eagles. He stood on his tiptoes and peered through the fan of beveled glass into a quiet living room awash with evening light. When the doctor didn’t appear after several more knocks, Kurt tried the knob and discovered that the door was unlocked. He stepped inside the living room and called Brumley’s name. Again, no answer. The house still nursed its ancient odors, only now Kurt detected urine and a trace of something that smelled like copper. He slipped the .45 from his shoulder holster and held it near his ear as he slowly approached the parlor off to the left. Through the doorway, pale gray light flickered from the television set.

  “Doc? ” he said, nearly shouting.

  From the parlor door he could see the old man slumped in a large overstuffed reading chair. His head was lying to the side, his eyes were closed, his half-moon reading glasses clinging to the tip of his nose. A section of newspaper was spread across his lap, the rest on the floor near his slippered feet. On the television screen a pair of eagles soared high in the Sierra Nevadas.

  Kurt quickly scanned the small room. There were no signs of struggle. “Doc,” he repeated, “are you all right?”

  He walked over and touched the man’s shoulder.

  “Hunh?” Brumley said, stirring, licking his dry lips. “Whu? Who is it?”

  He opened his eyes and stared at Kurt and the gun in his hand. The glasses dropped from his nose onto the newspaper in his lap.

  “It’s me again, Doc. Is everything okay?” he asked, restoring the .45 to its holster.

  “Say what, now?” Brumley asked in a croaking voice. He squinted at Kurt, trying to comprehend who he was. “Oh, it’s you, Bert. Goodness alive. I didn’t know you were back in town. Have you come to see Timmy?”

  His son Tim was nearly fifty years old and lived in California with his wife and three children.

  Kurt stepped over and turned down the TV set. “Sorry to wake you, Doc. I need you to look at a picture.”

  “A picture?” Brumley said. He sat up straight and worked his stiff neck. “Gracious sakes, your brother was here the other day asking a lot of questions, too. He’s the sheriff now, you know.”

  Kurt smiled at the old doctor. “Take a look at this photo and tell me if you’ve ever seen this woman before.” He handed Brumley the photograph of Ben and Dana Smerlas he’d torn from the newspaper. “Does she look familiar?”

  Brumley rubbed the sleep from his eyes and found his reading glasses. Breathing raggedly, he stared at the photo for at least two minutes without moving a muscle, his gaze frozen on the Smerlases. “I don’t know her,” he said finally. “Was she one of Martha’s school-mates?” Brumley’s daughter.

  “Are you sure you’ve never met her?”

  The old man raised his eyes to regard Kurt. “Not that I recall,” he said. “She’s a nice-looking gal, though.”

  “Look again,” Kurt said patiently. “Is this the woman who came to visit you last week?” He stooped down to study the photo with Brumley. “Late at night, remember? She reminded you of a Frankie Laine song. Her name was Mariah Windstar.”

  “Yes, of course, I remember the lady,” Brumley said, staring at the picture in his wobbly hands. “But this isn’t her. I can see why you might think so. They’re both attractive, both small and brunette.”

  “You’re sure it’s not her?”

  “I’m positive, Bert. I never forget a facial structure.”

  Kurt stood up straight and looked around the parlor. Embers smoldered in the quaint fireplace. The heavy, dust-stiff curtains had been drawn against the dying light. A stuffed blue grouse and the owl Brumley had repaired yesterday were the other occupants of the room, mounted on driftwood and staring black-eyed from their corner perches, silent companions overseeing the old man’s final preoccupations. Kurt thought he heard a noise and turned toward the doorway, his eyes searching the twilit corners of the living room and the stately dining area beyond the arch. There was too much unaccounted space in this house, an entire floor upstairs, too many rooms and closets and unopened doors.

  “Doc, how would you like to spend the next couple of days at the Hotel Jerome?” he asked. “The county will pick up the tab.”

  “Why on earth would I want to do that?”

  Kurt could hear wind rustling the trees outside the windows. The front porch creaked. This place was beginning to give him the creeps. He didn’t want anything to happen to the old coroner.

  “Mine tailings,” Kurt said. “There’s a problem with lead in the soil. It goes back to the silver mines a hundred years ago. The entire West End is being analyzed by the EPA this week.”

  “Lead, you say?”

  “The agency has sent a team out from Denver. They want you to leave for a couple of days while they conduct some tests around your house and in the basement.”

  “Good god. Lead! They’ll stir everything up.”

  “We’ll put you up in the Hotel Jerome. Three meals a day, courtesy of my department. Room service. Saunas. Whatever you want, Doc.”

  Brumley removed his reading glasses and stuck the curved tip of the arm in his mouth, thinking it over. “I’ve read somewhere that they have a masseuse on duty,” he said.

  “Yes, sir, I believe they do.”

  “How many days did you say?”

  “Two or three, tops.”

  “Make it four and I’ll go get my toothbrush.”

  Chapter thirty-three

  Kurt was showing Doc Brumley how to order a payper-view movie in his posh hotel suite when the beeper went off. It was Mac Murphy calling from the courthouse. “Walt Four and his brother are at the Nordic Club, racquetball court number three,” the deputy informed him over the phone. “They have dinner reservations afterward at the Caribou.”

  “What did you do, Mac? Break into their office and peek at the calendar?”

  “I know a guy whose girlfriend is pals with somebody whose sister is their secretary.”

  Aspen.

  The Nordic Club was the most prestigious, celebrity-infested health facility in the Rockies, an unobtrusive structure sprawling into the meadows and brushland on the east side of town. It was dark when Kurt parked among the BMWs and four-wheel sport utility vehicles gleaming under the halogen safety lights. As he crawled out of his old Willys with the envelope tucked under his arm, he felt giddy and loose. There was music in his head. He could smell the silent snow dancing in dark currents a thousand feet up the mountain. He wondered if this was what the doctor had warned him about, messages from the shaken eight ball.

  He hadn’t been to the Nordic Club for at least a year and didn’t recognize the two well-scrubbed young greeters stationed behind the marble sign-in desk. They didn’t seem to know who he was, either. “Police business,” he said, flashing his badge. “Nothing to be concerned about. I need to speak with one of your patrons.”

  Outside the glass walls of the racquetball courts a comfortable seating area was provided for curious spectators and players awaiting their turn. Tonight the chairs were unoccupied at court number three. Kurt placed the envelope on a table and sat watching the two brothers thwack the hard rubber ball off the black-scuffed walls. Jeffrey Bauer was poor competition for his tall athletic brother, who pounded each return with impressive force and skill, sending the overweight accountant into deep corners of the box to chase his next shot. In spite of the obvious mismatch, Walt IV showed no mercy in punishing his brother swing after swing.

  Kurt understood the competition between brothers. He an
d Bert had gone at it hard for an entire lifetime. Bert was faster, more agile; Kurt was stronger. Their rivalry had hung in that balance. But when all was said and done they had loved each other, and it was Bert who had slowed down that day and waited for him, pointing to the cutoff with his ski pole, saving his younger brother from the avalanche. Bert would never have left him behind. Jeffrey Bauer couldn’t say the same thing about his older brother.

  Behind the glass wall Jeffrey was bent double, gripping his knees, the racquet lying on the court next to his Reeboks. Waiting for him to recuperate, Walt IV stood near the service line bouncing the ball rapidly up and down between his racquet and the floor. He looked disgusted with his younger brother’s lack of stamina and conditioning. Kurt could tell by his impatient demeanor that the man didn’t tolerate weakness of any kind.

  “There you are, you son of a bitch!”

  Kurt turned in his chair to see Ben Smerlas storming toward him with a racquet swinging freely in his hand.

  “What’s the fucking idea picking on my wife?” Smerlas said, wagging the racquet at Kurt. The commissioner was dressed in a loose orange nylon gym suit that made him look like a Vegas hood. “You wanna pick on somebody, whyn’t you pick on me, motherfucker?”

  Kurt stood up. “You don’t know what’s going on, do you, you dumb bastard?” he said.

  “Izzat so? I know this. When I get through with you in this recall, you won’t have a pile of shit to crawl back under. You’re done, hoss.”

  Kurt smiled meanly. “Did your wife tell you she’d seen the tape of you and Nickie? I’ve got the original if you’d like to watch it sometime,” he said. “By the way, you might want to try Viagra for that weak little hard-on of yours.”

  Smerlas swung the racquet at him full force, overhand like a tennis serve, but Kurt caught the handle and swung the commissioner against the glass wall of the ball court with a thunderous boom. His legs buckled and he slid to the floor, but he recovered quickly and lunged at Kurt, tackling him around the knees and dragging him off his feet. Smerlas had surprising upper-body strength and powerful arms, and they wrestled around on the carpet until Kurt finally struggled to his knees, grabbed the man by his oily hair, and smashed his face against the glass.