Hardrock Stiff

by Thomas Zigal

  He looked puzzled. What old chum?

  “Jake’s sister, the tree humper with binoculars,” she said, reading his confusion.

  Kurt was still feeling drowsy but his head was slowly beginning to clear. They must have shot him up with something. “What about Lorenzo Banks?” he said. “Has he found anything in the Ajax?”

  “Not a neon arrow, if that’s what you mean. When I left him he was still poking around in the rubble. He had ruled out all the textbook devices with wires and timers. But he’s got a long way to go.”

  There had to be a connection between what had happened to Ned and the shootout with Tyler. Maybe the men in the Toyota were those dirt-bikers from the Black Diamond. Maybe they had already dealt with the old man who had violated their code.

  “Tyler and I had a nasty run-in yesterday with some bubbas in the Autobahn Society,” he told her. “Let’s pull them in for questioning. They were mad enough to lynch the poor bastard.”

  He could almost hear the gears clicking in Muffin’s head. “Did this run-in take place at a notorious gin joint in Bonedale?” she asked with a sly intonation. “And did it result in a demolished Dumpster?”

  “I refuse to answer that without my attorney present.”

  “I had another conversation with Sheriff Dan the Man this morning, Kurt,” she said. “He’s very interested in talking to you.”

  “Where is that damn nurse?” he said, pressing the call button again. “I’ve gotta get out of here. Hospitals make me paranoid.”

  At that moment the nurse entered the room. “Knock knock,” she said, a tall pretty woman named Sally who had helped Dr. Perry administer four stitches to Kurt’s forehead last summer. “How are you feeling, Kurt? Did you need something?”

  “Yeah, Sally, I need to be released.”

  She exchanged glances with Muffin. “I’m afraid that’s not a good idea,” the nurse said. “The doctor thinks you ought to take it easy for a day or so. We’ve got to get some fluids back in you.”

  “Can I please speak with him? Is he in the building?” He had considered removing the iv himself, putting on his pants, and walking out of here.

  Dr. Perry arrived with surprising haste and spent twenty minutes trying to talk Kurt out of leaving. Finally the young physician gave in. “All right, Kurt, if you’re this damned sure of yourself,” he said, clearly exasperated by Kurt’s stubbornness, “you must be feeling okay. But take it easy for a couple of days, will you? You may think you’re twenty-five, my friend,” he said, wagging the clipboard at him, “but the charts show me otherwise.”

  Chapter twenty

  Kurt was an hour late for his appointment with Corky Marcus. But as he strode across the Hyman Avenue cobblestones and glanced up through the branches of the planted cottonwoods, he could see a light in the window of Corky’s attic office and knew he was still at work. For most of his life Corky Marcus had been a practicing attorney, Harvard Law, third in his class, an ardent civil rights activist who had spilled his blood in Alabama with the Freedom Riders. During those dark early days of the movement he had wandered the back roads of the Deep South, registering black voters, and later had worked for Head Start and vista and a host of noble causes. But in the lean Reagan years, to pay his bills and send two children from a previous marriage to college, Corky had represented a cadre of bib-overall pot growers hiding out in the rural West and soon became known as a drug lawyer, much to his chagrin. After one of his outlaw clients turned a shotgun on his two young daughters in an Idaho cabin, Corky gave up his practice altogether and had now become everybody’s favorite fourth-grade teacher at Aspen Elementary. “I go to work in the morning with a smile on my face,” he’d told Kurt recently, “and I come home with a smile on my face. I should’ve done this a long time ago.”

  Corky still maintained a shrinking backlist of clients, a half-dozen locals for whom he felt loyalty and obligation, the ones who had been with him from the beginning in Aspen, sixteen years now. But he did not love the law anymore and his people knew that if their case required sincere emotional commitment, they were better off with someone else.

  In an alcove between a souvenir shop and a busy Thai café there was an inconspicuous stairwell leading up to Corky’s office. Kurt mounted the stairs, feeling somewhat fuzzy and out of sorts, a side effect of the drugs, he suspected, and not stress or exhaustion, as the doctor had surmised. The shower and change of clothing had not revived him entirely.

  The office door was open. Behind an ornate mahogany desk strewn with assignments and folders and children’s drawings, Corky sat scribbling on a stack of fourth-grade homework, making smiley-face notations with a red pen, licking on stars. “Yo, Kurt,” he said, peering up through thick horn-rim glasses. “I’d given up on you. Haven’t you heard of a marvelous new invention called the telephone?”

  “Sorry, Corky,” Kurt said, flopping down on a dusty couch by the bay windows. “I was in the hospital.”

  Corky smiled his homely smile. “And I thought my kids came up with the best excuses.”

  Meg had once described Corky as Woody Allen on skis. Short, sinewy and fit, mid-fifties, beaglelike, his unkempt mop of hair only now beginning to gray. He was the smartest man Kurt had ever met. Politics, literature, art, the long-term fiduciary implications of your charitable remainder unitrust. Corky Marcus had an inexhaustible command of the large, the small, the merely comic.

  “Somebody tried to kill Tyler Rutledge in the Lone Ute Mine. He was in surgery for about four hours this afternoon. His chances of survival aren’t real good.”

  Corky frowned, locked his hands behind his head, and leaned back in the old high-backed leather chair, exposing salt rings in the armpits of his zip-up gray jogging jacket. His T-shirt declared FILM IS ART, THEATER IS LIFE, TELEVISION IS FURNITURE.

  “The two of them back to back. I’m no metaphysician,” Corky said, “but this is way off the chance graph.”

  “You said it yourself. Ned was acting strange, and now this.” Kurt had sunk so deeply in the spongy couch cushions his bottom was dragging against a spring. He pulled himself to his feet and stood by the window. “When he told you he wanted to change his will, did he say what he had in mind?”

  “No,” Corky said, rising from the imposing chair to search through a tray of papers located on a file cabinet. “He was coming in next week. We would talk.”

  “He didn’t mention any new business associates?”

  “None,” Corky said, raising a curious eyebrow. “What makes you ask?”

  “Something he said the night before he died. He’d cut a deal with the devil.”

  “Mmm. That was always my line when I was a lawyer.”

  He found the folder he was looking for and sat down again. Behind him towered his bookshelves of legal tomes, hiking guides, favorite novels, cookbooks, volumes on teaching techniques and child psychology. The small office was stuffed so full of books and file cabinets and creeping plants, there was little room for his Solo-flex muscle machine.

  “I pulled his file last night,” Corky said. “He emended his will three years ago, our last official interaction. Estate planning is all I’ve been handling for him. I know bupkis about his other litigation.”

  “Didn’t you represent him against the Sierra Club and the county during the sound-ordinance beef?” A legal battle over the times of day Ned could set off his blasting charges.

  “Please.” Corky raised a hand. “Don’t remind me. The worst mistake of my legal career. Well, close. I took his case because Marie had just been killed and I felt sorry for Hunter.” Corky knew Marie from the same birthing class, the monthly reunions. “Never again. I can’t afford to make more enemies in this life. I told Ned he would have to find someone else to fight his mine skirmishes for him. Christ, I’m a card-carrying member of the Wilderness Society!”

  Kurt looked out the window. The row of century-old brick buildings cast a long shadow over the pedestrian mall below. Foot traffic was light this time of year, the sho
ulder season between skiing and the summer crowds. A couple of shopgirls were chatting quietly on a bench beneath the cottonwoods, taking a cigarette break from their slacker jobs.

  “You’ve read the will,” Kurt said. “Who gets those two worthless mines if Tyler dies?”

  Corky hesitated. “Is this an official police inquiry?”

  Kurt shrugged. “Sure,” he said.

  “If I don’t give you the information you’ll go to the DA and get the court to open the will, am I correct?”

  “That’s about the size of it, Corkus.”

  “Well, then,” he smiled, “as the executor of my client’s estate, I judge it in everyone’s best interest to reveal the contents of the will during the present inquiry.”

  Kurt shook his head wearily. “Shakespeare was right, wasn’t he?”

  “Why do you think I’m teaching fourth grade?”

  “Less paperwork, better food.”

  Corky opened the file in front of him. “This may come as a surprise, Sheriff Muller, but Tyler Rutledge is not the beneficiary of the mines. He is a salaried employee of the Carr Mining Company and not a business partner.”

  “He understands that?”

  “Of course,” Corky nodded. “Though I doubt he and Ned ever seriously discussed the business end of the enterprise. Ned was a very private cuss—the word sneaky comes to mind—and Tyler didn’t give a damn about financial arrangements as long as he could spend his life digging for silver and pulling down a paycheck every month.”

  “So who were Ned’s partners? And who is the beneficiary?”

  Corky threw up his hands. “He didn’t believe in partners, which is why I am frankly surprised you think there was something rational behind Ned’s midnight rantings,” he said, leafing through the pages. “And the beneficiary is obvious.” His knobby chin lifted and he gazed across the big desk at Kurt. “His grandson, Hunter.”

  Kurt had overlooked the obvious. He hadn’t even considered Hunter. There was a sudden, unsettling flutter in his stomach. “Well, now, I guess that brings us around to the original purpose of this meeting,” he said, resting his weight on the round arm of the couch. “Who did Ned name to be the boy’s guardian?”

  The old man trusted no one, Kurt thought. Who the hell would he appoint? Tink Tarver?

  “Here it is,” Corky said, finding the typewritten page. “This is what we worked on three years ago. My language, of course.” He began to read: “In the event of my death I insist that every effort be made to locate my son, Nathan Daniel Carr, through whatever investigative means are necessary, to place in his guardianship my grandson and legal ward, Hunter James Carr, son of Marie Carr and sole beneficiary of the Carr Mining Company.”

  “Nathan?” Kurt said, surprised. “Does anybody know where he is?”

  If he was still alive, Nathan Carr would be Kat Pfeil’s age, early forties. Kurt recalled that once, while pushing the kids in their strollers along the Rio Grande Trail, Marie had mentioned that she hadn’t seen or heard from her brother in fifteen years. Father and son had had a falling out when Nathan was in college and the boy had angrily disappeared from their lives. From time to time rumors had surfaced about him. He was a male prostitute in San Francisco. He was confined to an institution for violent schizophrenics. He had died of a drug overdose in Morocco. Marie discounted them all. She had known her brother as a gentle, introspective boy who had spent too much of his childhood fighting leukemia in a Denver hospital, protracted treatments that had forced Ned to sell off thirty-five acres of mine land on the ski side of Aspen Mountain. Wherever he was, Marie had insisted, whatever he was doing, he was better off a thousand miles from the foul air of the mines.

  “I’ve never met the man,” Corky said. “But your department should have no problem tracking him down.”

  “I’ll get Muffin on it right away. If we have to, well contact my dear old friends in the FBI.”

  They stared at each other for several seconds without speaking.

  “Nathan?” Kurt said, shaking his head skeptically, concerned about Hunter’s well-being. “He didn’t even show up for Marie’s funeral. Do you suppose he’s alive?”

  “If he’s not one hundred and ten percent mentally competent, socially adjusted, and financially stable, we won’t release Hunter into his custody.”

  “Can you do that? Do you have the power?”

  “I got the power,” Corky nodded, straight-faced. “And I got all the time in the world.”

  Hunter had lived with them for only twenty-four hours but Kurt could already see how difficult this was going to be. The boy packed off to live with a total stranger. He would be terrified, Lennon brokenhearted. Kurt simply wouldn’t accept a decision that turned Hunter over to someone who had never raised a child. What if you and Meg were killed and it was Lennon? he asked himself. It always came down to that. What if it was your kid?

  “I’m not letting that child go live with a flake,” Kurt said.

  “Relax, Kurt. We don’t know if Nathan Carr can be found, dead or alive. Let’s take this one step at a time. No need to panic yet. Have a little faith in my abilities.”

  Kurt smiled at him. If there was anyone you wanted on your side in a judicial street fight, it was Corky Marcus. “Who else knows about this will?” he asked.

  “Nobody.”

  “Not even Tyler?”

  Corky shook his head. “Not that I’m aware,” he said. “Unless Ned confided in him, which I doubt. The old boy was anything but loose of tongue.”

  Kurt stood up and walked over to examine the gallery of framed black-and-white photographs arranged on the wall. A young preppie Corky Marcus talking with Stokely Carmichael and John Lewis on the porch of a southern Negro farmhouse. A hirsute Corky Marcus laughing with Abbie Hoffman outside a courtroom. Corky with Bobby Kennedy, with William Kunstler, with a young and beautiful Petra Kelly.

  “What about his other lawyers?” Kurt asked. “Who’s been handling his mine litigation since you gave it up?”

  “A good question.”

  “The sound-ordinance hearings were four or five years ago, Corky. Since then Ned’s been in court at least twice that I know of. The EPA jerked him in for violation of the clean-water regs, and the county and the Sierra Club teamed up against him again over that damned access road. So who took his case, if you didn’t?”

  Corky rocked back in the chair, pondering the question, his bushy eyebrows joined in a serious intensity. “If I’m not mistaken,” he said, searching his memory, “the Free West people sent one of their pro bono attorneys to help him out.”

  “Who are they?”

  “The Free West Rebellion? You know who they are, Kurt. Paranoid neo-Nazis who think the federal government is run by the Trilateral Commission, the environmentalists are all druid priests, and everybody but John Wayne is trying to take away their individual freedom.”

  Kurt knew who they were. The monikers changed from year to year, but the agenda remained the same. “They have their own lawyers?”

  “About six years ago an attorney named Arnold Metcalf set up a legal foundation for them. The Free West Legal Coalition, run out of an office in Colorado Springs,” Corky said. “He was some kind of general counsel in the Interior Department during the Reagan administration, but George Bush was too much of an environmental president for him, so he packed up his briefcase and came on back to Colorado to start his foundation. The green groups were pinning the strip miners and the logging industry to the wall, and Metcalf showed up just in time to lead the counterattack.”

  “But why Ned? He didn’t strike me as a movement type.”

  “He’s the perfect poster boy. A real working miner, the little man hurt by the EPA, the Clean Air and Water Acts, the Wilderness Act. They’ve got a whole raft of lawyers they farm out to support their reactionary causes. A couple of years ago Congress made noises about repealing the Mining Law of 1872 and it set them off.”

  He bent down behind the desk, opened a minirefrigerator,
and pulled out two beers. “Happy hour yet?” he said, waving the cans.

  “I better not. I’m pumped full of chemicals.”

  Gorky shrugged. “I can see them adopting Ned as a pet project. Miner in trouble, his property rights in jeopardy, the entire free-enterprise system at stake. They like to take on the big Constitutional issues,” he said. “And they never turn down an opportunity to battle the Hydra-headed beast—the federal agencies and the environmental groups.”

  Kurt shook his head. “Poor Ned,” he said. “When you’re that unpopular, you take your friends where you can find them.”

  Corky poured beer into a frosty mug from the fridge. “Especially when the fees are waived.”

  Kurt picked up the telephone and dialed home. He was worried now, this business about Hunter as sole beneficiary. No one answered; the machine played his voice message. Meg and the boys must have gone on their hike.

  “Hi, Peaches, it’s me checking in. I’ll be home in fifteen minutes. When you and the guys come in, could you please stay put till I get there.”

  Unless something was terribly wrong, Kurt and Corky were the only two people who knew the content of the will. Still, Kurt felt uneasy.

  “By the way,” Corky said, paging through the folder in front of him, “Ned mentioned you in the settlement. I believe he left you something.”

  Kurt was astonished. He watched his friend’s smile cross the threshold into wicked amusement.

  “Ah, yes, here it is,” Corky said, lifting the page. “You get the Airstream trailer.”

  Chapter twenty-one

  A Pitco cruiser was parked between Ned’s rickety office and the Airstream trailer, and Kurt could see Muffin sitting behind the wheel, drinking coffee from a foam cup. When she heard his Jeep, she stepped out and nodded at him with a tired grin. She looked sleep-pinched and rumpled, as if she’d spent the night in the car. She hadn’t bothered to brush her short tousled hair.