The Perennial Killer: A Gardening Mystery

by Ann Ripley

  “Wonderful.” His brown eyes lit up. He waited to be served, and she handed him the filled spoon. But he opened his mouth, like a child, and she fed him. It turned out to be a great deal more intimate than she had intended. In fact, she had intended no intimacy at all.

  Putting down the empty spoon, she said briskly, “Well, now, Mr. Reingold, tell me about yourself and DRB.”

  “Yes, I do…” He smiled at his temporary lapse in English usage, then started over again, absolutely unruffled. “I mean to say, yes, I will do it. Exactly what do you want to know?”

  “When did you come to Boulder?”

  “It was five years ago. DRB has had many land holdings in the American West for some time, but by the mid-nineties, it was necessary for me to be physically present some of the time to manage our projects. It is handy, of course, to travel from DIA to almost anywhere in the world.”

  “So, your U.S. headquarters are in Denver?”

  “Actually, no. Our North American headquarters are south of Juarez. Do you know of northern Mexico? It is another country, a thriving area that almost seems like a part of the United States. We have a number of things going there. Construction supply and prefab plants, as well as the company headquarters.”

  “How interesting. Are prefab houses the wave of the future?”

  He smiled. “Certainly not in Boulder County. We do a great deal of development in this area, notably in Longmont, but people here prefer custom-built homes. Yet there is a fantastic market for the lower-cost, prefabricated housing in the United States. One thing DRB wants to do is provide that kind of housing to Americans.”

  “How very—”

  “Thoughtful? Philanthropic?” He smiled smoothly. “Mrs. Eldridge, I didn’t mean to give you a false impression. We are not philanthropists. If it were not profitable, we would not be involved.”

  The next remark seemed to spill out. “And you deal in other exports and imports?”

  He reached over and put his hand on hers for an instant. “I know it would be tedious for you to hear the particulars.” Not at all, she thought. She would have liked to get a better sense of the breadth of his business. But as she looked at him, the warm, fuzzy aura faded, and his hazel eyes behind the metal rims examined her a little more critically.

  Certainly, that last question was totally innocent. But Reingold hadn’t sat down at their table to answer questions, only to ask them.

  Chapter 10

  AFTER LUNCH, ANN TOOK LOUISE to her office, in a turn-of-the-century building of sandstone with granite trim. It was used for the overflow of county offices from the Art Deco county building across the street. They went into the back room so Louise could see a map of both Boulder County’s open space, and the Porter and Bingham properties. “The Porter land is the main attraction,” said Ann, “though Harriet’s stake is a fabulous second prize for someone. If the Porter Ranch becomes open space, think of the field day a builder would have, advertising houses as nestling right next to a thirteen-thousand-acre wilderness.”

  Louise examined the map. “Look at those cut-out corners on the east side of Harriet’s property; it’s as if someone cut samples from a piece of fabric.”

  “Her father sold off some acreage years ago, and she’s apparently continued to sell off more land intermittently through the years, as she needs the money.”

  “To whom?”

  “It’s hard to know. To development companies, initially, whose owners aren’t disclosed. The land isn’t far from where you’re renting. They’re the subdivisions you see running west from Route Thirty-six as you drive to Lyons. Upscale houses, some of them costing millions.”

  Then she turned her tawny eyes to Louise. “Tell me honestly, do you think Jimmy and Sally Porter died for this?”

  Louise wasn’t sure what Ann wanted to hear: reassurances, or the truth. In the end, Louise didn’t answer and she didn’t stay long, because it was obvious from the neat, high piles of papers on her desk that Ann had work to do. Louise promised Ann that she would keep in close touch. She wandered aimlessly back down the Pearl Street Mall, under a lacy canopy of locust trees, past lush beds of tuberous orange and yellow begonias, and magenta impatiens. A little bright for Louise’s tastes, but perfect for a public thoroughfare. A thick crowd of tourists, buoyed by the improving weather, mixed happily with the upscale business folks, scattered hippies, and street entertainers.

  Her thoughts strayed back to the people in Boulder who might have been involved in Jimmy Porter’s murder; she suspended for a moment her suspicion that Sally’s death was no accident. There were the men who loved land: Josef Reingold, Mark Payne, Sheriff Tatum. Even her own cameraman, Pete Fitzsimmons, and, for that matter, Tom Spangler. He had his own land stake out near Stony Flats, and a good move it had been, for the area was now under intense development. From nuclear to neighborhoods, she thought with a wry smile.

  She wondered why all the suspicion had fallen on her today? Her questions to Reingold had been quite innocent, but still the man was on guard. Maybe it was just his European way—some prohibition against women peering into the business of the men. And she hadn’t enjoyed her encounter with Mark Payne. He was a person she found hard to like. He, too, seemed suspicious of Louise. As for Sheriff Tatum, the two of them had clashed from the first moment they met, back when Jimmy Porter’s body was discovered. Eddie Porter, too, considered her an anathema.

  I’m winning lots of friends out here in the West, she thought cynically.

  It seemed only reasonable to do some checking at the library. A little guiltily, she realized she should look up Pete Fitzsimmons, too, since he was very much in the mix. She obtained directions from a passerby and started there on foot.

  Bill might not like this snooping about, but a little research couldn’t hurt anyone, and he had said she should keep her eyes open.…

  It was a scenic walk to the library, with the Flatirons, the almost vertical sandstone mountains that were Boulder’s signature, looming heavily over the downtown area. But with the reemergent sun behind them, they lived up to their name: flat, one-dimensional, as if someone had fashioned them of cardboard. Mounding up behind them were big white clouds which would spill the brief daily rain shower on the city at the prescribed hour of four, give or take a few minutes. Louise had learned this by getting wet one day. Now she checked her watch and saw that she had an hour or so before the downpour.

  The library yielded some answers. She found a Wall Street Journal article which detailed how Reingold’s company had systematically bought out attractive real estate, mostly during the eighties, when the pie-in-the-sky oil shale boom burst in Colorado, and land prices in the West were depressed.

  DRB had also made some less attractive moves regarding the transport of American goods over the border. These brought it under the scrutiny of the U.S. Customs Office. Not too unusual, she thought. Big company gets itself into a murky business situation, from which expensive lawyers must extricate it. Fines are paid, and some big shot at the top gets the ax. Louise was interested to read that the debonair Josef Reingold came out of all this on top, as chief of American operations.

  She found a few paragraphs about Reingold’s international jet-set life and multiple marriages. The accompanying pen sketch showed Reingold smiling enticingly at the world. Hmmm. She didn’t feel so bad about the crème brûlée experience any more; she wasn’t the first woman to be suckered into something by this provocative fellow.

  Next, she checked out Payne. A recent Boulder Daily Camera story contained a ten-year retrospective of his career. It talked about him as a former ski bum who eventually settled down and took over the family business when his father died, and made it more successful than his daddy ever had. Louise noticed that land, again, was the answer. The article on Payne was sympathetic, mentioning his parents’ tragic death in a plane crash, then carefully alluding to the later accident in which his former wife perished. Ann was right. The rich hometown boy’s life had not all been joy and glad
ness. To Louise, he seemed to be a person who was missing a crucial character trait, for he failed to generate any personal warmth. As Bill would say, a cold fish. Why had a wholesome person like Ann ever become involved with him?

  It wasn’t hard to find a fresh story on the sheriff, but it only repeated what she’d heard about Tatum’s long real estate and business background. The newspaper and the city of Boulder had seemed surprised at his victory in a close sheriff’s race; the colorful Boulder good-ol’-boy won by a whisker, despite the scent of scandal that surrounded him.

  She encountered only one story about Pete, accompanied by a picture of a youthful man grinning so broadly one could not see his eyes. She smiled. That’s Vete, all right. It described how this popular former CU lecturer had returned from seven years in California, and instead of resuming teaching English, had chosen to go into “business pursuits.” Like so many men around here, the temptation of business—and for that, she thought, read “land” was too great to resist.

  Seeing that article on the computer screen did something else. It validated Pete as a professional, making it painfully clear that her first impression of him had been way off the mark. Pete Fitzsimmons was both political and savvy, and very much a player here in Boulder County. She thought it only logical that he had had a part in the Porter Ranch land negotiations that preceded Ann Evans’s “victory”—not on his own, but possibly as a partner with someone like Payne or Reingold. She would have to pursue this further. Buoyed by her discoveries, Louise decided it was time to go home, after making a little detour to check out Eddie Porter’s place.

  The Persians, four hundred years before Christ, called beautiful enclosed and irrigated garden refuges pairidaeza, or paradise parks. And Eddie Porter lived in one. Irrigated by the South St. Vrain river, which wandered through his land. Backed by cliffs of red Lyons sandstone, shaggy and beautiful, interbedded with limestone and Pierre shale in grays and black. Graced with small forests of mature ponderosas and drifts of fluttery-leaved aspens.

  Willows and wildflowers grew rampant on the land near the river, with Eddie’s wood-and-sandstone cabin set just a little higher, in case of flood.

  It was one of the prettiest pieces of land Louise had seen out here.

  The only trouble with this paradise, at least from the aesthetic point of view, was the trash. The property was festooned, as far as the eye could see, with homely outbuildings, decrepit freestanding farm equipment, aging cars, canoes, and fencing—both metal and wood. But that was only the start of it. There were also sloppy piles of bricks, flagstones, cut wood, and gravel, as if Eddie might have wanted to open his own building supply store out here. The net effect was dismal, in Louise’s opinion. It dragged “paradise” down to “trash dump.”

  She had dropped in at the Gold Strike Café, ordered up a piece of pie, and easily extracted from Ruthie Dunn the information about where Eddie lived. When she arrived, Louise parked her car on the road and hiked in. Under no circumstances did she want to meet the man. Once on the property, she had ho problem—even though she felt a little silly—hiding behind outbuildings and pieces of junk. She didn’t know if she had enough nerve to enter the utility building and the shed she saw, but both had their doors hanging open, so she didn’t have to worry about the “breaking” part of breaking and entering.

  In search of something of more interest, she made her way to a corner of the property that lay below the looming sandstone cliff. So far, so good: no sign of Eddie. Sitting behind a pile of old barn wood—which Louise suspected was now very valuable—was a large, beat-up trailer. Crouching, she worked her way behind the barn wood to get a closer look. Behind the trailer, shoved against the cliff, was an old white pickup.

  Louise’s heart speeded up as she went over and examined the front fenders. First, she had a feeling of great elation, but it quickly passed. There were paint marks, all right, on both the left and right front fenders. It was as if Eddie had used this car as a battering ram, for there were streaks in several colors, including blue, the color of Sally Porter’s vehicle.

  She shoved her cowboy hat back on her head and stood, arms akimbo. Eddie was a liar, that much was true, for not owning up to his possession of a white car. Now, it would be up to Louise to squeal to somebody in law enforcement that Eddie Porter, as usual, was not telling the truth.

  Had Eddie run his sister off the road to give himself better odds? Now, it was two against one. He and Grace Prangley against Frank.

  That was when another stray thought nagged at her: There was someone else who drove a white car—one with “Boulder County Sheriff” emblazoned on the side.

  When Louise went home, she was tired. It was too late to nap and too early to eat. Cocktail time. But not only was she alone, she didn’t do cocktails well. She thought glumly of the two-day-old chicken parts in the fridge. She needed either to cook them, or to throw them away. At the moment, the thought of raw chicken made her gag.

  The events of the day had left her with a sense of discomfort; it was as if she were slogging through a marsh of dark water, trying vainly to reach the shore—trying to sort out the developers, the lawman, the bickering and suspicious family members. If only she could talk the whole thing over with Bill. She took out the emergency number he had given her, thought it over for a moment, and decided not to call.

  To heal both her spirits and her complexion, she smoothed some Bag Balm on her face, finally having found some for sale in a Boulder supermarket. The balm made her face tingle, as if something good were happening. Maybe there would be an improvement in the “prune” factor of her skin.

  She would set aside her black thoughts and put off drawing conclusions—just as the sheriff had advised. She fetched herself a bottle of spring water out of the refrigerator, grabbed her book about Emily, and went out on the porch to read.

  The story of this frontier woman’s troubles helped her forget the nagging shadows created by the Porter murders. Because she was convinced of it: Sally Porter had been killed, just like her father.

  Dark Water…and How to Make It Pure Again

  GROWING NUMBERS OF CITIES, businesses, and individuals are constructing plant-filled wetlands to treat industrial or household waste water. Towns and cities in various parts of the country use marshlands as an alternative to traditional treatment plants. They find it costs less to set up than a conventional system, saves them money on chemicals, and creates a beautiful nature preserve for waterfowl and other wildlife.

  The technology has been tailored to the needs of homes, businesses, small communities, schools, rest areas, towns and cities, and even Coors Field in Denver. The largest wetlands system is in Orlando, Florida, and treats twenty million gallons of waste water per day. It is used as an open-space park. It is a perfect solution for a homeowner who is building on clay, where an efficient leach field would be difficult.

  An idea straight from the marsh. This concept of water treatment comes straight from the marsh, which, like prairies and forests, is a self-organizing, self-maintaining system. Plants and microbes that grow in watery environments remove the contaminants from water by breaking them down into non-toxic forms.

  The wetland on a property takes the place of the leach field, which in a conventional system soaks up the outflow from the septic tank. In the leach field, the effluent gradually settles into the soil, like water percolating through coffee grounds. In the wetland, it will take a week to move through a shallow lined bed of plant-filled gravel.

  A town develops wetlands. When the little Colorado mountain town of Ouray decided to go to wetland treatment, it first installed a two-acre wetland plot. Plants such as bull-rushes, reeds, and cattails were allowed to grow for a year before waste water was turned into it. It took another full year to prove the system was working efficiently. Now, the town has excellent water quality, and doesn’t even need to chlorinate the final product before it is turned into the Uncompahgre River. This system cost one third less than a traditional one, and saves the town $
100,000 a year in operating costs.

  Cleansed water from these systems—so-called “gray water”*—can be reused to irrigate gardens, stored in ponds for fire protection purposes, or even piped back into homes or businesses for use. The role of plants in cleansing water is a subject of lively research. Cattails are known to absorb mercury, arsenic, and lead. Roses will remove poly chlorinated biphenyls, or PCB’s. Cottonwoods are being used to help leach out plutonium at a weapons plant. Wild tomatoes are used to remove TNT from residual water at military plants and big oil company plants, since they effectively break down hydrocarbons.

  Continued study is aimed at finding plants to ameliorate the contamination of many industrial wastes, including those from mines and from electronics factories. Thus, there are “designer” wetlands with plants and bacteria introduced to attack specific pollutants.

  Wetlands don’t wear out. It is said that engineers, more comfortable with machinery than nature systems, tend to be the greatest opponents of these natural systems, even though they are cheaper in both the short and the long run. Unlike traditional systems, they do not wear out in twenty years. Despite the reluctance of engineers, wetland systems are becoming more popular.

  * Recirculated “gray” water was a concept promoted by the the Sierra Club years ago, when there was little technical knowledge surrounding the idea. More than one devoted householder would simply run a pipe from the upstairs bathtub, out the window, down the side of the house, across the yard, and into the garden, so that this precious commodity was reused.

  Chapter 11

  THEY WERE ON AN ORGANIC farm east of Boulder, with the early morning sun giving Pete Fitzsimmons the kind of light and shadow he cherished for his camera work. It was an idyllic spot only five miles from the busy city, rimmed with tall trees and a high wooded bluff. The planted fields were edged with a large pond that attracted animals and birds like a blue-mirrored magnet. Acres of tomatoes, corn, cucumbers, herbs, sunflowers, squashes and pumpkins were spread out in the hot morning sun. The crops grew without chemicals. Only chicken dung and cow manure touched them.