Bye, Bye, Love

by Virginia Swift

  “I haven’t been around long enough,” Pammie told her. “Any idea, cutie pie?” she asked Quartz. He shook his head. “You could ask Kali or Lark,” she suggested.

  Yes, Sally certainly could. At the first opportunity.

  “Speaking of Kali,” said Pammie, “did you see the paper this morning? That company of hers turns out to have been working on a cure for mad cow and chronic wasting disease. Isn’t that bizarre?”

  “Yeah,” said Quartz. “What an outrageous coincidence.”

  Both Sally and Pammie just looked at him. “You gotta be kidding,” Pammie said finally.

  “Okay, I admit there’s something going on here. Heck, maybe Kali suspected what was wrong with the woman she loved, and had gotten her company involved in a desperate search for a cure,” Quartz allowed.

  “That’s a romantic’s-eye view of the situation,” Pammie told him, patting him on the hand. “But I doubt things work that way. After all, how long has Nina been acting strange? And how long does it take a major medical research program to get up and running? I don’t know.”

  Quartz looked sad. “Well,” he said, “you never know about timing. But at any rate, looks like they don’t have the cure, and the company’s going broke. No wonder Kali’s seemed so off balance and distracted lately. As if losing Nina weren’t enough, the poor woman’s got a bunch of other shit to deal with.”

  No surprise, then, that Kali was back and forth to Utah so much. A thought suddenly occurred to Sally. “According to the newspaper story, BIOS stock went in the toilet. Executives these days take a lot of their perks in stock. I wouldn’t be surprised if Kali hasn’t lost a fortune in the last couple of months.”

  “Her and all the other people who owned shares, which probably includes everybody from secretaries at the company to little old ladies in Iowa. But think about it, Quartz,” Pammie said. “Kali’s a senior vice president and a scientist. She knows how this stuff goes. Do you think she knew the FDA approval for—what’s it called?—Madicin...do you think she knew it was in trouble?”

  “Gee,” said Quartz. “I suppose it’s possible.”

  “Boy, I tell you what,” said Sally, “if it were me, and I had a bunch of money invested in something I thought was likely to go south, I’d be pretty tempted to dump my stock while it was still worth something.”

  Quartz took a swallow of coffee and said, “You might. But then you’d be sitting in the cell next to Martha Stewart, trying to figure out what color bar warmers to crochet.”

  “You guys know Kali,” said Sally. “Do you think she’s a candidate for Martha’s cell mate?”

  “Hell, I don’t know,” said Pammie. “I’ve only been hanging around the Wild West bunch because of my darlin’ here.” She grinned at Quartz. “But from what I’ve seen, just judging by the way she eats, Kali’s pretty much of an absolutist. I can’t imagine her bending the rules, even to save her own skin.”

  Sally thought another minute. “But consider the fact that her company does biomedical research. Obviously they must have to use animals as experimental subjects. That seems completely out of line with her politics. How do you suppose she works out that contradiction?”

  “I think her focus is computer simulations,” Quartz said. “She doesn’t do any work with animal subjects. But, of course, other researchers at the company must be using animals.” He looked at Sally and Pammy, eyes somber. “Who in the world doesn’t have some contradiction to work out? Nobody, but nobody, is made of pure love and light, no matter how noble they try to be.” And almost as an afterthought, he added, “I guess, in the end, everybody’s got something to hide.”

  Chapter 24

  Monday, Monday

  She didn’t call Cat, made no attempt to get in touch with Thomas Jackson, never contacted Nels Willen. She told herself that she was taking a step back, trying to collect her wits. The day had dawned gorgeously clear and unexpectedly warm. She crunched along on melting snow glittering in the sun, bound for her office, humming the Mamas and Papas’ anthem to the day of the week. Piled-up paperwork and cascading e-mail awaited her.

  Her intentions were good, though admittedly not pure. Sally sat at the computer table, perpendicular to her desk, methodically working her way through e-mail messages. She’d left her office door half-open, and she wasn’t a bit surprised when Nels Willen walked through it.

  He looked ten years older than he had the last time Sally had seen him. Still, he managed a smile that made her understand why Nina had sought refuge with him, and he sat down in her funky easy chair. “You doin’ okay?” he asked.

  “No physical damage,” she replied, swiveling from the computer to the main desk to face him. “I’ll admit to being a little skittish at times. A car backfired in front of our house last night, and I was half under the bed before I realized how I’d reacted. Now I know how dogs feel on the Fourth of July.”

  Willen nodded. “With what you’ve been through, you’ve probably got a little post-traumatic stress.”

  “Oh!” said Sally. “Is the trauma over?”

  Willen shook his head. “Some traumas take their time about it. Some don’t end, it seems. Guess that brings me to what I wanted to say to you. There are some things you need to know, if you’re gonna write about Angelina.”

  She cleared a space on the desk and leaned forward on her elbows, lacing her fingers and resting her head on her hands. “Nels, I don’t really know if I am going to write that book.”

  “But there’s still a chance you’ll do it. Cat wants you to do it. So does Stone.”

  Sally searched her heart, and admitted she still wanted to write about Nina’s life. “Yeah, there’s a chance.”

  “Okay,” said Willen. “I suspect you know why I took that rifle up to Shady Grove the morning Nina died.”

  Sally waited a beat. “I think I do. You were pretty sure you knew what was wrong with her, and where it would lead. She was exhibiting the symptoms of variant CreutzfeldJakob Disease, which you assumed she’d contracted in Europe, the years she ripped up her knee. You felt responsible. You were her doctor then. And more,” she ventured.

  Willen closed his eyes, slumped in the chair. “I’ve loved Nina Cruz for a quarter of a century. Not in a possessive way, you understand. There was more love in that woman than any one person could hold. All I’ve wanted was a little of her light shining on me. She gave me that. And more.”

  “She took a lot, too,” Sally said. “That’s become increasingly clear to me.”

  “And why not?” said Willen. “She gave away so much, she was entitled to a little back. She couldn’t find it in her heart to hurt anyone.”

  “What about Stone?” Sally asked. “What about the famous ‘Get a life, Tommy’ note?”

  “The man was killing himself,” said Willen. “Trust me. That was the only thing that could’ve shocked him out of the tailspin he was in. I knew them both. I saw what he was doing to himself. Leaving him was the most loving thing she could have done. The pain of it quite nearly killed her, too.”

  Sally nodded. “I believe you. That must have been incredibly hard for her. You can hear the whole history of their life together in the music.”

  “Yeah,” Willen laughed thinly. “They did it the hard way.”

  Sally thought about it. “Uh-huh. And you know what? Since then, have either of them taken the plunge, let somebody in, been so vulnerable? You’d know better than me.”

  Willen shook his head. “Not Nina, anyhow. And believe me, I tried. I thought I could be the one to help her heal. But she said she’d never again risk giving somebody everything. She couldn’t hurt that much, or hurt anybody else so deeply.”

  “So instead, she portioned out love in addictive little doses,” said Sally. “A self-protective, pretty effective strategy. She’d make only partial and temporary promises to people like you and Whitebird, like Kali. That way, she could move on, or come back, or move around, and not feel like she was betraying a trust. Anybody who wanted more,
or felt hurt, well, that was their problem. And if they chose to hang on and hang around, that was fine, too. She didn’t mind surrounding herself with people who adored her.”

  “I accepted her rules. She made ’em pretty clear.” He leaned over and put his elbow on the chair arm, his head in his palm. “Angelina was an unusually clear person in so many ways. That’s why it was so horrible to watch her blur and fade. I couldn’t stand it.”

  Sally’s fingers clenched. She pressed her lips together. “So you were going to do the humane thing. She’d asked you to bring the rifle, said somebody was trying to kill her. Obviously, her mental state was deteriorating. Paranoia strikes deep.”

  “In the end, Sally,” said Willen, “humans are nothing more than animals. She was a suffering animal. When I was a hunter, if I saw a deer with a broken leg, or one of my dogs got sick, I put it out of its misery.” He took a breath. “I figured it was my job to end Angelina’s torment, since I’d been the one who caused it in the first place.”

  How could anyone stand living under the burden of guilt this man hauled around? “You didn’t cause it, Nels. If, indeed, she got mad cow disease after she wrecked her knee, some Swiss quack caused it. And he certainly had no idea what he was doing. All you did was try to help her, the best way you knew how. It blows my mind that you were willing to go to prison, for the rest of your life, to end her pain,” Sally said.

  Willen sighed heavily. “No. In the end, no. I couldn’t do it. I put the guns down years ago. I’m not the man I was. And, as it turned out, she wasn’t quite as crazy as I thought, at least not all the time. She thought somebody was trying to kill her. Guess she was right.”

  Then the man who’d been so brave, so competent, on that terrible morning at Shady Grove, put his face in his hands and cried his heart out. Sally sat for a bit and watched him, then got up, walked around her desk, knelt on the floor, and put her arms around him.

  For the second time in little more than twenty-four hours, Sally found herself comforting a crying man. If that didn’t break your heart, she thought, what could?

  “Sally,” said Willen. “Don’t blame Angelina for trying to spread her love around. There were so many people who wanted a piece of her. She was so committed, so devoted, so luminously gifted. She’d walk into a room, and everybody in the place would just crave a little touch. Most people were content with just that. There were only two people I know of who always wanted more. And they undoubtedly deserved it.”

  “Stone and Cat,” said Sally. “The love of her life, and the sister of her heart.”

  “Both of them gave Angelina everything they had,” Willen said. “Somehow, she couldn’t handle it. They were made different from her.”

  It was the old Eric Clapton conundrum, and she asked the question out loud. “Why does love have to be so sad?”

  Willen shook his head. “Maybe it doesn’t always. Looks like Stone and Cat were made for each other.”

  So Willen knew, too. And it hadn’t taken Sally any time at all to figure it out. Had Nina known?

  “Of course she knew,” Cat Cruz said, when Sally called her an hour later, and asked the question.

  “How?” Sally asked.

  “I told her. She’d been keeping him on a yo-yo for years, and it wasn’t doing Thomas any good. They hadn’t seen much of each other recently, but last spring they were both at some charity event in Boulder, and I guess the sight of her shoved him off the wagon. He needed plenty of help, but she wasn’t into giving any. So he called me, and I came back to the States, and that’s when we got involved. She deserved to know. And do you know what she told me?”

  Sally said, “No.”

  “She just kind of smiled and said, ‘You’re in for a tough road. But that old boy deserves the best, so don’t screw up.’ Then a month after he got out of the clinic, she was calling him up about the benefit. Reeling in the line. She couldn’t let him go.”

  “That must have been infuriating,” Sally said.

  A pause. “Yeah. That’s one word for it. Plus there was the fact that I was beginning to worry about the financial stuff. I had only the vaguest inkling then, but in the past couple of weeks, Quartz has dug up a ton of really disturbing information. She was buying and selling stock, cashing in securities, and not penny-ante transactions either. While I was in Colorado, spending my days in some hick-town hotel room waiting for my hour of handholding with Thomas, she was moving money around. And then, when I was back in Africa, facing all that misery and worrying that, while I was away, the ever ingenious Stone Jackson would finally find a way to kill himself, my beloved sister contacted some lawyer in Seattle about drafting a new will.”

  “Seattle?” Sally said.

  “Yeah. Some guy she probably hid in her basement, back when he was a bomb-throwing anarchist. Now he’s a trusts-and-estates expert. I had no idea that shit was going on until she sent me a draft. We weren’t talking, and when I left the country on another UN gig, it seemed distinctly possible we’d never speak to each other again.

  “But she called me two days before she was killed. Said she loved me. Said we had a lot to talk about. Said she really needed my advice on plans for the Wild West Foundation. Needed someone she knew she could trust. Begged me to come out for the big Thanksgiving-weekend festivities. A lot of things had come clear to her. She loved me. She loved Stone. She...” Cat’s voice faltered, and she took a big breath. “She said she hoped we could make each other really happy, because we both deserved the love we knew how to give. She was writing us a song, and she planned to perform it at the benefit. She hadn’t written a new song in five years. She sang me a couple of lines. It was beautiful. We found some lyrics in a computer file. The cops confiscated all her tapes and CDs, but I called up your pal Atkins. Her last dated tape had a recording of what she’d done so far. He made a copy for me. I thought that was really nice of him,” Cat said.

  “Actually, it was,” Sally said, touched by the uncharacteristic gesture.

  “She didn’t get to finish it, Sally,” said Cat. “But I played it for Stone. I think he’s planning to finish it for her, and play it on Friday.”

  Sally was swamped with sadness. But she got hold of herself. “So what did you learn about Nina’s financial wheeling and dealing?”

  Cat’s voice turned hard. “Appears she’d been slipping around, at least in a small way, for a while, apparently at the urging of the wonderful Kelly Lee. Five years ago, she bought a substantial interest in BIOS. The stock rose slowly and steadily for a couple of years, and then really took off. All the while, she’d buy a little more here, a lot more there.”

  “So she was bankrolling Kali’s company,” said Sally.

  “Evidently. But in typical Nina fashion, always generously enough to require a hell of a lot of gratitude, but keeping her options open. The week before she died, she set up an account with an online broker. I think she was getting ready to dump the stock.”

  “Why?” Sally asked.

  “I think somebody’d tipped her that the company was about to take a dive. She didn’t want to go through the broker we usually use, because we’d been working with him for years and she didn’t want to get him in trouble. If it came out that she had inside information.”

  “So you’re assuming Kali told her, so she could get her money out in time.”

  “Yeah. Ever the devoted acolyte. I assume she took care of her own business, too, although it’s possible she felt like she had to go down with the ship, if for no other reason than to keep from going to jail later on.”

  “It’d be very interesting to know whether Kali stayed in or got out,” said Sally.

  “You’d have to think the FBI either already has, or will have, the answer to that question,” Cat pointed out.

  “And did Nina actually sell the stock?” Sally asked.

  “No,” said Cat. “Before she got around to it, somebody murdered her.”

  Chapter 25

  The Reeling Monster

  H
anging up the phone after talking to Cat, Sally tried to clear her head. Had it really been only a few weeks since Stone Jackson had walked into her office? Since she’d driven through the snow to watch Nina Cruz die? Since Jimbo Perrine had been shot? Since she herself had narrowly escaped death? It seemed an age since she’d slept out a blizzard on Nina’s office floor, found the mysterious note that she’d been sure had held the key to a killer’s identity.

  She still could not manage to convince herself that Jimbo Perrine had murdered Nina Cruz for money. And even if he had, that didn’t answer the question of who might have paid Jimbo to commit homicide.

  Maybe Nels Willen couldn’t fire the shot himself, but that didn’t mean he might not have found somebody to carry out his deadly plan.

  Maybe Randy Whitebird had sensed that his days as Wild West director and Nina’s main squeeze were numbered, and he’d sought a Ranger-turned-radical solution to looming rejection.

  Maybe Kelly Lee Brisbane had found out that Nina was planning to dump her BIOS stock, not to mention dump Kali herself. But what about the mad cow connection? Sally hadn’t exactly warmed up to the woman, but maybe if she’d had the chance to talk to her, one on one, she would have caught a glimpse of what Nina had seen in her. What if Kali had known what she was seeing as Nina succumbed to the ravages of spongiform encephalopathy? What if, as a biologist, she had thrown herself into looking for a cure out of love (and the knowledge that even one case of mad cow disease would send the company that found the magic bullet into the financial stratosphere)? In that case, Madicin was much, much more than a drug to Kali: it was both a potential fortune, and a desperate attempt to save her beloved’s life.

  And what would have happened when she realized that the wonder drug wasn’t going to work? A woman who wouldn’t eat cooked food seemed an unlikely candidate for hiring a hit man. But then, there were the snake earrings, the choice of a pseudonym. You never knew, did you?

  Even Nina’s own remarkable sister, or the famously tormented man who’d spent a life loving Nina, might have finally had enough, finding in Jimbo Perrine a willing tool of their rage. How would someone go about locating an assassin-for-hire in Laramie, Wyoming? How would they discover that the redneck, bass-playing taxidermist was willing to kill for dollars?