Next, I took myself back down to Sergeant Ortega’s office at the Denver Police Department. Once again, I found him eating, this time a takeout order of Mexican pastries. He looked up, deep-fried dough pocket running with honey halfway to his lips, and said doubtfully, “Sopaipilla?”
“Thank you, no,” I answered kindly. “I just dropped by to see if you’d had any luck with my little bag of excitement up in Wyoming.”
Ortega closed his mouth over his sopaipilla and chewed. “Em Hansen, you are like the dog who thinks sheep herding is too slow so he starts herding the other dogs. You are always snapping at my heels. You’re thinking the Denver Police Department has nothing better to do than chase some loco Wyoming lobos for you.”
“Sorry.”
“Well, you are a lucky person, because in fact I do have something for you.” He set down his pastry and pulled open a drawer, produced a single sheet of paper, and smoothed it across his desktop with a greasy thumb. “Your lady died of a drug overdose.”
I just sat there, stunned.
Ortega shrugged his shoulders sympathetically and picked up another sopaipilla.
“But everyone says she was murdered,” I said numbly. I was not ready to find out that Miriam of the journals, this friend I’d never met, had been a reckless dope fiend. Well, okay, she might have been a reckless lover, but dope was another matter. Or was it?
“She was murdered.”
I knit my brow. “Quit playing with me, Carlos.”
Ortega looked up meekly and took another bite. “Mil disculpas,” he said softly. “It is a bad habit in my profession to be playful where we can. I thought you didn’t know this woman.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t know her, but I’m kind of getting to know her.”
Ortega cocked his head, waited.
Oh, what the hell. “I’ve got her journals.”
His eyes closed. “Ah.”
“Or some of them. This other woman has the most recent ones in her office and won’t let me at them, or at least not since I opened my big mouth and asked her about a man who’s in them.” I heaved a sigh. “I told you Miriam had been having an affair, and that a man was seen visiting at the ranch the day she died.”
Ortega opened another desk drawer, deposited the bag with the remaining sopaipillas into it, wiped his hands on a paper napkin, and pulled a pad and pen to the center of his desk. “She was murdered, Em. This lab report says she was dosed with unusually pure cocaine. I suggest it was not her choice, because there were signs of a struggle, and the woman tried to vomit it up. And yes, we can hear that struggle on the nine-one-one tape, and hear the woman calling for help, and hear her beg her daughter to run away from the man who was doing this to her.”
I put my hands over my face. A violent struggle. So this was part of the shock Cecilia had experienced. “Who in hell murders with cocaine?” I asked.
“Who indeed.”
“Not a common occurrence in Converse County, Wyoming,” I said feebly.
“No, I’d say not.”
“So that’s why there’s been no arrest. It’s not a local.”
Ortega shrugged his rounded shoulders. “The sheriff believes a local man named Arapaho Bradley killed her, just as you told me.”
“But how would Po Bradley get hold of pure cocaine?”
“Sheriff Duluth told me this Po Bradley keeps fast company. He told me he spends his weekends in Saratoga, like that should mean something to me. Where’s that?”
Saratoga. I was beginning to hear that town named too often. “It’s a town south of Rawlins. Used to be a sleepy little ranching community like all the rest, but in recent years the rich boys have moved in with their hobby ranches and golf clubs. They’ve bought up a bunch of the land just to keep their favorite trout streams to themselves.”
“Hobby ranch?”
“It’s the Wyoming nickname for a rich boy’s ranch. They buy an old family spread for a huge load of dollars so they can use it as a weekend getaway. They put up a cushy new ‘ranch’ mansion, install a rent-a-cowboy in the tumble-down old hut, run a small herd of Herefords across the place, and call it a tax dodge.”
“You sound like you don’t approve of such use of land,” Ortega said dryly.
I shook my head. “No. They aren’t dependent on the income from the property, but they like the tax write-off, so when it comes time to market the beef, they’ll take low dollar. That drives the price down for everyone else. Which in turn drives old Wyoming families to give up and sell to city boys with lots of dollars.”
“And this cuts to your bones.”
I looked up into Carlos’s dark eyes and suddenly wanted to bawl. “Oh, Carlos, here I am trying to find a job because I don’t have a ranch myself to run, and this morning I did a so-called information interview with this shithead who’d rather eat road apples than give this little cowgirl a job. There he sits making probably mid six figures, with bonuses every time he lays someone off, and I’m not even asking mid five. And just to put the cherry on the sundae, he keeps me waiting most of an hour before he chases me off, and who’s he in there wasting my time with? More of those six-figure Charlies who’re all clapping him on his back and telling him to ‘Come on up to Saratoga.’”
Ortega blinked.
I hadn’t realized until I said all this just how much the whole episode had bothered me. As it was happening, I’d been too busy trying to make a legitimate interview out of a mercy chat to notice exactly how rotten it had felt to have my begging bowl out. “Well, that’s where and what Saratoga is,” I said miserably.
“Ah.” Ortega had averted his eyes to his page of notes, studiously leaving me a shred of pride as I pulled myself back together. “Okay. So would these ‘hobby ranchers’ include maybe a drug dealer or two?”
My mouth sagged open as I quickly computed possible connections involving grim-looking hawk-faced characters who conferred with unhappy corporate executives who were close friends of men whose wives had been killed on rental ranches in Wyoming that belonged to playboy ranchers who spent weekends in Saratoga with corporate executives who kept time with hawk-faced characters. The world sure had a way of shrinking when you connected all the dots. “It could indeed. I take it I never heard what you just told me.”
Ortega nodded. “Es correcto. I never said it to you. But I do say this: cocaine is not a nice substance. Such pure cocaine suggests a dealer, or even a direct line to the overseas distributor. Whoever brought it into that house and forced it into that woman is not running in polite circles. I recommend with all my heart you drop this case right now.”
This seemed eminently reasonable. Hand back Menken’s check. Wave bye-bye. Wait. “What about Cecelia? If she was there, doesn’t this mean she’s in danger?” Perhaps she remembers, but is afraid …
“I don’t know. I got a transcript of the tape, and I’m thinking that whoever did this may not have known that Cecelia was in the house, or thought she was asleep. She’s a smart girl, right? Was there a phone in her room, so she could stay hidden?”
“I think so.” I thought of the layout of the house. Would a struggle in her mother’s room have been heard over a phone in Cecelia’s? Or had Miriam’s phone been off the hook? Or had there been a third phone in the kitchen? I couldn’t recall. “If only we knew,” I said, my interest in finding the right psychologist increasing. Just how much had Cecelia seen?
“It is not ours to know this much about this case.”
“Let me see the transcript.”
“No.”
“Carlos!”
Ortega’s eyes went as deep as wells. “Em, I apologize. I have indulged myself in talking to you about all of this. But it is not my case, and not my jurisdiction. And you are my friend whom I want to keep safe. I know the stupidest thing I can do is challenge you, but please, please, this time stay out of trouble, okay? This is not your fight. Leave it to men—people—who are trained to deal with this kind of stuff. Go on and get a job. Have a good life. Start savi
ng for your retirement. Who knows, maybe you can make a lot of money and buy your own place under the sky.”
I sagged back in my chair. Ortega was right, this wasn’t my fight, and it was time I began trying to have a future. I spread my hands in submission and said, “Okay.” .
Ortega eyed me carefully, pulling at his lower lip. “Good. So why not meet me back here about six. We’ll have dinner, keep you busy while you get used to this new Em Hansen,” he said. “And while we eat, you can tell me what you know from these journals. Get it off your chest. I’ll see that the information is treated as kindly as possible.”
I sighed and nodded. “Fine.”
But it wasn’t fine. There had been no mention of drug taking in Miriam’s journals. I had three hours to kill before Ortega went off duty, and Miriam’s unread journals called to me like the siren of the rocks. And he’d asked to know what was in them, right?
I called Julia’s office and was told that she was out. So I phoned Cindey Howard. It was a gamble to go to her for information; she might have spoken with her husband since he had run me out of his office, and it wouldn’t do to seem like I was still snooping around his questionable doings.
Cindey’s voice came on whispery and hoarse, as if she was answering a clandestine call. “Oh. Em. What do you want?”
“I want to ask you some more questions about Miriam.”
“What about her?”
“Well, really about a man she knew in college.”
Cindey didn’t say anything right away, but I could almost hear the wheels in her brain turning, slowly, cagily deciding what she would say in reply. When she spoke again, her voice was almost seductive. “Why don’t you come over?” she said. “Say in half an hour or so?”
I thought, You want me in your house for some reason? I pondered this, decided that she must not have spoken to Fred, as he had definitely given me the bum’s rush and would not, therefore, be asking his wife to invite me over for a social call. So it was okay to go, and if she even mentioned to him that I had dropped by—which seemed unlikely, given the little that she had to say to anybody—she would report the truth, that I was only asking about Miriam. Besides, I wanted to know what she wanted from me.
Forty-five minutes of thrashing through afternoon traffic later, I pulled into her driveway. Cindey answered the door wearing gray leggings and a velour tunic that featured white snowflakes on a field of maroon. The ensemble would have looked great on someone more Cecelia’s age.
“So Emily,” she whispered, peering at me through her unreadable little eyes, “what brings you to my door?” As if she hadn’t asked me to come.
I stepped in out of the cover of the imposing front entrance to the chill spaciousness of her front hallway. “I was hoping you could help me know a little more about your friend.”
“Miriam?”
“Yes. There are some gaps I need to fill in.”
“Hmm.” Cindey led me into the vast cavern of her living room. We seated ourselves on opposite ends of a mauve leather-covered couch laden with throw cushions, facing each other. “So you’re beginning to find out about her, aren’t you,” she stated, her voice taking on that seductive purr again.
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, you know, beginning to knock the princess off her pedestal a bit.”
I leaned back and looked at her appraisingly. “If you have something to tell me, why don’t you just spit it out?”
Cindey busied herself with an examination of her fingernails. They were long and narrow, and projected from the tips of her chubby fingers like talons from a hawk’s toes.
I tried again, something more mollifying. “You know, of course, that I’m really only doing this for Cecelia. After all, I never even met Miriam.”
“Yes, poor Cecelia.”
“What was their relationship like?”
“Oh … it had its ups and downs.”
Cindey’s act was beginning to grate on my nerves. “Tell me about the downs,” I said, playing along in spite of my irritation.
“Well you know, Cecelia has never been a very popular girl.”
“And?” This was like pulling teeth. Only I wasn’t quite sure whose teeth were being pulled.
“Oh, it just infuriated Miriam. She had no sympathy for it.”
“Really. And just how was this expressed?”
“Oh, she was always trying to drag the poor dear off for a haircut, or to buy clothes. It was shocking.”
That’s the pot calling the kettle black, I thought. Something about this didn’t fit. Cecelia really had been an unkempt mess until fairly recently. She’d needed all the help she could get. So why was Cindey taking this tack? Just to get some digs in at Miriam? It was time to steer the conversation somewhere that would give me more hard facts and less innuendo. “I remember that a couple years ago, Miriam went away for a while. Do you know where she went?”
“No.”
“Or with whom?”
She shook her head, but gave me a look I suppose was meant to be coy.
I found it annoying. “You don’t know,” I pointed out, meaning it to sting just a bit. “But you two spent a lot of time together. What did you do with all that time? Shop? Go to the spa?”
Cindey shot me a heated look. Recovering herself, she offered me a cigarette, and when I refused, she lit one herself. “My one vice,” she said. Had she asked my opinion, I could have suggested a few others to add to her self-awareness. After breathing in the smoke, her voice came out even more hushed, a hiss from the grave. “To answer your question, Miriam and I had a long-standing habit of lunching together.” She leaned her head back and tried to make a theatrical gesture with the cigarette, arching it through the air, but her body was so stiff and tight that the movement was short and spastic.
“How long was long-standing?” I coughed as the smoke curled past my face.
Cindey ignored my hint. “It started clear back in college, when we were in classes together. We’d go straight from history to lunch. It was on the way back to the dorm,” she added, as if I might think she cared whether she had lunch with Miriam or not. “But Miriam didn’t confide in me very much. I won’t say she was secretive, exactly, just didn’t seem to have much to say,” Cindey pulled her feet up underneath herself, pointing her toes to make her feet look more elegant.
“I see. So you knew everyone she knew in college, then.”
“I suppose so.”
“Even this Chandler guy.” I tried to make it sound like a casual question, but I failed miserably.
“Chandler?” she asked, her voice all innocence.
Okay, I thought, if that’s the way you want to play this. “The man in her journal. Big guy, older than the rest of the class. Good dancer.”
“Oh, him.” Her eyes glittered.
“Yes, him.”
Cindey shot me a more shrouded look, took another drag on her cigarette, then studied the smoke at leisure. “I’d say we were acquainted, nothing more.”
“What was he like?” Now it was my turn to feign innocence.
A long pause, during which time Cindey looked straight into my eyes, as if gauging her next move. “Kind of wild.”
“Wild how? Like an animal? Like a bad boy?”
“Oh, I hear he ran with a rather fast crowd.”
“Drugs?”
A shorter pause. “Ye-e-es, lots of people did drugs back then. It was the era.”
“Ah. Have you seen Chandler since college?”
Pause. One heartbeat, two … “I’d heard he was in Denver.”
I felt like I was doing dental surgery with tiny tools on a large, slow-moving animal, all the time dimly aware that I was leaning too far into the creature’s mouth for safety. Cindey continued to stare at me. I sat up and leaned forward, put my feet flat on the floor, trying to indicate that I was ready to leave if she didn’t cut with the sleepwalking act. “Would you know how to get in touch with him?”
Cindey’s eyes glowed with unkind pleas
ure, looking right into me, as she shook her head.
“Well, then why don’t you put me in touch with your college alumni office?”
“I’m not sure they’d have an address.”
“Why?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “He was something of a rolling stone.”
“Then show me your college yearbook. That’ll give me clues.”
My request clearly startled her. She glanced around as if surprised to be caught at an illicit act, like a teenager found smoking behind the barn. I was perhaps not supposed to know that she still had that yearbook, still kept it somewhere close, where she could easily retrieve it. But she got up, took another stylized drag on her cigarette, and shuffled off down a hallway. When she returned, she was holding a large, heavy book bound with a faux-leather cover in maroon with white letters. She held it open, flipping back and forth through the pages, her eyes scanning nervously, as if checking certain pages to make sure it was okay to show them to me. Even from across the room, I could see that the edges of certain groups of pages had grown dark from excessive contact with the oil of her fingers. “The senior portraits are in the middle,” she said as she handed me the volume, opened to the page where her own highly romanticized pose had been recorded among seven others. “Cindey Ann Shwartzer, Beaver, Pennsylvania; French,” it read.
I flipped back several pages to M for Menken, but of course J. C. had been in an earlier class, and Miriam hadn’t yet taken his name. “What was Miriam’s maiden name?” I asked.
“Benner.”
Yes, there it was, a few pages before Cindey’s. I stared into the eyes of a softly lovely young thing with dark hair worn long and straight and parted down the middle, the uniform of the times. She had an oval face, with the kind of eyes that arch at the top but are straight across at the bottom, a plain, straight nose, and a look of hopeful surprise. “Miriam Jane Benner, Pleasantville, New York; History,” the caption stated. History? Surely she hadn’t read up on the raids of the Vikings and the triumph of the agrarian class. And wait, there was Julia, also done up in long, straight hair, a look of challenge and youthful arrogance stiffening her face. “Julia Joyce Richards, Northbrook, Illinois; Political Science.” “What about Chandler?” I asked. “What was his last name?”
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