by Wendy Clinch
The afternoon grew later and the crowd around the bar picked up. She kept on answering questions, remembering everything she could and criticizing herself for the gaps.
How about a backpack or something? He’d been lying on his back, that much she knew. So if he’d had a backpack, she wouldn’t have been able to tell. Unless she’d seen the straps, which she couldn’t say one way or another.
Skis? Wow. Skis. That was anybody’s guess, now that she thought about it. The way that they’d found him was she’d skied right over his face—
Eeeeewwwwwww.
Right. She knew. Horrible. Anyhow, she’d skied right over his head without even seeing it, assuming when she hit it that it was a log or a boulder or something, and she’d taken a great big yard sale of a fall, and Chip had recognized that it wasn’t a log or a boulder but an old movie star instead. She left out the part where Chip passed out in the snow. She’d even left that part out when she’d talked to the troopers. If Chip wanted to tell them about it, then that was his own business.
Anyhow, back to the question of skis. Chip had kind of started digging the body out, at least until it occurred to her that the troopers might want things left just the way they’d found them, so although in the end his torso was exposed pretty well and Chip had worked some on his arms and legs, they’d never gotten far enough to see if he was wearing ski boots. Or if there were skis stuck somewhere in the snow alongside him. So she couldn’t say.
Snowshoes? How about snowshoes? She didn’t remember anything sticking up. But then again she couldn’t be sure about the depth of the snow.
Had it bled, where she cut his face with the skis? No. She didn’t think so. She thought he was (A) pretty thoroughly dead by then, and (B) pretty much frozen solid. It was more like whacking a brick of frozen hot dogs with the tip of a knife, and the tip goes in through the plastic but instead of separating two of the dogs it kind of slides into one of them. Just opens it up a little bit. That’s all. Or like trying to cut through a frozen pork chop or something like that. He always was a ham actor.
That’s not nice. Don’t speak ill of the dead.
* * *
Manny Seville didn’t look like a man who was in any special hurry to leave town. He looked, on the contrary, as though he was enjoying himself all to heck.
Guy was crawling the streets in his patrol car, watching the sun go down over the mountain and waiting for the valley to fill up with darkness. That was when he saw Manny walking between the Slippery Slope and the Broken Binding. Manny and Buddy Frommer, strolling along the sidewalk like a couple of jolly pirates. Guy had never seen Buddy walking there before. As far as he knew, these days Buddy only existed behind the desk at the Slope and behind the wheel of his SUV. Maybe down in that house he and his wife had somewhere in Londonderry or wherever. But not out on the sidewalk. And certainly not out on the sidewalk practically arm in arm with another human being, their heads tipped together as if they were engaged in some kind of conspiracy.
On top of everything else, he was pretty sure that Buddy was actually smiling—although he’d never swear to it on a witness stand. It might have just been a new variation on his usual grimace.
Guy watched them come and he nodded in their direction just in case they had taken note of him through the tinted glass—they hadn’t—and then he turned the car into the lot opposite and backed it around and faced it toward the street. He switched the headlights on against the lowering dark. Just keeping an eye on things, as far as anybody could tell. Just keeping an eye on Manny and Buddy, to tell the truth.
It was only a short distance between the ski shop and the restaurant, maybe a quarter of a mile, but the two of them looked as if they might not ever make it. Every eight or ten steps one of them would stop, pulled up short by something he’d spotted on the ground or in the field alongside the road, or else by some idea that had popped into his brain. He’d point or pontificate or both. They looked like a pair of old philosophers or lunatics, one or the other. There was no distinguishing between the two.
So maybe, Guy was thinking, it was true after all—what people said about Buddy Frommer and how he made his money. How he kept the place going in spite of having no customers and not seeming to want any. Guy had always figured maybe he was a day trader or something along those lines, watching his stocks on the computer he had set up behind the counter. But maybe not. Maybe he was selling some kind of dope after all. It made sense, given what Stacey had said about seeing Stone in the basement of the shop with him, huddled over the workbench. And now this. Manny Seville had mentioned cocaine. Leave it to him to sniff out a supply of it—maybe through that Stone, whom neither one of them seemed exactly overwhelmed about missing. That was worth thinking about, wasn’t it?
He sat with his hands on the wheel and watched their stumbling silhouettes merge with the long shadows creeping down from the mountains. He kept on watching until they turned together into the parking lot at the Broken Binding.
TWENTY-FOUR
The gray-haired early dinner crowd was paying their checks and drifting toward the door, the après-ski scene in the bar was starting to get fueled up and raucous, and Stacey’s former fiancé was nursing a drink at the table by the jukebox, talking up a local girl who looked like she had a lot to learn about guys like Brian Russell. The kind of girl who’d gone to college up in Burlington or maybe over in Manchester, New Hampshire, some town not too far from home in whose bars she’d picked up the famous freshman fifteen and a handful of other unfortunate habits, all of which she figured she could shake through the magic of a couple of years back home living in this little nowhere burg with Mom and Dad—what with the clean living and the fresh air and all that. The kind of girl who hadn’t run into Brian’s type before and no wonder: Even Brian hadn’t been entirely Brian yet when he’d gone off to college. It had taken more than an accident of genetics and a privileged childhood in his parents’ fabulous house to make him into the creature who sat before her now. It had taken patience and time and a whole lot of practice. But he was pretty sure it had been worth it.
“That’s right,” he was saying with a disdainful little smile, raising a finger to signal Jack behind the bar that they were ready for another round. “Harper was in my employ when it happened.”
He’d begun the day telling anybody who’d listen that he and Stone had been working together, which he’d thought would give him a kind of Hollywoodish sheen. Around lunchtime he’d upgraded the story to their having been what he called business associates, which he figured could mean anything from the movie business to investments to God knew what. But just now he realized that if he was going to get anywhere with little Susie ChapStick he was going to have to do better than that, so he’d fallen back on the oldest trick in his book and the most automatic: the power of being in upper management. Nothing in the world beats a corner office, and the idea that he got there by climbing on the back of old-time Hollywood royalty like Harper Stone was just icing on the cake.
“Really? He was working for you?”
“Oh, yeah. I’d hired him for a project we were shooting—over on the mountain.”
“What kind of project?”
Jeez. How stupid can you get? Who doesn’t know that when a person in the business says “project,” that’s as specific as he has any intention of getting? A project could be anything. If it usually turns out to be something considerably less impressive than it sounds, then so be it. That’s why God invented words like project. Brian took a sip and gave it some thought. “Well,” he said after a second or two, “it wasn’t a science project, that’s for sure. Unless you consider whatever technology that old guy used to preserve himself as something worth looking into.”
“Hey,” she said with a grin, completely distracted, “I guess he’s even better preserved now. Freeze-dried and all.”
“Yeah, right.” It sent a chill up his spine. “Freeze-dried.”
* * *
At a table way in the back, in a dim
corner lit only by a sputtering votive candle, Manny Seville and Buddy Frommer had gone from goofy to morose. Right now they found themselves at a decision point, trying to figure whether they ought to stay in the bar and continue on toward flat-out drunk, or head into the dining room to cut the booze in their stomachs with a little prime rib. Manny was angling for the prime rib, since he hadn’t had lunch and a person could go only so far on Chex Mix and complimentary hot wings. Buddy was undecided.
Stacey came by to see if she could freshen their drinks, and they looked up at her like a couple of weary owls. “I think we’re going to hit the dining room,” said Manny, and Buddy didn’t seem to be able to muster any argument. For a change.
What he did was point at Stacey and say, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
“Yeah.” She brightened professionally. “I bought a pair of skis from you.”
“That’s nothing to brag about,” he said. “The world is full of people who’ve bought skis from me. I don’t think I’d remember you on account of that.” He dropped his hand to the table and cupped his drink.
“It was only a couple of days ago.”
Buddy shrugged. “Sue me.” Then he lifted his glass and eyed its contents. He started pushing his chair back and turned a bloodshot eye to her and said, “I’m bringing this with me. And don’t worry, sweetheart. You’ll get your tip.”
Yet Stacey wasn’t worried about that, not in the least. What she was worried about, suddenly and severely, was her own mental health. Because as Buddy raised his glass, she saw on his forearm the tattoo that she was certain she’d seen before on Harper Stone. A heart. An anchor. Chains. Hadn’t she taken note of that down in the service department at the Slippery Slope? When Stone and Buddy had been swapping lies or dope or whatever? Hadn’t she seen it on Stone’s arm, not Buddy’s?
Answering everybody’s earlier questions about finding Stone had made her doubt her ability to remember anything, and this was the capper. “I trust you,” she said. Then, collecting herself as best she could and fearing the worst from this wobbly pair as they set out for the dining room with glasses in their hands, she added, “How about I carry those drinks for you?”
They refused, of course. Now that she had a couple of months at the Binding under her belt, Stacey was beginning to see that drunks always refuse help of any sort. Denial is their default mode. Pete Hardwick had a rule that the bar staff was supposed to deliver customers’ drinks from one room to another, but there was only so much a person could do. So she let them go, clearing the table behind them and making a mental note to replace that votive candle with a fresh one, then looking up at the television over the bar just in time to catch a closed-captioned announcement by Harper Stone’s beleaguered publicist: Apparently the dead man had left no will at all, at least none that anybody had been able to dig up yet. Add to that the fact that he had no known living relations, add the widely-held suspicion that he had a half dozen illegitimate children scattered all around the Western world, add the understanding that he had multimillion-dollar estates in exclusive communities from coast to coast, and top it off with the suspicion that his dwindling movie career and his expensive tastes had left him with about a zillion dollars in unsecured debt, and you had a world-class legal struggle in the making.
She took a step backward and found Manny and Buddy standing there behind her still, transfixed by the television. They jumped and she jumped, too. Manny’s face went slack and his mouth dropped open as the story crawled past on the bottom of the screen. Buddy sneered up at the television and said how great it would have been if Stone had lived to see himself finally getting some decent publicity after all those years.
* * *
“The state police wanted me to tell them everything, of course.”
The girl leaned toward Brian, rapt. “Did they put you in one of those interrogation rooms, like on TV?”
He laughed it off. Mister Tough Guy. The Voice of Experience. “Hardly,” he said. “In fact, quite the opposite. They visited me in my condo.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I told them what I know. Background information, mostly. Personality issues. Behavioral stuff. Performance on the job.”
“Like if he’d been acting strangely? That kind of thing?”
“You’ve got it.”
“Well, had he?”
“Had he what?”
“Had he been acting strangely?”
“Hard to say.” It was hard, on account of Brian had only been on the job with Stone for a couple of days. Even then they hadn’t exchanged more than ten words. Prior to that he’d never met the guy. He’d never even seen one of his movies, other than on one dimly-remembered Saturday afternoon in junior high, stuck over at some friend’s house in the rain, bored half to death and seeking salvation in a cardboard box of old VHS tapes. As he recalled, it was either watch Murder Town or sit through some Clint Eastwood cowboy picture they’d both seen a hundred times already.
The girl poked at the votive candle between them. “Did he have any enemies or anything?”
“Wow,” said Brian. “You could be a police detective yourself.”
She beamed.
“Really. Have you thought of going into law enforcement?”
“I took a couple of classes,” she said.
“No kidding.”
“So they asked you that? They asked you did he have any enemies?”
“Oh, you bet they did.” They hadn’t asked him anything of the sort. Once they’d gotten the lowdown on how little he knew about Harper Stone, they’d taken his contact information, given him a business card as a courtesy, and tipped their hats good-bye.
“And?”
“And a person like Harper? With his profile and his status and his wealth?” (All of them, the profile and the status and the wealth, being things that he’d already trumped by claiming himself the guy’s employer.) “Why, he’s bound to have enemies. Don’t you think?”
“That’s why I asked.”
“I told them a few things. Let’s put it that way.” He sipped his drink. “Let’s leave it at that, OK?”
The girl leaned forward. “Aren’t you the mysterious one?”
“Sometimes,” he said, as mysteriously as possible.
* * *
Brian had been doing so well. When he went off to use the men’s room, though, everything changed: the people, the dynamic, his prospects, the works. He’d washed his hands and combed his hair and fixed his shirt collar just right, but when he came back to the table he found two more chairs pulled up and a couple of laid-back guys draped over them—guys younger than him by as many years as Susie ChapStick was, guys who looked like they might have gone to high school with her, guys who were just bursting with bullshit stories about their heroics on the mountain. There was no way in the world he could compete. He sat down and introduced himself, stayed put for as long as it took to finish his drink and salvage a little bit of his dignity, then excused himself for an empty stool at the bar. He hated like anything to drag himself over there in plain sight of Stacey, but she was pretty occupied anyhow.
Jack was right there when he sat down. “No luck?”
“It’s not about luck,” Brian said.
“I guess not.” He didn’t look like he meant it, though. He pointed to Brian’s empty glass. “Another one of those for you?”
“Sure,” said Brian.
Everything that Stacey might have had to say about finding Harper Stone beneath the snow was pretty much common knowledge by now. Brian sat quietly, letting that third drink work on him, feeling the information ebb and flow around the bar. It was nothing but locals, as far as he could tell. Somebody’d have a question for Stacey and Stacey would be too occupied to answer it entirely—she was either consulting Old Mr. Boston on the fine points of a drink she’d never made before or carrying a tray of Long Trails over to a table of snowmobile dudes who couldn’t seem to get enough—and somebody else would take up the thread on her be
half. There was a rhythm to it and a kind of comfort, too. All these people finishing each other’s sentences and filling in each other’s blank spaces. He had nothing to add, really, and it made him feel kind of low. Kind of jealous. Not on account of Stacey’s connection with anybody in particular—none of the men here filled that bill; it was only the bartender and some porky middle-aged guy who looked like a car salesman, and an old farmer whose gray hair stood straight up like it was scared of something—but because of how she seemed to be fitting in here better than she’d ever fit into his life. It made him wonder about things, until he decided that it was probably just the alcohol.
TWENTY-FIVE
Maybe the troopers were just throwing Guy a bone, but maybe not. Maybe they really were interested in his personal take on the local angle. Either way, it was going to give him something to do instead of the usual, which mainly consisted of bolstering the township’s budget by snagging flatlanders who thought that the road between here and Rutland was their own private speedway. Every time he issued a ticket he included a friendly and even faintly apologetic lecture about traffic safety and narrow roads and the stopping distances required by these treacherous wintertime surfaces, but everybody involved in the process knew the truth. As a general rule, it was 75 percent about the money. The money funded a lot of good things—including his own salary, without which the highways around here would definitely be more dangerous. So there you had it.
Anyhow, the lead-footed flatlanders were going to be getting a holiday today. God bless ’em, there’d been a little bit of fresh snowfall, and they’d be in an even bigger hurry than usual. Guy Ramsey, though, had other fish to fry.
* * *
He started at the Slippery Slope. Buddy’s big Japanese SUV was where it usually sat, in the parking spot right in front of the door. For a change there were five or six other cars, too, all of them from out of state. People coming and going with skis and poles over their shoulders and boots dangling from their gloved hands. Guy backed his patrol car into a space across from the door, killed the engine, and sat for a while watching folks come and go. It was actually kind of comical. You’d see somebody getting out of his car, a spring in his step and a smile on his face as he looked forward to a day on the mountain, and fifteen minutes later—when he came out of the shop with a pair of freshly-tuned skis over his shoulder or a sack of gear in his hand—that same guy’s face would be twisted into a mask of impotent rage. He’d be shaking his head never again, so help me God, never again. That, in a nutshell, was the special magic of Buddy Frommer. He’d made the Slippery Slope into a homey place, provided that home was an institution for the criminally insane.