by Carly Bishop
“Robyn—“
“Let it go, Stuart,” she warned. “It’s not too late—it’ll never be too late for me to go straight to the bar association. If you want to answer my questions, fine. Otherwise I’m out of here.”
He sulked a moment, then met her look. “I can’t be sure of what Keller knew. I just didn’t care and I don’t remember. I’d ask Crandall if I were you.”
“Who else had motives to want to kill Spyder?” Kiel asked, sending Robyn a “well done” glance.
Trudi laughed bitterly. “Two-thirds of Aspen.”
Robyn picked up her pad and pen again. “Was Spyder that unpopular?”
“Unpopular? No. He drew groupies like flies to honey. But sooner or later,” Trudi said, her voice whispery again, her tone almost regretful, “Spyder managed to insult and alienate everyone he ever knew. Everyone who had ever cared about him.”
“Can you narrow the field by remembering who was in Aspen at the time of his murder?” Kiel asked.
“God knows how many pathetic locals tumbled to his line. He didn’t confine himself to Pitkin County, either. He strayed as far away as Steamboat Springs—for that matter, Gstaad. Spyder delighted in leading women on, Mr. Alighieri, and then spurning them. Humiliating them with their infatuation.” She stared at her hands and turned her bracelets round and round. “The older he got, the worse he became, needing to know he could still attract young girls. But there are others who were far more likely.”
She rattled off the shorter list of specific names, people closer to Spyder Nielsen. “Spyder’s daughter Chloe had reason to want him dead. His sports marketing agent, Shad Petrie. Spyder was about to dump a major ski manufacturing endorsement that would cost Petrie dearly. Then there’s my ex-husband, Pascal Candelaria. Spyder delighted in taunting Pascal, who, as you know, is yesterday’s news himself. The sports network fired him last spring from his color commentator position.”
Robyn recorded the names Trudi listed, then posed another question. “Ms. Candelaria, do you really believe one of those people killed Spyder?”
Trudi exhaled sharply. “They all had reason, believe me…but, no. All I know is that I didn’t do it.”
“Did any of them have reason to frame you for his murder?” Kiel asked. “Who had it in for you? Chloe?”
“Spyder’s daughter and I have never gotten along well,” Trudi said. “But of course, she stood to gain the most. If I had been convicted of the murder, Spyder’s entire estate would have gone to her.”
“Who knew you would be out and when you would return?”
“Elsa.” Thoughtfully, Trudi turned the bangles on her wrist. “But she is the soul of discretion. Other than that, the people who were at the party I went to that evening.”
“Was Chloe one of them?”
“No.” Trudi frowned. “But if Chloe called that night and spoke to her father, she would know I was out of the house and that he was home.”
“What about Elsa, Ms. Candelaria? Did she ever threaten to leave after Spyder was murdered?”
Trudi folded her arms. “Elsa is a very pragmatic woman, Ms. Delaney. This is her home. This is her territory, and she wouldn’t leave it if the Ayatollah moved in.”
Robyn closed the spiral notebook and twisted her pen to close off the ballpoint. “Kiel and I will look into all of this. We may need to come back.”
Kiel rose from his chair. Stuart gave Trudi a hand up, then draped his arm around her shoulders, pulling her close. “This has to have been a tough year for you, Robyn—even getting back on your feet.”
“You’re right.” She stood taller. Her leg usually ached deep inside. Tonight it didn’t. “It has been a difficult year, Stuart. But if you’re wondering whether I have the stamina or the heart to pursue Keller’s death, don’t. I won’t rest until I get at the truth.”
NEAR 2:00 A.M., long after she’d lit the old-fashioned glass lantern to sleep by and climbed into the luxurious four-poster bed in her room at The Chandler House, Robyn got up and wandered into the parlor. A fire crackled softly in the fireplace. Kiel sat slouched in the deep leather easy chair.
She curled up on the sofa. Tucking her nightgown up around her feet, she pulled a crocheted throw to cover her shoulders.
“Can’t sleep?” he asked.
“No.” She shook her head. “Usually when I wake up it’s my leg bothering me.” She looked straight at him, teasing. “I don’t have that excuse anymore.”
Despite the times he had held forth about taking oneself lightly, he wasn’t easily humored this night. “What’s on your mind, Robyn?”
“Keller. What a relief it is that my leg isn’t aching. Why I can’t sleep. Who killed Spyder. Why Keller had to die. How I’m going to get at the truth. And…Kell.”
Kiel nodded. The lighthearted tone of her answer didn’t wash. It wasn’t as if he didn’t already know the answer to his question. Keller was always on her mind, permeating her consciousness for all time.
The decision to keep from her the truth that his soul was Keller’s rankled in his angel’s heart. He felt something startlingly similar to the human equivalent of guilt. Again.
In all his time of service as an Avenging Angel, he had never suffered such indecisiveness, such self-doubt. These were not usually part of an angel’s experience. Truth was truth, and justice, a clear and pristine proposition. Humans suffered with the gray areas, but in the place beyond temporal reality, no being harmed another and every soul was free to soar and expand and blossom into its fullness.
But in the here and now of Robyn Delaney’s existence Kiel feared his presence harmed her more than helped. In his essence, Kiel was Keller Trueblood, so he must always remind her of Keller at deeply subconscious levels where she was defenseless.
He had taken the matter up with Angelo three hours ago, in earth time.
It took Kiel no real time at all to soar back to the offices of the Denver Branch of Avenging Angels. He found Angelo sitting on a stone bench in the garden that had passed its season. The night air was crisp. Moonlight filtered through fluttering oak leaves.
Kiel sat beside Angelo.
“You’re in a dilemma,” Angelo observed.
Kiel nodded. “I’ve never been on an assignment where I believed my presence as an Avenging Angel was doing more harm than good.”
“Your perspective is alarmingly human, Ezekiel,” Angelo agreed, invoking Kiel’s full name to remind him his first obligation was to keep in place a larger picture than Robyn Delaney’s emotional state. “Crimes against human beings have been committed—crimes that require your efforts to be set to rights. Avenged.”
“Yeah,” Kiel said. “I know. The thing is, Robyn will suffer. It’s not fair to her to be kept in the dark. I may be an Avenging Angel, but I am also Keller in the truest sense. She knows. She recognizes me even though she has convinced herself that she was pretending, imagining I must be Keller.”
“Because you broke with rules and made love to her.”
Kiel felt divinely defensive. “If I hadn’t—“
“I’m well aware of the circumstances,” Angelo interrupted. “And I’ve taken this up with the highest councils. Robyn Delaney was teetering on the edge, heaven or earth, earth or heaven.” He tilted his head one way and then the other. “She had no way of knowing her destiny is far from fulfilled. You had no choice. To pull her back from the brink, she had to believe somewhere inside herself that she was coming back to Keller Trueblood.”
“But there are these complications now—“
“Exactly. The argument chases its tail. Robyn accepted you, and yours is the only help she would have accepted. You are the only reason she did not abandon her destiny—and there you have it. You must deal with the consequences, however heartrending.”
No argument could win. Kiel was stuck.
“Oh…and uh, about that ‘Alighieri’ business?”
Kiel groaned. This was the last time he’d get creative. Next time, Smith, he thought, or Dash’s o
ld standby, Divine. “What about it?”
Angelo smirked. “Got a laugh upstairs, kid.”
SO HE WAS GETTING LAUGHS upstairs. He whisked back to the Aspen B and B, fed the flames in the fireplace and cooled his heels. The irony—wavering, stuck between hot and cold—filled him.
He was stuck, and the inferno joke was hardly a joke at all anymore.
Watching the firelight glint off Robyn’s softly curling raven black hair now, he knew an awareness of Keller Trueblood’s feelings were slowly, inexorably coming to life inside him. He knew because he wanted to stroke her hair. He knew because his male parts throbbed, because the curve of her cheek begged his touch and because her own awareness of him heightened as surely as a doe in heat senses the stag.
Kiel cast a swathe of naiveté about her to protect her from her awareness of him. Momentarily disoriented, her brow puckered in a frown. Kiel cleared his throat. She had last spoken of Keller, so he began there. “According to Stuart, Keller knew what was up. Did he keep a journal?”
“Yes.” Robyn gave a quick shake of her head. “But he doodled so much you could hardly make sense of what he wrote down. That didn’t bother him, of course. He had a nearly photographic memory. But it drove his secretary and law clerks to distraction—when they weren’t howling over his cartoon figures.”
Kiel’s consciousness quickened. “That’s how he doodled? In cartoons?”
“Yes. Just quick sketches, but they were inspired, Kiel. He was really quite good. He paid his way through law school with freelance political cartoons. When I met him, he would sit in court and draw the little cartoon figures of the defense attorneys or the judge—even himself. What I remember best are the little beads of perspiration popping off the defense attorneys’ heads when they couldn’t get what they wanted out of a witness. Keller told me they were called plewds.”
“The sweat drops you mean?”
“Yes.” She spelled plewds for him. “He knew all the cartooning conventions, all the little squiggles and crosshatches and spirals—and what they were called. Like the little dust clouds Charles Schultz used to put all around Pigpen.” She hesitated a moment. “Do you have the foggiest idea what I’m talking about? Being an angel, I mean.”
“Sure. Charlie Brown. Beetle Bailey. Garfield.” He tossed off names of famous cartoon characters, but the truth was, between one instant and the next, Kiel knew he could pick up a pen and re-create on the spot any drawing Keller had ever made, any doodle, any cartoon figures.
He could have told her those dust clouds were called briffits in a cartoonist’s lingo. And the reason he could tell her was that everything Keller Trueblood had ever known about sketching and cartoons had just exploded into Kiel’s consciousness.
But he could never actually tell her. The list of things Kiel had to keep from her got longer. Good thing old Gepetto wasn’t his Creator.
“Remember,” Robyn was saying, “that I told Stuart I hadn’t seen the actual bronze statue that was used to kill Spyder? That Keller sketched it on a napkin for me?”
Kiel nodded, resigning himself to knowing about these things before she told him. He changed the subject. “So Keller had a near perfect memory?” He’d need to know because he would need one even more dependable—just to keep from screwing up somewhere along the way, betraying his possession of Keller Trueblood’s consciousness. “Give me an example.”
“Other than his law books? He remembered every case he ever read down to the footnotes.” She didn’t have to think hard to come up with many more. “Newspapers, magazines, cereal boxes. Keller could recite restaurant menus verbatim. It actually took a lot of effort to keep the minutiae of day-to-day living out of his head.” She smiled at the fond memories that had come to mind. “I never ever saw him look at a menu. Information overload, he called it. He would just order a steak, medium rare, and fries. And a pitcher of iced tea to himself.”
“Would he have kept a record of what he was thinking when he knew Stuart Willetts was getting into bed with the enemy?” The answers to these questions might become available to him as pieces of Keller’s memories returned. Talking with Robyn might jog them. “Any notes about what he planned to do about it or who he might have spoken to?”
“Yes.” Robyn gnawed gently at her lower lip. “He wanted everything down on paper, for the record, whether he ever had to refer to his notes again or not. I have his briefcase in the trunk of the car. He kept a DayTimer, and he usually recorded his witness interviews on audiotape. His clerk typed them into transcripts that he rarely used again because his recall was so infallible.”
“How soon did you know that about him?”
“Everyone around him knew, so it was just out there, like everyone knows the sun’s coming up in the morning. I can’t say exactly when I knew it for myself.”
She settled deeper into the sofa cushions, hugging the comforter close. “When I worked with him on the case that I wrote about in Where Angels Fear to Tread, I started out comparing what he told me with those records and transcripts as a matter of course—to double-check and confirm everything as I would in any other case.” She gave a delicate shrug. The crocheted blanket touched her chin. “I never caught him in a mistake, or even an inconsistency.”
Kiel grinned. “You tried?”
“All the time—at first because it was so obnoxious that he was never wrong.” She gave a faraway smile. “Later…after we got to know each other a little better, it turned into a harmless game we played. A way to flirt and do business at the same time.”
Kiel flashed on a string of memories, Keller’s memories, of “harmless” kisses and then less harmless ones, and then hotter, far less innocent, kisses he exacted over time as penalty from Robyn whenever his recall proved accurate.
He knew in those memories that there came a night in the spring when Keller had turned up the charm and the pressure and the heat, and Robyn had responded, challenging him on the accuracy of his recall not because she knew he was wrong, but for the opposite reason.
She knew he knew, and she knew perfectly well what would happen. Keller’s penalties were Robyn’s candy.
Kiel “remembered” how she had defied her attraction to Keller Trueblood at first. How she held up her professionalism like one of his force fields to fend off men, how she insisted she didn’t want to be involved with anyone at the time.
She was fierce at first and for days on end, then her resistance caved in to her own affinity to an intelligent, quick-witted, daring, all-out man who made her laugh.
Keller’s gradual seduction of her never felt carved in stone to her, like some routine he laid on anyone with breasts and a brain. He responded to her, not acting on whatever preconceived tactics he knew of in the battle of the sexes. He battered down her resistance by being willing to know her. To poking and prodding until he got at the truth about her. Truths that she would have had to spoon-feed to any other man she became interested in.
Finally knocking out her own defenses, she accepted his kisses, then liked them, craved them, invited them, returned them, deepened them, and came around for them again and again, until one night Keller took her on the desk in his office and they made love. Neither one of them was thinking at all or they would have thought to lower the shades and lock the doors.
No one had ever walked in on them, but Keller figured that was pure luck and poor planning. And they figured out soon that they needed a place of their own. A bed of their own…
This breech in Keller’s far more intimate memories knocked Kiel for a loop. He dammed them up, but unlike the little Dutch boy sticking his finger in a hole in the dike, Kiel wasn’t hopeful that stopping up the leak was going to be enough.
He made light of it all for Robyn, who could have no idea that her fairly tame revelation had triggered a stampede in him. “That kind of recall must be a pretty annoying habit in a husband.”
“It was.” She laughed softly. Her uncomplicated pleasure did a little, though not nearly enough, to ease his ten
sion. She stared a moment into the flames. “Anyway, we could look at his Day-Timer and his clerk’s records.”
“Did he also have copies of the trial transcripts?”
“I would think so, yes. They are probably all in a vault in the county courthouse. His Day-Timer, though, is in his briefcase.”
Kiel nodded. The book might well trigger further memories. He got up to put another pine log on the fire, then dropped back into the leather chair. The dry wood crackled and popped in the flames. The scent of burning pine got stronger. “Robyn, do you believe Stuart Willetts?”
Staring at the burst of fiery crackle rushing up the chimney, she looped a strand of her raven hair around her finger and twisted. “He desperately wanted us to believe him. A part of me is so incredibly offended by what he became—and that he would compare what Keller and I had with whatever kind of relationship he has with Trudi…but—” She broke off. “I did. I believed him.” She met Kiel’s gaze. “Do you think he was manipulating me?”
Kiel held her look. “I think he knows you’re vulnerable to that kind of emotional appeal—he’s not above using it. But I had the sense he was sincere. That he believes what he said. There’s no question, either, as to how good Trudi Candelaria was at manipulating him.”
“None,” Robyn agreed. “Although, somehow she just comes off a lot less trustworthy than he is. Maybe if I’d lived for ten years with a womanizer like Spyder Nielsen, I’d be as brittle as she is, too. My problem with believing either one of them is that Keller wouldn’t have been prosecuting her if he didn’t believe she killed Spyder. I trusted Keller’s judgment.”
“Do you know if he ever prosecuted a person who turned out to be innocent?”
Robyn nodded. “Once—that he knew of. A capital case. Murder in the first. A few years later, another man made a deathbed confession. The reason I trust his judgment so much is that he went to the mat with the system to free the man he’d convicted of the murder. Keller’s career came to a screeching halt for a while, but he did what he had to do.”