Twenty of us in here easily, but we hardly filled the space. Charles ordered a crate of champagne and food deliveries from several restaurants. We all mucked in, setting a table with caviar, French cheese, Mexican dips, hot plates, paté, and the like. After a couple of minutes I found Charles, gulping from a flute of champagne.
“Wonderful house,” I said, “just the place for a future congressman.”
“What?” he asked, grinning merrily.
“You’re moving into politics, I hear,” I said.
“Alex, walls have ears, I see. Don’t breathe a word of that. Please. But yes, it’s an exciting time, a very exciting time. You know, Robert thinks they’re going to ask me to give a speech at the GOP leadership seminar in Aspen on the sixteenth. I don’t know how I’ll manage it. Can you imagine, six months ago no one had heard of CAW. We couldn’t buy publicity and now, well, I hate to bring it into the realm of the personal, but things are looking up for me. I should have listened to Amber a long time ago.”
Charles was getting a little excited. I got him another champagne.
“So Amber wanted you to go into politics?” I asked, handing him the glass.
“She’s very clever, Amber, did I tell you how we met? Completely by accident, although I’d sort of known her before. Teacher-student relationships, frowned upon, you know. Anyway, yes, what a time. The first thing was to move CAW from Boulder to Denver. It seems like years rather than weeks ago. Couple of setbacks. We had those two terrible tragic incidents. Good God.”
His tongue was really loosening, but before he could tell me any more Amber appeared, took Charles by the arm, and tried to lead him over to the window.
“Sorry, Alex, she said, there’s something we have to take care of.”
“No, don’t go,” I said, “I never get to talk to the big boss anymore, this is my big chance to weave my way into his consciousness.”
“Yeah, what’s so important, darling?” Charles said.
“Well, I think we—someone knocked over a glass of champagne, you know what that will do to the carpet,” Amber said.
“Oh my God, Amber, leave it, this is a party, Rosita will do it tomorrow. Not tonight, we’re celebrating,” Charles said.
“Do come on, Charles,” Amber insisted.
They both disappeared and, try as I might, I couldn’t get into conversation with either of them the rest of the night. The best I could do was Robert, who was not drinking and indeed looked quite somber. He was talking to Abe about politics. I joined the conversation.
“Mind if I butt in? I find the American political system fascinating,” I said.
Robert looked me up and down as if deciding whether I was worth speaking to.
“And, Alexander, are you from the North of Ireland or the S-South?” Robert asked.
“The North,” I said.
“And that’s part of the UK,” Abe said.
“Yup.”
“So you vote for the London p-parliament,” Robert said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Interesting. Alex, we were just talking about the elections, here, n-next year,” Robert said.
“They vote for the president and the House and the Senate,” I said.
“No, not the Senate, Alex, only a third of the S-Senate,” Robert said.
“But it will be the big year,” Abe said, “a presidential election year. The GOP candidates are already battling it out. Dole will win, of course.”
“I know, how could you miss it, it’s in all the papers,” I said.
“You’d be surprised how many people don’t read the p-papers. Or they read exclusively about O. J. Simpson. Only about fifty percent of people eligible to vote actually vote in this country, I think in Ireland it’s around seventy to eighty percent.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Dole will lose,” Abe said, “and Charles will help pull the party back to the center, we’ll all do well out of this.”
Robert looked at Abe as if he were saying too much.
“Oh, I’ve told Alex about August sixth, we can trust him,” Abe said.
“Good heavens, how many other people have you t-told?”
“Just Alex.”
Robert turned to me.
“Alex, p-please don’t say anything to anyone. Abe should never have told you. We d-don’t know for certain that Wegener is going to announce his r-retirement, it wouldn’t do to j-jump the gun.”
“He’s retiring, Charles’ll have the drop on everyone, the state chair wants him, the GOP needs him. Nobody should forget that this is the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, not just Reagan and Bush,” Abe said.
“I’d rather you didn’t t-talk about this,” Robert said.
Abe looked a little put out.
“Ok,” he said glumly.
“You too, Alex,” Robert insisted.
“Won’t breathe a syllable,” I said.
“Robert, can I have a word?” someone asked.
Robert excused himself and headed across the room. Abe was embarrassed and made an excuse to leave me too.
As illuminating as the conversations with Charles and Robert had been, the real shock story of the night, the real revelation, the real scoop, was to come as the party was winding down and I was on a trip to the bathroom. Never has a bog run been so profitable in my life.
Some people, it is said, keep their Academy Award in the toilet, others provide reading material in a little magazine rack next to the throne, still others attempt to affect a comedic air by plastering the toilet walls with cartoons or purchasing kitschy or otherwise risible bathroom equipment. It is more of a British thing than an American thing. Brits take equal parts delight and shame at the contemplation of bodily functions. But some Americans feel the urge to introduce levity into their bathroom arrangements. Perhaps those who have gone to prestigious Anglophile universities.
The Mulhollands had thought it a good idea to place, on their bathroom wall, framed photographs of themselves in younger days. Preferably those from the awkward teenage years. There was Charles, face covered with acne, standing beside a snowman, whose face he had also unself-consciously covered with pebble acne. There was Amber dressed in a barrister’s wig and gown, playing a male part in the operetta Trial by Jury. There was a grinning Charles dressed in shorts and a striped jersey standing next to a dozen other boys, in front of a massed bundle of equipment, with the legend “Governor Bright Academy Lacrosse Team, 1973.”
Under the photograph in tiny print, each boy’s full name was spelled out. Charles William Mulholland, George Rupert Dunleavy, Steven Philip Smith, Alan James Houghton…
It took me a second to recall where I’d heard the name Alan Houghton before and then it did come back. Oh yes, I remember. The missing blackmailer.
Hubris, putting a photograph like this on public display?
Not necessarily. Probably no one ever took time to read the names. But even so, I wouldn’t have done it. Perhaps Charles wasn’t as clever as I thought.
I washed my hands and face, grinned, decided it was time to go.
Robert saw me to the front door and with forced, deliberate calm, I said:
“Wonderful party, mate.”
* * *
The next morning, I skipped the Areea-John lovefest breakfast and Pat’s martinis and after a nice hit of Afghani black tar heroin I walked to the Denver Public Library and did a search on Alan Houghton. Nothing. Next I tried the Governor Bright Academy lacrosse team. A lot of stories, but the big one, the one that interested me, happened back in 1973 when Charles would have been sixteen.
The Denver Post gave me the gist, but the Post itself had only two short articles and after a couple more questions, it didn’t take long before I was looking at the more extensive coverage in microfilmed copies of the Denver Dispatch, a now defunct newspaper that had covered the foothill communities to the west of the city.
The Post index had told me that an incident involving members of the lacrosse team had ha
ppened in May 1973.
Governor Bright Academy dated back to 1890, an all-boys boarding school in the southwest of Denver that, although not in the same league as Andover or Exeter, was far and away the best school in the state and indeed attracted pupils from all over the country. Bright took the boys at age eleven and kept them until they were seventeen. Academics were important, but Bright also encouraged each pupil to take part in a team sport. American football, soccer, baseball, ice hockey, basketball, lacrosse, and even cricket and rugby were offered. Those pupils who couldn’t make a team took up fencing or cross-country running or some other similar endeavor. Winter Fridays were devoted to skiing. Although Bright was a boarding school, its regime seemed to be popular with its pupils and almost half went on to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Academic excellence was important, but sporting achievement was rewarded with scholarships and other perks.
The lacrosse team was one of the most prestigious in the school. Lacrosse is a game unknown in Ireland, so I did some side research to find out what it was. Le jeu de la crosse. A French-named Indian game, popular among private schools. Played by the elite, mainly in the Atlantic states and Colorado.
The incident had happened on May 1, 1973, but had gone unreported by the Post and Denver Dispatch until two days later.
Maggie Prestwick was the daughter of the stable manager. Bright had its own riding school, with a half dozen show horses and another half dozen ponies for trail hiking. Tommy Prestwick, a single father, had a grown-up daughter at college and Maggie, who lived with him in the house over the converted stable block. Tommy had a lot of responsibilities and Maggie, he told reporters, was an independent girl who he thought could look after herself. He hadn’t noticed she was missing until the morning of May 2. He called the principal, who called the police. Bright, I suspected, had good relations with the Denver police department and they could be expected to be discreet.
Of course, the outcome of the police search was not good. My heart sank as I read the microfilm.
Along with a grainy picture of a derelict building, the May 3 issue of the Denver Dispatch had, as its front page lead, this:
Margaret Prestwick, the 15-year-old daughter of Tommy Prestwick, the stable manager at Governor Bright Academy, was found dead yesterday evening at the site of Rookery House, a former hotel, a mile from the Bright campus. Police are not releasing details of the incident and a spokesman for the Denver Police Department, Officer Anthony Sutcliffe, said that it was “too early to determine the cause of death or whether Margaret Prestwick had been sexually assaulted.” However, a spokesman for the Denver Coroner’s Office said late last night that Margaret Prestwick had been the victim of foul play….
In the next few days, the Denver Dispatch discovered further details of the incident. Margaret Prestwick had not been raped, but she had been sexually assaulted and then strangled. There were no scenes of struggle outside the property and the speculation was that Margaret had known her assailant and had arranged a liaison with him at Rookery House, a hotel that had suffered extensive fire damage years before and had lain empty since. In the weeks that followed, the Dispatch’s sense of frustration grew as little progress seemed to be made with the crime. The police interviewed many people, but no one was charged and there were no arrests. It must have been an important story within the community, for even two months later, the Dispatch’s crime reporter, Danny Lapaglia, was still writing about the unsolved murder.
This Fourth of July, the campus of Governor Bright Academy is quiet. School has been out for two weeks and the new term does not begin until after the long summer vacation. When school does begin, the new students at Bright will doubtless have heard of the ghastly events of the first week of May, when the daughter of the school’s former stable manager was brutally strangled a mere mile from where this reporter sits. As the weeks have gone by and the Denver police have seemingly run into a wall, it is no wonder that Tommy Prestwick, the murder victim’s distraught father, has resigned, leaving Bright Academy to be close to his only surviving daughter in New Orleans….
The story disappeared until November of that year, when Danny Lapaglia came out with a scoop. By this time, though, his article was only the lead on page five.
This reporter has learned that the Denver Police Department interviewed all the members of the Governor Bright lacrosse team in connection with the murder of Margaret Prestwick in May of this year….
The article went on to explain that a tiny piece of a lacrosse team tie had been found in Maggie’s teeth. Great significance had been attached to this. Every boy at Bright wore the same school uniform, black blazer, black trousers, white shirt. However, any boy who was a member of a team was permitted to wear his team tie rather than the school tie. If, indeed, the murderer was a member of the lacrosse team, that could leave only thirteen suspects. In Bright there were three soccer teams and two basketball teams, but only one lacrosse team, with ten players and three reserves. Only thirteen pupils in the whole school were permitted to wear the lacrosse team tie. All thirteen had been thoroughly interviewed but none had admitted to any knowledge of the murder. The police had not ruled out the possibility that a pupil who was not on the lacrosse team had used a team tie as the murder weapon.
But the police didn’t have the information that I had. That twenty years later Alan Houghton from that lacrosse team had been blackmailing Charles Mulholland from the same team. Maybe the blackmail was about something else, but maybe it was not. It certainly was worth looking into further.
I didn’t know how I felt. Ecstatic that I might have a lead, but it was a lead that would mean Charles, Amber’s husband, had killed more than once. Was Amber in any danger? In any case, I had to find out more.
I tried to speak to Danny Lapaglia, but his widow explained that he had died of cancer in 1983. Probably be a waste of time after twenty-two years but, anyway, I called in sick at CAW and took a trip out to the school.
It didn’t board anymore and half the pupils now were girls. Quite far out, too, the taxi ride cost twenty dollars. A beautiful campus: ivy-clad buildings, a swimming pool, a sculpture park. Only a short drive along Hampden Avenue to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
I told the headmaster’s assistant I was thinking of sending my adopted son there and he showed me around, but he’d been there for only two years and couldn’t be pumped for information. He let me walk the grounds. They didn’t own horses anymore and the stable block was now a garage for school buses. I walked in the hundred-degree heat across a dried stream and a brown field to where the old Rookery House hotel had been. Signs everywhere pointing out the danger of wildfires.
The old hotel was gone and a housing development had obliterated any hope of finding clues or insights into Maggie’s murder.
It was only during the walk back across the dusty field under the unforgiving Colorado sun that I saw why the boys had met Maggie at the Rookery House. The Bright campus was on a hill that commanded the surrounding area. Two boys in Bright uniforms could be spotted from miles away coming over these fields. Except for this one field that led to the Rookery. For this field lay behind a small mesa that sloped down and away from the Bright campus. On the downslope side the little dry stream to the Rookery and the Rookery itself were completely cut off from Bright. Once you got over the brow of the mesa, you disappeared from view. Nice spot for a rendezvous.
Was it possible she had agreed to meet both of them? It seemed unlikely.
In the photograph, Charles was handsome, tall, poised, Alan stubby, askew, asymmetrical, and unattractive. If I had to take a stab at it, I’d say that Alan had tagged along unannounced. What had happened next was anyone’s guess. Impossible to say then, impossible to say now….
I went to the school office and asked if I could browse through the alumni magazines to see how Bright pupils did in life. They were happy to let me have the last twenty years or so of the annual. It was even indexed. Alan Houghton appeared three times. In 1984 he was living on the
rue Saint-Vincent, trying to be—guess what?—a painter. In 1989 he was in his hometown of New York “working in the theater.” In 1992 he had moved to Denver, where he had bought a studio to “continue his experiments in the arts.” A grainy photograph from the 1980s showed a haggard young man, with a fixed grin and something that might be a brown toupee on his head.
He had moved to Denver, perhaps to be near his good friend Charles. Perhaps to start hitting him up for money. Who knew? But that might be it.
The bell went for the end of school.
“What time is that?” I asked one of the secretaries.
“Three-fifteen,” she said.
Three-fifteen. If I hurried, I could still get into the office.
I would. I wanted to see Amber, too. I wanted to untangle those thoughts of her that were crowding my mind.
I called for a taxi and made it there by just after four.
Abe was about to give me a lecture about lateness, but Amber intercepted me. Black jodhpurs, black cashmere sweater, boots. Hair tied back. Maybe not the most comfortable of sartorial choices, but it looked bloody great. She looked like a high-class dominatrix. As cute as a box of knives.
“Alexander, I’d like to speak with you,” she said.
“Ok,” I said, and I found myself wondering why my perception of her personality was so influenced by her taste in clothes.
She walked me over to the sofa that had just been set up in the reception area of the CAW offices.
“I’d like to ask you a favor,” she said.
“Oh, yeah?” I said, as those lovely turquoise eyes blinked in fast succession.
“Charles is being asked to speak at a Republican Leadership Conference in Aspen,” she said.
Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) Page 23