Tahoe Heat

by Todd Borg

  “Yeah, but Herman still lost ownership of the property that had been in his family for over one hundred years. It was very stressful for him.”

  “He’s still tuning pianos?”

  “Not his customers’. But he still tunes his own,”

  When we had walked a little farther away, Lily said, “I have a good idea!”

  “I bet you do,” I said.

  “I could ride Spot, and then he would have more fun on his walk!”

  “Why didn’t I think of that.” I put her on his back and held her hand while Spot walked along. Lily was thrilled, and she grinned continuously. A quarter-mile later, I thought maybe Spot would want a break, so I lifted her off.

  After that, Lily directed the conversation with a constant stream of questions. Which meant that we talked about dogs. Dog games and dog exercise and dog breeds and dog toys and how much dogs shed and how often you brush a dog’s teeth and what dogs eat and what dogs think about. Lily appeared to be as brilliant for her age as Ryan was for his, but after an hour of dog talk, I was ready to take a vow of silence and join a monastery.

  We were nearly back to the house when something startled Ryan. He was walking at the edge of the road, next to the tall pines when a sudden rustling sound and a movement made him react as if a bomb had gone off. He leaped away from the noise, hitting Lily and almost knocking her over. He landed in the street on the far side of me and grabbed my shoulder as if to get me between him and the devil.

  “Ryan, easy, everything’s okay.”

  Ryan stared toward the forest with the same wild, frantic eyes I’d seen in the middle of the night.

  “I thought it was...” He stopped and bent over, hands on knees, panting as if he’d just finished running a footrace. “I thought it was the wild Mustang.”

  “You only saw Heat once, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “You said it was a bad sign. Is that a Washoe thing? A vision of a Mustang?”

  “No. But Mustangs live all over the valleys east of Tahoe. I learned their ways by watching them as I grew up. So I know that Heat is not where he belongs. But I wasn’t ever taught specifically about Mustangs. In fact, I was never really taught Washoe customs in a proper sense. I’ve been around the elders, and I know that they have a long, great, oral history to share. But when my dad got the job as a principal in Reno, we moved away from Dresslerville, the Washoe community near Gardnerville.”

  “It’s unfortunate to have a negative feeling attached to a beautiful wild horse.”

  Ryan nodded as we walked. “I’ve had nightmares about Heat. I think his dislocation is symbolic of everything that’s wrong with my life.”

  “If they ever catch Heat, can I ride him?” Lily asked.

  “Maybe you can, Lily,” I said.

  When we got back from our walk, I asked Ryan if he knew how to reach Eli’s girlfriend Sydney. He gave me Eli’s number and said that he thought they were living together before Eli died.

  The phone rang five times, ten times, no machine to pick up. No harm in waiting. Could be someone was there, but was taking out the garbage.

  Someone picked up on the fourteenth ring.

  “Hello.” It was a statement, not a question. A soft, weak voice, young and female.

  “My name is Owen McKenna. May I speak to Sydney, please?”

  “This is she.” She sounded fragile and grief-stricken.

  “I’m a private investigator working for Ryan Lear. He believes that Eli’s death was not an accident. Some things have happened since Eli’s death that make me think there may be something to his idea.”

  She didn’t speak.

  “I’m sorry if this upsets you,” I said. “But I’m sure you would want to know the truth about Eli’s death, especially if there is anything to Ryan’s belief.”

  There was another silence. I waited.

  Finally she spoke. “I don’t think it was an accident, either.”

  “May I come over and talk to you?”

  The young woman was on delayed response. Perhaps the grief had slowed her brain.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Where do I go?”

  “I’m at Eli’s house. Do you know the Tahoe Keys?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s on Beach Drive. On the beach side.” She gave me the number. “What time will you come?”

  “Would an hour from now work?”

  “Yes.” Her voice was still so soft, it was hard to hear.

  I thanked her and hung up.

  I left Spot with Lily and Ryan and drove into South Lake Tahoe. In the middle of town I turned northwest on Tahoe Keys Blvd. A mile up the street I went by the Tahoe Keys sign.

  The Keys were one of those great development ideas back in the 1960s. Take hundreds of acres of “useless” wetlands, dredge out a bunch of canals, put up hundreds of upscale houses and a dock out back of each, and market them as homes on lakeshore.

  Now the Keys are considered an environmental nightmare, having eliminated the precious wetlands that used to filter runoff before it got to Tahoe’s pristine waters.

  Yet, even though the Keys get a chunk of blame for declining lake clarity, those homes have gone from merely pricey to some of the hottest real estate in Tahoe.

  Everybody wants a dock.

  I followed the road as it turned left and became Beach Drive. Eli Nathan’s house was on the right, one of the few Keys houses directly on the lake.

  As Tahoe beach houses go, Eli’s wasn’t ostentatious. But it was still 5000 or 6000 square feet. Standard nice-house architecture without any of the excessive timber frame features that make more recent lakeshore houses all look like they’re trying to imitate huge 19th century mountain lodges in the Swiss Alps or the Canadian Rockies.

  I walked up the flagstone walk and rang the bell.

  After a long wait, a petite young woman opened the door. Her sad brown eyes were rimmed with dark circles. She telegraphed a kind of permanent shock. She wore a baggy men’s sweater and baggy men’s jeans with the cuffs rolled up. She had on a baseball cap that was too big. It sat down low enough on her head that it pushed the tops of her ears out.

  “Hi, I’m Owen. You must be Sydney.”

  “Come in.”

  She turned and walked into a large, airy entry that had views through to the living room and the beach and lake and mountains beyond the wall of windows.

  As I followed her, I saw that she’d pulled her long brown hair into a thick ponytail and threaded it through the opening in the back of the oversized baseball cap. She may have lost the guy, but she was hanging onto the memory of him in every way that she could.

  She sat down on one of those over-sized leather couches that are made up of multiple sections that, assembled, created a big 90-degree curve. She pulled her legs up under her. Her hands clenched white-knuckled at the loose fabric of the bottom of the sweater.

  I sat on a big chair across from her.

  “I’m sorry for your loss, Sydney.”

  She nodded.

  “Ryan told me that Eli was an expert climber. Is that true?”

  She nodded again.

  “He also told me that while Eli took risks, he didn’t do it in a haphazard way, that he approached everything with care.”

  Another nod. “Eli was into the rush,” she said. “But it wasn’t like other people going for the thrill. I don’t know how to explain it. Like when he wanted to learn skydiving. He didn’t just call up the skydiving company and say, ‘Sign me up.’ He researched it the way he researched science and business. He read books, interviewed other skydivers, learned about the planes they use for jumping. Everything. He sort of became an expert before he even tried something. Only then did he do it.”

  “So he wasn’t an impulsive thrill-seeker.”

  “He was impulsive, but he only acted when he knew what he was doing. Climbing Cave Rock that day was an impulse. But he wouldn’t have done it if he weren’t already an expert climber.”

&nb
sp; Sydney stopped. I waited.

  “The problem I had with Eli wasn’t that he took risks,” she said. “I was okay with that in general because of how thoroughly he learned about the things he tried. My problem was that it was never enough. Instead of just climbing cliffs, he had to escalate it to taller and more vertical cliffs. Even cliffs that were overhangs. Then that wasn’t enough, and he had to give up any kind of belay, the rope protection that climbers use. He said that free climbing was the only pure climbing. I had a problem with that, climbing with no safety.”

  “That push to always want more is probably what made him so successful in business,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “But he took it to extremes. Like when skydiving wasn’t enough, and he wanted to try base-jumping.”

  “Is that where they jump off bridges and buildings?”

  “That, and worse. The really extreme version is where they jump off super tall cliffs and wear wing suits.”

  “Flying suits?”

  “Yeah. They have webs of fabric between the legs and between the arms and the body. You point your arms down so that your hands are a foot or so out from your hips.”

  “So you can fly like Batman?”

  She nodded, then shook her head at the craziness of it. “Eli did it. He went to Norway where they have a cliff thousands of feet high. Then he jumped off the cliffs at Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland. Eli showed me videos on the internet. It’s beyond nuts. They jump off cliffs, then spread their arms and legs and rocket through the air at something like a hundred fifty miles an hour. Then before they hit the ground, they open their parachutes.”

  “Do you think his risk-taking contributed to his fall at Cave Rock?”

  She shook her head. “No, in fact it was the way he took risks that makes me think something else was involved.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She thought for a moment. “He was very careful in how he prepared for it. Before he climbed Cave Rock, Eli said that the route wasn’t extreme. Coming from Eli, that tells me that relative to his ability, it was not a big deal. Of course, whenever I’d talk about some climb being dangerous, he would point out that you can kill yourself falling off a ten-foot wall. So it wasn’t like he didn’t know that he could die climbing Cave Rock. But when he said it wasn’t extreme, I don’t believe that it would have really taxed him. That’s what makes me think that something else was involved.”

  “Like what?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Did anyone else know that Eli was climbing that day?”

  “Other than the people who saw him and stopped their cars to watch? None that I know of.”

  “He didn’t tell anyone that he was going to climb?”

  She shook her head. “No. It was an impromptu thing.”

  “How did you end up stopping there?”

  “He was meeting someone.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. Someone called while we were driving. Eli talked a bit, then said that we were on the road, and maybe we should stop someplace where they could talk. They chose Cave Rock.”

  “Why Cave Rock?”

  “I’m not sure. I got the idea that the other person was new to Tahoe and maybe didn’t know places very well. Cave Rock is an easy landmark to see, and there’s a parking area. We were coming from South Lake Tahoe, so if a person were driving up from Carson City or someplace in that direction, it would make sense that Eli would say that. Hey, let’s meet at Cave Rock.”

  Sydney stopped. She frowned, no doubt thinking about what happened.

  “After he hung up, he didn’t say anything about the person who called?”

  “Nothing significant. I think it was a guy who was coming to Tahoe for vacation. In Eli’s business there was always another person he had to meet, always more details he had to discuss with someone. It got so I never really paid much attention to his dealings.

  “Anyway, when we got there, Eli looked at his watch and realized that we had twenty or thirty minutes to kill. So he started studying the rock. He saw a route over the southbound tunnel - he called it a line - and he got all excited. He always keeps his climbing shoes in the trunk. So he pulled them out, chalked up, and started climbing. I knew it was against the law to climb on Cave Rock. He knew it, too. I tried everything I could think of to stop him. But he wouldn’t listen to me. He kept going up, and I realized it was futile. I stopped shouting. I didn’t want to distract him. Then I walked down the highway a bit so I could see him, and there he was, just getting over the crest at the top. He turned and bent down, looking back at the route he just climbed. Then something happened. It was like he slipped or something. He went down on his side and slid. But as he went over the edge, he caught himself, and I thought he was okay. But then he lost his grip, and fell to the highway below.”

  Sydney shut her eyes, took a deep breath and held it.

  “Where did you meet Eli?” I asked, changing the subject to something less dark.

  “I’d been going to UC Berkeley. I sort of had an epiphany. I realized that I was majoring in physics because I was good at it, when in fact, I almost hate physics. I don’t like the idea that physics may eventually explain everything. I’m more of a romantic. I’m drawn to the concept that there are unexplainable aspects to this life. You can’t explain love with physics.

  “So I decided to take a year off. I moved in with a friend in Palo Alto, and got a job working in a café. That’s where I met Eli and Ryan and Jeanie. The Geek Troika, they called themselves. I waited on them once and I stuck my nose into their conversation. They were talking about some glitch in a scientific experiment, and I overheard them. So I said that it sounded like it was merely entropy inserting itself into the proceedings. And they got all excited and carried on about how there was another scientist in their midst, and joked that I was going to steal their trade secrets and such. After that, they requested that I be their waiter for their weekly meetings.

  “After a few weeks, Eli asked me out and we got along well as long as he didn’t talk about physics too much.”

  “Ryan told me that Eli was a physicist, too.”

  Sydney cracked a tiny smile.

  “Eli was everything. His main focus was computer science and applied electronics. But as he liked to say, everything in the universe, at its essence, still gets down to physics. So he got his Ph.D. in physics.”

  “Were you close?”

  “As close as I believe anyone could ever get with Eli. A couple of times I brought up the subject of marriage. He’d challenge me. ‘What does marriage give you?’ And no matter what I’d answer, he’d say, ‘You can have that anyway.’ Or, ‘You already have that.’ It didn’t make any difference what my answer was. Permanence? Commitment? Spiritual connection? Legal rights? Societal respect for our relationship?

  “He was right, of course. Even so, I guess it’s the romantic in me. In that way, I’m more like Ryan, carried away by unrealistic ideals. Ryan’s heart is as pure as a heart can get. But Ryan is too broken to have a serious relationship with most people. In spite of all of his success, he’s afraid of the world. I think that fear is manifested in his delusions. If he could find courage, I think his delusions would disappear.”

  “You may be right.”

  “Eli was a driven businessman scientist, and his rush through life was unrelenting and at times unbearable. But I found that ambition and drive very compelling. When Eli was on, the rest of the world was on a dimmer switch turned down low. With Eli, I felt that I was living a life ten times larger than any I would live without him.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “I have no idea. My friend Sheila is a psychologist. She says that the main thing I need to do now is nothing. No plans, no decisions, no changes. She says I should cut myself slack for about six months. It’s been ten days. I’m still in shock. Empty inside. Hollow. I still spend most of every day crying. I miss him so much.” Sydney looked out at the lake, wiped her eyes with
her sleeves.

  I told her again that I was sorry for her loss, thanked her for her time, and let myself out.

  SIXTEEN

  In the morning, I left Spot at the Lear house, headed to my office, paid some bills, and called Diamond.

  “Sergeant,” I said when he answered. “You know what coroner handled the death of Eli Nathan?”

  “Lemme check and call you back,” he said, and hung up.

  My phone rang two minutes later.

  “Captain Robyn Bridbury,” Diamond said. “She’s one of our Deputy Coroners. Robyn with a Y, not that it matters.” He gave me her office number.

  I dialed.

  “Douglas County Sheriff’s Office,” a woman said.

  “Robyn Bridbury, please.”

  “I’m sorry, Captain Bridbury is out,” the woman said, then added, “Wait, she just walked in. Please hold.”

  “Captain Bridbury,” a woman said in a cheerful feminine voice, like someone planning summer picnics, not investigating suspicious deaths.

  “My name is Owen McKenna, buddy of your illustrious Sergeant Martinez. Thanks for taking my call.”

  “I know about you. And I’ve heard distinguished and really smart and PITB used to describe Diamond. But wait ’til I lay illustrious on him.”

  “Pain In The Butt?”

  “You got it. What can I do for you?”

  “Wondering about the coroner’s report on Elijah Nathan,” I said.

  “Oh, that.” It sounded like something she wanted to forget. “Well, I’m just back from one meeting, and off to another in thirty seconds. And my afternoon is full. Let me look at my planner... Maybe we could talk day after tomorrow, early in the morning.”

  “You got a lunch date today?” I said.

  “Hey, I’m married, and he’s a big guy who carries a gun for work.”

  “Not that kinda date. Pick your spot and I’ll buy if you don’t mind talking shop over food. Maybe your info will help me catch a murderer.”

  “That’s a bit over-the-top for a guy who took a cliff dive. But you got a deal. You know the Carson Valley Inn?”