Tahoe Ice Grave

by Todd Borg

  “Okay,” I said. “I won’t waste your time any longer.” I walked around to the side of my Jeep. They probably thought I was going to get in and drive away. I opened the back door instead and let Spot out.

  Both men’s eyes got squinty as I came back around with Spot.

  I looked at the bodyguards. I figured I couldn’t take the big one, so I pointed at him. “Spot. Watch him. If he moves, eat him.”

  “Yeah, right.” the big guy said. The smaller guy was in suspended animation, looking at my dog.

  Spot looked at me, questioning. I nodded. “Yes, I’m serious.”

  Spot turned and growled at the large guy. Just as I’d hoped, he did the slow-build thing where he growls low and soft, then lifts his lips exposing his fangs and ups the amplitude of his growl until it sounds somewhere between an earthquake and the Second Coming. Once the earth was shaking, Spot lowered his head, swung it a bit from side to side and advanced on the large bodyguard.

  The man took a little step back, tripped on the edge of the stone chair and fell on his ass.

  At that moment, the other bodyguard took a wild swing at my head. I ducked fast, my aching body screaming with pain from the sudden movement, then I reached and plucked out his nose ring. He stifled a scream and grabbed me around the neck.

  I gritted my teeth against my throbbing headache and chopped down on the sides of his neck. His only response was to tighten his grip on my throat. His thumbs pressed into my Adam’s apple. I hit him a quick one-two in the abdomen, but he just squeezed harder. I couldn’t breathe. He was close to crushing my trachea. Desperate, I boxed his ears hard enough to rupture his eardrums. He let go of me and screamed.

  I staggered back, rubbing my neck, trying to suck air.

  He held his hands up to his ears. His eyes were wide and he was still screaming.

  Spot was hanging his head over the prostrate form of the big guy, his growl melting the nearby snow. The big guy’s eyes were twitching, but his body was as immobile as it had been before when he was standing up.

  “Shut up,” I said to the smaller guy. My voice was a whisper. I swallowed, pain shooting through my throat. “You’ll be fine if you see a doctor.”

  He screamed louder. “You wrecked my ears! You wrecked my damn ears!” He held his palms over his ears.

  “Shut up!” I said again, louder.

  He kept screaming.

  I was tempted to punch him in the throat to quiet him down. But I didn’t want to kill him. So I did my best to take a decent breath and punched him in the gut instead. I put some effort into it, rotating my shoulders and visualizing carrying the blow all the way through his body like they teach you in karate class.

  The shock to my own body felt as if I’d ripped all my muscles and broken several bones. But it was worth it because he stopped screaming. He doubled over and collapsed.

  I caught him and pushed him back until he hit the wall that was the side of the drawbridge. I kept up the momentum and lifted him up and over into the pond below.

  There was a big splash. Yellow and orange koi fled the scene as the man coughed and gagged and flailed at the water. His fancy purple-blond hair turned into a wimpy pink mat. I returned to where my dog stood above the big guy who was still lying on the stone walkway. Spot had lowered his growl to a whisper. The man’s face glistened with a thousand tiny drops of sweat.

  “Good boy, Spot,” I wheezed.

  “Get that dog off me,” the big guy muttered.

  “Sorry,” I said. I turned to my dog and pet him. “You’re pretty good.” Spot wagged. Shook his head. Saliva flew, some of it hitting the big guy’s face. The guy reached up to wipe it off.

  “Uh unh,” I said to the guy. I’d lost my patience when the other guy worked on my throat. I turned to Spot. “Spot, if this beefcake’s Adam’s apple even jiggles, rip his throat out.” I pointed with my finger at the man’s neck.

  Spot looked at the man, lifted his lip and did a little growl.

  The man slowly lowered his hand to the pavement.

  As I walked up to the castle, I reminded myself to buy some Danishes on the way home.

  THIRTY-ONE

  The front door of the house was five feet wide and had a rounded top. In the middle of the door was one of those miniature doors so that Igor could check for Goths before he opened up the master’s castle.

  The whole door opened as I approached.

  I expected Bela Lugosi with blood on his teeth.

  I got a barefoot woman in a red leotard and black tights. She had straight black hair to go with the tights and a red ruby on her right index finger to go with the leotard.

  “Lynette McCloud?”

  “I saw that,” she said, pointing out toward the drawbridge. She turned and walked away from me, her feet silent on the stone floor. She walked around a bronze sculpture on a white marble pedestal. A nude with a good shape. I wasn’t sure, but it looked like a Picasso.

  She spoke over her shoulder. “You embarrassed Algernon’s boys. That can be dangerous.”

  I shut the door and followed her. “I wanted to talk to you. They weren’t forthcoming. What could I do?”

  “Not all my clients are so persistent.” She went down a hall that had a rounded stone ceiling. She turned into a dance studio. Hardwood floor, dance bar, mirrored wall on one side, windows with a view of Lake Tahoe on the other side.

  “I’m not a client,” I said.

  “You are...”

  “Owen McKenna. I’m investigating the murder of Thos Kahale. I want to talk to Brock Chambers about it. He seems to be missing. I was directed to you as his lawyer. I was also directed to you as an antiquities expert.”

  “What did you do to your face?”

  “It’s just makeup. I put it on to scare your boys out there.”

  No smile, not even a crinkling of the eyes.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” She gestured at the dance bar. “I was warming up when I heard the commotion outside.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  She put a bare foot up on the dance bar, slid forward into a stretch and held it.

  “Is Algernon home?”

  “No.”

  “I thought that was his limo.”

  “It is. But he prefers to come and go in his helicopter. There was a break in the weather so off he went.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was kidding or not. “Where is Brock?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who is Ole Knudson?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Morella Meyers?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you know Thos Kahale?”

  “I see no point in saying ‘I don’t know’ to all your silly questions.”

  “What is your relationship with Brock?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Why did you move from L.A. to a town so small that people gossip about your spike heels?”

  Lynette McCloud straightened and took her foot off the bar. She turned the other direction, away from me, put her other foot on the bar and slid down into another stretch.

  “Is dabbling in antiques a way to spend sugar daddy’s money or is it a serious business?”

  No response.

  “Who is going to buy the Mark Twain manuscript and how much are they paying you?”

  I saw her eyes twitch, but nothing else. If she didn’t want to answer, she wouldn’t. Very cool.

  The woman had good lines, like the sculpture out front. Picasso would have whipped out his charcoal and done a drawing. Or taken off his shirt and beat his chest. Or first done the drawing and then beat his chest.

  McCloud rose up from her stretch and went into a series of dance positions.

  I knew nothing of dance, but I recognized one of the positions from the title of a sculpture by Degas. “Fourth position front,” I said. “On the left leg. Very good, but really, aren’t your hands a little tense?”

  That got her attention. She snapped her
head toward me, glared for a fraction of a second, then regained her composure and went back to ignoring me.

  “If you don’t answer my questions, I could use one of your lawyer tricks, get the papers and the authorization, make you talk.” Even as I said it, I thought it wasn’t true.

  Without releasing her arabesque, Lynette rotated her head and looked at me the way an eagle looks at a baby bunny rabbit.

  “Mr. McKenna, you have no idea how far in over your head you are. I have let you into this house because you amuse me. If I want, I can put you away for a long time. Assault and battery. Assault with a deadly weapon. Trespass.”

  She rose out of her stretch, turned sideways to the mirrors and did some more moves, one arm up, one arm on the bar. Her feet and knees were turned out as she lowered down and then rose up. She was graceful and had obviously spent many hours dancing.

  “I’ve heard that you are a lousy shot with a rifle,” I said.

  She stopped her movements and looked at me. “That’s a lie. I could shoot your left nut off from a hundred yards.”

  “How ‘bout the valve off a scuba tank?”

  “That too.” She turned and went back to her bar exercises. “We are through talking. If you have any survival instinct at all, you will not tangle with me. Others have tried and regretted it. Good day.”

  I understood that meant I was to leave.

  Spot was lying down in the snow next to the bodyguard. He wasn’t growling or even paying that much attention. He didn’t seem that tough. I held my hand up and looked at it. Maybe my fist was the deadly weapon she referred to.

  The man lying next to Spot followed me with his eyes. The man with the nose ring was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he was sleeping with the koi.

  “Let’s go, Spot.”

  He stood and trotted over to the Jeep. “You done good,” I said.

  As I drove off, I saw the big man rise to a sitting position and stay there.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The next morning, I thought I’d visit Thos’s other grandfather. I got Janeen Kahale on the phone.

  “I’d like to visit your father,” I said when she answered. “I don’t know his name.”

  “He goes by his Christian name of Francis Plummer.”

  “Can you give me his address?”

  “Certainly.” She rattled it off.

  “Do you think he will be home?”

  “Yes, if you’re going now. He always stays in during the noon hour. In the summer he naps during the heat of the day. In the winter he watches TV. I’ll call him and tell him to expect you.”

  Spot and I drove over Kingsbury Grade, crested Daggett Pass, then plunged down toward the southern end of the Carson Valley three thousand feet below. Just like the previous day, halfway down to the valley we drove out of the snow and clouds and into sunshine. The weather system dumping snow at Lake Tahoe was stuck in place as if the clouds had gotten snagged on the mountains.

  At the base of Kingsbury Grade I drove east on a blacktop road, then found the turn-off that Janeen had described. I followed a narrow gravel road to the south for a mile. It zig-zagged left then right, then left once again. Janeen had said the next turn was nearly hidden in a stand of cottonwoods. When I saw the trees I slowed to a crawl, watching for an opening. I still missed it and had to back up. I found a space between two trees, barely large enough to drive through. The passage was more like a horse trail than a driveway. It was clear the branches would scrape the Jeep so I told Spot to pull his head in and hit the button to roll the window up.

  The scraping was loud and harsh and I was grateful my Jeep was not a new model. The drive was straight, but bumped and jolted us for a quarter mile before we pulled up in front of a sea-foam green camper. The little camper box was the type designed for the bed of a pickup. But there was no pickup or any other vehicle in sight. The camper sat directly on the dirt. The high portion that normally projected over a pickup’s cab was propped up with two wooden fence posts.

  I left Spot in the Jeep with two of the windows rolled down. It may have been winter in Tahoe, but the Carson Valley is 1600 feet below the surface of the lake and much warmer than Tahoe.

  Mr. Plummer sat outside in a folding lawn chair. He wore a leather motorcycle jacket and faded jeans. On his feet were big athletic shoes. One hand held up a small book, angled to catch the sunlight. He appeared to continue reading as I pulled up, then lowered the book only after I’d gotten out and walked up toward him. The words on the cover said Emily Dickinson.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Plummer, my name is...”

  “McKenna,” he finished for me. He didn’t move and didn’t reach out his hand.

  “Janeen said she’d call you.” I glanced at the little camper and saw no phone wires, nor electrical wires for that matter.

  “Yes, she called me,” he said in a voice that had strong tones of Native American speech. His face was more weathered than the desert mountains, his dark skin creased into a complex network of deep folds and wrinkles.

  At that moment, a phone rang. Francis Plummer reached into a pocket of his leather jacket, pulled out a tiny cell phone and answered it.

  “Hello.” Francis shifted and the little volume of Emily Dickinson poetry slipped off his lap to the ground. “Yes, he’s here. No, I’m just watching TV. Yes, it’s fine. Say hi to Phillip. Bye.” He put the phone back in his pocket, reached down and picked up the poetry book.

  “I hope you don’t mind my visiting.”

  Mr. Plummer looked at me, his face blank. He had no reaction to my bandages or bruises. “My daughter said it was important.”

  “First, let me say how sorry I am about your grandson’s death.”

  Francis gave a solemn nod. “Janeen told me Thos isn’t the only one to die.”

  “No.”

  “I feel sorry for Jasper,” Francis said. “He was a good son-in-law to me. I still think Janeen made a mistake leaving him.”

  “You probably know that she hired me to investigate Thos’s death. I’d like to ask you a few questions if I may.”

  He nodded. “That your dog?” he said, looking over at Spot whose head was out the window.

  “Yes. His name is Spot.”

  Spot perked up his ears and looked very interested. Probably wondering if Francis Plummer had a microwave.

  “Did Thos contact you in the last couple of months?”

  Francis didn’t answer immediately. I had no doubt that he could remember. He was just making up his mind about whether to tell me. “Yes,” he said finally. “A couple of days before he died.”

  “Was it a routine, get-in-touch-with-your-grandfather kind of contact? Or something else?”

  Francis thought a bit. “Something else.”

  “Would you tell me about it? It may have bearing on my investigation.”

  Francis nodded again. “Yes, it may.”

  “Oh? I wish Janeen had told me.”

  “She didn’t know.”

  I looked at him.

  He could tell he was frustrating me. “Janeen didn’t know because she didn’t ask. My father taught me years ago not to poke my nose into other people’s business. He said that giving information where none is requested is vanity. But if you say the information is helpful, then I give it to you.”

  I didn’t dwell on the old man’s reasoning. “Why did Thos contact you?”

  “He wanted to know about sacred Washoe land.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him that all land is sacred. Then he asked me if there were certain places that were special. More sacred than others. Especially up in Tahoe. I told him about Cave Rock and all the other lands that have been sacred for the Washoe people.”

  I immediately thought of the cave in Cave Rock and wondered if Thos had moved a Twain manuscript from the sacred cave of his father’s family to the sacred cave of his mother’s.

  Francis shifted, lifting one of his legs up, athletic shoe on the chair, his fingers laced around his knee.
He was old, but he was agile. “My grandson said he didn’t want to know what was sacred for the Washoe. Just for our family. Like a private church. So I explained that there was no earth that was a church just for us, that our family worshipped the same land and the gifts of nature as all the Washoe worship.”

  “Did that seem to answer his question?”

  “You mean, did it satisfy my grandson?” Francis shook his head. “No. He wouldn’t let the idea alone. Finally, he said forget about what was sacred.”

  “And...” I prompted.

  “And tell him if there were any places in Tahoe that were special to our immediate family. Not sacred, just special.”

  “Were there?”

  “Yes. I told him the stories my grandfather used to tell me about fishing. Every spring they would make the journey from this valley up to Lake Tahoe where they would set up camp. They would spend the summer hunting and fishing. Mostly fishing. Rainbow and cutthroat trout and kokanee salmon. They had feasts at the lake, big fires and dances all summer long.” Francis looked with wistful eyes up at the mountains to the west. I followed his gaze. Monument Peak with Heavenly’s ski runs and Job’s Peak. Just on the other side lay Lake Tahoe.

  “I also told him a story my father told me. About an ice grave,” Francis said.

  “Is this a real place?”

  “I don’t think so.” Francis pushed his lips out and gave his head a little shake. “It always sounded like the other stories. Like the Indian boy who was being chased by the devil. The boy carried a branch from an aspen tree. As each leaf fell off it turned into a lake that the devil had to detour around. That’s how all the lakes around Tahoe were formed.”

  Francis looked at me with dark, impassive eyes. “Just like your culture, Washoe culture has many creation stories.”

  “What is the story of the ice grave?”

  Francis looked up at the mountains of Tahoe. Without turning toward me he spoke as if the mountains were listening. “It’s part of a fountain-of-youth story. There is supposed to be a cave in one of the Tahoe mountains. It is very hard to find. Some say that if you go into it and drink its waters you will experience a renewal.”