The Alpine Decoy

by Mary Daheim

  I tugged at Milo’s sleeve. “Tell me this much and I’ll go away, taking two disturbed young women with me,” I promised. “Is the dead man wearing leg shackles?”

  Milo gritted his teeth. “Yes. But they’ve been sawed through. So have the chains attached to his waist. By all means, call Vida. Call me a horse’s ass. It’s probably Wesley Charles. See that old car?” His long arm lashed out at the beater. “He stole that, maybe in Monroe, possibly Sultan. Now take your black and white broads, and get the hell out of here!”

  In spite of the proximity of a dead man, in spite of Milo’s latent racism and chauvinism, in spite of my own revulsion in the face of violence, I laughed. Milo Dodge was impossibly small-town. But somehow, I sensed that under his clumsy veneer of various prejudices, he wasn’t small-minded.

  “Milo,” I said, not entirely sure that I, too, wasn’t a trifle hysterical, “I could kiss you.”

  Milo loomed over me, his hazel eyes boring into mine. “Then why don’t you, you dink?”

  I felt myself being swept off the dirt road, pulled against Milo’s big, lanky frame, and kissed in a style I hadn’t remembered since a drunken fraternity party in 1969. I shuddered; I shook; I reeled even as he parked me back on the ground.

  “Milo!” I squeaked, staggering just a little, and putting a hand to my mouth, which felt as if it had been smacked by a wet fish.

  But Milo had already turned away and was giving orders to Bill Blatt and Dwight Gould. The ambulance men were awaiting further directions. Libby Boyd and Marilynn Lewis were standing ten yards away, as wary of each other as they were of the impulsive action between Milo and me.

  Angrily, I stalked toward them. “Get your truck, Libby,” I ordered. “Marilynn and I will walk.”

  Libby stared at me, her fair, wholesome face stunned. “You should have done that two minutes ago,” she declared.

  I gave her a fierce look. “Speak for yourself. Maybe Milo should have done that two years ago.” Taking Marilynn by the arm, I stomped out of the cul-de-sac.

  My guests sipped white wine, while I drank my standard bourbon. Yet neither of the two young women who sat at opposite ends of the sofa relaxed much. Libby seemed nervous; Marilynn appeared distressed. I had not mentioned Wesley Charles’s name out loud, and wouldn’t until after Libby was gone. Marilynn couldn’t have seen the body from where she was standing in the cul-de-sac. Indeed, I hadn’t seen it myself. It was possible, however, that she had heard me ask if the victim was wearing shackles. She might have heard of Wesley Charles’s escape on the radio. Or, I thought with a pang, she might know about it on a more personal level.

  Conversation was stilted and mundane. Not that murder is mundane, but our comments certainly were. Libby had pulled into the cul-de-sac because of a report that someone had set a snare, presumably for deer, in the woods between the cul-de-sac and the Tolberg farm. The Snoqualmie National Forest took a rectangular jog behind my property to the south and as far west as the Burl Creek Road. Libby Boyd had been checking to see if the trap was on federal land. She hadn’t found it, but on her way back to the truck, she had come across the three boys who had discovered Wesley Charles’s body.

  “They had just found him,” Libby explained. “They didn’t know what to make of it. I’m used to the city, so I thought at first it was a drunk, passed out. Then I saw the blood.”

  I kept waiting for her to mention Wesley Charles’s shackles or his prison uniform. But she didn’t. Perhaps Libby hadn’t seen the shackles; maybe she didn’t recognize convict clothes when she saw them. For all I knew, the state Department of Corrections transported prisoners in tuxedos. Real life didn’t always work like the movies or TV.

  Until now, Marilynn’s remarks had been limited to exclamations and murmurs. Suddenly, she shuddered and spoke in an uncertain, frightened voice: “Shot in the head—it sounds like a gangland execution. But that can’t be, can it?”

  The thought had never crossed my mind. I stared at Marilynn. “Do you mean gangland as in the mob, or as in a gang?”

  Marilynn’s gaze was still frightened, but now it was also wary. “The mob. I’ve read about how they kill people. I like true crime stories. They’re much better than fiction, where everything is too neat and tidy.”

  Chastened, I gave a murmur of assent. What did Marilynn know about gangs? I felt like an oaf for my insinuation.

  Libby Boyd was helping herself to more wine, pouring from the bottle I’d placed on the coffee table. “Oh, great! Now you tell me—there are gangsters in Alpine! What next, a back street I haven’t seen yet with hookers and drugs and porno stuff like they have in Hamburg?”

  The concept made me smile. I envisioned Milo and his deputies, stalking along River Road, passing not warehouses, but whorehouses; seeing not a loading dock full of lumber, but a bay window with scantily clad females; stopping not at the game warden’s office, but at a shuttered storefront where high rollers played low-down and dirty.

  “We’re too tame for any of that,” I finally said, closing the door on my fantasy. “If these two men had any connection with crime, then someone from Seattle must have followed them to Alpine.” I sounded sanguine, but somehow, the words didn’t ring true.

  Marilynn and Libby didn’t appear to notice. I offered Marilynn more wine, but she declined, instead asking to use the bathroom. As soon as she was out of the room, I expected Libby to make some comment about the fact that both victims were black—and to ask if I thought Marilynn had any connection with them.

  But Libby didn’t. She looked at her watch and announced that she had better get going. “I’m still officially on duty. I mean, it’s after six, and I was through then, but I ought to check in before I go home. I’d better run, I’m meeting someone at seven-thirty.”

  I saw Libby to the door. “Did you give the sheriff your statement?” I asked.

  Libby looked blank. “No. Should I? I mean, I told him what happened, but it was all pretty informal.” She made a rueful face.

  “Check with him tomorrow,” I said. “Milo Dodge likes to go by the book.”

  Libby leered at me. “Really? What book was he reading before he came up to the cul-de-sac? It must have been hot stuff.”

  In the wake of a second homicide in less than a week, I had been able to put Milo’s kiss out of my mind. My response to Libby’s impertinent question was a toss of my head. “An etiquette book,” I replied. “That was Milo’s macho way of apologizing for being a dumb shit.”

  To my surprise, Libby Boyd looked satisfied with the explanation. Maybe she knew a man like Milo. Most of us did.

  It seemed to me that Marilynn looked relieved to return from the bathroom and find Libby gone. I explained about Libby having to report in at the U.S. Forest Service office and that she had a date. Marilynn’s eyes narrowed.

  “A date? She hasn’t been here any longer than I have. I can’t even find an apartment, let alone a date.”

  “That makes two of us,” I retorted, “and don’t give me any dirty looks. What you saw with the sheriff wasn’t the sign of a hot romance. We’ve never shared more than a pizza until now.”

  Marilynn was not only more relaxed, but she seemed a trifle giddy. Sitting back down on the sofa, she laughed in her musical manner. “Well, you could have fooled me! If I hadn’t been so upset, I would have applauded. It was cute.”

  “Cute! I’m too old to be cute.” I grabbed my glass and realized that, except for a few shrunken ice cubes, it was empty. “I should feed us,” I announced, getting up to fetch myself a refill. “I’ve got boneless chicken breasts, rice, asparagus. It’ll take less than half an hour. Don’t argue—we haven’t had our talk yet.”

  “Then let me help,” Marilynn insisted. “I know a great recipe for asparagus with shirred egg and buttered bread crumbs. Have you got a hardboiled egg in the fridge?”

  I did, having had an urge earlier in the week for egg salad, which I’d never gotten around to fulfilling. The urge had now passed. Side by side, Marilynn and
I set to work in the kitchen. It felt good to have another female to man the stove. Vida didn’t count—her efforts were always diligent, but erratic, and sometimes downright disastrous.

  “You never said what was bothering you,” I began, unwrapping the package of chicken breasts.

  Marilynn uttered a noise that was part laugh, part groan. “It was your friend, the sheriff. He came to see me again. At least he was nice enough to use the clinic’s rear door.”

  “What this time?” I inquired, not looking at Marilynn for fear she’d see that I already knew.

  She sighed, resting her hands on the sink counter. She had been cutting the coarse ends off the asparagus and she held my sharpest kitchen knife. It occurred to me that I should be afraid. Marilynn, after all, was supposedly a suspect in a murder case. Two murder cases, for all I knew. But I felt no sense of alarm.

  “I don’t know what to say … not now.” She bowed her head. “The sheriff asked if I knew a man who escaped from prison this morning. Well, not prison, exactly—he was on his way to Monroe. I did know him, but not very well.” She sighed again. “And unless life is even weirder than it seems to be, I’d bet my last dollar he was the one who got shot over here in the cul-de-sac.” She turned to give me a resigned look, her classic features somehow askew.

  I wondered if I dared to level with Marilynn. She had sought my help; I had given her hospitality. She wasn’t quite young enough to be my daughter, but she could be a kid sister. Our personalities seemed to mesh. She was a big-city girl trying to make it in a small town. So was I. We had a great deal in common; we could be friends.

  I took a chance, knowing that in the process, I was starting down the road toward friendship—but also risking losing Marilynn at the first intersection.

  I talked as we cooked, I with my chicken breasts and rice, she with her asparagus and chopped egg. I explained about going to Seattle with Vida, about meeting Winola Prince, about reading microfiche at The Times, about Milo and his APB. And finally, about Kelvin Greene and Shane Campbell both working at Fred Meyer’s Broadway store on Capitol Hill.

  Marilynn had listened without comment, her eyes occasionally darting in my direction and giving away her distress. I reached my rationale, explaining my need to know, the public’s right to be informed, the whole fulsome excuse for being a meddlesome snoop.

  Marilynn interrupted me before I got to the part about a journalist’s search for truth. “Emma—you’re on the wrong track.” She took my hand and made me sit down in one of my mismatched kitchen chairs. I caught a glimpse of Marilynn Lewis, R.N., dealing with a recalcitrant patient. “Yes, I used to go out with Jerome Cole. Yes, he was often a jerk. Yes, I was shattered when he was killed. No, I wasn’t there when it happened. I knew Kelvin, of course, because of Winola. But I certainly didn’t know he was coming to Alpine, and I couldn’t tell you why he did. I practically fainted when I heard he was the one who was killed at the little grocery store.”

  “Actually,” I began, feeling chagrined, “he wasn’t killed there, he …”

  But Marilynn was shaking her head. “Wherever. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even surprise me. Maybe I always knew Kelvin—like Jerome—would come to a bad end. Drugs do that to people, one way or the other.” Her dark eyes turned moist. “It’s terrible, Emma. The person you know becomes somebody else—a stranger, even a monster. When Jerome wasn’t being a creep, he could be the most wonderful, charming, fascinating guy around. He was a musician—he knew all kinds of music, not just jazz, but classical, pop, the blues, even country and western. He played the saxophone like you wouldn’t believe, and he was just fine on the clarinet and trumpet, too. He had talent, that man—but he had a drug habit and he dealt. For over two years, I tried to talk him into rehab. I got nowhere. Oh, he made promises, he had plans, he sounded good. But he never carried through. When you’re doing drugs, today is yesterday, tomorrow never comes. It’s a world you and I don’t understand, thank God. I knew I was the one who had to make the changes—but I didn’t do it soon enough. He got killed before I could make the break.”

  Marilynn paused, her head in her hands. I had found my second, untouched drink, and took a deep sip. “Do you know why?”

  Marilynn’s attitude turned evasive. “Why? Who knows? A drug deal gone wrong, maybe. A misunderstanding. A fight. Jerome could turn violent. It’s hard to say.”

  I dared to ask another ugly question: “Was he violent around you?”

  The evasion intensified. “He could lose control,” she said slowly, her chin quavering just a bit. “Jerome didn’t always know what he was doing.”

  I let the answer go and decided to shift gears for the moment. “Cyndi Campbell had a beer with Kelvin that afternoon at the Icicle Creek Tavern,” I said. “Do you know why?”

  Falling back in her chair, Marilynn gaped at me. “Cyndi Campbell? Why, no! That’s ridiculous! Cyndi didn’t know Kelvin.”

  Marilynn seemed genuinely flummoxed. “But Kelvin and Shane worked together at Fred Meyer,” I pointed out.

  “I guess they did.” Her eyes grew shadowy. “I knew Shane in Seattle. That’s why I moved in with his family.” She didn’t look at me, but stared at the oilcloth table covering with its cheerful pattern of red poppies.

  In my mind’s eye, I could see myself weeding in the garden: a shoot of morning glory sprouted from the ground, then sent out new runners, creeping into the flower bed, entwining my rose bushes and day lilies and maidenhair ferns. So it seemed with Kelvin Greene—his life, which had at first seemed isolated, now reached out to touch so many others. And like the morning glory, it threatened to choke those with whom it became entangled.

  “How did you know Shane?” I asked quietly.

  Marilynn was still nervous, but her speech wasn’t self-conscious. “He was the assistant manager at Fred Meyer. I had a complaint. I’d bought a clock radio that didn’t work. He made the adjustment for me. We got to talking about appliances, and he said his dad owned a store in Alpine. I said my stepdad had one in Oakland. The next time I went into Fred Meyer, I ran into him, and he asked me about the new clock radio. It was fine, I told him. He was just going on break and asked me out to coffee. So I went.” She gave me an ingenuous smile.

  I was puzzled. “So you … sort of dated Shane?”

  “Not really. We had lunch a couple of times, and I’d run into him grocery shopping at QFC. I was going with Jerome, and Shane had a girlfriend. We were just friends. Really,” she added, her dark eyes begging me to believe her. “When I decided to break up with Jerome, I started looking for jobs out of town. The opening in Alpine came up, and by coincidence, it was about the same time Shane was moving back home. It just worked out that I was able to stay with the Campbells.”

  Coincidences happen, of course. They seem to happen more often in a small town than in the Big City. “And Kelvin? Did he and Shane know each other very well?”

  The red poppies in the tablecloth again seemed to consume Marilynn’s attention. “I doubt it. Kelvin usually worked nights in the stockroom. It was okay with Winola—she often took the night shift at the hospital.” Her gaze wandered to the stove. “Your rice—it’s boiling over.”

  So it was. I leaped up to turn the heat down. “And Wesley Charles? What about him?”

  Marilynn gave an impatient shake of her head. “Wesley lived across the hall from the apartment I shared with Winola. He was sort of strange—the kind who didn’t have many friends, but kept trying to insert himself into other people’s lives. I was nice to him, which may have been a mistake.” Marilynn made a wry face. “Isn’t it terrible how being kind can backfire?”

  I’d adjusted the burner and mopped up the rice water. “It is. You swear the next time some weirdo comes along, you’ll cut him—or her—off. But you don’t, which I suppose is a good thing.”

  Marilynn nodded, obviously relieved to be on philosophical, rather than factual ground, however briefly. “That was the trouble with Wesley—he kept trying to butt in. It bo
thered him when he’d hear Jerome ranting and carrying on. One night, Jerome went wild.” Pausing, Marilynn shifted in the chair. “Winola came home … she’d gotten off at eleven. She was afraid of Jerome when he was … like that. She made me leave. We went to … a friend’s. Nobody was home at first, but a few minutes later we got in.” Marilynn licked her lips and frowned at the bright poppies. “After about an hour, I called the apartment to see if Jerome had calmed down. Somebody I didn’t know answered. It was the police. Jerome had been killed. They arrested Wesley Charles.”

  I had returned to my place at the table. Marilynn sat with her forehead resting on her fist and her eyes closed. I thought she was going to cry, but she didn’t. “I didn’t go to the trial. I couldn’t stand it. I went through every emotion in the book in the three months between Jerome’s death and Wesley’s trial. I was angry—at Wesley, for killing Jerome, at Jerome for getting into a mess where he got himself murdered, at myself, for getting involved with Jerome in the first place. Then I began to grieve—oh, how I grieved!” She paused in mock dismay, then uttered a small, self-deprecating laugh. “I turned Jerome into a saint, I wiped out all his faults. Reality set in around Valentine’s Day. Shane invited me to a party.”

  I raised my eyebrow. “Shane? What about his girlfriend?”

  Marilynn gave a quick shake of her head. “Oh, it wasn’t a real date. Some of the people at Fred Meyer were giving the party, and Shane’s girlfriend was out of town. We had a nice time, I guess. It was my first social outing since Jerome died.”

  “Was Kelvin there?” I asked, keeping an eye on the clock. Our dinner should be almost ready.

  “Yes, he and Winola came. There were about thirty of us, I think. It was at somebody’s apartment on Capitol Hill.”

  “How,” I inquired, aware that the question was painful, “was Jerome killed?”

  Marilynn made an agitated motion with her hands, then stood up. “I really should melt the butter for the bread crumbs and egg.” She moved to the stove. I guessed she was more at ease talking while she worked. “I gather what happened was that after Winola and I left the apartment, Jerome was still smashing up things. Wesley went across the hall, and Jerome let him in. There was an argument, I think, and then they started fighting. Jerome was killed by a blow to the head. Wesley hit him with an ivory carving from Cameroon. Jerome died almost instantly. Or so I was told.” Again, she looked as if she might weep.