Into Thin Air

by Thomas Zigal

  Miles nodded, drinking. “Didn’t realize you could read, Muller. His book somewhere.” He pointed, sloshing liquid onto his wrist. “Met him in Buenos Aires during the junta trial. Good man, Quiroga.”

  “Somebody disagrees,” Kurt said. “He was murdered. His body was dumped in the Roaring Fork.”

  Miles looked stunned.

  “He was out at Star Meadow for one of their Save-the-Planet do’s,” Kurt said. “The Feds have jumped on the case, but I don’t trust the fuckers.”

  “The swine shall inherit the earth,” Miles said. “I keep trying to tell you that, Muller. I wish you’d listen to your elders.”

  “I take it Quiroga liked to speak his mind.”

  “You got that right. He did some serious payback on the pock-faced degenerates who tortured and killed his countrymen for sport. There was even a TV documentary, if my memory serves. He didn’t appreciate that they hooked his balls to a truck battery and lit him up like a Christmas tree. It’s all in his book,” he said, pointing somewhere, sloshing more whiskey on his worn checkered polyester pants.

  Kurt studied the titles in one teetering column of books and gave up. “I need a crash course in Argentine politics, Miles,” he said.

  Miles spread his arms in exasperation. “How come a guy with a sixth-grade command of current events keeps getting elected to public office, Muller?”

  “Ruthless party machine,” Kurt said.

  Ten years ago, angered by the rampant greed of real-estate developers and back-room chicanery in city government, a cabal of aging hippies and several flannel-capped old-timers whose lineage traced back to the mining era formed an opposition party. Miles ran for mayor, a stunt that brought national attention to the race. The election came down to the wire, but the Rabid Skunk party failed to pull off their upset. They lost every seat challenge except one: Kurt Muller became county sheriff by sixty-three votes. And for some unaccountable reason, possibly out of reverence for the Muller name, Kurt had held on to the post in two succeeding elections.

  “So you want to know about Argentine politics.” Miles made a croaking noise through his nose that sounded something like a scoff. He reached over and scooped more ice into his drink “Well, my friend, there was a coup in seventy-six, as I recall. Isabel Perón wasn’t killing enough subversives to satisfy the military’s bloodlust, so they threw her out and took over the job themselves. What I read, about thirty thousand Argentine citizens ate it in the next three or four years.” He shook his head sadly. “In those days, you wanted to see your friends, you didn’t go to a café. You just stood on the banks of the Rio de la Plata and waited for somebody you knew to float by.”

  Kurt thought about what the river had done to Omar Quiroga. He walked over and lifted the Wild Turkey from the sofa and drank straight from the bottle. The stuff burned like lye.

  Miles raised a bushy eyebrow. “Jesus, I hate an undisciplined drinker,” he said.

  “I watch the news, Miles,” Kurt said. “There have been elections in Argentina for a while now. How did that happen?”

  Miles scratched at a large brown mole growing on his pasty forehead. “The Falklands,” he said. “The colonels had worked themselves into a blood frenzy, feeding on unarmed philosophy majors and menopausal nuns, and thought they were ready to devour the Iron Maiden and her starch-and-brass navy. Unfortunate miscalculation. The cowards had never attacked somebody who could shoot back. When the smoke cleared, they’d blown their wad. Lots of obedient schoolboy recruits were hammered into dog meat, lots of tax money sank to the bottom of the sea. So much for lifting the national spirit,” he said. “So much for the glories of yesteryear.”

  Kurt stepped over to the fireplace. Half-burnt rubbish smoldered in the brazier, where Miles had tried to kindle a fire. An awful acrid odor of egg-shells, melon rinds, melted Styrofoam. It appeared as if the man had become distracted after the third match and wandered off.

  “So the military appointed a commission to find out what went wrong,” Miles concluded, “and the commission sent a handful of the more vicious piranhas to jail for their incompetence. The trial broke the scaly back of the junta.”

  Kurt spotted an old flintlock musket propped against the wall next to an ax and a shedding hearth broom.

  “Doesn’t make sense, the military punishing its own,” he said.

  Miles shrugged, placed his hands on his knees, and heaved. With considerable effort he managed to hoist himself to his feet. “Grievous sin, vanity, hubris. Confession. The willing acceptance of punishment.” He mumbled this litany, shuffling toward a pyre of books. “Sounds perfectly Catholic to me.”

  Kurt shouldered the smooth stock of the musket and sighted down the long, awkward barrel. The powder well smelled freshly capped.

  “Here,” Miles said, standing behind him with a hardcover book marked PITKIN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY.

  Kurt opened the cover and noticed the date stamp. Two years overdue.

  “Omar Quiroga’s account of the whole bloody debacle,” Miles said. “He was a decent man. You might learn something about politics, Muller. Or human nature. Read it and weep.”

  Kurt headed off down a narrow passageway between mounds of brittle paper, trying to reconstruct how he’d gotten here.

  “Thanks, Miles. After so much homey hospitality I hate to run.”

  He found the front porch and stuck his head out the door to look for the dogs. “Do us both a favor,” he said. “Stop calling me in the middle of the night or I’m going to bill you for therapy.”

  He dashed to the Jeep. Miles stood behind the screen door and whistled for the Dobermans. “Yo, North! Yo, Secord!” he hollered. “Attack this toad, ye hounds of hell!”

  By the time the Jeep reached the Jack in the Box head, the dogs were ripping at Kurt’s back tires.

  Chapter four

  Kurt lived in the house he had grown up in, a small hay barn the Bauhaus designer Herbert Bayer had converted into an Austrian chalet in the late forties for his good friends Otto and Hanne Muller. Settled on a stony plateau halfway up Red Mountain, the house held a spectacular view of Ajax and the tidy, red-brick town of Aspen.

  When Kurt arrived home he went looking for Lennon in his bedroom and found a chaos of plastic creatures and decaled armored vehicles spread across the floor. This was the same simple room Kurt and his brother had slept in till they left for college. On the bunk-bed headboards, nearly forty years old now, Roy Rogers twirled a rope from a rearing Trigger.

  “Somebody’s going to clean up his room tonight,” Kurt said.

  “Hands up, you’re under arrest!” a male voice commanded from the closet door. “Hands up, you’re under arrest!”

  Lennon stepped out and squeezed the trigger of his toy pistol and the recorded message repeated a third time. “Did I scare you, Dad?” he laughed.

  “Absolutely,” Kurt said, bending over to kiss him. Lennon’s soft red hair smelled of sweat and summer dust and that unmistakable scent that was Lennon and no other child. Blindfolded, Kurt could find this boy, the meadowy smell of his hair, in a roomful of sleeping children.

  “Did you lock anybody in jail today?” Lennon asked.

  “No, buddy, not today,” he said. He thought about the little boy who had discovered the body hurtling down the river. “But the day isn’t over yet.”

  In the living room Muffin reclined in a window seat, scuffed Adidas kicked off onto the floor, an outdoorsman magazine resting in her lap. She had changed into khaki shorts and her tan, muscular hiker’s legs were stretched out on the cushion. Her chestnut Dutch-boy hair was growing long and the bangs nearly covered her eyebrows. She was gazing through the open chalet window toward the deep blue twilight drifting over town.

  “Thanks for getting Lennon,” Kurt said.

  “No problem.”

  “Muffie bought me a frozen yogurt on the way home,” Lennon said, bounding over to hop in her lap.

  “Lots of calls,” she said, raking her fingers through the boy’s hair. “
The mayor wanted to know the grisly details. Nolan Riggs came by.” The head of the Tourist Bureau. “Libbie put him off. And that kid from the Daily News was snooping around. I told him to wait for a statement from you.”

  “How about Wing Taylor?”

  “He said the Feds flew in about one o’clock.”

  “Outstanding reaction time,” Kurt said, hanging his cap on a peg with the jackets. “A full hour before you found the body.”

  “Did you talk to Mart Heron about it? He probably panicked and called them in.”

  “Why would he call the Feds? Why wouldn’t he call his local sheriff to report a missing person? Like Dr. Rojas did.”

  Muffin smiled, a small tug at the corners of her mouth. “You can’t exactly blame him if he doesn’t appreciate the local sheriff,” she said.

  During the custody hearing Kurt’s lawyer had grilled the actor for an hour, trying unsuccessfully to establish that he was Meg Muller’s cultic lover. In the end the judge lost patience, dismissed the case, granted custody of Lennon to his mother. A month later she took the child and moved to Telluride.

  “Libbie called to say that the Feds finally showed up at the courthouse,” Muffin said. “They snapped a few Polaroids of the body. In and out in ten minutes.”

  “The bastards are just going through the paces,” Kurt said.

  Herbert Bayer’s kitchen was a large friendly space enclosed on one side by an oakwood bar. Kurt went to the old Frigidaire to get a beer. “Boy, I’d like to wipe the smug smile off that guy Staggs’s face,” he said.

  He watched Muffin snort into his son’s neck, the boy wincing and giggling, fighting to wriggle free. She was a scrupulous young deputy, fiercely loyal, hardworking, her instincts uncanny. She’d grown up with five brothers and could do most things better than Kurt. Ride a horse, ski the frozen passes, rappel down sheer granite, fly-fish the Frying pan, handle a gun.

  “When are we getting back with Dr. Rojas?” she asked.

  “Soon as the Feds are done,” Kurt said, holding an icy Budweiser can against his forehead.

  Muffin shook her head. “Maybe we should send a patrol car after her,” she said.

  They had slept together once, two years ago, the night of his last election. There was a victory celebration at the Jerome Bar and everyone drank too much. Muffin stayed till the thunderous breakup, sometime around three a.m., and then shyly asked him over. She lived alone in a trailer park then, at the foot of Smuggler Mountain. He was stumbling drunk and didn’t know what to expect when he knocked on her door. It had never crossed his mind that she might be attracted to him. He’d been divorced for over a year but had no time for romance, not with his job, a tough reelection campaign, a little son newly deposited on his doorstep.

  Somehow they ended up wrestling in their underwear on Muffin’s cramped hideaway bed. She took great delight in trapping him in the high-school wrestling holds she’d learned from her brothers. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on her hard, athletic body. He lifted weights with her at the Nordic Club and knew how strong she was, especially for a small woman, a hundred pounds lighter than Kurt but aggressive and agile, relentless.

  ‘Is this why you asked me over?’ he huffed, slipping through a half-Nelson and flinging her onto her back. He liked her heat, the glaze of sweat on her bare skin. ‘To check out my moves on the mat?’

  Dehydrated from too much liquor, he collapsed onto the rumpled quilt next to her, their breathing deep and labored in the frosty darkness of the trailer. When he was almost asleep she rolled over and rested her chin on his chest.

  ‘Tell you the truth,’ she said, ‘I’m still trying to make up my mind about men.’

  Kurt groaned, feeling nauseated from so much jostling around. Feeling, suddenly, the weight of three million years of male virility hanging between his legs. ‘Do us both a favor, Muff, and pick on somebody else. I’ve got so much heavy baggage I need a trailer hitch.’

  ‘Everybody has baggage, Kurt.’

  ‘You don’t understand. I’ve got a receding gumline, a hiatal hernia, and a messy past with the Columbia Record Club. I just bought my first reading glasses. My hair is falling out.’

  She raised herself up with a curious squint. ‘Where?’ she said, brushing her fingers through the thick brown hair Libbie cut every couple of months. ‘You’re not going bald, Kurt. Where?’

  ‘That little round circle. You know, the hurricane swirl. I’m losing shoreline there.’

  She brought her face close to his and kissed him softly on the mouth. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘You’ve got your little secrets, I’ve got mine.’

  ‘I don’t know about this, Muffin,’ he said, his eyes closed, fighting sleep. ‘We work together. I hired you.’

  She kissed him again. ‘So why aren’t you getting up to leave?’

  Afterward, lying together under the quilt in the pale moonlight, she asked if it had felt the same as it did with other women. He laughed and pulled her onto his chest in an affectionate cradling hug, trying not to give away his apprehensions. Instead of the tough young cop who pumped iron with the jocks at the club she suddenly seemed to him an innocent and vulnerable ranch girl from Wyoming, skittish as a kid sister, and he knew then he had made another foolish mistake.

  ‘I don’t want you to think I didn’t like it,’ she said in a small unsure voice. ‘But you were probably right. This was not a good idea.’

  “Do you suppose they were lovers?” Muffin asked from the window seat.

  “What?” Kurt said.

  She was still gazing out the chalet window into the deepening twilight.

  “Do you think Dr. Rojas and the writer were lovers?”

  Kurt took his beer and went to sit on the floor beside Lennon. “No,” he said. “No, I do not.”

  Chapter five

  That evening Kurt left his sleeping son with the baby-sitter and drove into town to see Zack Crawford, a bartender who worked the late shift at Andre’s. A landowner in Woody Creek was seeking a restraining order against Zack for skinny-dipping in the man’s pond every morning in full view of teenage daughters. Though he’d warned Zack several times about trespassing, the bartender would not stay away.

  “You off duty?” Zack said, holding up a tequila bottle with a silver spout.

  “I’m never off duty,” Kurt said. “But go ahead. This is a friendly visit.”

  Andre’s was the toniest nightclub in Aspen. During the Christmas holidays, at the height of ski season, Hollywood celebrities packed the glass disco floor every night till the wee hours, rubbing shoulders in a glamorous scrum. Kurt had once lost his date in the fog of dry ice and discovered her an hour later snorting coke in a men’s room stall with some hack actor from a canceled sitcom. Now he avoided the club during the season, especially at closing time. He happily let the city cops manage the arrogant drunks who insisted on driving their rented Porsches out in the snow. Last New Year’s Eve a rising starlet from Melrose Place was hospitalized when she threw a tantrum over a dui and swallowed her boyfriend’s ignition key.

  “Come hell or high taxes, I’ve been swimming in that pond every summer since 1972,” Zack complained to Kurt, who was sitting on a leather stool at the bar. Though it was June and business was at half tilt, disco music boomed from overhead speakers; colored lights flashed across the mirrored walls surrounding the dance floor.

  “That fucker blew in from Texas six months ago and bought up the land. Who died and made him God? I ought to take his ass to court over homestead rights.”

  Zack was dressed in a starched white shirt with a black bow tie, his long graying hair gelled back behind his ears. His cheekbones had begun to protrude with age, and after so many years in this dry air there was now a papery texture to his tan.

  “I can’t do anything about the property laws, Zack,” Kurt said, downing the shot of tequila. “Unless somebody changes them real quick, you’d better find another place to swim.”

  Zack exhaled a whistling breath and shook his head. A weari
ness dulled his eyes. “Hey, Kurt, remember me?” he said. “We used to smoke dope together and ski bare-assed down Ajax in the middle of the night. I was there at Crater Lake when you met Meg. I don’t recall you talking property rights back in seventy-six when me and you and Bert cut down all those billboards on the highway.” He wiped the sheeny black surface of the bar. “Tell me something, man. If Bert was still alive, would you bust him for taking a quick dip every morning in his birthday suit? ’Cause your brother was the one who showed me the pond. We used to swim there after we came home from Nam.”

  Kurt rested his elbows on the bar and stared down at his reflection in dark glass. A carnival face peered back at him, a warp of distortion, the image pushed out of shape and mired in wavy tar.

  “What am I supposed to do, Zack?” he said. “You wanted me to be sheriff, just like everybody else. So what the hell am I supposed to do?”

  Zack poured him another shot of tequila. “Go pop the people that are hurting somebody,” he shrugged, “and leave the rest of us poor bastards to our pathetic little pleasures.”

  Zack noticed a couple at the far end of the bar and left to greet them, clasping hands with the man in a cordial power shake. Kurt turned to see who it was.

  Jake Pfeil had arrived for the evening with a beautiful young woman on his arm. He gave Kurt a nod of recognition, their least unpleasant exchange in several years.

  Their fathers had created this resort, put it on the map. Kurt and Jake had grown up together. But there was too much history between them now and they made no effort to hide their animosity, especially since the Erickson investigation. Jake and Chad Erickson had shared real estate interests in Acapulco and Hawaii, and Kurt brought Jake in for interrogation. During their meetings Jake was hostile and elusive, antagonistic. He kept calling Kurt ‘little brother.’

  Tonight Jake was wearing an eggshell-white linen suit with a wildly floral tie. His salted hair was razor-cut to neat perfection, a style better suited to a younger man. He was a good twenty years older than his date.