Into Thin Air

by Thomas Zigal

  He slipped the recorder back into his blazer and leaned forward, the veins jutting in his neck. “Nobody busted for pot, and no serious traffickers of any kind. Not one. Fucking kingpins named Hay-soos flying in and out of here in their Lear jets all day long and the sheriff hasn’t noticed them, Muller. What do you think the grand jury’s going to conclude, my friend? Especially,” he said, “when I give them the details of the Erickson case.”

  Over the years Kurt had determined that the stories about drug lords and their Lear jets in Aspen had been greatly exaggerated. Tabloid fantasies, Hollywood myth. He’d come across little evidence. He also knew that if the stories were in fact true, his department had neither the technology nor the manpower to wage war against a multibillion-dollar enterprise that even Ronald Reagan was incapable of curtailing.

  “According to Agent Staggs,” Muffin said, “most of the Hispanic workers in the Valley are your foot soldiers. Yours and Jake Pfeil’s. He thinks they’re doing all your dealing and dirty laundry in exchange for green cards.”

  Kurt pressed the flesh between his eyes. “And my foot soldiers killed Omar Quiroga because he discovered our ring?”

  “So I am told,” she said.

  Kurt looked up. Staggs was still standing behind the chair. Defiant, composed, cocksure.

  “Tell me, Staggs,” he said, still unsettled by the tape. “What happened to Graciela Rojas?”

  The agent didn’t hesitate. “You killed her,” he said flatly. “You or one of your boys.”

  Kurt stood up slowly. Muffin stood at the same time and worked her body halfway between the two men, into that small, uncomfortable pocket of space that kept them apart. She looked worried, but determined to control what happened next. There were too many people here too close together, and one of them was wearing a gun.

  Kurt knew all the rational questions he could ask. Why would I have picked her up at the bar, in front of witnesses? How did I get these stitches in my head? Why did I tell my story to the authorities and then organize a search party out at the Grottos? But Staggs was a man with a vendetta, and such men had easy answers for everything. It was a waste of time to confront him with the weaknesses in his allegations. That was the job of lawyers.

  “Deputy Brown,” Kurt said, withdrawing the handkerchief from his parka, “there’s something you ought to take a look at.” He spread the cloth on a corner of his old desk and told her where he’d found the broken stem. “It’s a disgrace how sloppy the Bureau is getting these days,” he said.

  Staggs stared at the shard of glass. His mouth parted. Someone was going to lose his job for this. But the gears were already grinding—new rationalizations, another lie.

  “I suggest you have it dusted,” Kurt said to Muffin. “Good chance there’s a print. And I’d be willing to bet, oh, say, my Learjet and the Saab,” he said, “that the print you find won’t be mine. Or Jake Pfeil’s. Or from some poor Mexican busboy shot dead in his kitchen.”

  Muffin relaxed for a moment and bent over to study the stem. She gave Kurt a tenuous smile. “I’ll have it checked out right away,” she assured him.

  “I wonder,” Kurt said, “if our man here’s got a theory whose print’s going to show up on that glass.”

  Staggs had gone somewhere inside his head to readjust things. “If”—he spoke haltingly—“if what you say is true, that you got this from Quiroga’s room”—he cleared his throat, buying time, trying to reorganize his thoughts—“it belongs to the United States government. You’re tampering with evidence in a federal felony case.” His eyes left the broken glass and settled on Muffin. “You’re obligated under the law to turn it over to me immediately.”

  Muffin began to refold the corners of the handkerchief, carefully covering the stem. “What I’ve been wondering all along,” she said, “is how you found out Omar Quiroga was dead, Agent Staggs? I talked to Matt Heron and his people, and they said they didn’t even know Quiroga was missing until your men showed up to search his room. So why don’t you tell us,” she said, making a small white bundle on the desk, “in the spirit of cooperation between agencies—Who gave you the call?”

  Staggs had returned from that far-off floating place. “I strongly suggest,” he said, “that you hand that over right now, Deputy Brown.”

  Muffin walked around the desk and placed the bundle inside a drawer. “I’ll turn it over as soon as we get a workup,” she said. “I’ll be happy to share the findings with you.”

  She stepped to the office door and opened it, showing Staggs the way out. “Now if you don’t mind, sir,” she said, “I’ve scheduled an appointment with Mr. Muller for this hour. I would prefer to conduct my interrogation in private.”

  The agent waited, regarding them both with seething anger, then grabbed his blazer from the back of the folding chair. At the door he stopped and hitched his chin, that familiar gesture.

  “Your time is running out, Muller,” he said. “We’ve got a pretty package with your name on it, ace, and we’re about ready to tie the bow.” He glanced at Muffin. “You can fool this little gal here, and you can fool a lot of flakeheads in this dipshit burg, but you don’t fool me, my friend. I’ve got yards of tape on you and your sandlot pal Jake Pfeil. You’ve let things slide around here for a long time and you’ve made quite a cozy nest for yourself. But the party’s over, dude. I’m here to turn out the lights.”

  He slipped on his blue blazer. “I’ve got a file this thick on you Aspen boys. Affidavits, wire transcripts, glossy eight-by-tens, the whole enchilada. My only regret is,” he said, straightening his lapels, shaking out his cuffs, “your brother isn’t around to go down on this one too.”

  A cold chill raced through Kurt’s heart.

  “Don’t look so surprised, Muller,” Staggs said, his chin jutting. “I know all about your brother. Truth is, he may be the one I wanted the most.”

  The agent made a quick pivot and stormed through the reception area toward the courthouse corridor, his stride full of purpose and indignation.

  Kurt took a step after him but stopped, more baffled than angry. He had no idea what the man was talking about. But the chill remained in his blood.

  Chapter thirteen

  Lennon swung awkwardly and missed, and the ball disappeared into the brush at the edge of the yard. “That was a bad pitch,” he said, tilting back his head to look out from under the long bill of the Chicago Cubs baseball cap. Kurt’s father had brought this cap home for Bert when they were boys. It was still too big for Lennon, but he refused to bat without it.

  “Run get the ball,” Kurt said.

  He noticed a solitary hang-glider high in the thermals, his rainbow wings sailing above the river and the old brick hydroelectric building that now housed a handsome art museum. Some fool tourist half lost, floating aimlessly toward Red Mountain, oblivious to the cloudbursts every afternoon in the summer.

  “Over there,” Kurt pointed, directing Lennon into the cedar bushes. “More to your right.”

  Playing ball with his son out here in the yard usually cleared away all the rubbish in his head, but this afternoon he couldn’t stop thinking about what Staggs had said: ‘He may be the one I wanted the most.’

  Across the shallow valley, gray rain clouds were rolling like ground fog over the crest of Ajax, drifting toward the rusticated rooftops of town. A tiny gondola carried tourists up the long steel cable into the mist. Kurt had scattered Bert’s ashes on that mountain one rainy afternoon like this one, the clouds low and black above the peak where mourners had gathered in final meditation. His mother was there, frail and wheezing and racked with sorrow. She stayed in the Jeep while the others made their way down the steep grassy slope with the ceramic urn.

  Twenty years earlier the two brothers had drunk themselves blind the night before Bert shipped out to Nam. “Ashes in the wind,” he made Kurt promise. “I’ll probably come back in a million pieces. It won’t take much to scatter me.”

  In the end, a lifetime from the jungle, Kurt was
waiting when the helicopter touched down on the hospital roof. Even now, four summers later, he was still haunted by what he had seen when they unzipped the body bag.

  “I found it!” Lennon ran back into the yard, waving the baseball in his hand. “Come on, rag arm, fire the old peach! Fire the old pepper ball!”

  Kurt smiled. These were the same taunts Bert used to hurl at him when they were kids, playing in this same corner of the yard.

  Sometimes it helped to think that his brother had simply gone away somewhere. That they’d lost touch for a few months but would get back together at Christmas if the weather was good. There had been a petty disagreement. A misunderstanding. Brothers were like that sometimes. Bert always took his sweet time about saying what was on his mind. But they would work it out.

  Their closest years were the ones after they’d returned home from the army. They knew they had both survived some ancient, hellish rite of manhood and needed to close ranks to protect one another against the old deceptions of God and country. The world was not the same place they had left to become soldiers. While one brother slogged through the bloody rice paddies of Asia and the other monitored radio transmissions at a long gray border coiled with razor wire, their country split apart. Great men were murdered, cities burned. Their rosy childhood was gone.

  Kurt remembered how different Bert looked after Nam. His eyes mostly. Dark, hard, weary. At twenty-four he was already a troubled man. He chain-smoked now and spoke the bitter slang of a lifer. He trusted nobody, not even his brother. He tested Kurt, picked on him, brooded over imaginary offenses. It was as though their boyhood knot had come untied and Bert needed to tie it anew. He needed something certain, the familiar wordless comfort between brothers. More than anything he needed a friend who understood the trouble—the pain and loss and vicious brevity of it all.

  “Look, Daddy!” Lennon said, lowering his bat. “Wow! That guy’s coming right at us!”

  Kurt turned to see the hang-glider angling toward them, his belly skimming the green broom-tops of the cedar grove thirty yards away. He was going to crash into the thicket.

  “Come here!” Kurt said, racing toward his son. He could already picture those rainbow wings twisted in the dense brush like the shreds of a wind-tattered kite. His friend Bobby Coleman had hit the only tree in a hayfield and now lived in a wheelchair.

  “Let’s help him, Dad!” Lennon said, his eyes transfixed on the bright wings diving toward him.

  Kurt scooped up the boy and backpedaled for the house, watching the glider clear the last cedar by inches. The Cubs cap fell from Lennon’s head and he whined, but Kurt refused to stop and pick it up while that madman was plummeting into their yard.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said in amazement.

  For a moment the glider hovered above the clearing as if he could brake in midair. The wings shifted, dragging against an invisible current, defying gravity, and then the contraption floated gracefully to earth like a child’s birthday balloon with a slow deflating leak. The flyer’s legs touched ground running and he stumbled once, twice, catching himself each time. Kurt was certain the momentum would send him headlong into the parked vehicles, but the man had an athlete’s sense of balance, whoever he was, and pulled up beautifully, his heels digging into dirt.

  “Yowzer!” Lennon said, struggling to free himself from his father’s arms. “He landed just like Inspector Gadget!”

  They watched from the porch as the man in the orange Gore-Tex jumpsuit untangled himself from the flying machine. “Wait here,” Kurt said.

  “I want my cap,” Lennon said.

  “Wait right here,” Kurt said, holding him back by the wrist.

  The flyer flexed his legs and arms. He was tall, lean, smiling at them through a trim dark mustache. Kurt guessed the fool had developed trouble and was forced to bring himself down wherever he could. Dumb-shit tourist, he thought. He didn’t know there was no decent space to land over here on Red Mountain.

  “Got your message, little brother,” the man said, squatting, his knees cracking after a deep knee bend. He removed the bicycle crash helmet from his head and dropped his sun goggles into the bowl. “I just happened to be in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop in.”

  “You freaking lunatic,” Kurt said.

  Jake Pfeil looked back at the cedar grove and the path of his descent. He seemed as amazed as Kurt and Lennon. “I could use a drink,” he said.

  When Kurt came back outside with two cold beers, Jake was showing Lennon the harness of the hang-glider.

  “Nice kid,” Jake said. “Good thing for him he favors his mother.”

  “Daddy, this man said he can teach me how to fly!”

  “Go inside and play Nintendo or something,” Kurt said.

  Lennon’s bottom lip curled. “I want to learn how to fly,” he said.

  “Go on inside.”

  Lennon put his hands in the pockets of his Oshkosh jeans and sullenly refused to move.

  “Lennon, I told you to go inside,” Kurt raised his voice. “Do not argue with me. Just do it!”

  He was immediately angry with himself for using clumsy force. But he didn’t want his son listening to this conversation.

  Jake watched the boy walk toward the house, his head down, disappointed and hurt. “Can’t keep him under your wing forever, little brother,” he said.

  “Here’s your beer,” Kurt said. “We’ve got things to discuss.”

  Jake walked like a man who had just ridden a horse a great distance. He sat on the edge of the wood porch, letting his weight down gingerly, wincing. Kurt remembered Jake’s bad shoulder, the convenient old wound that excused his failure at college football.

  “I wondered when the Feds would finally get around to you,” Jake said.

  Kurt propped one foot on the porch and drank his beer. “I want to know what’s going on, Jake,” he said. He could hear the electronic blips of Nintendo coming from Lennon’s window.

  “My lawyer told me what Staggs has been saying about you and me and this army of wetbacks selling grass on school playgrounds,” Jake said, his forehead wrinkling with amusement. “You were a cop a long time, Muller. Tell me something. Where do they find guys like Staggs? I’m going to have my secretary send him my résumé. I quit dealing pot when the Mafia did away with ten-dollar lids.”

  Kurt knew that. Everybody in Aspen knew that.

  “Now he’s saying I had that scribbler whacked. The guy from fucking Tierra del Fuego you dragged out of the river. He says somebody has come forward with a make. You can see how I’m a little confused here myself, little brother. The man is adding insult to injury. First the schoolchildren, now murder one. I’m wondering if maybe there’s something here you know that I don’t. Like who’s this somebody telling stories to the Feds?”

  Kurt couldn’t be certain of Jake’s innocence in the Quiroga murder. He couldn’t be certain of anything about Jake. Not as long as there were file photos of Chad Erickson sitting upright in his car, the top of his skull split open like an overboiled egg where the projectile had exited his cranium.

  “Staggs played me a piece of the tapes, Jake,” Kurt said. “You dragged my name into your slime.”

  Jake took a drink and licked at the cottony film on his lips. “I’m at a disadvantage here, little brother,” he said. “My lawyer and I have only made it through cassette thirty-seven, the Reagan years.”

  “Listen to me, Jake.” Kurt dropped his boot from the porch, a resounding thud. “I don’t care if the grand jury drags your bloody carcass through the streets. All I want to know is why you think I’m such a good friend and standup guy I would so much as piss on you if you caught fire.”

  Jake took his time getting up. He stretched his back, flexed his legs again, then bent down to pick up Lennon’s bat. “Here I am coming down in the trees, my life flashes before my very eyes, and all I can remember is that time Bert hit one into your kitchen window,” he said, reading the bat’s label, feeling its grip. “Remember that? Our
mothers were making lunch for one of those awful family picnics and the glass flew all over the potato salad.”

  Kurt remembered that the three boys were sentenced to help the janitor mop and clean the Aspen Institute building.

  Jake took a slow practice swing. “The tapes are bullshit. Forget about them,” he said. “I’ve got lawyers that eat wiretaps for breakfast. By the time they’re finished, the grand jury will hear whatever we want them to hear.”

  “Somehow I don’t find that very comforting,” Kurt said.

  “This isn’t about tapes,” Jake said, setting his feet in a batter’s stance. “If they had good tapes they would’ve yanked me in a long time ago. This is something else. Somebody’s come forward with a make on this murder. I don’t know who it is, but he’s got the Feds wetting their happy little drawers.”

  “They want you pretty bad. I can’t say as I blame them.”

  Kurt had tried his best to put Jake away. It was impossible to imagine the man behind bars.

  “I didn’t take out that scribbler,” Jake said. “But somebody hates me bad enough to say I did. I’d like to find out why this individual’s got a problem with me.”

  He unzipped the orange jumpsuit and reached inside to rip loose a wallet Velcroed to his waistband. The wallet contained a substantial stack of hundred-dollar bills.

  “I want to talk to the guy,” he said, fanning the bills. At least five thousand dollars. “My lawyer has offered to arrange a meeting. Strictly private, no badges. We think we can work things out.”

  Kurt snorted. “Just like you worked things out with Chad Erickson?”

  “I need a name, little brother. That’s all. I’m not going to hurt anybody.”

  He tossed the wallet onto the porch next to an empty beer bottle.

  “You were a cop a long time. You learned a few chops, how to track somebody down. I want you to help me with this name. I could bring in a slick PI from L.A., but it’d take the guy a couple of weeks just to get over his asthma. I’ve got time considerations.”