Into Thin Air

by Thomas Zigal

  Kurt didn’t know whether to laugh or feel appreciated.

  “This is only an appetizer,” Jake said, nodding at the money. “A little for your trouble, a little to grease the wheels. I’ll double what you see there when you give me a name.”

  Kurt looked over at his son’s window. Lennon was standing there, his face close to the screen, watching the two men in the yard. He looked like the most forlorn little boy in all the world.

  “You’re out of a job, Muller. You could use the work,” Jake said. “I’m not going to hurt anybody. My lawyer just wants to know what the Feds think they’re doing hanging this bullshit on me. He wants to find out if Staggs has a case or he’s just passing gas.”

  Kurt stared at the wallet. With that kind of money a man could trade in his Jeep, buy an old van, pack up his son, and hit the road. Maybe take the boy to visit his mother in Oregon.

  “Look, man, I know you hate my guts,” Jake said, “but like it or not, whoever’s fucking me over is fucking you over too. I guess growing up in the same town with Jake Pfeil was a federal offense. I can’t change that. I’m just trying to find out who the players are.”

  Kurt suspected that if he found out something and gave Jake a name, whoever it was would have serious trouble starting his car.

  “It’s pretty simple, little brother. You help me, you help yourself.” He gave Kurt a rueful smile. “Like the old days, one big family picnic.”

  Kurt put his hands in his hip pockets and looked away at the mountain. “You’re forgetting something, aren’t you, Jake?”

  Jake shrugged. “Tell me.”

  “The glass in the potato salad.”

  They stared at each other. In spite of who Jake had become, in spite of who he had always been, Kurt saw in him at that moment a little piece of all that was left. They were the last surviving inheritors of a dream. Everyone else was either dead or living in Arizona.

  Kurt regarded the wallet of hundred-dollar bills. “I’ve got to know something first,” he said.

  Jake appeared unexpectedly pleased. “Name it,” he said.

  “Why were you and Bert spending so much time together those last few months?”

  Jake cracked his neck with a slight move of the head. The smile evaporated. “We played racquetball at the club a couple of times,” he said. “We did a little coke together. That what you’re after?”

  The last year of his brother’s life Kurt was so fogged by depression and lack of sleep he was only vaguely aware that something was wrong. Lately, though, looking back four years, he realized he’d been blind to many things. But who could blame him? There was a first child, a strained marriage, a murder investigation he couldn’t solve, pressure from the FBI.

  He knew now that Bert had withdrawn gradually, in small hurtful ways. He stopped calling. He stopped coming over to watch the Broncos play football on Sundays, their most sacred ritual. He made lame excuses to miss holiday get-togethers and weekend skiing and good bands in the clubs. Kurt understood, of course, that it was hard to be around him and Meg while there was a new baby in the house and so much tension. The place was a mess. Lennon cried hour after hour with colic. Kurt and Meg argued constantly about the thousand niggling obligations of baby maintenance, how to wash this, when to prepare that, whose turn it was. They were exhausted, nervous, shrill, boring. It made perfect sense, at the time, that Bert would choose to stay away.

  At the funeral, as Kurt carried the urn down the grassy slope to scatter his brother’s ashes, he struggled to remember how long it had been since he’d last seen or spoken to Bert.

  “I can’t take your money, Jake.”

  Jake glanced toward the house and saw Lennon standing at the window. “Think of it as an investment for your boy,” he said. “A college scholarship.”

  “There’s more,” Kurt said. “With you there’s always more.”

  Jake had a dreamy look in his eye, and for a moment Kurt remembered that expression on a much younger face.

  “Can you believe that two guys named Pfeil and Muller still own the high school stats in this valley?” he said, raising his face to the sky. “Most completions, most yards in the air for a single season, most passing touchdowns. It’s hard to believe, all these years.” He waited, his eyes closed to the sun. “Goes to show you what kind of sorry-ass teams they’ve fielded since the old days. Acid must’ve ruined the gene pool around here.”

  Kurt sat down on the edge of the porch and thought back to when he was a big wet-nosed sophomore at defensive end, trying with all his might, scrimmage after scrimmage in those cold autumn afternoons, to knock Jake Pfeil on his butt. Jake was still the most elusive son of a bitch in the world.

  “Maybe you didn’t know your brother as well as you wanted to,” Jake said.

  He was probably right, Kurt thought. He had known the burned-out young soldier who’d come home to the noisy confusion of a new world, but that was twenty years before. Bert was a very different man at the end.

  “He got tired of being poor,” Jake said. He opened his eyes and gave Kurt a sober look. “Every sweaty little sausage grinder in the country with a wad of money in his back pocket was buying a second home in Aspen and Bert got sick of watching them take over our town. I know you think I’ve turned out to be a bad boy, little brother, but let me tell you something. A lot of the fat cats with swimming pools up here on Red Mountain and in Starwood and the West End have buried their share of bodies back home in their quiet little suburbs. They’ve made their money over somebody’s grief.”

  Kurt wondered how many bodies Jake had buried in his time.

  “It bothered him,” Jake said. “He’d see some fucking moron with a bad toupee and gold chains, some guy who owned delis on Long Island, fly in here a couple of seasons with his squeeze secretary and then start acting like he was best friends with Jack and Warren. A few inquiries, a lot of liquid assets, the right realtor, and bingo”—he snapped his fingers—“instant property, instant status, instant Hollywood suck. It’s hard to recognize this place anymore. Remember when you could drop into the Paradise on a Tuesday fucking night and hear Cher—Cher, for Chrissake—singing her heart out to twenty locals in muddy Sorels? No more, little brother.”

  “I always hate it,” Kurt said, “when the sausage grinders chase off a class act.”

  “You asked,” Jake said, “so I’m telling. Bert hated what was happening here. He couldn’t figure out why they were rich and he wasn’t. And why they owned his town and he could barely make rent teaching their ugly kids how to ski.”

  Kurt stared down between his knees, watching a single black ant crawl across the scuffed toe of his hiking boot. “So you were going to help him out,” he said. “For old times’ sake.”

  Jake shrugged. “Bert was no different than anybody else,” he said. “He needed a little financial stability. He didn’t want to wake up one morning, twenty years from now, and have to walk down a cold linoleum corridor to piss in a toilet with a bunch of toothless old men.”

  Thunder rumbled over Ajax and Kurt could see the rain approaching. He thought about his mother living in Scottsdale among the blue-haired widows who nodded off every night after their clonidine.

  “How were you going to make him financially stable, Jake?”

  Jake held his ground. Even when wide hulky bodies were flying all around him, the pack pressing closer and closer, he always stood his ground and waited till the last second, scanning the entire field, watching the options unfold, holding out past any sensible margin of safety, before making his move. The best stats in the Valley. No one was ever going to catch him.

  “You always were the Boy Scout in the family, weren’t you, little brother?”

  There was something dark and slightly malicious in Jake’s smile.

  “Tell me about it,” Kurt said, rising to his feet. “You’ve never done anything in your life unless there was something in it for Jake Pfeil.”

  They faced each other now, only a few feet apart. Jake was not
going to flinch, not in this century. You could knock him down and he’d get up laughing. Kurt had seen it happen too many times. He’d get up laughing and the next time around he’d make you pay. The next time around he’d give you a good hard knee to the head when nobody was watching.

  “Did you offer him investment counseling, Jake?” Kurt said, nodding at the wallet. “Maybe some kind of employment opportunity? I’m curious to know how you were going to make an old ski bum like Bert a wealthy man.”

  “You’re still thinking like a fucking cop,” Jake said bitterly.

  They studied one another, the changes wrought by age, listening to other voices, laughter distant and forgotten, their own lost echoes in the yard. Slowly, unexpectedly, something softened in Jake’s face, that dreamy, faraway look again.

  “Tell you the truth, little brother, it never went very far,” he said in a quiet voice. “I had some ideas, sure. Some opportunities for him to move into. Nobody was in a rush. Then one afternoon I got a message from my answering service. Miles Cunningham called to tell me Bert had dropped off the Bells.”

  Kurt remembered what it was like when he phoned his mother. The hardest thing he’d ever done in his life. His windpipe had felt as though someone had knotted a wire around it. He kept clearing his throat, struggling to get out the message. She began to sob even before his first choking words. She knew. Mothers always knew.

  ‘Mein lieber Sohn,’ she cried over and over. ‘Mein lieber Sohn.’

  Kurt heard soft footsteps on the porch and turned. Lennon was standing there, looking down at the wallet.

  “Can I come out now, Daddy?” he asked in a tiny sad voice.

  “Sure you can, sweetheart,” Kurt said, walking over to hug him. There was a lump in his throat.

  All this talk about a dead son. “What’s that, Dad?” Lennon said, pointing to the wallet.

  “That belongs to Mr. Pfeil.”

  Lennon looked at Jake, then at the hang-glider resting near the Jeep. “Daddy, will you let Mr. Pfeil teach me how to fly?” he asked.

  Kurt ran his hand through Lennon’s silky red hair. “We’ll talk about it sometime,” he said.

  Not a chance in hell, he thought.

  “You’ve got a great kid there, little brother,” Jake said. “He’s growing like a weed. Last time I saw him he was in one of those papoose hippie things on his mother’s back.”

  Lennon shifted out of his father’s arms. “My mommy is getting well,” he said.

  Kurt and Jake exchanged glances.

  “She still in Telluride?” Jake asked.

  Kurt shook his head. “She’s moved on,” he said.

  “I always liked her,” Jake said. “She was a smart girl.”

  He ambled over and squatted to meet Lennon eye to eye. The Velcro wallet lay at the boy’s feet. “This is for you and your daddy,” he nodded, his hands on his knees. “Your daddy knows what to do.”

  Lennon looked up at Kurt with one eye squinted, as if he, too, were gazing drowsy-eyed into the sun. He smiled a sly, unsure smile at his father, an accomplice in a secret he didn’t understand.

  Jake straightened up and stretched. In spite of his fanatical daily workouts at the Nordic Club he always carried himself like a man who’d just taken a beating.

  “Think it over, little brother,” he said, rubbing the back of Lennon’s head, giving his neck an affectionate shake. “It’s only a name. Everybody will go home happy.”

  Kurt wasn’t going to lift a finger to help Jake eliminate another enemy. But he was curious now if there was someone out there linking his own name to the Quiroga murder.

  Jake picked up his crash helmet and started out across the rocky yard. “I’ll stay in touch,” he said over his shoulder:

  The rain was closer now, sweeping across the bowl of land this side of Hunter Creek. Kurt sat down on the edge of the porch and hooked an arm around Lennon’s waist.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” he called after Jake. The wallet hadn’t moved an inch.

  The old quarterback waved an arm lazily over his head like a seasoned ballplayer signaling for a fair catch. “Keep the glider,” he said, tramping off toward the dirt road that trailed into town. “I’m petrified by the damn thing.”

  Lennon dropped to one knee and jerked his arm, an imaginary gearshift. “Yesss!” he exclaimed.

  Kurt glanced at the wallet. He should have stuck it back in Jake’s jumpsuit, he thought.

  Five thousand dollars. Double that if he uncovered a name.

  He should have tossed it back.

  Chapter fourteen

  That evening he drove out Cemetery Lane past the deck-lit suburban enclave on the edge of the golf course, the strange lumpish pyramid of Red Butte jutting up in the dark just beyond the shingle roofs and two-car garages. The road dropped low to cross the bridge over the Roaring Fork, and as the Jeep climbed toward the scrubby pastures of McLain Flats, Kurt switched on the ultrasonic signal to warn any wandering deer that he was approaching at high speed. Off to the left he could see lights from the airport twinkling through the wide river gorge like distant stars visible in a black tunnel. A hundred years ago bearded men in drooping hats had blasted open that deep fault-line gorge to lay track for the old Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad, now another forgotten passage in history’s back pages.

  The unmarked turnoff to secluded Starwood looked like an ordinary country road going nowhere. The residents preferred it that way. Movie stars, rock singers, retired lobbyists, investors with a little property in Costa Rica. The elite of the elite. Aspen itself was not exclusive enough for them.

  The road curved up a boulder-pocked hillside without a single mansion in view. A security station was the first sign that visitors were entering another world.

  “How’s it going, Harley?” Kurt said to the uniformed guard who stepped out of his glass booth to greet him with clipboard in hand.

  “I recognize the Jeep.” The guard grinned at him. “But who’s that clean-cut dude sitting at the wheel?”

  “Shoot any autograph hounds lately?” Kurt said, amused by the huge ivory-stock Colt strapped to Harley’s hip in a Western holster.

  “I used to have a beard myself,” Harley said, stroking his chin. “My old lady left me ’cause I shaved it off. She said it was like living with a raw oyster.”

  His name was Harley Ferris and they played on the same softball team every summer. Harley was a big, sweet, slow-talking leftfielder with a rocket arm. Third-base runners thought they could tag up and make it home on a deep fly ball. Harley laughed like a mean little kid every time they tried.

  “What brings you up to my chateau?” Harley asked. “This police business, or you out roaming around?”

  Apparently he hadn’t heard that Kurt was a civilian now. But then Harley probably hadn’t heard that Gerald Ford was out of office.

  Kurt nodded at the clipboard in Harley’s hand. “Put down I came to shoot pool with Barry Manilow,” he said.

  Harley rolled his eyes. “I gotta put something,” he said. “Sorry, man. They run a tight ship around here.”

  “I’m going to the Rostagno party,” Kurt said.

  Harley straightened his thick shoulders and began to write on the clipboard sheet. “I’m supposed to ask for the invitation,” he said. “No matter who, I gotta ask.”

  Kurt opened the glove compartment and feigned a search through the junk. “What do you know about them?” he asked, rattling dead batteries and wire.

  “Not much,” Harley said, glancing up from his clipboard. “The girl’s home for the summer. She’s a real popular item, if you know what I mean. Takes to rich boys with funny hair and old Corvettes. When Daddy’s out of town, they start showing up with appointment slips.” He jerked his thumb at the guard station. “I’m thinking about installing one of those pick-a-number things they got at Baskin-Robbins.” He paused and grinned at Kurt. “You trying to get in her shorts too?”

  Kurt clattered screwdrivers in the glove c
ompartment. “Gee, Harley,” he said, “I can’t seem to find that damn invitation.”

  The guard leaned forward again and spoke in a quiet, conspiratorial, voice. “She’s a wild one, Kurt,” he said. “She gets a line of toot up her nose, she likes to come flying by with her top down, if you know what I mean. Always gives me a nice peek at her set. One of these days she’s going to kill somebody in that little sports car.”

  “Do you know which place is theirs?” Kurt asked. “I can’t find the invitation.”

  Harley Ferris produced a map of Starwood and circled the address. “You’re not going to get me in trouble, are you, Kurt?” he said, noticing the stitches above Kurt’s eye.

  “Relax, Harley,” Kurt said, putting the Jeep in gear. “I’ll wear a ski mask.”

  Beyond the security station the country road became an impeccably maintained street with proper curbs and gutters. Ivy and smooth green carpet grass replaced the arid hillside terrain, and the unnamed lanes of Starwood sundered off in their own secret designs. It was like Beverly Hills up here. Concealed in elaborate arboreal landscaping, the homes of the ultra rich sprawled across the mountainside, vying for the best view of the Valley, each one a fussy architect’s favorite wet dream. Kurt had been here on several occasions. Celebrity New Year’s parties, fund raisers for his campaigns. From time to time he brought minors home to their brittle parents—rich kids caught smoking dope in the park gazebo, or panhandling for money on the mall. He once drove to Carbondale to retrieve a Starwood girl who’d tried to rob a convenience store using a silver letter opener as a weapon. Fourteen years old, she couldn’t stand her latest stepfather and was running away to the Coast.

  In the dark it was impossible to find an address. He cruised down a narrow lane enclosed in dense hanging vines, the jungly foliage illumined by delicate Japanese lanterns that cast a green botanical hue over this thin ribbon of night. The only sound was the steady ticking of lawn sprinklers, their soft spray on leaves. He stopped to turn on the map light and check the directions, and realized he was lost. But he knew if he kept circling the cloistered streets he would eventually find a trail of parked automobiles. Within a half hour he came upon a platoon of young preppie valets arranging Volvos and BMWs along a wooded cul-de-sac.