Into Thin Air

by Thomas Zigal

  “I’ve made some mistakes,” he said, closing his eyes, trying to enjoy her hands.

  “Staggs has some pretty good reasons for thinking you’re dirty. You’ve done your best to make him a happy man.”

  Lennon shifted in his sleep, clinging like a kitten to his father’s chest. “Give me till noon,” Kurt said. “I’ll have some answers we can both live with.”

  “Let me take a wild guess,” she said. “Something to do with Patricia Graham’s latest husband.”

  “You’ll be the first to know,” he said.

  She circled the couch in the dusky light. When she wasn’t in a hurry she had a nice sensuous gait about her, a ranch girl’s stride, as if at any moment she might take a quick hitch-step and leap bareback onto a horse. She hadn’t bothered to brush her hair and long chestnut bangs fell in her eyes. Some men found her plain, unappealing, but Kurt liked the way she looked. He liked the smile that made her brown eyes sparkle.

  “You know, Kurt, when you were my boss there was something that pissed me off about you,” she said, sitting beside him. “Every case we worked, you always liked to keep one little revelation to yourself. I’m wondering what it’s going to be this time.”

  Her expression was distant, veiled in shadow.

  “We tested the blood on the sweater,” she said. “There were two makes. Hers”—she paused—“and yours.”

  For several minutes they sat in silence like quarreling lovers, each one waiting for the other to give in.

  “She’s dead, Muffin,” he said finally. “She’s in the river somewhere. I didn’t do it.”

  The telephone rang and Lennon jerked in his sleep, moaning gibberish, clutching at his father.

  “Yes?” Muffin said quietly into the receiver. “Yes, this is Brown. Who is this?”

  She held the phone and regarded Kurt with the professional seriousness he’d seen her use often in the line of duty. “All the way to the switch-backs?” she asked.

  She kept watching Kurt.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s wait for light.”

  She put down the receiver and ran a hand through her hair. “They couldn’t find them,” she said, closing her eyes, tired and impatient. “They drove up and down the Pass and didn’t see a soul.”

  “That’s fucking impossible,” Kurt said.

  “Believe it,” she said. “They’re going to make one more run and then come on in.”

  Sweat rushed down Kurt’s rib cage. “Did they check the turnoff at the Divide trail?”

  “Yes, goddammit,” she snapped at him.

  She stood up and strode toward the door. “I’m going outside to spell Perkins. Get some sleep,” she said, snatching her parka from the wall peg. “We’ll talk in the morning.”

  Impossible, Kurt thought. How the hell could three people in their condition disappear up there?

  “And Kurt,” she said, turning, zipping her parka. “Call Corky. Soon.”

  He sat holding his son in the solemn darkness of the living room, the boy’s warm lumpy body comforting him like one of Meg’s handmade feather beds. In spite of the early hour chill, Lennon’s hair was wet with perspiration. Kurt carried him up to his own bed and arranged pillows around him, the only passable substitute he could think of for a mother close beside him in sleep.

  Nobody is ever going to separate me from this beautiful child again, he thought, looking down at his son.

  He trod slowly back downstairs and went to his father’s study. Concealed behind a large, slightly surreal portrait of the Muller sons, painted as a gift by Ben Shahn in the 1950s, was an old wall safe with a combination lock. Kurt ticked the numbers he knew by heart and cranked open the heavy iron door. On a mound of ledgers and yellowing, string-tied family papers lay the wallet with Jake’s money, and next to it, Graciela’s woven handbag.

  ‘You always liked to keep one little revelation to yourself.’

  He counted the money again. Five thousand dollars for a name. He removed the small spiral notebook from the handbag and thumbed to the last page.

  PANZECA?

  Chapter seventeen

  At eight o’clock, a cool, cloudless summer morning from ridge to ridge, Kurt parked his Jeep in front of the Woody Creek Tavern and went inside. The place was dark and deserted except for the figure seated at a table near the window. Miles Cunningham came here every morning to take the edge off his night with a couple of bourbons and read his mail, which arrived in hefty bundles at this small, wood-stove roadhouse north of Aspen.

  College photography students wrote to tell Miles they’d discovered his work and it had changed their lives. Museum curators wanted to arrange retrospective exhibitions. Magazines requested permission to reprint his images. Aging bureau chiefs begged him to take another assignment. The occasional psychopath asked if a certain photograph carried a secret message etched in the emulsion. Miles read every correspondence with a stoic detachment and stuffed the print-fee checks in the pockets of his cammo hunting vest. He sorted through the photos sent as homage from admirers around the world but kept only the nudes, which he stapled to his bathroom wall in a growing erotic collage. On principle he never answered a single letter.

  “Morning, Miles,” Kurt said, dragging back a chair to sit down.

  Miles rested a forearm on a pile of envelopes, sipped his bourbon, and studied Kurt’s face. “Jesus, Muller,” he said, “you look like you’ve been in a cockfight.”

  The tavern carried the morning-after smells of stale beer and fried meat and the faint suggestion of broken toilet pipes. Kurt could hear somebody rattling cases of liquor bottles in the storeroom behind the bar.

  “So the Feds are all over your ass again,” Miles said, giving the morning newspaper a little shove across the table.

  The headline read MULLER UNDER INVESTIGATION FOR MISSING ARGENTINE WOMAN.

  “Hoover’s mutant progeny. They’re sweethearts, aren’t they?” Miles said. “The swine have broken into my photo files so many times I went ahead and gave them a key.”

  This morning Miles seemed relatively composed, his speech clear and clipped with precision. Perhaps this was how he always appeared before the day wore on and he sank deeper into his vices. The tics were less pronounced now, that awful twisting of the mouth as he formulated biting phrases, the stiff, arthritic angle of his neck. Kurt didn’t know what to make of him in such a temperate state.

  “The Feds are drawing their own cartoon,” Kurt said. “It doesn’t have much bearing on reality as we know it.”

  Miles picked up a tarnished silver lighter engraved with a map of Vietnam and lit a cigarette. There were already a half-dozen butts mashed in the tray. He squinted at Kurt through a plume of smoke, studying the damage to his face. “I think this is what you want,” he said, sliding a large manila envelope to the middle of the table.

  Kurt reached out to take the envelope but Miles clamped a strong hand over his wrist. “First,” he said, “I’d like to know why I spent half the freaking night digging through my files for this. What’s going on here, little brother?”

  Kurt looked him in the eye. “Let go of my wrist,” he said.

  Miles released his grip. He tapped ash into the tray, took another drag, and sat back in his chair, watching Kurt open the envelope.

  The photograph showed a man in full military dress. Tall, regal, late middle age, his hair and neatly kept beard turning silver. Miles had cropped out the other officers standing around him, but it was clear that the man was engaged in lively conversation with several of his peers in the armed forces.

  “Colonel Octavio Panzeca,” Miles said.

  In spite of the cosmetic changes, Kurt knew who he was. The black horn-rim glasses gave him away.

  “I didn’t remember him,” Miles said. “I had to plow through a lot of stored-away shit to find something. That’s all I’ve got. He was strictly small time compared to the killer barracudas at the top. He never went to trial—at least while I was down there. He wasn’t one of the junta
leaders they ran through the belt line.” He sipped his drink. “Who is he?”

  Kurt stared at the photograph. “He lives in Starwood,” he said. “I think the Feds are holding his hand in some kind of protection program.” He glanced over at Miles. “Any idea why they’d go to so much trouble for a two-bit colonel from a Third World country?”

  Miles shrugged. “Who can figure the fucking State Department?” he said. “I called an old pal of mine in Austin who teaches Latin American studies. We hung out in Buenos Aires during the trials. He said Panzeca was the officer in charge of their weapons research. They were working on the Bomb. Maybe nasty chemicals too. Sounds like he knows some dirty little secrets.”

  Kurt slipped the photograph back into the envelope.

  “This prick have anything to do with Omar Quiroga?” Miles asked, flicking ashes in the direction of the tray.

  Kurt didn’t know how much he wanted to tell Miles. “That’s my guess,” he said. “Details to be worked out in a future trade.”

  Miles’s hand disappeared under the table. There was the sound of ripping tape, and then he withdrew a pistol. Kurt was wearing a shoulder holster underneath his parka, but there was no way he could get to it.

  Miles placed the pistol on the table between them. A Baby Browning. Tape still clung to the stock.

  “Take this,” Miles said. “If I know you, you probably aren’t packing adequate fire protection.”

  Kurt relaxed a little and smiled at his old friend. “You always read your mail with a gun taped under the table?”

  “Ever since the CIA killed Elvis,” Miles said. “A man can’t be too careful nowadays. It’s best to trust no one.”

  Kurt pushed the pistol back toward Miles, picked up the envelope, and rose from his chair.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said.

  Miles sipped the last of his bourbon. “Hey, look, Muller,” he said, “we’ve been down a lot of long dusty roads together, man. You need my help with this thing, I’ll be there. I’ve got special resources. We’ll leave carnage stacked up like cordwood through the whole farking Valley.”

  Kurt stood there observing the living legend. The bourbon was restoring his usual bravado, the ugly twist to the mouth.

  “I was talking to Jake Pfeil yesterday and he told me you were the one who called him when my brother was killed,” Kurt said. “I don’t know why I find that strange, Miles. I guess I didn’t realize you and Jake were so tight.”

  Miles regarded him without expression. The cigarette smoldered from his fingers. “I liked Bert,” he said. “He knew how to have a good time. He tried to teach me the joys of cross-country, poor dude.”

  “I guess you liked Jake a lot too. It was very considerate of you to let him know.”

  Miles leaned forward and snuffed out the cigarette, absently poking at the butts in the tray. He spoke without raising his eyes. “If there’s something bothering you, Muller,” he said, “why don’t you cut to the chase?”

  Kurt tapped the edge of the envelope on the table. “What’s bothering me, Miles, is you think I’m your little brother.”

  Miles poured bourbon into his glass and peered up at him.

  “You make a phone call to Jake anytime soon,” Kurt said, “tell him he owes me five thousand dollars.”

  As he drove back down the farm-to-market road toward Aspen, Muffin paged him on his CB.

  “We’ve been looking for you all over the county,” she said. “You need to come in. Some kids at the Free School found a body down by the river. I’m fairly sure it’s her.”

  Sweat speckled his top lip. “Twenty minutes max,” he said.

  “Kurt,” she said. “Prepare yourself for this, okay? It’s not an easy id. Some animals got at her.”

  Muffin met Kurt at the courthouse steps and walked him down to the basement morgue. “They were on a field trip,” she told him.

  The Roaring Fork River rambled like a gentle brook through grassy meadows near the Peaceful Valley Free School. With tambourines and fifes and tall sticks laced with flowing ribbons, the children had marched down to the water to look for mushrooms and wild medicinal herbs.

  “She wasn’t in one piece,” she said. “I’ve already arranged counselors for the school.”

  When they entered the morgue they found the coroner, Dr. Paul Louvier, drinking coffee by the examination table. Louvier was a short, muscular, humorless Canadian who had once been the team doctor for a pro hockey club but lost faith in steroids and moved to Aspen in the seventies to ski and treat knee injuries in a makeshift clinic near the library. In those days the county had no budget for a coroner, so he volunteered when he was needed.

  The smell of human decay was overwhelming. “You’d better put those on,” Louvier said, indicating the two masks on a tray next to various probing instruments.

  The body lay under a sheet on the examination table. Louvier raised his mask, sipped coffee, pulled it back in place.

  “Kurt, this isn’t pretty,” he said. “I’m just going to show you the upper torso and the head. Luckily, the animals didn’t chew up the face too bad. I think you can make an id.”

  The coroner lifted the sheet. A rotting odor escaped like fumes from a sealed room, and Kurt’s eyes began to tear. He stepped closer to the table, forcing himself to look They were right, he wasn’t prepared for this. Her long gray-black hair was clotted with mud and a piece of scalp had been gnawed away above one ear. But except for three deep bite marks on her face and shoulders, and a bluish swelling, her features remained remarkably intact. The icy river water had prevented too much deterioration.

  “Yes,” Kurt managed to say. “It’s her.”

  He remembered standing here with her at this same table while she examined the bullet hole in the skull of her old friend, Quiroga. Kurt began to tremble. This was harder than he had thought. He took a deep breath, trying to pull himself together, but the floor softened underneath him like undulating rubber.

  “Why don’t we talk in the office?” Muffin suggested.

  Upstairs, Kurt sat in a folding chair and drank cold water from the bottle dispenser while the coroner described his preliminary findings.

  “No apparent bullet entries,” Louvier said. “At least not anywhere I can find. But bear in mind we don’t have a complete corpse here.”

  He speculated that death had been caused by a broken neck. “But there’s no trauma associated with, say, a blunt instrument. The massive injury to the neck and the hemorrhaging lead me to believe she took a fall. Maybe onto some rocks. My guess is she was dead before the water filled her lungs.”

  Kurt remembered what Miles had said about that river in Buenos Aires. You wanted to see your friends, you just stood on the banks and waited for one of them to float by.

  Muffin paced the area near her desk. “So you’re saying you don’t see any signs of foul play,” she said.

  “No, I don’t,” Louvier said. “But I’m going to take a break and have some breakfast and then go at her again, just to make sure.”

  After the coroner left, Muffin walked over and touched Kurt’s arm. “I’m sorry, Kurt,” she said.

  He was still absorbing the shock. Several moments passed before he realized Muffin was speaking.

  “I was wrong,” she said. “I should have listened to you.”

  “Forget it,” he said. “You did your homework. You had your reasons.”

  She looked pale, uncertain. “Staggs is coming by in half an hour to discuss the case. He doesn’t know we have a body. This is going to give him a big hard-on, Kurt. Did you call Corky Marcus?”

  Kurt finished the cup of water. “Either somebody pushed her,” he said, still trying to puzzle out what had happened, “or she was running in the dark and fell into the gorge.”

  Muffin returned to the desk and sat down, dropping her head back against the leather rest. “Kurt,” she said, “I know this is tearing your heart out. But there’s a police investigation under way here, and I’m in charge of
it. You were the last guy to see her alive, by your own admission. Your blood is on her sweater. Staggs will want me to lock you up.”

  Kurt crushed the paper cup and stood. “Did you find the Mexicans?” he asked.

  Muffin shook her head. “The boys went back about five-thirty and searched the area for two hours in the daylight,” she said. “Not a trace.”

  There were too many things Kurt couldn’t explain. Too many things that didn’t make sense. He looked at the young woman sitting behind his old desk and remembered how well they had worked together, how loyal she remained through the tough times. As far away and unlikely as their night together had been, he recalled it now with a melancholy fondness.

  “If Staggs wants me, tell him to come get me himself,” he said. “I’ll be in the Jerome Bar at noon. I’ve got something to show him.”

  Chapter eighteen

  He crossed the courthouse lawn and walked toward the Blake Building, wondering if Cecilia and Jake were still together this late in the morning. A city crew rolled by in a flatbed truck, placing orange no-parking cones along Main and Galena, clearing the streets for the annual fifty-kilometer bicycle race. Spectators were already unfolding lawn chairs, claiming turf, watching bored teenage daughters flirt with the local high-school boys careening bare-chested through the crowd on skateboards. In another hour the racers would appear, sleek blurs of color following the course through town and onward, upward, to the Continental Divide.

  “Sheriff Muller!”

  He looked back over his shoulder to discover Hans Gitter hobbling after him. Kurt was surprised that the old professor was still here. Everyone else at Star Meadow had packed up and gone home.