Tahoe Blowup

by Todd Borg

  “Which is?”

  “I believe Mr. Jake Pooler died between eight and ten p.m. on the night of the first forest fire,” Street said.

  “The same time as the beginning of the fire?”

  “Right. I can’t say the fire killed him. But being that the times coincide, it is likely. Has Diamond gotten an autopsy report yet?”

  “Not that I know of,” I said. “But I’ll bet it shows smoke inhalation. Which would make it murder.”

  We were driving through South Lake Tahoe. Street turned up Ski Run Blvd. toward Heavenly Ski Resort. At the parking lot, she went around and on up Keller and then parked on a side street between two angular houses with beautiful views of the town and the lake beyond.

  I let Spot out. Street reached into the back of the car and pulled out a telescoping aluminum rod with a large curved plastic hook on one end.

  “Looks like a boat hook,” I said.

  “Right. It belongs to my neighbor. He’s out of town. He always says I can borrow any of his stuff.”

  I looked around at the mountain. “Not too many boats up here.”

  “Well,” Street said, demonstrating. “In this collapsed position it makes a good staff for hiking. But if you get out of line, I can telescope it all the way out and use it to reel you in.” She popped the catch, extended the pole and gently hooked the hook around my neck. Then she pulled me toward her, hand over hand, until our lips met in a moist kiss.

  “Effective,” I mumbled against her mouth.

  Street released me, collapsed the boat hook to its short dimension and pulled her backpack out of the car. “Come. Our picnic awaits.” She hiked up to where the neighborhood road dead-ended against the steep mountainside. There was a narrow trail that went into the woods. Spot ran ahead, eagerly sniffing out the recent movements of forest critters.

  I followed Street up the trail.

  She had the cuffs on her khaki shorts rolled up to mid-thigh, and above her hiking boots were red wool socks that came to mid-calf. She’d rolled up the sleeves of her red flannel shirt so that her thin forearms were revealed. Her skin glowed.

  I showed proper restraint and kept my hands to myself.

  “This picnic that waits for us,” I said. “Is it in your backpack? All I brought is the wine.”

  “The food is in my backpack,” she said. “The picnic is up on the mountain.”

  “The difference being?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. The right setting, weather, companionship, you know what I mean. This particular picnic features an amazing view. Speaking of which, you shouldn’t be walking behind me on this narrow trail. I’m blocking everything and I’ve been here before. This is my treat. You should go first.”

  “No, I’m fine,” I said. “Besides, the view from here is very nice.”

  Spot came running toward us down the trail, more pleasure in his demeanor than I had seen since his persecution over Pussy Cat. He did a quick stop in front of Street. She reached out and gave him a pet. He about-faced and trotted back up the mountain.

  The trail went around a giant boulder and the forest suddenly gave way to the steep open ski run that fronts the lower part of Heavenly.

  Called The Face, it is, in winter, 1700 vertical feet of Black Diamond skiing, one of the meanest mogul runs in the country. I remembered that its monster bumps were like a thousand buried VW Beetles.

  Coming upon it now, without snow, emphasized how steep the terrain is. “Tell me we’re not hiking up The Face,” I said, my legs protesting at the thought.

  Street turned and grinned. “What’sa matter? I thought you liked vigorous exercise.”

  “Some kinds,” I said, holding her eyes a moment.

  “Anyway,” she said, “we’re going across, not up.”

  Street cut across the slope with Spot ranging out in front of her. He looked back now and then to check that he was going in the same general direction. I followed, enjoying the view across Lake Tahoe, but mostly watching Street hiking at an angle upslope a few yards in front of me.

  She was a diminutive woman, not so much in terms of her five foot five inch height, but in her slenderness. Yet despite her small stature, there was no frailty about her. Many times people had been surprised when they asked her to join them on a ski or bike outing only to find that Street had more stamina and guts than anyone else in the group. She was like a sapling, thin and graceful, yet strong and tough.

  But feminine. Although Street thought she was too thin, I knew well her luxurious curves.

  We came to a line of trees, stepped through them and out onto another ski run. This one was called Gunbarrel and was as steep as The Face. Here, Street turned and headed straight up the mountain.

  “Hey, sweetie,” I called. “You made a wrong turn. Aren’t we supposed to go this way?” I pointed vaguely downhill.

  “Just a little farther, hon,” she said. She seemed to be angling toward one of the chairlift towers on the high-speed quad that races skiers up the mountain in winter.

  I followed, my lungs working hard. Spot looked back and saw Street’s change in direction. He loped toward her.

  Street stopped at the chairlift tower and waited for me to join her.

  “This the picnic sight?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “When I was looking up the mountain the other day, I noticed that one of the chairs on the downward cable was stopped next to one of the lift towers.” She pointed up above our heads. “Voila.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Our picnic,” she said. She reached onto one of the welded steel rungs on the tower and, holding her boat hook staff in one hand, began climbing.

  “Street, wait. Let’s be reasonable. Shouldn’t we discuss this first?”

  “What’s to discuss?” She was already ten feet up and moving fast.

  “This lift tower must be fifty or sixty feet high. That’s a dangerous height.”

  “You ride the chair all the time when you’re skiing,” she called out. “You never said anything about it being dangerous.”

  “But then I’m just sitting,” I said. “And there’s snow below when you’re skiing. Now you’re climbing and there is nothing below but boulders and dirt.”

  “I can’t hear you,” Street said. She was thirty feet above the ground. Spot looked up at her and whined.

  “I said that if you fall you won’t hit snow, you’ll hit rocks,” I yelled.

  “I won’t fall,” she yelled back. “Come on up. I don’t want to eat alone.”

  I looked at Spot. “Too late for me to be a show-off,” I said to him. “So if you don’t mind waiting down here, I’ll throw you a scrap of lunch. If I live to eat it, that is.” I rubbed his head, reached up onto the steel rungs and began climbing after Street.

  Chairlifts seem much higher when one isn’t skiing. As I rose high above the ground I felt ill at ease. Many times I’ve stood on the edge of a cliff and gazed down hundreds or even thousands of feet and felt secure. But dangling from steel is not like standing on granite. My nervous system was on alert. Spot, as if sensing my concern, whimpered from down below. But Street was above me and I needed to at least make an attempt to maintain the tough guy facade I’d been working on for so long.

  “I almost fell asleep in the hot sun,” Street said when I finally got just below her at her perch near the top of the lift tower.

  I looked down the mountain. The steep slope of the Gunbarrel ski run made it seem as if we were a thousand feet above the lake. Then again, maybe we were. I pretended it was no different than standing at the railing on my deck.

  “Spot was worried about you,” I said. “I took a moment to reassure him.”

  “Right,” Street said.

  “We’re going to eat while hanging onto these lift tower rungs?” I asked.

  “No, silly. We’re going to have a relaxing picnic on the living room couch.” She pointed to the chair that hung out in midair, next to the tower. It was on the downward cable and pointed down the moun
tain toward the lake.

  “But Street,” I said, keeping my voice calm. “The nearest edge of that chair is four feet out. You don’t want to leap that far when you’re sixty feet above the ground.”

  “Which is why I brought this.” She reached out the boat hook and snagged the side rail of the chair. By pulling on the hook, she swung the heavy four-person chair a couple of feet toward us. It hung crooked under the pull of the boat hook. Street then reached into her backpack and removed a short coil of rope. She tossed one end of the line around the rail on the chair, made a large loop through one of the steel rungs on the chairlift tower, and tied it off.

  Next, she took the boat hook and laid it horizontally from the rung on the lift tower across to the back edge of the big chair. Grabbing it and wiggling it vigorously to make sure it wouldn’t shift, she put some weight on the boat hook, reached a leg out into space and, as I watched speechless, made a little leap onto the chair. The air in my lungs suddenly seemed to lack oxygen.

  “Come on, Owen. You’ve got long legs. This will be a small step for you.”

  I shook my head in disapproval. “Heavenly is going to send up the chairlift police. We’ll be incarcerated for riding the chair without a lift ticket.”

  Street held up her backpack, trying to tempt me. “All the food is out here on this chair.”

  “But I’ve got the wine,” was my weak reply. We looked at each other. Her eyes were demonic. I climbed up another two rungs, leaned on the boat hook and stepped through space out to the chair.

  I moved awkwardly as I lowered myself into a sitting position.

  “Now,” Street said. “If you rotate the loop of rope holding the chair, you can untie the knot and the chair will swing back so it hangs straight.”

  “Sure, I knew that,” I said, still getting accustomed to the height and position. I did as she said and let the chair swing out to its natural position.

  We were now facing down the mountain toward South Lake Tahoe and the lake. Put skis and boots on my feet and snow on the ground and I would have felt normal. But without, it took some getting used to. Street pulled down the safety bar and I immediately felt much more secure.

  I reached into my pack, pulled out two of my best wine glasses, propped them between my legs and busied myself with the corkscrew.

  Street unwrapped deli sandwiches and opened a bag of potato chips. Being that the chair was designed for four skiers, we had plenty of room. Street turned sideways with one of her legs folded under her. I poured the wine and we toasted.

  “Here’s to rescuing the damsel in distress on the chairlift,” I said.

  “Oh, Owen, I’m so glad you did!” She sipped her wine, then leaned over and gave me a hug.

  At that moment Spot whined.

  We both leaned over the edge of the chair and looked. He was sitting on his haunches at the base of the tower, staring up at us.

  “Okay, Spot. Catch.” I broke off part of my sandwich and tossed it down. It separated into pieces of roll and turkey and tomato as it fell. Spot snapped at more than one and missed them all. It took him all of a second to inhale them off of the ground.

  “You didn’t think I’d forget him, did you?” Street pulled some Hostess Twinkies out of her pack.

  “Street, I’m not sure that food is approved by the American Kennel Club.”

  “Let’s let Spot be the judge of that.” She pulled off the plastic wrapper. “Hey, Spot!” She tossed one of them down to him. He caught it in the air. The sound was something like a plug of whipped grease getting sucked into a Hoover vacuum cleaner.

  “I don’t believe you did that,” I said, doing my own fast work on my sandwich and potato chips.

  “Any more news on the firestarter?” Street asked.

  “Not much in specific except that I have a lot of suspects with both motive and opportunity.”

  “What about studying the general characteristics of arsonists and applying those to your suspects?”

  “I’ve tried and it doesn’t narrow them down much.” I gave Street a brief recap of my visit with Arthur Jones Middleton the Sixth, my interrogation of the bar manager in Truckee and the other people I’d spoken to. Then I told her what I’d learned from the psychologist in San Francisco.

  “The homicidal trinity sounds bizarre!” she said. “Imagine that such a strange group of behaviors are so commonly present in serial killers. The animal torture and playing with fire make sense. But bed-wetting! It makes you wonder how the brain is set up that those patterns connect to thrill killing.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “To a psychologist, the brain must be a dark labyrinth.” I munched more of my sandwich and washed it down with wine. The chair swung slightly, reminding me that we were dangling above the world. “What about insects?” I said. “Do they ever exhibit aberrant behaviors?”

  Street sipped some wine. “Not much. For all their complexity, bugs are relatively simple. They don’t manifest psychological pathology in the way that we think of it. They are more tightly controlled, their behavior hardwired into their brains. They eat, rest, reproduce and care for their young. All other behavior is an offshoot of one of those basic Darwinian drives.”

  “Same for people, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose,” she said.

  “Are there any bad bugs? Criminal bugs?”

  “Well, bugs can get pretty nasty. For example, there is a type of scarab beetle that invades an ant colony and then absorbs the scents of the ants and their surroundings. The beetle is so good at it that the ants don’t recognize it as a predator. The beetle then roams through the colony freely eating the offspring of the ants. But I guess it wouldn’t be criminal behavior any more than that of a hunter who dons camouflage clothing and goes into the woods to shoot deer.”

  “What about within a species?” I asked.

  “Bugs will steal from or even kill their own kind, but not in the sense that we think of as criminal. Within a species, they are merely fighting over food or a potential female mate.”

  “There aren’t any true deviants? No serial killers?”

  “I don’t know if any research has been done in that direction. I suppose that now and then a bug goes astray. Possibly due to a mutation or an injury to its nervous system.”

  “What would the other members of its species do when confronted with such a bug?”

  “In most cases, nothing,” Street said. “Most insects are relatively solitary. They come together only to mate. But among the social insects, the ants, bees, wasps and termites, there could be a group response to a deviant member of their community.”

  “What would the response be?”

  “It would depend on the circumstances. But in the case of a severe transgressor, they would possibly attack and kill it.”

  “Ah, there is justice in this world,” I said.

  “Here and there,” Street said. “Speaking of which, how shall we do justice to the remainder of this wine?”

  “I think I can manage it,” I said.

  “It’s not too much wine for an early lunch?”

  “A big guy has big fuel requirements.” I upended the last of the bottle into my glass. I glanced over at the gulf between the chair and the lift tower. “Besides, this will help give me the faith to make that leap.”

  “Kierkegaard’s Leap of Faith,” Street said.

  “To Kierkegaard,” I said, holding my glass up.

  Street held hers up and we clicked.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The next morning Spot and I headed out early.

  I knew nothing about Joanie Dove except where she had lived and worked. I thought I’d start with her neighbors.

  The Tallac Properties neighborhood where the fire had raged through was a wreck, two houses burned to the ground, the forest devastated. The houses that weren’t burned were covered with ash and soot, their once-neat yards dark with debris. I left Spot snoozing in the Jeep and went to the house nearest the charred hulk of Joanie’s and rang the doorbell
. The place looked deserted. Like so many houses in Tahoe, it was probably a vacation home, empty most of the year. I rang two more times and eventually moved on to the next house.

  No one answered at the second house so I walked down to the third.

  This time a young woman answered the door. She was tall and slim and held a remarkably pudgy, wide-eyed baby in her arms. The woman turned her body back and forth, rocking the baby vigorously enough that I wondered if the child was wide-eyed because it was nauseous.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Hi, my name’s Owen McKenna. I’m looking into the fire on behalf of the fire department.” I handed her one of my McKenna Investigations cards. “May I ask you a few questions?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m sorry about your neighbor Joanie Dove. Did you know her?”

  “Not well. But she was very kind. What a horrible thing it must be to die in a fire.” The woman shook her head which made for an unusual movement on her already-twisting body. The baby glanced up at mom’s face then stared even more intently back at me. It looked about to spit up. I moved a half step back.

  “Did she ever talk to you?”

  “Just a little, here and there,” the woman said. “We’d say hello coming and going, that sort of thing. And when we moved in, Joanie came over with a fresh-baked apple pie. God, it was so good! I asked her for baking tips and Joanie said her personal secret is to always use half again as much brown sugar as any recipe calls for. Did you know that about brown sugar?”

  “Uh, no, actually,” I said. “I didn’t.”

  “Anyway, she seemed to be an awfully sweet person. Gentle and soft-spoken.”

  “What about family? Any that you know of?”

  “Just a sister. Quite a bit older than Joanie. She lives out in Kirkwood.”

  “Do you recall her name?”

  The woman shook her head again. That, with her twisting body, was making me dizzy. I could only imagine what the baby was going through. “Wait,” she suddenly said. “Mrs. Mortensen, that was it.”