by Mary Daheim
“Mayor Baugh wants to open it,” I said in a casual voice.
“Jeez! That’s great, we’ll end up with fifty men trying to rescue some poor little kid who wandered in by mistake.” Dodge’s annoyance was turning into anger. “Why can’t people leave well enough alone?” His tone changed quickly. “Have you heard from Chris again?”
“No. Are you looking for him?” I didn’t sound quite so casual this time.
Dodge sighed. “I was hoping we wouldn’t have to. By the way, did you know the story made the five o’clock news on the Everett radio stations?”
I gave a little gasp. Apparently, the Seattle media hadn’t had the time—or the inclination—to pick up on the item yet. “No. Well, it’s out in the open anyway.”
“Simon’s pitching a fit,” Dodge said, not without a hint of pleasure. “Hey, you want to go get some dinner? How about that French place down the highway?”
In the past few months, Milo Dodge and I had shared a half-dozen meals, usually accidental luncheon encounters. This was the first time he’d issued a formal invitation. Rankled by my son’s gibes, I accepted. Besides, what better way to ferret out more information than over boeuf Bourguignon and a glass of Beaujolais?
I was changing into a white crepe blouse and a black pleated skirt when Vida called.
“Can you swing a crowbar?” she demanded.
I allowed that I thought I could.
“So can anybody who’s not feeble,” she retorted. “So where does that leave us? Did you hear about the Everett stations?” She was gleeful. “Let that moron Simon put that up his nose. As for Fuzzy, it’ll make his hair fall off.”
While trying to button my blouse and juggle the receiver, I told Vida about Phoebe’s letter to Chris. She was flabbergasted.
“Well, if that doesn’t beat all!” A teakettle whistled in the background and Vida’s canary, Cupcake, competed with the sound. “Why would she do such a thing?”
“Sucking up, my son would say,” I suggested, marveling that he hadn’t. “How does Phoebe get along with the rest of the Doukases?”
“Like cat and dog,” said Vida. “Except for Cece. Cece Doukas gets along with everybody, which is a sure sign that there’s something wrong with her. Simon’s never approved of his father carrying on with Phoebe, but he doesn’t dare speak up, the little weasel, and Kent’s been downright insulting. Jennifer sticks up her nose, and Mark—well, Mark considered Phoebe a world-class leech. Which she is, but I hate to admit to agreeing with Mark, even if he is dead.”
I slipped into my sling-back black pumps. “You don’t suppose Phoebe is angling to marry Neeny, do you?”
Vida scoffed. “After all these years? You know the old saying about the cow and the free milk—Phoebe’s been a regular dairy farm for Neeny Doukas.” She huffed a bit, then suddenly changed her tune. “Emma, people are very strange. Do you suppose that’s why Phoebe dragged Neeny to Las Vegas?”
I’d forgotten about the trip the previous month. “Gee, it could be. At least it’s something we could check out. Or Milo could. I’m going to dinner with him. I’ll mention it.”
“You’re what?” Vida’s voice exploded into my ear.
I cringed. I hadn’t wanted to confess my date with the sheriff, but I knew that by tomorrow morning, it would be all over town. “We’re going to discuss the case.” It wasn’t a lie: Given the circumstances, of course we’d talk about Mark’s murder.
Vida huffed and puffed some more. “Ooooh—just be careful, Emma.”
“Hey, I’m safe. I’ll be with a law enforcement person.”
Vida’s tone turned dour. “Don’t let him finagle any more out of you than you get from him. In any way,” she added darkly.
“Don’t worry, I’m a big girl,” I insisted. But I sounded more confident than I felt. I had the feeling that Vida knew it.
The Café de Flore was run by a Frenchman who had married a Californian. Together, they had fled north with dreams of opening a restaurant that featured prime examples of cuisine from Paris, Brittany, and Normandy, with a dash of Beverly Hills.
The decor was as simple as it was predictable: one wall covered with wine racks, gleaming copper pots suspended from the ceiling, and bunches of dried wildflowers. The tables and chairs were an odd-lot collection that looked as if the owners had bought up kitchen donations to St. Vincent de Paul. But the food was excellent, and though the menu was small, the wine list was long. I chose the beef I’d envisioned, while Milo let me recommend the pork chops baked with apples. We didn’t mention Mark until our entrées arrived.
“How did the radio people in Everett get the story?” I inquired after he’d raised the subject by remarking that murder investigations were exhausting.
“The usual way,” he answered. Milo’s shambling frame was decked out in what I guessed he considered semiformal attire—a brown corduroy sports coat, tan shirt, dark brown slacks. No tie. “They check our blotter over the phone every morning,” Milo explained. “Then we got a couple of calls, so one of the deputies doled out the bare facts. We didn’t know about the crowbar for sure at that time.” He gave me a wry grin. “You’ll be glad to hear they didn’t mention Mark finding gold.”
I was relieved. It’s embarrassing to find yourself a laughingstock among your peer group. “Are you still after Chris?” I asked bluntly.
Milo, who was trying to figure out the identity of his vegetable, gave a shrug. “We certainly need to question him, yes. I’m putting out an APB tomorrow if he hasn’t shown up by tonight. I would have done it earlier, but Eeeny talked me out of it.”
Inwardly, I thanked the former sheriff. “He doesn’t think Chris is … involved?”
“He doesn’t think we have any evidence.” Milo surrendered and ate the unknown vegetable. My guess was that it was turnip; I had tiny brussels sprouts. “I think Eeeny’s overly cautious.”
Judging from that remark, I gathered that Milo Dodge did indeed have some sort of evidence. My appetite flagged. I approached the matter obliquely. “Have you figured out where Chris went last night?”
Milo nodded once. “Oh, yeah. We know quite a bit about that.” He pushed aside the single candle that flickered between us. “Don’t you?” His gaze was very level.
“I sure don’t.” I bristled a bit. “He was like a clam when he got back to my house. Where was he?”
Chewing on his pork chop, Milo shot me a disapproving glance. “I can’t tell you that, Emma. Hell,” he chuckled, “you won’t even tell me what I’m eating. What’s a pomme?”
“It’s a walrus tusk,” I snapped. “Okay, then I won’t tell you about Phoebe Pratt eloping with Neeny Doukas.”
Milo’s sandy brows arched. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Never mind.” I would have hummed a bit if we hadn’t been sitting down to dinner. My mother had never allowed singing at the table. “If you don’t believe me, check it out. Clark County, Nevada. August of this year.”
To my satisfaction, Milo was hooked. “We will. Hell, Emma, this is a community property state. Neeny must have rewritten his will. If he hasn’t, everything will go to Phoebe should she outlive him.”
“Simon would make sure it didn’t,” I pointed out. “Assuming he knows they got married.”
Milo waved to a couple coming across the room. I didn’t know them. In fact, I only recognized four of our fellow diners, both younger couples who lived on the fringes of Alpine. The rest of the two dozen customers had probably come up from Monroe, or even Seattle and Everett. The Café de Flore’s reputation was growing beyond the boundary of Skykomish County.
“Whether or not Phoebe and Neeny eloped doesn’t help us with Mark’s murder,” Milo noted. “It’d be more likely that somebody would have knocked off Phoebe. Or even Neeny.”
I sipped my Beaujolais and tried to figure out the flaw in Milo’s argument. I couldn’t find one. I sighed. “What about Heather Bardeen?”
“Heather?” Milo looked puzzled. “She’d already broken up
with Mark. Why would she want to bash his head in?”
“Maybe he done her wrong,” I said lightly.
“I’m sure he did. More than once. But so what? When did you last meet a twenty-year-old girl who went gaga over her lost honor?”
Milo had a point. Even if Heather was pregnant, she wasn’t likely to rush off to Icicle Creek and bust Mark’s head with a crowbar. I savored my last mouthful of beef and wondered if the bikers had really returned.
Milo’s plate was clean as a whistle, turnips and all. He took out a small spiral note pad with a ballpoint pen. “By the way, I’ll need a description of Chris for that APB.”
I grimaced, feeling like a traitor. But dissembling wouldn’t serve any purpose. The Doukases, Harvey Ad-cock, and a dozen other people could provide the information Milo needed.
“Twenty years old, five-eleven, about a hundred and fifty pounds, straight black hair worn just a little too long, black eyes, straight nose, slight dimple in chin, no distinguishing marks.” I hesitated, giving Milo time to finish writing. He was quick and looked up with approval. I went on: “Faded blue jeans, maybe Levi’s, faded denim jacket, maybe ditto, Hard Rock Cafe—Honolulu T-shirt, Dodgers baseball cap, Reebok tennis shoes in white with black and green stripes. No, hold it.”
Milo looked up again, pen poised over the pad. “What?”
“He’d changed his T-shirt.” I shut my eyes, trying to picture Chris as I’d seen him last. “It was something about Hawaii—a cocktail, with SUCK ’EM UP! on it, I think. And … let me see … I can’t … Oh!” I put a hand to my mouth. “He wasn’t wearing that denim jacket. He’d loaned it to Mark. Chris had on Mark’s leather bomber jacket.”
Frowning, Milo flipped back through the pages of his note pad. “You’re right. Mark had on a denim jacket, J. C. Penney issue.” He regarded me very seriously. “Tell me more about the baseball cap.”
“More? What can I say? That it was autographed by Tommy Lasorda?” I gave Milo a perplexed look. He didn’t so much as flicker an eyelid. Then I saw Chris in my mind’s eye again, standing in front of the Monet. “Chris wasn’t wearing the cap when he came home. Is that what you mean?”
Milo nodded once and tapped the note pad with his pen. “Mark wore the cap. They found it next to his body. It’s got his blood and his hair on it.”
“Of course,” I said slowly. “It was raining. Mark borrowed both the cap and the denim jacket. Chris’s hair was wet when he came home. I remember that now.” Struck by a sudden thought, I leaned eagerly across the table. “Now reconsider your suspicions regarding Chris—if he’d killed Mark, wouldn’t he have taken back his own jacket?”
Milo looked at me as if I’d been sniffing Elmer’s Glue. “I’ve never said Chris murdered Mark,” he replied carefully. “What are you implying? First they swap clothes, then they try to kill each other? My sisters used to do that, but fortunately, nobody ever ended up dead.”
The waitress came for our dessert order, but for once I abstained and ordered a King Alfonse. Milo settled for the café’s version of burnt cream and a snifter of brandy.
There was something else about Chris and Mark and their jackets that bothered me, but my brain was numbed by the excellent meal. The fragmentary idea slipped away, and I changed the subject from violence to domesticity. “Where are your kids?” I asked Milo when the waitress had left.
“The youngest—Michelle—is living with Old Mulehide and her second husband, Peter the Snake, in Bellevue. Tanya is shacked up with some would-be sculptor in Seattle.” He shook his head. “She supports him, and he makes erasers out of Play-Doh. I don’t get it. My son, Brandon, is going to school in Oregon. Corvallis. He wants to be a vet.”
“At least he has a goal.”
Milo shrugged. “Of sorts. He wants to move to Kentucky and take care of million-dollar thoroughbreds. He’ll be lucky to come back to Alpine and unruffle the feathers of Vida’s canary.”
I sympathized, briefly. Furtively, I glanced over at Milo, who was immersed in his burnt cream. He was attractive in his way, with regular, if unremarkable features, tall, solid, smart enough. He even had a sense of humor. So why did I feel about as thrilled by his presence as if I’d been dining with Vida? The truth was, I’d hoped the evening might provide a springboard for future intimacies. Maybe it was Adam’s needling, or the thought of spending the night alone in the wake of a murder. Perhaps I was lonely and didn’t know it. But whatever had spurred me into wishing for some sparks to fly with Milo Dodge, the truth was that nothing was happening. I fervently hoped it was the same with Milo.
I didn’t get to find out. When we pulled up in front of my house half an hour later, Bill Blatt was waiting for the sheriff. Fuzzy Baugh had been rushed to Alpine Community Hospital with an apparent heart attack; he was listed in critical condition. Milo Dodge put the siren on and raced off toward Front Street, leaving me alone.
* * *
The last person I expected to see on my doorstep that night was Jennifer Doukas MacDuff. She knocked just before ten, about a half hour after I got home. Wearing another sack of a dress and with her long hair straggling over her shoulders, Jennifer was definitely waiflike. I took in a deep breath of fresh, pine-scented air and ushered her into the living room.
“Kent and I had a fight,” she said, collapsing onto the sofa. “Over you.”
“Me?” I had just changed into my bathrobe and was drinking a Pepsi. “Why?”
Jennifer slumped against the cushions, looking even more drab than usual by contrast with my emerald-green upholstery. “Kent thinks your story about the gold got Mark killed. He said you all but admitted it at my folks’ house. And he also thinks you’re hiding Chris Ramirez.” She gave me a plaintive look. “Are you?”
“No. Want some pop?”
Jennifer did and opted for 7-Up. I returned from the kitchen to find her in tears.
“What’s wrong? Are you crying for Mark?” I inquired gently, sitting next to her and putting the glass of soda on the coffee table.
Jennifer sobbed on but shook her head. “Mark was a jerk in a lot of ways,” she said between sniffs. “I’ll miss him, sure. But it’s Chris I feel most sorry for.”
“How come?” I shifted on the sofa while Jennifer tried to compose herself and sit up.
“I was the only one he’d make up to when he was little,” Jennifer said. “Aunt Margaret had me baby-sit a couple of times. That was just before Hector disappeared. I never understood that. I was only a kid, about ten, but I liked Uncle Hector. He wasn’t educated, but he was nice. He seemed to really like Aunt Margaret—and Chris, too. His running off has never made any sense to me. Maybe I was too young to take it all in.”
“Tell me about Hector.” It had occurred to me that in more ways than one, Hector Ramirez was the missing link in the Doukas family history. “What did he do for a living?”
Jennifer reached for her pop and looked vague, which I realized was typical. “Labor stuff. Not logging, but construction, maybe. My father said he was lazy. Hector didn’t work all the time, but sort of off and on.”
“Construction’s like that,” I remarked. Vida had said Hector had come to Alpine to help put in a sewer line. It would follow that he’d try to get work as a manual laborer; it would also follow that Neeny Doukas would try to prevent his despised son-in-law from getting employment. “Maybe Hector left town to find another job and something happened to him.”
Lapping at her soda like a cat, Jennifer shook her head, the honey-blond hair swinging across her face. “If he had, wouldn’t somebody have notified Aunt Margaret? He must have had an I.D. Besides, he and Margaret did go away for a while, when they were first married. In fact, Chris was born in Seattle. But I guess she got homesick. Or else she thought the rest of the family would change their minds. They didn’t.”
“Was Hector an American or a Mexican National?” I asked.
Jennifer considered. “I think he was from Los Angeles. He had kind of an accent but not much.” She sat back, h
er shoulders hunched. The Doukas arrogance seemed to have been obliterated in Jennifer by Cecelia’s self-effacing nature. In some ways, it was a pity. I wondered how Jennifer faced up to Kent MacDuff.
I finished my Pepsi and realized that the rich food and red wine had given me heartburn. A bit guiltily, I thought of Fuzzy Baugh, lying in the intensive care unit at Alpine Community Hospital. If his heart attack had been severe, he would be moved to Everett or Seattle. Alpine’s medical facilities were limited.
I came back to the subject at hand. “Do you remember much about Hector’s disappearance?”
Jennifer fiddled with her hair and squirmed a bit. “Not really. Margaret didn’t tell anybody at first. At least not the family. Then I guess she called the sheriff, but they didn’t start looking for him right away. Grandpa interfered, I think, and told Eeeny Moroni not to bother.”
Recalling that Vida had said there were rumors about Neeny paying Hector to hit the road, I decided to broach the topic. “Do you think your grandfather might have bribed Hector to leave town?”
Jennifer turned her pale blue eyes on me in astonishment. “Oh! I don’t …” She swallowed hard, blinked and put her chin on her fist. “Gosh, I don’t know. I never thought about it.” For a few moments, she apparently did just that. Then she gave a tentative shake of her head. “I can imagine Grandpa trying it, but honestly, I don’t see Hector going along with him. Like I said, Hector really loved Aunt Margaret and Chris.”
The living room was silent while we each reflected on the life and times of Hector Ramirez. I hadn’t built a fire, and there was a definite chill in the air. The wind was gentle tonight, a soft sigh in the trees that surrounded all but the front of my house. I heard a logging truck rumble down the street as someone came home, no doubt after a long stop at Mugs Ahoy or the Icicle Creek Tavern.
I was the first to break the silence. “I’m puzzled about Chris and Mark. Your brother borrowed Chris’s cap and jacket, yet Kent says they had a fight. That doesn’t make sense.”