Ice on the Grapevine

by R. E. Donald

  "I admire your confidence, especially since you know how carefully you've got to dot your i's and cross your t's if the prosecutor expects to make a case that'll stand up to a lawyer the caliber of Jeff Feldman."

  At the mention of Feldman's name, Russell put down his cappuccino, said nothing. The trucker had said nothing overtly offensive, but Russell felt his anger rising.

  "I've never met Sharon's lawyer, Alora Magee. What's she like?" asked Rayne.

  "Low profile, unlike your friend, Feldman, a lawyer of such high caliber that his main objective in taking on this case was the publicity."

  "Didn't he tell me that you and he were old school friends?"

  Russell snorted. "Going to school together didn't make us friends. You know, sometimes I have trouble picturing you as a cop. Are you always this naive?"

  "Yes." Rayne half smiled. "I guess I am."

  Russell snorted. "Yes. Yes. What are you? A fuckin' army private?" he said irritably. "Can't you ever say 'yeah' like everybody else?"

  "Sure. If I wanted to."

  "Once a Mountie, always a Mountie." Russell wasn't getting any satisfaction from this conversation, and decided it was time to terminate it. He drained the last of his cappuccino, then said, "I guess you haven't spoken to Feldman recently."

  "Why do you say that?" asked Rayne, getting to his feet.

  "Because," said Russell, with a smug smile. "He's so worried about losing the case, he's threatening to drop your friend as a client."

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  When Hunter entered his office, Jeff Feldman was sitting behind a pile of books with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up, could have passed for a college student except for the huge oak desk. He tossed his pen lightly onto a yellow legal pad and stood up to shake Hunter's hand. "Thanks for coming in," he said. "I hope you've got some information for me, because I can use all the help I can get on your friend's case."

  Hunter pulled up a leather-upholstered chair and sat down. "I hear you're not too happy with your client," he said.

  "I guess you could say that. I'm not getting anything from him, except for continual requests to speak with his wife. And with you."

  "With me?"

  "He's pinning a lot of hope on you. And none on me. I'm just his lawyer. I'm just the shmuck who has to present his case in court. You, you're the white knight crusading against the dragon." He laughed. "I can't get through to him. I'd hate to admit I've come up against a case I can't even manufacture, let alone win, but I've got better things to do than to butt heads with a reluctant client. If I wanted that kind of client, I would've gone to work for the public defender's office."

  "I wish I could help."

  "Maybe you can. I don't have time to take you there this afternoon, but I'm due for a phone call to see if Ray's decided to tell me anything. You game to try talking to him again?"

  "Sure. Thanks." It was what Hunter had been hoping for.

  "Maybe if you can get him to talk to you about what happened - if you can get him to say anything at all - it'll put a hole in the dike and he'll start talking to me." Jeff picked up the phone and dialed.

  It took a while for him to get Ray on the line, so Hunter gave Jeff a rundown of what he'd found out in Burnaby, the speculation that the victim and his friends had been involved with drugs, and the fact that Williams' car had been found in Washington state. Jeff jotted a few things down as they talked. Once Ray was on the phone, Jeff handed the receiver across the desk to Hunter.

  "Have you found out who did it yet?" Ray asked.

  "No, I haven't, Ray, and you're not helping matters by withholding information. Why didn't you tell us that you and Sharon knew the victim?"

  There was silence on the other end of the line.

  "Did you think the police wouldn't find out?"

  "I just hoped, I guess," he said.

  "And now the police have found the victim's car near the I-5 in Mount Vernon, Washington. You have anything to say about that?" Hunter paused, but again, silence. "I hope we don't find out tomorrow that the police found your fingerprints all over it. If you know anything about it, speak up now. If you're innocent, you've got everything to gain and nothing to lose by telling me the truth. This time no one from the sheriff's department or the prosecutor's office, not even your lawyer is listening in. It's just you and me this time, Ray."

  Ray cleared his throat. "I'm sorry, Hunter. If I knew for sure that talking to you or to anyone would help us... help Sharon... but I don't know who I can trust. I know I can't talk to the police, and from what I know of lawyers... Well, I just can't take the chance. People like that twist things around. I can't play those games, Hunter. I can't think fast enough. I just can't take the chance."

  "You do realize that it looks worse when you lie, or conceal facts? Have you thought of that?"

  "Of course I've thought of it. It's eating away at me, not knowing what to do."

  "How do you expect Jeff to prepare your case? How do you expect him to be able to prove your innocence?"

  "I thought the police, or you, would find evidence that somebody else might have done it. I really hoped..."

  Hunter sighed. "Will you work with me now? We'll take it one step at a time. Where did Williams get in your trailer? Mount Vernon?"

  "I don't know."

  "Assuming you didn't put him there, when did you find out he was there?"

  Silence.

  "Ray? Did you hear me? When did you find out Williams was in your trailer?"

  "I'm afraid..."

  "Afraid of what, Ray?"

  "I'm sorry, Hunter. I'm afraid I just can't tell you right now."

  "Are you saying that he wasn't in your trailer? The evidence is pretty clear-cut, Ray. You're making it harder on yourself by denying it."

  "I said, I can't tell you." His voice was monotone, almost dead.

  "What can you tell me?" Hunter was beginning to feel frustrated.

  "If you can't find out who did it," said Ray, "I'll say whatever they want me to say if they'll just let Sharon go."

  "We've been over this ground before. If you're thinking about confessing just to get Sharon out of jail, you're throwing away your future, yours and Sharon's both. She won't thank you for that, Ray, letting yourself get jailed for something you didn't do."

  "I've got to go now, Hunter."

  "Do you understand me, Ray?" said Hunter, but the line was already dead. "I don't get it," he said to Jeff as he handed back the telephone receiver. "He's not a stupid man. Why is he being so stubborn about this?" He exhaled, shaking his head in disbelief, then held up his hand. "No, you don't have to tell me. He's protecting his wife. What does she have to say?"

  Jeff shrugged. "For that," he said, "you'll have to ask Alora Magee."

  "What's missing?" the police officer had asked. When Hellen had arrived home to evidence of a break-in, she had immediately called both Teresa and the RCMP. Teresa was home before the police arrived. When neither she nor Hellen could answer the constable's question, he said, "Go through your belongings and see if anything's been taken."

  Teresa stood at the door of the bedroom, felt the energy drain from her shoulders through her hips and disappear through her heels. Splotches of white fingerprinting powder mottled the varnished surface of the chest of drawers; its round brass knobs were dusted with soot. She fought an urge to walk away, close the door behind her, and never come back. What were they looking for? How would she ever know what was stolen?

  What if what was stolen was another of Greg's secrets? She didn’t know what he did at night when she was asleep. Sometimes she would hear him come in from his gig, hear him rustle in the kitchen, hear the sounds of voices on the TV in the living room, then hear the click of the back door. What was he doing outside in the dark? What if he owned something that was worth lots of money and never told her about it? His old record albums? His CD's? His sheet music? He had tons of sheet music, things he'd written himself. She would never know if some of it was m
issing. She would never know if it was worth anything. Could some of it be valuable? Was some of it stolen? How would she ever know?

  She started with the closet. Boots and shoes littered the floor outside it, so she knelt and began to sort through them, at first placing Greg's in one neat row, hers in another. Then, picking up one of Greg's old ragged sneakers by the laces, she got to her feet and searched the room, looking for a place to put it. His shoes didn't belong in her closet any longer. Her eyes kept coming back to the waterbed. Greg's waterbed. She tossed the sneakers, one after another, watching the fat ripples of their landing lift the edges of the quilt, remembering how, in the early hours of morning, Greg would get into bed and she would rise and fall, her eyes closed tight, rise and fall, pretending not to have wakened, rise and fall, until he'd become still. She thought of the times, just hours before she had to get up for work, when he had crawled into bed and wrapped his arms around her from behind, his naked skin cold against her own, his breath over her shoulder smelling of marijuana and beer. She would pretend to be asleep when he moved his hips against her, and the feel of his erection would stir a desire in her that she struggled to ignore. The bed would go, she decided. The waterbed would definitely go.

  Her clothing, picked up from the floor of the closet and shaken out, went back on hangers, which she spaced evenly from one end of the chrome bar to the other. Greg's shirts and pants, his two jeans jackets, one frayed at the cuffs and one still inky with blue dye, landed on top of the shoes on the bed. Was any of Greg's clothing missing? She couldn't tell. She remembered what he'd been wearing in the photograph the police had shown her, the photo with his eyes closed and his skin the color of yogurt. The blue and green striped polo shirt he'd bought at Value Village. It angered her that he had died in a second hand shirt.

  Teresa slid the closet door shut, then faced the chest of drawers and squared her shoulders. Some of the clothing had been strewn on the floor, and some trailed out of the half open drawers like weeds between cracks in the sidewalk. The top drawer was where she kept her panties and nighties and brassieres. The intruder, whoever he was, had pawed through them. Even if it meant staying up half the night at the laundromat and being sleepy at her keyboard tomorrow, she'd have to wash them all before she put them away again. She dragged over the hamper and opened the lid. Inside were Greg's black jeans and his green shirt and a pair of his socks. She stared at them for a full minute, then picked up the hamper and shook it over the waterbed.

  "What are you doing?" Hellen stood in the doorway, a hairbrush in her hand.

  "There's no point in putting Greg's clothes away." Teresa pulled out the drawer still half full of Greg's underwear and socks and dumped it out onto the growing pile on the waterbed. "I'm cleaning out his things."

  "What are you going to do with them?"

  Teresa struggled to pull the little drawer out of Greg's night table. It contained nothing but junk, as far as she could tell: guitar picks, an extra steel tube for playing slide guitar, business cards and snatches of song written on napkins and scraps of paper. Once worth nothing to anyone but Greg, and now, worth nothing even to him. When she’d first moved in with Hellen, her brothers had helped her move the few pieces of furniture she had bought. She couldn’t ask them for help moving the waterbed out. She couldn’t let them guess that she had been living with Greg as man and wife. She dumped the contents of the night table drawer onto the waterbed, and said, "I'll put it in bags for the Salvation Army, and call them to pick up the bed."

  Hellen just stood there, watching Teresa work, and languidly running the hair brush through her short hair. Teresa wondered if she would ask for the bed. If she does, Teresa thought, I will chop it into small pieces and burn it. "Did you find anything missing in your room?" she asked.

  "No," said Hellen. She stepped inside the room and nudged a sweatshirt, one of Greg's, with her toe. "Whoever it was sure made a mess but I can't think of anything that's missing, can you?" She picked up the sweatshirt and held it out to inspect it.

  Teresa shook her head.

  "It gives me the creeps, thinking that Greg's murderer might have been here, going through our stuff," said Hellen. "I wonder who that fat woman was. I can't picture her as the murderer, but you never know."

  Teresa didn't want to think about it. She took a deep breath and covered her face with her hands, trying to keep from telling Hellen to shut up and go away.

  "Poor Jag. All this has been so awful for you." Hellen said, putting a hand on Teresa's shoulder. "Where will you sleep tonight?" She pulled Teresa close in a hug. "You can sleep with me if you like."

  Teresa pulled away. "No, Hellen. I'll be fine."

  Hellen shrugged. "This is a nice sweatshirt," she said, holding it up against her chest.

  "Yes," said Teresa, taking it from her. She stood there stiffly, waiting for Hellen to leave.

  Hellen smiled, then raised the hair brush and resumed brushing her hair. "I think I'll put on the kettle," she said, "for tea."

  When she had gone, Teresa looked around the room. "What's missing?" the police officer had asked her. What would he say if she told him the truth? What would he say if she told him, "It was me. I was missing from this room. I'd moved over so far to make room for Greg that there was hardly anything of me left." She hadn't recognized how little was left of her in here until after Greg was gone. She smiled to herself as she used Greg's sweatshirt to wipe the fingerprint powder off the brass knobs of the chest of drawers, then dropped the sweatshirt on top of the pile on the bed.

  She'd moved over for Greg, and that was a mistake. She wasn't going to move over again now for Hellen.

  Hunter took the Overland exit off the Santa Monica freeway and had no trouble finding the Italian restaurant Alora Magee had picked for their meeting. As he drove slowly into the lot beside it, looking for a suitable place to park the Freightliner, a dark haired woman wearing khaki walking shorts and a white shirt got out of a small black Audi and flagged him to a large parking spot behind the building. By the time he had turned off the engine and opened the door, she was standing beside the truck with her hand stuck out.

  "Hi," she said, smiling. "You must be Hunter. I'm Alora Magee." Her handshake was firm, her hand neither cool nor warm. He liked her instantly. "Where's the rest of your truck?" she asked.

  "I left the trailer at the truck stop. Parking this thing is enough of a challenge." He prepared to close the door, but she stopped him with a hand on his arm.

  "I've always wondered what it felt like to drive one of these mothers," she said. "You mind if I look inside?"

  "Be my guest."

  She climbed into the driver's seat and sat there, her hands on the wheel and a grin on her face. "Cool," she said, laughing. "Do I look like a trucker?"

  "About as much as you look like a lawyer."

  "I'm not what you expected?"

  "To tell you the truth, I didn't give it much thought." And he hadn't, but for some reason it surprised him that she was so informal and friendly. She seemed self-assured and uncomplicated, as straight-ahead and cloudless as a spring wind.

  "I did," she said. "You look a lot like I expected, based on what Sharon said about you."

  He raised his eyebrows. "She told you what I look like?"

  She frowned, wrinkling her nose. "Not exactly. She said you were a really nice man but that most people didn't want to mess with you. I figured that put you somewhere between Roy Rogers and Charles Bronson."

  "Old guys. You got that part right."

  "Old? You? Well, maybe mature." She clambered down out of the truck, and he climbed back inside, pulled the Wal-Mart bag El had given him out from under the passenger seat.

  "Before I forget," he said, handing it to her, "here's a care package for Sharon."

  Alora reached in and pulled out one of the books. She held it up so they could both see the cover and looked at him sideways, a smile dimpling one cheek. "Forbidden Desire?"

  Hunter coughed and looked away. "They're not fr
om me."

  "That's what they all say," she said with a laugh. She opened to a random page and cleared her throat. "Jasmine could feel the muscles of his back through the wet fabric of her nightgown. She felt her nipples tingle and harden, and she buried her face in his neck, hoping desperately that he couldn't feel the heat of her unbidden desire," she read. "Whew!" She fanned her face with the book. "Hot stuff."

  Hunter could feel himself begin to blush, made himself think of something else. "Did Sharon tell you she knew the victim?"

  Alora looked sideways at him again, her eyebrows rising lightly, as if she recognized his discomfort and found it amusing. "No. It appears she's taken a vow of silence when it comes to the case. She won't say much of anything." She paused, frowning. "Do you have any idea why?"

  "Yes," he said. "That's exactly what Ray's doing. It seems to me that he's refusing to say anything at all rather than take the risk of saying something that might incriminate his wife, and my guess is she's doing the same to protect her husband."

  Alora slapped the book lightly against her thigh. "You sure these aren't yours?" she asked slyly. "That's a pretty romantic notion you've come up with, for this day and age."

  "I guess I'm old fashioned," he said.

  "I guess you are." She dropped the book back into the bag, pulled out a manila envelope. "What's this?"

  "I don't know. It's from El."

  "El?"

  "My dispatcher, Elspeth Watson. You spoke to her, I believe."

  She nodded. "Of course," she said, sliding an enlarged photograph out of the envelope. "Peaches!" she said with delight, looking up at him for confirmation. "Sharon will be happy to have this. She told me about Peaches."

  "El's got a soft spot for yappy little dogs. She has one of her own."

  "These books are El's, too?"

  "I guess so."

  "From her voice, I'd pictured her more as a woman who'd own a Rottweiler and read Stephen King. Someone tried to interrupt while she was on the phone to me, and she swore like a longshoreman."