3 Swift Run

by Laura Disilverio

  “What’s their next step?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She picked up the phone and dialed a number from memory. “Montgomery, it’s me.”

  I tried not to listen in on her conversation, but it’s kind of hard not to overhear in an office that’s smaller than my closet with no doors except on the powder room. From Charlie’s tone, it didn’t seem to be going well, and she hung up after barely more than a minute, scowling. “He won’t tell me anything,” she said. “Says he doesn’t know what Lorrimore’s thinking or doing. Says he got called out on an attempted murder outside Cowboys last night and isn’t in the loop on the Heather-Anne case.”

  “He probably isn’t,” I said, dismayed by her anger.

  “He could be if he wanted to be.”

  She plopped down in front of her computer again, winced, and tapped the keys so hard they sounded like bullets. “Wait a minute … Look at this, Gigi. He lied!”

  “Who lied?” I scurried around my desk to peer over Charlie’s shoulder. Her screen showed a page from the Mountain Press, a paper that advertised itself as being for Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge, and Sevierville, Tennessee. She was looking at what seemed to be the society page. An article about a fund-raiser for the Heart Association showed a color photo of four smiling people in evening wear, two women and two men.

  “That strapless dress isn’t a good choice for her,” I said, pointing to the woman on the far left who looked to be about my age and size. “She needs more support.”

  Charlie stabbed a finger at the screen. “Not her. Him.”

  The man she pointed at had a gray-streaked beard and a weathered face, and he was seated in a wheelchair. “He looks kind of like Kris Kristofferson. What about him?”

  “‘Sunny and Brian Wilcox, Lisetta Teegle, and Wilfred Cheney share a joke at the Have a Heart fund-raiser at Gatlinburg’s Glenstone Lodge,’” she read from the caption. “Wilfred Cheney! That’s Heather-Anne’s purportedly abusive husband. He’s in a wheelchair—he couldn’t have strangled Heather-Anne at the Embassy Suites.”

  “Maybe it’s her brother-in-law,” I suggested. “My sister May married a man with six brothers, and she’s all the time getting calls from people trying to reach one of her nieces and nephews or sisters-in-law.”

  “I didn’t know you had a sister.”

  “Three of them,” I said. “Two of them are still in Georgia, but Coretta and her husband live in Houston.”

  “It’s not a bad thought,” Charlie said, “except—” She tapped a few keys and a new photo came up, this one from a newspaper wedding announcement. “Ta-da.” She leaned back so I could see it better.

  A young woman with her dark hair in an up-do, wearing a wedding dress so tight I could practically read the label on her undies, had her arm tucked into Wilfred Cheney’s arm. There wasn’t so much gray in his beard, and he wasn’t in a wheelchair, but it was the same man. I leaned closer and studied the bride, who was younger and plumper than Heather-Anne, and brunette, to boot.

  “Do you think that’s Heather-Anne?” Charlie asked, eyeing the photo doubtfully.

  The bride’s hand rested on the groom’s arm, and I could make out a flawless French manicure, even in the black-and-white photo. “It’s her,” I said, pointing out the manicure.

  Charlie gave me an incredulous look. “First time I’ve seen someone make an identification off a manicure. I’ll take your word for it.” She scrolled up to show the date: almost five years ago. “The Heart Association fund-raiser was two months ago,” she said, “so sometime after the wedding, Wilfred ended up in a wheelchair, and Lucinda ran off and became Heather-Anne. What do you want to bet the two events were related?”

  “Who lied?” I asked, going back to Charlie’s original statement.

  “Alan ‘I Don’t Own a Shirt’ Brodnax. He said Cheney’s been after Heather-Anne, that she was afraid of him, that he might well have killed her. You can’t tell me Brodnax—who is a professional researcher, for heaven’s sake—didn’t know the man was in a wheelchair and couldn’t have been chasing Heather-Anne all over the country, much less strangling her at the Embassy Suites without anyone noticing.”

  “Maybe someone did,” I said. “I mean, maybe someone noticed a man in a wheelchair.” The thought excited me: Dexter wouldn’t be the prime suspect if Heather-Anne’s former husband had been seen at the hotel.

  Charlie’s brows arched, but before she could say anything, the phone rang. I snatched it up. “Swift Investigations, Gigi Goldman speaking. May I help you?”

  An official-sounding voice on the other end asked me if I was the owner of a red BMW and read off a license plate number. It’s not like I had my license plate numbers memorized, but I said, “Yes.”

  Charlie looked a question at me, and I mouthed, “Dexter’s car.” She scooted closer, and I held the phone away from my ear a bit so she could hear.

  The speaker identified himself as a CSPD patrol officer and said, “Your car’s been involved in a hit-and-run accident at the First and Main Town Center. Do you know who was driving the vehicle?”

  “I reported it stolen last night,” I said, grateful that Charlie had made me do that.

  “You’ll need to come down here and make arrangements to have it towed and deal with insurance issues,” the officer said in an uncompromising voice.

  “Was Les— was anyone injured?”

  “There were no reported injuries. The driver fled the scene, according to witnesses.”

  “Come on,” Charlie said when I hung up. “I’ll drive. You’re shaking too much to keep the car on the road.”

  “What could have happened?” I shrugged into my parka and zipped it. “What if Les is injured? Maybe he has a concussion and doesn’t know who he is or how to get help. He might need me.”

  Charlie gave me a not-so-gentle shove out the door. “He divorced you and ran off with another woman, Gigi. He doesn’t get to ‘need’ you anymore.”

  “You don’t stop caring about someone after more than thirty years of marriage just like that, you know,” I said, my cashmere gloves making it hard to snap my fingers on “just like that.”

  Charlie rolled her eyes. “Then the sooner we get there and have a look around, the sooner you can play ministering angel. Although, personally, I’d be more tempted to play Dr. Kevorkian.”

  20

  We got to the First and Main Town Center on the east side of Colorado Springs twenty minutes later. It wasn’t hard to figure out where the accident was. A police car with its lights twirling blue and red in the gray morning was parked half on the sidewalk near the Cinemark Theater. A tow truck driver was hooking up to the rear of the Beemer. The front half of the car was covered with a huge COMING ATTRACTIONS sign advertising an R-rated movie with werewolves, aliens, and Adam Sandler. Ick, yuck, and ugh. The sign had apparently fallen on the BMW after it rammed into the metal post holding it. I knew what I would see if I looked under the sign: thousands of dollars’ worth of damage I couldn’t afford to get fixed.

  “Maybe it’s not as bad as it looks,” Charlie said with false heartiness as we parked and got out of her Subaru.

  “Maybe it’s worse.” I’m not normally a gloomy person, but this week was getting me down. I signed some paperwork for the police officer and the tow truck driver while Charlie walked up to the crippled BMW. I didn’t know how I’d tell Dexter that his car had been flattened by werewolves and aliens. I was about to join Charlie when the movie theater manager came up, all waving arms and angry voice, to talk about insurance and getting her sign repaired. I saw Charlie jerk open the car’s back door before I let the manager drag me into her office.

  When I came out, the police car was gone and so was Dexter’s car. Charlie stood on the sidewalk, a zip-up folder under her arm, talking to a stocky man who was leaning toward her in a way that made it look like he was sharing a secret. He wore a lumberjack cap and boots, ready for the snow, and he had dark pouches under his eyes, as if someone had glued on soggy
tea bags. I wondered if he knew that Preparation H, the kind you can get from Canada, would help with the puffiness.

  He broke off when I got near. “Who’s this?” he asked suspiciously.

  “My partner,” Charlie said in a soothing voice. “You were saying…”

  “Yeah, then the guy takes off running toward the theater. He didn’t even stop to see if he’d hurt anyone, and there were plenty of people around, I’ll tell you, including a bus-full of seniors from one of those retirement centers who were here to see that new Sean Connery movie. I thought he was dead. Anyway, like I say, the guy took off running and the guy in the other car—at least, I think it was a guy, although it had those smoky windows, so I couldn’t say for sure—zooms up onto the sidewalk and tries to run down the first guy. He gets away by the skin of his teeth and ducks into the theater with the clerks all yelling at him about not having a ticket, and the guy in the black car takes off. Look, you can see the tire marks.” The man pointed to marks on the sidewalk, where the water jets would be shooting up if it were summer.

  “Do you know what kind of car it was?” Charlie asked.

  “Something sporty. Foreign maybe. Black.”

  “You’ve been very helpful, Mr. Kimmel.” She handed him a card. “Please call if you think of anything else.”

  “Is there a reward?” he asked hopefully.

  Charlie shook her head, and he joined a woman I hadn’t noticed earlier, who was clearly waiting for him.

  “What was that all about?” I asked Charlie, shivering as the wind picked up.

  “I’m not completely sure,” she said, staring after the man and his wife as they headed for the Dick’s Sporting Goods. “It sounds to me like someone is after Les. From what Mr. Kimmel and another witness I talked to had to say, someone deliberately caused the accident, trying to run into Les’s car. I don’t know if they were trying to stop him or kill him, although my money’s on the former since it’d be hard to kill him in an area this congested and hope to get away.”

  A frown puckered my brow. “I hope he’s okay. Where do you suppose he is?”

  “Watching the latest Hangover movie?” She nodded toward the theater, then grabbed my arm as I started in that direction. “Not really. He probably ran straight through the building and out the back exit. He could be anywhere in the city, or halfway to Albuquerque by now.”

  Snowflakes started to fall, and I stuck out my tongue to catch one as we returned to the car. “What’s that?” I gestured to the folder under Charlie’s arm.

  “Ah, this.” She held it up. It was a simple black leather-look folder, letter sized, that zipped around three sides. “It’s not Dexter’s, is it?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve never seen it.”

  Charlie smiled triumphantly. “Then it must be Les’s. He bolted from the Beemer so quickly he didn’t think to grab it.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  We got in the car, and Charlie cranked the heat up. The zipper stuck when she tried to open the case and then gave with a ripping sound. “It’s better than Christmas,” I said, leaning sideways to peer into the case.

  It contained a tablet of paper elastic-banded into place on the right-hand side and a pen slotted into the middle. On the left-hand side, letters and papers poked out of two flat pockets. We shuffled through the four or five sheets of paper, most of which seemed to be hotel receipts. “Doesn’t look very useful,” Charlie said. She pulled out the last item, an envelope addressed to Les in Costa Rica. When she shook it, a newspaper clipping fell out.

  I stooped to pick it up and held it so we could both read it. I’d noticed recently that I was having to hold things farther and farther away to read them. The tiny, smudgy print on the newspaper clipping was especially hard. I’d bought a couple of pairs of reading glasses and hunted through my purse for some now. Charlie was done with the article by the time I pulled out the retro cat’s-eye-shaped pink glasses with a rhinestone pattern on the corners. If I had to look old, at least I could have fun doing it.

  “Interesting,” Charlie said as I read the brief article. It was about a murder in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Robert Eustis, a wealthy rancher, had been poisoned with brake fluid, apparently mixed in his Long Island iced tea, and died. Due to the ranch’s remote location and the brutal winter weather, the body had gone undiscovered for what might have been weeks. The police were calling his death a homicide and were looking for Eustis’s wife, Amanda. “We need to make sure she’s safe,” the local sheriff said, “and see what she might be able to tell us about Mr. Eustis’s unfortunate demise.”

  I turned the clipping over but couldn’t find a date on it anywhere. “Whyever do you suppose Les had this?” I asked. “He was never interested in any of those true crime shows.”

  “Good question.” Charlie put the car in gear and backed out. “Is there a return address on the envelope?”

  I picked up the slightly worn business-sized envelope and turned it over. “Nope.” Peering at the postmark, I tried to read it. “It looks like it was sent from here, though. I can make out ’ings, CO.’”

  “Can you read the date?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “I suppose Les could have been carrying it around for months, but I’ll bet it was sent sometime the week before he disappeared. Why else would he bring it with him? I say we get back to the office and see what we can find online about this murder and Mr. Robert Eustis,” Charlie said, speeding up once we got back on Powers Boulevard.

  * * *

  The computer search was disappointing. We dug up the article and discovered that it had been published in January three years ago. Further searching led to a couple of brief follow-up articles and an obit with a photo of Robert Eustis. “He looked nice,” I said, studying the photo of the gray-haired man, who had been sixty-three when he died. He had gentle eyes and slightly overlapping front teeth. “Says here he’s survived by his wife, Amanda, two children, and three grandbabies. So sad. He was predeceased by his first wife, also named Amanda. Now, that’s weird.”

  Charlie had printed out the follow-up articles and was reading them at her desk. “They never solved the murder, and they never located Amanda Eustis the Second. I think a call to the sheriff might be in order.”

  She found a phone number in a matter of seconds and was talking to the sheriff moments later. I listened in but didn’t get anything out of it other than Charlie’s one- or two-word responses. She was on the phone less than three minutes and had a thoughtful look on her face when she hung up.

  “Well? What did he say?”

  She gave me a considering look. “It’s what he didn’t say that interests me.” She paused. “Are you up for a trip to Wyoming?”

  I stared at her in dismay. “What? Why?”

  “I think we need to talk to Sheriff Huff in person. He was cagey on the phone, wouldn’t tell me anything we didn’t already know from the newspaper articles. It’s clear, though, that there’s more to the story. I think he might give up more face-to-face.”

  “But, Charlie, this rancher’s murder might not have anything to do with Les’s disappearance or with Heather-Anne’s death or anything.”

  “Maybe not, but my intuition says otherwise. I think this clipping is key. I think it’s the reason Les left Costa Rica. A trip to Cheyenne will only cost us a day. I asked the sheriff to fax us a photo of Amanda Eustis, but he says there isn’t one. She only married Eustis a few months before he died, and apparently she was camera-shy.”

  I ignored the last part. “I can’t be away overnight again. What will I do with the kids? And now that Dexter doesn’t have a car to drive…”

  “I’ll go,” Charlie said.

  “You can’t drive all that way on your own,” I objected. “Not yet. Your bullet wound!”

  She sucked in her upper lip, and I could see she was thinking about telling me she’d be fine, but then she caved. “You’re right. I’ll find someone to go with me, do the driving. I’d
ask Montgomery, but he’s made it as clear as vodka that he’s not coming near this case. Maybe Albertine or Dan.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t go,” I said, feeling guilty. “I’m not pulling my weight.”

  “Don’t worry about it. You went to Aspen, and there’s plenty you can do here. You might start by talking to Hollis Sloan, the guy I saw Heather-Anne with at the Y whose wife accused her of theft. Then you can track down Patrick Dreiser and see what he’s been up to recently, like maybe plotting revenge on Les and killing Heather-Anne to get back at him. On second thought”—she gazed at me assessingly—“that can probably wait until I get back.”

  “I can talk to him,” I said, drawing myself up straighter. Dreiser might make me a little nervous—he was obnoxious and threatening after Les left—but I could talk to him in a public place. It’s not like he’d get back at Les by doing anything to me, I thought sadly, since Les had divorced me and obviously didn’t care what happened to me. If he’d cared, he would have left us a little something more than the house, the Hummer, and a half interest in a just-scraping-by PI firm. “Should we give the newspaper clipping to the police?”

  “Good idea. Fax it and the other papers from Les’s folder to them and tell Detective Lorrimore about someone trying to mow down Les. I doubt she’ll be able to do anything without more info, but you never know what piece of data might bust a case open.”

  I made a note. “Thank you for doing this, Charlie,” I said. “I know we’re not even getting paid to find Les anymore.”

  She shrugged away my gratitude. “It’s not like we have any other big cases at the moment. If we have to find the real killer in order to keep Dexter out of prison, that’s what we’ll do.” When I teared up, she added, “I can’t have my partner distracted by running off to the state pen twice a week to visit her son. Think of all the billable hours we’d lose.”