The Main Corpse

by Diane Mott Davidson

  “May I come in?” Instead of her usual bounciness, she sounded frighteningly subdued.

  I invited her to sit down and gave her a glass of Dry Sack. The hand she took it with was trembling. For once it was good to have no jobs. I asked her to stay for dinner. She declined and drank her sherry in silence.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” she said finally.

  Arch was in the next room. I told him we were leaving. Even though the sun was finally shining intermittently through towers of white cumulus clouds, I put on a slicker, tossed Tom’s raincoat over Marla’s shoulders, and picked up two umbrellas. It would be good for Marla to walk. We emerged into the cool, wet-scented air.

  I waved to a few neighbors as we moved down the sidewalk. Now that the rain had momentarily let up, the entire neighborhood, it seemed, was either out in their gardens putting in flowers, or out on their decks trying to soak up a little sun, dermatologists be damned.

  “I feel totally depressed,” Marla offered glumly as we rounded the corner and started up a graveled footpath put in by some earnest Boy Scouts about ten years previously. The path was lined with pine trees and white-barked aspens, their buds still tightly closed because of the late spring. A sudden burst of sunshine made raindrops glisten sharply on each pine needle.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “Did Albert Lipscomb ever show up?”

  “No.” She chuckled bitterly. Her fingers brushed pine needles and sent a shower of drops onto the gravel. “No indeedy. Tony filed the missing person report this morning. The cops started looking for credit card usage, the usual. The Denver police department is mobilized now, too.” She took a deep breath, then moaned, “Oh, God.”

  I tried to think. Had Tom mentioned anything unusual going on at the department? He had been tied up testifying in a forgery case he’d been working on for over a year. But I hadn’t heard a thing about what was going on at the department except for the usual complaints about Captain Shockley.

  “The Denver department?” I asked. “Why?”

  We came to a wooden bench, also placed by the Scouts. Marla said, “Goldy, will you sit down?”

  I brushed raindrops off the cedar boards and obeyed. The sun slipped behind a billowing cloud; the sky darkened ominously. Next to me, Marla shivered as a raindrop fell. She said, “Before he left, Albert Lipscomb cleaned out the partnership account. Three and a half million dollars.”

  “Judas priest…. How did he do that?”

  “Well, he went to the central bank location. First of the Rockies, downtown Denver. Ordered the cash out of the account on Monday, picked it up on Tuesday. Apparently he charmed the teller, too.”

  “Some charm job,”

  “Must have been,” Marla said with eerie calm, “because she disappeared with him.”

  Chapter 7

  Marla did not elaborate on Albert’s and the bank teller’s disappearance, as no details were known. She did report that Tony was in a state of shock. He kept saying, “We have to make everything look normal. This is just a glitch. The work got to him. He’s just holed up in a motel with the girl. Maybe they’re in the Caymans.” The partnership would not immediately go under; they had a small escrow account as well as modest equity positions in Medigen and other companies. “It’s going to be okay,” Marla said Tony kept repeating like a mantra. “We just have to believe it’s going to be okay.”

  This was not the case at the Furman County Sheriff’s Department.

  “I don’t know how the cops reacted to the 1929 crash,” Tom told me as he patted an appreciative Jake that night. Tom shook his head. “But it couldn’t have been much worse than the way Shockley is handling this. He calls Prospect every hour on the hour. He calls the Denver P.D. every hour on the half, to see if they’ve found that teller yet. He’s handling the Missing Persons on Lipscomb himself.”

  I looked up from my recipe file. I’d promised to take a chocolate care package to General Farquhar the next day. “The captain is handling the Lipscomb search personally? What happens to all those rapists and murderers out there while Shockley searches for his missing money?”

  Tom chuckled. “Not much. Law enforcement in this county has been put on hold, you can bet that.” When I made incredulous noises, Tom wagged a finger at me. “You gotta keep the distance in this job, Goldy, it’s the only way to stay sane. Besides, I want Prospect to get straightened out. If Shockley doesn’t have enough money to retire, I’m going to have a heart attack myself.”

  “Has he found anything?”

  Tom shook his head. “First place he sent his team was to Orpheus Canyon Road, to see if Lipscomb had pulled a Victoria Lear—you know, maybe had a car crash. He hadn’t. Why would you risk escaping across Orpheus Canyon Road, with all that money and a cute bank teller? Then he sent guys to that damn mine, where, if you’ll excuse my saying so, he didn’t exactly strike pay dirt either. The place was totally deserted and all locked up. It’s not in his jurisdiction anyway. This Lipscomb? If he changes license plates, doesn’t use his credit card, and doesn’t get stopped for anything, it could take forever to find him.” He rumpled Jake’s ears and gave me a serious look. “I gotta tell you, Shockley called me in and asked about Marla.”

  “Marla? Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Tom replied slowly. “Shockley’s secretive and paranoid as hell. He asked how long I’d known Marla, did she seem entirely stable, did I know how much she stood to lose if Prospect went under. He implied her little argument with Lipscomb at the party might have turned sinister at a later point.”

  “Good God. That’s ridiculous. Marla couldn’t hurt a soul.” If you didn’t count the Jerk, that is. And he had deserved it.

  “I was very offhand, said Marla’s bark was worse than her bite, a wonderful friend to you for many years, all that.” He sighed. “But I have to tell you, Miss G., I didn’t feel good about the conversation. At all.”

  Neither, of course, did I.

  The next morning, I suggested Arch take his dog far from the sounds and smells of my kitchen while I prepared General Farquhar’s chocolate treat. If Jake loved cinnamon, there was no telling how he’d flip for products made from the cocoa bean. Arch was only too delighted to lead Jake up to his room. Gleefully, he vowed he was going to teach the hound the difference between fake blood and the real thing. Although I was not eager to know the details of this lesson, Arch assured me he had a whole bottle of fake blood left over from his Halloween disguise, and he’d just use a pinprick of his own blood for contrast. How comforting.

  So, while Arch and Jake played with blood upstairs, I sifted dark European cocoa with flour, and thought back to when I’d worked for General Bo Farquhar. Two years ago he’d been married, strong, utterly confident. A battalion commander in his 1960 class at West Point, he had distinguished himself in the Special Forces in Vietnam and been promoted early to the rank of general. He’d become the army’s ranking man in the study of terrorists. To his superiors’ eventual chagrin, however, Bo developed his own idea of who deserved to share his military know-how. A group of Afghans—facing Russians who refused to retreat—had found a friend in General Bo Farquhar. While the Carter administration insisted the Russians withdraw, the Afghans scored a few hits with suddenly acquired state-of-the-art weapons, smuggled to them by none other than General Bo. When the story broke, the general had been forced to retire. Undeterred, he’d settled with his wife Adele, Marla’s sister, in a huge house on Sam Snead Lane in the Meadowview area of Aspen Meadow Country Club. There he’d experimented with his cache of goodies, with the unfortunate conclusion that while I was working for him, things and people had blown up, including Adele. Although he had not been charged with killing anyone, the general had ended up at the Colorado state penitentiary at Canon City for illegal possession of explosives.

  I beat unsalted butter with brown sugar and remembered bringing Bo brownies while he was in prison. I’d visited him there twice. Each time he had asked about Arch; he’d wanted to hear all the details of m
y son’s checkered school life at Elk Park Prep. Bo had wanted to know about Julian, too. But most insistently, the imprisoned general had questioned me about Marla. I’d always replied she was fine. He’d looked at me expectantly: Would Marla ever come to visit?

  There was no chance of that, unfortunately. Illogical as it was, Marla still blamed Bo for the death of her sister, despite the fact that he’d had nothing to do with Adele’s demise. Marla had said as much to me last fall, when we’d visited Bride’s Creek, the spot where Adele Farquhar’s ashes were scattered. General Bo, ever heroic, still loved the deceased Adele himself. The fact that Marla refused to see him pained the general deeply.

  As I scooped out dark balls of the rich, chocolate-chip-dotted cookie batter, I tried to imagine the general’s new hosts. What kind of deal had Bo Farquhar hatched with these guys to get free room and board at a luxurious, privately owned ranch? Mind you, these former military-industrial-complex honchos didn’t call it a ranch, Bo had told Arch when he’d called to let us know he was back. They called it a compound. And I had no clue what Bo was doing out there that kept him so busy. I melted luscious, creamy white chocolate over the stove and resolved not to worry. General Bo was astonishingly good at survival. At least, he had been before he’d been sent away.

  I tasted one of the triple-rich chocolate cookies and shivered with pleasure. The warm chips were seductively gooey inside the dark chocolate dough that was robed in white chocolate. If these didn’t give General Bo his desired chocolate fix, nothing would.

  Oddly enough, I was looking forward to seeing General Bo again. I didn’t have any catering to do until this evening, when I visited the Trotfields, formerly served by their Sri Lankan chef. The food for that sumptuous dinner in Meadowview was mostly prepared. I smiled; the Trotfields did not live far from the Farquhars’ old estate. But our family had no emotional link to the Trotfields—nothing like our connection to General Bo. Not only had I worked for General Farquhar at a time when I’d desperately needed a job to support Arch, but he had wormed his way into our hearts: Arch’s, Julian’s, mine, even Tom’s. Of course, Tom had not been enthusiastic about my visits to the general when he was behind bars. Still, I reflected as I greedily licked my chocolate-smeared fingertips, eccentric as he was, General Bo was a friend.

  Chocoholic Cookies

  2 cups rolled oats

  2 cups (1 12-ounce package) semisweet chocolate chips

  1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened to room temperature

  1 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar

  ½ cup granulated sugar

  1½ cups all-purpose flour

  ½ teaspoon baking soda

  ½ teaspoon salt

  ¼ cup unsweetened cocoa, preferably Hershey’s Premium European-Style

  2 large eggs, slightly beaten

  1 tablespoon milk

  1½ teaspoons pure vanilla extract

  9 ounces (3 3-ounce bars) “white chocolate,” preferably Lindt Swiss White Confectionery Bar

  1½ tablespoons solid vegetable shortening such as Crisco

  Preheat oven to 350°. Butter 2 cookie sheets. Do not alter the order in which the ingredients are combined. In a large bowl, combine the oats and chocolate chips; set aside. In another large bowl, beat together the butter and sugars until creamy. Sift together the flour, baking soda, salt, and cocoa, then add to the butter mixture, stirring until thoroughly combined. The batter will be very stiff. Stir the milk and vanilla into the eggs, then stir this mixture into the butter mixture until thoroughly combined. Add the chips and oats; stir until well mixed.

  Using a two-tablespoon scoop, drop batter 2 inches apart on cookie sheets. Bake 9 to 12 minutes, until cooked through. Cool on pan 1 minute; transfer to wire racks to cool completely.

  Melt the white chocolate with the solid vegetable shortening in the top of a double boiler over simmering water. Holding a cooled cookie between your thumb and forefinger, dip the edge into the warm white chocolate to cover the top third of the cookie. Place on a rack over wax paper to dry completely. Store between layers of wax paper in an airtight container in a cool place.

  Makes 5 dozen.

  Tom, however, had been skeptical when we’d discussed my plans.

  “There’s nothing unusual about the general not having to serve his whole sentence,” Tom announced that morning, before leaving for his sixth straight day in court. “I checked with his parole officer. Bo doesn’t need to work because he has an income. From the army and the sale of what was left of his property, because the land underneath the house that blew up was valuable. I guess he invested the proceeds of the sale.” He frowned. “But the guy’s a nut case, Goldy; you know that.”

  “He’s just … odd,” I’d replied cheerfully. “He doesn’t think things through the way most folks do. He gets all passionate, demands to be in charge, and that’s what gets him into trouble. But I promised I’d go see him and I’m going. Anyway, with his wife dead and Marla refusing to see him, who knows how many friends he has left?”

  “Oh, he has plenty of friends. I checked on that, too.” Tom chuckled. “Friends who managed his financial affairs while he was in jail. Friends who have oddball radio programs. Friends who would plan the invasion of Saturn if they thought there’d be a payoff in it,”

  “Please, no cop paranoia, all right? I’m just taking the man some cookies. That’s all he wants. Okay?”

  Tom shot me a skeptical look. “I’d feel better if Macguire or somebody went with you. I’m not sure I like the idea of you paying a house call on a convicted felon and surrounded by those paramilitary wackos.”

  I’d sighed, but said nothing. Who was there to go with me? Not Marla. And if I asked Macguire, the would-be law enforcer, to be my bodyguard at an army-type compound, he would probably show up in battle gear juggling a brace of hand grenades. No gasoline needed on that particular fire, thank you very much.

  I took the second batch of chocolate cookies out of the oven, set the cookie sheets aside to cool, and reflected on what I hadn’t told Tom: that the general had instructed me to come alone. Sometimes you just had to act on your gut instinct. I was keeping my mouth shut and going unaccompanied. Like most caterers, the gut is the only organ I trust, anyway.

  Arch pelted down the stairs to report that he was taking Jake over to his friend Todd’s. I didn’t ask about the blood test. Fifteen minutes later, I’d packed the cookies and revved up the van. Time to see just what was going on out at that thousand-acre nonranch.

  Despite the fact that it was the tenth of June, fat snowflakes mixed with rain splattered softly on my windshield as I drove along the wet streets of Aspen Meadow. The water in Cottonwood Creek was so high that it no longer flowed under the main bridge in town, but instead hit the concrete at midpoint and created a turbid backwash the length of the cross street. I turned and headed toward the small mountain town of Blue Spruce, five hundred feet above and fifteen miles west of Aspen Meadow. Actually, it was fifteen miles on the main road, General Bo had said, then ten miles meandering on dirt roads that were sure to be treacherous with snow and mud. I couldn’t wait.

  Just west of town, traffic had been diverted because of yet another washed-out bridge. Sam Perdue’s dishevelment and frustration at the same type of crisis earlier this week made me resolve to go slow. The van bumped precariously over the makeshift bridge. Here the creek was particularly tumultuous, like dirty laundry water in a wild washing machine. But also dangerous. It made me nervous to look at the culverts, which had obviously not been designed to swallow so much liquid. Each concrete cylinder I passed was clogged with stones and brush. Above the culverts’ rims, thick, wet sticks protruded like skeletons.

  The van wheezed and climbed, topped a hill, and descended into a deep valley. I passed Carl’s You-Snag-’Em, We-Bag-’Em Trout Fishing Pond, High Country Auto Repair, which looked abandoned, the equally decrepit Aspen Grove restaurant, and finally the minuscule Blue Spruce fire department and even tinier Blue Spruce post office. I w
heeled the van right on what I hoped was the first dirt road Bo had described. Another road and then another deteriorated into rutted pathways, where it was all I could do to avoid stony fissures and puddles the size of small ponds. The muddy pathway with its central ice-crusted grass strip did not appear promising. Just when I became convinced I had gone the wrong way, the bumpy road abruptly ended at a gate and a high chain-link fence that extended in both directions through thick pine trees. There was a freshly painted white guard shack at the gate. Within moments of my approach, a tall man in a hooded green slicker came out to the van. He held a clipboard covered with plastic.

  “Yes?” He was light-skinned and dark-haired, with sparkling espresso-colored eyes.

  I told him who I was visiting and why. The guard politely demanded that I open the back doors of the van so he could inspect it. Moving methodically, he used a flashlight to peer along all the racks, under the seats, into the glove compartment. He even asked that I uncover the platters of chocolate cookies. He tapped the bottom of each platter and eyed the enticing contents dispassionately. So much for everyone being a chocoholic at heart.

  He motioned for me to re-cover the plates, then squeaked the gate open and impassively waved me through. The van rocked upward as the rutted dirt road became smooth pavement without warning. Five minutes later, I pulled up in front of a massive, styleless stucco house that looked more like a barracks than a dwelling. Parked outside were three camouflage-painted trucks. Two camo-suited men greeted me at the heavy wooden entrance. Just inside, a closed-circuit camera monitored my movements. One of the men wordlessly took the keys to my van. The other ushered me into a room decorated with a long mahogany conference table and another surveillance camera.