The Main Corpse

by Diane Mott Davidson

  Macguire heaved out an exasperated sigh. “Well, if I knew about this, and I was his girlfriend, I’d have shoved him into that creek.”

  “Marla knew he was dating around for a while, Macguire. This is old news. I just don’t understand why he wanted a nurse or med student.”

  He took a sip of water. “That’s the weird part. She would do medical procedures on him before they … you know, did it.”

  I closed my eyes, then opened them. “What kind of medical procedures?” I asked, keeping my voice even.

  “According to Elissa, Tony wanted his blood pressure taken, and his pulse, and his temperature—you know, vital signs. Then she would listen to his chest, test his reflexes—”

  “Macguire, please. That’s disgusting.”

  He touched his bandage. “They got together every Wednesday. Royce would have a room in his house all prepared. I mean, examination table, stethoscope, latex gloves, cotton balls, alcohol, sterile needles, blood pressure cuff, test tubes, thermometers, on and on. Bitsy was really disgusted when Elissa told her all this. Bitsy said she would have pretended to be a nurse for him, except he wanted the genuine article.”

  “So he had a medical fetish.”

  “The last thing the med student did before they had sex was to take his temperature. Tony wanted to know if he was really hot.”

  “Macguire, enough!”

  “I told you it was kinky.”

  “I’ll try to follow up on the IPO stuff, anyway.”

  We were both aware that a change had come over the room. It was like a siren stopping beside the car behind you. First the siren squeals in your ears, then you get used to it, then you wonder what happened to it. With one movement, Macguire and I turned our heads toward the roommate’s bed.

  A gray-haired man leaned up on one blue-pajamaed elbow in the bed. His eyes were wide and his mouth gaped. Perspiration beaded his forehead.

  “Are you okay?” I asked anxiously.

  He rasped, “Did she take his temperature orally or anally?”

  Ten minutes later I had said good-bye to Macguire and was heading toward a hospital pay phone. I had less than five hours before the general was due at the house. Less than five hours to figure out what was going on, less than five hours before I went outside the law and tried to help Marla. I would need as much information as possible before that time came. I sat down in one of the lobby phone booths and tried to think.

  Except for the goat scheme a couple of years ago, everything at Prospect Financial had been going well. Going well, that is, until the firm decided to put money into the Eurydice. And why had the firm decided to put three and a half mil into a mine that had been closed for decades? Because Albert had inherited both the place and the fervent belief that it was chock-a-block with gold ore. His enthusiasm had been empirically borne out by the geology and assay reports that he and Tony had commissioned. It hadn’t been difficult to be both promoter and investment company. With Medigen, Prospect Financial Partners had already proven they had the Midas touch, and thirty-five clients had been more than eager to put up a hundred thousand each to make another killing.

  But then Chief Investment Officer Victoria Lear had died suddenly while working on the Eurydice IPO. Marla had found a discrepancy in the assays. Albert had disappeared with the investors’ money. Now Tony, too, was missing under suspicious circumstances. And Marla was being made the scapegoat.

  Begin at the beginning, I thought. A month ago, Victoria Lear had been working on an initial public offering of stock for the mine venture. I punched the buttons for the Bank of Aspen Meadow and asked to speak with Eileen Tobey on a matter of great fiscal urgency.

  “It’s your caterer,” I said breathlessly, when Eileen finally came on the line. “Just have a quick question, but it’s really, really important. What do you know about initial public offerings? What do you have to do to make one happen?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Goldy, I’m busy!” Eileen snapped. Then her voice changed. “Look, I’ve got an important meeting in five minutes. But … I heard a nasty rumor about our mutual friend, Marla Korman.”

  “Really.” My heart hardened; bad news sure traveled fast in the high country. No matter how busy you were, apparently, meetings couldn’t proceed until people were up on their gossip.

  Eileen’s voice was like syrup. “I’ll tell you what you want to know if you’ll tell me it’s true she knifed Tony Royce.”

  “It’s not true,” I said emphatically. “But she is in jail. Now listen,” I plunged on before she could ask any more questions, “I don’t want to keep you, Eileen. If I were a venture capital firm, and I’d done a private placement and raised a bunch of money to reopen a mine, what would I have to do to take the venture public?”

  “Hmm. I don’t suppose this has to do with a certain venture capital firm we all know and love?”

  “Just tell me what I’d need for an IPO. Please,” I added.

  She took a deep breath and assumed an authoritative tone. “Very simply, the firm would hand the whole thing over to an investment banker, who would, among other things, hire an independent auditor to check all the facts presented in the prospectus.”

  “Like what kinds of facts?”

  “Oh, that you were what you said you were. Say for a mine, you’d have to have the assays done by a reputable assay lab. You’d hire an independent mining consulting firm to go in and check your geology reports. Like that. It takes a long time and a lot of paperwork, Goldy. You have to spend months on an IPO. What are you getting at?”

  “Oh, nothing,” I said, dejected. “It was just a long shot.”

  I hung up and considered the narrow, smeared windows of the booth. I didn’t have a copy of the prospectus, so I had no idea who the geologist of record was, or how trustworthy his or her reports were. Then go to the next thing. What had Victoria Lear discovered? If the assays could be proven to be fraudulent, as Marla had suspected, then finding out who had ordered and paid for those glowing analyses of the Eurydice’s ore might offer something tangible. Maybe that was what Victoria had discovered. I certainly didn’t have a complete set of the assays, and I didn’t think anyone outside of the Prospect Financial offices did, either. But if I could find out who ordered them … it was a long shot, indeed. I dug out my credit calling card, phoned Nevada information, then the number for Kepler Assay Lab in Henderson.

  “Ah, this is Kiki Belknap,” I said when the lab receptionist answered. “I’m Tony Royce’s secretary at Prospect Financial? Listen, Mr. Royce is out of the office at the moment? But I need to be connected to the first person he ever talked to down there—”

  “Miss Belknap,” the voice replied stiffly. “As you must be aware, discussion of assays is confidential. Information can only be released to the person originally requesting the assay.”

  “And for the Eurydice Gold Mine in Idaho Springs,” I said breathlessly, “who exactly was that? We don’t seem to have it in our files.”

  Kepler Assay Labs disconnected. I slammed down the phone. So much for long shots. The sheriff’s department could get the information, but for that you needed a subpoena and all kinds of time. I glanced at my watch: 12:15. I didn’t have all kinds of time. And then I remembered what Marla had said to me a week ago. The mine was producing gold during the Second World War, and FDR had it closed down with that order of his, L-208.… I turned this over in my mind. L-208. I thought about executive orders, pushing the idea back and forth and over again, the way I kneaded bread. Then I replayed what Macguire had learned about some man at Prospect and his last conversation with Victoria Lear: They were arguing about World War II.

  Shouldn’t there be public records about all this somewhere? Back to long shots.

  I leafed through the phone book and called first the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, where I got switched to the Division of Minerals and Geology, which eventually transferred me to the Office of Active and Inactive Mines, where a very helpful person told me that I could fin
d out a mine’s history by getting it pulled—for a fee—from the state archives. Imagining a football stadium full of red tape, I called the state archives.

  “Hi there,” I said in a friendly voice when the archivist answered. “I’m wondering if I could get a quick look at the file on the Eurydice Mine in Clear Creek County. I need it this afternoon.”

  “Oh, is that you, Ms. Lear?” the archivist said with a laugh. “I recognize your voice. But the last time you wanted a quick look at that file, you were here for an hour!”

  My skin chilled to the bone. Now I knew whose voice mine resembled so closely it had scared Albert’s secretary. I replied, “I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”

  I sprinted out to the parking lot and gunned the van toward Macguire’s photo place. While they were hunting for the roll of film, I put in a call to Tom.

  “Have you found out anything?” I asked.

  He sighed. “This guy Albert Lipscomb is bad. Want to know how bad? We just found the body of that bank teller he cozied up to last week. Dottie Quentin. She was supposed to be watching her neighbors’ place. Neighbors had a hot tub. The teller was strangled and then her body was placed in the hot tub with the wooden top on. The neighbors found her when they came back from vacation.”

  “Oh, Lord.” The man with the pictures had returned. I said into the phone, “So what does all this mean?”

  “It means Marla is lucky Albert, if that’s who it was, didn’t kill her. So far though, only a few people here seem to think Lipscomb would come back to settle a score with Tony and Marla. Killing the teller, that they could see, Albert didn’t want her to talk. But why come back?”

  I said, “I don’t know. Maybe Albert and Tony are in on something together and are trying—successfully, as it turns out—to throw law enforcement off their trail. Have you found out anything about Marla?”

  “Only that you were right. Shockley’s out for blood. Hers.”

  I said I wasn’t surprised and signed off. I paid for the pictures and rushed back to my van, where I slid the envelope open.

  Macguire’s graduation pictures showed joyful, silly, mugging faces of teenagers atypically dressed in blouses above long chiffon skirts and pristinely white shirts and striped ties. The first picture after the graduation batch was of Macguire’s scarred Subaru on a dirt road with pine trees in the background. I was willing to bet this was up by the Grizzly Creek campsite. Then Macguire had held the camera out to take a picture of himself swathed in a camouflage-cloth poncho. The rest of the photos were of Tony and Marla in the rain, busying themselves around the campsite. They’d pitched the tent on a mound. They’d lit the Sterno, heated and then eaten the soup I’d sent up. Then they’d hauled water out of the creek, cleaned up their dishes, and put the trash into the trunk of the Mercedes. This was all as Marla had reported.

  I peered at the pictures of Tony. He wore an unzipped rainjacket, and under it, a sweatshirt with “University of—but I couldn’t see the rest. It didn’t look as if he had the white monogrammed shirt on underneath the sweatshirt, but it was hard to tell with the fading light and the rain.

  The next-to-last photo of the batch was a zoom-in on Marla and Tony’s faces. Tony seemed to be laughing at something Marla had said. Marla, with a look of intense irritation, was staring straight at the camera. In the last picture, Tony had reached over to hug Marla, a movement that exposed his right forearm and wrist. A glimmer of light had caught the movement on film.

  He was wearing a gold watch.

  Chapter 15

  As I exceeded the speed limits on my way to the state archives, I tried to convince myself that Tony was a rich enough dude to have two watches. But why would he have told Marla not to wear her own timepiece? Maybe it was just an issue of psychological control. He wanted to be the one telling time. Having been married to a doctor dedicated to psychological control, I knew the telltale signs.

  Still, I thought as I accelerated the van toward downtown Denver, the fact that Tony was wearing a gold watch at the campsite made things look doubly bad for Marla. I was glad that I, and not the police, had Macguire’s photographs.

  I parked in front of the dull-looking government building, pushed through the vaultlike door to the basement archives, turned a corner, and arrived in a large, well-lit room with two desks, several long tables, a couple of rooms with microfilm machines, and row upon row of stacks. The smiling, frizzy-haired woman identified herself as the archivist. She asked me for three dollars for file retrieval of records for the Eurydice Gold Mine in Clear Creek County, then gave me a puzzled look.

  “Goodness,” she trilled, “you’re not who I thought you were. You sounded just like someone else on the phone. So friendly! But so much in a hurry!”

  “Victoria Lear’s my friend,” I lied. “I know she’s very thorough, but always quite rushed. A good businesswoman, though, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose,” the archivist replied noncommittally, as another patron had shown up at the desk. I knew questions concerning Victoria Lear’s visits to the archives would be fruitless. Colorado librarians take patron confidentiality as seriously as priests do the seal of confession. The frizzy-haired librarian directed me to sit at one of the long tables, and I acquiesced. At least I had received a vital piece of information: Victoria had been here.

  When the archivist brought me the legal-length file with its typed tab: EURYDICE—CLEAR CREEK, I felt a wave of panic. What was I looking for, and how would I know it when I found it? Could I see what Victoria had seen? A grandfather clock standing by a near wall said two o’clock. I ordered myself to get going.

  Something related to World War II. That was what the argument between Victoria and someone at Prospect had been about. I flipped to the beginning of the file and perused an inspection report from 1915: At present the work is confined to driving a crosscut to cut the Jack vein. I read another from 1918: I secured the samples you asked for and will bring them to Denver tomorrow. In 1922, the mine produced 161.8 tons of gold ore, and employed ten people. In 1930 an inspector indicated the character of ore as Gold, Silver, Lead, Zinc. In 1931, a new inspector noted that there was No fire protection and that the mine was not producing: Their objective is to sink the shaft deeper and get under the ore. In 1937, the same inspector stated: The gold and silver ore has played out. There is a large quantity of lead-zinc ore, and mining this on a small scale is their current objective. But by 1944, production of lead at the Eurydice was in full swing, owing to the demand for bullets and resulting good prices for lead. Then in 1947, the mine was inspected and stated to be Closed because of the falling price of lead, now that the war is over. There are no stockpiles. No ore has been sent to a mill or sold in the last year. No staff except a night watchman.

  Wait a minute. I flipped back to the beginning and read through the stack of inspection reports. In the twenties the mine had been producing gold at a good clip. Then the precious metal ore came to an end, and the mine produced lead. There was no mention of Executive Order L-208. The mine had never closed during the Second World War, because the gold at the Eurydice had played out in the 1930’s.

  Victoria Lear had been eager to get started on the initial public offering of stock in the Eurydice Mine. She’d started looking at documentation that someone wasn’t prepared for her to see. The information in front of me had been her death warrant.

  A light rain misted the windshield as I coaxed my van up Interstate 70. Red sparks—brake lights of vehicles ahead—appeared and disappeared through the haze. It was like driving through a dream. I slowed the van and tried to get my racing mind to do the same.

  After the gold was gone, the underlying ore, full of lead and zinc, had provided a bonanza for Albert Lipscomb’s grandfather until the war was over. Whatever enthusiastic belief Albert’s grandfather may have had that there was still gold in his mine was based on hope rather than reality. This hope, a common pipe dream in Colorado, had been fed by Albert, Tony, or both, in securing questionable assays an
d, I was now willing to bet, buying off a shady geologist. But the partners hadn’t counted on Victoria Lear making a trip to the state archives.

  Still—how did you get from there to Albert disappearing with all the money? And why had he felt he had to kill the teller? And what was Tony Royce’s role in all this?

  I sped up the van. Marla couldn’t have murdered Tony, I told myself. She was impulsive, yes. She had a temper. But as far as I knew, she hadn’t investigated the Eurydice beyond getting Macguire to show one of the Kepler assays to someone at the School of Mines. There was just no way she would fight with her boyfriend, knife him, steal his watch, throw him in the creek, then march over and assault the person who’d photographed their presence at the campsite. And to follow that up by hitchhiking back into town, then hiding out until she could claim she was assaulted by an unknown attacker? No way.

  Now, it was possible that Marla had been extremely angry with Tony. She had ample reason to be, I countered as I braked hastily behind a grocery truck. Tony had been two-timing her. Make that three-timing, if you believed in the existence of the stripper. Or four-timing, if Eileen had lied about their breaking up. No matter what, Tony certainly had been involved with all manner of women until he’d made a pretense of loyalty to Marla. And if Marla knew of his playtime with the med student … I didn’t want to think about it. Besides the infidelity, she could have been upset about Albert’s absconding with her money. Tony hadn’t warned her that his partner might be using a disreputable assay lab. And Tony might have suspected that Albert would steal money from the Prospect partnership account if one of their deals went bad.

  So maybe Marla and Tony had had an argument. Maybe she had even hit him. But Marla wouldn’t, couldn’t hit Macguire. Of course, in the storm, and with him in the rain poncho, she may not have known it was Macguire. Then again, perhaps Tony had been the one to hit Marla and Macguire, plant the evidence, and take off with the gun. But Tony wasn’t bald. And although he’d been wearing a watch, it was not his ultraexpensive one. The Rolex, I was willing to wager, was not a bauble you’d absentmindedly leave behind at your girlfriend’s house if you were taking off for parts unknown.