Authors: Laura DiSilverio
“My name’s Georgia Goldman,” I said, approaching the counter. “I was hoping I could
speak to Dr. Sloan for a few minutes.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
I shook my head, conscious that the waiting moms and teens could hear every word.
“No. I was hoping he could maybe squeeze me in between appointments. I only need a
few minutes.”
Shuffling through some file folders, the receptionist said, “We only do exams by appointment,
Ms. Goldman. If you’re thinking about braces—”
“Braces! I’m—”
“—for your overbite, then—”
I didn’t have an overbite! Did I? My tongue pushed against my top teeth. “I’m not
here about braces,” I said thickly.
“Oh.” He studied me, taking in my plum-colored mohair jacket and my gold Bob Mackie
tank top. “A sales rep. Dr. Sloan only meets with salespeople on—”
“I’m not in sales, either. I’m a private investigator.” I like telling people that.
The hum of conversation behind me quit, and I glanced over my shoulder to see everyone
in the waiting room staring at me. I handed the receptionist my card and lowered my
voice. “It’s a private matter.”
The receptionist looked uncertain. A smocked assistant emerged from the back and called
a couple of names off a clipboard. Two of the kids in the waiting room followed her
back. Then an older, silver-haired man I knew at once must be Dr. Sloan approached
the counter, laid a file on it, and scribbled something on a sticky note. Tanned and
a little thick around the waist, he looked to be in his early sixties.
“Dr. Sloan,” the receptionist said, “this woman—”
I held out my hand and gave him my friendliest smile. “Georgia Goldman. Gigi. I just
need—”
He peered at me, head cocked. “Hm, something for your overbite?”
I was about to inform everyone in the office once and for all that I did not have
an overbite when the doctor added, “I can squeeze you in now. Come on back.”
I shut my mouth and followed him to an exam room with a wallpaper border that had
galloping horses. He gestured me to the full-length, loungelike padded chair with
the powerful light suspended over it. I perched on it and swung my legs up, making
sure my skirt didn’t slide too high. “I’m really—”
“Open, please.” He pressed at the corner of my jaw and I opened.
“Aw weelly ere oo ahsk ahout Hedder-Anng.”
“Um-hm.” Inserting an angled mirror, he inspected my molars. After a second, he pulled
it out and rolled his chair toward the counter to make notes.
Seizing my chance, I sat up straight, banging my forehead on the light fixture he’d
pulled low to examine my teeth. “Ow.” I put a hand to my head but continued, “Dr.
Sloan, I’m here to ask you about Heather-Anne Pawlusik.”
He jolted and the pen slipped from his hand, clinking to the floor. He swiveled. “What?
Who are you? You’re not here about braces.”
“I tried to tell you I’m not,” I said. “I’m a private investigator.”
“Oh, my God.” He dropped his face into his hands. “Did my wife send you? Is this—”
“Your wife? Heavens, no. We don’t do divorce work. Well, not unless we really, really
need the money.”
“Divorce? She wants a divorce?” He looked up, panic in his eyes.
“Dr. Sloan! Hollis. I don’t know your wife. She didn’t hire us. Heather-Anne did.”
Sucking in two deep breaths, he said, “I don’t understand.”
“I’m trying to tell you.” Sheesh, the man went on and on. “Heather-Anne hired us—”
“Who’s ‘us’?” Suspicion glimmered in his gray eyes.
“Me and my partner, Charlie Swift. We own Swift Investigations. Heather-Anne hired
us to find my husband, well, my ex-husband, and—”
“What? You’re not making any sense. I’ve got patients to see.” He stood up, looming
over me on the exam chair.
I could tell he was going to walk out any moment and I’d never get another crack at
him. “When Heather-Anne was killed, the—”
“What?” He turned Casper-pale and sagged like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
He slammed a hand onto the counter to keep himself from falling. “Killed? You mean …
she’s dead?”
“You didn’t know? I’m so sorry I broke the news to you like that. Here, let me get
you some water.” I slid off the awkward chair and got one of those little paper cups
dentists give you to rinse with and filled it from the sink in the corner. Dr. Sloan
took it with a trembling hand and drank. I refilled it twice before he regained control.
“Better?”
He nodded. “Tell me what happened. No, wait.” He crossed to the open door, looked
both ways down the hall, and closed it softly. He turned to face me. “Okay.”
As briefly and gently as possible, I told him about Heather-Anne being strangled.
“Oh, my God.” He ran his hand down his face, dragging the flesh down so he momentarily
looked like a basset hound.
“Were you and Heather-Anne … friends?” I asked.
He gave a snort of bitter laughter. “I thought so at one time. But then I found out
she had more ‘friends’ like me, and I broke it off.”
“More friends like you?”
“I wasn’t the only man she was seeing. I know of at least one other. There may have
been dozens, for all I know. Dozens of men of a certain age and income dazzled by
that smile, that hair, that body, and the thought that she found them attractive.
Well, there’s no fool like an old fool, as my wife tells me,” he said.
“You’re not old.”
He gave me a cynical look. “I’m older now than I was this morning, Ms.… Gold, did
you say?”
“Gigi.”
“At first, being with Heather-Anne made me feel younger, vital. Then…” He trailed
off.
“So if you’d broken things off, why did you work out with her on Saturday?”
He stiffened. “How did you know—? My wife
did
hire you! You’ve been spying on me.” He made for the door.
I hurried after him and put a hand on his arm. “No! My partner was meeting Heather-Anne,
and she saw you at the YMCA.”
Turning, he looked down at me, and I realized my hand was still on his arm. I quickly
drew it away.
“Heather-Anne called me. She said she was back in town. I knew she’d been in Nicaragua
or some such place with that crook she ran off with.”
I gulped back an objection at his description of Les. “And?”
“She said she was back in the training business, that she’d missed working with me
and hoped we could get together.” He rubbed his eyebrow. “We got together for a training
session, nothing more. She said she needed money. I felt sorry for her, so I gave
her some. End of story.”
“I’m sorry, but did your wife know you’d given Heather-Anne money again? I heard she
accused her of stealing from you.” I winced as I said it, expecting him to explode.
“Leave Myra out of this. In fact,” he continued coldly, “I don’t know why I’m talking
to you. I’d like you to leave now.” He pulled the door open. One of his technicians
stood there, arm raised to knock. She stepped back and looked from Hollis Sloan to
me and back again.
“Uh, the Braisten boy is ready for you, Doctor.”
“Mrs. Gold has decided she doesn’t want orthodontic intervention,” he said, not even
looking at me. Without a good-bye, he hurried down the hall toward his waiting patient.
The technician escorted me to the waiting room. “Are you sure?” she asked. “Dr. Sloan
is the best orthodontist in the city. He could take care of that overbite in no time.”
“I don’t have an overbite!”
* * *
Back in the Hummer, I examined my smile in the rearview mirror and thought of all
the things I should have asked, like who was the other man that Hollis Sloan knew
had been sleeping with Heather-Anne, and had she said why she was in town again, and
where had he—and his wife—been on Sunday morning when Heather-Anne was getting strangled.
Hollis Sloan had seemed genuinely shocked to hear that Heather-Anne was dead, but
for all I knew he did community theater productions in his spare time and was an accomplished
actor.
I headed back to the office, planning to do some research on Alan Brodnax. After that,
I guessed, I’d have no excuse for avoiding a meeting with Patrick Dreiser. The thought
made me sigh. I craned my neck and looked up through the windshield. Angry clouds
the color of pencil lead made the sky look closer than it had been earlier. I hoped
Charlie got to Wyoming and back before the storm hit.
23
The Laramie County sheriff didn’t look at all as Charlie had envisioned him after
their phone conversation. She’d been thinking tall cowboy, big gut, late middle age.
The reality was shorter, slimmer, and younger. Sheriff Hadley Huff was maybe five-nine,
145 pounds, thirty years old, and looked like a marathoner in a crisply ironed white
shirt and olive-brown uniform slacks. He shook Charlie’s hand when she was shown into
his office and surveyed her with frank interest.
“Former military?” he asked.
When she nodded, he said, “Me, too. Army. Six years. Artillery. You?”
“Air force. Seven years. Office of Special Investigations.”
They spent a few minutes discussing their respective military careers before Huff
opened a file folder. “The Eustis case, huh? I’ve got to tell you, this one eats at
me. I’d only been in office a couple months when Robert Eustis’s body was found. As
I told you on the phone, the case is still unsolved. Bugs me. After you called to
say you were coming up, I made you a copy of the case file. I wasn’t sure if I’d hand
it over, but—”
He slid a manila envelope across the desk to Charlie. She flipped through the crime
scene photos and autopsy report for a moment, then looked up to find Huff’s gaze on
her. The Wyoming state seal on the wall behind him dominated the office.
“You’re being awfully helpful to an out-of-town PI,” she observed.
He smiled thinly. “I’d give assistance to anyone I thought stood a chance of making
progress on this case. You seem like a better bet than most.”
She looked a question at him, and he amplified. “You’re not a quitter. I’ve run twenty-two
marathons, and I can stand at the starting line and look at the people lined up at
the tape and say, ‘quitter, quitter, quitter.’” His finger pointed a different way
on each “quitter,” as if he were singling out individuals. “I can see it in the way
they hold themselves, their expressions, something in their eyes.” He shrugged. “I
think that once you sink your teeth into something, you keep after it. Ever run a
marathon?”
“Once.”
“Finish?”
“Three hours and fifty-two minutes.”
He nodded with satisfaction. “Knew it.”
Charlie felt vaguely uncomfortable at being analyzed so astutely by a young man she’d
known for only fifteen minutes. “Are you saying you’ve quit on the case?”
He smiled broadly, not one whit offended by her question. “By no means, but I’ve got
plenty of other cases in this jurisdiction and limited manpower. I’m viewing you as
an extension of my force, if you will, because I know if I share what I have with
you, you’ll share what you learn with me.” He made it a statement.
“Absolutely,” Charlie agreed, seeing no reason she wouldn’t be happy to pass along
what she found out to Sheriff Huff. She returned the reports to the envelope and set
it aside. “I appreciate the documents, but I’m more interested in your impressions
of the case, the nuances that probably aren’t on any of those forms. Did you have
any suspects?”
“Two.” He held up his index and middle fingers. “Eustis’s son, Robert Junior.” He
folded down one finger. “According to everyone we interviewed, he was mighty pissed
off about his father remarrying and hated the new wife.”
“Amanda Two.”
“Right. He’d persuaded his father to insist on a prenup and was working hard to ensure
that Robert Senior didn’t change his will in her favor. In that scenario, Amanda Two
is dead.”
“If he hated the new wife, why wouldn’t Junior just kill her? Why kill his father?”
Sheriff Huff gave her an appreciative look. “Rumor—confirmed by several sources, including
the local bank manager—has it that Robert Junior was running the ranch into the ground.
Robert Senior was on the verge of taking back financial and day-to-day control of
ranch operations. The son blew up at his dad when he told him and threatened to kill
him, in a café just down the road.” The sheriff nodded to his left. “Did I mention
that was less than a week before the coroner estimates Robert Senior was poisoned?
I guess he couldn’t stomach the humiliation, or the downsizing of his lifestyle, or
both.”
“Your second suspect?” Charlie already knew what he was going to say. “Amanda Two?”
“Bingo. As near as anyone can tell, there’s about three-quarters of a million missing
from old man Eustis’s bank accounts. He’d added Amanda’s name to the accounts right
after marrying her, and large withdrawals of cash were made starting shortly thereafter.
Could have been cash payments for a new bull or piece of ranch equipment, or mismanagement
by Robert Junior, but it looks suspicious. At least, Robert Junior insists it’s suspicious.
In that scenario, Amanda killed her husband to keep him from realizing she was siphoning
money out of their accounts, or
because
he’d already found her out, and ran off to start a new life elsewhere.”
“Is this her?” Charlie passed Sheriff Huff the newspaper photo of “Lucinda Cheney’s”
wedding, the only picture she’d been able to find of Heather-Anne.
“I wouldn’t know. I never met the woman, and no one could produce a photo of her.
I understand she was a platinum blonde, though that’s nothing a box of hair dye wouldn’t
fix.”
“Is there anyone around who would know if this was Amanda Two?”
“Robert Junior. I’m sure he’d be more than happy to see you and give you his ‘evil
stepmother’ spiel.” From the way Huff said it, Charlie could tell he was no great
fan of Robert Junior.
“I’d appreciate it if you could give him a call and ask if he’ll see me.”
Ninety seconds later, Huff gave her a nod as he hung up. “Robert’s out of town, but
his wife says she’ll see you. Her name’s Tansy, and she knew Amanda Two. The ranch
is east of here, north of Thunder Basin. Let me have my secretary print you some directions.”