The Alpine Betrayal (26 page)

“Say, Milo, what’s that blue thing you’re fiddling with?”

Glancing down at his hand, Milo’s long mouth twitched in a dry smile. “This? It’s my pet cock. Want to play with it?”

I giggled. “No, thanks.”

Sometimes Milo wasn’t as dense as I thought he was.

I hoped Vida wouldn’t be too late getting back from Seattle. It was too hot to do yard work, or clean house, or get a head start on the next issue of
The Advocate
. I flopped on the sofa and read for an hour, then took a chance and called Adam. He wasn’t in, but I suddenly realized I hadn’t collected all the items on his wish list. If Curtis Graff was leaving for Ketchikan the next day, I had to get cracking. In less than an hour, the mall would be closed. At least the stores were air-conditioned. The idea should have come to me sooner.

By six
P.M
., I had finished my shopping, coming as close as I could to Adam’s specific desires. I stopped at the Venison Inn for dinner and was surprised to see Matt Tabor sitting alone at a window table. He wore his brooding look, and a feeble attempt by two young women seeking an autograph was rejected with a surly remark. My initial instinct to say hello died aborning. Matt was obviously in no mood for company.

But I was wrong. Five minutes later, Marje Blatt came into the restaurant and walked straight to Matt’s table. He looked up and gave her a tight smile. It appeared Matt was expecting Marje.

As I ate my London broil, I watched the couple surreptitiously. Could Marje be the love of Matt’s life? It didn’t seem possible. How would they know each other? He’d been in Alpine for less than two weeks. She had been engaged to Cody Graff until his death. I chewed very slowly on my buttered carrots. But if somehow they were lovers, what would be more convenient than that Cody should die? I chewed some more, turning the carrots to pap. Matt apparently had a terrible temper and wasn’t adverse to beating people up with a fireplace shovel. Marje, however, seemed of a more peaceable nature. But poison was said to be a woman’s weapon….

I tried to read the signals they gave off between them. Earnest conversation, a serious discussion, no physical contact, not so much as a smoldering glance. Their meal outlasted mine. I dawdled over my lemonade, wished I could smoke about six cigarettes, and finally left while they were still finishing their entrée.

The phone was ringing when I got in the house. I caught it just before it switched over to the answering machine. It was Milo.

“You were right, Emma. Or were you wrong?” He sounded vague. “Whatever. No call was made from Matt Tabor’s room that morning. Whoever he was talking to was with him.”

I told him about Matt and Marje. “I have to be honest, though,” I cautioned. “I didn’t see any sparks fly.”

“Hmmmm.” Milo was musing, and I could see him fingering his long chin. Or his pet cock. “Marje would have been at work that time of day, right?”

“Probably.” My hunch was teasing me. “Are you keeping an eye on Matt?”

“Not really, why?”

“I just wondered.” There was something I had to say, to
tell Milo, to keep the hazily evolving idea alive in my mind. “How’s Reid?”

“I haven’t heard. What’s up, Emma? You sound antsy.”

“I am,” I admitted. “Say, where’s Curtis Graff staying? I’ve got to see him before he goes back to Alaska.”

“He was at Patti’s, but he may be at Cody’s apartment, clearing stuff out. That’s my guess. The number’s in the book.”

I found Cody Graff’s listing before Milo did and I rang off. Curtis answered on the first ring. To my surprise, he offered to come up and collect Adam’s parcels.

He arrived half an hour later, just as I felt the first breath of fresh air filter through the evergreens. Curtis was wearing a dress shirt, no tie, but tailored slacks. I couldn’t help but stare.

“You look sharp,” I said, showing him into the living room. “I don’t have the gumption to get dressed up in this kind of weather.”

He gave me a diffident smile. “I’ve got a dinner reservation in less than an hour at Café de Flore.” His eyes roamed the living room, taking in my Monet and Turner prints, the stone fireplace, the braided rug my great-grandmother had made almost a century earlier. I expected him to comment on the decor, but instead he shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at me sideways. “I’m taking Dani to dinner. She could use an evening out.”

“Well!” I cleared my throat. “That’s nice, Curtis. She’s been through hell.” I collected myself and turned a level gaze on him. “Now—and a long time ago.”

To my further surprise, Curtis sat down on the sofa. “I’m getting the idea that a lot of people know the truth about what happened—a long time ago. Maybe that’s good.”

I seated myself in the armchair opposite him. “You don’t sound positive.”

“I’m not.” He was now looking away, in the direction of the tall oak cabinet that housed my alphabet soup collection of audio-visual pleasures: TV, VCR, CD player. Curtis’s gray eyes had the same restless quality as his brother’s, but
there was no sign of Cody’s sulkiness. “It’s tough,” Curtis said, after a long pause, “to know when you’ve done the right thing, isn’t it? I mean, even if you’ve pondered long and hard, and you know it’s the only way, you still don’t feel easy in your mind.”

Curtis’s remarkable, if cryptic, little speech caught me off guard. “Life is very complicated,” I said, falling back on a platitude. “Are you talking about dealing with other people or making independent choices?”

For some reason, my query brought a faint smile to Curtis’s face. “Not independent. No, not at all. Let’s just say it’s about people.” He rested one leg over the other knee, careful of the crease in his slacks. “I must sound weird. Coming back to Alpine after all these years has been an unreal experience.”

“I should think so. It would feel odd under any circumstances, but with Cody getting killed, it must almost make you sorry you came.”

“I had to come.” His face had turned very earnest; the words almost sounded desperate. “But I’ll be real glad to leave tomorrow night.”

“Curtis,” I said, hoping to strike a balance between friendly curiosity and professional interrogation, “why
did
you come?” I hoped my tone would imply that I had a right to know and that he had a duty to tell me.

His response came slowly. Curtis’s teeth worried his lower lip and his fingers thrummed on his knee. “I wanted to see Dani.”

“You care for her that much?”

Above the shake rooftop, I could hear the cawing of crows. A car took the corner too fast on Fir Street, causing the wheels to screech. On the other side of town, a Burlington Northern freight whistled as it slowed on its ascent into the mountains.

“Dani’s special,” Curtis said at last. “I don’t mean because she’s a movie star. She was always that way. Even when she was a kid, there was something different about
her. She didn’t
act
different, she just
was
different. It’s hard to explain.”

I had an inkling of what Curtis meant: Reid Hampton had described her as
luminous;
but the word was too extravagant. Dani Marsh struck me as more down-to-earth. “She seems like a very decent person. Vulnerable, too, the kind you’d want to protect.”

Curtis nodded energetically. “That’s it. She’s tough in some ways, but not in others. Her mother is the other way around. I mean, Patti talks tough, but she really isn’t. Dani’s the opposite. And she’s decent, all right. You got it.” He seemed pleased with my analysis.

“I’m guessing that you weren’t pleased when Dani married your brother.”

“I sure wasn’t.” Curtis scowled at the memory. “Anybody could have told her it was a bad idea. I don’t think it took her more than two weeks to figure it out for herself.”

I was searching for another roundabout way to ask the obvious. It’s not easy for a journalist to avoid direct questions. But unlike Vida, I couldn’t be so blunt in casual conversation.

“Yet they stayed together for over a year,” I remarked, “and went ahead and had a baby.”

Curtis put both feet on the floor and stood up. “They stayed together for over a year. That’s right.” He moved in a semicircle, one hand ruffling the hair at the back of his neck.

Curtis didn’t seem inclined to elaborate. “The baby’s death must have sealed the fate of that marriage,” I said. “How did Cody take it?”

Curtis gave me an odd look, part puzzled, part scornful. “He acted all broken up. He blamed Dani for going out.”

“But Cody was with the baby,” I pointed out.

Scorn vanquished puzzlement. “That’s right.” Curtis bit off the words.

“What happened that night, Curtis?” I’d finally managed to ask the direct question.

Curtis looked as if he were going to sit down again, but
instead he wandered to the end of the sofa. Deep in thought, he gazed at the end table—at the telephone, answering machine, pen, notepad, and my prized Tiffany lily lamp. “Dani called the fire department. She was hysterical, almost impossible to understand. I was on active status, so I answered the phone. All I could figure out was that something terrible had happened.” He was speaking dispassionately, divorcing himself from his memories. “A couple of other guys and I went out to their trailer home, ready for anything. Art Fremstad was already there. Dani was a little calmer, but still a mess. Cody was blubbering into his beer, trying to drink himself stupid. Little Scarlett was dead, probably had been for almost an hour.”

He stopped, presumably gathering courage. Curtis moved the length of the coffee table, pausing by the floor lamp with its shade of geometric stained glass. “I got sick. I threw up in their bathroom.” He hung his head. “Then Doc Dewey came. He asked Art and me a lot of questions. It dawned on me what he was getting at. But he never said anything. He just sort of looked at us, and at Dani and Cody, and said to send for Al Driggers and the hearse.”

“But you knew then that the baby’s death wasn’t natural?”

Cody’s face had darkened, his features looking sharp in the shadow cast by the lamp. “Not for sure. There were some marks on her face, but Cody said he’d tried to revive her. You don’t want to think about the other possibility.”

“No,” I breathed. “Of course not. Especially when it’s your own brother and his child.”

Curtis wrapped his fingers around the lamp’s slim column and stared straight at me. “But,” he said softly, “it wasn’t his child.”

I sucked in my breath. My jaw must have dropped, and I knew I was gaping stupidly at Curtis. “What …” I began, but Curtis’s face had closed up, as if he had given everything he had, and the larder was empty. Judging from the blank look in his gray eyes, his soul was empty, too.

“I’d better go meet Dani,” he said in his normal voice.
“It takes a while to drive down to Café de Flore if there’s heavy traffic coming over the pass on a Saturday night. You got Adam’s stuff?”

I did, having hastily packed everything into a large cardboard box just before Curtis arrived. I thanked him, wished him well, and hoped he enjoyed his dinner. It was almost dark when I watched him go down the walk to the street where Cody’s pickup was parked. I wondered if Curtis intended to drive it to Café de Flore or if Dani was going to borrow Matt’s Zimmer.

Most of all, I wondered about little Scarlett’s father. Perhaps Curtis had been suffering from grief as well as shock when he’d thrown up in his brother’s bathroom. It struck me as very likely that Curtis Graff hadn’t lost a niece that summer night, but a daughter.

It was after ten o’clock when Vida called. “Did you have a good time?” I asked, envisioning the Pacific Science Center in ruins.

“Yes, yes, never mind that,” she said in a voice that sounded as if her engine was racing. “Listen, Emma, I just tucked Roger in and went through his belongings to get his dirty clothes. I found the medicine young Doc Dewey gave him. Amy had sent it along, but Roger forgot to tell me.” Vida took a deep breath while I waited for her to launch a new attack on the modern approach to child-rearing. “Emma, it’s Haloperidol.
Doesn’t that beat all?”

I
DROVE OVER
to Vida’s in my bathrobe. She couldn’t leave Roger, of course, lest he parboil a burglar or engage in some other childish prank. Insisting that I see for myself, and convinced that despite modern electronic switching equipment in the telephone company’s central office, our words could be overheard, Vida had asked me to come to her house.

I arrived just as she was putting a green-edged cloth over the cage of her canary, Cupcake. “Roger’s asleep,” she said in a whisper. “The poor little fellow is all worn out. He had no idea those security guards could run so fast at the Center.”

I decided not to ask why Roger was being chased, and could only hope that he also had been chastened. At the sound of the tea kettle, Vida whisked into the kitchen. I followed her while she made tea.

“Here’s the stuff,” she said, pointing to an innocent-looking bottle on the counter. “It’s also called Haldol.”

I read the label, with its usual cautions. “Okay,” I said, sitting down at her Formica-covered kitchen table, “so we know the drug existed in this form in this town. So what?”

Vida, unlike most people I know, actually serves tea in teacups. She carried a Radford’s yellow rose pattern for me and an English garden scene by Royal Albert for herself. “Emma—look at that label.” She blew on her tea and waited for my reaction.

I started to read aloud, but Vida gave a vigorous shake of her head. “I’m not talking about what’s there—I’m talking
about what’s not.” Her eyebrows arched above the tortoiseshell frames. “No pharmacy label. Young Doc Dewey took it right off the shelf in his office.”

“Oh!” I sighed at my obtuseness. But I still didn’t see Vida’s point. I admitted as much.

“It means,” said Vida, “that this stuff—which was what Cody ingested—was available at the clinic. Someone could have gone in to see either of the Deweys and made off with a bottle of it and poisoned Cody.”

The theory fell flat with me. “No, Vida. They lock up drugs. You know that.”

Vida’s chin jutted. “I know they don’t. They’re really rather careless. Back by the lab, they have a room which is part dispensary, part supply closet. It’s never locked. I walked right in once and helped myself to one of those travel-sized boxes of Kleenex for the car. I think we should check with Marje and see who had appointments in the week or two before Cody died.”