by Thomas Zigal
Chapter three
A home in Starwood was a promise of protected anonymity. Yet the guardhouse and electronic gate and round-the-clock surveillance patrol had not prevented one lone young woman with a carving knife from making her way on foot to the Bauer mansion, where she’d hoisted herself over the stone wall and smashed a patio door with her fists, screaming obscenities, before the security system had finally registered her on the grid. Kurt remembered how frightened Nicole had been that night, how he’d set aside his department notepad to hold her shivering body, consoling her with hot tea and brandy until she’d pulled herself together. Those hours late into the night were the beginning.
“You’ve added more lights,” he said as the limousine climbed the private drive flossed with snow. Even through tinted glass the Bauer mansion looked ablaze. When the automatic gates swung open, he could see strategic new floodlights illuminating the stone walls and garden. Snowflakes drifted like flaming ash through the harsh beams. It felt like Christmas in a prison yard. Maybe that’s what this place has become for her, he thought.
“I took your professional advice and put in some extra bells and whistles since the last time you were here,” she said, glancing at him with mild reproach. “I get that way when there’s no man in my life.”
Kurt smiled skeptically. There was always someone in Nicole Bauer’s life. L’homme du jour. Their identities remained the best-kept secret in Aspen.
With her family inheritance Nicole had built this sprawling split-level palace of glass and lodgepole pine long before Starwood had acquired guards and gates. Her parties up here in the early ’70s were legendary. Kurt’s older brother had once crashed an all-night bacchanal, when Rocky Rhodes and his band were at their peak, and his brother talked about the scene for years. Group sex with French film stars, electric Kool-Aid in the bathtub, Rocky’s melancholy guitar riffing out over the dark valley. Two decades later Kurt was still hearing stories about those Bauer bashes. Graying yuppies around the grill, sighing wistfully, pining for the wild old days in Aspen.
The chauffeur opened the limo door, and when Kurt stepped out after Nicole he bumped the young man, confirming the bulge under the jacket. “You have a permit to carry that piece, Kyle?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“You know how to use it?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
Kyle appeared to be a spruced-up snowboarder she’d dragged off the slopes to play butler and bodyguard. Probably her rainy day boy toy as well. Nordic, mid-twenties, deeply tanned, lank blond hair hanging below the blue chauffeur cap. He looked very familiar.
“We’ve met before, haven’t we?” Kurt said. “Refresh my memory.”
Kyle’s eyes darted nervously below the tipped-down bill of his cap. “It’s a small town,” he said.
Kurt stared at him, trying to remember his case. “You’ve been one of my county guests,” he said. “Remind me of the occasion.”
The young man turned dutifully to Nicole, as if he owed the explanation to her. “I cut a fence,” he admitted with a petulant shrug.
Of course, Kurt thought. Kyle Martin. The self-proclaimed elk defender who had cut down a section of ranch fence near Owl Creek because the fence had long obstructed an elk migratory run. A ranch foreman had wrestled Kyle to the ground and hog-tied him with a cattle rope until the deputies arrived.
“Kyle’s a dear,” Nicole interceded, hooking her arm around Kurt’s and huddling against his body as they trod through the snow toward the bright entrance. “He’s always close by when I need him.”
They crossed the front deck, leaving tracks in the light powder, and Kurt felt a sudden, unexpected affection for the secret nights he’d slipped in and out of these formidable double doors. It occurred to him that perhaps she was a very clever actor indeed, as the tabloids had always portrayed her, and that her entire story was a deliberate lie to lure him back here to those velvet memories.
When the doors opened before them, another young man stood waiting in the rectangle of warm light. “Good evening, Miz Bauer,” he said.
“Good evening, Lyle,” she said, slipping out of her faux fur and dropping it into his arms. In her heels she was six feet tall, her legs unforgettably long and shapely. Tonight she was wearing a black evening dress with thin straps, and her bare shoulders were still brown from a summer tan.
“Kyle and Lyle,” Kurt mumbled, glancing at Nicole. “These boys haven’t killed their parents, have they?”
Lyle could have been Kyle’s dark twin, the domestic version. Hand-woven sweater, suede slippers, his black hair pulled back in a ponytail. Three bead-gems were implanted in the soft cartilage of one ear. Like Kyle, he seemed eager to please his employer. Their behavior struck Kurt as the phony solicitude ex-cons always paid to parole officers.
“Would you like a drink?” Nicole asked Kurt with a tantalizing smile. “Or is this going to be all work and no play, Sheriff?”
“Let’s see the letters,” he said, surrendering his overcoat to Lyle. “I may need a drink afterwards.”
She led him up the spiral staircase to her bedroom, a large open space made cozy by earth tones, Navajo fabric, and Mexican folk art. How well he remembered the comforts of this room. He found himself staring at his own reflection in the glass doors leading onto the deck where that hapless young fool had crashed through the railing on a wintry night like tonight, snow clinging to the panes.
“Make yourself at home,” she said, sweeping her hand across the room in a grand gesture. “The letters are in a safe. I’ll get them for you.”
He sat in a plush reading chair near the bed, removed the tuxedo bow tie, loosened his collar. Slipping off his damp patent leather shoes, he rested his feet on the ottoman and listened to the logs crackling in the fireplace. Several large-scale paintings of animals in the wild, richly layered canvases with thick brushstrokes and dazzling colors, decorated the walls. Kurt had always been fascinated by the one in which a huge howling bear was fending off an attacking bighorn buck while other rams looked on in the blue Rocky Mountain landscape.
I prefer animals to people, Nicole had once told him. They settle things out in the open. Without lawyers.
The night table was only an arm’s length away. He opened a drawer and remembered her private world of lotions and lubricants and that pull-string dope bag of potpourri, the jasmine and sandalwood she always sprinkled on the sheets before making love. He found a plastic vial of pills and read the label. WARNING: DO NOT DRINK ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES WHEN TAKING THIS MEDICATION. It was something called Risperidone, prescribed by Dr. Jay Westbrook—her ex-husband and Aspen’s most prominent psychiatrist. The date indicated that the pills were two weeks old. Apparently Westbrook was still her shrink, though they had been divorced for at least five years.
Kurt found something else at the back of the drawer—a small Beretta hiding like a black scorpion among her effects. He made sure the safety was on, then slid the pistol back under a silk sleeping mask and shut the drawer.
Closing his eyes, listening to the wind crying underneath the terrace doors, he thought he could hear echoes of the room’s many secrets, ex-husbands and otherworldly voices, animal spirits. They should have conducted this business in another part of the house.
“You look comfortable,” she said, reentering the room. “Should I have Lyle bring you a pipe and slippers?”
“You don’t want to spoil me,” he said.
She handed him a small stack of envelopes bound by a red ribbon, six letters altogether. “Here they are,” she said. “I’ll be back in a minute. Sure you don’t want that drink?”
It was nearly midnight and he was beginning to tire. “I could use some coffee,” he said.
“Sorry I’m not more stimulating company,” she said, frowning at him over her shoulder as she walked to the door. “Maybe the letters will provide better entertainment.”
He untied the ribbon. Aspen postmarks, which meant they’d been mailed within a few square miles. Judging b
y the dates, they had arrived at her p.o.b every few days for the past two weeks. The writer had used an old manual typewriter, pica face, maybe an Underwood like the one that had belonged to Kurt’s father, a heavy black antique gathering dust now in the book-lined study at home. A quick glance through the first letter disclosed numerous strikeovers and spelling errors, dropped words, a breathless urgency. Glued to every page were cutouts from hard-core porno magazines and lingerie catalogs, scantily clad women and couples engaged in various sex acts. Large single words spliced from magazines—REAM, GASH, NAIL—had been pasted at random. The pages took on the messy look of a ’60s pop collage. He was prepared to dismiss them as a deranged prank, someone getting off on talking dirty to a one-time celebrity with a scandalous past. Until he began reading.
Rocky and Nicole’s stormy romance had been well documented in tabloids and rock magazines over the years, so the allusions to violent public scenes, legendary recording sessions, and Moroccan holidays did not surprise or impress Kurt. What finally forced him to sit up and take notice was the sex itself. The descriptions sent a shock of recognition through him. Her rituals, her peculiar tastes. Kurt raised a page close to his face and smelled the scent of jasmine, the fragrance that clung to his body for hours after he’d made love to Nicole Bauer.
The door opened and she walked in bearing a silver tea tray with a service of coffee. When she saw the blush on his face she stopped to study him. “Well,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “I see you’ve got past the foreplay.”
Without comment he read on. Whoever had written this wasn’t making wild guesses. In the third letter there were graphic details only someone who had been Nicole’s lover would know. Before i kill you im going to mount you from behind, it said, describing with disturbing precision the way Nicole liked to come pressing her partner’s finger against her. You dont know how much i miss that in the grave. Nothing but worms to fill my void.
“Black?” Nicole said. “Isn’t that how you take it?” She was pouring coffee from a silver pitcher.
“What’s going on here, Nicole?” He felt caught up in some perverse game, the object and rules of which she would reveal at her own leisure.
“I was hoping you would tell me. You’re the cop.”
Despite his suspicion that he was being played for a fool, he opened the last envelope. The tone had turned darker, more desperate. She had betrayed him, the letter said. She was fucking everyone, even the guys in his band. She was going down on women. Wasnt i enough for you? The final passage was a recounting of that tragic night. How he’d found her in bed with that bitch Pariah and it was her fault that he and Nicole had fought. He didn’t mean to hurt her. He didn’t mean to strike her face. But now she would have to die for what she and Pariah had done to him.
Nicole set the coffee cup on a side table next to Kurt’s tuxedo sleeve. She gave his shoulder an affectionate tug and turned to retrieve her Scotch.
Kurt scanned the last paragraph again. Nickie and Pariah, the letter said. They had pushed him through the railing. They had murdered him. Evil fucking cunts.
He refolded the letter, slipped it into its envelope, and placed the stack on the side table next to the steaming coffee. She was staring at him now, trying to gauge his reaction, her face gravely troubled. He understood why she was reluctant to allow the police to examine these documents.
“Is any of this true?” he asked.
A smile brushed her lips. “You must have a poor memory, Kurt,” she said. “I suppose I should feel insulted.”
“Rocky’s death, Nickie. Who was Pariah?”
Her smile vanished. “There was a groupie named Mariah who hung out with the band. Rocky didn’t like her, so he nicknamed her Pariah.”
“Cute.”
“Rocky was ever so cute,” she said dryly. “A real wordsmith.”
Without touching the coffee, Kurt stood up and went to the doors facing the deck. Starless and heavy, the night pressed against the glass with a palpable force, the cold seeping inside, chilling his stocking feet. Snow floated at him on dark currents, tapping the glass like insistent moths.
“Was she here the night he was killed?”
He could see her reflection in the glass. Sipping Scotch, sauntering toward him in a slow, languorous motion. “Are you asking me as a friend?” she said. “Or are you asking me as a cop?”
Like everyone in Aspen, he had followed the trial twenty years ago and was fairly certain there had been no testimony about a third party present at the time of Rocky’s death. He would have remembered something so dramatic.
“You want my help, Nickie,” he said, turning to face her, “you’ve got to be straight with me.”
She was so close he could smell the Scotch on her breath. If she was taking the medication in the drawer, she shouldn’t be drinking like this.
“It was a long time ago, Kurt. I’ve spent half my inheritance in therapy trying to forget that night. Hell, I even married my shrink so I could get free home care. Until that blew up in my face, too.”
A few months after the trial she’d married Jay Westbrook, the man her family’s defense team had hired to testify that she was mentally unstable at the time of the incident. Kurt remembered that a newspaper editorial had cynically diagnosed the marriage as a form of the Stockholm Syndrome—a prisoner falling in love with her captor. Another bizarre turn, but by that time Nicole Bauer had no reputation left to protect.
“Was Mariah here, Nickie? Was she involved in what took place?”
She stepped past Kurt and stared through the glass doors into the night. Wind jiggled the brass handles. “Rocky was beating me up. It wasn’t the first time,” she said in a calm, distant voice, exhaling a weary sigh. “He lunged at me and I fell down and he went through the railing. That’s what I remember, and that’s what I testified at the trial. Nothing else matters.”
Her back was bare in the evening dress, fine smooth muscles he had massaged many times with her oils. “The D.A. might disagree,” he said. If she had perjured herself, or withheld evidence, such a disclosure could nullify the original trial and reopen the case.
“I don’t want to go through that nightmare again.” She turned, her eyes pleading with him. “I’m not a very strong person right now. Isn’t there some way you can take care of this without the whole fucking world peeping through my windows?”
He understood what she wanted. Her own private cop on the case. Professional, personal, discreet. A cop who had compromised himself a year ago and was vulnerable to this emotional blackmail.
“Harassment by mail is a federal crime,” he said. “This is a case for the FBI. They’re very good at tracking down creeps who write dirty letters.”
“Don’t be clever about this,” she said with a quick burst of emotion. “He’s going to kill me. I don’t need some pencil-neck showing up next month with a postal form to fill out. I need help now, Kurt. Tonight.”
“You’re being a bit melodramatic, aren’t you?”
“You’ve read the letters. How could anyone know those things but Rocky?” She leaned into him and kissed his neck. Her body was warm and her hair smelled like an Asian garden, the bouquet from the letters. “Help me, Kurt.”
This felt familiar, her fear, her unexpected kiss. When they’d first met she was living alone and frightened by the memories in her own house. He had lost someone dear to him, too, and was haunted by his part in the woman’s death. They both knew what it was like to live through sorrow and blame. He and Nicole had needed each other, if only for one brief consoling moment.
“There’s a simple explanation, Nickie,” he said, his face against her ear. “One of your old lovers has gone off his rocker. Somebody you’ve told too many secrets to. He’s pissed and crazy and getting back at you.”
She pulled away from him and took a long drink of Scotch. “You have a warped view of my love life,” she said irritably. “You and the rest of this town.”
“It’s going to be someone you know. Someone
very much alive. I’m sure you can come up with a short list of names if you give it any thought at all.”
She gazed past his shoulder into the snowy darkness. “I’m afraid names are a problem,” she said, careful not to meet his eye. There wasn’t a man in Aspen willing to have his name linked with Nicole Bauer’s.
“That’s where any cop would start. A list of unhappy boyfriends.”
He watched a smile take shape and turn wicked. “There are no unhappy boyfriends, Kurt,” she said. “Only the ones who lost their nerve.”
He felt the sting of her remark. She was right, of course. He had stopped seeing her, stopped returning her calls, because their stolen hours together were changing into something deeper and he feared exposure, talk, public ridicule.
“There’s one boyfriend we can eliminate, though, isn’t there?” she said, nuzzling his neck.
“And how can you be so sure of that?” he asked, teasing her.
“Because you’re the only one I didn’t disappoint.”
He smiled and wrapped his long arms around her. No, she hadn’t disappointed him. If she had had another past, another reputation to live down, perhaps they would still be together.
“How is your lip?” she asked, kissing the swollen skin where she’d bitten him. “Would you like some ice for it?”
“It doesn’t hurt so much when you do that.”
“Mmm,” she said. “Then maybe this will help.”
She kissed him again and they fell into it the way they had the first time, their bodies drawn together in a desperate rush. This ember-lit room had once been their refuge against the world on the other side of the glass, cold and dark and stalking with strangers. Now they were back in each other’s arms as if there had been no year apart.
When they were undressed and lying in bed, she opened the night table drawer to search for her potpourri. The stock of the Beretta had slipped out from its hiding place underneath the sleeping mask.
“What’s the gun for?” he asked, sliding his hand along her bare back.
“Nothing to worry about, darling,” she said. “Just an extra precaution.”
