by Dakota Kahn
I frowned. I can understand the cover-your-butt stuff coming from a politician on a lot of things. But there were two really big points here: a) a man was murdered and, as far as I was concerned b) the wrong man was being railroaded into jail for it.
And here, it seemed to me I was talking to the conductor of this railroad, and he wanted me in the engine room shoveling coal. Or… I guess it would have to be a real old railroad, since there isn’t a lot of coal shoveling going on with trains these days.
Still, my point stood. Mayor Reynolds was part of the problem, and he was looking at me and saying, “you, too.”
“No,” I said aloud.
“No what?”
“No, I’m not going to be part of any operation that’s okay with getting things wrong when a man’s life is at stake.”
“Getting things wrong? This vagrant was caught with blood on his hands the day after he assaulted the man in public!” Mayor Reynolds said, looking like he was talking to a particularly willful and stupid infant.
“One, there was no blood. From what I understand, Mr. Wendover was hanged.”
“I was using a figure of speech,” Mayor Reynolds said, rolling his eyes.
“And it was barely an assault. I was there, I saw it, too. Rip was aggressively interacting in a public forum with the intent to frankly exchange views when Mr. Wendover panicked, and his Mr. Greene practically murdered Rip on the spot.”
There’s a reason everybody hates lawyers. I didn’t tell a lie, it was an interpretation of events presented in a reasonable way to show my client in the best possible light.
“You don’t seem to understand, Becker, so I’ll make it very plain. I’m a politician, plain speaking is not me at my most comfortable.”
He took a deep breath, probably said a private prayer for deliverance, and then looked at me, square in the eyes. It was his equivalent of a steely glare, I guess. I’d give it a 4 on the steely scale, at best.
“On Monday night there is a hard deadline set by the Landowner.” He nodded as if I should be shocked and alarmed he dared mention the mysterious Landowner. “And if we miss that deadline, the offer for development goes off the table for half a decade.”
“Who is this Landowner that—”
He waved his arms again, his hands conducting symphonies nobody could hear. Either our mayor was certifiably insane, or this was a situation causing him deep, deep stress. Heart attack and stroke and nervous breakdown all at once stress.
“We… You don’t need to know this. Everyone’s going to find out.” Another deep breath, another steeling of himself for talking to the idiot. This time, he pulled up the chair, and gave me a real “man of the people” leveling with you look.
“We don’t know who the Landowner is. Before the quake a couple years ago I would’ve sworn that was all state land, but no. It’s been leased to the county ever since Crestgold was a thriving city. This Landowner goes very far back, has very deep pockets and demands complete anonymity. Everything goes through his man at Barker, and he’s the one who put this deadline on the deal. Why? Because he can.”
This was all so arcane and strange that it hardly seemed fair to put a murder on top of the whole odd affair. But there was no helping that. Mr. Wendover was dead, somebody did it. And the mayor still wouldn’t tell me for real why he was in my office.
I reminded him of the fact.
“So you yell and get mad at me, but what do you expect me to do?”
“First, keep it under your hat. The way you were thundering around the sheriff station this morning, I thought you’d end up heading right to the TV station.”
“What? No, I was meeting my client, and now, once I have my office to myself I’ll begin preparing his defense. Or more to the point, try to get the ridiculous charges dropped altogether.”
“No, no, no. You’re not following me at all. Don’t you see, Becker? Can’t you understand? If we do not have somebody already caught for this atrocity, that means… some murderer is walking around my town. This isn’t San Francisco, where the crime is part of the atmosphere. Wendover and Sparks might run out! This has to be solved.”
He could have stamped his foot at the end of that last line. I kept my cool, I kept my swear words in my head and off my lips, and I kept my eyes on his.
“Then get the cops to solve it. They’ve got the wrong guy… and I’m going to prove it,” I said, words that came out when I had no idea what they meant, really, and whether or not I even came close to meaning them.
But they hit the mayor like a 2x4.
“What? No! You’ll go around, what? Asking questions? Spreading rumors? People will find out. They can’t find out!” He was back on his feet, getting ready to conduct his third movement of Reynolds’ “The Mayor Goes Crazy” in D major.
And even if I wanted to suppress a scandal for a mayor who, in every interaction I’ve had with him seemed to be mildly put out by my existence, he seemed to be forgetting where he was. He was right, this wasn’t San Francisco. That city’s big enough someone can keep a secret.
“Whispering Pines is too small a town to keep something like this secret, Mayor Reynolds,” I said, trying not to copy his ‘talking to a stupid child’ tone. I wasn’t completely successful.
“Oh, and you’ll make sure of it, won’t you?” he turned, and then stiffened like a cartoon character who’d been struck by electricity. With a speed that proved his weekend workouts out at the Universe of Fitness were paying off, he was out of my office like a pencil shot from a rubber-band.
I looked out and couldn’t see what set him off. It was a regular morning in Whispering Pines. The sun didn’t get all the way around the mountain until well past 10 most days, and so the morning light was never harsh. It seemed to be dappled by pine needles wherever it shone from, and gave the entire town a shimmery atmosphere.
It was still early on a Saturday (oh, heck, barely even 8:00! This was stupid early) and this was usually a sleepy part of the year. An occasional truck rumbled by, there was breakfast traffic, but it wasn’t crowded out in the world. You could pass by Whispering Pines and barely see a soul between here and your fishing trip or hiking trip or whatever the heck you were doing up and out so early.
It wasn’t until I saw the mayor rushing back into my office with several newspapers in his hands that I saw the delivery truck arcing out of the parking lot. There was a guy in the back of it, wearing a baseball cap and looking very confused. I guess his day job didn’t usually involve the mayor shouting at him as he drove by.
“Look at this!” Mayor Reynolds said, pulling out one of the newspapers, flapping it open and holding it out to me.
It was the Whispering Pines Gazette, a weekly paper that was printed in a kind of magazine folded style instead of a normal newspaper broadsheet, and, if I remembered right it usually doesn’t print on a Saturday. Indeed, the papers in Mayor Reynolds hands (which, technically, he had stolen from other subscribers) were terribly thin.
The word Extra was at the top of the page, and just underneath that, in lurid red, MURDER.
“Who told them?” he said, pointing the paper at me as the printed finger of accusation.
“I told you, Mayor, it’s a small town. I only heard about it when… I was informed by the police that I had a client who required legal representation,” I said, deciding in the spur of the moment that Blake didn’t need his name being mud to the mayor. “And I bet I’m one of the last people in town to know.”
Looking like a Cesar in a room full of Brutuses, Mayor Reynolds shook his head.
“I heard that the man was writing a confession when you stopped him. It would have been in his best interest to let him confess. All our best interests. Think about it,” Mayor Reynolds said, giving me a look of conspiratorial iciness.
I don’t know if it was supposed to make me feel scared. I guess it kinda worked, but it also made me mad.
They… I don’t know who “they” were but every hero is always up against some secret
“they” - They wanted this to go away. For all I knew, they wouldn’t even care about whether Rip got off after the deal was inked, as long as everything ran smoothly.
And as slimy as I thought Wendover looked up there on the platform, with his supposed business partner that looked like a mob tough guy and a wife who was some kind of ice princess, he was still dead. Somebody had to be looking out for that, too.
Aw, hell, I thought. Now it’s a darned moral cause. I was stuck with this to the end, wherever that lead.
Chapter 5
Now that I was a volunteer murder solver, I had to figure out just what in the heck it was that those people did. I’d elected myself consulting detective, but that didn’t mean I had idea one of how to go about it.
My first instinct was to call up Blake and be a damsel for him to rescue from distress. But that idea made me feel sour in my stomach and my throat, like I’d swallowed something nasty that wanted to come back up for a rematch. Blake had got me out to the Sheriff’s station while Rip was being forced (at gunpoint, now, in my imagination) to sign a confession to something he wasn’t capable of doing.
As far as I knew.
I sat there, musing, kinda lost, when my e-mail beeped. Long after it should have arrived, the initial police report about the discovery of the body and the arrest of Rip was at my fingertips.
It was written in Blake’s terse cop style, with his “whereupon I discovered the individual” and “upon assessing the situation” and all kinds of things official people do to make sure you’re too bored reading what they write to get anything good out of it. I was trained for reading this kind of thing, though, so here’s the gist:
Sometime between midnight last night and five o’clock this morning, James Wendover came, apparently alone, to his questionably legal construction site. His car was discovered still parked at the office bungalow for the construction about a mile away from Crestgold this morning.
Apparently at some time late last evening there was an injunction from the court - the gallows had to come down within 24 hours, or Wendover construction would be in violation of one of the strictures of the Landowner’s agreement… and they would be unable to compete for the development rights.
It was the workers that Wendover had contacted last night and told to, in their words, “get up at the ass-crack of dawn and tear the thing down” who discovered his body. These workers did just that, but found that Wendover was there ahead of them, hanging dead by his necktie from the hanging beam of the gallows, his feet dangling just above the scaffolding.
Ugh, it was awful to imagine. And they called the police, who found Rip Chiaki in the nearby 150 year old saloon, hollering about “the bastard getting what came to him” and poking at his new tie clip. Wendover’s tie clip.
That didn’t sound good. After Rip was detained, the scene of the murder was examined, and then the body was cursorily examined. Articles belonging to Rip were found on the victim’s person, to wit a cuff link and a tie clip.
“Oh, Rip,” I said out loud, imagining… I don’t know what I imagined. But it wasn’t good, and it definitely wasn’t good for Rip.
After that time, the Detective arrived on scene, and the Chief Deputy took the person of interest into custody.
The Detective was Detective Elizabeth Schlimme. I had met her once socially, and had her in the witness stand about three times in my recent work as a public defender. I don’t know if it’s fair to call her the angriest woman I have ever known. She might just be the angriest person on the planet, a little… no, not little, she’s almost six foot, a big cloud of red hair, growling mouth and chips on shoulders and everything that you don’t want to have to deal with. She might be good at her job, I don’t know, but everybody that works for her gets a funny look on their face when you mention her. It’s like they’re remembering some form of mental jujitsu to keep from saying everything they have thought about that awful, awful woman.
I did not want to cross paths with her if it were at all possible to avoid it.
But that might not be possible, since I had decided I was going to do her job for her.
Unless I could just forget the whole thing, sleep through the weekend and let it all blow over. Come Monday I bet they let Rip out, and somebody gets the development contract and absolutely nobody, thinking back on this terrible incident, remembers lil’ Kate Becker sticking her cute-as-a-button nose in it.
Yeah. Or Rip might just go to jail for something he didn’t do because you sat back and did nothing.
Stupid conscience. After putting the police report and everything else I knew (precious little) into a little report of my own, I left my office and headed to the one place I was not looking forward to, but the place I knew I needed to go.
I headed for the scene of the crime.
Driving out to the old ghost town brought up some old memories. Weirdly sparse memories, as if I they were from dreams, rather than my own youth. To get to old Crestgold, you could start out on the highway, but before you began the steep grade down the mountain, you take a right and plunge right into the mountain’s shadow. After a couple of miles of driving through places with such dense tree coverage you almost think you were heading from the day into the night, you come into the Crestgold valley, where the town once lay spread out like a postcard picture.
Only the valley had been obliterated by the earthquakes, and what was left behind was no town.
The first thing I saw once I came out of the densest pack of trees was the old sign - Crestgold - Ghost Town - Proceed with Caution. Stamped above that was an enormous red Closed to the Public, which itself had been crossed out and replaced with words in yellow, Construction Zone - Official Business Only.
And then, a couple hundred yards of flat-land past the sign was one of the last pieces of old ghost town that still stood where it had been built, more than 150 years ago. An old windmill, once used for drawing water out of the ground but now just an ornament, stood motionless, a mute witness to the rise and fall of the entire Crestgold saga.
Beyond that was a makeshift car-park, with tents and chalked out places for cars to park, most of them empty. In the center of the car-park was a bungalow office. I parked near the office, and got out, breathing deeply the crisp mountain air.
Looking in one direction, away from the car and office but not quite back where I’d come, I could see the breadth of the Crestgold valley. It was hilly, with some prominences rising up almost mountain height themselves. In the winter those would be snow-capped, even if the snow didn’t reach all the way down to Crestgold itself.
Then I turned, and let out an involuntary, “Wow.”
It’s hard to describe Crestgold, the town. The best way to do it is to imagine an elaborate sand castle, making up an entire town. And then someone dive-bombed right in the center of it, tearing huge gluts of sand away. The structures would fall beneath where the sand was dug out… but unlike sand they wouldn’t completely collapse.
So you could see the deep torn ravines, right off the edge of the land, with houses and buildings sticking right up from them. As I stepped closer, I could see the little pockets of isolated land that had been yanked down by the tectonic upheaval, but otherwise remained intact. There was that entire section of the red light district that, though now dozens of feet lower and several yards to the left of where it had been built, still stood.
It was amazing. And dangerous looking. But there were ropes along the paths, and a couple of amazing looking temporary bridges like the kind of thing they showed in the ads of the U.S. Army doing cool dangerous things overseas. It was down one of these temporary bridges that I saw the yellow police tape, and standing right in front of it Deputy Woody Woodman, wearing his mirrored sunglasses, standing with his arms folded.
Woody had been a sheriff’s deputy in Whispering Pines for so long, I remember Aunt Gladys, in one of her rare moments of familial camaraderie, telling us about getting busted by him (for what, she’d never say.) I was never busted because I wa
s never bad, really, but he and my sister Susan became regular acquaintances from her high school shenanigans. Me, he likes.
“Hey, you,” Woody said, with an accent that sounded too backwoods for just about any place in California. “What’cha doing out here, Miss Becker?”
“Oh, Woody, you can call me Kate, you know that,” I said, tromping down the bridge that lead into the preserved section of town.
“Yeah, but I still gotta know what you’re doing here.”
“I’m representing Rip Chiaki,” I said, and Woody’s face clouded.
“Oh, right. So you know all about this. I bet everybody does, but we haven’t got much of the lookie-loo coming yet. Still a pain to get down here,” Woody said.
“Yeah, it’s a ways and… Oh, Woody, you know Rip couldn’t have had anything to do with killing somebody!”
Woody sighed, then pulled off his mirrored glasses. With them on, he could maintain some amount of cop tough allure. Without them his big brown eyes made him look like an old puppy, one that had never grown up into a dog just the way Woody’d never moved up in the department. He was happy being a puppy.
“I know what I know,” he said, cryptically. “But I also know that Liz did her walkthrough and she said it looked pretty open and shut to her.”
“And all of a sudden we’re letting Liz call the shots?” I said, giving him a little coquettish smile.
“She’s the detective,” he said, but he returned my smile.
“And wouldn’t it be gratifying to show up the detective in her own case?” I said.
“Oh, she wouldn’t let that stand. She’d figure out some way to get back at me, I know it.” He nodded his head sagely, then winked at me. “But I’m also old and don’t give a damn. What do you need, sweetheart?”
“I need to look at the scene of the crime,” I said.
“Can’t let nobody near it who ain’t on official police business,” Woody said, lifting up police tape so I could duck underneath it.
