I Scarce Can Die (Quill Gordon Mystery Book 5)

by Michael Wallace

  “No.”

  “But for whatever my humble medical opinion is worth, I don’t think you’re going crackers.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Of course I could be wrong.”

  Gordon reached for the check. “Let’s go fishing,” he said.

  A QUARTER MILE UP THE HIGHWAY from Collier’s there was a dirt road on the right side that meandered three and a half miles to Tres Piños Lake. The road wound through a dense pine forest that was emitting a potent bouquet after the previous day’s rain. At the end of the road, they came to a small parking area and three picnic tables by the lake, which was picture-postcard stunning by any measure. Three large pines, from which the lake took its name, guarded the outlet, where a small creek began making its way down to the Bellota. The lake, a few hundred acres in size, was flanked by steep, mountains, dotted with stands of pine and aspen. Lingering clouds from the weather system added variety to a deep blue sky, reflected on the water’s surface. Best of all, this late in the season and in the middle of the week, they had the place to themselves.

  They removed their rods, already assembled, from the back of the Cherokee, and Gordon walked the short distance to where the creek emptied from the lake. He scanned the water with polarized sunglasses and returned to the parking area.

  “Doesn’t look too promising here,” he said. “I propose we walk around the lake to the other side, where the creek runs in.”

  “Whatever you say, boss.”

  A perimeter trail ringed the lake, and they followed it heading clockwise. In places it was cut into the mountainside five to 15 feet above the water. At one point there was a flatter, forested section of land between the slope and the lake. As they walked through it, they startled a doe and two fawns, who ran off to another section of the copse. In 15 minutes they reached a gravelly beach, 75 feet wide and bisected by a creek coming down from a gorge in the mountains. This late in the season, the creek was six feet wide and six inches deep, delivering a steady flow of cold, pure water into the lake.

  “Nymphs?” Peter asked, as Gordon studied the water.

  “Do you see anything feeding on the surface?”

  “No.”

  “Then nymphs.”

  Gordon’s rod was already rigged with a #16 black A.P. nymph, imitating a larval insect. After jumping the stream to put some separation between himself and Peter, he set a floating indicator six feet above the fly and made a short cast into the current of the stream flowing into the lake. He let it drift out 60 feet, to no avail. Half a dozen more casts produced the same result. Peter, on the other side of the creek, was having similar luck.

  “What’s up?” Peter finally said.

  Gordon reeled in his fly. “Either it’s too early, and the fish haven’t started to feed yet, or they’re down deeper than the six feet we’re fishing. I’m going to try deeper and see what happens.”

  He snipped the fly off the end of the line, tied on another three feet of tippet, then added another six inches at the end of that. He tied the fly back on, clamped a split shot (a BB-sized weight) above the knot six inches from the fly, raised the indicator three feet, and moved back to the water’s edge. He made a short, inelegant cast that nevertheless put the fly and indicator seven feet out in the lake, at the edge of the current from the creek. Stripping out line, he watched the indicator as it floated out into the water. Thirty feet from shore, it twitched slightly, and he raised his rod, setting the hook in the fish on the other end.

  “It’s not too early,” he called to Peter.

  Several minutes later, he had landed, unhooked and released a 13-inch Rainbow. Peter set up his rod the same way and began to catch fish, too. Over the next hour, they caught and released several handsome fish each, half of them Brook Trout. At 10:30, the action abruptly stopped, and after half a dozen casts with nary a nibble, Gordon declared it was time to move on.

  “This is a tonic for the soul,” Peter said after Gordon had jumped over the creek. “It’s good to get away from legal documents and financial searches.”

  “I hear you, but that should be mostly behind us now.”

  “We still don’t know what happened in Connie Baxter’s murder.”

  “And we don’t have to know,” Gordon said. “I’m curious of course, but the reality is I don’t need to solve the case. My mission was to see if there were grounds for seeking to overturn the conviction, or at least re-open the investigation, and we’ve established that there are. I just have a few loose ends to clean up, and after that I can make a report to NGNC and let them take it from there. So the bottom line, my friend, is that we should be able to do a lot more fishing in the next few days.”

  “I wish I could believe that,” Peter said under his breath.

  IT IS DOUBTFUL that San Anselmo — an affluent Marin County suburb of San Francisco — is home to an establishment with the tenor of Tony’s Tip Top Tavern, but in the unlikely event such a place exists, Barbara Chandler (Connie Baxter’s sister) wouldn’t have been caught dead in it.

  Accordingly, Elizabeth was to meet Barbara at Lorelei’s Coffee House, a block and a half from the Tamalpais Theater in the old downtown area. Barbara had said she could be recognized by a copy of I Know This Much to Be True, a novel by Wally Lamb she’d be carrying. The book had been number one on the Times best-seller list two months earlier and was chosen for Oprah’s book club. The latter fact did not predispose Elizabeth to like Barbara, but she reminded herself she had a job to do and set out to do it as thoroughly and professionally as possible.

  Lorelei’s took its name from the Marilyn Monroe character in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and was a museum of Monroe photographs and memorabilia. Elizabeth arrived at 2:28 for a 2:30 appointment, and saw two women at separate tables reading I Know This Much to Be True. Neither of them answered to Barbara, so Elizabeth got herself a medium latte and sat down at one of the few remaining round, wood tables. At 2:40 a well-dressed, well-coiffed, very thin woman walked in, carrying the book, and began looking around. Elizabeth waved to her, and Barbara walked over.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said breathlessly, dropping the book on the table with a thud. “I had to explain yet again to the gardeners how the hedge should be trimmed. I hope they get it this time. I’ll be right back.”

  She walked off to the order counter before Elizabeth had a chance to say hello or introduce herself. Three minutes later she returned with a cup of black coffee and began eyeing Elizabeth’s latte hungrily.

  “I wish I could have that,” she said, “but I have to watch my weight.”

  It looked to Elizabeth as if Barbara had enough room for westward expansion to handle a latte — several if she wanted them. But she kept the thought to herself and instead said, extending her hand:

  “Elizabeth Macondray. Thank you so much for coming.”

  “Not a problem, if it’s about Connie. I brought the book because I still have three hundred pages to read before our book club meets on Sunday. It’s almost nine hundred pages. The rule at our book club is that we’re not supposed to do any books that are over four hundred pages because we are, after all, very busy people. But Mary Anne Morris was choosing for this month, and she wouldn’t hear of anything else. So there we are. Plus my husband, Harvey, who’s a doctor, is going to fixate on the medical scenes and drive the rest of the club to distraction. I mean, I love him dearly, but when he gets on that hobby horse, everybody else tunes out.”

  She paused for a sip of coffee, and Elizabeth tried to get a word in edgewise.

  “Book clubs can be trying,” she said.

  “Do you belong to one?”

  Elizabeth laughed. “I teach English, so it would be a busman’s holiday for me.”

  “Well, what are you reading now?”

  “Felix Holt The Radical, by George Eliot.”

  “Eliot. Don’t think I’ve heard of him.”

  “Nineteenth century author.” She was about to add that Eliot was a woman, but checked herself. “Mostly read
in college English classes, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh.” She took another minuscule sip of coffee. “So you wanted to talk about Connie?”

  “If that’s not too hard for you.”

  “I’ll never get over it completely, but enough time has passed that I can discuss her calmly. What did you want to know?”

  Elizabeth decided to ease into the subject. “For starters, can you tell me what she was like growing up?”

  Barbara considered the question for several seconds. “I think she was pretty happy. We both were. We grew up in a suburb of Sacramento. Our father worked for the city, and our mother was a nurse. She went back to work part-time when we were a bit older. But I’d also say Connie was strong-willed and smart in a very practical way. She knew what she wanted and wasn’t above using her brains to do it. But even from the beginning, she had a bad picker when it came to men. She wasn’t interested in the ones who were smart and ambitious. She went for sweet and goofy.”

  “Like Gary Baxter?”

  “Like Gary when he wasn’t drinking. I don’t think she understood the extent of his problem until she married him. Alcoholism wasn’t something we were familiar with.”

  “Did you see any of the trial?”

  “My dear, I sat through the whole thing. It was horrible, but I had to do it for Connie’s sake.”

  “Did anything strike you about it?”

  “You know, when I first got the news, I couldn’t believe Gary had done it. I mean, he was a loser, but I always thought he loved her. I think part of the reason I went to the trial was to try to find out why, and I never did. The prosecution didn’t offer a motive, but of course he was on the scene and drunk, so I guess it had to be him.” She took another sip of coffee. “Still, the lack of motive did bother me a bit.”

  “Did you see Connie perform in The Philadelphia Story — the play she was in a couple of months before she died?”

  Barbara nodded. “I went up the last weekend and saw it three nights in a row. Connie was really good — the best thing in the play, really. I was very happy for her that she found an outlet for her talents. I could see it was picking her up, even offstage. She seemed almost radiant at times — not worn down the way she’d been the past few years.”

  “Did you have a chance to see how she got along with the rest of the cast? Offstage, I mean.”

  “Well, it was pretty obvious that the actor — I can’t remember his name — who played the man she eventually married —in the play, I mean — was hot for her. And the woman who played the photographer seemed to really dislike Connie.”

  “I understood she expected to get Connie’s part.”

  “That would probably account for it, then.”

  “And you don’t think Connie returned the male actor’s feelings?”

  “It didn’t look like it to me, though just between us, it wouldn’t have surprised me if she had an affair eventually. Life with Gary was no bowl of roses, and something like that might have been a way of beginning to make a break with him. I’m convinced they would have split eventually.”

  “One of the things that hardly got mentioned at the trial was that she had $900 in cash in her purse when she was killed. Do you know where that might have come from?”

  “I’ve wondered about that myself. It came to me, you know. We used it to defray her burial expenses.”

  “Could she have saved it from her paycheck?”

  “Oh my God, no. They were poor as church mice. Several times I loaned her a hundred or two to make it to the end of the month. I had to do it from my own allowance, and Harvey would have been furious if he’d known.”

  “Do you think she may have found a way of getting some cash on the side somehow?”

  “It’s possible. Like I said, she was smart and strong-willed. If she saw a chance, she’d take it — as long as she thought she could get away with it and nobody would get hurt.”

  “One other thing, then. In her purse they also found a piece of paper with the number 34,079.14. It sounds as if it was a dollar amount, and I was wondering if you can think of anything it could be.”

  “Unless it was her credit card balance — no. I doubt she made that much in a year.”

  “All right. Well, thank you. You’ve been very helpful, and I know it must be stressful for you to talk about this.”

  “Stress is having to finish this book by Sunday,” Barbara said. “But I’m happy to help if there’s any chance the person who killed Connie is still out there. And I don’t altogether believe Gary did it, in spite of everything. You know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t think he had the passion, gumption or initiative to do something that bold. Not even with a lot of Dutch courage in him.”

  GORDON AND PETER rolled into Dutchtown a little after 2:30, and Gordon did something he realized he should have done earlier. He had let Peter go through the materials on The Philadelphia Story but hadn’t looked at them himself. He was kicking himself for that, and when he looked at the program back at the house, he kicked himself even harder.

  It showed the role of Dinah Lord, precocious kid sister to Tracy Lord (Connie’s part) had been played by Stephanie Pope, and Mac, the night watchman, had been played by Reg Cooper.

  Gordon pulled out the phone directory in the kitchen and found that there were two Popes listed in the Dutchtown area, one of them being Gary’s attorney. And Reg was hardly a common name, so Gordon guessed it belonged to Reg the bartender at Rope’s End. He called Pope at his law office.

  “What’s up, Gordon? You have another bombshell for me?”

  “No bombshells today, just questions. Was the Stephanie Pope who had a part in The Philadelphia Story two years ago your daughter?”

  “She certainly is, and she did a terrific job. And to anticipate your next question, she gave me a bad time over defending Gary.”

  “I’d like to talk to her about that — the play, I mean. Now that we’re looking at possible alternative explanations for the crime, there’s just a chance she saw or heard something and didn’t realize the importance of it at the time.”

  There was a silence for several seconds before Pope replied.

  “Why didn’t I think of that? Look, she has two big exams tomorrow, so can it wait until tomorrow afternoon?”

  “It can wait.”

  “I’ll have her come by the office when school’s out. I’ll even let you do most of the talking.”

  “All right, but you’re Gary’s lawyer.”

  “I’m also Stephanie’s dad, and I’m pretty sure she’ll listen to you more than she’ll listen to me. She could hardly listen less.”

  “All right then. What time?”

  “High school has a half-day tomorrow. They’re out at 12:45. Say 1:30 — give her a chance to eat something beforehand?”

  “I’ll see you then. Oh, and did you get the medical report?”

  “Grudgingly delivered at 9:30 today.”

  “Could you make a copy for my doctor friend? There’s a chance he might see something in it.”

  “Will do. I’ll see you at 1:30 then.”

  Gordon went to the notebook, where he’d been jotting down information about the case and saw a notation that Melissa McConnell was supposed to be meeting with Gary Baxter at Folsom Prison tomorrow. He called her, and she answered right away.

  “Gordon. Good to hear from you. Have you come up with anything, or have you been too busy flirting with Marlene Dietrich impersonators? I’ve been talking to Elizabeth.”

  “Just for the record, Marlene was flirting with me, and yes, I have come up with a few things. But first, are you still seeing Gary Baxter tomorrow?”

  “11 o’clock.”

  “Good. Can I give you a few questions to ask him?”

  “Of course.”

  “For starters, when you talked with Gary before, did he ever say anything about suspecting Connie might be seeing someone else?”

  “Good God — no. Was she?”

/>   “I don’t want to go into everything right now, but there’s pretty good evidence she was. I need to know if Gary suspected anything like that, and, if he did, it’s really important to know who he suspected of being the other man.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out, but you’d think he’d have told his attorney about something like that.”

  “Second, his wife had $900 in twenties in her purse when she was killed. Can you ask Gary if A) he knew about it, and B) he has any idea where it might have come from.”

  “OK. $900 in twenties. Got it.”

  “Next, ask him if the dollar amount $34,079.14 means anything to him.”

  “Hold on. Can you repeat that?”

  Gordon did, slowly.

  “And finally,” he said, “ask him to tell you everything he can about The Philadelphia Story.”

  “You mean the movie with Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart?”

  “No, I mean the summer theater production his wife starred in a little over a month before she was killed.”

  “I didn’t know she was an actress.”

  “I gather she didn’t either until she auditioned for the play. But if Gary didn’t kill her, my nose tells me there’s a good chance that being in that play was where she may have crossed paths with her killer.”

  “All right. Anything else?”

  “Not now. But will you promise to call me tomorrow night and let me know what Gary said.”

  She promised.

  Peter was taking a nap, so Gordon had the house to himself. He made a pot of tea, took the cup out to the deck, and drank the tea slowly, looking at Dutch Joe Creek and at the upper story window in the vacant house where he had seen the woman in white (minus the white) on Saturday morning. There was no sign of life in the house. At 4:15, his cell phone rang.

  “Gordon, Basil Dill here.”

  “Basil. Good to hear your plummy voice again.”

  “Yes. Well, an hour ago I just remembered what had been in the back of my mind about The Philadelphia Story two years ago. I was wondering if we might meet at the Rope’s End and discuss it over a refreshing beverage.”