I was jolted from my reading by Julia’s sudden entry into the conference room across from her office, where she had installed me with my lunch and the journal. Julia, who glanced at the journal with such indifference that I knew she hadn’t read it. But then, Miriam hadn’t even bothered to tape these incriminating pages shut. Miriam had known she could trust Julia’s disinterest. “I have to leave for a meeting,” she announced.
My buffalo burger sat half-eaten on the plate. I glanced at my watch: 1:30. Betty Bloom had scheduled an interview with a shrink for two. “Um, I do, too,” I muttered. “Why don’t I take this with me and bring it back later?”
“No way. You can come back if you must, but it will have to be another day.”
“When?”
“Not until Friday at the soonest. I’m going out of town.”
No! “But your secretary could watch me, or—”
“No. N-O. I may not think much of Miriam’s literary compulsion, but she was a friend of mine, and I will not chance that her innermost angst will be scrutinized by the public.”
I groaned, closed the journal, and stood up. “Let me walk you to the street.”
Julia shrugged. “If you insist.”
We took the stairs down five flights just as we had come up, no doubt a health regime that the indomitable Julia had devised to ward off weakness and the grim specter of anyone thinking her conventional. “I’m guessing you haven’t read that journal,” I said, not certain how to dive into the topic.
Julia turned her head toward me. ‘‘Of course not. I have a life, dearie.”
That stung. “But—”
“I’m in a hurry.” She was getting ahead of me, almost jogging down the stairs, the soft lapels of her jacket starting to flap. The curls on her head bounced like a hundred dogged soldiers marching double time quickstep.
“But there was someone she mentioned in there. I was wondering if you knew him. It could be important.”
“Who?”
“Chandler—ah, I forget his last name.” Had Miriam mentioned it?
She shot me a look of openmouthed surprise, then turned her face back toward the stairs and quickened her step.
“Miriam met him in college. Tall, good-looking guy with a mustache.”
Julia spun on me with a look of fury. Checked herself. Seemed frozen, caught in a moment of uncertainty. Then as we reached the street, she said, “I have to go,” jumped into a cab, and went.
TWENTY-TWO
AS I marched up Eighteenth Street toward my next appointment, I decided with appropriate fury that Julia had been wrong, that Miriam Menken had in fact been a very intelligent woman. Case in point, she had known exactly where to hide her journals and with whom.
With these thoughts and the disturbing revelations of the journal teeming in my mind, I burst into the waiting room of the second psychologist on my list, Mary Ann Fielding. Her inner door was closed. I picked up a magazine and took a seat. Flipped pages impatiently. Jiggled my foot. Fretted.
Had Miriam run off to Aspen with Chandler, leaving Cecelia to write frantic limericks? And if so, why had Miriam come back? I wanted to know. I needed to know. So stricken was I by this need that it never even occurred to me to wonder why it seemed so important.
Mary Ann Fielding swept into her offices at five minutes before the hour carrying a shopping bag from Macy’s, glanced briefly at me, let herself into the inner office, and closed the door behind her. Precisely at two, she reopened the inner door and silently beckoned me to enter.
Quiet room. One desk, two chairs, a sofa, floor-to-ceiling bookcase with books that looked unread. Fern. Shopping bag out of sight. She gestured for me to sit down in the chair opposite the desk, then lowered herself into the one facing it, expertly hiding her legs from view.
I sat. Waited.
“What brings you here?” she asked, her voice consumed by the sound-proofed air.
“I’m looking for the right person to help a friend of mine. She’s a teenager whose mother was murdered. Cecelia was there at the time, but remembers nothing. She’s a bright girl who always did well in school before, but now she’s flunking out.” Had her grades begun to slide earlier, I found myself wondering, after she and Heather began to see the gold BMW?
“I see.”
I snapped my mind back into the room. “Cecelia’s been seeing someone else, someone who was trying to help her retrieve her memories, but so far no luck. I spoke with this person myself and, er, thought it better to see who else might be available to assist her.” I squirmed in my seat, my mind straying back to the information I had just read in Miriam’s journal.
“Mmm.”
“Oh, so I’m wondering if you can help.”
“Tell me a little bit more, please.”
“More?”
“Tell me about this girl’s relationship with her mother.”
“Oh. Well, the mother. Ah … well, she’d been gone for a while, you see, but had come back. I’m—this meeting is confidential, right?”
“Of course.”
“Right, so the mother was having this affair—maybe only I know about this, so this ·goes no further, right?—with a man who … well, you see, her husband’s not much to write home about as a lover.” What had Miriam said? Sexual, but not sensual? “I mean, she said as much, or wrote about it, but even I wouldn‘t—couldn’t—imagine, but maybe that’s beside the point. You see, Cecelia dotes on him, and he on her, and I don’t know the mother except from her journals.”
“Her journals?”
“Yeah.” I was getting balled up, uncertain which parts of the story were important—or at least to Cecelia, or to this psychologist—and which weren’t.
“Mmm?” she prompted.
“Well, I mean, can you work with this kind of stuff?”
The psychologist leaned forward, put her elbows on her desk. “This doesn’t sound to me as difficult or as confusing as it may seem to you at this time. Such feelings are not so uncommon as you may think. Of course, you’d need to see me for several months, working on perhaps the simpler aspects of these matters before we could hope to get into your core issues.”
“My what?”
“It takes a while for the therapeutic relationship to become established.”
“What? Oh. No, no, no, you don’t understand. This isn’t for me; it’s for this girl. Cecelia.”
The psychologist smiled encouragingly. “Certainly.”
“No, really.”
The smile spread. I could see teeth now, but the eyes were distant. “No problem. We’ll just talk about Cecelia. I can make time for you on Tuesdays.”
I hoisted myself from my seat. Waved bye-bye as I passed through the door. And closed it behind me. Tightly.
After that little tour of the land of fantasy, I needed to speak with someone I knew would listen to reason. As luck would have it, Sergeant Carlos Ortega was in his office at the Denver Police Department’s homicide squad.
I found him leaning back in his chair, adding a carnitas burrito to his already ample girth. He smiled as he consumed it, dark eyes caressing it with love and gratitude. “Em,” he murmured. “Sorry, this is the only one I got, but there are chips.” He placed a paper sack with big round grease stains on top of a stack of papers on his desk. “Please, help yourself.”
I pulled what was left of my buffalo burger out of the bag I was carrying. “Got you covered. There a microwave around here?”
He gestured toward a hall to his left. “Third door. Hurry back—it’s been much too long since I’ve seen you, friend.”
Once ensconced with a revitalized burger, I told Ortega about Miriam’s murder and Cecelia’s slow decline, about the ranch where it happened, my visits with Julia, Cindey, and J. C. Menken himself. The parts about the journal, I left out.
Ortega listened intently, his round brown face alert, his short fingers carefully managing the soft sides of the shortening burrito so that not a drop of its precious juices would be lost. When I was
done, he said, “Oh, so that’s what you were doing talking to that sheriff.”
“Yeah, well, the Menkens are friends of mine, and you know …”
He nodded. “Mm-hmm. I know about you. Curiosity is like a drug to you.”
“You’re one to talk.”
Ortega smiled. “They still not found out who did it?”
“Right.”
“Some kind of poison, you say?”
“That’s what I hear on the grapevine.”
“Lab work should have told them a lot. But they don’t have the same setup we have here. They may not know exactly.”
“I see.”
“So you talked to the sheriff, and you’ve been poking about the town, too, right? No, don’t answer that. I know you, Em. When your curiosity gets the better of you, you are a force of nature.” He gazed levelly into my eyes.
I returned his gaze. “The sheriff thinks this Po Bradley guy did it, so maybe he isn’t looking far enough. And now I maybe know something that maybe the sheriff does not.”
Ortega waited.
“Well, you remember when we were working on the case at Blackfeet Oil,” I began.
Ortega’s eyes twinkled again. “We? Oh yes, that’s right, you were my boss for that investigation,” he chided.
I wrinkled my nose at him. “And a damn good one. Well, this is that same Menken family. J. C. was the president of the company, remember? Only now the company’s folded and he’s on his own, putting together investment deals for wildcatting and so forth.” As I said this, the image of the drill site on Po’s ranch slid across my mind.
Ortega nodded. Gently pressed the last morsel of his burrito between his lips. Sighed with gastronomic gratification.
“You’ll remember that his wife, Miriam, now the deceased, was gone during that time. Well, Cecelia thought she’d run away with some other man, but J. C. kind of behaved like it wasn’t happening.”
“He’s good at that.”
“Right. And she came back and nobody said boo.”
“Oh. Mmm.”
“But now I’ve found out that she did have an affair, for certain.”
Ortega looked suitably pained at the news that the Menken marriage had been sullied by infidelity.
“No, really, I think it’s important.”
Ortega arranged his face in a mask of polite interest.
I knew this act. This was his way of getting me to spill everything while he told me nothing. Fine, two could play this game; I’d tell him just a little bit more, but certainly not everything. “This guy up in Douglas who rented them the house where it happened saw the guy the same day it happened,” I announced, seeing a possible flaw in my logic even as I spoke: how did I know for certain that the big, mustached Chandler that Miriam had described in her journal was the same mustached man with the ailing gold BMW that Po Bradley had seen the afternoon before the murder? But then again, how likely was it that it could be someone else? Cars of that description were more than unusual in ranch country, and the likelihood that both car and driver would fit the description that closely was near to nil.
My bullet had hit its mark. Ortega’s face had lost its glow of humor. “Okay,” he said quietly.
“So what should I do?”
“How do you know this?”
“I … know this.”
Ortega sighed and folded his hands meekly in his lap, his long-suffering saint posture. “Em Hansen, you’re going to get me in trouble again, aren’t you? And yourself.”
“Could you just give me your opinion? Truth be known, I’d just as soon stay out of this myself.”
Ortega snorted. “Sure, that’s why you already drove all the way to Wyoming. Okay, so you have evidence and you have your reasons to keep it to yourself. But you want to figure this out, or get someone else to figure it out for you. Okay. My opinion? You should turn over your evidence, my friend.”
“I don’t have it.”
Ortega cocked his head, a gesture that gave him the air of an inquisitive chickadee. “Okay, so this is material evidence that you have seen but don’t control. Interesting. You want me to play twenty questions with you?”
“No.”
“You want me to get hooked, too?”
“No. No, in fact I want to get unhooked. I want to know how to get done with it, get out, go home, and mind my own business. I want-”
Ortega hung his head and smiled. “Em Hansen, you will never be the one to go home. You are one of those locos that wanders through this life with the burden of questions that don’t have answers weighing on your heart. It’s as if you thought your mortal soul was in peril.” He touched his shirt above his own corazon. “In Mexico, someone would build a shrine to you, and all the local peasants would come to ask for miracles, but here in Norte America, everyone is much more sane and rational: they just hand you an expense account and ask a favor that might get you killed. But okay, so I’ll look into this and see what I can learn.” He raised his head and looked at me, shook a round finger. “But you must promise this time to try to keep at least your physical self safe.”
TWENTY-THREE
I found an Annie Oakley Bradley in the telephone book, which led me to a care home in Arvada, a suburb not far from Lafayette. She was resting in a wheelchair with her eyes closed, breathing shallowly from a plastic tube strapped underneath her nose. She looked older than Po, much older, but it was probably her illness that made her so gray. She opened her eyes when I said her name. “Who are you, dear?” she asked.
“Em Hansen. I’m from Chugwater. I … I’m looking into the death of the woman who rented your ranch last summer.”
Annie’s eyes fluttered closed again. “Oh.”
“Po said the spread belongs to you. It’s beautiful.”
Her eyes opened again, clearer this time, and a smile spread across her face. “Yes.”
“I’m sorry something so awful had to go and happen there.”
Annie shifted in her chair. “That’s life, I guess. Or should I say that’s death.” She laughed thinly at her own joke.
“I’m wondering if you wouldn’t mind telling me a few things about your brother.”
Her pale blue eyes focused sharply on mine. “Oh? Well, why not? You can’t take it with you. The information, I mean.”
“Right. Well, here it is: I’m trying to figure out why he hasn’t taken better care of his part of the ranch.”
The pale eyes closed again. “Po is a dim bulb.”
“Oh.”
“Always has been. Not lazy exactly, just not half-smart. Course, he was the boy, so the folks left the wad to him, but he didn’t take much to ranching, never did. Just thought he could sit back and lease the land, live on that. Stupid kid.”
“Your land looks much healthier,” I said, immediately sorry for my choice of words.
“Hah. Of course it does. I was the one who knew how to manage the irrigation works. It takes a lifetime to know a bit of land, several lifetimes, even. My pa and his pa both worked those ditches, knew how to catch the runoff, steer it here and there, soak it through the ground, pick it up again downhill and use it again. Po didn’t grasp any of that.” She coughed, stopped to breathe more oxygen from her tube. “Guess Pa couldn’t stand to see it go to nothing, so that part, at least, he left to me.”
“Who’s running it now? It still looks good.”
“Nephew.” Cough. “Good kid. I taught him what I could.”
“Why not leave the acreage to him?”
“Nah, he’s going off to the military soon’s he’s old enough. Can’t make it on eighty anyway. Time to sell it. Bygones be bygones.”
“Yeah.” I paused, thought for a while. “You happen to know about the oil company that approached Po to drill the wildcat on his land?”
“Oil? Yeah. Po told me about that. Bunch of nutheads from Saratoga. There’s no oil our side of the Platte. Up north is where they got oil.”
Saratoga. “Think they’ll drill it?”
“No. Couldn’t of wanted that oil too badly, could they? Bunch of gamblers was a dumb as Po. Guess Po got a free shed out of it, though.”
“Wouldn’t he have gotten a little more than that?” I asked, knowing I was really pushing past the point of bad manners. But Annie didn’t seem to care.
“What d’you mean?”
“Well, money. Leasehold agreement?”
Annie made a pshaw gesture with one hand. “Two cents. You’re wanting to know if it was enough to buy that wife of his another house.” Her dry lips spread slightly with mirth as I started to color. “Wasn’t. God only knows where he came up with that cash.”
I drove back to Boulder and sat, fresh out of ideas of what to do with myself. Time is not always my friend. That evening, it hung about my shoulders like a shackle and chains, holding me in the irritation of the present moment. I had nowhere to go. I had nothing to do. The few friends I’d kept contact with in Denver all lead busy lives, and were not, therefore, available to distract me from my growing restlessness. Even my new landlady had plans for the evening. Stanley the dog snubbed me more bluntly, directing at me doggy sniffs that suggested I smelled foul even by canine standards before retiring to the far corner of the yard.
There was a message for me on the kitchen counter in purple ink advising me that Cecelia Menken had called. For some reason, I couldn’t handle returning the call. Instead, I just slunk upstairs to my room and lay down on the bed. The needs of young girls would have to wait.
Betty Bloom left early the next morning for a rousing spate of exercise at some spa, her wild corona of reddish hair billowing out over a dark green sweat suit and a collar formed of a mint-colored towel. “Don’t forget you have two shrink appointments today,” she called cheerily as she dashed out the back door. “Your hat size ought to be about a five by the time you come home tonight.”
“Ta,” I grunted as I lurched toward the counter to set down my coffee and retrieve an English muffin from the toaster.
“Ta yourself,” she called. “You’ve got Renata DuBois at eleven. Address on the calendar.” I heard Stanley whine pitifully as the door closed behind her.
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