I read carefully, sifting her words for evidence, for any lead that would tell me what had brought about her death, and who had killed her. Experience had taught me that seldom was one person wholly responsible for a murder. One person might strike the killing blow, but it took often many to build the maze of loss and confusion that brought such moments into being. Certainly Chandler’s name was inscribed on every path that led to or from her, and it seemed more and more likely to me that he had been the vector of the killing dose. And yet I couldn’t see him feeding it to her, couldn’t see this man who had lain down with her on softest fleece and listened to her words with such tenderness rising up against her with killing vengeance. Certainly he had forced himself on her in college, not once but twice, first in his rooms and then days later in hers, pressing desperately against her for relief, but would a man like that kill the single thing that released him?
February 21
I’m going back. I thought for a while, how easy to just stay gone. I told myself that after all I’ve been gone five months, and that hasn’t hurt much, so why not just extend it indefinitely? But she says I need to confront things as they are, otherwise I’d probably just pick up where I left off in a new relationship. I suppose that’s true. Truth seems hard to identify anymore.
I wanted to think that what led me to Chandler was some universal need or truth or suffering, but she says I need to look first at just me and my one marriage, and try to leave the rest of the universe out of it for now. I asked her if she had a better perspective on it, and she says that I’m trying to cut myself off from feeling my needs. I guess that’s right. All I feel just now is sad. Sad that I can’t seem to have what I need. With Joe, I have all the security in the world, but no passion. With Chandler, it was the opposite. I try to push this need for passion away from me, but it keeps coming back, seeping into my dreams, both when I’m asleep and when I’m awake. What are my needs? I need to be touched. I need to feel that one special body next to mine. And I need to love the man inside that body. Is the man I need just a phantom from my imagination?
It isn’t just sex I want. I had sex with Joe, but it never filled me. I want my senses. Joe loves me, or at least as well as he knows how, but he has no sense of touch. Chandler knows how to touch me, but I’ve never kidded myself that he knows how to love. He’s not a man, he’s a ghost.
Phantoms and ghosts. I’ll have to learn to tell them apart.
February 22
Home tomorrow. She says I need to remember that it’s okay to have needs, even if they can’t be met. What a novel thought.
So Miriam was going home. Suddenly, I remembered another homecoming; Heather’s mother, the addict who was due home that afternoon from the Betty Ford Clinic. It could not be mere coincidence that this woman had succumbed to cocaine addiction just as Chandler had appeared in the neighborhood. She must know him. Might know where to find him. I looked at my watch: 2:45. If I made all the lights just right, I could be in Genesee by 3:15 and question the woman quickly before her daughter came home from school. I would have to be careful, make certain that Cindey Howard did not see me or my truck pass through the neighborhood, and it would make me a little late meeting Jim in Lafayette by four, but surely the lawyers would keep him waiting, and his aunt’s will had to be more complex than he had thought.
I can make it, I told myself as I put the key in the ignition and turned the truck toward Genesee.
I found Heather Wentworth’s mother sitting in a wrought-iron chair with gaily colored chintz cushions. She had placed it in the middle of the otherwise-empty back deck of her sprawling cedar house, and she was leaning back, tipping the front legs up off the thick wooden planking, sipping at a glass of plain water as she beheld a stand of ponderosa pines and the mountains beyond.
I introduced myself and explained my presence. “I’m a friend of Cecelia Menken’s,” I began. “Her dad asked me to help her move past her mother’s death, and … well, that brings me, among other places here. I’m thinking you might know a little about a man named Chandler Jennings.”
Mrs. Wentworth hurled her glass of water into the grass beyond the deck and began to cry.
I felt deeply embarrassed.
Presently, she began to talk, her words thick with tears. “He used me, you know. Oh, at first I thought it was the real thing, that he truly cared about me, but that was a load of bull. Okay, I was drinking, and I did that part on my own, I know that, but he got me on the coke. Turned me onto it for sex, at first, like it would be so much more fun if we were high, but then it was coke first and the sex maybe, and then just the coke. You want to know about Chandler Jennings? He’s a monster!”
“How’d you meet him?”
Mrs. Wentworth looked up at me like I’d only just appeared, kind of surprised. Her eyes and lips had swollen with the tears, making her middle-aged face seem almost young again, if infinitely tired. “Cindey Howard introduced us. Why?”
“Where? When?”
“Up in Saratoga some weekend, a couple years ago.”
I worked with her awhile, sharpening her recollection. She admitted to some haziness (“The drink, you know … . I have to just deal with that now, be an adult”), but I was able to deduce that Chandler had appeared in her life not long after he had reappeared in Miriam’s. As precisely as I could get her to reckon, he had taken up with her about when Miriam had overheard Cecelia talking with Heather.
And Miriam had thought Cecelia knew. But had she known? Had they been talking about Heather’s mother, and not Cecelia’s?
“Do you know if he was seeing other people in the area?” I asked.
“Chandler? Shit, he was probably fucking half the women in this development.” She rolled her head in misery and let it hang, as if it were no longer of use to her.
“I have just one more question for you. Those weekends in Saratoga—was there a man named Al Rosenblatt there, too?”
“Rosenblatt? I don’t know. There were lots of people up there. Could have been.”
I described him.
“Oh, that one. Yeah, there was a man like that at dinner with the Howards once. And I saw him at the golf course once, only he didn’t play.”
“Did he ever speak with you, or your husband?”
“With Hector? Maybe. Yeah, I seem to recall he did, only I’ll be damned if I was invited to join in the conversation.”
“You say Chandler used you. Do you mean to meet other people, or to make a sale of drugs?”
She shook her head lethargically. “Sale? Hell, he gave them to me free.”
“Then what—”
“He wanted information. I can see it all now. I was so stupid!”
“What kind of information?”
“What my husband’s company was doing. That sort of thing. It’s been takeover city out there. The asshole was just pimping for information. Get me high, screw my brains out, and then pump me for information. What a dumb shit I am!”
“What kind of information?”
“Who was making it, who wasn’t.”
“You mean whose company was doing okay, and who was on the skids?”
“Yeah, tender little nothings like that.”
“And how is your husband’s company doing?”
“Okay now.”
“Meaning?”
“His sales record was slipping, but my, he’s busy now. Always gone. Can’t even be here for my triumphant return.”
“What does your husband sell?” I asked.
“Mud.”
Of course. “Drilling mud.”
“Yes.”
“Does your husband happen to work overseas at all?” I asked, playing a hunch that was beginning to feel more like a certainty.
Mrs. Wentworth waved a limp hand. “Sure. Venezuela, mostly. Colombia, once in a while.”
“And Canada. Edmonton perhaps.”
“Of course.”
“Not,to mention Wyoming.”
“Why not.”
“A
nd his company’s had hard times lately.”
“Haven’t they all?”
“But the happy news is he’s got a new client who’s going to drill a test hole in offshore Africa.”
She opened one bloodshot eye. “How’d you know? Hey, what’s this all about, anyway?”
I phoned Sergeant Ortega from the first pay booth I came to. “Rosenblatt’s smuggling cocaine in bags of drilling mud,” I said.
“Where are you, Em? I’ll send a car.”
“You know, the funny thing is, he didn’t even need Wentworth’s mud company to do it.”
“Wentworth?” I could hear his pencil tap down hard as he began to scribble notes. “First name?”
“Lives in Genesee. Next door to the Menkens. Look him up.”
“Name of company?”
“I don’t know. Try the phone book. But the thing is, there are clay deposits in Colombia. Barite, much purer than our domestic bentonite. There’s even a pharmaceutical application for it, and it’s white—a nice pure white, just like cocaine. They could have used Boomer’s chemical company down there in Colombia. Or maybe they’re doing that, too. Diversification, you know; it’s good for business. Spreads the risks.”
Ortega spoke quickly, keeping his voice low. “Em, you’re way too close now. It’s not just one man on an operation like this; it’s many. And you don’t know who the rest of them are or what they look like and neither do we. Please come to my office right now. Now, Em!”
All the pieces were going together smoothly. “They could have used the pure barite and just swapped half the containers for cocaine, but no, they had to get complicated and use bags of American mud being returned from drilling jobs in Venezuela. They brought them in through Canada. Why? I suppose Canadian customs wouldn’t check as closely as ours. Then once it’s in Canada, they have only to ship it across to Edmonton, a nice oil capital, so it looks like a normal oil-field transit from there. Sure, bring it down into nice wide-open Wyoming, and store it in that shed on the Broken Spoke Ranch; just tell that old moron Po they’re going to drill him a wildcat and make him rich—nobody’ll believe a braggart like him anyway. Fred Howard they need for the African jobs, so they could launder the profits through what look like legitimate investments offshore. Why, I’ll bet they even meant to drill that hole for Po. One-stop shopping: drug storage and money laundering all in one. Problem was, there was a murder on that ranch—lady died of a cocaine overdose—and they thought they’d better not attract any more notice.”
“Em …”
“I wonder what they wanted J. C. for. Shit, they should know they can’t put that boy in harness; he’s too crazy by half.”
“Please.”
“Oh, don’t worry about me, Carlos. I have to go to Lafayette to see a friend. A boyfriend, goddamn it, and no, it has nothing to do with any of this. To hell with my little life, anyway.”
I was late, an hour and thirty-five minutes, to be exact; I hit commuter traffic going up the back way via Rocky Flats to Boulder, and then got stuck behind an accident on the turnpike trying to get to Lafayette. And then I’d gotten lost.
I found Jim Erikson leaning against his rental car in the parking lot outside the lawyer’s office. He looked as stiff as a cigar store Indian, and about as animated.
“I’m sorry, Jim,” I began. I considered lying to him, even made up a quick story about a cement truck and a school bus as I crossed the final ten feet of pavement between us, but that wooden look on Jim’s face told me that no amount of apologizing or fabrication was going to make a difference.
I leaned into him and gave him a kiss, which he did not receive with a discernable welcome. Flesh hit flesh, but that was all. I felt an urge to shake him. Chaotic thoughts spilled about inside me, setting off a rebellion I didn’t know I possessed: I wanted him to thrill me, damn it! What was I supposed to do, fall for some guy like Menken and go stark raving nuts like Miriam? With an angry edge to my voice, I said, “Listen, Jim, it’s been one of those days. I got offered a job at about eight-fifteen this morning, and had to be there like immediately. My next appointment was at noon, to which I was fifteen minutes late, and the one after that at two. And I can’t even begin to tell you how strange each of these meetings has been. I—”
“Well, I suppose it can’t be helped, then,” he said nonsensically, his face stiff with indignation. “Where do we go from here? You free for dinner, or do I need to get back in line?”
Fury rose up and shot words out of my mouth before I could control their tone. “No, I’m not free for dinner. Like I’ve been trying to tell you, I’m in the middle of a really weird day, and—”
“Later then?” he said, eyes flaring.
I paused, my gears fully jammed. Later? What, were we supposed to go to bed? To bed with a man who had just rendered a kiss into sawdust? I briefly considered taking him to Betty Bloom’s house. What would she think of him? Would she laugh? “Well, I’m staying with this woman who doesn’t like me to bring men … ah, guests home, and—”
“Fine, then. I’ll send a card when I get home.”
“Listen to me! I’ve got the Denver Police and the FBI or something telling me to lie low. I’ve got a landlady who doesn’t like men. I’ve got a half-finished case hanging over my head. I’ve got—”
Jim squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh, so that’s how it is. Didn’t you learn anything out there in California, nearly getting killed? Do you go looking for this kind of trouble?” To himself, he muttered, “What were you thinking of, Jim? She didn’t want this to happen, and you knew it.”
Never argue with a wounded man, I told myself. Try apologizing. But when I looked down inside myself, I found not regret, but anger. Anger that he didn’t care what I had been doing with my time. Anger that he was angry with me rather than worried. And yet I was too uncertain of myself to simply walk away. I took a deep breath, tried to sound upbeat. “Listen, you’re going to be here several days. Can’t we get together—” I stopped, realizing that of course I would be gone. Flying. I had scheduled that cross-country flight for first thing the next morning, and no one knew about that plan but me and Peggy. Yes, I had to go, what safer place could Carlos Ortega ask me to be? Wide-open space was the safest place for a ranch-bred woman like me. Out in the back of nowhere, or down the creek hidden among the cottonwoods … .
Jim’s eyes were open again. As he read the abstraction in mine, his face went slack with resignation. He opened his mouth and spoke his mind: “Woman, you are as slippery as a cake of soap.” He climbed into his rental car and rolled down the window. “If you wake up in the middle of the night and find you’re a leopard with a new set of spots, I’ll be at my aunt’s house in Broomfield, going through her papers. Her name was Priscilla, same last name as mine, because she never married, just like you.”
I stepped back and swept one arm out magnanimously, indicating that he could pass.
There was no time to grieve.
Back in Boulder, I telephoned Sergeant Ortega to tell him where I was.
“They’ll know you didn’t make your flight by now,” he said sadly. “They’ll be looking for you. Come meet me at my mother’s house. You’ll be safe there.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but I have another plan.”
I heard Ortega sigh deeply. “Stay in touch?”
“Don’t worry about me, Carlos. Like I say, I’ve got a plan.”
Betty was watching me, eavesdropping from the living room. When I hung up the phone, she came into the kitchen and planted herself between me and the door that led to my room. “What’s up, Sherlock?”
“Nothing. All right, something, but I think it best if I don’t tell you about it.”
“Have it your way.”
“Anyone call?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been out.”
“No messages?”
“Not the way that thing’s looking.” She lifted the trash can and pointed inside at what was left of the answering machine. It wa
s in five pieces, two large and three small, all sporting prominent fang marks. The message tape was in shreds. “Men,” she commented, staring daggers out the back window at Stanley. “They’re all alike, human or canine. Can’t tell technology from a chew toy. Now, you know why I didn’t have one.”
I stared desolately at these mute remains. Had Fred Howard called again, angrily, or perhaps desperately wanting to know where I was? “Betty, what was the greeting message like that you put on there?”
“Oh, something like ‘You have reached the home of Betty Bloom; now fuck off.’”
“No, seriously.”
“It just said, ‘You have reached Betty’s machine. You know what to do.’”
That seemed uninformative enough. But had I told J. C. Menken where I was staying, and would he tell Fred if Fred asked him? I was sure I had written a spurious address on the forms I had filled out that morning, but had I given the real one at any time? I strained to remember. Couldn’t. Hell. “Betty, I’m sorry to tell you this, but I’ve got to … um, get gone for just now. Um, there are some men who might come looking for me, and, um, it’s best if they not find me. Or you.” I smiled weakly.
Betty gave me a look that could fell a raccoon at twenty yards. “Well, darling, you know my opinion of men.”
“I can’t say you’re wrong this time.”
“Safety in numbers?”
“Stanley coming?”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“I think we should hide my truck somewhere and take your car.”
Betty began to smile. “Getaway driver. I like that.”
“I’ll teach you a little escape-and-evasion driving.”
“Better and better.” Betty pulled back her wild red hair, gathering it into an elastic ribbon to ready herself for action. “I favor a little camping, myself. The air’s been so pleasant, and there’s supposed to be a nice moon tonight.”
I watched her move methodically about the kitchen, picking up her keys, readying a few delicacies to snack on, and a thermos of coffee. I had known her only a short while, and yet her gestures were already familiar. I took comfort, trying not to notice that the similarity lay in a self-sufficiency born of female bachelorhood. I said, “Just so long as you can get me to Jeffco Airport at dawn.”
Only Flesh and Bones Page 22
