Dying for Chocolate

by Diane Mott Davidson

  He said, “Just a few questions, if you can manage it.”

  Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts . . .

  I nodded and followed him, slowly, slowly. The BMW was behind me now. I was leaving Philip to strangers, foreign men in suits who would make their decree. It was unbearable.

  My name again. Yes. I got into the patrol car. I tried to focus on the policeman, but Philip’s face invaded my mind. Could you describe what happened? Yes. Even then something inside said: I can describe it. What I can’t do is explain it.

  Outside the car, snow fell like soft feathers, sticking in some places, melting in others. When I tried to think of what I was going to do with Adele’s T-bird, I would see the back of Philip’s car, see the black smoke belching, see his forehead and cheeks sprayed with blood.

  The ambulance came. Paramedics splashed through the mud. Someone brought me a paper cup of coffee, told the cop the EMS guys had hooked the victim up to a machine to send telemetry down to a Denver hospital. A doctor had confirmed that Philip Miller was dead. Somebody from the coroner’s office was on the way.

  Now a new policeman, a state patrolman, asked my name, the location of my vehicle, and if I was the one who had witnessed the accident from the other direction. When I made my answers he handed me a notebook and said to write down all I had seen. I wrote and passed it to him. While he was reading, someone rapped on the window of the patrol car. The patrolman, whose name tag said only Lowry, stepped out of the car. When he got back in he was grumbling.

  My head throbbed. “May I go now?” I asked. I was seized with a surge of panic, as I had been when one of Arch’s classmates was killed in a school-bus accident two years before. I needed to see Arch, to be with him, to make sure he was okay. I said, “I need to get home. To my son.”

  Where exactly was he, Lowry wanted to know, where was home? I dived into the muddle of my brain. Where was Arch now? At the school. He needed to get to the Farquhars. Yes, Lowry said, the police would phone and have Arch call home.

  Home. The word brought tears, finally, as if by mentioning one loss there could be grief for all others.

  Elizabeth, Elizabeth Miller, my voice was saying, someone needs to find Elizabeth, someone needs to tell her. And through my blubbering Lowry again extracted information and promised follow-up.

  I took a deep breath.

  Lowry said, “A friend of yours was up in this area and answered the call about the accident. He’s from the Sheriff’s Department, an investigator by the name of Tom Schulz. . . . He wanted to know if you were all right.”

  “He answered the call?”

  “Didn’t know you were in it till he got here. You want to see him or not?”

  “Yes,” I said as tears stung my eyes again. “Please, I’d like to see Schulz.”

  “Soon. About this accident. . .” said Lowry.

  I looked out the window, but could not see Tom Schulz through the crowd. The snow was coming down now in a slanted rush to the mountain meadow, like millions of tiny arrows shooting to earth.

  “Exactly how fast was the victim going,” Lowry wanted to know.

  “It’s on there,” I said, and motioned to the pad. “About forty.” The speed limit was thirty on that road, but you could do forty on most of the straight stretches if you were careful. Which was not, of course, what Philip Miller had been.

  “You see,” I said, “it was more the way he was driving.”

  “And the way he was driving was . . .”

  “Zigzag. As if he didn’t have control of the car.”

  Lowry narrowed his eyes at me. “So what did you think?”

  I shook my head and mumbled something about not knowing. “Maybe car trouble,” I said.

  “Why didn’t he pull over?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what I can’t figure out.”

  Then we had to go back to the beginning, how I had been catering the brunch where Philip had been a guest who had arrived late.

  Officer Lowry said, “Why was he late, do you know?”

  “He’d just had an appointment. Medical, I think.”

  “Something wrong with him?”

  I shrugged.

  “Did he mention his car?”

  “No.”

  “Did he smell like anything?”

  I squinted at Lowry.

  “Like alcohol, for instance,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Did he act at all strange?”

  “Well, he . . .” I reflected and moved uncomfortably in the vinyl seat. Had he acted strange? I said, “He hadn’t had breakfast. . . he was hungry. And he wanted to see me, that’s why I was following him. We were going to have coffee over by his office.”

  “At this brunch, what did he eat?”

  I told him. “Do you know if they reached his sister—”

  Lowry said, “The chief deputy coroner’s already on the way to the school to find the sister. This won’t take too much longer.”

  I was aware of the policeman’s after-shave, of the camphor-scented blanket around my shoulders, of the squeaking noise the front seat made when Lowry turned around to face me. All these made my stomach turn over. I wanted to be where the things and people were familiar. To check on Arch.

  Ahead of us, the county coroner’s van carrying Philip Miller pulled out slowly onto Highway 24. There were no blinking lights. There was no siren.

  “You were telling me what he ate,” prodded Lowry. “I need to know what he drank, too.”

  “I’ve told you all I saw him eat. He may have had some juice or coffee, I don’t know.”

  “Did he complain of stomach or headache, fever, dizziness, chest pain, anything like that?”

  “No.”

  “Okay,” said Lowry. He asked about how to reach me and said someone might call later. I gave him the Farquhars’ address on Sam Snead Lane in the Meadowview area of Aspen Meadow Country Club.

  I started to get out of the car, then said, “I just don’t think I’ve conveyed to you how weird this accident was. An hour ago he was fine. He drove like a maniac into town and now he’s dead. Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”

  Lowry looked at me. He said, “Sometimes when something’s wrong, or when somebody’s drunk, say, they just speed up. They think, I won’t stop, I’ll just get where I’m going and then everything will be okay.”

  “But it was so . . . strange.”

  His jowls trembled when he shook his head. He said, “A lot of car accidents look strange, lady.”

  Investigator Tom Schulz was talking with a short, big-bellied red-haired man when I walked up.

  He gave me a sympathetic look and said, “You okay?”

  I nodded. He made an introductory wave with one large hand.

  “This is one of the coroner’s deputies.” “I just got here,” the man mumbled to Schulz. “This guy a crispy critter or what?”

  I stared at the red-haired man and then lunged for him. Somebody started shrieking, “You bastard, you—”

  “Whoa, Goldy, whoa,” said Schulz as he deftly grabbed me around the middle. “He didn’t mean anything.” But the red-haired man looked at Schulz, who must have given him a Get Lost look.

  He mumbled, “Catch you later, Schulz,” and slunk off.

  Tom Schulz gently turned me around and held me against his big body. He arranged the blanket over my head, then held me out to make sure I was all right. Tom Schulz could use his size to threaten those whom he did not trust. He could transform the broad expanses of his handsome face into a scowl, a smirk, or impassive flatness. But now his green eyes were full of worry, now his jaunty sand-colored eyebrows were drawn into an anxious line. He pulled me in for a hug. I closed my eyes and let his warmth envelop me. He said, “I thought you said you were all right.”

  “Not if I have to listen to some idiot.”

  “Sorry about that. You work for the coroner, you gotta keep the distance.”

  We got into his car, a nondescript Chrysler you would expe
ct a cop to drive. I looked down at my shoes. They were soaked, splotched with melting snow and mud. I turned to him and heard my voice waver. “A friend of mine just died.”

  Schulz turned and looked at me. He offered his hand, which I took and held. It was warm and fleshy and completely enclosed mine.

  After a moment, he pulled his hand away and leaned over to fasten my seat belt. “Okay, Miss G., let’s get you back to your new place. You’ll have to give me directions, seeing as how I’ve never been there.”

  I told him to drive to the club area. I did not look at the crumpled BMW as we inched past. We traveled in silence. The snow stopped almost as suddenly as it had begun: June in the high country. The clouds, which were low, began to lift from the ground and part in wisps over the hills of Elk Park and Aspen Meadow. Sunlight made occasional passes across the meadow, turning it to glitter.

  “Daylight,” said Schulz. “One P.M., ’bout time.”

  I struggled under the seat belt to untangle my purse, which I had miraculously remembered, then rummaged around for sunglasses. Halfway through my search I forgot what I was looking for. I took a deep breath and threw the purse on the floor.

  Tom Schulz said, “You want to talk about this accident?”

  I gave him the briefest possible account of what had happened.

  “You said Philip Miller was a friend of yours?”

  “We’d gone to school together. C.U.”

  We drove without speaking. Into the silence I said, “I was going out with Philip Miller.”

  More silence. Then Schulz said, “What’s your ex-husband up to these days?”

  I sniffed, looked out the window. “Last month he was bugging me, driving by a lot. Making hang-up calls, inventing legal problems. I was afraid he might get drunk, come over, and give me some trouble. That’s why I took this job. The Farquhars’ house has a lot of alarms.”

  “Does he still see Arch?”

  I nodded and looked at my nails. They looked very strange. I did not want to talk about this subject and said so.

  “Just tell me this,” Schulz said as he looked over at me. “Did Korman know where you were going this morning?”

  I couldn’t think. I said, “I don’t know. He wasn’t at the brunch, although I thought he might put in an appearance.”

  Silence again filled the car. We passed the stone walls with the wood-carved sign, ASPEN MEADOW COUNTRY CLUB. The phone wires would heat up quickly in the club area, because Philip Miller was, or had been, a resident.

  The post-accident daze clung to me like a blanket. Scenes from the last hour intruded on my consciousness: the curves of the road, the feel of the accelerator beneath my foot.

  Philip.

  “I’m up here because some weird guy phoned,” Schulz was saying. With great effort I turned to listen. He mused silently for a moment before he said, “Call comes in and the guy gets out two sentences before he hangs up. He says, You gotta come help me, I live up by Aspen Meadow Country Club. You gotta come help me, my life’s in danger. Click.”

  5.

  I sighed. I said, “That’s just great. Did you get a number, anything?”

  “Anytime you call 911, we’ve automatically got it. Problem is, the guy called from the clubhouse. It could be any number of extensions. They sent a car over, and nothing suspicious was going on. Anyway. I’m going there to check after I leave you off. Someone at home at this house where we’re going, by the way?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  “You got a house key?”

  I was so out of it I couldn’t remember. And then I remembered they were in the Thunderbird. I said, “No keys.”

  “Guess it’s good I turned up, huh?”

  I didn’t answer. In the distance the golf course was a pastiche of soaked green and ice white. The snow was melting quickly, and golf carts were starting their buglike crawl up the paved path.

  For some reason, this struck me as insanity. How could people play golf today? How could they just go on?

  I moaned. Schulz reached over, lifted my left hand from my lap, and held it. He said, “Need me to pull over?”

  I nodded and he did. I opened the door and was sick.

  When I had wiped my mouth with tissues he discreetly handed over, I said, “I’m sorry. I’m so embarrassed.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Let’s just get you to this place.”

  I closed my eyes and mumbled the directions to Sam Snead Lane, a dead end. When I felt a little better I looked out again at the greens, but then changed my mind. Better just to focus on the inside of the car for a while.

  “I wonder if they asked these guys if they could use their names,” said Schulz. I ventured a glance out. Schulz wrinkled his nose as he started down Arnold Palmer Avenue. I told him in a voice that still did not sound like mine that it had been the developer’s idea to make up for the loss of a second eighteen holes by naming the streets after famous golfers. Schulz shook his head. “No second golf course, but a dry sailing club. Houses here look like boats. Great big yachts tied up on the grass.”

  I looked out at the pale gray and tan mini-mansions sailing past. While the other houses in Aspen Meadow were generally stained dark tones of rustic green and rustic brown, here the palette was light. The magnificent dwellings were indeed like ships made of pale wood and glass; they perched on waves of mountain grass rolling down from the tops of the surrounding hills.

  Schulz squinted, rocked the car left onto Sam Snead Lane, then veered right into the Farquhars’ cul-de-sac. The tall and expansive pearl-gray Victorian stood on the highest wave of grass. The house’s brilliant white trim shimmered in the sudden sunlight.

  “Code, Miss G.?” asked Schulz as we arrived at the security gate guarding the fence to the Farquhars’ two acres.

  I stared at the closed-circuit camera and the panel of buttons. After a moment I remembered the code and told him what buttons to press.

  On the porch Schulz pushed the lit doorbell. Inside, the chimes echoed plaintively. General Farquhar’s voice boomed Yes? over the intercom.

  “General,” I said, “there’s been an accident. I’m here with a policeman. I don’t have my keys.”

  “Just a moment,” cracked the voice.

  “Nice security system,” said Schulz. “You living in a separate part of the house?”

  I said, “Sort of. We have two rooms on the third floor, with our own back staircase to the kitchen and pool.”

  “A pool in this climate? Amazing.”

  “Heated. Adele has a herniated disc at her fourth lumbar vertebra, as well as degenerative arthritis. She has to swim every day.”

  “Or ice-skate,” said Schulz.

  There was a clicking behind the door: General Bo Farquhar was preparing to meet the world.

  “Yes?” His sharp features were pinched in puzzlement at the presence of Schulz. “Please,” he said again when he recognized me, “please come in,” and he pulled the door open.

  “I remember this guy from the news,” Schulz whispered to me.

  I shook my head at him and warned with my eyes, Not now.

  “Are you all right, Goldy?” the general barked.

  I took a deep breath and nodded into the demanding gaze of the general’s pale blue eyes. General Bo Farquhar’s eyes weren’t just light blue, they were almost colorless, like his white skin and cropped-close white-blond hair. He towered over me, holding himself as erect as he had in the West Point class of 1960. General Bo Farquhar was not handsome. His lips were too thin, his chin too prominent, his nose too long. But he had the kind of effortless charisma that people pay thousands of dollars to get from image-development corporations. And don’t think he didn’t know it.

  “Quite a system you’ve got here,” said Schuiz after introductions.

  “All you need is one ambush,” said the general, with a grim smile. “What happened?” he asked.

  I motioned toward the living room.

  The general started to lead us in that
direction, then turned and said, “You all go in and sit down. I’ll get some coffee. Brandy, too,” he said as an afterthought. Then he pivoted and disappeared across the dining room’s Oriental rug, a lilac-and-salmon-colored Kirman.

  We settled into the pink and green ocean of a living room adjoining the foyer. I sat on one of the two rose-colored couches; Schuiz lowered himself uncomfortably into one of the pale green damask wing chairs. Another Kirman, this one in hues of pink and green, floated beneath us, while on the walls green and pink fans and dried floral wreaths vied with neo-Renoir oils.

  Schuiz said, “Guy seems awful young for a general. Refresh my memory.”

  “He was the army’s ranking man in studying terrorists. Methods and materials,” I said in a low voice. “But nobody told him to share his know-how with the Afghanis. He just did it. He had to retire, sort of a compromise. He still researches and writes about terrorists. My bet is he’s trying to regain the respect of the Pentagon crowd. He is a little odd,” I added.

  “Uh-huh,” said Schuiz as he gazed at the shelves on either side of the fireplace. “Look at that.” He pointed to the Farquhars’ stereo. “Motion detector.”

  I looked, but saw only a small red light on the side of one of the speakers. I knew how to turn off each of the four loops of the security system; that was the extent of my knowledge.

  Schuiz halted his visual inspection long enough to finger a piece of fudge on the coffee table. “Okay if I have one of these?”

  “Sure.” The last thing I wanted to think about was food. As an afterthought, I said, “I didn’t make them.” And then I remembered with sudden pain the golden balloons from Philip, which he’d brought with a box of Ferrero Rocher chocolates.

  Schulz eyed the fudge skeptically. “Does that mean they’re not very good?”

  “It just means I didn’t make them. Julian Teller did. Resident teenager whose father owns a candy shop. Julian’s one of Mrs. Farquhar’s people projects, sort of like Arch and me.”

  Schulz chewed and said, “Not bad.” Then he winked at me. “Not as good as yours, though.”

  I nodded, uncaring. Fatigue was creeping up my legs like cold water. There was a knot in my stomach. The sight of Philip was coming back.