Wash Her Guilt Away (Quill Gordon Mystery Book 2)

by Michael Wallace

  “Argument would be an understatement. More like a catfight. It didn’t last long. Rachel and I stepped in and separated them.”

  “Rachel?”

  “Rachel Adderly. She and her husband are staying in Rusty Spinner.”

  “Is there some reason she got involved instead of Mr. Adderly?”

  “She’s taller and more athletic than he is. And his name’s Bingham. Stuart Bingham.”

  “I see. Kept his name, did he?”

  “She got elected to the Oakland City Council before she married him, so I guess she kept hers, too.”

  “A politician, eh? There used to be a lot of them coming to Harry’s, but they were all men back then. So tell me how the fight started. Who threw the first punch?”

  “Verbally, Wendy. Physically it was April, but it only happened after Wendy called her a dumb slut.”

  “And is she? A dumb slut, I mean?”

  “Nah, she’s pretty bright. Young and a bit confused, but basically a good kid. And she reads people pretty well. She read Wendy well enough.”

  Lilly coughed. “If I could say something, sir. She has a bit of a mouth, but she comes across as trying to get attention, not mean.”

  “Point taken, deputy. So let me ask you, Gordon. Did this fight last night come out of nowhere, or were there indications they didn’t like each other?”

  “I’d say there were indications, yes. Wendy was pretty high-maintenance and could be a bit haughty. April got sort of passive-aggressive with her, and I think Wendy picked up on that. But I’d say it was simple irritation on both sides — hardly enough to lead to murder.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that, and so will the jury, if it gets that far. When somebody ends up dead right after having a fight with someone else, I have to give that someone else a good look.”

  “Of course you do. But I don’t think you’ll find anything there.”

  “How about the rest of the people here? Mrs. Van Holland get into it with any of them?”

  Gordon took a deep breath and looked at the ceiling.

  “It did look to me as if she was flirting with one of the men here.”

  “Which one?”

  “Drew Evans.”

  “Any indication it was mutual?”

  “He seemed to be flirting back. I don’t know if there was any more to it than that.”

  “Was she flirting with anyone else?”

  “Not that I can remember.”

  Rogers tapped the legal pad with his pencil three times.

  “Is that your story? Because I heard she was coming on to you pretty good the night before last.”

  Gordon blushed. Damn Peter, he thought.

  “Sorry. Yeah, she did come on to me a bit in the Fireside Lounge, but there was nothing to it. I think she was just killing time until her husband got there.”

  “Funny way to kill time, don’t you think? But then I never did understand San Francisco lifestyles.”

  “I’m sure no married woman in Lava County would do such a thing. But as my father would say, detective, is there a line of questioning here?”

  “Don’t be a smartass. When a married woman has been murdered after flirting with two men other than her husband, I have to give the two men and the husband a good look. How would you say her husband took this ‘flirting’ as you call it?”

  “He was oblivious. She was pretty careful to do it behind his back.”

  “So it may have been more than flirting?”

  “Not with me.”

  “How about Evans?”

  “You’ll have to ask him.”

  “How about the doctor?”

  “Nothing that I saw.”

  “Sakamoto?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me. If he was looking at a trout fly, she could take off her clothes and sit in his lap and he wouldn’t notice.”

  “Back to her husband, then. Are you sure he didn’t know what she was doing?”

  “As sure as you can be by observing. He just married her at the end of last year, and I think he was still on a pink cloud.”

  “He’ll be off it pretty fast. This’ll all come out now, and who knows what else. That’s the hell of a murder investigation. All right. You can go now.”

  Gordon stood up. “Do you want me to stay at Harry’s?”

  “I’ve talked to you and the doctor already. If you want to leave the property for a couple of hours, that’s OK. But don’t go back to your cabin until we’ve covered that whole area, don’t talk to any reporters, and don’t discuss the case between yourselves. Got that?”

  Gordon nodded. “Understood.”

  9

  THEIR FISHING RODS were in the cabin they couldn’t go back to, so Gordon and Peter were at loose ends. They offered to pay Johnny for the lost day, but he flatly refused. Finally, they decided to drive to town and have lunch at Casa Rosita. It began to rain halfway there, and they had to run 60 feet through a downpour to get into the restaurant.

  It was a weekday, so the girl who had served them on Sunday was probably in school. A pleasant-looking woman who may have been her mother served them. There was hardly anyone else in the place, and it wasn’t long before Gordon and Peter began discussing the murder, in defiance of Rogers’ orders. After going around on it a few minutes, Peter said:

  “I don’t think this is going to turn out to be a roving serial killer. It has to be somebody at Harry’s. The dinners are going to be a lot more awkward from this point on.”

  “Never mind our discomfort. I just hope Detective Rogers sorts it out fast. I didn’t like the way he was questioning me.”

  “He can’t be sure you didn’t do it, Gordon. He has to look at everybody. He was grilling me about why I noticed the absence of footprints this morning and about whether I was sure the light went out in her cabin at 1:45 in the morning.”

  “Which you didn’t tell me about, by the way.”

  “Sorry about that. But once we were back in the lodge, everybody else was there. If I mentioned that in front of the killer, it would give him an edge, knowing that.”

  “Or her.”

  “I guess that’s possible, but somehow I don’t think so.”

  “Me, too. So did you rat out Drew, too, or did you just tell him she was flirting with me.”

  “I told him about Drew. But I just remembered something. The day we arrived, you saw someone coming out of Wendy’s cabin when we were standing on the pier. We assumed it was her husband, but Johnny said it couldn’t have been.”

  “God, I forgot all about that.” He stared at his chips and 7-Up for a minute. “I don’t like this, Peter. There’s only one person it could have been.”

  The bell on the front door jangled, and they looked up. A very wet Cynthia Henley was standing in the doorway, and she immediately made a beeline for their table.

  “I thought you might be here,” she said. “Mind if I join you? Cynthia Henley from the Beacon-Journal.”

  Gordon and Peter looked at each other. There was no polite way to refuse.

  “Please do,” Gordon said. He picked up a chair from the next table and set it perpendicular to his and Peter’s. “But we can’t discuss what happened at Harry’s.”

  “That’s OK. But I had to run over here without breakfast, so I’m starving.” The waitress showed up with another bowl of chips. “Number Two with a chicken taco, please, and a Dr. Pepper.”

  “So did you just stumble across us, or were you looking for us?” Peter asked.

  “I was looking.”

  “And how did you find us?”

  “I figured you were going to have lunch, and there are only so many places here. You picked the best one. I saw the silver Cherokee out front and recognized the license plate.”

  “You knew that?” Gordon said.

  “I was in the parking lot at Harry’s staring at it for an hour. I know every car that was at Harry’s by make and license plate.”

  “All right,” Gordon said. “But this lunch is off the reco
rd, or whatever you call it when you don’t quote anything we say. And since we can’t talk about what you want to talk about, tell us a bit about yourself.”

  “I’m not that interesting. Just another frustrated journalist.”

  “Are there a lot of those?” said Peter. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Oh, yeah. A lot of us got into it because we thought it would be a way to make a difference. So we ran up a debt getting a graduate degree, then we wind up in a place like this, covering water board meetings and school bake sales.”

  “The road to the New York Times has to start somewhere, I guess,” Gordon said.

  “New York Times, hell. I’d be thrilled to death with an offer from the Sacramento Bee.”

  “Is there much of a future? Seems as if cable TV is siphoning off some of the advertising, and the Internet, if it turns into what people are predicting, could affect it, too.”

  “People have been writing obituaries for the newspaper industry for 75 years. It’s not as big as it used to be, but it still keeps going and makes good money. Not that the reporters see much of it.”

  “I hear you. My college roommate works for the Chronicle and he says the same thing.”

  “About the Internet or the money?”

  “The money.”

  The three of them laughed.

  “That snow didn’t last long,” she said.

  “Not surprising, considering it’s May,” Gordon said.

  “Actually,” said Peter, “I was told by several reliable sources that snow at this time of year in this place is an impossibility.”

  “It’s unusual,” she said, “but not impossible. The weather in the mountains can be totally screwy. I’ve been told that five years ago, Cavalry Mountain got a dusting of snow in the third week of August. But this snow melted so fast when the rain came, it probably washed away all the footprints around the murder cabin.”

  “It would have if there’d been any,” Peter said.

  “Peter!” Gordon snapped.

  Cynthia looked back and forth at the two men.

  “You mean somebody was killed in a cabin surrounded by snow and there weren’t any footprints?”

  “Maybe we should change the subject,” Gordon said.

  “How could that happen?”

  “Probably a lot of ways, and you should probably get the information from Detective Rogers.”

  “Sorry. I said we weren’t going to talk about the crime.”

  “That’s all right,” Peter said. “You’re just doing your job.”

  Their plates arrived, and they stopped talking for a few minutes to eat. The rain picked up its intensity, and they could hear it landing hard on the roof of the restaurant and the pavement outside. Cynthia resumed the conversation, staring at her plate as she spoke.

  “Rogers said the victim was a younger woman here with her older husband. She must have been popular — a pretty young woman at a place like this, with a lot of men around.”

  She looked up in time to see Gordon and Peter exchanging glances of disbelief.

  “You mean she wasn’t popular? Why not?”

  “For someone who wasn’t going to talk about the crime, you certainly keep coming back to it,” Gordon said.

  “It’s what she does,” Peter muttered.

  “It’s what I do,” she said. “I can’t help it. There’s going to be a lot of interest in this story, and I want to be sure I get it right.”

  “Is that because of the reputation of Harry’s?” Gordon asked.

  “I didn’t know it had one.”

  “Oh, yes. Quite a history.” Gordon looked at Peter. “Let me tell you about it.”

  With that, he launched into the tale he had told Peter at the same restaurant three days earlier. He kept it going until they finished the meal and the waitress brought the check, which he paid after saying goodbye and good luck to Cynthia Henley.

  10

  THE RAIN HAD LET UP by the time they returned to Harry’s, and the driveway to it was sealed off by a sheriff’s car and a Highway Patrol vehicle. Two TV crews from the small stations in Red Gulch were also at the entrance, mostly huddled in their vans for as much warmth and dryness as the vehicles could provide. Gordon gave his name to the deputy standing sentinel, who waved him through.

  “You have to report to the main lodge,” he said, but they should be opening up the cabins a bit later.”

  Inside the lodge, the scene looked superficially cheery at first, with a good fire going in the lounge and people in small groups reading, talking in low voices, or playing board games. But the way everyone quickly and nervously looked up when Gordon and Peter entered, betrayed the tension they all felt.

  “Can I get you anything to drink?” asked April from behind the bar.

  “Any coffee left?” Gordon replied.

  She poured him a cup and looked at Peter.

  “What the hell,” he said. “I’m supposed to be on vacation. Let me have a beer.”

  She drew him a pint, and he joined Gordon, who had moved to a table with a chessboard on one side of the room. On the opposite side, Rachel and Stuart were at a similar table, deep in play, saying nothing to each other. Rachel was playing white, and from a quick glance it seemed to Gordon that she had more pieces on the board than her husband and that several of them were on his side, in an attack position. Drew and Johnny were sitting in the chairs near the fire, alternating silences with bursts of low-voice conversation. Charles Van Holland sat alone at a table in the middle of the room; a whiskey glass was in front of him, and he lifted it in their direction. Gordon raised his coffee cup in reply.

  “I don’t see Alan,” Gordon said. “I guess he’s being interrogated now.”

  “Now that would be a low-percentage proposition,” Peter said.

  They sat in silence for several minutes until Rogers returned with a bewildered-looking Alan next to him. Alan broke off from the detective and headed for Drew.

  “Gordon!” Rogers called. “Could I have a few more minutes of your time?”

  They walked back down the hall to the room. Lilly was still in his chair, and his notebook was considerably more filled up than it had been that morning. Gordon took the same seat as before. Rogers stared at him for 30 seconds before speaking.

  “I talked with Sheriff Baker this afternoon and told him Judge Gordon’s son was on the crime scene. He suggested I talk with Sheriff Baca[1] down in Summit County.”

  Gordon stiffened slightly. “I hope he’s well.”

  “Pissed off at the world as always. He sent his regards and said you’re a man who doesn’t miss much.”

  “Kind of him.”

  “He wouldn’t have said it if he didn’t mean it.” Rogers took a deep breath and looked at Lilly. “You don’t need to be writing this down, deputy. So here’s the deal, Gordon. I need something from you.” He stopped and looked at the ceiling, collecting his thoughts.

  “I can’t recall that I’ve ever handled a case like this before. The crime scene is a hotel, all the suspects are staying here, they’re mostly from out of town and can’t leave yet, so they’re going to be here for a couple of days talking to each other and saying God knows what. There’s a chance that somebody will say something important when I’m not around, and if that happens, I need to know as soon as possible. But I need someone with judgment paying attention to what’s being said and reporting to me. In short, I want you to be my eyes and ears when I’m not around.”

  “You want me to spy on the other guests?”

  “I want you to help me catch a killer, dammit. You saw what Mrs. Van Holland looked like in that cabin. Did she deserve that? Does anybody?”

  “No, you’re right.”

  “I’m not asking you to take any initiative. I’m not asking you to do something by yourself or search somebody’s cabin. All I’m saying is pay attention to what’s happening around you, and if anybody says something interesting, tell me about it.”

  “I guess I can do that.”


  “Good man. That’s all I’m asking. We’ll meet before dinner the next night or two, however long I’m here. Don’t hesitate to tell me anything at all that you see or hear. This case is a mess, so some little thing you ovehear could make a difference.”

  “I’ll do that, but don’t I qualify as a suspect?”

  “Of course you do. And if the evidence points to you, I’ll have no problem arresting you. I’m keeping an open mind. But I want someone to be paying attention, and you seem like the best bet for now.”

  “You didn’t consider Alan?”

  Rogers laughed. “He hardly knew the victim was here. You, on the other hand, sized up the situation pretty well, and nothing you said was contradicted by anyone else.”

  “Mind if I ask how the case is going?”

  “Of course I mind. It’s an outhouse full of shit. That give you the picture?”

  “I think I get it.”

  “We have an impossible situation, a disaster of a crime scene, weather wiping out the evidence, a dozen suspects with alibis that aren’t alibis, a victim who was begging for trouble and got it, and almost everybody holding back information. Other than that, it’s such an open-and-shut case that the captain figured I could handle it without a partner. I should have retired last month.”

  Gordon smiled. “I’m sure it’ll work out. Anything else?” He stood to leave.

  “Now that you mention it, there is one more thing.” Gordon sat down. “I’m not saying you’re deliberately holding anything back, but I’m getting the sense there’s something you haven’t told me. Maybe something you forgot about and remembered later; maybe something you didn’t think was important enough to mention. My gut tells me there’s something, and my gut is rarely wrong.”

  The two men looked into each other’s eyes for 15 seconds.

  “I thought of something at lunch,” Gordon said. “It happened a few days ago, and I didn’t remember it right away.”

  Rogers nodded and let him keep talking.

  “Sunday afternoon when Peter and I got here, we saw a man leave the Van Holland cabin and head toward the woods. At the time, I assumed it was her husband. But he was on the river with Johnny, so it couldn’t have been him. Don Potter was in town, so it wasn’t him. Drew and Alan hadn’t arrived yet, so they’re out. There’s only one man it could have been.”