Tough Cookie gbcm-9

by Diane Mott Davidson

  “Is that why you think I did Arthur’s wine delivery for him? To cozy up to you?”

  “Isn’t it? Everyone knows I was no friend of Doug Portman. Doug Portman was a rotten judge of art who thought he was very smart. His ignorance hurt people. Including me. So what’s the real point of you asking me about Doug Portman at the bistro?”

  “Whoa. Listen. I do love your work. I do want to know how you got started. And it would be helpful if you could tell me if you saw anything suspicious on Friday. That’s it. You don’t want to talk, just say so.”

  She snorted impatiently. “I’ll let you know if I mind talking. Regarding your first question. I tried to make a living as a painter of large abstract oils. Critics, including Doug Portman, loved them. I didn’t sell a single one.”

  “That’s too bad—”

  She lowered her voice and held up an imaginary magazine. “ ‘Ms. Faraday’s groundbreaking canvases depict violence with passion, color, and ontology.’”

  “Doug said that?”

  “Are you kidding? Doug Portman wouldn’t have known the difference between ‘ontology’ and ‘on-line trading.’ Those lines were from some Denver critic. Anyway, I needed to pay the rent, so I tried my hand at making collages. Some critics dismissed them as ‘craftwork.’ Most ignored them. Unfortunately, our one local critic, Doug Portman, hated them because they were small and intimate, not grand or grandiose.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Her smile was a thin slash. “Don’t be. I sold every one of those first collages. I even enjoyed ignoring Doug when he referred to my work as”—here she lowered her voice again—“ ‘saccharine and domestic.’ I formed the Killdeer Artists’ Association, so the artists in town could network to make money instead of being jealous and competitive. Eventually, a few magazine writers did pieces on my work, and I received a stream of orders. Now I have a tidy little business, and I don’t give a hoot about passion and ontology.” She speared a piece of chicken. “Ready for the answer to Question Two? No, I didn’t see anything Friday morning.”

  Watch it, I warned myself. I stalled by taking a sip of water. Actually, I had thought of a couple more questions, on the subject of Nate Bullock and his pregnant widow. If Boots Faraday felt so close to Nate that she came to the annual fund-raiser held in his name, maybe she knew what was going on with my old friend Rorry.

  “I admire your spunk,” I commented with a smile, then pretended to ponder a bit. “The Bullocks used to live in Aspen Meadow, where I’m from. You mentioned an artists’ association. Is that how you got to know Nate?”

  “Yes, I met Nate through KAA.” Her answer was curt, as if she were suddenly under legal cross-examination. “He was a good cameraman, but public television doesn’t pay that much. He joined the artists’ association when he was trying to make some extra money. Then he died.”

  “Nate wanted to make extra money? Doing what?”

  Her face turned rigid. “I really can’t say.”

  “But … he’s been dead for three years. Look, Boots, Rorry was my friend. A long time ago, we taught Sunday school together. She seemed so terribly unhappy yesterday—”

  Boots snarled: “Don’t get me started on Rorry,” then seemed to regret it. After a moment, she continued in a steadier voice: “I’ll tell you why Nate wanted extra money. When you taught Sunday school with Rorry, was she complaining about wanting to have children, but not being able to afford it?”

  I thought back. Had she? I only remembered her wistful admiration for Arch, then a toddler. “No … but that was years ago. I’d love to get in touch with her again—”

  “She works for Killdeer Corp. I think she’s still in the same trailer where she and Nate lived. Shouldn’t be hard to find.”

  “Was Nate trying to make that extra money when he died?”

  Boots glanced out at the gondola whizzing along, high above the beautiful, treacherous mountain. “I told you: I can’t say exactly. He had some film ideas, he had his PBS work. That’s what I know.”

  I got the distinct feeling that that was not all she knew. But I said only, “Rorry is pregnant now. Do you know if she’s seeing someone?”

  “Man, you don’t quit, do you? I don’t know anything about Rorry Bullock’s social life. She doesn’t confide in me.” She took a bite of salad and regarded me warily over her fork. “The gallery called and told me you were in this morning. You turned your nose up at their show and went straight to my stuff. Now all of a sudden you’re my biggest fan, pumping me with questions about my career, Doug Portman, and Nate and Rorry Bullock. Why?”

  The waitress reappeared. I ordered a double espresso and a brownie with vanilla ice cream. Boots declined anything.

  “I just wanted to find out more about Doug Portman. That’s all. Asking about Rorry popped into my head when you mentioned Nate. Honest.”

  “And why do you want to know about Portman?”

  I sighed. “I told you that already. If you don’t want to believe me, don’t.”

  Again she tilted her chin back in appraisal. “How do you take to criticism? I find myself wondering what you thought of the first two sentences under your photo in the Killdeer paper? ‘Some call her the corpulent Queen of Cream. But this caterer is one tough cookie’?”

  I shook my head. The Killdeer paper was not part of my regular reading material, I was happy to say. Which was probably a good thing, since discussing it filled Boots’s voice with vitriol. How she must have hated Doug Portman, with his uncomplimentary critiques. I replied tentatively, “I’d say I’m a tad shy of corpulent—”

  “I know why you wanted to have lunch with me,” Boots interrupted. “You don’t care about my work. Or the artists’ association. And you certainly don’t give a damn about Nate Bullock. You think I killed that son-of-a-bitch know-nothing wannabe critic, Doug Portman.”

  “Did you?”

  “No. But I wish I had. Am I a suspect?”

  “No, you’re paranoid. I’m higher up on the list of suspects than you are.”

  “Were you there when he died, Goldy?”

  “No.”

  “Then why is the sheriff’s department asking you about his so-called suspicious death?” She grinned maliciously. “I mean, if you don’t mind me asking a question or two.”

  “My ex-husband is in jail. Doug was a member of the state parole board. I was skiing with him. It looks peculiar.”

  My dessert arrived and we fell silent. When the waitress left, Boots demanded, “Why do the cops even think it’s a suspicious death in the first place?”

  I sipped my espresso. I couldn’t tell her about the medical patches and the threat, couldn’t tell her about the mysterious closure of the run, or the blood all over the snow. “I don’t know exactly.”

  Boots pursed her lovely lips. Then she said, “Baloney.”

  I shrugged. The anger in her was making me nervous.

  She stood, snatched up her jacket, and flipped her blond hair over her shoulders. “Go to hell, tough cookie.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Well! Let’s do lunch any ol’ time.

  I finished the brownie, sipped my espresso, and reflected on Boots’s news that my crime-solving exploits had been written up in the local paper. How had I missed that? The waitress returned and told me the blond lady had thrown a fifty-dollar bill at her. I told her to keep the change.

  I got directions to Mountain Man Wines, where the manager said he would happily deliver the rest of Arthur’s bottled invites. By the time I got to Big Map, a light snow had begun to fall. Pink-cheeked skiers, their boot buckles clanking, headed past me, bound for lunch after a brisk morning on the slopes. And speaking of food, not only had my meeting with Boots Faraday been less than perfect, I had to assess my first day as a personal chef as a failure. Arthur had not given me a check, had not signed a contract, had only given me a vague list of foods I could put together for his wine-tasting buffet.

  He was going to call, though, and wanted me to do the buffet Mond
ay. Wonderful.

  I passed a line of skiers waiting for the gondola. I clambered up to the bottom of Base View Run, where skiers and snowboarders had to stop to take off their equipment before heading back to the gondola or across the footbridge. At the far left of the run’s end stood Big Map, a fifteen-by-eight-foot plastic-covered diagram of the ski area. Arch was not there.

  I wiggled my toes to keep warm. As the bottom of a run is a precarious place to spend any time just standing around, I worked my way through the snow to get closer to the map. To my right, hooting, calling skiers and snowboarders produced waves of snow as they made sudden hockey stops and stepped out of their bindings. Children, fat as doughboys in their brightly colored down jackets, wheeled this way and that, searching for parents from whom they’d become separated on the hill. Occasionally an out-of-control skier or snowboarder would biff—slang for crash—into one of the kids and send him sprawling. Two ski patrol members standing near the map called warnings, helped the children up, and yanked the tickets of particularly reckless skiers and boarders.

  Arch knew where to find me, so I didn’t waste time trying to spot him among the hordes descending the last leg of the run. I turned to the map and ran my fingers along Widowmaker and Jitterbug Run. My eyes inexorably turned to Hot-Rodder, where Doug Portman had died. With all the stamping around done by the patrol as they tried to rescue Doug, there couldn’t have been much of a crime scene left for the police and Forest Service to investigate.

  My eyes wandered over the diagram to Elk Valley, where Nate Bullock had died three years ago. Nate wanted to make extra money. Doing what? I really can’t say…. Striped red lines indicated both the valley and the ridge above it as out-of-bounds for skiing. Just to the west of Elk Valley lay a green-dotted area labeled Area III Expansion. On the map, I retraced my route this morning along the main road and then to the parking lot by the Elk Ridge Nature Trail. If I had come out the other side of the parking lot the first time, I could have found Arthur’s condo without a hitch. Speaking of directions …

  Near me a ski patroller was carefully buckling yellow straps around a transport sled. I called a greeting down and received an answering smile from the patroller, a young woman with a thin, tanned face.

  “I don’t want to interrupt you,” I began.

  “You’re not. Have you lost somebody? Do you need help?”

  I told her I was just waiting for my son. “But I do have a couple of questions about the map, if you don’t mind.” I introduced myself and said that yesterday I’d done a fund-raiser for Nate Bullock up at the bistro.

  “Yeah,” the patroller said mournfully, “I knew Nate. Everybody did.” Her genuine sadness seemed a contrast to Rorry’s bitter words from yesterday: I’m not sad. Just puzzled. And then there had been Boots’s angry comment: Don’t get me started on Rorry.

  I turned back to the map. “What I can’t figure out is why a high-country-wise person like Nate would go into a dangerous area like that.”

  She shrugged. “There hadn’t been a slide there in thirty years. Nate probably thought he’d be okay.”

  I glanced at the slope. “Rorry Bullock, Nate’s widow? She’s an old friend of mine.”

  The patrolwoman put her hands on her knees, sprang up agilely, and brushed snow from her legs. She was about my height, with dark blond hair poking from beneath her red hat. She moved with a graceful, unconscious athleticism, and as usual at the ski resort, I felt horridly uncoordinated and chubby. But not corpulent. At least, I hoped not.

  “Yeah,” she said, “Rorry’s getting close, now. With that baby about to pop, I’m surprised she came up to the bistro yesterday.”

  “But she did,” I said. “Unfortunately, I was so busy yesterday that I didn’t get a chance to talk with her very much. I know she’s an employee of Killdeer Corp and lives in a trailer, but I don’t know where she works or have her exact address or phone number any more. Any ideas?”

  The patrolwoman harnessed the sled to her shoulders. “Last I heard, Rorry was working the night shift at the container warehouse. I’m pretty sure her number is listed. Oh, and she has the only green-and-white mobile home in Killdeer.” She expertly stamped snow off her boots, signaling that she was ready to go.

  “Ah,” I said hesitantly. “Do you think it’s okay to talk to Rorry about the avalanche? I kind of got weird vibes from her yesterday.”

  The patrolwoman shrugged inside her harness, then pointed to two patrol members working the bottom of the slope. “Ask Gail. The tall one. She knows Rorry pretty well. She was also on the search team that found Nate.”

  I thanked her and galumphed between skiers and boarders to Gail, whose windburned, leathery face was framed with long, shiny black hair pulled off her forehead with a thick red band. I scanned the slope—still no Arch. As I introduced myself to Gail, I recognized her: she was the woman who’d pulled me up from the snow yesterday morning, when I’d fallen after disembarking from the gondola. She recognized me, too, and said I’d done a great job on the Bullock fund-raiser. How about that, I thought. A compliment, for a change!

  I told her I was looking for my son and his friend, both snowboarders, both late. Gail asked for their description and said she hadn’t seen them, but she’d keep an eye out.

  “The patrolwoman over there by the map?” I asked. “The one with the sled? I told her I was a friend of the Bullocks. She mentioned you were on one of the search teams that went out for Nate.”

  Gail nodded sadly. “Yeah, I was.”

  “Uh, Rorry and I were real close before she moved to Killdeer. I’d like to hook up with her again, bring her some casseroles for when the baby arrives. But she seemed to be in an awfully bad mood when I saw her yesterday …”

  “That figures. The memorial is hard on her, I think. And of course, losing Nate, and then their baby, that was horrible, too.”

  I’m not sad, Goldy. Just puzzled.

  “Uh,” I ventured, “the patrolwoman over there said an avalanche hadn’t come down Elk Ridge for thirty years.”

  Gail shrugged. “You get the right snow conditions, a slope steeper than thirty degrees, a trigger, it could happen anywhere. That’s why we set explosives on some peaks. We want to anticipate slides.”

  “But there wasn’t an explosive trigger for the avalanche that killed Nate. Or was there?” Before she could answer, I heard a familiar yell: Mom! followed by Goldy Schulz! just in case there was any doubt what Mom was being summoned.

  From the other end of the run, Arch waved at me with both hands. “Hey, Mom!” He and Todd, their snowboards leashed to their ankles, scooted toward me. Snow clung to Todd’s hat, jacket, pants, and mittens. His lowered chin indicated discouragement, pain, and embarrassment. He must have taken an awfully bad fall. At least he hadn’t had to be carried off the slope. Speaking of which.

  “The other patroller said you were on the team that actually brought out Nate’s body,” I said to Gail.

  Gail flipped her glossy hair back and scowled at the mountain. “There was a report, all public record, if you want to look it up. I read about you in the paper, wanting to do your own investigations.”

  I shook my head. “I want to know what’s bothering Rorry. I just don’t want to say something to her that would hurt her feelings—”

  Gail’s voice softened. “We believe there was a human trigger for the avalanche. So you might not even want to mention the slide to Rorry.”

  “What?”

  She looked away. “It’s all public record,” she repeated. “There were three sets of tracks at the Elk Ridge trailhead that day. It’s a well-marked hiking area in the summertime, but this was winter, with seven inches of new snow. We saw two sets of boot prints going up, one Nate’s, one somebody else’s. Snow-depth was almost identical, so there’s reason to believe Nate went up with somebody. Still, it’s not impossible that the other person came up later. It’s just unlikely—”

  I stopped her. “Why is it unlikely?”

  “If you f
ollow someone else, you usually step in their tracks. It makes it easier to walk. Nate’s and this other person’s tracks were side by side.”

  “Somebody else was hit by the avalanche that day, but didn’t get killed? Or was killed and never found?”

  “No,” Gail corrected patiently, holding me with her dark eyes. Arch and Todd were twenty feet away. “Somebody went partway up the path with Nate. Then his companion or whoever split off and went up the ridge. Nate descended to the valley. We don’t know why he went there. His footprints led into the slide. We didn’t find him for five hours. By then, he’d suffocated.”

  “And the third set of tracks?”

  Again I got the dark eyes. “Nate’s companion came back down. Running, from the look of the tracks. We never found out who he was. Or she. I don’t know if anyone ever told Rorry about the second person on the slope that day. Probably she knows anyway. So as I say, you might not want to talk to her about it.” She strode away to admonish a skier who’d slammed into an entire family.

  Openmouthed, I struggled to process what I’d just been told. Two sets of tracks up? One down? Did Rorry indeed know about Nate’s companion? And who could it have been? Why hadn’t that person ever shown up?

  “Mom!” Arch was panting. His flushed cheeks were wet with melted snow. “Todd got hit by a lady skier. She bounced off him and crashed into me. Major yard sale and I’m not kidding. Then she yelled at us for getting in her way. I told her, ‘Y’ever heard of Yield to the downhill skier?’ and she shouted, ‘You’re not a skier!’”

  I consoled him while he brushed clumps of snow from his shoulders and complained of prejudice against snowboarders. Poor Todd shuffled up and I asked if he was all right. His ambiguous I guess was followed by a request to take him back to his condo, which I did.

  Arch fell asleep in the Range Rover within five minutes of our leaving Killdeer. By the time I pulled into High Country Towing in Dillon, he was snoring. A man in oil-splashed coveralls unlocked the gates to a lot crammed with vehicles, all of which had seen better days. When I caught sight of my ruined van, an unexpected lump rose in my throat. My trustworthy vehicle, its Goldilocks’ Catering, Where Everything Is Just Right! now crumpled and illegible, had been my companion through years of catering. The van’s sorry state seemed an omen of the loss of my business. I patted the bumper and bid it a silent farewell. Then, before the overall-guy could call the local mental health center, I scooped up Tom’s skis—miraculously unharmed—as well as my own ski gear and my backpack, and roared toward home.