Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller
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He flew down the steep hill, pumping his knees, placing his poles high on the crests of moguls, picking up speed, breathing hard. He passed the other skier, the woman, who had stopped to rest in the sun near some aspen trees.
A pain ripped his calf. His leg skidded out from under him—he felt himself falling. One boot, then the other, snapped loose from the bindings; the skis vanished from his sight. He was tumbling, sliding, trying not to tense up. Letting it happen: that was all he could do. Don’t let me break a leg, he prayed—I have no time for that. He skidded, somersaulted once, then came to a jolting stop against the side of a mogul.
His sunglasses had been torn from his head and the snow in his eyes blinded him. The breath had been knocked from his lungs. He wiped his eyes with the wet edge of a glove. He sat up slowly—a few inches at a time—moved his legs, then his arms, then flexed his neck. No pain. Nothing broken. Lucky! He had been shocked by the fall, but the soft powder had saved him.
Sitting upright, he spat cold snow from his mouth and peered uphill, searching for his skis. Gone. Invisible. Maybe buried in the powder. But he had to be thankful that the bindings had released, modern ski technology saving him from broken ankles or worse.
Feeling shaky, he raised himself up a bit more and scanned the slope. He saw the skis where he had first taken the fall, a good hundred feet uphill, jammed into a mogul. As soon as he could breathe properly he would get up and trek up there and haul them out.
Then he noticed the woman, the one who had been resting by the aspen grove, skiing across the slope and weaving gracefully through the valleys between the high moguls. She disappeared from view for a moment. Dennis blinked as a chunk of snow dropped from his hair into his eyes.
When he had cleared his vision and looked again, the woman was swinging down gently toward him. An angel now, even more than woman: she had his two skis slung over one shoulder. She carried her poles in her other hand.
She skied smoothly down to where he sat in the torn-up snow, and came to a quiet halt by turning a little uphill.
“You all right?”
“I think I am,” Dennis said.
“Nothing broken?”
“Nothing I can feel.”
“Rest awhile,” the woman said. “Don’t get up yet.”
“Thank you. Thank you for everything.”
He wiped more snow from his forehead. His hair and beard were still fall of iced chunks of snow. The woman laid his skis between two moguls and then with a gloved hand scooped up more salvage: his prescription sunglasses. “Want me to clean these off for you?”
“That would be kind of you,” Dennis said.
“Hit a rock under the powder?”
“Wish I had that excuse. Felt like a leg cramp. I’m out of shape.” The woman laughed warmly. “You looked pretty good up there until you wiped out.”
“Not as good as you did coming down the bumps without poles.” She handed him his glasses, which she had cleaned with a handkerchief. Dennis slid them over his ears—the frames ice-cold on the bridge of his nose—got to his feet, and began slapping snow off his parka and ski pants.
He knew already by her voice and silhouette that she was more young than old. Her goggles shielded her eyes. Under them, he thought, she might be beautiful. Hard to tell. And it didn’t matter. He’d come to Colorado to ski, not to hunt for the other kind of adventure. For several years now he had been divorced, and his ex-wife was dead. He was raising two children by himself. That was involvement enough.
“I’m okay now,” he said. “I don’t want to hold you up. Are you skiing alone?”
“This run. I’m meeting my friends up at the Sundeck at noon. They don’t do the big moguls. You ready to try this again? I’ll go down with you if you want company.”
“I’d appreciate that. Let’s do it.” He knocked the snow off his boots and bindings and stepped into his skis.
She led the way, arms reaching out in easy rhythm with the poles. He could see she checked her speed now and then to accommodate him. By the time they had skied out of the Dumps and down Spar Gulch and had reached the groomed slope of Little Nell, which led to the base of Aspen Mountain, he felt fine again.
“You’re good,” he said, while they waited in line for the gondola.
“Well, I love it. I try to be good at what I love. Seems worth it.”
He marked that down in his mind as something to remember, but made no comment. Despite his bluff appearance and despite being a silver-tongued courtroom advocate when such need arose, Dennis was not immediately at ease with strangers. But he wanted to be a friendly man, and it was a fifteen-minute ride to the summit at more than 11,000 feet. Although each car of the gondola carried six persons, he and the woman who had saved his skis and glasses were alone, facing down-mountain. The red-roofed old mining town fell away from view as the whitecapped mountain range rose against the horizon.
The woman unzipped her black ski jacket, loosened her neck gaiter, and unsnapped the buckles on her ski boots. She took off her goggles and gloves. Her fingers were long and slender. She had clear, vibrant dark eyes, high cheekbones, a wide mouth. She wore hardly any makeup. What struck Dennis most was her sense of calm certainty.
“You’re not a tourist,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“Do you live here in town?”
“No. In Springhill.”
“Springhill… I’m not sure where that is.”
“On the back range. Gunnison County. Above the Crystal River Valley.”
“Near Marble?” Marble, he knew, was a hamlet far away in the high country.
“About six hundred feet above Marble.”
“That’s seriously high. And have you lived there a long time?”
“I was born there.”
Almost everyone who lived here had come from elsewhere; Aspen and the Roaring Fork Valley were a mecca not only for skiers and sybarites but for those in pursuit of the good life. At a party in Manhattan where a few people in a corner of the room were comparing ski destinations, Dennis had heard a social worker say, “Aspen? It’s just not fucking real out there.” Dennis, after a long year defending dope dealers and multimillionaire corporate thieves, had responded: “Three cheers for unreality.”
“I’m Dennis Conway,” he said to the woman in the gondola.
“Sophie Henderson.”
Her hand when he shook it was cool, the fingers surprisingly delicate. He judged her to be in her middle thirties, but he was aware that women were always a few years older than his first guess.
“If you don’t mind my prying, what do you do up there in 9,000-foot-high Springhill?”
“I teach science to the kids at school. And I’m the mayor.” When she saw his expression she shrugged. “No big deal. There were only three hundred fifty people in town the last time anyone bothered to count.”
“I’m still impressed. How far did you say Springhill is from here?”
“Fifteen miles from the back of Aspen Mountain and past the Maroon Bells, if you know a friendly eagle who’ll give you a lift.” Sophie Henderson’s laugh was deep, vibrant, so that Dennis felt its echo in his chest. “By road, over an hour.”
“You’ve come a long way to ski.”
“You flew for five hours, Mr. Conway, didn’t you?”
“If you include changing planes in Denver. How’d you know that?”
“I can hear New York. And probably Ivy League.”
“New York, but not the city,” he protested. “Not by birth, anyway.” He wanted to tell her what he was, and hide his sins. “I’m from Watkins Glen—a small town on a lake in upstate New York you never heard of. And you’re right, I went to Dartmouth, then Oxford for a year, a little detour in the military, and then Yale Law School. After that I decided to practice law in New York City for reasons that don’t seem as valid as they did back then. I’m widowed. Or widowered. I’m not sure which is right. I live in Connecticut with my two kids. A nutshell biography. Tells you all and nothing.”
“It doesn’t surprise me—it amazes me. How did that happen?”
“I went to Cornell. Chemistry major. Ithaca is pretty close to Watkins Glen.”
She tugged off her ski hat, and a torrent of reddish brown hair flowed over her parka. He sensed what it would feel like to clench that hair in his hand. His attitude toward her changed, increasing in tonal value. Something seized him: the effect of some scented cream holding memories of childhood, or the natural smell that rose from clean skin.
“My father’s a lawyer,” she said. “Retired, but I know the species firsthand. You remind me of him.”
“I hope you get on with him.”
Sophie Henderson said, “I adore him.”
At the top of Aspen Mountain they stepped from the gondola and clicked into the bindings of their skis. “Do you see your friends around?” Dennis asked.
She scanned the flats in front of the Sundeck restaurant, then pointed to people near Lift Three who were waving at her. She poled over; Dennis followed. A minute later she introduced him to a blonde woman in her middle thirties and a man of about the same age; an older man with silver hair, gray beard and lively brown eyes; and a younger man, dark-haired and powerfully built. The latter offered Dennis only a surly nod. This might be Sophie’s lover, Dennis thought.
He caught only the first names: Jane, Hank, Edward, Oliver. They talked among themselves for a minute—they were all from Springhill, he realized. Adjusting goggles and boot buckles, they faced down the mountain.
“Which run?”
“Dipsy Doodle?”
“Then Bonnie’s for lunch.”
Dennis asked, “Mind if I ski with you?”
The younger man scowled, but the three others looked immediately toward Sophie Henderson. Her eyes wavered.
Edward, the man with silver hair, turned to Dennis and spoke decisively. “By all means, do. Maybe you can keep up with Sophie.”
“He can,” Sophie said.
Dennis’s parents, academics, were simple people living in a small town. Even in his late teens and early twenties their son’s ambition had been to be like them: honorable, moral, and honest. Quite a few years later an opposing prosecutor said of him, “Dennis will whip your ass a hundred different ways in court, but he’s a decent man.” That prosecutor, Mickey Karp, at first had been Dennis’s fellow apprentice at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, when both young men had moved to the city from the provinces: Dennis from Watkins Glen, Mickey from North Carolina. Their common passion was skiing, and in four successive winters they traveled together, first north to Sugar- bush and Killington, then west to Tahoe and Aspen. After the last trip Mickey said, “I’ve had enough of the city. Colorado’s for me.” He had found another lawyer recently moved West from Chicago, and together they opened a practice in Aspen.
Dennis’s other Aspen pal was Josh Gamble, the six-foot-six-inch, 270-seventy-pound elected sheriff of Pitkin County, where Aspen was the county seat. Dennis had roomed with him at Dartmouth. Josh Gamble had slipped loose from a brokerage firm in Philadelphia eighteen years ago to be a ski bum, but even ski bums had to eat. He drove a bus for the Roaring Fork Transit Authority, then signed up to become a traffic control officer, chalking tires. It was an easy step to the raise in pay that went with the job of deputy sheriff. They gave him a gun; he put it on his night table and stared at it for a week before he ever opened the cylinder. He became patrol director and a year later ran successfully for sheriff. He didn’t like to lock people up and never hired anyone as a deputy who he suspected really wanted to be a cop.
“Anyone gets a wet spot in his jeans when he thinks of carrying a weapon and arresting somebody,” Josh Gamble told Dennis, “I won’t hire.”
“Then who works for you?”
“People I like. Ain’t that the point?”
Maybe it was, Dennis reflected. Most of the people he worked with, he realized unhappily, he didn’t like.
On this most recent trip, over breakfast one morning at the Main Street Bakery, Josh said, “The way I see it, Denny boy, you’re fed up with life back in the Big Rotten Apple. You got pollution, traffic, crowds, mayhem, designer drugs, fifteen-year-olds of all shades packing Saturday Night Specials. That’s a hell of a world, and the burbs are part of it, man. Why don’t you quit while you’re young enough? Move out West, where kids are still kids, men are men, and women do the shopping.”
Dennis squeezed his friend’s beefy shoulder. “Because I’m a criminal lawyer. Who would I defend here? You don’t have a criminal class. People have space, they’re not hemmed in by a ghetto or high-rises, they’re not pissed off at the world. Plenty of them are poor but they don’t seem to give a rat’s ass as long as they can ski in winter and hike in summer. It’s close to being a crime-free valley. How could I make a living?”
“Got a rise in ski thefts this season,” the sheriff said thoughtfully. “Fraud by check is known to happen. Cocaine’s coming into the valley big-time. Mexican road workers get drunk on Saturday night. Domestic violence is also a solid growth industry. You could find work. I don’t know about fees, but work, yes.”
When Dennis paid the check the sheriff didn’t protest. “I’ll think about it,” the lawyer said. “Meanwhile, I’m off for the mountain. You stay down here and defend the community against fraud by check.” That was the day he wiped out on the Dumps and Sophie Henderson dug his skis out of the snow.
They ate soup and salad together midmountain on the deck at Bonnie’s Restaurant. It was a cloudless February day, warm enough for a few hardy skiers to strip down to T-shirts. Dennis discovered that Hank Lovell, among Sophie’s companions, was the CEO of a marble quarry in Springhill. His wife, Jane, was a dental technician who worked for the older man, Edward Brophy, the town dentist. “If anyone develops a toothache today,” Edward explained, “they’ll have to find a bottle of brandy. I’m the only game in town.”
The other man, Oliver Cone, was Edward’s nephew. He was a shift foreman at the Springhill marble quarry. He still glowered at Dennis and had almost nothing to say.
By the end of the afternoon Dennis felt the first inchoate stirrings of that borderline psychotic state called falling-in-love. He forced himself to stay calm. Do I need this? he asked himself. Do I want it?More to the point: Can I help it? He was able to formulate the questions but unable to provide answers. When he and Sophie were leaning on their ski poles at Lift Three, waiting for the others to catch up, he said, “You’re widowed, is that what you said?”
“He died in an avalanche five years ago.”
“And Oliver?”
“Oliver is Edward’s nephew, and Edward is a dear friend of mine. Oliver’s not as unpleasant as he seems. And he’s unusually bright— he’s just a little shy about showing it.”
“That’s not really what I was asking,” Dennis admitted. “Are you and Oliver—?” He let the sentence hang there; he knew she understood his meaning.
“No,” Sophie said.
Dennis asked her to have dinner with him that evening.
“I can’t. Town Council and Water Board meeting. Springhill is a corporation. We have a home rule charter—we vote a lot of our own taxes for roads, education, stuff like that. Nothing earth-shaking going on right now, but the mayor chairs the council. I have to be there.”
“Tomorrow evening?”
Sophie bit her lip. She was thinking about it hard, and he wondered why. If not Oliver Cone, then another man in her life; it had to be. He felt gloomy for a moment.
But she said finally, in a strangely formal way, “Yes, if you’d like it, I’ll have dinner with you tomorrow evening.”
In the high-speed quad chair on the lift, after Dennis had said goodbye and skied off, Edward Brophy remarked to Sophie, “I like that lawyer fellow. He’s no jeekus. He’s intelligent and he’s cheerf
ul. Seems to me that he keeps something in reserve. Not out to charm you or bowl you over. And he’s a ree bahl skier.”
She nodded and tossed her dark red hair. “He asked me out to dinner tomorrow evening.”
“I thought he would, if you gave him a chance.”
“I must have done that.”
“And what did you say?”
“I couldn’t think of an excuse. I said yes. But I’ve decided to break the date.”
“Just because he’s a skibtail?”
A skibtail, in the Springling lingo, was a stranger. Frowning, Sophie said, “You don’t think that’s a good enough reason?”
The dentist smiled affectionately. “You seemed to be getting on so well.” When Sophie frowned again, Edward raised his palm. “He asked you for a dinner date. It’s not the rest of your life. Take a chance, Sophie. Enjoy your time on this earth. So he’s a skibtail. I’ve looked around at home, and I’m sure you have too. You’ve turned down my bad-tempered nephew, for which I can’t quite blame you. Who else that’s decent is available?”
At the top of the lift she vaulted off the chair, planted her poles, kicked into a turn, and thrust herself alone down the mountain toward the long run of Copper Bowl.
Driving home later, she could not as easily thrust Dennis Conway from her mind. Craggy, a little rough-edged for a city fellow … doesn’t trim his beard too well. My type, no doubt of it. A successful lawyer, she imagined, with that same confident air her father had always had. She liked the way he’d reacted to her helping him when he took the tumble on the mountain. He hadn’t been embarrassed, hadn’t done any macho things afterward. In the gondola he’d listened when she spoke, seeming to digest her words and thoughts rather than merely waiting for his chance to sound off.
Maybe it was an act. A good con job. A city slicker. A skibtail; not one of us. That hardly ever worked out.
But Sophie was moved by him, stirred at a level that she could deal with only in her heart, not her head, and she decided to take the risk.
Chapter 2
Mystery of a Dead Dog
QUEENIE O’HARE WORE more than one hat. She was a Pitkin County deputy sheriff as well as one of five community safety officers working for the city of Aspen. And also at the moment, on this morning shift, she was supervising animal control officer.