Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller

by Clifford Irving

  Sophie lit lamps. The light was warm; the cabin had a hint of an enchanted place in a forest. A Swiss cuckoo clock ticked in the living room. An old dark brown violin case stood propped against the coffee table.

  “You play it?”

  “Since I was a child. My great-grandmother taught me. Shall I?”

  “Later, yes. Not now.” Dennis sank into the pillows of the living room sofa. Sitting next to him, Sophie touched his hands. He kissed her for what seemed half an hour: it was only five minutes. Her hands were so cool, and they seemed fragile. It made him want to protect her from whatever might do harm.

  “Do you want to make love?” Sophie asked.

  “Of course I do,” Dennis said.

  Taking his hand, she led him upstairs.

  Moonlight shone into the bedroom. From afar Dennis heard water singing over rocks. When she took off her clothes he saw that she was more lovely than he had imagined.

  In the morning she said, “It’s been two years since I was with a man. And that was very brief. I was starting to think I’d be an old maid.”

  “How could that be? A woman as lovely as you?”

  “I don’t go out. And I’m not easy to please. Listen to what I have to say. The sex was wonderful. I’m sure it will get even better. But I don’t want to be just a sweet diversion—your Colorado girlfriend. If that’s what it is, or will become, be honest and tell me. We’ll both get over it.”

  Dennis didn’t want to make promises he wasn’t sure he could keep.

  He knew she was more than a diversion but he was afraid to admit, so quickly, how much more he already dreamed of. He was silent, but the way Sophie smiled at him and touched his cheek with cool fingers made him feel she had read his mind.

  For a week they stayed cocooned in the rumpled bed. Sometimes it was two o’clock in the afternoon before they padded downstairs to throw open the door to the refrigerator. Other days they reached the ski slopes of nearby Snowmass Mountain at the crack of noon.

  Together they skied the Hanging Glades. Dennis heard the quick rush of her breath when she dug her edges hard on the turns, the dry swish of both their pairs of skis schussing the last long steep glide to the bottom; and he heard the beating of his heart when he simply looked at her.

  He flew back to New York on a Sunday and the next morning went straight to court. His caseload piled up. Briefs were unwritten, telephone calls unanswered. Court dates had to be adjusted. He began to work fourteen hours a day. But until July, with his sister and his devoted German housekeeper caring for his children and assuaging his guilt, he managed to jet to Colorado twice every month for a three- day weekend.

  In April he and Sophie skied on cross-country trails that wound through the forests between Springhill and Aspen. Another time she borrowed a snowmobile from a friend. On the back of an eagle, as she had told him on the day they’d met, it was only fifteen miles between Aspen and their isolated hamlet. But the high peaks of the Elk Range—the Maroon Bells—interdicted the passage. The Bells were recipes for disaster, Sophie said. Not extreme technical climbs, but deceptive ones, for the rock was down-sloping, loose, and unstable. The snowpacks were treacherous. The gullies through which a crosscountry skier had to trek were in the path of avalanches that began as early as October and ended as late as July. Expert climbers who did not know the proper routes had died on the Maroon Bells.

  A network of a dozen good-sized cabins existed deep in the mountains between Aspen and Vail, for emergencies and rental by summer hikers or adventurous cross-country skiers. Run by the not-for-profit Tenth Mountain Division Hut Association, they were often stocked with food, cots, firewood, medical supplies, a two-way radio, and avalanche rescue equipment. Sophie knew these huts well. In June, between tourist seasons, she took Dennis to the hut at a place called Lead King Basin and they made love there in the wilderness. By July he believed that life without Sophie made no sense for him. He asked her to marry him.

  But it was not quite that simple.

  They were hiking along the bank of a high creek near Springhill. Mountain bluebirds streaked across the meadows, as if flecks of summer sky had been torn away. Dennis’s eyes narrowed like a sea captain’s peering into a haze of battle smoke.

  “Sophie, listen. Criminal law is what I do. You should see me in trial. I shine. I take my work and the law seriously. It would be hard for me to leave New York. It has nothing to do with the city itself—I could give that up. But it’s where my practice is.”

  “And it would be hard for me to leave Springhill,” she replied calmly. “That’s where my life is.”

  He had no ready answer. Could he compare his law practice to her life itself?

  “Dennis, it may not be simple for you to grasp this—not yet, not now—but if I weren’t here, if I couldn’t remain here, I wouldn’t be the person you think you love.”

  “I don’t believe that,” he said.

  “You must.”

  “I would love you anywhere.”

  “I’m sure you would. You’re not hearing me. If I were elsewhere, I would be different.”

  “How?”

  Sophie didn’t respond. He had already learned that she was capable of breaking off a conversation when she had said all she needed to say. In that she was stubborn to the point of intractable. He understood that she was begging him to reflect on her words, pursue no farther. He was puzzled, but he cherished her and he would not try to command her to fit into his scheme of understanding.

  The cold creek flowed over rocks and broken branches. They sat on a boulder by the edge of the water. In the Ice Age, such boulders had been carried southward by the glacier on its route from the polar cap. When the glacier retreated northward again, the boulders remained—”for us to sit on,” Sophie said, “and occasionally, if we don’t plan well, to tumble down on us.”

  A choice and a kind of sacrifice were necessary: either he or Sophie would have to bend. He knew there were always alternatives to the way one lives. Not always easy ones … but they were there. And he had been looking for them.

  “Sophie—”

  She placed a finger on his lips. She led him off into the forest, spread the flowered cotton picnic sheet, and made love to him in the cool shifting shadows of the trees as the afternoon breeze began to blow. She took off his shirt and bit him lightly on his shoulders and chest, then began to suck his nipples. In the act of love she had no inhibition. She straddled him so that he felt the soil and pebbles and twigs dig into his back. He heard an owl and the trill of a hummingbird far away. Sophie’s catlike cries seemed to fill the forest. No bird or creature would dare intrude.

  The next afternoon he walked up the carpeted stairs to the offices of Karp & Ballard on the Hyman Avenue Mall in Aspen, not far from the gondola.

  “I’m going to marry a woman from Springhill,” Dennis said to Mickey Karp, his old friend from the United States Attorney’s Office in Manhattan. “Can you use a middle-aged trial lawyer to pick up paper clips and teach you guys about the real world?”

  Mickey Karp was a trim man in his early forties, with black hair and twinkling dark eyes. “Yes, we can definitely use the man you describe. But, Dennis, this is Aspen. Famous for its peace and quiet—its basic dullness. A New York criminal defense attorney…”

  Dennis waved away his past life with a flick of the hand. “I’m not in it for the money and the ego. This is for sanity. Anew life.”

  Mickey and his partner, Bill Ballard, took a day to work out a simple partnership arrangement. Dennis would need some time to clean up his caseload in New York, put his Westport house on the market, sell out, pack up for him and the children, say goodbyes. Change his life. Change his world.

  Chapter 4

  Memories of Dylan Thomas

  DENNIS’S EXODUS WAS delayed by a continuance in a drug case. He wouldn’t leave the children yet again, so he persuaded Sophie to fly East and spend Thanksgiving with them all. Brian was eight, Lucy six.

  At first she was quiet wit
h the children, and they were shy. But within a day they were friends. She brought her violin and played for them. She fiddled Irish airs and Gypsy songs and danced around the carpet as she played, head bobbing, auburn hair flying. She laughed as she played. The children laughed too, and Lucy clapped her hands. Then Sophie played a movement from a Bach sonata. The children fell silent. After the Bach, Sophie stopped.

  “Will you show me around your town?” she asked them. “If you do that, one day I’ll show you around mine.”

  “Where do you live?” Brian asked.

  “In the mountains, high up near the sky. There are wonderful places in the forest there. A wonderful warm spring—the town is named after it. Avery special place. I’ll take you. I promise.”

  The next day all four drove the two hundred miles from Connecticut through the Catskills to Dennis’s parents’ home in Watkins Glen on Seneca Lake. Dennis’s two sisters, one from Greenwich and one from Rochester, joined them for the holiday dinner. His Aunt Jennie came down from Rochester as well; she was ninety-five years old and ailing.

  “Can she make the trip?” Dennis asked his sister.

  “It might be her last Thanksgiving. She wants to come.”

  The autumnal eruption of crimson and gold had faded more than a month ago. The trees were bare, and a raw wind blew across New York State. Dennis’s father was a former history professor at Ithaca College. Now that he was retired he kept a pair of old saddle horses, goats, pigs, a yard full of chickens, and a cow, and was realizing a lifelong ambition to write a book proving that Shakespeare’s Hamlet was a decisive young prince much maligned and misunderstood by scholars, theatrical producers, and filmmakers.

  In the living room, while Aunt Jennie napped and the others were off on a tour of the barns, Dennis’s mother said to him, “I like your young woman. She’s so even tempered. So warm and bright. The children like her too.”

  “She’s what they need,” he said. “This time it will work. I won’t fail again.”

  “You didn’t fail the first time, Denny darling. You chose the wrong woman.”

  “That’s a failure of judgment, Mother.”

  At the Thanksgiving feast, after he had carved the turkey, Dennis’s father said to Sophie, “Dennis told me you went to Cornell. I taught at Ithaca College. Did he mention that? It was about a hundred years ago. But if you spent four years far above Cayuga’s waters, you can’t be a stranger to Watkins Glen. All the students come to our waterfall when the weather warms up.”

  “I remember,” Sophie said. “I came here to swim under it. You felt as if you were drowning, and it was thrilling, not frightening. It seems like a hundred years ago to me too.”

  “What did you major in?”

  “Chemistry. But what I really liked was nineteenth-century English lit. Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge.”

  “Then you must have studied with John Yates. The expert on the Romantics. John was a friend of mine.”

  “No, with David Daiches.” Sophie began to cough, and reached for another helping of turkey and cranberry sauce.

  “I knew Daiches too, but not well. More of an expert on Scotch whisky, he was. He went off to the Chair of Poetry at Cambridge, in England. And before him there was the illustrious Vladimir Nabokov. I go a long way back, you see. Were you a good student? Did you love the Hill?”

  “I wasn’t very industrious. I was homesick, and I was so cold there.” Across the table, Dennis’s Rochester sister laughed. “Dennis says that in Colorado you live at 9,000 feet! Now that’s what I call cold!”

  “Cold,” Aunt Jennie repeated, nodding, her hands shaking.

  “But it’s not so,” Sophie said politely. “There’s no humidity high up in the Rockies, and hardly any wind. People in the East talk all the time about the windchill factor. We don’t have it. The snow is so soft and dry you can’t make a snowball with it until April. They call it champagne powder. In winter the sun is strong enough for me to grow bougainvillea in my greenhouse. And gardenias, and orchids. Dennis will tell you …”

  Sophie had spoken with all the quiet passion of a woman in love. But in this instance, in love with a place—her snowbound wilderness.

  She went to bed early that night, and Dennis stayed up to drink a nightcap of scotch with his father.

  “Daiches”—his father mused—”your bride-to-be’s English professor, taught me the little I know about the making of single-malt whisky. ‘You get the best brands,’ he said, ‘and cheap too, at Macy’s in New York.’ He drank a lot of it, so he should have known. Dylan Thomas came to visit him. Friendly fellow, but a serious boozer— gave a reading of his poetry up on the Hill. He and Daiches had a merry old time of it. I was introduced to Dylan. Tragic life.” He frowned. “You know, Dennis, it doesn’t make sense.”

  “What doesn’t, Dad? That Dylan Thomas had a tragic life?”

  “That Sophie could have studied under David Daiches. It was in the late forties and early fifties that he was in Ithaca. By the time she would have graduated, he was long gone to Cambridge.”

  Dennis knew his father forgot things and sometimes got dates confused. He had just turned seventy-five.

  “I know exactly what you’re thinking,” his father said. “The old man’s a bit gaga. First stage of Alzheimer’s. But I’m telling you, Dylan came to visit Cornell in 1950. I went over to hear him read at Willard Straight Hall. Magnificent voice. I remember it like it was yesterday.”

  “So how could she have been there? That would make her well over sixty years old.”

  “You’re right,” Dennis said, “she must have got him mixed up with someone else.” He leaned over and gave his father a strong hug—the older man smelled comfortably of tweed and horses and old books. Dennis said, “I’m going to hit the hay. What do you think, Dad?”

  “About what? Sophie?”

  “Yes, about Sophie.”

  “Does it matter what I think?”

  It was not the enthusiasm Dennis had hoped for. He waited, uncertain whether to go on. Finally his father said, “I think she’s fine. Obviously she loves you if she’d come all the way up here to where it’s reallycold, just to visit your aged parents.”

  Dennis squeezed his father’s shoulder. “That’s it, eh? ‘People in the East talk about windchill.’ A slur on dear old Watkins Glen! That bothered you, did it?”

  “Honestly, Denny, you can’t tell me it’s colder here at virtually sea level than it is at 9,000 feet, can you? Can you really?”

  “It is, Dad. I’ve been there, and what she says is true.”

  “Go to bed. Your brains are addled by love. Keep your bride-to-be warm in our Siberia.”

  Chapter 5

  Crime Scene

  “I CAN’T SEE the whole body,” Sheriff Josh Gamble said, frowning, bending forward to study the photographs spread on Queenie’s desk.

  “Meaning what?” Queenie asked. “You don’t think it’s a Scottish deerhound?”

  “Of course I do. You can tell by the head. I’m just saying that I can’t see the whole body or the throat or the other eye.”

  “Why is that important, Josh?”

  The sheriff handed Queenie a Xeroxed copy of a flyer faxed to his office the previous summer by the Colorado State Police. The flyer asked all law enforcement personnel in the state to be on the alert for any suspicious deaths of domestic animals.

  “You remember?”

  Queenie remembered, annoyed that it had slipped her mind. Last spring, for the second year in a row, what appeared to be an adolescent Satanic cult had cropped up in the suburbs of Denver and by summer had spread to rural parts of the state. Dogs and cats were found in out-of-the-way places, throats slit, eyes gouged out. Males were castrated. There was talk of a cult belief that domestic animals were polluting the planet with their excrement.

  “But the theory was,” Queenie said, “that the kids did this in summer, when school was out and they had nothing better to do.”

  “You don’t know when the deerhound was
killed, do you? You only know when this quarry guy up in Springhill claims it went missing.”

  Queenie thought it over for a minute. “I’d better go up to Pearl Pass and take a look.”

  That evening she called the Clark brothers at their trailer home downvalley in El Jebel. “Ever been in the service, Fred?”

  Fred Clark said he had been a corporal in the army.

  “Then you know what it means to volunteer.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Corporal Clark, I need you or your brother to volunteer for a trip by snowmobile to Pearl Pass.”

  In 4 A.M. winter darkness, Queenie drove her rattly Jeep Wagoneer up to the T Lazy 7 Ranch not far from the base of the Maroon Bells. Harold Clark and Deputy Doug Larsen awaited her, dressed in blaze orange jackets so no rampaging hunter would mistake them for a mule deer or elk, as happened now and then in the blood-soaked past of these peaceful mountains.

  A small black-and-white dog bounded out of Queenie’s Jeep and began running in circles in the snow, barking happily “What’s that?” Larsen asked.

  “That, which I think deserves to be called who, is my Jack Russell terrier. Her name is Bimbo.”

  “Cute. Where do you propose to leave her?”

  “She’s coming with us.”

  “Surely you jest.”

  “If Mr. Clark, with the best of intentions,” Queenie said, “takes us to the general area up near Pearl Pass but doesn’t know the exact spot where he and his brother found the dog—what do we do? Search every square foot of the Elk Range above 12,000 feet?” Bimbo rolled on her back on a patch of earth. “You get her within fifty yards of that dead deerhound’s body and she’ll be all over it. She’s a major-league sniffer.”

  A half-moon cast shadows as the three searchers and dog set out on two snowmobiles. The roar of the engines on the narrow trail shattered the silence. Harold Clark rode behind Doug Larsen in the lead snowmobile. Queenie brought up the rear, with Bimbo strapped to her ample chest and wrapped in a blanket.

  East of the Maroon Bells broad expanses of snow stretched for miles on either side of the trail. The dawn sky filled with chalky light. The snowmobiles climbed noisily to 12,500 feet. Forests below appeared as distant ink splotches, and great rocks thrust up out of the tundra. Vegetation was ragged, some mountainsides so scoured by wind they looked sandblasted. Queenie pointed to the south, where the snowpack of the Elk Range was marred by a long, ugly avalanche scar down its middle.