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

by Clifford Irving

  Sophie was there as the official representative of the incorporated township. “I’m sorry,” she said to Queenie, “but on behalf of the Town Council I have to ask you if you have a court order.”

  “I have a fax from the circuit judge in Gunnison.” Queenie waved a flimsy piece of paper in the cold mountain air.

  Sophie looked at Dennis, asking a wordless question.

  “It’s not exactly proper,” Dennis said, “but it’s fair to say that if we objected we’d be delaying the proper course of justice. And bear in mind, all they have to do is drive over to the courthouse in Gunnison and get it.”

  Sophie turned back to Queenie. “You can open the graves.”

  The graves were side by side, with stone markers bearing the names of Henry Lovell and Susan Lovell, the dates of death, and two simple crosses.

  There were three shovels. Queenie supervised, and the two male deputies dug. The third shovel had been jammed into a snowbank piled up at the edge of Henry Lovell’s grave. To Dennis’s eyes its lonely and upright presence seemed to grow more and more accusative as the deputies dug and sweated. But he restrained himself. It was not his job to make things easier for the opposition.

  Fat snowflakes swirled from a heavy sky. The wind blew more strongly. The diggers began to stamp their feet as they worked.

  Dennis’s feet grew cold. More than cold, he was restless and unhappy. Murmuring some words of apology, he detached himself from Sophie and the diggers and began to walk toward the nearby woods, down the row of gravestones and small monuments and markers. It was a tasteful cemetery, a testimonial to modest lives and modest exits. Not many graves. Probably, Dennis decided, in the old days plenty of people were buried in their backyards in brief ceremonies, or maybe no ceremony at all. Maybe still.

  He came to a small mottled pink marble headstone with a smaller one beside it. A portrait of a dog had been carved into the smaller stone. Dennis read the words beneath the portrait: a faithful basset hound had died soon after its master had departed this earth.

  The basset hound—DEVOTED FRIEND AND CHEERFUL COMPANION—bore the dignified name of Randall. Randall’s master—upon closer examination, his mistress—had been named Ellen Hapgood. The name was familiar, but at first Dennis couldn’t remember why. Then he remembered. Ellen Hapgood’s passing, as Sophie had once told him, had taken place a few months prior to Dennis’s arrival in Springhill. “She sat in her rocking chair talking to herself all day long and swatting imaginary hats with a broom.” She had died at ninety-one, Sophie had said.

  Dennis looked at the dates carved into the stone: October 3, 1919— July 20,1993.

  He made the calculation twice, but the laws of arithmetical subtraction did not change. She had been seventy-four. Dennis continued walking among the gravestones. Sophie could have made a mistake. Memory played tricks.

  The wind gusted, making his eyes tear a little. The snow fell more thickly. His shoes crunched into the covering. Now there was purpose to his wandering. His back was to the gravediggers and he wondered if Sophie were watching him. But when he turned he saw he had moved to a point where a stand of pines stood between him and the diggers.

  On the western fringe of the little cemetery he found what he was looking for. Bibsy’s maiden name had been Whittaker. Here were the graves of the Whittakers, Sophie’s grandparents. He checked the dates of birth and death. Nothing out of the ordinary. Both had died in their seventies. A few yards farther along he came to the graves of Scott’s parents. Sophie had told him that her paternal grandmother, Janice Cone Henderson, had died at the age of forty, in 1956. Young. From cancer, he recalled. The inscription confirmed her date of death and age.

  Next to her, Scott’s father was buried. The carved inscription read: SCOTT HENDERSON. BELOVED FATHER TO PATRICIA AND SCOTT JR. And under that: 1894-1965.

  “My father’s father” Sophie had said, “lived to be eighty-five …”

  But the arithmetic of the gravestone said seventy-one. Dennis stared balefully for a minute or two. For Sophie to err about Ellen Hapgood’s age was one thing; to make the same mistake about Scott’s father was another. Why would Sophie lie about such a small thing like that? What sense did it make? Denial of mortality? Sophie was a sensible woman. He had never heard her express any fear of death or dying. She was as calm in facing the future as anyone he’d ever known.

  He wanted the answers. But if he demanded to know why on earth she kept insisting that people in Springhill lived to a ripe old age, he would be digging a pit between them. Was it important enough to force a confrontation? He felt a chill in his blood. In its grayness and with its stealthy wind, the day was not a common one.

  Still pondering, he returned to the Lovells’ graves. The two men were digging. The gaze of Sophie’s dark eyes rested on him with somber regard. Dennis felt the blood rush to his face. She knows where I’ve been. She couldn’t see me behind the stand of pine, but still she knows.

  He picked up the third shovel. He looked at Queenie O’Hare—she nodded at him: Yes, of course. Pitkin County thanks you, Counselor.

  The bite of the blade into the soil jolted up his arms into his back. It felt appropriate. He needed to labor, to punish himself a little for his knowledge, his doubt, his effort at keeping all the negatives under control. Life was too good; he loved his wife too much to disrupt the harmony.

  By the time the wood of the casket showed itself, a film of sweat beaded Dennis’s forehead. A minute later Queenie said, “That will do it.”

  One of the deputies hunkered down and unscrewed the metal handles, snapped open the two metal clasps, then looked at Queenie for permission. She moved her head once. The deputy exerted a certain effort, cleared his throat, and raised the heavy wooden lid.

  Dennis had been expecting the worst. In Vietnam during the Tet offensive, when Dennis’s sapper platoon was blowing up Charlie’s antipersonnel mines in the jungle, he had seen enough death and decay for a lifetime.

  The casket—lined with dark blue silk that picked up highlights from the reflection of the sky—was empty. There was nothing inside but sawdust, wood chips, pebbles, and a single small clump of dry earth.

  Dennis had no idea what to say. Queenie O’Hare grunted words to herself that he did not understand. She bent to sniff the silk lining. Her head moved slightly; her eyes shifted to Dennis.

  “Put your nose down there.”

  He crouched, but already he understood the meaning of her quiet command. Issuing from the casket was a musty smell of disuse—but that was all. There was no evidence of decay. He grasped what Queenie had already realized: there was no smell of detergent or other cleaning materials. No body had decayed here and then been removed. No body had ever been here.

  Queenie looked at Dennis and Sophie. “Are you surprised?”

  Sophie blew out a frosty breath and turned her head away.

  “Yes,” Dennis said to Queenie. “Aren’t you?”

  “The God’s honest truth?” Queenie jumped up, almost athletically. “Not at all. I would have bet the ranch and the mortgage that this grave would be empty as a church on New Year’s Eve. So now let’s open the other one. Any bets?”

  A short time later they saw that the second casket was empty, and it too had no odor.

  Walking back to town through the wind-driven snow, Queenie said, “You know as well as I do these graves weren’t opened and robbed. Dennis, those bodies we found at Pearl Pass are what’s left of Henry Lovell Sr. and Susan Lovell. Don’t you grasp that now?”

  When Dennis didn’t reply, Queenie turned to Sophie, who had yet to say a word other than monosyllabic answers to questions of procedure. Her hands were deep in her pockets. She walked with her head slightly bowed. In her expression he felt a kind of stoicism: I will get through this somehow if you are loyal to me. It was as if the cold air carried the message straight from her body to his mind.

  “I think your dentist up here was mistaken,” Queenie said to her, “about the teeth identification. Maybe
he made a mistake and pulled the wrong records. I’ll talk to him again.”

  “Yes, of course,” Sophie said.

  “And Dr. Pendergast, the one who issued the death certificates, I want to see her too.”

  “I understand.”

  “I also need to know who put the bodies in the caskets, or claimed to have done it—not to mention whoever lowered these empty boxes into the ground and forgot to say, ‘Jeez, folks, ain’t they light? “

  Queenie laughed, but the mirth had a sour edge to it. “And I’ve got a job of fingerprinting to do today. That’s the other reason we came up here. We prefer doing it at the courthouse in Aspen. I assume your client and her husband are available?”

  “They’re waiting for you at home,” Dennis said. “Once you print them, how long will it take to get a match-up and a result?”

  Queenie shrugged. “If it’s a negative, we’ll know by tomorrow. If it’s a positive, it might take a couple of days. If we’re not sure and the la- tents have to be faxed to Denver and the FBI in Washington, we could be talking about a week.”

  From the Hendersons’ living room, Dennis drew Scott into the privacy of the indoor pool area. It was warm there, and Dennis mopped his forehead with a handkerchief.

  “Scott, I have some important things to do here in Springhill, but I don’t want to stall or play games with the Sheriff’s Office. I’m going to call one of my partners and have him meet you at the courthouse—he’ll fill in for me, he’ll represent Bibsy That means I won’t be with you on the ride down to Aspen. Don’t say anything to this deputy. Discuss the weather. Discuss the new four-lane highway. Discuss whatever you damn please, but don’t discuss this case. Is that clear?”

  “I’m a lawyer too, remember?” Scott offered him a warm smile— but then it faded. “What’s so important you can’t come down with us?”

  Dennis said, “I have to talk to a few people up here about a pair of empty caskets.”

  Chapter 13

  A Lawyer at Work

  A FAINT SMELL of antiseptic perfume hung in the air of Edward Brophy’s dental office. Dennis had to wait until Edward finished adjusting the wire braces on Nancy Loomis, a local teenager. He tried reading one-year-old issues of Time and Money but his concentration wandered.

  Ten minutes later Edward stood by a plastic-covered dental chair, writing treatment notes on the patient’s chart. Dennis sat on the swivel chair that normally the dentist or his assistant occupied.

  “First, Edward, spend a few bucks and get some new magazine subscriptions. Second, believe that I’m on your side in this matter. Bibsy is my client. You may not understand this concept, but that relationship counts just as much to me as the fact that she’s Sophie’s mother.”

  “You lawyers are peculiar fellows.”

  “That’s often been said.”

  Edward sighed. “Dentists have ethics as well.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. I’d like you to dust off those ethics and check the Lovells’ records again. The Aspen deputy sheriff thinks you might have made a mistake in identification. She’s going to come ask you about it. At some point she may even require a statement under oath.” Dennis hesitated, to give his next words a little stonier meaning. “I think, when she used the word mistake, she was giving you the benefit of the doubt.”

  Edward sighed and looked glum.

  “Can you go through the records now?” Dennis asked.

  “I have a patient due any minute. The Crenshaw boy. It’s an emergency. I have to look through his charts.”

  “Do you want me to wait?”

  “No. I’ll do it later today.”

  “Edward, this is serious.”

  The dentist kept sighing like a man in pain. He took a turn around the small room, halted his pacing, and faced Dennis, who caught a quick blaze from his eyes like that of a wounded animal in a trap. But his voice was surprisingly soft. “Do you want some advice from me, Dennis?

  “I’m always grateful for intelligent advice.”

  “Whatever you’re trying to find, or prove—give it up.”

  Dennis felt his blood rising. “I’m trying to prove that Bibsy Henderson is not guilty of murder. Edward, what are you covering up? Were those people at Pearl Pass the Lovells? Did you switch their dental records? And if so—why?”

  After a few moments, Edward sank down into the dental chair. So I’m right, Dennis realized. And if I figured it out, so will Queenie O’Hare and Josh Gamble.

  “I need to know all about this,” he said. “I’ll wait until you’ve finished with your patient, with this emergency, whatever the hell it is.”

  “There’s no emergency,” Edward said. “There’s no patient coming.” His hands were shaking.

  “Wrong, Edward. There is an emergency. And you’re in the middle of it. Now take a shot of booze or Pentothal if you need one, and tell me why you switched those records.”

  Dennis arrived at the marble quarry after the end of the lunch break. It was at the end of Quarry Road, two miles past his and Sophie’s house. Along the edges of the road were blocks and shards of marble that had tumbled from trucks and wagons and been left there. A couple of snowmobiles and a big orange Sno-Cat that was used for avalanche control were parked outside next to pickup trucks and heavy-duty, four-wheel-drive vehicles.

  The quarry produced some of the purest white marble in the world; part of its product had gone into banks and monuments throughout the United States. Giant wool cloth curtains hung over the two large openings to maintain an inside temperature just above freezing. A dozen men were working, bundled in parkas and thick ski hats. Dennis watched while a twenty-ton marble block, cut that day from the side wall, was skidded by a front-end loader up a portable steel ramp to the bed of a truck for the trip down to the Denver & Rio Grande Western railroad yards at West Glenwood Springs.

  A few minutes later he sat with Hank Lovell in the quarry director’s office. It was sparsely decorated, with only a space heater to ward off the cold. Dennis kept his coat and gloves on. Hank was a well-built man with midnight black hair, a sensual mouth, and brown eyes with long lashes.

  “What can I do for you, Dennis?”

  “You can tell me the truth about your parents’ death.”

  “My parents …” Hank barely articulated the words.

  “Hank, this is not the time for evasion. If I’m going to give Bibsy the kind of legal help she needs, I have to know what’s going on. Edward changed the dental records. I know that.”

  “He admitted that to you?”

  “I can’t answer that question. If he did, it would fall under confidentiality. Do you understand what I’m saying? These are not strangers we’re talking about. Your parents were murdered, or they were helped to commit suicide, which under Colorado law is a form of murder. What were they doing up at Pearl Pass? And why did Bibsy and Scott go up there?”

  Hank drummed his stubby fingers on the desktop.

  Dennis sighed. “I’ll try to make it easy for you. As far as you know, were either of your parents suffering from cancer?”

  “I don’t know,” Hank said. “That’s a fact.”

  “Anything degenerative? More esoteric, like bacillary dysentery or cerebral rheumatism?”

  “I swear to you, I don’t know.”

  “What about AIDS?”

  “My God. They were a little too old for that, don’t you think?”

  “I wonder. In Springhill, anything’s possible.”

  “Why don’t you ask Grace Pendergast?”

  “I already have,” Dennis said, “after I talked to Edward Brophy.”

  “And what did she tell you?”

  “Grace is a tough lady. Can’t discuss her patients’ illnesses with me, not even her patients who are dead and gone. She filled out their death certificates. Those had to be lies too. Hank”—Dennis reached across the desk and grasped the younger man’s wrist—”I need to know the truth. Why weren’t your parents buried in the Springhill cemetery?”

&n
bsp; “I don’t know,” Hank said. But the vigor had fled from his voice.

  “Why were they taken up to Pearl Pass to be buried?”

  “I don’t know,” Hank said.

  “My God, do you know anything? Did they die here in Springhill, or up there in Pitkin County? Did Scott and Bibsy go up there with them? To help them die?”

  “What do they say?”

  “They don’t. They’re sitting on it. You’re all sitting on it. And under the circumstances, that’s a terrible mistake.” Dennis felt he was about to lose control.

  “You’d better talk to Sophie,” Hank said. “That would be the proper thing to do.”

  “Yes. Proper. Fuck you, and fuck this ‘proper’ business. But yes, I will.” Dennis stood. He said, “There’s one thing more. I asked Grace who the casket bearers were at the funerals here. I had to practically arm-wrestle her, but she gave me the names of the men. You were one of them, and the others work here in the quarry. They were the same men for both funerals.” He glanced at his handwriting on a slip of paper. “Mark Hapgood, Oliver Cone, John Frazee. Cone is your foreman, right? I need to talk to them for a few minutes. To all four of you together, unless it means the marble business comes to a crashing halt and the town’s whole economy is threatened.”

  Ten minutes later the four men stood waiting in the glare of a halogen lamp near one of the ten-foot-long diamond-particle chain saws used to cut the larger blocks of marble. None of the men smoked. All chewed gum. Hapgood was a sandy-haired, hard-looking, bucktoothed man in his middle twenties. Frazee seemed a few years older, swarthy as were all the numerous Frazee clan, with a dark mustache and a close-cropped bullet head. Oliver Cone, muscular arms and shoulders straining his parka, was their immediate boss.

  All wore dark blue or khaki-colored parkas and frayed jeans. They were the town’s younger element that Dennis hardly knew. They roared through the back range on their snowmobiles, and in season— and sometimes out of it—chugged deep into the Maroon Bells wilderness on the quarry-owned Sno-Cat to hunt elk with either rifle or metal bow. In the evenings they worked out at the gym on Main Street. Driving home from work in Aspen, if his car window was open, Dennis often heard their husky laughter over the clank of iron disks and the crash of barbells dropped to concrete. He had always found the young men a little menacing, strangely defensive and wary, as if his presence threatened them. He would have been friendlier if they gave him the opportunity, but they offered little more than a nod of the head when he ran into them at the general store or the local bank.