Morris snorted. “You think she wants to know the truth? She was driven here by a friend, Flynn.” Morris laid the palm of his hand flat on the wooden surface of the desk. “A male friend. All these people live and think in a way inconceivable to me. As soon as I opened the door to the room where we had put Huttenbach’s things, she backed right away. I doubt she’d even know what belongs to her husband and what doesn’t.”
“Where is she now?”
“Room 11. Behind the fireplace. She’s waiting for the Shaws to pickle her husband in preservatives and pack him in a box. She never even asked to see him.”
“We’ll go talk to her,” said Flynn.
Carl Morris stood up behind his desk. “You ask us to care that some spoiled kid choked on his silver spoon last night? Well, I don’t care. The spoons at my house may be aluminum but I need ’em to feed my kids. Doesn’t that make sense to you?”
“Yes, it makes sense,” said Flynn. “It makes so much sense, regretfully, it even makes a fence four meters high make sense.”
11
Flynn knocked on the door of Room 11.
“Who is it?” inquired a woman’s voice.
Flynn did not answer.
Presently the door was opened by a short man in his early thirties wearing a well-cut jacket and slacks. His moustache was pencil-thin.
“Yes?”
He did not resist Flynn and Cocky entering the room.
A woman in her late twenties, tailored suit, sat with a straight back, crossed ankles, in one of the two plastic chairs in the room. On the table between the two chairs were used coffee cups.
“Carol Huttenbach, I’m Inspector Flynn. I’m with the police. This is Detective Lieutenant Concannon.”
“I’m Max Harvey,” said the man coming around from behind them, returning to the other chair. “I drove Carol up.”
“You have my sympathy, Mrs. Huttenbach.”
“Thank you. I suppose I could ask you to sit on the beds.” Her hands were clasped in her lap. “This place is so frightfully cold.”
“I must say,” drawled Max Harvey, “when I talked to Chief of Police Jensen I didn’t get the impression his staff is so grand as to include an inspector and a detective lieutenant.”
“You’ll be going back today?” Flynn asked.
There was no luggage visible in the room.
“Yes. The children…We’re just waiting for the undertakers…”
“I understand.”
“The manager put us in this room to get us away from the press.”
“Did you talk to the press at all?”
“I did.” Max said, as if it were a joke. “As a friend of the family.”
“What’s there to say?” Carol Huttenbach’s voice was low and shivering. “A terrible hunting accident…”
Standing halfway across the small, dark room, Flynn kept his hands in his overcoat pockets. “Why don’t you tell me anything you can.”
“Why don’t you tell me anything you can, Inspector,” Carol said sharply.
“Carol…”Max said.
Flynn waited for a moment, waited for questions which would reveal her contempt for what she had been told, what she had been shown.
Instead, her eyes sought neutrality in the farther wall.
“Just general things,” Flynn urged, “about your husband.”
“He’s dead,” she said angrily.
“Did he come here often?” Flynn asked.
“Yes. Often. To this dump. This freezing dump. Packed up his damned guns and fishing rods and woolens and waders and came up here. To this…place! Timberbreak Lodge: The Rod and Gun Club. Look at it! Not even a place for us to get a sandwich!”
“This is your first time here?”
“Of course. And last.”
“Your husband always came alone?”
She looked at Max a moment, sighed, and shook her head.
“It’s all right, Carol.”
“You don’t believe your husband was alone, Mrs. Huttenbach?”
Carol Huttenbach started to say something, and stopped.
“It’s all right, Carol,” Max Harvey repeated. “Inspector Flynn is not from the press. He’s a policeman. And he knows if he repeats what you say, to the press, he’s in trouble. That right, Flynn? They have to know things before we go. Better to be frank with them, than to be dragged back to this…God-awful place.”
Flynn waited, unsure of the source of her anger.
Cocky sat on the bed nearer the door.
“Where is she?” Carol Huttenbach blurted.
“Where’s who?” Flynn asked.
“My God,” she sputtered. “It’s a man’s world, all right, isn’t it? The hotel manager—”
“Carl Morris,” Max Harvey said.
“That sheep-dipped town cop—”
“Chief Jensen,” Max Harvey said.
“You two. You tell me Dwight went outside in the middle of the night to clean his gun and the gun discharged and blew the top of his head off. That can happen to anybody. Especially Dwight, so cocksure of himself he was as careless as a pampered two-year-old. What did you men do with the woman he was with? Just send her packing in the middle of the night? Just because Dwight was a man and you’re all men and ho-ho-ho, men will be men, belly up to the bar, boys, no need to mention he was with a woman, just pack her off before the little wife gets here?”
Flynn turned slightly, looked at Cocky, then at Max Harvey, then back at Carol Huttenbach. “What makes you think he was with a woman?”
“My husband was never not with a woman, Inspector Whatever-your-name-is.”
“Ghote.” Flynn smiled. “Ghote-dipped.”
“My husband was a profoundly spoiled man,” Carol Huttenbach announced. “Sexually spoiled. He was boyishly handsome, healthy, rich, powerful, utterly charming, and as sexy as a magazine cover. He didn’t even have to blow that damned trumpet of his to have a parade of women following him.”
Max Harvey sat forward and put a hand on her arm. She waved it off.
He continued to sit forward, holding his own hands.
“Dwight always had everything his own way. He really believed all the attention he got, all those women throwing themselves at him, were his God-given right.”
Often Flynn had seen bereavement express itself as anger at the deceased. Watching Carol Huttenbach, Flynn wondered if he wasn’t seeing just plain anger.
“Why can’t we ask her what happened? Why did he go outside in the middle of the night to clean his gun?”
“Because someone was in his bed,” Max Harvey said with certainty. “Asleep.”
Flynn said: “Who?”
“Oh, come on,” Carol Huttenbach scoffed. “Don’t give me the ho-ho-ho bit. Some of us sweet little things have to put on stupidity publicly, but that doesn’t mean privately we’re stupid.”
“But whom do you think he was with?”
“You tell me.”
“I mean,” said Flynn. “Do you think he was with anyone in particular?”
“Don’t tell me he came to this fabled resort for the cuisine. Of course, with someone in particular. This is pretty far outside his own congressional district, wouldn’t you say?”
“But who?” Flynn persisted gently.
“God! Any one of a dozen, I can think of. That female lawyer from Washington. His cousin, Wendy. They could never keep their hands off each other. That female pilot forever flying in from Wyoming, what’s her name, Sandy—”
“Wilcomb,” said Max Harvey.
“Mark Brandon’s wife, at every dinner party, always all over him. Jenny Clifford.”
“Quite ajar of worms,” intoned Max Harvey, drawing on his king-sized cigarette.
“Jenny Clifford? Does she have a brother?”
“I think so.”
“Her brother,” said Max Harvey, “is Ernest Clifford, who, at a very young age indeed, is a chief news executive at UBC.”
“I see.”
Carol Huttenbach
said, “Dwight could have gone straight to the top. Straight to The White House. He had money, looks, friends, important connections. He had a magical way of getting things done, getting what he wanted. No one ever understood how he did it. With no apparent effort, no work. All he had to do was pick up a phone, and kazam!” Her tone continued angry. “He was so cocksure of himself, he blew his stupid head off.”
“And you,” Flynn asked. “Would you have gone straight to the top with him?”
“Of course.” She crossed her ankles more tightly. “I have the children to think of.”
12
“Love is not all that’s blind.” In the parking lot of Timberbreak Lodge, Flynn watched his dashboard gauges work. “Needs gasoline,” he said. “Let’s go see if Bellingham has a center.”
As they slowly went downhill on the black-top road, Cocky said, “Didn’t know Ernest Clifford is a news executive at UBC.”
“And has a sister attracted to the recently deceased married man.” Sunlight poured through the breaks in the clouds. The valley and mountainsides to their left now were colorful under the waning fall foliage. “Ach, that’s the way this place is meant to be seen, I’m sure. I told you you might enjoy a few days in the country, Cocky. Peace. Quiet. Dry French toast and bland venison stew. Playful companions. Bodies being dragged about in the small hours.”
“Edward Buckingham,” said Cocky, “is currently out of office as governor of the state whose border is only fifteen hundred kilometers to the northwest of us.”
“Is that so? Thought I’d seen his face in the who-else-is-news columns.”
“Elected twice, the limit for that state in succession. Must wait a term before he can run again. Generally believed still to be running the state through his attorney general, now serving as governor.”
“Good thing it is, too, that one of us reads the newspapers. Frankly, I find the newspapers’ daily announcements of the imminent end of the world seldom right.”
“Philip Arlington is a banker, mostly,” Cocky said. “Currently serving as a White House economic advisor. I think he taught economics once at Yale, or some such place.”
“Unusual for a banker to be so vain.”
“I noticed the chin tucks, too. Cosmetic surgery on his face and more than once, I’d say. Not everyone, Frank, ages as gracefully as I do.” Cocky chuckled.
“Wendell Oland is senior partner in a major law firm,” Flynn said. “You may think he’s senile. I think he had a genuine regard for his new waterproofs.”
“He must have a high regard for all his wearing apparel. At least he keeps all his clothes put safely away somewhere.”
“And Lauderdale is a judge,” said Flynn. “I’m sure there’s no sexual bias in his court. Can’t matter to him at all whether a defendant is wearing trousers or a skirt.”
“I don’t know who Ashley is. Some kind of a businessman, I guess. In financial hot water.”
“Maybe he counts Timberbreak Lodge among his assets. And Wahler is Rutledge’s lawyer, mind you, not his secretary or driver. And three weeks ago, he strangled a lampshade with his necktie. Indeed, we’re all dialectical.”
Flynn pulled into a one-pump station. “Fill the tank with your best,” he said to the attendant. “Vanilla, if you have it.”
“All out of vanilla,” said the attendant. “You want chocolate or strawberry?”
“Damn,” Flynn muttered to Cocky. “All the wrong people are running the world.”
He followed the attendant to the back of the station wagon. “Nice day.”
“Seen better. Last July fourth was better. Didn’t rain. Next July fourth will be better, too.”
“It won’t rain then, either?”
“Gas station will be closed then, too.” The attendant had a spot of skin cancer on his cheek. Flynn wondered if the man knew what it was he was shaving around every day.
“That always makes for a nice day.”
“Except Christmas. My aunt comes Christmas. Hate my aunt.”
“But the gas station’s closed.”
“Wish it were open. Could avoid my aunt.”
Flynn waved to the high land to the northwest. “Must be real nice up in that area on a day like this.”
“Must be.” The attendant put the nozzle back in the pump.
“Are there roads up there?”
“Probably.”
“Never got up there, eh?” Flynn read the meter and gave the man money.
“Can’t. Some sort of secret government installation.”
“Oh, yes?”
“All fenced off. Always has been. Can’t go nowhere near it.”
“I’m sure some of you young chaps know your way up into that area. Where the holes in the fence are.”
“Can’t even take a wire-cutter to the fence. All electrified. Guards and dogs behind every bush. Probably going to poison us one of these days. Blow us all up or something.”
“Would you mind that much?”
“Not if my aunt goes first. Least I’d die happy.”
“Why don’t you like your aunt?”
“She owns the gas station.”
“Oh. I see.”
“Good thing about the installation is people here have to drive around it to get to the county seat. Adds eight miles on to their trip, each way.”
“What’s so good about that?”
“It means I sell more gas.”
“What do you care how much gas you sell if your aunt owns the station?”
“I cheat.”
Flynn got back into the car. “Cocky, I’m not at all sure the wrong people are running the world after all.”
On their right hand side on their drive back uphill was a rustic tavern. Flynn had notice the sign, “The Three Belles of Bellingham,” when they were driving down. The parking lot was nearly filled with cars and small trucks.
“Might be a place for tea and scones.” Flynn slowed the car.
“It’s a roadhouse, Frank. A gin mill.”
“Is it? Then we won’t embarrass them by asking for scones.”
It took Flynn’s eyes a moment to adjust to the dark interior of The Three Belles of Bellingham, despite the neon lighting hanging from the ceiling. At this hour Sunday afternoon, most stools at the long bar were being squatted on. Customers at the bar, all men, were drinking whiskey and beer and yelling at a raised television on which a game of football was being played out for them.
There were two women serving bar, both blond, dimpled, comfortably built, and young.
There were also people stuffed into the booths along the outer wall. Most booths had at least two women in them.
“Let’s sit at the bar,” Flynn said.
“Not a day away from the wife,” Cocky commented, “and he’s eyeing the barmaids.”
“Hardly my fault,” said Flynn. “Do you find Judge Lauderdale that attractive yourself?”
They found two stools at the end of the bar farther from the television.
“Who’s winning?” Flynn asked the barmaid.
“The Jets. Six to nothing.”
“The Jets are winning,” Flynn notified Cocky. “Did you bet on the Jets?”
“I bet on the Patriots.”
“The Patriots aren’t playing the Jets.” On the barmaid’s full blouse letters spelled out “Alice.”
“That must be why he bet on them,” Flynn said. “What will you have, Cocky?”
“Jameson’s,” Cocky said. “Water. No ice.”
“And you, sir?”
Flynn considered the question. “I had a drink once. Didn’t like it much.”
Alice laughed, then thought Flynn might be serious. “Nothing for you?”
“You don’t carry herb tea, I suppose?”
“Who’s Herb?”
“I’ll pay for him,” Flynn said. “That will justify my use of the stool.”
When the barmaid brought Cocky his Irish whiskey, Flynn asked her, “Where’s the third?”
“You only asked fo
r one.”
“The third belle of Bellingham.”
“Oh. Home taking care of our kids. Getting dinner.”
“Three sisters, are you?”
“Yup.”
“And how do you come to own such a place as this, as young as you are?”
“Dad died and left it to us. Nice of him, uh?”
“Very nice.”
“Jacques Crepier, the hockey player. Remember him?”
“Died young, I think.”
“You could say that. Old, though, for a squash that had been cracked as often as his head had. Don’t know how he made it to thirty-eight. Sure you don’t want to try another drink, Mister?”
“I’ll contribute to the pollution by smoking.” He showed her he was filling his pipe. “What’s The Rod and Gun Club?” Alice had been about to turn away. “We noticed a little sign on a dirt road as we were coming down.”
“It’s a private club,” Alice said.
“Do they welcome tourists?”
She smiled. “Not even you, handsome.” She began to rinse a few glasses beneath the bar. “It’s a private, rich man’s club. It’s always been there.”
“Pretty big?”
“Takes up a lot of acres.”
“Someone said it’s really a secret government installation.”
“Who said that?”
“The young man at the gas station.”
“Oh, you mean that Herb. He was sent home from school in first grade and never came back. Nobody but idiots believe that. Just ‘cause there’s a fence around it, and guards. Some of the guys get angry, once in a while, when the huntin’ gets slim around here, that they can’t go on the rich men’s private reserve. Say they’re going to take it by storm, or set a fire on it, or something. They never do. That’s all just Saturday night talk.”
Cocky appeared to be enjoying his Jameson’s.
“Must provide lots of local jobs, though. Big place like that.”
“I’ve never known anyone to work there. Guess they get all their help from New York. We never even see anybody from there. They must have their own stores and bowling alley and everything. Once in a while big cars go through town on the way there. Nope.” She shook water out of a glass. “It just sits there like a big black hole in the landscape.”
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