“Wire, actually. Less than an inch thick. He crossed for the first time in, like, 1907. Five hundred feet up. Two football fields across. No friggin’ net. No safety harness. Wuss factor? Zero. Ivy would sashay out to the middle of the canyon during his performance and he would proceed to stand on his damn head.”
“Sam? Really? I’m not drunk yet.”
“I kid you not.”
If Sam’s Ivy Baldwin yarn was true, I was awed. The unpredictable winds in Eldorado Canyon are neither apocryphal nor are they urban legend. But I failed to see where Sam was going. Given the nature of our conversation to that point, I had my ears peeled for both bullshit and an underlying metaphor. I grabbed another oyster.
“On a night like tonight—but back then—Ivy Baldwin might have felt like he could reach out and touch the darn moon from where he was standing on that wire.”
Ivy crossed in the dark? The metaphor continued to elude me. The oysters were disappearing at an alarming pace, disproportionately into Sam’s mouth. I ate one more. I could either savor the oysters or eat the oysters. Sam’s appetite wouldn’t permit me to do both.
Sam sensed my skepticism about Ivy Baldwin. He went into the trailer and returned with an old postcard with a photo of Ivy Baldwin crossing Eldorado Springs canyon on the high wire. “Convinced?”
“Yes. Wow. Wow.”
“Ivy said that crossing that canyon on a wire was ‘the greatest poison in the world. One drop could kill you.’” Sam jirbled out more whiskey. He examined the bottle before he put it down. “Rye? Goes okay with the oysters, which I would not have thought. Liquor with liquor? I will try to remember that.”
“Sam? What’s the high-wire story about? Is there a metaphor I’m missing?”
He tossed down the last of the oysters before he settled back. The chair had not been designed with Sam’s BMI in mind; I was anticipating a disaster involving plastic fatigue before the evening progressed much further. As though Sam was determined to make things even more precarious than they were, he balanced his flip-flopped feet, ankles crossed, on the top rail of the creaky deck. That maneuver shifted his weight to the rear legs of the certainly insufficient chair.
He then scoffed at fate by resting the stout glass of rye whiskey on the flattest part of his amply rounded abdomen. The flattest part of Sam’s belly wasn’t flat, exactly. It was the flattest part only when compared with the completely rounded other parts. To raise the danger quotient to alarming levels, Sam lifted his arms and intertwined his fingers behind his head.
I couldn’t take my eyes off of the glass. The whiskey was sloshing as it tried to keep up with gravity’s dictate that it find and hold a line that mimicked the horizon, something made nigh impossible by the glass leaning this way and that with every movement Sam made and each breath Sam took.
He said, “No metaphor. I have become Ivy Baldwin’s biggest fan. I want to make him a star. I want to go to a movie about him at the Boedecker.”
I was not convinced about Sam’s sincerity. I continued to be distracted by the damn glass.
He said, “I was just about to tell you about the why. Yes?”
I couldn’t remember what the why was about. I said, “Yes, Sam. That’d be great.”
Waiting for the glass to tumble was kind of like being part of the century-earlier audience craning my neck to watch Ivy Baldwin’s headstand on his wire high in the sky above Eldorado. The only thing more alluring than the spectacle of success was the prospect of failure. The price of admission guaranteed one outcome or the other. For the audience it would be win-win. Same attraction as the one Sam had for his weekend love, NASCAR. If there was a metaphor to be found I was convinced it lurked in there somewhere.
I felt Sam staring at me. His glare felt ferocious. I shifted my gaze to meet his and forced myself to hold it. I felt a little frightened. Maybe more than a little.
“The why? The why is mostly because you’ve been such a douche,” Sam said. “When you’re not misleading me lately, you’re accusing me of something. But you know all that.” He burped. The glass jumped. “But no worries. I forgive you.”
50
MY REPLY LACKED MATURITY. I said, “You forgive me? You’ve been the douche.”
“That may be true,” he said. “Do you forgive me?”
The Kumamotos and Ivy Baldwin had knocked me off script. It was not an ideal moment for me to withdraw into contemplation. But contemplate I did, starting with a consideration about whether his request for forgiveness was specious.
“That’s what I thought,” Sam said into the dead air. “Whatever’s been going on between us, it’s not about either of us not being perfect. We’re both guilty of that. What’s going on between us is about not being trusted.”
The leaning whiskey glass on his belly had to be the single most distracting non-naked thing on the planet. I couldn’t not stare at it.
I said, “Do you ever think about the morality? What we did? How are we different from”—I tried on potential descriptors like I might try on shoes. Other killers? Other murderers? Other criminals? I decided to use names instead—“Michael McClelland or Carl Luppo? They killed. We killed.”
Sam said, “Late at night. Sometimes. I think about it. Not the morality. I don’t go there. I tell myself that a killer was walking down the hall to my son’s bedroom with a gun in his hand and a round in the chamber. That I protected my kid. I tell myself I had no choice but to do what I did.”
“That’s what I tell myself, too,” I said. It was taking all of my self-restraint not to grab the glass off Sam’s gut. “Does it work for you? Do you believe in those moments that your rationalization is more self-righteous than the ones that a million others have used? You’ve arrested killers. I imagine most of them must have rationales.”
“Mostly yes, sometimes no.” Sam was oblivious to the risk of the teetering glass. I did not know how that could be true. He said, “Somebody needs to say this out loud. I will be the one. I trust you, Alan. Do you trust me?”
Sam was asking a big question. I wanted to tell him I trusted him. I also wanted to be truthful. A frank answer would be nuanced. I feared the pace of our conversation, and the impact of the rye on my cognitive skills, meant I would get insufficient time to get the complexities aligned.
I was right. Sam huffed. “Well, that says a ton. Do you think I killed Big Elias?”
The new question took little contemplation. I said, “When I came over here tonight my intent was to be honest. My honest answer is I don’t know if you killed him.”
“Well, shit.” Sam rescued the glass from his belly, drained the contents, dropped his flip-flopped feet to the floor, and put his elbows on his knees.
As relieved as I was about the glass, I was aggrieved that Sam couldn’t understand my position. I said, “What? You’re saying that if I read the events of that day a certain way, a certain reasonable way, that makes me a douche?”
Sam said, “No. Accusing me of murder makes you a douche. The way you read events? That makes you an amateur. I’ve been making allowances for you being an amateur since the day we met.”
I was surprised at how little offense I took at that. I said, “Have you followed the case? Big Elias’s death? In the press?”
“What? No. I have plenty of my own work. Do you know we have criminals in town that you haven’t met?” I shrugged. He said, “Do you watch Dr. Phil?”
Point. “You don’t know what the witness saw that evening?”
“I didn’t know there was a witness.” He poured himself more whiskey.
I wanted Sam to explain the white jumpsuit. The Tyvek. But I didn’t want to be the one to tell him about it. I wanted him to admit he already knew. I wanted him to give me the explanation he’d already worked out, the lie he wanted me to believe.
He pulled out his phone. “Don’t want to tell me? Fine. I can look up the damn article right now. Give me a minute. O has good WiFi.”
Shit. He wasn’t bluffing. I said, “A witness drov
e by. There was a second person at the horse trailer. The other person was wearing a white, hooded, one-piece jumpsuit.”
Sam was no idiot. I would not have to draw him a map to my insinuation. He swallowed a gulp of whiskey. Then he said, “Could be a coincidence. Good Samaritan.”
What I swallowed was the word bullshit.
Sam’s voice took on a storytelling timbre. “Couple of years ago, I’m on the Mall to see somebody about a case and right in front of me a tourist punches a homeless man in the face. I knew the homeless guy. He was an asshole. Antagonistic. Aggressive. Rude. The kind of homeless guy who gives the homeless guys on the Mall their bad rep.
“The tourist was a German who spoke good English, but what he kept saying to explain why he hit the homeless man was that the guy had ‘earned it.’ I was telling him that you’re not allowed to hit somebody in America because he earned it. We went back and forth a couple of times. He finally resorts to German to make his point—he says something-something then ‘backpfeifengesicht.’”
Sam spelled out the word for me as though the correct spelling would make all the difference in the world. It didn’t. “Which means?” I asked.
“Exactly.” He made a whiskey face. “I’m getting there. His girlfriend—sweet thing—translated. Her English was like your daughter Sofie’s. Perfect. She said that the homeless guy had insulted her and made crude sexual advances and then acted belligerent when her boyfriend stood up for her. And then she explained that the word—backpfeifengesicht—translated, very roughly, as ‘his face was in need of a fist.’ She scrunched her hand up into a cute little fist and showed it to me. You know, to help me understand.
“See? That’s Big Elias. Backpfeifengesicht. An asshole going through life with a face in need of a fist. Am I sorry that it was a hoof instead of a fist? Not really.”
As calmly as if he were checking hockey scores, Sam pulled up an article from The Coloradoan on his phone. He had to mount his reading glasses onto his nose to read the story. “You’re exactly right,” Sam said as he finished reading. “That’s what the witness said. White hooded jumpsuit.”
“And?”
“And you should drop this, Alan. Find a new hobby. Detecting doesn’t suit you.”
Sam’s dismissive attitude wasn’t unfamiliar. I usually succumbed to its pull, gave him what he wanted. Not that time. I forced the issue. “Did you?” I said. “Kill him?”
“Fuck you,” Sam said. He spoke the words under his breath, not as though he didn’t mean them, but as though it hurt him to say them. “Big Elias was an abusive prick who used people like he traded horses—his eye on nothing but the bottom line and what suited him best. He went through life without consequence. Horse, kid, family, neighbor. Didn’t matter. The more I learned about him, the more I came to despise the old fuck. I stayed up late nights wondering how to get that child out of his house.”
“Elias Tres?”
“Child protective services had given the old guy a lifetime pass. Why?” He shrugged. “Law enforcement had given the old shit a lifetime pass. Why? I was too much of an outsider to learn how or why he got so much deference in that town but I know it happens. I assume that half the skeletons in the asshole’s closet were other people’s skeletons. You know what I’m saying? There are jerks like him in Boulder who get away with all kinds of crap, too. It’s almost always because they possess a stash of someone else’s Kryptonite.”
“I suspect you have a theory about the dirt he had.”
“I do not. But I bet it’s good. Unless Elias Contopo robbed the local bank at gunpoint on Friday afternoon while in drag, no one was going to do anything to him. That was a fact. The truth? Here’s some truth for you: I am glad the man is dead.”
“You’re basically admitting that you had a motive to kill him, Sam.”
“Motive? Nah. I had a rationale for wanting him dead. But a lot of people did. You talk to ten people who knew him, ten more who did business with him, you’ll find nineteen didn’t like him and five or six minimum who would load a gun if someone else would pull the trigger.
“What happened in the horse trailer that night? As far as I’m concerned that was someone else pulling the trigger. That’s all.”
The whiskey insisted I say what I was thinking. “You know what, Sam? I don’t give a shit whether or not you have a rationale, I care that you have an alibi.”
Sam laughed. His laugh was bitter and was supercharged by his blood alcohol level. Just like earlier I heard Emily bark her response to him.
“I don’t owe you an alibi,” Sam said.
“I beg to differ. Without that drawing I gave you in the ICU? I think your life would feel less contented right now.” I was thinking the absence of oysters and Ophelia. The presence of lawyers and prison.
“You ‘beg to differ’? That’s hilarious. What, you want it back?”
I said, “You still have it? Really?” I assumed Tres’s drawing was ashes.
Sam didn’t answer. He had no reason to give the drawing back to me. He said, “The night the horses killed the old asshole, I was in a meeting here in town that lasted until seven thirty. Is that a good enough alibi for you?”
He drained his drink. He poured us each another inch.
I did the arithmetic. Shy of a waiting helicopter there was no way that Sam could have gone from Boulder to north of Fort Collins in time to arrange a flat on Big Elias’s horse trailer and then somehow prod the horses into crushing the old man to death. If Sam was in Boulder at seven thirty he didn’t squeeze into that Tyvek jumpsuit on Tatonka Trail to kill Big Elias. The logistics didn’t work.
I wondered if I had the dates wrong. Or if Sam did. But the real question was whether Sam was telling me the truth about his meeting in Boulder.
“With whom”—the correct grammar felt odd on my whiskeyed lips—“were you meeting?” I asked. My wandering mind immediately began to consider the most reasonable possibility—that Sam’s “meeting” was a euphemism for him having an affair. Yet another affair. From my point of view, one more in a string of unlikely trysts. Women loved Sam. Sam lacked compunction. Over the years, I’d felt occasional envy about it all. I also felt a lot of bewilderment.
If it were true that Sam was straying again, what I was feeling in the moment was acute empathy for Ophelia. If it were true, then my best friend and my dead wife had a lot in common. Which meant that Ophelia and I had a lot in common.
I did not wish to have that in common with her.
“The meeting was with someone you know,” Sam said. “Let’s leave it there.”
The words burned like he’d thrown his rye into my eyes. His casual admission forced me to imagine something—ugh—I really didn’t want to be imagining: that the person Sam was shtupping was someone I knew, perhaps well.
Kirsten’s repeated insistences that “I am seeing someone” seeped into my brain like floodwater coming in under the door. Along with the memory of the Upslope she had in her refrigerator … Sam likes Upslope. Shit. No. Would you, Sam? Really?
“No,” I said. “Tell me who the meeting was with.”
“No. You need to trust me,” Sam said. “How about that?”
I belched. The burp was a digestive artifact of bao and beer and oysters and rye and was completely noneditorial in nature.
Sam’s words were echoing in my head. Trust me … trust me … trust me.
I was feeling the same complicated feelings about trust that I’d had with Lauren in our final minutes together the morning before she was shot. The only unfamiliar part of the dialogue with Sam was that I was playing Lauren’s role while Sam was playing mine.
Sam was not easily offended by the outputting of bodily gases. But my belch had apparently crossed a line. He said, “That was gross.” He waved his hand in front of his face. “Your situation these last few months? Jesus alive. Losing Lauren like that. Doing everything—everything—I’ve watched you do to hold on to those kids. To keep them afloat. To keep them together. To help the
m survive all this. It has … informed me, Alan.” He put his huge hand on his chest with his fingers spread.
I was thinking, You don’t know half of it. And your sudden empathy isn’t going to make me trust you. I said, “I don’t know what that means, Sam.” My words were true, but mostly I was buying time while I plotted my escape so that I could be gone before he got to the part where he admitted the detail about him and Kirsten hooking up while Big Elias was being trampled to death by equines. Jesus.
“It means that, through observing your life, how you were living, I saw that I was at risk. That I could lose it all. In a second. I could lose real love. I am talking Ophelia. Simon. God.” Probably due to the rye I couldn’t tell whether the God was indicative of Sam’s fear that he was losing his deity, or whether it was a simple invocation, or even an instance of him taking his Lord’s name in vain. “I came to the conclusion that it was time to clean up my act. To stop being stupid. To stop seeing what I could get away with. To stop fucking around with what’s important in my life.
“I needed to stop being a good man only when my good woman was looking, to stop being a good father only on those days that my son was under my roof. It was time for me to earn—earn, damn it—a reliable spot in the hearts of the people I treasure. And to find a way to go to bed each night confident in my heart that I had earned that spot in their hearts again that very day.
“I had to cherish what I had—what I loved—enough not to fuck it up.”
Speaking seemed stupid. I wasn’t being smart, but I wasn’t quite stupid. I could also feel the element that was trust worming its way back onto my personal periodic table.
During his soliloquy Sam had been looking in the direction of the start-of-night silhouette of the Front Range, the jagged ragged form of intersecting purple ridges backlit by the lingering light of the half-moon that had already disappeared into tomorrow.
He turned his head to look at me. “The meeting I was at that night? The night Gordo Elias died? I was with my therapist, Alan. My goddamn psycho”—pause—“therapist.”
I opened my mouth. He said, “Don’t. I’m not done.” I closed my mouth.
Compound Fractures Page 27
