“For God’s sake, Gigi! I’ve been pounding on the door for half an hour. What? You were so busy putting your face on you couldn’t come down and let me out? You didn’t have to lock the door in the first place.” He stomped to the fridge, smelling like stale alcohol. He jerked the door open so hard the condiment bottles clinked. “There’s no orange juice!”
Hangovers made Les surly.
“I suppose there’s no paper today, either,” he said, peering out the window at the snowy driveway. “Lazy buggers. Any excuse not to deliver the paper. If you’re making eggs, I’ll have mine over easy.”
Crossing my arms over my chest, I glared at him and decided to practice being meaner. “Charlie thinks I should call the police on you.”
That got his attention. He whirled and tried out a smile. “Gigi. Hon. That’s not necessary. I’m sorry if I sounded a bit … testy. It’s just that I’m worried. Look, I’ll scramble us both some eggs, okay?”
“I want cereal.” I crossed to the pantry for the Honey Bunches of Oats, poured some into a bowl, and added milk. After a moment, Les did likewise. We sat at the kitchen table, eating in silence. “Heather-Anne told Charlie you guys had a fight and that you left,” I said finally, stirring the leftover milk in the bottom of my bowl.
Les burped. “I need some coffee.” He got up and began to make a pot, complaining that I didn’t have his favorite brand anymore. Finally, with the coffee brewing, he came back to the table. “We did. That newspaper clipping arrived and I lost it. Heather-Anne and I had been reasonably honest with each other about our pasts. She knew that my business dealings weren’t always on the up-and-up, and I knew she’d made a habit of … of separating men from their money. I knew she’d been married before and that she’d walked away from those marriages with a lot of cash.”
“Marriages? How many?”
“Two that I knew about. A guy named Cheney in Tennessee and another guy in Oklahoma when she was younger. Parnell Parkin, his name was. Three,” he added reluctantly, “if it turns out she was the wife referred to in the Wyoming clipping. She had a rough childhood. Her dad left when she was only three or four, and her mom found herself a succession of sugar daddies who often didn’t want Heather-Anne or her brother around. He was younger and sick. They were always trying to scrape together money to pay for doctors or get him medicine. Anyway, her mom pretty much brought her up to think that the best way to make a buck was to use her assets to con some poor schmuck out of it.”
I was thinking “poor thing” when images from Reba’s video of “Fancy” started playing in my brain and I wondered if Heather-Anne hadn’t made the whole story up after hearing that song. She probably didn’t even have a brother, sick or otherwise. Les got up to fill his coffee cup and actually brought me one.
“Thanks.” I took a sip, wondering how Charlie could possibly prefer a cold Pepsi to coffee. “So you got mad when you read the clipping and…?”
“We fought. Argued. I accused her of lying. She slammed out of the house and I drank. You know how I get sometimes.” He looked a little sheepish. “I guess I fell asleep.”
Or passed out.
“When I woke up it was the next morning and she was gone. Gone gone, not ‘out walking the beach in a snit’ gone. I couldn’t think of where she might have gone except here, so I got a ticket to Denver and followed her.”
“Heather-Anne told Charlie that you left first and she followed you.”
He flapped a hand. “No, it was the other way around.”
“Why were you in Aspen?”
“I’ve kept in touch with Cherry and Moss. I knew they were out of the country. I needed to keep a low profile because of the arrest warrant, and I missed skiing, and I thought Aspen would be a romantic place for me and Heather-Anne to make up when…” He trailed off, looking sad.
I didn’t know what to believe. Staring at his profile as he sipped his coffee, I realized something. “You really loved her, didn’t you?” I felt like someone had squeezed my rib cage too tight. “You wouldn’t have risked coming back to the States if you didn’t.”
Les’s expression told me all I needed to know. Before he could say anything, though, the front door creaked open and Dexter called, “Mom, I’m home. James’s family took off for a day on the slopes, so they dropped me. Mom?”
Les and I exchanged panicked looks. Well, mine was panicked. Les’s was more resigned.
Dexter appeared in the kitchen, snow clods falling off his boots. The cold had reddened his handsome face, and his blond bangs half-hid his eyes. “I thought I’d—” He caught sight of his dad and stopped.
“Hi, son—” Les started.
“It’s not what it looks like,” I said. I didn’t know what Dexter thought it looked like, but whatever it looked like, that’s not what it was.
Dexter turned on his heel and marched away, leaving a trail of snow melting on the floor.
I started out of my chair. “Honey—”
Les grabbed my arm. “Let him go.”
A door slammed upstairs. I pulled away from Les and trotted up the stairs. Knocking on Dexter’s door, I tried the knob. It was locked. “Dexter, your dad didn’t have anyplace to stay last night, so I let him stay in the basement. It’s not … we’re not…”
No response. I tried explaining again but got only silence. “Your dad will be gone soon, okay?” I waited a few more minutes, hoping he would say something, but he didn’t. Trudging back down the stairs, I heaved a sigh. Parenting was a lot easier when the kids were in elementary school. Now that they were in high school …
The kitchen was empty when I returned to it, the mugs still on the table. Had Les gone down for a shower? Before I could even move the mugs to the sink, the doorbell rang. I hurried to open it and found four burly police officers on the porch, patrol cars behind them striping the snow with red and blue. My mouth fell open.
“Mrs. Goldman? We’ve had a report of a wanted felon in the area. Is Lester Goldman inside?”
“Uh…”
“May we come in?”
I nodded, and they stamped their feet on the mat before stepping into the foyer. I wished I could train the kids to do that.
“Do you feel threatened? Are you under duress, ma’am?” the policeman with three chevrons on his jacket asked, his narrowed eyes taking in the living room, the staircase, and the opening leading to the kitchen and the study.
“Um, no, I’m fine.” How did they know Les was here? A slight noise made me look up, and I saw Dexter looking down at us from the landing, cell phone in hand, triumphant smile tightening his lips. Oh.
“Where can we find Mr. Goldman?”
Even if I’d wanted to protect Les—and I wasn’t sure at that moment if I did or not—there was no point in lying with Dexter standing right there ready to paint a bull’s-eye on his father’s back. “I think he’s in the basement.”
“Where’s that?”
I pointed to the door.
“Is he armed?”
The question startled me. “No! I mean, I don’t think so.”
They headed for the basement door, saying, “Wait here. You, too.” They beckoned to Dexter, who slouched down the stairs and propped himself against the wall, texting furiously. The tall cop with ears that stuck out stayed in the front hall with us while two others started down the basement stairs and the last one slipped out the front door and around toward the garage, drawing his gun.
“They won’t shoot Les, will they?”
The young policeman’s eyes slid to me and then went back to tracking his partner outside. I could tell he wished he was chasing Les rather than babysitting me and Dexter. “Probably not.”
He sounded sorry about it. Before I could respond, one of the cops called from the basement, “All clear. There’s no one down here.”
“Hey, Sarge, I found footprints out back.” The outside cop’s voice came over the radio.
I scurried across the living room and looked down into the backyard. Dexter and
the jug-eared cop followed me as the other policemen pounded up the basement stairs. Pretty soon, we were all craning our necks to look down. Sure enough, a set of footprints, big dents in the drifted snow, led away from the house and across the Klamerers’ backyard. Les must have seen or heard the police pull up, I guessed, and taken off. Dexter snapped photos with his cell phone.
One pair of cops started following the footprints, and the sergeant came inside, talking into the radio clipped near his shoulder. Pulling out a notebook, he asked me, “What was Goldman wearing?”
“Would you like some coffee? I’m sure you must be frozen, after—”
“Just answer my question, please, Mrs. Goldman.”
I was only trying to be thoughtful; he didn’t have to get all huffy. “Um, jeans,” I said, “and a cerise-colored sweatshirt.”
“Say what?” The sergeant twisted one brow inward and looked up from his notebook.
“Red,” the tall young cop said.
The sergeant and Dexter eyed him suspiciously, and he blushed. “My sister’s an artist,” he mumbled.
The questioning continued for ten minutes until the pair of cops chasing Les radioed in to say they’d lost his trail. I wasn’t sure if I was glad or sad. The cops left soon after that, the sergeant getting all stern and telling me to call immediately if Les turned up again. “Harboring a wanted man is a crime,” he warned. “You can be charged as an accessory.”
When they had driven off and I had closed the door behind them, I turned to have it out with Dexter. “Did you call the police on your father because he wrecked your car?” I asked, hands on my hips.
He gave me an incredulous look through the bangs draped over his eyes. “You just don’t get it, do you, Mom?”
Before I could ask what he meant, because I had no idea, he was halfway up the stairs. I called his name, but he kept going, waving the cell phone over his head. “Gotta put these on Facebook.”
When I was growing up in Georgia, having a daddy in prison, like some of my classmates did, was something to be ashamed of. In fourth grade, the Farrell twins went around saying their dad was working in a car factory up north, and it wasn’t until I heard a couple of women whispering in the frozen food section at the Piggly Wiggly that I learned Mr. Farrell was really in jail for robbing a Smyrna bank. Now, the police tracking your dad through the snow gave you bragging rights on Facebook.
I called Charlie to tell her what Les had said about Heather-Anne’s earlier husbands and how he followed her to Colorado Springs, and that he was gone again. She answered the phone sounding out of breath.
“Digging out Dan’s truck,” she said. “What’s up?”
When I told her Les had run off, she asked, “Did he leave anything?”
“I don’t know. I’ll check the basement and call you back.” Hanging up, I hurried downstairs, happy to have something to do that didn’t involve trying to talk to my son about why he sicced the cops on his father. The basement felt colder than usual, and I found the open window Les must have gone out of. If it wasn’t just like him to leave it open so the heater was warming the whole backyard! He wouldn’t have done that if he were still paying the utility bill, I thought, trying to close the window. It wouldn’t latch, and I realized Les had broken it climbing through. Putting a throw pillow against the half-inch gap to keep all the hot air from leaking out, I crept back to the guest bedroom, sneaking along as if Les might still be there. He wasn’t.
The bed was unmade, the coverlet tossed on the floor, and the room smelled a bit sour. I wrinkled my nose. Stripping the bed, I looked around but didn’t see anything that might belong to Les. In the bathroom, I found a minitube of toothpaste, a wet washcloth on the floor, and a pocket-sized spiral notebook on the toilet tank. Excited, I seized it and riffled through the pages. Nothing. Not one single solitary phone number or list or note. Tiny bits of paper caught in the spiral wire showed where pages had been torn out.
Disappointed, I shoved it in my pocket and headed back upstairs. I didn’t have the faintest clue who to call about fixing the window. That made me reflect that one of the hard things about being a divorced single mom, which I’d never thought about before I was one, was not being able to fix a broken window or blow out the sprinkler system for winter, or know how to find someone to do it for you who wouldn’t cheat you. I sighed heavily, closed the basement door, and got myself the last slice of lemon cake and the Yellow Pages.
33
Charlie and Dan were back on the road again by nine o’clock, but it was too late for Dan to comfort the dying woman; her family had called to say she’d passed on early that morning. Charlie felt guiltier than ever for having dragged Dan to Wyoming, but he swept aside her apology.
“Jean Warren and I had many conversations about this life and the next over the past couple of months. She was a woman of faith and had come to terms with dying,” he said. Charlie wondered what Dan would have to say about the next life, one she wasn’t sure she believed in, but a fellow guest offered to drive them back to Dan’s truck, and she didn’t pursue it.
Once they dug the truck out of the snow and got it back on the road, the rest was easy since plows had cleared I-25 while they slept and the state police had reopened the highway. Twenty minutes saw them in Denver, where billboards advertising the stock show gave Charlie an idea.
“Is it okay if we make a half hour detour?” she asked Dan, pulling out her cell phone.
“You want to talk to Eustis, don’t you?” Amused resignation sounded in his voice, though he kept his eyes on the road and the lighter than usual traffic.
She smiled at his acuity and nodded.
“I’ve got to see what I can do for the Warrens and talk to Joseph about funeral arrangements, but I don’t suppose an hour one way or the other will matter greatly.”
With that tacit agreement, Charlie called Sheriff Huff, who called Tansy Eustis and got her husband’s cell phone number.
“Do you know something I don’t?” the sheriff asked Charlie when he called back to give her the cell number.
“Undoubtedly,” she said, “but not necessarily about the Eustis case. I’ll keep you posted.”
Huff laughed and rang off. Charlie dialed Eustis’s number and explained who she was and why she wanted to talk to him.
“Hell, yeah, I’ll talk to you if you think you’ve got a lead on that bitch who killed my father,” he said in a cigarette-roughened voice. The sound of a bad PA system echoed in the background, and Charlie had to put a finger in one ear to hear his directions to a meeting place. Dan was taking the I-70 exit toward the stock show grounds even as she hung up. Ten minutes later they pulled off the highway and parked in a dirt lot packed with pickups and livestock trailers. A rancher was leading a bison on a line, and the animal lowered his shaggy head to stare at Charlie and Dan as they got out of the truck. Snow had turned the dirt underfoot to a mire, and an overzealous plow operator had gouged furrows into the lot, making walking hazardous. Piles of dirt-blackened snow edged the lot. By the time they made it to the exhibition building where Eustis had said he’d meet them, Charlie’s jeans were spattered with what she hoped was only mud from ankle to knee, and her boots weighed an extra two pounds each from all the muck caked on them.
Charlie and Dan stamped their feet vigorously on the concrete pad outside the warehouselike building and stepped into an atmosphere humid with moisture from damp coats, mud, and, it seemed, a few thousand rabbits. Charlie sneezed.
Hutches lined several aisles, and crowds of people ambled past, admiring the gray, white, brown, black, or speckled inhabitants. Some of the bunnies were the size of cocker spaniels, while others would have fit easily in Charlie’s hand. If they hadn’t been making her eyes itch and her nose run, she might have enjoyed looking at them. As it was, she glanced around for Eustis and saw a man in a gray cowboy hat waving at them from tables clustered near a hot dog stand. She and Dan wormed through the crowd to Eustis and introduced themselves. Not wanting to distract Eustis
by mentioning Dan’s title, she introduced him merely as “an associate.”
Eustis was in his early forties, Charlie guessed, but looked older. He was a lean man in well-used jeans and a pearl-snapped shirt under a worn leather jacket. He pushed his hat back on his brow as he shook their hands, and Charlie eyed it, almost certain she’d seen it and him leaving Heather-Anne Pawlusik’s hotel room at the Embassy Suites a few days before the woman was strangled.
“Sorry about this,” he said by way of greeting, his voice gravelly, “but the rabbit judging is happening now, and my youngest has several rabbits entered.” He gestured vaguely toward the hutches and, Charlie assumed, his kid. “M’other boys raised Simmental calves and made themselves a bundle on the sales, but, no, Eric’s got to raise goddamn rabbits. Still, he’s won a few ribbons.” Distaste for the rabbits warred with pride in his voice. He sank into a metal folding chair and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket. Sliding one out, he fingered it but didn’t light up. “Can’t smoke in here,” he complained.
“We won’t take much of your time,” Charlie promised as she and Dan also sat.
“Tansy said you were out at the Triple E yesterday, that you showed her a photo of a woman that might be Amanda?”
Charlie unfolded the photo and pushed it across the table to him. It stuck on the tacky surface, and Eustis reached for it. “Could be her,” he said. He gazed at it a moment longer, covering Heather-Anne’s hair with his thumb. “I think it might be her. Where did you get this?” The page trembled.
“She lived in Colorado Springs for a while,” Charlie said, “and recently moved to Costa Rica. Do you know anyone named Les Goldman?”
Eustis’s brow crinkled. “Doesn’t ring any bells.”
“He’s not someone you or your dad did business with?”
“Not me. Dad had deals going I wasn’t in on, though. Why?” He tapped an impatient foot on the dirt floor.
3 Swift Run Page 20
