by Todd Borg
It seemed that Melissa’s death was likely an accident. But to do Jennifer any service required me to consider that Melissa might have been murdered.
What could be a motive for killing a six-year-old kid? Because she saw something she wasn’t supposed to see? Such a scenario presumed that someone was doing something abhorrent up on the mountain and didn’t want a six-year-old to be able to finger him. Which was a far-fetched notion.
I took another look down the rock slide and imagined the path a falling body would take. The slide got steeper as it went down until it was near vertical. Being early May, it was still covered with a heavy layer of snow. I stared for another minute down the wide white swath trying to intuit something more about Melissa’s death, but realized I would learn nothing further until I knew where they had found the body. I hiked back down Maggie’s and drove south around the lake. It was too late to stop at the police station and ask my friend Mallory about Melissa’s death, so I headed back up the east shore.
North of Cave Rock, I turned right onto a private road that winds its way two miles up to a small group of homes. My four-room log cabin was the original building. The previous owner had subdivided the land. Now there were five other houses, all grand assemblages of glass and rough-cut beams with prow fronts and cedar shake roofs. My humble structure was the black sheep of the bunch, but my stock broker, software engineer neighbors didn’t seem to mind. I think they felt it was good to occasionally rub elbows with common folk who didn’t even have a garage, never mind a Range Rover to put in it.
But I did have a ten million dollar view.
My cabin sits at 7,200 feet above sea level, 1,000 feet above the lake. The best place to see the view is from the deck which projects out from the mountain.
Street Casey’s VW bug was in my drive and Spot got excited when he saw it. I told him to be quiet as we went inside. Street was not in my small cabin. I went out to the deck.
Street stood at the railing facing the lake, her body silhouetted against the sunset. She was skinny, but she looked great in her black blouse and black jeans. I touched Spot, held my finger out for silence and lingered at the view, then said, “Get you a beer?”
Street turned and grinned and patted her thighs.
“Spot, honey, c’mere!”
He bounded to her and, lifting his snout a few inches, licked her chin. Street hugged him, then swung a leg over his back and, giggling like a little girl, rode him around in a circle. “I’ll take a light,” she managed through her giggles.
“A whole one?” I said.
“Just half.”
I went inside, poured half a beer into a tall narrow glass and brought it and another bottle for me back outside.
Street was back at the railing, facing across the water toward Emerald Bay, Maggie’s Peaks and the white snow-covered gash of the rock slide. I set the beers on the railing and put my arm around Street’s shoulders. I ran my fingers over her prominent jaw bone, across the tiny acne scars, down to the full, red lips. She’d put on a hint of shadow under her cheekbones, making them look even more dramatic than normal. She was gorgeous in spite of her flaws and I wondered for the thousandth time why she used cosmetics to make herself look more severe. I kissed her. The warmth of her high metabolism radiated like a heat lamp.
“Catch any bad guys lately?” she asked.
“Nope. But I’ve got a new client. Thinks her sister was murdered. If so, there’s a bad guy in there somewhere.”
The sun was disappearing behind the mountains making God rays flash through the clouds. The last of the sun made the amber liquid in Street’s glass glow like a danger beacon.
As if on cue, a large spider came strutting down the railing toward us. I cocked my finger to shoot it into space and then remembered Street’s presence. The woman had spent a sizable part of her life studying creepy crawlers. I let the bug pass by unscathed.
“What’s this?” Street said. “A sudden case of arachniphilia?” She took a tiny sip of her beer.
“Did you expect anything less around you?”
“Yes, actually.” She pointed a delicate finger at the spider. “That guy is a Turret spider. Makes his living eating insects, mostly ants. You want to be nice to insects, you should squish the spiders.”
“Figures I’d get it wrong,” I said. “I guess I don’t find bugs interesting enough to keep the different types straight.”
“Some night I’ll sneak a couple of Cow Killers under your sheets. You’ll become interested pretty quick.”
“What’s a Cow Killer?”
“A type of wasp, red and black. Got a sting so severe people claim it could kill a cow.”
Street looked at her watch. “I better go,” she said. “I have to give a paper at an entomology conference in Oakland at eight in the morning. If I leave now I can get to my hotel by eleven p.m. I just wanted to see you before I left.”
I walked her to her car, kissed her goodbye and watched as she drove away. A sadness, out of proportion to the moment, washed over me. I gave myself a shake and went inside.
My art books sit in a disheveled row on a long shelf that is open above so that the tallest hardcovers can sit side by side with small paperbacks. Although I never seem to get them organized, I knew right where to find the big Hopper monograph. My little cabin doesn’t have a table so I sat down in my leather chair and opened it in my lap.
I wasn’t looking for a specific image so much as a feeling that many of Hopper’s paintings give me. My eyes lingered on certain reproductions. The lighthouses all alone on a hill. A group of people in a cafe, together physically but disaffected and emotionally alone. An old building in a forgotten part of town, past its prime and facing abandonment at best, demolition at worst.
The New York Movie painting flashed by and I turned back to it. I realized I wasn’t drawn to the young woman so much as I was drawn to her pensiveness. Like Street, her loneliness was hidden from the world, revealed only to herself and only when she was alone. For her, self-reliance was more than just a worthy goal, it was a survival code as necessary as food or shelter.
I lingered on the image, fighting back my own loneliness at Street’s departure. She had a conference to go to, no doubt important to her career. That I would give up my entire career if it meant I could spend every evening with her didn’t mean I should judge her for not doing the same. Our driving forces were as different as our backgrounds and I should expect nothing else.
I’d come from a long line of Scots and Irishmen, scattered in big cities from Boston to Philadelphia to San Francisco. My father and uncles and grandfathers were gruff, loud-talking, beer-guzzling street cops, tough but fair-minded if a suspect was white, tough and not-so-fair-minded if the suspect was brown. The women in my family tree were plump, cheerful mothers, equally prejudiced but devoted to their kids like mother bears. If we didn’t grow up with a broad and liberal view of the world, we at least grew up loved and cared for. And our families were intensely focused on protecting their own.
Street, in contrast, came from a union of two broken people who thought of her not as a child needing their love and attention, but as a problem interfering with their lives. When Street’s only brother died after a beating by her recently paroled father, she ran away at 15 and never went back.
It seemed the rest of her life was going to be an exercise in self-reliance. When a young child is burned by the very people she is dependent on, that child learns never to get too close or dependent again.
I knew Street cared for me, maybe even loved me, and I knew I was as large a part of her day-to-day life as anyone had ever been. But she always kept me at an emotional distance. Oftentimes, I thought I could break through and get her to finally share some essential aspect of her inner self with me, but it never happened.
The cliché says that in the end one is always alone. But I thought maybe it is not just in the end. I looked at the Hopper book some more, then went into my kitchen nook to find something f
or dinner.
The next morning I was up early. Mallory would not be in the station until 8:00 or 8:30. I pulled on my sweats. Spot and I walked down our road until we came to the highway at the base of the mountain. There we turned and started back up. Spot was excited, knowing that it was time to run. His slowest loping gait matches my fastest uphill run so it was hard for him to stay with me. Then we both settled back, me to a fast jog, Spot to a slow trot, as I forced myself up 1,000 vertical feet. It is a ten percent grade for two miles and takes me twenty minutes. At the top we turned around and did it again.
When we reached the cabin, Spot lapped heartily from his water bowl while I drank two glasses of water. Then Spot fetched a piece of rawhide that looked like old road kill. I put on coffee and got in the shower.
When I came out Spot was still working on the rawhide, his paws holding it in place. He rolled his big eyes up at me. It’s hard to imagine a beast with claw and fang looking tender and feminine, but he could have been Rita Hayworth caught nibbling beef jerky in her dressing room.
After a late breakfast, Spot and I drove to the South Lake Tahoe police station.
Spot stayed in the car while I went inside.
“Mallory in?” I asked the burly young man behind the desk.
“Who’s asking?” he said, his voice thick like a big city cop on a TV show.
“Tell him McKenna wants to take him to Mulligan’s. Buy him a Guinness.”
The young cop frowned at me. He picked up the phone and relayed my message.
Mallory came out sashaying and twisting. “Hey, hey, hey, McKenna, where you been!” He grabbed my hand, shook it like he was snapping a towel. Then he turned to the young cop on the desk and was all serious. “I’m going out for an important conference,” he said in a deep voice. “Hold my calls. No paging, no radio. I don’t care if the Huns take the town. Got it?”
The cop at the desk smiled. “Sure, captain. An important conference.”
Mallory poked a big finger at the young cop’s chest. “You’ll go far, kid.”
We walked toward my Jeep. Mallory saw Spot with his head out the rear window. “Sure you don’t want to take my Blazer? Those cherries’ll get us there in a hurry.”
“Spot likes you,” I said.
“He likes beach balls, too,” Mallory said. “That doesn’t keep him from putting them in his mouth.”
“Your head looks nothing like a beach ball,” I said as I opened the door. “Size and shape and lack of hair, maybe, but no blue and yellow triangles.”
Mallory got in and sat stiffly. “There ought to be a law,” he said, looking over his shoulder. “Used to be a guy up in Montgomery Estates who kept tigers. He needed a permit. So should you.”
I started the Jeep and pulled out of the lot. “Permit for a puppy dog?”
Mallory grunted.
Spot, realizing he wasn’t going to get pet, hung his head and put on his sad eyes as we drove down Lake Tahoe Blvd. to Mulligan’s Irish Pub.
We found a place to sit and ordered a round of Guinness Stout.
“Got a memory test,” I said. I sipped my brew and licked the head off my upper lip. “Nine years ago a girl named Melissa Salazar fell off the rock slide above Emerald Bay. She was six years old. Remember?”
Mallory put down his beer. “Let me guess. The grandmother hired you to find out about the sister.”
“Jennifer?”
“I don’t know the name,” Mallory said. “The twin.”
I nodded.
“The old lady put that girl through half a dozen psychology examinations. She was convinced the sister pushed her off. Said those girls fought like rabid kittens.”
“Anything come of it?”
“The tests?” Mallory said. “Naw. ’cept that girl proved to be a genius. I.Q. as high as the Transamerica Pyramid. The word on the force was that if she did it, she’d never get caught. Too smart. Played those shrinks like a deck of cards.”
“Personal opinion?”
“Don’t know,” Mallory said. “But even if she did it, she was six years old. Can’t prosecute a six-year-old. They say some are just born bad. Maybe so.”
“Know who found the body?”
Mallory finished off his glass and signaled for two more. “It was one of Ellie Ibsen’s search and rescue dogs that found the kid.”
“She still around?”
“Down in the foothills near Placerville.”
I brought Mallory back to the station, told him thanks and took Spot for a walk. We wandered down the bike paths toward the community college. I ruminated. Spot sniffed.
I remembered what Blakey Yardman, the SFPDcriminologist told me when I was on the force. “Any homicide ain’t an obvious drug burn, look at the family first.”
Could Mallory’s speculations be right? Could a child actually murder her sister? Jennifer was the one who wanted me to find the supposed killer, so I hadn’t considered her as a suspect. But maybe I’d fallen for an old trick. There’d been dissertations written on the psychology of guilty people who want their crimes to be discovered. And it was possible that the only two people who knew that Melissa was on the mountain that day were her grandmother and sister.
Which left me with a question of physical strength. Could a six-year-old push her sister off a cliff? The steepest part of the slide was out and down from the top. It would take a tremendous effort for a kid to push another kid that far. Then again, they might have climbed down to one of the boulders that protruded above the vertical drop-off. From that point a little push would do the job.
I found myself going over my conversation with Jennifer, searching for clues I’d missed. Nothing presented itself.
As for the grandmother, any woman in good enough shape to climb a mountain could easily toss a child off a cliff. Although I had not yet met Gramma Salazar, it was hard to imagine a woman murdering her own granddaughter. But if she had done it and worried about being found out, maybe she used the psychological tests to try to throw suspicion Jennifer’s way.
Be good to find out.
FOUR
