Fade to White (18 page)

“I wish.”

“You wish.”

“You bet.”

“So you didn’t see him.”

“Nope.”

“You didn’t sell him anything.”

“Nope.” The notion of making a sale seemed to pull Buddy out of his reverie of that long-ago night at the drive-in. He raised his big head and looked around the shop: at the stacked skis, the racked helmets, the hanging jackets and pants. “To be perfectly frank,” he said, “and not to bite the hand that feeds me, I think a big shot like Harper Stone would go for equipment a little higher-end than this crap.”

Guy waited a half a second. He knew there was some risk in the path he was about to take, but he took it anyhow. “So you didn’t sell him the same stuff you sold Manny Seville?”

“Who?”

“The director. From New York.”

“I didn’t sell him anything.”

“No?”

“No,” Buddy said, with a harder edge. Anyone could see that bringing Manny into the picture—Manny and whatever it was that he and Buddy had partaken of prior to their drunken-sailor walk to the Binding—had snapped him out of his Hollywood reverie and restored him to his usual pugnacious self. Too bad, for the sake of the questioning—and the sake of the next customer. Whoever came in the door next was due for an extra dose of that old Buddy Frommer magic.

“All right,” Guy said, “I’ll take your word for it. And you never met Stone, either.”

“Nope.” A little trace of that starstruck gleam passed over his face, but it didn’t last. “I’d sure as hell remember
that.
”

TWENTY-SIX

One side of the mountain:

Here comes Stacey, racing down the steeps at the top of Oh, Brother! with Chip right behind her. When they stop at a catwalk to catch their breath and look up at them, their separate paths through the overnight snowfall will cross and recross like a double helix.
A thing of beauty,
Chip will say, although the real beauty is always in the making of it.

The other side of the mountain:

Here goes Guy, cranking his patrol car up the narrow and winding trail to the cabin where Stacey and Chip brought the car on that fateful night. The state troopers said that they’d gotten nothing out of the guy who lived there, except a report about how two kids had shown up after dark and gone hiking over the peak on skis. A couple of crazy kids. The new snowfall makes things treacherous but Guy perseveres, taking the untracked white stuff as a sign that when he gets to the top there’ll probably be somebody home.

*   *   *

There was a pickup in front of the cabin with a big yellow plow mounted on the front of it, the whole deal covered over with snow. Just as Guy had imagined. Past the pickup was a woodpile of epic scale, three or four cords at least, stacked neatly and covered over with blue tarpaulins against the weather. He pulled the patrol car up in the shadow of it and got out, the snow at this elevation well up over the cuffs of his pantlegs. The cabin sat in a clearing with a view of the sky that must have been just right for getting satellite television, to judge by the dish mounted under the eaves and pointing skyward. Guy remembered when a satellite dish was a satellite dish, when people with money around here—people in the woods, where cable didn’t go—had big black bowls in their yards that looked like something out of a science-fiction movie. All steel latticework and sharp antennas and heavy-duty cables snaking through high grass. Something fit to capture signals from the deep-space crew of
Mission to Antares
. Not anymore, though. These days everybody had their own little vest-pocket dish, just as nice and compact as you please. Mount it under the eaves to keep the snow off, and you were in business. Things changed.

The front porch of the cabin was loaded with junk. It wasn’t trash, at least not most of it, but it was definitely junk. Guy always made a distinction between the two. Trash was garbage. Junk was old beat-up stuff with some use left in it, at least in somebody’s mind. The junk in this particular collection included a couple of aluminum folding chairs, a gas grill without a tank, a pony saddle, a busted recliner, and a snow shovel that he wished somebody’d used before he got here. There was some newer stuff mixed in, too. A Garden Weasel. A pair of aluminum snowshoes. A Crock-Pot still in its packaging.

He stepped onto the porch, stamped his boots off, went to the door and knocked. There was a television on inside, loud, and he could hear it through the glass. Nobody answered the door so he knocked again, louder. This time there were footsteps inside and the creaking of a chair and the slamming of a door. The volume on the television went down and footsteps approached. Guy adjusted his hat, squared his feet on a novelty doormat that read
COME BACK WITH A WARRANT
, and put on a businesslike smile.

“Yeah,” said the tall man as he opened the door wide. Just that. “Yeah.”

“Sheriff Ramsey.” Tilting his hat. “Guy Ramsey.”

“How you doing.”

“All right. You?”

“All right.” The tall man looked as if he could keep this up all day.

“Mind if I come on in?” He cocked his head to see behind the tall man a little. A cold wind swept around him and around the tall man and into the living room, flipping the pages of a copy of
Guns & Ammo
that lay on a big wooden industrial spool that Guy figured must be a coffee table.

“How come?”

“I’ve got a couple questions for you.”

“Troopers’ve already been here.”

“I know that.”

The wind blew again and the pages of
Guns & Ammo
kept turning until most of them had flipped over; then the magazine fell off onto the floor. The tall man didn’t budge and he didn’t say anything.

Guy went on. “The troopers and a local guy like me,” he said, “we kind of look at things from different directions.”

The tall man narrowed his eyes. “If it’s their case, then you got no authority.”

“You’ve been watching too many cop shows.”

“Sue me.”

So help him, if Guy heard that expression again today he was going to have to kill somebody. He squared his shoulders against the cold wind, put a hand on the open door, and said, “How about we just go inside and quit heating up the outdoors.”

Rather than stand in his way, the tall man stepped back.

*   *   *

Stacey and Chip were on a chair with one of the ski instructors and a little kid who looked to be no more than four or five years old. Stacey hated riding with little kids, and if left to her own devices she wouldn’t have done it. She was always afraid that they were going to slide forward under the bar and plummet to their deaths—either that, or slip rearward below the seat back and dangle by their skis until they finally wriggled loose, and
the
n plummet to their deaths. What a nightmare. Often enough some instructor who’d gotten overburdened with kids would be standing in the lift line trying to pawn them off on unwitting skiers one or two at a time, but Stacey always said no. Actually, it was more like, “No, really, I just can’t, see, I’m, uh, I understand, but, uh, I mean, you know…” until the chair came and she could get on and make her escape. The thought of losing some helpless little five-year-old from the seat of a chairlift was simply too much to bear, and it was one of the things that kept her from ever becoming an instructor. That and an unwillingness to let the sport that she loved so much get tainted by the stigma of
work
. That would ruin everything.

Stacey was on one end of the chair and the instructor was on the other, with the little kid and Chip in between them. That was all right. If the kid went, there was no way she could be held responsible. Plus Chip was on the Ski Patrol, so he’d know what to do—if you could do anything other than wave good-bye. Argghh. She closed her eyes and waited for the ride to be over.

Chip nudged her with his shoulder. “What happened to those new Heads?”

“Gone,” she said.

“Somebody steal ’em?”

“Hah. I almost wish. Then I could claim them on my insurance or something.” She picked up the tips of her old skis and studied them, clacking them together to knock off the snow. “Actually, it’s kind of the opposite of theft—but it comes to the same thing in the end. I’ll probably never get them back. They’re evidence.”

“What?”

“You heard right.”

“No.”

“If you’re talking about the new Heads that I skated across Harper Stone’s forehead with, yes.”

“Unbelievable.”

“Well, they did do some damage.”

“I know, but—”

The ski instructor leaned forward, one hand on the little kid’s chest to keep him from going anywhere. He was an old man with a gray mustache all icicled over, and when he spoke his Long Island accent gave his whole life story away. He’d retired from someplace in New York, moved up here to get away from it all, and taken up instructing to fill the empty hours. It happened all the time. He held the kid and looked past Chip to zero in on Stacey. “Are you the one that found him?”

“Hey,” Chip said, a little hurt. “What am I, chopped liver?”

“Never mind you,” the old man from Long Island said. “I heard it was a girl. That’s what everybody’s saying.
‘Some girl found him,’
that’s what they say.” Then, lifting his hand and pointing at Stacey, “So it was you, huh?”

“It was both of us. Kind of.”

“I’ll be.” Without the pressure of the instructor’s hand on his chest the kid leaned forward a couple of inches, pushing out his tongue toward the metal safety bar. “Hey, kid,” the old man barked, pushing him back. “Quit acting like an idiot.” The kid settled back with a dazed and disappointed look.

“That kind of thing could hurt your tip,” Chip said. “Calling a little kid an idiot.”

“What the hell do I care about a tip? Besides, I bring him back with half his tongue ripped off, you think I’ll get a tip for that? Huh? You think these yuppies are handing out tens and twenties to guys who bring their kids back at the end of the day all disfigured and everything? Not on your life.” The old man sat chuckling into his icy mustache for a minute, and then he remembered about Harper Stone. “So you’re the ones found that old bastard, huh? Tell me all about it.”

The whole morning was going to go pretty much like this.

*   *   *

The tall man’s name was Frank Schmidt. Guy took out a pad and pencil to get the spelling right, then he put them away rather than give Frank the idea that this little conversation was anything more than the neighborly visit it seemed like. You never got anywhere with that.

Apparently, Frank was a lineman for the electric company. That would explain the giant spool that he used for a coffee table, the even bigger one that looked to be serving as a kitchen table in the next room, and the little one that stood against the wall with a toolbox on it. It would also explain the hard hat hanging on a peg by the door where Guy had left his boots, and the filthy orange storm gear hanging alongside it. You didn’t exactly have to be Sherlock Holmes. Today was Frank Schmidt’s day off, he said in a much softer voice than Guy had expected once they got inside and sat down. Almost whispering. Guy was lucky to have found him home, he said.

“I was pretty sure there’d be somebody—” Guy started, intending to explain that the absence of tracks on the lane suggested that no one had gone out this morning, but Frank lifted a finger to his lips and shushed him gently.

“The little woman’s still sawing wood,” he said.

“Sorry,” said Guy, thinking of how the television had been blaring just two minutes ago.

“It’s my day off, and she’s the one sacked out. Ain’t that the way?”

“I guess it is,” said Guy.

Schmidt shook his head, long-suffering, and ran the flat of his hand over his buzz cut. “Anyhow,” he whispered, “like I said, the troopers been here already.”

There was coffee on in the kitchen and Guy sure could have used some of it, but Frank wasn’t going to offer and Guy wasn’t going to ask.

“Right,” said Guy. “And you—”

“—didn’t see nothing but them two kids. It ain’t like this place is Grand Central Station or nothing.” He laughed between his teeth, hissing.

“Sure. I can see that.” Guy looked down at his stocking feet, cold on the hardwood planks. “The little woman didn’t see anything either?”

“Not a thing.”

“You sure about that?”

“Not before and not after. She was up here all day and I got off early around lunchtime. I come home and we watched a video.”

“What’d you see?”

“I told you we didn’t see nothing but them two kids.”

Guy cocked his head. “The video. What’d you see?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Just curious. Maybe you saw something good.”

Frank lifted his hands.

Guy laughed, softly, and scratched his head for effect. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You remember not seeing something you didn’t see, but you don’t remember seeing something you did see.”

“I can’t explain it,” said Frank. “It must have been some chick flick.”

“Fine,” said Guy. “Just kidding. It’s funny how your mind works, though, isn’t it?”

“Right. It sure is.”

“What about the day before, then?”

From behind the door came a creaking of bedsprings, and Frank lowered his voice another notch. “The day before? I think we watched something on HBO.”

“No. Sorry. I didn’t mean on the television. I meant did you see anything suspicious the day before.”

Frank smacked himself in the head. “Sorry. No.”

“Any tracks in all that snow?”

“Nothing.”

“Anybody up here that shouldn’t have been?”

“Wait a minute. Was that the day it come down so hard?”

“No. The day after.”

“Right. I was stuck here all day the day it come down. Couldn’t get out.”

“Not even with that plow?”

“I’d have gotten out if they’d called me. If there’d been an outage or whatever.”

“Lucky you,” said Guy.

The bedsprings sounded again, accompanied by a mild cough mostly muffled by a pillow.

“You mind if I stay around and ask your wife a question or two? Just confirm she didn’t see all the same things you didn’t see?”