Killer Weekend (10 page)

   "There you are!" Patrick Cutter announced as he charged through the door. He dismissed Walt and Dryer without so much as a glance. "Been looking for you everywhere."

   "A little business to attend to," Liz Shaler said. She looked over at Walt and he saw apology on her face.

   Cutter's arrival had slammed her back into the reality of her headlining his coveted conference. He wondered what it felt like to be drawn between power and money and one's personal safety. He got his answer more quickly than he wanted.

   "Well," she said, pulling herself up out of the chair, but slowly, as if suddenly more heavy or painful. "I'll count on you to keep me up on any developments, Walt. Day or night, okay?"

   "Smoky-backroom deals?" Patrick Cutter said in his obligatory sarcasm.

   "There's been a murder in Salt Lake that has all the markings of a professional hit." Walt's voice was filled with frustration.

   "Well, good," Cutter said, without missing a beat. "We must have been given bad information. What a relief." With a penetrating look, he challenged first Dryer, then Walt, and finally Shaler to contradict him.

   Walt was about to when Liz Shaler caught his eye and silently called him off.

   "Who needs a drink?" Cutter asked, ever the jovial host. "I'm buying." He laughed at his own joke, took Liz Shaler by the elbow, and led her to the door before Walt gathered his courage.

   As Cutter opened the door, there stood Stuart Holms, about to knock. For a moment tension filled the short space between Holms and Shaler.

   "Your Honor," Holms said.

   "Mr. Holms," Shaler returned.

   "I know we've had our issues," Holms said. "I was just wondering if we might get a minute together? I would hope we could both put the past behind us and keep an open mind toward the future."

   "From what I read in the press," Liz Shaler said, "the past is hardly behind us. You've made your opinions of me abundantly clear."

   "I'd like to discuss that."

   Another palpable silence fell between them. "Let's all get a drink!" Cutter moved her through the door. "Come on, Stu—let's get this worked out."

   Liz glanced back at Walt furtively, still outwardly apologetic. With the music and the drone of excited conversation entering the room like a wave, Walt found himself making a parallel to Marie Antoinette's lowering her head into the guillotine.

   Three clocks tolled throughout the house within a few seconds of one another: 8 p.m.

   He was late for dinner.

W
alt joined his father at a table in the near corner of the Pioneer Saloon's restaurant, just below a wall display of barbed wire. Jerry sat with his back to a pair of rawhide snowshoes. The tabletop was sealed in so many coats of polyurethane that it looked like a piece of amber.

   "Sorry I'm late."

   "Nothing new."

   A bouncy waitress arrived. Walt ordered a house salad and ribs; his father, a bowl of corn chowder, a thick cut of prime rib, and another Scotch.

   Jerry, already looking drunk, indicated a copy of
The Express Week
ender
he'd been reading—a seasonal supplement to the town's weekly paper. "This just in: You've got birds shitting in your county dog pound and a cougar snacking on yellow Lab mountain dogs. The Wild West certainly offers challenging crimes."

   Walt had no desire to mention Salt Lake and start an argument. "Beats working for a living!"

   "You should patch it up with Gail for the sake of the kids."

   "Gail is where she should be, Dad. Leave it alone."

"She's your wife."

   "Was. The truth of the matter is, she was a great wife, a terrific wife, but a lousy mother. She never rose to the job, and knew she never would. Say what you want, but some women aren't cut out for it, just as some guys aren't. And she's one of them. It was never going to work."

   "This is you talking."

   "She'd tell you the same thing, I promise."

   "It's going to wreck the kids," Jerry mumbled, trying to sip Scotch at the same time.

   "Believe it or not, they're way better than they were. Now when they see her it's for a few hours, a half day at most, and she can handle that just fine. Thrives. She'd grown gloomy and short-tempered. It was a bad scene."

   "She's your wife."

   "I know it violates your
Ozzie and Harriet
sensibilities, Dad, but it's working. Leave it alone. If it ain't broke—"

   "But it
is
broke."

   "No, it's not. And why we go around on this every time we talk, I don't know. What's with that?"

   Five minutes passed in silence. Walt didn't hear the nearby conversations, or the music, or the guys behind the grill calling out orders— only a droning whine in his ears that the beer would not quiet. His father's voice saying,
She's your wife.

   "Why the end run this afternoon? Why cut me out like that?" Walt said. "How can that possibly help anything?"

   "You took that all personal. It wasn't like that."

   "You can't stand the thought of me running this, can you?"

   "I never said that."

   A second Scotch was delivered, along with the salad and soup. Jerry ignored the soup.

"If she made the announcement early," Walt said, "it might help."

   "You've had protection experience?" Jerry found this amusing. "Save your energy for this cougar."

   Another silence descended. Their meals were delivered.

   "Is it so impossible that we all might actually work together?" Walt suggested.

   "Is that your experience talking?"

   "Where's this coming from? What did I do to deserve this?"

   Jerry made a point of dramatically checking his watch. "We don't have near enough of that kind of time."

   "Don't mix me up with Bobby."

   Jerry slapped the table. His drink jumped. He won the attention of a few nearby tables. He leveled his bloodshot eyes at Walt, wiped his wet lips with his napkin, and then carefully sawed through his slab of prime rib.

   "I asked Myra and Kevin to join us for dessert," Walt said. "If you don't want to see them . . ."

   "'Course I do."

   "Kevin needs us, Dad. Needs us as role models, not constantly at battle. Maybe we could declare a truce for a few minutes tonight."

   Jerry sought answers in his reflection in the drink. "What battle?"

   "And at some point we've got to clear the air on Bobby's death."

   The man's eyes flashed darkly.

   "Kevin and Myra need closure. Keeping it to yourself—"

   "I'm not keeping anything to myself."

   "You think you're protecting us. I know your heart's in a good place on this. But it's boomeranging."

   "All the king's horses and all the king's men," Jerry said.

   "We can't help Bobby, but we can put this family back together, Dad."

   "You and Gail are doing your part. Right?" Jerry pulled on the Scotch, rescuing the ice cubes from drowning. He peered out from beneath his brow, cruelly, then set the drink down without a sound.

   Walt spotted Myra and Kevin by the grill, scanning tables. "Here they are," Walt said. "Remember, Dad, he's not a little boy anymore."

   Jerry drained the drink. "Shut the hell up."

T
revalian occupied a high stool in a darkened corner near the entrance to the Duchin Lounge. At 11:15, the place was jumping.

         Immediately to his left, a Madison Avenue type, remade in three-hundred-dollar jeans and colorfully stitched cowboy boots, made sloppy with a woman twenty years his junior. They drank from martini glasses; she had an annoying habit of reapplying her lipstick between sips and kisses.

   Joe Fos—a Filipino in his sixties—animated jazz standards and show tunes with keyboard flourishes. The bass player pulled the drummer along, and the dancers never rested.

   At standing room only, the volume of conversation overpowered the attempts of young waitresses taking orders.

   Trevalian nursed a Drambuie, not out of any great love for the potent liqueur, but because it promised to color his breath for the next several hours, and that might prove important.

   He had yet to find a way to work around the loss of Ricky. The idea had been to establish himself with the dog so that a substitution wouldn't be noticed.

   At the set break, he studied the clientele, the clubby, familiar way they moved from table to table saying their hellos with air kisses and firm handshakes. Bits and pieces of conversation reached his corner: golf, film, and some politics. Elizabeth Shaler's name surfaced more than once. He kept an eye on the door in case she happened by. He'd read the
New Yorker
piece—he'd read nearly everything written about her. Knew her better than she knew herself. Old habits died hard.

   When the band began again, it did so as a quartet, behind the enchanting voice of a dirty blonde in her midthirties. She wore a tightfitting red cocktail dress with a plunging neckline that tickled her navel. She'd worked on her face to look young and innocent. But her smoky, emotionally charged voice added to her years. She won herself light applause, but deserved better. Another place, another time, and he might have been interested.

   Shaler never showed. The combo stopped at 11:45, the snifter on the piano overflowing with twenty-dollar tips. The tables slowly emptied ahead of the 1 a.m. closing. Trevalian left the lodge, stepping out into the surprisingly chilly mountain air. He walked quietly along the beautifully lit paths, past the shops, the theater, and the pond, reaching the inn. He continued on, out into the parking lot and beyond, finally reaching a delivery alley.

   Moonlit, gray scattered clouds raced overhead, sliced into pieces by the mountain peaks. He worked into a slight stagger, for appearance's sake, and proceeded down the narrow strip of asphalt toward the loading bays behind the inn.

   From the study off Cutter's kitchen, Trevalian had found the wife's Outlook program up and running, and he'd scanned her calendar for appointments and appearances. Two entries had mentioned Shaler by name: the opening luau on Friday night and the luncheon on Sunday at 10 a.m.

   Rafe Nagler had an invitation to the luau but not to the luncheon.

   His foray tonight was to study the layout of the banquet room ahead of her keynote on Sunday—to pace off exit routes and familiarize himself with the look and feel of the ballroom through eyes not clouded by prosthetic contact lenses.

   His skin cool, his heart rate calm, Trevalian casually entered a loading bay and moved through a dark service hallway behind the banquet room. He passed food service trolleys, discarded aprons, and a wall phone with a stretched-out cord. The corridor smelled unpleasant but not unfamiliar—years of spilled salads comingling with the stain of human sweat. He pulled open a fire door marked banquet room c.

   He stepped inside.

   Sand. The entire ballroom floor was covered in it. Three inches deep or more. Trevalian sank into it, both astonished and horrified. Then he recalled the Friday night dinner had been themed a luau, and he marveled at Patrick Cutter's excess. Would it stay the weekend, or would it be removed by Sunday? If it stayed, it would prove a formidable obstacle for him.

   His eyes were just beginning to adjust when he heard voices at the far doors.

   Someone was coming inside.

N
early an hour earlier, at 12:30 a.m., Walt had hit a wall of fatigue while attempting to catch up on paperwork. Preparing to call it a night, he'd been organizing the Salt Lake photos when he saw one of the retail space's torn-apart ceiling. Then he checked Shaler's master schedule, grabbed his gun belt, and took off at a run.

   Now, at nearly 1:30 a.m., driving north, he called O'Brien's cell phone.

   "Did I wake you?" he asked.

   "I wish," answered the security man.

   Walt asked, "Did your guys check the banquet room after the workers got out of there?"

   "You worry too much. I like that about you. We've got all day tomorrow. The first real event is the luau tomorrow night."

   "Shaler's scheduled for a walk-through and sound check at 10 a.m., preregistration."

   He could practically hear O'Brien thinking.

   "We need to sweep the room," Walt announced. "I'm heading up there. I'm going to do a walk-through tonight."

   "Tonight? How 'bout first thing in the morning? We've got to move Patrick back into the residence. He dined in town following the party."

   Walt could hear O'Brien's despair. Private security often amounted to little more than babysitting. He'd never envied his father his six-figure salary for this reason.

   O'Brien offered to send two of his guys over to help Walt.

   "I'm good. I've got patrols doing nothing this time of night."

   With O'Brien still making offers, Walt politely signed off and called Tom Brandon. Brandon was off duty. When he failed to reach him, Walt turned off into the Red Top trailer park. With so many of the trailers looking the same, he drove past Brandon's on his first try. It wasn't the trailer, but his wife's car that stopped Walt on the second try: Gail's minivan was parked in Brandon's driveway. He slowed, then continued on, catching sight of the trailer in his rearview mirror. Dark. Locked up for the night.

   He pulled to the corner, stopped, and threw his head against the steering wheel. He couldn't catch his breath. His heart was doing a tumbling act. He squeezed out tears before he knew it, then leaned back and wiped his face on his sleeve. He kept checking the rearview mirror, the minivan and the trailer now quite small in the frame, hoping he'd gotten the wrong place, the wrong car. He drove around the block again, and this time checked the plates. Stopped at the same corner. Ached the same way.