Murder on High (32 page)

Brent also had his father’s natural dignity. The cowboys Linc had played might have been rough around the edges, but he had always had the grace of the natural aristocrat. He had been a kind man too—a man who never could have found it in his heart to hate anyone, and Charlotte sensed that about his son as well. She was sure that had Linc lived, he would have forgiven Iris, however angry he might have been with her in the scene at the Marmont. That was the way he was. Mack was more like his mother, in temperament as well as appearance. They had clung to their obsessions like dogs to a bone, never willing to bury them and move on.

It turned out that Brent had tracked Mack down on the suspicion that he was out to harm Iris. At the least, he had wanted to see what Mack was up to. He had followed him up the mountain, but he’d been too late.

He had told the story in Linc’s deep, mellow voice, less crusty for lack of the cigarettes that Linc had chain-smoked. How the boys would lie awake in their room at their mother’s house, inventing ways of murdering the woman who had taken their father away from them: stabbing, hanging, drowning, shooting.

“It was a game for us; or rather, it was a game for me,” he said. “I guess it wasn’t a game for Mack.” He took a deep breath. “At one point we actually
did
make a game out of it. We got the idea from Clue, the board game.”

“Colonel Mustard did it in the library with the wrench,” said Tracey.

He nodded. “We had our own set of rules, in which the victim was always Miss Plum. In later years,” he continued, “I didn’t think much about her. Then came the article in the L.A.
Times
. Shortly after that, I saw a picture of her somewhere, and figured out that she was the woman at the Marmont. I wanted to track her down, just to talk with her. It was an unfinished part of my life that I wanted to put behind me. I put the ads in
Variety
, and the other trade papers. Then I found out that Harold Ames was still around, and I called him. What he told me was enough to lay her to rest for me. I had no desire to find out more.”

“But Mack did,” said Charlotte.

“Yes,” he said. “After my conversation with Ames, Mack told me that he was going to go to the Lyceum to find Iris. When he dropped out of sight right after that, I didn’t think anything of it. He was always dropping out of sight. Then I got a postcard from him. It was of the Indian Island bridge. There was only one sentence: ‘It’s going to be a bow and arrow.’”

Brent shifted the position of his long legs. “I didn’t know if it was a joke, or what. But I didn’t want to just let it ride. There had always been this streak in Mack that was—I don’t know—extreme.”

“Your Aunt Elaine told me how he had burned all his money at her kitchen table as a symbol of his contempt for material values,” Charlotte said.

Brent held out an enormous hand, which was just like his father’s. “There you go,” he said. “A perfect example. You never knew what he was going to do. Anyway, I decided to drive out. I would be needing a car; besides, Mack never did anything fast. I got to the Lyceum in two days. When I asked about a Thoreau authority who lived in Old Town, the woman there gave me Iris’ name. Then I drove up to Old Town and staked out her house for a couple of weeks. Mack came by a few times, and I got the sense that they were friends, which really set me wondering. Why would he have befriended her?”

“Unless he was planning to kill her,” said Tracey.

Brent nodded. “When I saw her and her companion packing up for the camping trip, I suspected that Mack’s plan was about to go down. I couldn’t decide whether to follow Mack or Iris. By then, I knew that Mack was living in the trailer. I decided on Mack, which was where I went wrong. Had I stuck with Iris, maybe it wouldn’t have happened. Anyway, I followed him to Katahdin, and even stayed in the same campground. In the morning, I followed him up, and then watched while he and Iris ate lunch at Thoreau Spring.”

“From where?” asked Charlotte, thinking of her conversation with Hilmers.

“From the spot where the Abol Trail comes out on the Tableland.”

She nodded.

Brent went on. “Then she headed up to Baxter Peak, and he headed back down. I was waiting for him just below the Tableland. I asked him what he was doing. I was confused by then. Why was he coming down, if she was going up? He told me that he was following in Thoreau’s footsteps, and that Thoreau had only come as far as the Tableland. He was mad that I had followed him. When I asked him about the postcard, he said it was part of our game.”

“Part of the game,” Tracey repeated.

“Yeah. That Indian Island had been the inspiration for a new murder weapon to add to our make-believe arsenal. I didn’t know what to think. I asked him about his friendship with Iris. He went on in a convincing way about their shared admiration for Thoreau. I knew he’d always been a Thoreau fan, so that made sense to me. Since I didn’t see any bow sticking out of his backpack, I assumed I’d been wrong.”

“Then what?” asked Tracey.

“Then we quarreled. He told me to stay out of his business. Then he continued on down the trail. I went up; I figured that as long as I had come that far, I might as well go to the top. I passed Iris on Baxter Peak—she was just sitting there—and continued on across the Knife Edge. I was resting on Pamola Peak when I saw it happen.”

“You saw it?” said Charlotte.

He nodded. “She was standing on the tip of one of those knobs, looking out. All of a sudden, I saw her totter; she reminded me of my daughter’s Gumby, one of those blowup figures that are weighted at the bottom. She rocked back and forth a couple of times, and then she went over. I had a front row seat for the fall. It was gruesome.”

“Where was Mack?”

“I couldn’t see him. At first, I thought she’d had a stroke or a heart attack. Then I saw Mack scrambling up South Peak in the direction of Baxter. He was wearing a balaclava hat to cover his beard, and a navy windbreaker over his jacket. But I knew it was him. I recognized the orange backpack, too.”

Charlotte remembered that backpack from the trailer. She leaned back against her chair. “Phew!” she said.

“How come you didn’t come to us?” said Tracey.

Charlotte knew that Tracey had to give the impression of being hard-nosed, but she doubted he would take any action against Brent.

“He was my brother,” Brent replied. “Also, I didn’t actually
see
him do anything. It looked like she just fell to me.”

After Tracey had given him the requisite lecture about being an accessory to a murder, Charlotte spoke:

“I didn’t tell Mack the real story of how your father died, but I’ll tell you. You can tell Mack if you want to.” She paused, and then continued. “Your father didn’t die of a heart attack. At least, he didn’t die of a heart attack brought on by the argument with Iris.”

Though Charlotte had been spared many of the details of Linc’s death, there was one detail she hadn’t been spared: the autopsy report. Gloria had sent her a copy, for what reason Charlotte had never figured out. She had read it and reread it and reread it, trying to make some sense of Linc’s death.

That’s why she could remember it so well now.

“What did he die of, then?” Brent asked.

“The official diagnosis was first-degree heart block, subsequent to mild cardiogenic shock induced by a kick in the chest from a horse.”

Brent stared at her. “But he hadn’t been at the ranch,” he said.

“It didn’t happen at the ranch. It happened during the shooting of
Red Rocks
. The kick damaged the part of the heart that carries the electrical impulses that keep it beating. His heart hadn’t been working right for two weeks, and finally it just stopped.”

“We see that in auto accidents sometimes,” said Tracey. “When people get hit in the chest by the steering wheel.”

“But …” Brent began, his handsome face torn with confusion.

Charlotte held up a hand in demurral. “I know,” she said. “I’ll backtrack a little and fill in the holes. As you know, Linc hadn’t worked for four years when he got the lead in
Red Rocks
.”

Brent nodded.

“He got it because William Ireland was as much of a renegade as he was. He didn’t care that your father had been blacklisted; he’d been blacklisted himself. He was using his own money to finance the picture. If he wanted Crawford, he was going to have Crawford. But it quickly became apparent, to me anyway, that there was an unhealthy chemistry at work between the two men.”

“In what way?” asked Brent.

“Ireland was a man’s man, like Linc was …”

“Or had been, before he met you,” interjected Brent.

She nodded in agreement. “I don’t know if it was me, or that he was getting older, but it’s true that he’d given up a lot of that. Ireland, however, was still going strong. He reminded me of Linc’s father,” she said. “In the way he flaunted his masculinity in that Hemingway-esque way: boozing, carousing, showing off; refusing to be impressed by the exploits of other men.”

“He could still afford to; he was younger than Dad,” said Brent.

“By fifteen years or so,” she agreed. “Anyway, being with Ireland revived all of that for Linc. His virility complex, I called it. To impress Ireland, he decided to dispense with the stunt man.”

“He did all the stunts himself?” Brent said.

She nodded. “He’d come home night after night covered with scrapes and bruises. One day he did fifteen takes of a scene in which he roped a wild stallion. Another day he was dragged by a rope for four hundred feet.”

“I remember that scene,” said Tracey.

“Every night, I’d rub him down with Ben-Gay, give him an aspirin, and put him to bed. I think his wanting to do everything himself also came from not having worked for so long. He wanted to prove he could still do everything he used to. In that sense, perhaps Iris
was
indirectly responsible for his death.”

“Didn’t anyone ever tell him he was too old for that?”

“Myself, among others,” she said. “But you knew your father.”

He nodded. “Stubborn as a mule.”

“He wouldn’t even wear gloves in the roping scenes,” Charlotte said. “He’d come home with his hands looking like raw hamburger meat. Anyway, it was in one of those roping scenes that a stallion kicked him in the chest.”

“We didn’t know,” he said.

“Why would you have known? Everyone was trying to shield you from what was going on. There was no reason to explain the details to you; as far as you were concerned, a heart attack was all the explanation that was necessary.”

“Did you know about the kick in the chest?”

“Not until your mother sent me the autopsy report. I did know that he hadn’t been feeling well for a couple of weeks. He complained about feeling tired; he thought he was coming down with the flu. He had even thought about canceling the meeting with Harold Ames.”

“I see now why you said I might not want to tell Mack,” Brent said. “I’d be telling him that he killed Iris for nothing.”

“I don’t think it matters. It was his own hate that killed Iris, a hate that he’d nursed for thirty-three years, until it became so big and strong and dark that there was no escaping it.”

“How’s he doing?” asked Tracey.

“Okay,” Brent said. “It sounds odd to say, but I think he’s quite content in his cell. He doesn’t seem to mind it a bit. I suppose it’s not that much different from his horse trailer.”

Charlotte was reminded of a young follower of Thoreau’s whom she had read about in the bulletin of the Thoreau Association, who had shed family, friends, and possessions for a life of simplicity in the Alaskan wilderness. Neglecting to prepare properly, he’d been caught by the Alaskan winter without enough food, and had starved to death. In describing the youth, the author had used the phrase the “euphoria of dispossession” to describe his mania for doing without.

The author of the article had commented that it was as if, by subconscious design, the youth had sought death as the ultimate act of renunciation. Similarly, it was as if Mack had sought out the loss of his freedom, and his status as an outcast from society.

“Well,” said Brent, standing up to his full height of six foot four. “I guess I’ll be getting back to the airport.”

“Did you get everything out of the trailer?” asked Tracey.

He nodded. “I’m having the stuff he wanted to save sent back to Colorado. There wasn’t much; it was mostly books. He didn’t even want his clothes. Oh, I almost forgot.” He pulled a book out of his carry-on bag, and handed it to Charlotte. “He said he wanted Lottie to have this.”

“Lottie?” said Tracey.

“It was our nickname for Charlotte,” Brent explained.

It was Linc’s copy of
Walden
. She slipped it out of its case, which was covered in brown and burgundy marbleized paper, and ran her fingers down the leather spine. Then she opened it up. It fell open to the section on Economy. One sentence was underlined:

“There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.”

16

For over an hour, Charlotte and Tracey had been climbing Katahdin. They had decided to give it a try just after Mack’s arraignment. They both felt as if they had an appointment to keep with the mountain, as if the case wouldn’t really be closed until they, too, had made their pilgrimages to the summit. For Tracey, it was an appointment with an old acquaintance; for Charlotte, it was a first-time meeting, an effort to square the mountain of her imagination with the real thing. After camping overnight at Chimney Pond, they had set out first thing in the morning in order to reach the summit at a reasonable hour. The campground ranger, Chris Sargent, had assured Charlotte that as long as she was fit (which she was), there was no reason why she couldn’t go to the top. Many people her age and older had done it; it just took them longer. He advised them to plan on four hours instead of the usual two. As their ascent route, they chose the Dudley Trail, the easternmost of the four trails leading to the rim of the basin from Chimney Pond, and the only one whose terminus was Pamola Peak. They would descend the same way, the only alternative being to cross the Knife Edge to Baxter Peak, which neither of them was eager to do.