Nothing but Gossip (5 page)

The patrolmen and officers began to take charge of the scene, and after a couple of minutes I heard Jack Lewis’s dress-parade stride strutting down the gray terrazzo in his shiny lizard Tony Lamas and his voice snapping orders to his little lieutenant, Evan, who always skittled alongside him like a sand crab on a leash.

Okay. Okay. Maybe I am as surly about Jack as he is about me, but he’s got all the toys of his office, toys and power I used to have before I got caught in bed with the judge. Now I’ve got the prestige of a marshal’s badge and am—and I’m not just making this up; most of the top law-enforcement officials in the country will back me up on this—a better, smarter, more thorough, creative, competent, higher-rate-of-more-successfully-prosecuted-crimes detective than he is. But facts are facts: I am no longer the chief of detectives of a major metropolitan area (my department in Santa Bianca was twice the size of Jack’s in Roundup, I might add). And he is. And it makes me crazy. And he knows it. He knows I’m better and he knows he’s got the cards. So we’ve forged a sometimes gracious, sometimes rancorous truce, packed with mutual suspicion and resentment, like eight-year-olds whose mothers have forced them to apologize to each other but who still hate each other’s guts and can’t wait to trip each other on the way down the hall.

“Hey, Bennett,” he greeted me. “You losing weight? You look pretty good.”

“Even if I lost a hundred pounds, Jack, I’d still be more woman than you could handle.” This was an exaggeration.
If I lost a hundred pounds I would be dead, or at least very, very, very sick.

“Any idea whose prints these are?” He peered down at the carpet square.

“Sorry. I don’t know many of the guests. Most of the men have on boots.”

“You aren’t going to help me much, are you?”

“Don’t be silly, Jack. I just don’t know.”

“And you have no ideas, either. Right?”

I grinned at him. “I’ll get out of your way,” I said. “I know you’ve got a lot to do. Call me if I can help.”

As I walked back to join Richard, I concentrated on the expression I’d seen on Johnny Bourbon’s face, because it was so unlike the fear and horror on any of the others, and it came down to two words: Glory and Salvation.

T
he sun hadn’t crested the hills into the main valley of the ranch when Richard and I left on our early-morning ride, he on his big palomino stallion, Hotspur, and me on my small quarterhorse mare, Ariel. The gentle wispy clouds above us were golden peach pink, the sky was a deep azure blue, and the morning star refused to leave, lingering by the wings until the last possible second before making her exit. In another week, it would be too dark to ride at five-thirty.

We clipped along at a brisk walk, our breath visible in the chilly hill-country air.

“Name this,” Richard said, letting fly with some stunning aria or other. It was beautiful, but I had no clue what it was. My appreciation of opera is absolute. My ability to identify anything but the overture to
The Barber of Seville
—which incidentally had always been my father’s favorite opera, if you could say he had a favorite, since he pretty much loathed them all equally, but he liked it because in the end the Bartolo didn’t have to pay a dowry for Rosina to marry Count Almaviva— is
absolutely nonexistent. Richard was always trying a “Name That Tune” situation with me in the futile hope that I would pick up something along the way. My standard for judging classical music is whether or not I would like to have it played at my funeral. So far, in addition to “Happy Trails to You,” which even I know is not considered classical music by most people, about ten pieces have made the cut for what I sincerely hope is not my final selection.

I looked up at the trees and fiddled with my reins a second. It did sound familiar. “It’s right on the tip of my tongue. Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me. It’s from
La Traviata
, right?”

“Wrong. It’s from
Le nozze di Figaro, The Marriage of Figaro
. Mozart.”

“I know what
Le nozze di Figaro
is.” I was getting a little annoyed with this tutoring. It had been going on for months and was clearly a complete waste of time.

“Okay,” Richard said, clearly enjoying himself. “Name this.” Off he went again. He had the most perfect, big, rich tenor voice. He could even sing at a trot.

“That,” I said with conviction, “is Rodolfo’s big number in
Bohème
.”

“Wrong,” Richard said. “It’s from
Tosca
. And it’s not a ‘number,’ it’s an ‘aria.’ I can’t believe you don’t recognize it, Lilly. You watched me conduct it five times in Viareggio this summer.”

“Really?” I said. “Well, aren’t I a dope? Okay, Mr. Puccini, you name this.” I held up my middle finger in Richard’s general direction and gave Ariel the green light. We shot off down the road at high speed, leaving Richard laughing and singing in the dust.

Of course, he caught us; there was no way Ariel and I could outrun Richard on Hotspur. Unfortunately, in a test of physical endurance, the combination of muscle,
testosterone, and determination almost always prevails over litheness, beauty, and quick wits. Besides, I like being overpowered occasionally by a well-muscled, long-legged, determined cowboy, especially when it’s Richard. Also, it helped keep my mind off the fact that Alma Rutherford Gilhooly had been shot ten hours ago and Jack Lewis hadn’t yet called to ask me for help. I wondered if they’d come up with anything on the boot prints. I’d measured them, and they appeared to be about size eleven or twelve, pretty standard.

We got back to the house at six, red-cheeked, robust, ornery. Even Baby, my wire-haired fox terrier, who had waited for us at the barn, leapt from one piece of living-room furniture to the next, big smile on her face, before curling up in front of the small fire in the breakfast room and going back to sleep. Her life was very good.

“When I die,” Richard said, “I want to come back as your dog.”

“Me, too.”

I called the hospital. Alma was still holding on, but only in the barest possible sense. The prognosis was not optimistic.

“A gentleman called,” Celestina, my cook, said in perfect English. Celestina uses her Mexican accent only around strangers. She refreshes the accent every year when she and her husband take their whole family to Acapulco for Easter vacation. She is the third generation of Vargases to live on the Circle B. “Wanted directions to the house, but I told him how to get to your office and said you’d meet him there at eight o’clock.
Bueno?
”

“
Bueno
,” I said, pouring Richard and me both cups of death-strong cowboy coffee while Celestina flipped the hot cakes. “
Gracias
. Who was it?”

“Wouldn’t tell me.”

That wasn’t especially unusual in my business. People called with secret information and sometimes even wore silly disguises to deliver it in person.

After breakfast, I gave Richard a lift down to the chopper, where Christian waited in the comfortable cabin, poring over his standard three feet of paperwork and getting fed up with Richard’s and my long, lingering kiss good-bye.

“For God’s sake, Lilly.” Christian’s bushy black eyebrows frowned at me over his sparkling blue eyes. “He’s just going to the office, not on a shuttle mission.” He was only pretending to be perturbed, though. Everyone in the family was happy that Richard and I were about to make it official.

They were airborne practically before the door was closed. I watched, the sun at my back, until they were no bigger than a mosquito before heading back to the house to get cleaned up.

I had to go to town later to return some recovered jewels to a client, so, instead of jeans, I slipped into loose black trousers, a cashmere sweater set, and suede pumps, laid on a few pearls—every year seems to require another strand—threw Baby into the Jeep, and took off for my international headquarters in Bennett’s Fort, a small tourist-trap town that sits at the edge of the ranch—a gaudy carbuncle on the Circle B’s generous two-hundred-thousand-acre hips—the way Angeles City had leeched itself onto the edge of Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines.

Bennett’s Fort is the kind of place that was authentic at one time, sort of like Central City or Blackhawk or Cripple Creek, Colorado. These towns used to house what little urban history we have here in the West.
They’d been boomtowns in the big silver- and gold-mining eras in the mid- to late nineteenth century and were jam-packed with a unique combination of ornate, gingerbread Victorian architecture and severe, rough-plank Wild West structures. Today, because those once-historic towns are now gambling centers, the landmark buildings have either vanished altogether or been converted into glitzy, high-tech casinos catering to people whose sense of history is limited to who won the last Super Bowl.

The history itself has been annihilated.

Even the Central City Opera House, one of the prettiest historic opera houses in the world, where grand opera is still presented every summer, is no longer worth the trip. Who wants to get dressed up, drive for an hour from Denver through a hot canyon behind a diesel-belching tour bus, and spend the evening being gawked at by some fat slob in too-tight polyester shorts and a Day-Glo Spider-Man T-shirt with a cigarette glued to her bottom lip and a tub of quarters in her grungy paw? Not me.

Bennett’s Fort had once been an honest-to-God wooden fort, built by my great-great-grandfather for the cavalry to withstand Indian attacks. Then, as skirmishes gave way to cattle drives, a “town” grew up outside the front gate, and such elements of polite civilization as the
GOLDEN NUGGET SALOON—SASPARILLY ONLY FIVE DOLLARS A SHOT
and
HOTEL—MISS KITTY AND TEDDY ROOSEVELT SLEPT HERE
and
JAIL—SEE WYATT EARP’S DESK AND SIX-SHOOTERS
lined its dirt street.

Today, Bennett’s Fort—which is owned by my cousin Bucky Bennett: Mayor for Life—is one of Wyoming’s most successful tourist traps. He has added well-known Victorian/Old Western historic commercial venues such as: Ye Olde Rock Shoppe, Ye Olde Rock
Candy and Salt Water Taffy Shoppe, Ye Olde Tintype Studio, where a boy can dress up as Jesse James or Wyatt Earp and a girl as a dance-hall floozy in a black-satin corset, torn fishnet stockings and garters and stick a pheasant feather in her hair and they can get their pitcher took for twenty-five dollars. Each. And my new favorite: Ye Olde Video Arcadie.

“Doesn’t it ever bother you, Buck,” I said, as I joined him in his regular booth in the saloon for a quick cup of Ecstasy’s coffee and a warm bear claw before heading upstairs to my office, “that all this Ye Olde stuff is more Richard the First than Victoria?”

“Nah.” Buck tossed down his first shot of Jack Daniel’s, daintily blotted his gray-flecked moustache with a clean, ironed handkerchief from the back pocket of his jeans, and took a big bite of pancakes and sausage and syrup. “These people could care less. It wouldn’t make any difference if Alan King or Larry King or even King Arthur himself came up and whacked them over the head with a jousting lance. All they want to know is, ‘Where’s the bathroom?’ That’s why I put two million into all these fancy Johns. People have been driving, kids screaming, hot as hell—‘Where’s the bathroom?’ ”

It was true, too. Bennett’s Fort’s dirt street, gee-gawed storefront façades and shoppes were old-fashioned-looking and historically correct (depending on whose history you chose to follow), but downstairs, underlying the entire town, were restrooms so clean and sparkling and modern that
Architectural Digest
had done a feature on them. Buck had been hoping for a cover story.

Of course, as with everything in Bennett’s Fort, nothing was free. You had to show the restroom attendant a receipt for a minimum five-dollar purchase in a Bennett’s Fort emporium before she’d let you in. Sometimes,
in the summer, it got so crowded, people would be lined up in the street waiting to get into the restrooms, holding their five-dollar cups of sasparilly as if they were specimen cups for some huge insurance-plan physical. Children under twelve got in free.

“Let’s get some more Java going over here, sugar,” Buck called over to Ecstasy, his fifty-year-old burned-out hippie sister-in-law, who shuffled across in her Earth Shoe sandals, dirty gray hair clamped into a stringy ponytail at the nape of her turkey neck.

“Hey, Lil.” She smiled at me, her teeth as brown and big as fence posts, her vacant face a hundred years old. She’d surrendered her brain to LSD at a Steppenwolf concert back there in Boulder in ’sixty-eight, and it had taken her someplace very, very weird and scary and aged her overnight. Her husband, Buck’s brother Bill, was so gone he now spent most of the year in the barn untangling the Christmas lights until it was time to put them up again.

“Hey, Ec.” I smiled back as she shuffled home to her stool behind the bar and “Good Morning America.”

Suddenly a crash and some scraping sounds thundered from my offices upstairs. Dust fell from the ceiling in long, thin, curtains, like scrims in a theater.

“What’s that girl up to now?” Buck squinted at the ceiling. He was referring to my secretary, Linda Long, whose pants he was always trying to think of a way to get into, but my brother Elias had beaten him to it.

“Who knows?” I shrugged. “She’s always moving things around. So what’s up for you today?” I was trying to decide if I should join him in a shot of sour mash. It smelled delicious.

“Got that Redford crew rolling in any minute.” He looked at his watch, a stainless-steel Seiko he’d worn since Vietnam. “They start shooting tomorrow.”

In the off-season, which was basically the nine months between Labor Day and Memorial Day, with the exception of a few weeks at Christmas, Buck rented out the town to movie producers for an insane amount of money. Today Robert Redford’s company would arrive to shoot a socially conscious, politically correct, old-time Western about cowboys who treated women as equals and believed that no meant no. And Indian braves who killed four-thousand-pound buffalo with slingshots and bows and arrows and would never, ever, consider driving a thousand head of them at a time off cliffs to kill them. And believed that no meant no. It would be another one of those history-rewrite flicks, sort of like Oliver Stone’s stuff.