The Alpine Christmas (28 page)

“That’s a decent guess,” Milo replied. “Nobody’s ever rich enough to afford a serious drug habit. Especially not a young woman who was probably on an allowance.”

Milo made sense. “How did they get together? Carol and Bridget went to the same school, but not the others.” I frowned at the mounted steelhead behind Milo’s desk. He had decorated it with a strand of green tinsel. “At dances? Football games? Summer camp?”

“Hey!” Milo grinned at me. “You’re sharp. We’ll see if
King County can find out if they were counselors. Going into their junior year, they’d be sixteen, seventeen, too old to be regular campers.” He scribbled a note to himself.

“I still think Bridget may be in danger,” I said, swallowing the last of the ersatz coffee.

Milo’s phone rang; he ignored it. The caller persisted, which meant that Bill Blatt wasn’t intercepting in the outer office. Resignedly, Milo picked up the receiver. His indolent form snapped to attention.

“Is that right?… I’ll be … Yeah, right, we figured that much.… Oh?… Well, now … When?… Sure, okay.… Thanks. By the way, here’s something you might want to run through the …”

I stood up, now too warm in my car coat but unwilling to take it off when I knew I was on the verge of leaving.

Milo continued to give instructions to the person on the other end of the line. At last he hung up, and gave me a self-satisfied look. “Standish Crocker is being charged with racketeering, money laundering, and drug dealing. He used that investment firm as a front for providing cocaine and call girls to businessmen from Seattle to Singapore. What do you think of that?”

I sat down again. “Whew! That’s incredible! I thought Standish Crocker was some stuffy old Brahmin. What’d he do, go into his second childhood?”

“He died. Standish Crocker II, that is, in 1989. His son, Standish Crocker III, is only thirty-four, a real swinger. But he swung too far. Maybe Travis did, too.” Milo was still looking pleased. “He’s being taken into Seattle for questioning today.”

My first, irrelevant, thought was for Louise Nyquist and her dinner party. I didn’t admit as much to Milo. “So maybe that’s how Travis met Bridget? She was one of the call girls?”

“
Was
. Maybe.” Milo was now frowning at his hastily scribbled notes. “Bridget Dunne, Carol Neal, Kathleen Francich, Rachel Rosen, April Johnson, and Tiffany Matthews
all have arrest records for soliciting. But only Kathleen and Carol have been busted during the last year and a half. That figures—Tiffany died, April and Bridget got married. Rachel … maybe she reformed and went to college.”

“Let’s hope. All of them had some advantages. It would be reassuring to think they didn’t have to come to a tragic end.” I suddenly felt weighed down by Milo’s news. It was one thing to make suppositions; it was quite another to be confronted with the bald truth. Six girls, from decent families with good intentions, sent off to private schools to develop their intellectual and spiritual potential—and they’d ended up selling themselves to international thrill-seekers who hid behind three-piece suits. “Is Standish Crocker in jail?” I hoped he was hanging by his thumbs.

“He was released on his own recognizance.” Milo saw my disappointment. “No doubt he’s languishing in the quiet splendor of his Hunts Point mansion.”

I stood up again. I felt a perverse need to make Milo feel as glum as I did. “You still don’t know who the killer is.”

Milo’s hazel eyes studied my gloomy face. “No. I don’t. But we can start grilling Bridget Nyquist. With Travis gone, she’ll be vulnerable.”

She would indeed. And not just to the sheriff. Bridget would also be vulnerable to the killer. I was sorry I’d taunted Milo. Most of all, I was sorry for Bridget and the other five girls from fine private schools. Three of them were already dead. Was April Johnson safe in Texas? Where was Rachel Rosen?

Bridget Nyquist was in Alpine, and everybody knew it. Including the killer.

The rest of the day was not nearly as eventful as the first hour on the job. It took Ross Blatt less than ten minutes to restore our heat. The bill came to $87.34, a cut-rate bargain, Ross asserted, due to the presence of Aunt Vida. I hated to think what it would have cost if there had not been a blood relative on hand.

There was more reaction to this week’s edition of
The Advocate
, with two dozen letters to the editor arriving in the mail. Eleven upheld my stand on the spotted owl, two denounced it, four criticized the sheriff for not having arrested the murderer or anybody else, three had their own memories of the Marmot, and the rest were miscellaneous. As usual, I’d run them all.

The fire department and the insurance people still hadn’t decided whether or not Evan Singer’s cabin had been burned deliberately. Evan had admitted that he didn’t always lock up when he left. This revelation was made to Ben after Evan arrived at the rectory around ten o’clock the previous evening. He was not wearing a Santa Claus suit.

If Milo had learned anything new about the murder case, I didn’t hear it. The details of the charges filed against Standish Crocker III came over the wire, but they didn’t provide further enlightenment. Bill Blatt had called around eleven to say that Travis Nyquist had been taken into Seattle. He had put a good face on it, claiming he was being summoned
merely to help out with the investigation. To my relief, Bridget went with him.

The pageant was scheduled for seven
P.M
., but Ben suggested that I join him for dinner at the rectory. Teresa McHale was leaving for the evening, but planned to put out what she termed
a cold collage
. Adam’s date with Toni Andreas was on, though he allowed that they might show up at the school hall later. Toni’s brother, Todd, was playing Colonel Parker.

I left work early, arriving home in time to go through the mail and check in with Adam. He had spent the afternoon at the rectory again, but hadn’t accomplished as much as expected.

“Mrs. McHale insisted we work on the front porch,” Adam said, haphazardly unsorting the laundry I’d set out for him that morning. “She’s really picky, and insisted the porch was rotting and somebody would fall through and sue the church. But Uncle Ben and I couldn’t figure out where it had gone bad and even with the sun shining, our fingers got so stiff we had to quit. We ended up hauling a bunch of junk from the church basement.”

I had been in St. Mildred’s basement once, when I had volunteered to help set up for Easter. If the bowels of the Marmot contained a history of Alpine entertainment, the church vault was a religious museum: the purple draperies that once shrouded statues during Lent, a set of wooden clappers used on Good Friday in the pre–Vatican II millennium, a carton of outmoded Baltimore Catechisms, and an actual nun’s habit, complete with wimple. Relics, I’d thought, not in the true theological sense, but certainly of a different era in the Church. I suspected that the first item that Ben threw out was the Baltimore Catechisms.

I left before Adam did, again walking. The sky was still clear, and the stars were out. Almost every house now had its tree—fir, spruce, pine; tall, bushy, angular; flocked, artificial, traditional. Christmas trees are as individual as the people who decorate them. Mine was as big as the room
could hold; its branches were as loaded as they could bear. Was I compensating for a hole in my life? Probably. Weren’t we all?

When I got to the rectory, Teresa McHale was about to leave. “There’s ham, macaroni salad, bread, sweet pickles, and cheese,” she told me, jiggling a set of car keys. “I may be late. I’m meeting an old friend in Edmonds.”

“What about Evan Singer?” I asked. “Is he eating here, too?”

Teresa bent down to pick up a large canvas shopping bag that bore a recycling logo. It was crammed with red tissue paper. Maybe it was recyclable, too. Fleetingly, I wondered if Teresa was one of the environmentalists who disapproved of my stand on the spotted owl.

“Evan Singer!” she exclaimed. “Really, that man is deranged! I’m all for being a good Christian, but there
are
limits! Your brother is very naive about people. He’s spent too much time with all those blacks and the Indians.” With a nod, Teresa exited the rectory.

Ben popped his head around the corner of the pastor’s study. He was grinning. “Do you think I’m naive, Sluggly?”

“Eavesdropper! Yes, in some respects. Or maybe it’s just that you’re not a complete cynic like most of us.”

Ben led me into the parlor, which was aptly named, because it was right out of a 1930s time warp. Overstuffed mohair furniture, solid but dull end tables, a glass-fronted bookcase, and a cut-velvet side chair with curving wooden arms were crammed into the room, along with a somewhat newer TV console of bleached mahogany. The brown wall-to-wall carpeting dated from the ’Sixties, and was worn but curiously unfaded, as if the drapes were seldom opened. It was a room more suited to listening to Notre Dame football than to the tribulations of a troubled soul.

Since liturgically the Church was celebrating Advent, rather than Christmas, the only holiday concession was a velvet-covered wreath with an electric candle, which glowed
in the front window. The walls were covered with religious art of the sentimental school—a proud-as-punch Virgin Mary and St. Joseph showing off the twelve-year old Christ as if He’d just won first place in a debate contest (come to think of it, He had); St. Cecilia, with plucked eyebrows and marcelled hair, being showered with roses as she played her harpsichord; the Holy Family on the flight into Egypt, a term that has always thrown me since they couldn’t possibly have gone more than three miles an hour with that plodding little donkey. My favorite, however, was the one picture that attested to Father Fitz’s humanity and to the fact that somewhere, at some time, the man had possessed a sense of humor: The art work dated from the turn-of-the-century and showed two red-robed altar boys hiding behind the corner of a huge stone church, about to launch snowballs at an unsuspecting young lad in civilian clothes. I loved the scene. I loved Father Fitz for displaying it.

“We can’t eat in here. Mrs. McHale is afraid we’ll ruin the furniture,” Ben said wryly, opening the cupboard doors on the TV cabinet. He got out a bottle of Canadian whiskey, two glasses, and a bucket of ice. “Father Fitz was down to his last drop of Bushmills. No wonder he had a stroke. It’s a good thing I like rye.”

“Where’s Evan?” I asked, accepting a glass from Ben. It was Waterford crystal, cut like diamonds, and felt good in my hand.

Ben sat down in the other overstuffed chair. “Who knows? He’s been gone since noon. He didn’t get up until eleven.”

“Did you talk to him much?”

Ben shook his head. “Last night I got him settled down in Father Fitz’s room. He acted upset, tired, so I didn’t push it. Of course I didn’t know about the latest incident until you told me this morning. Evan was out of here before we could have any meaningful dialogue.”

“Will he be back tonight?” It was chilly in the rectory, and I eyed the empty fireplace with longing.

“Who knows?” Ben followed my gaze. “Forget it. Mrs. McHale says fireplaces are a bother. Now you know why Father Fitz wore two sweaters.”

Teresa’s cold collage was adequate. The pageant was endearing. Elvis learned much from the Wise Men, despite Colonel Parker’s lousy advice to ignore them. But even the colonel capitulated at the end, joining the rock ’n’ roll shepherds in a stirring version of “O Come All Ye Faithful.” Elvis, as it turned out, was a girl.

After partaking of refreshments, Ben and I returned to the rectory. There was no sign of Teresa McHale or Evan Singer, but it wasn’t yet nine o’clock. The clouds were rolling in again from the north. Ben and I had a dollop of brandy before I headed home. Adam and Toni hadn’t showed up at the pageant, which didn’t come as a surprise. It did, however, present a new set of worries. When Adam was away at school, I had put his love life out of my mind. But while he was under my roof, I fretted. I was visited by visions of an irate Mr. Andreas, who grew taller and broader with every passing minute, pounding on the door and demanding that my son make an honest woman out of his daughter.

But Adam was home when I got there, comfortably ensconced on the sofa, watching
Cheers
. “Toni’s brain is unfurnished,” he said at the commercial break. “What’s with people around here? Some of them think the big city is Monroe.”

I was about to explain small town mentality to my son when the phone rang. It was Ben.

“I found a mailbag under Evan Singer’s bed. It’s got a tag on it that says it belongs to
The Advocate
. You want it?”

I frowned into the phone. “Sure. But … I don’t get it. Why did Evan Singer steal our mailbag?”

Ben chuckled. “He needed something to put these old film cans in. You ever heard of a movie called
Gösta Berling’s Saga
?”

I had—and recently. “Listen, Stench, don’t you read
The
Advocate
?” I heard Ben squirm at the other end. He’d read
most
of the paper, at least the front page. But a pastor’s life was busy, especially when you were new in town, and it was Advent …

I cut Ben off. “
Gösta Berling’s Saga
was Greta Garbo’s first big hit. It was also the film that Lars Nyquist used for the grand opening of the Marmot. Now what the hell are you talking about?”

Ten minutes later, I was back at the rectory, this time driving my car, which took five minutes to warm up. Four big round tins of film lay on the parlor floor, clearly marked in English and in Swedish. “Where,” I asked in amazement, “did Evan get these? They must be worth something.”

Ben got out the brandy again. “Think about it,” said my brother, his usually crackling voice slowing to a drawl that he might have picked up in Mississippi. “Evan Singer spends Tuesday night at the Marmot. How long is he there? What’s he doing? We don’t know, Oscar doesn’t know. Oscar finds him asleep in the theatre’s auditorium. Cut to Wednesday. Enter Evan dressed as Santa, suit stolen from the mayor, mailbag taken from your office. Now why does he need the sack?”

I eyed my brother in the dim amber light of a three-way lamp, conservatively set on low. “To carry something … And,” I added, suddenly remembering Vida’s barbed remark of the previous week, “because Fuzzy Baugh didn’t use a pack. He has lumbago.”