The Perennial Killer: A Gardening Mystery (17 page)

Ann gave him a guarded look and said, “If you want to do it, do it. There’s no one who would like to see the person caught more than I would.”

They watched in silence as the man made his way out of the restaurant. Then, as Louise decided to yield to the temptation of crème brûlée, and Ann to tiramisu, Josef Reingold walked over.

“Do you mind?” he asked, as he dragged a nearby chair up to their small table. Sophisticated glasses with understated wire frames, expressive hazel eyes, a thin nose, the faint odor of cologne—Louise found it made a rather pleasant impression. He bowed his head toward her. “I deeply regret that I didn’t have the chance to talk to you at the open space meeting.” Then he, too, went into a lament over the Porter family’s double tragedy. “You two were questioned by the sheriff, I hear.” His eyes were guileless.

The women exchanged glances. Reingold wanted to find out what they knew. Louise answered. “The sheriff, of course, might want us to keep everything confidential.” She leaned forward toward Reingold. “But just between us, Ann and I learned absolutely nothing from Sally, even though we had dinner with her last night.” She settled back and took a spoonful of the crème brûlée.

The developer seemed to relax then, and turned the subject to other things, asking her all about her work, where she was renting a house, what her husband did. Reluctantly, Louise told him that Bill worked for the State Department, for somehow she was sure the man would know if she lied.

But she felt flutters in her chest. Was Reingold pumping her? After a minute, she decided that he was merely lusting after her dessert, for, as he talked, he overtly eyed her crème brûlée, with its freshly blowtorched crackling-brown-sugar glaze.

Without thinking, she picked up an auxiliary spoon. “Would you like a bite?”

“Wonderful.” His brown eyes lit up. He waited to be served, and she handed him the filled spoon. But he opened his mouth, like a child, and she fed him. It turned out to be a great deal more intimate than she had intended. In fact, she had intended no intimacy at all.

Putting down the empty spoon, she said briskly, “Well, now, Mr. Reingold, tell me about yourself and DRB.”

“Yes, I do…” He smiled at his temporary lapse in English usage, then started over again, absolutely unruffled. “I mean to say, yes, I
will
do it. Exactly what do you want to know?”

“When did you come to Boulder?”

“It was five years ago. DRB has had many land holdings in the American West for some time, but by the mid-nineties, it was necessary for me to be physically present some of the time to manage our projects. It is handy, of course, to travel from DIA to almost anywhere in the world.”

“So, your U.S. headquarters are in Denver?”

“Actually, no. Our North American headquarters are south of Juarez. Do you know of northern Mexico? It is another country, a thriving area that almost seems like a part of the United States. We have a number of things going there. Construction supply and prefab plants, as well as the company headquarters.”

“How interesting. Are prefab houses the wave of the future?”

He smiled. “Certainly not in Boulder County. We do a great deal of development in this area, notably in Longmont, but people here prefer custom-built homes. Yet there is a fantastic market for the lower-cost, prefabricated housing in the United States. One thing DRB wants to do is provide that kind of housing to Americans.”

“How very—”

“Thoughtful? Philanthropic?” He smiled smoothly. “Mrs. Eldridge, I didn’t mean to give you a false impression. We are not philanthropists. If it were not profitable, we would not be involved.”

The next remark seemed to spill out. “And you deal in other exports and imports?”

He reached over and put his hand on hers for an instant. “I know it would be tedious for you to hear the particulars.” Not at all, she thought. She would have liked to get a better sense of the breadth of his business. But as she looked at him, the warm, fuzzy aura faded, and his hazel eyes behind the metal rims examined her a little more critically.

Certainly, that last question was totally innocent. But Reingold hadn’t sat down at their table to answer questions, only to ask them.

A
FTER LUNCH
, A
NN TOOK LOUISE
to her office, in a turn-of-the-century building of sandstone with granite trim. It was used for the overflow of county offices from the Art Deco county building across the street. They went into the back room so Louise could see a map of both Boulder County’s open space, and the Porter and Bingham properties. “The Porter land is the main attraction,” said Ann, “though Harriet’s stake is a fabulous second prize for someone. If the Porter Ranch becomes open space, think
of the field day a builder would have, advertising houses as nestling right next to a thirteen-thousand-acre wilderness.”

Louise examined the map. “Look at those cut-out corners on the east side of Harriet’s property; it’s as if someone cut samples from a piece of fabric.”

“Her father sold off some acreage years ago, and she’s apparently continued to sell off more land intermittently through the years, as she needs the money.”

“To whom?”

“It’s hard to know. To development companies, initially, whose owners aren’t disclosed. The land isn’t far from where you’re renting. They’re the subdivisions you see running west from Route Thirty-six as you drive to Lyons. Upscale houses, some of them costing millions.”

Then she turned her tawny eyes to Louise. “Tell me honestly, do you think Jimmy and Sally Porter died for this?”

Louise wasn’t sure what Ann wanted to hear: reassurances, or the truth. In the end, Louise didn’t answer and she didn’t stay long, because it was obvious from the neat, high piles of papers on her desk that Ann had work to do. Louise promised Ann that she would keep in close touch. She wandered aimlessly back down the Pearl Street Mall, under a lacy canopy of locust trees, past lush beds of tuberous orange and yellow begonias, and magenta impatiens. A little bright for Louise’s tastes, but perfect for a public thoroughfare. A thick crowd of tourists, buoyed by the improving weather, mixed happily with the upscale business folks, scattered hippies, and street entertainers.

Her thoughts strayed back to the people in Boulder who might have been involved in Jimmy Porter’s murder; she suspended for a moment her suspicion that Sally’s death was no accident. There were the men who loved land: Josef Reingold, Mark Payne, Sheriff Tatum. Even her own
cameraman, Pete Fitzsimmons, and, for that matter, Tom Spangler. He had his own land stake out near Stony Flats, and a good move it had been, for the area was now under intense development. From nuclear to neighborhoods, she thought with a wry smile.

She wondered why all the suspicion had fallen on
her
today? Her questions to Reingold had been quite innocent, but still the man was on guard. Maybe it was just his European way—some prohibition against women peering into the business of the men. And she hadn’t enjoyed her encounter with Mark Payne. He was a person she found hard to like. He, too, seemed suspicious of Louise. As for Sheriff Tatum, the two of them had clashed from the first moment they met, back when Jimmy Porter’s body was discovered. Eddie Porter, too, considered her an anathema.

I’m winning lots of friends out here in the West
, she thought cynically.

It seemed only reasonable to do some checking at the library. A little guiltily, she realized she should look up Pete Fitzsimmons, too, since he was very much in the mix. She obtained directions from a passerby and started there on foot.

Bill might not like this snooping about, but a little research couldn’t hurt anyone, and he
had
said she should keep her eyes open.…

It was a scenic walk to the library, with the Flatirons, the almost vertical sandstone mountains that were Boulder’s signature, looming heavily over the downtown area. But with the reemergent sun behind them, they lived up to their name: flat, one-dimensional, as if someone had fashioned them of cardboard. Mounding up behind them were big white clouds which would spill the brief daily rain shower on the city at the prescribed hour of four, give or take a few minutes. Louise had learned this by getting wet
one day. Now she checked her watch and saw that she had an hour or so before the downpour.

The library yielded some answers. She found a Wall Street Journal article which detailed how Reingold’s company had systematically bought out attractive real estate, mostly during the eighties, when the pie-in-the-sky oil shale boom burst in Colorado, and land prices in the West were depressed.

DRB had also made some less attractive moves regarding the transport of American goods over the border. These brought it under the scrutiny of the U.S. Customs Office. Not too unusual, she thought. Big company gets itself into a murky business situation, from which expensive lawyers must extricate it. Fines are paid, and some big shot at the top gets the ax. Louise was interested to read that the debonair Josef Reingold came out of all this on top, as chief of American operations.

She found a few paragraphs about Reingold’s international jet-set life and multiple marriages. The accompanying pen sketch showed Reingold smiling enticingly at the world. Hmmm. She didn’t feel so bad about the crème brûlée experience any more; she wasn’t the first woman to be suckered into something by this provocative fellow.

Next, she checked out Payne. A recent Boulder
Daily Camera
story contained a ten-year retrospective of his career. It talked about him as a former ski bum who eventually settled down and took over the family business when his father died, and made it more successful than his daddy ever had. Louise noticed that land, again, was the answer. The article on Payne was sympathetic, mentioning his parents’ tragic death in a plane crash, then carefully alluding to the later accident in which his former wife perished. Ann was right. The rich hometown boy’s life had not all been joy and gladness. To Louise, he seemed to be a person who was missing a crucial character trait, for he failed
to generate any personal warmth. As Bill would say, a cold fish. Why had a wholesome person like Ann ever become involved with him?

It wasn’t hard to find a fresh story on the sheriff, but it only repeated what she’d heard about Tatum’s long real estate and business background. The newspaper and the city of Boulder had seemed surprised at his victory in a close sheriff’s race; the colorful Boulder good-ol’-boy won by a whisker, despite the scent of scandal that surrounded him.

She encountered only one story about Pete, accompanied by a picture of a youthful man grinning so broadly one could not see his eyes. She smiled.
That’s Vete, all right
. It described how this popular former CU lecturer had returned from seven years in California, and instead of resuming teaching English, had chosen to go into “business pursuits.” Like so many men around here, the temptation of business—
and for that
, she thought,
read “land”
was too great to resist.

Seeing that article on the computer screen did something else. It validated Pete as a professional, making it painfully clear that her first impression of him had been way off the mark. Pete Fitzsimmons was both political and savvy, and very much a player here in Boulder County. She thought it only logical that he had had a part in the Porter Ranch land negotiations that preceded Ann Evans’s “victory”—not on his own, but possibly as a partner with someone like Payne or Reingold. She would have to pursue this further. Buoyed by her discoveries, Louise decided it was time to go home, after making a little detour to check out Eddie Porter’s place.

The Persians, four hundred years before Christ, called beautiful enclosed and irrigated garden refuges
pairidaeza
,
or paradise parks. And Eddie Porter lived in one. Irrigated by the South St. Vrain river, which wandered through his land. Backed by cliffs of red Lyons sandstone, shaggy and beautiful, interbedded with limestone and Pierre shale in grays and black. Graced with small forests of mature ponderosas and drifts of fluttery-leaved aspens.