Alpine Hero (3 page)

The sheriff glanced at Jack’s brief notes. “Okay,” Milo said with a sigh, “you got there a little after two. What happened next?”

I told him. It didn’t take long. My gaze kept falling on Milo’s cigarette. He had been responsible—thus I rationalized—for my resumption of smoking over a year ago. But I’d managed to quit—again—the previous summer. Now I was beginning to think that had been a bad idea.

“You didn’t see anybody in the corridor?” Milo asked, exhaling a small blue cloud.

“No.” For the first time I considered the corridor itself. “I’m not even sure where it goes. I’ve used the women’s room a couple of times when I’ve been at Stella’s, but I never paid much attention to the rest of the building’s rear area.”

Having gotten control of himself, Milo was now very much the no-nonsense law officer. “It runs the width of the building,” he explained without inflection. “There’s a men’s room at the other end, by Sky Travel. The fire exit is used for deliveries. All the first-floor tenants have direct access to the back corridor except for the optician
on the corner. They have to go around through the travel agency.”

I pictured the Clemans Building floor plan in my mind. The building was old, and named for the town founder, Carl Clemans. Its three stories included Stella’s, Sky Travel, and the optician, all of which faced Front Street. The local medical supply store was at the rear, with its entrance on the side street. In the center of the structure was a small foyer, an elevator, and a staircase. The second floor was occupied by the Doukas law firm, an architect, and an accountant. The third and top story housed several small offices, including a loan company, an environmentalist group, a consignment shop, and an antiques store.

I had a question of my own for Milo. “Are you saying anybody could have come in off the street and gone through the back way to get to the facial room?”

Milo shook his head. “No. That’s kept locked, except for deliveries. Whenever UPS or whoever comes by, they have to buzz from a box on Pine Street. The tenant getting the delivery comes to unlock the door. I had to ask Will Stuart at the medical supply place to let Doc Dewey and the ambulance drivers in.”

Almost unconsciously, I made the connection: Will Stuart was Nancy Dewey’s brother. He had owned Alpine Medical Supply almost as long as Nancy’s husband had practiced medicine in Alpine. It was a fortuitous arrangement, especially for Doc Dewey and his brother-in-law. It was also profitable in an area where many loggers had lost more than their jobs over the years. Even strangers unfamiliar with Pacific Northwest lifestyles can tell they’re in a timber town by the number of men with missing digits and limbs.

“You’re certain she was dead when you opened the door?” Milo inquired on a cloud of smoke.

“I didn’t take her pulse. Jeez, Milo, she was limp as a rag.…” I paused, vividly recalling Kay Whitman’s bloodied body.

“You didn’t touch her?” Milo’s hazel eyes were fixed on my face.

I winced. “I sure didn’t. I got as far as the threshold. I was looking straight at her. Her head was propped up on a pillow or something. It didn’t take long to see that her throat had been cut and …” I shook myself, trying to erase the awful picture from my mind’s eye.

“Did you see anyone at all—somebody who didn’t belong in the building?” Milo’s expression was even more stolid than usual.

“No.” I knew the sheriff had to go by the book, but his attitude annoyed me. “If I had, wouldn’t I have said so?”

Puffing on his cigarette, Milo shrugged. “Witnesses get hysterical. They don’t always remember what they’ve seen. Or else they think it isn’t important.”

I leaned across the almost new pine table. “Milo—it’s me, Emma. Not some dizzy goof like Laurie or maybe Becca. Perception is part of my job.”

“You’re still a witness.” Milo’s expression was inscrutable.

“I’ve told you everything I know,” I said, trying not to sound testy. “Why don’t you tell me about the weapon?”

“What’s to tell?” Milo stubbed out his cigarette with great care. “We don’t know anything about the weapon yet. I can only tell you that it was sharp.” A glint of irony showed in the sheriff’s hazel eyes.

“No kidding.” I wasn’t amused. “That rules out an emery board or an orange stick, I suppose.”

Milo frowned. “What’s an orange stick?”

“Never mind. Get a manicure someday. Then you’ll find out.”

Glancing at his reasonably well-kept nails, Milo made
a face. “What’s wrong with clippers?” he muttered, then resumed his official attitude. “Did you go into the women’s room?”

“No, I never intended to. I was heading for the changing room.”

“Did you go in there?”

“No. I found the body first. What would you expect me to do—walk away, change into a smock, and have Stella tend to my tresses while another client is lying dead in the back room?” Now my tone was definitely sarcastic. “ ‘Oh, by the way, Stella,’ ” I said, mimicking myself, “ ‘did you know there’s a stiff on the facial table? I wouldn’t try pushing that neck-firming cream you’re selling out front if I were you.’ ”

“That’s not funny.” Milo had turned severe. “Did you recognize the victim?”

“I don’t know the victim,” I answered, no longer caring if I sounded waspish. Noting that Milo’s color was deepening, and aware that it signaled an impending outburst, I tried to simmer down. “Frankly, it would be impossible to recognize anybody—even if I knew them—when they’re all covered with goop and wrapped like a mummy.”

“That’s what I figured.” The color was still in Milo’s face, but he didn’t sound angry. In fact, his words were leaden. Watching him closely, I could see the worry in his eyes. Indeed, his attitude seemed to verge on fear.

Suddenly I knew what the sheriff was thinking. But before I could say so, he spoke again:

“Honoria and her brother stopped by to inspect our new quarters. She mentioned that her sister-in-law had taken her appointment at Stella’s.” Milo’s voice began to drag. “My point is that the victim was unrecognizable. So did the killer make a mistake?”

I waited for Milo to continue. But either he wouldn’t
or he couldn’t. Still, I knew what he meant and why he looked so troubled. At the last minute Kay Whitman had taken her sister-in-law’s appointment. If the murder was premeditated, the killer might not have known of the change. Under all that cosmetic camouflage, he or she wouldn’t have been able to tell one Whitman from another.

Maybe Honoria shouldn’t have been drinking Milo’s bad coffee in the sheriff’s office down the hall. Maybe someone had intended to put her in the hospital morgue instead.

V
IDA WAS
so angry that she sat on her derby. We had finally returned to
The Advocate
around three-thirty. When Milo was finished questioning me, he insisted that Vida and I both leave. Naturally, we protested, arguing our rights as members of the press. But Milo was firm—we couldn’t sit in on the interrogations, we weren’t allowed to disturb Honoria and her brother, and we were in the way. Whatever hard news came out of the initial interviews would be passed on to
The Advocate
in plenty of time for our Tuesday-afternoon deadline.

I’ll admit that it wasn’t easy for me to concentrate. I’ve covered my share of homicides, both in Alpine and during my sixteen years with
The Oregonian.
When I first started on the metro beat in Portland, a veteran reporter told me never to think of the victim by name. You can’t take any kind of personal interest in the deceased, he’d advised. He always referred to the dead person as The Stiff. But I’d never quite been able to dissociate myself. This time it was even harder. I didn’t know Kay Whitman, but I knew her sister-in-law and I’d found her body. Nevertheless, we had a paper to put out. When Vida returned to the office, I considered reminding her that we had other things to do in order to meet our Tuesday deadline.

Vida, however, was in no mood to be diverted. She
had stomped back to the office in her splay-footed manner, banged the door open, removed her derby, flung it across the room, where it landed on her chair—and then sat on her hat. The crushed felt object that now reposed in her hands curbed her temper. But she was still indignant.

“Imagine! My own nephew, Billy, sitting right there guarding the door to Honoria and her brother, Whoozits! Whatever is the matter with Milo? Ooooooh!” Vida dumped the crumpled derby under her desk, whipped off her glasses, and began to rub violently at her eyes.

My ad manager, Leo Walsh, came into the news office with a folder of promotional mock-ups cradled in his arms. Taking in Vida’s distress, he grinned.

“What’s wrong, Duchess? Has the Burl Creek Thimble Club been unmasked as a front for hookers?”

Vida was not amused, either by the nickname or the remark. “Where have you been, Leo?” she demanded. “You’ve no right to behave in such a flippant manner when someone has been brutally murdered two blocks away from this very office.”

Leo’s seamed face registered disbelief. “What are you talking about? I’ve been doing the car lots on the other side of town. We’ve got Presidents’ Day promotions coming up, remember?”

“Of course I remember,” Vida snapped. “I can even remember when we celebrated our presidents’ birthdays separately.”

“You can probably remember the presidents,” Leo quipped. Seeing the fire flare in Vida’s eyes, he quickly backtracked. “I mean, which ones we honor, Washington and Lincoln. Most younger people—kids, that is—think it’s a generic holiday, for all the presidents.” Leo was speaking faster and faster, obviously trying to save himself from Vida’s wrath. “You know—like All Saints. But
they don’t know what that is, either. And you’re a Presbyterian anyway.” Now virtually mumbling, he went to his desk, where he opened the big folder and began studying his vehicle ads. “I got the trucking place, too,” he said in a more normal voice. “The trouble is, who’s going to buy those secondhand logging rigs these days?”

“Vida’s not kidding,” I said, sitting on the edge of Leo’s desk. “A woman got her throat slit at Stella’s Salon this afternoon.”

Leo was absorbed in his layouts. “Is that a new service? Eye tucks, boob jobs, putting hot wax all over yourselves, so you feel like a freaking eel. What does this one do, get rid of the turkey wattle? You women have the damnedest things done to your—” His head shot up and he stared at me with his world-weary brown eyes. “Shit! You’re not kidding! Who was it?”

I started to explain, but Carla Steinmetz breezed into the office before I could get out more than two words. Unlike Leo, my reporter obviously had been someplace in town where the news of Kay Whitman’s death had already been received. To my amazement, Carla didn’t start with a barrage of questions. Instead, she shrieked, flew across the office, and hurled herself at me with such force that I almost fell on top of Leo’s ads.

“Emma! I thought it was you! Emma! You’re alive! Emma, Emma,
Emma
!”

Carla’s concern was flattering, but she was smothering me. Gently, I pried her loose. “It was Kay Whitman,” I said. “Honoria Whitman’s sister-in-law. I gather that Kay and Honoria’s brother are visiting from somewhere.”

Both Carla and Leo looked blank. My reporter was the first to recall Honoria. “Oh!” she exclaimed, brushing the long black hair off her pretty face. “The sheriff’s main squeeze! I know her.”

“The sheriff’s occasional squeeze—if you’ll pardon
the rather crude term,” Vida put in with a sharp glance for me. “I don’t believe that their romance is flourishing as it once was.”

“They’ve had some problems,” I conceded, avoiding Vida’s gaze. “But that’s not important now. We’ve got a homicide story on our hands.”

Vida and I explained what had happened at the salon. My ad manager and my reporter were sobered by the news. Leo held his head in his hands, cursing a world gone mad.

“It’s never been sane,” Vida remarked with some asperity. “You ought to know, Leo. You’re from Los Angeles.”

For once, Leo didn’t take the bait. Instead, he concentrated on a photo of a 1974 Ken worth logging rig.

Carla, however, was watching me expectantly. She is eager to please, and sometimes does. But as a journalist, she is a better photographer than a reporter.

In the recent past Carla had chided me about not giving her meatier assignments. Back in October, I’d caved in and assigned her to a public hearing on giving Skykomish County property owners more control over federal lands. The issue was relatively complicated, and I couldn’t blame Carla for being confused. But when one speaker referred to environmentalists as Mafia enforcers and another labeled bureaucrats as Nazis, Carla’s story took off on a tangent. By the time she was done, it sounded as if the Godfather and Adolf Hitler had moved to Alpine.

Thus, I wasn’t about to give Carla the Kay Whitman homicide assignment. Nor did I have much choice. Vida was clearing her throat loudly at the corner desk.

“You promised,” she said with a wag of her finger.

“But, Vida, you never do hard news,” I protested. “I
didn’t argue at Stella’s because everything was in such confusion.”

Vida had resurrected her derby and was making an unsatisfactory effort to block the crown. “It’s not up to me to tell you how to run your newspaper, but it’s quite clear that you can’t cover this story.”

“Why not?” I was mildly annoyed. Vida may presume, but she is never presumptuous. “Just because I found the body …”

“I don’t mean that.” Vida dusted off the derby, which remained sadly misshapen. She had put her glasses back on and now gazed at me over the tortoiseshell rims. “I mean you and Milo. His girlfriend is involved.
One
of his girlfriends. It seems to me that your coverage of the investigation would be unethical. Under the circumstances.” Vida jammed the mangled hat back on her head.

In my office cubbyhole, I quietly fumed. Milo Dodge and I were not a romantic item. We never had been. Over the years we’d become good friends, and a couple of kisses had resulted. Admittedly, in the past few months, as I sorted through my feelings for Tom Cavanaugh and Milo wrestled with his for Honoria Whitman, we had grown closer. In fact, I’d finally confided the whole story of my relationship with Tom. Milo had responded with the details of his broken first marriage, and his current problems with Honoria. We’d given each other a shoulder to cry on, but not much else.