Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller (12 page)

“You mind my asking you questions?”

“You didn’t ask. I just ran off at the mouth.” Harry Parrot laughed. “Anyway, you’re a lawyer, aren’t you? Isn’t that what you people do? Butt in?”

Dennis smiled. “Do you have an agent for your paintings?”

“Had a couple. Didn’t work out too good. One stole, and the other was an idiot. The one who stole made more money for me than the one who was an idiot.”

“Any exhibitions?”

“A few. Didn’t sell much. And never the big oils.”

“Look, forgive me,” Dennis said, “I do know a few gallery owners and art dealers, but I don’t keep in touch that much with contemporary art. Have any of your shows been in New York or London or Paris? Does the art world pay homage? Are you a cult? Am I a dolt for not knowing your name? “

Harry took a swig from the vodka bottle. “No, no, and no. I do what I do because I need to. Braque said, A painter paints because he don’t know how to do anything else.’ And old Renoir said, ‘No misery in the world can make a real painter quit painting.’ So that’s me.”

“Tell me this, if it still doesn’t strike you as cross-examination. How do you make enough to live on?”

“The town helps me out.”

“In what way?”

“Well, you know that the marble quarry and the coal mines are a town-owned corporation. The stock and the profits belong to the whole goddam town. A while back they voted me a salary so’s I could paint and have a swig of vodka now and then. Don’t need anything else.”

Maybe, Dennis thought, such patronage might happen in an Israeli kibbutz or in a nineteenth-century socialist utopian community. But Springhill was a tiny Colorado mountain town—a capitalist hamlet— where everyone seemed to work at ventures far more prosaic and utilitarian than giant-sized oils on canvas.

“Does the town have a poet and a modern jazz composer they also support?” he asked, not quite sure if he were serious or jesting. You never knew around here, it seemed.

Harry shook his shaggy gray head. “Nope. I’m it. What they do for me isn’t a matter of principle or policy. It’s just the way things fell out.

Someone suggested it way back when. Next thing you knew, in a weak moment, the folks said, ‘Hell, why not?’ “

Dennis looked around at the heavy canvases stacked against every wall. “If you keep going at this rate, Harry, you’ll run out of storage space.”

“I have a problem there,” Parrot admitted.

“You won’t live forever, Harry. You might think of showing and selling, if not for your sake, then—this may sound pompous, but I really mean it—for the sake of art. If I can help …”

Here I go again, Dennis thought. His father had instructed him as a boy: “Son, in the next life the only gifts you’ll get are what you gave away in this one.” Dennis had handled more than his share of
pro bono
law cases, but even beyond the ethical dictates of his profession it was his nature to help anyone he thought was deserving. His mind brimmed immediately with ideas, speculations, road maps. He backed up his advice with time and money if that was the way to get done what he believed had to be done.

“Kind of you,” Parrot said. “Maybe. If there’s enough time.”

“There’s never forever, Harry.”

“No, there sure isn’t forever. Nobody gets forever. We decided that a long time ago.”

Dennis frowned, not quite understanding.

“Come on upstairs and have a drink,” Parrot said. “I’ve always thought Sophie was a hell of a woman and that stepson of mine didn’t deserve her. She’s all heart, and if she says a pet chipmunk can pull a freight train, you can hitch that varmint up and clear the tracks. I’m starting to like you. You may be a busybody but you have good taste in art. That makes you special. I keep tonic and clean glasses for specials.”

Harry Parrot and Dennis became friends. Dennis would often stop by for a drink or to see new work. Once they went cross-country skiing together, the older man spryer and with more stamina than Dennis could have imagined.

It was to Harry that Dennis began to confess his confusions about certain things he had noticed in the village of Springhill. The health and longevity aspect continued to puzzle him. Then there was the question of consanguine marriage. He brought the subject up with Harry rather than Sophie, in the hope of a more satisfying response.

“You’re goddam one hundred percent right,” Harry said. “Not many people marry outside of the community.”

“Well, your late wife did,” Dennis said. “And so did Sophie, to me. But obviously it rarely happens.”

“Right. Takes a hell of a lot more than a majority to agree. Has to be damned near unanimous.”

Dennis leaned forward, not sure he had heard correctly. “A majority of who? What are you talking about?”

Harry waved the vodka bottle at him. “Figuratively speaking. Hey, man, Sophie’s our mayor, our leader—you think we’d just let her marry
anybody?
She said you were smart and you skied almost as good as she did, and if the council or the board said no she’d quit. Hard to turn her down. So you’re here. And that’s what matters,
n’est-ce pas?”

“Harry, you’re drunk.”

“When I speak French,” the painter said, “you can bet on it. English too, for that matter.”

“One more thing,” Dennis continued, picking up the thread of his concern—”what doesn’t happen here is that anyone marries someone from the outside and goes away to live there. The mate who’s not from Springhill comes to Springhill to live. Isn’t that so?”

“Not always,” Harry said. “I have a nephew, went to USC, met a gal out there, got her in the family way, and married her. Stayed there to become a rich land developer in Orange County. Dumb kid, and that sure proves it. And I knew one or two others like that.”

“I suppose what I meant is…” Dennis hesitated. “Sophie wouldn’t consider leaving.”

“Not at her age,” Harry said.

“She’s only thirty-eight.”

Harry was cleaning some sable brushes as he talked. “I only meant that the life here is pretty simple. Pure, even. It’s hard to beat it. After a while, staying here is as easy as getting up after you sit down on a thumbtack. What’s out there that any of us needs? I’ve been around longer’n dirt and I sure don’t know. Why would anyone want to give away the store, so to speak, and go back on the bricks? You tell me. You’ll see.”

You’ll see …
Sophie’s favorite words to him too. What was it that he would see?

As for purity and simplicity, Dennis was no longer so sure to what extent they existed here. It depended on how you defined things. He’d known since his June midnight ramble along the creek that there was a sexual sophistication among the older generation that didn’t exist anywhere else he’d ever been. Harry had been in that hot tub too. So that when Harry said to him, “Life here is pretty simple … what’s out there beyond old Springhill that any of us needs?” Dennis had reason to wonder how Harry defined his terms.

He had also learned, to his surprise, that along with Sophie, Grace Pendergast, a young coal miner named Amos McKee, and Oliver Cone, Harry was a member of the town’s five-person Water Board. The board’s principal function, aside from keeping tabs on the genetics of the town population, Dennis still did not understand. “What
is
this Water Board?” he asked Harry, smiling. “Are they the ones who approve of marriages to skibtails?”

Harry reached for the vodka bottle. “You got a good memory. No, I like to joke. Aside from all the other stuff they dump on us, the Water Board is just what it says it is. We monitor the supply, check for fecal chloroform, lead, stuff like that. Bacterial contamination. Groundwater here can kill you, man. Comes into contact with mine tailings, all kinds of shit. I don’t give a bedbug’s ass about any of it, but under Colorado law every community has to file an annual goddam report to the state about its water.”

“And
you
take part in all that?”

“I help, that’s all.”

Dennis laughed. “Harry, you’re not just an artist—you’re a con artist too. I don’t believe any of it.”

“Believe, man. It’s a fact. The town supports me—remember that. Gotta pay the piper. So I go to the meetings. Half the time I’m so soused I can’t hardly remember what goes on or how I vote.”

He was still thinking and dreaming about Harry when suddenly he realized he had reached the stoplight at Cemetery Lane in Aspen. To his left the broad expanse of Red Mountain and the garish palazzos of the rich rose under the blue morning sky. Traffic was backed up on the two- lane road entering Aspen; the workforce was arriving from downvalley.

The world is going about its business, Dennis thought, and so am I. My business is to find out why my mother-in-law is a suspect in a murder case.

Chapter 11
The Second Injection

WITH A HUFF and a snort, Josh Gamble twisted his bulk around in his swivel chair and glanced up at the grandfather clock in the far corner of his office. The clock ticked with the utmost gravity, as though apportioning the hours of humankind. The sheriff waved his hand in the general southerly direction of Aspen Mountain, which he couldn’t see, since his office in the basement of the Pitkin County Courthouse faced the rear. Its single window offered a view of a mound of frozen dirt.

“Seven inches overnight!” he boomed. “I
hate
working on a day like this!” He pointed a blunt finger at Dennis. “You were up there yesterday. I can see my mamma was right—I should have gone to law school. I’ve got to sit here and battle evildoers, but you can hit the mountain whenever you feel like it. That’s undemocratic. You know what sperm and lawyers have in common?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” Dennis said. “Only one in a million has a chance of making it as a human being. I heard that one my first year at Yale.”

“Age don’t diminish truth.”

Dennis sat on the sofa next to plump Queenie O’Hare. The lower part of Coroner Jeff Waters’s torso had all but vanished into a sagging easy chair under the head of a ten-point elk.

“And to answer your earlier question—yes, yesterday I was up on the mountain in the powder until I was rudely interrupted by events that still haven’t been properly explained to me.”

Ray Bond, the county deputy district attorney in the Ninth Judicial District, was the only person standing—he lacked the patience to sit and be confined. A former football star from the University of Colorado, he was now a redheaded man in his late thirties and a bodybuilder, more muscular than sinewy. He still helped coach the perennially winless Aspen High School football team. He owned a powerful baritone voice that he exercised not only on the playing field but also pacing the Pitkin County courtroom asserting the rights of the county’s citizens. He was a man on the move. He twitched and fidgeted, stretched and paced. He was known to rush at the jury and roar, “Ladies and gentlemen, the defense attorney represents the accused. I, on the other hand, represent the state of Colorado, but even more I represent the victims of this crime. I speak for them … and of course for the people …“

“I would have liked to ski too,” he said to Dennis now—”but let’s face it, we don’t get a double murder every day.”

Picking some breakfast pancake out of his teeth with a gold toothpick, Josh Gamble nodded. “Yes, Ray, maybe once every hundred years, if we’re lucky.”

He meant that there had not been a double murder in Pitkin County since the previous century, when a local banker had shot his wife and her Ute Indian lover and been sentenced to three years at hard labor, of which he served six months. So Ray Bond was excited. He leaned forward from his standing position to listen to the sheriff’s every word and to the words of all others in the room, which resembled more a book-lined hunter’s den than a sheriff’s office. There were complete sets of Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and Jane Austen, an ancient
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, and six volumes of Dunsterville and Garay’s
Venezuelan Orchids.
Like Sophie, the sheriff had a greenhouse.

“Dennis,” he said, “the others know this, but I need to enlighten you. We do things a little different here in backcountry Colorado than you might be used to in bad-assed New York. A little less formal. Sometimes downright friendly. We—and by that I mean all the county officials—are going to tell you everything we know about this alleged crime. Of course you don’t have to do the same, and you’d be a lousy lawyer if you did, because you’ve got a client to represent, and that client might be guilty of some heinous act that you’re unaware of, and might need all the help he or she can get. Is all that clear?”

Dennis nodded, pleased. It was what he had expected of his friend and college chum.

The swivel chair creaked under Josh’s bulk. “Right now we’re only interested in figuring out what happened up there at Pearl Pass. I guess you are too.”

“Absolutely,” Dennis said.

“And maybe,” Josh said, “since we hicks ain’t quite as stupid as some people would like to think, the bunch of us here, if we don’t play lawyer-and-lawman games, can figure it out together. Work as a team. You game to try?”

Dennis was more than game: he was enthused.

The sheriff turned to the young coroner. “Jeff, tell us everything you know. If I get bored I’ll yawn visibly, and you can take that as a signal to go into third gear. Dennis, if you have any questions, don’t be shy. But I guess you never were, were you?”

It was going to work out fine, Dennis decided, and turned toward the coroner.

On the morning after the bodies had been brought down on snowmobiles from Pearl Pass—Jeff Waters said—he and Otto Beckmann, the forensic pathologist and medical examiner for Garfield County, had conducted a six-hour autopsy. It took place in Valley View Hospital, in Glenwood Springs, forty miles downvalley from Aspen.

The victims’ bodies had spent the night in cold storage at forty-two degrees Fahrenheit, but still, splayed out on the steel gurneys, they smelled. There had been several months of rot. At high altitudes in winter a certain amount of mummification occurs, but it was clear from the outset of the autopsy that the bodies had been placed in their common grave during warm weather. To offset the smell, Drs. Beckmann and Waters wore surgical masks smeared with Vicks Vaporous.